The Union Club Mysteries

by Asimov, Isaac

In the kitchenette, a sparse collection of comestibles in jars and cans. Some cutlery and pans and a can opener. None of it looked very used.

  The super shrugged and said, "I suppose he ate out mostly. That's what I told the other guys." "But you don't know where?"

  He shrugged again, "I mind my own business. In this neighborhood, you got to."

  "The guys at the station say you claim you talked to him sometimes."

  "Well, you know, like when I come to collect the rent, or fix the shower when it leaks. Like that."

  "What kind of stuff does he write."

  "I don't know. Nothing / read, I can tell you that." He sniggered.

  I said, "I don't see any books around with his name on them."

  He said, "He said once he wrote for the magazines a lot. Maybe he don't write books. I don't think he used his own name, either. I think he said that once."

  "What magazines did he write for?"

  "I don't know."

  "What name did he use?"

  "I don't know that either. He never told me and I didn't ask. No business of mine."

  "His typing ever bother the neighbors?"

  "Nobody ain't never complained. Listen, in this house you could beat up on your old lady at three in the morning and set her to screaming like a banshee, and no one would complain."

  "Did you ever hear the typing?"

  "You mean in my apartment? Nah. I'm two floors down."

  "I mean, in the hall?"

  "Sure. Once in a while. Very light. An old building like this got good walls."

  "Ever see him type?"

  "Sure. I'd come to fix something and I'd hear the typewriter going, tap, tap. Like I said, lightly. He'd let me in and then he'd sit down again, and go back to typing. Probably didn't make much money out of it or he wouldn't live here." He sniggered again.

  I grunted and left. There were three other neighbors on the floor. None could describe the missing man; all insisted they knew nothing about him. One thought she could hear the typing sometimes, but she never paid any attention. "We keep ourselves to ourselves, mister," she said.

  They surely did. There was no use pursuing the case any further.

  For one thing, we didn't have to. Smith was now clearly in focus. Without his knowing it, we knew where he was and who he was and from that point on Smith was useless to the opposition and very useful to us— until such time as the opposition realized his cover had been broken. At that time we took him neatly into custody before they could arrange a fatal accident for him.

  But if you don't mind, I'll go freshen my drink.

  Griswold made as though to rise, but Jennings pulled his own chair in front of Griswold's and said, "You'll simply have to die of thirst unless you tell us first where and who he was."

  Griswold drew his white eyebrows together in an annoyed frown. "You mean it isn't obvious? —There was no William Smith. He was a decoy designed to deflect the Department's attention if they ever got too close, and it almost worked. Thanks to one forgotten detail, however, it was clear to me that no one ever used that apartment for writing of any kind, and since the super claimed he had actually seen Smith typing, the conclusion was that it was the super himself who was maintaining the deception and that he was our man. That's all. Simplicity itself."

  "No, it isn't," said Baranov. "How could you tell the apartment was never used for writing?"

  "It lacked the essential. You can write without a library and without reference books. You can write without a desk. You can write without a typewriter. You don't even have to have ordinary paper. You can write on the back of envelopes or on shopping bags or in the margins of newspapers.

  "But, gentlemen, any writer will tell you that there is one object that no writer can possibly do without, and that object was not in the apartment. I told you every- thing that was in the apartment and I didn't mention that object."

  "But what was it?" I demanded.

  Griswold's white mustache bristled. "A wastepaper basket! How can a professional writer do without that?"

  To Contents

  The Thin Line

  Griswold had been absent from the Union Club for several of our postprandial sessions, but now he sat there, to all appearances sound asleep. His shaggy white mustache puffed outward regularly under the force of his exhalations.

  I said, "He can't have been away on business. He must be retired."

  "Retired from what?" said Baranov skeptically. "You don't believe all those fairy tales he tells us, do you?"

  "I don't know," said Jennings. "Most of them seem quite plausible."

  "That's a matter of opinion," said Baranov. "For one thing, all those tales of spy and counterspy—I'll bet he gets them out of his imagination. Look here, I'm sure he's never left the country. What kind of a spy would never leave the country? What's there to do in the United States?"

  Griswold's glass of scotch and soda, quite full, suspended midway even as he slept and (as ever) in no danger of spilling, moved slightly, as though operated by remote control, in the direction of his lips. It moved further and finally reached those lips. Griswold, with no sign of having awakened, sipped delicately, removed the glass and said, "I don't admit I have never left the country."

  His eyes opened and he said, "And if I had never done so, there would still be plenty to occupy an agent right here at home. There is an honorable list of those who died right here under the Stars and Stripes—like Archie Davidson, to name just one."

  Archie Davidson [said Griswold] never left the United States, something which you uninformeds seem to think is true of me. Throughout his dozen years of service for the Department, however, Archie was never without something to do.

  Does it occur to you gentlemen that there are well over a hundred foreign embassies and an even larger number of consulates in the United States?

  Every single one of them must gather information that is of service to their nation, as our embassies and consulates do abroad in the service of our nation. Information gathering must be carried out more or less clandestinely and, in the case of a number of embassies, illegally, and for purposes that menace the security of our country.

