Keep The Giraffe Burning (12 page)

‘A prisoner is told by the governor that he’ll be hanged one day in the coming week, but not on any day he’s expecting it.’ He’s rambling again. ‘Now he knows he can’t be executed on Saturday. If they haven’t killed him on any of the other six days, they can’t kill him on the seventh, when he’ll certainly be expecting it. So Saturday is out.’

Why do so many paradoxes involve prisoners and hanging?

‘By the same reasoning, Friday is out. Since it has to be one of the six days, it can’t be the sixth, because he must expect it by then. Friday is out, Thursday is out, and so on. He eliminates each day until he’s left with only Sunday. But they can’t hang him then, either, because he now expects it. So they can’t hang him at all.’

The Acamarians aren’t too bright. They really don’t see the rest of it. Our prisoner reasons that they can’t hang him on any day of the week, so he’s never expecting it. So they can hang him anytime.

‘They want answers,’ says my cell-mate. ‘Tell them nothing.’

The interrogation room is like the first-class compartment of a luxury flight. You scrunch down in your comfortable seat with your earphones. If they like your answers, they show you movies. I’ve seen both of their excellent, all-family selections:
Keys of the Kingdom
(Gregory Peck meets God) and
My Friend Flicka
(Roddy MacDowall meets horse).

Under intensive interrogation, and bribed with chicken and butter, I tell them about prisoners A, B and C.

‘The governor tells them that two will hang, and one will be set free. A says to the governor, “Tell me the name of one of the other men who will hang. If both of them are going to be hanged, just tell me either name.”

‘The governor says, “B will hang.”

‘A now sees that his survival chances have increased. Earlier, he had one chance in three of surviving. Now, either C or himself will go free, so his chances are one in two.

‘“Wait,” says the governor. “Suppose I said C instead of B?”

‘“My chances would still improve in the same way.”

‘“Suppose I said nothing at all, then.”

‘“It’s still the same. You’d be suppressing one name or the other, and, no matter which, my chances would still be one in two.”’

This baffles them. They can’t see why the governor is in the story at all. A could simply imagine a governor coming to him and speaking a name. So A’s chances of survival are always one in two?

‘That’s right,’ I lie. Why do I enjoy lying to them? They’re doing their best.

I finally ask Professor Rice to put his escape plan into action.

‘All right. Look at the corner of the cell. There, see where the ceiling
and floor corners are? Now, why do they have to be inside corners? Couldn’t they just possibly be the outside corners of a crooked cube?’

I stare at them until they are. We jump back, avoiding the big lopsided cube as it falls over. We’re free.

Two other freed prisoners rush over to thank him. They even shake his hand.

‘I’m A,’ says the taller. ‘This is my cell-mate, B. I’m afraid C was crushed beneath a big stone block. Good thing his insurance coverage started a few minutes ago.’

The four of us get on a train (and five get off). Professor Rice finds his clipboard on the floor and makes a note.

I feel I’ve heard A’s story before: ‘B and I are related. We hang around together, doing odd jobs. You know, chopping wood, pumping water in and out of tanks. Or racing. We race a lot. Rowboats, upstream and downstream, stuff like that. Good clean fun.’

What is it I like about A so much?

‘Fun!’ B has the shoulder slump of a born loser. ‘Like if I ride a bike from X to Y, A has to race me in a car, passing me at –’

‘That’s not fair,’ A says. ‘You generally have twice as many apples as I do, before you give me half the –’

‘Give, give, give! It’s been the same ever since you were as many years old as I am younger than you were when –’

‘Ignore him.’ A turns to me. ‘It all goes back to our parents, a lawyer and a model. They met at a footrace. The lawyer could go faster uphill and on the level, but mother was faster on the downhill parts. So naturally mother won.’

Professor Rice does not look up from his work. ‘I take it you mean the lawyer was your mother.’

B, still sulking, says, ‘A’s not my brother, you know.’

I feel it’s true.

‘It’s true!’ Professor Rice is fascinated. ‘I calculate the number of passengers generated within this carriage as exactly – uh, I have the figures here – exactly
one.’

I hate to say it. ‘Professor, have you counted yourself?’

He adjusts his taped glasses, turns over the pages on his clipboard for a moment or two. Finally he says:

‘Have I told you about my novel?’

The train wheels begin to scream. I know what’s happened: The tracks are getting narrower as we near the horizon.

I get off alone at the next station. (No one gets in.) Along the deserted platform, I hear voices from the exit tunnels. Going alone through the tunnel, I hear feet and voices on the escalators.

No one is on the escalators. No one in the ticket-collector’s box, where I find his burning cigarette on the shelf. Outside there are traffic noises, murmuring mobs of shoppers, the cry of a newspaper man. But of course when I get there, it’s to see: abandoned cars; a stack of papers peeling off
and blowing away; an ice-cream cone on the pavement, just starting to melt. London, perhaps the world, is one big
Mary Celeste,
with everyone suddenly out to lunch.

Professor Rice’s office is here, in a blue glass tower where brokers and lawyers, on a normal day, might sit and reason with one another.

All I can find of his novel is in the typewriter:

‘If I’m God,’ said God, who was, ‘then why can’t I do anything I like? Why can’t I lock myself in a prison from which even I can’t escape?’

He found this, like all questions, rhetorical.

‘I know the answer to that one,’ he cried, paring his fingernails. ‘The answer is, even I can’t contradict myself. Ha!’

Ha indeed. One crummy idea, in a half-dozen lines, and that cribbed from Aquinas. Nor any explanation of the fingernails. (Can the Infinite grow?) Why can’t God contradict himself, anyway?

