It was something like learning a part.
Over and over again, he rehearsed each step in his mind. The store would close at five tonight. The employees would be anxious to get home to their families. This had been a trying, harrowing few weeks, and tonight it would be over, and the employees would rush into the streets and into the subways and home to waiting loved ones. A desperate wave of rushing self-pity flooded over him. Who are my loved ones? he asked silently. Who is waiting for me tonight?
Someone was talking to him. He looked down, nodding.
“Yes, yes,” he said mechanically. “And what else?”
The person kept talking. He half listened, nodding all the while, smiling, smiling.
There had been many loved ones in the good days. Women, more women than he could count. Rich women, and young women, and jaded women, and fresh young girls. Where had he been ten years ago at this time? California? Yes, of course, the picture deal. How strange it had seemed to be in a land of sunshine at that time of the year. And he had blown the picture. He had not wanted to, he had not wanted to at all. But he’d been hopelessly drunk for … how many days? And you can’t shoot a picture when the star doesn’t come to the set.
The star.
Randolph Blair.
Tonight, he would be a star again. Tonight, he would accomplish the murder of Atkins with style and grace. When they closed the doors of the store, when the shoppers left, when the endless questions, the endless requests stopped, he would go to Atkins’s office. He would not even change his clothes. He would go straight to Atkins’s office and he would collect his pay envelope and he would shoot him. He would run into the streets then. In the streets he would be safe. In the streets Randolph Blair—the man whose face was once known to millions—would be anonymously safe. The concept was ironical. It appealed to a vestige of humor somewhere deep within him. Randolph Blair would tonight play the most important role of his career, and he would play it anonymously.
Smiling, chuckling, he listened to the requests.
The crowd began thinning out at about four thirty. He was exhausted by that time. The only thing that kept him going was the knowledge that he would soon kill Mr. Atkins.
At four forty-five, he answered his last request. Sitting alone then, a corpulent unsmiling man, he watched the clock on the wall. Four fifty. Four fifty-two, fifty-seven. Four fifty-nine.
He got off the chair and waddled to the elevator banks. The other employees were tallying the cash register receipts, anxious to get out of the store. He buzzed for the elevator and waited.
The doors slid open. The elevator operator smiled automatically.
“All over, huh?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s all over,” Blair said.
“Going to pick up your envelope? Cashier’s office?”
“Mr. Atkins pays me personally,” he said.
“Yeah? How come?”
“He wanted it that way,” he answered.
“Maybe he’s hoping you’ll be good to him, huh?” the operator said, and he burst out laughing.
He did not laugh with the operator. He knew very well why Atkins paid him personally. He did it so that he would have the pleasure each week of handing Randolph Blair—a man who had once earned five thousand dollars in a single week—a pay envelope containing forty-nine dollars and thirty-two cents.
“Ground floor then?” the operator asked.
“Yes. Ground floor.”
When the elevator stopped, he got out of it quickly. He walked directly to Atkins’s office. The secretary-receptionist was already gone. He smiled grimly, went to Atkins’s door, and knocked on it.
“Who is it?” Atkins asked.
“Me,” he said. “Blair.”
“Oh, Nick. Come in, come in,” Atkins said.
He opened the door and entered the office.
“Come for your pay?” Atkins asked.
“Yes.”
He wanted to pull the Luger now and begin firing. He waited. Tensely, he waited.
“Little drink first, Nick?” Atkins asked.
“No,” he said.
“Come on, come on. Little drink never hurt anybody.”
“I don’t drink,” he said.
“My father used to say that.”
“I’m not your father.”
“I know,” Atkins said. “Come on, have a drink. It won’t hurt you. Your job’s over now. Your performance is over.” He underlined the word smirkingly. “You can have a drink. Everyone’ll be taking a little drink tonight.”
“No.”
“Why not? I’m trying to be friendly. I’m trying to …”
Atkins stopped. His eyes widened slightly. The Luger had come out from beneath Blair’s coat with considerable ease. He stared at the gun. “Wh … what’s that?” he said.
“It’s a gun,” Blair answered coldly. “Give me my pay.”
Atkins opened the drawer quickly. “Certainly. Certainly. You didn’t think I was … was going to cheat you, did you? You …”
“Give me my pay.”
Atkins put the envelope on the desk. Blair picked it up.
“And here’s yours,” he said, and he fired three times, watching Atkins collapse on the desk.
The enormity of the act rattled him. The door. The door. He had to get to it. The wastepaper basket tripped him up, sent him lunging forward, but his flailing arms gave him a measure of balance and kept him from going down.
He checked his flight before he had gone very far into the store. Poise, he told himself. Control. Remember you’re Randolph Blair.
The counters were already protectively concealed by dust sheets.
They reminded him of a body, covered, dead. Atkins.
Though he bolted again, he had enough presence of mind this time to duck into a restroom.
He was unaware of how long he had remained there, but when he emerged it was evident he had completely collected himself. His walk suggested the regal, or the confident calm of an actor sure of his part. And as he walked, he upbraided himself for having behaved like a juvenile suddenly overwhelmed by stage fright.
