The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  It should have been a pleasant little walk, but there was the time element to consider, and besides, I didn’t much like the thought of leaving our rented vehicle outside the fraternity house. Just as I lifted my foot to let the car glide on downslope to the sorority house, Cagey said, “We’ll see about this,” opened the passenger door, and stepped out.

  Naturally, whether it was the car’s forward momentum or the jerk when I slammed my foot back down on the brake, she pitched to the ground with a thud and a shout.

  Stabbing the “Park” button with one finger, I threw open my door and rushed around to her. M. Greenhill, who had been riding in the seat directly behind Cagey’s, beat me by a few nanoseconds.

  My lieutenant lay sprawled face in the lawn, body across the sidewalk, one foot still caught on the edge of the car’s doorframe. M. Greenhill touched her back near the neck, and she let out a yelp.

  “Get her foot,” I told M. Greenhill, picturing the car door slamming on it. As our client hurried to unhook Cagey’s toes from the doorframe and ease her leg to the ground, I bent anxiously over my friend. Cagey turned her head, looked up at me, gave me a slow and very deliberate wink, and then commenced one of the worst series of howls I have ever heard.

  “Oh, my Lord!” M. Greenhill gasped, starting to push the buttons on her wristphone. “I’ll get an ambulance—”

  I reacted with a “No!” and quickly added, “Not yet. Get the nearest help first. Up there! Yes,” I urged her, as she glanced at the Pi Rho house. “This is an emergency!”

  In fact, the Pi Rho door was already open, a square young man looking out at us across the expanse of partly raked lawn. After one more instant of hesitation, and one glance around at the astrodisk players—who were also starting toward us—M. Greenhill dashed to the stocky youth, probably because he was nearest.

  Cagey snatched time between her cries and groans to mutter up at me, “Good work, Sergeant!”

  Then M. Greenhill and the Greek stalwart were upon us. Like the lawnplayers, he wore a black armband.

  “What’s wrong?” he exclaimed. “You hurt, M.?” He touched her shoulder, so gently and tentatively that I couldn’t be sure his finger actually reached the cloth of her tunic. She might simply have seen it coming. But she flinched away with a yelp, and he instantly retreated to stand looking down at her, arms hanging awkwardly at his sides.

  “I think it’s her ankle,” said I. “Mostly. Can you walk, Lieutenant?”

  Still moaning, she shook her head weakly.

  “We shouldn’t move her,” the fraternity man offered uncertainly.

  At that, she rolled over and sat up, remembering to support herself on the arm he hadn’t touched. “You aren’t going to leave me lying here on the cold ground, are you?”

  “Come on, Spuds,” said the first astrodisk player to reach us, a nice-looking young fellow—at least a senior, I guessed—with sandy hair and dark eyes. “We can make her comfortable in the house.”

  The square youth shook his head and mumbled something about possible internal injuries.

  “If I had any of those,” Cagey pointed out, still groaning, but not so loudly as to undermine her argument, “I wouldn’t have been able to roll over.”

  “That’s right, Spuds,” said another astrodisk player.

  Spuds tried again. “You don’t always know—”

  “It’s my right ankle,” said Cagey. “It’s gone out on me before.”

  The sandy-haired upperclassman said, “I’ll take responsibility, Spuds. Just get her up to the house.”

  “What about your shoulder?” Spuds asked Cagey.

  “Twisted muscle, I think,” she replied without hesitation. That much could well have been true, after the fall she’d taken.

  Spuds walked around to where he could pick her up with her other shoulder next to his chest, squatted, gathered her into his arms, and stood again in one of the most perfect maneuvers of this type I have ever seen, doing all the down and up work with his leg muscles. I trailed them to the house in awe. M. Greenhill and the rest of the astrodisk players, men and women alike, came along. No one said anything about women being permitted into the house by special invitation only.

