It was worse this year than last. Frank wasn’t doing as well financially as he’d expected, and then early in November Susie discovered she was pregnant again, and what with one thing and another Frank was headed for a real peak of ill-temper. He screamed at the children constantly, and the name of Nackles was never far from his tongue.
Susie did what she could to counteract Frank’s bad influence, but he wouldn’t let her do much. All through November and December he was home more and more of the time, because the Christmas season is the wrong time to sell insurance anyway and also because he was hating the job more every day and thus giving it less of his time. The more he hated the job, the worse his temper became, and the more he drank, and the worse his limp got, and the louder were his shouts, and the more violent his references to Nackles. It just built and built and built, and reached its crescendo on Christmas Eve, when some small or imagined infraction of one of the children—Stewart, I think—resulted in Frank’s pulling all the Christmas presents from all the closets and stowing them all in the cur to be taken back to the stores, because this Christmas for sure it wouldn’t be Santa Claus who would be visiting this house, it would be Nackles.
By the time Susie got the children to bed, everyone in the house was a nervous wreck. The children were too frightened to sleep, and Susie was too unnerved herself to be of much help in soothing them. Frank, who had taken to drinking at home lately, had locked himself in the bedroom with a bottle.
It was nearly eleven o’clock before Susie got the children all quitted down, and then she went out to the car and brought all the presents back in and arranged them under the tree. Then, not wanting to see or hear her husband any more that night—he was like a big spoiled child throwing a tantrum—she herself went to sleep on the living room sofa.
Frank junior awoke her in the morning, crying. “Look, Mama!
Nackles didn’t come, he didn’t come!” And pointed to the presents she’d placed under the tree.
The other two children came down shortly after, and Susie and the youngsters sat on the floor and opened the presents, enjoying themselves as much as possible, but still with restraint. There were none of the usual squeals of childish pleasure; no one wanted Daddy to comic storming downstairs in one of his rages. So the children contented themselves with ear-to-ear smiles and whispered exclamations, and after a while Susie made breakfast, and the day carried along as pleasantly as amid he expected under the circumstances.
It was a little after twelve that Susie began to worry about Frank’s non-appearance. She braved herself to go up and knock on the locked door and call his name, but she girt no answer, not even the expected snarl, so just around one o’clock she called me and I hurried on over. I rapped smartly on the bedroom door, got no answer, and finally I threatened to break the door in if Frank didn’t open up. When I still got no answer, break the door in I did.
And Frank, of course, was gone.
The police say he ran away, deserted his family, primarily because of Susie’s fourth pregnancy. They say he went out the window and dropped to the backyard, so Susie wouldn’t see him and try to stop him. And they say he didn’t take the car because he was afraid Susie would hear him start the engine.
That all sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Yet, I just can’t believe Frank would walk out on Susie without a lot of shouting about it first. Nor that he would leave his car, which he was fonder of than his wife and children.
But what’s the alternative? There’s only one I can think of: Nackles.
I would rather not believe that I would rather not believe that Frank, in inventing Nackles and spreading word of him, made him real. I would rather not believe that Nackles actually did visit my sister’s house on Christmas Eve.
But did he? If so, he couldn’t have carried off any of the children, for a more subdued and better-behaved trio of youngsters you won’t find anywhere. But Nackles, being brand-new and never having had a meal before, would need somebody. Somebody to whom he was real, somebody not protected by the shield of Santa Claus. And, as I say, Frank was drinking that night. Alcohol makes the brain believe in the existence of all sorts of things. Also, Frank was a spoiled child if there ever was one.
There’s no question but that Frank Junior and Linda Joyce and Stewart believe in Nackles. And Frank spread the gospel of Nackles to others, some of whom spread it to their own children. And some of whom will spread the new Evil to other parents. And ours is a mobile society, with families constantly being transferred by Daddy’s company from one end of the country to another, so how long can it be before Nackles is a power not only in this one city, but all across the nation?
I don’t know if Nackles exists, or will exist. All I know for sure is that there’s suddenly a new level of meaning in the lyric of that popular Christmas song. You know the one I mean:
You’d better watch out.
