The bleep started up again.
“A curse sounds so melodramatic and medieval; but is it in essence any different from a prayer for victory, which chaplains offer up regularly? As I imagine you did in your field Mass. Certainly all of your communicants are praying for victory to the Lord of Hosts—and as Captain Fassbander would point out, it makes them better fighting men. I will confess that even as a teacher of the law, I have no marked doctrinal confidence in the efficacy of a curse. I do not expect the spaceship of the invaders to be blasted by the forked lightning of Yahveh. But my men have an exaggerated sort of faith in me, and I owe it to them to do anything possible to strengthen their morale. Which is all the legion or any other army expects of chaplains anyway; we are no longer priests of the Lord, but boosters of morale—a type of sublimated YMCA secretary. Well, in my case, say YMHA.”
The bleep stopped again.
“I never knew your eyes to be so sensitive before,” Acosta observed tartly.
“I thought you might want a little time to think it over,” Malloy ventured.
“I’ve thought it over. What else have I been telling you? Now please, Mule. Everything’s all set. Fassbander will explode completely if I don’t speak my curse into this mike in two minutes.”
Silently Mule Malloy started up the bleep.
“Why did I become ordained?” Acosta backtracked. “That’s no question really. The question is why have I remained in a profession to which I am so little suited. I will confess to you, Mule, and to you only, that I have not the spiritual humility and patience that I might desire. I itch for something beyond the humdrum problems of a congregation or an army detachment. Sometimes I have felt that I should drop everything else and concentrate on my psi faculties, that they might lead me to this goal I seek without understanding. But they are too erratic. I know the law, I love the ritual, but I am not good as a rabbi, a teacher, because . . .”
For the third time the bleep stopped, and Mule Malloy said, “Because you are a saint.”
And before Chaim Acosta could protest, he went on, “Or a prophet, if you want Fassbander’s distinction. There are all kinds of saints and prophets. There are the gentle, humble, patient ones like Francis of Assisi and Job and Ruth—or do you count women? And there are God’s firebrands, the ones of fierce intellect and dreadful determination, who shake the history of God’s elect, the saints who have reached through sin to salvation with a confident power that is the reverse of the pride of the Lucifer, cast from the same ringing metal.”
“Mule . . . !” Acosta protested. “This isn’t you. These aren’t your words. And you didn’t learn these in parochial school . . .”
Malloy seemed not to hear him. “Paul, Thomas More, Catherine of Siena, Augustine,” he recited in rich cadence. “Elijah, Ezekiel, Judas Maccabeus, Moses, David . . . You are a prophet, Chaim. Forget the rationalizing double talk of the Rhinists and recognize whence your powers come, how you were guided to save me, what the ‘strange thoughts’ were that you had during last night’s vigil of prayer. You are a prophet—and you are not going to curse men, the children of God.”
Abruptly Malloy slumped forward over the wheel. There was silence in the bleep. Chaim Acosta stared at his hands as if he knew no gesture for this situation.
“Gentlemen!” Captain Fassbander’s voice was even more rasping than usual over the telecom. “Will you please get the blessed lead out and get up that rise? It’s two minutes, twenty seconds, past zero!”
Automatically Acosta depressed the switch and said, “Right away, Captain.” Mule Malloy stirred and opened his eyes. “Was that Fassbander?”
“Yes . . . But there’s no hurry, Mule. I can’t understand it. What made you . . . ?”
“I don’t understand it, either. Never passed out like that before. Doctor used to say that head injury in the Wisconsin game might—but after thirty years . . .” Chaim Acosta sighed. “You sound like my Mule again. But before . . .”
“Why? Did I say something? Seems to me like there was something important I wanted to say to you.”
“I wonder what they’d say at Tel Aviv. Telepathic communication of subconscious minds? Externalization of thoughts that I was afraid to acknowledge consciously? Yes, you said something, Mule; and I was as astonished as Balaam when his ass spoke to him on his journey to . . . Mule!”
Acosta’s eyes were blackly alight as never before, and his hands flickered eagerly. “Mule, do you remember the story of Balaam? It’s in the fourth book of Moses . . .”
