Strasse snorted.
“And then there was the very slight chance—which nevertheless occurred—that the collector would die. And so the legal inventory of his estate would turn up a Scarletin. And some person just might be able to read the meaning in this—if there is any.”
“Just what I was going to say,” Strasse said. “Even if what you say happened did happen,” he continued, “his kidnapers wouldn’t pass on the painting without examining it. The first thing they’d suspect would be a hidden message. It’s so obvious.”
“You didn’t think so a moment ago,” Ralph said. “But you are right... in agreeing with me. Now, let us hypothesize. Scarletin, a work of art, but he wishes to embody in it a message. Probably a map of sorts which will lead the police—or someone else looking for him—directly to the place where he is kept prisoner.
“How is he to do this without detection by the kidpnapers? He has to be subtle enough to escape their inspection. How subtle depends, I would imagine, on their education and perceptivity. But too subtle a message will go over everybody’s head. And he is limited in his choice of symbols by the situation, by the names or professions of his kidnapers—if he knows them—and by the particular location of his prison—if he knows that.”
“If, if, if?” Strasse said, throwing his hands up in the air.
“If me no ifs,” Ralph said. “But first let us consider that Scarletin is equally at home in German or English. He loves the pun-loving Carroll and Baum. So, perhaps, due to the contingencies of the situation, he is forced to pun in both languages.”
“It would be like him,” Mrs. Scarletin said. “But is it likely that he would use this method when he would know that very few people would be capable of understanding him?”
“As I said, it was a long shot, Madame. But better than nothing.”
“Now, Weisstein, whatever else I am, I am a dog. Hence, I am color-blind.” (But not throughout his career. See The Adventure of the Tired Color Man, to be published.) “Please describe the colors of each object on this canvas.”
Strasse sniggered, but we ignored him. When I had finished, Ralph said, “Thank you, my dear Weisstein. Now, let us separate the significant from the insignificant. Though, as a matter of fact, in this case even the insignificant is significant. Notice the two painted walls which divide the painting into three parts—like Gaul. One starts from the middle of the left-hand side and curves up to the middle of the upper edge. The other starts in the middle of the right-hand side and curves down to the middle of the lower side. All three parts are filled with strange and seemingly unrelated—and often seemingly unintelligible—objects. The Fauve Mauve apologists, however, maintain that their creations come from the collective unconscious, not the individual or personal and so are intelligible to everybody.”
“Damned nonsense!” I said, forgetting Lisa in my indignation.
“Not in this case, I suspect,” Ralph said. “Now, notice that the two walls, which look much like the Great Wall of China, bear many zeros on their tops. And that within the area these walls enclose, other zeros are scattered. Does this mean nothing to you?”
“Zero equals nothing,” I said.
“A rudimentary observation, Doctor, but valid,” Ralph said. “I would say that Scarletin is telling us that the objects within the walls mean nothing. It is the central portion that bears the message. There are no zeros there.”
“Prove it,” Strasse said.
“The first step first—if one can find it. Observe in the upper right-hand corner the strange figure of a man. The upper half is, obviously, Sherlock Holmes, with his deerstalker hat, cloak, pipe—though whether his meditative briar root or disputatious clay can’t be determined—and his magnifying glass in hand. The lower half, with the lederhosen and so on, obviously indicates a Bavarian in particular and a German in general. The demi-figure of Holmes means two things to the earnest seeker after the truth. One, that we are to use detective methods on this painting. Two, that half of the puzzle is in English. The lower half means that half of the puzzle is in German. Which I anticipated.”
“Preposterous!” Strasse said. “And just what does that next figure, the one in sixteenth-century costume, mean?”
“Ah, yes, the torso of a bald and bearded gentleman with an Elizabethan ruff around his neck. He is writing with a pen on a sheet of paper. There is a title on the upper part of the paper. Doctor, please look at it through the magnifying glass which you’ll find in my kit.”
5
MORE DAWNING LIGHT
I did so, and I said, “I can barely make it out. Scarletin must have used a glass to do it. It says New Atlantis.”
“Does that suggest anything to anybody?” Ralph said.
Obviously it did to him, but he was enjoying the sensation of being more intelligent than the humans around him. I resented his attitude somewhat, and yet I could understand it. He had been patronized by too many humans for too long a time.
“The great scholar and statesman Francis Bacon wrote the New Atlantis,” I said suddenly. Ralph winked at me, and I cried, “Bacon! Scarletin’s mistress is Hilda Speck!”
(Speck in German means bacon.)
“You have put one foot forward, my dear Weisstein,” Ralph said. “Now let us see you bring up the other.”
“The Bacon, with the next two figures, comprise a group separate from the others,” I said. “Obviously, they are to be considered as closely related. But I confess that I cannot make much sense out of Bacon, a green horse, and a house with an attic window from which a woman with an owl on her shoulder leans. Nor do I know the significance of the tendril which connects all of them.”
“Stuck in the mud, eh, kid?” Ralph said, startling me. But I was to get used to his swift transitions from the persona of Holmes to Spade and others and back again.
“Tell me, Doc, is the green of the oats-burner of any particular shade?”
“Hmm,” I said.
