The Investigations of Avram Davidson (20 page)

Throats were cleared, eyes wiped, noses blown. Don Alexander essayed to speak, but was prevented by emotion. At last the silence was broken by Don Swede Swanson. “So let be Sylvester,” he said huskily. There was a chorus of nods.

*   *   *

“O
F COURSE, THERE
is one hazard of the chase involved in my sweet Sauncepeur's snaffling hot broils off these outdoor grills,” Lord Grue and Groole observed. “It—shall I sweeten the air in here a bit? I've a packet of frankincense that my friend, Osman Ali the Somali, sent me not long ago; I wouldn't
buy
incense, of course,” he said, sprinkling the pale yellow grains on the glowing embers. A pungent odor filled the cave.

Denny the Dip coughed. The Marquess donned his gauntlet and examined the falcon's talons, particularly about the pads. “It makes the poor creature's petti-toes sore. I've experimented with various nostra and it's my considered opinion that Pinaud's Moustache Wax is above all things the best. Is there anything more left in the flask? Shall we kill it, as you say over here? Ah, good show.”

With a gesture he motioned to Denny to take the bed; he himself reclined on a tiger skin which was stored during the day in a dry niche. Thus settled, he grew expansive. “Ah, it's not what I've been accustomed to, me that used to have my own shooting lodge in the grouse season, waited on, hand and foot, by a dozen Baloochi servants; well, and now here I am, like a bloody eremite, living on me wits and the $5.60 I get from home each week.”

Denny lifted his head. “You're a remittance man?” he inquired.

“Sort of remittance man, you might say, yes. Me nevew, Piers Plunkert, pays me two quid a week, not so much to stay away as to stay alive. ‘Avoid alcohol, Uncle,' he writes, ‘and mind you wear your wooly muffler when the north wind blows.' It's not filial piety, mind, or avuncular piety, or anything like it. You see, if I pop off,
he
becomes the twelfth Marquess of Grue and Groole, and all the rest of that clobber—the mere thought of it makes his blood run cold. No, he's not a Labour M.P.; his fix is worse than that. He's one of the
Angry Young Men!

“Struth! Lives in a filthy little room in South Stepney, and composes very bad, very blank verse damning The Establishment, under the pseudonym of ‘Alf Huggins.' Well, now, I ask you—would
you
pay any attention to an Angry Young Man named Lord Grue and Groole? No, of course you wouldn't. And neither would anyone else.

“Once a year I threaten suicide. ‘It doesn't matter about me, my boy,' I write. ‘
You
will carry on the name and title.' My word, what a flap that puts him in!
Always
good for ten quid pronto via cablegram.”

A sound, so dim and distant that it failed to reach the ear of Denny the Dip, caused the peerless peer to break off discourse and raise his head. “Bogey,” he announced. “Policeman, to you. Weighs about a hundred and sixty and has trouble with his left arch. Neglects his tum, too—hear it rumble!”

Denny strained, could hear nothing but the traffic passing through the park, its sound rising and falling with the wind, like surf. He murmured, “What a talent you got, Grooley! What a team we'd make!”

“A team we certainly will
not
make!” the peer snorted. “But, as to your playing squire to my knight, hmm, well, we'll consider it. I plan to take a brisk walk in the morning, down to the Battery and vicinage. We'll see if you can stand the pace—no sinecure being gunbearer, as it were, to the man who out-walked The Man-Eater of Mysore. And another thing—” He thwacked the Dip across the feet with his swagger stick. “No more of this ‘Grooley'! Call me Sahib, Bwana, Kyrios, or M'lord.”

*   *   *

“H
MM
,”
MURMURED
L
ORD
Grue and Groole, pausing and looking in the shop window. “I find that curious. Don't
you
find that curious, Denny?”

Denny, panting and aching from the long trek down from Central Park, was finding nothing curious but his inability to break away and sink to rest. “Wuzzat, Gr—I mean Bwana?” he moaned. He was bearing, in lieu of gun, the Marquess's swagger stick.

“Use your
eyes,
man! There, in the window. What do you see?”

The Dip wiped the sweat out of his eyes. “Leather goods?” he inquired. “Outboard motors? Canned crab-meat?” The Marquess clicked his tongue, and swore rapidly in Swahili (Up-Country dialect). “Seasoned Honduras mahogany?” the Dip continued hastily. “Flowered organdy? Blue rayon? Manila hemp?”

