The Union Club Mysteries

by Asimov, Isaac

  The police lieutenant did just that on one occasion, about twenty years ago or so. He was an old friend of mine, and I didn't mind helping him if I could.

  "Griswold," he said, holding up the thumb and forefinger of his right hand a quarter-inch apart, "I'm this far from getting on the track of something that will lead me to the central artery of the drug flow in this city."

  "Excellent," I said.

  "But I may not make that little bit. I'm missing half a ghost."

  "What?" For a moment, I thought the lieutenant was intending some sort of practical joke at my expense, although he was notoriously lacking in a sense of humor, practical or otherwise. He said, "We have a line of investigation that makes it quite certain that we can put our finger on someone who will serve as a perfect conduit of information to the very top."

  "Grab him!" I said, for I am impatient with subtlety when the time for direct action has come.

  "I can't. We only know his nickname. He's called Haifa Ghost."

  "You can't be serious."

  "He chose it himself apparently, and that's all we've got. He's a whole ghost for any chance we seem to have of identifying him."

  "You have no idea at all as to who he might be?"

  "Yes, we have some idea. Indirect evidence leads us to suppose he's a member of the Black Belts, a street gang."

  "Might not one of them turn state's evidence, suitably induced?"

  The lieutenant rolled his eyes upward, as though calling on Heaven to witness my stupidity. "Get one of those petty hoodlums to sing? Not talking is the chief item in their own perverted notion of rules of honor. And by the time we broke one of them down, Half a Ghost would know we were after him and be gone."

  "Take them all."

  "We couldn't hold them. This isn't a police state— more's the pity, I sometimes think. And that would alert them, too. Isn't there some way you can tell us who Half a Ghost is right now, with enough certainty so that we can hope to catch him by surprise and sweep him into giving us the information we need?"

  "Do you have anything for me to go on? Anything? Even I can't give you something in return for nothing."

  "We suspect that Half a Ghost has something to do with his first name. Don't ask me what. A private joke of his own, I suspect. The trouble is we have the first names of the ten members of the gang who are old enough and have heft enough to be Half a Ghost, and not one of those first names means anything at all ghostwise."

  "What are they?" "Here they are, in alphabetical order."

  I looked at the list: Alex, Barney, Dwayne, Gregory, Jimmy, Joshua, Lester, Norton, Roy, Simon.

  I said, in disbelief, "One of them is called Dwayne?"

  "He's called Bugsy for short. Every one of them is nicknamed, but one of them has Half a Ghost in addition, that's all. Which one?"

  "Look," I said, "If the nickname were Rock, I would feel reasonably sure that it was taken from the name Simon. Simon means rock in Aramaic, according to the Bible, so the Apostle Simon was called Petrus in Latin, or Peter in English. Most people know that; perhaps even these two-bit hoods. If the nickname were King, I'd bet on Roy, which is the French word for king. If it were Jericho, I'd bet on Joshua."

  "Why are you telling me all that? The nickname is Half a Ghost."

  "Are you certain? There's no mistake?"

  "Who can be certain, one hundred percent? Give it a good ninety, though."

  "Are you sure of the Black Belts?"

  ''Another good ninety.''

  "Are you sure of the first names?"

  "One hundred percent. We checked with the birth certificates. And Griswold, I need it fast. I need it now. Come on, look at the list."

  I looked, "It's certainly nothing obvious."

  "Would I need you if it were obvious?"

  "Do you know anything about these individuals aside from their names? Do you know their schooling?"

  "They all went to school—officially. How much they actually attended—what they listened to—I suppose they can read after a fashion. They're streetwise, though, and they're no dummies."

  "Hasn't one of them had a real education? Finished high school at least. Gone to college maybe. Don't tell me which one. Just tell me if one of them has. Or if one of them is a reader and is known to go to the library— anything like that."

  The lieutenant looked astonished. "Well, as a matter of fact, one of them fits that. He went to one of the city colleges for two years before dropping out. I didn't take that seriously. These days they're experimenting with taking in anyone, you know, whatever the marks. Do you want me to check his transcript?"

  "Maybe that won't be necessary. Just one, you say?"

  "Just one."

  "Would it be that one?" and I pointed to one of the names on the list.

  The lieutenant's mouth fell open, and he said, "Yes. How the hell could you know just from the name?"

  I explained and said, "Grab him!"

  The lieutenant did and what followed may not have been strictly and entirely legal—it was just before the Supreme Court got into the act—but he had his big bust. And you have to admit that, in a way, that's a ghost story.

  Griswold yawned, sipped at his drink and closed his eyes, but Baranov, who had copied down the list of names when Griswold had given them, said, "Damn it, Griswold, there's nothing in this list that refers to a ghost, or half a ghost, or an education, and you can't tell us there is."

  Griswold sneered. "A ghost is a specter, isn't it? An immaterial apparition, or appearance. Well, when Isaac Newton first passed sunlight through a prism he got a rainbow of colors, an immaterial apparition. So he called it a spectrum, and we still call it a spectrum today. People who take physics in college, or even in high school, would know that. And if he had a sense of humor, as the lieutenant didn't, he would think of the spectrum as a ghost.

