Jota chuckled. "Of course. Mustn't disturb him at the bank. The manager would chew his ears off . . . at any rate, such desperate liberties must never be taken. By the way, is anything happening in Shuteley?"
"What would happen in ShuteleyT' I said cautiously, wondering if by any chance he'd heard anything.
He hadn't. "As you say. Silly question."
"As a matter of fact," I said, "there is something going on. Maybe just a small thing, but something . . . No, don't ask questions. Wait till you get here."
"You intrigue me . . . Something happening in Shuteley seems like a contradiction in terms. But I can wait. Oh . . . how did Sheila take the great news that I was coming back?"
"Unenthusiastically," I said.
He chuckled again. "Don't worry. I promised. If you remember, I never promised before."
He rang off.
That was technically true, that he had never promised not to make a pass at Sheila. I wondered, however, if anyone but Jota would have considered such a thing worth saying. You weren't morally entitled to stab a man in the back because you'd never promised not to.
As I hung up, Wilma came in. She was breathless and rather indignant. "Mr. Mathers, there's a young man insisting on seeing you, and nobody but you. He looks like a camper, and he's . . . well, the things he's been saying to the girls -- "
"Send him in," I said. "Right away."
She looked surprised; but said nothing and went out.
The door opened again and a young Goliath entered. He wore a white T-shirt and shorts and was obviously one of the giants, probably the biggest of them all. I judged him to be six feet seven.
He had not been one of the giants with Snow White at The Copper Beech.
"Val Mathers?" he said, advancing with outstretched hand. "I'm John Smith."
"Really?" I said politely.
"No, not really, if you insist, but it's as fair a name as any, isn't it?"
"You wouldn't by any chance be Greg, would you?"
He dropped his hand. He was not pleased.
"How in fisk do you know that?" he snarled.
Not pressing my luck, I said: "Where's your camp, Greg?"
For a moment he simmered, and then decided to be friends again.
"In a bend on the river about a mile upstream."
I knew the place. It was three-quarters of a mile beyond my house, on the other side of the river, the north side.
He sat down without invitation, looked at me expectantly and said nothing.
He was blond, very goodlooking, perhaps nineteen or twenty. His accent puzzled me a little. It was not foreign, his speech was very clear, and yet I had never heard anyone speak quite like him. I had not missed those two words "fair" and "fisk." The natural thing to say would have been "as good a name as any," and "fisk" seemed to be a cuss word.
There was nothing strange about his shirt and shorts and shoes except that they fitted better than clothes generally do and looked as if they had just that moment been put on, brand new. But for the giants that was nothing strange.
He was completely at ease, and I was therefore puzzled by his easy manner and sudden silence -- as if he expected me to tell him why he'd come.
"Well, Mr. Smith?" I prompted. "Or Greg, as you like?"
"I want to insure against catastrophe in Shuteley during the next twenty-four hours," he said coolly.
"Catastrophe?" I said.
"Catastrophe."
"In the next ~twenty-four hours?"
"In the next twenty-four hours. You're remarkably up on the quicktake, Val."
There were lots of openings. I chose one. "You can't do business under a false or incomplete name. John Smith won't do. Greg won't do."
For a moment, for the second time, his eyes gleamed with a feral light, and I knew that this man was dangerous. He didn't like to be balked. Despite his easy manner, he was liable at any moment to become an animal. A huge, dangerous animal.
I tried another opening. "We can always supply better rates for particular contingencies. If you wanted to insure against flood, say -- "
He grinned, all easiness and friendliness again. "Flood's unlikely, isn't it? They tell me the river's never been lower."
"Catastrophe in twenty-four hours in Shuteley," I said, "is unlikely. Another thing, Greg -- you're over twenty-one?"
"What about it?"
"If you're not, there are difficulties."
"Do you sell insurance or not?"
"I don't sell insurance, Greg. I arrange it, if it seems to be to the mutual advantage of both parties. Now, let's see -- you want to insure, Greg? But you don't live in Shuteley."
"No."
"And -- in the next twenty-four hours?"
"We're only going to be here twenty-four hours," he said simply, "give or take an hour or two."
"What sort of sum have you in mind?"
"Nothing most. A million pounds, maybe. Perhaps two million."
It was time, I thought, to restore sanity to the conversation. "I'm afraid such a transaction would hardly be practicable," I said. "Although in theory insurance against any contingency is possible, such as rain on a certain day, failure of a crop, or delay in a certain delivery, there are always difficulties in definition, and it takes time to work out policy conditions. It would be quite impossible to draw up a policy within the time specified, to operate . . . "
Greg was laughing, a great roaring bellow of amusement that rattled the windows. "Val, you sound like an old man," he said.
