Helen McCloy

by Minotaur Country

  “Oh, no!” Hilary’s voice was as steely as her hair. “It was all your editor’s idea, not ours.”

  “Does it really matter?” Vivian Playfair sounded as if she were bored with the whole thing. “What questions would you like to ask me, Miss Perkins?”

  “There’s one question all newspaper people would like to ask you, if they dared.”

  “Please dare. What is it?”

  Tash took a deep breath. “Is the Governor going to run for a second term this fall?”

  Vivian’s glance darted to Hilary. Almost imperceptibly, Hilary shook her head.

  “I’m sorry.” The small voice was colorless. “I can’t talk about that.”

  Poor Bill Brewer! This interview was going to be the usual guff after all.

  “Nothing political, if you please, Miss Perkins.” Hilary’s hard smile was more hostile than any scowl.

  Tash was still looking at Vivian. What’s the matter with her? Is she sick? Or afraid? She looks at this Hilary Truance the way a retarded child might look at a harsh, psychiatric nurse . . .

  For some time Tash had been aware of a sound like the ticking of a loud clock: thock . . . thock . . . thock. Now she identified it, the sound of a tennis ball during a fast rally. She could not see a tennis court through the glass walls, but there must be one somewhere nearby.

  “Do you like being a Governor’s wife, Mrs. Playfair?” The idiot question got the idiot answer it deserved. “Who wouldn’t? Such a restful life. Nothing to do. Nothing.”

  Was there a chemical trace of irony there?

  Hilary threw herself into the breach once more. “I am sure Miss Perkins’ readers would enjoy hearing about your conservation program, Mrs. Playfair.”

  Vivian looked blank. “What conservation program?”

  “Those apple trees.” Hilary turned back to Tash. “I’ll give you all the documentation before you leave.”

  Sam looked at Tash quizzically. Had they wasted a whole afternoon getting press releases that would have been mailed to the office anyway?

  “Where are these apple trees?” he asked Hilary. “Could I get a shot of them?”

  “Come over here and I’ll show you.”

  Sam followed Hilary to a glass door and peered over her shoulder. “Those little things?”

  “There are five hundred of them!”

  Something plucked at Tash’s sleeve. She turned her head. Vivian Playfair was at her elbow, speaking rapidly in a voice just above a whisper.

  “Will you do me a great kindness and mail this letter for me when you leave?”

  “Why, of course.” Tash took the envelope, small, square, white, and dropped it in her handbag.

  “Thank you. I really did plant some apple trees here, but I don’t think of it as conservation. It was sentiment, really. When I was a little girl I lived in the country and I used to climb an old apple tree in our orchard that I called ‘Aunt Apple,’ and . . .”

  Tash lost the rest.

  Two men were coming through the trees side by side, tennis rackets in their hands. Both were tall and lithe and immaculate in tennis white. Sun-light, filtered through leaves above, made the fair head gilt and the dark head black. They moved with the unconscious grace of the young, athletic male, and Tash thought she had never seen a more pleasing sight.

  The fair one was the first to see people in the glass-enclosed room. He swerved toward one of the glass doors.

  “Governor!” Hilary Truance was taken aback. “I didn’t—I thought—”

  “Am I intruding?” Jeremy Playfair bent his head below the lintel and stepped into the room.

  He was too masculine to be handsome, but there was something engaging about him, an irresistible air of courage and decision.

  “This is Tash Perkins,” said Vivian. “She’s interviewing me. You must have read her column.”

  Jeremy nodded at Tash as if he scarcely saw her. She was sure he had never heard of her column or of her. His eyes were for his wife only.

  “Viv, are you sure you’re not overdoing things?”

  “Quite sure. I never felt better.” She made an effort to match the words with her voice and smile. She almost succeeded. “Miss Perkins, do you know Carlos de Miranda?”

  The dark young man bowed to Tash with that shadow of ceremonial flourish inherent in Latin genes. Tash remembered Darwin’s account of a French infant, who had never seen French people, but who began to shrug her shoulders before she was a year old. Character might not be inherited, but gesture was.

  Vivian finished her story about the apple trees, and Sam went outside to photograph them. Tash tried hard to think of some question that would give a little spice to this blandest of interviews.

  “Do you think women voters are going to be important in the next election?”

  Vivian looked at her husband. “Why don’t you answer that one?”

  “Of course they’re going to be important,” said Jeremy. “Women are never going back to a world where their only economic value is their sex.”

  “Oh!” Tash’s eyes were shining. “May I quote you on that?”

  “No.” Hilary Truance was on her feet.

  “Wait a minute, Hilary,” protested Jeremy.

  But Hilary stood her ground. “Governor, you must not talk as if you liked women.”

  “Why not? After all, I do.”

  “But it suggests that women like you. Why else would you like them?”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “Bad? It’s political suicide.”

  “You mean men will see me as a traitor to my sex?”

  “I mean men will be jealous. You should make a point of saying something nasty about women every now and then.”

  “Thank you. I shall make a note of that.”

