My Brother's Keeper Read online

  Table of Contents

  MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

  PART I

  PART II CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  PART III

  MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

  by Marcia Davenport

  1954

  For C.D.B.

  PART I

  I never knew the Holt brothers, which seems strange because within a few weeks of their deaths I felt that nobody else could have known them so well. I never saw Seymour Holt at all. What I saw of Randall Holt was as gruesome a sight as a man could meet in a lifetime. By the day when they found Randall Holt I had already learned a great deal about that gentle man, and it became all the more harrowing and ghastly to have to watch while they scooped up the unspeakable thing from the rotting floor and carried it away in a covered basket.

  Like the rest of the world I first knew of the Holt brothers through the newspapers which made them a sensation. Scarcely anybody has forgotten how Seymour Holt was found dead in that derelict house crammed from cellar to roof with one hundred and seventy tons of hoarded rubbish; and how, after twenty-two days’ search by the police, Randall Holt’s body was found buried in one of his own booby-traps, in the same room where Seymour died.

  Day after day the story ran on the front pages of the New York newspapers, and I followed it in their European editions which reached me by air in Milano. The Corriere of course reported it too; their very able American correspondent made the most of a drama sure to grip Italian imaginations. So one heard the thing discussed everywhere. I was then winding up an eighteen months’ stint on exchange service from our bank, while the Credito Settentrionale had sent my opposite number to my place in our Foreign Department in New York. It was a good arrangement. I learned more than I could have done in any other way and I had a delightful time besides. I am afraid I will never again get used to a gobbled sandwich and a gulped cup of coffee at a counter or off the corner of my desk, instead of the restful two-hour luncheon where I learned to eat and drink perhaps too well, and to enjoy the company of my Italian friends with the comfortable knowledge that there was nothing else to do with the time: every office and place of business was closed like ours. This comes at first as a surprise to Americans working on the Continent, but I notice how quickly we adapt ourselves to it and stop mumbling about inefficiency and wasted time.

  Gianfranco Pozzi and I had just returned from such a lunch at Gino e Biki, whose cooking is one of the higher pleasures of Milanese life, when I was pitched head first into the sensation over the Holt brothers. This might be all in the day’s work for a newspaper reporter or a doctor or a lawyer, but it seemed very far off course to me. We had been reading the New York papers while we drank our espresso after lunch; that was the first of a series of days in which they itemized the junk which came crashing through an upstairs window of the Holt house as the police inched and dug their way through ceiling-high tunnels of bundled newspapers and heaved mountains of stuff out into the back yard. I can still see Gianfranco’s face, pop-eyed with amazement, while I read aloud and translated: electric generators, old bicycles, gas chandeliers, dressmakers’ forms, toys, a trombone, a buggytop, automobile parts, old opera programmes, kerosene stoves, women’s hats and corsets, innumerable tattered suitcases, a pair of oars, a guitar, a checkerboard … the time came when I saw the inside of the house, and all this was as nothing compared with what remained there. That day, however, I was still dumbfounded by what we had been reading, so it seemed the more incredible a quarter of an hour later that the dead hand of Seymour Holt should reach across the Atlantic to touch myself, of all unconcerned people, in a Milanese bank.

  Commendatore Nerini, one of the senior officers, called me to his desk and himself was much too Italian to take a dry banker’s attitude towards the letter he picked up from a cluster of papers clipped to an envelope which had apparently just arrived by air from New York. He handed me the letter, saying, “Here is an extraordinary thing, Veecherly, molto strano. Look at this.” His English was pretty good, carefully spoken and heavily accented. I always felt apologetic for the trouble I caused those good-natured Italians with a name like Wycherly.

