I didn’t forget to keep an eye and ear out for Cagey, but she was nowhere in sight and none of the closed doors let through any sound; and by the time I figured out that I could have asked about “that woman they rushed in dripping blood” without giving it away that we knew each other, I was on my way home.
It occurred to me to worry about how my employer would get home. Each of us had taken a car; she had six in the Warrington House garage, including an actual oldfashioned gasoline burner. But from what I’d seen and heard, she’d hardly be able to drive back herself, and a lot of the taxi drivers in Marltown knew both of us by sight. Eventually I remembered that that didn’t mean they would be aware we had both been at Sunvale Clinic that day; nevertheless, on reaching Warrington House I made sure to ask Gucchi, who was Cagey’s chauffeur, if she had come home yet; and when he replied that he didn’t know but the Novocor was still missing, to warn him not to let on anything about me if he got a call to collect her from Sunvale.
I went into the house and found Nancy in the kitchen reading Nathan Jasinsky’s new bestseller, The Last Great War. As far as I know, Jasinsky was the first historian to call it that; up until then, everyone had still been calling it World War One, World War Two, and the Time Between the Wars. I asked Nancy if the book was any good.
“Bloody,” she said. “I’m glad I had my dinner an hour ago. Cagida come home with you? Should I put on your dinner?” Nancy was the only person I knew who called Cagey by her full registered first name.
It was after 18:30 by now. Thinking things over, I realized that a lot of glass splinters would take a long time to dig out, so it wasn’t too surprising that I had beat Cagey home. Whenever she finally got back, she might not want any dinner anyway; but as for me, I found myself ravenous. I told Nancy to go ahead and put my dinner on, and while it was microwaving I’d check and see if maybe our employer had come in by any of the other doors.
She hadn’t, so before sitting down ten minutes later to eat, I told Nancy where she was and why I couldn’t be the one to phone there if we wanted to ask for her. I ate that evening in the winter sunset alcove of the living wing, looking out at the spotlighted ice sculptures in the garden courtyard. Alvarie, the Warrington House gardener, spent much of every winter making really remarkable ice sculptures; but that evening they were little else than wavery stalagmites, thanks to the spring thaw.
When Nancy brought in my dessert, which must have been either something frozen and microwaved until softly steaming, or something flambe’, she told me that she had talked with a Sunvale clinical assistant, a Ms. Gavichenny, who assured her that Mrs. Warrington was fine and should be ready to come home in about another three quarters of an hour. Nancy liked to give people the oldfashioned titles; but she never could remember the exact old distinctions between “Mrs.,” “Ms.,” and “Miss.” When talking formally about her employer, she sometimes called her by one title and sometimes by another; I wondered whether M. Gavichenny had thought much about it.
Tired of looking at the melting ice sculptures, I asked Nancy to sit and have coffee with me, which she was always happy to do. Cagey never ran the kind of household that built barriers between employers and employed. All she did was insist that we all call her “Sergeant” to her face. After that, it was a free and easy establishment in the Old American tradition. Nancy even started to set a third cup automatically before remembering that Cagey wasn’t home just now to join us.
We didn’t worry about her. We were used to her fancy freaks of playacting and the way they could combine with her accident-prone character. She was in competent medical hands; and, while I had hatched a few infinitesimal suspicions about the pharmacist, they had been pretty well driven out of my working memory by the doctor who had diagnosed Rob’s death of Carmine’s disease and now wanted to run more tests on me. Anyway, M. Coffield with his mysterious past wasn’t the one treating Cagey.
None of us really believed as yet that this time our Sergeant Thursday could have stumbled into a case of actual murder.
I fully intended to wait until Cagey got home. We rarely went to bed before 23:30 or midnight any night, often not until 02:30. But that evening I could hardly hold my eyes open. Only the act of sipping coffee kept me awake; the caffeine was no help at all. I talked; but if I knew at the time what we were talking about, it left no groove in my memory from about the first or second time Nancy hottened my cup until the time she said something like, “Well, Sylvia, it’s been a long, hard week for you. You’ll be better off in bed than falling asleep with your cup in your hand.”
