The Convivial Codfish (19 page)

“Right now, I’ll snatch at anything. How’s Marcia? Did you see her?”

“Yes, and she’s a little better. They’ve taken her off the critical list and given her a cup of tea.”

“Thank God for that! If Gerry’d come home and found her—he’s pretty devastated as it is, I expect.”

“It was quite a jolt, certainly. He’s as concerned for you as he is for his wife, I think. He took it hard about your brother.”

“He would. Good old Gerry. God, I still can’t believe any of this. Now there’s some nonsense being talked about some Russian’s having poisoned the caviar. They’re howling about having to recall every blasted can we’ve sold.”

“Will it affect you seriously if they do?”

“The firm, you mean? It could wipe us out, I suppose. The caviar alone wouldn’t matter so much, it’s what would happen afterward. People are so leery about poison in food, you know. Can’t blame them, of course. And we’re a small family concern. Never wanted to be anything more. Still don’t. It wouldn’t take much to send us to the wall. I can’t seem to care about that now. But our great-grandfather started the business. I expect I wouldn’t much care to be the one who finished it.”

“Assuming the business does keep going,” said Max, “how will your brother’s death affect its day-to-day operation? If that’s not an improper question.”

“Oh, it’s not improper.” Tolbathy put a puzzled stress on the last word, as if he wondered why Max hadn’t said “irrelevant” instead.

“Wouter will be missed, of course. My brother was—oh, everyone’s favorite uncle. Nobody ever cared what he did, we simply enjoyed having him around. As far as our actual operations are concerned, I don’t suppose his absence will matter a whit. Neither would mine, if it comes to that. My sons would just step in and carry on. They do most of the work as it is, these days.”

“Your sons weren’t at the party last night.”

“No, they’ve gone skiing with the younger Whets. This was strictly for Hester’s and my old crowd. The family were all together for a big celebration at Thanksgiving, you know, and we were planning another at Christmas. Wouter was always the life and soul—” Tom couldn’t get any farther.

“I’m sorry I never got to know Wouter,” said Max.

“You’d have liked him.” Tom blew his nose. “Everybody did.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“What? Oh, I see. Max, you do realize the police are calling Wouter’s death an accident?”

“Yes, and I expect you yourself realize they’re doing it for the same reason they’re calling your poisoned caviar a Russian plot. They figure it’s what you want. Is it?”

“God, what a question.”

Tolbathy sighed and didn’t say any more for a while. Then he shook his head, slowly, as if it hurt. “No, that’s not what I want. One can’t cover up wrongdoing. So we have to let them go ahead and find out which of my guests murdered Wouter and tried to poison the rest. That will salvage the firm, I expect, at God knows what cost in broken friendships and public humiliation.”

“If you did go along with a coverup, there’s always the chance you might not have many friends left to offend, after a while. Or any family to be humiliated. The kind of person who’d feed a deadly poison indiscriminately to a whole trainload of his alleged friends can’t be overly concerned with the sanctity of human life. He’s probably off someplace right now, buying himself a drink to celebrate and wondering what he should do for an encore.”

“All right, Max. I’ve said what you wanted me to say. Now what do you want me to do?”

“Make it plain to the police you don’t want any favors but only the truth.”

“They won’t believe I mean it unless I can furnish some hard evidence. They’ve already stuck their own necks out, don’t forget.”

“I know. That’s what I was building up to. We can’t expect them to break their backs now looking for something they don’t want to find, so what we have to do is hand them something they can’t turn down. We might start with the colchicine. Know anybody other than Wouter who takes gout medicine? Do you know where he got his? Do you know a pharmacist who could tell us where colchicine comes from? Damn, I ought to know that myself. I worked in a drugstore when I was going to college. What I did mostly, though, was make banana splits.”

Tolbathy gave Max a wry hint of a smile. “If Wouter were here, he’d say the logical place to start would be with the banana splits.”

“And he’d have been right, like as not. Would you happen to have a dictionary or an encyclopedia?”

“Certainly, in the library. Downstairs and to the right behind the staircase.”

“Thanks.”

Max went on down. He found the library: a handsome, high-ceilinged room with shell-carved arches over the tiers of bookshelves; antique globes sitting around on carved walnut stands and leather-topped tables; enormous folios laid open to show marvelous prints of locomotives from the era of the Old Ironsides and the Best Friend of Charleston; steel engravings of old railroad stations; maps of forgotten railways. It would have been a marvelous room to spend a day browsing in, but Max hadn’t a day to spend on such a luxury. He spied a Webster’s Unabridged on a wooden turntable and went directly to it.

