A Man Called Milo Morai

I

Although radios and gramophones blared out songs of coins falling from the skies, the only thing that the skies over depression-racked Chicago seemed to be producing were rain, snow, sleet and windborne stenches from the stockyards this winter of the Year of Our Lord 1936.

Or, at least, so thought Police Officer Bob Murphey as he squatted, back to a wall, keeping watch over the unfortunate gent who lay unconscious before him on the damp, slimy, gritty stones of the alleyway. Bob was certain that this one was a real gent—his clothing was too fine, too obviously expensive, for him to be aught else than a gent or a hood, and it was too conservative of cut and color to be the latter. That expensive clothing had likely gotten him into this sorry pickle, Murphey silently reflected. Why, his shoes alone represented a week’s pay for the average working Joe these dark days … if said Joe was lucky enough to be working at all.

Bob had been walking his beat, huddled into his uniform coat against the chill and the thick, cloying mist, when he had passed the alley mouth and sighted in his peripheral vision a flicker of movement too large to have been a mere rat or alley cat or gaunt scavenger dog. He had turned back then, taken his best grip on his billy club and demanded, “Now what in hell’s goin’ on back there?”

There was scuttling movement, then footfalls rapidly receding down the alleyway. Murphey had proceeded cautiously on until he had suddenly tripped over and almost fallen onto a recumbent body. A brief examination had revealed that the victim was not dead yet, though from the amount of blood clotting the dark hair, he might soon be. After he had carefully, as gently as possible, dragged the body closer to the alley mouth, he had trotted the half-block or so to the callbox and reported the need for an ambulance at this location.

He had returned in time to find two miscreants—likely the same ones who had slugged the gent’s head and robbed him to begin with—engaged in trying to get off the man’s shoes and greatcoat. One of them had gotten away, but the other now sat handcuffed and groaning from the beating Bob had inflicted with his billy club.

“I’m getting old,” thought the shivering policeman, clenching his jaws to stop his teeth from chattering. “Twenty years ago, it’s the both of the bastards I’d’ve got, not just this one. When I come back from France back in ‘18, all full of piss and vinegar, it looked like the world was my oyster for sure. What in hell happened to all those plans, all those chances I knew was just sitting out there waiting for Big Bob Murphey to come along?”

After glancing at his prisoner and assuring himself that the clubbed and moaning man offered no further threat, Murphey let his billy dangle from his wrist by the thong and tucked his numbed hands under his armpits. “I wonder if that poor gent there was in the Great War, too? Likely he was—he looks about of an age with me. ‘Course, he prob’ly was an officer—he looks the type. He sure got his breaks after the war, else he wouldn’t be laying there in a greatcoat that cost a hunnerd dollars if it cost one red cent. I dunno—things would prob’ly have fell in place better for me if I hadn’t gone and married Kate as soon as I did. Hell, she’d’ve waited for me to make my pile, and we both and the kids too would’ve been a sight better off if I had. But then, I’d prob’ly’ve lost it all back in ‘29 like the rest of the high-rollers did and ended up dead or riding boxcars or in jail or sweeping up horse biscuits with the WPA. At least I got me a steady job and three squares a day for me and Kate and the kids and a roof over our heads and coal to burn in the Arcola, and all that is a whole helluva lot more than most folks can say these days.”

His hands thawed a bit, Bob Murphey delved into his coat pocket and brought out the billfold he had taken from his handcuffed captive. Leaning toward the dim light out of the street beyond the alley mouth, he opened the butter-soft calfskin and riffled the sharp new bills contained therein. Sinking back onto his haunches, he whistled between his teeth. At least six hundred, maybe a thousand dollars, between one and two years’ pay for the likes of him, if you didn’t include the piddling amounts of cash and merchandise that he accepted now and then from certain cautiously selected persons on his beat for the casting of a blind eye on victimless activities.

“Well, Mr. Milo Moray,” he muttered to himself, reading the name stamped in gold leaf inside the billfold, “sure and you’re bound to have a sight more where this came from. And you do owe me something for saving your life tonight, after all.”

He stood up then and emptied the billfold, folded the bills into two wads, then stuffed one down each sock to come to rest under the arches of his feet. He then stalked over to stand looming over the prisoner.

“What did you and your partner do with this man’s money?” he demanded of the battered, manacled criminal.

