The Big Clock

by Kenneth Fearing

  “Will you?” I said, looking hard at Stroud. “I think more likely it’s been destroyed.”

  Something moved in that rigid face of his, fixed in its casual, counterfeit smile.

  “No,” he said, at last. “I don’t think so, Miss Patterson. I have reason to believe your picture is quite safe.” He turned back to his desk and lifted the phone. Holding it, he gave me a hard, uncompromising stare it was impossible for me to misconstrue. “It will be recovered,” he told me. “Provided everything else goes off all right. Do you fully understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. God damn him. He was actually blackmailing me. It was me who should be blackmailing him. In fact, I would. “It damn well better be safe. I understand it’s worth thousands and thousands of dollars.”

  He nodded.

  “We think so. Now, what would you like to drink?”

  “She likes muscatel,” said Mr. Klausmeyer.

  “Rye,” I yelled. What did I care why he killed her? If the Fury was safe, probably the Fundamentals was safe, too, and it actually was worth a lot of money—now. And if it wasn’t safe, I could always talk up later. Besides, he really did collect my pictures. “Not just one. A whole lot. Order a dozen.” It would take something to stay in the same room with a murderer. And at the same time remember that dignity paid, at least in public.

  George Stroud X

  SOMETIME very early I woke on a couch I’d had moved into my office, put on my shoes and necktie, the only clothing I’d removed, and in a mental cloud moved over to my desk.

  My watch said a few minutes after eight. Today was the day. I still didn’t know how I would meet it. But I knew it was the day. The police would finish the check-up in Albany. Somebody would think of combing the building.

  Yesterday should have been the day, and why it wasn’t, I would never really know. When that Patterson woman walked in here I should have been through. I knew why she hadn’t identified me, the fact that I had not destroyed her picture, and my threat that I still would, if she opened her mouth. Artists are curious. I shuddered when I thought how close I’d come, actually, to getting rid of that canvas. She could still make trouble, any time she felt like it, and maybe she would. She was erratic enough. At about eight in the evening she’d packed herself off. But she might be back. At any moment, for any reason, she might change her mind.

  Nobody answered when I pressed the button for a copy boy, and at last I phoned the drugstore downstairs. Eventually I got my sandwich and my quart of black coffee. In Roy’s office, Harry Slater and Alvin Dealey were keeping the death watch.

  Shortly before nine the rest of the staff began to come in. Leon Temple arrived, and then Roy, Englund, and Don and Eddy reached the office almost simultaneously.

  “Why don’t you go home?” Roy asked me. “There’s nothing you can do now, is there?”

  I shook my head. “I’m staying.”

  “You want to be in at the finish?”

  “Right. How’s everything downstairs?”

  Leon Temple said: “Tighter than a drum. Phil Best has just spelled Mike. We’ve got the whole night side of the Van Barth down there, and some more special cops. I don’t understand it.”

  This was it. I felt it coming. “What don’t you understand?” I asked.

  “Why that guy hasn’t come out. What the hell. He’s here, but where is he?”

  “Maybe he left before we threw a line around the place,” I said.

  “Not a chance.”

  “He may have simply walked in one door and out the other,” I argued. “Perhaps he knew he was being followed.”

  “No,” said Leon. “That porter followed him right to the elevator. He took an express. He could be anywhere above the eighteenth floor. For all we know, he’s somewhere up here in our own organization.”

  “What can we do about it?” Englund asked.

  “He’ll show,” I said.

  “I thought time was essential, George,” Roy reminded me.

  “It is.”

  “It occurs to me,” said Leon, “if he doesn’t show—” So it was going to be Leon Temple. I looked at him and waited. “We could take those eyewitnesses, with the building police, and some of our own men, and go through the whole place from top to bottom. We could cover every office. That would settle it. It would take a couple of hours, but we’d know.”

  I had to appear to consider the idea. It already looked bad that I hadn’t suggested it myself. I nodded, and said: “You have something.”

  “Well, shall we do it?”

  If I knew where those eyewitnesses were, if I could be informed of their progress from floor to floor and from suite to suite, there might still be a way. No game is over until the whistle blows.

  “Get started,” I said. “You handle this, Leon. And I want you to keep me informed of every move. Let me know what floor you start on, which direction you’re working, and where you’re going next.”

  “O.K.,” he said. “First, we’ll get witnesses and cops on every floor above eighteen. They’ll cover the stairs, the elevators, and I’ll have them be careful to watch people moving from office to office, the mail-chutes, johns, closets—everything.” I nodded, but didn’t speak. “I think that would be right, don’t you?”

  God, what a price. Here was the bill, and it had to be paid.

  Of course this was whining, but I knew no man on earth ever watched his whole life go to bits and pieces, carrying with it the lives of those close to him also down into ashes, without a silent protest. The man who really accepts his fate, really bows without a quiver to the big gamble he has made and lost, that is a lie, a myth. There is no such man, there never has been, never will be.

  “All right,” I said. “Keep me informed.”

  “I’d like to take Dick and Eddy and Don. And some more, as soon as they come in.”

  “Take them.”

  “And I think those witnesses should be encouraged.”