“Colchicine: a poisonous alkaloid derived from the seeds and bulbs of the common colchicum. It is used in medicine and also to promote variations in plants, fruits, etc.”

And there was a clean little line drawing of the colchicum itself. The name, it appeared, might have been derived from Colchis, the home of Medea, who, the dictionary kindly reminded Max as if he hadn’t already known, was a sorceress and poisoner of ancient legend. Colchicum, he learned, was also known as meadow saffron and looked like a crocus but bloomed in the fall instead of the springtime. No doubt every damned plant breeder in Bexhill had a bucketful of colchicine powder and a meadowful of colchicum plants. He slammed the book shut and went back upstairs.

“Do you know anybody around here who grows meadow saffron?” he asked Tom Tolbathy.

“Meadow saffron? Is that what colchicine comes from?”

“That’s what it says in the book. Apparently the plant’s common enough.”

“I’m not much up on gardening, I’m afraid. Hester could tell you, or Dork. He knows all about—oh, God!”

“You and me both,” said Max.

There had been altogether too many gardeners on that train. The one he was wondering about right now was Gerald Whet. Why hadn’t Tom’s great pal shown any sign of recognition when Max had mentioned colchicine? It shouldn’t take any high degree of brain power to link up colchicine with colchicum, not if your work involved you with poisonous plants.

Tom Tolbathy might be wondering about that, too. He was sunk into his pillows, so pale that Max got scared.

“Shall I call the maid for you?” he asked.

“No, don’t bother her. I’m all right. It’s my age, I suppose. Seventy-four last August. It’s a long time to have lived. Too long, perhaps. I’ve had it all my own way, up to now. Nothing awful ever happened, except for the war and Cousin Bigelow getting killed. We were babies together, Wouter and Biggie and I. Now I’m all that’s left.”

“You have your friends.”

“Yes, my luck’s still holding there. Jem and Gerry and the rest of the Comrades. Biggie’d have been a Comrade, if he’d lived. Max, I can’t handle this. Do whatever you think best. And help me to the bathroom before you go, if you’ll be so kind.”

“Sure, glad to.”

Max got Tolbathy valeted and saw him safely back to bed.

“Sorry if I’ve worn you out.”

“Don’t be,” said Tolbathy. “You’re doing the right thing. Tell Gerry he’s welcome to use the Volvo. I wouldn’t trust Rollo to drive after dark. And for God’s sake, make them keep Hester in the hospital till it’s safe for her to come out. If I lost her, too—” Tolbathy couldn’t finish.

“H
ESTER’S GOING TO BE
fine,” said Max, hoping to God he was right, “and so are you and so are your friends.” Those who weren’t already dead, at any rate.

“Look, I’m going to leave you to get some rest now, but before I go, I’d like to look around your brother’s room. Since you say he had no enemies, we’ll have to find some other reason for him to have been killed. Was he likely to have got involved with one of the Comrades, say, in what he thought was just a practical joke? According to Jem, you go in rather heavily for pulling gags on each other.”

“We do,” Tolbathy conceded, “and I suppose he might. Though Wouter wasn’t exactly the—I’m not sure how to put this.”

Max tried to help him out. “For instance, when I mentioned Jem’s broken hip to your friend Whet this afternoon—this was before he knew anything about what happened on the train—Whet’s first reaction was to get hold of a stuffed octopus and send it to Jem at the hospital. Would Wouter have been the man Whet would have asked to deliver the octopus, for instance?”

“Probably not,” Tom admitted. “Not that Wouter wouldn’t have thought a stuffed octopus just the ticket, mind you. I’d go for it myself, if I were up to that sort of thing right now. The problem with Wouter, though, was that one could never be sure where anything he took a hand in might wind up. He’d get to thinking that if a stuffed octopus was good, a live octopus would be even better, and why not have it come into the room wearing pink ballet slippers and dancing the tango with itself? That proving not feasible, Wouter would build a hollow one six feet high with movable parts, get inside it, and prance into the room wiggling the legs and flashing the eyeballs, and scare poor Jem into thinking the DT’s had finally caught up with him.”

Tolbathy actually managed to smile. “I must say the idea is not without a certain mad charm. Wouter’s projects seldom were.”

