The Return of the Black Widowers

by Isaac Asimov

  "I inspected the house quickly and superficially by day. I didn't want any spying local to get too suspicious about the professionalism of the kind of search I might make. It was very ordinary, with the usual air of quiet and loneliness that long-deserted houses have. I found nothing unusual. After nightfall, I returned. There was no electricity, of course. You can't have that in a haunted house. Ghosts are, in any case, the children of the wavering, flickering shadows of the hearth fire. The steady light of electric bulbs is sure death to ghosts. It was necessary to investigate the house by flashlight, but I had a good one.

  "I now gave the house a real inspection, foot by foot and inch by inch. I had no trouble discovering the wiring and the microphones. I suppose the local TV repairman had set it up and was under the impression he had done a good job, but he could scarcely expect to fool the trained and practiced eye."

  Gonzalo said, "Then it was just as fake as you expected. And an obvious fake, too."

  "Why are you surprised?" asked DaRienzi. "All haunted houses are fakes, but very few, I admit, as obviously so as this one."

  "I suppose," said Drake, looking thoughtful, "that there was no point in lingering after that."

  "On the contrary," said DaRienzi. "I felt it important to stay the night. I was curious as to the sort of manifestations they would manufacture for me. Surely they hadn't wired the place for nothing. And it's a good thing I did, because, as I told you at the beginning, they did startle me. I took off my jacket and shoes and sat in the one chair that looked as though it would bear my weight and be reasonably comfortable. Then I waited."

  "Staying up all night is no fun," muttered Trumbull.

  "I didn't stay up all night," said DaRienzi. "The manifestations came long before the night was over."

  "What were they?" asked Gonzalo eagerly.

  "Nothing more than my name," said DaRienzi. "There was an eerie whisper, with just a trace of sound that told me it was coming in over a microphone. 'Marcellus DaRienzi, Marcellus DaRienzi,' then a pause, then again. It was repeated four times altogether and the last repetition of my name was allowed to die away into a third screech that sounded like 'Beware.' It was all very primitive.

  "When I decided the show was over at about two a.m., I got up, left, went to Harry's, and slept the rest of the night in comfort. By midmorning I was cleaning up and packing, and by midafternoon I left for New York."

  Drake said, "Did anyone ask what had happened the night before?"

  "No. They saw me and knew I was alive, but they knew what had happened. And I didn't feel any great need to discuss it."

  Gonzalo writhed in his seat and finally said, "I don't want to insult you, but that's a pretty dull ghost story."

  DaRienzi didn't seem the least insulted. "Actually," he said, "the ghost story had not yet begun. I was some twenty miles away from the village when it suddenly struck me like an alarm in the night. I had to pull the car over to the side of the road and start thinking."

  Avalon frowned. "Thinking about what, Marc?"

  "Don't you get it, Jeff? Once you found out your wife was all right, you suddenly realized you had to get to the true point: who had poked you? And once I found out that the house was a patent fake, I suddenly realized I had to get to the true point, too."

  "Which was?" said Gonzalo.

  "Which was: how did they know my name?"

  There was a general look of surprise about the table (and a fleeting smile crossed Henry's face).

  Trumbull put the general thought into words, growling, "Why shouldn't they know your name?"

  "Because I never gave it to anybody in the village," said DaRienzi, "and not one of them ever asked. I told you I've made a fetish of anonymity in connection with my work all my professional life. I was there to write my book, not to publicize myself. I told no one my name. I regretted allowing anyone to see me, even.

  "Do you see the problem this creates? The true believers of psychic phenomena are sometimes forced to admit fakery is involved, but they are then likely to insist that true paranormal effects are produced even in the midst of trickery. Well, then, despite all the wiring, despite the microphonic equipment, did something really paranormal take place? How could anyone have known my name?"

  Trumbull said, "I don't think there's much mystery, Marcellus. You must have told someone your name."

  "Rely on me,” said DaRienzi stiffly, “I didn't tell anyone my name."

  "In that case," said Trumbull, "someone must have recognized you."

