The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  It was Solly’s star of David.

  The professor said softly, “I told his family that he wanted a friend to have it. I had assumed that friend would be his roommate. Do you want it now, or do you want me to hold it for whenever you feel ready to remember?”

  Clement put his right hand up and closed it around the little silver charm. It hurt no more than when Solly had pressed it to his chest the night of his hazing. “Thank you, Pater,” he said. “I’d like to take it now.”

  But why hadn’t Dr. Fairchild given it to April? Maybe he hadn’t known how close ... Someday, Clement thought, maybe I can give it to her myself. On Solly’s behalf.

  III

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)

  Arlie’s conference was in Milwaukee, and I had already had my suitcase packed to go with him; changing back into Sergeant Tommi for the weekend required only meeting my lieutenant and her new client at the needletrain station and traveling on with them beyond Milwaukee to Hodag Crossing.

  Arlie was disappointed, of course; but I, to tell the truth, wasn’t. Working on a new case with Lieutenant Thursday promised to be a lot more exciting than shopping around a big city with other spouses of seminar attendees all Saturday, and museum- or theater-hopping all Sunday; while as for the nights, they were always shortened anyway at these affairs by the long evening conversations over wine and finger foods in people’s hotel rooms. And if this turned out to be a real case and needed longer than a weekend, we’d be stitching back to Marltown from time to time anyway. Besides, it meant traveling in the Warrington coach.

  Left to her own choice, Cagey might have preferred leaving the Warrington in the needletrain gare for private coaches while she traveled economy class like a real, underpaid police officer. But offering us the ride was her thanks to Arlie for lending me back, to me for coming, and to M. Greenhill for bringing her the case. Moreover, it saved Cagey herself a little time. The Warrington private coach was a miniature home on wheels, its closets so fully stocked that Cagey could actually pack her overnight case for Hodag Crossing en route.

  Being late was not among my lieutenant’s idiosyncrasies—except when accidents delayed her—and over the years she had learned how to allow extra time to compensate for the continual minor mishaps that formed part of her everyday existence. We were settled in the Warrington coach ten minutes before the train was scheduled to leave.

  Coordinating their efforts by phone, our hired girl and Cagey’s housekeeper had each packed us a thermal foodtote, Mandy supplying hot eggs, grits, and oat muffins; Nancy chilled juice, exotic fruit salad in melon cups, and yogurt shakes. Arlie started unpacking one foodtote, M. Greenhill the other, I went about setting the table and making the coffee—Cagey would drink any kind of coffee but always preferred freshly ground and brewed gourmet beans—and she herself started wadding up spare garments and throwing them into the battered old suitcase that looked more like a prop for a tramp clown act than the possession of a woman whose family was worth forty or fifty billion tridols.

  Someone had turned the newscreen on, probably Cagey, whose era of preference was one in which people had still been or pretended to be highly addicted to the news; and CSN’s Pureblood Cinnamon anchorwoman, Nellie Kittiwake, was telling anyone who might be listening that another second-generation war criminal had just been arrested, thanks to the continuing efforts of the Secret Service.

  “Walter Brouyer Volsung, 67,” she was saying, “has already been quoted as planning to base his defense on the claim that his own involvement with the White Klan was motivationed solely by the 1996 arrest and trial of his father, Hans Schott, the notorious ‘Beast of Buchenwald,’ and the effect it had on—”

  “Some people will say anything to pass their own guilt on to somebody else!” M. Greenhill burst out. And then, looking around a little abashedly, as if aware of possibly having broken in on something somebody else wanted to hear, she added, “Won’t they?”

  “Actually,” said Arlie, “I was chewing on ‘motivationed.’ Why not ‘motivationized’? Or ‘motivationated’? How do they get these new words past the dictionary programs?”

  “In fact,” Cagey remarked from the sleeping end of the coach, where she had her suitcase opened on the bed, “the criminal mind is infinitely capable of justifying itself. Nothing it plans or commits is bad; everything is either good or else justified by the ultimate goal. It’s the accidental criminal, the decent soul who happens to take one bad step out of line, that cracks and confesses in agonies of conscience.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Arlie.

