Merchants of Menace Page 17

  “You see, Mr. Pewter, Alicia has not had an untroubled childhood. When she was four, my first wife—the former Hazel Wad­low Whitney—fell unaccountably from the top of a Christmas tree and succumbed. Alicia was the only witness.” He sighed a dry dead sigh, like leaves being swept up by a slipshod gar­dener. “At fourteen she was unavoidably involved in a bank robbery in Connecticut. The town will be nameless.”

  “Is it the same town Hoseblender was riding his bicycle in?”

  “No,” he admitted. “It’s a different nameless town.”

  “Do you have any pictures of your daughter?”

  “Yes, but you’ll have to be careful who you show them to, since they’re pornographic. Another unfortunate moment in the poor child’s past.”

  ’’When’d she leave?”

  “The day after my fourth wife—the former Hazel Wadlow Whitney—fell off the cupola.”

  “I thought Hazel Wadlow Whitney was your first wife?”

  “This is a different Hazel Wadlow Whitney. I have a tendency to marry women with that name. It has upset Alicia more than once. When she was fifteen, she ran away to Topeka, Kansas, and was later arrested for trying to break the Men­ninger Brothers’ windows.”

  “Any idea where she might be?”

  “You might look for that candy-striped ice-cream wagon.”

  I scowled at his finished old lusterless eyes. ’’You’re keeping something back from me.”

  “Very well,” he said, making a feminine gesture. “She is not alone. There is a strong possibility she may be with her half-brother. You see, fifteen years ago I discovered a foundling on my doorstep. He was nearly five at the time and quite bright. The note pinned to him explained that he had an IQ of 185.”

  “How does that make him a half-brother to Alicia?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “A hundred dollars a day and expenses is my fee,” I told him.

  “Dawes will give you an envelope full of money, Mr. Pewter. If you’ll excuse me, I have to take a steam bath. I suf­fer from a malignant disease, and steam seems to be good for me.”

  The room, now that I noticed it, was as foggy as the 2900 block on Jackson Street in San Francisco. I said goodbye, and went out to find the butler and my money.

  Chapter 3

  Something old Bultitude had said gave me a hunch, and I took a jet to Connecticut as soon as I left him.

  The night seems timeless when you are hurtling through it at a fast clip—like a marble in some pinball machine in a grease-and-chili-smelling place on some hot, dry side street on the underbelly of Southern California. We all of us drag the past with us like one of those big silver trailers that clog the L.A. highways. Looking, all of us, for a place to pull off the road and park the damn thing, but we never do it.

  Spent time is somewhat like the bird in that poem by Coleridge, and we carry it around our neck like a gift necktie that we have to wear to please the giver, who gave it to us like somebody passing out the second-rate wine now that the guests, who sit around like numbed patients in some sort of cosmic dentist’s waiting room, are too unsober to know or care.

  I suppose you’ve felt like that when you’re flying, too.

  Chapter 4

  The cops beat me up in Connecticut. They always do. But I found out what I wanted. By noon, on a hot, dry, sticky-ninety­ and-climbing day, I was back at the drive-in I’d gone to by mistake.

  The kitchen was like all the meals they made you eat as a lonely child. It smelled of oatmeal and fried foods and stale chocolate cake.

  “You,” I said to the fry cook.

  He was a pale youth of about twenty. His face had the worn look of one who has lost two falls out of three—lost too many battles with the dark side of himself.

  “Don’t bug me now, mister,” he said. “I’ve got to fry three orders of oatmeal.”

  I picked a soft spot in his belly and gave him a stiff-fingered jab there. He fell over onto the stale chocolate cake, making the silent falling sound that a giant tree does when it topples alone in a distant wood.

  “I know you’re Albert B. Bultitude,” I told the kid, jerking him to his feet. “Yesterday when I came in here I saw the overcoat.”

  “You weren’t in this kitchen yesterday, mister.”

  “Don’t mix me up while I’m trying to explain this case,” I said. “They told me some things in Connecticut.”

  “Sure, they’re a knowledgeable bunch in Connecticut. You take Westport, for instance, they have a great many gifted people there.”