THE ULTIMATE CAPER:
The Purloined Letter
“Yes,” the fat man said, “I’ve spent the last seventeen years in this pursuit. More armagnac, Mr. Staid?”
“Nice booze,” Staid admitted. Adding a splash of Fresca, he said, “What is this dingus anyway, this purloined letter?”
“Ah,” the fat man said. “It’s quite a story, Mr. Staid. I have you ever heard of the Barony of Ueltenplotz?”
Staid sucked on his stogie. “Thuringian, isn’t it? One of the prizes in the Carpathian succession, not settled till MCCLXIV.”
“Very good, Mr. Staid! I like a man who knows his dates.”
“These onions aren’t bad either,” Staid allowed.
“Well, sir,” the fat man said, “if you know the history of the Barons Ueltenplotz, you know they’ve been the renegades of Mitteleuropa for a thousand years.”
“Maupers and gapes.” Staid grated.
“Exactly. And arrogant to a fault. What would you say, sir, if I told you the seventh Baron Ueltenplotz stole a letter from the European alphabet?”
“I’d say your brain was all funny.”
“And yet, sir, that is precisely what happened. Yes, sir. The family name was originally one letter longer, beginning with that missing letter.”
“Which letter was it?”
“No one knows,” the fat man said. “In MXXIX, the seventh Baron, Helmut the Homicidal, having seen one of his personal monogrammed polo shirts being used as a horsewipe, determined to commandeer his initial letter for his own personal use. The Barony was wealthy in those days—carrots had been discovered in the territory—and so monks, scribes, delineators, transvestites and other civil servants were dispatched across Europe to excise that letter wherever it might appear. Illuminated manuscripts developed sudden unexplained fly specks and pen smears. Literate men—and they were few in the CMth century, Mr. Staid. I assure you—were bribed or threatened to forget that letter. The alphabet, which had been twenty-seven letters in length—‘Thrice nine’ was a saying of the time, Mr. Staid, long since forgotten—was reduced to twenty-six. The letter between K and L had been stolen! And what do you say to that, sir?”
“I say you’ve been staring at the light too long,” Staid said. He puffed on his pipe.
“And yet these are facts, sir, facts. I first came across this remarkable story seventeen years ago, in MCMLVIII, in conversation with a retired harpsichord tuner in Potsdam. The letter had been removed everywhere, Mr. Staid, except from the face of one shield, sir, one shield maintained for centuries in the deepest recesses of Schloss Ueltenplotz. During the Second World War, a Technical Sergeant from Bismarck, North Dakota, stumbling across the shield and mistaking it for a beer tray, sent it home to his father, an official in the Veterans of Foreign Wars. But the shield never arrived, sir, and what do you think of that?”
“Not much,” Staid admitted, and dragged on his cigarette.
“It had been stolen, sir, yet again, by a Jugoslav General in Istanbul, one Brigadier Ueltehmitt. But he didn’t know what he had, sir. He thought the mark on the shield was a typographical erro
r, and believed it to be a Yield sign from the Hungarian Highway Department.”
“What’s this dingus look like, anyway?”
“No one knows for certain,” the fat man said.
“What’s it supposed to sound like?” Staid said.
“No one has pronounced that letter,” the fat man said, “in over a thousand years. Some think it’s the sound in a man’s throat on the third day of Asian flu when watching a rock record commercial during the six o’clock news.”
“Guttural,” said Staid.
The fat man, whose real name was Guttural, frowned at Staid through narrowed eyes. “It seems I’ve underestimated you,” he said.
“Looks like,” admitted Staid.
“Well, sir,” the fat man said, “we’ll put our cards on the table. I want that letter. Will you join me?”
“Where is this dingus, anyway?”
“Come along, sir!”
