The Avram Davidson Treasury (16 page)

“Any friend of Edgar’s is someone to be wary of,” Don said. “Getchu a drink?”

Walt said he was sure they’d like to see the studio. There was plenty of time for drinks.

“Time?” Don muttered. “Whaddayu know about time?”

“Just step this way,” Walt said loudly, giving his brother-in-law a deadly look. “We think, we rather think,” he said, taking the wraps off the huge piece, “of calling this the Gemini—”

Don said genially that they had to call it
something
and that Gemini (he supposed) sounded better than Diseased Kidney.

Mr. White laughed.

Edgar Feld echoed the laugh, though not very heartily. “Mr. Benedict has the most modest, most deprecatory attitude toward his work of any modern artist—working in wood or in any other medium.”

Mr. White said that was very commendable. He asked Don if he’d like a cigar.

“I would, indeed!” the modest artist assented. “Between cigarette smoke, gasoline and diesel fumes, the air is getting unfit to breathe nowadays… So Edgar is conning you into modern art, hey, Whitey?”

“Ho, ho!” Edgar Feld chuckled hollowly.

“Nothing better than a good cigar.” Don puffed his contentment.

White said, with diffidence, that he was only just beginning to learn about modern art. “I used to collect Americana,” he explained.

Edgar Feld declared that Mr. White had formerly had a collection of wooden Indians. His tone indicated that, while this was not to be taken seriously, open mockery was uncalled for.

Don set down the glass he had brought along with him. No, White was hardly WIS material. He was safe. “Did you really? Any of Tom Millards, by any chance? Tom carved some of the sweetest fly-figures ever made.”

Mr. White’s face lit up. “Are you a wooden Indian buff, too?” he cried. “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I had two of Millard’s fly-figures, and one of his pompeys—”

Walt guffawed. “What are fly-figures and pompeys?”

“A fly-figure is a sachem with an outstretched arm,” Don said. “A pompey is a black boy.”

“A rosebud,” Mr. White happily took up the theme, “is a squaw figure. A scout is one who’s shading his eyes with one hand. Tom Millard, oh, yes! And I had some by John Cromwell, Nick Collins, Thomas V. Brooks, and Tom White—my namesake. Listen! Maybe you can tell me. Was Leopold Schwager a manufacturer or an artist?”

Don Benedict laughed scornfully. “Leopold Schwager was a junk-dealer! Bought old figures for five, ten dollars, puttied and painted ’em, sold ’em for twenty-five. Cobb!” he exclaimed suddenly. “You have any Cobbs, Mr. White?”

“Cobb of Canal Street? No, I always wanted one, but—”

Edgar Feld looked at Walter Swift, cleared his throat. “Now, Don—”

“Cobb of Canal Street,” Don said loudly, “never used a mallet. No, sir. Drove the chisel with the palm of his hand. And then there was Charley Voles—”

Feld raised his voice above Don’s. “Yes, we must talk about his fascinating though obsolete art sometime. Don’t you want to step a little closer to the Gemini, Mr. White?”

“Yes, White, damn it, buy the damned Gemini so they’ll quit bothering us and we can get back to
real
art,” said Don.

And forget about Walter, Demuth’s and the WIS, he said to himself.

Next morning, he tried to remember what had happened after that. White
had
taken the shapeless mass of wood Walt called Gemini. (What would he tell Roger Down, the private collector? Some good, whopping lie, depend on it.) He was sure he remembered White with his checkbook out. And then? A confused picture of White examining the polished surface, pointing at something—

Don Benedict badly wanted a cup of coffee. His room was just off the studio, and once there had been a hot-plate there, but Walt had ordered it removed on the grounds of danger. So now Don had to go up to Walt’s apartment when he wanted a cup of coffee. That was how Walt liked everything to be: little brother coming to big brother. Well, there was no help for it. Don went upstairs, anticipating cold looks, curt remarks, at every step.

However, Walt was sweetness itself this morning. The coffee was ready; Walt had poured it even before Don entered the kitchen. After he finished his cup (made from unboiled water, powdered coffee, ice-cold milk) Walt urged another on him. Rather than speak, he took it.

Don knew, by the falsely jovial note of Walter’s voice, that Something Was Up. He gulped the tepid slop and rose. “Thanks. See you later, Walter—”

But Walter reached out his hand and took him by the arm. “Let’s talk about the Lost Dutchman Mine. (”The
what
?”) The Spanish Treasure. (“I don’t—”) Spelled E-l-w-e-l-l,” said Walter, with an air at once sly and triumphant.

