The clergyman, Rev. Ambrose B. Mortimer, has been missing since September 6.
The photo above the article was evidently a recent one, no doubt reproduced from the visa in question. I recognized the smiling moon-wide face, although it took me a moment to place him as the man whose dinner I'd stumbled over on the plane. Without the moustache, he looked less like Charlie Chan.
The accompanying letter filled in a few details. 'I called up the Herald,' my sister wrote, 'but they couldn't tell me any more than was in the article. Just the same, finding that out took me half an hour, since the stupid woman at the switchboard kept putting me through to the wrong person. I guess you're right anything that prints colour pictures on page one shouldn't call itself a newspaper.
'This afternoon I called up the police department, but they weren't very helpful either. I suppose you just can't expect to find out much over the phone, though I still rely on it. Finally I got an Officer Linahan, who told me he's just replied to that letter of yours. Have you heard from him yet?
The man was very evasive. He was trying to be nice, but I could tell he was impatient to get off. He did give me the full name of the man they're looking for - Djaktu Abdul Djaktutchow, isn't that marvellous? - and he told me they have some more material on him which they can't release right now. I argued and pleaded (you know how persuasive I can be!) and finally, because I claimed I'd been a close friend of Rev. Mortimer's, I wheedled something out of him which he swore he'd deny if I told anyone but you. Apparently the poor man must have been deathly ill, maybe even tubercular - I intended to get a patch test next week, just to play safe, and I recommend that you get one too - because it seems that, in the reverend's bedroom, they found something very odd: pieces of lung tissue. Human lung tissue.'
I, too, was a detective in youth. – H.P LOVECRAFT, 2/17/1931
Do amateur detectives still exist? I mean, outside the novels? I doubt it. Who, af~er all, has the time for such games today? Not I, unfortunately; though for more than a decade I'd been nominally retired, my days were quite full with the unromantic activities that occupy everyone this side of the paperbacks: letters, luncheon dates, visits to my niece and to my doctor; books (not enough) and television (too much) and perhaps a Golden Agers' matinee (though I have largely stopped going to films, finding myself increasingly out of sympathy with their heroes). I also spent Halloween week in Atlantic City, and most of another attempting to interest a rather overpolite young publisher in reprinting some of my early work.
All this, of course, is intended as a sort of apologia for my having put off further inquiries into poor Mortimer's case till mid-November. The truth is, the matter almost slipped my mind; only in novels do people not have better things to do.
It was Maude who reawakened my interest. She had been avidly scanning the papers - in vain -
for further reports on the man's disappearance; I believe she had even phoned Sergeant Linahan a second time, but had learned nothing new. Now she wrote me with a tiny fragment of information, heard at thirdhand: one of her bridge partners had had it on the authority of 'a friend in the police force' that the search for Mr Djaktu was being widened to include his presumed companion - 'a Negro child,' or so my sister reported. Although there was every possibility that this information was false, or that it concerned an entirely different case, I could tell she regarded it as very sinister indeed.
Perhaps that was why the following afternoon found me struggling once more up the steps of the natural history museum - as much to satisfy Maude as myself. Her allusion to a Negro, coming after the curious discovery in Mortimer's bedroom, had recalled to mind the figure on the Malayan robe, and I had been troubled all night by the fantasy of a black man - a man much like the beggar I'd just seen huddled against Roosevelt's statue - coughing his lungs out into a sort of twisted horn.
I had encountered few other people on the streets that afternoon, as it was unseasonably cold for a city that's often mild till January; I wore a muffler, and my grey tweed overcoat flapped round my heels. Inside, however, the place like all American buildings was overheated; I was soon the same as I made my way up the demoralizingly long staircase to the second floor.
The corridors were silent and empty, but for the morose figure of a guard seated before one of the alcoves, head down as if in mourning, and, from above me, the hiss of the steam radiators near the marble ceiling. Slowly, and rather enjoying the sense of privilege that comes from having a museum to oneself, I retraced my earlier route past the immense skeletons of dinosaurs (These great creatures once trod the earth where you now walk') and down to the Hall of Primitive Man, where two Puerto Rican youths, obviously playing hooky, stood by the African wing gazing worshipfully at a Masai warrior in full battle gear. In the section devoted to Asia I paused to get my bearings, looking in vain for the squat figure in the robe. The glass case was empty. Over its plaque was taped a printed notice: 'Temporarily removed for restoration.'
This was no doubt the first time in forty years that the display had been taken down, and of course I'd picked just this occasion to look for it. So much for luck. I headed for the nearest staircase, at the far end of the wing. From behind me the clank of metal echoed down the hall, followed by the angry voice of the guard. Perhaps that Masai spear had proved too great a temptation.
In the main lobby I was issued a written pass to enter the north wing, where the staff offices were located. 'You want the workrooms on basement level,' said the woman at the information counter; the summer's bored coed had become a friendly old lady who eyed me with some interest. 'Just ask the guard at the bottom of the stairs, past the cafeteria. I do hope you find what you're looking for.'
Carefully keeping the pink slip she'd handed me visible for anyone who might demand it, I descended. As I turned on to the stairwell I was confronted with a kind of vision: a blonde, Scandinavian-looking family were coming up the stairs towards me, the four upturned faces almost interchangeable, parents and two little girls with the pursed lips and timidly hopeful eyes of the tourist, while just behind them, apparently unheard, capered a grinning black youth, practically walking on the father's heels. In my present state of mind the scene appeared particularly disturbing -
the boy's expression was certainly one of mockery - and I wondered if the guard who stood before the cafeteria had noticed. If he had, however, he gave no sign; he glanced without curiosity at my pass and pointed towards a fire door at the end of the hall.
The offices in the lower level were surprisingly shabby - the walls here were not marble but faded green plaster - and the entire corridor had a ~uried' feeling to it, no doubt because the only outside light came from ground-level window gratings high overhead. I had been told to ask for one of the research associates, a Mr Richmond; his office was part of a suite broken up by pegboard dividers. The door was open, and he got up from his desk as soon as I entered; I suspect that, in view of my age and grey tweed overcoat, he may have taken me for someone important.
A plump young man with sandy-coloured beard, he looked like an out-of-shape surfer, but his sunniness dissolved when I mentioned my interest in the green silk robe. 'And I suppose you're the man who complained about it upstairs, am I right?'I assured him that I was not.
'Well, someone sure did,' he said, still eyeing me resentfully; on the wall behind him an Indian warmask did the same. 'Some damn tourist, maybe, in town for a day and out to make trouble.
Threatened to call the Malaysian Embassy. If you put up a fuss those people upstairs get scared it'll wind up in the Times.'