MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

The first news that Michael and Jacob had of the dragon of Chinatown was provided by an acquaintance of them called Clive. Clive frequented Chinatown because of a bad addiction he had: he was an opium smoker. That addiction would end up driving him crazy and leading him to be enslaved by an ant colony from Prospect Park. However, in 1937, he was still not crazy, so when he told Michael and Jacob about the dragon, they believed him. According to Clive, the dragon was hidden in the basement of an opium den called “Yinglong”. Clive said he had heard its grunts and grinding of teeth, and sometimes he saw tongues of fire escape under the door that gave access to the basement. Once, he was smoking next to the basement door when the Chinese in charge opened it, and then he could see it: a huge bug-eyed dragon with horrible jaws and more than eight yards long. When he asked the Chinese, he was told that there was nothing to worry about and, laughing, they added that it was the den’s pet. Mic...

In February of 1936, the American archaeologist Mrs. Martha Cunningham, began in Alexandria a long journey by ship to transfer to America the mortal remains of her husband. She was so attached to him that at no time wanted to separate from his coffin and it was said that in the transatlantic that was driving them back home, they were seen walking both of them on the first class cabins’ deck. Naturally, the coffin did not walk by its own means but was pushed in a cart by a baggage handler. In the New York harbor, a vehicle awaited them that took them both to their residence of Park Avenue. Before embarking on their trip to Egypt a year before, all the servants had been dismissed, but Mrs. Cunningham was in no hurry to replace them. Naturally, her family and friends knew that in that coffin did not travel her husband for the very simple reason that she was not married and, in fact, she was proud of her spinsterhood which gave her the freedom she wanted. Many members of the New York upper...

In 1937, Joe Louis won the title of Heavyweight champion. But few people know of an incident that occurred to this legendary boxer when he was still an amateur. Here is the scoop… Joe Louis had 69 professional fights with only three losses, And the balance of his previous career as an amateur was even more spectacular: he had lost only one fight, and most surprising of all is that he did it in front of a blind fighter. Do you understand now why the incident was silenced when Louis reached the stardom? However, it must be said that the fault was not Louis's or the merit of the blind boxer. I’ll tell you what happened. It turns out that in 1935 ENIGMA CONSULTANTS S.L. received a commission from the coach of Louis, a certain Harold "Bux" Clinton. Mr. Clinton was sure that someone had given his promising pupil the evil eye. Louis had been in an hospital for a week then. He had several broken ribs, a broken nose, purple eyes and bruises all over his body. Two weeks earlier, M...

Ernest Jennings never studied hypnosis techniques. He was just a born hypnotist. He didn’t need to use any technique, he just stared at you with that stupid face he had, and he got you under his control. However, he was not aware of his power until the day he went to ask for an autograph to Rita Hayworth after seeing her in the film “Charlie Chan in Egypt” and immediately she was signing not only the autograph but the marriage certificate by which both they became husband and wife. Naturally, she asked for a divorce immediately after the judge declared them as such, that is, as soon as the hypnotic effects wore off. She alleged mental coercion and the forensic psychologist ruled that, indeed, Jennings had a hypnotic power that he was unaware of until that moment. That also explained why when he went to ask for a job as maintenance worker at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., he was designated chief executive officer. Of course, when the Lehman brothers realized that the new CEO had difficu...

Michael and Jacob held one of their periodic discussions about the convenience of carrying a weapon with them. On that occasion Michael was especially angry because his friend had bought a gun without consulting him before. While Jacob’s attention was briefly distracted, Michael confiscated the weapon arguing the danger posed by that gun in his hands because, when Jacob stared at something, he tended to become cross-eyed and also his pulse trembled and once, in a shooting cabin of Coney Island, the manager had to hide under the counter in view of the erratic movements of his shooting hand. But the discussion was suddenly interrupted when someone knocked on the office’s door. Such was the elegant way of dressing and distinguished bearing of their new client that Michael and Jacob thought they were in the presence of an English lord, or of a direct descendant of an English lord, or of an English descendant of a Chinese lord, or maybe of a squirrel in a tux. -Good morning, my name is Ri...

One day ENIGMA CONSULTANTS S.L. received a call from the mayor urging Michael and Jacob to investigate a strange phenomenon that many neighbors of Washington Heights had communicated to the City Hall. Mayor LaGuardia was too busy to go into further details, he just urged them to go to that neighborhood and see what the hell was going on there. So that's what they did. After spending all morning walking around the neighborhood, Michael was the first to detect an anomaly (a certain Grace Faydworth was the second, a child name Rob the third and Jacob was the last one). What was this anomaly?, you’ll ask. I tell you: a certain number of guys they passed on the street had a strange attitude that caused a chill. Those guys walked with a rigidity of robots, had no expression in the face and their glance was empty: they just wandered the streets absorbed as if they were zombies. Michael noticed it because he had the reference of his uncle Jeremiah, who was a zombie since he traveled to Hai...