Don sat down heavily.

“Don’t know what I mean by those figures of speech? Odd. You did last night. Matter of fact, they were yours,” said Walter, mouth pursed with mean amusement. He would refresh Don’s memory. Last night, Mr. White had asked Don how he had come to have so much contemporary knowledge about the making of wooden Indians. Don had laughed. “An old prospector I befriended left me the map to the Lost Dutchman Mine,” he had said, waving his glass. “To the Spanish Treasure.”

When Mr. White, puzzled, asked what he meant, Don had said, “It’s easy. You just walk around the horses.” Now what, just exactly, had Don meant by that?

“I must have been drunk, Walter.”

“Oh, yes, you were drunk, all right. But
in vino veritas
… Now I’ve been thinking it out very carefully, Don. It seems to me that ‘the old desert rat’ you spoke of must have been that fellow Elwell, who slipped on the ice two winters ago. The one you got to the hospital and visited regularly till he died. Am I right, Don? Am I?”

Don nodded miserably. “Damn liquor,” he added.

“
Now
we’re making progress,” said Walt. “
Okay.
Now about this map to the mine. I know he left you that damn notebook. I know that. But I looked it over very carefully and it was just a lot of figures scribbled—equations, or whatever th’ hell you call ’em. But it had something else in it, didn’t it? Something you took out. We’ll get to just what by and by. So—and it was right after that that you started going on these vacations of yours. Made me curious. Those funny clothes you wore.”

Stiff and tight, Don sat in the bright, neat kitchen and watched the waters rise. There was nothing for him here and now, except for Mary and the children, and his love for them had been no more selfish than theirs for him. He had been glad when Walt first appeared, happy when they married, unhappy when Walt’s real nature appeared, very pleased when the chance occurred to offer “a position” to his brother-in-law. The misgivings felt when a few people actually offered to buy the shapeless wooden things he had created almost aimlessly (he knowing that he was not a sculptor but a craftsman) vanished when he saw it was the perfect setup for keeping Mary and the kids supported.

Of course, after a while Don had been able to arrange the majority of the “sales.” The waste of time involved in hacking out the wooden horrors which “private collectors” bought was deplorable. The whole system was dreadfully clumsy, but its sole purpose—to create a world in which Walter would be satisfied and Mary happy—was being fulfilled, at any rate.

Or had been.

What would happen now, with Walter on the verge of finding out everything?

“And Syracuse—what a cottonpickin’ alibi! I figured you had a woman hid away for sure, wasting your time when you should have been working, so—well, I wanted to find out who she was, where she lived. That’s why I always went through your pockets when you came back from these ‘vacations’—”

“Walter, you didn’t!”

But of course he knew damned well that Walter did. Had known for some time that Walter was doing it. Had acted accordingly. Instead of hiding the evidence, he had deliberately planted it, and in such a way that it couldn’t possibly fail to add up to exactly one conclusion.

“What a lot of junk!” Walter jeered. “Like somebody swept the floor of an antique shop and dumped it all in your pocket. Ticket stubs with funny old printing, clippings from newspapers of years back—and all like that.
However
—” he jabbed a thick, triumphant finger at Don—“money is money, no matter how old it is. Right?
Damned
right! Old dollar bills, old gold pieces. Time after time. You weren’t very cautious, old buddy. So now—just what is this ‘Spanish Treasure’ that you’ve been tapping? Let’s have the details, son, or else I’ll be mighty unhappy. And when I’m unhappy, Mary is too …”

That was very true, Don had realized for some time now. And if Mary couldn’t protect herself, how could the youngsters escape?

“I’m tired of scraping along on ten per cent, you see, Don. I got that great old American ambition: I want to be in business for myself. And you are going to provide the capital. So—again, and for the last time—let’s have the details.”

Was this the time to tell him? And, hard upon the thought, the answer came: Yes, the time was now, time to tell the truth. At once his heart felt light, joyous; the heavy weight (long so terribly, constantly familiar) was removed from him.

“Mr. Elwell—the old gentleman who slipped on the ice; you were right about that, Walter—” Walter’s face slipped into its familiar, smug smile. “Mr. Elwell was a math teacher at the high school down the block. Imagine It—a genius like him, pounding algebra into the heads of sullen children! But he didn’t let it get him down, because that was just his living. What he mainly lived for were his space-time theorems. ‘Elwell’s Equations,’ we called them—”

Walter snorted. “Don’t tell me the old gimp was a time traveler and left you his time machine?”

