Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (24 page)

Naturally enough a shade sometimes failed to be drawn, or rolled up impulsively on some whirringly wicked whim of its own. Even more naturally the more adventurous boys of Felicidad would climb the surrounding trees, or egg one another on to mount the vine-covered wall, in hopes of catching a revealing glimpse of one or more of Mrs. Delgato's girls.

Many of the grown men of Felicidad showed an interest in the house of Mrs. Delgato quite equal to that of the boys, though it was a more covert interest. Not so, however, in the case of Les Grimes, one of Felicidad's mental "unfortunates," who was always either loitering at the railway station, where the trains were a noisy excitement and an occasional quarter could be picked up for toting a stranger's bags, or prowling outside Mrs. Delgato's place, a slack-jawed Peeping Tom. Les liked to mouth over the rude name the Felicidados had given the dark stucco house – he seemed to take an endless pleasure in the terse phrase.

Mrs. Delgato was aware of Les's interest in her girls and when they met on the street she would threaten him jovially with the silver-handled whip it was her habit to carry.

"I saw you luring Lolita, shameless one!" she would cry. "Have a care, man." Or words to that effect.

Lolita was typical of Mrs. Delgato's girls and probably the pick of them for sheer beauty – a luxurious, youthful creature with the striking combination of green eyes and naturally yellow hair. Lazily graceful, forever yawning and stretching, Lolita loved to sunbathe in the garden when Mrs. Delgato permitted. At such times Lolita would croon a little song to herself in a way that was strangely seductive. Small wonder that Les – like others who could be named – was drawn back again and again to the vine-covered wall! Arrogant and seductive, Lolita was the general sort of female Leopold von Sacher-Masoch had in mind when he wrote the celebrated novel
Venus in Furs
that added the word masochism to our vocabulary – and Mrs. Delgato reinforced this identification of Lolita as the cruel and beautiful
femme fatale
by sometimes referring to her affectionately as
La Muerte Amarilla
, the Yellow Death.

Most Felicidados accepted Mrs. Delgato's odd harsh language and silver-handled whip along with the other eccentricities of this iron-haired dark-skinned little woman, straight-backed and muscular despite her years, who along with her rudely-named and, truth to tell, odorous establishment was one of the prominent features of the town.

Some long-faced citizens, to be sure, enjoyed shaking their heads and predicting that, if action were not taken to make Mrs. Delgato dispose of her girls, there would some day be a scandal, a great tragedy even, and the fair name of Felicidad would be forever smirched. It was unnatural, these argued, for girls like Mrs. Delgato's to behave with unfailing propriety and permit themselves to be cooped up forever. A disgraceful outbreak of some sort was inevitable, these pessimists would dolorously maintain.

But, as we have noted before, Felicidad was a lazy town and things might have gone on without catastrophe for many years, or even until Mrs. Delgato and her girls had withered into moth-eaten scarecrows and been quietly laid away – if Andy Henderson had not arrived in town one evening just as the shadows were darkening from rose to charcoal.

 

ANDY HENDERSON was a person who knew a great deal (which he would tell you loudly on the slightest provocation) about houses where the girls gathered of an evening in a large parlor with an upright piano, horsehair sofas, a beaded curtain and peacock plumes – girls naked and in furs, or otherwise temptingly set forth. Andy gave Les Grimes two bits for carrying his sample case and Gladstone bag to the hotel and there he asked him a blunt and rudely worded question and later he gave Les a larger silver disk for conducting him to the house of Mrs. Delgato.

At the front gate Andy dismissed Les, believing that the companionship of a mature moron would not increase his stature in the eyes of Madam Delgato – for he was prepared to address her either as that or as Señora Delgato, he had not yet decided which. Les for his part was well satisfied to retreat to his favorite observation post behind the vine-covered wall.

Moonlight showered excitement on the old dark manse and on the overgrown jungle-like garden heavy with the perfume of honeysuckle. The drawn blinds didn't bother Andy – he had expected those, though it is true that he had also expected a little light and noise to be filtering through them. The complete silence and darkness – except for the silver-scattering moonlight – were a trifle unnerving. A more wildly imaginative man might have thought of ghost girls, silver splashed, haunting an abandoned bordello.

