tantaliz

by Isaac Asimov ed.

  People who had known him in those years described him as a thin, hairy, shy, eccentric little man with a delicate constitution; and while Mr. Nation found it possible to believe almost anything he had heard about Emmanuel Vogel, he could not bring himself to credit the reports of his physical frailness, since all his life he had performed, as a matter of course, work which would have caused the average, healthy dray-horse to stagger and collapse in the streets.

  John Littleton, the lawyer, said: "I know he got his own laundry sooner or later. The question is, how long did it take?"

  It took ten years," continued Mr. Nation. "By that time he'd saved a thousand dollars, and had already found a ground-floor location in Harlem where he hoped to prosper."

  In the rear of the living-room, which was already becoming a little dusky, the Filipino houseboy was stuffing broiled mushroom caps with a mixture of crab and lobster meat He listened with pride to the conversation, smiling and nodding wisely each time Mr. Nation made a point It was his opinion that his employer was not aggressive enough, that too often he permitted his inferiors to dominate a conversation.

  The houseboy placed the mushrooms on circular pieces of thin toast, and added to each a portion of a golden-brown, spiced sauce which he had perfected himself. When he first had come to work for Mr. Nation, he sometimes would put down his tray, rub his hands together, and laugh boisterously at his employer's witty remarks, rolling his eyes and glancing seductively at the guests, as if urging them to appreciate and applaud too; but Mr. Nation had told him finally that such partisanship, while heart warming and most flattering, was not entirely in keeping with the stricter usages of good form, and he had had to give it up. Now he arranged the mushrooms on a silver platter and moved silently toward the guests, his teeth white and gleaming, and at that instant Mr. Nation was saying:

  "It's necessary for me to describe the new place in detail, I'm afraid. Well, to begin with, there was a large front room that faced on the street; behind it, there were two smaller connecting rooms that opened onto a tenement hallway. The one window in the main room looked out on a narrow courtyard at the side.—Have I made myself clear? Do you visualize the layout of Emmanuel's laundry?"

  The guests said they did, and he went on: "After taking the place, Emmanuel's first move was to rent the two smaller rooms to an old colored woman who lived alone, and who was content to mind her own business. When the deal between them was made, the connecting door was locked and bolted from the laundry side, but not being satisfied with that, Emmanuel had it nailed securely. He had iron bars put across the window that faced the court, bars so close together that not even a sparrow hawk could have got through them. Afterwards, he had two extra locks and a heavy chain put on the street door, and as a further precaution, the workmen added a strong iron bolt—all, you understand, on the inside."

  John Littleton selected a mushroom, bit into it, swallowed, and said, "He'd already invested his capital, so he couldn't have had much loose cash lying around at the time. Then what was he trying to protect? What did he really have to lose?"

  Marcella Crosby sat forward excitedly in her chair. It was axiomatic, she said, that those who have the least must guard it the most faithfully. She pointed out that when we love and are loved in return, we leave our riches unguarded for all to accept or destroy; but when love is gone, we see, at last, what has slipped through our fingers, and struggle to keep what we no longer possess.

  When we are young and full of life, and have health in profusion, we consider those things our peculiar right, and accept them without gratitude. While we have our treasure, we give no thought to it, as if our very indifference to the things we have in abundance were our assurance they would last forever; but when we are old and ailing, and life has become nagging, painful, and hardly worth keeping, we discover, at length, that it is too precious to be given up, and make the most elaborate efforts to preserve it, to hold on to the unprofitable days we have left

  Marcella confessed that the fable of the barn door and the missing horse had always interested her, not because of its innate truth, but because of its sly, ingenuous falsity. To be accurate, to accord with the perverse nature of man's mind, the moral should be reversed to warn us all that there's no use locking the barn door until we know for certain that the horse is actually gone.

  Her voice grew self-conscious, hesitated, and died away.

