“Under those powerful, delicately nerved, practiced surgeon’s hands.
“Professor Seligmann.” Ellery loomed over the old man. “You’re the only being on the face of the earth in a position to tell me the truth. Isn’t it fact that when Edward Cazalis came to you eighteen years ago for psychiatric treatment he had broken down under a dreadful load of guilt — the guilt of having murdered his own two children in the act of delivery?”
After a moment old Seligmann took the empty pipe from his lip. He said carefully, “For a physician to murder his own unborn children under the delusion that they were another’s — this would be psychosis, Herr Queen, no? You could not expect him to follow his subsequent brilliant, stable career, most particularly in the field of psychiatry. And my position, what would that have been? Still, you believe this, Herr Queen?”
Ellery laughed angrily. “Would it make my meaning clear if I amended my question to conclude: ‘the guilt of fearing he had murdered his own two children’?”
The old man looked pleased.
“Because it was the logical development of his neurosis, wasn’t it? He had excessive feelings of guilt about his hates and a great need for punishment. He, the eminent obstetrician, had brought thousands of other men’s children into the world alive, but under his hands his own children had died. Did I kill them? he agonized. Did my obsessive jealousy and suspicions make my hands fail? Did I want them to be born dead and my hands saw to it that they were? I did want them to be born dead. And they were born dead. Therefore I killed them. The terrible illogic of neurosis.
“His common sense told him they had been breech births; his neurosis told him he had performed countless other breeches successfully. His common sense told him that his wife, let’s say, was not ideally constructed for motherhood; his neurosis told him her babies were fathered by other men. His common sense told him he had done his efficient best; his neurosis told him that he had not, that he might have done this or that, or not done that or this, or that had he not insisted on performing the deliveries himself but placed his wife in the hands of another obstetrician, his children would have survived. And so on.
“Because he had an overwhelming compulsion to believe it, within a short time Cazalis had convinced himself that he’d murdered both babies. A little of this mental Schrecklichkeit and he broke. When his wife took him traveling and he came to Vienna — odd coincidence, wouldn’t you say, Professor? — lo, he collapsed again. And went to you. And you, Professor Seligmann, you probed and analyzed and treated and... you cured him?”
When the old psychoanalyst spoke, his rumbling voice held a growl. “It is too many years and I know nothing of his emotional problems since. Even at the time there was a menopausal complication. If in the past few years he has been pushing himself too hard — at the present stage of his life... Often in the middle age people are unable to defend themselves by means of neurotic symptoms and they break down completely into a psychosis. We find, for example, that paranoid schizophrenia is frequently a disease of late middle age. Still, I am surprised and troubled. I do not know. I should have to see him.”
“He still has guilt feelings. He must have. It’s the only explanation for what he’s done, Professor.”
“What he has done? You mean, Mr. Queen, murdering nine persons?”
“No.”
“He has done something else?”
“Yes.”
“In addition to the nine murders?”
“To the exclusion,” said Ellery, “of the nine murders.”
Seligmann rapped the bowl of his meerschaum on the arm of the chair.
“Come, mein Herr. You speak in riddles. Precisely what is it that you do mean?”
“I mean,” said Ellery, “that Cazalis is innocent of the charge for which he is going to trial in New York tomorrow morning.”
“Innocent?”
“I mean, Professor Seligmann, that Cazalis did not kill those nine people. Cazalis is not — and never was — the Cat.”
13
Seligmann said, “Let us expose Fate, whose other name is Bauer.” He bellowed, “Elsa!”
Frau Bauer appeared, pure jinni.
“Elsa—” began the old man.
But Frau Bauer interrupted, stumbling from a secure “Herr Professor” into uncertain English so that Ellery knew her remarks were intended for his ears also. “You have breakfast eaten when it is already lunch. Lunch you have not eaten. Now comes your time to rest.” Fists on bony hips, Frau Bauer glared challenge to the non-Viennese world.
“I’m so very sorry, Professor—”
“For what, Mr. Queen? Elsa.” The old man spoke gently, in German. “You’ve listened at the door. You’ve insulted my guest. Now you wish to rob me of my few remaining hours of consciousness. Must I hypnotize you?”
Frau Bauer whitened. She fled.
“It is my only weapon against her,” chuckled the old man. “I threaten to put her under hypnosis and send her into the Soviet zone to serve as the plaything of Moscow. It is not a matter of morals with Elsa; it is sheer horror. She would as soon get in bed with the Antichrist. You were telling me, Mr. Queen, that Cazalis is innocent after all?”
“Yes.”
The old man sat back, smiling. “Do you arrive at this conclusion by way of your unique scientifically unknown method of analysis, or is it based upon fact? Such fact as would, for example, satisfy your courts of law.”
“It’s based on a fact which would satisfy anyone above the mental age of five, Professor Seligmann,” Ellery retorted. “Its very simplicity, I think, has obscured it. Its simplicity and the fact that the murders have been so numerous and have dragged on for so long. Too, it’s been the kind of case in which the individuality of the victims has tended to blur and blend as the murders multiplied, until at the end one looked back on a homogeneous pile of carcasses, so many head of cattle passed through the slaughter pen. The same sort of reaction one got looking at the official pictures of the corpses of Belsen, Buchenwald, Oswiecim, and Maidanek. No particularity. Just death.”
“But the fact, Mr. Queen.” With a flick of impatience, and something else. And suddenly Ellery recalled that Béla Seligmann’s only daughter, married to a Polish Jewish doctor, had died at Treblinka. Love particularizes death, Ellery thought. And little else.
“Oh, the fact,” he said. “Why, it’s a mere matter of beginners’ physics, Professor. You attended the Zürich convention earlier this year, you told me. Exactly when this year?”
The white brows met. “The end of May, was it not?”
“The meeting lasted ten days and the concluding session was held on the night of June 3. On the night of June 3 Dr. Edward Cazalis of the United States read a paper entitled Ochlophobia, Nyctophobia, and Ponophobia in the convention hall before a large audience. As reported in a Zürcher scientific journal, the speaker scheduled to precede Cazalis, a Dane, ran far over his allotted time, to virtually the adjournment hour. Out of courtesy to Dr. Cazalis, however, who had attended all the sessions — according to a footnote in the journal — the American was permitted to deliver his paper. Cazalis began reading around midnight and finished at a few minutes past 2 o’clock in the morning. The convention was then adjourned for the year. The official adjournment time was 2:24 A.M. 4th June.”
Ellery shrugged. “The time difference between Zürich and New York being six hours, midnight of June 3 in Zürich, which is when Cazalis began reading his paper to the convention, was 6 P.M. June 3 in New York; 2 A.M. June 4 in Zurich, which is about when Cazalis finished reading his paper there, was 8 P.M. June 3 in New York. Assuming the absurd — that Cazalis whisked himself from the convention hall immediately on adjournment or even as he stepped off the platform at the conclusion of his talk, that he had already checked out of his hotel and had his luggage waiting, that the slight matter of his visa had been taken care of, that there was a plane ready to take off for the United States at the Zürich airport the instant he reached there (for which specific plane Cazalis had a ticket, notwithstanding Dr. Naardvoessler’s windiness, the unusual hour, or the impossibility of having foreseen the delay), that this plane flew to New York nonstop, that at Newark Airport or La Guardia Cazalis found a police motorcycle escort waiting to conduct his taxi through traffic at the highest possible speed — assuming all this nonsense, Herr Professor, at which hour could Edward Cazalis have reached midtown Manhattan, would you say? The earliest conceivable hour?”