membranes. As though regular nightmares—always the same, yet increasingly repulsive to the detective—were not- enough woe for one man to bear, he was troubled with a sudden, appalling sharpness of hearing. This was strange, for Fitzgerald had always been a little deaf in one ear.
The noises he heard were distressing things, things like the ticking of a wristwatch two floors beneath his flat, the gurgle of water in sewers as he walked tile streets, humming of underground telephone wires.
Headquarters was a bedlam with its stentorian breathing, the machine-gun fire of a telephone being dialed, the howitzer crash of a cigarette case snapping shut.
He had his bedroom soundproofed and tried to bear it The inches of fibreboard helped a little; he found that he could focus his attention on a book and practically exclude from his mind the regular swish of air in his bronchial tubes, the thudding at his wrists and temples, the slushing noise of food passing through his transverse colon.
Fitzgerald did not go mad for he was a man with ideals. He believed in clean government and total extirpation of what he fondly believed was a criminal class which could be detected by the ear lobes and other distinguishing physical characteristics.
He did not go to a doctor because he knew that the word would get back to headquarters that Fitzgerald heard things and would probably begin to see things pretty soon and that it wasn't good policy to have a man like mat on the force.
The detective read up on the later Freudians, trying to interpret the recurrent dream. The book said that it meant he had been secretly in love with a third cousin on his mother's side and that he was ashamed of it now and wanted to die, but that he was afraid of heavenly judgment. He knew that wasn't so; his mother had had no relations and detective Fitzgerald wasn't afraid of anything under the sun.
After two weeks of increasing horror he was walking around like a corpse, moving by instinct and wearily doing his best to dodge the accidents that seemed to trail him. It was then that he was assigned to check on the Cult of Hagar. The records showed that they had registered at City Hall, but records don't show everything.
He walked in on the cult during a service and dully noted that its members were more prosperous in appearance than they had been, and that there were more women present Joseph Kazam was going through precisely the same ritual that, the detective had last seen.
When the last bill had fallen into the pot covered with gilded wood and the last dowager had left Kazam emerged and greeted the detective.
'Fitzgerald,' he said, 'you damned fool, why didn't you come to me in the first place?'
'For what?' asked the detective, loosening the waxed cotton plugs in his ears.
The stringy, brown man chuckled. 'Your friend Rooney's been at work on you. You hear things. You can't sleep and when you do—'
'That's plenty,' interjected Fitzgerald. 'Can you help me out of this mess I'm in?'
'Nothing to it Nothing at all. Come into the office.'
Dully the detective followed, wondering if the cot had been removed.
The ritual that Kazam performed was simple in the extreme, but a little revolting. The mucky aspects of it Fitzgerald completely excused when he suddenly realized that he no longer heard his own blood pumping through his veins, and that the asthmatic wheeze of the janitor in the basement was now private to the 'janitor again. 'How does it feel?'
asked Kazam concernedly. 'Magnificent,' breathed the detective, throwing away his cotton plugs. 'Too wonderful for words.'
'I'm sorry about what I had to do,' said the other man, 'but that was to get your attention principally. The real cure was mental projection.' He then dismissed the bedevilment of Fitzgerald with an airy wave of the hand. 'Look at this,' he said.
'My God!' breathed the detective. 'Is it real?' Joseph Kazam was holding out an enormous diamond cut into a thousand glittering facets that shattered the light from his desk lamp into a glorious blaze of color.
'This,' said the stringy, brown man, 'is the Charity Diamond.'
'You mean,' sputtered the detective, 'you got it from—' The very woman,' said Kazam hastily. 'And of her own free will. I have a receipt:
'For the sum of one dollar in payment for the Charity Diamond. Signed, Mrs.——''
'Yes,' said the detective. 'Happy days for the Sons of Hagar. Is this what you've been waiting for?'
'This,' said Kazam curiously turning the stone in his hand, 'is what I've been hunting over all the world for years. And only by starting a nut cult could I get it Thank God it’s legal.'
'What are you going to do now?' asked the detective. 'Use the diamond for a little trip. You will want to come along, I think. You'll have a chance to meet your Mr. Rooney.'
'Lead on,' said Fitzgerald. 'After the past two weeks I can stand anything.'
'Very well.' Kazam turned out the desk lamp. 'It glows,' whispered Fitzgerald. He was referring to the diamond, over whose surface was passing an eerie blue light, ike the invisible flame of anthracite. 'I'd like you to pray for success, Mr. Fitzgerald,' said Kazam. The detective began silently to go over his brief stock of prayers. He was barely conscious of the fact that the other man was mumbling to himself and caressing the diamond with long, wiry fingers.
The shine of the stone grew brighter yet; strangely, though, it did not pick out any of the details of the room.
Then Kazam let out an ear-splitting howl. Fitzgerald winced, closing his eyes for just a moment. When he opened them he began to curse in real earnest.
'You damned rotter!' he cried. 'Taking me here—'
The Persian looked at him coldly and snapped: 'Easy, man! This is real—look around you!'
The detective looked around and saw that the tower of stone was rather far in the distance, farther than in his dreams, usually. He stooped and picked Up a handful of the fine white desert sand, let it run through his fingers.
'How did you get us here?' he asked hoarsely.
'Same way I cured you of Runi Sarif's curse. The diamond has rare powers to draw the attention. Ask any jewel-thief. This one, being enormously expensive, is so completely engrossing that unsuspected powers of concentration are released. That, combined with my own sound knowledge of a particular traditional branch of psychology, was enough to break the walls down which held us pent to East 59th Street'
The detective was beginning to laugh, flatly and hysterically. 'I come to you hag-ridden, you first cure me and then plunge me twice as deep into Hell, Kazam! What's the good of it?'
'This isn't Hell,' said the Persian matter-of-factly. 'It isn't Hell, but it isn't Heaven either. Sit down and let me explain.' Obediently Fitzgerald squatted on the sand. He noticed that Kazam cast an apprehensive glance at the horizon before beginning.
'I was born in Persia,' said Kazam, 'but I am not Persian by blood, religion or culture. My life began in a little mountain village where I soon saw that I was treated not as the other children were. My slightest wish could command the elders of the village and if I gave an order it would be carried out.
'The reasons for all this were explained to me on my thirteenth birthday by an old man—a very old man whose beard reached to his knees. He said that he had in him only a small part of the blood of Kaidar, but that I was almost full of k, that there was little human blood in me, 'I cried and screamed and said that I didn't want to be Kaidar, that I just wanted to be a person. I ran away from the village after another year, before they began to teach me their twisted, ritualistic versions of occult principles. It was this flight which saved me from the usual fate of the Kaidar; had I stayed I would have become a celebrated miracle man, known for all of two hundred miles or so, curing the sick and cursing the well. My highest flight would be to create a new Islamic faction—number three hundred and eighty-two, I suppose.
'Instead I knocked around the world. And Lord, got knocked around too. Tramp steamers, maritime strike in Frisco, the Bela Kun regime in Hungary—I wound up in North Africa when I was about thirty years old.
'I was broke, as broke as any person could be and stay alive. A Scotswoman picked me up, hired me, taught me mathematics. I plunged into it, algebra, conies, analytics, calculus, relativity. Before I was done, I'd worked out wave-mechanics three years before that Frenchman had even begun to think about it.
'When I showed her the set of differential equations for the carbon molecule, all solved, she damned me for an unnatural monster and threw me out But she'd given me the beginnings of mental discipline, and done it many thousands of times better than they could have in that Persian village. I began to realize what I was.
