by M. E. Kerr
“In his pictures he has a big handlebar mustache and a monocle … so it’ll be easy.”
Nina was back in the room, arms folded across her chest, an uncertain look in her eyes, directed at me.
“Mustard, Fell?” she said.
“Yes. Dijon?”
“Dijon. It’s already on both sandwiches. I’d have had to make you another if you didn’t like it … Well?” She shrugged. “Is this a private conversation?” She couldn’t seem to look at her father.
“Not really, Nina, honey,” he answered her, and his tone of voice told her I hadn’t squealed … yet.
Then he said, “I checked with Sevens today and learned that Fell’s signed up for a blind date for The Charles Dance.”
He glanced across at me. “You don’t have to take a blind date, Fell, if you’d prefer to take Nina. I’m ready for her to see how Sevens do things.”
“Oh, Dad! Can I go?”
“Well, Fell?” said Mr. Deem.
Both of them were looking at me expectantly.
“Sure,” I said. What was I supposed to say? “Would you go with me, Nina?”
“I’d like that, Fell.”
“It’ll be her very first time on The Hill,” said Mr. Deem. “I wanted it to be for something Sevens was doing. This is perfect.”
“Perfect!” Nina agreed. “Oh, I hope and pray nothing comes up to spoil this!”
Her father chuckled. “Such histrionics, Nina! You hope and pray? Nothing’s going to spoil this. What could spoil it?”
Then he said, “I know you’re hurrying, Fell, and Nina’s occupied a lot of your time today, so take the BMW. It’s cold, too.”
“I can hike it,” I told him.
“Anyone can hike it, but what’s being a Sevens all about? … Take advantage of your advantages, Fell. You can bring the car back tomorrow afternoon.” Then, meticulous as always, he added, “I told you before, didn’t I, that there’s a spare key in the back ashtray?”
Nina walked me to the door. “I feel like a spare female. You don’t have to take me to the dance if you don’t want to,” she said. “I know Dad sprang that on you in a way you almost couldn’t refuse.”
“He sprang it on you, too,” I said. I was getting into my boots and thinking about buying myself some Odor-Eaters for the insides, if I kept visiting the Deems.
“He didn’t spring it on me, exactly. I’ve been begging him to ask you to invite me.”
I was glad, too glad, the kind of glad that leaps up the way Wordsworth’s heart did when he beheld a rainbow in the sky.
“If today hadn’t happened,” I started to say, and she didn’t let me finish. She put two fingers against my lips. “Today was the tag end of something. The Fates arranged for today to happen.”
“You arranged for today to happen, Nina.”
“It was like the final period at the end of the sentence ‘I don’t care about him anymore.’”
“Just say the period. Never mind the final period.”
“My tutor.” She smiled at me, coming closer.
I moved back a step, remembering the dragonfly with the blue wings crawling out of her bra.
I said, “Why do I still have the feeling I can’t trust you?”
“I’ll make that go away. You’ll see.”
She was looking all over my face, and I could feel something shivering down my arms.
Her hands reached up, starting to rest on my shoulders, but I shrugged them away, trying to act the way someone would when he was still angry.
It wasn’t easy.
Maybe my problem was I liked tricky females. I didn’t have a history of elevated heartbeat except when I was confronted by the beautiful/sweet-talking/kinky ones who made chopped liver out of your heart.
She handed me the keys to the BMW, and I went outside where winter was waiting to cool me off.
Chapter 16
All I wanted to do that night was eat my sandwich in peace and study for the test on medieval history coming up Monday. I’d be expected to explain, in an hour, how a scruffy army of illiterate soldiers, chomping on hunks of raw meat between battles, could bring down the whole Roman Empire.
Sevens House was dead. It seemed as though everyone but Mrs. Violet, our housemother, was still over at The Tower. I looked at my watch. It was almost eight. They were finished with dessert by now, those who hadn’t left for the weekend. Some were still hanging around over coffee, or starting to play chess and backgammon in the library. Others were on their way into Cottersville, to meet the bus from Miss Tyler’s or to go to the movies, bowling, the play at the Civic Center.
I got my mail. That was when I noticed someone else abroad in Sevens House. Creery. Behind me in the phone booth. He wasn’t dining at The Tower these nights. He looked like he’d just come in from the cold, too.
I could hear him telling someone, “I waited over an hour for you. Ask Lowell. Where were you?”
I opened a club bill for the gold 7 I’d already sent to Mom. OVERDUE was stamped across it.
“Then I’ll come there tomorrow morning,” Creery continued…. “Not too early because I’ll be up late.”
I didn’t have any personal letters. I never opened my box that I didn’t hope I’d see one from Delia. I was going to hear from Delia the day they discovered something that would rhyme with orange, but that never stopped me looking for the tiny handwriting with the long loops and the ? bars flying off the handles.
I had the usual junk mail: Save the Seals and Support National Arbor Day. Your Christmas subscription to Esquire will be up next December so renew in March. A catalog from The Sharper Image promising that a Shotline Putter would release the pro golfer within me.
