The Avram Davidson Treasury (29 page)

The waiter passed a folded slip of paper to Bob Rosen when he came with the popskull. “The lady left it,” he said. “What lady?” “The blond lady.” Agent and ad man smiled, made appropriate remarks while Bob scanned the note, recognized it as being in his own handwriting, failed to make it out, crammed it in his pocket.

“Mr. Anhalt,” said Stuart, turning dark, large-pupiled eyes on his client, “is a very important man at Rutherford’s: he has a corner office.” A gentle, somewhat tired smile from Anhalt, who gave the conversation a turn and talked about his home in Darien, and the work he was doing on it, by himself. Thus they got through the round of drinks, then walked a few blocks to the restaurant.

Here Bob was infinitely relieved that Anhalt did not order poached egg on creamed spinach, corned beef hash, or something equally simple, wholesome, and disgusting, and tending to inhibit Bob’s own wide-ranging tastes: Anhalt ordered duckling, Stuart had mutton chops, and Bob chose tripe and onions.

“Joe Tressling tells me that you’re going to write something for the cheese show,” said Anhalt, as they disarranged the pickle plate. Bob half-lifted his eyebrows, smiled. Stuart gazed broodingly into the innards of a sour tomato as if he might be saying to himself, “Ten percent of $17.72, Monegasque rights to a detective story.”

“More cheese is being eaten today in the United States than twenty-five years ago,” Anhalt continued. “Much, much more… Is it the result of advertising? Such as the Aunt Carrie Hour? Has that changed public taste? Or—has public taste changed for, say, other reasons, and are we just riding the wave?”

“The man who could have answered that question,” Bob said, “died the day before yesterday.”

Anhalt let out his breath. “How do you know he could have?”

“He said so.”

Anhalt, who’d had a half-eaten dilled cucumber in his hand, carefully laid it in the ash-tray, and leaned forward. “What else did he say? Old Martens, I mean. You
do
mean Old Martens, don’t you?”

Bob said that was right, and added, with unintentional untruthfulness, that he’d been offered a thousand dollars for that information, and had turned it down. Before he could correct himself, Anhalt, customary faint pink face gone almost red, and Stuart Emmanuel, eyes glittering hugely, said with one voice, “
Who offered—?
”

“What comes out of a chimney?”

Stuart, recovering first (Anhalt continued to stare, said nothing, while the color receded), said, “Bob, this is not a joke. That is the reason we have this appointment. An awful lot of money is involved—for you, for me, for Phil Anhalt, for, well, for everybody. For just everybody. So—”

It slipped out. “For T. Pettys Shadwell?” Bob asked.

The effect, as they used to say in pre-atomic days, was electrical. Stuart made a noise, between a moan and a hiss, rather like a man who, having trustingly lowered his breeches, sits all unawares upon an icicle. He clutched Bob’s hand. “You didn’t godforbid
sign
anything?” he wailed. Anhalt, who had gone red before, went white this time around, but still retained diffidence enough to place his hand merely upon Bob’s jacket cuff.

“He’s a cad!” he said, in trembling tones. “A swine, Mr. Rosen!”

“‘The most despicable of living men’,” quoted Mr. Rosen. (“Exactly,” said Anhalt.)

“Bob, you didn’t
sign
anything, godforbid?”

“No. No. No. But I feel as if I’ve had all the mystery I intend to have. And unless I get Information, why, gents, I shan’t undo one button.” The waiter arrived with the food and, according to the rules and customs of the Waiters’ Union, gave everybody the wrong orders. When this was straightened out, Stuart said, confidently, “Why, of course, Bob: Information: Why, certainly. There is nothing to conceal. Not from
you
,” he said, chuckling. “Go ahead, start eating. I’ll eat and talk, you just eat and listen.”

And so, as he tucked away the tripe and onions, Bob heard Stuart recount, through a slight barrier of masticated mutton-chop, a most astonishing tale. In every generation (Stuart said) there were leaders of fashion, arbiters of style. At Nero’s court, Petronius. In Regency England, Beau Brummel. At present and for some time past, everyone knew about the Paris designers and their influence. And in the literary field (“Ahah!” muttered Bob, staring darkly at his forkful of stewed ox-paunch)—in the literary field, said Stuart, swallowing in haste for greater clarity, they all knew what effect a review by any one of A Certain Few Names, on the front page of the Sunday Times book section, could have upon the work of even an absolute unknown.

“It will sky-rocket it to Fame and Fortune with the speed of light,” said Stuart.