  Furthermore, the internal political battles of various nations are fought out on the territory of the United States. Various terrorist groups, or dissidents, or freedom fighters (they're called different things, according to viewpoint) operate here.

  All these things must engage our attention and Archie was an excellent worker: unobtrusive, skilled and persuasive.

  That he be persuasive was important, for one of the tasks of any skilled agent is that he manage to gain the confidence of someone on the other side. Someone working for the enemy is clearly a particularly reliable source of information, whether he is a defector on principle, a greedy fellow in search of money or other rewards, or simply an overconfident blabbermouth. Naturally, a defector on principle is the most reliable source and the one most likely to take large risks.

  There was no one like Archie for finding the enemy who would work with us out of conviction and, at the time under discussion, he had one. We knew none of the details, of course, but the Department was pretty sure he had one. It was the easiest way of accounting for the nature and reliability of the information he fed us. ' Nor did we try to find out what his source was. It makes sense not to do so.

  When one has a spy in the enemy camp, the fewer who know his identity, the safer the spy and the connection. Even if the agent were to communicate the identity to a thoroughly reliable co-worker, the communication itself would be a point of weakness. Messages can be intercepted and interpreted, words overheard, gestures understood. The behavior of two people can serve as a more reliable lead for enemy eyes, than the behavior of one, the behavior of three still more so, and so on.

  It is best, then, if there is a thin line between agent and enemy informer, a very thin line. If only the agent knows the informer, that is best. The informer himself feels more secure if he is confident that only one person knows what h
e is doing. He will then speak more freely. Archie had the ability to inspire that kind of confidence and he could do so because he had the conscious knowledge that he never double-crossed.

  It was a very special loss to us when Archie was killed.

  There was no way of telling that he had been killed in the line of duty. No one left a calling card. He was merely found dead in a doorway in a dubious street of one of our large eastern cities.

  He had been knifed, and the knife had been withdrawn and was gone. His wallet was also gone, and it might be taken for granted that it was an ordinary mugging.

  That is what the local police took it for, at any rate. Archie was not a well-known person; he had a professional unobtrusiveness and his cover was that of a clerk in a liquor store, so there was no reason for the police to give it special attention or for the press to stir much.

  Nor could the Department take a very active interest. In the first place, we didn't find out about it till well after the fact. In the second, it would have been counterproductive to adopt too high a profile in the matter.

  The killing might conceivably have been an ordinary mugging with no connection whatever to Archie's work. In that case, it would certainly be a bad move to allow anyone watching the Department (and of course we are under surveillance by dozens of groups of undesirables) to learn, definitely, that Archie was an agent. That could lead them to other agents and could endanger much of our work. In particular, it might endanger the enemy informer that Archie was using and that we might perhaps salvage.

  Then, too, we didn't really care whether Archie was killed by an ordinary mugger or by the enemy. We don't deal in revenge at the Department. We're not going to waste our time finding out who killed one of our men so that we can kill in return. Our work is more important than melodrama of that sort. Besides, even if Archie were killed, let us say, at the orders of an important foreign embassy, the actual murderer might well be a hired hophead, who wouldn't even remember the details of the hiring.

  No, what was important to us was Archie's work, not Archie. And the most important part of his work at the time he was killed was his link to the enemy informer— that thin line that was so thin it stretched between two people only, and that was snapped when one of those two people was killed.

  Unless, of course, Archie had somehow managed to give information that could allow us to reconstruct the thin line. It didn't seem likely that he could have done so, but it would have been his duty to do so if he could and this therefore had to be followed up.

  Naturally, I was the one sent to deal with the police. My air of calm authority always worked well with them and smoothed the troubled waters that inevitably arose when the local law-enforcement people thought they were going to be overwhelmed by the Feds.

  I spent considerable time in indirection that served to obscure the exact reason why Washington might be interested, but I won't bother you with that. I will tell it far more directly than it actually was.

  I said, "Was he still alive when he was found?"

  "Hell no. He'd been dead at least three hours." "Too bad. It's always nice when there's still life in them and they can say something."

  "You mean like 'The man who killed me was—' and then they croak before they can get the word out?"

  "We like them to get the word out. He didn't leave any messages, I suppose?"

  "You mean, written in his own blood on the sidewalk?" The homicide man seemed to be trying to get a rise out of me, but I didn't oblige. He said, "There was some blood soaked into the jacket he was wearing, but none near or on his hands. What's more, there was nothing scrabbled in the dust; no words formed out of banana peels and other garbage. Listen, his wallet was gone and it was all we could do to work out his identity."

  "His pockets were searched?"

  "Of course."

  "Anything interesting? Do you have a list?"

  "I have better than that," said the detective. "Here's the stuff itself." He upended a plastic bag and let it all spill out on his desk.