  “Forget that,” I told him. “I know who your mother is.”

  His eyes flickered like a cigarette lighter about to run out of fluid. “How did you guess?”

  “She let the towel slip when she was in the steam bath and I figured it out.”

  “Well, you’re right. Our mistake was keeping the past festering too long.”

  “It wasn’t Hazel Wadlow Whitney who fell from the cupola, it was Tro Bultitude, pushed by you. I thought Dawes was too tough. He’s really your Uncle Brewster from Maine. Still the whole business about the silverware doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “I never heard of any silverware.”

  “Good. Then I’ll leave that part out.”

  “I guess you know about Alicia, too.”

  “There is no Alicia,” I said. “There never was. Alicia is really Tony, your other half-brother. He drove the car that time in Connecticut. The accident with the ice-cream wagon made him walk funny, and then he decided to try the Alicia bit.”

  “It’s odd how the past catches up with us,” said Albert.

  “The only thing is,” I said, watching the oatmeal burn away to ashes, “I still don’t see why your mother hired me at all. She’s accomplished only the arrest of her son for the murder of her husband.”

  “Mother’s been rather dotty since she fell off the Christmas tree that time.”

  I needed a lungful of fresh air. “Let’s go, Albert I know some cops in L.A. who aren’t corrupt, and I’m turning you over to them.”

  Outside Albert stared at the bright, intense blue of the ocean. He hesitated for a long second, and then waved boyishly at the mindless timeless water.

  “Goodbye,” he called. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing the ocean again for a while.”

  He was right.

  Marmalade Wine

  Joan Aiken

  How should one advertise it? Marmalade Wine, for that Taste of Terror?

  “Paradise,” Blacker said to himself, moving forward into the wood. “Paradise. Fairyland.”

  He was a man given to exaggeration; poetic license he called it, and his friends called it “Blacker’s little flights of fancy,” or something less polite, but on this occasion he spoke nothing but the truth.

  The wood stood silent about him, tall, golden, with afternoon sunlight slanting through the half-unfurled leaves of early summer. Underfoot, anemones palely carpeted the ground. A cuckoo called.

  “Paradise,” Blacker repeated, closed the gate behind him, and strode down the overgrown path, looking for a spot in which to eat his ham sandwich. Hazel bushes thickened at either side until the circular blue eye of the gateway by which he had come in dwindled to a pinpoint and vanished. The taller trees over-topping the hazels were not yet in full leaf and gave little cover; it was very hot in the wood and very still.

  Suddenly Blacker stopped short with an exclamation of sur­prise and regret: lying among the dog’s-mercury by the path was the body of a cock-pheasant in the full splendor of its spring plumage. Blacker turned the bird over with the towns­man’s pity and curiosity at such evidence of nature’s unkindness; the feathers, purple-bronze, green, and gold, were smooth under his hand as a girl’s hair.

  “Poor thing,” he said aloud, “what can have happened to it?”

  He walked on, wondering if he could turn the incident to account. “Threnody for a Pheasant in May.” Too precious? Too sentimental? Perhaps a weekly would take it. He began
choosing rhymes, staring at his feet as he walked, abandoning his conscious rapture at the beauty around him.

  Stricken to death...and something...leafy ride,

  Before his...something...fully flaunt his pride.

  Or would a shorter line be better, something utterly simple and heartfelt, limpid tears of grief like spring rain dripping off the petals of a flower?

  It was odd, Blacker thought, increasing his pace, how difficult he found writing nature poetry; nature was beautiful, maybe, but it was not stimulating. And it was nature poetry that Field and Garden wanted. Still, that pheasant ought to be worth five guineas. Tread lightly past, Where he lies still, And something last...

  Damn! In his absorption he had nearly trodden on another pheasant. What was happening to the birds? Blacker, who ob­jected to occurrences with no visible explanation, walked on, frowning.

