Something the Cat Dragged In (14 page)

“Not from Balaclava they’re not,” said Dorkin. “Come on, show us your cafeteria passes.”

“Who the hell carries a cafeteria pass?”

This brought general hysteria and a sea of waving cafeteria passes. Mrs. Mouzouka’s food being as good as it was, no genuine student would ever run the risk of being deterred from getting at it.

“Shut up, everybody,” yelled Dorkin. “Give the poor slobs a chance. Okay, so let’s see your calluses.”

“Their what?” gasped a young woman reporter.

“Calluses.” Dorkin held out his own well-hardened palm. “We all get ’em from doing fieldwork. Come on, you guys, hold out your hands.”

“Go to hell.” The nearest demonstrator spat at him and jammed his fists into his pockets.

Dorkin turned to the cameras and shrugged. “That’s the thanks we get. I was just trying to do these guys a favor. It must be a long walk back to wherever they came from. If they haven’t got cars of their own, I think Congressman Sill and Mrs. Smuth ought to be decent enough to take them back to wherever they picked them up, that’s all.”

“Wait a second,” said the oldest and soberest of the out-of-town reporters. “Are you saying this is not a genuine Balaclava student demonstration against Bertram G. Claude?”

“Not so’s you’d notice it. This bunch here are the guys running the demonstration. We students are just having kind of a pre-Halloween party. Care to bob for apples?”

“Not now, thanks. You’re not really serious about these signs and slogans?”

“That depends on what you mean by serious. See, we already know Claude’s not going to get more than four and a half votes in Balaclava County, including his own. It’ll be his voting record in the state legislature that defeats him, not a bunch of people yelling and waving signs. Since these outsiders came along and brought up the subject, though, we figured we might as well let Claude find out we don’t swallow his line of bull even if we do go to a cow college.”

“Then you don’t in fact object to Congressman Claude’s speaking on campus?”

“Why should we? We love political speeches. Take Congressman Sill, for instance. We could listen to him for hours.”

“And often have,” piped up one of the apple-bobbers. “Wouldn’t you like an apple before you go, Mr. Sill?”

Congressman Sill did not want an apple. He did not, for the first time in history, care to make any further comment. He wanted to go away, and he went. The demonstration was over.

“DRAT!” SAID SHANDY.

“What’s the matter?” young Dorkin asked him. “Did I goof up?”

“Far from it. You’re going to make a great Secretary of Agriculture one of these days, young man. The—er—expletive was prompted by my recalling that I had a few questions of my own I’d meant to ask Sill. Perhaps this was not an auspicious time, however. Have you seen Mrs. Smuth?”

“She went thataway.” Dorkin nodded Svenson-ward. “Don’t ask me why. Say, no kidding, Professor, how come she’s working for Claude instead of Peters?”

“There you have me,” Shandy fudged. “One can only infer that she enjoys being on committees. Claude has lots, and Peters never has any.”

“Sam Peters doesn’t have a few other things Flirty Bertie does,” sniffed the second apple-bobber. “Have an apple, Professor Shandy?”

“Didn’t Eve make some such remark to Adam?” Nevertheless, Shandy took the apple. “Thank you, Miss—er—Peters, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Sam’s my uncle, I’m proud to say. Professor, is President Svenson really going to let that nerd Bertie speak on campus?”

“To the best of my knowledge, the point is still moot. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“Because I have this thing about not liking to get rent in twain and have the pieces jumped on, I guess. It must be a leftover from the time my brother tore up my paper dolls just because I glued the pages of his
Playboy
magazine together. Men are brutes. Except Uncle Sam. He’s an old bunny rabbit, and I’d be sick if that ghastly Bertie so much as nibbled the edge off his majority. Say, you don’t suppose we could get Mrs. Mouzouka to schedule a pie throwing contest as part of the entertainment if he does have the gall to show up?”

“Mrs. Mouzouka takes a dim view of wasting good food on wanton frivolity, as do I and as should you. Anyway, a paper plate full of shaving cream is just as effective. Not that I’m advocating anything so unsubtle, you understand.”

“Perish the thought,” said Miss Peters’s companion. “What I’m trying to figure out is why President Svenson never showed up. Usually if we have a demonstration, he’s right out here yelling with the rest of us, only louder.”