  "I can't believe that. I have very few photos of myself and none at all for distribution." Halsted said, "They might have seen you, not your photograph. After all, you must give talks about your labors, and if you ever gave a talk in Burlington someone from the village may have happened to—"

  DaRienzi registered annoyance. "You haven't listened to me. I hold my anonymity sacred. I don't give talks, and I certainly never talked in Burlington."

  Rubin said, "Yours is not a common name, so they couldn't have made a lucky guess."

  "It's unthinkable that they would."

  Rubin said, "Was the name pronounced correctly?"

  DaRienzi's face relaxed into a smile. "Good for you. Actually, both names were mispronounced. Marcellus was stressed on the first syllable rather than the second, while DaRienzi was given a long 'i' sound at the close."

  "Which means," said Rubin, "that the so-called ghost saw your name but had never heard it pronounced."

  "Exactly," said DaRienzi. "I came to the same conclusion."

  "Which leads me to think," said Rubin, "that someone broke into your friend's summer house and ransacked your papers and belongings for your name."

  "I'm sure that isn't so," said DaRienzi. "They couldn't have ransacked the house without disturbing my papers and I would have noticed that at once. Besides, as it happened, I didn't have my name on anything there."

  "Well, then," said Gonzalo, with more than a trace of satisfaction, "you're in Jeff's position. You're forced to consider the paranormal."

  "I'm more in Jeff's position than you think, Mario, for, like Jeff, I solved the problem—or at least I found a satisfactory solution that involved nothing beyond the natural."

  "And what was that?" asked Avalon.

  DaRienzi said cheerfully, "Do none of you see it? It's much simpler than Jeff's solution and doesn't involve personal quirks that no one but the solver would be expected to know."

  There was a longish pause, and Drake shook his head. "I'm afraid you've got us. Unless Henry has a suggestion."

  "Henry," said Gonzalo abruptly, "what's the answer?"

  Henry, from his quiet station at the sideboard, said, "If I may be permitted to say so, gentlemen, the solution was obvious from the start."

  "Was it?" said DaRienzi a little captiously.

  "I'm afraid so. At the beginning of your stay in Vermont, you bought two weeks' supplies and more at the village store. At today's prices, it may well have come to a sizable bit of money."

  "It did," said DaRienzi, beginning to smile.

  "And surely, considering our plastic culture, you did not pay in cash."

  DaRienzi broke into a roar of laughter. "Got it! You got it! Of course I didn't pay cash. I shoved over my credit card—"

  "And your name was on it," said Henry. "And your signature had to be placed on the slip they stamped, and it was so common and ordinary an action that you thought nothing of it, and didn't recall it at once later on. I'm afraid it is much more difficult to be anonymous in our modern society than we imagine."

  Return to Table of Contents

  THE GUEST’S GUEST

  T

  he man looked down at his hand and said to the waiter who was standing at the head of the stairs, "The Milano Restaurant, Fifth and Eighteenth, second floor. Right?"

  "Perfectly correct, sir," said the waiter smoothly. "And you, I take it, are Mr. Halsted's guest."

  "That's right. Roger invited me." He handed his umbrella to the waiter, together with his
hat and so on, and carefully removed his coat. "You won't mind checking these for me, Waiter?"

  "Not at all. We have a small cloakroom for the special use of the Black Widowers on the occasion of their monthly banquet."

  "Good, good—I hope I'm not too late."

  "Not at all, sir. The Widowers are all here, but they are still in the cocktail hour. May I bring you something to drink?"

  "A dry martini, if you don't mind. —In there?"

  "That's right, sir."

  The man walked in and Roger Halsted, who was obviously on the lookout, said, "Ah, there you are, David. I was going to give you five more minutes before I started worrying."

  "No need," said the guest. "I had absolutely no trouble except for the traffic. It's a little slushy outside and there's something about even a trace of wet snow that seems to slow everything up."

  "So it does," said Halsted. "Here, let me introduce you, David. Fellow Black Widowers, this is my friend, David S. Rose, and you will have to forgive him if, after I introduce all of you, he doesn't remember your names. David is the most absent-minded person I know.

