A Saucer of Loneliness (29 page)

He sighed and said what Opie had done. What she had done to me, to a marriage. She’d told him, all right. He said it and, “Better drink your drink, Tom.”

I drank it. I needed to. Then I looked at him. “Now that’s on the record, what do you do about it?”

Hank didn’t say anything. I covered my face and rocked back and forth. “I guess this happens to lots of guys, their wives making it with someone else. Sometimes it breaks them up, sometimes it doesn’t. How do they live when it doesn’t?”

Hank just fiddled with a table lighter. I picked up my empty glass and looked at it and all of a sudden the stem broke in two. Red blood began welling out. Hank yelped and came to me with his handkerchief. He tied it around my wrist and pulled it so tight it hurt. “Why is it so important that Opie and I get back together, Hank? To you, I mean?”

He gave me a strange look and went into the bathroom. I heard him rummaging around in the medicine chest. “There’s more in it than you and Opie, Tom,” he called out. He came back in with bandages. “I guess you’re so full of this that it’s around you every way you look, but there are other things going on in the world, honest.”

“I guess there are, but they don’t seem to matter.”

“Hold still,” he said. “This’ll hurt.” He stuck the iodine on my cut. It hurt like hell and I wished all hurts were as easy to take. He said, “Something awful funny is going on at Beck’s.”

“What happened to me is funny?” I said.

“Shut up. You know what I mean.” He finished the bandage and went to the bar. “Well, maybe you don’t. Look, how long have you known Beck?”

“Years.”

“How well?”

“As well as you can know a guy you went to school with, roomed with, lent money to and had lunch with four times a week for eight-nine years.”

“Ever notice anything odd about him?”

“No. Not Beck. The original predictable boy. Right-wing Republican, solid-color tie, independent income, thinks ‘Rustle of Spring’ is opera, drinks vermouth-and-soda in hot weather and never touches a martini until 4 P.M. Likes to have people around, all kinds of people. The wackier the better. But he never did, said, or thought a wacky thing in his life.”

“Never? You did say never?”

“Never. Except—”

“Except?”

I looked at the bandage he had made. Very neat. “That rumpus room of his. What got into him to fix it up that way I’ll never know. I almost dropped dead when I saw it.”

“Why?”

“Have you been there?”

He nodded. Something uncoiled back of his eyes, and it reminded me so much of Opie that I grunted the way a man does when he walks into a wagon-tongue in the dark. I took a good pull at the glass he’d brought and hung on to the subject, hard. “So you’ve been there. Does that look like the setup of a man who’s surrounded himself all his life with nothing more modern than Dutch Queen Anne?”

He didn’t say anything.

“I tell you I
know
. I think Beck would ride around in a Victorian brougham if it wouldn’t make him conspicuous. He hates to be conspicuous as much as he hates modern furniture.”

“A room can’t get more ‘modern’ than that one,” said Hank.

“Foam rubber and chromium,” I said reminiscently. “Fireplace of black marble; high-gloss black Formica on the table-tops. Wall-to-wall broad-looms and freeform scatter-rugs. Fluorescents, all in coves, yet. The bookcase looks like a bar; the bar looks like a legitimate flight of steps.”

“Maybe he’s a masochist, making himself unhappy in a house furnished the way he hates it.”

“He’s no masochist, unless you figure the painful company of some of the weirdies he invites to his parties. And he doesn’t live in a
house
furnished in Science Fiction Modern. He lives in a house with alternate Chinese Chippendale and that Dutch Queen Anne I was talking about. Only that room, that one rumpus room, is modern; and what he did it for I’ll never know. It must have cost him a young fortune.”

“It cost him what you might call a middle-aged fortune,” Hank said bluntly. “I got the figures.”

I snapped out of the mild reminiscences. “Have you now! Hank, what’s the burning interest in Beck and his decor?”

Hank got up, stretched, sat down again and leaned forward with such earnestness and urgency that I drew back. “Tom, suppose I could prove that it wasn’t her fault at all?”

I thought about it. Finally, between my teeth, I said, “If you could really prove that, I know one mudhead that would get thoroughly killed.”

