CHAPTER THREE
A Shot in the Arm
THERE was a heavy, groaning noise that went through my body like an organ note. I lay and felt pain fill me.
A woman’s voice cut through my head like a knife: “Are you okay, Burroughs? What did they do to you?”
I tried to open my eyes. The lashes were gummed together as if I’d been on a two-week drunk. The pain of the lashes pulling was a relief, superimposed on the throbbing agony that spread from my head all over my body. My right eye pulled open and light lanced into it like a scalpel slitting a boil.
The woman’s voice sounded again, hysterically: “Are you okay, Burroughs?”
“I know you,” I croaked. “You’re—you’re—” The word wouldn’t come. I saw a face pass in front of my right eye. It was a face, then a pattern of planes and colors, then a face again.
“You’re—you’re—” I croaked. Where did they go? The words? I could see them, almost, shapeless, elusive things just beyond my grasp.
I clutched at the words. “Annie,” I rasped. “That’s who you are.”
“Yeah,” said her voice relievedly. “I thought they knocked you off your trolley. Here, sit up.”
I felt her arms around me, pressing my broken rib.
“Water,” I croaked, feeling the blackness that closed in.
“I got some aspirin here,” she said. I saw a little flat box pass in front of my eyes. I lifted my right hand and felt every joint and strand of muscle scream. I clawed the box open and pressed all the tablets into my mouth, a dozen of them. The woman helped me drink a glass of water and the tablets went down.
My other eye pulled open and focused.
“Help me up,” I rasped. “Walk me. Don’t let me stiffen.”
She tugged me to my feet and walked me, eight paces out, eight paces back. I began to see where I was, and my muscles began to work together.
“Where are we?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know where this is,” she said. “Two Spanish-looking guys snatched me into a car when I went out to mail a letter. They blindfolded me. I’m glad they didn’t blackjack me too.” She glanced at my head and shuddered.
Eight paces out, eight paces back. Eight paces out, eight paces back. The place was a store-room, full of crates. There was a sink in one corner and one strong light bulb in the center of the ceiling. There was one massive door.
“I cracked the code, Annie,” I said.
She stopped walking and I found I could go on by myself, eight paces out, eight paces back. The room swayed and lurched, but I could walk.
“What was it?” she demanded eagerly. “Who did she have the dirt on?”
“The code was a list of eighty names and addresses,” I said. “That’s all. What did you think it was?”
“But she always had money—” said Annie, bewilderedly to herself. She turned on me. “You’re holding out! You’re lying. You want to keep this to yourself. I’ll kill you for this!” She drew back one hand. I watched stupidly as it swung and slammed the side of my head. I crashed to the floor.
“Just eighty names,” I whispered tiredly. “Eighty—”
She stared at me with horror in her eyes. She was down on the floor beside me, babbling that she hadn’t meant to hit me, she was sorry, she ought to be hung for it—
She got me another glass of water and made me drink it. She heaved me to my feet and helped me walk again.
“What’s it all about?” I asked wearily.
“That lady-dog, Eveline Speyendecker. She always had cash, a roll of big bills on the first of the month. She didn’t get it from her family. It had something to do with that little book, and she was always saying she knew secrets—I had it all figured out.”
“Blackmail?” I asked.
“That’s what I think. Thought.” She glared at me suspiciously for a moment. “When she died I got that book from her dresser. I figured I could take it over and work the shake-down. It was in code, so I figured you could crack it for me.”
The door opened. A man was shoved through and sprawled on the floor. The big Havana bouncer grinned from the door and slammed it.
“Dr. Gandle!” gasped Annie. “What are you doing here?”
I stared at the man. It was the doctor who’d made out the death certificate of Eveline Speyendecker. He was mussed up and madder than hell. He scrambled to his feet.
“They can’t do this to a medical man,” he snapped. “It’s barbarous, simply barbarous. What do you know about this, you two?”
We told our stories. He looked at me closely under the eyes and delicately felt my skull.
“You’ll be all right,” he said. “Perhaps a very slight fracture, probably not. What the devil’s all this about?”
“Somebody’s rounding up witnesses of the woman’s death,” I said. “Somebody with South American connections and a sucker-list of some kind.”
“List for what?” he demanded.
“I wouldn’t know. But Eveline was in with them. She used the list. When she was killed they wanted it back. But Annie swiped it and passed it to me to decode. Eveline’s associates tried twice to get it away from me, and succeeded. But I had copies made—”
Dr. Gandle was standing with his back to the door. There was a wide smile on his face and a small revolver in his hand.
“THANKS, Burroughs,” he said.
“The delivery boy for the photo shop told the elevator man he was delivering French postcards, but we had to be sure, you know. Thanks again.” His heel beat an SOS on the door; it opened and the little tango dancer came in, with the cheap Luger copy steady in his right fist.
In his other hand was my gray, snap-brim felt hat. Dr. Gandle put the little gun away and passed the hat to me. “I took this from the hall closet on my way out,” he smiled. “I figured if there was any trouble with you and we had to cool you it would come in handy.”
