The Avram Davidson Treasury (31 page)

Item. The Seven Sebastian Sisters had no other address than the one on Purchase Place, and all the furniture was in their fireproof warehouse, with two years’ storage paid in advance.

Item. The owner of the house on Purchase Place said, “I told them I’d had an offer to buy the house, but I wouldn’t, if they’d agree to a rent increase. And the next thing I knew, the keys came in the mail.”

Little and Harpey, as well as Scribbley’s Sons, reported only that Alt and Bart, Junior, had said that they were leaving, but hadn’t said where they were going.

“Maybe they’ve gone on a trip somewhere,” Stuart suggested. “Maybe they’ll come back before long. Anhalt has ears in all the publishing houses, maybe he’ll hear something.”

But before Anhalt heard anything, Mac decided that there was no longer anything to hear. “I wash my hands of it all,” he declared. “It’s a wild goose chase. Where did you ever pick up this crackpot idea in the first place?” And Phillips Anhalt’s smile faded away. Weeks passed, and months.

But Bob Rosen has never abandoned hope. He has checked with the Board of Education about Bentley’s records, to see if they know anything about a transcript or transfer. He has haunted Nassau Street, bothering—in particular—dealers specializing in Pseudo-Arabian air mail issues, in hopes that Mr. Benson has made his whereabouts known to them. He has hocked his watch to buy hamburgers and pizzas for the Vipers, and innumerable Scotches on innumerable rocks for the trim young men and the girls fresh out of Bennington who staff the offices of our leading publishers. He—

In short, he has taken up the search of Peter Martens (Old Pete, Sneaky Pete). He is looking for the sources of the Nile. Has he
ever
found
anything?
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he has.

The strange nature of cyclical coincidences has been summed up, somewhere, in the classical remark that one can go for years without seeing a one-legged man wearing a baseball cap; and then, in a single afternoon, one will see three of them. So it happened with Bob Rosen.

One day, feeling dull and heavy, and finding that the elfin notes of Kitty Benson’s voice seemed to be growing fainter in his mind, Bob called up her old landlord.

“No,” said the old landlord, “I never heard another word from them. And I’ll tell you who else I never heard from, either. The fellow who offered to buy the house. He never came around and when I called his office, he just laughed at me. Fine way to do business.”

“What’s his name?” Bob asked, listlessly.

“Funny name,” said the old landlord. “E. Peters Shadwall? Something like that. The Hell with him, anyway.”

Bob tore his rooms apart looking for the card with the perforated top edge which Shadwell had—it seemed so very long ago—torn off his little book and given him. Also, it struck him, neither could he find the piece of paper on which he had scribbled Old Martens’ last message, with the Bensons’ name and street on it. He fumbled through the Yellow Book, but couldn’t seem to locate the proper category for the mantisman’s business. And he gave up on the regular directory, what with Shad, Shadd, -wel, -well, -welle, etc.

He would, he decided, go and ask Stuart Emmanuel. The dapper little agent had taken the loss of the Bensons so hard (“It was a beauty of a deal,” he’d all but wept) that he might also advance a small sum of money for the sake of the Quest. Bob was in the upper East 40s when he passed a bar where he had once taken Noreen for cocktails—a mistake, for it had advanced her already expensive tastes another notch—and this reminded him that he had not heard from her in some time. He was trying to calculate just how much time, and if he ought to do something about it, when he saw the third one-legged man in the baseball cap.

That is to say, speaking nonmetaphorically, he had turned to cross a street in the middle of a block, and was halted by the absence of any gap between the two vehicles (part of a traffic jam caused by a long-unclosed incision in the street) directly in front of him. Reading from right to left, the vehicles consisted of an Eleanor-blue truck reading
Grandma Goldberg’s Yum-Yum Borsht
, and an Obscene-pink Jaguar containing T. Pettys Shadwell and Noreen.

It was the Moment of the Shock of Recognition. He understood everything.

Without his making a sound, they turned together and saw him, mouth open, everything written on his face. And they knew that he knew.

“Why, Bob,” said Noreen. “Ah, Rosen,” said Shadwell.

“I’m sorry that we weren’t able to have you at the
wed
ding,” she said. “But everything happened so
quickly
. Pete just swept me off my feet.”