Nancy was the only member of the household who called me Sylvia.
* * * *
I was asleep before I finished pulling the covers up to my chin. Nancy later reported tucking me in when she glanced into my bedroom.
I woke—not really, but into a dream—at a time my bedside clock registered as 2:30; but that is questionable, not only because the clock seemed to be showing the time by the old twelve-hour system, with no “0” in front of the 2, but because it melted away almost at once into a puddle that looked like melted ice cream, leaving only its luminous green digits standing, and then changing every instant, like slot machine figures, to keep forming different times. Many of the digits didn’t even look like numerals. One looked like a “Mr. Yuk” face.
As I sat up, using my hairnet to try to wipe away the sticky melted clock, I saw that my bedroom was a Salvador Dali landscape plain, stretching out farther than I could see on three sides; the fourth side was behind my headboard, and I didn’t dare look back, because I could somehow visualize my bed balancing on the edge of a sharp, deep abyss. The plain itself, however, was quite beautiful, with little groves of green trees growing here and there; a few small, fluffy clouds around the horizons; and dolphins frolicking in
the distance.
Although the dolphins seemed to be leaping in and out of the solid plain, they left slow splashes. Realizing there must be water around those dolphins, I got out of bed so as to fetch some to use in wiping up the melted clock, although I fretted a little about how to carry the water back, because some tiny part of me had remembered that I’d never in my life actually worn a hairnet to bed or anywhere else.
Solid at first, the plain soon grew mushy beneath my bare feet. At length, rather than sink in, I sprang up and found myself flying above the plain. Delighted, I made up my mind to fly to its farthest edge and see whatever I could see.
It seemed that I spent all the rest of the night in this long dream, until sometime near morning, when I fell back into deep delta sleep, so that Nancy had trouble shaking me awake at 08:30. Of course, that wouldn’t match the normal cycle of alternating delta sleep and lighter REM sleep with its colorful dreams getting longer toward morning until as a general rule we wake up from the last dream of the night. But Rob’s death, Cagey’s investigation, and my own fears of Carmine’s had put me under stress, and stress is one factor that can alter a person’s normal cycles.
In any case, I dreamed far too much that night to record it all, especially since I’m not much of a dream recollector and never kept a dream diary except for two weeks in fifth grade, when we were studying the sleep and dreaming cycles; and again for a one-term college course in Introductory Psychobiology. Yet for once I seemed to remember most of my dreaming—the entire long, unbroken stretch as it seemed to me next morning, though I guessed I must actually have been sinking in and out of REM sleep as usual without the NREM stages leaving any apparent breaks in continuity.
Even without such breaks, some scenes stood out more clearly in my memory, as if they might have special significance. For example, there was one terrible nightmare scene in which I stared down on what I somehow recognized as Cagey’s corpse, even though it looked more like scraps of raw meat and chicken bones floating in green paint, while a woman who looked and sounded like Katherine Hepburn but whom I knew to be Dr. Suttler screamed up at me in Russian, or at
least a Russian accent, “Next dime you vill belief her! Next dime you vill belief her!”
Another time I was with a man who looked like Rob and had the wonderful telephone voice of Angelo Stavropolos, but whom I was calling “Arlington.” We sat together and talked in clouds so exactly like the clouds shown in cartoons of dreams, and heaven, and lovers dreaming they’re in heaven, that we may have been laughing about it ourselves. “I had a secret,” he kept whispering to me. “Didn’t you know? I had a secret.” This was a great joke, at which we both laughed until our sides ached, as we rolled around and around in the clouds.
Another time I saw M. Coffield, this time looking like Peter Lorre playing a Nazi general in the old Reel Time of Movies. He shot an exploding pellet into Miss Woodburn; but when she collapsed, she was only a Paradise Fish. Then Dr. Macumber—and now he was wearing the Nazi uniform—came forward and said: “For that, you must be put on warcrimes trial. But meanwhile, of course, we must see what we can do for the fish. Oh, poor little angelfish!” And he picked her up and started injecting her with a needleful of something that looked like mustard.