  "The spectrum is made up of a rainbow of colors, as I said, and these colors are in a certain order. In order to memorize the order of colors, students are frequently given a sentence such as: Read Out Your Good Book In Verse. The initials stand for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet, though Indigo is not usually considered a separate color. It's just a deep blue, really, and is generally omitted. The initial letters representing the order of colors in the spectrum or 'ghost' are ROYGBV, if you leave out indigo, and the letters in the first half of the ghost are ROY.

  "If, then, Roy is the only one with any schooling to speak of, and if ROY represents Half a Ghost, after a fashion, what else do you need?"

  To Contents

  There Was a Young Lady

  Jennings rustled his newspaper, a practice not quite in keeping with the somber splendor of the Union Club library, and that was quite sufficient evidence of his outrage.

  "Five horses killed in the latest IRA bombing in London," he said. "They knew horses would die. Why should horses have to pay for human passions?"

  "They always did," said Baranov phlegmatically, "as long as there has been cavalry. Do you know how many horses died in the charge of the Light Brigade?"

  I said, "As long as human beings divide themselves into groups marked off by trivial cultural differences and consider these differences worth dying for—"

  Baranov cut me off, as he sometimes does when I try to put things in clear perspective, and said, "That's been going on for five thousand years of written history. How do you stop it?"

  Jennings rustled his paper again and muttered, "Israel in Lebanon, Iran in Iraq, rebels in El Salvador and Honduras, terrorists everywhere—"

  I said, "A decent concept of human unity against the forces of ignorance and misery, the real enemies—"

  "And meanwhile?" said Baranov.

  Griswold, who had been slowly, and with some difficulty, trying to cross one leg over the other even while, to all appearances, fast asleep, now growled softly and said, "Meanwhile you do what you can on a case-by-case basis." "As you have done, no doubt," I said with as much sarcasm as I could manage.

&nbs
p; "In my own small way—now and then," he said, opening his eyes and glaring at me.

  The trouble spot most embarrassing to the American government [said Griswold] is Northern Ireland. Great Britain is our closest ally, and yet there are many politically active and very articulate Irish-Americans within our borders. It is impossible for the American government to make any sort of move toward one party without giving insupportable offense to the other. Even pious wishes aren't safe.

  Therefore, although it is well-known that the Irish Republican Army gets much of its financing and its arms supply from the United States, there is nothing much our government can do about it openly. Great Britain is, of course, aware of this and, unofficially, quite bitter about it, and our government has to do what it can to cut down-the aid—but not openly; never openly.

  The head of the Department didn't have to explain any of this to me when he came to call at my diggings one evening after dinner. I understood the situation.

  "There's a new weapons conduit," he said, "running from here to Ireland, and we've got to close it down. We can't condone terrorism for whatever reason."

  "Is the Irish government helping?"

  "Not openly," he said.

  I nodded. That was not hard to understand, either. Ireland did not want the troubles to spill over the border into its own quiet land, so it had to do what it could to defuse the IRA hotheads, but it could not—simply could not—openly appear to be allying itself with the one-time British overlords against those who were fighting to free the whole island.

  "I take it," I said, "you haven't been able to plug the conduit, and are coming to me for help."

  The head said stiffly, "I came to show you this," and he unfolded a piece of paper.

  There were five lines of Xeroxed writing on it which went: There was a young lady named Alice, Who said, "I don't want to seem callous,

  But I can't abide hicks

  From the big-city sticks Like Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas."

  Some of the letters had curlicues added and, around it, were vague doodlings.

  I said, "Not bad. I presume the writer was from the Northeast or Midwest?"

  "Boston."

  "And was expressing his or her contempt for the big cities of the Sun Belt. Its people were hicks just the same."

  The head shrugged it off. "That doesn't matter, Griswold. The important thing is that this was written by one of our agents, a young fellow who infiltrated the IRA arms network. We have good reason to think he had worked out the details of the conduit."

  "And there's some reason you can't ask him?"

  "Reason enough. He's dead."

  "Reason enough," I agreed. "Where did you find this?"

  "In his hotel room. It was written the last night of his life. We are quite certain of that, and a chain of convincing circumstantial evidence seems to tell us it must have been written during a conference with the people managing the conduit. Three hours later, or thereabouts, our agent was killed in his sleazy hotel room."

  "By an intruder having nothing to do with the case, perhaps."

  "We don't think so because we don't believe in coincidences. The room was hastily ransacked, and presumably effectively, too, for in our own search we found nothing to help us—except, just possibly, that verse I showed you. The paper was folded up small and was under the old-fashioned bathtub-on-legs. He may have tossed it there when he realized his friends had tumbled to his identity and were at the door."

  "And he thought it would help you? How?"

  "He was an inveterate doodler. We know he was. And he had the habit of being spurred into it by something he saw or heard. He wasn't even aware of it. Our guess is that in the discussion of the conduit some mention was made, let us say, of 'Alice of Dallas.' Struck by the rhyme, he wrote the verse."

  I thought about it awhile. "Alice of Dallas? What good is that? Dallas, as the verse says, is a big city, and the Alices in it may well amount to thousands. It is not an uncommon name."