“It’s Nile green,” Lisa said.
“You’re certainly a model client, sweetheart,” Ralph said. “Very well, my dear sawbones, does this mean nothing to you? Yes? What about you, Strasse?”
Strasse muttered something.
Lisa said, “Nilpferd!”
“Yes,” Ralph said. “Nilpferd. (Nile-horse.) Another word for hippopotamus. And Hilda Speck’s brother is nicknamed Hippopotamus. Now for the next figure, the house with the woman looking out the attic and bearing an owl on her shoulder. Tell me, Strasse, does the Hippo have any special pals? One who is, perhaps, Greek? From the city of Athens?”
Strasse sputtered and said, “Somebody in the department has been feeding you information. I’ll...”
“Not at all,” Ralph said. “Obviously, the attic and the woman with the owl are the significant parts of the image. Dachstube (attic) conveys no meaning in German, but if we use the English translation, we are on the way to light. The word has two meanings in English. If capitalized, Attic, it refers to the ancient Athenian language or culture and, in a broader sense, to Greece as a whole. Note that the German adjective attisch is similar to the English Attic. To clinch this, Scarletin painted a woman with an owl on her shoulder. Who else could this be but the goddess of wisdom, patron deity of Athens? Scarletin was taking a chance on using her, since his kidnapers, even if they did not get beyond high school, might have encountered Athena. But they might not remember her, and, anyway, Scarletin had to use some redundancy to make sure his message got across. I would not be surprised if we do not run across considerable redundancy here.”
“And the tendrils?” I said.
“A pun in German, my dear Doctor. Ranke (tendril) is similar to Ranke (intrigues). The three figures are bound together by the tendril of intrigue.”
Strasse coughed and said, “And the mirror beneath the house with the attic?”
“Observe that the yellow brick road starts from the mirror and curves to the left or westward. I suggest that Scarletin means here that the road actually goes to th
e right or eastward. Mirror images are in reverse, of course.”
“What road?” Strasse said.
Ralph rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“Surely the kidnapers made my husband explain the symbolism?” Lisa said. “They would be very suspicious that he might do exactly what he did do.”
“There would be nothing to keep him from a false explanation,” Ralph said. “So far, it is obvious that Scarletin has named the criminals. How he was able to identify them or to locate his place of imprisonment, I don’t know. Time and deduction—with a little luck—will reveal all. Could we have a road map of Germany, please?”
“I’m no dog to fetch and carry,” Strasse grumbled, but he obtained a map nevertheless. This was the large Mair’s, scale of 1:750,000, used primarily to indicate the autobahn system. Strasse unfolded it and pinned it to the wall with the upper part of Germany showing.
“If Scarletin had put, say, an American hamburger at the beginning of the brick road, its meaning would have been obvious even to the dummkopf kidnapers,” Ralph said. “He credited his searchers—if any—with intelligence. They would realize the road has to start where the crime started—in Hamburg.”
He was silent while comparing the map and the painting. After a while the fidgeting Strasse said, “Come, man! I mean, dog! You...”
“You mean Herr von Wau Wau, yes?” Ralph said.
Strasse became red-faced again, but after a struggle he said, “Of course. Herr von Wau Wau. How do you interpret this, this mess of a mystery?”
“You’ll note that there are many figures along the yellow brick road until one gets to the large moon rising behind the castle. All these figures have halos over their heads. This puzzled me until I understood that the halos are also zeros. We are to pay no attention to the figures beneath them.
“But the moon behind the castle? Look at the map. Two of the roads running southeast out of Hamburg meet just above the city of Luneburg. A burg is a castle, but the Lune doesn’t mean anything in German in this context. It is, however, similar to the English lunar, hence the moon. And the yellow brick road goes south from there.
“I must confess that I am now at a loss. So, we get in a car and travel to Luneburg and south of it while I study the map and the painting.”
“We can’t take the painting with us; it’s too big!” Strasse said.
“I have it all in here,” Ralph said, tapping his head with his paw. “But I suggest we take a color Polaroid shot of the painting for you who have weak memories,” and he grinned at Strasse.
6
FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
Strasse did not like it, but he could not proceed without Ralph, and Ralph insisted that Mrs. Scarletin and I be brought along. First, he sent two men to watch Hilda Speck and to make sure she did not try to leave town—as the Americans say. He had no evidence to arrest her as yet, nor did he really think—I believe—that he was going to have any.
The dog, Lisa, and I got into the rear of a large police limousine, steam-driven, of course. Strasse sat in the front with the driver. Another car, which kept in radio contact with us, was to follow us at a distance of a kilometer.
An hour later, we were just north of Luneburg. A half-hour later, still going south, we were just north of the town of Uelzen. It was still daylight, and so I could easily see the photo of the painting which I held. The yellow road on it ran south of the moon rising behind the castle (Luneburg) and extended a little south of a group of three strange figures. These were a hornless sheep (probably a female), a section of an overhead railway, and an archer with a medieval Japanese coiffure and medieval clothes.
Below this group the road split. One road wound toward the walls in the upper and lower parts of the picture and eventually went through them. The other curved almost due south to the left and then went through or by some more puzzling figures.