  “The case, of course,” I murmured to him. “Our new case.”

  “Oh, yes. The dracula of Hodag Crossing.”

  Cagey was going on, “Of course, there’s also the trick of splitting the consciousness. The old Jekyll and Hyde ploy. Building a wall in the conscience so that the ‘good’ persona can’t see what the ‘bad’ persona is up to.”

  “No,” said M. Greenhill. Either she had heard Arlie and me, or she had tuned in Cagey’s line of thought by herself. “I’m sure Clement is integrated. Whatever else he is.”

  “Are you sure?” Cagey pressed rhetorically. “Going around in dracula costume may look like wearing the shadow self out in plain view, but it could also be an elaborate mind game. One so complex he isn’t even aware of it himself, not on the surface. From what you’ve told us, a richer field for deep, repressed desires trying to burst through a straitjacket exterior—”

  “But maybe I haven’t told you very well,” the young woman cut in. “Maybe I haven’t been able to explain him, to do him justice.”

  “No,” Cagey agreed—or should I say disagreed?—”because maybe you don’t understand him. Maybe he doesn’t even understand himself. All the same, it never hurts to keep an eye on these repressed types, and charbroiling the vict ... Hey! Look here!” she interrupted herself, opening a drawer and pulling out what looked like some sort of beanbag or lopsided and flattened ball. “Those good old blue cotton knockaroundtown socks of mine! I wondered where I’d left ’em.”

  Looking again, I saw that they were indeed a packet of socks rolled together and turned inside-out one over the other in the very old-fashioned trick Cagey had resurrected from somewhere and insisted her launderers learn. She tossed the bundle jubilantly into the air, failed to catch it, bent over to pick it up and somehow managed instead—even though the floor was thickly carpeted—to knock it out of reach. Still bent over, she took a step after it, and at that moment the needletrain started, smoothly but with such a sudden rapid momentum in the other direction as to send her sprawling forward.

  “Oowow! Oooch!” she howled, making a four-point landing on hands and knees. Her knees were still sore from last night, and we were shortly to find that she picked up a few fabric burns on her palms in this new mishap. But after a second of screwing up her face and clutching her body into a ball, she rolled over, sat up, and added a simple, conversational, “Ouch.”

  By this time, M. Greenhill was on her own knees beside the detective, and I was getting the first-aid kit from its compartment in the coach’s emergency panel.

  Arlie, who had shot forward to thrust his arm as a cushion between the hard edge of the table and the line of Cagey’s involuntary dive, quietly told her, “That was close, Cagida. Another few centimeters, and you’d have caught yourself a nasty crack in the face.”

  “And made a bloody mess of our breakfast,” she added, looking up at the table. “Well, it could have been a lot worse. Tommi, when you’re finished there, if you could make sure those socks don’t get away? Be a shame to lose those suckers after cornering ’em again.”

  Arlie touched up Cagey’s knees and hands, I recovered the socks and tucked them into a corner of the half-filled suitcase, and M. Greenhill finished setting out our breakfast. On the screen, Nellie Kittiwake was talking about Patrice Ingeborg Stivison’
s new book that argued the Hellmouth Amusement Park fire of October 14, 2040, had been caused by arson. Cagey shut it off from the nearest chair-arm control panel, and we finally settled down to our meal. We had just about enough time to eat in comfort and load the dishcleaner before reaching Milwaukee.

  Most of Cagey’s accidents were undoubtedly genuine, but I have sometimes suspected that a few of them were at least partially staged, on the spur of the moment, to cover her own or somebody else’s faux pas. For example, the one I’ve just described happened as she was starting to point out what other evidence burning a victim’s corpse can cover up. She could have suddenly seen how such a verb as “charbroiling” might hurt a close friend of the victim’s. Now and then I used to ask her about these episodes, but she always looked innocent and asked me back if I really supposed her accident-proneness needed any prodding; or if I thought she didn’t gather enough bruises in the normal course of things. Whether or not she ever semi-staged her accidents, though, she could certainly take advantage of them when she wanted to.