  Phil Cottman, who published her work, who advertised her as the greatest mystic poet since William Blake, and who was embarrassed by her imagery until it was safely between the covers of one of her volumes, looked down at the rug and said, "Perhaps Emmanuel had accumulated more money than the price of his laundry, and the extra cash was hidden somewhere about the place. If that's true, then his precautions were sensible enough."

  Outside, the park was now bathed in the soft, full light of the sun, and Dr. Flugelmann, observing it in silence, her eyes half closed and a little sad, waved suddenly in the direction of the bird house and said, "Oh, no, no! It wasn't anything definite, anything real, he feared. The laundry with its locks and bolts and bars was only his little white bird house where he hoped to be safe. Oh, I know the type so well, and have had them in treatment many times. Always, they have a sense of their own doom: they fear they will be robbed, they fear they will be murdered, they fear, beyond the next building, there lurks some terror for them alone."

  She turned to Walter Nation, asking him if Emmanuel had expressed his anxieties to others, and if they were now part of the record of his death; but he said that he did not know. A moment later he went on with the details of Emmanuel's life in the new neighborhood. During the months he had lived there, he had not once gone out of the small area from which he drew his living. He had had no assistants. He had continued to work long hours, longer than ever, now that he was laboring for himself alone. He was never known to go to the theater, or even to the movies. He did not read. He did not drink or gamble. He did not have a friend with whom he could talk, or to whom he could confide his ambitions or his fears. He had no sweetheart.

  And so Emmanuel lived for a time, and then, after delivering a parcel of laundry to a customer one night, he stopped in the cigar store across the street from his place to buy a pack of cigarettes. It was 10 o'clock at the time, and the clerk, who knew him as well as anybody, asked if he were now going to bed. Emmanuel replied that he'd like to, but could not, as he had at least two hours more work to do that night Then the clerk watched him cross the street, unfasten bis system of locks, enter his laundry, and turn on the lights. Fifteen minutes later, the clerk happened to look across the street again, and seeing the fights in the laundry go out he said to himself, "Emmanuel didn't do his work after all." He started to turn away, to go back behind his counter, but he had an odd sense of disaster at that moment, a feeling that something was wrong across the street, and he stood irresolute inside his shop, staring at Emmanuel's door.

  At about the instant the clerk had seen the lights go out, Emmanuel's tenant, the old colored woman who lived in the adjoining rooms, heard three pistol shots from the interior of the laundry. The sound alarmed her, and she went to the connecting door and called out, "Are you all right? Is everything all right in there?" But she got no answer, and she hurried through the door of the tenement house and onto the sidewalk, bumping into a policeman who was passing. What she told the policeman as she disengaged herself was not known, but the chances were she did not say that she had heard three shots. If she did tell him that, then his assumption that he was dealing with a routine suicide seemed, in Mr. Nation's opinion, almost incredible.

  "She was excited at the time," said John Littleton. "Maybe she jumped at the conclusion, and simply told the cop that the laundry-man had shot himself. Maybe the cop accepted her theory without question."

  Mr. Nation considered this explanation logical. At any rate, neither the policeman nor the old woman had thought murder a possibility as they approached the laundry door. "All this had taken only a minute or so, but
already a crowd had gathered, and when the policeman found the door locked, and realized he couldn't get in without breaking it down, he thought of the transom. There was a small boy in the crowd, so the policeman lifted the boy onto his shoulders, and told him to crawl through the transom and open the door from the inside; but the boy found out soon enough that Emmanuel had thought of the transom too, and that it was nailed shut Then the policeman handed the boy his club, and told him to break the glass with it. The boy did so, and lowered himself into the room. Almost at once the group outside heard him fumbling at the locks and bolts, but he solved them all at last, and the door swung open upon the most beguiling mystery of our time."