Randolph Blair pushed through the revolving doors. There was a sharp bite to the air, the promise of snow. He took a deep breath, calmly surveyed the people hurrying along, their arms loaded with packages.
And suddenly he heard laughter, a child’s thin, piercing laugh. It cut into him like a knife. He turned and saw the laughing boy, tethered by one hand to the woman beside him, the boy’s pale face, his arm and forefinger pointing upward, pointing derisively.
More laughter arose. The laughter of men, of women. A festive carousel, in the show window to one side of him, started up. Its music blared. It joined in the laughter, underscoring, counter-pointing the laughter.
Blair felt caught in a punishing whirlpool. There seemed no way he could stop the sound, movement, everything that conspired to batter him.
Then the sight of policemen coming out of the store was completely unnerving. They appeared to be advancing toward him. And as he pulled the Luger on them, and even as he was over-powered and disarmed, a part of his mind felt that this was all unreal, all part of a dramatic role that he was playing.
But it was not a proper part for one wearing the red coat and trousers, the black belt and boots of a department store Santa Claus, the same clothes three thousand other men in the city were wearing. To blend into their anonymity, he lacked only a white beard, and he had lost his in the frantic exit he had made from Atkins’s office.
And of course to a child—and even to some adults—a Santa Claus minus a beard might be a laughing matter.
CHARLES WILLEFORD
A GENUINE ALECTRYOMANCER
February 1959
AT AHMM we like to think of Charles Willeford as one of our own—he actually worked as an associate editor for the magazine for a few years in the 1960s. Though he wrote and published widely, he is perhaps best remembered for his Hoke Moseley mysteries published in the 1980s, most notably Miami B
lues, which was also made into a movie. His untimely death in 1988 put an end to a remarkable career. Here’s a story from early in his association with AHMM.
On the surface, the situation is quite mad, and yet there appears to be an irrefutable logic in the chain of incidents leading to my predicament. There it floats, bobbing, just beyond my grasp, and I have to believe that if I don’t snag it with my fingers this time, I certainly shall on the next or the next stroke … and I must keep swimming, keep trying. There isn’t much else I can do!
Where did the old alectryomancer come from in the first place? I didn’t see or hear him approach on the soft sand. I looked up from the sea and there he was, waiting patiently for me to recognize him. The blue denim rags covering his thin hips and shanks were clean. His dusky skin was the shade of wet No. 2 sandpaper, and he held a shredded-brimmed straw hat in his right hand. Once he had my attention, he nodded his head amiably and smiled, exposing toothless gums the color of a rotten mango.
“What do you want?” I said rudely. One of my chief reasons for renting a cottage on the island of Bequia was the private beach.
“Please excuse my intrusion, Mr. Waxman,” the native said politely, “but when I heard that the author of Cockfighting in the Zone of Interior had rented a cottage on Princess Margaret Beach, I wanted to congratulate him in person.”
I was mollified, and at the same time, taken aback. Of course, I had written Cockfighting in the Zone of Interior, but it was a thin pamphlet, privately printed, issued in a limited edition of five hundred copies. The pamphlet had been written at the request of two well-to-do Florida cockfighters who hoped to gain support for the sport from an eastern syndicate, and I had been well paid. But it certainly wasn’t the type of booklet to wind up in the hands of a Bequian native in the British West Indies.
“Where did you get a copy of that?” I said, getting to my feet and brushing the damp sand off my swimming trunks.
“Gamecocks are my source of livelihood,” he replied simply. “And I read everything I can concerning gamefowl. Your pamphlet, sir, was excellent.”
“Thank you, but my information was excellent. I didn’t know you fought gamecocks on Bequia, however. According to an English mandate passed in 1857, cockfighting was forbidden throughout the empire.”
“I don’t fight gamecocks, Mr. Waxman.” He smiled again and held up a hand. “My interest in gamefowl lies in a parallel art: alectryomancy.”
I laughed, but I was interested. I had gone to Bequia because it was a peaceful little island in the Grenadines, and I had hoped to finish a novel. But in three months time I hadn’t written a line. Bored, and with little to do but stare sullenly at the sea, I found myself enjoying this curious encounter.
“That’s a parallel art,” I agreed, “but I didn’t know there were any practitioners of alectryomancy left in the Atomic Age.”
“My rooster has made some fascinating predictions concerning the atom, Mr. Waxman,” the alectryomancer confided. “If you would care to visit me sometime, we could discuss his findings. Or possibly, you might be more interested in obtaining a personal reading—”
“I don’t need a gamecock to make predictions for me,” I said truthfully. “If I don’t get some work done on my book soon, I’ll run out of money and be forced to return to the States and look for work.”
“Isn’t your writing going well?”
“It isn’t going at all.”
“Then there must be a reason. And only through alectryomancy—”
I cut the interview short and returned to my cottage. After fixing a cup of coffee and thinking about the odd meeting for a few minutes, I came to the conclusion that there might possibly be an article in it. Three or four thousand words on the old fellow’s occupation might conceivably find a market in the U.S., and I wasn’t getting anywhere with my novel. Of course, alectryomancy is usually considered as a false science, on a par with astrology. A circle is described on the bare ground; the alphabet is then written around the outer edge of the circle, and a grain of corn is placed on each letter. A rooster is tethered to a stake in the center by his left leg, and then as he pecks a grain of corn from the various letters, the letters are written down, in order, and a message of—the science is crazy, really! For one thing, before there could be any validity to the message, the rooster would have to be able to understand a language. And a chicken’s brain is about the size of a BB. Still, an article about a practicing alectryomancer would be of interest to a great many people, and I needed the money.