  Jeremy and Carlos were both laughing, but Hilary Truance was serious. “Please remember: Being liked by women does not help a male candidate with male voters. It hurts him.”

  “Don’t worry, Hilary,” said Carlos. “I’ll put a check- rein on his libido until the election is over.”

  “So you are going to run again?” said Tash.

  There was a roar of silence.

  “Nothing is decided yet,” said the Governor. “And neither I nor Mrs. Playfair have anything to say on that subject for publication.”

  “I understand.” Tash sighed. It would have put her story on the front page if she could have announced the Governor’s candidacy. Now she had not got any story and she had annoyed the Governor.

  When Sam came back from the apple orchard, Tash rose to take her leave.

  “It was an unexpected bonus meeting you,” she said to Jeremy Playfair. “I hope some day you’ll let me publish your views on women voters.”

  She smiled at Hilary Truance and Carlos de Miranda, but the smile she gave Vivian Playfair was warmer.

  “You’ve been patient,” said Tash. “And generous with your time. Don’t worry about your letter. I’ll mail it as soon as I get back to town.”

  “Letter?” The Governor looked quickly at Tash. “What letter?”

  “Letter?” repeated Vivian in a cool, steady voice. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  3

  TASH WAS LATE for dinner.

  The headwaiter gave her his smile for steady customers and led her to a table by a window with a view of the river.

  Gordon Freese struggled to his feet slowly as if he were older than he actually was.

  “You’re late.”

  “Sorry.” She smiled her thanks to the headwaiter as he pulled out her chair. Like magic, a Campari soda appeared before her. All the waiters here knew her before-dinner drink.

  Gordon collapsed rather than sat down.

  “Well?” His voice was plaintive.

  “I had an extra job today. I had to go to Leafy Way and interview the Governor’s wife. I was late getting back.”

  “I thought you’d given up reporting.”

  “It was a special assig
nment.”

  “You might have telephoned me.”

  “I didn’t have much chance, really. I came here directly from Leafy Way. Only stopped a moment to drop Sam at the office.”

  “Sam who?”

  “Sam Bates, the photographer who went with me.”

  Tash looked across the table and wondered for the hundredth time: How did I ever allow myself to drift into a relationship like this?

  The most logical answer was the most humiliating: Gordon was the only game in town.

  Tash was a realist. At twenty-five, she knew she had missed the young mating season. Most of the men she met now would be the proverbially very married or very promiscuous or very homosexual. Gordon was the only one she had met who had seemed to her truly uncommitted, as if he might be a male version of herself: lonely and a little shy about love-making.

  Now it was beginning to dawn on her that, in addition to the married, the promiscuous, and the homosexual, there might be a fourth category: the neuter.

  Ethologists had found individuals among birds and mammals in nature who abstained from courtship during the breeding season, though dissection did not reveal any anatomical difference between them and the others. Did something like that explain Gordon?

  If love is “egoism for two,” her dalliance with Gordon was loneliness for two.

  Suddenly, tonight, it seemed intolerable.

  Why tonight?

  Had it anything to do with that vision of two young men in tennis white, sauntering under trees, their heads dappled with sunlight?

  How entirely different this evening would be if either Carlos de Miranda or Jeremy Playfair were sitting on the other side of the table.

  Perhaps it was better to stay at home with a good book or a bad television show, than to go out in the evening with the Gordons of this world.

  “I am hesitating between sweetbreads financière or duck à l’orange,” announced Gordon.

  He was one of those people who can consume a vast amount of calories without gaining an ounce. She had scarcely noticed this before. Tonight, like everything else about him, it irritated her.

  “I’ll have lamb chops and string beans, please.”

  “Dieting again?”

  “I have to, now I spend more time sitting a typewriter than riding or playing tennis.”

  “I sit at a desk all day, but I do not have to diet.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “You are in a frightfully negative mood tonight.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What is the matter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But she did know. She could have answered his question in one word: you.

  Was it his job that made him what he was? Or had he sought the job because he was born that way? He was a civil servant hidden away in an arcane niche of the labyrinthine Department of Progress and Rehabilitation in nearby Washington. His job was his favorite subject of conversation.

  “. . . and so I told him that eight copies are always made of every aide-mémoire in our section and one of those eight should always come to my desk as a matter of routine. He couldn’t answer that. He didn’t even try. So now I am biding my time. If I do not find a copy of the next aide-mémoire on my desk the day it is sent out, I shall take the law into my own hands and go over his head to the Deputy Assistant Secretary. It is a revolutionary thing to do, but what else can I do when a matter of principle is at stake? And—Tash! You’re not listening!”

  “Oh, yes, I am. What happens to all these aides-mémoires in a year or so?”

  “They are stored in a warehouse.”

  “How long has your section been making eight copies of everything?”

  “Since World War Two.”

  “Must be a pretty big warehouse.”

  She had hoped for a smile, but he answered seriously: “It is. Very big.”

