Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Then where’s my hat? I’ve got an office uptown. I work there.” I answered.

  The maid, who either read minds for a hobby or had been carefully briefed, came in with a pair of cocktail glasses and a shaker on a tray. I was about to be drunk under the table and artfully pried loose from whatever this dame wanted to know.

  “Have a drink before you go,” she said.

  “Lady,” I snapped, “if you want to pump me go ahead. My retainer will be that twenty in your pocket. It won’t buy you anything but my company.”

  Eveline smiled confidently and gave me the twenty. I wrote her a receipt in retainer for services this date and she put it away and poured two cocktails.

  She had toasted silently and was about to sip when I took the glass from her lips and substituted mine. She stared at it, bewildered, then as the light broke exploded into laughter.

  “Oh, not really!” she gasped. “You’ve been reading too many comic books. Good heavens, drugged liquor!”

  “Go ahead and drink it,” I suggested.

  She squared her shoulders and drained the glass, looking at me pityingly.

  Then she collapsed on the floor, her face distorted and deathly white.

  I felt for her pulse and couldn’t find it because she didn’t have a pulse any more. She was dead.

  WHAT happened after that was something like a nightmare. You know how it is when you’re running and running in a dream and can’t get anywhere, when the air’s thick and gooey and holds you back? That’s how the next couple of hours were in the Speyendecker house.

  I had felt her pulse and there wasn’t any. I sniffed her breath and got only alcohol. I roared for the maid, who popped up and phoned the family doctor.

  The doctor was shocked and grave when he came, and went upstairs after a whispered summons from the maid. When he came down he was uncomfortable and gruff, and carried a bed-sheet which he spread over the body.

  I tried to tell him about the cocktail and found that the cocktail set was gone.

  I tore into the kitchen and found that the maid had washed the set very thoroughly and put it in the china closet.

  When I got back to the parlor the doctor was making a phone call. He was calling not the Medical Examiner, but an expensive, exclusive mortician. I babbled at him that in case of suspicious death—

  He swiveled on me. “Suspicious?” he rasped.

  “Damned right, doctor!”

  He grunted and drew the sheet from the body. He took a printed form the size of a big index card from his black bag and began to fill it out, ignoring me. He filled in the name, Eveline Maynell Speyendecker; age, twenty-three. Hair, brown; eyes, brown; height, sixty-seven inches; weight, a hundred and twenty pounds. He filled in place of birth, name of nearest relation; Charles Speyendecker, father; mother deceased, and then he paused.

  He stared at the five lines next to Cause of Death, tapping his front teeth with the fountain pen. He wrote down: Cardiovascular diathesis, sev. That means heart-failure. Heart-failure means nothing.

  The mortician’s men came in black coats and mournful manners. They took Eveline Maynell Speyendecker away. The doctor went upstairs with the death certificate in his hand. I waited in the parlor for my hat. The doctor came down with the certificate sticking from his jacket pocket. The maid brought him his hat and he left, without a second look at me.

  The maid asked me if there was anything she could bring me. She was wondering why I was hanging around.

  “My hat. Please,” I said.

  She looked bewildered. “Did you put it down somewhere?” she asked.

  “I handed it to you. Now I want it back.”

  “It isn’t in the hall closet, sir. I looked when I got the doctor’s hat. I don’t remember—”

  I felt myself flushing brick red. “I had a hat,” I growled. “I had a hat when I came here. While I’ve been here I turned down a case, I’ve nearly been poisoned, I’ve seen somebody get poisoned and the poisoning hushed up. I want my hat. Go find it.”

  She nodded, frozen-faced. “Very well, sir. I’ll look again. But I don’t believe—” She left, muttering.

  I heard the front door open. Somebody called in a gruff, homey voice: “Annie?”

  The man came into the parlor, big, powerful-looking, a little past middle age, flawlessly dressed in a faintly old-fashioned, gray business suit.

  “Hello, there,” he grinned at me. “I’m Charles Speyendecker, Eveline’s father. I suppose you’re one of her friends?”

  “Burroughs,” I said. “Private detective. Called here for a consultation by Miss Emily.”