  “Pay them. I’ll give you a voucher.” I signed my name to a cashier’s form, leaving the amount blank, and tossed it to Leon. “Good hunting,” I said, and I think I created a brief smile.

  Pretty soon the office was empty, and then Leon called to say they were going through the eighteenth floor, with all exits closed and all down-elevators being stopped for inspection. There was just one way to go. Up.

  I had a half-formed idea that there might be some safety in the very heart of the enemy’s territory, Steve’s or Earl’s offices on the thirty-second floor, and I was trying to hit upon a way to work it when the phone rang and it was Steve himself. His voice was blurred and strained, and somehow bewildered, as he asked me to come up there at once.

  In Hagen’s office I found, besides Steve, Earl Janoth and our chief attorney, Ralph Beeman, with John Wayne, the organization’s biggest stockholder, and four other editors. And then I saw Fred Steichel, M.E. of Jennett-Donohue. All of them looked stunned and slightly embarrassed. Except Steichel, who seemed apologetic, and Earl, who radiated more than his customary assurance. He came forward and heartily shook my hand, and I saw that the self-confidence was, instead, nervous tension mounting to near hysteria. “George,” he said. “This makes me very glad.” I don’t think he really saw me, though, and I don’t believe he saw, actually saw, anyone else in the room as he turned and went on, “I see no reason why we should wait. What I have to say now can be drawn up and issued to the entire staff later, expressing my regret that I could not have the pleasure of speaking to each and every one of them personally.” I sat down and looked at the fascinated faces around me. They sensed, as I did, the one and only thing that could be impending. “As you may know, there have been certain differences on our controlling board, as to the editorial policies of Janoth publications. I have consistently worked and fought for free, flexible, creative journalism, not only as I saw it, but as every last member of the staff saw it. I want to say now I think this policy was correct, and I am proud of our record, proud that I have enlisted the services of so mu
ch talent.” He paused to look at Hagen, who looked at no one as he stonily concentrated upon a scramble of lines and circles on the pad before him. “But the controlling board does not agree that my policies have been for the best interests of the organization. And the recent tragedy, of which you are all aware, has increased the opposition’s mistrust of my leadership. Under the circumstances, I cannot blame them. Rather than jeopardize the future of the entire venture, I have consented to step aside, and to permit a merger with the firm of Jennett-Donohue. I hope you will all keep alive the spirit of the old organization in the new one. I hope you will give to Mr. Steichel, your new managing editor, the same loyalty you gave to Steve and myself.”

  Then the attorney, Beeman, took up the same theme and elaborated upon it, and then Wayne began to talk about Earl’s step as being temporary, and that everyone looked to his early return. He was still speaking when the door opened and Leon Temple stepped inside. I went over to him.

  “We’ve drawn a blank so far,” he told me. “But just to be sure, I think we should go through both Janoth’s and Hagen’s offices.”

  In the second that the door opened and shut, I saw a knot of people in the corridor, a porter from Gil’s and a waiter from the Van Barth among them.

  “Drop it,” I said. “The assignment is killed.”

  Leon’s gaze went slowly around the room, absorbing a scene that might have been posed in some historical museum. His eyes came back to me, and I nodded.

  “You mean, send them all away?”

  “Send them away. We are having a big change. It is the same as Pompeii.”

  Back in the room I heard Wayne say to Hagen: “—either the Paris bureau, or the Vienna bureau. I imagine you can have either one, if you want it.”

  “I’ll think it over,” Hagen told him.

  “The organization comes ahead of everything,” Earl was too jovially and confidently reiterating. It was both ghastly and yet heroic. “Whatever happens, that must go on. It is bigger than I am, bigger than any one of us. I won’t see it injured or even endangered.”

  Our new managing editor, Steichel, was the only person who seemed to be on the sidelines. I went over to him.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I know you want more money,” he told me. “But what else do you want?”

  I could see he would be no improvement at all. I said: “Emory Mafferson.”

  I thought that would catch him off balance, and it did.

  “What? You actually want Mafferson?”

  “We want to bring out Funded Individuals. In cartoon strips. We’ll dramatize it in pictures.” Doubt and suspicion were still there, in Steichel’s eyes, but interest began to kindle. “Nobody reads, any more,” I went on. “Pictorial presentation, that’s the whole future. Let Emory go ahead with Funded Individuals in a new five-color book on slick paper.”

  Grudgingly, he said: “I’ll have to think that one over. We’ll see.”

  George Stroud XI

  THE REST of that day went by like a motion picture running wild, sometimes too fast, and again too slow. I called up Georgette, and made a date to meet her for dinner that evening at the Van Barth. She sounded extra gay, though I couldn’t imagine why. I was the only member of the family who knew what it meant to go all the way through life and come out of it alive.

  I explained that the last assignment was over, and then she put Georgia on the wire. The conversation proceeded like this:

  “Hello? Hello? Is that you, George? This is George.”

  “Hello, George. This is George.”

  “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “All right, now we’ve said hello.”

  “Hello, George, you have to tell me a story. What’s her name?”

  “Claudia. And she’s at least fifteen years old.”

  “Six.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Six. Hello? Hello?”