  Suddenly, she was thankful things had never gone further between them. He would be a sober, industrious lover. He would read all the sex manuals about “arousing” a woman and bring to love-making the same patience and calculation that he would bring to the coupling of two engines. It would not occur to him that to be joyous such things must be spontaneous and mutual as they are in nature.

  Rain was falling when they reached the parking lot after dinner.

  Tash looked across the open space to a shopping center where neon lights advertised a liquor store.

  “I haven’t a drop of anything to drink. Let’s pick up something over there.”

  “You needn’t bother for my sake,” said Gordon. “I’m just as happy without it.”

  “Then I’ll bother for my sake,” said Tash. “I’m not just as happy without it.”

  Gordon cast one longing look at his dry, warm car, then turned up his coat collar and plodded after her through the drizzle.

  It was a self-service place, more like a supermarket than an old-fashioned wine merchant’s. Shelves along four aisles displayed row upon row of glittering bottles, each ticketed with its price.

  Gordon stopped at the cashier’s desk to buy cigarettes, while Tash wandered down the first aisle looking for a bottle of Madeira, her favorite after-dinner drink.

  “Please, ma’am, can y’all tell me if this here is the cheapest sherry wine?”

  It was the soft speech of the rural, western counties.

  She turned her head and saw at her right elbow a frail boy with hair like thistledown floating around a delicate face. Pale eyes, half-closed, blurred, blind-looking. An elfin smile. He might have been a fallen angel who could still remember Paradise.

  “Aren’t you a little young to be buying wine?”

  “I’m older than I look.”

  “These California sherries are the cheapest. This one is sweet and this one dry. Less sweet.”

  “Thank ya, ma’am.” He didn’t even bother to look at the sherry. He was edging away.

  “These are from New York state, and—”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He was still edging away. Didn’t he want to buy? Was the price too steep?

  She reached for a bottle of rainwater Madeira and turned to drop it in the wire basket on her left arm. Her handbag, dangling by its strap from the same arm, was wide open. The pocket inside, where she kept her wallet, was empty.

  She looked up and saw a tall man. He had a cast in one eye and a mouth that twisted down at one corner. He was holding her wallet in one hand. In the other he was holding a white envelope.

  She reached for the wallet, crying out: “That’s mine!”

  With one blow, he knocked her to the floor.

  Anger brought her to her feet. No one else was near her. No one else was looking toward her. But she could see the backs of of the tall man and the angelic boy moving away from her down the aisle toward the door. They were not running, but neither were they loitering. And they were together.

  “Stop! Wait a minute!”

  Heads turned to look at her as she ran after them.

  They were passing the cashier’s desk when they heard her cry.

  They broke into a run.

  “Gordon! Stop them! They’ve got my wallet.”

  Gordon stood and stared at them, mouth open. Another man, coming through the revolving door, heard her and tried to block their way. He was flung side as they pushed through the door.

  Tash followed them.

  There was a crowd of after-dinner shoppers in the parking lot, but no sign of the man or the boy. Either they had melted into the crowd or hidden in the darkness beyond the lighted windows.

  A police car was parked at the curb with two men in it.

  “My wallet.” Tash was panting now. “They took it. A man and a boy. They just came out of the liquor store. Didn’t you see them?”

  The policeman near the curb shook his head. “Which way did they go, lady?”

  “I don’t know. When I got Outside, there was no sign of them.”

  “You followed them? They might have broken your arm or wors
e.”

  “I know. It was stupid. But I just wasn’t thinking. I didn’t have time to think.”

  “You were lucky they got away. Were there witnesses?”

  “The people in the store.”

  “Then I’d better talk to them. Wait here, Joe.”

  Inside the store, a dozen or so customers were gathered around the cashier’s desk, all talking at once.

  “Officer, the man was short and blond and young.”

  “No, he was well over six feet and swarthy and built like a football player.”

  “There were two men,” said Gordon. “And one had a knife. That’s why I didn’t try to stop them.”

  “I didn’t see no knife!”

  The policeman looked at Tash. “You see? We’ll never get a description.”

  “Why don’t you ask me for one?” she retorted. “I’m the only person who had a close look at them. There were two, a man and a boy. The boy distracted me while the man took my wallet out of my bag.”

  “Sounds like a pro caper,” said the policeman. “You’d better come to the precinct station house tomorrow and see if you can identify them from mug shots. What’s your name and address?”

  She told him.

  “What does the wallet look like?”

  “Brown. Real alligator. I got it before I knew alligators were an endangered species.” She realized she was babbling and tried to pull herself together. “It was lined with tan calfskin. Flat and thin. More like a billfold than a wallet.”

  “Do you know how much money was in it?”

  “Thirty-nine dollars.”

  The policeman was writing all this down in his notebook slowly and laboriously. Tash had an impression he would be handier with a nightstick than a pen.

  “Was there anything else in the wallet besides cash?”

  “No . . . Yes, there was. I almost forgot. A blank check for emergencies. And an identification card. It came with the wallet. I filled it in long ago. Name, address, and telephone number.”

  “You mean you signed this identification card?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “In ink?”