If it sounds as though I did nothing but dream all night about Sunvale Clinic, that’s
only because I’ve picked out the few scenes that dealt directly with people involved in Cagey’s current investigation. A full description even of all the scenes I could still remember by the end of the next day would take many more pages and involve many, many people from my earlier life whom Cagey herself never knew, and many characters whom not even I ever knew except in that dream. In fact, a lot of psychoanalysts would probably say that, considering the lapse of time between my dream and the first recorded account I made of it, the characters I later identified as Dr. Suttler, M. Coffield, Dr. Macumber, and the rest were most likely other people entirely, or mere anonymous figures, at the actual moment I dreamed them.
However that may be, I awoke feeling that I had been through a remarkable experience, sometimes wonderful, sometimes nightmarish, and on the whole incredibly illuminating and strangely satisfying. As I came back more fully to real life and started remembering things a little more distinctly, my first question was, “Where’s Cagey? Did she get home all right?”
Chapter 6
She had. Well, of course, commented my brain. When I got down to the winter breakfast nook she was already there, devouring toast and pouring coffee one-handed, high on enthusiasm and painkillers. Her right hand was too neatly and heavily bandaged to do more than help steady things, but fortunately she was ambidextrous. “Equally clumsy with both hands,” she used to quip of herself after minor mishaps.
“What happened?” I wanted to know at once. “You were only planning to fake a fit.”
“Picked the wrong place to fake it, that’s all.” She filled my cup before setting down the coffee server. “I should have thrown it in McBooks. Books don’t shatter and cut you when you fall. Found a copy of Hardiwink’s renovelization of the last Clouseau movie, by the way. Apparently the only one of Hardiwink’s books they keep in print over here, but I must’ve dropped it at the Blown Bubble. Told Officer Gucchi to ask if they found it and drop over to the bookshop for another copy if they didn’t, when he goes in to pay for the monster knickknack I broke. Ghastly thing. They could never have sold it anyway, probably overjoyed to have it broken. Also told him to pick up five hundred grams of every coffee the Beans of St. Mary’s has in stock. Great stuff, if what they bag is the same as what they brew to serve their customers right there. Well, Officer Tomlinson, anything to report?”
“Not much, I’m afraid,” I answered, relieved and happy to find her her usual self. “I think my cube memory filled up before I’d finished interviewing Dr. Macumber, but I couldn’t spot anything suspicious about him anyway.”
“Too bad about your recording, but things like that can’t always be helped. It even happened to me yesterday. Twice, in fact. I was too near a state of shock to remember to flip my pocket unit on in time and missed getting about half my interview with Dr. Suttler. And then the cube filled up at a time I couldn’t change it without risk of the witness clamming up, so we’ve got to depend on my brain memory for the last part of a very interesting dataflow. Fortunately, I spoke my report into a fresh cube before I went to bed.”
“I didn’t,” I confessed, and explained why not. “I was too sleepy even to play the recording back and see exactly where it ended.”
She shook her head in theatrical sorrow. “Tommi, Tommi, you’ll never make sergeant this way. Well, better give me your report right now. I’ll compare it with your recording later on. Don’t worry: I put a new cube in the room unit this morning, and switched it on when you came in.”
It didn’t take me long to recap my experience at Sunvale Clinic the preceding afternoon, the most impressive points being my high white blood cell count and my appointment to return for further testing.
“Great!” Cagey started to rub her palms together, winced when her left hand hit the bandages on her right, and contented herself with repeating, “Great! Suttler wants me back this afternoon too, for another look at my wounded paw. It’s all working out just fine.”
Then it was her turn to talk while I ate. Of course, we were going to exchange yesterday’s recorded data, so she wouldn’t have had to fill me in over breakfast; but Cagey never let things like that stop her. In theory any differences between the recorded and recollected versions ought to prove meaningful in themselves, showing what our own investigative subconsciousnesses were emphasizing or suppressing. In practice we rarely had time for all this comparison sifting, but the theory justified Cagey’s continual rethinking things with her tongue.