“Come to the point.” But Stuart, now grinding away on a chunk of grilled sheep, could only gurgle, wave his fork, and raise his eyebrows. Anhalt stopped his moody task of reducing the duckling to a mass of orange-flavored fibres, and turned to take the words, as it were, from Stuart’s mutton-filled mouth.

“The point, Mr. Rosen, is that poor old Martens went up and down Madison Avenue for years claiming he had found a way of predicting fashions and styles, and nobody believed him. Frankly,
I
didn’t. But I do now. What caused me to change my mind was this: When I heard, day before yesterday, that he had died so suddenly, I had a feeling that I
had
something of his, something that he’d left for me to look at once, something I’d taken just to get rid of him. And, oh, perhaps I was feeling a bit guilty, certainly a bit sorry, so I asked my secretary to get it for me. Well, you know, with the J. Oscar Rutherford people, as with Nature, nothing is ever lost—” Phillips Anhalt smiled his rather shy, rather sweet and slightly baffled smile—“so she got it for me and I took a look at it… I was …” he paused, hesitated for
mot juste
.

Stuart, with a masterful swallow, leaped into the breach, claymore in hand. “He was flabbergasted!”

Astounded, amended Anhalt. He was astounded.

There, in an envelope addressed to Peter Martens, and postmarked November 10, 1945, was a color snapshot of a young man wearing a fancy weskit.

“Now, you know, Mr. Rosen, no one in 1945 was wearing fancy weskits. They didn’t come in till some years later. How did Martens
know
they were going to come in? And there was another snapshot of a young man in a charcoal suit and a pink shirt. Nobody was wearing that outfit in ’45… I checked the records, you see, and the old gentleman had left the things for me in December of that year. I’m ashamed to say that I had the receptionist put him off when he called again… But just think of it: fancy weskits, charcoal suits, pink shirts, in 1945.” He brooded. Bob asked if there was anything about gray flannel suits in the envelope, and Anhalt smiled a faint and fleeting smile.

“Ah, Bob, now, Bob,” Stuart pursed his mouth in mild (and greasy) reproof. “You still don’t seem to realize that this is S*E*R*I*O*U*S*.”

“Indeed it is,” said P. Anhalt. “As soon as I told Mac about it, do you know what he said, Stu? He said, ‘Phil, don’t spare the horses.’” And they nodded soberly, as those who have received wisdom from on high.

“Who,” Bob asked, “is Mac?”

Shocked looks. Mac, he was told, the older men speaking both tandem and
au pair
, was Robert R. Mac Ian, head of the happy J. Oscar Rutherford corporate family.

“Of course, Phil,” Stuart observed, picking slyly at his baked potato, “I won’t ask why it took you till this morning to get in touch with me. With some other outfit, I might maybe suspect that they were trying to see what they could locate for themselves without having to cut our boy, here, in for a slice of the pie. He being the old man’s confidante and moral heir, anyway, so to speak.” (Bob stared at this description, said nothing. Let the thing develop as far at it would by itself, he reflected.) “But not the Rutherford outfit. It’s too big, too ethical, for things like that.” Anhalt didn’t answer.

After a second, Stuart went on, “Yes, Bob, this is really something big. If the late old Mr. Martens’ ideas can be successfully developed—and I’m sure Phil, here will not expect you to divulge until we are ready to talk Terms—they will be really invaluable to people like manufacturers, fashion editors, designers, merchants, and, last but not least—advertising men. Fortunes can literally be made, and saved. No wonder that a dirty dog like this guy Shadwell is trying to horn in on it. Why, listen—but I’m afraid we’ll have to terminate this enchanting conversation. Bob has to go home and get the material in order—” (What material? Bob wondered. Oh, well, so far: $40 from Shadwell and a free lunch from Anhalt.)—“and you and I, Phil, will discuss those horses Mac said not to spare.”

Anhalt nodded. It seemed obvious to Rosen that the ad man was unhappy, unhappy about having given Peter Martens the brush-off while he was alive, unhappy about being numbered among the vultures now that he was dead. And, so thinking, Bob realized with more than a touch of shame, that he himself was now numbered among the vultures; and he asked about funeral arrangements. But it seemed that the Masonic order was taking care of that: the late Peter Martens was already on his way back to his native town of Marietta, Ohio, where his lodge brothers would give him a formal farewell: aprons, sprigs of acacia, and all the ritual appurtenances. And Bob thought, why not? And was feeling somehow, very much relieved.

