Oddly enough, Rurik was not given to vindictiveness or hate, in the generally accepted sense of these terms. Something was missing from him that makes society possible. Call it a soul, call it a heart, call it pity; but say that he wanted to be alone. And so he was, right to the end, with a high-backed chair all to himself, and a secret which he thought he would carry on his own, looked within himself, to a narrow place where nobody could touch him.
This secret was the whereabouts of certain buried treasure; I mean the location of $2,600,000 which he had stolen and hidden nobody knew where.
It was Rurik who stole the armored truck in Butte, Montana. At any moment now the pulp-writers will rehash the Rurik snatch as a “perfect crime.” The details are available in the files of all the newspapers in the world. It is sufficient to say, here, simply that Rurik and his two companions, later to be known as “The Unholy Three,” exquisitely timing and balancing the operation, got away with an immense payroll, together with nearly all the money that had been in the vault of a great bank, one day, and seemed to evaporate, truck and all. Timing, timing, timing, said the Sunday supplement criminologists; until one became sick and tired of the word. There was also some reference to Mr. G.K. Chesterton’s “The Invisible Man,” whose cloak of invisibility was the fact that he was too familiar, at a given hour, to appear conspicuously out of place.
Both schools of thought were right: the timers and the psychologists. At one moment there was an armored truck loaded with money. Next moment there were three or four bewildered men, loosely holding pistols they did not know what to point at; three streets full of traffic had stopped for the lights, and a great fortune was on its way to nowhere. Only one shot was fired, and that by a bank guard named Larkin, a retired police officer who, when the three bandits appeared, one of them with a gun in his hand, let fly with a short-barreled .38. As it later transpired, Larkin hit Rurik in the hip and so precipitated his capture. When the money is recovered, it is believed, Larkin will have good legal grounds for claiming a reasonable portion of the reward. The robbers, by arrangement, carried unloaded automatics—it seems that Rurik was very particular about this. So, in about as long as it takes a man to say: “Was that a backfire?”—one of the greatest robberies of our time was perpetrated, and there was great federal perplexity. Anywhere in the world a man can disappear, as Willie Sutton did, simply by being patient and keeping still. In Montana, even an armored truck can disappear. But how does two and a half million-odd dollars disappear?
They found the truck a certain distance out of town, empty. Where, then, was the paper money and the silver? Any moving-man will tell you that there is nothing heavier than paper, and any bank messenger will tell you that there is nothing more unwieldy than a bag of loose coin. He would be a very strong man indeed who could carry on his back even a quarter of a million dollars in small bills for the distance of fifteen city blocks. Throw in a bag or two of silver dollars to joggle the equilibrium, and put soft sand underfoot instead of paving stones, and no man can do it. A mule couldn’t. And here not two hundred and fifty thousand, but two and a half million dollars had been spirited away to some hiding place in the rocks!
Reconstructing the affair, the federal authorities arrived at the conclusion that Rurik and his men stopped the truck somewhere on the outskirts of Butte and hid the money in some place tantalizingly close to town, known only to themselves. Each took $8,000 for current expenses. The truck was driven about fifteen miles further, to a point near where Rurik had hidden a getaway car. Rurik took this car, and then they separated, arranging to meet when it was expedient to do so. But this is what happened: Little Dominic, trying to buy a used car in Helena, was recognized and died fighting it out with the state troopers. MacGinnis lost his way northward among the rocks and died there, in his pig-headed way, rather than give himself up. Only Rurik was taken alive, having fainted through loss of blood in a filling-station.
It is worthy of note that before he lost consciousness, his last words were: “Even maps you can’t trust,” and afterward raved of the illusion of space and the fallacy of distance, until they brought him to. The State pumped into Rurik the solid blood and the plasma of I forget how many honest men before he was brought to trial and convicted of the bank robbery. Here the FBI furnished the additional information that, under another name, Rurik was wanted in the state of New York for murder. So he was shipped back to New York, neatly patched up, and there after fair trial, found guilty and sentenced to death by electrocution. He took the sentence impassively, his only comment being: “A short life and a merry one—” though, since most of his short life had been spent hiding or running away, I find it difficult to concur with his opinion of merriment.
Now while Rurik was playing pinochle in the death house, there came to him a certain Father Jellusik who said that Dr. Holliday, the eye surgeon, wanted Rurik’s eyes. The condemned man, laughing heartily, said: “Listen, Father, the D.A. offers me my life if I sing where the dough is stashed! And now somebody wants my eyes. No disrespect, Father, but don’t make me laugh. D’you think I never heard how you can see things in a dead man’s eye?”
Father Jellusik said, “My son, that’s an old wives’ tale. I have it on reliable authority that a dead man’s eye is no more revealing than an unloaded camera.”
Rurik began, “Once I looked into . . . well, anyway, I never saw nothing. What do they want my eyes for?”
“An eye,” said Father Jellusik, “is nothing but a certain arrangement of body tissue. Put it like this: you are you, Rurik. If one of your fingers were chopped off, would you still be Rurik?”
“Who else?”
“Without your arms and legs, who would you be?”
“Rurik.”
“Now say you had an expensive miniature camera, and were making your will. Wouldn’t you give it away?”
“To the cops, no.”
“But to an innocent child?”
“I guess I might.”
“And the eye, you know, is nothing but a camera.”
In the end Rurik signed a document bequeathing his eyes to Dr. Holliday, for the benefit of this remarkable surgeon’s child patients, many of whom had been born blind. “You can’t take ’em with you,” Rurik is alleged to have said; thereby letting loose a tidal wave of emotion. One would have thought that Rurik was the first person ever to utter this proposition. The sob sisters took him to their bosoms, and put into his mouth all kinds of scrapbook philosophy, such as: “If more folks thought more about more folks, the world—” et cetera, et cetera. His last words, which were: “Hold it, I changed my mind,” were reported as: “I feel kind of at peace now.” The general public completely ignored the fact that there was a little matter of two and a half million dollars which Rurik had, to all practical intents and purposes, taken with him.