“Numbers? All I remember is he had a talking ass. I suppose there’s a pun on Mule?”
“Balaam, son of Beor,” said the rabbi with quiet intensity, “was a prophet in Moab. The Israelites were invading Moab, and King Balak ordered Balaam to curse them. His ass not only spoke to him; more important, it halted and refused to budge on the journey until Balaam had listened to a message from the Lord . . .
“You were right, Mule. Whether you remember what you said or not, whether your description of me was God’s truth or the telepathic projection of my own ego, you were right in one thing: These invaders are men, by all the standards that we debated yesterday. Moreover they are men suited to Mars; our patrol reported them as naked and unprotected in this cold and this atmosphere. I wonder if they have scouted this planet before and selected it as suitable; that could have been some observation device left by them that trapped you in the pass, since we’ve never found traces of an earlier Martian civilization.
“Mars is not for us. We cannot live here normally; our scientific researches have proved fruitless; and we maintain an inert, bored garrison only because our planetary ego cannot face facts and surrender the symbol of our ‘conquest of space.’ These other men can live here, perhaps fruitfully, to the glory of God and eventually to the good of our own world as well, as two suitably populated planets come to know each other. You were right; I cannot curse men.”
“GENTLEMEN!”
Deftly Acosta reached down and switched off the telecom. “You agree, Mule?”
“I . . . I . . . I guess I drive back now, Chaim?”
“Of course not. Do you think I want to face Fassbander now? You drive on. At once. Up to the top of the rise. Or haven’t you yet remembered the rest of the story of Balaam? He didn’t stop at refusing to curse his fellow children of God. Not Balaam.
“He blessed them.”
Mule Malloy had remembered that. He had remembered more, too. The phonograph needle had coursed through the grooves of Bible study on up to the thirty-first chapter of Numbers with its brief epilog to the story of Balaam:
So Moses ordered a muster of men sufficient to ivreak the Lord’s vengeance on the Midianites. . . . All the menfolk they killed, the chiefs of the tribe . . . Balaam, too, the son of Beor, they put to the sword.
He looked at the tense face of Chaim Acosta, where exultation and resignation blended as they must in a man who knows at last the pattern of his life, and realized that Chaim’s memory, too, went as far as the thirty-first chapter.
And there isn’t a word in the Bible as to what became of the ass, thought Mule Malloy, and started the bleep up the rise.
The Anomaly of the Empty Man
“This is for you,” Inspector Abrahams announced wryly. Another screwy one.”
I was late and out of breath. I’d somehow got entangled on Market Street with the Downtown Merchants’ Association annual parade, and for a while it looked like I’d be spending the day surrounded by gigantic balloon-parodies of humanity. But it takes more than rubber Gullivers to hold me up when Inspector Abrahams announces that he’s got a case of the kind he labels “for Lamb.”
And San Francisco’s the city for them to happen in. Nobody anywhere else ever had such a motive for murder as the butler Frank Miller in 1896, or such an idea of how to execute a bank robbery as the zany Mr. Will in 1952. Take a look at Joe Jackson’s San Francisco Murders, and you’ll see that we can achieve a flavor all our own. And when we do, Abrahams lets me
in on it.
Abrahams didn’t add any explanation. He just opened the door of the apartment. I went in ahead of him. It was a place I could have liked it if it hadn’t been for what was on the floor.
Two walls were mostly windows. One gave a good view of the Golden Gate. From the other, on a fine day, you could see the Farallones, and it was a fine day.
The other two walls were records and a record player. I’d heard of the Stam-baugh collection of early operatic recordings. If I’d been there on any other errand, my mouth would have watered at the prospect of listening to lost great voices.
“If you can get a story out of this that makes sense,” the Inspector grunted, “you’re welcome to it—at the usual fee.” Which was a dinner at Lupo’s Pizzeria, complete with pizza Carus’s, tomatoes with fresh basil and sour French bread to mop up the inspired sauce of Lupo’s special calamari (squids to you). “Everything’s just the way we found it.”