I stupidly turned the hat over in my hands. It had a new sweat-band, a little thicker and higher than the old one. I turned the sweat-band down and saw that it was actually a double fold of very thin leather, like an old-fashioned money belt. There was fine, white powder dabbed on it.
“When they find you,” said the doctor, “they’ll figure you just took an overdose and that’ll be that. A couple of days later they’ll find Annie with a bindle or two in her girdle, also dead from an overdose. No connection; it happens every day in a city this size.”
“Narcotics,” I said.
The tango dancer laughed and the doctor nodded, with a gleam in his eye.
“Narcotics,” he said. “Eight hundred grains of cocaine a week, via the banana boats front South America. Eveline took care of the carriage trade for me, but she began to use a little too damned much herself and became very unreliable. One week she took the receipts and gave them all to some prize-fighter she liked. That did it.”
“How did you kill her?” I asked.
He chuckled. “There’s an experimental drug called Gibbs 773 that they’re using for early meningitis cases. It decomposes in alcohol. Decomposes, in fact, into phenol and assorted arsenates, all highly poisonous. I’d been filling her with Gibbs 773 for a week, and it finally paid off. She took a cocktail on top of a stomach-full of the stuff and it fell apart and the parts poisoned her. I knew I’d be called in, so I could cover it up.”
“Neat,” I said.
He nodded complacently. “Bring them into my office, Paco,” he said to the tango dancer.
The tango dancer jerked his big gun at us. We went through the door into a handsome Park Avenue doctor’s waiting room. The bouncer was there; he closed the door and shoved a filing case against it that blocked it completely. We went on into the office.
It was very white and sterile. There were cabinets of instruments, an X-ray machine, a diathermy set, an operating chair and an anaesthesia outfit. The doctor slipped into a white lab coat and busied himself at a table with a Bunsen burner.
I watched as
he opened ten little packets of wax paper that held a pinch apiece of white powder, like corn starch or confectioner’s sugar. He set a test tube of distilled water to bubbling over the flame and let the powder trickle into it. Some dissolved, the rest scummed up on top. The doctor stirred with a glass rod, turned down the flame.
Something was bothering me. “What were the numbers after those names on the list?” I asked.
“Daily dosages in grains,” he said. “Interesting, too.” He took a little chrome-plated box from his cabinet and began to assemble the parts of a big 400 cc hypodermic needle. “Did you happen to notice the distribution?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“A pity. According to the Theory of Least Squares you’d expect the numbers to be very different in their scattering.” He sniffed at the cooling test tube and undamped it, pouring the fifty grain solution into a small glass beaker.
“If one graphed dosage in grains against number of individuals for any given dosage you’d expect a smooth, bellshaped curve, wouldn’t you?”
“Yep,” I said.
HE DIPPED the needle into the beaker with his left hand. “And yet,” he said, “in a sampling of eighty you find that the curve is almost that of the exponential function. I may do a paper on it.”
Delicately, with his right hand, he lifted the plunger. “The Bulletin of the Society of American Toxicologists, I think,” he said musingly. “I’ve done a couple of pieces on the physiology of addiction for them. A statistical study following them should be very effective, don’t you think?”
He held the loaded hypodermic needle as a fencer holds his epee in the salute, the point level with his eyes, the barrel vertical. With the other hand he pressed delicately on the plunger and a tiny thread of the solution spurted from the tip of the needle.
“No embolism to complicate the autopsy on you two,” he smiled. He turned to the girl, whose face was chalky white, whose eyes were riveted on the tip of the needle, following it as a rabbit does a snake.
He nodded almost imperceptibly at the bouncer, who gripped the girl from behind, by her biceps. He forced her left arm out. She was trembling, and her eyes never left the needle.
“Yes,” brooded the doctor, “narcotics are mad—quite mad.” Casually he slipped the needle into the girl’s arm, just above the elbow. His eyes were on the fine red lines etched in the barrel of the needle. The plunger eased down, expelling the solution into the girl’s vein. It met one of the little lines halfway down the tube and the doctor twitched the needle out with a practiced, competent gesture.
The bouncer pushed the girl into the operating chair. She wasn’t looking at the needle any more, but at the little blister on her arm, with the tiny speck of blood in its center. She began to twitch. Her face was a sea-sick green.
She lurched from the chair and began wordlessly to stumbled towards me. The little man with the big gun stepped in her way and pushed her back into the chair. She gasped for air as the stuff reached the nerves that tell the lungs to breathe and the heart to beat. Her eyes burned and then went out.
I watched her die; I hardly felt the doctor, who was doing something to my arm. I looked and saw him roll up my left sleeve. The hypodermic had been laid on the table right by the Bunsen burner.
“I wonder sometimes,” the doctor was saying, “how it all will end. As you probably know, addiction grows every year. Logically that means that—”
He slipped the needle into my arm at the very instant the bouncer grabbed me from behind in an iron grip. He pressed the plunger and I heaved forward.
“Damn you!” said the doctor.
“You es-stop that stoff,” said the tango dancer silkily. “This way kill you easy. I can shoot you in gots, yes?”
The doctor was standing holding the hypodermic barrel; my move had broken it off where the needle joined it. He angrily plucked the point of the needle from my arm and went to his cabinet.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mathematical Mayhem
WHAT HAPPENED next was new to me. The cocaine that squirted into me before the needle broke began to do things—strange things.