The Ueltehmitt Caper ran without a hitch. First, the three helicopters descended over the Bahnhof Boogie in Dusseldorf. released their grappling hooks and removed the building to Schwartzvogel Island in Lake Liebfraumilch, w here the demolition team with the laser sliced through the sides of the vault. Eliminating the alarm system by squirting Redi-Whip into the air-conditioning ducts, they sprayed the guards with a sleep-inducing gas disguised as pocket packs of Propa PH, and lowered ropes to one another until exactly 6:27. Removing the lead-lined box containing the priceless Shield of Ueltenplotz, they placed it in the speedboat and sped away to the innocent-appearing minesweeper dawdling in the current. Waterline gates in the minesweeper yawned open, the speedboat entered, and before the minesweeper sank the lead-lined box had been transferred to the catapult plane and launched skyward. Two hours later, the pilot parachuted over Loch Ness and was driven swiftly to Scotswa Hay, the ancestral retreat of Guttural’s co-conspirator Hart in the highlands.
Staid, Guttural, Hart, Wilmer, Obloquy and the beauteous Laurinda synchronized their watches and crowded around the table where lay the package, now wrapped in yesterday’s Dortmunder Zeitung Geblatt. Ripping off the wrappings, the fat man opened the box and took out the precious shield.
“Ahhhh.” said the beauteous Wilmer.
“At last,” commented Obloquy, and choked to death on his Russian cigarette.
The fat man turned over the shield. “No!” he cried. “No!”
Staid frowned at the shield. Rounder than most, it bore the figure of pi.
“It’s a Frisbee!” cried the fat man.
“You fool!” shrieked Laurinda, stamping her foot with a dater. “Ueltehmitt tricked you!”
“Wrong dingus, huh?” Staid asked, and lit up a corncob.
“Seventeen years,” the fat man said. “Well, I’ll give it seventeen more if need be.” He flung the false shield out the window. “On to Istanbul! Will you join us. Staid?”
“No, thanks, fat man.” Staid watched the Frisbee sail over the heath cliff, “it in the sky,” he said.
THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR
I
When the elevator didn’t come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency—well, I won’t go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn’t come, that put the roof on the city, as they say.
It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you’re lucky if you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.
But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I’d been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it—to propose to Linda. I’d called her second thing this morning—right after the egg yolk—and invited myself down to her place. “Ten o’clock,” she’d said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o’clock, she meant ten o’clock.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that Linda’s a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn’t return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up.
Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years. Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we’d started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I’d been killed. She couldn’t visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her w hat actually had happened—I’d broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four days.
And then the elevator didn’t come.
Until then, I’d managed somehow to keep the day’s minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn’t very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one.
I had a Whimsical Approach: “Honey, I see there’s a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.” And I had a Romantic Approach: “Darling, I can’t live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I’m madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?” I even had a Straightforward Approach: “Linda. I’m going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can’t think of anyone I would rather spend the time with than you.”
Actually, though I wouldn’t even have admitted this to Linda, much less to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract for any kind of marriage other than Non-P—Non-Permanent, No Progeny.
So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time came I would probably be so tongue-tied I’d be capable of no more than a blurted, “Will you marry me?” and I struggled with zippers and malfunctioning aircons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment at five minutes to ten.
Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away. It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I was giving myself plenty of time.
But then the elevator didn’t come.
I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn’t understand it.
The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of the burton being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for either the next local or for the express. So it couldn’t be more than twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.
I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If it didn’t arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.
It didn’t arrive.
I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to give her advance warning that I would be late?
Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my apartment I dialed Linda’s number, and the screen lit up with white letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.
Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to keep us from being interrupted.
Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if the elevator
should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute late.
No matter. It didn’t arrive.
I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door three rimes before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment. fuming, slammed the door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud they’d be able to hear me in sub-basement three.
I got some more letters that spelled. BUSY.
It took three tries before I got through to a harried-looking female receptionist. “My name is Rice!” I bellowed. “Edmund Rice! I live on the hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and—”
“The-elevator-is-disconnected.” She said it very rapidly, as though she were growing very used to saying it.
It only stopped me for a second. “Disconnected? What do you mean disconnected? Elevators don’t gel disconnected!” I told her.
“We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,” she rattled. My bellowing was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.
I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it, giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as rationally as you could please, “Would you mind terribly telling me why the elevator is disconnected?”
“l-am-sorry-sir-but-that—”
“Stop,” I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her looking at me. She hadn’t done that before, she’d merely gazed blankly at her screen and parroted her responses.
But now she was actually looking at me.
Tomorrow's Crimes Page 3