Snuffling, the slumped, bleeding man half-whined, “Didn” have time to do nuthin’ with it. It’s still in his billfold, hones’ to God, it is.”

Bob Murphey sighed. “Wrong answer, feller.” Leaning down, he unlocked and removed the handcuffs, returned them to their place, then took a two-handed grip on the billy club and brought it down with all of his strength upon the prisoner’s head. Bob was a beefy man, a very strong man, and the one blow of the lead-weighted baton was all that was necessary to cave in the gaunt prisoner’s skull. Then he tucked the empty billfold back in the pocket from which he had taken it when first he had searched the man.

Of course, the initial victim of attack was apprised of none of these events until much later.

He awakened in a bed. The bed was hard, and the small pillow under his head had the consistency of a brick. He had no idea where he might be, why he was where he was, or exactly who he was.

A woman of medium height was making one of two beds on the other side of the room, moving swiftly and surely, tucking up the sheets in smooth motions that left tight corners. It was when she turned to do the same for the other bed that she noticed that he was awake. Smiling warmly, she left the rumpled bed and bustled over to crank up the head of his bed.

“Oh, Mr. Moray, doctor will be so glad to hear that we’re finally conscious. How do we feel? Any headache, hmm? Would we like a drink of nice, cool water? An aspirin?”

“Yes,” he finally got out, wondering if that croak was his normal speaking voice. “Water. Please, water.”

The white-clad woman eased him a little more erect with an arm that proved surprisingly strong, then bore a glass with a bent-glass tube to his lips and allowed him to drain it before lowering his body back down. He was again asleep before his head touched the stone-hard pillow.

When he once more awakened, the wan light that had come earlier through the window on his right was gone, replaced by the bright glare of the electric lamp in the ceiling above him. The two beds across the room sat crisply empty, and the white-clad woman who had given him water was nowhere to be seen. However, another woman, also wearing white—shoes, stockings, dress and odd-shaped cap atop her dark-blond, pulled-back hair— sat in a chair near his bedside reading a book.

He tried to amass enough saliva to moisten his mouth and bone-dry throat but, failing in the effort, croaked, “Wa … water.”

Obviously startled, the seated woman dropped her book and sprang to her feet. “Certainly, Mr. Moray, of course you may have water, all the water you want. But you’ve got to try to stay awake for a little while, too. Poor Dr. Guiscarde is dead on his feet, but he insisted that he be called as soon as you woke up again. He needs to examine you and talk with you about something he thinks important.”

While speaking, she had pushed a button, and, when another woman in white opened the door, she said, “Miss Pollak, please get word to Dr. Guiscarde that Mr. Moray is conscious now.”

Although she had promised him all the water he wanted, she actually allowed him only small sips from the glass tube and carried on a nonstop monologue for the ten minutes before a spare, gangly young man entered and took her place at the bedside, signaling her to raise the head of the bed. From his black bag he removed a stethoscope, a reflector mounted on a headband and several other instruments, with which he proceeded to subject the patient to a brief examination. Then, bidding the woman to leave the room, he took her chair, slumping into it with a deep sigh.

“Do you recall anything of what happened to you night before last, Mr. Moray? No? Well, a beat cop interrupted a pair of men who had slugged you, knocked you down and were in the process of robbing you. When he went to the callbox to get an ambulance down there, the two came back, but that was when their luck ran out; one ran again but the other fought, and the cop killed him with his baton, I hear tell. Officer Robert Emmett Murphey is as strong as the proverbial ox, so I find it entirely believable that he bashed the robber just a little too hard.

“The hoodlum who got away must have had the money from your billfold, that and your watch and chain, which were ripped from your vest to the severe detriment of the pocket and buttonhole, I fear me. But they never had time or leisure to get your vest open, much less the shirt, so your moneybelt and all within it are laid away in the hospital safe in an envelope that I personally sealed before turning it over to the administrator. But, man, don’t you know that it’s been illegal to hold gold for more than two years now? If the federal government knew you were walking around with six or seven pounds of double eagles, they’d roast you over a slow fire.

“Not that I necessarily agree with Roosevelt’s policies, you understand, for they don’t seem to be working out all that well for the vast majority of the people who have elected him twice, now. About the only good thing he’s done was to make it legal to sell good booze again, in place of those poisonous bootleg slops.

