The Djinn (9 page)

Dr. Jarvis
looked at me closely. “Of course it’s strange. In his own way, Max Greaves was
a very strange man. But he knew what he was doing. You have to understand that
he was not an amateur.”

“An amateur what?
I don’t understand.”

“An amateur
anything,” said Dr. Jarvis carefully. “He was a businessman, a diplomat, a
collector of rare antiquities, a scholar, and a gentleman. He pursued none of
his interests in an amateurish way. As I say, he knew what he was doing.”

I sighed. “All
the same, he ended up killing himself?”

Dr. Jarvis
shrugged. “Did he?”

“Well, you know
that as well as I do
,” I said. “Marjorie found him in
the kitchen with his face all cut up.”

Dr. Jarvis laid
down his napkin and stared at me solemnly. “I don’t know what your profession
is, Mr. Erskine,” he said in a grave voice, “but in my profession I learn not
to leap to hasty conclusions.”

“So you’re
saying it wasn’t suicide?”

“It was suicide
of a particular kind.”

I reached for a
cigarette. “What particular kind? How many kinds of suicide are there?”

Dr. Jarvis took
a gold lighter from his vest pocket, reached over, and lit my cigarette. “There
are many different kinds of suicide/’ he said steadily. “Almost as many kinds
as there are cases. Each person who decides to take his or her own life does H
for a reason which, at the time of death, seems overwhelmingly important
Suicide is the result of a mental crisis, and all mental crises vary. Each
person is subject to different strains and different pressures.”

“I think you
can spare me the grade-school psychology,” I said. “I want to know what kind of
suicide Max Greaves committed.”

Dr. Jarvis
removed his eyeglasses. He had those pale watery eyes that remind me of clams
on the half-shell, with a touch of Tabasco sauce in the corner.

“Max Greaves’s
suicide was of the self-sacrificing kind,” said Dr. Jarvis quietly. “He didn’t
take his own life. He gave it.”

I stood up and
walked across to the window. Outside, it was sunny and warm and normal. In
here, the chill and tension that seemed to accompany everything I said about
the jar was all too obvious. I stayed silent for a while, smoking my cigarette,
then
I said, “Dr. Jarvis, if Max gave his life, can
you tell me what for and why?”

Dr. Jarvis
coughed. “Mr. Erskine, before I answer that question, I have one of my own.
What is it that you think threatens Mrs. Greaves, and what has it to do with
Max’s death?”

I leaned
against the window and watched the distant flecks of foam on the dark blue sea.
“I don’t know,” I said softly. “There is something strange about that jar, and
I don’t know what it is. I believe that Max invested the jar with all kinds of
peculiar properties it didn’t really have. I think he convinced himself that
these things really happened-that the jar sang and performed all kinds of other
tricks. I’d say that he brought all his anguish and punishment on himself. What
worries me
is
that Marjorie now seems to feel the same
way about the jar, and if she feels the same way, well-maybe she’ll wind up the
same way.”

Dr. Jarvis
grimaced. He looked tired and old, and I could hardly believe he was the same
doctor
who had come to visit me all those years ago, and sat
on the end of my bed, and showed me how to make airplanes out of wooden tongue
spatulas.

“Mr. Erskine,”
he said, “I will tell you all I know. It’s supposed to be unethical, but I have
been as confused and baffled by Max’s death as you have, and perhaps it will
help if a fresh mind is brought to bear on it.”

I stayed by the
window, smoking and looking out over the garden. “Go on,” I said, “I’m
listening.”

“I said that
Max was not an amateur-not at anything. Whatever he did, he always believed he
should do it as well as, or perhaps even better than, a professional. He didn’t
spare himself anything, and if he couldn’t be the best at what he did, then he
simply gave up and would never try that particular pursuit again. Max Greaves
had to be number one.”

“That’s a fair
description,” I said quietly.