Bob said, “I’ll bet.”

She said, “Don’t be bitter”—seeing that he was, and enjoying it. Horns sounded, voices cursed, but the line of cars didn’t move.

“You did it,” Bob said, coming close. Shadwell’s hands left the wheel and came together at his chest, fingers down. “
You
saw that crisp green money he left and you saw his card and got in touch with him and
you
came in and took the note and—
Where are they?
” he shouted, taking hold of the small car and shaking it. “I don’t give a damn about the money, just tell me where they are! Just let me see the girl!”

But T. Pettys Shadwell just laughed and laughed, his voice like the whisper of the wind in the dry leaves. “Why,
Bob,
” said Noreen, bugging her eyes and flashing her large, coarse gems, and giving the scene all she had, “why, Bob, was there a
girl?
You never told
me.
”

Bob abandoned his anger, disclaimed all interest in the commercial aspect of the Bensons, offered to execute bonds and sign papers in blood, if only he were allowed to see Kitty. Shadwell, fingering his tiny carat of a mustache, shrugged. “Write the girl a letter,” he said, smirking. “I assure you, all mail will be forwarded.” And then the traffic jam broke and the Jag zoomed off, Noreen’s scarlet lips pursed in blowing a kiss.

“Write?” Why, bless you, of course Bob wrote. Every day and often twice a day for weeks. But never a reply did he get. And on realizing that his letters probably went no farther than Noreen (Mrs. T. Pettys) Shadwell, who doubtless gloated and sneered in the midst of her luxury, he fell into despair, and ceased. Where is Kitty of the heart-shaped face, Kitty of the light-gold hair, Kitty of the elfin voice? Where are her mother and father and her three brothers? Where now are the sources of the Nile? Ah, where?

So there you are. One can hardly suppose that Shadwell has perforce kidnapped the entire Benson family, but the fact is that they have disappeared almost entirely without trace, and the slight trace which remains leads directly to and only to the door of T. Pettys Shadwell Associates, Market Research Advisors. Has he whisked them all away to some sylvan retreat in the remote recesses of the Great Smoky Mountains? Are they even now pursuing their prophetic ways in one of the ever-burgeoning, endlessly proliferating suburbs of the City of the Angels? Or has he, with genius diabolical, located them so near to hand that far-sighted vision must needs forever miss them?

In deepest Brooklyn, perhaps, amongst whose labyrinthine ways an army of surveyors could scarce find their own stakes?—or in fathomless Queens, red brick and yellow brick, world without end, where the questing heart grows sick and faint?

Rosen does not know, but he has not ceased to care. He writes to live, but he lives to look, now selling, now searching, famine succeeding feast, but hope never failing.

Phillips Anhalt, however, has not continued so successfully. He has not Bob’s hopes. Anhalt continues, it is true, with the T. Oscar Rutherford people, but no longer has his corner office, or any private office at all. Anhalt failed: Anhalt now has a desk in the bullpen with the other failures and the new apprentices.

And while Bob ceaselessly searches the streets—for who knows in which place he may find the springs bubbling and welling?—and while Anhalt drinks bitter tea and toils like a slave in a salt mine, that swine, that cad, that most despicable of living men, T. Pettys Shadwell, has three full floors in a new building of steel, aluminum, and blue-green glass a block from the Cathedral; he has a box at the Met, a house in Bucks County, a place on the Vineyard, an apartment in Beekman Place, a Caddy, a Bentley,
two
Jaguars, a yacht that sleeps ten, and one of the choicest small (but ever-growing) collection of Renoirs in private hands today…

I
NTRODUCTION BY
E
ILEEN
G
UNN

Its twists and turns, its nested stories, its suggestion of other tales that never quite cross the path of the narration, all mark “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” as a Davidsonian fabulation. It begins quite wonderfully, with a cool dawn, the promise of a hot day, a sudden plunge into bitter cold, then a damp plateau of thermal misery—all in the space of five sentences.

The layers of narration interact to yield a short, sharp meditation on the decline of empire. At the very heart of the piece is a theme to which Avram returned a number of times: the odd and not necessarily requited attachments formed by big, brawling soldiers to their smaller, meeker buddies.