  The path bore downhill to the right, and leaving the hazel coppice, crossed a tiny valley. Below him, Blacker was surprised to see a small, secretive flint cottage, surrounded on three sides by trees. In front of it was a patch of turf. A deck chair stood there, and a man was peacefully stretched out in it, enjoying the afternoon sun.

  Blacker’s first impulse was to turn back; he felt as if he had walked into somebody’s garden, and was filled with mild irritation at the unexpectedness of the encounter; there ought to have been some warning signs, dash it all. The wood had seemed as deserted as Eden itself. But his turning round would have an appearance of guilt and furtiveness; on second thought, he decided to go boldly past the cottage. After all, there was no fence, and the path was not marked private in any way; he had a perfect right to be there.

  “Good afternoon,” said the man pleasantly as Blacker approached. “Remarkably fine weather, is it not?’’

  “I do hope I’m not trespassing.”

  Studying the man, Blacker revised his first guess. This was no gamekeeper; there was distinction in every line of the thin, sculptured face. What most attracted Blacker’s attention were the hands, holding a small gilt coffee-cup; they were as white, frail, and attenuated as the pale roots of water-plants.

  “Not at all,” the man said cordially. “In fact, you arrive at a most opportune moment; you are very welcome. I was just wishing for a little company. Delightful as I find this sylvan retreat, it becomes, all of a sudden, a little dull, a little banal. I do trust that you have time to sit down and share my after­ lunch coffee and liqueur.”

  As he spoke, he reached behind him and brought out a second deck chair from the cottage porch.

  “Why, thank you; I should be delighted,” said Blacker, won­dering if he had the strength of character to take out the ham sandwich and eat it in front of this patrician hermit.

  Before he made up his mind, the man had gone into the house and returned with another gilt cup full of black, fragrant coffee, hot as Tartarus, which he handed to Blacker. He carried also a tiny glass, and into this, from a blackcurrant-cordial bottle, he carefully poured a clear, colorless liquor.

  Blacker sniffed his glassful with caution, mistrusting the bottle and its evidence of home brewing, but the scent, aromatic and power­ful, was similar to that of curaçao, and the liquid moved in its glass with an oily smoothness. It certainly was not cow­ slip wine.

  “Well,” said his host, reseating himself and gesturing slightly with his glass, “how do you do?” He sipped delicately.

  “Cheers,” said Blacker, and added, “My name’s Roger Blacker.” It sounded a little lame.

  The liqueur was not curaçao, but akin to it, and quite remarkably potent; Blacker, who was very hungry, felt the fumes rise up inside his head as if an orange tree had taken root there and was putting out leaves and golden glowing fruit.

  “Sir Francis Deeking,” the other man said, and then Blacker understood why his hands had seemed so spectacular, so portentously out of the common.

  “The surgeon? But surely you don’t live down here?”

  Deeking waved a hand deprecatingly. “A weekend retreat. A hermitage, to which I can retire from the strain of my calling.”

  “It certainly is very remote,” Blacker remarked. “It must be five miles from the nearest road.”

  “Six. And you, my dear Mr. Blacker, what is your profession?”

  “Oh, a writer,” said Blacker modestly. The drink was having its usual effect on him; he managed to convey not that he was a journalist on a twopenny daily with literary yearnings, but that he was a philosopher and essayist of rare quality, a sort of second Bacon. All the time he spoke, while drawn out most flatteringly by the questions of Sir Francis, he was recalling journalistic scraps of information about his host: the operation on the Indian Prince; the Cabinet Minister’s appendix; the amputation performed on that unfortunate ballerina who had both feet crushed in a railway accident; the major operation which had proved so miraculously successful on the American heiress.

  “You must feel like a god,” he said suddenly, noticing with surprise that his glass was empty. Sir Francis waved the remark aside.

  “We all have our godlike attributes,” he said, leaning forward. “Now you, Mr Blacker, a writer, a creative artist—do you not know a power akin to godhead when you transfer your thought to paper?’’

