Helen McCloy

by Minotaur Country

  “I don’t suppose anybody is.”

  “They are.” Jo Beth looked at Jeremy and then down the table at Vivian. “They are both perfect in their parts, and I think the Governor enjoys every minute of it. Sometimes I wonder about Vivian. She doesn’t take the slightest interest in social questions that interest Jeremy, yet, personally, she is compassionate. Her maid, Juana Fernandez, is a Barloventan immigrant who couldn’t get a job with anyone else. Total illiteracy and no English.”

  “But Mrs. Playfair took her on?”

  “Yes. I met Juana through settlement work. I told Vivian about her, and Vivian promptly offered her this job as personal maid to tide her over until she could learn English and go on to a better job. Few women would have done that.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you? Juana’s face is monstrously scarred, the result of being questioned by secret police under the Roya regime. That face is a much greater handicap than lack of English or illiteracy. Employers, both men and women, took one look at it and said, ‘No.’ It was something they did not want to look at every day. Yet Vivian accepted it as part of her daily life. There is more to Vivian than most people think.”

  Over coffee, the Governor got down to business with Tash.

  “Let me give you a quick run-down on my personal prejudices in writing and speaking.

  “I like everything short—speeches, paragraphs, sentences, and words. I like a frequent change of pace. Monotony will put any audience to sleep. I don’t like starting with a corny joke. Plunge in medias res like Horace.

  “I like salt and pepper; wit, not clowning. Some people object that wit hurts. That’s why we should use it. Politics is a fight. The word ‘slogan’ means war cry. Anger can be useful if you use anger and don’t let it use you.

  “Please avoid rhetoric. Say ‘Duluth,’ not ‘the zenith city of the unsalted seas.’ Say ‘a small group of dishonest bosses,’ not ‘a miniscule coterie of unscrupulous elitists.’ Don’t revive words that were decently buried generations ago, or invent new ones. Don’t say ‘peers’ when you mean ‘equals,’ or ‘confidentiality’ when you mean ‘trust’ or ‘privacy.’ And don’t use nouns as adjectives or verbs.”

  Tash smiled. “So I can’t say everybody who lives in a structured society has a conflicted personality?”

  “Not unless you want to lose all thrust, clout, and charisma. Any other questions?”

  “Only one. What are these speeches going to be about?”

  Jeremy laughed aloud. He was beginning to seem more aware of her as an individual now.

  “A difficult question!” The laughter lines faded. “The campaign starts tonight. I’m announcing my candidacy for a second term at a men’s dinner for Nobel Prize winners at the University. From now on, there will be two major issues: inflation and the strike.

  “There are only a few things you can do about inflation at the state level, but I’m going to do all of them. Carlos will brief you on details.

  “As for the strike, I’m going to call one more conference with union leaders tomorrow. Don’t laugh. It might work this time.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  His eyes went out of focus, looking into his own mind.

  “I can’t do what Carlos and Job want: shift the whole burden onto the President. The responsibility is mine, not his. I don’t want to break a strike by injunction. It’s a bad precedent. But how can I let this Barlovento blockade go on? If I do, people will starve in Barlovento next winter. That’s war. That could mean a little Vietnam on our own front doorstep. I’ll do anything to prevent that.”

  This morning, listening to Job Jackman’s credo, Tash had begun to wonder if it was Jeremy Playfair’s credo, too. If it was, she could not work for him. Now, listening to Jeremy himself, she realized that he had his own credo. It was not Job’s. It was one Tash could respect. Job was evidently the tactician here, not the policy maker, perhaps not even the strategist.

  “Anything else you want to know?”

  “I can’t think of anything, thank you.”

  Jeremy rose. “Back to the salt mines then. What’s on this afternoon, Carlos?”

  “A flock of bills that just passed the legislature before it adjourned.”

  “Important bills?” asked Hilary.

  Carlos smiled. “Most people think the one abolishing capital punishment is fairly important.”

