The yellow-gloved hand moved ever so lightly, and the audience took the cue.
“DESTROY HIM!” they roared again, and once more, “DESTROY HIM!”
Then the light came on, suddenly and without warning. Matt saw the people blink at each other under the many colors and seem to wonder what they had said. Fred Simmons avoided his eye.
Ahasver spoke now in a more ordinary tone. “It is not given to us to know when the Nine Times Nine may be fulfilled. It cannot be in less than twelve hours, nor in more than a month. And that any who doubt may be convinced, I must needs tell you the name of this devil of yellow hate, this fiend who would destroy us. Watch your papers, and know the power of the Ancients when ye read of the death of Wolfe Harrigan.”
Matt looked at Wolfe. He was grinning contentedly.
Chapter 5
When Matt awoke that Low Sunday (Easter, according to the Children of Light), he had a moment’s difficulty placing himself. Then he saw the dart-board and remembered. He was lying on the couch which had received Raincoat, and somebody had thoughtfully thrown a blanket over him.
He lit a cigarette and began to reconstruct the evening—the drab meeting which had turned into such wild fantasy with the setting of the Nine Times Nine, then the return to this house and the long hours of solid work while Wolfe Harrigan, glowing with enthusiasm, had taken his new assistant through all the notes and files and shown him the raw materials for his work. Matt rememered fascination slowly giving place to pure weariness. The last he recalled was sitting on this couch while Wolfe read excerpts from the Gospel according to Joseph—mad stuff, about how Christ spent seven years in India and Tibet learning the secrets of the Ancients as an ambassador of the Essene sect.
That must have finished him. He looked at his watch. Good Lord! Two o’clock. But it must have been well on toward five when he had fallen helplessly asleep.
The hall door opened and Arthur Harrigan slouched in. “Where’s Pop?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I just woke up.”
“Jeez.” Arthur look at him with admiration. “Did you drag Pop out on a bender? Nobody’s done that in ten years.”
“We were working.”
“Working, huh?” Arthur delivered a man-to-man leer.
“Cigarette?”
“Thanks. I ran out, and the drugstore’s a long ways.” Arthur flopped into a chair and let the cigarette dangle from his lower lip. “You’re a strange one in this family,” he drawled.
“Why?”
“You look like maybe you’d been around. You’re human. The rest of us here—the Harrigan tribe—we’ve got too much money to be good and too much religion to be bad. We just hover. Watch out for us, though. Especially for Concha.”
“Why for her?”
“Maybe you’re just what she needs only she doesn’t know it yet. Day before yesterday she was going to be a saint. She’s on the rebound now, and here you are. You dress like hell and you’re ugly as sin; but hell and sin have their points, particularly when you’re her age. So watch out.”
Matt frowned. “I don’t know as I like that, Harrigan. It’s a hell of a way to talk about your sister.”
“Is it?”
The chapel door opened softly and Wolfe Harrigan’s gray head peered in. “Oh, you’re up, Duncan. Good. Want some breakfast?”
“Look, Pop,” Arthur broke in. “I’ve got to talk to you.”
“The answer,” said Wolfe, “is still no. What do you usually start the day with?”
“So Duncan’s breakfast counts for more than my life?”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“What are you trying to make out of me? Do you think I want to sit around on my fanny all my life and be the son of the Harrigans?” He crumpled his cigarette and tossed it away. “I want to do something on my own. And these guys’ll cut me in for five gr—thousand. Ten’d be better, but they’ll take five. You wouldn’t even notice it, Pop.”
“I’d notice you using it.”
“But look, Pop—”
“No.”
Arthur hesitated in irresolute fury, so irate that he stood almost straight. “All right. That’s that. I’ll see them tonight and tell them I’m Papa’s little angel and the hell with them. But we’re through, Pop, you and me. I mean that. You may be a ‘good man,’ but you’re hard as hell. And if anybody wants to put another curse on you—well, they can count me in.”
He left the room suddenly.
“‘Do something on his own’!” Wolfe Harrigan snorted. “Do you know what this is he wants to be cut in on? A gambling joint. He’s been a patron there. I knew about it, but what could I do? Finally, the proprietors decided they could get more money out of him another way. They want to take him ‘into partnership,’ and they’ll clean him and me, too, if they can. And he prates about the right to lead his own life!”
“So the Nine Times Nine got into the papers? Swell publicity.”
“No. It didn’t. Not a word. But what makes you think so?”
“Arthur’s grand speech. ‘If anybody wants to put another curse on you.’ I thought you’d decided not to tell the family about last night’s curse.”
“I didn’t. I was afraid they’d worry, after the Swami.”
“Then how did Arthur find out about the Nine Times Nine?”
“I don’t know,” said Wolfe Harrigan slowly.
“Have some more toast?” Concha urged.
Matt shook his head and mumbled “O, ank ou,” through a mouth filled with the remains of his fifth slice.
“Nobody eats much toast around here and I do like to watch it jump. Please, let me make you another.”
His mouth was clear again. “If I don’t have to eat it.”
“You’re nice.” She sliced off a fresh piece of bread, put it in the toaster, and pulled down the lever.
