A Puzzle for fools Read online

  "My responsibilities are great," he remarked with a slight smile. "Naturally, it means everything to me as an individual and as a psychiatrist that my patients should make good progress. But there are other complications, too. Take the case of Herr Stroubel, for example. He is certainly one of the greatest conductors of our age. His return to health is eagerly awaited by the musical world. The board of directors of the Eastern Symphony Orchestra have even offered to donate ten thousand dollars to the institution on the day he leaves us, a well man. He had been showing splendid progress; but recently there has been a distinct setback."

  Doctor Lenz told me no details, but I guessed that the famous conductor must have been frightened just as I had been frightened earlier that night.

  "There is another case," continued Lenz slowly, "which is even more delicate. Mr. Laribee, as you know, is an immensely wealthy man. He has made and lost several huge fortunes on the stock market." He passed a hand across his beard. "Mr. Laribee has appointed his daughter and myself as trustees of his estate. By the present arrangement a great deal of money will come to the institution at his death, or at any time when he should have to be certified permanently insane."

  "And you mean he's being upset, too?*

  "No. Not yet." The gray eyes stared at me fixedly. "But you can imagine how worried I am lest this—er— influence should affect him. He is doing well at present But if he should suffer from any shock while under my care, you can guess what people would think—the scandal."

  He broke off and for a moment neither of us spoke. Until then I had been too intrigued to wonder why Doctor Lenz should have confided so casually in a half-cured drunk. Now the thought came into my mind and I asked him point-blank.

  "I have told you this, Mr. Duluth," he announced solemnly, "because I want you to help me. Of course, I have absolute confidence in my staff but in this particular case they can be of no great assistance. People who are mentally sick are often reserved. They do not like to tell their medical attendants about the things which upset them, especially when they fancy that those things are part of their own sickness. Patients who would not talk to their physicians might talk to you as a fellow inmate."

  It was a long time since anyone had put me in a position of trust. I told him so and he smiled slowly.

  "I have deliberately asked your help," he said, "because you are one of the few patients here whose mind is basically healthy. As I have said, I feel that you need nothing more than an interest in life. I thought this might help to give you that interest."

  I didn't speak for a moment. Then I asked: "But that voice said there would be murder. Aren't you going to take that seriously?"

  "You seem to have misunderstood me, Mr. Duluth." Lenz's voice chilled slightly. "I take everything very seriously indeed. But this is a mental hospital. In an institution of this type, one does not take everything which is heard or seen literally."

  I didn't grasp his point, but he left me no time for questions. He spent the next few minutes making me feel good, as only expensive psychiatrists can. Then he rang the bell for Warren to take me back to my room.

  As I waited for the night attendant, I happened to glance down at the bedroom slippers which Miss Brush had provided for me. There was nothing particularly unusual about them except that they were large and obviously male.

  Miss Brush, I knew, was the most efficient of young women. But it showed almost excessive efficiency to keep slippers in her bedroom against the chance visit of a neurotic male patient in bare feet.

  I might have tried to puzzle it out. But Doctor Lenz was speaking again.

  "Do not worry, Mr. Duluth. And remember that, if you see or hear anything out of the ordinary, that thing is real and has its basis in fact. Do not let anyone or anything persuade you that you are suffering under a delusion. Good night."

  3

  I HAD NO OBJECTIONS now to going back with Warren. Of course, if I had been a little more, or a little less crazy, I might have thought that Lenz had been putting up an elaborate song and dance to get me interested in something . besides myself. But I didn't. Although I had been unable exactly to grasp his attitude toward it, I felt that he actually did believe strange things were going on in the place. Well, it was exciting; something to break the clinical monotony.

  Back in Wing Two, as the men's quarters were officially titled, Warren handed me over to the dour care of the night nurse, Mrs. Fogarty, who happened also to be his sister.

  Apart from the celestial Miss Brush, the staff on Wing Two was a family party and, according to rumor, not a particularly happy one. We patients spent hours of prurient speculation upon the complicated relationships which were worthy of Dostoyevsky or Julian Green.