“When you are ready to convert some of those gold pieces to cash, let me know. I think my father would buy them from you at a premium, since they look to be brand-new, unworn coins. He’s a well-known numismatist, so he can buy and hold them legally, which is one way to get around Roosevelt and his socialism.

“Strange thing about you, though. When they brought you in here, your hair was a sticky mat of blood, yet I could find no wound or even an abrasion anywhere on your head to account for that blood. Your hat was crushed, which might mean that the thick, stiff furfelt absorbed most of the blow you were dealt, but that still doesn’t account for the blood. My theory is that blood, from the man the cop killed ran down to the center of the alley and pooled under your head. Gruesome, heh? But it’s as reasonable a theory as any other, I think.

“I’m going to have you moved upstairs to a nicer room, a real private room. I’d like to observe you for a few days —head injuries can be tricky. You can easily afford private nurses and these days most of the nurses are in dire need of patients who can pay for their services. Mrs. Jennings, who was here when you woke a few minutes ago, will be your night nurse, and I have another in mind for your day nurse, too. Should you not care for what the hospital kitchen calls food, and not many do, there are several restaurants hereabouts that can cater your meals for reasonable costs.

“Whom should we contact about you, Mr. Moray? Family? Friends? Business associates?”

It took some little time, days of repetitive questioning, the bringing in of other doctors, specialists, before the man called Milo Moray was able to finally convince them all that he truly lacked any memory of his name and his life prior to the assault on him by the two thugs.

The room was bright, cheery, furnished fully, and had attached a private toilet and bath to justify its steep rate of five dollars a day. The patient found the food provided bland but palatable and only rarely had meals fetched in to him from outside sources. Mrs. Jennings and Miss Duncan, his nurses, cared for him competently, brought him books from the nearby public library and helped him pass the time with conversations. As he could remember nothing of his past life, they told him of themselves and, in Mrs. Jennings’ case, of her husband and child.

Not that he ever seemed to lack for conversation. His status as something of a mystery man seemed to bring the oddballs out of the woodwork, as Dr. Gerald Guiscarde put it. He himself spent as much time as his busy schedule would allow with his patient, conversing with him as an equal, and he also continued to set various tests to the man he called Milo Moray.

Among other things, he was able to determine that although his patient’s English was accentless, non-regional American, he also was more than merely fluent in High German and French, as well as Latin and Classical Greek. Dr. Sam Osterreich, the psychiatrist, was able to add to the list of accomplishments the facts that the memoryless man was also well grounded in Yiddish, Hebrew, several dialects of Plattdeutsch, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. Through assorted visitors, it was established that the man called Moray could converse in such other tongues as Slovak, Croatian, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian and Basque.

But he proved unable to understand Cantonese, Sioux, Hindi, Tamil or Welsh, though he was proved to be fluent in Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Dutch. It was the consensus of opinion among the linguists that Guiscarde filtered in that, although probably a university graduate, certainly well educated, Moray had not learned most of his vast array of tongues in an academic setting, but rather through living among and conversing with the people whose native languages he had learned so well and in such depth.

Dr. Osterreich was a stooped little gnome of a man whose English was sometimes halting and always heavily accented. He had studied under fellow Austrian Dr. Sigmund Freud. In his mid-fifties, he was a very recent immigrant and had been a widower since his wife had died of influenza while he had been serving as a medical officer of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army in the Great War.

One early evening after his office hours, he showed up at the mystery patient’s room with a large chess set and board, a commodious flask of fine brandy and a brace of crystal snifters. He had been prepared to teach the game to his host, but it proved unnecessary, in the end, for the man called Moray was sufficiently adept to make their games long and slow, and the psychiatrist was to return many times for chess, brandy and rambling chats in English, German and Yiddish.

After a signal defeat one night, the doctor tipped over his king and regarded his host for a long moment. “What-efer you war, mein freund, goot, solid gold I vould lay that a military man you vunce war. The firm principles of strategy and tactics most naturally to you seem to come. You ponder, you efery aspect weigh, but then mofe mit alacrity and resolution. Too young you look to have been in the late unpleasantness, but to know all that you seem to know, I also feel that older than you look you must assuredly to be. Efen mit a true ear for languages, for instance, more years than you seem to have vould have required been for you to have mastered so fery many as you haf. Most truly a puzzle you are, mein freund, Milo.”

Some month after first awakening in the hospital, the patient had just breakfasted one morning when Dr. Gerald Guiscarde arrived with a large, thick manila envelope under one arm.

