More Tales of the Black Widowers (15 page)

“Yes, I believe it,” snapped Trumbull, “if you want to risk heart attacks, emphysema, and lung cancer, that's your business, and I wish you joy of any or all of them. I wouldn't interfere with your pleasure for the world if you want to do it off in a closed room somewhere. But why the hell should / breathe your foul smoke and run the risk of disease so that you might have your perverse pleasure—”

He broke off since Drake, who was visibly attempting not to, had one of his not too infrequent coughing spells.

Trumbull looked pleased. “Happy coughing,” he said. “When's the last time you could breathe freely?”

Roger Halsted, who occasionally smoked but was not doing so at the moment, said, with the mild stutter with which he was sometimes afflicted, “Why are you so upset, Tom? What makes this meeting different from any other?”

“Nothing at all, but I've had enough. I've overflowed. Every time I come home after an evening with you smoldering garbage piles, my clothes smell and I have to burn them.”

“What I think,” said Drake, “is that he found that button when he was reaching into a subway trash can for a newspaper, and it's made a missionary out of him.”

“I feel like a missionary,” said Trumbull. “I would like to push a law through Congress that would place tobacco in the same category with marijuana and hashish. By God, the evidence for the physiological damage caused by tobacco is infinitely stronger than for any damage caused by marijuana.”

Geoffrey Avalon, always sensitive to any reference to his own profession of law, stared down austerely from his seventy-four inches and said, “I would not advise another law legislating morality. Some of the finest men in history have tried to reform the world by passing laws against bad habits, and there is no record of any of them working. I'm old enough to remember Prohibition in this country.”

Trumbull said, “You smoke a pipe. You're an interested party. Am I the only non-smoker here?”

“I don't smoke,” said Mario Gonzalo, raising his voice. He was in another corner, talking to the guest.

“All right then,” said Trumbull. “Come here, Mario. You're host for the evening. Set up a no-smoking rule.”

“Out of order. Out of order,” said Rubin heatedly. “The host can only legislate on Black Widower procedures, not on private morality. He can't order the members to take off their clothes, or to stand on their heads and whistle 'Dixie, or to stop smoking—or to start smoking, for that matter.”

“It could be done,” said Halsted gently, “if the host proposed the measure and put it to a vote, but the smokers are four to two against you, Tom.”

“Wait awhile,” said Trumbull. “There's Henry. He's a member. What do you say, Henry?”

Henry, the perennial waiter at the Black Widowers' banquets, had nearly completed setting the table. Now he lifted his smooth and unwrinkled face which, as always, belied the fact that he was a sexagenarian, and said, “I do not myself smoke and would welcome a ban on smoking, but I do not demand it.”

“Even if he did,” said Rubin, “it would be four to three, still a majority on the side of vice.”

“How about the guest?” said Trumbull doggedly, “Mr.—”

“Hilary Evans,” said Avalon severely. He made it his business never to forget a guest's name, at least for the evening of the dinner.

Trumbull said, “Where do you stand, Mr. Evans?”

Hilary Evans was short and tubby, with cheeks that were plump, pink, and smooth. His mouth was small and his eyes were quick-moving behind the lightly tinted lenses of his metal-rimmed spectacles. His hair, surprisingly dark in view of the lightness of his complexion, lay back smoothly. He might have been in his middle forties.

He said in a tenor voice, “I smoke occasionally and do not often mind if others do, but I have current reasons for sympathy with you, sir. Smoking has been the occasion for misery for me.”

Trumbull, one eye nearly closing as he lifted the side of his mouth in a snarl, looked as though he would have pressed the matter further, but Rubin said at once, “Five to three. Issue settled,” and Henry imperturbably announced that the dinner was served.

Trumbull scrambled to get the seat next to Gonzalo, the other non-smoker, and asked him in an undertone, “Who is this- Evans?”