  279 "David, this tall drink of water with the ferocious eyebrows is Geoffrey Avalon, a patent attorney. This short drink of water with a beard he should be ashamed of is Emmanuel Rubin, a mystery writer. This fellow with the grayish-white hair and the scowl is Thomas Trumbull. He works for the government in something he's too ashamed to describe. This one with the little moustache that looks like a smear of dirt is James Drake, a retired chemist. Finally, there's this one who's dressed to kill, and whose color combinations sometimes make us sick. He's Mario Gonzalo, an artist."

  "And there's Henry," said Gonzalo.

  "Oh, right. Our most important member, Henry, our esteemed waiter, without whom no meeting could possibly be held."

  Avalon said, in his startling baritone, "Would Mr. Rose care to repeat our names and thus, perhaps, affix them in his memory?"

  Rose laughed. "I'd love to try, but I'd fail. It's all I can do to remember Roger's name. As the evening wears on, I may catch onto the names. Sometimes I do."

  "I mean it," said Halsted. "He's got the world's worst memory. Whenever he goes somewhere, his wife has to pin his destination to his shirt so that passersby can help him when he gets lost."

  "It's not that bad," said Rose.

  David Rose made a rather startling appearance. He was nearly six feet tall, but gave the impression of stockiness. He had bright-red hair, center-parted, and a bright-red beard of moderate length. He had the freckles to go with it, and he wore tortoise-shell glasses that lent him a definitely old-fashioned air. He was clearly an amiable fellow, however, and didn't seem the least put out by Halsted's teasing.

  Nor did he seem shy or withdrawn. The conversation returned to where it had been before he had arrived, and it consisted of the nearly inevitable discussion of the Persian Gulf crisis, and of Rubin's loud insistence that Saddam Hussein had to be wiped off the face of the ancient Land of the Two Rivers.*

  Ed. Note: This story was written shortly before the first Gulf War began.

  Avalon rumbled, "Who would disagree with you, were it not that we must ask what the consequences would be? Macbeth says, 'If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.' The question is that when it is done, would it indeed be done in the sense that there would be no new problems arising that would be worse than the problem we thought we were solving?"

  Rose said, "If we're going to quote Shakespeare, remember that Hamlet says that not knowing what lies ahead 'puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.'"

  Avalon said, "It's not cowardly to consider war only as the last resort, or to pause and think things out very carefully before doing anything that may not prove retrievable."

  Rubin said, "It's fight him now as he is, or fight him later when he's worked up nuclear weapons."

  The argument grew more heated until Henry's quiet voice said, "Gentlemen, dinner is served."

  It wasn't long after Thanksgiving and what the Black Widowers sat down to was the traditional feast. It began with melon and prosciutto, followed by a large bowl of lobster bisque, a salad, and then the inevitable roast turkey, with chestnut stuffing, cranberry sauce, yams, and string beans, and pumpkin pie—or, for those who preferred it, strawberry shortcake. There were also several kinds of breads and rolls, together with generous pats of butter, plus coffee or tea ad libitum.

  Roger Halsted, who knew what was coming, used host's privilege to put an end to the Persian Gulf discussion. He said, "We will, one and all of us, get indigestion if we argue out the thing while eating. Let's talk about something else."

  And, of course, he had no sooner said that than a deadly silence fell on the table, as no one appeared able to think of a suitable topic.

  David Rose grinned, his eyes glinting through his tortoiseshells. "Well, let me start then. This group meets every month, I take it." "Absolutely. Right here in the Milano," said Avalon, "and we've done so for decades."

  "And this is the full number of members? Or are some missing?"

  "One or two have died," said Avalon, "or have moved far away from the city, and they have been replaced. We six, however, and Henry are the full number right now and our identity has remained unchanged now for twenty years, though we are one and all of us growing rather precariously old."

  "It's delightful," said Rose. "I belong to a group that—"

  Gonzalo raised his hand. "You can't talk about yourself during dinner, Mr. Rose. That's for afterward, when we grill you."

