by Otto Penzler
“It’s a new one on me, but maybe you’re right. I only know water filters.”
“It’s my job to be right about things like that. Good night, Mr. MacKenzie.”
—
The voice on the wire said, “Mr. MacKenzie? Is this the Mr. Stephen MacKenzie who was in an elevator accident a year ago last August? The newspapers gave—”
“Yes, I was.”
“Well, I’d like you to come to dinner at my house next Saturday evening, at exactly seven o’clock.”
MacKenzie cocked his brows at himself in the wall mirror. “Hadn’t you better tell me who you are, first?”
“Sorry,” said the voice, crisply. “I thought I had. I’ve been doing this for the past hour or so, and it’s beginning to tell on me. This is Harold Hardecker, I’m head of the Hardecker Import and Export Company.”
“Well, I still don’t place you, Mr. Hardecker,” MacKenzie said. “Are you one of the men who was on that elevator with me?”
“No, my son was. He lost his life.”
“Oh,” said MacKenzie. He remembered now. A man with a trim white mustache, standing in the milling crowd, buttonholing the cops as they hurried by…
“Can I expect you then at seven next Saturday, Mr. MacKenzie? I’m at—Park Avenue.”
“Frankly,” said MacKenzie, who was a plain soul not much given to social hypocrisy, “I don’t see any point to it. I don’t believe we’ve ever spoken to one another before. Why do you single me out?”
Hardecker explained patiently, even good-naturedly, “I’m not singling you out, Mr. MacKenzie. I’ve already contacted each of the others who were in the car that night with my son, and they’ve all agreed to be there. I don’t wish to disclose what I have in mind beforehand; I’m giving this dinner for that purpose. However, I might mention that my son died intestate, and his poor wife passed away in childbirth in the early hours of the following morning. His estate reverted to me, and I am a lonely old man, without friends or relatives, and with more money already than I know what to do with. It occurred to me to bring together five perfect strangers, who shared a common hazard with my son, who were with him during the last few moments of his life.” The voice paused, insinuatingly, to let this sink in. Then it resumed, “If you’ll be at my house for dinner Saturday at seven, I’ll have an announcement of considerable importance to make. It’s to your interest to be present when I do.”
MacKenzie scanned his water-filter-salesman’s salary with his mind’s eye, and found it altogether unsatisfactory, as he had done not once but many times before. “All right,” he agreed, after a moment’s consideration…
Saturday at six he was still saying, “You can’t tell me. The guy isn’t in his right mind, to do a thing like this. Five people that he don’t know from Adam, and that don’t know each other. I wonder if it’s a practical joke?”
“Well, if you feel that way, why didn’t you refuse him?” said his wife, brushing off his dark blue coat.
“I’m curious to find out what it’s all about. I want to see what the gag is.” Curiosity is one of the strongest of human traits. It’s almost irresistible. The expectation of getting something for nothing is no slouch either. MacKenzie was a good guy, but he was a guy after all, not an image on a stained-glass window.
At the door she said with belated anxiety, “Steve, I know you can take care of yourself and all that, but if you don’t like the looks of things, I mean if none of the others show up, don’t stay there alone.”
He laughed. He’d made up his mind by now, had even spent the windfall ahead of time, already. “You make me feel like one of those innocents in the old silent pictures, that were always being invited to a big blowout and when they got there they were alone with the villain and just supper for two. Don’t worry, Toots, if there’s no one else there, I turn around and come back.”
—
The building had a Park Avenue address, but was actually on one of the exclusive side streets just off that thoroughfare. A small ultra-ultra cooperative, with only one apartment to a floor. “Mr. Harold Hardecker?” asked Mr. MacKenzie in the lobby. “Stephen MacKenzie.”
He saw the hallman take out a small typed list of five names, four of which already had been penciled out, and cross out the last one. “Go right up, Mr. MacKenzie. Third floor.”
