Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  It was a great, friendly lunch. We had a bottle of wine with the artichokes and the stuffed veal, swapping personal stories and reminiscences and getting mellow. When I judged he was mellow enough I said, “I’ve got a little problem, Vic.”

  He mopped the last of his crusty bread in the last of his cream sauce, looking at me. “That was true about company policy, Nolly.”

  “I know that, Vic.”

  He nodded and waved to the waiter for coffee. “It isn’t money, is it? Because if it is, hell, Nolly, I know you’re good for whatever you need.”

  “Not money. Just a problem. I have this client, or at least I did have him …” And I told him about Woody Calderon, and the offer he couldn’t refuse, and the thousand-dollar cashier’s check.

  Vic refilled his coffee cup twice while I was talking. He drank it hot and black, swallowing it down as though he wanted to make sure he blotted up the last of the wine before he said anything he maybe shouldn’t.

  Then he sighed. “That’s funny,” he commented. “So what are you going to do? Pay off his I.R.S. tab?”

  “I already did that. There’s two hundred dollars left over.”

  “So that’s your fee. Just keep it— No,” he said, nodding as though the dentist had just told him the tooth would have to be recapped, “I know. It isn’t the money that’s worrying’ you. You want to know if I know anything about it, as far as Narabedla and Mr. Davidson-Jones are concerned.”

  I said, “You can see where I might be curious.”

  “I don’t mind your curiosity, Nolly.” He thought for a moment, beckoning for more coffee. “You understand, Narabedla’s huge. I don’t know everything that goes on in it. Maybe nobody does but Henry Davidson-Jones himself, and I’ll bet even he can’t keep track of the details. I have a specific job. I’m U.S. investments and subsidiaries, that’s all. I audit the statements from the other offices and prepare a consolidated profit-and-loss for the board meetings—that takes my time and seven other people’s, just for that. I don’t have a thing to do with, for instance, any of the offshore holdings, except now and then when one of the U.S. executives makes a trip to Europe or somewhere for meetings and we get his expense records. And I certainly don’t know anything about Davidson-Jones’s personal philanthropies. He’s never discussed his interest in the arts with me. He’s never discussed anything with me. I’ve never met the man.”

  “It was just a thought,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I can’t help you, Nolly,” he said warmly, his big face friendly enough and regretful enough. To make up for it, he said, “How about a brandy?”

  So we had a brandy, and Vic told me why the Mets couldn’t possibly repeat last year’s season, while the Yankees were bound to improve, and when the check came he grabbed it. “Narabedla’s got more money than you do,” he said. And then, while we were waiting for his credit-card imprint, he said suddenly, “There is one funny thing.”

  I took a deep swallow of the cooling coffee, then I sat up straight, wishing I hadn’t had the final brandy. Something was coming.

  “It’s not a secret,” he said seriously—to himself more than to me, I thought. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t know about it.”

  He paused to add in the tip and scribble his name. I didn’t even breathe. “It’s just this woman,” he said. “She came into the office a month or two ago. Irene Madigan. From Beaumont, Texas, I think, only she was staying at that women’s hotel downtown—the Martha Washington, is it? God knows if she’s still there. And she didn’t belong in our department at all. She just came in off the street and somebody got rid of her by shooing her onto me.”

  He paused to put the pen back in his pocket, then remembered it was Restaurant Associates’ pen and dropped it on the plate. He sighed. “This is just between us, Nolly?”

  “Promise.”

  “The last thing I want to do is get the company into some embarrassing situation. Well, what it is, her cousin had some kind of deal with Mr. Davidson-Jones. And the cousin disappeared, too.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  There have been times when I missed my little old office with the kind of despairing passion a former grand duke might have held for the droshkies and white nights of old St. Petersburg. Whatever else it was, it was sane and, not counting such times as the 14th of April, never scary.