“It wasn’t a machine. It was only a—well, I guess it
was
a sort of map, after all. He tried to explain his theories to me, but I just couldn’t understand them. It was kind of like chess problems—I never could understand
them,
either. So when we arranged that I was going to visit 1880, he wrote it all down for me. It’s like a pattern. You go back and forth and up and down and after a while—”

“After a while you’re in 1880?”

“That’s right.”

Walter’s face had settled in odd lines. “I thought you were going to try not telling me what I’d figured out for myself,” he said in the cutting exaggeration of his normally exaggerated Southern drawl. This was the first time he had used it on Don, though Don had heard it used often enough on Mary and the kids. “The map, and all those clues you were stupid enough to leave in your pockets, and the stupidest of all—carving your own squiggle signature into all those dozens of old wooden Indians. Think I can’t add?”

“But that was Canal Street, 1880, and this is now,” said Don in a carefully dismal-sounding voice. “I thought it was safe.”

Walter looked at him. Walter—who had never earned an ethical dollar in his life, and had scarcely bothered to make a pretense of supporting his wife since Don’s work had started to sell—asked, “All right, why 1880—and why wooden Indians?”

Don explained to him how he felt at ease there, how the air was fresher, the food tastier, how the Russians were a menace only to other Russians, how—and the sachems! What real, sincere pleasure and pride he got out of carving them.

They were
used!
Not like the silly modern stuff he turned out now, stuff whose value rested only on the fact that self-seekers like Edgar Feld were able to con critics and public into believing it was valuable.

Walt scarcely heard him. “But how much money can you make carving wooden Indians?”

“Not very much in modern terms. But you see, Walt—I invest.”

And that was the bait in the trap he’d set and Walt rose to it and struck. “The market! Damn it to hell, of
course!
” The prospect of the (for once in his whole shoddy career) Absolutely Sure Thing, the Plunge which was certain to be a Killing, of moving where he could know without doubt what the next move would be, almost deprived Walter of breath.

“A tycoon,” he gasped. “You could have been a tycoon and all you could think of was—”

Don said that he didn’t want to be a tycoon. He just wanted to carve wooden—

“Why, I could make us better than tycoons! Kings! Emperors! One airplane—” He subsided after Don convinced him that Elwell’s Equation could transport only the individual and what he had on or was carrying. “Lugers,” he muttered. “Tommy-guns. If I’m a millionaire, I’ll need bodyguards. Gould, Fisk, Morgan—they better watch out, that’s all.”

He slowly refocused on Don. “And
I’ll
carry the map,” he said.

He held out his hand. Slowly, as if with infinite misgivings, Don handed over to him the paper with Elwell’s 1880 Equation.

Walter looked at it, lips moving, brows twisting, and Don recalled his own mystification when the old man had showed it to him.

“…
where
X
is one pace and
Y
is five-sixth of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle of which both arms are
X
in length …
”

“Well,” said Walter, “now let’s get down to business.” He rose, went off toward the living room, returned in a minute. Following him was a man with the tense, set face of a fanatic. He looked at Don with burning eyes.

“Anders!” cried Don.

“Where is the Equation?” Anders demanded.

“Oh,
I
got that,” Walter said.

He took it out, showed a glimpse, thrust it in his pocket. He stepped back, put a chair between him and the WIS man.

“Not so fast,” he said. “I got it and I’m keeping it. At least for now. So let’s talk business. Where’s the cash?”

As Anders, breathing heavily, brought out the roll of bills, “Oh, Walter, what have you done?” Don moaned. “Don’t throw me in the bramble-bush, Brer Wolf!”

“Here is the first part of it,” said Anders, ignoring his former WIS associate. “For this you agree to return to Canal Street, 1880, and destroy—by whatever means are available—the infamous firm of Demuth’s. In the unlikely case of their continuing in the business after the destruction—”

“They won’t. Best goon job money can buy; leave it to me.”

Anders hesitated.

Walter promptly said, “No, you can’t come along. Don’t ask again. Just him and me. I’ll need him for bird-dogging. I’ll get in touch when we come back. As agreed, I bring back copies of the New York papers showing that Demuth’s was blown up or burned down. On your way.”