But Andy Henderson's imagination, though vigorous, abided within narrow limits. He rapped in a brash rhythm on the thick green door and waited, balancing in his mind the phrases "the girls" and las muchachas." A place like this might be all Mexican, he reminded himself.

The door did not open and there were no footsteps – at least not of anyone wearing heels; he
did
fancy he heard a soft thump and a brief clicking noise, as if a barefoot girl with a bone or horn anklet worn loosely had taken a quick step.

Andy frowned and knocked again, more heavily and in a more solemn rhythm. The door moved inward a fraction of an inch.

He pushed it open wide and peered inside. There was only darkness ... a soft crooning that in its strange way was infinitely seductive ... and, striking through the heavy sweetness of the honeysuckle, a gaggingly sour stench that was for the moment quite inexplicable though somehow most frightening ...

Andy had taken an automatic step forward and a board creaked loudly under his foot ...

It was his screams – loud though not long – rather than the incoherent cries of Les Grimes that brought the Felicidados running. They came with their guns, knowing that the day of the pessimists had come and they would at last have to take the decisive action they had anticipated but evaded for so long.

Mrs. Delgato's girls were effectively disposed of after considerable excitement and a few days later Mrs. Delgato was conducted to the nearest hospital that the state maintained for the mentally aberrated – conducted with considerable dignity and respect, such as it was only proper to accord to one who carried with her magnificently and to the end the aura of a great professional reputation.

Who could blame her if she had become a shade eccentric with the years and had chosen to live in retirement with "her girls" (as she called them to the end) on a surprisingly democratic footing? Had she not once been Lupe Delgato, known from Tijuana to Trinidad as the Queen of Tiger Tamers?

And who could blame Les Grimes for his infatuation with the rude name given to Mrs. Delgato's establishment – even though it caused the death of a salesman? Not one Felicidado doubted Les's veracity when he explained that Andy Henderson had clearly asked to be taken to the Cat House.

 

 

 

THE BLACK EWE

 

VERY WELL, I'll tell you why I broke off my engagement to Lavinia Simes – though I'm not the sort of person who likes to go around broadcasting the facts of his private life. There's altogether too much broadcasting going on these days, by wave, newsprint and heaven knows what subtler avenues of approach to the human mind.

I could sum it all up in one word
horror
. But that doesn't mean much by itself. Besides, it would let you explain it away as a neurotic delusion, aftermath of the near nervous breakdown I had in 1946, when I quit my desk job with OSS. Though why anyone shouldn't have a nervous breakdown these days, with the whole world rushing hypnotized into the mouth of doom, is more than I can see.

At any rate "ridiculous neurotic delusion" is the explanation favored by most of the friends of the Simes – one syllable, you know, rhymes with limes. They delight in telling each other how without any word of warning I walked away from Lavinia in the midst of a sight-seeing tour of Chicago and refused ever to see her again. Which is completely accurate incidentally.

They all think I behaved outrageously.

All of them, that is, except Mrs. Grotius. When I met her afterwards she said, "Well, Ken, at least you won't go the way of Conners Maytal and Fritz Nordenfelt and Clive Maybrick and René Coulet and the other nice young men Lavinia was engaged to."

I didn't want to go into it with Mrs. Grotius, so I merely said, "Oh those were all accidents. And even the coincidence of so many fatal accidents isn't particularly striking when you remember that Lavinia and her father have always managed to be in the danger spots of the world."

"Yes, accidents do seem to cluster around Lavinia," Mrs. Grotius agreed in that dry voice of hers. "I wonder if that's why she always wears black, Ken?"

She always does, you know. It's a regular fetish with her. Lavinia once explained it, with a stab at psychoanalysis, as being an unconscious guilt-reaction to the fact that her mother had died bringing her into the world.

The mothers of monsters generally die giving them birth, so perhaps it's fair enough that the monsters should wear mourning.

Then another time Lavinia suggested, with hush-voiced Midwestern idealism, that perhaps she wore black because she was so conscious of the miserable state of the world. Which may be a lot more to the point.

Now I have a third explanation that's much more convincing to explaining why I left Lavinia on that sight-seeing tour.

