Merchants of Menace

by Joan Aiken

  It was food for thought. Were the opponents exhausted from wielding the lash, or grown careless with a surfeit of loot? Winkman did not think so. Rather it seemed that the Prince was smoldering over Jeanne’ s continued rapid but ragged dummy play. If so, it must really have been bugging him, be­cause on the last deal he gave an almost shocking exhibition of ineptness.

  Against four spades, Jake led the heart king, Edna playing the eight. He continued with the ace, Polensky trumping. The Prince now carefully laid down the spade king and then en­tered dummy with a diamond to take a spade finesse on the way back. This sequence was like something from the fortieth of a cent game in the back room at the Y.W. Jake accepted the trick and played a third heart to Edna’s queen. The Prince, down to two trumps, was now in trouble. He frowned and discarded a club, but this feeble maneuver was much too little and too late. Edna stoically produced a fourth heart and another cast-iron contract bit the dust.

  As the cards lay, almost any line of play would have worked—except the one chosen by the Prince. Many rubber bridge players would simply cash the ace-king of spades, abandoning trumps if the queen failed to appear, and run the diamonds, conceding two trump tricks but bringing the hand home on the club finesse. Others might have tested the club finesse first, and then “adjusted” their view of how to play the trumps, according to whether the club play won or lost. A slightly more elegant line would be to enter dummy at trick three for an immediate trump finesse—a line that could pre­vail with the trump queen four deep in the East and the club king off-side—and would leave the spade eight to cover the fourth heart if it lost, and again reduce the hand to the club finesse. It was all very perplexing.

  Nevertheless, the session broke up with Jake and Edna minus $38,000, give or take a few hundred.

  Jake slept late. The sun was high when, clad in swim trunks and white terrycloth robe, he descended to the terrace, where a sumptuous buffet brunch awaited him.

  The Countess was breath-catching in a turquoise bikini with a transparent cover-up that achieved the near-ultimate in futility. The Prince was sartorially resplendent in a tailored robe of bronze and purple with a coat of arms over the left breast. As be turned to accompany Jeanne down to the sand, Jake half-expected to see POLENSKY stenciled across the back. He even sported custom-built beach sandals.

  When they were out of earshot, Edna turned to Jake. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I know my game is plodding and uninspired, Wink. But I feel so outclassed. And Jeanne is little more than a beginner. Perhaps I should start all over. What do you think?”

  He dispatched the last of his eggs Benedict and poured himself another cup of coffee. He was deft enough at tamper­ing with the truth, but, with Edna, there was hardly ever any need. Inside her doughy exterior, she had a lovely core of toughness that he had seen often bent, but never broken. But he could sense that she was uniquely vulnerable now, and that the breaking point was perilously close. Was that why, without quite knowing it herself, she had sent for him? He mentally riffled through his file of clichés, but after a dozen years of coaching her under the stress of tournament pressure, there was very little he had left to say.

  He put down his coffee cup. “Your game is not the great­est, Edna. Maybe someday it will be. But it has integrity, and it’s always around the target.” He paused, groping. “Bridge and golf are very similar disciplines.” Edna in her culottes would never make the cover of Vogue, but she was a steady and competent performer on the links. “Horton Smith was a great golfer in the Hagen era, and, like most pros, a deadly putter. The press, always seeking the sensational, gave rise to the belief that Smith won tournaments because he knocked the ball in the cup from anywhere on the green. Once asked the secret of great putting, he gave a simple, unsensational answer. ‘The guy who sinks the most putts,’ he said, ‘is the guy who’s closest to the pin.’ Remember that, Edna.”

  Jake strolled down to the beach and caught the Prince emerging from the surf. Polensky made a business of arranging his beach towel, but there was a moment when he stood barefoot, erect, and quite close. Jake slid his eyes to the horizon and back to make sure. The Prince’s eyes were a good two inches below his own.

  “Where’s the beautiful Countess?” he asked.

  “Along the bitch she swims, and then back walks to exer­cise her feet,” the Prince volunteered, quickly dropping onto his towel.

  Jeanne appeared around an abutment that shielded the pri­vate beach and walked toward them along the hard-surfaced shore just above the wave-line. “Hi, champ!” she called to Winkman, accentuating the sway of her hips a trifle. “Say,” she added, coming closer, “you look like an Olympics cham­pion instead of a bridge expert.’’

