The tailor seemed to prick his ears. He rose to his feet, as if in response to some auditory signal that they of course could not hear. He was shown looking out of the window of his workshop. The scene then switched to a band of troubadours parading through the streets of a medieval city, followed by an appreciative crowd. At the head of the musicians was a kindly looking old man in motley, playing the fiddle. ‘Ah, yes,’ continued Dr Casaubon. ‘The fiddler there, you see. He is the Devil.’
The scene switched back to the tailor’s workshop. He threw down the coat he was working on and rushed out.
‘If I remember rightly, for it is some years since I saw the film, our tailor enters into a contract with the Devil, surrendering his soul in return for musical talent. The devil gives him a magical violin which he is able to play as a virtuoso. He becomes a famous concert violinist, performing to packed houses at the greatest concert halls in the world. Beautiful women fall at his feet. Inevitably, the time comes for the Devil to collect on his side of the deal. And just as inevitably, the tailor tries to escape. The Devil pursues him to a strange castle. The tailor finds himself in a room containing giant musical instruments, including an enormous violin. He hides in the case for this instrument, the inside of which is curiously cushioned, in a manner reminiscent of a coffin. The Devil, who up until this point had appeared as the mild old gentleman you see now, is suddenly a beast of colossal size. He lifts up the violin case with the tailor inside and carries it easily down to the dungeon of the castle, where the door to Hell is located.’
‘Lumme, he’s spoilt it now!’ cried Inchball. ‘We know what happens!’
‘We are not watching the films for entertainment,’ said Quinn. ‘But in an effort to understand better the mind of the man who created them.’
‘And what does this tell us about his mind?’ wondered Macadam.
‘Doctor?’
‘The Faustian figure is one in which driving ambition overrides any moral considerations. The ambition may be said to be pathological. It is interesting that in Waechter’s version of the story, his hero seeks fame as a creative artist – a musician – rather than as a scientist seeking knowledge, as in the original myth. There is perhaps something autobiographical about his choice of subject. It seems to suggest that Waechter is prepared to do anything in order to further his career as an artist.’
‘And could doing anything include murder?’
‘That’s an interesting question, Inspector. This could be a coded message from a conflicted psyche. A kind of warning. Or it could, in fact, represent the exorcism of the drives that it portrays – which are by the very act of expression rendered safe. If he tells the story of Faust, he has no need to be Faust.’
The film was a one-reeler. It raced through the action Dr Casaubon had already described. They were now at the moment where the mild old gentleman presented himself at the successful musician’s dressing room, after a triumphant performance. The Devil picked up the violin he had given the tailor and smiled. An inter-title appeared, which Dr Casaubon translated: ‘Ah! The trusty Stradivarius! What would you be without it?’
The old man’s expression became mysteriously threatening. It seemed to suggest that he could take the other man’s talent away from him as easily as he had granted it. The tailor tried to wrestle the violin from the Devil’s hands. In the process, the delicate instrument shattered. The tailor ran from his own dressing room. The old man threw back his head and laughed.
‘Of course, an alternative interpretation,’ continued Dr Casaubon, ‘and one which had not occurred to me until now, is that Waechter in fact identifies himself with the Devil in this story. As a film director, he controls and directs the lives of his characters. He decides who lives and who dies. Perhaps … perhaps he has sought to exercise the same power in the real world.’
‘Ain’t that a lot of help!’ Inchball gave a humourless chuckle. ‘Either he’s the poor feller who sells his soul to the Devil, or he’s the Devil who buys it.’
‘Your sergeant has made a very astute psychological observation, Inspector. In psychology, it is perfectly possible for opposing characteristics to exist in the same personality. A coin has two sides, does it not? As does the psyche. Waechter may well see himself as both the soul facing damnation and the Devil carrying the condemned soul off to Hell. He is both the tortured and the torturer.’
‘But is he a killer?’
‘On the evidence of this?’ There was a shifting of shoulders in the darkness. ‘He is a poet.’
‘Funny kind of poet,’ said Macadam, as the violin case containing the damned tailor was carried off to Hell. The film flapped and clattered out its last few feet.
There was a brief interlude during which Macadam rewound the film and set up the next.
It was another short. The title again appeared in German: Totentanz.
Dr Casaubon translated: ‘The Dance of Death. Or Danse Macabre.’
The film appeared to be a light comedy about madness and death. It concerned a man, again played by Berenger, who took pleasure in dressing up as Death in order to play pranks on his neighbours. He donned a black costume and hood, on to which a luminous white skeleton and skull had been painted.
The first neighbour he called on dropped down dead from a heart attack. The second victim was so frightened that he ran upstairs and threw himself out of a first-storey window. He broke his neck in the fall and died. When the prankster knocked on the third door, he was met by a figure dressed exactly the same as him, also carrying a scythe over his shoulder. The two Deaths confronted one another. The practical joker held his sides and mimed laughing, punching his counterpart on the shoulder, joshingly.
There was an inter-title in German, which Dr Casaubon was good enough to translate for them: ‘I see you have had the same idea as me!’
The prankster then pulled off his mask, inviting the other Death to do the same with a merry laugh. But the neighbour refused. The practical joker made a grab for the supposed hood of the other figure. His fingers sank into the empty eye sockets of a real skull. A pile of bones collapsed on the floor, together with an empty cloak and discarded scythe. The practical joker’s hilarity turned to terror. He began to scream.
The next scene showed him confined in a lunatic asylum, surrounded by other lunatics.
Quinn was aware of a sense of premonition. Perhaps he had seen something in the background of the scene that prepared him subconsciously for what was to come: the entrance of a man he recognized as the first Dr Casaubon, the very same man who had whisked away the wounded woman a few nights ago in Cecil Court. A moment later, he saw her too. She was there as one of the lunatics closing in on Berenger’s character. In a final coup of trick photography, all the inmates and medical staff of the asylum peeled away the masks of their faces, revealing their death’s head skulls beneath.
The prankster was not in an asylum. He had died and gone to Hell. The director of the asylum – the first Dr Casaubon – was the Devil.
FORTY-TWO
Konrad Waechter looked up at the vast concave entrance to the Islington Porrick’s Palace, a kind of gigantic gilded conch shell set into the black, soot-grimed facade of Upper Street. He could not suppress a smile at the sheer visual splendour of it. It seemed to promise as much as it presented, leading kinema viewers into a grotto of fantasy and spectacle, away from the grim sordid reality of their lives. Indeed, it would make an attractive location for a scene in a motion picture. He closed his eye on the vision, as if overwhelmed by it. The darkness that overtook him was filled with the abstract, teeming shapes created by a film of living flesh drawn over a bright day. His mind began inventing scenarios.
Perhaps he had underestimated Porrick. He began to think this was a man he could go into partnership with, after all. And at least he had stopped trying to push that nasty little dog on him.