  It is a fact, however, that all during that breakfast she kept the conversation away from Hodag Crossing, usually by asking questions about old movies. My own university major had been in Cinematic Literature, and New Millennium turned out to have a healthy Reeltime department; so even though M. Greenhill had taken only one overview course in old movies, we managed quite nicely. I was a bit surprised that so young a person as M. Greenhill could put preoccupying concerns aside and blend into recreational talk as well as she did, especially when the preoccupations were so heavy.

  In fact, my husband was the first one of us who finally brought the subject up again, just before he got off the train in Milwaukee. “So long, child of my soul,” he told the university woman, showing his age a little, and how long ago he had grown up, in the term of address he chose. “And I wouldn’t let him get too close to that lovely neck until we can be very, very sure of him.”

  “He’s never even tried,” she replied. “And he doesn’t have fangs anyway. He thinks he does, but he doesn’t.”

  “All the same,” said my husband, “plain human teeth have been known to draw blood, and a severed vein can do some dangerous bleeding. If he really does perceive himself as an actual dracula, and sees you as his ... What was her name?”

  “Mina Harker,” said Cagey, going straight back to the printed source while I was still running a search through all the classic film versions I could remember. “Arlie’s right. If Czarny sees you as his Mina, you could be in more personal danger than you guess.”

  She was. How much more, none of us had yet guessed.

  * * * *

  IV

  * * * *

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)

  * * * *

  From Milwaukee to Eau Claire gave Cagey barely enough time to finish throwing things in her overnight case; but the needletrain network had not yet reached Hodag Crossing, so at Eau Claire we had to leave the Warrington coach in parkage and rent a car. Naturally, I drove. Cagey had finally decided a few years earlier that she was much too accident prone to be trusted behind a wheel, and now kept her driver’s license current only as an extra ID.

  Highway travel being slower, it was after ten hundred hours when we arrived. Hodag Crossing looked like a quiet, pleasant university community, much of it out walking around jacketless, making the most of the glorious autumn day. Acclimated as I was to Kentucky weather, to me the air seemed a little chilly for retracting the car’s roofdome the way Cagey insisted on doing—”for a better lookaround”—when we reached the 25 kph zone at the city limits, but not so much so that I couldn’t stand it; and M. Greenhill, in the back seat, seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. To me, the trees looked joltingly bare for not quite the middle of October; but M. Greenhill said they were normal for upper Wisconsin, and we saw young people happily raking up everywhere, less to clear the leaves away, I thought, than to get them into hills for jumping and burrowing in like children. The sky had just enough cumulus clouds to scan them for the shapes of animals and things.

  “Any classes today?” Cagey asked.

  “I don’t think so,” M. Greenhill replied. “Not at a fancy-class school like New Millennium. Especially not the weekend before New Constitution Day. There’ll be enough class-cutting Monday. I know I don’t have any classes today. In fact, I haven’t had a Saturday class yet, except for a couple of field trips and one-day seminars.”

  “Hmmm,” said Cagey. “We used to have plenty of Saturday classes when I was an undergrad back in the Upper Paleolithic. Of course, it wasn’t really a fancy-class school, either. Just one with a noticeable percentage of fanciers.” In fact, it had been Princeton; but Cagey never liked admitting to ivy roots. They didn’t go with her self-image of oldtime plainclothes cop. “Well,” she went on, “let’s hope we find Czarny at home. I want a good, hard look at this floater.”

  I suggested, “He ought to be asleep in his coffin at this time of day.”

  “Please,” said M. Greenhill. “You promised not to judge him till you saw him for yourselves.”

  “She’s right, Sergeant,” Cagey said easily, “we did. Last night in a weak moment, when Arlie had me in agony over that big one in my second knee. You people really ought to get your porch steps capped.”

  “So that you can get rubber or steelplas splinters instead of wooden ones?” I asked. I had been going to point out that I’d only made a general observation based on common knowledge about the habits of vampires in general; but I saw in time that it might sound like joking about tragedy, something our client seemed too young and earnest to understand.

  “Hard rubber splinters,” Cagy mused. “A thought to conjure by. If you’re a Grand Inquisitor. Looks like we’re getting into Greektown now.”