  “But which Olympics?” Jake sighed. “Anyway, it’s an illusion. We have so many in our culture, don’t we?”

  She laughed. “Is this a new game? Find the hidden stiletto in that remark?”

  He shrugged. “My stilettos are never too hard to find, Countess. Just check the nearest bull’s-eye.”

  He left her biting a pensive lip and walked out into the surf. As a Midwestern boy, he knew the coldness of the water in the Great Lakes, but years of sheltered living around tepid pools had softened him unmercifully. He had to clench his teeth to keep going, and total immersion rivaled the ecstasy of crawling into a casket of ice. But after a dozen strokes or so, he began actually to enjoy it. It was so brutally elemental, it gave one a sense of conquest to survive. He turned and began to sidestroke his way along parallel to the beach. It was in such repetitive and mechanical activities that be often did his best thinking.

  Cheating, of course, was always a thing to be considered. But to attempt to cheat against him would have required a rather massive ego. In his time he bad been retained by trans­ Atlantic cruise ships, various old line clubs, private blue book clients, and even by operators of back room cigar store games. Regardless of the site, the means were always limited, and be could almost check them off in his sleep. The adept dealer, the marked cards, the cold deck, the sloppy shuffler, the one-at-a­ time-card-picker-upper. Then there were the tired old mechan­ical props that every bridge pro knows by heart. The tinted glasses, the hearing aid, contact lenses, the motorized wheelchair, the electronic cane, the peephole, the colleague with the binoculars, the hole in the ceiling, the taps from the floor below. Moreover, he was certain that Edna, in her bland and simplis­tic way, bad managed to inform her guests of Winkman’s familiarity with this sordid side of card life. It all made for a nice problem. Keeping the solution equally genteel might not be so easy. But he thought again of that sweat-racked night, when, with no other place to turn and with a man’s life in the balance, he had turned to Edna...

  He was becoming numb. He had heard that people had frozen to death that way, in a sort of tranquil euphoria, and switched to a vigorous overhand stroke, heading directly for the beach. He came ashore at a private beach two estates to the north of the Mallorys’. It was deserted and be was plodding along, heading back, when a cheery voice called to him.

  Jake recognized it at once as coming from Randy Maxwell. He turned to see the financier beckoning to him. Maxwell was attired in disreputable shorts and a stained T-shirt, and was stand­ing at the entrance to what appeared to be a well-tended jungle. Jake joined him and saw that the trees concealed a squat functional building of concrete and hollow tile.

  “My hobby shop,” Randy explained. “Since the word ‘work’ is vulgarly de trop around here, I had to draw it up as a ‘summer house’ to get a building permit—and then hide it.”

  Inside, even Jake’s unsophisticated eye could detect a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of electronic toys. “What do you do in here?” he asked. “Besides compute relative strength indices on the Dow Jones averages.”

  Randy laughed. “Believe it or not, I’ve got a computer that does just that. Mainly, I piddle. What I’m really trying to do, I suppose, is recapture what I had in my garage down on South Sangamon Street twenty-five years ago. I
used to piddle with impractical, noncommercial things, and one year I made twelve million. Now, of course, such things are done in what is called a laboratory, and it’s considered unseemly for me to be caught in one. I pay young squirts fabulous salaries to do what I’d cheerfully do for nothing.” He pointed to the array of equip­ment. “But it isn’t the same. I just don’t get the ideas any­ more.”

  “Even the Greeks didn’t have a word for it,” Jake said. “Slip me another Polaroid, and I’ll sit down and weep with you, Alexander.”

  Maxwell shook his head. “It would spoil you, Jake. I wouldn’t want to be a party to that. Integrity is fine, but it’s twice as fine when it costs till it hurts.” He turned cheerful again. “Here.” He handed Jake two plastic boxes about the size of matchboxes. “Let’s try something.”

  “Behind you and to your left,” Randy went on, “there’s a cabinet with a shelf full of large capacitors.”

  “What’s a capacitor?”

  “A radio-electronic device. There are also some small condensers.”

  “Same question.”

  “Same answer. I am going to tell you how many of each. Listen closely.”