  The firm of L. Knollwood Stennis and Associates comprised altogether six people, counting me and the receptionist. The other person who really mattered was Marlene Abramson. In ways I did not like to admit, she was more important to the firm than I was.

  When Marlene was nineteen years old she married a brilliant young medical student. For the next seven years she spent her time bearing three of his kids, supporting them all while he finished school, keeping up her own studies on the side, and providing an impeccably kosher house.

  Then, one night, the medical student, now a gynecologist, took her out to an expensive dinner in the kind of place where you can’t make a scene and told her about the physiotherapist who was about to make him the kind of attentive, loving, sharing wife he had always dreamed of.

  Marlene was a wonder. She didn’t even tie up his assets for the next thousand years. She only told her lawyer to make sure the kids got all there was for them to get, and philosophically walked away from Central Park South to see what the world had to offer to a divorcee with kids. Whatever else it had had, it hadn’t provided another man.

  By the time I got Marlene, the last of the kids was starting college. Marlene was “over thirty”—had to be well past forty-five, I calculated—and her principal interests were dieting, fussing over the incompetent, and waiting for the grandchildren. L. Knollwood Stennis and Associates suited her perfectly; there were plenty of unworldly incompetents among our clientele. And she suited them better than I would have believed possible when I hired her.

  Marlene was a creative and smart bookkeeper, who didn’t like to admit that she was also a CPA. She could have walked out of my office any day and taken half the accounts with her. She didn’t because she had no reason to. She had as much vacation time as I did, which was almost all the time there was when either of us could be spared, and on the first business day of every year she would tell me how big a raise she wanted. I would give it to her. We never argued about it. She knew what the cash flow was as well as I did. She wasn’t greedy, and neither was I.

  She was also my good friend, so she was the one I told about the missing cousin of this Irene Madigan. I had, of course, told her about Woody Calderon long since. She listened attentively. Then she whistled. It wasn’t a very successful whistle, because this was one of the days when she was giving up smoking and her mouth was full of chewing gum, but it expressed astonishment and concern.

  “So what about going to the police, Nolly?”

  “Would you? What do you think?”

  “I think like you think. No. You got nothing solid for them to go on and, Jesus, what’s the use of it, they can’t even find the three kids that ripped off my stereo and the silver dollars from Harrah’s Club in Vegas.”

  “D’accord,” I said. Marlene had been practicing her French to get ready for a week in Paris, and I had been helping her. Us operatic types, or former operatic types, get to learn a little of everything.

  “So where’s this Irene Madigan now?”

  “She’s not in the Martha Washington, anyway. She checked out two weeks ago. They wouldn’t give me an address.”

  “She might be in the Beaumont, Texas, phone book.”

  “She might,” I agreed.

  “So maybe you could call her,” Marlene went on, thinking things through. “But if you did, what would you say to her?” I nodded, and Marlene nodded back, and then she stood up and bawled, “Sally! Bring us a little coffee, there’s a darling.”

  I waited for her program to run. Coffee is Marlene’s prescription for everything, especially for getting started in the mornings you can’t get started in, and even more for solvin
g problems that don’t have any solution, like justifying a client’s thousand-dollar charitable contribution that he doesn’t have receipts for. Or this one.

  After Sally popped in with the coffee, Marlene told me two long, irrelevant stories. I listened to them patiently, knowing that, like the hum of the cooling fan when the computer is going, they were the outward sign of the processing that was going on in her head. The first story was about the schwartze who cleaned her apartment, and how the city bus driver who was her lover was suspected of fooling around with a Board of Transportation payroll clerk. The second was about the shicksa who was her daughter-in-law, who not only was Milwaukee’s biggest customer for the Pill but was thought to be considering a tubal ligation. I listened. I knew how Marlene’s mind worked, so I wasn’t surprised when she made the abrupt transition back to the subject. She was saying that it would serve the shicksa right if Marlene were to come to stay for a weekend and put aspirins in the Pill holder, and finished with, “Wait till she wants to be a grandmother herself, she’ll sing a different song. So why don’t you just go to him and ask?”