A butler opened the single door in the elevator foyer for him, greeted him by name and took his hat. A single glance at the money this place spelled would have been enough to restore anyone’s confidence. People that lived like this were perfectly capable of having five strangers in to dinner, subdividing a dead son’s estate among them, and chalking it off as just that evening’s little whimsy. The sense of proportion alters above a certain yearly income.
He remembered Hardecker readily enough as soon as he saw him coming toward him along the central gallery that seemed to bisect the place like a bowling alley. It took him about three and a half minutes to get up to him, at that. The man had aged appreciably from the visual snapshot that was all he’d had of him at the scene of the accident. He was slightly stooped, very thin at the waist, looked as though he’d suffered. But the white mustache was as trim and needle-pointed as ever, and he had on one of the new turned-over soft collars under his dinner jacket, which gave him a peculiarly boyish look in spite of the almost blinding white of his undiminished hair, cropped close as a Prussian’s.
Hardecker held out his hand, said with just the right mixture of dignity and warmth, “How do you do, Mr. MacKenzie, I’m very glad to know you. Come in and meet the others and have a pickup.”
There were no women present in the living room, just the four men sitting around at ease. There was no sense of strain, of stiffness; an advantage that stag gatherings are apt to have over mixed parties anyway, not through the fault of women, but through men’s consciousness of them.
Kenshaw, the scholarly-looking man, had a white scar still visible under his left eye where his glasses had broken. The cherubic Lambert had deserted the illuminated fountain pen business, he hurriedly confided, unasked, to MacKenzie, for the ladies’ foundation-girdle business. No more mechanical gadgets for him. Or as he put it, unarguably, “A brassière they gotta have, or else. But who needs a fountain pen?” The hard-bitten mug was introduced as Prendergast, occupation undisclosed. Megaffin, the bill collector, was no longer a bill collector. “I send out my own now,” he explained, swiveling a synthetic diamond around on his pinky.
MacKenzie selected Scotch, and when he’d caught up with the rest the butler came to the door, almost as though he’d been timing him through a knothole. He just looked in, then went away again.
“Let’s go and get down to business now, gentlemen, shall we?” Hardecker grinned. He had the happy faculty, MacKenzie said to himself, of making you feel perfectly at home, without overdoing it, getting in your hair. Which looks easier than it is.
—
No flowers, candles, or fripperies like that were on the table set for six; just good substantial man’s board. Hardecker said, “Just sit down anywhere you choose, only keep the head for me.” Lambert and Kenshaw took one side, Prendergast and Megaffin the other. MacKenzie sat down at the foot. It was obvious that whatever announcement their host intended making was being kept for the end of the meal, as was only fitting.
The butler had closed a pair of sliding doors beyond them after they were all in, and he stayed outside. The waiting was done by a man. It was a typical bachelor’s repast, plain, marvelously cooked, without dainty or frivolous accessories to detract from it, salads, vegetables, things like that. Each course had its vintage corollary. And at the end no cloying sweets—Roquefort cheese and coffee with the blue flame of Courvoisier flickering above each glass. It was a masterpiece. And each one, as it ended, relaxed in his chair in a haze of golden daydreams. They anticipated coming into money, money they hadn’t had to work for, maybe more money than they’d ever had before. It wasn’t such a bad world after all.
One thing had str
uck MacKenzie, but since he’d never been waited on by servants in a private home before, only in restaurants, he couldn’t determine whether it was unusual or customary. There was an expensive mahogany buffet running across one side of the dining room, but the waiter had done no serving or carving on it, had brought in each portion separately, always individually, even the roast. The coffee and the wines, too, had been poured behind the scenes, the glasses and the cups brought in already filled. It gave the man a lot more work and slowed the meal somewhat, but if that was the way it was done in Hardecker’s house, that was the way it was done.
When they were already luxuriating with their cigars and cigarettes, and the cloth had been cleared of all but the emptied coffee cups, an additional dish was brought in. It was a silver chalice, a sort of stemmed bowl, holding a thick yellowish substance that looked like mayonnaise. The waiter placed it in the exact geometrical center of the table, even measuring with his eye its distance from both sides, and from the head and foot, and shifting its position to conform. Then he took the lid off and left it open. Threads of steam rose sluggishly from it. Every eye was on it interestedly.