  “Hello. Yes, she’s six. And here’s what she did. One day she started to pick at a loose thread in her handkerchief, and it began to come away, and pretty soon she’d picked her handkerchief until all of it disappeared and before she knew it she was pulling away at some yarn in her sweater, and then her dress, and she kept pulling and pulling and before long she got tangled up with some hair on her head and after that she still kept pulling and pretty soon poor Claudia was just a heap of yarn lying on the floor.”

  “So then what did she do? Hello?”

  “So then she just lay there on the floor and looked up at the chair where she’d been sitting, only of course it was empty by now. And she said, ‘Where am I?’”

  Success. I got an unbelieving spray of laughter. “So then what did I do? Hello? Hello?”

  “Then you did nothing,” I said. “Except you were always careful after that not to pull out any loose threads. Not too far.”

  “Hello? Is that all?”

  “That’s all for now.”

  “Good-bye. Hello?”

  “We said hello. Now we’re saying good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”

  After that I phoned an agency and got a couple of tickets for a show that evening. And then, on an impulse, I phoned the art dealer who had sent us the photograph of the Louise Patterson exhibit. I told him who I was, and asked: “How much are Pattersons actually worth?”

  “That all depends,” he said. “Do you want to buy, or have you got one you want to sell?”

  “Both. I want a rough evaluation.”

  “Well. Frankly, nobody knows. I suppose you’re referring to that recent article in your Newsways?”

  “More or less.”

  “Well. That was an exaggeration, of course. And the market on somebody like Patterson is always fluctuating. But I’d say anything of hers would average two or three thousand. I happen to have a number of canvases of hers, exceptional things, you could buy for around that figure.”

  “What would the Judas bring? I mean the one with the hands. You sent us a photograph of it.”

  “Well, that’s different. It’s received a lot of publicity, and I suppose that would be worth a little more. But, unfortunately, I haven’t got the picture itself. It is really lost, apparently.”

  “It isn’t lost,” I said. “I have it. How much is it worth?”

  There was a perceptible wait.

  “You actually have it?”

  “I have.”

  “You understand, Mr.—”

  “Stroud. George Stroud.”

  “You understand, Mr. Stroud, I don’t buy pictures myself. I simply exhibit pictures, and take a commission from the sales made through my gallery. But if you really have that Judas I believe it can be sold for anywhere between five and ten thousand dollars.”

  I thanked him and dropped the phone.

  The big clock ran everywhere, overlooked no one, omitted no one, forgot nothing, remembered nothing, knew nothing. Was nothing, I would have liked to add, but I knew better. It was just about everything. Everything there is.

  That afternoon Louise Patterson came roaring into the office, more than a little drunk. I had been expecting her. She wanted to talk to me, and I packed us both off to Gil’s.

  When we were lined up at the bar at Gil’s she said: “What about that picture of mine. What have you done with it?”

  “Nothing. I have it at my home. Why should I have done anything with it?”

  “You know why,” she thundered. “Because it proves you killed Pauline Delos.”

  Three customers looked around with some interest. So then I had to explain to her that I hadn’t, and in guarded language, suppressing most of the details, I outlined the police theory of the case. When I had finished, she said, disappointedly: “So you’re really not a murderer, after all?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  A cyclone of laughter issued from her. For a moment she couldn’t catch her breath. I thought she’d fall off her chair.

  “I�
�m sorry, too, Mr. Stroud. I was being so brave yesterday afternoon in your office, you have no idea. God, what I won’t do to save those pictures of mine. The more I saw you the more sinister you looked. Come to think of it, you really are sinister. Aren’t you?”

  She was quite a woman. I liked her more and more. Yesterday she’d looked like something out of an album, but today she’d evidently taken some pains to put herself together. She was big, and dark, and alive.

  Gil ranged down the bar in front of us.

  “Evening,” he said to both of us, then to me, “Say, a friend of yours was hanging around here for the last week or so, looking for you. He sure wanted to see you. Bad. But he ain’t here now. A whole lot of people been looking for you.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve seen them all. Give us a couple of rye highballs, and let the lady play the game.”

  Then for a while Gil and the Patterson woman worked away at it. She started by asking for a balloon, which was easy, the only toy Gil had saved from the old fire next to the carbarns, and ended by asking for a Raphael, also quite simple, a postcard he’d mailed to his wife from Italy, on a long voyage.

  Something like eight drinks later Patterson remembered something, as I’d known she sooner or later would.

  “George, there’s something I don’t understand. Why did they want me to identify you? What was the idea?”

  She was more than a little drunk, and I gravely told her: “They wanted to find out who had that picture of yours. It was believed lost. Remember? And it’s priceless. Remember that? And naturally, our organization wanted to trace it down.”

  She stared for a moment of semi-belief, then exploded into another storm of laughter.

  “Double-talk. I want the truth. Where’s my picture? I want it back. I could have it back the minute you were found, according to Mr. Klausmeyer.” The memory of Don seemed to touch off another wave of deafening hilarity. “That angleworm. To hell with him. Well, where is it?”

  “Louise,” I said.

  “It’s worth a lot of money, it belongs to me, and I want it. When are you going to give it to me?”