  “What about?” he said. His manner hardened like chilling steel.

  “Your daughter, sir. Weren’t you phoned about her?”

  He moved up to me and took each of my lapels in a fist. He pushed his face against mine and growled. “And what about my daughter, you two-bit keyhole flatfoot?”

  I broke the lapel hold and pushed him off.

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  The man went crazy before my eyes. There wasn’t a second’s doubt or hesitation; he simply flung himself on me.

  It was a pretty tough fight. Most people don’t really try to damage you. They don’t know how hard it really is to paste the KO on a guy, so they keep trying for one until they’re worn out. Most people know just enough about boxing form to misunderstand the fact that it’s an elaborate and artificial system operating within strict rules, almost useless in a real melee.

  If Charles Speyendecker knew anything about boxing form he didn’t show it that afternoon. He clawed his hands, curled up his lip like a wolf and rushed. I tried to trip him as I stepped aside, but one of his flailing hands caught my jacket and took me to the floor with him. I felt his clubbed fists pounding the side of my head and his knees digging viciously into my back.

  It wasn’t the time for fancy-work. I rolled over and the first thing I grabbed I twisted. It happened to be his ear, and he let out an animal howl. He stopped pounding and pulled my arm away. I butted him in the mouth with all the steam I had, and he gagged and flopped onto his back. I had felt teeth splintering, and my scalp was wet with his blood and mine.

  He kicked with both feet at my ribs as I was scrambling to get up. It was his bad luck that I fell on him, mainly his midsection. He was panting like a wild beast and his hands shot at my throat. I felt a short, cool flash of satisfaction. When that happens to you in a fight you’ve won it, if you keep your head.

  The sucker thinks he’s strangling you, which he isn’t, both his hands are occupied and the field is yours. I measured the distance to his button, hoped he had a glass jaw, cocked my right fist and fired it.

  His eyes went glassy, his hands fell from my throat and he relaxed all over. I felt his pulse before I swayed to my feet and staggered into the big foyer.

  The maid was coming down the stairs. She said indignantly: “Sir, I’ve looked all over and you didn’t—” She saw me then and breathed, “Oh, good Lord!”

  I looked at myself in the hall mirror.

  I was in bad shape.

  “I lose more damned teeth that way,” I said. “Mr. Speyendecker’s in the parlor, Annie. He wants a drink of water.”

  I lurched through the door and stumbled down the three scrubbed brownstone steps. The subway station was two blocks away. I hoped I could make it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Mysterious Code

  I MADE it to my hotel through the thick of the homebound subway rush. The house doctor put some tape on me, found I had a broken rib on the left side and told me to stay in bed for a couple of days. The house valet said my blue serge suit was through, not worth reweaving the rips, and could he have it for rags, please. I said okay.

  I was out a suit and a hat; I was in twenty bucks less a doctor’s bill. You’re a shrewd operator, Burroughs; they have to get up before the chickens to put one over on you, you needle-headed jerk.

  I had a good night’s sleep and went to the office with my
side taped up. I phoned 32 Centre to ask what the chances were of making an assault charge stick on Mr. Charles Speyendecker. They just laughed at me. If I complained I’d be lucky to get off with life, they said. I didn’t even try Homicide. Burroughs knows when he’s licked. As far as I was concerned it was mysterious; it was nasty and it was over.

  It had been over for a full hour when my phone rang.

  “Annie Murdoch,” said a woman’s voice guardedly. “The Speyendecker parlormaid.”

  “Good morning, Annie. Who gets killed today?”

  “Don’t kid me, Burroughs. You want a hundred bucks?”

  “Lord, yes!”

  “It’s Thursday, maid’s afternoon off. See me at Clinton’s Cafeteria, Forty-Second Street, one-thirty by the coffee counter.”

  It’s a date, I said to myself. To her I remarked; “If I haven’t anything better to do I’ll be there.”

  “Better than a hundred bucks?” she said sourly and hung up.