  “But you don’t?” Job looked at Carlos quizzically.

  Carlos shrugged. “I can’t forget the hard-boiled Frenchman who said: Que messieurs les assassins commencent!”

  “You know I don’t speak French.”

  “Let murderers do it first.”

  “What else?” asked Hilary.

  “There’s that bill cracking down on drug addicts,” said Carlos. “Jeremy is going to veto that.”

  Job turned on Jeremy. “You’re making a double mistake: signing a bill to abolish the death penalty and vetoing a bill to crack down on drug addicts. Have you talked to Captain Wilkes about addicts? He’s had a lot of experience.”

  “Wilkes is a post-dated Puritan.”

  “He’s also an average voter. Better than a Gallup Poll any day. Jerry, the trick is to be liberal, but not too liberal. The middle of the road is where the votes are.”

  “We’ve got a new law that cracks down on drug pushers,” said Jeremy. “One of the toughest in the country.”

  “The man in the street wants to crack down on pushers and addicts both,” retorted Job. “He can’t distinguish between them.”

  “But I can. Job, some day we’ll have preventive law-enforcement, as we already have preventive medicine. Until we do we just have to compromise as best we can.”

  He gave good-bye to Jo Beth, nodded to Hilary and Tash, but paused when he came to his wife and took both her hands in his. “Take care of yourself, Viv. Promise!”

  A glance from Hilary summoned Tash.

  “It’s three o’clock already. These luncheons kill the afternoon. I’d never get any work done if we had them often. What do you say to tennis and a swim?”

  “That’ll really kill the afternoon.”

  “You make your own hours here as long as you get things done on time. You can bone up on Barlovento this evening quite as well as this afternoon.”

  “I don’t have a racket or sneakers, and this skirt is narrow.”

  “There are extra rackets for guests in the bathhouse. Sneakers and shorts, too.”

  Tash, long out of practise, was easily beaten by Hilary, but she enjoyed stretching her muscles. Even more, she enjoyed the swim afterward in a borrowed suit.

  When she came out of the bathhouse, she found Hilary had ordered iced tea for both of them.

  “Would you like a sandwich or something?” she asked Tash. “It’s nearly six.”

  “I couldn’t possibly eat anything after a late luncheon like that.”

  “Neither could I. Let’s skip dinner and loaf here until the stars come out.”

  After so many months of living in town, Tash found herself luxuriating in the flower fragrances and the long reaches of new-mown grass gilded by a late afternoon sun.

  “Is all this taxpayers’ money?”

  “A previous governor put in the tennis courts and the pool at his own expense. Jeremy pays for upkeep out of his own pocket. Like so many rich men in office, he is morbidly sensitive to any charge of freeloading, but then he can afford to be. It’s the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who takes the taxpayer for every penny, but as he would be the first to point out, he has to, doesn’t he?”

  Walking back to the office wing through the soft spring night, Tash said: “Has Mrs. Playfair been ill?”

  “What on earth makes you think that?”

  “The way the Governor worries about her. Just now he said: ‘Take care of yourself.’ Monday he said: ‘Are you sure you’re not overdoing things?’ ”

  “That’s just his way. I’m an old friend of the Playfair family. My mother used t
o know his mother. I’ve never forgotten his mother saying years ago: ‘Jerry was always such an affectionate little boy.’ That quality is rare in men.”

  “You’re a pessimist.”

  “Worse. A cynic. I believe in nothing, not even in the political future of Jeremy Playfair and that’s high treason around here.”

  “Then why do you stay?”

  “Because I love Jeremy. I can put it that way, because I’m old enough to be his mother. He has mana.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The thing most people think they’re talking about when they say charisma. It’s Greek, selective and artificial, the gift of divine grace, sought by faith and bestowed by ritual on a priest or sacred king.

  “Mana is Polynesian, unselective and natural, unsought and unbestowed. Every living creature is born with some mana. How could it be otherwise when mana is the power that makes and sustains the universe?”

