The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Meanwhile, he had a decent peephole through the shrubbery at just about eye level. Not a good view, but a decent one. Far down the street, he was able to see the car pull away from in front of Dr. Fairchild’s house.

  Where would they be going now?

  Thank Omniprovidence that Hodag Crossing wasn’t such a large town, and that the car was a blue ‘34 Windbreaker with a couple of good, distinctive dents and an AVERTZ license plate. Easy to spot.

  * * * *

  M. Gertjie Botswa Zigabarra, April Greenhill’s “Aunt Cherky,” had an unpretentious if bizarrely floorplanned home in a housing development thrown up south of Oldtown during the 2020s.

  Tomlinson describes Zigabarra’s house as looking “something like a scout vessel built by extremely freakish aliens, that had just bumped down and grown an old-fashioned porch in the middle of a chrysanthemum bed surrounded by an abandoned kiddieland.” Aunt Cherky was a large, well-rounded woman with milk-chocolate skin and epicanthic eyes that seemed always to be smiling. She had prepared “probably enough lunch to fed the entire Purple Rose,” of which Warrington-Thursday ate generously and Tomlinson as much as she could, regretting that she had swallowed so many of Dr. Fairchild’s sandwiches and mini-apples. Zigabarra provided eager, if chit-chatty, hostess conversation all through the meal, but could give no material evidence about Batory-Czarny aside from her general impression that he was “a good sprout” and “a very nice young man ... Well, maybe just a shade too much on the serious side.” Once, when her informally adopted “niece” was out of the room for a moment, she added, “No, I never worry about April when she’s with Clemmie, ‘vampire’ or not. Not that he is, of course. It’s all put-on. His one little freak of fancyism. I think he just does it to try to fit in better with all these rich uppercrust fanciers in the school. He’s always on the lookout for how to climb up social ladders. His biggest fault, that I can see. Wears himself too thin—swimming team, university choir, dramatics—he played the lead in their production of ‘Dracula’ last year, now that was something to see, April still has a poster somewhere. I thought he was good, myself, but the local and school compnews critics gave him lousy reviews, he cried a bit on April’s shoulder, so to speak, over what they said about his performance. And then belonging to that hoity Purple fraternity, too, and still having to keep his grades up because of his scholarship ... Bite anybody? Lordy, when would he find the time?”

  After lunch, it was decided that April, who very much wanted to make her usual Saturday visit to her grandfather, would take her adoptive aunt’s car and do so while Warrington-Thursday and Tomlinson pursued their investigation. Warrington-Thursday politely but steadfastly refused to promise Zigabarra that she and her watson would return for dinner, pleading that they could never know where an investigation might lead them, nor for how long. She promised, however, to return if possible by 22:00 to take advantage of Zigabarra’s insistent offer of bedroom and breakfast.

  * * * *

  Dr. Matthew Fairchild, who had officially added his mother’s maiden name of Stanley to his own out of deference to her when the new nomenclature system was ratified (to his personal regret), but preferred not to use it, stood at his glass doors and pondered the situation. If Barghoothi’s death had attracted the attention of the Warrington woman, that fancy-class amateur criminologist ... Criminologist? What a pretentious word for a person obviously interested only in the trifling, ephemeral, one-on-one misdemeanors of isolated individuals, without the least perceptible understanding or sense of justice when it came to the true crimes of the human race, the deep scars ...

  The penphone beeped in his pocket. It was an old-model phone, but in some ways the more useful for that. One of a set so out of date that only other instruments of the same vintage could be set to decode communications put through its obsolete modal scramblers. Scooping it out of his pocket, he tuned in.

  “The Pater speaking,” he said.

  “Fieldmarshal here, Pater. They’re splitting up. Visitors heading back toward campus, Sweetheart going for Auntie’s sunburner ...”

  “Any sign of Bloodbrother?”

  “No, sir. Well, he always says he doesn’t cast a shadow.”

  “Shhh, son, let me think.” Fairchild drummed his fingers on his trousers leg.

  “Sweetheart backing out of the garage.”

  “All right, Fieldmarshal, stay with her. I’ll get someone else to rearguard the Visitors, but if Bloodbrother is interested at all, he’s more likely to show up in Sweetheart’s vicinity than theirs, and meanwhile ...”