Matt supposed that she must have gone to mass that morning, but she couldn’t have worn her present costume of black slacks and a bright red sweater. Particularly not that sweater. She was being quite different from yesterday—neither a child nor a wraith, but a delightful blend of girl and woman.
“Tell me,” she said, “are you going to live here?”
“Good Lord, no. Why should I?”
“You’ve sort of been around this weekend. And it might be nice.”
Matt finished his tomato juice. “Madame is so kind.”
“No, really it might. I mean, having somebody young around the house besides Arthur. He’s such a droop.”
“How about Gregory?”
“A different kind of a droop. But you—you’re something else again. You’re alive and real the way—” her voice altered subtly—“the way Father is.”
“Your father,” Matt shifted the subject, “is just about the swellest person I’ve met in lo these long years. He does something to you. He makes you want to feel and act and work as intensely as he does. And it’s grand work he’s doing. At first I thought of it as just a job, but now I’m beginning to see …”
The girl half-pouted. “Don’t let’s talk about Father. Let’s talk about you.”
“Want to go slumming, Miss Harrigan? Life in the raw—”
She made a face. “Don’t be sill. And please call me Concha. I like that. Do you know what my name really is? It’s María Concepción Harrigán Pelayo, and I love it.” Even Harrigan became a liquid Spanish word as she uttered it.
Matt smiled. “You’re a sweet child, Concha.”
She stood up suddenly, her eyes fierce and her high breasts trembling. “Don’t say that. I’m not either a child. I’m almost eighteen. Do I look like a child? I can see your eyes; I know you don’t think so. And I don’t feel like a child, either. I know things—awful things—things a child couldn’t bear. And I’m holding them in me, like a woman, and they hurt. But I won’t be a child. I won’t!”
With a little pop, the toast shot up out of the machine. The scene was punctured. Concha stood there for a moment, her red lips twisting. T
hen she turned and ran out of the room. Matt didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying.
Often thereafter Matt tried to reconstruct that Sunday afternoon, but it was hard to fix people and their movements exactly in his mind. Concha disappeared after that breakfast scene; where she went he did not know. Arthur, obedient for all his fine show of rebellion, was sent off to fetch Sister Ursula and Sister Felicitas. Aunt Ellen, it appeared, had caught a cold over the rainy weekend and was unable to go to the convent for a necessary business interview about some charitable arrangements, so special permission had been secured. … (The Sisters of Martha of Bethany, Matt thought, seemed to lead a singularly free life for nuns. He had thought that all religious women were strictly cloistered and you talked to them through iron grilles.) Then at some point R. Joseph had come (apparently he regularly took Sunday dinner with the family), found no one free to talk to but Arthur, and wandered about disconsolately.
And most of this time Matt was locked up in the study with Wolfe Harrigan, going over more details that had not been covered the night before. The word “locked” is used literally.
“Afraid,” Wolfe explained, half-smiling, “that Friday night worried me more than I liked to admit. It was too easy for the Swami to push open those French windows. They’re bolted now, top and bottom. And the doors are locked, too. Concha says I’ll perish for fresh air, but I point out the hardihood of the continental races.”
At last Wolfe decided that their preliminary work was over. “I think you’ve got a rough idea now of what we’re doing. The important thing on the present agenda, as you must realize, is the Children of Light. There’s something purposive about that organization. It’s gathering power and it plans to use it. That business last night about the Communist bombing plane was absurd but indicative. Political allusions, and frequently far more direct ones, are creeping more and more often into the messages of the Ancients. What we need to know now is the identity of this Ahasver, and who’s running the shebang.”
“Haven’t you any idea yet?”
“I wouldn’t say that. I have an idea, but—well, to be frank, Duncan, I’m not telling even you. There are a few notes I haven’t shown you. You’ll read them eventually—and I hope it’s I who’ll give them to you.”
“What do you mean? Who else would?”
Wolfe was tossing darts again. “I merely meant this: Last night, after I’d tucked you in on the couch, I wrote out a holograph codicil to my will, naming you my literary executor.”
“Me?”
“You. After two days you know more about my work than my whole family put together. Yes, and I think you care more. At my death all my notes and papers will be handed over to you, to make what use of you please. Unless my judgment is slipping badly, it will be a good use. And I’ve warned you,” he added heavily as Matt started to speak, “how I feel about effusions of gratitude. See who that is at the hall door.”
Matt turned the knob of the bolt and opened the door. The caller was Concha. She had changed again, this time to a bright plaid dress with a demure black velvet bodice. It made her look roughly fourteen.
“Look,” said Matt. “Do me a favor? Stay one person long enough for me to get used to it.”
“‘A woman is a sometime thing,’” she half-sang. “You’ll get used to it, all right. Won’t he, Father?”
“I suppose he’ll have to if we’re to lead a peaceful existence around here. What did you want, Concha?”
She pointed. “Him.”
“Is that all? Very well, darling. I’m through with him for the time being. You can have him.”
“Hey,” said Matt. “Haven’t you people heard about the thirteenth amendment? Am I just property?”
Concha frowned at him in the manner of one appraising an offering on the auction block. “He looks strong, Massa Harrigan, powerful strong. Kin he tote and carry?”