  I went over the material. Keys, change, a small pocket comb, a memo book, an eyeglass case, a ball-point pen. I looked through the memo book. There was nothing in it, though several of the leaves were torn out. A good agent puts as little on paper as possible. If for some reason he must record something, he gets rid of it as soon as possible.

  "Anything else?" I asked.

  The detective shook the plastic bag wordlessly. A little wad of paper fell out to his apparent surprise. I picked it up and spread it out. It said in straggly capital letters: CALL TAXICAB.

  The paper was from the memo book. I used the ballpoint to make marks on a piece of scrap paper on the desk. It was the right color and thickness.

  I said, "Was this written after he was stabbed?"

  The detective shrugged. "Could be."

  "Which pocket was this found in? Was it found wadded? Where was the pen?"

  We had to locate the officer who had first found Archie and the detective who had then arrived on the scene. The results seemed conclusive. The paper, wadded, was in the left jacket pocket; the fountain-pen with Archie's right hand holding it in the right jacket pocket. If no one had considered all this, it was because no importance was attached to the murder.

  It was clear, however, that Archie's last effort, like the good agent he was, gave us important information. It had to be some reference to his contact, some way of reconstituting the thin line.

  I considered. Archie didn't say which taxicab to call. Was it a particular company? Did he use a particular company and could we find out which it was? Was there some message we could gather if we used the Yellow Pages and turned to the "taxicab" entry? Or was it something else?

  I thought very intensively for a minute or so and then took a course of action that located the enemy informer and reconstituted the link. Before the other side located the informer and dealt with him, we had had time to gather some important items of information that helped in the satisfactory resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. So it was a happy ending—

  "No you don't," I said, tramping hard on his shoe to keep him awake. "You haven't told us the important thing."

  Griswold frowned. "Certainly, I did. I took a course of action that located the enemy informer and—''

  "Yes, but how? What taxicab company did you call?"

  "I didn't call any. Good God, man, don't tell me you don't understand. When you make a local phone call, you dial seven numbers. Each number, from 2 to 9, has three letters associated with it, dating back to the days when exchanges had names. We have ABC in the 2 position, DEF in the 3 position and so on. It's possible to give a telephone number in terms of letters if there are no 1's or 0's in it. There are no letters at all associated with 1; and only a Z associated with 0 on some dials.

  "So I didn't call any taxicab company. I dialed T-A-X-I-C-A-B, which in numbers is 829-4222. That was the contact point. Undoubtedly, Archie found it easier to remember the word than the number combination and when dying, the word was all he remembered—so he scrawled it in desperation."

  To Contents

  Mystery Tune

  Baranov rustled his paper with definite annoyance as we sat within the august confines of the Union Club that evening. He said, "There's been another gang killing in Brooklyn."

  "What else is new?" I asked, unimpressed.

  "Well, damn it," said Baranov, "now they'll put in who knows how many police man-hours on the case while valuable police work languishes. Who cares if one gangster kills another? Let them."

  "It sets a bad precedent," said Jennings sententiously. "Murder is murder and you can't let it go. Besides, you don't really know it's a gang killing till you investigate."

  "Then again," I added, "hardly any of them are ever solved, so maybe the police don't waste too much time."

  "Yes, they do," responded Baranov hotly. "There's plenty of waste, however little time they spend on it. No one involved will talk and the police aren't allowed to beat it out of them.
Even close relatives of the victim won't talk, the damn fools. You'd think they'd want to see the murderer caught."

  It was at this time that Griswold stirred. His soft snore ended in a brief period of near strangulation and, recovering, he smoothed his white mustache with the hand that wasn't holding his scotch and soda.

  He said, "Of course they want to see the murderer get his, but not by police procedure. They want it by gang vengeance, which is more sure in any case. The criminal ethic depends on the closed mouth. Without that, the forces of society learn too much and they all suffer. There was the case once—"

  For a moment, it looked as though he might drop off again, but Jennings, who was seated closest, kicked his ankle and Griswold's eyes opened wide. With a soft "ouch" he continued—

  There was the case once [said Griswold] of Eighty-eight Jinks. He was christened Christopher, I believe, but he was a pianist by talent and the way he stroked the eighty-eight keys rechristened him. At least, no one ever called him anything else but Eighty-eight to my knowledge.

  He might have become a great pianist, too, many people thought. He could play anything he had ever heard, in any style, and could improvise chords that would tear your heart out. He had a good voice, too. Something was missing, though. The drive wasn't there. And he drank quite expertly and that ruined what chance remained.

  By the time he was thirty-five, he was making a precarious living by tinkling the keys in various barrooms and second-rate night spots, and running errands for the gangs. He was a gentle guy even when he was the worse for drink—which was most of the time, though that never seemed to get in the way of his fingers on the keyboard.

  The police knew him well and laid off him generally. He never made a nuisance of himself, so there was never occasion to lodge a drunk-and-disorderly charge against him. He did not use drugs or push them; he had no part in the operations of the ladies of the evening, who infested the establishments for which he played; and the errands he ran for the boys were innocuous enough as such things go.

  Sometimes the police did try to pump him for something, but he would never talk.