  A tall lad met us at the door. He looked almost as strong as Spuds, though in a different way, broadshouldered and broadchested, but tapering at the waist and hips. He reminded me a bit of Sylvester Stallone, but with more the face of Errol Flynn; it is true, however, that while I am a solid, Tested 94 percent reality perceiver, at least five of my six fantasy-perception points come from my tendency to see every male in the best-looking light possible. It had become a harmless and purely esthetical life enhancement since my marriage, but Cagey used to kid me about it sometimes.

  “Inviting you in, M.,” the tall lad told Cagey. “And, for the emergency, all of you ... Hey!” His voice changed sharply. “April Greenhill? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m with them,” she answered stiffly.

  Spuds had already carried Cagey on through. Following, I paused in the doorway, baffled by the apparent hostility between our client and the Pi Rho man.

  “She is with us,” I vouched for M. Greenhill.

  “Well, okay for now.” He stepped farther out of the way; I tuned in the impression that he was actually behaving as though her touch might contaminate him somehow. It made his features look less handsome and more sneery, even to me.

  I took our client’s arm reassuringly and drew her on into the vestibule, leading her as if she, and not I, were the utter stranger to the Purple Rose. Under cover of the tall lad’s greeting the other three women by name—they turned out to be Pi Psi sisters—I murmured to M. Greenhill, “Are any of these fellows Clement?”

  She shook her head. “The one you just met at the door is Stallion Clearwater Drinkwater. The one who’s carrying Lieutenant Thursday is Spuds Struwwelpeter. He’s about the best of the lot, except for Clement. The ones who were playing astrodisk are Fred Fletcher, Steve Wu, and Joe Achinua. They’re all right, I suppose. The women are Honeysuckle Lawrence and Kriemhild Johanson and I’m not sure about the other one.”

  We stepped into the living room, an immense place with vaulted ceiling, sunken floor, walk-in fireplace equipped for either holo or real logs, bookshelves on one wall, pseudo hunting trophies on another, holographic scenery on the third, and the fourth was chiefly window. The furniture was Artfully Careless Hodgepodge: every piece antique or reproduction antique, none of it matching any other piece. Not even the desk, which was Pre-Last Great War Newspaper Office Rolltop, and its chair, which I thought was imitation Hepplewhite or Chippendale.

  Spuds was settling Cagey in an overstuffed recliner, and another Pi Rho, who was wearing a pledge badge and looked hardly old enough to be an eleventh-grader, let alone a university frosh, was asking a little awkwardly if she wanted Asprik or Tylequin. Predictably, she asked for brandy in coffee. He nodded, glanced around at us, said, “Oh, hi, April,” and left the room.

  He resembled a very young cross between Rudolf Valentino and the 2020s star Ravindar Saladin. I looked at our client, who shook her head slightly and murmured, “No, he’s Valentino Abernathy Saladin.” Obviously he, or whoever had offered him those first and final names, had tuned in on the same resemblances I had. Some men are handsome enough that my modicum of fantasy perception doesn’t need to do anything to the data feed coming in through my eyes.

  More important, I noticed that Val Saladin’s reaction to M. Greenhill had totally lacked the hostility evident in Stallion Drinkwater’s. Nor had either Spuds or the astrodisk players seemed to bristle at sight of her. She, on the other hand, had referred to “the best of the lot” as if she had little use for the Purple Rose as a whole; and I sensed that she was carrying herself inside their house as if behind enemy lines.

  Not that I felt particularly at my own ease. The inside of a fraternity house was having an
effect on me comparable—I suppose—to the effect the inside of a synagogue might have on a Southern Baptist, or the inside of a locker room on someone of the “complementary gender,” as they’re sometimes calling it now.

  Cagey, however, looked completely in her element, surrounded by solicitous young Greeks offering her extra pillows, painkillers and water, hot coffee in a real glass mug, reading or screening matter to occupy her wait until the ambulance arrived—everyone seemed to take it for granted that someone else had already called the ambulance. My lieutenant let them go on taking it for granted, waved away the painkillers, accepted the pillows and the coffee, opted for conversation in place of timekillers ...