In the thirties, due to the economic depression, paradoxically the show business moved higher. People needed to get away from their everyday worries. The less privileged went to the movie theaters. Wealthy people filled Broadway shows. The lights of Broadway at dusk were already a spectacle in itself. But in 1937 it was scheduled a show titled "I’ve got a stain in my pants" that drove the agency ENIGMA CONSULTANTS S. L. nuts. George Firstein, the show’s producer, contacted Michael and Jacob because of a strange phenomenon that happened at the end of each performance. It turned out that while the audience was leaving the theater, Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries” sounded. And what was so strange about this?, someone might ask. Plainly and simply, the strangeness lay in the fact that the orchestra had already stopped playing. The pit was empty and yet not only did the music sound but it sounded so loud that many spectators threw themselves to the ground thinking that the naz...

In the year 1937, the "On Leong", one of the tongs or Chinese secret societies of New York City, declared war on a rival tong, the "Hip Song", because of a dispute regarding the length of the queue   that Chinese men should wear. At that time there lived in Chinatown a reputed Chinese magician named Cao Xing who felt a great affinity for Jewish culture. To the point that he used to walk around Jewish neighborhoods disguised as an orthodox jew with a long false beard, long false payots, long false hair and a long false brain that enabled him to speak and understand Yiddish with the exception of some loose words like fridn, kvetch or mishposheh. Thanks to this good characterization, he had managed to make friends with a Williamsburg rabbi called Weinman. This rabbi instructed him in the Kabbalah and, at the request of Cao Xing (who when disguised as a Jew was called Gershom Alishpensky), taught him the secret procedure for building a Golem  with the strength of three...

One day Jacob Schlemihl went walking through the Bronx when he witnessed something that for most people would have gone unnoticed, but that a mind used to mysteries could not ignore. A middle-aged woman was flying over the rooftops by the simple procedure of waving her arms. Jacob’s curiosity led him to climb the stairs of one of the tallest buildings in the area, access the roof and from there climb a metal ladder to the top of a water tower. From that privileged position, he was able to follow the flight of the woman and discover her landing place: a rooftop a few blocks away. When he told his partner what he had seen, Michael did not believe him. But at the insistence of Jacob, finally he decided to accompany him to the building where supposedly the flying woman had landed. Before that, however, he took the precaution of calling the City Hall to verify if there had been any human cannonball performance in the area. The answer was no. So Michael had no choice but to accompany his fri...

Mr. Landgroom, director of The NYSM (New York State Museum), had contacted ENIGMA CONSULTANTS S.L. on the occasion of the donation of an extremely strange artifact. Although it was supposed to be over a thousand years old, this artifact did not look more than twenty. It had been found by a certain Jonas “Birdbrain” Kalgary in the basement of his house in the neighborhood of Canarsie, in Brooklyn. According to his testimony, Birdbrain was digging a grave to bury an enemy of his whom he had just killed (this naive confession caused him to end up in jail) when his shovel stumbled over a head. He cursed his luck because he thought the grave was already occupied, but then the head opened one eye and then the other. Birdbrain felt a great relief because if the head was alive he could get it out of the hole without desecrating any grave. (Desecrating tombs was, for Birdbrain, the greatest sin a man could commit.) So he took out the head and deposited it on the table. Its features were Indian ...

Decidedly, something strange was happening in Coney Island. Apparently everything was normal, as in any high season. The beaches were crowded with bathers. People had fun, had snacks, walked, rode at the attractions of Luna Park or Steeplechase. Couples made love furtively under the Boardwalk ... However, a forty-year-old man named Gus Nicholson had entered the tunnel of terror in a trolley three days ago and had not yet left. And the same thing had happened to a certain Dominic Colosanto: he spent three days disappeared in "The Torture Chamber." Only he had more luck: he ended up leaving the tunnel in the same trolley he had entered, but he did it with an ice pick stuck in the head. On the other hand, when the police inspected the interior of this "dark ride", he found an employee of the US Post Office called Phil Denson, another missing person, but he was alive and well and five officers were needed to separate him from an attractive mechanic woman who moved in th...

When Jacob Schlemihl and Michael Schlimazl were asked who was the most extraordinary person they had met in the course of their activity as researchers of enigmas, their answer was Nikola Tesla (although Jacob hesitated between him and Santa Claus or maybe Sheldon Appelbaum, his barber). When they met him, Tesla was already seventy years old, but he was still active. He kept patenting new inventions and at that time maintained close contact with beings from other planets. He lived in two adjoining rooms on the 33rd floor of Hotel New Yorker. Tesla himself had hired ENIGMA CONSULTANTS S.L. to investigate whether those little green men who occasionally appeared on his balcony were really extraterrestrials or dwarves painted green, as he had sometimes suspected. (The transmission of knowledge between these little green men and Tesla worked in the opposite direction to that assumed today by conspiracy theorists.) As long as their investigation lasted, Tesla invited Michael and Jacob to res...

