Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

The Vorpal Blade by Edward D. Hoch

It is almost a year since EQMM lost one of the greatest mystery short story writers of all time, Edward D. Hoch. We have been publishing an assortment of remaining new Hoch stories and Hoch reprints since his death, in order to complete another full year in the unbroken streak of publication he’s had in this magazine since 1973. Fan Steve Steinbock suggested this story as a good way to conclude Ed Hoch’s 36-year streak. There will be periodic Hoch reprints in future.

* * *

Winterluck had been living with Von Baden for some five years before he ever raised the subject of the Heidelberg killing. It was on a mild April day — one of the first pleasant days of spring — and they were strolling around the big yard as they so often did when the weather was good. Overhead, the sky was blue with promise, and already the first small buds were clustering on branches.

“The German spring is a wonderful time,” Winterluck said that morning.

“Spring is always wonderful,” Von Baden said. “I remember only one bad spring — in ’forty-five, when it meant the Allies would begin their final drive along the western front. That year, I cursed the birds as they sang in the trees, and wished I could hold back the blossoms with my hands. But the snow melted, and the tanks rumbled on.”

“They would have come in any event,” Winterluck said. “Hitler was finished. We were all finished.” He stared for a time at the distant trees. “It was like some great tragedy by Shakespeare, though I suppose the other side didn’t see it that way.”

Von Baden nodded his balding head, and the light caught the curving scar on his left cheek. “Perhaps Hitler was a sort of Hamlet, at least to us. Perhaps he should have died by a poisoned sword.”

Winterluck was still staring at the trees. “That reminds me of the Heidelberg thing. Remember it?”

“How could I forget? I was there.”

“Cassan was a sort of Hamlet, and he was struck down by a poisoned sword.”

But Von Baden shook his head. “To borrow from our late enemies the English, he was much more a Jabberwock, struck down by a vorpal blade.”

“How did it happen?” Winterluck asked. “I never heard the full details.”

“Very few people did. The crime — if crime it was — happened at a time when young Cassan was the most hated, and feared, student in all of Heidelberg. No one very much wanted to see the boy who killed him punished. In those days, such things were easy to hush up, and after all, Cassan was not the first to die in the dueling clubs of Heidelberg. Or the last.”

“But some said he was murdered, killed by a poisoned sword. At least that was the talk at the time.”

“That was the talk, yes.” Von Baden’s eyes clouded, as if he were trying to remember the exact feeling of that day. “It was such a long time ago, a lifetime ago. The world has seen so much violence since, I wonder if what happened there could still have any importance.”

“It was important to Cassan. It was the end of his life.”

“Yes, yes,” Von Baden agreed, scratching the smooth skin of his aging head. “It was surely important to Cassan.”

In that time, when Germany was only just recovering from one war, and the figure of Adolf Hitler was known only to the jailers of Landsberg and a handful of followers, Heidelberg was still the university town with its singing students and beer-drinking frolic. Von Baden had entered the university in 1921, the same year that Joseph Goebbels was receiving his Ph.D. at the age of twenty-four. He did not know Goebbels then, and was not to meet him until much later.

For Von Baden, Heidelberg University was a dream realized. Away from the confines of a strict home for the first time, he plunged into the daily student life and joined almost at once one of the five dueling clubs that were the center of university social life. At the beginning, and during all of his freshman year, he thought very little about the actual fact of dueling, the main reason for the clubs’ existence. He had seen the scarred faces about the campus and in the classroom, of course, and he was often present at the semiweekly matches in the large whitewashed apartment on the second floor of the public house. But to him it remained a thing apart, not nearly so important as the annual election of a beer king among the dueling corps.