  I hung on. “Ask who what?”

  “Ask Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones if he can explain about Woody, of course. You know him already.”

  “I don’t know him. I met him once or twice, a long time ago.”

  “He wouldn’t remember you?”

  I said reluctantly, “I guess I could remind him.”

  Marlene took a sip of her cooling coffee and made a face. “Sally!” she yelled over her shoulder. “The coffee’s worse than ever, even, sweetheart!” And to me she said, “You’ve already thought of all this stuff, both ways, right? And what it is, you just don’t want to do it.”

  “Not a whole lot. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to ask a millionaire embarrassing questions.”

  “And what’s the reason you think it would be embarrassing? Have you got the idea Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones has some weird habit of murdering musicians?”

  I looked at her squarely. “Do you?”

  “Nah! Who needs to kill musicians? Dope, booze, cigarettes, women—they’re all busy killing themselves. Anyway, Nolly,” she went on, “I tell you what. I’ll write you a note you can put in your pocket, ‘Dear Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones, better not kill this man, because a friend knows exactly where he’s going, and if he doesn’t get back safe the friend goes to the cops.’ ”

  I grinned at her. “Maybe I’ll give it a try,” I said.

  “Thatta boy! Only Nolly, listen. If things start to look not so good, make sure they read the note. You don’t know, Nolly. You’re too trusting, you don’t know the world, you’ve got no idea what kind of weird business you could be getting yourself into.” And on that point she was righter than even Marlene herself could have guessed.

  CHAPTER

  4

  It is not my nature to go skulking around like Sam Spade. I don’t have a talent for it.

  On the other hand, I was curious.

  Curiosity wasn’t the only thing. I really was concerned about Woody Calderon. I didn’t like his being dead. He was sort of a friend as well as a client, and, besides, he was a hell of a fine cellist, no matter how many critics had decided not.

  All this being true, I am ashamed to admit that I was actually enjoying myself. An accountant’s job is not unrewarding, but nobody ever called it thrilling. If I couldn’t be an opera star, it was at least an interesting change to be a private detective for a while. So I did twenty push-ups to clear my head, and when I was good and aerobic, I went the whole distance. I sat down and wrote a note to Henry Davidson-Jones:

  Dear Mr. Davidson-Jones:

  I don’t know if you will remember me, but years ago you were good enough to offer me a tour as a singer.

  Unfortunately, illness damaged my voice. However, since then my voice has come back. I am contemplating trying to return to singing, and I would be honored to audition for you.

  Of course that wasn’t really true. The kindest thing you could say about my singing voice was that just a little bit of it was still there, maybe. Enough so that singing in the shower, with the water splashing on my head and the tiles of the shower stall bouncing the sound back to me, sometimes didn’t sound bad at all. It was the kind of voice that people at a party might think pretty wonderful when everybody was gathered around the piano, especially after a few drinks. It would never be a star’s voice, but Henry Davidson-Jones might not realize that.

  So a week later I was down in the World Trade Center, eighty-odd stories up, talking to a woman who looked like a photographer’s model, seated at a gilt table with a bud vase and a telephone and nothing else. I showed her my letter from Mr. William Purvis, secretary to Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones, saying that Mr. Davidson-Jones was willing to receive me.

  She took me right in.

  Mr. Davidson-Jones’s office was not a bit like my own. Mr. Davidson-Jones’s office was something like a private sitting room off the lobby of a really first-class hotel and something like heaven. It was furnished in Rich. It had a clump of palm trees growing out of a tub in the middle of the room, and flowering vines—hibiscus, maybe?—climbing the far wall. I won’t even talk about the furniture, which was mostly antique couches. I won’t talk about the ceiling, or not exactly, because it didn’t have one. What it had was a sky.