“For starters,” she said, “Raisa Rachmaninova Suttler, M.D., is what I believe they sometimes call a ‘Junoesque’ beauty. Tall, dark, stately, could probably pull off a pretty convincing male impersonation if she wanted, but she was wearing a skirtsuit yesterday, and I’d guess, as nearly as I’m equipped to judge, that she can still turn as many male heads as she likes, even at her age—let’s see, that’s ...”
“Forty-six,” I supplied.
“Really? Hmmm ... Yes, I guess that could be right, if she wasn’t fudging on her immigration papers, and according to the INS that ain’t so easy to do.” It wasn’t my statement Cagey had questioned; it was the accuracy of our data. “Anyway,” she went on, “it wasn’t hard to get the impression that in Doc Suttler’s opinion, her old motherland got the very short end of the deal when they traded her in for Hardiwink. Not just because a medical doctor’s worth more as a matter of principle than a litterateur, but also because she seems convinced that Hardiwink is one of the worst litterateurs ever invented. I got almost the impression that she thinks our country was eager to get rid of him, and she feels insulted that she wasn’t traded for anyone better.”
I said, “I thought they had waiting lists, that it was just whoever reaches the top of the lists at the same time.” (I’m sure that sentence is full of bad grammar; but wherever I can I’m transcribing from the recorded cubes, and people don’t always use perfect grammar when they’re simply talking.)
“As far as I know,” said Cagey, “it is waiting lists. Maybe Doc Suttler thinks we should’ve executed Hardiwink instead of exporting him to some poor, innocent other nation. I tell you, Tommi, there’s something coldblooded about that woman. Not much bedside manner. She fixed my hand up right enough, but I kept expecting her to whiplash me any minute for getting it full of glass and interrupting her schedule. And I’m going to tell you this in strict confidence, Officer: if she had, I’d probably have broken down and cried.”
“Were you in very much pain?”
“Oh, no, none at all. Less pain then than now. Shock until they had me in the operating theater, and then a local anesthetic. Hardly even remembered I had a hand, until I looked over at it. Kind of interesting. Wonder if I’ll have to reregister my fingerprints? Some of these splinters had lo
dged right between whorls—”
“Please, Sergeant!” I said. I’m a little squeamish, at least at the meal table. Cagey isn’t. Not about herself, anyway.
“Sorry, Officer Tomlinson. You’re right, not over breakfast. Anyway, it was just Suttler’s manner. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d scolded me and then followed it up with a ruler across the knuckles. Although she may have some excuse—... Well, I don’t want to prejudice your impression of that. As for Davis G. Hardiwink, I can’t very well come out with a critical pronouncement until I read some of his work, can I? And when does Suttler get a chance to read it? Or any good stuff—Spillane or King or any of the other classical authors of our Western World—to compare against Hardiwink’s? I thought physicians never had time to read anything but medical journals.”
“I don’t suppose,” I said, “that Davis Hardiwink, whatever his faults, can possibly have had anything to do with what happened to Rob.”
“No, but Dr. Raisa R. Suttler could, and that’s the point. I’m planning to take Hardiwink’s novel along this afternoon, read it in the waiting room, see what reaction that yanks out of her.”
“She might not even see it.”
“Yes, she will. It’s one of those oversized paperbacks, too big for my pocket, and I don’t intend to start carrying a purse all of a sudden when I’m not even in disguise, just in plainclothes.”
“But what will be the point? You already know she doesn’t think much of his work.”
“Yes.” Cagey frowned. “Wish I could remember how I know. It got into the conversation somehow before I remembered to turn on my recorder. Anyway, the point is that you can’t get too much character input, and if she sees me reading an author she’s just badmouthed to me, especially if I act innocent and say I thought she was recommending him, that should be good for quite an interesting wad of input.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 6