  Since there were both hot and cold beverage urns in the room, along with an array of tea bags and beverage powders, I wondered why Valentino Saladin had left the room, until I remembered that the legal drinking age had gone back to twenty-three except for members of the armed forces. Quite possibly universities, including university-related Greek houses, had gone back to lip-servicing the legal drinking age, which would mean that young M. Saladin must have been scrounging for Cagey’s brandy.

  Meanwhile, M. Greenhill went to the beverage urns and asked me what I’d prefer. At this, two of the fraternity boys left Cagey and hurried over to us, as if they had suddenly been made aware of their duties as hosts to all their guests. I recognized them as Fred Fletcher and Steve Wu. Spuds, he of the broad, broad shoulders, hesitated, turning to look awkwardly at us without venturing farther than a step or two from his guard post at the back of Cagey’s lounger. I smiled at him, trying to reassure him that we already had more than enough servers, and asked M. Wu for tea with lemonade, hot.

  “Nothing, thank you,” M. Greenhill was telling M. Fletcher.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” he insisted, “we can’t let you get away without anything.”

  “All right, cold water.”

  “How about a little cola fizz in it?”

  “No, thank you, I hate cola.”

  “Come on, darling, it’s unAmerican to hate cola.”

  “Just water, M. Fletcher. Or nothing, thank you very much.”

  I overheard all this in growing perplexity. M. Fletcher used a kind of mock Bogey accent, so that even his “sweetheart” and “darling” could have been interpreted as good-natured pleasantry. M. Greenhill’s replies were tensely polite. Which was reacting to the other’s dislike or imagined dislike?

  And wasn’t the death of a mutual friend supposed to draw people together? Or did the Greeks hold it against M. Greenhill that she wasn’t wearing an armband for Solly Goldfein? But she was in black trousers and a gray tunic with a geometrical maze design in black; and the armbands were marked with the Greek letters, as if they were only for the deceased boy’s fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. April Greenhill, like me, was an Independent.

  As M. Wu handed me my lemonaded tea, and M. Fletcher moved off to get M. Greenhill’s water, I became aware of Cagey announcing, “Actually, we came here to see M. Czarny. Clement Czarny.”

  “Our pet vampire?” asked one of the sorority women.

  “Right, sister. Or so we’ve been given to understand.” Cagey was definitely moving into tough-cop mode. “He around this morning?”

  “Why?” came a new voice from the doorway. “What do you want with Batory?”

  I turned my head and stifled a gasp. The tall lad who had materialized in the doorway looked several years older than the others—mature, in fact—dressed almost completely in a purple so dark it would have looked black if his armband hadn’t been there to show the difference, with a white neckscarf, and his lightly frosted black hair caught back softly in a pony tail. He struck even me as exceptionally handsome (though Cagey later pronounced him “fair to middling”), and the timing seemed so perfectly on cue that I clutched M. Greenhill’s arm and murmured to her, “Czarny?”—though with more of an exclamation point than a question mark.

  She shook her head slightly.

  * * * *

  IV

  * * * *

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)

  * * * *

  The incredibly handsome (to my eyes, at least) young man came into the room, held up a half-liter bottle of Courvoisier, and said, as if in utter confidence that his would be instantly recognized as a noble name, “I am Ramon Mendoza y Mendoza. And I repeat, who are you and what is your business with Batory?”

  “By ‘Batory,’” said Cagey, “I take it you mean Clement Czarny?”

  “I do. Batory is the true family name. ‘Czarny’ is only an affectation, as much as to register the final name ‘Black.’”

  “Sure you haven’t got that turned around?” said Lieutenant Thursday. “Sounds more like a self-proclaimed vampire to choose ‘Batory’ for the registered final name.”

  “If you doubt my word, check the Directory for yourself.” Mendoza gave the Courvoisier bottle one pendulum-motion shake.

  “No need for Names and Prints right now,” Cagey replied. “We’ve established that we’re talking about the same floater. That’s good enough for a starting point.” She held out her mug of coffee.

  Stepping forward, Mendoza tipped in a generous shot of the liquor. “Whatever you choose to call him, our vampire is not here today.”