  I don’t mean it was a real sky, because even if the ceilings were glass you couldn’t look out of the top of the World Trade Center without seeing a lot of upside-down Japanese tourists in Windows on the World. But what it was could fool you. There must have been some sort of planetarium projector somewhere, because Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones’s ceiling gave every appearance of being studded with actual stars. I could even recognize some of the constellations. The easiest ones, anyway. About the easiest there is is Orion, with its three stars in a row for the belt, and there it was, flanked on one side by Sirius and Procyon, on the other by Aldebaran and the Pleiades. Behind a scattering of flowering vines on one of the side walls was a ceiling-high tank of tropical fish. It was illuminated from within, beautifully lighting a bunch of two-dimensional angelfish, and a lot of bright red and green and orange tetras.

  And all this on the eighty-somethingth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He was not only a very rich man, Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones, he was also one willing to spend money to indulge himself.

  The other kind of man he was was a relaxed and self-assured one.

  He opened the door for me himself. He shook my hand warmly, and he greeted me by name. Actually, by my nickname, which showed either a grand memory or an even better filing system. “Nolly, my boy, what wonderful news about your voice! Come in, sit down, would you like a drink?” You could feel the warmth and charm soaking into your pores. He was projecting that cordial intimacy that makes careers for actors and politicians, and con-men.

  I let him lead me to a leather armchair that had a table next to it containing both a whiskey decanter and a silver coffeepot with a clean cup. I expected him to say, “Name your poison.” He didn’t say anything more, so after I had sat down and gazed around I offered, “You’ve redecorated your office since the last time I was here.”

  He allowed himself a smile of pleasure. “Crazy, isn’t it? But I admit I love it. It was a present from the board for my twenty-fifth year with the company.”

  It was not much of a challenge to my arithmetical powers to figure out that that made him at least fifty. He didn’t look it. He didn’t look any older than the last time I’d seen him, a forty who could pass for thirty-five in a nightclub, and maybe twenty-six on the squash court. He had one of those expensive tans, and no thin spots anywhere in his hair. Although he was no taller than I, he had a lot more presence.

  “Will you sing for me, please?” he asked, as though that were the thing he had been waiting for to make his day. I assured him I would. He spoke into a telephone on the desk—well, I guess it was a desk. It looked like a drawingroom table with four different vases of flowers, b
ut there turned out to be a phone somewhere among them.

  Almost at once a door opened. A nice-looking elderly lady came in and smiled at me. She lifted the lid of a kind of secretary-looking thing and revealed a keyboard. “Miss Harfst will accompany you. It’s only electronic,” Davidson-Jones apologized, “but it has a good tone, I think.”

  It did. It took me a moment to get used to the idea that even a millionaire can keep a recital accompanist on premises for whenever he may take a notion to hear somebody sing, but when I suggested to the woman that we try the “Champagne Aria” from Don Giovanni, she nodded and began to play immediately. She played through it once, beautifully, and the tone of the piano was all Davidson-Jones had promised.

  The “Champagne Aria” is a delightful, fast-paced piece, not too hard if you watch yourself on the breathing. I sang it, really, fairly well. Davidson-Jones listened with full attention, but without comment.

  “Would you like another?” I offered. “Pagliacci, perhaps?”

  “No, you’ve done well,” he said, giving the accompanist a smile that meant she could go. She did. “My congratulations, Nolly,” said Davidson-Jones. “I never thought I’d hear you sing like that again. Are you ready for some coffee, then?”

  I let him pour me a cup of Marlene’s recipe for dealing with everything, and took the difficult plunge. “I don’t suppose that offer is still open after all these years, Mr. Davidson-Jones, but what made me think of it was what happened to Woody Calderon.”

  He didn’t spill a drop of the coffee. He didn’t even look surprised. “Ah, Woody,” he said sadly. “What a pity. What a terrible loss to music. Yes, Nolly, I had hoped to help his career on a bit, and I am deeply saddened that it can’t be done now.”