“Could your brother in fact have built a mechanical octopus?”

“Oh yes, easily. Wouter had an incredible knack for that sort of thing. One of our grandsons is caught up in this Dungeons and Dragons craze just now, so Wouter built him a dragon as his Christmas present. It breaths real fire.”

“My God!”

“It’s only sparks from some kind of ratchet thing and a red light in the throat that runs on batteries, but the effect is quite amazing. And it does the smoke and fume thing, of course. Wouter managed that with sulfur.”

“How big is this dragon?”

“Five feet long or so. Wouter wanted to make it really dragon-sized, but Hester managed somehow to curb his enthusiasm. Wootie’s room at school’s only about ten feet square and already crammed to the ceiling with heaven knows what. You’ll see the dragon in Wouter’s workroom. He lives—lived—in the suite over the kitchen wing. Go straight down the hall past the staircase, turn right at the arch, then through the door at the far end. It won’t be locked. We’ve never locked ourselves away from one another.”

Tom Tolbathy wasn’t looking at Max, or at anything in particular. His eyes were bleak, fixed on a future without a brother who could build fire-breathing dragons. Max left him with his grief and went to find Wouter’s rooms. As he opened the connecting door that had never been kept locked, something growled.

It turned out to be Rollo.

“Don’t worry,” Max told him in the same tone he’d have used to conciliate a hostile dog. “It’s okay. Mr. Tolbathy told me to come and have a look around.”

Rollo didn’t say anything, only jerked his head. Max took that for an invitation and went in.

This must have been Wouter’s sitting room. Hester, or somebody, had clearly devoted thought and care to decorating it comfortably in the discreet browns and rough-textured fabrics men are deemed to prefer. Wouter had added a few homey touches of his own.

An articulated skeleton was stretched out on the sofa, modestly clad in a red flannel nightshirt with a monogram on the bosom, its skull cozily propped on a ruffled pink satin pillow. An avocado plant some seven feet high had its pot mounted on roller skates and its branches festooned with strings of gilded peanuts. These could have been intended as holiday decorations, but now that he’d had a glimpse of Wouter’s modus operandi, Max thought they were more likely snacks for visiting squirrels with expensive tastes.

The next room had been designed as a bedroom. Here again, the decorator had wrought in vain. Bed and dresser had been shoved aside to make room for a workbench, a power saw, a lathe, and a vast number of tools. There among the drills and hammers stood a handsome green dragon with a bright yellow belly and tasteful orange necktie, its upper scales subtly shaded from turquoise to chartreuse.

Rollo, it was clear, took an avuncular interest in the dragon. He cranked it up and gave Max a demonstration. Sure enough, noxious fumes spewed forth from the nostrils, smoke curled around its head, an illuminated tongue darted flamelike from its scarlet-lined mouth, sparks flew as the ratchet created a wonderful rattling roar.

The dragon was mounted on red wooden wheels and had, as one might have expected, a string to pull it by. Rollo trundled it around the room, proud as a two-year-old with a new Christmas toy, while the dragon snorted and fumed and sparked in a manner that could not fail to delight the young sophisticates at Woottie’s boarding school.

“Ain’t that somethin’?” Rollo demanded.

Max said it sure was, and Rollo’s heart was won. “Want to see the trains?”

“Wouldn’t miss ’em for anything. Where are they?”

“Through here.”

Tom had certainly done his brother proud in the matter of space. There was yet another room beyond the dragon’s lair. This was by far the largest, and it was wholly given over to a vast, complex electric train setup.

Wouter hadn’t missed a trick. He’d created mountains with tunnels under them, rivers with trestles over them, quaintly picturesque country villages, big cities surrounded by realistically depressing urban sprawl. There was a skyscraper with a window washer dangling against its mirrored side, capable of being raised and lowered from floor to floor on his tiny scaffolding. There was a fast-food restaurant with miniature chickens going in empty-winged at one door and coming out the other carrying little paper takeout bags. Max wondered a bit uncomfortably what Wouter had imagined might be inside the bags.

There were depots, roundhouses, shuntlines, switches galore. Rollo started flipping levers at a tremendous console. Lights blinked, whistles blew, passenger and freight trains rushed over the trestles and through the tunnels, up the mountains and down the valleys. Cars got coupled and uncoupled, shunted off, picked up by other trains, hustled away again around and around the tracks.