  “A Polynesian Holy Ghost?”

  “I tried to find out, but the dictionary I consulted said simply: The Holy Ghost. Obsolete. So now I’ll never know what the Holy Ghost is, or rather, was.

  “Better stick to mana. It’s the thing in all of us that works magic and is worked upon by magic, and it can’t work without one’s physical presence. A few people are born with more than their share of it. They cast spells on the rest of us. We go through life dancing to the tunes they play.”

  “And the Governor is one of those?”

  Hilary nodded. “He has too much mana. He has too much of everything. Haven’t you ever noticed how Fate loves a shining target? It’s dangerous to be too lucky. Wasn’t the Greek symbol for Nemesis a measure pressed down and running over?”

  At the door of her own office Tash looked carefully at the array of alarm buttons. One glowed red. That meant the alarm system was working. She switched it off by pressing numbered buttons in the numerical sequence of the combination based on her birth date, and then opened the door.

  “Hilary! Come here, please!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Tash had left her typewriter open. Now, something yellow lay on the keys where she could not miss seeing it the moment she opened the door.

  She had no words for what she felt as she stood looking down at the body of the dead canary.

  Its neck was broken.

  6

  IT WAS HILARY who found a piece of brown wrapping paper in the closet and made a parcel of the dead bird. It was Hilary who remembered to check the alarm button after she had locked the office door behind them with Tash’s key.

  “The alarm’s working now. Was it working when you unlocked the door?”

  “Yes. I switched it off before I used the key.”

  Hilary led the way down the corridor to the door that opened into the rest of the house.

  “Could it have been a cat?” Tash could not quite control her voice.

  “Would a cat leave a dead bird on a typewriter? And then go out of a room, shutting a door and resetting an alarm system? Whoever did all that walked on two legs.”

  “But why would anyone do it?”

  They were crossing the broad front hall to a door Tash had not noticed before. Hilary opened it without knocking. A man in uniform was sitting at a switchboard with earphones on his head. He pushed the earphones aside as Hilary began to speak.

  “Tell Captain Wilkes that Mrs. Truance must see him at once. Priority. I’ll wait here in the hall until he comes.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell Mrs. Playfair?” said Tash.

  “She’s resting,” said Hilary. “She skipped dinner, too. I think we should let her rest.”

  The hall was empty and shadowy as they sat down to wait for Captain Wilkes.

  “I didn’t realize there were so many policemen here,” said Tash.

  “It’s the Governor’s guard, detailed from the state police. There are a dozen of them, but sometimes I think that’s not enough. Obviously, it wasn’t enough today.”

  “Why are you so sure this was someone from outside? Couldn’t it have been an inside job, a wanton joke? One of the pages perhaps? Or somebody in the kitchen?” Hilary shook her head. “I doubt it. They’re all handpicked. They’re all civil servants. They’re well-paid and they’ve always seemed proud of their jobs.”

  “What is Captain Wilkes like?”

  “He’s hand-picked, too. Command of the Governor’s guard, is the plum job for state policemen, and Captain Wilkes is not a stereotype. He’s a West Point graduate who took degrees in law and criminology after he left the Army. Bred to be a soldier, he believes that war is a collective psychosis, epidemic in the twentieth century, and that civilian crime is merely one phase of the disease.”

  “Do you think he’s right?”

  “I don’t know, but if he’s wrong, I hope no one ever tells him so. Captain Wilkes would take it hard, and—” She was cut short by the front doorbell.

  An usher crossed the hall and opened the door to two men in uniform.

  The cavalry breeches and boots reminded Tash that when the state police service was founded there were no cars. The men had patrolled on horseback, like Canadian Mounted Police from whom their uniforms were copied. There had been a lot of resistance to taking them off horses, but it finally became apparent to everyone that they could not gallop after modern cars in a state that comprised ten thousand square miles. Their first cars were big sedans, and their first radios took up the whole back seat. Now they had small, fast cars and two-way radios they could carry in their pockets, but they still wore cavalry boots and breeches and officers still called their men troopers.

