Part 24 (1/2)

'That's Gilbert Griffin and the girl next to him, that's his child-bride Emily Griffin, G.o.d rest her soul, wherever her soul might be.'

'I see. You'll have to tell us about it.'

They found a dark corner booth in the Lantern Bar, with squeaky black leather seats. Walter would have given anything for an ice-cold Coors, but he had to settle for a Diet c.o.ke. Sometimes he wished he had picked a career in which drinking was not only acceptable but obligatory, like politics, or acting, or writing fiction. Charlie ordered a gla.s.s of water, with a twist.

'So you knew Gordon Veitch,' said Walter, when Henry's c.o.c.ktail arrived.

'You bet. We all knew him, all of us clowns. Gordon Veitch was Mago Verde, the Green Magician. His father before him, Daniel Veitch, he was Mago Verde, too, and he handed it down to Gordon - the make-up, the tricks, but most of all that mean malicious att.i.tude. If there was ever a son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h on this planet it was Daniel Veitch and if there was ever a son-of-a-son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h it was Gordon Veitch. But let me tell you one thing. Gordon Veitch may have been mean and malicious to everybody else, but he was never once mean and malicious to me. I guess you could say that he took me under his wing.'

'How did you come to meet him?' asked Walter.

'I met him at Corey's Circus. I used to work there after school, making myself some money by mucking out the animals. You ever smell lion s.h.i.+t? There is no worse smell on this planet than lion s.h.i.+t. Well, tiger s.h.i.+t maybe.

'I got to know some of the clowns and most of them were good to me, considering I was nothing more than a part-time s.h.i.+t-shoveler. Bongo especially. He was Portuguese, believe it or not, and his real name was Remi. He helped me to design my own make-up and he lent me some of his outfits and he showed me how to juggle with knives and how to walk on the low wire and how to fall on my a.s.s without hurting myself.

'But it was Mago Verde who took a real s.h.i.+ne to me, especially if I ran errands for him, like placing bets on the horses and bringing him cigarettes and bottles of hooch. All of the other circus folk, though, they stayed well clear of him. He would trip people up when they were carrying boxes of light bulbs; or he would do this trick when he threw an egg up into the air and catch it in a velvet bag, but when he asked some sucker to dip his hand into the bag and pick the egg out for him, the bag was cram-full of razor blades. Like I say, he was a regular son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h. He had the power, though, no mistake about that.'

'The power?' asked Walter. 'What power was that, exactly?'

Henry sucked noisily at his c.o.c.ktail. Then he held it up to the light and said, 'Not bad. But too much sloe gin.'

'What power, Henry?' Walter pressed him.

Henry blinked at him as if he had never seen him before in his life. But then he lifted one finger and tapped it against the side of his bulbous nose. 'Daniel Veitch had given Gordon a whole lot more than his make-up and his magic tricks and his mean and malicious att.i.tude. He had pa.s.sed on the family knack of stepping into other people's dreams. That's what he told me, anyhow, and he proved it to me.'

'Excuse me? Stepping into other people's dreams? How exactly did he do that?'

'Search me. But he always insisted that he could do it, and once he told me that he had stepped into one of my dreams when I was sleeping - a dream I was having about fis.h.i.+ng out on Lake Erie and my boat was sinking - and he described that dream to me in every detail - just like he had actually been there, too, standing right behind me.'

'OK,' said Walter, trying not to sound too skeptical. 'Go on.'

'Well, the dream thing, that's where Gilbert Griffin came into it, and Gilbert Griffin was the real instigator of what happened next, although I never told n.o.body about it because n.o.body would never have believed me.'

'So what makes you think that we're going to believe you?'

'You can believe me if you want to, or not if you don't. I'm ninety-three years old now and I don't give a rat's a.s.s. But I might as well tell somebody before I cash in my chips and it might as well be you. Especially young Charlie here. He understands about clowns, don't you, Charlie?'

'All right,' said Walter. 'What heinous act of heiniosity did Gilbert Griffin commit?'

'It was that child-bride of his, Emily. He was nuts about her - and you can see from the picture in the lobby how cute she was. But in July of nineteen thirty-five, only eighteen months after they were married, she came out of Kroger's Family Store on n.o.ble Road up in Cleveland Heights and she was knocked down by a speeding automobile and she died two days later in hospital.

'Gilbert Griffin, he was inconsolable and it was public knowledge how grief-stricken he was. He placed advertis.e.m.e.nts in the Plain Dealer every day, offering thousand-dollar rewards to any mediums who could contact Emily in the spirit world so that he could talk to her and tell her how much he missed her. That's when Mago Verde got in contact with him and said he could visit Emily in his dreams and bring him back messages from her, and even letters. But that wasn't all. For a price, he said, there was a way that he could bring her back to life.'

'Jesus,' said Walter. 'Did Gilbert Griffin believe him?'

Henry sucked more c.o.c.ktail and nodded. 'He surely did. Mago Verde told me about it, too. According to him, it was some hocus-pocus they devised in the Vatican in the Middle Ages. You know what hocus-pocus is, don't you?'

'Hocus-pocus? What are you talking about? Sure I do.'