I tossed it all in the wastebasket while Creery told whoever he was talking to that he had to cram for the same history test. I decided to keep him in mind if we were called on to describe Alaric the Goth, the one who plundered Rome and got everyone eating each other instead of the parrots’ tongues they were fond of baking into pies.
I did wonder who Creery’d have in his life to complain to, since it wasn’t his stepbrother on the phone. And I thought about who he might be meeting “there” the next day … maybe the same one who arranged for Lowell Hunter to stay at number 6 Playwicky.
“How are you, Fell?” said Mrs. Violet. “Long time no see.”
Our housemother was always in white, always gorgeous, usually stationed nights in the wing chair near the reception room.
“I’m fine, thanks. What are you reading tonight?”
She closed the book in her lap so I could see the cover. Hunted Down by Charles Dickens.
“You want to hear something extraordinary?” she said, not waiting for my answer. “Listen. I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honestly out of countenance, any day in the week. She pushed a strand of blond hair away from her forehead and looked up at me. “And I always judge boys by whether or not they can look you in the eye.”
“Maybe Dickens didn’t mean boys,” I said. “My dad used to say a really good con man always looks you in the eye.”
So had Delia had that skill. So did Nina.
“I’ll have to think about that,” Mrs. Violet said.
Creery was going up the staircase in a long gabardine overcoat, the blue-and-white wool Sevens scarf wrapped around his neck, the tail behind his head.
It wasn’t like him to greet Mrs. Violet. It wasn’t like his eyes to see the people around him. His eyes saw La La Land, little blue and red pills, joints and smoke.
“Fell? That friend of yours from the dorm was in your room earlier this evening. He said he had permission.”
“He does, ma’am.”
“Sidney Dibble.”
“Yes.”
“And your mother called. She said it wasn’t important. Just a hello.”
Mom had probably received the gold 7 for her birthday.
I
thanked Mrs. Violet and kept going. In a while her freshman groupies would come over from The Tower. A score of them. Healthy young boys who turned into groveling lackeys, eager to do any chore she could dream up. Or they simply sat at her feet while she read to them. It didn’t matter what. She’d call them “darling” or “dear” — words most of them never heard from any lips but hers, unless they called home.
When I got up to my room, I saw that Dib had left a red 7 hanging on my doorknob. All Sevens were issued one, which we could hang there when we didn’t want to be disturbed. No one in Sevens House went through a door with one on it.
I pocketed it as I went inside.
The living room was dark, but I could see through to the bedroom, where there were green letters lit up on the face of the word processor.
I switched on a light and got out of my coat. I grabbed a Soho lemon spritzer from the refrigerator.
I supposed Dib had left me a message For My Eyes Only, probably something against Sevens … me and Sevens.
I wanted to relish the corned beef sandwich before I read it. I wanted to think a minute about Nina. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, someone wrote. Not the same one who wrote Duty before pleasure.
There was just enough Dijon on the bread. I was too hungry to care that the bread was white and fell into the empty-carbohydrate category, too ravenous to regret it wasn’t rye or pumpernickel. Too starved to miss a fat dill-and-garlic pickle.
I began demolishing it, still standing, which is the only honest position for rationalizing. All I’d agreed to do was report back to David Deem if Nina tried to see Dragon. Technically, she hadn’t tried to see him, only Dragonland … Chances were that what she’d found there would be enough to discourage her from ever wanting to see him again.
I played it back a few times and it didn’t have a discordant note.
My dad would have said it was too pat.
But my dad hadn’t arrived at his judgments when he was seventeen, horny, and far from Brooklyn.
I finished the sandwich and carried my bottle of lemon spritzer in toward the green letters.
Dear Lionel,
The enclosed copy of a letter from Cyril Creery to his stepbrother is self-explanatory.
I think you will agree that this is more serious than anything that has ever been handled in Twilight Truth, although ideally it should be done in that manner. However, it is unlikely, as you’ll see in the fifth paragraph, that Creery would ever on his own allow it to be used in that ceremony.
The letter came into my hands because a concerned outside party knew the information in it was vital to Sevens. I make no apologies for passing it on to you, since the honor of Sevens has, for me, always had priority over any other principle.
I’ve held on to this since Christmas, weighing what course to take. Surely this calls for The Sevens Revenge … and for the immediate ouster of Cyril Creery from our organization.
Sincerely,
Paul Lasher
Lasher’s letter had been written three days before his death.
I reached up and switched on my desk light.
Dib had left a note on my blotter.
It wasn’t a tutorial inside — it was a regular microwafer I came upon when I pushed Microwafer Directory and found LETTERS.
There are others there: complaints to stores, and one to his father about the delivery of the Porsche, but nothing pertinent.
They are all permanently stored, so just pull the microwafer out, turn the two switches off, and CALL ME.
Dib
I called him.
“What do you think Creery’s letter could have said, Fell?”
“How would I know?”
“And what about The Sevens Revenge? You said it was a myth.”
“I thought it was. It’s news to me, too.”
“Sure. Surprise, surprise.”
I couldn’t convince him that I was as much in the dark as he was, but we made a date to meet in the morning.
