The Investigations of Avram Davidson

by Avram Davidson

  * * *

  “WHITE PIGEON IF it’s No,” Don Sylvester mumbled. “Black pigeon if it’s Yes. White, No. Black, Yes. I got it.” But he was still nervous. Suppose he fumbled his responsibilities at the crucial moment—suppose he bungled the job? For the hundredth time his fingers examined the catches on the cage, lifted one up a fraction of an inch, closed it, then lifted the other—and there was a sudden sound from the cage.

  Don Sylvester’s startled fingers flew to his mouth. The catch snapped up. The black pigeon hopped out, fluttered to the window sill, cooed again, and—as Sylvester made a frantic lunge for it—spread its wings and flew out. It soared up, up, up, circled once, circled twice, then flew off toward Brooklyn.

  Sylvester stared at the air in wordless horror. Then he stared at the door of the Grand Council Chamber. Any moment now, it might open. He tiptoed over and listened.

  “I say no!” a voice declared.

  “And I say yes!” declared a second voice.

  Helplessly, his eyes roamed the anteroom, fell at length on the telephone. Regardless of possible wiretaps, he quickly and fearfully dialed a number. “Hello?” he whispered hoarsely. “Hello, Philomena? Listen, Philomena—”

  * * *

  THE BLACK PIGEON flapped its way toward Brooklyn with leisurely strokes, thinking deep pigeonic thoughts. Now and then it caught an updraft and coasted effortlessly. It was in no hurry. But, of course, it really was not very far to Brooklyn, as a pigeon flies.…

  * * *

  “EASY DOES IT—watch my toes, ya dope—down, down.”

  “Good afternoon, boys,” said Daisy. “I just came out to mail a letter to Turkey. Did you know that airmail is ten cents cheaper to the west bank of the Hellespont, because it’s in Europe? Oooh—gumballs! Let me see if I have a penny—”

  “No, let me see if I got one, Miss—”

  “No, lemme see, Forry—”

  “Aa, c’mon, I gotta have one—”

  While the three Nafiosi were plunging in their pockets, the yacht’s launch drew up to the pier. Out of it came Tosci, the Project Supervisor, and three crewmen. “What are you up to?” Tosci shouted.

  “What’s it to you?” Forrance countered.

  “I order you to remove those machines from this area at once!”

  Instantly truculent, Forrance thrust out his jaw. “Nobody orders the Nafia what to do with its machines,” he said. “Anyways, not south of Vesey Street,” he amended.

  “Put them on the truck and see that they are driven away,” Tosci instructed a crewman, who began to obey, but was prevented by Blood. The crewman swung, Blood’s nose, ever sensitive, began to bleed, and Daisy, aroused, cried, “You let him alone!” and wielded her pocketbook with a will. The crewman staggered. Guts, gauging his distance to a nicety, swung his ponderous belly around and knocked him down.

  “Take the girl,” shouted the Project Supervisor, in his own language. “She is undoubtedly their ‘moll.’ We will keep her aboard as a hostage.” And while he, Tosci, and one of their men engaged the tiny syndicate in combat, the other two sailors hustled Daisy into the launch, muffling her cries for help.

  * * *

  MRS. GOODEYCOONCE, NEELY, Denny, Guido, and Lord Grue and Groole were out for a walk. No decision had yet been made on the noble lord’s proposal, but nevertheless everyone seemed to be growing somewhat closer. The Marquess was telling about the time that he rescued the Dowager Begum of Oont from the horrid captivity in which she had been placed by her dissolute nephew, the Oonti Ghook. All listened in fascination, except the dog Guido, who had heard the story before.

  So taken up in his account was the Marquess that he absentmindedly abstracted from his pocket a particularly foul pipe (which respect for the lady had normally prevented his smoking in her presence), and proceeded to charge it with the notoriously rank tobacco swept up for sale to the inhabitants of the lower-income quarters of Quetta; and struck a match to it. At the first unconsidered whiff Mrs. Goodeycoonce coughed. Then she gagged, then she inhaled with a harsh, gasping breath. And next she turned white, green, and bright red.

  Neely was the first to notice. “Granny!” he said. “Granny?” Then, “It must be your pipe—”

  The Marquess was overcome with confusion and remorse. “Terribly sorry,” he declared. “I’d knock the dottle out, except that’s all it is, you know—dottle, I mean. I say, Mrs. Goodeycoonce—oh, I say.”