“Milo, I’ve conferred with Sam, and we agree that there’s nothing we can do for you, in the hospital or out, so it’s just a useless waste of your money to stay here any longer, I feel.

“Now, I took the liberty of sending your gold to my father, and he bought it all, as I was certain he would, for thirty-four dollars per coin, which came to two thousand, eight hundred and fifty-six dollars. There’s an accounting in the envelope along with your moneybelt, but I’ll tell you now that with the hospital, the nurses, Sam, me, and the specialists all paid, you still have two thousand and twenty-two dollars and eighteen cents.

“Have you plans after you leave here? You don’t intend to leave the area, do you? Sam and I still would like to see you regularly, keep up with your progress, as it were.”

The patient smiled sadly. “Where would I go? What would I do? I seem to have lost not only my past but, with it, any roots I might have had. No, I suppose I’ll find a residence hotel somewhere, then try to find a job of some description.”

But his day nurse, Fanny Duncan, would not hear of such a thing, and that was how he wound up a boarder in the same house in which she lived. His ten dollars per week brought him a comfortable room, three plain but good meals per day, bath and toilet down the hall, clean bed linens once a week and a familial atmosphere.

In 1914, Staff Sergeant Patrick O’Shea had left the Army he had so dearly loved behind him to take over the management of the brewery following the calamitous deaths of his father and all three of his elder brothers in a boating accident. He had also married his eldest brother’s widow, Maggie, a new bride become suddenly a new widow, and they had moved into the big, rambling family house. With a staff of well-trained servants, they lived comfortably and happily, their first, Michael Gilbert O’Shea, being born in 1916. Patrick himself seemed to be adapting well to his executive position, but then the first dim tattoo of the war drums began to be heard and the warhorse in him began to champ at the bit.

By the time the twins, Sally and Joseph, came along, their father was in the trenches. He returned to a business ruined by Prohibition. He returned crippled and nearly blind from being gassed. That was when Maggie, perforce, took over the house and the family.

Regretfully, she let most of the servants go, retaining only the cook, the children’s nurse and a single housemaid. After conferring with Patrick’s attorney, she sold the brewery—lock, stock, barrels and land—for the best price she could get, paid the workers a generous severance and then followed the attorney’s advice in investing what was left. Thanks to the income derived from those shrewd investments, she was soon able to hire back all of the former servants and go back to the kind of life into which she had married. And thus they lived for more than ten years.

Then, overnight, their fortune was wiped out along with many another on Black Friday. Her attorney and financial adviser, who had been on that Thursday a multimillionare, shot himself in the head with a shotgun. Maggie’s butler did the same with a German pistol. With a rare prescience, she went down the following Monday and emptied what money lay still in her accounts out of the banks which soon were closed.

By this time, the children were really too old to have need of a nurse, so she retained only the cook and Nellie, the maid. She firmly insisted that her elder daughter, [ Sally, and her younger, Kathleen, spend most of their ! free time in learning the arts of housekeeping and cooking, for she anticipated and feared the day when there would be too little money left to pay for any servants at all. Herself, she dusted off her only marketable skill and secured a nursing jo,b in the nearby hospital; it was not much money, true, but it was steady and far better than nothing.

With two guest rooms and two more rooms of former servants sitting vacant and useless, Maggie O’Shea got the idea of taking in boarders, nurses, all of them. When, in 1934, Michael’s appointment to the United States Military Academy emptied yet another room, she had no difficulty in promptly filling it with another nurse, Miss Fanny Duncan.

In 1936, two more rooms became vacant. Joseph enlisted in the Navy and his twin, Sally, moved into the hospital residence hall to begin her nurse’s training. This meant that Maggie had to hire on a second maid, but there was space for another in the quarters that had once been the chauffeur’s over the garage, and with the combination of her salary, her husband’s pension and seventy dollars each week in paid rents, she could easily afford the extra employee. And so there were presently two more nurses in the house that certain of the more affluent neighbors were beginning to call “the Convent of Saint Maggie,” not that Maggie cared a fig. She had kept her house, kept her family together, adequately fed and clothed and even provided gainful employment for non-family household members, which was more than many another could say in these hard, bitter times.