  The letter was from Bowen Dugdale, the head of our Trust Department, and had been written four days before—two days after the body of Seymour Holt was found. It informed us that Seymour Holt had been a client of our bank which, together with Holt’s lawyer, was named executor of his will. The will, wrote Dugdale, contained a provisionary bequest which would necessitate the obtaining of immediate, certified information. Seymour Holt had stipulated that if one Renata Tosi, last heard of in San Bernardo di Bellagio, could furnish incontrovertible proof of the identity of the father of her son, known as Sebastiano Gandolfi, the said Renata Tosi was bequeathed a life income from the bulk of Seymour Holt’s estate, with the principal to go outright to Sebastiano Gandolfi after the death of the said Renata Tosi. If Renata Tosi should predecease Seymour Holt, Sebastiano Gandolfi must himself furnish proof of the identity of his father in order to inherit the legacy.

  I stopped reading and looked at Commendatore Nerini. He was staring at me with an expression which struck me, surprisingly, as shocked. His lower lip was thrust forward and his brows knitted.

  “Cosa dice?” he asked hunching his shoulders.

  “Fantastic.”

  “Fantastic. Even without the sensation of ‘ow this ‘Olt died and what manner of man he was. But, for this affair to create another scandalo here—” His face became a question-mark.

  “But Commendatore,” I said, “why? Some obscure woman, an illegitimate son … it happens anywhere … every day …”

  “But preferably not to a distinguished man.”

  “Oh.” I laid the papers on the desk and thought for a moment. Names unless they are widely known in one’s own country do not mean much when one is a stranger elsewhere. But almost at once I began to realize why Nerini seemed so concerned. “You think,” I asked him, “that this could be Professor Gandolfi? The—”

  “The scholar,” he agreed. “The physicist. The Council Minister. One of the most respected men in Italy, in Europe. A patriot—”

  “The Nobel Prize,” I murmured, as the details fell into place in my mind. “But why do you think it must be he?”

  “He comes from that Comune, he has one of those cognomi by which half the peasants in the district call themselves, and he is the only Gandolfi known to the world. How can it be any other?”

  “But—” I picked up the letter again. It was unnecessary to point out that the great man’s name was apparently not Gandolfi at all.

  “Exactly,” agreed Nerini. “And you may be the one who has the very awkward task of informing him, or of asking him to admit the fact if he knows it already.”

  There did not seem to be any way that I could refuse. Bowen Dugdale had asked that I be sent to obtain the information since I was so soon anyway to return to New York, where the findings would have to be filed before Seymour Holt’s estate could be administered. Dugdale had added, “We cannot make inquiries through Seymour Holt’s brother Randall, because Randall Holt has not been seen since before Seymour Holt’s body was found. Randall Holt closed his checking account with us in 1913, and our bank has had no dealings with h
im since. Unless he is proved to be dead there is not much we can do in that quarter now.”

  I suppose Nerini, watching me read all this, must have seen that I was not too sure of my ability to get the information for Dugdale. But we agreed that I had to try, and I said, “I only hope my Italian is good enough.”

  “It is good enough. Of course I can send somebody with you if you like, but—”

  “I see.”

  “First you must find the woman if she is alive, and whatever she may say, she will be more reluctant to say it to two men than to one. And if she is dead—”

  “I hope not.”

  “I too. Dunque, you will go tomorrow?”

  The mission was a failure. I had to return almost empty-handed to Milano from my strange and frustrating day in a remote mountain village high above the Lake of Como, and cable my report to Bowen Dugdale. Next day he rang me up on the transatlantic telephone.

  “Better catch the first plane over, Dick,” he said. “They’ve reamed tons of stuff out of that house and I’ve been through enough of it to find the woman’s name all over the place.”

  “Are they still chucking the junk out of the window?” I asked.

  “No, that’s been stopped. You come back here and help sort it out and then take the tangible proofs back to Italy and try to force the issue with them. That’s the only way to do it.”

  So I left at once for New York. I have always thought that if it had not been for that suspended twenty-four hours with nothing to do but sit cramped in the plane, unable to sleep, the Holt brothers might never have taken such a grip on my imagination that for a good many weeks I scarcely thought about anything else. I have flown the Atlantic—and the Pacific too, for that matter—so many times that the trip has become no more extraordinary than a ride in a taxi. But that flight from Milano to New York seemed to me like a witch’s broomstick, rushing me through the air to the most grisly objective that a journey might have. The plane landed in the early afternoon and, having almost no luggage, I was out of Customs and into a taxi in less than half an hour. Bowen Dugdale had suggested I go to his club, where he was putting me up, and have the bath and the nap which are all one can usually put one’s mind on when arriving from a long flight; he would join me there for dinner.