I looked at the unfinished highball, now almost colorless with all its ice melted and its soda flat. I looked at the cylindrical ash of the cigarette which had burned itself out. I looked at the vacuum cleaner—a shockingly utilitarian object in this set for gracious living. I looked at the record player, still switched on, still making its methodical seventy-eight revolutions per minute, though there was no record on the turntable.
Then I managed to look again at the thing on the floor.
It was worse than a body. It was like a tasteless bloodless parody of the usual occupant of the spot marked X. Clothes scattered in disorder seem normal—even more normal, perhaps, in a bachelor apartment than clothes properly hung in closets. But this . . .
Above the neck of the dressing gown lay the spectacles. The sleeves of the shirt were inside the sleeves of the dressing gown. The shirt was buttoned, even to the collar, and the foulard tie was knotted tight up against the collar button. The tails of the shirt were tucked properly into the zipped-up, properly belted trousers. Below the trouser cuffs lay the shoes, at a lifelike angle, with the tops of the socks emerging from them.
“And there’s an undershirt under the shirt,” Inspector Abrahams muttered disconsolately, “and shorts inside the pants. Complete outfit: what the well-dressed man will wear. Only no man in them.”
It was as though James Stambaugh had been attacked by some solvent which eats away only flesh and leaves all the inanimate articles. Or as though some hyperspatial suction had drawn the living man out of his wardrobe, leaving his sartorial shell behind him.
I said, “Can I dirty an ashtray in this scene?”
Abrahams nodded. “I was just keeping it for you to see. We’ve got our pictures.” While I lit up, he crossed to the record player and switched it off. “Damned whirligig gets on my nerves.”
“Whole damned setup gets on mine,” I said. “It’s like a strip-tease version of the Mary Celeste. Only the strip wasn’t a gradual tease; just abruptly, whoosh!, a man’s gone. One minute he’s comfortably dressed in his apartment, smoking, drinking, playing records. The next he’s stark naked—and where and doing what?”
Abrahams pulled at his nose, which didn’t need lengthening. “We had the Japanese valet check the wardrobe. Every article of clothing James Stambaugh owned is still here in the apartment.”
“Who found him?” I asked.
“Kaguchi. The valet. He had last night off. He let himself in this morning, to prepare coffee and prairie oysters as usual. He found this.”
“Blood?” I ventured.
Abrahams shook his head.
“Visitors?”
“Ten apartments in this building. Three of them had parties last night. You can figure how much help the elevator man was.”
“The drink?”
“We took a sample to the lab. Nothing but the best scotch.”
I frowned at the vacuum cleaner. “What’s that doing out here? It ought to live in a closet.”
“Puzzled Kaguchi too. He even says it was still a little warm when he found it, like it had been used. But we looked in the bag. I assure you Stambaugh didn’t get sucked in there.”
“Motive?”
“Gay dog, our Mr. Stambaugh. Maybe you read Herb Caen’s gossip column too? And Kaguchi gave us a little fill-in. Brothers, fathers, husbands . . . Too many motives.”
“But why this way?” I brooded. “Get rid of him, sure. But why leave this hollow husk . . . ?”
“Not just why, Lamb. How.”
“How? That should be easy enough to—”
“Try it. Try fitting sleeves into sleeves, pants into pants, so they’re as smooth and even as if they were still on the body. I’ve tried, with the rest of the wardrobe. It doesn’t work.”
I had an idea. “You don’t fit ’em in,” I said smugly. “You take ’em off. Look.”
I unbuttoned my coat and shirt, undid my tie, and pulled everything off at once. “See,” I said; “sleeves in sleeves.” I unzipped and stepped out of trousers and shorts. “See; pants in pants.”
Inspector Abrahams was whistling the refrain of Strip Polka. “You missed your career, Lamb,” he said. “Only now you’ve got to put your shirt tails between the outer pants and the inner ones and still keep everything smooth. And look in here.” He lifted up one shoe and took out a pocket flash and shot a beam inside. “The sock’s caught on a little snag in one of the metal eyelets. That’s kept it from collapsing, and you can still see the faint impress of toes in there. Try slipping your foot out of a laced-up shoe and see if you can get that result.”
I was getting dressed again and feeling like a damned fool.
“Got any other inspirations?” Abrahams grinned.