  “Captain Wilkes!” Hilary almost ran to the older of the two men. “Look.” She opened the brown paper parcel. “It was in Miss Perkins office, on her typewriter. We found it a few moments ago. Before we went into the office, the door was locked and the alarm system was working.”

  “Miss Perkins?” He bowed to Tash. “You’re assuming this is Mrs. Playfair’s canary?”

  “I know it is.”

  “Let’s make sure.” He turned to the younger man beside him. “Lieutenant Pulaski, you know where the Florida Room is. If the cage is empty, bring it here.” He turned back to Hilary.

  “Does Mrs. Playfair know?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s wrap this up again.” He folded the paper around the dead bird. “I wouldn’t want her to come downstairs and see it suddenly, without any warning.”

  Pulaski came back carrying the cage. There was still sand on the floor and pieces of lettuce and cuttlebone. There were still bowls of seed and water, but the door stood open and the cage was empty. No bright-eyed, little ball of feathers mopped and mowed before the scrap of looking-glass or poured out his heart in song.

  “Be careful how you handle that cage,” said Wilkes. “I know it’s mostly wicker, but there’s some smooth wood in the frame. There just might be a fingerprint. Send it down to the lab with this parcel, mark both Immediate Attention, and send four men to search every room in this house. It’s barely possible that whoever did it is still here, though it’s not likely.

  “One other thing: Call the company that installed the alarm system and tell them we want a technician to come here and check it at once.”

  “It couldn’t be bypassed, could it?” said Hilary. “That’s what I want to find out. It’s an old system, installed years ago. I’ve been telling the Governor that he should demand a more modern one. This doesn’t have any of the latest gimmicks. For instance, it doesn’t have a back-up system working on long-term batteries to switch to automatically if the electricity goes off in a storm.”

  “Anything else, sir?”

  “Yes, I want you yourself to check the men on the gates. Ask each one for names and descriptions of everybody who came in or went out since—” He turned back to Hilary. “When did anyone last see the bird alive?”

  “Before luncheon, I think. A little after one. Tash and I have been with each other ever since one.”

&nb
sp; “And just when did you find the bird?”

  “About ten minutes ago.”

  Wilkes turned back to Pulaski.

  “That narrows it a little. We must identify everyone who went in or out of this place between one and five this afternoon. I also want to know if there were any untoward incidents at the gates, like someone trying to get in or out without proper identification.”

  The lieutenant was starting to salute when Wilkes’ voice arrested his motion.

  “Pulaski.”

  “Sir?”

  Wilkes looked at his watch. “It’s nine o’clock. The Governor is already at that Nobel Prize dinner, making a speech to announce his candidacy. Tell the man on the switchboard here to call the University and ask for one of the Governor’s aides—preferably Mr. de Miranda. Try not to alarm him unnecessarily, but tell him that if it’s at all possible for him to get back here at once without inconveniencing the Governor, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Yes, sir.” This time Pulaski finished his salute and pivoted on his heel.

  “Mrs. Truance, do you think this can be kept out of the newspapers?” demanded Wilkes.

  “If anybody can do it, Carlos de Miranda will.”

  “He must do it. We’ll never find this hole in our security if we’ve got a gaggle of reporters on our heels.” It gave a Tash a funny feeling to realize that she was no longer an outsider, one of the gaggle of reporters. She was now an insider, hoping that those dreadful newspaper people would not get hold of this incident and blow it up out of all proportion to its significance.

  At the same time, she couldn’t help wishing that she could talk over the whole thing with Bill Brewer. How interested he would be and how his comments would throw light into the dark corners!

  “Could the bird have got out of the cage by itself?” Tash was thinking aloud now. “Or could someone have let it out and then become too frightened to report it when the bird got away? Don’t birds indoors dash themselves to death against windowpanes trying to get through the glass they can’t see?”