I didn’t look the alectryomancer up immediately; things are not done so speedily in the West Indies. I prepared myself for the impending interview by thinking about it for a couple of days, and then made my way to the seer’s shack on Mt. Pleasant. Bequia is a small island, and it wasn’t difficult to learn where he lived.
“Where,” I asked my maid, “does the old man with the rooster live?”
It is to the woman’s credit that she knew to whom I referred, because every resident on the island owns a few chickens and at least one rooster. She gave directions I could understand, and even went so far as to draw a crude map with her finger on the sandy beach in front of the cottage.
Mt. Pleasant isn’t a high mountain, but the path was crooked and steep and the walk of forty minutes had winded me by the time I reached the old man’s shack at the peak. He greeted me warmly and invited me to enjoy the loveliness of his view. Nine miles away, the volcanic, verdant mass of St. Vincent loomed above the sea, and behind us toward the southwest, the smaller islands of the Grenadines glimmered like emeralds.
“Your view is beautiful,” I said, when I was breathing normally again.
“We like it,” the old native nodded his head.
“We?”
“My rooster and me.”
“Oh, yes,” I said casually, snapping my fingers. “I’d like to take a look at him.”
A low whistle from the alectryomancer and the rooster marched sedately out of the shack he shared with his master and joined us in the clearing. He was a large whitish bird of about six pounds, with brown and red feathers splashing his wings and chest. His comb was unclipped, and his dark red wattles dangled almost to his breast. He eyed me suspiciously for a moment, cocking his head alertly to one side, and crowed deep in his throat before turning away to scratch listlessly in the dirt.
“Looks like a Whitehackle cross.”
“Correct, Mr. Waxman,” the alectryomancer said respectfully. “His mother was a purebred Wild Jungle Fowl.”
“I suspected as much. Only purebred gamecocks can be utilized in alectryomancy, as you must know,” I added pedantically.
“Of course.”
For a few moments we sat quietly on the ground watching the rooster, and then I cleared my throat. “As long as I’m here, I may as well have a reading.”
“I’ll change my clothes.” The old man smiled, exposing his raw gums for my inspection, before hobbling painfully into his shack. The shack itself was an unusual structure, built of five-gallon oil tins, smashed flat, and topped by a mauve-colored fifty-gallon oil drum, which held, I presumed, rain water. Forming an even square around the clearing were several dozen additional five-gallon tins, each containing a potted arrowroot plant. I don’t suppose an alectryomancer does too much business on a small island, and the arrowroot plants probably supplemented the old man’s income.
I was unprepared for the change in attire and started slightly when the alectryomancer reappeared. A dirty white cotton turban had been wrapped around his bald head, and he wore a long-sleeved blue work shirt buttoned to the neck. Tiny red felt hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds had been sewn in thick profusion on the shirt, and larger hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds had been sewn on the pair of faded khaki trousers he now wore instead of the ragged blue denim shorts. His feet were still bare, however, which rather spoiled the effect.
“That’s a unique costume, Mr.—?”
“Wainscoting. Two Moons Wainscoting. Thank you, sir.�
�
“Is Two Moons your given name, Mr. Wainscoting?”
“You might say that. It was given to me when I was a small boy. My father took me across the channel to St. Vincent when I was eleven years old. When I returned, my friends asked me what I had seen over there. ‘St. Vincent has a moon, too,’ I told them. And I’ve been called Two Moons ever since.”
“It’s a perfect name for an alectryomancer.”
“I’ve always regarded it highly. And now …” Two Moons tethered the Whitehackle cross to a stake in the clearing with a piece of brown twine, and proceeded to draw a large circle around him with a pointed stick.
“The ancient Greeks,” I said, to reveal to the man that I knew a few things about alectryomancy, “always described the circle on the ground prior to tethering the gamecock in the center.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “But that isn’t the way we do it in the West Indies. Every island race has its own peculiarities. Of course, I can see some merit in describing the circle first, but on the other hand, it is possible that a portion of the circle will be rubbed out inadvertently when reentering it to tether the cock. I have tried both methods, and in all probability I shall use the Greek method again some time in the future. But the system employed doesn’t affect the reading, or so I have learned through experience.”
“You could get into an argument on that statement.”
“You can have an argument on anything pertaining to alectryomancy,” Two Moons said cheerfully, and he began to draw the letters of the alphabet in a clockwise direction about the outer perimeter of the circle. He apparently took considerable pride in his work, drawing large capital letters with a pointed stick, rubbing them out again when they didn’t come up to his high standards, and doing them over again. He measured the distances between each letter, using his stick as a ruler, and found it necessary to redraw the S and T because they were too close together.
“Now,” he said when he was finished, “the hard part is over. What is your birth date, Mr. Waxman?”
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