Gonzalo said, “He's personnel manager for a firm in whose advertising campaign I was involved. He interviewed me and, even though he's rather a queer guy, we got along. I thought he might be interesting.”

“I hope so,” said Trumbull, “though I don't think much of a guy who votes with the enemy even though he sympathizes with me.”

Gonzalo said, “You don't know the details.”

“I intend to find out,” said Trumbull grimly.

The dinner conversation had trouble getting off the subject of tobacco. Avalon, who had reduced his second drink to the usual half-way mark and had then left it severely alone, remarked that cigarette smoking was the only new vice introduced by modern man.

“How about LSD and the mind-expanding drugs?” said Gonzalo at once and Avalon, having thought about that for a moment, owned defeat.

Rubin loudly demanded the definition of “vice.” He said, “Anything you don't like is a vice. If you approve of it, it isn't. Many a temperance crusader was addicted to food as viciously as anyone could be addicted to drink.” And Rubin, who was thin, pushed his soup away half eaten, with a look of ostentatious virtue.

Halsted, who was not thin, muttered, “Not many calories in clear turtle soup.”

Trumbull said, “Listen, I don't care what you do, or whether it's a vice or a virtue, as long as you keep it to yourself and to those you practice it with. If you drink whisky and I don't want to, no alcohol gets into my blood; if you want to pick up a dame, there's no risk of my picking up anything that goes along with that. But when you drag at a cigarette
I
smell the smoke,
I
get it in my lungs,
I
run the risk of cancer.”

“Quite right,” said Evans suddenly. “Filthy habit,” and he glanced quickly at Drake, who was sitting next to him and who shifted his cigarette to his other hand, the one farther from Evans.

Avalon cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, there are no strictures against tobacco that can be considered new. Over three and a half centuries ago James I of England wrote a book called
Counterblast to Tobacco
in which he rehearsed every point that Tom could make, allowing for gains in scientific knowledge since then—”

“And you know what kind of a person James I was?” said Rubin with a snort. “Filthy and stupid.”

“Not really stupid,” said Avalon. “Henry IV of France called him the 'wisest fool in Christendom' but that merely indicated he lacked judgment rather than learning.”

“I call that stupid,” said Rubin.

“If lacking judgment were the criterion, few of us would escape,” said Avalon.

“You'd be first in line, Manny,” said Trumbull, and then allowed his expression to soften as Henry placed a generous sliver of pecan pie, laden with ice cream, before him. Trumbull approved of pecan pie as he approved of few things.

Over the last of the coffee Gonzalo said, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! I think it's time to leave the general for the specific. Our guest is now the subject and, Tom, are you willing—”

Trumbull said with alacrity, “I am not only willing to take over the grilling, I insist on it. Let's have quiet. —Henry, you can bring the brandy at your convenience. —Mr. Evans, it is the custom of this organization to ask a guest, as our first question, how he justifies his existence. In this case, I will tell you how you may justify your existence as far as I am concerned. Please tell me why it is you have current reason to sympathize with my view on smoking, though you smoke yourself on occasions. Have you been cheated by the tobacco industry?”

Evans shook his head and smiled briefly. “It has nothing to do with the tobacco industry. I wish it had. I work for an investment firm and my reasons have to do with my activities there.”

“In what way?”

Evans looked rather gloomy. “That,” he said, “would be difficult to explain adequately. I might say that a matter of smoking has rather spoiled a hitherto perfect record of mine in the Sherlock Holmes way. But,” and here he sighed, “I'd rather not talk about it, to be perfectly honest.”

“Sherlock Holmes?” said Gonzalo delightedly. “Henry, if—”

Trumbull waved an imperious arm. “Shut up, Mario. I think, Mr. Evans, that the price of the meal is an honest attempt on your part to explain exactly what you mean. We have time and we will listen.”

Evans sighed again. He adjusted his glasses and said, “Mr. Gonzalo, in inviting me, you told me I would be grilled. I must confess I did not think the sore spot would be probed at the very start.”