“Well,” said
Dr. Jarvis, “Max was one of the most knowledgeable collectors of mystic Middle
Eastern antiquities in the world. I don’t know whether you know this, but most
of his possessions were connected with magic and the occult. The jar was his
greatest triumph. He bought it in Persia in the 1950s, shipped it back to the
United States, and then spent years trying to discover what it was and how it
should be looked after. He believed it was the original jar of Ali Babah, who
was supposed to be a court wizard in some ancient time. He often talked to me
about it, and he used to say that he believed there was a real genie in it,
like the genie of the lamp. He said the top of the jar was sealed to keep the
genie inside, and if you tried to break it open, you would die in a manner too
horrible to contemplate. The genie was very powerful and very malevolent. The
only way to control it would be to find some of the old magic books and learn
how to keep your genie at heel.”

I sat down and
leaned back. “Did you believe any of this? Or did you think that his mind was
wandering.”

Dr. Jarvis
smiled. “I didn’t know what to believe. Max was always so convincing when he
talked about the genie. He used to call it Jar of the Djinn. I believe
djinn is
another Arab word for genie.”

“That’s right.”
I nodded knowledgeably, although I had only found that out for myself the
previous day. “Djinn, genie, jinni, they’re all the same thing.”

“I have
wondered about Max more and more,” said Dr. Jarvis. “When I first saw his body,
I thought he must have been murdered. But there was no possible way that anyone
could have gotten in or out of the kitchen where he killed himself. It was also
plain by the hesitation marks that he was committing suicide. The question
was-as you have asked yourself-why?”

“Was he mad?” I
asked bluntly. “Is that it? Did he go off his head?”

“We can’t rule
that out,” said Dr. Jarvis. “But as far as I’m concerned, there are only two
possibilities.”

“What are
they?”

Dr. Jarvis
raised a thumb and a finger. “One, that he was mentally deranged, and he
believed that the Jar of the Djinn had evil powers which were overwhelming him.
Or two, that the Jar of the Djinn really was getting at him,
and he killed himself to prevent it from taking over his mind and his body.”

I poured myself
some more coffee. “Is there any evidence either way?”

Dr. Jarvis
shook his head.
“Not very much.
With Mrs. Greaves’s
permission, I undertook an autopsy. There was no brain damage, no serious tumor
or disease which might have contributed toward hallucinatory or mentally
deranged behavior.”

“That doesn’t
mean he wasn’t deranged.”

“Oh, no, of
course not,” said Dr. Jarvis. “He may well have suffered quite serious mental
derangement without it being detectable by ordinary physical examination. But
my autopsy did show that is was less likely, particularly since everything else
he did, apart from his studies of the jar, v/as perfectly natural and normal,
and showed no signs of imbalance or inconsistency.”

I crushed out
my cigarette.
“And what about the evidence against mental
derangement?
Is there any evidence in favor of the jar being-well,
whatever it is?”

“There is very
little,” said Dr. Jarvis. “Most of it is legend and hearsay; at least that’s
what I gathered from the occasional clues Max used to give me. He always used
to say it was impossible to open the jar, but if you could, you would see
nothing. The djinn, he said, had no physical manifestations when it was trapped
inside the jar. For that reason, every powerful
djinn
tried to persuade outsiders to find a face for it.”

I could feel a
chill, a prickly sensation in my hands.
“A face?”
I
said in a whisper.

“That’s right.
The djinn could not leave the jar until it had found a face for itself. Without
a face, it was trapped and powerless to walk abroad. Or fly, or swim, or
whatever it is that djinns do.”

“Dr. Jams, is
it possible that Max Greaves tried to cut off his face to prevent the djinn
from getting it?”

Dr. Jarvis
looked away. “That was what I meant by a suicide of self-sacrifice,’ he said.
“Whether the
djinn exists
or not, Max believed that he
was doing all of us a favor by denying the djinn the one thing that it needed
to get out of its prison.
His own face.”

I didn’t know
what to say. I sat slumped in my seat, while Dr. Jarvis watched me with calm,
con-censed, benevolent eyes, and the half-hunter watch in his vest chattered away
like a busy old woman.

I
opened the car door and climbed in. Anna was dearly annoyed. “You
took your time, didn’t you? I thought you said you were only going to talk to
him for a couple of minutes,”

I started the
engine, swung the car around, and headed out toward the beach road. I reached
into my pocket for a cigarette.

“You seem to
have lost the power of speech, as well as all sense of time,” she said sharply.

