Merchants of Menace Read online

  “Not necessarily, not necessarily,” said Ellery with a hateful haste. “The old boy had a sense of history, Martha. They all did in those days. They knew they were men of destiny, and that the eyes of posterity were upon them. Burying ’em is just what Washington would have done!”

  “Do you really th—think so?”

  Oh…pfui.

  “But even if he did bury them,” Martha sniffled, “it doesn’t stand to reason Simeon and Sarah would have let them stay buried. They’d have dug that copper box up like rabbits the minute G-George turned his back.”

  “Two simple countryfolk?” cried Ellery. “Salt of the earth? The new American earth? Disregard the wishes of His Mighti­ness, George Washington, First President of the United States? Are you out of your mind? And anyway, what would Simeon do with a dress-sword?”

  Beat it into a plowshare, thought Nikki spitefully, that’s what he’d do.

  “And that half disme. How much could it have been worth in 1791? Martha, they’re here under your farm somewhere. You wait and see—”

  “I wish I could b-believe it…Ellery.”

  “Shucks, child. Now stop crying—”

  From the door, Miss Porter said stiffly: “You might put your shirt back on, Superman, before you catch pneumonia.”

  Mr. Queen prowled about the Clarke acres for the remainder of that day, his nose at a low altitude. He spent some time in the barn. He devoted at least twenty minutes to each of the twelve holes in the earth. He reinspected the oaken wreckage of his axwork, like a paleontologist examining an ancient petri­faction for the impression of a dinosaur foot. He measured off the distance between the holes; and, for a moment, a faint tremor of emotion shook him. George Washington had been a surveyor in his youth; here was evidence that his passion for exactitude had not wearied with the years. As far as Ellery could make out, the twelve oaks had been set into the earth at exactly equal distances, in an equilateral triangle.

  It was at this point that Ellery had seated himself upon the seat of a cultivator behind the barn, wondering at his suddenly accelerated circulation. Little memories were knocking at the door. And as he opened to admit them, it was as if he were admitting a personality. It was, of course, at this time that the sense of personal conflict first obtruded. He had merely to shut his eyes in order to materialize a tall, large-featured man carefully pacing off the distances between twelve points—pacing them off in a sort of objective challenge to the unborn future. George Washington...

  The man Washington had from the beginning possessed an affinity for numbers. It had remained with him all his life. To count things, not so much for the sake of the things, perhaps, as for the counting, had been of the utmost importance to him. As a boy in Mr. Williams’s school in Westmoreland, he ex­celled in arithmetic. Long division, subtraction, weights and measures—to calculate cords of wood and pecks of peas, pints and gallons and avoirdupois—young George delighted in these as other boys delighted in horseplay. As a man, he merely directed his passion into the channel of his possessions. Through his possessions he apparently satisfied his curious need for enumeration. He was not content simply to keep accounts of the acreage he owned, its yield, his slaves, his pounds and pence. Ellery recalled the extraordinary case of Washington and the seed. He once calculated the number of seeds in a pound troy weight of red clover. Not appeased by the statistics on red clover, Washington then went to work on a pound of timothy seed. His conclusions were: 71,000 and 298,000. His appetite unsatisfied, he thereupon fell upon the problem of New River grass. Here he tackled a calculation worthy of his prowess: his mathematical labors produced the great, pacifying figure of 844,800.

  This man was so obsessed with numbers, Ellery thought, staring at the ruins of Washington’s Grove, that he counted the windows in each house of his Mount Vernon estate and the number of “Paynes” in each window of each house, and then triumphantly recorded the exact number of each in his own handwriting.

  It was like a hunger, requiring periodic appeasement. In 1747, as a boy of fifteen, George Washington drew “A Plan of Major Law: Washingtons Turnip Field as Survey’d by me.” In 1786, at the age of fifty-four, General Washington, the most famous man in the world, occupied himself with determining the exact elevation of his piazza above the Potomac’s high­ water mark. No doubt he experienced a warmer satisfaction thereafter for knowing that when he sat upon his piazza looking down upon the river he was exactly 124 feet 10½ inches above it.