  “Sweetheart heading out on Redpath Road.”

  “On her way to the rest home, no doubt. All right, Fieldmarshal, carry on. Over and out.”

  Fairchild clicked the penphone off and immediately back on to pushtone a new number. There was only one other agent he could trust to follow Warrington and her friend. “Stalwart? Yes, Pater here. I’m detailing you to rearguard our Visitors. You know their vehicle: dark blue 2034 Windbreaker, license plate AVERTZ-14. Last seen on Redpath Road heading east toward campus. ... Now, Stalwart, don’t give me that! Yes, it’s important to watch them. They’re looking for Bloodbrother, they may find him. They don’t have the least idea what they’re stumbling into, and I think that you are aware what a stumbler that woman is at the best of times. ... All right, that’s better. And remember, Stalwart, bear it firmly in your mind: the safety of Warrington and her friend comes first. Over and out.”

  Once again he switched his penphone off, this time to return it to his pocket. He thought once more of Maklowski and Hartwick, down there in Madison, awaiting a single phone signal: two bars from Calderwell’s setting of the “Dies Irae.”

  He feared the interface Hartwick and Warrington might make, she the hardboiled clouseau and he the romantic lone ranger. And yet, at this point, it might be more dangerous not to call in the professionals. Hoping that circumstances were not forcing his hand prematurely, Dr. Fairchild made the call.

  Then, as stern with himself as with any of his boys, he put aside all further thoughts of the situation until new developments should arise, and settled himself to steady his nerves with a new picture, a near-representational landscape with birds, the whole built entirely out of Euclidean geometrics. He worked this time in colored pencil, for the ease of laying it down at an instant’s notice.

  VIII

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)

  Amy Ryan Thelwell Residence Hall was four stories’ worth of box, built around a central courtyard. The architect had laid token 2020s offbeat geometrics in concrete bas-relief all over the outer walls, but that only made it an incongruously decorated box. Unless the interior and the central courtyard had a lot more elegance than the exterior, I could almost understand why someone might have wanted to get out of Thelwell Hall into even such a piece of architectural indigestion as the Pi Rho house.

  Just as, having visited the Pi Rho house, I thought I could understand why someone would want to move out of it into ... wherever Czarny had gone to earth.

  “Although actually,” I remarked, taking another look at Thelwell Hall, “it’s probably better than the dorm where I spent my frosh year. I simply can’t imagine anyone sticking around in a dorm longer than one year.”

  “Why not?” Cagey teased me. “Where else would a student go who opted to stay Independent?”

  “There are plenty of other places besides Greek houses. Apartments; cooperative houses; sometimes hotels and motels give students special rates—”

  “Today’s students? We’re dealing with a new breed here, Sergeant. Marching straight back past the Moral Awakening to the Victorian Age.”

  “But this is M. Ko-Ko’s third year, isn’t it? Surely a junior—”

  “In this burg, there may not be anything outside the dorms and Greek houses until you’re a doctoral student at the very least. Except maybe room and board with some r
espectable private family.”

  “M. Czarny is a junior, too,” I pointed out. “and he’s apparently found someplace else—at short notice, too. Don’t try to tell me we’re slipping all the way back to the Double Standard?”

  “Bogey, I hope not!” She got out of the car—safely, for once—and stood leaning on it, rubbing her shoulder, and gazing up at Thelwell Hall. “O tempora, O mores ...”

  “For pity’s sake, Lieutenant,” I observed, “you’re only thirty-four. I’m thirty-two. We’re hardly middle-aged yet!”

  “Humor me, Sergeant. With my accident rate, I may have to get in all Seven Ages well before my half-century mark. Anyway, I feel middle-aged, with all these younkers around. Gad, they look like gradeschoolers! Besides, it’s been a fast century for social change. Makes you feel old before your time. Well, come on, let’s see how the place looks inside.”

  It looked quite a bit better inside, with good quality furniture in subdued colors and a deal of marblesim. Likewise, what could be seen, through the window behind the front desk, of the central court was very nice: a tiny plot with two fruit trees, autumnally bare now; a pagoda-shaped fountain, drained for the season, in blue and green porcelain; and flower tiers with late fall blooms still supplying dots of color. I guessed that the interior decorators and landscape gardeners had been doing competent updates over the years.