  The telephone rang just then, and Mr. Nation lifted the receiver. When he replaced it, he went on to say that, in the long, precise wedge of brightness from the policeman's flashlight, Emmanuel Vogel was seen lying in the center of his room, rapidly bleeding to death. There was an expression of horror on his face, as if what he had feared in secret had come true at last, and as the policeman and the crowd watched him, the arm that had rested against his thigh twitched, relaxed slowly, and slid forward to the floor. He moved his lips three times, as if trying to speak, then shuddered and slumped somehow from within. His eyes opened and fixed themselves on the ceiling in the patient, impersonal stare of death, and the obsessed purpose of his harried and insipid life was now fulfilled.

  The first thing the policeman noticed was that there was no gun near the body; the next was that the victim had been shot three times—twice in the head, once through the right hand. When the significance of these facts became clear to him, he told one of the people outside to call police headquarters and report a homicide. Then he pushed back the crowd and bolted the door again. He found the light switch and snapped it on, moving forward with nervous caution. He was convinced, at that time, that the murderer was still in the room, but he searched it thoroughly, and there was nobody there. When he couldn't discover the murderer, he determined, at least, to locate the weapon the murderer had used; but he couldn't find the gun either.

  By that time the ambulance and the police cars had arrived, and at once the medical examiner settled the question of how Emmanuel had died: he had been shot from a distance of several feet, by a revolver held level with his head. It was murder, he said; it couldn't possibly be anything else. At once the room was filled with specialists testing, measuring, photographing, examining, and asking questions. They found the one window closed, and latched from the inside, the iron bars all in place. The connecting door was still bolted and locked from the inside, still firmly nailed shut

  When the homicide experts saw all this, they looked at one another in astonishment, and shook their heads. Then the policeman repeated his story, and the detectives again questioned the group who had been at the door when it had swung open. They verified each detail of the policeman's story: the door had most certainly been locked on the inside, they said, and after the boy opened it, absolutely nobody had come out of the room. There was no doubt in their minds on this point. They would swear to it anywhere, any time.

  The homicide men had then gone back to work in earnest If the murderer had not left the laundry, obviously he was still in it somewhere; and in the days that followed, they almost dismantled the place as they searched, but without success, for trapdoors, sliding panels, or even holes in the walls and ceiling through which a pistol could have been fired. They followed every clue, exhausted every possibility, and learned nothing. To this day, the mystery of how Emmanuel Vogel was murdered, by whom, and for what reason, was as great as it had been on the original February night of his death.

  "How about the boy?" asked Phil Cottman. "He might have picked up the pistol while he was alone in the room. Did anybody think of that?"

  "Yes," said Mr. Nation. "Everybody thought of it, including the cop who was first on the scene. When he saw the gun was missing, even before he shut the door again, he searched the child, but there was no gun."

  He said he'd like to clear up some of the other points that might be bothering his listeners. To begin with, there were no fingerprints, no strands of hair in the victim's fist, no torn letters to be pieced together, no broken buttons—no physical clues of any sort, in fact. The laundry had not been ransacked. Everything was found to be in order, in its proper place. The glass in the barred window was quite intact, the front door elaborately secured from the inside, as everybody knew by this time. It wasn't likely the murderer could have refastened the bolts and chains after leaving the room, but even if he had been able to do so, he would not have had time. Then, too, he would have had to make himself invisible while doing it, for the cigar clerk had been watching the door from the time the lights went out until the crowd gathered. Afterwards, Emmanuel's life had been traced step by step, from the time he was bom, until the time he had died. He had been no famous person in disguise; he had been no secret agent of a foreign government He had been precisely what he appeared to be—an illiterate, obscure, terrified, eccentric little laundryman who lived alone and who had known almost nobody.

  To the west, along Madison Avenue, the cabs sped up and down in a steady, aggressive stream, their bodies flashing yellow, green, and orange in the brilliant, late afternoon light Farther away, somewhere to the north, an ambulance clanged as it approached East River, and Dr. Flugelmann, listening tensely, as if the warning were a sound most familiar to her, pressed her plump, ringed fingers together and said, "I do not know why, but I assumed that Emmanuel would be killed by a crushing blow, something brutal and entirely primitive. Being killed by a pistol was not at all right for him."