  And in 1791, as President of the United States, Ellery mused, he was striding about right here, setting saplings into the ground, twelve of them in an equilateral triangle, and beneath one of them he buried a copper case containing his sword and the half disme coined from his own silver. Beneath one of them... But it was not beneath one of them. Or had it been? And had long ago been dug up by a Clarke? But the story had apparently died with Simeon and Sarah. On the other hand...

  Ellery found himself irrationally reluctant to conclude the obvious. George Washington’s lifelong absorption with figures kept intruding. Twelve trees, equidistant, in an equilateral triangle.

  “What is it?” he kept asking himself, almost angrily. “Why isn’t it satisfying me?”

  And then, in the gathering dusk, a very odd explanation insinuated itself. Because it wouldn’t have satisfied him!

  That’s silly, Ellery said to himself abruptly. It has all the earmarks of a satisfying experience. There is no more satisfying figure in all geometry than an equilateral triangle. It is closed, symmetrical, definite, a whole and balanced and finished thing.

  But it wouldn’t have satisfied George Washington...for all its symmetry and perfection.

  Then perhaps there is a symmetry and perfection beyond the cold beauty of figures?

  At this point, Ellery began to question his own postulates...lost in the dark and to his time...

  They found him at ten-thirty, crouched on the cultivator seat, numb and staring.

  He permitted himself to be led into the house, he suffered Nikki to subject him to the indignity of having his shoes and socks stripped off and his frozen feet rubbed to life, he ate Martha Clarke’s dinner—all with a detachment and indifference which alarmed the girls and even made old Tobias look uneasy.

  “If it’s going to have this effect on him—” began Martha, and then she said: “Ellery, give it up. Forget it.” But she had to shake him before he heard her.

  He shook his head. “They’re there.”

  “Where?” cried the girls simultaneously.

  “In Washington’s Grove.”

  “Ye found ’em?” croaked Tobias Clarke, half-rising.

  “No.”

  The Clarkes and Nikki exchanged glances.

  “Then how can you be so certain they’re buried there, Ellery?” asked Nikki gently.

  Ellery looked bewildered. “Darned if I know how I know,” he said, and he even laughed a little. “Maybe George Washington told me.” Then he stopped laughing and went into the fire-lit parlor and—pointedly—slid the doors shut.

  At ten minutes past midnight, Martha Clarke gave up the contest.

  “Isn’t he ever going to come out of there?” she said, yawning.

  “You never can tell what Ellery will do,” replied Nikki.

  “Well, I can’t keep my eyes open another minute.”

  “Funny,” said Nikki. “I’m not the least bit sleepy.”

  “You city girls.”

  “You country girls.”

  They laughed. Then they stopped laughing, and for a moment there was no sound in the kitchen but the patient sentry­ walk of the grandfather clock and the snores of Tobias assault­ing the ceiling from above.

  “Well,” said Martha. Then she said: “I just can’t. Are you staying up, Nikki?”

  “For a little while. You go to bed, Martha.”

  “Yes. Well. Good night.”

  “Good night, Martha.”

  At the door Martha turned suddenly: “Did he say George Washington told him?�
�

  “Yes.”

  Martha went rather quickly up the stairs.

  Nikki waited fifteen minutes. Then she tiptoed to the foot of the stairs and listened. She heard Tobias snuffling and snorting as he turned over in his bed, and an uneasy moan from the direction of Martha’s bedroom, as if she were dreaming an unwholesome dream. Nikki set her jaw grimly and went to the parlor doors and slid them open.

  Ellery was on his knees before the fire. His elbows were rest­ing on the floor. His face was propped in his hands. In this attitude his posterior was considerably higher than his head.

  “Ellery!”

  “Huh?’’

  “Ellery, what on earth—?”

  “Nikki. I thought you’d gone to bed long ago.” In the firelight his face was haggard.

  “But what have you been doing! You look exhausted!”

  “I am. I’ve been wrestling with a man who could bend a horseshoe with his naked hands. A very strong man. In more ways than one.”

