Conrad Aiken - King Coffin

When he reached the Parker House Hotel, he suddenly decided to go in — he wanted not only to wash his hands, very carefully and slowly, but also to admire in the mirror above the washbasin the fine forehead and the extraordinary eyes of the man who had now so clearly and calmly seen to the end of a human life: King Coffin.

If for a moment the thing, in coming closer, seemed almost in the nature of an encroachment, as if his own shadow were somehow falling on himself, or his own image walking toward him out of a mirror, the sensation passed immediately, with a mere knitting of the brows, and what ensued was a natural and profound laughter, the golden laughter of the gaia scienza , the gay wisdom. The heavens and the houses laughed together, the whole sound of the hostile city was gay, not to say ribald, and it was as if he himself were mounting rapidly up a spiral of air or light. The impulses were many and confused — to call up Gerta, for example, to call up Sandbach, call up Toppan, even Mrs. Taber; to call them all up and tell them what had happened. Ammen speaking! Yes? And I wanted to say that I’ve found a man, a stranger, and I have him on the end of an invisible cord, a cord three miles long, and with this cord I shall slowly but surely kill him. I shall dangle him there like a puppet, like Punch or Judy, until I want him. I shall then summon him to the place of execution, wherever I choose, and it shall be done.… But against this was also the contrary impulse, and the more natural — to make this the beginning of a new and essentially secret life: to go underground, into darkness, and to remain there. No one should know what he was doing, where he was, what planning, what evolving: at most, now and then, he would give them the fleetingest of little signals, the showing of a single and ambiguous light, glimpsed for only a moment and gone again, or the utterance of a deceptive word or two in the most disguised and bland of voices. They would know nothing, until he had returned at last from the underworld, wearing a new terribleness of splendor. And even then though they would recognize the new power, the new terror, they would guess in vain at the reason, find him as mysterious in the light as in the dark.

But only for the time being .

This fact must not be lost sight of.

He lengthened and quickened his pace, he had thought little about his direction, found himself now proceeding from the foot of Mount Vernon Street to the Esplanade against gusts of wind, the Charles River Basin lay before him half clouded, half flashing under the changing sky, the nearer waves leaden, the farther bright. The raw new works for the new lagoons, islands, bridges, the stretches of bare earth where as yet no grass showed, the heavy masses of unplaced stone lying awry, the ungainly bastions projecting against the river, windswept and sinister, — all this accorded admirably with his own changing scene, his sense of disruption and tumult. The ruthlessness and purposiveness of architecture, of the architect — yes, there are times when one must be a Bucyrus-Erie steam shovel.

Only for the time being: the shadow lay heaviest in that phrase, in the notion of time . Once the weapon had been aimed, one could not delay indefinitely the pulling of the trigger; there must necessarily be a limit to the time during which one merely observed, from a distance, and for whatever satisfaction, one’s quarry: the one-who-wants-to-be-killed must be killed! But need it be at once?

It was a nice question.

Actually, of course, there was no hurry. Mr. Jones could not escape — for how could he take flight from a danger of which he wasn’t even aware? He would be there, he would wait, as long as it was necessary for him to wait. But this wasn’t really the problem. The real problem was once more in the matter of purity , and about this it was imperative to think very clearly, without any vagueness or any self-deception. One must be certain that one was not delaying for the wrong reasons: for example, out of fear, or a distrust of one’s mere competence. But that was dismissed as soon as considered. The thing would be, if not entirely simple, at all events quite practicable: it would need, when the right time came, when the circumstances had been sufficiently studied or arranged only the cool exercise of a little logic. Some small and quite uncomplicated structure of deception would serve, all the more obviously in view of the fact that the victim was completely unsuspecting. An invitation to something, somewhere — Belmont, Concord, Nantasket—

No, there was no cause for worry, there was no fringe of self-deception, he was not afraid; the thing was as good as done. He could safely leave the actual form of the murder to be determined by future events. The revolver, with which he was an expert marksman, brought all the way from Naples, canoe on the Concord River — these details need not yet be considered. Or a casual lurch in the subway? What was far more important now was the other question, which he had not quite clearly foreseen though he had vaguely felt it — the question as to how legitimate would be the mere pleasure in observation , in the daily watching and study of Mr. K. N. Jones. In the last half hour, the intense reality of this pleasure had become only too manifest. It must have been, from the very beginning, somewhere vaguely in his mind — it was certainly a part of the pleasure of the pure detective-impulse, as discussed by himself and Toppan. But admitting this, how safely and for how long could it be protracted? The line must be drawn somewhere — the stranger must in essence remain a stranger — and if it was perhaps legitimate to learn as much about the little man as possible, by careful study, one must be scrupulous in learning only what could be learned from outside . Yes, that was it; that would keep it pure: everything would be all right as long as the stranger did not know him . The stranger must not become an acquaintance? Even this was not wholly clear, however — for if knowing about his victim was a perfectly legitimate part of his pleasure, then surely it was difficult to set any limit?…

Advertising; he was an advertising agent; a publicity expert. Presumably not a very good or successful one. What did such fellows do? And how could that be found out?

Two girls, one of them with an Alsatian on a leash, walked for a moment parallel with him.

— And from where I was sitting in the front row of the balcony I could look right down on his little pink bald head—

— Was his wife there too?

— Yes, I suppose it was—

— With red hair? and she has very skinny arms, you can see them when she wears—

He turned to the left, entered the rutted and shabby alley behind Beacon Street, paused to let a car pass, looked in and saw an old lady with a black hat and veil — the fierce bird’s-eyes peered at him and were gone. For some reason he stood still, gazed after the retreating car, watched it swing slowly, bumping over the uneven surface, up the left turn which took it to Beacon Street. A final glimpse of that white and hostile Boston profile and it had vanished. Something in it, as in this wind, the rapid shift of cold spring sunlight with gray shadow, brought him an eclipse: his hatred rose suddenly and sharply, the vision returned to him at last night at Gerta’s, it grew like a tree, thrust darkly and venomously above him, spread violent and lethal boughs to right and left over the hated void. As he stood still in the dusty alley, with tightening arms and hands held hard against his sides, it was himself who thus grew and darkened and obscurely multiplied. He had taken possession of the world. Conscious of his powerful arrogance, his half-closed eyes, his out-going intelligence and limitless vision, he looked to right and left along the alley as far as he could, saw the few people in the distance, knew them, dismissed them. They had not noticed him, and even if they had, they were as unaware of his true reality, his malevolence, as the oak tree is of thunder. If they saw him at all, they saw him simply as a man standing still in a dusty alley, a man with dusty shoes, tall and thin, dressed in a dark suit, his dark hair blown in the wind. Perhaps they thought of him as odd and solitary, or even as absurd and self-conscious: as if to be standing there close to the high brick wall, motionless in the swirling dust, was a kind of awkward pose, something either meaningless or ridiculous. Or shabby and mean.…