“Sho nuff, Missy,” said Wolfe.
“Kin he pick cotton and plant taters?”
“Sho nuff, Missy.”
“And kin he play croquet?”
“Sho nuff,” said Matt.
“Don’t bother to wrap him. I’ll just take him this way.” She slipped her arm through Matt’s and led him gaily off.
Concha was being very resolutely gay now; and Matt, struggling constantly to adjust himself to the mercurial moods of her youth, began to feel far older than his twenty-seven years could possibly justify. He realized further that people who have not played croquet for many years should not blithely answer “Sho nuff” when asked if they play it.
But the game was fun all the same. The croquet lawn, scene of Matt’s struggle with Raincoat, lay just beyond the French windows of the study. The day had turned warm, and the late sun beat hotly back from these west-facing windows. It was good to be outdoors in that sun with a lovely, if exceedingly unsettling, girl. For lovely, Matt had decided upon mature reflection, she emphatically was.
Matt was hopelessly beaten from the start. Concha’s pleasure in knocking his ball to far corners of the earth was positively devilish; and she would generally coast comfortably up against the home post before he was halfway round. But, incompetent loser though he was, he was sorry when R. Joseph Harrigan descended upon them.
Joseph, it was obvious, was lonely. He had had no one to talk to all afternoon (Arthur could not be said to count as a responsive audience), and he was a man who had to talk. Matt must have looked like a promising auditor, for the lawyer bore down upon him eagerly.
The verb “bore” soon began to acquire a final d. Concha stood for a bit, tapping her mallet restlessly, and finally gave up and slipped around the back way into the house, unnoticed by Joseph, who was explaining the sort of man really needed on the Supreme Court.
The two men were sitting on a bench, across the croquet lawn from the French windows. Wolfe hadn’t turned on his light, Matt noticed idly, though it was getting near sunset. The last rays were now glaring against the uncurtained glass with blinding intensity.
Matt spurned a croquet ball with his foot and turned his attention back to Joseph. The man’s talk, he was slowly coming to realize, was honestly worth listening to. You can disagree completely with a speaker’s position, and still enjoy and respect the acuteness with which he presents it. So Matt felt now. Most of Joseph’s opinions he would have dismissed, coming from another, as sheer reactionary drivel; but he sensed in this exponent a certain rockbound integrity which impressed him. He began to listen more closely, to answer, even occasionally, to his surprise, to agree. Despite the manner and appearance of the plutocratic politician, there was in R. Joseph Harrigan something of the same strength and purposiveness which Matt so admired in his brother.
“You can say what you like, sir,” he was protesting, “about inefficiency and bad administration on the WPA arts projects. I worked on one; I could probably tell more stories of that sort than you’ve ever heard. But in spite of all that, you must admit the necessity and the value of—” He stopped dead.
“Go on, young man.” R. Joseph was interested.
The sun had left the French windows. Now you could see the study behind them dimly outlined in the glow of a plentiful fire. And you could see something more.
“I’m sorry, sir. But look at those windows.”
Joseph looked. The glow revealed the front of Wolfe’s desk. Wolfe’s own chair was invisible in shadow, but bending over the desk was a strange figure. The face was hidden, but the costume was clearly visible. Leaning over Wolfe Harrigan’s desk was a man in a yellow robe.
“Young man,” said Joseph tensely, “we’re going inside.”
Matt was with him on that. There was only one conceivable reason why Ahasver should come to Wolfe Harrigan’s study. He never doubted for an instant that the man was Ahasver. The face might be invisible, but that robe, that hood, were identification enough.
Matt started toward the windows, but R. Joseph, alert and efficient in the emergency, laid a hand on his arm. “They’re locked, re
member. Besides, he can see us coming if we go that way. Come around back.” And the lawyer set off at a trot around the corner of the house to the back door. But Joseph was not built for physical agility; his heroic ride to the rescue began with a tumble over a wicket.
Matt didn’t even pause to help him to his feet. The more he thought of the Yellow Robe in the study, the more he knew that he was needed there. His ears rang with the tumultuous triple shout of “DESTROY HIM!” Wolfe may have scoffed at the menace of the Ancients; but the physical threat of the presence of Ahasver himself was another matter.
As he reached the back door he looked around. R. Joseph had turned the corner at a great rate, only to come a cropper and just miss braining himself against the stone back of the fireplace. Despite the urgency of the moment, it was hard to keep back a snort. Toppled dignity is ludicrous even in the shadow of danger. But Matt controlled himself, slipped into the hall, and rapped loudly on the study door.
There had been no answer when Joseph, not so impeccably neat as usual, joined him. “Try the knob,” he suggested.
“I tried. The latch is on.”
“Then the chapel door. That might—”
Miss Ellen Harrigan looked up in amazement from her rosary as her brother and that strange young man dashed into the chapel and began to pound on the door of the study, rattling the knob and shoving at the wood with their shoulders.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“We saw … man in there … yellow robe … Wolfe … might be danger …” Joseph panted.
“Might be?” said Matt. “Something’s wrong, God knows. He doesn’t answer.”
“Do you think we could break it down?”
Nine Times Nine Page 6