  The angular Mrs. Fogarty was the wife of Jo Fogarty, our day attendant and, either by choice or by accident, their work shifts gave them practically no time together by day or night. Their union, if it was one at all, was obviously of the spirit. And Mrs. Fogarty, as though suffering from a sort of spinsterial hang-over, spent most of her time and her grim affection upon her brother.

  Incidentally, she was as plain as Miss Brush was pretty, presumably on the theory that we mental patients needed stimulation by day and sedation by night.

  Mrs. Fogarty greeted me with an antiseptically anxious smile and a rustle of starched cuffs. Owing to a slight hardness of hearing, she had cultivated the habit of never speaking herself when a facial expression or a gesture was sufficient to convey her meaning. A nod of the head indicated that I was to go back to my room, and together we started down the corridor.

  We had just reached my door when there was a scuffling sound in Laribee's room, next to mine. As we paused, old Laribee ran out into the corridor, his gray woolen pajamas flapping in unbuttoned abandon. His florid face was creased with fear. His eyes had that blank hopeless look which a few weeks in the sanitarium had made me know only too well. Dazedly he came up to us, clutching shakily for Mrs. Fogarty's large-boned hand.

  "Tell them to stop," he moaned. "I've tried not to give way. I tried to keep quiet. But they've got to stop."

  Mrs. Fogarty's equine face registered professional consolation, and then, as though sensing that the situation demanded words, she added mechanically: "It's all right, Mr. Laribee. No one's hurting you."

  "But they've got to stop." He was a tall, heavy man, and it was somehow shocking to see the tears rolling down his cheeks like a baby's. 'Tell them to stop the ticker. It's way behind the market. Stocks must be crashing. Don't you see? I'm ruined. Everything's going. The ticker—make the ticker stop."

  The night nurse's fingers gripped his firmly and she drew him back into his room. Through the wall I could hear him, quite hysterical now.

  "Put in a stop loss order on my Consolidated Trust— crashing—crashing."

  Mrs. Fogarty's answering voice was placid and reassuring. "Nonsense, Mr. Laribee. Stocks are all going up. Now you go to sleep and read about them in the paper tomorrow."

  At last she calmed him down. I heard her creak past my door.

  What a job, I thought, spending the night looking after nuts like us.

  After her footsteps had faded and the room was quiet again, I found myself thinking about old Laribee. I didn't have much sympathy for him, or for any of the Wall Street wizards who in 1929 had wizarded away their own money and, incidentally, quite a bit of mine, too. But it was pathetic to think of a man who still had a couple of million going crazy because he thought he was broke.

  And yet I remembered that Doctor Lenz had said he was making progress. A few stray words which I had overheard that morning between Miss Brush and Moreno passed through my mind. They had been talking about Laribee, about his improvement. "It's been weeks now since he's heard that ticker," Miss Brush had said. "Looks as though he's picking up."

  It had been weeks since he had heard that ticker! Why had he had this relapse? Was it perhaps due to what Lenz had called the subversive influence?

  Mrs. Fogarty must have given him something to m
ake him sleep, because he wasn't whimpering any more. There was silence again; that deep, institutional silence which had scared me earlier in the evening, but which somehow held no fears for me now. I listened to the stillness, not expecting to hear anything. Then for the second time that night I had a shock. But this time it was a shock that intrigued me, not one that set me off blubbering like a frightened kid.

  I sat up in bed. Yes, there was no doubt about it. Too soft and muffled for Mrs. Fogarty's ears to have caught, but quite distinct, I could make out a quick, rhythmic ticking, quicker than a clock.

  Tick, tack — tick, tack!

  It came through the wall from somewhere in Laribee's room.

  Tick, tack — tick, tack!

  There were only two things for me to think. Either I was catching old Laribee's bug, or else there was something in that room ticking, something quite separate from the sinister sounds in Laribee's broken brain.

  Tick, tack — tick, tack!

  4

  NEXT MORNING I felt pretty fair considering my hectic night. Jo Fogarty, one-time champion wrestler and now the night nurse's problematic husband, woke me at the usual, ungodly hour of seven-thirty.