I fell asleep reading about the Crusades and dreamed that Nina was handing me Creery’s letter. Then her face turned into Delia’s, and she said, “Surprise, surprise, Fell.”
Chapter 17
Saturday morning.
Nobody’d ever warned me about winters in Pennsylvania. The cold sky hung heavy above me, like some enormous net over a ballroom loaded with balloons waiting to be freed with the jerk of a rope, only snow would pour down. Everyone walking along the streets had little white clouds puffing out of them, their postures bent and huddled into benumbed bones. I had the heater going full blast; ditto the radio: warming up with INXS, Big Pig, and John Cougar Mellencamp.
I cruised up and down Playwicky Road. It was narrow and twisting, with few trees save for the oak I’d stood behind the night I’d seen Lowell Hunter come out of number 6.
Anyone on foot would be seen immediately in the daytime.
Most of the apartment houses had parking lots behind them. There were few cars. Those that parked out front were also too conspicuous for any serious surveillance.
I headed for the nearest supermarket, where you were most likely to find boxes of all shapes and sizes.
Dib was standing in front of the dorm when I pulled up at eight. He hadn’t expected me to arrive in a car. I had to beep the horn. He ran toward me layered in a turtleneck, a shirt, a crew-neck sweater, a parka. Levi’s, boots, his old navy-striped Moriarty hat pulled down over his ears.
“Where’d you get the wheels?”
While I told him, and he interrupted to say he had to have something cold to drink, I got the first blast of a breath that could probably have killed little flying things as easily as anything Black Flag made.
“There’s a store down on Main near the bus stop. You can get a Coke there.”
“And aspirin,” said Dib.
“How did you tie one on in the dorm?”
“I went out for an hour after your call.”
“With your gang?”
“Just Little Jack. You don’t mind if I have a little fun too, do you? … Where are we headed?”
“The only thing I can think to do is follow the one lead we have, while I have a car.”
“Lasher’s letter is the one lead we have.”
“I’m talking about Playwicky Road now.”
“Let’s talk about why Lionel Schwartz didn’t mention that letter to the police.”
“Dib, we went over that last night. He might have mentioned it, and they might have their reason for keeping it quiet.”
“I think Sevens is keeping it quiet.”
“You told me what you think. Now let me take a look at number six Playwicky and see who’s meeting Creery there.”
“I’m not in any shape to sit around watching an apartment when we don’t know what we’re looking for.”
“You don’t have to watch it. You have to help set me up. Then you can go back to the dorm and sack out.”
“I might even have to puke,” he said.
He wasn’t kidding. He looked pale. He was rubbing his stomach the way you’d soothe some frightened animal.
“What’s the big box in back?” he asked.
“I’ll explain that later…. Dib, you look and stink like something died in you.”
“Cork it, Fell! I’m just hung over.”
“What’s going on with you? Do you drink a lot, or was last night a first?”
“We go out.”
“Where do you go when you go out?”
“Around, Fell. What difference does it make to you? I have to have other friends.”
“You can get yourself expelled — that’s the difference it makes to me.”
“Unlike you, hmmm?”
“Maybe I can’t get expelled, but I can’t get away with drinking either. We’re self-regulatory, but the bottom line’s the same.”
“‘Just a song at twilight.” Dib sang off-key.
“Well, it’s better than getting the boot. You’re asking for it, Dib.”
�
��You’ve swallowed Sevens hook, line, and sinker, Fell.”
“I don’t even hang out with them! I’m so busy tutoring a townie, it took you to bring that letter out of the machine.”
“What about the gold 7 you got your mom?”
“I got it for her, not for me.”
“My mom wouldn’t wear one of those things, even if I was in Sevens. She doesn’t buy designer clothes, either, and not because she can’t afford to. She says she’s not a walking advertisement for Calvin Klein or Gucci.”
“Yours has been around more than mine. Mine’s easily impressed, maybe.”
“You’re easily impressed, Fell.”
“I’m not easily asphyxiated, or your breath would have killed me two blocks back.”
We both began to laugh.
The tension that had started crowding us was broken. At Main Pharmacy he bought some Binaca for his breath and a couple of cans of cold Sprite.
• • •
A block before Playwicky Road, I pulled over to the curb.
“I learned this from my father,” I said. “He’d do this when he was staking out some place they were dealing drugs. We’re going to put that big box back there up where you’re sitting, and I’m going to get inside it. See where I cut the holes?”
He gave a look. “What am I going to do?”
“After I get inside the box, you’re going to drive up in front of the house. You’re going to leave me under the box. You can catch a bus back near the pharmacy.”
“So it’ll just look like a car with a box in it.”
“Right…. When my father’d be watching a crack house, sometimes he’d be stuck inside for a whole afternoon. He’d take along a wide-neck water bottle to piss into.”
“Neat, Fell! And you’ll be all right by yourself?”
“Why not? I’m just going to watch the place. Maybe I won’t see anything important. But I want to try and find out who’s there besides Creery and Lowell Hunter.”
“It’ll be a Sevens, for sure, and what’ll that tell you?”
“I’ll know when I know.”
“And you’re going to tell me when you know?”
“Yes. I’m going to tell you.”