  “At least the dorms are still gender-integrated,” Cagey observed, watching the last of the lunch crowd wander their way by ones, twos, and threes outside or to the room wings. “There may be hope for the upcoming generation yet.”

  I got M. Ko-Ko’s room number—308 West—not from the dorm directory screen but from a kewpie-cheeked young desk assistant filling in workhours, and we went on up.

  Dormitory corridors probably haven’t changed much for two centuries or more. I know that my old fifteen-story dorm was given its seventy-fifth birthday party the year I spent there, and its corridors looked very much like the one we visited in Thelwell Hall. The main difference was the wall covering, Thelwell Hall having new sound-absorbent wallcarpeting, put up within the last year or two, instead of elderly paint.

  Many of the doors were stuck over with posters, cartoons, and other whimsical documents. That hadn’t changed, either, since my own university generation. What had changed was that the official powers had finally bowed to the custom and covered the doors with tackboard, instead of officially forbidding it and threatening extra charges to anyone who damaged the door finish. Or perhaps the official approach varied more from school to school than from decade to decade.

  The door of 308 West bore only one item, a computer-printout reproduction of a poster for some twentieth-century production of The Mikado, featuring a cartoon portrait of the Lord High Executioner and the caption, apparently substituted for some of the original performance information: “Suicide Is A Capital Offence.” That made it clear from which of a number of literary and other originals M. Ko-Ko had chosen her final name.

  When I pushed the doorchime button, the miniscreen lit up with the message, aurally repeated in a low, gruff computer voice: “Out of order. Please give three knocks.”

  “Okay,” said Cagey, and did.

  The miniscreen replied this time, “Studying, but available if it’s really important.”

  “Would you say it’s really important, Sergeant Tomlinson?”

  “I’d say it’s really important, Lieutenant Thursday.”

  “Right.” Cagey tried the doorknob.

  It turned easily. As she swung the door open, a young alto voice, anything but computerized, chanted out, “Yo! Who comes?”

  A petite young woman was swiveling around in her desk chair to watch us. When it comes to my own gender, I have 100 percent reality perception: M. Keiko Kato Ko-Ko looked every bit as Pureblood Butterscotch as April had told us, straight black hair—cut short—almond eyes, high cheekbones, and all. Not beautiful or even particularly pretty at first glance, but with the kind of comfortable attractiveness that can seem better and better the longer one looks at it; the kind of appeal the Satellite Philosopher says everyone has or can have, but I think it was especially noticeable in M. Ko-Ko’s case. She was dressed in a baggy gold pullover and faded bluejeans with red flannel lining that showed on the rolled-up cuffs and through a rip over one knee.

  “Now, let’s see,” she remarked mischievously. “Where do I know you girls from, again?”

  “Nowhere, so far,” Cagey told her.

  “Oh, that’s good. I was afraid for a minute there my recognition perception was slipping. And when the old recognition perception goes, can insanity lag far behind? Well, I guess you’ve got business, or you wouldn’t have come around looking up a total stranger, so find yourselves seats wherever you can in the clutter and tell me about it.”

  Actually, her room was quite neat for a university student’s; but it was a single, with limited seating. Cagey plopped herself on the bed, leaving the one guest chair for me.

  “Lieutenant Cagey Thursday, M. Ko-Ko,” she said. “And this is my partner, Sergeant Tomlinson.”

  “Lieutenant. Sergeant. Charmed ta meetcha. Is that ‘K’ as in ‘karmel-corn’ and ‘G’ as in ‘good for you,’ Lieutenant?”

  “No, it’s Cagey as in ‘cage’ with an ‘ee,’ but you can think of it as K-G if you want. Some people do. And you’d be Keiko Kato Ko-Ko, right?” Cagey added, pronouncing it “Cake-o Kayto Cocoa” as April had told us.

