15
They walked through the great hall of the Residence to the courtyard. There was a disturbing clatter and buzz all about. It seemed to come from everywhere. Servants and minor flunkies bustled about, doors banged, guards ran here and there. Outside, where they had left the Residence car, there was a traffic jam. An armed PRPD man was trying to untangle it; he was shouting for help. Finally the tangle was unsnarled and vehicles began to move through the gates. There were a great many trucks. On the road outside other trucks and cars struggled toward the Residence, bumper to bumper.
The Inspector stuck his head out of the car window. “Look at the sky!”
It was alive with aircraft. They were all big ones — transports, trimotored passenger planes. Curiously, as many seemed to be coming in as taking off. The island shook under their thunder.
“What’s happening!”
“Maybe the King has declared himself a war,” said Ellery inching the car forward. “This has all the earmarks of a mobilization which has been thoroughly worked out in advance, with everything ready to roll at the touch of a button.”
“The way he’s feeling right now, he couldn’t declare a dividend. Turn off this road if you want to get somewhere. This is worse than the Merritt Parkway on Labor Day.”
Just past the belt of woods surrounding the Residence, Ellery found a side lane, scarcely wider than a bridle path, which was free of traffic. He swung into it. A truck driver shouted enviously after him.
“I think this comes out near the cliffs somewhere,” said the Inspector. “Near the harbor.”
“Sounds like just the place for a quiet talk.”
A few minutes later they were parked on the edge of the cliffs. The harbor lay below them.
The sight confounded them. The bay was clogged with ships of all lengths and tonnages. The cruiser Bendigo had withdrawn from the neck of the bay; it was anchored some distance at sea, near a light cruiser which the Queens had not seen before. Launches darted and skipped about loaded with passengers. The turrets of several big submarines were surfacing. The docks were piled high with crated goods; they were being loaded at a furious tempo into the holds. The roads leading down from the interior of the island looked like ant trails. And from the entire harbor area rose a confused roar that increased in volume with each moment.
“Whatever they’re doing,” said the Inspector wonderingly, “they sure had everything ready. What’s come over this place? Did you have anything to do with this?”
“No,” said Ellery slowly. “No, I don’t see how I could have.” He shook his head. “Well, do you want to see what I brought back from Wrightsville?”
“Brought back?”
Ellery reached over to the back seat of the car. He opened the suitcase he had carried off the plane that morning. A bulky manila envelope lay on his haberdashery. He took this and sat back.
“This is what I was doing in Wrightsville,” he said unclasping the envelope. “You’d better read it. To the end.”
It was a thick manuscript, and the Inspector took it with a glance at the harbor. But he read slowly, without looking up.
While his father read, Ellery watched the harbor. A fleet of seaplanes had landed in the bay to add to the mess. They were taking on passengers. Before the Inspector had finished they took off, making their runs along the narrow channel cleared by a squad of fast launches, evidently of the harbor traffic police.
When the Inspector had put down the last page, he stared incredulously at the frantic activity below them. “I hadn’t realized the extent of his power... I suppose,” he said suddenly, “this is all on the level?”
“Every word of it, Dad.”
“It’s hard for a schmo like me to believe. It’s too... colossal. But, son.” The Inspector eyed the manuscript Ellery was stuffing back into the envelope. “You said—”
“I know what I said,” Ellery interrupted fiercely. He tossed the envelope behind him. “And I say it again. What’s been happening on this island in purgatory is all in that envelope. Not the details, not the little techniques of circumstances and plot! But the backgrounds, the reasons.”
Ellery took Judah’s little Walther out of his pocket. He pointed it absently through the windshield at the heavy cruiser. And pulled the trigger. The Inspector ducked. But nothing happened. The gun was empty after all.
“Take the problem of Judah’s miracle,” Ellery said. “It was really no problem at all. What made it a problem was not its impossibility, but the positions of the people involved in it. Those were the impossibilities — until you knew the story that began in 1897, the story that exposed the people for what they were and are... the story that’s in the envelope. Then the people were no longer impossibilities and the human problem — the big problem — was solved.”
The Inspector said nothing. He did not understand, but he knew that soon he would. It had happened a hundred times before, in just this way. Still, for the hundredth time, he wondered.
“The physical aspects of Judah’s miracle first,” Ellery said, toying with the Walther. “It was such a very simple miracle. A man points an empty gun at a solid wall, and two rooms away, across a corridor filled with men, with another and even thicker wall intervening, another man slumps back with a bullet in his breast.
“An empty gun can’t shoot a bullet. But even if it could, no bullet could have entered the other room from outside. So Judah didn’t shoot King. No one shot King—” the Inspector started “—from outside the Confidential Room. It was materially impossible. But King was shot while in that room. I’d seen him, with my own eyes, unwounded, only three and a half minutes before the shot. So had you. We’d seen him close that door, automatically causing it to lock, and you yourself swore that the door was not opened again until we went in together after midnight. And that was the only way in or out of the room. Conclusion: King was shot from inside the room. He must have been. There’s no other possibility.”
“Except,” remarked his father, “that that was impossible, too.”
“There’s no other possibility,” repeated Ellery. “Therefore the appearance of impossibility is an illusion. He was shot from inside the room. That being the fact, only one person could have shot him. There were only two persons in that room, and there is no possibility from the circumstances that there could have been more than two, less than two, or two different ones. The two persons who entered that room, who remained in that room, and whom we found in that room were King and Karla. King could not possibly have shot himself; there were no powder marks on his shirt. Therefore Karla shot him.”
The Inspector said, “But Karla had no gun.”
“Another illusion. Why did we assume that Karla had no gun? Because we couldn’t find one. But Karla did shoot him. Therefore our search was at fault. Karla must have had a gun, and since it couldn’t possibly have left the room by the time we entered it to find King unconscious from his wound, then it was still in the room when we entered.”
“And the door was immediately shut,” retorted his father, “and no one was allowed to leave while we searched, and we searched everything and everyone there, and before anyone was passed out through the door we made another body search, and before anything was passed out through the door we searched it, too, and still we didn’t find the gun. Now that’s really an impossibility, Ellery. That’s what hung me up. If the gun had to be in that room, why didn’t we find it?”
“Because we didn’t look in the place where it was hidden.”
“We looked in everything!”