The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  There was nothing to say. MacVeagh just sat there. He’d been sure it was the contemptible Phil Rogers. His conscience had felt clear. But now, watching the man she should have married . . .

  “The worst thing,” Johansen added, “is that I like you, MacVeagh. I don’t even want to wring your neck for you. But Laura’d better be happy.”

  “She will be,” said MacVeagh flatly. He rose from the table stiffly, made arrangements with the bartender about getting Johansen home, and walked out. There was nothing he could do.

  No, he couldn’t even be generous and give her back. The scandal of a divorce . . . Magic doesn’t work backward. Was this the catch that Molly talked about?

  The second thing that happened that night was unimportant. But it makes a good sample of a kind of minor incident that cropped up occasionally on the plateau.

  On his way to the office, MacVeagh went past the Lyric. He absently read the marquee and saw that the theater was playing Rio Rhythm, Metropolis Pictures’ latest well-intentioned contribution to the Good Neighbor Policy. There were no patrons lined up at the box office—no one in the lobby at all save Clara in her cage and Mr. Marcus, looking smaller and unhappier than ever.

  He took the usual huge stogie out of his mouth and waved a despondent greeting to MacVeagh. The editor paused. “Poor house tonight?” he asked sympathetically.

  “Poor house, he says!” Mr. Marcus replaced the cigar and it joggled with his words. “Mr. MacVeagh, I give you my word, even the ushers won’t stay in the auditorium!”

  MacVeagh whistled. “That bad?”

  “Bad? Mr. MacVeagh, Rio Rhythm is colossal, stupendous, and likewise terrific. But it smells, yet.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Stink bombs, Mr. MacVeagh. Stink bombs they throw, yet, into the Lyric. A strictly union house I run, I pay my bills, I got no competitors, and now comes stink bombs. It ain’t possible. But it’s true.”

  MacVeagh half guessed the answer even then. He got it in full with Molly’s first speech when he reached the office.

  “Boss, you’ve got to look after things better yourself. I don’t know how the copy desk let it get by. Of course, that kid you put onto handling movie reviews is green; he doesn’t know there’s some things you just don’t say in a paper, true though they may be. But look!”

  MacVeagh looked, knowing what he would see. The movie review, a new department added experimentally since the Sentinel had expanded so, stated succinctly: “Rio Rhythm stinks.”

  John MacVeagh was silent for a long count. Then he said wryly, “It’s quite a responsibility, isn’t it, Molly?”

  “Boss,” she said, “you’re the only man in the world I’d trust with it.”

  He believed her—not that it was true, but that she thought it was. And that was all the more reason why . . .

  “You’re kidding yourself, Molly. Not that I don’t like to hear it. But this is a power that should never be used for anything but the best. I’ve tried to use it that way. And tonight I’ve learned that—well, I’ll put in inadvertently to salve my conscience—that I’m ruining one man’s business and have destroyed another’s happiness.

  “It’s too much power. You can’t realize all its ramifications. It’s horrible—and yet it’s wonderful, too. To know that it’s yours—it—it makes you feel like a god, Molly. No, more than that: Like God.”

  There was an echo in the back of his mind. Something gnawing there, something remembered . . .

  Then he heard the words as clearly as though they were spoken in the room. Father Byrne’s unfinished sentence: “If you were God—” And Jake Willis’ question that had prompted it: “Why doesn’t God stop the war?”

  Molly watched the light that came on in the boss’s eyes. It was almost beautiful, and still it frightened her.

  “Well,” said John MacVeagh, “why don’t I?”

  It took a little preparing. For one thing, he hadn’t tried anything on such a global scale before. He didn’t know if influence outside of Grover would work, though truth should be truth universally.

  For another, it took some advance work. He had to concoct an elaborate lie about new censorship regulations received from Washington, so that the tickers were moved into his private office and the foreign news came out to the rewrite staff only over his desk.

  And the public had to be built up to it. It couldn’t come too suddenly, too unbelievably. He prepared stories of mounting Axis defeats. He built up the internal dissension in Axis countries.

