Ellery, who had flown an ocean and crisscrossed half a continent to talk about something else, found himself giving a Times Square sightseeing busman’s description of postwar Manhattan. And as he talked his sense of time, numbed by his hyperborean flight, began to revive and tick away; and he experienced the shock of recognition, as if this — now — were something very old insisting in a flash on being re-experienced. Tomorrow the trial of Edward Cazalis began and here he was, gossiping with a very old man over four thousand miles away by any route. A pulse began to clamor, and Ellery fell silent as the car drew up before a shellpocked apartment building on some broad Strasse whose name he had not even bothered to watch for.
Frau Bauer, Professor Seligmann’s housekeeper, greeted her aged employer with aspirin, tea, a hot-water bag, and imprecation — and Ellery with a reminiscent frigidity; but the old man brushed her aside with a smiling “Ruhe!” and led Ellery by the hand, like a child, into the land of Gemütlichkeit.
Here, in Seligmann’s study, were the best of the grace and charming intelligence of Alt Wien. The decor was twinkly with wit; it had animation, a leisurely joyousness, and it was a little sly in a friendly way. Here the self-conscious new did not intrude; there was nothing of Prussian precision; things had a patina, they were fine and they glowed.
Like the fire. Oh, the fire. Ellery sat in the lap of a motherly chair and he felt life. And when Frau Bauer served a starving man’s breakfast, complete to melting, wonderful Kaffee-kuchen and pots of rich and aromatic coffee, he knew he was dreaming.
“The best coffee in the world,” Ellery said to his host, raising his second cup. “One of the few national advertising claims with the merit of exact truth.”
“The coffee, like almost everything else Elsa has served you, comes to me from friends in the United States.” At Ellery’s blush Seligmann chuckled. “Forgive me, Herr Queen, I am an old Schuft, as we say, a scoundrel. You have not crossed an ocean to indulge in my bad manners.” He said evenly, “What is this now about my Edward Cazalis?”
So here it was.
Ellery left the motherly chair to stand before the fire like a man.
He said: “You saw Cazalis in Zurich in June, Professor Seligmann. Have you heard from him since?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know what’s been going on in New York this summer and fall?”
“Life. And death.”
“I beg pardon?”
The old man smiled. “I assume it, Mr. Queen. Has it not always? I do not read newspapers since the war begins. That is for people who like to suffer. I, I do not like to suffer. I have surrendered myself to eternity. For me there is today this room, tomorrow cremation, unless the authorities cannot agree to allow it, in which case they may stuff me and place me in the clock tower of the Rathaus and I shall keep reminding them of the time. Why do you ask?”
“Herr Professor, I’ve just made a discovery.”
“And what is that?”
Ellery laughed. “You know all about it.”
The old man shook silently. He didn’t when I phoned him from New York, thought Ellery, but he’s done some catching up since.
“You do, don’t you?”
“I have made some inquiries since, yes. Was it so evident? Sit down, Mr. Queen, sit down, we are not enemies. Your city has been terrorized by a paranoid murderer who strangled nine people, and now Edward Cazalis has been arrested for the crimes.”
“You don’t know the details.”
“No.”
Ellery sat down and related the story, beginning with the discovery of Archibald Dudley Abernethy’s body and ending with the capture of Cazalis in the First Avenue alley. Then he briefly indicated the subsequent conduct of the prisoner.
“Tomorrow, Professor Seligmann, Cazalis’s trial begins in New York, and I’m in Vienna—”
“To what purpose?” The old man regarded Ellery through the reek of his meerschaum. “I treated Cazalis as a patient when he came first to Vienna with his wife eighteen years ago, he studied under me subsequently, he left — I believe in 1935 — to return to America, and since that time I have seen him once. This summer. What is it you want of me, Herr Queen?”
“Help.”
“Mine? But the case is concluded. What more can there be? I do not understand. And if there is more, in which way could I be of assistance?”
“Yes.” Ellery fingered his cup. “It must be confusing. Especially since the evidence against Cazalis is so damning. He was captured in the act of attempting a tenth murder. He directed the police to the hiding place of a stock of strangling cords and they found where he said they would be, in the locked medical files in his office. And he confessed to the previous nine murders in considerable detail.” Ellery set his cup down with care. “Professor Seligmann, I know nothing of your science beyond, let’s say, some intelligent layman’s understanding of the differences among neurotic behavior, neurosis, and psychosis. But in spite of — or perhaps because of — my lack of knowledge in your field I’ve been experiencing my own brand of tension, arising from a rather curious fact.”
“And that is?”
“Cazalis never explained his... forgive me for hesitating... his motive. If he’s psychotic, his motives proceed from false views of reality which can have only clinical interest. But if he’s not... Herr Professor, before I’m satisfied, I’ve got to know what drove Cazalis to those murders.”
“And you believe I can tell you, Herr Queen?”
“Yes.”
“How so?” The old man puffed.
“You treated him. Moreover, he studied under you. To become a psychiatrist he had himself to be analyzed, a mandatory procedure—”
But Seligmann was shaking his great head. “In the case of a man so old as Cazalis was when he began to study with me, Mr. Queen, analysis is not a mandatory procedure. It is a most questionable procedure, Mr. Queen. Very few have been successfully analyzed at the age of 49, which is how old he was in 1931. Indeed, the entire project was questionable because of his age. I attempted it in Cazalis’s case only because he interested me, he had a medical background, and I wished to experiment. As it happened, we were successful. Forgive me for interrupting—”
“At any rate, you analyzed him.”
“I analyzed him, yes.”
Ellery hitched forward. “What was wrong with him?”
Seligmann murmured: “What is wrong with any of us?”
“That’s no answer.”
“It is one answer, Mr. Queen. We all exhibit neurotic behavior. All, without exception.”
“Now you’re indulging your Schufterei, if that’s the word.” The old man laughed delightedly. “I ask you again, Herr Professor: What was the underlying cause of Cazalis’s emotional upset?”
Seligmann kept puffing.
“It’s the question that’s brought me here. Because I know none of the essential facts, only the inconclusive superficial ones. Cazalis came from a poverty-laden background. He was one of fourteen children. He abandoned his parents and his brothers and sisters when a wealthy man befriended and educated him. And then he abandoned his benefactor. Everything about his career seems to me to point to an abnormal ambition, a compulsive overdrive to success — including his marriage. While his professional ethics remained high, his personal history is characterized by calculation and tremendous energy. And then, suddenly, at the apex of his career, in his prime — a breakdown. Suggestive.”
The old man said nothing.
“He’d been treated for a mild case of what they called ‘shell shock’ in the first war. Was there a connection? I don’t know. Was there, Herr Professor?”