Champion of Lost Causes by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand [Brand, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
Publisher: Roy Glashan's Library
Published: 2016-08-19T22:00:00+00:00

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XXV. — “MURDER”

“I HAVE an excellent starting point. The last time I talked with you—and the first time—you said that on an occasion I held the price of a man’s life in my hand.”

“I remember it nicely. The very expression on your face when I made the remark.”

“Very well. Will you develop that remark?”

“In what way?”

“Tell me how it is possible to buy a life.”

“Willingly. There is in this city a Murder Company.”

“A what!”

“A Murder Company. Does that surprise you?”

Loring sipped his drink and composed himself.

“I have heard of such atrocious things—in fiction, I think.”

“Fiction is drab stuff. Turn to life. Do you want humor, pathos, tragedy? Any ten men make a crowd, any crowd will furnish you with all these things. A Murder Company? Why not?”

“Men gathered for the sole purpose of destroying other men for a price?”

“I repeat: why not? How wanting our civilization would be without such a convenience! No, I thank God that we are still not entirely degenerated. Why, sir, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all had their Murder Companies. That of the Medici in France was a crude organization—but effective in a crude century.

“There have always been such organizations. They meet a primitive need. There are peoples with whom murder is a religious rite. There are head-hunters who hang up their trophies.”

“Barbarians! Yes, I can understand that.”

“Tush! What difference between the Indian who took a scalp and the Western gunman—now, alas, too few—who chipped a notch on his gun? Different skins—the same vigorous, joyous, manly hearts beneath the skin! Open your eyes to the world, my dear fellow.

“At this very moment, in Central Africa, the spearman hurls his leaf-bladed spear across the corn and strikes down the bought victim; the little brown man in India peeps over the fallen trunk and blows his poisoned arrow into the back of the bought victim; and the hired gunfighter in Manhattan slips through the back entrance and sends his daintily placed bullet into the brain of his bought victim. And yet you shudder at the thought of a Murder Company? My friend, you bring me close to laughter!”

“At least,” said Loring, “you are stimulating, if not quite credible.”

“It is true,” nodded the man with the opal, “that my mind is not limited by the absurd bonds of truth. I thank God that He made me enough of a poet to tell a round, sounding lie with grace and unction. But what is false or unique in the idea of a Murder Company?

“What would you think of a civilization which crowds the thought of the world into your bookshelves, the music of the world upon a series of little wax disks, the art of the world at least shadowed forth in a pile of pictures at a penny a piece? What would you think of such a civilization, I say, if after having heated you without smoke, and lighted you without flame, and annihilated for you space and time, and for you read the stars of heaven like

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