  At the cafeteria that afternoon I didn’t recognize her until she spoke to me. She wasn’t wearing the stiff white cap or the pale-pink lipstick of the front parlor. I had an idea as I looked her over that she hadn’t waited very long to inherit some of Eveline’s wardrobe. She wore a cocktail dress, very blue and sporty, a Fifth Avenue hat, and smelled faintly of expensive perfume right from Miss Speyendecker’s dressing table.

  “Hello,” I said. “The hundred bucks?”

  “Take it easy. You don’t get it for nothing. You work for it. Get me a cup of coffee and sit down.”

  I did. “The hundred bucks?” I asked.

  She took a dime-store memo book, loose-leaf, side-opening, about four by six inches, out of her alligator bag.

  “Can you crack codes?” she asked.

  “Like other people crack peanuts. The hundred bucks?”

  She hesitated and finally handed me the book. I opened it and leafed through. It was either pretty old or had been referred to a lot; the pages were dog-eared and stained. There were about twenty leaves. On one side of each was a solid mass of typed capitals, broken into the usual five-letter groups. There were vague pencil marks, some underlinings.

  I looked over it at her. She was brooding and finally burst out: “If I could only trust you!”

  “The—” I began.

  “I know,” she snarled. “The hundred bucks. Can you crack that for a hundred?”

  “I can’t promise,” I said. “Give me fifty. That’ll buy three days work on the thing. I’ll know by then whether it can be cracked or not. If I do break it you can give me the rest.”

  She wanted to cut a hundred bill in half, holding one herself and giving me the other. I patiently explained to her that I was just a businessman with nothing to gain by dime-novel methods, that I’d give her a square deal and if she didn’t like it, too bad.

  She slipped me two twenties and a ten under the table, very lady-like, and I wrote her a receipt. She wouldn’t let me put down anything about code work on the receipt.

  “See me here tomorrow, same time?” she suggested.

  I studied her. “I thought this was your afternoon off?”

  “I can get away if I have to,” she smiled easily.

  “Yeah,” I said. We shook hands, which was her idea, and I left to walk uptown to the office.

  At Broadway and 46th I had to wait for a traffic light. One of those characters who takes life easily faced me and opened his newspaper for a look at the comics while waiting for the light to change. The newspaper’s upper edge tickled me under the chin. Somebody bumped softly against me.

  My hand snapped down and crunched on a wrist. I brought the other hand across my body and took the black memo book out of the fingers of the man who’d jostled me. The man with the newspaper suddenly melted into the crowd.

  I LOOKED at what I’d grabbed. He was small, weasely, unkempt, dirty. He didn’t look at me, but he said out of the corner of his mouth: “No harm done, huh? Don’t turn me in. You’ll be tied up for a week in court.”

  I held his wrist with my right hand and put the book in my inside breast pocket with my left.

  I don’t like dips. They’re invariably chronic criminals. Arrest means nothing to them, and they care less than nothing for the sick, horrified feeling in the stomach of a decent workingman who reaches for his money and finds it isn’t there.

  “Don’t hurt me, mister,” he said hoarsely, still not looking at me.

  I pushed him out of my way. There’s a photo shop on Broadway and 49th Street where I have work done that takes more equipment than I own. I stopped in there and spent fifteen minutes with the manager in the back room. Then I walked the couple of blocks to my office.

  Two characters were sitting in the waiting room that I keep unlocked. As soon as I saw that they weren’t reading the girlie magazines left there I knew that for once my hunch had panned out. They were a Mutt and Jeff pair, both very Spanish looking. The little one looked like a tango dancer, the big one like the bouncer of an expensive Havana night club.

  “We want the book,” said the little one, standing. His hand was in his jacket pocket.

  “So take the book,” I said, holding it out to him.

  He grabbed it, riffled the pages unbelievingly and exchanged a relieved glance with the big one.

  “Vamonos,” he said. “Esta OK.”

  To me he bowed lightly and said: “No trobbles. We thanka you very motch.”

  “Seguramente, senores,” I said. “De nada.”

  They smiled, probably at my accent, and left. I went into the inner office, locked the door and twiddled my thumbs for twenty minutes, then phoned the photo shop.

  “You want ’em already?” asked the manager.