  But leaving the airport I took a sudden decision and told the cab driver to take the Midtown Tunnel and go to the address in Chelsea of the Holt brothers’ house. I was not only curious about it; I felt a powerful compulsion to see it. The driver grumbled about a helluva break to have to go to such a part of town in the worst time of day, but I told him it would be worth his while and counted myself lucky that he was not one of those garrulous characters; I wanted to think undisturbed. He was silent while we were inching our way across town behind prodigious truck traffic to reach Tenth Avenue so that we could come back, eastbound, on Twenty-fourth Street. As we turned into that block I saw the driver scratch the back of his head and he said, “Say, mister, ain’t this here number we’re headin’ for that house full o’ junk where the fella was found dead?”

  “Maybe,” I said. But before we could creep within several hundred yards of the place, I saw the crowd gathered in the street. “I might as well get out here,” I said, and tipped the man well enough to satisfy his temper if not his curiosity. He had no idea of passing the house without stopping to rubberneck at it.

  Carrying my small travelling bag, I walked slowly along the pavement. The house was in one of those famous Chelsea terrace rows, set far back from the sidewalk behind spacious front yards almost half a block deep. Nothing on Manhattan Island is more obscenely derelict than the few of those yards that remain, abandoned to filth, trash, rats and the savage stray cats who hunt them; to the ruin wrought by the most wretched type of slum which seems infinitely uglier and crueller than the vilest railroad tenements of the lower East Side or dark Harlem. These Chelsea houses were once dignified and beautiful, homes of which gracious people were proud, homes which they loved in much the same way as the children they raised in them.

  There must have been three hundred people in the crowd standing on the sidewalk and spilling over into the street. They were largely silent, and I could see that many of them had been there much of the time since this dreadful scene had become the centre of public attention; this was the ninth day since the discovery of Seymour Holt’s body. The onlookers were apparently the drab and raddled people of the neighborhood. I had read that a mob of more than a thousand had watched on the day when the police had dumped all that rubbish out of the window, but when that was stopped the spectators had obviously thinned out to this assemblage of regulars. They were not allowed inside the front yard, which was cordoned off by the police, and guarded by two officers who were looking thoroughly bored. I saw more policemen on the high front stoop, whose sandstone steps appeared to be sagging crazily, and other men inside the house. The front door stood open. I stopped for a time on the curbstone, craning to see past the people.

  Nothing could ever again look so ominous to me as the tall bleak façade of that rotting house. One could see all over it the marks of long cumulative decay. Chunks of the streaked brown sandstone cornice and the ornate window-facings had broken off, leaving rude gaps in the design, uniform with the whole row, which had been the pride of some forgotten architect of the ‘Fifties. The neighboring houses were in no better repair but there was an eloquent difference between them and the desolate home of the Holts. The other houses had all been broken up into warrens inhabited by turbulent, drifting slum-dwellers whose crazy variegations of dirty torn curtains, milk bottles, tin cans, stunted plants, cats and dogs, soiled bedding, and ragged laundry filled the windows. The Holt house there in the middle of all this was a sepulchre, uniform and lifeless from the cellar windows to the roof. I stood and looked at it for a long time. Every window had once been covered by a drawn blind whose original color nobody could guess; but these blinds were all in shreds and tatters and behind each it was impossible to discern just what filled the crusted window and formed a solid black block. I found out soon enough. I could even imagine, standing there. But once I went inside I never again had that awful sense of disembodiment, as if I too were a ghost, hovering there on the pavement, watching a sharp autumn wind whip and fling dirty things—old paper, rags, a broken Piccadilly collar, the brim of a straw hat—across the black grit of that hideous front yard.