Even crippled as he was, a living testament to the horrors of modern warfare, to the inherent dangers of a soldier’s life, Maggie often felt that the government should be paying Patrick far more than his pension for, if nothing else, his recruiting activities. He had gotten his eldest an appointment to the USMA, persuaded his youngest to enter the military, along with many another man and boy with whom he kad come in contact over the years. The old soldier had even gone after the nurses resident in his home and, at length, blarneyed one of them, Jane Sullivan, into entering the Army Nurse Corps.

Jane Sullivan’s room became vacant while Fanny Duncan was still nursing the mystery man, and it was Fanny who first got the idea, broached it to Dr. Guiscarde and, with his not inconsiderable help, convinced first Maggie O’Shea, then the man called Milo Moray.

“Look, Maggie,” Guiscarde had said, “we want to keep the patient in a sheltered environment for as long as necessary, and we want that environment to be as close as possible to the hospital. And it’s not as if he were some deadbeat or bum, anyway. No, he’s not employed yet, but in confidence I’ll tell you this: he paid a staggering bill for his hospital room, round-the-clock nursing and the bills of several doctors in full and in cash, to the tune of well over eight hundred dollars, and he’s still well heeled even after the outlay. His resources would allow him to pay your going rent for going on four years even if he never got a job.

“Although he still can’t remember his past life or even his own name, he’s a proven brain—brilliant. He speaks a score of languages at the least, fluently, too. Dr. Samuel Osterreich says that he has met darned few men who were as good at chess as is this patient… .“He let that last dangle enticingly, having been coached on that particular by Fanny Duncan.

“Well,” Maggie pondered aloud, “I’ve never taken in a man for a boarder before, but this man sounds like he … and poor Pat has had nobody living in to play chess with since the boys left. All right, doctor, I’ll take him on a trial basis. If he works out, fine. If it looks like he won’t fit in, I’ll have to heave him out. Okay?”

After his first meeting with Mr. Milo Moray, Pat O’Shea told him bluntly, “Mister, whatever else you was, you was a soldier, once, prob’ly a ofser. You just carry yourself that way, and b’lieve me, I knows. Most likely, the bestest way for you to get your mem’ry back is to re-up. ‘Course, with you not rememb’ring and all, you prob’ly won’t get your commission back right away, but when you ready to enlist, you just let me know. I’ll get you back in—I knows some guys, local.”

Milo—he was finally beginning to think of himself as Milo Moray, since that was what everyone called him, for all that the name evoked not even the faint ghost of a memory within him—tramped the streets for over two weeks, searching in vain for some variety of employment. There just were no jobs available, it seemed.

Pat O’Shea pointed out that the frustration would be every bit as bad or worse in another area. “It’s the same all over thishere country, Milo. A few folks thinks and says it’s bettern it was five, six years ago, but don’t look that way to me, no way. Bestest thing a man could do, I think, is to enlist. The Army’s a good life. Oh, yeah, it’s hard sometimes and a man don’t get paid much, but he gets his clothes and three squares a day, regular, and he don’t have to pay doctors or dentists nothin’, and once he gets him a few stripes, he’s in like Flynn, less he fucks up or suthin’.”

Dr. Sam Osterreich arrived at the O’Shea house shortly after dinner of a night. After a few games of chess with O’Shea, he took Milo aside and opened the briefcase he had brought along.

Shoving a wad of newsprint toward Milo, he said, “Read, if read you can, please.”

Two of the sheets were German newspapers, one was Russian, one French and one Italian. To his surprise, Milo discovered that he could comprehend all of them, and he began to read them to the psychiatrist, but was interrupted by a wave of the hand.

“Nein, nein, you do not understand. Translate them to me, please, if you can.”

When Milo had done so, had translated the gist of short articles from four of the five papers, Osterreich nodded brusquely and took back the papers.

“Enough. Gut, gut, sehr gut. A job you now haf, if still you need of one haf, meinfreund. You may vork here, in your home, or in an office downtown from where you must in any case go to be gifen the papers each week and to return the completed translations of the indicated articles. One penny per word will be paid for each accurate translation returned, and to be accurate, they all must, this very important is, Milo.

“The bulk of the papers will in German be, but some will in Russian be, or in French, Spanish, Italian, various of the Slavic and Scandinavian languages, Finnish, sometimes, Yiddish, Dutch, Portuguese and even Slovakian.”

Pat O’Shea had been shamelessly eavesdropping, and he now demanded, “Now, just a minute, doctor, what in hell you getting Milo mixed up in, anyhow? Some of thishere Bolshevik mess? I heard you just say some them papers was going to be in Russian!”