  As I stumbled out of bed into my slippers, I noticed that the ones lent me by Miss Brush had vanished. The day nurse, too, it seemed, was an early riser.

  We all had our daily treatments and mine consisted largely of a thorough pepping up. Dr. Stevens, whose job it was to look after the patients' physical condition as opposed to their mental frailties, had prescribed an extensive course of physio-therapy and massage. He was a pleasant fellow and I didn't hold it against him, but I always felt injured at being dragged to the slaughter before breakfast. That morning I sulked as Fogarty took me down to the physio-therapy room and made me atone, once again, for my years of soaking, with the pin shower, the electrical camel and other outlandish exercises.

  Fogarty was one of those half-ugly brutes just past their prime with a sense of humor and a Tarzan attractiveness for the women who like that sort of thing. And quite a lot of them did, judging from the tales he told me. I couldn't help wondering sometimes whether he was equally frank with his grim-faced wife.

  For some reason he was crazy to get into show business; stunts and strong-man acts, or something of the sort. I think that was why he liked me, or, at least, played up to me. Anyhow, we had become quite friendly and he told me sanitarium gossip out of school.

  While I lay naked on the slab, waving my legs, he started to kid me about the night before.

  "Gettin' into Miss Brush's bedroom!" he said. "You’ll have old man Laribee after you if you don't watch out"

  "Laribee?"

  "Sure, he's nuts about her, asks her to marry him twenty times a day. I figured everyone knew that."

  I thought he was being funny, but he convinced me that he was serious. And after all, there was nothing particularly fantastic about it. Usually Laribee was perfectly normal. Last night was the only time I had seen him acting up. He was a widower with a couple of million and a good chance of getting well again. And even if he was hovering around the crazy sixties, he was still young and sane enough to know an attractive girl when he saw one. I was interested to hear Miss Brush's reactions to these proposals, but Fogarty had gone off on another tangent.

  "So my sissy brother-in-law threw a headlock on you," he was saying as he kneaded my muscles. "He reckons he's got the leverage even if he don't have the weight. Had the nerve to challenge me for a tumble the other night—me, an ex-champ! But I say, what's the use of chewing up a little guy like that anyway?"

  I had a look at his muscles and felt he could chew up anyone, even the steel-cabled Warren. I knew that no love was lost between the two of them and I imagined that, if it came to blows, he could beat up his brother-in-law with one hand tied behind his back. I told him so and he seemed pleased.

  "It's kind of nice to have a drunk to look after once in a while; someone who isn't out-and-out cuckoo," he said. "They're more human, if you see what I mean." He gave me a final slap and asked, "How's 'at?"

  I said it was fine, and that for the first time since I had been in the place I felt like eating something for breakfast.

  And I did. Despite a slight return of jitteriness, I managed to get some cereal down without kidding myself that the milk was rye. Miss Brush, who presided in the dining room as a kind of hygienic hostess, noticed immediately and showed her approval.

  "Night life seems to agree with your appetite, Mr. Duluth."

  "Yeah," I said. "And I never thanked you for the blanket and the bedroom slippers."

  She smiled disarmingly and moved away.

  Since my talk with Lenz, I found myself feeling an almost convalescent interest in the people around me. Before, patients and staff alike had just been sombre caricatures on a monotone backcloth. I had been too wrapped up in myself to pay any attention to them. But now I began to figure out the relationships between them and do a bit of wondering. After all, from my own experience I knew that Lenz' "subversive influence" lurked somewhere in the building. Maybe it was tangible. Maybe it was right here in the room. Drunk, sober or convalescent, the detective instinct is as fundamental as birth or sex.

  We had small individual tables in the dining room, just two or four at a table to kid us into believing we were on a boat or something and not in the hatch. I ate alone with Martin Geddes, a nice, quiet Englishman who superficially had nothing worse wrong with him than a tendency to talk too much about the Empire, and India, where he had been born.