  I stopped musing, deciding to waste no more time; and making my way through the crowd, I explained my errand to the first guard of police, so that I was quickly passed along from one group to the next, until I was standing at the entrance doorway.

  I have thought hard how to describe the smell which was the first, the constant, and the inescapable impression of that house. Merely by thinking about it now I can feel the nausea moving up my gullet. Perhaps it is enough to say that my outfit of the Third Army was the one that broke open Buchenwald in April, 1945. It was we who found the ceiling-high piles of unburned bodies stacked like logs between the gas chambers and the crematory ovens; we who had to do something about the train of open freight cars overflowing with corpses, abandoned there on the railway siding in the sunshine. That was the unholiest possible exaggeration of what such a stench could be. But I was appalled to find the Holt house different only in degree. The smell of death and rot and vileness was the same, yet in its way even fouler, because as everybody knows, the place was a solid impacted block of massed paper and trash, pierced only by those terrifying tunnels. Never in thirty-five years at the least had a window been opened. In fact the only unobstructed window in the entire house was the one at the second floor rear near which Seymour Holt had sat, paralyzed and blind, until he died there. That was the window which the police broke open after receiving a mysterious telephone call suggesting that they investigate the Holt house; the window to which they set the fireman’s ladder that was their first means of access, and their only way of carrying out the body of Seymour Holt. Every other window was solidly obstructed. No wo
nder the detectives working inside the house kept the front door open behind them; but that made little difference.

  The policeman at the door cupped his hands and shouted into the foetid black hole. I waited, almost retching at the stench, and presently there appeared two men in dirty coveralls. One came from a black cave to the right, where all I could see were stacks and piles and masses of I did not yet know what, except for bundles of crumbling newspapers; and the second man came cautiously down the stairs, lighting his way with a strong electric torch and watching his footing. He did not touch the banister which had once, apparently, been a handsome turned rail and was now leaning crazily out over the hall, with some of its posts dangling and the rest missing altogether. He shook his head slowly as he joined me and stepped outside for some air and a cigarette.

  “Glad to meet you, Mr. Wycherly,” he said. “Mr. Cullom said you’d probably be here today.” Cullom was Seymour Holt’s lawyer. “My name’s Deering. My partner here is Sam Blyfeld.” Each man pulled a soiled work glove from his right hand, making a disgusted face; we shook hands and Deering said, “Some mess, eh?”

  “How do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.

  Deering shoved a denim cap to the back of his head and took a deep breath of the outside air. “God, I wish I did know,” he said.

  “We think we’re looking for Randall Holt,” said Blyfeld.

  “Any clues?”

  Both men shook their heads. Deering answered. “Just a hunch, but we’ve all got the same one. Cullom too. He’s had lines out all over any place the man might be. So has the Department. But you ask me, he’s right in there.”

  “The stink,” said Blyfeld. “That’s enough for me. Old Seymour’s been out of there nine days and the stink’s just as bad as ever. Got to be a reason.”

  They explained why the search had to be so slow and so cautious. It was on account of the booby-traps. The rooms, insofar as they had been able to get into them, had been filled up by a consistent plan, a weird example of methodical madness. There was a groundwork of objects, beginning with the furniture which had first belonged in each room, buttressed by a wild assortment of things such as had been thrown out of a second-storey window and listed in The Times the day I had read it all out to Gianfranco Pozzi. Between and around and on top of this mass were the bundled newspapers, tightly jammed all the way to the ceiling, and solidly from wall to wall, except for the tunnels that had been built to thread them. There was no recognizable plan about the tunnels, they existed as the only means of getting through or across the rooms; sometimes they were curved, sometimes short and straight and turned at sharp angles. Everywhere they were punctuated by booby-traps, horrible, cunning contrivances of string and wire and old automobile parts and pieces of broken furniture. Deering and Blyfeld explained that some of the traps were just alarms, rigged up with empty tin cans and old bottles intended to tumble down with a hellish noise and warn the brothers of intruders. But other traps, said Deering, were deadly—connected with ropes which would pull over into the tunnel half a ton of bundled newspapers and block it entirely.