  But Mrs. Goodeycoonce’s face had taken on an almost masculine appearance. She rolled up first one fist, loosely, and then the other, placed them in alignment, lifted them to her eyes, and peered out upon the River. And in a gutturally accented and heavy voice quite unlike her usual tones she declared, “Zound der alarm! Beat to qvarters! Zo, zo, wat den duyvel!”

  The Marquess’s eagle-keen eyes followed her glance and immediately observed something very much amiss upon the waters.

  “Stap my vitals, if I don’t believe a gel is being forced aboard that vessel over there,” he said. “Bad show, that. What?”

  Instantly the possessing spirit of Peter Stuyvesant vanished and was replaced by that of Mrs. Goodeycoonce. She uttered a cry. “White slavery, that’s what it must be! And in broad daylight, too. Oh, the brazen things! What should we do?”

  Neely hauled an old-fashioned but quite authentic and brass-bound telescope from his pocket and swung it around. As he focused in and recognized Daisy, struggling desperately while being taken up the gangway, he uttered a hoarse shout of rage.

  “‘Do’?” he yelled. “We’ve got to save her! Come on! My boat! Let’s go!”

  * * *

  THE BLACK PIGEON passed over City Hall, dallied for a few moments in the currents around the Woolworth Building, and then pressed on in the general direction of Sand Street.…

  * * *

  AS NEELY’S BOAT zoomed under the bow of the yacht, the Marquess kicked off his shoes, seized the anchor chain, and swarmed up like a monkey. Neely and Denny were met at the foot of the gangway ladder by two crewmen, who shouted, gesticulated, and menaced them with boathooks. But in a moment the boatmen’s attention was diverted by a tumult from above. Part of this was caused by Lord Grue and Groole who, darting from one place of concealment to another, called out (in different voices) battle cries in Pathan, Kikuyu, and Demotic Greek; and part of it was caused by the alarm of the crew at being boarded—so they thought—by a host of foes.

  While their opponents’ attention was thus distracted, Denny and Neely gained the deck where Neely at once knocked down the first sailor he saw. Denny’s contribution was more circumspect. Noting an oily rag in a corner he took out a match. In a moment clouds of black smoke arose.

  “Fire!” cried the Dip. “Fire! Fire!”

  Part of the crew promptly swarmed down the ladder into Neely’s boat and cast off. The rest jumped over the side and commenced swimming briskly toward the nearer shore.

  “Hello!” Neely shouted, stumbling along the passageways, opening doors. “Hello, hello! Where are you?”

  A muffled voice called, he burst in, and there was Daisy, gagged and bound, struggling in a chair. Neely cut her loose, removed the gag, and—after only a very slight hesitation, perhaps natural in a shy young man of good family—kissed her repeatedly.

  “Well,” said Daisy tremulously, as he paused for breath, and then to herself, “I guess he’s not such a milksop after all.”

  On deck Denny the Dip and the Marquess stomped out the smoldering rag, though not, however, in time to avoid having attracted two police boats, a Coast Guard cutter, the Governor’s Island ferry, a Hudson River Dayliner, and the New York City Fireboat, Zophar Mills, all of which converged on the yacht.

  “Thank you, thank you,” called out the Marquess, between cupped hands. “We don’t require any assistance, the fire is out. You will observe, however, that officers and crew have abandoned the ship, which means that she is now, under maritime law, by right of salvage, the property of myself and my associates, both in personam and in rem.”<
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  The failure of the engines to start, it was ascertained after a careful scrutiny, was owing to the intrusion of a large waterbug into one of the oil lines; this was soon set right. An attempt of a floating delegate of the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union to question the Marquess’s right to take the helm of the salvaged vessel was quickly terminated by the revelation that he possessed a first-class navigation certificate in the Siamese Merchant Marine. The delegate addressed him henceforth as “Captain,” and, on departing, offered him the use of all the amenities of the Union Hall.

  It was while seeing this personage off that Lord Grue and Groole observed a familiar shadow on the deck of the yacht, and, taking off his quasi-caracul and waving it, lured Sauncepeur down from what the poet Pope once so prettily described as “the azure Realms of Air.”