“There’ll be none of that talk,” he rapped. I squinted up at him and decided not to protest. He really meant it. He went on, “You have
got
to understand exactly what I mean.” He paused to chew words before he let them out, then said, “I don’t want you to get up any wild hopes. I’m not going to be able to prove Opie didn’t … didn’t do what she said she did Saturday night. She did it, and that’s that. Shut up, now, Tom—don’t say it! Not to me. She’s my sister; do you think I’m enjoying this?” When I simmered down a bit, Hank said, “All I think I can prove is that what happened was completely beyond her control, and that she’s completely innocent in terms of intention, even if she is guilty in terms of action.”

“I’d like that,” I said, with all my heart. “I’d like that just fine. Only it’s hardly the kind of thing you can really prove.” I double-took it. “What are you talking about?” I demanded angrily. “You mean she was hypnotized?”

“I do not,” he said positively. “No amount of hypnotism would make her do something she didn’t want to do, and I’m working on
the premise that she didn’t want to.”

“Dope, then?”

“I don’t think so. Did she look doped to you?”

“No.” I thought back carefully. “Besides, I never heard of a drug that could do that to a woman that quickly and leave no after-effects.”

“There is none, and if there were it wasn’t used on her.”

“Cut out the guessing games then, and tell me what it was!”

He looked at me and his face changed. “Sorry,” he said softly. “I can’t. I don’t know. But I mean to find out.”

“You better say more,” I said, dazed. “You lost me back there some place.”

“You know where Klaus was picked up?”

I started. “The atom spy? No. What’s that got to do with it?”

“Maybe a lot,” said Hank. “Just a hunch I’ve got. Anyway, they got him at one of Beck’s parties.”

“I’ll be damned,” I breathed. “I didn’t know that.”

“Most people don’t. It was one-two-three-hush. There was a Central Intelligence agent there and Klaus walked over to him and spilled the whole thing. The agent got him out of there and arrested him, then checked his story. It checked all right. Do you know
Cry for Clara
?”

“Do I know it? I wish I’d never heard it. Seventeen weeks on the ‘Hit Parade,’ and squalling out of every radio and every record store and juke-box in creation. Do I know it?”

“Know who wrote it?”

“No.”

“Guy called Willy Simms. Never wrote a song before, never wrote one since.”

“So?”

“He did the first draft at one of Beck’s parties.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with—”

He interrupted me. “The hen fight that put two nice deep fingernail gouges across Marie Munro’s million-dollar face happened at Beck’s. A schoolteacher did it—an otherwise harmless old biddy who’d never even seen a Munro picture and hadn’t even spoken to The Face that evening. The man who—”

“Wait a minute, wait a min—” I started, but he wouldn’t wait.

“The man who killed that preacher on Webb Street two weeks ago—remember?—did it with Beck’s poker, which he threw out of Beck’s rumpus room window like a damn javelin. That hilarious story—I heard you telling it yourself—about the pansy breeder at the Flower Show.”

“Don’t tell me that one came from Beck’s.” I grinned in spite of myself.

“It did. Because of someone’s remark that nobody knows where dirty stories originate. And
bing
, that one was originated on the spot.” He paused. “By Lila Falsehaven.”

“Lila? You mean the white-haired old granny who writes children’s books?” I drank on that. That was too fine. “Hank, what are you getting at with all this?”

Hank pulled on an earlobe. “All these things I mentioned—all different, all happening to different kinds of people. I think there’s a lowest common denominator.”

“You’ve already told me that; they all happened at Beck’s parties.”

“The thing I’m talking about
makes
things happen at Beck’s parties.”

“Aw, for Pete’s sake. Coincidence.…”

“Coincidence hell!” he rumbled. “Can’t you understand that I’ve known about this thing for a long time now? I’m not telling you all these things occurred to me just since Opie … uh … since last Saturday night. I’m telling you that what Opie did is another one of those things.”

I grunted thoughtfully. “Lowest common denominator.… Heck, the main thing all those people have in common is that they have nothing in common.”

“That’s right,” Hank nodded. “That seems to be Beck’s rule-of-thumb: always mix them up. A rich and a talented one, a weird one, a dull one.”

“Makes for a good party,” I said stupidly.

He had the good sense not to pick that one up. Good party. Swell party. Opie.… No, I wouldn’t think about it. I said, “What’s this all about, anyway? Why worry so much about Beck? It’s his business who he invites. Strange things happen—sure, they’d happen at
your house if you filled it up with characters.”