“The only inspiration I’ve got is as to where to go now.”
“Some day,” the Inspector grunted, “I’ll learn where you go for your extra-bright ideas.”
“As the old lady said to the elephant keeper,” I muttered, “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
The Montgomery Block (Monkey Block to natives) is an antic and reboantic warren of offices and studios on the fringe of Grant Avenue’s Chinatown and Columbus Avenue’s Italian-Mexican-French-Basque quarter. The studio I wanted was down a long corridor, beyond that all-American bend where the Italian newspaper Corriere delPopolo sits cater-corner from the office of Tinn Hugh Yu, Ph.D. and Notary Public.
Things were relatively quiet today in Dr. Verner’s studio. Slavko Catenich was still hammering away at his block of marble, apparently on the theory that the natural form inherent in the stone would emerge if you hit it often enough. Irma Borigian was running over vocal exercises and occasionally checking herself by striking a note on the piano, which seemed to bring her more reassurance than it did me. Those two, plus a couple of lads industriously fencing whom I’d never seen before, were the only members of Verner’s Varieties on hand today.
Irma ah-ah-ahed and pinked, the fencers clicked, Slavko crashed, and in the midst of the decibels the Old Man stood at his five-foot lectern-desk, resolutely proceeding in quill-pen longhand with the resounding periods of The Anatomy of Nonscience, that never-concluded compendium of curiosities which was half Robert Burton and half Charles Fort.
He gave me the medium look. Not the hasty “Just this sentence” or the forbidding “Dear boy, this page must be finished”; but the in-between “One more deathless paragraph” look. I grabbed a chair and tried to watch Irma’s singing and listen to Slavko’s sculpting.
There’s no describing Dr. Verner. You can say his age is somewhere between seventy and a hundred. You can say he has a mane of hair like an albino lion and a little goatee like a Kentucky Colonel who never heard of cigars. (“When a man’s hair is white,” I’ve heard him say, “tobacco and a beard are mutually exclusive vices.”) You can mention the towering figure and the un-English mobility of the white old hands and the disconcerting twinkle of those impossibly blue eyes. And you’d still have about as satisfactory a description as when you say the Taj Mahal is a domed, square, white marble building.
The twinkle was in the eyes and the mobility was in the hands when he finally came to tower over me. They were both gone by the time I’d finished the story of the Stambaugh apartment and the empty man. He stood for a moment frowning, the eyes lusterless, the hands limp at his sides. Then, still standing like that, he relaxed the frown and opened his mouth in a resonant bellow.
“You sticks!” he roared. (Irma stopped and looked hurt.) “You stones!” (The fencers stopped and looked expectant.) “You worse than worst of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts” (Slavko stopped and looked resigned.) “imagine howling,” Dr. Verner concluded in a columbine coo, having shifted in mid-quotation from one Shakespearean play to another so deftly that I was still looking for the joint.
Verner’s Varieties waited for the next number on the bill. In majestic silence Dr. Verner stalked to his record player. Stambaugh’s had been a fancy enough custommade job, but nothing like this.
If you think things are confusing now, with records revolving at 78, 45, and 332 rpm, you should see the records of the early part of the century. There were cylinders, of course (Verner had a separate machine for them). Disc records, instead of our present standard sizes, ranged anywhere from seven to fourteen inches in diameter, with curious fractional stops in between. Even the center holes came in assorted sizes. Many discs were lateral-cut, like modern ones; but quite a few were hill-anddale, with the needle riding up and down instead of sideways—which actually gave better reproduction but somehow never became overwhelmingly popular. The grooving varied too, so that even if two companies both used hill-and-dale cutting you couldn’t play the records of one on a machine for the other. And just to make things trickier, some records started from the inside instead of the outer edge. It was Free Enterprise gone hogwild.
Dr. Verner had explained all this while demonstrating to me how his player could cope with any disc record ever manufactured. And I had heard him play everything on it from smuggled dubbings of Crosby blow-ups to a recording by the original Floradora Sextet—which was, he was always careful to point out, a double sextet or, as he preferred, a duodecimet.
The Compleat Boucher Page 47