  And it worked. Associated Press reports from the battlefields referred to yesterday’s great victory which had been born on his typewriter. For one last experiment, he assassinated Goering. The press-association stories were crowded the next day with rumors from neutral countries and denials from Berlin.

  And finally the front page of the Grover Sentinel bore nothing but two words:

  WAR ENDED

  MacVeagh had deleted the exclamation point from the proof. There was no need for it.

  VI

  Excerpts from the diary of Hank Branson, FBI:

  Washington, June 23.

  This looks to be the strangest case I’ve tackled yet. Screwier than that Nazi ring that figured out a way to spread subversive propaganda through a burlesque show.

  The chief called me in this morning, and he was plenty worried. “Did you ever hear of a town called Grover?” he asked.

  Of course I had. It’s where the Hitchcock plant is. So I said sure and waited for him to spill the rest of it. But it took him a while. Almost as though he was embarrassed by what he had to say.

  At last he came out with, “Hank, you’re going to think I’m crazy. But as best we can figure it out, this is the situation: All this country is at war with the Axis— excepting Grover.”

  “Since when,” I wanted to know, “do city councils have to declare war?”

  So he tried to explain. “For two weeks now, the town of Grover has had no part in the war effort. The Hitchcock plant has stopped producing and is retooling for peace production. The Grover draft board hasn’t sent in one man of its quota. The Grover merchants have stopped turning in their ration stamps. Even the tin-can collections have stopped. Grover isn’t at war.”

  “But that’s nuts,” I said.

  “I warned you. But that’s the case. We’ve sent them memoranda and warnings and notifications and every other kind of governmental scrap paper you can imagine. Either they don’t receive them or they don’t read them. No answers, no explanations. We’ve got to send a man in there to investigate on the spot. And it’s got to be from our office. I don’t think an Army man could keep his trigger finger steady at the spectacle of a whole community resigning from the war.”

  “Have you got any ideas?” I asked. “Anything to give me a lead.”

  The chief frowned. “Like you say, it’s nuts. There’s no accounting for it. Unless— Look, now you’ll really think I’m crazy. But sometimes when I want to relax, I read those science-fiction magazines. You understand?”

  “They’re cheaper than blondes,” I admitted.

  “So this is the only thing that strikes me: some kind of a magnetic force field exists around Grover that keeps it out of touch with the rest of the world. Maybe even a temporal field that twists it into a time where there isn’t any war. Maybe the whole thing’s a new secret weapon of the enemy, and they’re trying it out there. Soften up the people for invasion by making them think it’s all over. Go ahead. Laugh. But if you think my answer’s screwy—and it is—just remember: it’s up to you to find the right one.”

  So that’s my assignment, and I never had a cockeyeder one: Find out why one town, out of this whole nation, has quit the war flat.

  Proutyville, June 24.

  At least Proutyville’s what it says on the road map, though where I am says just MOTEL and that seems to be about all there is.

  I’m the only customer tonight. The motel business isn’t what it used to be. I guess that’s why the ga
rage next door is already converted into a blacksmith’s job.

  “People that live around here, they’ve got to get into town now and then,” the old guy that runs it said to me. “So they’re pretty well converted back to horses already.”

  “I’ve known guys that were converted to horses,” I said. “But only partially.”

  “I mean, converted to the use of horses.” There was a funny sort of precise dignity about this correction. “I am pleased to be back at the old work.”

  He looked old enough to have flourished when blacksmithing was big time. I asked, “What did you do in the meanwhile?”

  “All kinds of metal trades. Printing mostly.”

  And that got us talking about printing and newspapers, which is right up my alley because Pop used to own the paper in Sage Bluffs and I’ve lately been tied up with most of the department’s cases involving seditious publications.

  “A paper can do a lot of harm,” I insisted. “Oh, I know it’s been the style to cry down the power of the press ever since the 1936 and 1940 elections. But a paper still has a lot of influence even though it’s hard to separate cause and effect. For instance, do Chicagoans think that way because of the Tribune, or is there a Tribune because Chicagoans are like that?”