“Here’s what it’s about. I want you to go back there and find out what that lowest common denominator is.”

“Why?”

“For the magazine, maybe. It depends. Anyhow, kid, that’s an assignment.”

“Stick it,” I said. “I’m not going back there.”

“Why not?”

“That’s the stupidest question yet!”

“Tom,” he said gently. “Getting riled up won’t help. I really want to know why you don’t want to go back. Is it the place you can’t stand, or the idea of seeing Opie there?”

“I don’t mind the place,” I said sullenly.

He was so pleased I was astonished. “Then you can go back. She will never go there again.”

“You sound real positive.”

“I am. Things happen at Beck’s parties. But if they happen to you, you don’t go back.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. But that’s one of the things I want you to find out about.”

“Hank, this is crazy!”

“Sure it’s crazy. And you’re just the man for the job.”

“Why, especially?”

“Because you know Beck better than most people. Because you have something personal at stake. Because you’re a good reporter. And—well, because you’re so damn normal.”

I didn’t feel normal. I said, “If you’re so interested in Beck and his shindigs, why don’t you chase the story down yourself? You seem to know what to look for.”

When he didn’t answer, I looked up. He had turned his back. After a while he said, “I’m one of the ones who can’t go back.”

I thought that over. “You mean something happened to you?

“Yes, something happened to me,” he snarled in angry mimicry. “And that part of it you can skip.”

For the first time I felt that little nubbin of intrigue that bites me
when I’m near a really hot story. “So you’ve taken care of my Saturday nights. What am I supposed to do the rest of the week?”

“You’ve been around the magazine long enough not to ask me how to do your work. I just mentioned a lot of people. Go find out why they did the things they did.” And all of a sudden he stalked to the door, scooped up his hat, growled a noise that was probably “Goodnight,” and left.

I went to see Lila Falsehaven. It was no trouble at all to get her address from Kiddy-Joy Books, Inc. She invited me to tea when I called her up. Tea, no less. Me. Tom Conway.

She was a real greeting-card grandma. Steel-rimmed specs with the thickest part at the lower edges. Gleaming, perfect, even false teeth. A voice that reminded you of a silver plate full of warm spice cookies. And on the table between us, a silver plate full of warm spice cookies. “Cream?” she said. “Or lemon?”

“Straight.”—“I mean, neither, thank you. This place looks just like the place where the Lila Falsehaven books are written.”

“Thank you,” she said, inclining her neat little head. She passed me tea in a convoluted bone-china cup I could have sneezed off a mantel at forty paces. “I’ve been told before that my books and my home and my appearance are those of the perfect grandmother. I’ve never had a child, you know. But I believe I’ve more grandchildren than anyone who ever lived.” She delivered up an intricate old laugh like intricate old lace.

I tasted the tea. People should drink more tea. I put down the little cup and leaned back and smiled at her. “I like it here.”

She blushed like a kid and smiled back. “And now—what can I do for you? Surely that wicked magazine of yours doesn’t want a story by me. Or even about me.”

“It’s not a wicked magazine,” I said loyally. “Just true-to-life. We call them as we see them.”

“Some truths,” she said gently, “are better left uncalled.”

“You really believe that?”

“I really do,” she said.

“But the world isn’t what your grandchildren read about in your books.”

“My world is,” she said with conviction.

I had come here for something, and now was the time to get it. I shook my head. “Not completely. Some of your world has flower shows with pansies in them.”

She didn’t make a sound. She closed her eyes, and I watched her smooth old skin turn to ivory and then to paper. I waited. At last her eyes opened again. She looked straight at me, lifted one hand, then the other, spread them apart and placed each on the carven chair-arms. I looked at the hands, and saw each in turn relax as if by a deep effort of will. Her eyes drew me right up out of my chair. Deep in them was a spark, as hot, as bright, and quite as clean as a welding arc. The whole sweet room held its breath.

“Mr. Conway,” she said in a voice that was very faint and very distinct, “I believe in truth as I believe in innocence and in beauty, so I shall not lie to you. I understand now that you came here to find out if I was really the one who contrived that filthy anecdote. I was. But if you came to find out why I did it, or what is in me that made it possible, I cannot help you. I’m sorry. If I knew, if I only knew, perhaps I’d tell you. Now you’d better go.”