  Suddenly Jake became aware of a soundless tingling in his left hand and recognized a series of six impulses. Then came a series of shorter or lighter impulses. “Six capacitors and ten condensers,” he said. “The last time I was in your house you had a bottle of Scotch that talked in a whiskey tenor. I liked that trick better.’’

  “Me, too,” Randy said. “But we have to be practical.”

  “Indeed. And what will this thing do? Communicate with your refrigerator to give you different colored ice cubes?”

  “It is one of the world’s great myths, Jake, that real progress comes from creating to fill a need. Such efforts are always stodgy and pedestrian. Create first; find the need later. Check that cabinet.”

  Jake checked and found the six capacitors and ten condensers.

  “Now move a number of condensers down to the next shelf and tell me how many by pressing down with your right thumb.”

  Jake moved three, and pressed down on the black box in his right hand three times.

  “Three,” Randy said. “Isn’t that nice? No wires, no sound.” A phone rang. “Damn,” he said, putting it down. “Another di­rectors’ meeting. Got to run. Stop over for a drink before you leave, Jake.”

  Jake resumed his stroll along the beach, coming presently to the abutment where he had first spotted Jeanne. He found him­self almost treading on her small but well-formed footprints.

  Edna’s beach was deserted, and he gathered up his robe and headed directly for his shower. Coming out, he began carefully to pack. He worked at remaining cool and dispassionate, sipping rye and water because it seemed to him to have a clean taste. Sometimes he even brushed his teeth with it. But the sour nausea was not in his mouth or stomach. He took a deep breath, followed the broad upstairs hall to the south wing, and tapped on Jeanne’s door.

  The Countess was reclining on a love seat in canary yellow lounging pajamas and looked almost feverishly fetching. She sat up and gave him a warm smile. “Let me fix you a drink. What a pleasant surprise. But this is hardly the hour for a seduction, is it?”

  Jake sat down across from her and accepted the drink. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t gotten around to punching a time card on it.’’

  She laughed. “You’re such a devastating rebuker, Wink. Do you really enjoy cutting people up, or is it just a pose?”

  “In this case, neither,” Jake said. “It’s a job. Something like swabbing down the head—somebody has to do it. It’ll help if we omit the headshrinker jargon about sibling hostilities. You and Edna were raised as sisters, but you have everything, and she’s a dowdy frump. You glitter and sparkle and have royal consorts, and all she can do is blink her bovine eyes. Of course, it’s unbelievably cruel that she should have the money instead of you. But I don’t think money is the whole story, Jeanne. You could marry a bundle. It’s got to be something else. Edna’s got something that infuriates you. It completely distorts your perspective. You’ve spent years pirouetting around her, mercilessly tossing your darts, artfully searching out her most vulnerable parts. You do it with your clothes, your style, your men—you’d even toss in an affair with me, once you sensed it would wound her. But Edna won’t show hurt. That’s an aristocracy that you just can’t comprehend. Over the years, you’ve hit her with every­ thing in your sick arsenal. But she won’t show hurt. She just chews her cud and endures it. But suppose you could humiliate her at bridge? She couldn’t pretend to ignore that, could she? And with me as her partner? The skin should really be thin and tender there, shouldn’t it? But your vaulting fury overreached itself.”

  The Countess’s face was a white mask. “Indeed? In what way?”

  “You got carried away by the caprice of a few cards. You wanted the ecstasy of plunging the knife yourself. You played the dummy too fast for little Sergie to clue you. Not that he’s the greatest…”

  Her face was suddenly mottled with rage. “Why, you—you point-count gigolo. You cheap pasteboard mercenary. Don’t you dare speak to me that way. Don’t tell me you’re really fond of the old sow! How much is she paying you? Tell me that!” She was standing over him, her bodice heaving.

  Jake sipped his drink. “Edna would never pay me for a favor, Jeanne. Besides, anything I could do for her was paid for long, long ago—and not with money.” He looked out the win­dow. “I’m a creampuff as well as a dreamer, Jeanne. I can’t protect Edna from all the hurts in the world, much as I might like to, but I can protect her from a pair of filthy frauds—and will.”