The story’s chilly glimpse of postwar London harkens back to a winter visit Avram made there in the early 1950s. A letter from that trip natters on cheerfully about the December weather: “California is California,…nothing but month after month of dreary, monotonous sunshine. Hey, look at that delightful drizzle!” Avram describes an improbable encounter with a pink-cheeked English lad:

“Will you give us a thruppence for the sweets?” he asks. Poor kid. Probably hasn’t had a piece of candy in a coon’s age. Everything is rationed over here.

“Which one of these are thruppence?” I ask him.

“That one there,” he says.

“Isn’t that what they call a florin?” They have more coins over here than Carter has liver pills.

“Ooo, you don’t want to go calling it a florin, mister. Only foreigners call them that.” Good thing to know.

… A couple years from now and most likely he’ll be a Resident Magistrate in Southern Somaliland, calmly picking off man-eating tigers while the anguished villagers beat their drums.

In some peculiar fashion, “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” echos the letter’s juxtaposition of Avram’s experience and Kipling’s Anglo-India.

First published in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
in June of 1961, “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” received the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story of the year. Oddly for a celebrated story, it has never before been collected.

THE AFFAIR AT LAHORE CANTONMENT

I
T IS SOME TIME
before dawn, in the late spring, as I write this. The seagulls have more than an hour before it will be their moment to fly in from the river, screeing and crying, and then fly back. After them, the pigeons will murmur, and it will be day, perhaps a hot, sticky day. Right now the air is deliciously cool, but I find myself shivering. I find myself imagining the cold, the bitter cold, of that morning when Death came in full panoply, like one dressed for dinner. That morning so very long ago …

In the winter of 1946-7 it was cold enough to suit me, and more, although the thermometer was well above what I used to consider a cold winter at home. But I was then in England, and the wet and the chill never seemed to leave me. The cottage where I was staying had the most marvelous picturesque fireplaces—it had them in every single room, in fact. But coal was rationed and firewood seemed not only unavailable, it seemed unheard of. There was an antique electric heater, but it emitted only a dull coppery glow which died out a few inches away. The only gas fire was, naturally enough, in the kitchen, a cramped and tiny room, where it was impossible to write.

And it was in order to write that I was in England. In the mornings I visited the private library, fortunately unbombed, where lay a mass of material unavailable in America. Afternoons I did the actual writing. In the early evenings I listened to the Third Program while I looked over what I had written, and revised it.

Late evenings? It was, as I say, cold. Raw and damp. I could retire to bed with a brace of hot water bottles and read. I could go to the movies. I could go to the local, see if they had any spirits left, or, failing that—and it usually failed—have a mug of cider. Beer, I don’t care for. The local was named…well, I won’t say exactly what it was named. It may have been called The Green Man. Or The Grapes. Or The Something Arms. A certain measure of reticence is, I think, called for, although by now the last of the principals in the story must surely be dead. But for those who are insatiably curious there are always the newspaper files to check.

But be all that as it may. It was eight o’clock at night. The Marx Brothers were playing at the cinema, but I had seen this one twice before the War and twice during the War. My two hot water bottles gaped pinkly, ready to preserve my feet from frostbite if I cared to retire early to bed. I would have, but it happened that the only reading matter was a large and illustrated work on Etruscan tombs.

So the local won. It was really no contest.

It was warm there, and noisy and smoky and sociable. True, almost none of the sociability was directed my way, but as long as I wasn’t openly being hated, I didn’t care. Besides, we were all in luck: there
was
whiskey on hand. Gin, too. I drank slowly of the stuff that keeps the bare knees of Scotland warm and watched the people at their quaint native rituals—darts, football pools, even skittles.

A large, rather loutish-looking man at my right, who had made somewhat of a point of ignoring me, said suddenly, “Ah, Gaffer’s heard there’s gin!” A sort of ripple ran through the crowded room, and I turned around to look.

A man and a woman had come in. A little husk of a shriveled old man, wrapped almost to the tip of his rufous nose. An old woman, evidently his wife, was with him, and she helped undo the cocoon of overcoat, pullover, and muffler that, once removed, seemed to reduce him by half. They were obviously known and liked.