Yes, it was all entirely fitting. Vestal, unwanted stepchild of Knoxville, half-caste bastard community the city would not annex, instead grew around and ignored. This tawdry house, part of a cheap suburban development project that went bust in the Depression along with everyone else. Half the houses remained unfinished in their gullied and weedgrown lots, shunned even by vagrants. This one had been finished — a shabby stucco eyesore of what the developers had called variously Roman or Moorish architecture, and named the rutted dirt lanes things like “Via Roma” or “Castille Lane.” The shoddy structure was already falling apart, going the way of all bright and glittering dreams.
And here he sat in a broken-springed chair, in a dirty room with crumbling plaster and threadbare fake-oriental carpet. His blond hair turned prematurely thin, a stained lounging jacket covering an athletically slim frame that had gone softly to seed. Only these two objects had substance and reality: Absinthe, that slow, insidious poison, a taste for which he had cultivated in the old days of wealth and refined decadence. The Luger, sleek and deadly, all that remained of his days of courage and glory, a winged knight fighting the Hun dragon in the skies of France to win the war that would end all wars.
God, but wasn’t it fitting! “Dulce et decorum est…” he quoted to himself, taking another long sip of absinthe. A witchery of distilled dream in the bitter, heavy sweetness of anise perfume. With practiced ease he pressed the magazine release catch of the Luger, examined the clip with its eight 9 mm. cartridges, replaced the magazine. One would be enough; he wouldn’t miss.
His shadowed blue eyes again stared at the evening News-Sentinel, lying crumpled on the dirty carpet beside his chair. At this distance his vision was no longer keen enough to read beyond the headlines, but he had long since committed every word to memory.
FIERY CRASH CLAIMS NOTED
OCCULTIST AND FIANCÉE
Dillon, N.C. The brilliant career of noted occultist, John Chance, ended tragically yesterday in a late night auto crash not far from this small mountain community. The tragedy also claimed the life of Miss Kirsten von Brocken, Dr. Chance’s fiancée and research assistant.
There were no witnesses to the crash, which local authorities estimate to have occurred shortly before midnight. Apparently Chance, who was driving Miss von Brocken’s late model Packard, lost control on a curve and plunged down the steep mountain slope. While thick fog delayed discovery of the accident for several hours, local authorities state that the couple was killed instantly. Their automobile was totally demolished and the bodies burned beyond recognition. Identification was made from personal effects.
Chance, 37, was a native of Knoxville who spent much of his life abroad. Prior to America’s active entry in the World War, he flew for the R.F.C. and was credited with 18 victories before crashing behind lines. Reported dead, he survived German prison hospitals to escape shortly before Armistice. In 1920, sole heir to the Chance estate, he liquidated his family’s extensive holdings in the munitions industry with the avowed intention to devote his life and fortune in the study of the underlying causes that drive men to make war. In the years of globetrotting that followed, he earned doctorate degrees in Anthropology and Psychology, and studied in numerous prestigious universities and institutes. He was considered one of the world’s foremost authorities in the esoteric realms of parapsychology and legitimate occult phenomena, as well as a scholar of folk myths and superstitions. He was the author of several books, among them Supernatural or Paranormal? and The Veil of Superstition.
Miss von Brocken, 30, was the daughter of an ancient and distinguished Prussian house. She became a naturalized American citizen following the recent move to the political forefront of National-Socialism in Germany. Miss von Brocken, considered herself to have significant clairvoyant abilities, had for several years assisted Dr. Chance in his research. The couple met in Berlin while Dr. Chance was studying there and had traveled extensively. They only recently had returned to Knoxville to announce their engagement.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
Moore took another long sip of absinthe, letting its licorice fire blaze through his senses. Yes, incomplete, he thought with a bitter smile. But not for long. He glared at the newspaper photo of Chance, standing big and uncomfortable in dinner dress, with Kirsten on his arm, a poised blonde goddess in her daring black evening gown. God, why had he stayed in Knoxville…
He set aside the tall glass, gripped the knurled knobs of the Luger’s toggle joint in his free hand, pulled back sharply and released — watching the gleam of brass as the 9 mm. cartridge was driven into the firing chamber. Geladen.
Moore recovered his glass and grimly considered the loaded automatic. He remembered the day he had claimed the Luger from the broken body of the Fokker pilot whose triplane he had sent spinning broken-winged to earth on the Allied side. Kill number ten for him. He and Chance had gotten gloriously drunk.
What friends they had been — two idealistic scions of American industrial wealth, off on a lark to destroy the Hun — before the War changed them both. He remembered the shock of their reunion after Chance had crawled through Hell to escape from that German prison hospital. It was a haggard, demon-haunted John Chance who had returned from that ordeal — a driven man, obsessed with half-mad theories and vaguely hinted-at memories of his experiences. Moore in those intervening months had followed his natural talents toward dissipation, and in the whirl of alcohol, drugs, and women was scarcely bothered with the knowledge that for him killing had become the greatest thrill of all.
Strangely, they had not drifted apart entirely after the war. While Chance went from university to university, and Moore squandered his family fortune in the casinos and vice dens of the world, their paths occasionally crossed. So it was in Berlin in 1929.
Moore had been drawn to Berlin by the splendid decadence of that city’s frenzied bacchanalia, where the vices of the old aristocracy and the new intelligentsia promised surcease from even his ennui. Chance had gravitated there in his peripatetic quest from one intellectual center to another, searching for answers that seemed forever hidden. It was Moore who introduced Chance to Kirsten von Brocken.
The Grafin von Brocken had a wide circle of admirers, of whom Compton Moore was perhaps most ardent. She was a spiritualist, a crystal-gazer — whose aristocratic beauty was all the more sensational for the aura of mysticism in which she cloaked herself. Men hovered mothlike about her presence when she appeared at the cabaret or theatre, at Bohemian revels or dinner parties of the social elite. With that hint of notoriety that guaranteed social triumph, the Grafin had conquered Berlin that summer, and to be permitted to attend a séance at her apartment was an honor jealously sought after by the blood and chivalry of the city.
Moore had spent many long summer evenings hovering near the Grafin’s flame. Did she love him? She invited; she retreated — as with all the others. He was certain he was in love with her. All of her admirers, after all, were in love with her — from stolid old General von Hoffmannsthal to that consumptive Austrian artist Meier.
Then a sudden encounter with John Chance, and in a gush of enthusiasm Moore had described Kirsten and invited him along to a séance. Chance went along solemnly skeptical, came away thoughtful and impressed. She and Chance saw more of one another thereafter, soon to the exclusion of Kirsten’s previous admirers — Moore as well.