Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He hung up, and Peg sat looking at the bland cornerless bulk of her cradled telephone. Robin, Robin English. She formed his name with silent lips, and smiled a little. “Robin,” she whispered, “I’m going to catch you by the ear and stand you in a corner for doing this to me.” Robin was a child—such a child.

  Her assistant came in. “A Mr. Voisier to see you doctor.”

  “Thank you, Helen. Ask him—Voisier! Good heavens, I didn’t expect him so quickly! Yes, show him in. Show him right in!”

  Voisier appeared at the door, rather as if he had been projected there. He looked over the office, more rapidly than he appeared to be doing it, and then let his gaze slide to rest on her face. He smiled.

  “Mr. Voisier?”

  “I am very glad to meet you, doctor.” He came forward, and she noticed that the Homburg he carried was not black, but a very dark brown. Like his eyes.

  “You got here very quickly, Mr. Voisier.”

  “I was just downstairs when I called.”

  She frowned briefly, realizing that she had been told that he had come to the hospital perfectly confident that he could talk her into seeing him. She wondered why she didn’t mind too much. “Sit down a moment,” she said, “I’ll be ready to leave in a second.”

  He thanked her, and surprised her by not taking the chair she indicated at the end of her desk and close to her, but one in the corner. He sat down, ignoring the magazines on the end table next to him, and rested a part of the weight of his eyes on her as she worked, stacking the reports on her desk and putting them away.

  When her desk was clear she paused a moment, thinking, and then dipped into the file drawer and brought out her copy of Robin’s case history. She did not open it—she knew every line in it—but sat running her fingers over the binding, wondering whether to bring it with her.

  “Bring it along,” said Voisier, his eyes on the ceiling.

  “I knew someone else who acted telepathic,” said Peg with a little quirk of the lips. “All right.”

  The way he helped her on with her coat and handed her through the door made her feel like reaching for a lace trim to drape over her arm as she walked. They did not speak as they went down in the elevator. She wanted to study his face, but he was studying hers, and strangely, she did not want to meet his eyes.

  Parked in front of the hospital was a low-slung limousine, beautifully kept, not too new. A chauffeur with a young, impassive face opened the door and Peg got in, feeling the lack of a velvet carpet and a fanfare or two. Voisier followed, and the car slid silently into traffic. Voisier gave no orders to the chauffeur, which was another indication to Peg of how sure he had been that she would come out with him. She wondered if he had made reservations wherever they were going. She never knew, because they pulled up in front of Lelalo’s, and both the doorman and the head waiter greeted Voisier effusively and she realized that they would at any time, reservation or no reservation. They were shown to a very comfortable corner table. Peg asked for an Alexander; Voisier did not order at all, but a silvery cocktail was brought and set down before him.

  Finally she met his eyes. He seemed relaxed, but watchful, and his gaze was absolutely unswerving. She gritted her teeth and said lightly, “Have you read any good books lately?”

  His eyes dropped to the case history lying on the table between them. “No,” he said.

  “Tell me what you know.”

  He drummed idly on the table with long, flexible fingers. “Robin is in the trucking business,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. And in insurance. Air freight. Distilling. Drugs. A few others.”

  “For goodness sake! But that doesn’t sound like Robin!”

  “What doesn’t sound like Robin?”

  “Robin is almost exclusively a creative person. Business—organizing, money-making itself—these have never had any interest for him.”

  “They have now,” said Voisier in a slightly awed tone.

  “If he did go into business,” said Peg carefully, “it would be like that—diversification, and excellent results in everything he tried. That is, if he’s still … I mean, if he hasn’t changed. How do you know this?”

  “I can’t understand how he’s doing, it,” Voisier said, ignoring her question. “He has bought out a bunch of independent truckers, for example. Standardized their equipment, rerouted and scheduled them, put in the latest equipment for servicing all the way, so that he has practically delay-proof service. He pays his employees eight per cent more than … than other firms, and works them four less straight-time hours per week. Yet his rates are twelve per cent per hundredweight under those of any of his competitors. Am I boring you?”

  “You are not.”

  “He has hit the insurance business in an unusual way. He has a counseling service made up of insurance men so carefully chosen and so highly paid that his agency is a factor to be reckoned with by every company in the East. His specialty is in advising clients—the thousand-dollar policyholder to banking insurance—on ways and means of combining policies to get the maximum coverage from the smallest premium. His charge is nominal; it doesn’t seem to be a money-making proposition, much, at all. But he is getting an increasing power to throw large blocks of insurance business any way he wants to. He does it to the benefit of the policyholder and well within the law. In other words, what he is machinating for is influence. And since nobody can possibly predict what he is going to do next, the agency is a Damocletian sword over us … uh … over the insurance companies.”

  “Mr. Voisier—wait. How do you know all this?”