  “She has clutched a quarry,” he observed. “Well-footed, my pretty, well-trussed. Let me have pelt, dearie—nay, don’t mantle it—there. Good. You shall have new bewits, with bells, and silver varvels to your jesses, with my crest upon them. Hel-lo, hel-lo, what have you done, you demned vulture? You’ve taken a carrier pigeon!” He opened the message capsule. “Bombs Away,” he read. “Rum, very rum. Doubtless the name of a horse, and some poor booby of a bookmaker has taken this means of evading the puritanical Yankee laws dealing with the dissemination of racing intelligence. Hmm, well, not my pidjin. Haw, haw!” he chuckled at the pun. “Denny!” he called.

  “Yes, M’Lord?”

  The Marquess tossed him the bird. “A pigeon for the pot. See that Sauncepeur gets the head and the humbles; afterwards she’s to have a nice little piece of beefsteak, and a bone to break.”

  * * *

  THAT, IN A way, concludes the story. The epilogue is brief. Don Lefty McGonigle, though heartbroken at the abrupt and (to him mysterious) disappearance of his son-in-law and daughter, takes some comfort in the frequent picture postcards that Philomena sends him from such places as Tahiti, Puntas Arenas, Bulawayo, and other locales where the Mafia’s writ (fearsomely hard on deserters) runneth not. The Nafia (originally organized in 1880 under the full name of the National Federation of Independent Artisans, a “Wide Awake” or Chowder and Marching Society, as part of the presidential campaign of General Winfield Scott Hancock, whose famous declaration that “the tariff is a local issue” insured his defeat by General J. Abram Garfield)—the Nafia still controls all the gumball and Indian nut machines south of Vesey Street; and revels in the publicity resultant from its members’ brief incarceration, along with Tosci, the Project Supervisor, and the three crewmen. The Cherry Street Mob would now not dream of muscling in on a syndicate whose pictures were in all the papers in connection with a portfolio containing $87,000,000; it is the Mob’s belief that the fight was caused by the Nafia’s attempting to hijack this sum.

  Cornelius (“Neely”) and Daisy Goodeycoonce have purchased, out of their share of the salvage money, one of the most up-and-coming bait-and-boatyard businesses on Long Island Sound. Granny Goodeycoonce at first was reluctant, but on learning that Daisy’s mother was a Van Dyne, of the (originally) Bergen-op-Zoom, Holland, Van Dynes, she extended her blessings. It remains her view, however, that the family profession of nocturnal customs collecting is merely in abeyance, and will be kept in trust, as it were, for the children.

  Granny is, in fact, for the first time in her life, no longer a Goodeycoonce, but Mistress of Snee, Lady of Muckle Greet, Baroness Bogle, Countess Ballypatcoogen, Viscountess Penhokey, Marchioness of Grue and Groole—and, presumably, Lord High Keeperess of the Queen’s Bears—although on this last point Debrett’s is inclined to be dubious. The fact that the older couple has chosen to go on a prolonged honeymoon with their yacht to the general vicinage of the Sulu Sea where, those in the know report, the opportunities for untaxed commerce (coarsely called “smuggling” by some) between the Philippines, Indonesia, and British North Borneo are simply splendid, is doubtless purely coincidental.

  One thread (or at most two) in the gorgeous tapestry we have woven for the instruction of our readers remains as yet untied. This is the question of what happened to Tosci and his Project Supervisor after their release from brief confinement on unpressed charges of assault.

  It is unquestionably true that their pictures were in all the papers. It is equally true, and equally unquestionable, that the Mafia frowns on publicity for those connected with its far-flung operations. Rumors that the two men were fitted for concrete spaceshoes and subsequently invited to participate in skindiving operations south of Ambrose Light, no matter how persistent, cannot be confirmed.

  A Mr. Alexander Borjia, businessman and art connoisseur, questioned by a Congressional investigating committee, said (or at any rate, read from a prepared statement): “My only information about the so-called Mafia comes from having heard that it is sometimes mentioned in the Sunday supplements of sensation-seeking newspapers. I do not read these myself, being unable to approve of the desecration of the Lord’s Day which their publication and distribution necessarily involve. Nor can I subscribe to the emphasis such journals place upon crime and similar sordid subjects, which cannot but have an unfortunate effect upon our basically clean-living American youth.”