'No, you don't. I can tell by your face. Hocus-pocus comes the Latin hoc est corpus, which is the words they speak in the Eucharist when the communion wafer is supposed to turn into flesh. If you can turn a biscuit into a person, it can't be too much trouble to turn a dream into a person, can it?' He tapped his forehead. 'Don't look so surprised, detective. There's a whole encyclopedia up inside of this head. I wasn't no director of no museum for forty-eight years without learning nothing, even if it was only a clown museum.'

Walter said, 'OK. I'm impressed. So what was this hocus-pocus, exactly?'

'Mago Verde told me that you had to make a trade. To bring one dead person out of the world of dreams and back to the world of reality, you had to take nine innocent people from the world of reality and take them through to the world of dreams, like forever. Nine for one.'

'Why nine?'

Henry rolled up his eyes as if he were talking to a six-year-old child. 'Because nine is the magic number which is the beginning of everything. Nine makes everything tick. Time, s.p.a.ce, life, death - everything runs on the number nine. Nine is like the key to the universal clock. So nine people had to be taken away before one could come back.'

'Oh, yeah?'

'Why do you think we say that cats have nine lives? And ”a st.i.tch in time saves nine”?' He held up nine fingers, and counted each of them in turn. 'In the Christian religion, there are nine orders of angels. In Hebrew, G.o.d has seventy-two names, and seven and two add up to nine. In Arabic, G.o.d has ninety-nine names. The Mayans believed that nine was a sacred number, and in China, on the ninth day of the ninth month, the day of Double Yang, people believe that their dead and faraway friends can appear in front of them.

'Nine is the number that makes dreams work. Next time you have a dream, try to remember how many nines appeared in it. Could be anything - nine doork.n.o.bs, nine cakes, nine people, nine trees. But I guarantee you, the number nine will be in there someplace.'

'I don't dream, Henry,' said Walter. 'I don't dream ever.'

'You do, detective, even if you can't remember it. Next time, try to remember. Nine bottles of beer hanging on the wall, nine willing women.'

'So what happened?' asked Walter, trying to change the subject. 'Mago Verde conned Gilbert Griffin into thinking that he could bring his beloved Emily back to life, and in return Gilbert Griffin paid him to kidnap nine innocent people and take them off to the land of nod? That sounds suspiciously like conspiracy to me, if not murder for hire.'

Henry shrugged. 'I never had no proof, detective, which is why I never told n.o.body for all of these years. What would have been the point? They probably would have carted me off to the funny farm. But it was only a few days after Mago Verde went to see Gilbert Griffin that he quit the circus without saying so much as goodbye to n.o.body, and then all of them killings and all of them disappearances started in the Cleveland Flats.

'There was all manner of suspects. At first Eliot Ness thought it was some doctor from Glenville. Then he thought it was a longsh.o.r.eman called Crudd.i.c.k. But there must have been at least one eye witness who said it was somebody dressed up as a clown, because the cops came around two or three times to Corey's Circus, and each time they ransacked the place. They never found Mago Verde, though. Mago Verde had flown the coop, and none of us ever saw him again, which made us all think that he could have been the killer.

'Once Eliot Ness came around to Corey's Circus in person, although he didn't talk to me. I always remember how he had this dark s.h.i.+ny hair parted in the center, and a red necktie.

'They never caught Gordon Veitch though, did they?' asked Walter.

'No, they didn't. Not to bring to trial, anyhow. There was more murders and more rapes, and more disappearances, and in August of nineteen thirty-eight the cops got a tip-off about the whereabouts of Mago Verde and they burned down half of Shantytown. There was a huge public hoo-ha, especially in the press, but after that the killings stopped, so the cops presumed that they had done their job, and that Mago Verde was dead.'

'But you blame Gilbert Griffin for what happened?'

'Who else? I'm ninety-nine percent sure that Gilbert Griffin paid Mago Verde to kill or kidnap those innocent people. And what was more, he gave Mago Verde the wherewithal to take his victims through to the world of dreams.'

'The wherewithal? What do you mean by that?'

'Mago Verde told me that all nine victims had to be dreamed about, and each of the nine dreams had to be arranged in the same building in a special mystical pattern - an ennead, which means a figure of nine. It was like a psychic combination-lock, that's how he put it. Once you had dreamed all nine dreams in the same building, in the right pattern, the doors to the world of dreams would be opened up, click-clickety-click, and a person could be taken through from one reality to the other, or vice versa.'

'I see,' said Walter. 'Or rather, I don't see. To be totally honest, I don't understand what the f.u.c.k you're talking about.' He was pretty sure that Henry didn't hear him say that, because Henry simply shrugged.

'We never found out if Mago Verde was shooting us a line or not. Eighteen women was murdered or raped in all, but only seven people disappeared for good, five women and two men. So maybe he didn't make the nine before the cops got him.'

'Tell me,' said Walter. 'Have you ever seen Mago Verde since August, nineteen thirty-eight?'

Henry shook his head. 'No, sir. Not once. And let's face it, even if the cops didn't get him, Old Father Time would have done for him by now.'

'Yes. You're right. Although somebody else could be wearing his make-up, couldn't they?'

'Sure. But stealing some other clown's face, that's the worst thing that any clown could do. They never do that, ever. Stealing a man's face is like stealing his soul. If somebody is pa.s.sing themselves off as Mago Verde, then I'd sure like to know who it is.'