  “The most amazing thing of all is what he is doing in the drugs business. He has tapped a source of hard-to-get biochemicals that is something remarkable. Some sort of synthesis … never mind. I’m running along like a Wall Street Journal excerpt and I’m not going to start reciting things from the Journal of the Chemical Institute.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “I have a picture of him. He spoke at a trucker’s union meeting with his independent chain proposal recently. It’s a good shot, and though he’s changed a little since I last saw him, there’s no mistaking him. He was using the name of Reuben Ritter—not that that’s a matter of any importance, since elsewhere he is known as Schwartz, Mancinelli, Walker, Chandler, and O’Shaughnessy. Where he goes after the meetings and an occasional dinner he attends, no one knows. He only goes out on business and he always leaves a highly competent authority behind to handle the details.”

  “May I see the picture?”

  “Certainly.” Voisier took out a fine-tooled Moroccan wallet and leafed through it. He pulled out a four-by-five print and handed it to her.

  “It is Robin,” she said instantly, shakily; and then she pored over the picture, her eyes tearing down into it. A slight sound from Voisier made her look up; he was regarding her with a quizzical grin. She went back to the picture.

  It was Robin, all right; and he stood before a flat table obviously in a loft which was converted to a meeting hall. He was half-leaning against the table, and his head and one arm were raised, and his face was turned to the right of the camera.

  Yes, it was Robin, all right; but Robin subtly changed. His features were—was it older? They were the features of a young man; but there was a set of purpose about the profile that was unfamiliar to her. Two slightly out-of-focus faces in the background, watching him with something approaching raptness, added to the completely authoritative, unselfconscious pose of the speaker. And Peg knew that from that picture alone, something within her would never again let her speak of Robin as “that child.” It was a jarring realization, for “Robin” and “Childishness” were all but inseparable associations in her mind.

  She became conscious of Voisier’s long white hand hovering in front of her. She looked up and clutched the picture. “You want it back?”

  “I’d … oh, I have the negative. Go ahead.” The quizzical smile appeared again.

  Peg slipped the pi
cture into her pocketbook, closed it tightly, and only when she felt Voisier’s amused eyes on her hands did she relax her grip on the clasp. She said, “How do you think I can help you locate him?”

  Voisier put the tips of his fingers together and eyed her over them. “In that book of yours,” he said, indicating the thick binder of prognosis carbons, “you probably have information which would help us to predict at least what sort of surroundings Robin English would find for himself. I know what businesses he’s in, and pretty much how he’s conducting them. Certainly we could draw some pretty shrewd conclusions.” He paused, and looked thoughtfully at the second joints of his fingers, one after the other. “All I have to do is see him once. Just once,” he said as if to himself. “When I do, I can find out where he is living, what he is doing every hour, where he is liable to str … ah … jump next.”

  “You almost said ‘where he will strike next,’ ” Peg said.

  “Did I? I didn’t know. That’s ridiculous, of course.”

  “I suppose it is,” she said slowly, watching his face. “Mr. Voisier, you have a remarkably easy way about you.”

  “I? Thank you.”

  “You’re easy to talk with, and you talk easily. You divert the conversation to your chosen ways so very easily. You have still not told me why you want to locate Robin English.”

  “Everyone wants to know where Robin English is. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “I doubt, somehow, that you are motivated by intellectual curiosity. I don’t think you want to produce another play of his, particularly, or sell a story to the press and scoop the town, or—obviously not this—give him pointers on his new business ventures. I hate to be blunt with anyone,” she said with a sudden rush of warmth, “but I must ask you—what are you after?”

  He spread his hands. “I like the boy. Brilliant as he is, he is getting himself into a little hot water with certain of the interests with which he is competing. In the business world, as in the world of nations, there is room enough for everybody, providing everybody will cooperate. It is impossible to cooperate with a man who cannot be reached.”

  “It is impossible to retaliate, also.”

  Voisier held up a deploring hand. “Retaliate is too strong a term. Active as he is, it is inconceivable that he can keep himself hidden much longer. It is infinitely more desirable that I get to him before any of the others—I who have demonstrated so conclusively that I have his interests at heart. I like the boy.”

  “You like the boy.” The picture of Robin in the union hall rose before her eyes. That was no boy. “Mr. Voisier, you are telling me that he is in danger, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “He is playing a dangerous game.”

  “Dangerous game? Danger from what?”

  “I have not made up a roster, doctor.”

  She stared at him. “Mr. Voisier—just what business are you in?”

  “I’m a producer. Surely you know that.”

  “Yes. I have just remembered that I heard you once mentioned in connection with the trucking business, and again, there was something to do with drugs—”

  “You have a proclivity,” said Voisier casually, “of connecting yourself, in one way or another, with remarkable people. I, like Robin English, am a man of some diversification.”

  She sat quietly for a moment, and thought. As Voisier had predicted, little pieces were beginning to fit here and there. Robin’s progress had been so carefully charted, and prognosis made in such detail, that the information Voisier had given her was highly indicative. If she could talk it over with Mel—

  “I can’t piece all this together on the spot,” she said.

  “Why don’t you get in touch with your associate, Dr. Warfield?”

  “You must be psychic,” she said wryly. “Let me phone him.

  Without seeming to move quickly, Voisier was on his feet and assisting her out of the chair before she knew she was moving. “By all means,” he said. “And if you can impress the urgency of the matter on him, it will be to Robin’s benefit.”