I lit my
cigarette with my battered Zippo. “I always get like this when I’m afraid that
a woman has proved me wrong. It’s called male chauvinist dog-in-the-mangerism.”

“You smoke too
much,” she said, opening the car window. “Do you know that it’s a statistical
fact that more people are killed by lung cancer than by evil spirits?”

“I’m not sure
I’d prefer the lung cancer,” I said, taking a wide corner with howling tires.

“What did he
say?” she asked. “Did he tell you how Max Greaves died?”

I kept my eyes
on the road. “Dr. Jarvis doesn’t know any more than we do. He’s just guessing,
like us. But he thinks that Max cut off his face for a very specific reason.
Whether there was anything magical inside that
jar
or
not, Max was trying to stop it from coming to life.

“I don’t
understand.”

“Neither do I
really, and neither does Dr. Jarvis. Max told Dr. Jarvis the jar contained
a djinn
, but the djinn couldn’t escape from the jar without
a face. The
djinn was
supposed to be formless, if you
see what I mean-just a puff of smoke in a bottle. It couldn’t have any
existence outside the jar without borrowing physical features from something or
someone else. That’s why Max removed all his portrait collection and broke his
pipe and burned every picture and food label that showed a face.”

Anna frowned.
“That doesn’t make sense. If the djinn could have taken Max’s face, why didn’t
it take it right away? Why didn’t it take Marjorie’s face-or Miss Johnson’s?”

I swerved to
avoid a boy on a bicycle with a fishing pole. “The thought of an ancient evil
spirit with Miss Johnson’s face on it is too frightening to contemplate,” I
said. “If you were
a djinn
, would you want to go
around looking like her?”

“Harry, you’re
not being serious.”

I flung my
half-smoked butt out of the window. “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?
You know I don’t want to believe any of this, and at the same time, you know
damned well that I do”

She parted her
gorgeous glossy lips. “You do believe?” she said huskily. “You mean you really
think that-”

“It’s like
Sherlock Holmes, isn’t it? Eliminate the impossible, and whatever’s left,
however improbable, is the truth. Something
like
that.
I think the whole idea of
this djinn
is unlikely and
improbable, but every other explanation for what’s going on at Winter Sails is
goddamned ridiculous.”

“But what about Marjorie’s face, and Miss Johnson’s?”

“I don’t know.
Maybe
ifs more difficult for djinns to take faces from real
people than it is
from pictures or photographs. Maybe this Professor
Qualt will have some ideas.”

“Is that where
you want to go now?” asked Anna.

I shook my
head. “First of all, I want to visit Marjorie. I just want to see if she feels
the same way now that she did last night.”

“Okay,” said
Anna. ‘I’ll second that”

It took us
another ten minutes to reach Winter Sails. We drove slowly up the graveled
drive, past the leaning trees and the overgrown lawns, and pulled up in front
of the house. It looked empty and deserted. The pick was leaning on the porch
where I had left it last night, and the drapes in the upstairs rooms were still
drawn.

We climbed out
of the car and looked around. The soft westerly wind made the weathervane swing
and squeak. There was a fresh smell of salt in the air. I went up to the
peeling blue front door and pulled the bell. Inside the house, I heard the
chimes.

“It looks as
though there’s nobody home,” said Anna after a while;

“Wait a minute
or two,” I told her. “Maybe they slept late.”

I rang the
doorbell again, and we waited patiently for someone to answer. After two or
three minutes, we decided that Marjorie and Miss Johnson must have gone out
marketing, or whatever it is that widows and their homely companions do on
August mornings.

“You don’t
think that anything’s happened, do you?” asked Anna.

“What do you
mean?”

“Well-what
about that figure we saw last night?
The one in the robe?”

“Don’t ask me.
Why don’t you check the garage to see if the car’s still there. I’ll take a
look round the side.”

Anna crunched
across the gravel to the dilapidated garage, while I walked around to the side
of the house and up three small brick steps to the big lawn. From the center of
the lawn I could see the turret, with its conical Gothic roof and dark
forbidding windows. I was wondering if it was possible to take a ladder and
climb up there, so that we could see what we had in store for us before we
actually knocked down the turret door.