  “First make another set of prints and lock them in your safe. Tell your chuckle-headed delivery boy to ride a couple of floors past mine when he comes and walk down. Tell him not to come into my office unless the corridor’s empty. Give him some kind of story.”

  “Right. I’ll tell him it’s a deck of French postcards.”

  Twenty minutes later the photo shop delivery boy handed me a well-sealed package and leered at me. I leered back and gave him a quarter. I locked the door after him, spread the photographs out and got to work on the code.

  I COULDN’T keep my mind on it. That nice old lady kept wanting me to follow her niece, her brother’s face kept appearing between me and the photographs, distorted with animal rage, Annie, the parlormaid kept whispering that she wanted to trust me. And the sullen, beautiful face of the girl who had died glowered tragically over my shoulder. The little dip, the two hard guys who’d taken the book, they were there too. Something tied them together—was it my hat? Where was my gray snap-brim felt?

  I brushed them aside and worked on the code, which turned out to be not a code at all, but a triple substitution cipher. It gave way with a crash at eleven that night, and I put a client’s report form in the typewriter and copied it out.

  It was just a list of eighty names and addresses. The only thing I didn’t understand was that after each name came a number. Most of the names were followed by number five, which was the lowest number; one was followed by the number fifteen and the rest were scattered between the two extremes.

  I typed: Paragraph Four—Analysis of Addresses: The addresses listed have no apparent center, being distributed at a geographical random throughout Greater New York. However, cursory inspection shows that there is an economic mean presented in that no address is in a poor neighborhood and about fifteen percent in expensive neighborhoods.

  Annie Murdoch was getting her fifty bucks worth. I wound up with a flourishing signature, filed a carbon, made a neat package of the report original and the photographs of the book’s pages. I locked the package in the safe and headed for the hotel and my bed.

  I didn’t get to my bed. I was picked off like a sitting duck on 50th Street. It was the little tango dancer again; he oozed against me and: “Es-stop, Mr. Burroughs.” He was rodded up; I felt the bar
rel of a big gun poke me through his jacket pocket.

  “Where to, Pancho?” I asked, trying to be casual.

  “In the car, if you please-y,” he said, pointing with his left hand. I stepped into a good-looking black sedan. The tango dancer climbed in after me. He took out his gun, letting it rest casually in his lap. It was a Luger that looked sloppy and out of drawing; I guessed it was a cheap Spanish or Balkan copy. Still, nine millimeters of caliber is much too much to argue with.

  The big bouncer was in the driver’s seat, and he took off without a word or a change of expression.

  “Hell of a snatch car you have here,” I said. “Anybody’d remember it for a year.”

  “Es-natch?” he asked, politely puzzled.

  “Kidnapping,” I explained.

  “Gracias,” he smiled. He shifted the gun to his left hand and took something out of his breast pocket. It was wrapped in a tube of newspaper. He held up a corner of the paper and the weight of the object unrolled it. A black cylinder fell into his lap. It was about eight inches long, an inch in diameter, tapering a bit towards the handle end. It was made of heavy, braided leather strips. The seams were turned in so as not to break the skin. There was a supple leather loop at the handle end.

  With a practiced gesture he flipped the loop about his wrist and across his palm. He flicked the sap in the air once and smiled as the heavy steel spring in the joint responded, magnifying the little wrist motion he’d given it. The lead-loaded tip swung in a vicious arc three times before it trembled to rest.

  I stared at him as he smiled. “Better not,” I said. “Other guys have been sorry they slugged me. You’ll be very damned sorry if you do.”

  My palms were sweating; I dug my nails into them and fought with myself to keep from jumping him. He was holding the cheap Luger copy very steady in his left hand. It could take the flick of a finger to send .775 square inches of steel mashing through my intestines, expanding as it went. I leaned back and shut my eyes, shuddering, waiting for the inevitable blow.

  I heard the faint swish of the sap and then heard a roaring louder than anything I’d ever heard, louder than thunder, louder than the solid wall of cannon that the krauts had massed before Leipsig. I swung way, way out, past Mars, past Neptune. I was swinging out into the black gulf like Tarzan on a vine, and just before the vine swung back it turned to oil in my hands and they slipped from it and I fell into the darkness.