  Our hostess nodded. “Hades of a moniker, ain’t it? I can’t do anything about the family name, but at least ‘Kato’ sounds a little Latin, don’t you think? And I thought about changing my first to Cookie-o or Pie-o, but I kinda like hanging onto Cake-o as a souvenir. Makes my folks feel good, you know. Someday maybe I’ll reregister my final to Pish-Tush. That’s the character who just stands around through the whole opera making comments and filling in with ensemble singing and never getting himself into any kind of trouble, generally being cynical and worldly-wise and low-profile, keeping his own nose good and clean. Fits me better than ‘Ko-Ko,’ I think. But, what the heck, all those ‘K’s’ are so doggone alliterative. Always use either just two or all four of ’em when I initial myself, of course—never three. So. What else can I do for you?”

  “You can tell us,” said Cagey, “the whereabouts of Clement Batory Czarny.”

  Keiko went stiff. She didn’t change position, but for a moment every muscle seemed to tense up; and when she relaxed again, I thought it was with an effort. “The Pi Rho house. You can’t miss it, the most gothic mansion in Greektown, big deep-purple gormenghast of a place. If he isn’t there, his fratty brothers should know where to find him.”

  “They don’t. We’ve already checked.”

  “Then leave a message.”

  “He isn’t just out for the day, M. Ko-Ko,” said Cagey. “They believe he’s quit residence.”

  “And gone where.” It was a statement, not a question. “Oh, no, that’d be a pretty hard one for me to swallow, after the way he pawed and finagled and begged his cousin Donna to help get him into that unholy brotherhood.”

  “He took his clothes,” Cagey replied.

  “And his lute,” I added. “We understand it’s a fairly valuable instrument.”

  “It is.” Keiko nodded. “Yeah, that sounds like it could be serious, all right. Not that he’s never taken his lute out on weekend trips before. Just not very often.”

  “The fraternity father confirms that Czarny has left residence,” Cagey said, stretching the truth since Dr. Fairchild had never confirmed it in so many words, merely accepted our request for the vampire’s new address without blinking, questioning, or any other sign of surprise.

  “Old Fairsquare?” said Keiko. “Who insisted on calling him ‘Batory,’ natch. Well, if the Fairsquare doesn’t know where he’s gone ... You asked him that, too?”

  “You know how to
tune in a picture, M. Ko-Ko,” Cagey replied.

  “Thanks. But I still don’t know anything about where Clement went.”

  “All right,” said Cagey, “we’ll leave it for now. But I’d be very interested to know why you called it an ‘unholy’ fraternity, M.”

  “What, did I? I guess because to me all that kind of thing seems more or less unholy. Any group with Mystic Secrets For Initiates Only and ritualistic mumbo-jumbo and that kind of garbage. But yeah, I guess I’d put the Purple Rose right down there with the unholiest of the unholy. For one thing, they’ve got some of the worst lunkers on campus. For another thing, their rituals are infamous. When they decide some poor rushee is good enough for their clique, they grab him in with a pledge ceremony that should make any other kind of hazing obsolete. If you’d seen what they did to Clement when they pledged him ... Not that he minded it,” she added as if trying to be fair. “Welcomed it in ecstasies, in fact. He’ll dance for pure joy when he finds himself in Purgatory.”

  “Why ecstasies?” Cagey asked. “I mean the Pi Rho business, not Purgatory.”

  “Why? Because that doggone Purple Rose is considered the top of the Greek social ladder around here. Don’t ask me why. I suspect it goes back to before our time, that the Rose is really a has-been house on its way down, only nobody’s noticed yet. Trailing shreds of glory as it goes. ... All I know is, I came pretty doggone close to lodging a complaint with the President’s Office about Clement’s pledge ceremony. Only he might not have wanted to forgive me.”

  “Mind telling us,” Cagey pressed, “what your relationship is with M. Czarny?”

  “Good pal. Study buddy. Just one of the fellas.”

  Cagey remarked, “Old friendships can suffer when one of the buddies goes Greek and the other doesn’t.”

  “Hey! He may be a social climber, but he isn’t the kind that uses friendships up and throws them away. Once you’re Clement Czarny’s buddy, you stay his buddy until and unless you break the relationship.” She cocked her head and added, “Come to think of it, that could be a drawback in social climbing. Could make it rough for him. Of course, theoretically we’re all social equals here at NMU, but it’s like Animal Farm—’Some are more equal than others.’ Ain’t that always the case?”