On the uptown bus which he had chosen over the swifter, hotter, dingier subway, he tried to collect his thoughts. What on earth could he ever hope to remember about a drunken conversation, which would make any sense to anybody, let alone be worth money? “The Sources of the Nile,” the old man had said, glaring at him with bloody eye. Well, Shadwell knew the phrase, too. Maybe Shadwell knew what it meant, exactly what it meant, because he, Bob Rosen, sure as Hell didn’t. But the phrase did catch at the imagination. Martens had spent years—who knew how many?—seeking the sources of his particular Nile, the great river of fashion, as Mungo Park, Livingstone, Speke, and other half-forgotten explorers, had spent years in search of theirs. They had all endured privation, anguish, rebuffs, hostility…and in the end, just as the quest had killed Mungo Park, Livingstone, Speke, the other quest had killed old Peter Martens.

But, aside from insisting that there
was
a source or sources, and that he knew
where
, what had Peter said? Why hadn’t Bob stayed sober? Probably that fat blonde at the next table, she of the poisonously green drink and the rotten step-children, probably she retained more of the old man’s tale, picked up by intertable osmosis, than did Bob himself.

And with that he heard the voice of the waiter at the bar that noon:
The lady left it …
What lady? …
The blond lady …
Bob scrabbled in his pocket and came up with the note. On the sweaty, crumpled bit of paper, scrawled in his own writing, or a cruel semblance of it, he read:
Ditx sags su Bimsoh oh
—

“What the
Hell!
” he muttered, and fell to, with furrowed face, to make out what evidently owed more to Bushmill’s than to Everhard Faber. At length he decided that the note read,
Peter says, see Bensons on Purchase Place, the Bronx, if I don’t believe him. Peter says, write it down.

“It must mean something,” he said, half-aloud, staring absently from Fifth Avenue to Central Park, as the bus roared and rattled between opulence and greenery. “It has to mean something.”

“Well, what a shame,” said Mr. Benson. “But how nice it was of you to come and tell us.” His wavy-gray hair was cut evenly around in soupbowl style, and as there was no white skin at the back of his neck, had evidently been so cut for some time. “Would you like some iced tea?”

“Still, he Went Quickly,” said Mrs. Benson, who, at the business of being a woman, was in rather a large way of business. “I don’t think there’s any iced tea, Daddy. When I have to go, that’s the way I want to go. Lemonade, maybe?”

“There isn’t any lemonade if what Kitty was drinking was the last of the lemonade. The Masons give you a nice funeral. A real nice funeral. I used to think about joining up, but I never seem to get around to it. I think there’s some gin. Isn’t there some gin, Mommy? How about a nice cool glass of gin-and-cider, Bob? Kit will make us some, by and by.”

Bob said, softly, that that sounded nice. He sat half-sunken in a canvas chair in the large, cool living-room. A quarter of an hour ago, having found out with little difficulty
which
house on Purchase Place was the Bensons’, he had approached with something close to fear and trembling. Certainly, he had been sweating in profusion. The not-too-recently painted wooden house was just a blind, he told himself. Inside there would be banks of noiseless machines into which cards were fed and from which tapes rolled in smooth continuity. And a large, broad-shouldered young man whose hair was cut so close to the skull that the scars underneath were plain to see, this young man would bar Bob’s way and, with cold, calm, confidence, say, “Yes?”

“Er, um, Mr. Martens told me to see Mr. Benson.”

“There is no Mr. Martens connected with our organization and Mr. Benson had gone to Washington. I’m afraid you can’t come in: everything here is Classified.”

And Bob would slink away, feeling Shoulders’ scornful glance in the small of his shrinking, sweaty back.

But it hadn’t been like that at all. Not anything like that at all.

Mr. Benson waved an envelope at Bob. “Here’s a connivo, if you like,” he said. “Fooled I don’t know how many honest collectors, and dealers, too: Prince Abu-Somebody flies over here from Pseudo-Arabia without an expense account. Gets in with some crooked dealers,
I
could name them, but I won’t, prints off this
en
—
tire
issue of airmails, precancelled. Made a mint. Flies back to Pseudo-Arabia,
whomp!
they cut off his head!” And he chuckled richly at the thought of this prompt and summary vengeance. Plainly, in Mr. Benson’s eyes, it had been done in the name of philatelic ethics; no considerations of dynastic intrigues among the petrol pashas entered his mind.

“Kitty, are you going to make us some cold drinks?” Mrs. B. inquired. “Poor old Pete, he used to be here for Sunday dinner on and off, oh, for just years. Is that Bentley coming?”