  She turned suddenly calculating. “Oh, come now. Let’s not make wildly slanderous statements. Besides, Sergio—”

  Jake sighed. “Sergio said we can always buy him. But you see, Countess, Sergie is sadly two inches shorter on the beach than in the drawing room.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “So he wears elevator shoes. What has a little male vanity got to do with anything?”

  “About the same amount,” Jake said, “as phony fallen arches. Half-firm sand takes a fairly revealing footprint. You may be fallen, Countess, but the problem is not in your arches.”

  “Just what are you getting at?”

  “Many things. None of them pretty. I suspect that against Fred and Randy all you really needed was the receiver, which you could hide in your hair, and, consequently, there was no mention of your bad arches and clumsy shoes. But when I came into the act, you had to go on two-way communication. That’s why you wanted me beside you and Edna ahead of you when you went up the stairs. Is that enough? I’ll deal with Sergie later.”

  She gave him a venomous glare. “That does it! The only thing you’ll deal with later is my attorney.” She grasped the top of her pajamas, ready to rip. “If you’re not out of here in five seconds with your lips sealed, I’m going to scream rape!”

  But Jake wasn’t there to protest. “Excuse me for being rude to the crude,” he said, from the region of her closet. “A topless bridge player should make a peek worth even more than two finesses. But I’m after even bigger skin game.”

  He returned with an armload of her shoes. Whether it was this or his remark that inhibited her, she did not scream. Several of them, he noted, were made by a custom cobbler in Florence, and had one feature in common—a nice substantial heel. A little toying revealed the clever way in which they could be de­tached, and the equally deft manner in which they bad been hollowed. Quite enough to conceal a little black box—one in each heel.

  He sighed. The rich often spoke in parables. Randy Maxwell would never dream of accusing one of Edna’s guests of rooking him out of thirty grand. But he’d spend a week figuring out how it was done, drop suave and subtle suggestions to Edna about importing Jake Winkman, and then contrive to get Jake to do the dirty work. But the really important task remained.

  The Countess, watching him, had difficulty lighting a cigarette. She blew out a cloud of
smoke. “Okay. Now what?”

  “I go through the rest of your shoes and search the room until I find the transmitter and receiver—or you hand them to me.”

  She dug them out from behind the cushions of the love seat and handed them to him, a look of actual triumph suddenly lighting her eyes, “There. Now call Edna and explain to her how her little sister and ward abused her hospitality and cheated her. Go on. Maybe she’ll prefer charges, and we can make an international thing out of it.”

  He smiled ruefully. “No wonder you’re such a lousy bridge player. Listen to me, Jeanne. I don’t think you’re all that bad, or all that stupid. Besides, I need your help. Edna wouldn’t prefer charges. She’d probably apologize for inspiring your perfidy. But she’d be hurt, and we don’t really want that, do we?”

  She gawked. “Are you kidding? I should cooperate with you to spare that cretin’s feelings! Just how will you manage that?”

  “By cutting out your heart, if I have to,” Jake said. “We’re going downstairs in a few minutes for a session of bridge—and just in case there’s more of these around—you’ll be wearing bedroom slippers.”

  She sat forward in rigid disbelief. “So you can cut Serg and me to pieces just to plaster up Edna’s ego? And take back our hard-earned money? Do you realize how much time and effort we— Try to make me!”

  “If you insist.” He moved to the door. “I’ll let pride put a pitch­fork to your derrière. You see, Jeanne, Sergie is not a bridge expert.”

  “Not a bridge expert!” She actually goggled. “What do you mean? Why everyone—even Edna—has complimented him on his game. At Nice and Cannes he was always a big winner.”

  Jake shook his head. “He played too well,” he said, “on defense. When he was practically looking at all four hands. Bridge doesn’t work that way. There are a hundred fine dummy players for every topflight defensive player, He is a middling fair casino-style player—what we call a palooka-killer. Since you asked for it, brace yourself: Sergie is a con man. He pro­moted you for the sole purpose of getting into this house and out again—with a bundle. By involving you, he provided him­self with complete immunity even if he was caught. If I know the type—and believe me I do—I’ll bet he brought his mistress along when he followed you over here. He’s got her stashed at some downtown hotel. Hasn’t he made a quick trip or two to see his ‘consulate’?”