“Is it well mixed?” they heard Hardecker ask.
“Yes, sir,” said the waiter.
“That will be all, don’t come in again.”
The man left by the pantry door he had been using, and it clicked slightly after it had closed behind him.
Somebody—Megaffin—asked cozily: “What’s that got in it?” evidently on the lookout for still more treats.
“Oh, quite a number of things,” Hardecker answered carelessly, “whites of eggs, mustard, as well as certain other ingredients all beaten up together.”
MacKenzie, trying to be funny, said, “Sounds like an antidote.”
“It is an antidote,” Hardecker answered, looking steadily down the table at him. He must have pushed a call button or something under the table, for the butler opened the sliding doors and stood between them, without coming in.
Hardecker didn’t turn his head. “You have that gun I gave you? Stand there, please, on the other side of those doors and see that no one comes out of here. If they try it, you know what to do.”
The doors slipped to again, effaced him, but not before MacKenzie, facing that way, had seen something glimmer in his hand.
Tension was slow in coming on, the change was too abrupt, they had been too steeped in the rosy afterglow of the meal and their own imminent good fortune. Then too, not all of them were equally alert mentally, particularly Megaffin, who had been on such a fourth dimensional plane of unaccustomedness all evening he couldn’t tell menace from hospitality, even when a gun was mentioned.
Its first focal point was Hardecker’s own face—that went slowly white, grim, remorseless. From there it darted out to MacKenzie and Lambert, caught at them, paled them too. The rest grew allergic to it one by one, until there was complete silence at the table.
Hardecker spoke. Not loudly, not angrily, but in a steely, pitiless voice. “Gentlemen, there’s a murderer in our midst.”
Five breaths were sharply indrawn together, making a fearful “Ffff!” sound around the table. Not so much aghast at the statement itself, as aghast at the implication of retribution that lurked just behind it. And behind that was the shadowy suspicion that it had already been exacted.
No one said anything.
The hard, remorseless cores of Hardecker’s eyes shot from face-to-face. He was smoking a long slim cigar, cigarette-thin. He pointed it straight out before him, indicated them all with it without moving it much, like a dark finger of doom. “Gentlemen, one of you killed my son.” Pause. “On August 30, 1936.” Pause. “And hasn’t paid for it yet.”
The words were like a stone going down into a deep pool of transparent water, and the ripples spreading out from them spelled fear.
MacKenzie said slowly, “You’re setting yourself above the properly constituted authorities? The findings of the coroner’s inquest were suicide while of unsound mind. Why do you hold them incompe—”
Hardecker cut him short like a whip. “This isn’t a discussion. It’s—” a long pause, then very low, but very audible, “an execution.”
There was another of those strangling silences. They took it in a variety of ways, each according to his temperament. MacKenzie just kept staring at him, startled, apprehensive. Apprehensive, but not inordinately frightened, any more than he had been that night on the elevator. The scholarly-looking Kenshaw had a rebuking look on his face, that of a teacher for an unruly pupil, and the scar on his cheek stood out whitely. Megaffin looked shifty, like some small weasel at bay, planning its next move. The pugnacious-looking guy was going to cave in again in a minute, judging by the wavering of his facial lines. Lambert pinched the bridge of his nose momentarily, dropped his hand, mumbled something that sounded like, “Oy, I give up my pinochle club to come here, yet!”