"You're not really serious about this at all, are you?" I said thoughtfully.
He stopped laughing at once. "No. It was just an idea. Quite a most idea, really . . . but as you say, hardly practicable. I just wondered what you'd say."
"Who is the girl," I said abruptly, "whose dress disappears?"
Unsurprised, he answered: "All of them, when they wear Luxon."
"Luxon?"
"Well, you see, the idea is . . . it's one of those feminine paradoxes, arising out of the curious way women think . . . If you're wearing a dress, a perfectly decent dress, and bits of it disappear at times, that's all right. Nothing indecent about it, became it only seems to disappear. It's really there all the time."
"Why does nobody drink beer?"
"We don't like the taste. And it's grossing." ' ú
"Grossing?"
"Fattening."
"Greg, where do you come from?"
"Here."
"Here? Maybe. But here isn't Shuteley."
"Here," he repeated blandly.
"What's this about a duel?"
Again I had disconcerted and angered him. The red animal light flashed in his eyes.
"Nothing about a duel," he said shortly. "And what do you know about it, anyway? No, never mind."
He stood up and moved to the door. "Sorry you won't do a deal, Val," he said over his shoulder, his composure restored. "But as you guessed, I didn't really think you would. By the way, you know Gil Carswell, don't you?"
"Yes, but how -- "
"And Clarence Mulliner?"
"Yes. In fact -- "
"In fact, he'll arrive here at 3:10."
He closed the door quietly behind him.
Gil called me from the bank, for the first time ever, and said: "Val, I want to see you fight away. Come out for a drink."
"All right," I said. "See you in The Copper Beech."
"That chrome-plated morgue?"
"There won't be anybody there."
"I see. Right. In five minutes."
I left the office at once to walk to The Copper Beech.
At the door Tommy grabbed my lapels in his eagerness to tell me something. "She just passed again, Mr. Mathers. If you hurry you'll catch up with her."
"Thanks, Tommy," I said, released myself and went out into the mid-morning sun.
Fifty yards ahead was the girl in the pink suit. Although I could see only her back, there was no doubt whatever that she was Snow White. Her slim, smoothly rolling hips were
only one of the assets of a one-in-a-million shape to go with her one-in-a-million face; it would have been a crime to cover legs like hers with the sheerest nylons.
One small surprise: I wouldn't have expected such a girl to wear the same outfit two days running.
Since she was alone this time, I'd have hurried after her and stopped her. But it wasn't necessary. Glancing over her shoulder she saw me, and making no pretense that she didn't know me from Adam, stopped and leaned against a lamp standard to wait for me.
As I approached, her shoulders were suddenly bare. This time I saw more clearly what happened, when it happened. Out of the corner of my eye I still saw the lower part of her jacket and her skirt. It was as if my gaze had burned a hole in her clothes.
There were a few people in the street, and some of them were staring. For the most part, however, they seemed to be pretending that they hadn't noticed anything. (This was Shuteley.)
When I was ten feet away Snow White's jacket was complete again, but her skirt was abbreviated to playsuit length. Then she wore the whole suit again except for a large circular cut-out round her navel.
Cut-out wasn't quite the right word. Material and flesh merged into each other like candlelight and shadows.
More than her blue-black hair had made me think of her as Snow White. Her flesh all over -- and by this time I'd seen quite a lot of it, in aggregate -- was pale and creamy, and in this summer that was a rare achievement. None of the giants was pale. Every one of them was tanned, some lightly, some quite heavily.
She was with the giants but not of them.
I stopped. "Hello," I said.
She smiled.
"I'm Val Mathers," I said, "as I suspect you know very well."
I scored a point with this. Her eyes widened, and she asked: "What makes you say that?"
"You recognized me in the bar last night."
She nodded, admitting it. But she added nothing, admitting no more.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Miranda."
"Just Miranda?"
Her suit, oddly enough, was not changing any more. Perhaps what one saw depended on the angle of vision. Moved by a spirit of experiment, I stretched out my hand to touch her waist . . .
. . . She struck my hand hard, though without malice. "Wait for an invitation," she said coolly, and turned and walked away, to my disappointment. I had expected more from the encounter.
From the back, like the other girl, she wore perfectly normal clothes.
I found Gil in The Copper Beech. Although the lounge was not as empty as it had been the previous evening, only half a dozen people were there.
We sat in the corner where the campers had sat the evening before, and we had it to ourselves.
Gil and I were the same height and weight, and at one time had resembled one another. Now he had thick glasses and a permanent leave-me-alone frown, and I hoped I didn't look remotely like him.