  “You mean that for real, or just in the polite sense?” Cagey pressed him.

  “No, literally,” Fred Fletcher put in, making him the first one besides Cagey and Mendoza to speak since Mendoza’s entrance. “Batory sliced out of here this morning.”

  “Or maybe last night,” young M. Saladin, who had trailed in behind Mendoza, added eagerly.

  “Before anyone else was up, anyway,” Fletcher explained.

  “Hmmm.” Cagey sipped brandied coffee and let her gaze move methodically around the room. “Anybody like to tell me why?”

  “To avoid tearful good-byes, I imagine,” said Mendoza.

  One of the Pi Sighs giggled; I never was sure who or why. She might simply have been amused by Mendoza’s reply and the way he delivered it.

  “Let’s cut out the games, shall we?” Cagey told them. “It shouldn’t have taken a genius to figure out I wasn’t just asking why he left in the dead of night. I was asking why he left, period.”

  “Oh, not ‘period,’” cried one of the sorority women. “Let’s hope not, anyway! I’m sure he’ll be floating back from time to time.”

  “He’d better float back by Wednesday,” said Fletcher, “if he wants to keep his bedroom space.”

  “Let’s get this straight,” said Cagey. “He left without telling anybody, and he left last night or early this morning, but you’re sure he isn’t just out somewhere hanging one on.”

  “Hanging one on what?” asked Valentino Saladin. The expression must have been too oldfashioned for his immediate recognition.

  “A tassel on Uncle Hiram’s pink elephant,” Cagey improvised. “How do you people know when and if he may or may not be planning to come back?”

  Spuds—he of the broad and powerful build—offered, “He took a lot of his clothes.”

  “And his lute,” said Mendoza. “A fairly fine reproduction antique, that instrument. As well as his jewelry, though that should go without saying. He wears it every waking hour.”

  “Thanks,” said Cagey. “It wouldn’t have gone without saying to us, seeing as how we’ve never met the young man.”

  There was a general murmur at that. Mendoza said calmly above it, “No? We had assumed you were two more of his relatives. Blame me! I’m not sure we should have let two strange women into our parlor.”

  “Your brothers didn’t have that much choice, M. Mendoza,” Cagey told him. “It was a case of emergency assistance. Besides, I’m Lieutenant C. W. Thursday, and I’m here to ask some questions.”

  “Thursday?” asked Stallion Drinkwater. “Sergean
t Thursday who uncovered the mad doctor of—”

  “Lieutenant Thursday, now,” she reminded him. “That caper bagged me a promotion. And this is Tomlinson, my sergeant.” She didn’t add that the new titles, hers from Sergeant to Lieutenant and mine from Officer to Sergeant, were entirely her own decision. Anyone who recognized her from newscasts would probably be aware that she was a fancy-class amateur.

  But they would also be aware that her working relationship with most real police had become quite friendly thanks to the Sunvale case; and everyone except Ramon Mendoza, Stallion Drinkwater, Valentino Saladin, and one of the sorority women started acting nervous. M. Saladin started looking hero-worshipful, the sorority woman dropped into a chair and looked tolerant, M. Drinkwater folded his arms across his chest and put on the impassive expression of the stereotypical stoic Injun Brave. Mendoza’s attitude showed no change at all.

  “Well!” he said. “Lieutenant Cagida Warrington Thursday! We are honored. Please, Lieutenant, ask your questions.”

  I thought that he sounded as if he could answer virtually any question he chose. Very few people know that Cagey’s first name was Cagida before she reregistered it as the nickname version. I couldn’t even remember that we had ever given “Cagida” to any news service. Had Ramon Mendoza y Mendoza actually looked it up in an old, archival Names and Prints directory?

  “First,” my lieutenant began, “while we’re still more or less on the subject, I think I’d like to hear a little more about Czarny’s jewelry.”

  “Why?” That came from Fred Fletcher.

  “Because M. Mendoza made a point of mentioning it. Which suggests it must be something more or less unusual.”