  “I’ll see,” she said.

  She went to the phone booth and called, and Mel was out, and when she returned to the table Voisier was gone. So was his limousine. So was Robin’s case history.

  “Mel, I don’t know how I could have been such a fantastic idiot,” she said brokenly.

  She was in his office, hunched up in a big wing chair, and for the first time in years looking small and childish and frightened.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Peg,” said Warfield gently. “No one would expect that kind of prank from a man like that.”

  “It w-was awful,” she almost whispered. “He made such a fool of me! I called the waiter immediately, of course, and he acted surprised to see me at all. He absolutely denied having seen such a thing as that case book at all. So did the head waiter. So did the doorman, They simply looked at me as if I were crazy, exchanging wondering glances at each other in between times. Mel … Mel, I don’t like that man, that Voisier!”

  “I wouldn’t wonder.”

  “No—aside from that slick little piece of larceny. There’s something evil about him.”

  “That’s an understatement, if ever I heard one,” Mel said. “I don’t know much about that man—no one does—but the things I know aren’t too good. I wonder if you knew that Chickering Chemical was his?”

  “That drug firm that was peddling hashish as a tonic?”

  “Not a tonic. A facial—mud pack, I think it was. It didn’t harm the skin. Didn’t do it any good, either. It was sold in small and adulterated quantities at a fantastic price, but it was hashish all right.”

  “But all the officers of that company are in jail?”

  “All they could get anything on.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “One of their lab assistants went to pharmaceutical school with me. Silly fool he was, but a very likable character. He could be bought, and he was. He was paid well, and he didn’t care. I did what I could to help him when the whole mess happened, but he was in too deep. He had no cause to lie to me, and he told me that Voisier was the man behind the whole rotten deal.”

  “Why didn’t he give some evidence against Voisier?”

  “No evidence. Not a scrap. Voisier’s much too clever to leave loose ends around. Witness the trick he pulled on you. And besides—my imbecile of a friend rather admires him.”

  “Admires him—and Voisier got him into the penitentiary?”

  “He blames only himself. And it seems that Voisier has a certain likable something about him—”

  Peg thought of that saturnine face, and the compelling eyes of the man. She remembered his tactile glance, and the incredible flexibility of his voice. “Oh.” She shook herself. “I can’t afford the luxury of sitting here and saying how awful it all is,” she said firmly, putting away her handkerchief. “What are we going to do?”

  “Why do anything? Robin English is no longer our responsibility, if it’s Robin you’re worried about. As far as the book is concerned, I have the original, so that’s a small loss.”

  “When does your responsibility to a person end?” she demanded hotly.

  “That depends,” he said, looking at the ceiling, “on what the person in question means to you. If it’s a patient, and that patient, of sound mind, decides to go to another doctor or to stop treatment altogether, there is no law or ethic which demands that I try to hold him. If, on the other hand, the person is a … well, of personal interest, it’s a different matter.”

  “And you feel that Robin can look out for himself?”

  “He’s demonstrated that pretty well so far, He must include self-preservation and the ability to act on it among his other talents.”

  “Mel—this isn’t like you!”

  “Isn’t it, though!”

  “Mel!” she cried, shocked. “If it weren’t for us he wouldn’t be in all this trouble! He’s hooked up with Voisier in some way, and—”

  Mel put h
is hands on her shoulders and pushed her back in her chair. He looked at her somberly and then sighed. “Peg,” he said finally, “I’ve got to say this. I deeply regret the day I ever set eyes on Robin English. You haven’t been yourself since the day you met him.”

  She thought of the extraordinary statement Robin had made at tea that day, about Mel Warfield’s desire to kill him. She looked up at Warfield with horror in her face.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “You’re all tangled up in your emotions, and you can’t think straight. You think Robin’s mixed up with Voisier in some business way. Isn’t it obvious what Robin is doing? You know that Voisier is mixed up in a dozen different businesses, two-thirds of which are shady in some way or another. You were told by Voisier himself that Robin is engaged in some of these same fields. I think you’ll find that Robin is engaged in all of them. I think that if you are fool enough to mix yourself into anything this big and this dirty, you’ll discover Robin is out to undercut everything the man is doing.”

  “Why? Why on earth should he do that?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Probably because he recognizes Voisier as his own brand of genius, with many years’ start on him. Without doubt he feels crushed by Voisier—feels that the world isn’t big enough for both of them. The ‘why’ of it isn’t important. The fact remains that if he is not doing such a fantastic thing, he isn’t in any danger and you needn’t worry about him. If he is, then he must be outdoing Voisier on the dirtiest of his rackets.”

  “No, Mel—no! Robin wouldn’t do that!”

  “Someone is. How many new addiction cases has your hospital admitted in the past three months?”

  “Well, there is a decided upswing, but what has that—”

  “Robin could be responsible. It would have to be a one-source deal—someone previously unknown, without a record that can be checked, with a tremendous organizing ability and personal compulsion, and a lot of scientific skill. Most of the drugs found on these poor devils are synthetic.”

  “But Robin never did an evil thing in his life!”