  "Grill me?" For a moment he looked puzzled. Then he turned toward Halsted. "I remember now, Roger. You warned me about that."

  Halsted smiled. "I'm amazed you do remember. But don't worry—it won't hurt."

  "I'm not worried," said Rose.

  Henry had cleared die table and was serving the concluding brandy when Halsted rattled his spoon against the water glass and said, "Gentlemen, the time has come for grilling our worthy guest. Mario, suppose you take over the task of grill-master."

  "Sure," said Gonzalo. He turned to their guest. "We have your name, Mr. Rose, but what we'd like to know is what you do for a living."

  Rose said, "I'm a printer. I make a pretty fair living out of it, but what really gives my life meaning is that I'm a book collector. Not an undiscriminating^ one, of course. No one would have enough room to collect books indiscriminately. What I collect are old books on chemistry, pre-Lavoisier."

  Gonzalo looked puzzled at the final word, but said, "Does that mean you're a chemist, Mr. Rose?"

  Rose shook his head. "Not at all. I just like those old books and their old woodcuts of chemical instruments, their old ways of describing chemical experiments and so on. I have a number of medieval books on alchemy, too." He felt about his clothing. "I don't think I remembered to bring my card case, but you're welcome to visit my establishment and look at the books yourselves if you want to.—Come to think of it, wasn't one of you introduced as a retired chemist?"

  Drake coughed through the smoke of his cigarette and said, "That was I. I'd love to look at your collection."

  "Yes," said Halsted, "well, don't ask David where his shop is located, he probably doesn't remember. But I do and I'll write it down for you, Jim. It's really an interesting collection he has— you'll enjoy it."

  Gonzalo looked impatient. He said, "I'm the grill master and I don't want to go any deeper into the collection right now. During the meal, Mr. Rose said he belonged to some group which I think he was going to compare to the Black Widowers."

  "Well, yes, I was," said Rose.

  "Good. You are now free to do so," said Gonzalo. "Go ahead."

  "Thank you," said Rose. "I belong to a group called the Thursday Lunch and, as the name implies, we meet every Thursday for lunch—at the Arts Club, actually. It's a very nice group of slightly superannuated gentlemen—rather like yourselves. In fact, l
ast Thursday I just happened to witness the simultaneous arrival of three of the more important of the Thursday Lunchers, each one with his cane, struggling up the stairs toward the front door. I couldn't help but think that the cane is our mark of distinction."

  "How many attend the luncheon?" asked Gonzalo.

  "Actually, anywhere from fifty to ninety, depending on the weather and on the nature of the speaker."

  "You have speakers, then?"

  "Oh, yes. We begin the meeting at noon and there's a half-hour cocktail period. At twelve-thirty sharp, luncheon is served. At one-fifteen P.M., our entertainer is introduced—someone who sings or plays an instrument—and at one-thirty we have our speaker. At two P.M., we break up. The whole thing lasts only two hours, but it's all very congenial and it's the high point of the week for most of us— certainly for me." "How long have you been a member?" asked Trumbull suddenly.

  "Nineteen years. The club was founded in nineteen-oh-five, so it has a longish history as such things go."

  "What are the qualifications for entry?" asked Gonzalo.

  "To start with, it was a group of newspapermen who met for lunch every Thursday, and for a while it was intended for newspapermen only. However, you know how these clubs tend to expand. We now consider ourselves a group of communicators. Anyone who is engaged in reaching the public with information of some sort or other qualifies. This means the group now includes writers of all sorts—editors, publishers, members of the visual media, artists, and so on. I qualify primarily because I'm a printer, though being a book collector also helps.

  "As a matter of fact," Rose went on, "being a printer makes me a particularly useful TL-er, since we put out an annual book in connection with our annual banquet."

  "What kind of book?" asked Avalon.

  "Nothing elaborate. It lists all the members, with photographs of many of diem. It contains some essays—our president is a well-known writer and can be counted on to contribute—and artwork, photographs of all our guests, a list of those members who died in the past year, and so on. I print it without charge and, believe me, the money the club saves in this way is vital."