Gil could have done anything. That is, he had the theoretical ability to do almost anything. In practice he had achieved nothing and never would.
Being sensitive myself, I understood him better than anyone else except possibly Barbara. But nobody could do anything for him. He couldn't do anything for himself.
The slightest criticism, the merest breath of condemnation, even meant as a jest, deeply wounded him. He was a bleeder. Scratch him, and he bled for days. If he made a genuine mistake, it took him a month to recover from it. But it didn't even have to be genuine. Someone merely had to hint that something, anything he'd done was a stupid thing to do, and he'd start to bleed slowly, silently.
Of course he defended himself. He spent his life and all his vast potential defending himself against attack, when he wasn't being attacked.
I was nearly as sorry for him as for myself. What was the use of being a near-genius when a casual remark by an office-boy could mean a month of misery for you?
Gil had married Barbara, another moody genius, who sketched and sculpted and wrote poetry and flatly refused ever to go further than five miles from the village green. She had roots, apparently.
"What do you know, Val?" Gil asked abruptly, when the waitress had brought our beers. "What do you think is going on?"
I took out a penny. "Let's toss for first innings," I said. Gil lost, and I put him in first.
"A gang of kids have been hanging round the house," he said. "They seem very interested in Garry."
Garry was Gil's two-year-old son. He was an only child and was going to remain so for two excellent reasons. Barbara couldn't have any more children, and neither -- as he had told me one moresely drunken night when we were both feeling sorry for ourselves -- could Gil.
"Can I have Dina?" he asked. "She'd be company for Barbara."
So that was it. "Jota's coming," I reminded him. "And he wants to stay with you."
"With us?" Gil was astonished. "You've got a great big house. We only have . . . "
He stopped.
They had an outside lavatory. The wooden stairs up to their flat were so worn that they looked as if they'd been carved curved. The floors creaked and were uneven . . . when houses had been revalued a year or two back, nearly everybody's valuation, including ours, was doubled, at least. Gil's had been halved -- human beings weren't supposed to live in such conditions any more.
Although as a bank clerk Gil didn't make a great deal of money, others in his position, married with one child, managed to live far, more comfortably. But neither Gil nor Barbara was remotely practical. They bought things they thought they needed, but didn't. They didn't buy things they did need.
"We can manage, I suppose," he said stiffly.
"You still want Dina?"
"Yes. I have to go to work, and Barbara's nervous."
"Dina won't be much help."
Gil shrugged impatiently. He was always impatient when anyone didn't instantly understand him, even though he had not supplied all the essential information.
"I don't think they mean any harm, the kids. Maybe they won't even come back. It's just that Barbara's alone in the house all day . . . I thought of Dina because she doesn't go out much. And if Jota's there . . . "
He let that hang, and I didn't take it off the hook. As far as we knew Jota had only once broken trust with either of us in that particular way. Gil knew what had happened -- Sheila had said something to Barbara. The idea of Jota making a pass at Barbara seemed fantastic to me, but it probably didn't seem so fantastic to Gil.
"All right," I said. "I'll ask her."
Rather surprisingly, Dina got on quite well with both Gil and Barbara. Moody geniuses don't like competition or criticism, and Dina never gave them any.
We said no more about Jota. Barbara would cling to Dina, and away from me, away from Sheila (whom she really trusted in a peculiar way) Dina would stick to the one person she knew.
"There's something else about those kids," Gil said. "They came into the bank and changed some money. Silver into notes. I was the only one to notice a certain very strange thing, and for some reason I didn't point it out to anyone else."
Gil felt in his pocket and produced two half-crowns, two florins, two shillings. He made no comment, so I examined them.
It wasn't hard to get the point. The half-crowns were both fairly shiny, dated 1961. The florins were old and worn, dated 1935. The shillings were dated 1952.
"I see what you mean," I said.
"Do you?" He sounded skeptical. Gil, with his inflated IQ, could never believe that anyone else had more capacity for putting two and two together than . . . well, Dina.
I looked more closely, One half-crown had an infinitesimal scratch across the Queen's hair. So had the other. The milling on the florins was identical, particularly worn just below the date.
"There were a lot more of these?"
"Yes."
"Any notes?" I asked.
"No. Well?"
He was challenging me to reach his own conclusion.
I said: "I know why you didn't
point this out."
"Do you?"
"They must be forgeries, of course. Forgeries so good they'd be hard to detect, and won't ever be detected now that they're mixed with other coins and the duplication isn't significant. Notes weren't forged, or duplicated, because the numbers would eventually give them away."
Snow White and the Giants Page 4