  She explained that while Mr. Nation was telling his story, she, too, had been occupied. She had been weaving a fantasy of her own, she said—a fantasy which had concerned Emmanuel and his mother's washtub. As the others no doubt remembered, he had spent his formative years above it, and when he had left his native country at last, what was clearly the most precious thing he possessed? It was the washtub, of course, and she thought it the one thing from his past that he had brought with him to America. He could not have abandoned it if he had tried, for he was tied to the tub in a way that others are tied to the ones they most love: it had become his father and mother, his sister and brother; it had even become a sort of industrious wife to him, a wife who shared his labors, and gave him security against the world he feared so much.

  She went on to say that we all want security of one sort or another. It was normal and most natural to want security. But life itself was not at all secure. Life was strong and cruel, and its purpose was not peace, but conflict If we are just secure enough, we are fortunate indeed, for then we can enjoy the wonderful things that life also has to give us; but if we become too secure, if we give up too much, then we have repudiated life itself. Who can say where the dividing line is? How can we know when we are entirely safe, or are merely not living at all?

  She lowered her head with a smiling humility, as if asking pardon for being both trite and tiresome, and said gently: "And now, if you permit it, I will finish my small fantasy of the laundryman and his washtub: now, let us recall that Emmanuel's mother had washed her life away over that tub, and Emmanuel himself, although he did not realize it, perhaps, had really done the same. Then where had the essence of those lives gone? What had become of all that vitality, that energy, that strength and striving? I think the tub had absorbed it"

  She turned in her chair, played with the beads about her throat, and went on with her story: she thought that after a while the assimilated lives of Emmanuel and his mother had had their effect on the ancient, wood-and-iron tub—so much so, in fact, that gradually the tub had achieved an awareness of both its own existence and the existence of its tormentors. It had begun to feel a little too; to suffer pain in a sort of primitive, mindless way. Perhaps, during the last months of the laundryman's career, it would sometimes appear to shiver. Perhaps it would manage to slide forward on the bench, as if seeking to escape its oppressor, and Emmanuel,
grasping it again with his reddened, soapy hands would sigh patiently and pull it into place once more. Perhaps the tub even resisted him on occasion, and he would feel the tension, the sudden hostility between them.

  And then, one night, life itself had originated mysteriously in the tub, just as it had, with an equal mysteriousness, once originated in Emmanuel and his mother, and at that moment the tub understood the bondage the three of them had shared in common; but what it could not know was that the Vogels, being human, and as such almost indestructible, could endure easily what the tub could not. ... All this had happened on the February night when Emmanuel had bought his cigarettes and crossed the street. Then, as he prepared to do his extra work, the tub had gathered all its strength together, had risen up, struck him, and crushed his skull.

  She held her glass forward toward the window, allowing the sunlight to touch it, to bring to life the shattered pinks and greens in the crystal; then, seeing that John Littleton was about to offer an objection to her theory, she smiled and said placatingly, "I know, I know. He wasn't killed by a blow from a washtub. He was shot by a pistol. It makes my story even sillier, doesn't it?"

  "Emmanuel Vogel was killed by somebody as real as any person in this room," said John Littleton, "and I think I know how it was done. Now, the first thing is to determine the motive. All right, then: Let's take the commonest motive of all—greed."

  He went on to say that the frightened ask for the disaster that so often overtakes them. If Emmanuel had behaved like others, perhaps his neighbors would have thought nothing of him; but with all those bolts and locks, they must have wondered what he had so precious that he must guard it so well; then, since we can understand the minds of others only with the content of our own minds, and since the most precious thing to those who knew him was money, they all must have thought, at one time or another, that the little laundryman was rich, that his wealth was hidden somewhere in his room. Having come to this conclusion, it was only natural that one of them should decide to take the money for himself.