“
Ahah!
Just so, a great lovely coil of Manila hempen rope. Notice anything odd about it?
No?
You were pulling the wrong mendicant dodge, you should've used a tin cup. You really don't see that scarlet thread running through it, so cleverly and closely intertwined that it cannot be picked out without spoiling the rope? You
do
see it; good. No use to ask if you know what it means; you don't, so I'll tell you. It means that rope was made by and for the Royal Navy. It is
never
sold, so it must have been stolen. No one would dare fence it in Blighty, so they've shipped it over here. Clever, I call that. Must look into this.”

He entered the shop, followed by Denny, who sank at once into a chair. The dog Guido, looking as cool and fresh as his master, stood motionless. Mrs. Goodeycoonce emerged from the back.

“Afternoon, ma'am,” said Lord Grue and Groole, touching the brim of his quasi-caracul cap, and giving her no chance to speak. “My name is Arthur Powisse, of the Powisse Exterminating Company. Allow me to offer you my card—dear me, I seem to have given the last one away; ah, well, it doesn't signify. This is my chief assistant, Mr. Dennis, and the animal is one of our pack of trained Tyrolean Rat Hounds. We have just finished a rush job at one of the neighborhood warehouses, and, happening to pass by and being entranced by your very attractive window display, thought we would drop in and offer you an estimate on de-ratting your premises.”

Mrs. Goodeycoonce opened her mouth, but the Marquess swept on. “I anticipate your next comment, ma'am. You are about to say, ‘But I keep a clean house'—and so you do, so you obviously do. But do your
neighbors?
Aye, there's the rub; they don't, alas. Around the corner is an establishment of the type known as, if you will pardon the expression, a common flophouse—the sort of place where they throw fishbones in the corner and never sweep up. Three doors down is the manufactory of Gorman's Glossy Glue Cakes, a purely animal product, on which
Ratus ratus
thrives, ma'am, simply
thrives!
”

Something flickered in Granny Goodeycoonce's eyes which seemed to indicate she had long been aware of the proximity of Gorman's Glossy Glue Cakes, particularly on very warm days, and found in it no refreshment of soul whatsoever.

“How often at night,” Lord Grue and Groole waxed almost lyrical, “when all should be quiet, must you not have heard Noises, eh?—and attributed them to the settling of the timbers, the expansion and contraction of the joists and beams. Not a bit of it!
Rats!
” His voice sank to a whisper. “Oh, the horror of it! First one grey shadow, then another—”

He took a step forward, she took one backward, he advanced, she retreated. “Then great grisly waves of them, first in the foundations, then in the cellar, then—does this door lead to the cellar? I had better examine it.”

*   *   *

L
ATER THAT EVENING
found the Marquess and his bearer deep in the shadowy doorway of an empty warehouse. “It was the advent of that offensively wholesome-looking young chap, her grandson, that broke the spell,” the Marquess mused. “Said she'd consider it. No matter. I saw the cellar. Those crates and crates of Polish hams! Those bales of raw rubber! Turkish Sipahi cigarettes! That infinite variety of portable, seaborne merchandise!

“It can only mean one thing: the people are pukka river pirates. I know the signs—seen them on the Thames, the Nile, Hoogli, Brahmapootra, Whampoa, Pei-Ho—
eheu fugaces.
Nice set-up she's got there—snug shop, tidy house, fine figger, and a widow woman, I'm sure—no sign of a husband and anyone can see she's not the divorcing type. Hmm, well, question is: How does the lad get the stuff there? How do river pirates
usually
get the stuff there? Just so.”

And they had walked along the waterfront, the Marquess examining the water as intently as one of the inhabitants of the Sunda Straits peering for
bêche-de-mer,
the Dip plodding along to the rear of Guido, as sunken beneath the weight of the swagger stick as if it had been an elephant gun. He reflected on the day he might have spent, conning old ladies out of coins, and on a certain bat-cave he knew of, where an ounce and a quarter of Old Cordwainer retailed for the ridiculous sum of 31 cents. But there was that about the Marquess which said
Hither to me, caitiff, and therein fail not, at your peril;
therefore Denny plodded meekly.