  It was at or about this point that Senator S. Robert E. Lee (“Sourbelly Sam”) Sorby (D., Old Catawba) chose to light up his famous double-bowl corncob pipe, of which it has been said that the voters of his native state sent him to Washington because they could not stand the smell of it at home. Mr. Borjia (evidently as unimpressed as the Old Catawba voters by Senator Sorby’s statement that the mixture was made according to a formula invented by the Indians after whom the State was named)—Mr. Borjia coughed, gagged, gasped, turned white, green, red; and after leveling an imaginary telescope consisting of his own loosely rolled fists, proceeded (in a strange, guttural, and heavily accented voice quite unlike his own) to describe what was even then going on in the secret chambers of the Mafia in such wealth of detail as to make it abundantly clear to the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative branches of the Government (as well as to himself, when with bulging eyes he subsequently read the transcripts of his own “confession”) that he must never be allowed outside any of the several Federal caravanserais in which he has subsequently and successively been entertained.

  And there let us leave him.

  AFTERWORD FOR THE LORD OF CENTRAL PARK

  I HAVE BEEN told (by whom?—who knows by whom?—you think I have time to ask the ID of every nut who comes down the pike?) (ans.: No.)—I have been told that Plato, somewhere, says in effect that when a carpenter makes a table he is merely copying, in wood, a table (a prototable?) which already exists in his mind. Which already exists in his mind as a sort of mental reflection of a sort of celestial table. As it were. If Plato did not call this latter an archetype of a table, it was because Plato had not read Jung. Although of course, if Plato did call it an archetype, does this mean that Plato had read Jung? If history is, as some Greek philosophers said it is, cyclical, perhaps Plato had indeed read Jung. (This, by the way is called “metaphysics.” If you had a brother, would he love noodles?) What is all this leading up to? Why are you so suspicious? The archetype or it may be the prototype of this story is a book by Robert Nathan. Chap who had lost his home during the Depression, and all his goods save for a four-poster bed, had moved the bed to a cave in Central Park. What’s the matter? Shakespeare didn’t steal from Holinshed? I wrote this story a long time ago, and on reading the as-yet-untitled ms., Lorna Moore, then wife to Ward Moore, said, “I know just the title for it: The Lord of Central Park.” And I thought she was right. And I still think so. But somewhere along the line came an editor who thought he had a better one. And so it goes. (It does go so.)

  Now. Was there an actual prototype for the Lord of Central Park himself? Well … In a way it is a composite; of all the magnificent loonies which used to flourish in the days of the Ever-victorious British Raj. And in a way it is based slightly upon an actual (nonroyal) duke who was actua
lly the last man to be tried by the House of Lords as “a jury of his peers.” The House of Lords has relinquished this right. And is Britain visibly better off? However. Not my pidgin. The duke is dead now. So never mind which one. Fe dux does not, after all, imply the duke was gay.

  And as for the Manhattan exemplified in this tale of things odd and curious, there are those who say that it is not the real Manhattan. To which I say, It is a real Manhattan: I have walked its streets. And if much has been destroyed in the Manhattan of others, none of it has been destroyed in the Manhattan of my mind. The archetype remains, for archetypes do not suffer themselves to be destroyed.

  (Note: Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant has died, at a great age, after this story was written. He was the last living male descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, last Dutch Governor of New York, then New Amsterdam, New Netherlands.)

  MURDER IS MURDER

  “MURDER IS MURDER” is a very short story with a very striking title and the conflicts of a Russian crime novel. The story was published in 1973, and spins variations on the familiar theme of murder for inheritance.

  Avram was a master of idiosyncratic variations. When a publisher asked him for biographical information he responded, “For the benefit of those interested in astrology, my rising sign is attached to a Goodyear blimp, and my moon is in Omaha.”

  Michael Kurland, in his introduction to The Redward Edward Papers, described the quirky Davidson persona: “Avram has a whim of iron. He holds a ninth-degree black belt in idiosyncrasy, being the originator of several of the more complex modern moves. He is not antagonistic toward all mechanical devices; he is quite fond of the water wheel and maintains a strict neutrality toward the spinning jenny.”