  "You're perfectly right," said the head, "but we don't work completely blind, you know. We have independent leads and areas of suspicion. We can narrow the field immensely in our search for an Alice of Dallas. Still—we found nothing at all. There was no Alice showing up in a place or under conditions where we could see at once that we were peeping inside the conduit, or even possibly peeping."

  "Are you sure you would be able to tell?"

  "Yes," he said uncompromisingly.

  "Does that complete the story?"

  "No. Our agent mentioned three cities. We had to consider the other two."

  "Los Angeles and Houston? They're even larger than Dallas. And what becomes of the Alice of Dallas that sparked this piece of elegant poetry, if that's the case?"

  "It might not have been a direct spark. There might have been a remark about 'Alice of Houston,' say, and our man might have unconsciously thought, 'If it had been Alice of Dallas, it would rhyme,' and that would get him started."

  "I suppose you put Los Angeles and Houston through the wringer, too, then?"

  "Of course. As it happens, none of those cities are centers of IRA support, which simplifies the problem a bit. If it had been New York or Boston, we'd have had a much harder time."

  "Did you find anything in Los Angeles or Houston?"

  "Nothing."

  "It may be the verse means nothing, then."

  "We can't believe that. Our agent tossed it under the bathtub. He clearly felt that even if he had written it as a thoughtless doodle, it held something important for us. Why can't we find that, then?"

  I said, "Was there anything on the back of the paper?"

  "Nothing."

  "Any signs of—"

  "No invisible ink, if that's what you're getting at. How the devil would he be sitting at a conference, scratching away with invisible ink? As it is, it may be his doodling on this occasion in this way that roused suspicion against him."

  "What about the curlicues on the letters, and those other markings on the paper? Any significance there?"

  "We couldn't find any. See here, can you?" He held up the paper before my eyes.

  "No," I admitted. Then I said, "You know, it's quite possible the doodle means nothing at all. He just wrote it for no reason, found it in his pocket when he got to his room, scrunched it up, tossed it at a wastepaper basket and missed. It rolled under the bathtub, but it remains meaningless. Isn't that possible?"

  The head looked annoyed. "Of course it's possible— but we can't chance it. If a flood of new arms reaches the IRA from America, the British will lean hard—though quietly—on the American government. And our government will lean hard—and not so quietly—on us. I don't want to earn a black eye for the Department, and I certainly don't want to lose my job over this."

  "What are you going to do, then?"

  "The only thing I can do, for now, is to go over those three cities again and again. In fact, we haven't actually stopped sifting, but I need a new lead. There must be something in this doggerel that we're missing. There must be some information it's giving us which we don't see. There's something about 'hicks' or 'big-city sticks' that is meaningful, but I just don't know what that can be. Do you?"

  I looked at the piece of paper again. "Are you expecting me to see at a glance something the whole Department has failed at?"

  "Can you?"

  I said, "Would the name of a fourth city do?" "What are you talking about?" He snatched the paper back and stared hard at it. "Do you mean some of the letters of the words run together to give the name of a city."

  "Not that I noticed," I said. "It's a good deal more obvious than that."

  "I don't understand you at all."

  So I explained. He stared at me, snorted and said, "Ridiculous!"

  "Take it or leave it," I said. "It's all I can suggest."

  He stamped out, and he never did let me know what happened; and I, of course, would not do him the favor of asking. However, I do have my friends in the Department, and I do
know for a fact that no shipment of arms went through at that time. I suspect, therefore, that the fourth city was indeed the one in question, that someone named "Alice" or perhaps code-named "Alice" was located there. I had, I presumed, actually penetrated the core of the problem and helped puncture and break up the conduit.—Which did not surprise me, of course.

  Griswold finished his drink with an insufferable air of self-satisfaction on his face.

  "Why do you look puzzled?" he asked.

  "Not puzzled," said Baranov. "Amused. This time you've just flipped off the deep end."

  "There is no fourth city mentioned in the verse," said Jennings.

  "As you well know," I said.

  "I never said it was mentioned. I just asked the head if a fourth city would do."

  "What fourth city?" I demanded.

  Griswold said, "What I was presented with was not just a verse, or doggerel, or a stanza of poetry. It was a limerick.''

  "Of course," said Jennings. "We all know that."

  "And 'limerick' is not just the name of a verse form. It's the name of a city in Ireland, an important port in the Southwest at the mouth of the Shannon River. The name of the verse is derived from the name of that city, though the details are a little obscure. If the agent heard talk of an Alice who played an important role in the conduit in the city of Limerick, he might easily have been moved to construct a limerick about Alice. And, apparently, that was what really happened."

  To Contents

  Afterword

  I had a sneaking feeling that when I brought in "There Was a Young Lady" and told Eric that I now had enough stories to put out a full-sized collection, that.he would heave a sigh of relief and say, "Thank goodness, now you can stop doing them for us."

  It seemed to me that if he did, I would feel a little hurt, but I would recover quickly. After all, thinking up a new "Griswold" the first week of every month is a chore. It isn't as if it's all I have to do.