  From there on we got practically philosophical. He had a lot of strange ideas, that old boy. Mostly about truth. How truth was relative, which there’s nothing new in that idea, though he dressed it up fancy. And something about truth and spheres of influence—how a newspaper, for instance, aimed at printingTheTruth, which there is no such thing as, but actually tried, if it was honest, to print the truth (lower case) for its own sphere of influence. Outside the radius of its circulation, truth might, for another editor, be something quite else again. And then he said, to himself like, “I’d like to hear sometime how that wish came out,” which didn’t mean anything but sort of ended that discussion.

  It was then I brought up my own little problem, and that’s the only reason I’ve bothered to write all this down, though there’s no telling what a crackpot blacksmith like that meant.

  It’s hard to get a clear picture of him in my mind now while I’m writing this. He’s tall and thin and he has a great beak of a nose. But what I can’t remember is does he have a beard? I’d almost swear he does, and still—

  Anyway, I told him about Grover, naming no names, and asked him what he thought of that set-up. He liked to speculate; OK, here was a nice ripe subject.

  He thought a little and said, “Is it Grover?” I guess some detail in my description of the plant and stuff tipped it off. I didn’t answer, but he went on: “Think over what I’ve said, my boy. When you get to Grover and see what the situation is, remember what we’ve talked about tonight. Then you’ll have your answer.”

  This prating hasn’t any place in my diary. I know that. I feel like a dope writing it down. But there’s a certain curious compulsion about it. Not so much because I feel that this is going to help explain whatever is going on in Grover, but because I’ve got this eerie sensation that that old man is like nothing else I’ve met in all my life.

  It’s funny. I keep thinking of my Welsh grandmother and the stories she used to tell me when I was so high. It’s twenty years since I’ve thought of those.

  Grover, June 25.

  Nothing to record today but long, tiresome driving over deserted highways. I wonder what gas rationing has done to the sales of Burma Shave.

  The roads were noticeably more populated as I got nearer Grover, even though it was by then pretty late. Maybe they’ve abolished that rationing, too.

  Too late to do any checking now; I’ll get to work tomorrow, with my usual routine of dropping in at the local paper first to gather a picture.

  Grover, June 26.

  Two of the oddest things in my life with the FBI have happened today. One, the minor one, is that I’ve somehow mislaid my diary, which is why this entry is written on note paper. The other, and what has really got me worried, is that I’ve mislaid my job.

  Just that. I haven’t the slightest idea why I am in Grover.

  It’s a nice little town. Small and cozy and like a thousand others, only maybe even more pleasant. It’s going great guns now, of course, reveling, like everyplace else, in the boom of postwar prosperity.

  There’s a jiggy, catchy chorus in The Chocolate Soldier that goes, “Thank the Lord the war is over, tum-tee-tum tee-tum tee-tover—” Nice, happy little tune; it ought to be the theme song of these times. It seems like only yesterday I was stewing, and all the rest of the department with me, about saboteurs and subversive elements and all the other wartime problems.

  Only now I’ve got something else to stew about, which is why I’m here.

  I tried to get at it indirectly with John MacVeagh, a stolid sort of young man with heavy eyebrows and a quiet grin, who edits the Grover Sentinel—surprisingly large and prosperous paper for a town this size. Daily, too.

  I liked MacVeagh—good guy. Says he didn’t serve in the war because a punctured eardrum kept him out, but says he tried his best to see Grover through it on the home front. We settled down to quite a confab, and I deliberately let it slip that I was from the FBI. I hoped that’d cue him into, “Oh, so you’re here on the Hungadunga case, huh?” But no go. No reaction at all, but a mild wonder as to what a G-man was doing in Grover.

  I didn’t tell him.