  “Well, not exactly then,” said Blacker, feeling the liqueur moving inside his head in golden and russet-colored clouds. “Not so much then, but I do have one unusual power, a power not shared by many people, of foretelling the future. For in­stance, as I was coming through the wood, I knew this house would be here. I knew I should find you sitting in front of it. I can look at the list of runners in a race, and the name of the winner fairly leaps out at me from the page, as if it was printed in golden ink. Forthcoming events—air disasters, train crashes—I always sense in advance. I begin to have a terrible feeling of impending doom, as if my brain was a volcano just on the point of eruption.”

  What was that other item of news about Sir Francis Deeking, he wondered, a recent report, a tiny paragraph that had caught his eye in The Times? He could not recall it.

  “Really?’’ Sir Francis was looking at him with the keenest interest; his eyes, hooded and fanatical under their heavy lids, held brilliant points of light. “I have always longed to know somebody with such a power. It must be a terrifying respon­sibility.”

  “Oh, it is,” Blacker said. He contrived to look bowed under the weight of supernatural cares; noticed that his glass was full again, and drained it. “Of course, I don’t use the faculty for my own ends; something fundamental in me rises up to prevent that. It’s as basic, you know, as the instinct forbidding cannibalism or incest—”

  “Quite, quite,” Sir Francis agreed. “But for another person, you would be able to give warnings, advise profitable courses of action—? My dear fellow, your glass is empty. Allow me.”

  “This is marvelous stuff,” Blacker said hazily. “It’s like a wreath of orange blossom.” He gestured with his finger.

  “I distill it myself; from marmalade. But do go on with what you were saying. Could you, for instance, tell me the winner of this afternoon’s Manchester Plate?”

  “Bow Bells,” Blacker said unhesitatingly. It was the only name he could remember.

  “You interest me enormously. And the result of today’s Aldwych by-election? Do you know that?”

  “Unwin, the Liberal, will get in by a majority of two hundred and eighty-two. He won’t take his seat, though. He’ll be killed at seven this evening in a lift accident at his hotel.” Blacker was well away by now.

  “Will he, indeed?” Sir Francis appeared delighted. “A pestilent fellow. I have sat on several boards with him. Do continue.”

  Blacker required little encouragement He told the story of the financier whom he had warned in time of the oil company crash; the dream about the famous violinist which had resulted in the man’s cancelling his passage on the ill-fated Orion; and the tragic tale of the bullfighter who had ignored his warning.

  “But I’m talking too
much about myself,” he said at length, partly because he noticed an ominous clogging of his tongue, a refusal of his thoughts to marshal themselves. He cast about for an impersonal topic, something simple.

  “The pheasants,” he said. “What’s happened to the pheasants? Cut down in their prime. It—it’s terrible. I found four in the wood up there, four or five.”

  “Really?” Sir Francis seemed callously uninterested in the fate of the pheasants. “It’s the chemical sprays they use on the crops, I understand. Bound to upset the ecology; they never work out the probable results beforehand. Now if you were in charge, my dear Mr. Blacker—but forgive me, it is a hot afternoon, and you must be tired and footsore if you have walked from Witherstow this morning—let me suggest that you have a short sleep…”

  His voice seemed to come from farther and farther away; a network of sun-colored leaves laced themselves in front of Blacker’s eyes. Gratefully he leaned back and stretched out his aching feet.

  Some time after this Blacker roused a little—or was it only a dream?—to see Sir Francis standing by him, rubbing his hands, with a face of jubilation.

  “My dear fellow, my dear Mr Blacker, what a lusus naturae you are. I can never be sufficiently grateful that you came my way. Bow Bells walked home—positively ambled. I have been listening to the commentary. What a misfortune that I had no time to place money on the horse—but never mind, never mind, that can be remedied another time.

  “It is unkind of me to disturb your well-earned rest, though; drink this last thimbleful and finish your nap while the sun is on the wood.”

  As Blacker’s head sank back against the deck chair again, Sir Francis leaned forward and gently took the glass from his hand.

  Sweet river of dreams, thought Blacker, fancy the horse actually winning. I wish I’d had a fiver on it myself; I could do with a new pair of shoes. I should have undone these before I dozed off, they’re too tight or something. I must wake up soon, ought to be on my way in half an hour or so...