  The first part to have been built up between “Oldtown”—the original Hodag Crossing—and the New Millennium campus, “Greektown” consisted mainly of fraternity and sorority houses built in the first few decades of the 21st century. Most of them were oversized mansions in immense lots. The streets were very slightly curved, with an occasional dramatic twist, the kind of street layout that had erupted into the violent angles and curls of 2020s neighborhoods, before the nation returned to strict gridline streets in the ’30s. New Hodag’s Greektown still seemed to have quite a few unbuilt lots, but most of them had been turned into miniparks and sportslawns. The few that might have been truly vacant had “Wilderness Preserve” signs, accompanied with Greek letters.

  Greek letters are ... well ... Greek to me; but Cagey read them off with keen interest: “Sigma Phi Omicron ... Xi Xi Xi ... Beta Theta ... Omega Upsilon ... Ah, here we are! Pi Rho. Bogey! ain’t that shack a beaut?”

  The Pi Rho house, home of Clement Czarny, once home of the late Solomon Barghoothi Goldfein, and home-to-have-been of the late Tony Tallpines, was a huge NeoVictorian building that sprawled out over its vast lot looking as if it had been planned to create the instant effect of an old family mansion added onto haphazardly, room by room, over at least two centuries. It was sided in a kind of dark and dusty pinkish maroon that can look quite nice in miniature tea roses—I thought of the fraternity’s nickname, “the Purple Rose.” What looked like several kilometers’ worth of white gingerbread trim laced every edge and gutter without making the place as a whole appear any less massive. It was all so overpowering in itself that it took me awhile to become aware of the two mounds of leaves in the half-raked yard, or the black wreath on the front door.

  “Mama Mia!” Cagey went on, eying it appreciatively as I parked the car. “Did whoever designed that baby have an edifice complex, or what? Well, let’s charge on up there.”

  “We can’t,” said M. Greenhill. “Women aren’t allowed inside except by special permission, and then only in the front rooms.”

  “Not…allowed ... in?” said Cagey.

  “That’s usual for Greek houses, isn’
t it?” I remarked.

  “Not when I was a Sappho, it wasn’t!” she replied. “We were integrated then, all the way. Gripes, what’s this world coming to?”

  Cagey had earned her degree in the ’20s; and I had never gone Greek, so that it was always easy for me to believe whatever I was told about the idiosyncrasies of Greek houses.

  “We’ll have to go to the Pi Psi house next door and ask to use their phone,” said M. Greenhill. “They’re the sister house, so they should have a direct screenlink to the Rhos. And if Clement isn’t at home, maybe one of the Purple Sighs can get another of the Rhos to let us in.”

  M. Czarny didn’t wear a personal phone. They had been going more and more out of fashion, for realizers as well as fanciers, all during the 2030s, what with the new emphasis on Privacy Rights; and they might not have fit into his personal world even at the height of their popularity. We could have looked up the Pi Rho house phone number on one of our screens at home or on the train, but it was Cagey’s guiderule never to hand suspects enough advance notice to give them time for clearing out before our arrival, so neither of us had even suggested phoning ahead.

  “We aren’t ‘women,’ anyway!” Cagey argued. “We’re cops—police investigators—officers of the Law!”

  “Even pollies have to play along with other people’s rules sometimes,” I said as diplomatically as I could. “If we were male officers trying to get into the Pi Psi house, we’d run into the same thing. Is that the Pi Psi house over there?” I went on to M. Greenhill. “No wonder they call it the ‘Purple Sigh’!”

  It was the same basic color as its brother house, only several degrees lighter, which made it even more jolting. The Purple Rose house was dark enough that, on a very gray day, it might be possible at first glance to mistake the color for brown. There would be no way in any kind of daylight to mistake the Purple Sigh color for anything but a garish purple. On the other hand, the architecture looked comparatively tidy, at least from a little distance; it must have been almost the length of a football field from doorstep to doorstep, with a lawnsports yard, where half a dozen young people of both sexes, each wearing a black armband, were playing astrodisk.