The first was a representation of a man (he looked like the risen Jesus) coming from a tomb set in the middle of some trees. To its right and a little lower was a waistcoat. Next was what looked like William Penn, the Quaker. Following it was a man in a leopard loincloth with two large apes at his heels.
Next was a man dressed in clothes such as the ancient Mesopotamian people wore. He was down on all fours, his head bent close to the grass. Beside him was a banana tree.
Across the road was a large hot-air balloon with a baldheaded man in the wicker basket. On the side of the bag in large letters were: O.Z.
Across the road from it were what looked like two large Vikings wading through a sea. Behind them was the outline of a fleet of dragon-prowed longships and the silhouette of a horde of horn-helmeted bearded men. The two leaders were approaching a body of naked warriors, colored blue, standing in horse-drawn chariots.
South of these was a woman dressed in mid-Victorian clothes, hoopskirts and all, and behind her a mansion typical of the pre-Civil War American south. By it was a tavern, if the drunks lying outside it and the board hanging over the doorway meant anything. The sign was too small to contain even letters written under a magnifying glass.
A little to the left, the road terminated in a pair of hands tearing a package from another pair of hands.
Just before we got to Uelzen, Strasse said, “How do you know that we’re on the right road?”
“Consider the sheep, the raised section of railway, and the Japanese archer,” Ralph said. “In English, U is pronounced exactly like the word for the female sheep—ewe. An elevated railway is colloquially an el. The Japanese archer could be a Samurai, but I do not think so. He is a Zen archer. Thus, U, el, and zen or the German city of Uelzen.”
“All of this seems so easy, so apparent, now that you’ve pointed it out,” I said.
“Hindsight has twenty/twenty vision,” he said somewhat bitterly.
“And the rest?” I said.
“The town of Esterholz is not so difficult. Would you care to try?”
“Another English-German hybrid pun,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “Ester sounds much like Easter, hence the risen Christ. And the wood is the holz, of course. Holt, archaic English for a small wood or copse, by the way, comes from the same Germanic root as holz.”
“And the Weste (waistcoat)?” Ralph said.
“I would guess that that means to take the road west of Esterholz,” I said somewhat more confidently.
“Excellent, Doctor,” he said. “And the Quaker?”
“I really don’t know,” I said, chagrined because Lisa had been looking admiringly at me.
He gave his short barking laughter and said, “And neither do I, my dear fellow! I am sure that some of these symbols, perhaps most, have a meaning which will not be apparent until we have studied the neighborhood.”
Seven kilometers southeast of Uelzen, we turned into the village of Esterholz and then west onto the road to Wrestede. Looking at the hands tearing loose the package from the other pair, I suddenly cried out, “Of course! Wrestede! Suggesting the English, wrested! The hands are wresting the package away! Then that means that Scarletin is a prisoner somewhere between Esterholz and Wrestede!”
“Give that man the big stuffed teddy bear,” Ralph said. “OK, toots, so where is Scarletin?”
I fell silent. The others said nothing, but the increasing tension was making us sweat. We all looked waxy and pale in the light of the sinking sun. In half an hour, night would be on us.
“Slow down so I can read the names on the gateways of the farms,” Ralph said. The driver obeyed, and presently Ralph said, “Ach!”
I could see nothing which reminded me of a Quaker.
“The owner of that farm is named Fuchs (fox),” I said.
“Yes, and the founder of the Society of Friends, or The Quakers, was George Fox,” he said.
He added a moment later, “As I remember it, it was in this area that some particularly bestial—or should I say human?—murders occurred in 1845. A man named Wilhelm Graustock was finally caught and convicted.”
<
br /> I had never heard of this case, but, as I was to find out, Ralph had an immense knowledge of sensational literature. He seemed to know the details of every horror committed in the last two centuries.
“What is the connection between Herr Graustock and this figure which is obviously Tarzan?” I said.
“Graustock is remarkably similar in sound to Greystoke,” he said. “As you may or may not know, the lord of the jungle was also Lord Greystoke of the British peerage. As a fact, Graustock and Greystoke both mean exactly the same thing, a gray stick or pole. They have common Germanic roots. Ach, there it is! The descendants of the infamous butcher still hold his property, but are, I believe, singularly peaceful farmers.”
“And the man on all fours by a banana tree?” Strasse growled. It hurt him to ask, but he could not push back his curiosity.
Ralph burst out laughing again. “Another example of redundancy, I believe. And the most difficult to figure out. A tough one, sweetheart. Want to put in your two pfennigs’ worth?”
“Aw, go find a fireplug,” Strasse said, at which Ralph laughed even more loudly.
“Unless I’m mistaken,” Ralph said, “the next two images stand for a word, not a thing. They symbolize nebanan (next door). The question is, next door to what? The Graustock farm or the places indicated by the balloon and the battle tableau and the antebellum scene? I see nothing as yet which indicates that we are on or about to hit the bullseye. Continue at the same speed driver.”
There was silence for a minute. I refused to speak because of my pride. Finally, Lisa said, “For heaven’s sake, Herr von Wau Wau, I’m dying of curiosity! How did you ever get nebanan?”