I look out over the blue city. At any moment, the alien invasion could begin. For centuries, the hordes of Acamar have been on the way: Levering themselves slowly through space; hand-over-hand (if they have hands) along weightless ropes, through frictionless pulleys, dragged along by perpetual motion …

When the first few loaves appear in the sky, I begin the incantation:

‘A certain barber of Acamar shaves all the Acamarians who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?’

They think it over and mail a card to me:
Can there be such
a
barber?

There can’t. He twinkles out of existence.

Taking a deep breath, I say, ‘If a barber does not exist, neither do his customers.’

No one on Acamar shaves himself. Already plumes of smoke trail from a few loaves, before sunset the fields will be full of warm toast: fodder for the gentle, lowing, purple beasts.

A
NOTHER
F
ENTON
W
ORTH
M
YSTERY

Fenton Worth instructed his valet Bozo to turn away all callers for the rest of the evening.

‘I mean to spend a quiet evening with a good book,’ said the popular private detective, and indicated a new, calf-bound volume on the library table.

Bozo smirked, knowing what usually happened to all such ‘quiet evenings’ in the life of a famous sleuth. ‘I imagine, sir,’ he said, ‘that a beautiful lady will burst in, begging you to save her life. That, or else Inspector Grogan will ask you to help recover the Stilton diamonds.’

The well-known private dick smiled. ‘Not tonight, Bozo. I mean it: No calls of any kind. If it is a matter of life and death, as is usual, refer our caller to the police. Other cases I can look into in the morning. For now, I’m going to lock myself in the library, and I don’t want to be disturbed.’

With that, the eminent criminologist shooed his servant from the room, turned the key and settled into his favourite Morris chair with the ‘good book’. It was a detection novel, entitled
The Locked Room.

‘The Locked Room,
eh? That should be of considerable interest,’ he mused, toying with his letter opener. This curious instrument was actually a Moro weapon, an example of that knife with a wavy blade familiar to crossword buffs as a
kriis.
Opening the volume, Fenton used the
kriis
to slit a few pages, then began to read.

The plot of this novel, shorn of its ornaments, misdirections and other fanciful elements, was simple: A man was found dead in a sealed room, locked from the inside. No one else was found in the room, and though the death was certainly a homicide, no weapon could be found. Suspects were abundant, yet how could any of them have done it?

Fenton had met a great many such cases in real life; indeed, they formed the bulk of his murder investigations. He had opened locked rooms containing corpses which had been done to death by strangulation, shooting, stabbing, poison, smothering, drowning, burning, being chopped to bits, electrocution; by the action of deadly snakes and spiders – and far worse.

A few of such cases involved rooms which were not really locked at all. These included rooms with secret panels and one room where the midget assassin lay hidden in a chest. Fenton had left all such ‘cheating’ cases to the police.

More interesting were the cases where the rooms were really locked, but ingeniously locked from the outside. One killer, having simply locked
the door and concealed the key in his hand, helped smash a panel of the door to get into the room. Then he reached through the panel and ‘found’ the key in the lock. Others relied on clever systems of string, pins, wires and so on, to drop latch-bars, shoot bolts and turn locks from outside the door. One killer simply removed the door hinges, replacing them after his grim business inside.

In other cases the room was locked, and from the inside, but it was not utterly unimpregnable. Poison gas might be introduced by a ventilator, as, indeed, might an adder. Ice bullets might be fired through the keyhole to kill, then melt, leaving no trace of the weapon. Others used poison darts fired through an otherwise inaccessible window, bombs down the chimney and so on. In one curious case a man was stabbed through the wall itself, with a very long, thin, sharp sword.

There were a number of ‘funny contrivance’ cases. These invariably concerned machines, hidden about the rooms which, having done their deeds, became to all appearances innocent furniture again. Some were set off by the victims themselves, some by remote control and some by clockwork. Men were shot by telephones, blown up by hearing aids, stabbed by clocks, strangled by stethoscopes and ripped to pieces by typewriters. In this category Fenton placed his interesting ‘Case of the Freudian Outlook’, where a man was crushed to death between the redhot iron walls of a gimmicked room.

He paused to cut a few more pages. This mystery,
The Locked Room,
was the most baffling he’d yet encountered, and nothing like any of the others.

It was certainly not like the elaborate suicide in ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Step’, where the victim hanged himself with an especially knotted and weighted rope. When the door to the room was broken in, this noose undid itself, deposited the body on the floor, and vanished out the window into (for this was in Venice) the Grand Canal.

Nor did this case resemble ‘The Orchid Piano Mystery’, where the victim locked himself in a room coincidentally full of broken furniture and other signs of a struggle, fainted and cracked his head on the fender. That case had given Fenton some food for thought, as had the related ‘Mauve Marimba Mystery’. There the supposed victim had merely suffered an epileptic seizure, smashed up the room, and ended by kicking himself in the face until dead (this epileptic was also a dancer).

Fenton’s meditations were here interrupted by Bozo, who came in with a tray of toast and cocoa.

‘I was just thinking over some of my old “locked-room” cases, Bozo,’ said the renowned gumshoe. ‘I must confess that real-life cases are a whale of a lot easier than detective fiction. This novel has me stymied, so far.’ And he outlined the story for his valet.

‘It sounds tough, sir,’ said Bozo. ‘Reminds one of the “Case of the Bashful Bimbo”.’

‘No, I think you’re thinking of the “Vast Duck Mystery”, aren’t you, Bozo? Where it finally turned out that the victim had been stabbed with
a hatpin at the ambassador’s reception, amid a roomful of people. He wasn’t even aware of the stabbing himself. He’d gone into another room, locked himself in, and then the slow leakage from his heart finally caught up with him.’

‘Like I’ve caught up with you,’ laughed Inspector Grogan, strolling in. ‘I came over on the chance of getting you to help on the Stilton diamonds case. I found this young lady outside. Claims her life’s in danger.’