I think Mrs. Grotius saw pretty deeply into Lavinia. Underneath her faddish interest in the occult Mrs. Grotius is quite an acute old lady. Come to think of it, it was she who first pointed out to me, in an earlier and idler conversation, another oddity in Lavinia's dress.

"Ever notice anything else queer about the way Lavinia dresses?" she asked me a little teasingly because I had just fallen in love with Lavinia.

"I don't think so," I replied, "except maybe that her clothes are a bit out of fashion."

"Behind the fashions, you mean?"

"I suppose so."

Mrs. Grotius shook her head. "That's what any man would say and most women. And they'd be wrong. Actually Lavinia is always about a year
ahead
of the fashions. But since next year's clothes always look more like
last
year's clothes, most people would explain it the other way. But I notice details and Lavinia is always ahead, not behind."

"Really?" I said, hardly listening.

"Oh yes. Understand, there's nothing particularly clever or striking about her dresses – ugh, that awful black! In fact, they're what you'd call conservative models. Still, they're six months to a year ahead."

"How do you explain it?" I asked, still not much interested.

Mrs. Grotius shrugged lightly. "Perhaps she picks it up when she's off with her father in foreign parts. Though I never knew that Casablanca and Teheran were nerve-centers for the world of
haute couture
. Or perhaps," she added, with a whimsical smile, "Lavinia peeks into the future."

That remark of Mrs. Grotius may not have been pure whimsy. She may have been remembering the thing that happened at a still earlier date. And that takes me back to 1937 and the real beginning of the story of Lavinia and myself. She was about seventeen then and engaged to my friend Conners Maytal.

I didn't have a flicker of conscious interest in Lavinia at the time. I just thought of her as another of those precocious but proper Midwestern girls, brought up in a world of politically-active, internationally-minded adults but never losing that trace of Bible-belt coldness and gaucherie, that "fresh from the prairie" look. Slim, tall, dark-haired, dreamy-eyed, not at all sexy, at least not in any exciting way. I wasn't aware of the excitement of coldness in those days.

We were all gathered in Mrs. Grotius' apartment with its restful pearl-gray furnishings and mildly arty feel. Conners Maytal, a curly-haired, dashing young man with some hush-hush, vaguely dangerous government job. The nubile Lavinia. Theodore her father, a thin-cheeked, beaming man with manners that a lifetime in the Foreign Service had made the easiest and jolliest, most unimpeachable you could imagine.

He's just got back from a legation job in Spain and would soon be off to some other corner of the world. Lavinia, of course, always went with him. He'd raised her from a baby, despite his world-wide jaunts. I imagine it was on her account that he always tried to get back to Chicago between assignments, though Mrs. Grotius claimed it was to stock up on some sensible Midwestern isolationism, after those foreigners drained it out of him.

Besides those three there was myself, Mrs. Grotius, of course, and four or five others. Mrs. Grotius had just heard about Professor Rhine's telepathy experiments at Duke and insisted that we try our luck at them.

She had the stuff you need – a deck of cards with the different symbols – square, circle, star and so on. The way we did it was that one person went slowly through the deck, concentrating on each symbol as it came up, while the other person, who of course couldn't look at the cards, drew a picture of whatever symbol he thought was up at the time.

It turned out to be pretty boring. None of us had anything unusual in the way of scores until it came to Lavinia's turn. She was a whiz at it. Her score was well beyond anything you could reasonably expect – and that in spite of the fact that she drew two or three symbols that weren't on the original cards.

One was just a circle with a jagged line through it – a little like a cartoonist's diagram of the world cracking in two. The other was a bit more complicated. It consisted of two ellipses over-lapping each other crosswise with a dot in the very center.

We puzzled over that latter diagram a good while without recognizing it. The fact is that no one would have recognized it then except a chemist or physicist. Now everyone knows what it means. It's been blazoned all over magazine covers and advertisements -the simplest symbol for the atom.

Maybe that's not beyond the bounds of chance – a girl back in 1937 and repeatedly drawing the symbol of the thing that eight years later was to disrupt the whole course of history. Still, especially with the world of today striding blindly toward some atomic doom like a somnambulist under the control of an evil magician, I don't know.