“One can only assume he had weightier matters on his mind,” said Shandy. “I’ll go tell him the—er—tumult and the shouting have died, if it will relieve your mind.”

“You’re a brave man, Professor Shandy,” said Miss Peters. “Come on, Angela, we’d better return this bucket to the dairy. Tell the president to be sure and vote for Uncle Sam, won’t you?”

“I hardly think he needs any urging.”

With those words, Shandy betook himself in the direction Mrs. Smuth had been pursuing when last espied. Why hadn’t Svenson so much as poked his head out the window during the entire brouhaha? Was it possible he was actually afraid of that woman?

No, Svenson was not afraid of anything except Sieglinde’s displeasure, and he’d even been known to risk that in a pinch. But he was deeply concerned about what Ruth Smuth could do to the college, and if the just-past demonstration was a sample, he had damned good reason to be. This had been genuine kick-in-the-guts stuff, the sort of rotten trick that got labeled professional politics by people who meant professional hooliganism. The real professional politicians were people like Sam Peters, who believed in the vows they took, told their constituents what they aimed to do, did it to the best of their abilities, and weren’t ashamed to stand by what they’d done because they had nothing to be ashamed of.

Getting back to Dorkin’s question, what was Ruth Smuth mixing herself up in this sort of thing for? Congressman Sill was easy enough to figure. He’d naturally harbor a grudge against Sam Peters for the simple reason that Sam was a winner and he himself a loser. Sam had taken the seat in the state legislature that Sill had got booted out of after that one term in which he’d proved to the voters’ full dissatisfaction that he didn’t know his hock from his crupper. Sam had been reelected term after term because he’d learned the job and done it right. He’d gone on to national office because he’d earned promotion the hard way.

That wouldn’t cut any ice with a man like Sill. He’d never lost his yen for the limelight, and he’d never been averse to jumping on any bandwagon slung low enough to let him get a foot aboard. Mrs. Smuth must have known the sort of character she was dealing with; she’d been around Balaclava County long enough. Dragging Sill up here was in itself an incitement to riot, let alone bringing those headbanded hell-raisers along with him. Was this her own idea, or had Claude put her up to it?

What sort of woman was Ruth Smuth, anyway? Competent enough, she’d proved that during the silo fund raising. Everybody’d been flabbergasted at the way she’d got the money pouring in; amazed at the way unexpected bonanzas kept turning up, like those Chippendale tables some antique expert just happened to recognize at that yard sale and nobly sold for the cause instead of nobbling them for herself as any bona fide antique dealer would be far more likely to do.

Shandy could remember his neighbor Mirelle Feldster sighing in ecstasy, “It just seems as if it was meant to be!” Maybe for once in her life Mirelle had stated an unadorned fact. Maybe Ruth Smuth had orchestrated those dramatic windfalls herself. Had she had this long-term goal even then?

Or had she been what he’d thought her at the time: a clever, energetic woman with a whopping ego drive and too much time on her hands? Had someone used her then, and was someone using her now? Was it Bertram G. Claude in person, or was some master puppeteer manipulating them both from behind a well-camouflaged curtain?

Mrs. Smuth and Claude could be lovers, Shandy supposed. There was a Mr. Smuth floating around in the background, but that didn’t cut any ice nowadays, if indeed it ever had. Anyway, to the best of Shandy’s recollection from the days of the silo drive, Mr. Smuth had had neither dimples, wavy chestnut-brown hair, nor lots of flashing teeth. Shandy couldn’t recall if Smuth had any teeth at all. If it came to that, he wouldn’t have known the man if Smuth had come up and bitten him, though of course that would have settled the question of teeth.

How the hell had he got himself involved with Ruth Smuth’s husband’s hypothetical bridgework? And why was he deliberately approaching Thorkjeld Svenson’s door?

Well, he was here. Feeling like an especially puny David with a bad case of hives and a broken slingshot, he knocked, then stuck his head in.

“Arrgh,” said Thorkjeld Svenson.

“Er—quite,” Shandy replied. “Were you aware that we’ve been having an anti-Claude demonstration?”

“Urrgh!”

“I thought you might want to know it’s concluded. Successfully, I believe, all things considered. Would you care to consider?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Smuth’s been here, I gather.”