The clock stopped. The doctor took a million years to take one step toward the cabinet. He took a score of eternities to fit the new needle together. While he filled it with fluid from the old one I solved every riddle of the universe and set myself a trillion new ones and solved them all.
Everything was razor-sharp. I was in an eternal, unchanging instant when everything was stripped clean, was utterly itself.
I’m no mathematician, but in that instant I thought about and understood everything I’d ever tried to think about and tried to understand in mathematics.
I idly set myself a problem, a crazy problem that no human being could ever solve in his lifetime, a problem that the big differential analyzing machine at M.I.T. would take a century to answer.
The problem was: Consider and analyse the possible paths of the bouncer, the tango dancer, the doctor, and the bullets from their guns. Calculate a path for Burroughs to follow so that he shall arrive at the little man with the big gun without being either shot or tackled.
Maybe it was just a dope-dream that I set the problem and solved it. Maybe what happened was a combination of luck, a certain amount of training, the shot of cocaine and the crack on the head. Maybe.
So I solved the problem, or thought I did. I broke away from the bouncer and rambled across the floor. I was just out out of the way every time he tried to grab me. Each time the tango dancer tried to shoot it just happened that the bouncer was in the way. It just happened that I reached the tango dancer from the side before he could turn and took his gun from his hand, breaking the wrist as I did so.
I shot the bouncer in the face. The doctor was slowly, slowly, drawing his gun. I aimed carefully, got a perfect sight picture of his left eye and took a hundred years to squeeze the trigger. The bullet drifted through the air and into his head.
The tango dancer was coming at me as though he was walking under water, a knife wavering in his left hand. I gently put the gun in my pocket and took him by the throat. I lifted him slowly and pushed. He floated through the air like a feather in the breeze and crumpled eerily and silently against the wall. He hung there for fifty years and began to drift down the wall to the floor. He lay there looking strangely crumpled and broken.
The eternal instant came to an end. I was just a man, a very sick one when I saw what I’d done. I managed to phone the Narcotics Squad at 32 Centre before I passed out.
They came and chopped down the door and woke me up and patted me on the back and gave me whiskey. They smashed open the store room where we’d been locked up and whistled when they opened the boxes. They called the local FBI chief, and he came, gray-haired, very businesslike and polite, and he shook my hand too, when he’d heard the story.
Then somebody noticed that I was three-quarters dead and called an ambulance.
I woke up in a private room in Bellevue’s Police Ward. Miss Emily Rose Speyendecker was sitting by the bedside, in mourning.
“I do hope you’re feeling better, Mr. Burroughs,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m dreadfully disappointed in Dr. Gandle,” she said unhappily. “And had you heard that poor Charles shot himself?”
“No,” I said.
“In his office. He doted on Eveline, and then this came out. I seem to be the only one left, don’t I? I suppose I’ll always be the survivor.” Her lip trembled for a moment; then she lifted her chin and was a little queen again.
“That’s not what I came to see you about,” she smiled. “You’ll forgive me. I feel it’s really my responsibility, since I called you, don’t you think so?”
She didn’t even give me a chance to answer, but rattled on: “I’ve taken the liberty of making this out. You’ll excuse me, I’m sure. You must be dreadfully tired. I’ll be going now and I do wish you a very speedy recovery, Mr. Burrough.”
An oblong of white paper rest
ed on my blanket and she was gone.
I held the paper to my eyes and turned it over. It was a bank draft—on the oldest bank in North America—for five hundred dollars.
“That makes it all right,” I said to the empty room. “Five hundred dollars makes you forget that you’ve seen death crouch like a panther ready to spring. You won’t remember Eveline and Annie now. The doctor, the bouncer, and the tango dancer were the villains of the piece, so they had to die before the curtain fell. Charles Speyendecker loved his daughter and he died, but you’ll forget it now. You’ll never hear their voices in the night; you’ll never see them watching from the dark with eyes that are now closed forever.”
The paper oblong fluttered from my hands to the floor.
THE END
The Only Thing We Learn
If, like the Professor, we could see clearly, would we hate the enemy that tomorrow will overwhelm us?
THE professor, though he did not know the actor’s phrase for it, was counting the house—peering through a spyhole in the door through which he would in a moment appear before the class. He was pleased with what he saw. Tier after tier of young people, ready with notebooks and styli, chattering tentatively, glancing at the door against which his nose was flattened, waiting for the pleasant interlude known as “Archaeo-Literature 203” to begin.
The professor stepped back, smoothed his tunic, crooked four books in his left elbow and made his entrance. Four swift strides brought him to the lectern and, for the thousandth-odd time, he impassively swept the lecture hall with his gaze. Then he gave a wry little smile. Inside, for the thousandth-odd time, he was nagged by the irritable little thought that the lectern really ought to be a foot or so higher.
The irritation did not show. He was out to win the audience, and he did. A dead silence, the supreme tribute, gratified him. Imperceptibly, the lights of the lecture hall began to dim and the light on the lectern to brighten.
Collected Short Fiction Page 93