Hardecker resumed, as though he hadn’t said anything unusual just now. “I know who the man is. I know which one among you the man is. It’s taken me a year to find out, but now I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt.” He was looking at his cigar now, watching the ash drop off of its own weight onto his coffee saucer. “The police wouldn’t listen to me, they insisted it was suicide. The evidence was insufficient to convince them the first time, and for all I know it still may be.” He raised his eyes. “But I demand justice for the taking of my son’s life.” He took an expensive, dime-thin, octagonal watch out of his pocket, placed it face up on the table before him. “Gentlemen, it’s now nine o’clock. In half an hour, at the most, one of you will be dead. Did you notice that you were all served separately just now? One dish, and one alone out of all of them, was deadly. It’s putting in its slow, sure work right as we sit here.” He pointed to the silver tureen, equidistant from all of them. “There’s the answer. There’s the antidote. I have no wish to set myself up as executioner above the law. Let the murderer be the chooser. Let him reach out and save his life and stand convicted before all of you. Or let him keep silent and go down to his death without confessing, privately executed for what can’t be publicly proved. In twenty-five minutes collapse will come without warning. Then it will be too late.”
It was Lambert who voiced the question in all their minds. “But are you sure you did this to the right—”
“I haven’t made any mistake, the waiter was carefully rehearsed, you are all perfectly unharmed but the killer.”
Lambert didn’t seem to derive much consolation from this. “Now he tells us! A fine way to digest a meal,” he brooded aloud. “Why didn’t you serve the murderer first, so then the rest of us could eat in peace at least?”
“Shut up,” somebody said, terrifiedly.
“Twenty minutes to go,” Hardecker said, tonelessly, as a chime signal over the radio.
MacKenzie said, without heat, “You can’t be sane, you know, to do a thing like this.”
“Did you ever have a son?” was the answer.
Something seemed to snap in Megaffin. His chair jolted back. “I’m gettin’ out of here,” he said hoarsely.
The doors parted about two inches, silently as water, and a black metal cylinder peered through. “That man there,” directed Hardecker. “Shoot him where he stands if he doesn’t sit down.”
Megaffin shrank down in his seat again like a whipped cur, tried to shelter himself behind Prendergast’s shoulder. The doors slipped together again into a hairline crack.
“I couldn’t,” sighed the cherubic-faced Lambert, “feel more at home if I was in the Brown House at Munich!”
“Eighteen minutes,” was the comment from the head of the table.
Prendergast suddenly grimaced uncontrollably, flattened his forearms on the table, and ducked his head onto them. He sniveled aloud. “I can’t stand it! Lemme out of here! I didn’t do it!”
A wave of revulsion went around the table. It was not because he’d broken down, analyzed MacKenzie, it was just that he didn’t have the face for it. It
should have been Lambert with his kewpie physiognomy, if anyone. The latter, however, was having other troubles. He touched the side of his head, tapped himself on the chest. “Whoof!” he murmured. “What heartburn! He should live so long, I don’t take this up with my lawyer!”
“This is no way,” said MacKenzie surlily. “If you had any kind of a case—”
“This is my way,” was Hardecker’s crackling answer. “I’ve given the man his choice. He needn’t have it this way; he has his alternative. Fourteen minutes. Let me remind you, the longer the antidote’s delayed, the more doubtful its efficacy will be. If it’s postponed too long, it may miss altogether.”
—
Conscious of a sticking sensation in his stomach, as though a mass of concrete had lodged there, MacKenzie felt a burning sensation shoot out from it. There is such a thing as nervous indigestion, he knew, but…He eyed the silver goblet reflectively.
But they were all doing that almost incessantly. Prendergast had raised his head again, but it remained a woebegone mask of infantile fretfulness. Megaffin was green in the face and kept moistening his lips. Kenshaw was the most self-controlled of the lot; he had folded his arms and just sat there, as though waiting to see which one of the others would reach for the salvation in the silver container.
MacKenzie could feel a painful pulsing under his solar plexus now, he was in acute discomfort that verged on cramp. The thought of what this might be was bringing out sweat on his forehead.
Lambert reached out abruptly, and they all quit breathing for a minute. But his hand dodged the silver tureen, plunged into a box of perfectos to one side of it. He grabbed up two, stuck one in his breast pocket, the other between his teeth. “On you,” he remarked resentfully to Hardecker.