  He was in for a disease which seemed like sleeping sickness, but which his chart called narcolepsy, complicated with cataplexy. He was liable to fall off into a rigid, profound sleep at any moment.

  That morning he did not appear for breakfast and, consequently, I had more time and opportunity to observe the others.

  From a casual glance it would have been difficult to tell that there was anything wrong with any of us. Laribee was over the way from me. Apart from a slight twitch around his heavy mouth, he might have been any successful Wall Street financier taking breakfast anywhere. But I noticed he was up to his old tricks of pushing away the food and whispering:

  "It's no use. I can't afford it. With Steel down below 30, I’ve got to economize—economize."

  Miss Brush was watching him with an angelic brightness which almost hid the worried cloud in her deep blue eyes, I remembered what Fogarty had told me and wondered just how much of the day nurse's worry was professional.

  Laribee sat at a table with a very beautiful, lustrous young man with perfect tailoring and the mouth of a saint. His name was David Fenwick, and, although usually he was no more peculiar than the average young aesthete, he occasionally heard spirit voices. You could see him suddenly break off in the middle of a sentence to listen to phantom messages which were, to him, far more important than the conversation of his fellow inmates. Spiritualism had gotten him as successfully as spirits had gotten me.

  There were about six others, but I only knew a couple of them. Franz Stroubel sat by himself, a fragile, paper-thin little man with a shock of white hair and the eyes of a fawn. He had been in Doctor Lenz’ sanitarium ever since that night six months before when, instead of conducting the Eastern Symphony Orchestra, he had begun to conduct the audience, and later had stood bare-headed in Times Square trying to conduct the traffic. The rhythm of life had become confused in his mind.

  As I watched him at the breakfast table, his beautiful hands never stopped moving. There was no other means of telling that he had suffered a setback.

  The most popular inmate was Billy Trent, a swell kid who had been hit on the head playing football. It was only a superficial brain lesion. He thought he was serving in a drug store, and he would come up all smiles and eagerness to ask your order. You couldn't resist him. You had to take a chocolate milk shake and a liverwurst on rye. Miss Brush had told me the lesion would heal soon and he would be well again. It made me glad.

  After breakfast I began
to wonder about the nonappearance of Geddes. I knew that he, like myself, had a bad time nights. I couldn't help thinking that, perhaps, something had happened to him, too.

  I asked Miss Brush about it when she conducted us to the smoking room, where we were supposed to digest our breakfasts over the high-brow magazines. She didn't reply. She never did when you asked anything about the other patients. She just struck a match for my cigarette and told me there was a good article on theatrical producing in Harper's. To please her, I picked up the magazine and started to read.

  Geddes looked pretty shaken when he appeared. He strolled over to me and sat down on the couch. He was one of those thirtyish men who look like Ronald Colman; handsome, groomed, and with a mustache which you felt must be a whole-time job. He had been in America several years but like Rupert Brooke's grave, he was forever England, or, rather, Anglo-India.

  I noticed that his hand trembled as he lifted his cigarette for Miss Brush to light. I asked him quite bluntly if he had had a good night. He seemed surprised that I had started the amenities, because I was usually pretty glum.

  "A good night?" he echoed in that type of English voice which, in the Lonsdale era, used to set Broadway by the ears. "As a matter of fact, I had a rotten night."

  "I had a pretty bad time, too," I said encouragingly. "Maybe I disturbed you."

  "There was a bit of a row, but I didn't pay much attention." I felt that he was edging around to say something.

  "I guess it's fairly grim for you here," I tried. "After all, you're not a mental salad like the rest of us. Your trouble's more or less physical."

  "I suppose it is." He spoke quietly but with a strange faltering in his voice. "You're better off than I am, though. They'll cure you, but none of these doctors seem to know the first thing about narcolepsy. I've read a few medical books and I know as much about it as any of 'em. They say you've got a screw loose in the central nervous system. They know something snaps and you go to sleep fifteen times a day and that if you've got cataplexy, too, you're liable to turn as rigid as a five-bar gate. But they can't do anything about making you well."