Karmesin by Gerald Kersh

Author:Gerald Kersh [Kersh, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 1932009027
Publisher: Crippen & Landru
Published: 2016-09-23T07:00:00+00:00

The Thiel Who Played Dead

Karmesin’s moustache has always fascinated me. It is full of zoological interest; it appears to live a life of its own. When I first met him twenty-five years ago, it resembled a hibernating squirrel. Ten years later, it had turned into a dying raccoon. And now it was a grey—backed gull seeking refuge from a storm under the jutting crag of his formidable nose, so that as his cigarette burned down low I half expected it to fly away with a terrible squawk. But he rescued it in the nick of time, dropped the glowing stub into the dregs of his coffee cup, and gave it a reassuring pat.

He caught my glance — Karmesin missed nothing — and said: “Yes, old boy, it has gone white. It grew out white after I shaved it off in 1923.”

“For a disguise?” I asked.

“Well, to lay the foundations for one. Ah, that was an affair! The world has never seen the like of it, and never will again!”

Now Karmesin is an enigma. In all the years I have known him, I have never been able to decide whether he is the greatest criminal, or the greatest liar, the world has ever known. Either way, he is great. He has his facts at his fingertips — the unlikeliest facts. He never contradicts himself, and when he falls into a reminiscent mood he casts such a spell upon you by a kind of sleight-of-mind that, while he talks, you must believe ... He is the conjurer and you, the child at the party when, in the dimmed light, the bowl of goldfish comes out of the hat. And you go away saying to yourself: It must be a lie ... Or was it?

“Tell me about it,” I said.

With heavy sarcasm, he said: “There is no earthly use telling you anything, you. You never believe me. You are one of those fools that call themselves ‘sceptics,’ and ‘hard-headed,’ et cetera, et cetera. And what fools you turn out to be in your misbelief! You will believe in Signor Ponzi’s gold, or Ivar Kreugar’s mad promises, far more sincerely than you believe in God. That is why the easiest money I have ever made has been by picking out the shrewdest sceptic I could find.”“Oh, Karmesin!” I begged.

“I will tell you, briefly,” said Karmesin with a chuckle, “just in order to shock you ...”

Oh, if I could convey to you that sonorous, steady, insistent, hypnotic voice of Karmesin’s when he began to talk, gazing straight in front of him! And his eyes. You have seen one of those ancient portraits in which the subject, looking at nothing, appears from every angle to be watching you? Such were the eyes of Karmesin, as he told his story...

I am that rare combination, a thinker and a man of action (Karmesin began). Therefore, it has been possible for me, in the course of a long life devoted almost exclusively to robbery in most of its forms, to conceive and execute some of the most sensational coups in the history of crime.

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