In 1936, Michael Schlimazl and Jacob Schlemihl were commissioned by the mayor of New York City to solve the mystery of the Loew’s 175th Street Theatre, a movie palace where, seemingly, strange things happened. Sometimes the projector was blocked suddenly, other times the lights of the room were lit in the middle of the movie, and sometimes the spectators were catapulted by their seats and ended up floating around the room like restless spirits. Michael and Jacob took the opportunity to go to the screening of a brand new film: “Dracula's Daughter”. That day nothing unusual happened except for some isolated incidents, such as the fact that a man lost his toupee during the screening and the next day appeared at the Bronx Zoo crowning the head of a chimpanzee. Or the fact that another spectator spent all his time gargling so loudly that he prevented the correct listening of the dialogues. So much so that when Michael and Jacob left the theater and commented the movie, they found that e...

In May of 1936, a couple was having a picnic by the lake in Central Park. They ate sandwiches while chatting and pampering. Everything was fine until only one sandwich remained. The two rushed over it, but their heads clashed. Then a tense discussion ensued about who had the right to eat that last sandwich. The woman, who was a lawyer for Baumann & Persky, brought up a paragraph of the Constitution that, according to a lax interpretation, empowered her to eat that last morsel. On the other hand, the man, who was a devout Jew, alleged a dark chapter of the Mishnah concerning the right of primogeniture. But their arguments do not matter to us. The relevant thing is what happened with the sandwich while both were discussing. According to the testimony that the couple later gave to the police, a sea monster emerged from the lake and, stretching its long neck, snatched and ate the sandwich, then it submerged again underwater. It was not the first case of these characteristics that reac...

A Brooklyn merchant showed up one day at the ENIGMA CONSULTANTS office to explain a very personal topic: "Every night a horrid woman tries to make love with me" "Sorry. We don't deal with such personal issues. I suggest you ask for a divorce. " "But I love my wife!" "Well, I don't think she would love you in case she heard you call her 'horrid woman'" At this point, Jacob intervened: “'Horrid woman' is not necessarily pejorative. But in view of the scant success of his assessment he decided to plead again the Fifth Amendment. "I don't mean my wife! My wife doesn't know anything about this! Luckily we sleep in separate rooms and she has a very deep sleep " "So there's another woman in your house ..." "Not! My wife and I live alone " "Are you implying that a woman sneaks into your house at night to make love with you without your consent ? "Exactly!" “That...

I bet you never imagined that a lap dog could become the terror of the police of a city like New York. Well that was what happened on October 7, 1939, when the Pekingese dog of Miss Madeleine Stockhorn got rabies or went crazy or had a bad day. It all started when, before dawn, the dog stood on his hind paws before his owner and declared that he wanted to go for a walk. Miss Stockhorn was surprised that he made that request so early, but then she did not notice that he had done it in English and not barking like he used to. Accustomed to indulging all his whims, Miss Stockhorn took the dog for a walk. However, he behaved strangely. The dog walked backwards and was singing the Marseillaise in perfect French (although his owner did not give importance then to that detail). Suddenly, when passing in front of the police station, the dog broke off from the leash and ran into the building launching revolutionary slogans in a perfect Russian, a language he did not know either, although no on...

On the night of March 21, 1938, two metallic spheres the size of a basketball, dropped from the sky over New York City. One of them traversed the roof of the mayor's penthouse, landing precisely on his head when he was in the company of other members of freemasonry plotting a conspiracy destined to overthrow himself. The next morning, Michael and Jacob received an urgent call from Mount Sinai Hospital requiring their immediate presence. When they entered the room where the mayor was prostrate, a doctor was trying with sledgehammers to reduce a huge bump protruding from his head. Amid his screams of pain, the mayor explained to Michael and Jacob what happened last night and instructed them to go to his penthouse and retrieve the mysterious sphere before the cleaning lady arrived. (This cleaning lady used to throw away any inanimate object of a volume less than two cubic foots.) When the two enigma researchers accessed the skyscraper where the mayor’s penthouse was located, the cle...

A New York press tycoon (whom we will call Mr. X) sent for Michael and Jacob early in the morning. The man had had a dream that night and feared that the dream was premonitory. He had great faith in premonitory dreams. Once he dreamed that it would rain and it rained all day long. On another occasion he dreamed that a man stabbed him in the back and it also rained all day long. So it's no wonder that Mr. X had faith in premonitory dreams. But the dream of that night was so odd, that Michel and Jacob reassured him about it. Besides, the day had dawned sunny and there was nothing that presaged that it was going to rain. But Mr. X really looked like he was not holding together well, and he asked them not to lose sight of him until he came home at night. It was just a precautionary measure. Just in case he was swallowed by a whale as he had dreamed. Michael and Jacob scrupulously fulfilled their mission and throughout that day they accompanied Mr. X everywhere and had their eyes wid...