“Ho,” said His Lordship, stopping, and pointing at the filthy waters of the East River, which, in a happier time, lined with forests and grassy meads, were thick with salmon, shad, cod, alewives, herring, sturgeon, and all fruits of the sea; now the waters were merely thick. “Observe,” said His Lordship. “You see how—there—the oil slick, orange peel, bad bananas, and other rubbish floats down with the tide. Whereas the flotsam rides more or less straight out from under us and joins the current at a right angle. The
main
current, that is. Let's have a dekko,” he declared, and shinnied down the side of the wharf timbers almost to the water's edge.

His enthusiasm, as he clambered up, almost communicated itself to the Dip. “Whuddaya see, Sahib?” he asked, craning.

“Enough. Tonight, when the eyes of the Blessed Houris in Paradise, yclept ‘stars' in our rude Saxon Tongue, shine as clearly as this filthy air will allow them to, we shall follow young Mr. Goodeycoonce. Here are rupees, or whatever the juice they call them—‘quarters'? Just so. Go thou and eat, and return within the hour. As for me, a strip of biltong will do, and fortunately I took care to refill the flask. They make good whiskey in Belfast, I must say, cursed Orangemen though they be.” He raised his drink and waved it across a trickle in the gutter. “To the King over the water”—and drank. His glass eye glittered defiance to all the House of Hanover.

*   *   *

A
LL WAS QUIET
in the kitchen behind T
HE
A
LMOST
A
NYTHING
S
ECOND
-H
AND
G
OODS AND
O
UTLET
S
TORE
. Granny Goodeycoonce was pasting in her scrapbook the latest letter she had received in reply to a message of congratulations sent on the birthday of one of the Princesses of the Netherlands. It read, as did all the others in the scrapbook:
The Queen has read your letter with interest and directs me to thank you for your good wishes.
And it was signed, as nearly as could be made out, Squiggle Van Squiggle, Secretary.

“Gee,” said Neely, looking up from a trade journal he was reading, “here's a bait business for sale on Long Island, on the North Shore.” There was no answer. He tried again. “And a boat basin in Connecticut. ‘Must be sold at once,' the ad says, ‘to settle estate.' Gee.”

His grandmother capped the tube of library paste. “I suppose Princess Beatrix will be getting engaged pretty soon,” she observed. “I wonder who to. How old is the Crown Prince of Greece? No, that wouldn't do, I suppose; he'll be
King
of Greece some day, and she'll be Queen of Holland. Hmm.” She knit her brows, deep in the problems of dynasty.

“They could be combined,” Neely suggested.

Granny Goodeycoonce looked up, amazed. “What, Greece and
Hol
land?”

“No, I mean a bait business and a boatyard. People,” he explained enthusiastically, “would buy
bait
to fish with from their
boats.
And—”

She clicked her tongue. “The idea! A Goodeycoonce becoming a fishmonger!”

“Better than being a river pirate,” he mumbled.

“Never let me hear you use that word again!” she snapped. “The very idea! Have you
no
respect for the traditions of the family? Why, it makes my blood boil! And don't you forget for one minute, young man, that I am a Goodeycoonce by descent as well as by marriage; don't you forget
that!
”

“Fat chance,” Neely muttered.

His grandmother opened her mouth to release a thunderbolt, but at that moment there came a thud from the cellar, followed by a clatter.

“Oh, my land,” Granny whispered, a hand at her throat. “Rats! I should've listened to that Limey. Is the door to the cellar locked?”

Answer was superfluous, for at that moment the door swung open and in stepped the Limey himself, more properly described as Arthur Marmaduke Roderick Lodowicke William Rufus de Powisse-Plunkert, Baron Bogle, Earl of Ballypatcoogan, Viscount Penhokey, Laird of Muckle Greet, Master of Snee, 11th Marquess of Grue and Groole in the Peerage of England, and Hereditary Lord High Keeper of the Queen's Bears. “Good evening, all,” he said.

Neely went pale. “I knew it!” he cried. “I knew we couldn't go on getting away with it forever, not after almost three hundred years! That exterminator story was just a dodge—he must be from the Harbor Patrol, or the Coast Guard!”

The Marquess took his swagger stick from the quivering Denny (who had made the underground voyage with his head under his coat, for fear of bats), and smacked it gently into the palm of his hand. “You know, I resent that very much,” he said, a touch of petulance in his voice. “I will have you know that I am no copper's nark, common informer, or fink. I—”