  “What are you talking about? Who?”

  “George Washington. Go to bed, Nikki.”

  “George...Washington?’’

  “Go to bed.”

  “...Wrestling with him?”

  “Trying to break through his defenses. Get into his mind. It’s not an easy mind to get into. He’s been dead such a long time—that makes the difference. The dead are stubborn, Nikki. Aren’t you going to bed?’’

  Nikki backed out shivering. The house was icy.

  It was even icier when an inhuman bellow accompanied by a thunder that shook the Revolutionary walls of her bedroom brought Nikki out of bed with a yelping leap.

  But it was only Ellery.

  He was somewhere up the hall, in the first glacial light of dawn, hammering on Martha Clarke’s door.

  “Martha. Martha! Wake up, damn you, and tell me where I can find a book in this damned house! A biography of Washington—a history of the United States—an almanac...anything!”

  The parlor fire had long since given up the ghost. Nikki and Martha in wrappers, and Tobias Clarke in an ancient bathrobe over his marbled long underwear, stood around shivering and bewildered as a disheveled, daemonic Ellery leafed eagerly through a 1921 edition of The Farmer’s Fact Book and Complete Compendium.

  “Here it is!” The words shot out of his mouth like bullets, leaving puffs of smoke.

  “What is it, Ellery?”

  “What on earth are you looking for?”

  “He’s loony, I tell ye!”

  Ellery turned with a look of ineffable peace, closing the book.

  “That’s it,” he said. “That’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  “Vermont. The State of Vermont.”

  “Vermont...?”

  “Vermont?”

  “Vermont. What in the crawlin’ creeper’s Vermont got to do with—?”

  “Vermont,” said Ellery with a tired smile, “did not enter the Union until March fourth, 1791. So that proves it, don’t you see?”

  “Proves what?” shrieked Nikki.

  “Where George Washington buried his sword and half disme.”

  “Because,” said Ellery in the rapidly lightening dawn behind the barn, “Vermont was the fourteenth State to do so. The fourteenth. Tobias, would you get me an ax, please?”

  “An ax,” mumbled Tobias. He shuffled away, shaking his head.

  “Come on, Ellery, I’m d-dying of c-cold!” chattered Nikki, dancing up and down before the cultivator.

  “Ellery,” said Martha Clarke piteously, “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “It’s very simple, Martha—oh, thank you, Tobias—as simple,” said Ellery, “as simple arithmetic. Numbers, my dears—numbers tell this remarkable story. Numbers and their influence on our first President who was, above all things, a number-man. That was my key. I merely had to discover the lock to fit it into. Vermont was the lock. And the door’s open.”

  Nikki seated herself on the cultivator. You had to give Ellery his head in a situation like this; you couldn’t drive him for beans. Well, she thought grudgingly, seeing how pale and how tired-looking he was after a night’s wrestling with George Washington, he’s earned it.

  “The number was wrong,” said Ellery solemnly, leaning on Tobias’s ax. “Twelve trees. Washington apparently planted twelve trees—Simeon Clarke’s Diary never did mention the number twelve, but the evidence seemed unquestionable—there were twelve oaks in an equilateral triangle, each one an equal distance from its neighbor.

  “And yet . . . I felt that twelve oaks couldn’t be, perfect as the triangle was. Not if they were planted by George Washington. Not on February the twenty-second, New Style, in the year of our Lord 1791.

  “Because on February the twenty-second, 1791—in fact, until March the fourth, when Vermont entered the Union to swell its original number by one—there was another number in the United States so important, so revered, so much a part of the common speech and the common living—and dying—that it was more than a number; it was a solemn and sacred thing; almost not a number at all. It overshadowed other numbers like the still-unborn Paul Bunyan. It was memorialized on the new American flag in the number of its stars and the number of its stripes. It was a number of which George Washington was the standard-bearer!—the head and only recently the strong right arm of the new Republic which had been born out of the blood and muscle of its integers. It was a number which was in the hearts and minds and mouths of all Americans.