Trumbull said, “Sir, I merely followed up your own remark. You have no one to blame but yourself for making it. Please do not spoil our game.”

Gonzalo said, “It's all right, Mr. Evans. I told you that nothing said in this room is ever repeated outside.”

“Never!” said Trumbull emphatically.

Evans said, “Not that there is anything in the least criminal or unethical about what happened to me. It is merely that I will be forced to—deflate myself. I imagine I could easily be made fun of if it were to become general knowledge that—”

“It will not get about,” said Trumbull and, anticipating the other's next remark out of weary experience, went on, “Nor will our esteemed waiter be a problem to you. Of us all, Henry is the most trustworthy.”

Evans cleared his throat and held his brandy glass between thumb and forefinger. “The point is that I am personnel manager. It is my job to help decide on whether this one or that one is to be hired, fired, promoted, or left behind. Sometimes I turn out to be the court of last resort, for I have proven myself to be expert at the job. —You see, since I have been assured of the confidentiality of what I say, I can afford to praise myself.”

“Tell the truth even if it be self-praise,” said Trumbull. “In what way have you proved yourself to be expert?”

“In hiring a man to a sensitive position,” said Evans, “and many of our positions are extremely sensitive since we routinely handle very large sums of money, we, of course, rely on all sorts of reference data which the applicant, whether coming from outside or facing promotion from inside, may be unaware of. We know much about his background, his character, his personality, his experience.

“Yet that, you see, if often not enough. To know that a person has done well in a certain position is no certain augury that he will do well in another more responsible position, or one that is merely different. To know that he has done well in the past does not tell us what strains he is under that might cause him to do ill in the future. We may not know to what extent he dissimulates. The human mind is a mystery, gentlemen.

“It may happen, then, that on certain occasions there is left room for doubt, despite all the information we have, and it is then that the judgment is left up to me. For many years my judgments have been justified by subsequent experience with those I have chosen for one position or another, and in many cases by indirect experience with those I have turned away. At least this has been so until—”

Evans removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes as though aware that an inner sight had failed him. “My superiors are kind enough to say that one mistake in twenty-three years is excusable, but it doesn't help. I shall not be trusted in future as I have been before. And rightly so, for I acted too soon, and on the basis of a prejudice.”

Gonzalo, who was putting the final touches on the sketch of the guest, and making him look preternaturally prim with a mouth pursed to a dot, said, “Against whom or what were you prejudiced?”

Rubin said, “Artists, I hope.”

Trumbull cried out, “Let the man talk. —The prejudice had something to do with smoking?”

Evans replaced his glasses carefully and fixed his gaze on Trumbull. “I have a system which is impossible to describe in words, for it is based partly on intuition and partly on experience. —I am a close observer of the minutiae of human behavior. I mean the small things. I select something highly characteristic of a particular person, out of some instinctive feeling I appear to have.

“It might be smoking, for instance. If so, I note how he handles the cigarette; how he fiddles with it; the manner in which he puffs; the interval between puffs; how far down he smokes the stub; how he puts it out. There is infinite complexity in the interaction between a person and his cigarette—or anything else, his tie clasp, his ringers, the table before him. I have studied the complexity of small behavior all my adult life, first out of curiosity and amusement and, soon enough, out of serious intent.”

Drake smiled narrowly and said, “You mean those little things tell you something about the people you interview?”

“Yes, they do,” said Evans emphatically.

“All right. That's where the Sherlock Holmes angle comes in. And what can you tell us about ourselves, then?”

Evans shook his head. “I have been paying little professional attention to any of you. Even if I had, the conditions here are not proper for my purposes and I am without the ancillary knowledge that more standardized investigations would have placed on my desk. I can say very little about you.”

Trumbull said, “This isn't a parlor game anyway, Jim. Mr. Evans can tell you're a tobacco addict who flips ashes into his soup—”