  I tried the same stunt on the chief of police, who kept quoting Bible texts at me and telling me about a murder they had a while back and how he solved it. (Would you believe it? The butler did it! Honest.) Nothing doing on the reaction business. Grover, ever since the famous murder, has had the most crime-free record in the State. Nothing in my line.

  Nothing to do but sleep on it and hope tomorrow turns up either my diary or my memory.

  Grover, June 27.

  I like Grover. Now that the war’s over, the department’ll be cutting down on its staff. I might do worse than resign and settle down here. I’ve always wanted to try some pulp writing to show up the guys that write about us. And in a few years Chief Hanby’ll be retiring, and if I’m established in the community by then—

  And I’m going to have to get out of the department if things go on like this. Had a swell day today—visited the Hitchcock plant and saw their fabulous new work with plastics in consumer goods, had dinner at MacVeagh’s and went out to a picture and a bar on a double date with him and his wife—who is the loveliest thing I ever saw, if you like icicles—and a girl from the paper, who’s a nice kid.

  But I still don’t know from nothing.

  I sent a wire back to the chief:

  WIRE FULL INSTRUCTIONS AT ONCE MY MISSION LOCAL POLICE CHIEF WANTS FORMAL OK.

  I know, I know. It’s a thin story, and it probably won’t work. But I’ve got to try something.

  Grover, June 28.

  I got an answer:

  YOUR QUOTE MISSION UNQUOTE ALL A MISTAKE. RETURN WASHINGTON.

  I don’t get it. Maybe when I see the chief again—

  So now, regretfully, we bid farewell to the sunny, happy town of Grover, nestling at the foot—

  Proutyville, June 29.

  As you—whoever you are and whatever you think you’re doing reading other people’s diaries—can see, my diary’s turned up again. And that I am, as they say in the classics, stark, raving mad seems about the only possible answer.

  Maybe I thought the chief was crazy. What’s he going to call me?

  I read over again what the old guy with—or without—the beard said. Where he said I’d find the answer. I didn’t.

  So I went over to see him again, but he wasn’t there. There was a fat man drinking beer out of a quart bottle, and as soon as he saw me he poured a glassful and handed it over unasked.

  It tasted good, and I said, “Thanks,” and meant it. Then I described the old boy and asked where was he.

  The fat man poured himself another glass and said, “Damfino. He come in here one day and says,
‘See you’re setting up to shoe horses. Need an old hand at the business?’ So I says, ‘Sure, what’s your name?’ and he says, ‘Wieland,’ leastways that’s what I think he says, like that beer out in California. ‘Wieland,’ he says. ‘I’m a smith,’ so he goes to work. Then just this morning he up and says, ‘I’m needed more elsewhere,’ he says, ‘I gotta be going,’ he says, ‘now you been a swell employer,’ he says, ‘so if you—’ ” The fat man stopped. “So he up and quit me.”

  “Because you were a swell employer?”

  “That? That was just something he says. Some foolishness. Hey, your glass is empty.” The fat man filled my glass and his own.

  The beer was good. It kept me from quite going nuts. I sat there the most of the evening. It wasn’t till late that a kind of crawly feeling began to hit me. “Look,” I said. “I’ve drunk beer most places you can name, but I never saw a quart bottle hold that many glasses.”

  The fat man poured out some more. “This?” he said, offhand-like. “Oh, this is just something Wieland give me.”

  And I suppose I’m writing all this out to keep from thinking about what I’m going to say to the chief. But what can I say? Nothing but this:

  Grover isn’t at war. And when you’re there, it’s true.

  Washington, June 30.

  I’m not going to try to write the scene with the chief. It still stings, kind of. But he softened up a little toward the end. I’m not to be fired; just suspended. Farnsworth’s taking the Grover assignment. And I get a rest—

  Bide-a-wee Nursing Home, July 1.

  VII

  It was hot in the office that June night. John MacVeagh should have been deep in his studies, but other thoughts kept distracting him.

  These studies had come to occupy more and more of his time. His responsibilities were such that he could not tolerate anything less than perfection in his concepts of what was the desirable truth.