  “No. If George Washington, who was not merely the living symbol of all this, but carried with him that extraordinary compulsion toward numbers which characterized his whole temperament besides, had wished to plant a number of oak trees to commemorate a birthday visit in the year 1791...he would have, he could have, selected only one number out of all the mathematical trillions at his command—the number thirteen.”

  The sun was looking over the edge of Pennsylvania at Washington’s Grove.

  “George Washington planted thirteen trees here that day, and under one of them he buried Paul Revere’s copper case. Twelve of the trees he arranged in an equilateral triangle, and we know that the historic treasure was not under any of the twelve. Therefore be must have buried the case under the thirteenth—a thirteenth oak sapling which grew to oakhood and, some time during the past century and a half, withered and died and vanished, vanished so utterly that it left no trace, not even its roots.

  “Where would Washington have planted that thirteenth oak? Because beneath the spot where it once stood—there lies the copper case containing his sword and the first coin to be struck off in the new United States.”

  And Ellery glanced tenderly at the cherry sapling which Tobias Clarke had set into the earth in the middle of Washing­ton’s Grove six years before.

  “Washington the surveyor, the geometer, the man whose mind cried out for integral symmetries? Obviously, in only one place: In the center of the triangle. Any other place would be unthinkable.”

  And Ellery hefted Tobias’s ax and strode toward the six­-year-old tree. He raised the ax.

  But suddenly he lowered it, and turned, and said in a rather startled way: “See here! Isn’t today...?”

  “Washington’s Birthday,” said Nikki.

  Ellery grinned, and began to chop down the cherry tree.

  Amateur Standing

  Suzanne Blanc

  This exercise in the niceties of deft plotting has never before been published. It’s one that’s a pleasure to introduce.

  Every weekday morning for twenty-odd years, Francis Whitcomb had climbed out of bed at exactly seven o’clock. On winter mornings like this he would close the windows, light the gas wall heater, pick up his clothes, and pad away to the kitchen to dress. Although he was always very careful to avoid awakening Emma, sometimes, before he could steal through the bedroom door, her huge body would stir ominously. Slowly the tangled nest of her iron-gray hair would rise above the covers, then her pale, flabby face would emerge. She would
glare at him with sleep-glazed, reptilian eyes and call him an “awkward, bumbling fool.”

  At such moments, Francis found his wife monstrously ugly. Corseted and groomed, Emma was considered a handsome woman, but Francis was never able to forget how she looked in the harsh light of morning.

  This morning he had quietly crawled out of bed, closed the windows and opened the petcock on the heater—all precisely as usual. But here his long-established routine varied. Instead of lighting the gas, he let it hiss unimpeded into the room, swiftly gathered up his clothes and, barely glancing at Emma, shut her into the death chamber behind him.

  Fortunately for Francis, he was blissfully unaware of the dangerous properties of his murder weapon. In the kitchen, without even considering the possibilities of explosion, he plugged in the coffee pot and toaster. As he shaved at the cracked mirror over the sink he pictured the deadly fumes filling the bedroom, contained by the walls, the windows, the door. He imagined it rising like water, covering first the floor, lapping against the underside of the bed, creeping up over the mattress, seeping in under the blankets with Emma. Since the gas com­pany is reluctant to issue such statistics, he had no idea how long it would take for the fumes to kill her. In three hours, maybe four, certainly by noon at the latest, Emma would be dead.

  At seven forty-five, carrying the lunch sack Emma had prepared the night before, Francis hurried along the chill, bright street to the trolley stop. The brown paper sack was one of the many small, humiliating economies Emma forced on him, and generally Francis was uncomfortably aware of the status token in his hand. However, since this was the last lunch sack he would ever have to carry, its burden became a pleasant re­minder. He smiled benignly at Mary Anderson as she ran past him on the way to school, tipped his hat to her mother who was sweeping off the front porch. At the corner he followed a friendly knot of people into the streetcar, exchanged a few pleasantries with the conductor, and took his customary seat next to the window. It could not have been a more ordinary way in which to start a new life.