Osterreich shook his balding head vigorously. “Nothing of the sort, Mr. O’Shea. To a group of recent immgrants I have the honor to belong, to be an officer. Convinced we all are that in Europe a very bloodbath approaching is, a holocaust of such proportions as nefer seen in the world before has been. To alert the citizens and officials of this, our new homeland, we are now trying through means of issuing a monthly digest of signs culled from European newspapers. We do this at our own expense, for most imperative it is that our new, free, vonderful homeland be warned, be prepared and secure when starts does this conflagration, for in this war, coming, there no neutrals will be, we fear; all nations combatants will be and only the strongest vill survive it.”

O’Shea snorted. “Bejabbers and you’re talkin’ nonsense, doctor, pure nonsense. It won’t be no more wars, not big ones, anyway. We got us the League of Nations and the World Court to settle diff rences in Europe. Pres’dent Woodrow Wilson—”

“Your pardon, Mr. O’Shea,” Osterreich courteously interrupted, “but I must say that your vaunted President-of-the-United-States-of-America a true naif was, and used shamelessly by France and Great Britain was to their own, most selfish ends. Nothing his supposed-great deeds accomplished but to sow the seeds of discord and misery and future war for Europe and the world. The so-called Treaty of Versailles was nothing of the sort, Mr. O’Shea, rather was it the ultimate revenge of France for the defeat she in the Franco-Prussian War suffered. Not only did the provisions of that hellish document leave France as the sole large, united, strong and vealthy nation upon the continent of Europe, it sundered, impoverished and thoroughly humiliated two of her historic rivals for hegemony—the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She had no fear of her other two historic rivals, for Britain had been her ally and took her part in all the negotiations, while Russia in utter turmoil was not to be a threat.

“Legally robbed of eferything of value—ofersea colonies, merchant ships, naval ships, most of the bullion that their monies backed, their heafy industries und mining, denied credit universally und with their monies worthless—the defeated were left with only starvation and despair on national scales. Und just as the despair of millions of Russians bred Bolshevism, Mr. O’Shea, so the soul-deep despair of the cruelly used Germanic peoples has bred its own brand of fanaticism, a variety efery bit as dangerous to individuals and to nations as is the Russian variety.

“But the true horror of our group, Mr. O’Shea, is that Americans like you seem blissfully unaware of just how close to worldwide war we coming are. This is why the dissemination of our digest so important is, for very few Americans speak any of the languages but English, so necessary it is to translate the other important languages into English, hoping that what they read in our digest will cause them to take from the sand their heads in time.”

Milo’s first day of work at the office of Dr. Osterreich’s group revealed to him and the others there that he spoke at least two other languages, Ukrainian and Modern Greek, at least six regional dialects of German, three of French and the variant of the Dutch language known as Afrikaans and still spoken only in the Union of South Africa. But that first day also revealed to him that was he to get any meaningful amount of work done each day, it would have to be at someplace other than in that office.

All of the other eleven men and women in the office had immigrated within the last decade from various European lands. One man and two women were White Russians and were jokingly called “the old non-nobility” because they had been in America longest. In addition, there were an Austrian, two Germans, a Pole, two French ladies, a Hollander and a Neapolitan Italian. Milo had met a few of them before when Osterreich had brought them to his hospital room to try to determine just how well he spoke certain foreign languages with which the psychiatrist, himself, was no more than peripherally familiar, and of course those whom he had not met had heard of him from their coworkers and from Dr. Osterreich.

The staff all were bubblingly curious, and none of them seemed to believe that he truly could recall none of his past life. The two Russian ladies seemed to firmly believe him to be a Russian nobleman of some degree who had found it prudent to bury his past lest agents of Josef Stalin find and kill him; the Russian man, on the other hand, was working under the firm assumption that Milo was a Trotskyite on the run or possibly a Cossack officer who had left Russia with his regiment’s payroll in gold.

All of the others had their own opinions as to Milo’s true identity, most of them wildly speculative if not downright romantic, and they constantly harassed him with questions to the point that he elected to do all future work either at the boardinghouse or in the enforced tranquillity of the public library.

He soon found the library a good choice, for frequently he came across words in various languages of which he did not know the exact meaning. Reference books and dictionaries available at the library gave him not only the meanings he sought but also seemed to give him something else of a puzzling nature to ponder.