Thorkjeld Svenson picked up a Boston telephone book that happened to be lying nearby. There is a trick to making the seemingly impossible feat of tearing a thick directory in two look easy. Svenson did not employ that trick, he just ripped. Then he tore the halves into quarters, the quarters into eighths. Then he hurled the resultant confetti in the general direction of his wastebasket and roared, “Siddown.”

Shandy sat.

“You thought of anything yet?”

“Significant progress has been made,” Shandy lied.

“Forward or backward?”

“I couldn’t say offhand,” he had to confess. “Did Mrs. Smuth tell you how she and Sill fomented the revolution themselves?”

“Ungh?” Svenson didn’t exactly brighten up, but a momentary rift in the gloom could be discerned by a trained eye. “How?”

“Alerted the news media in advance and brought in a gaggle of professional agitators to get the tumult raging nicely before the reporters showed up. Sill went to Boston this morning, so we may assume he rounded them up there.”

“So?”

“So one of your seniors, whom I intend to recommend for high honors and a Croix de Guerre, pointed out that interesting circumstance for the edification of the media lads and lasses.”

Shandy gave a full report of the masterful way in which Dorkin and his cohorts had defused the situation. “As young Lancelot was neatly dropping his bombshell down Sill’s throat, I happened to notice Mrs. Smuth heading this way with blood in her eye, so I thought I’d drop over. She’s a brave woman, or an extremely foolish one. I wish I knew which.”

Svenson reached for another phone book, rolled it into a tube, wrung it in two with one twist of his mammoth forepaws, and flung the remains after the first one.

“Foolish,” he said. “Damned foolish.”

“SO THERE YOU HAVE
it, my pearl of the Orient. Any bright ideas?”

“No, but I daresay I’ll think of something,” said Peter’s wife, taking his well-polished dinner plate away. “Might I interest you in a sliver of apple pie?”

“Try me on a hunk. With cheese, if we have any. The extra protein may help to sustain me through the long night watches.”

“What long night watches? You’re not planning to sit up and brood?”

“No. I’m planning to collect Ottermole after he’s finished playing Cops and Robbers with his kiddies, and go down to look for bloodstains at the museum.”

“How jolly. Does he really?”

“Look for bloodstains? From time to time, as occasion arises. It goes with the job.”

“I meant play Cops and Robbers with his children. It sounds so cozy and parental, and he always goes around scowling and zipping that leather jacket and looking tough. How many does he have?”

“Dozens, no doubt. I never thought to ask. Is the number of Ottermole progeny germane to the issue at hand?”

“Who knows? The most germane thing I can think of is, what happened to Professor Ungley’s files?”

“Spoken like a true librarian. By what route did we progress from Cops and Robbers to Ungley’s files?”

“Somebody robbed the professor and copped his files, silly. A woman, I should think. Men wouldn’t have sense enough to think of plastic bags.”

“In October they would. Men—some men of low understanding, that is—have the insane habit of raking dead leaves into trash bags and carting them to the dump instead of dumping them on the compost heap. This is the season for dead leaves, ergo anybody of criminal tendencies would naturally be thinking of stuffing things into plastic trash bags.”

“Speaking of which,” said Helen, “what about our own yard?”

“What, indeed?”

“It needs raking.”

“Why do women have this perverse talent for sneaking up on a man and whamming him over the head with some inconsequential chore when he has his mind on weightier issues?”

“Because men have this perverse talent for weaseling out of the chores on the specious grounds that doing a little honest work around the place is less important than playing Cops and Robbers with Fred Ottermole. Do you two honestly expect to find bloodstains on that floor?”

“Not we two, no. We expect Frank Joad to find them if in fact they exist.”

“You didn’t tell me Professor Joad would be among those present. I do like that man. He’s never once asked me to look up a statistic about anything whatsoever. If it’s that big a party, why can’t I come?”

“No reason, I suppose. We might invite Mrs. Joad and Mrs. Ottermole while we’re about it.”

“Now you’re being snide and cynical. I’m sure it will be a dreadful bore anyway. While you’re crawling around getting splinters in your knees, I shall flounce off in a huff and return Mary Enderble’s cake plates she left at Iduna Stott’s the day we had the party for Grace Porble.”

“I suppose that makes sense, but kindly refrain from telling me how. Whatever happened to the pie you mentioned a while back?”

“I’ll get it. You sit there and meditate on weighty issues. Such as the effects of eating too much apple pie and cheese.”