The Eighth Circle

by Stanley Ellin

  A handsome, gray-haired woman came up and looked at the remnants of sandwich in Chipman’s hand. “Oh, Joe,” she said reproachfully.

  Chipman sighed. “How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a wife who counts calories. Hannah, Mr. Kirk here is a real, live private detective. When you find him following you some day you’ll know that the jig is up.”

  Hannah Chipman smiled at Murray. “That’ll be the day. Are you a friend of Alex, Mr. Kirk?”

  “Not quite,” said Murray. “More the friend of a friend.”

  “Alex, the vulgar Bulgar,” Chipman said. “I got him his first job designing some sets for United Television that were real gems, and now look at him. Maybe you don’t know it, Kirk, but he was quite a painter before he got started on these Duco and chickenshit masterpieces of his.”

  “Oh, Joe,” said his wife.

  “Well, that’s what they are,” Chipman said placidly. “After all, I was raised on a New Jersey chicken farm along with a couple of thousand Leghorns. I shoveled enough guano in my time to know it when I see it.”

  “What’re you in town for?” Murray asked. “Just taking in art shows?”

  “No, I’m in on the expense account. My angle is package deals where you put together a star, a director, and a story, and then go beg for financing. The trouble nowadays is with stories. Stars and directors I can shake off trees, but not stories. Right now I’m combing Broadway down to the last flop on the chance that M-G-M hasn’t already bought everything. Kapeesh?”

  “I kapeesh,” Murray said. “But you’ll have a job making good pictures out of what I’ve been seeing this season.”

  “Good pictures? Who said anything about good pictures? Wake up, my friend. Look around you at our brave new world. The movies are all drive-ins today. It’s where the kids go so they can muzzle in the car, and the family people go so they can dump baby in the playground while they catch up on their sleep. You think any of them are worried about how good the picture is? All they want is something on the screen so they’ve got an excuse for being there.”

  “Oh, God,” said Hannah Chipman, “here we go again.”

  Murray said to Chipman: “Come to think of it, I know somebody—strictly by way of business, that is—who backed a show called Time Out of Hand two or three years ago. Ever hear of it?”

  “I not only heard of it, I had the pleasure of turning it down when they were trying to peddle screen rights. That desperate I never was. Why?”

  “No particular reason. How much would you say something like that cost to produce?”

  Chipman shrugged. “Depends on a lot of things. Eighty thousand bucks is rock bottom, but it could run to plenty more by the time you get done adding up this and that. If you want the figures all you have to do is look up the copy of the Wall Street Journal where they announced the incorporation of the play company. That’ll give you the bad news in detail. One thing about financing a show—”

  “Joe,” said his wife, “if you can’t find something else to talk about, I am going to scream.”

  “Isn’t she cute?” commented Chipman. “She hates these business trips, because all you do on them is talk business.”

  “And talk and talk,” said Hannah Chipman. “And you know you won’t have a single story property to show for it when we get back to the Coast.”

  “Maybe not,” Chipman said, “but maybe there’s something else we can take along with us.” He nudged Murray. “Have you seen that?” he asked mysteriously. “Can you picture it in Technicolor?”

  Murray looked, and saw that he meant Ruth, who, with her brow knit in a frown, was intently listening to a harangue by The O’Mearagh.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “Oh boy, have you got a gift for expression,” said Chipman. “My friend, what you are now looking at is more than very nice. It is something aimed at stirring up even the knotheads who inhabit drive-ins. I’ve been watching her right along—”

  “I know, dear,” said his wife.

  “—I’ve been watching her right along, and my uncanny producer’s eye tells me that there are vistas opening for all concerned. How anyone can look so much like a primrose on a river’s bank and yet send out such tiger-lily vibrations I do not know, but that I’ll leave to her analyst. All I’m interested in are those vibrations. Are you getting them?” he asked Murray.

  “Clear as a bell,” said Murray. It struck him that the Chipmans, while unpredictable, might help cushion the impact when he presented himself to Ruth. “You want to meet her?”

  “I sure do,” Chipman said with alacrity. He turned wonderingly to his wife. “How do you like that? He knows her, and he’s been standing here killing time with us. Have you ever seen such self-control?”

  “Not since I’ve known you, I haven’t,” said Hannah Chipman.

  By now, the circle around Ruth had yielded to The O’Mearagh, leaving him in sole possession. He was not happy at the intrusion of the newcomers, and that did not surprise Murray. What did surprise him was the nature of Ruth’s greeting to him. Her hand in his was warm and responsive, her voice altogether friendly. “I’m so glad you came,” she said eagerly. “There’s something I wanted to tell you.”

  With the memory of her panic at their last parting vividly in mind he had expected anything but this. Then he took in her flushed cheeks, her shining eyes, and the empty glass she was holding, and realized that Didi’s explosive martinis had been at work here. It was also clear that they had been at work on The O’Mearagh as well, but with different effects.

  “Movie people,” said The O’Mearagh with loathing after introductions had been made. He stared hard at Chipman. “Ah, but there’s the bloody mercenaries of the arts for you. There’s the carrion birds of culture.”

  “Please,” said Chipman. “I’ve been trying to keep it from my wife. What do you want to do, queer me with her?”

  The object of his concern patted his shoulder encouragingly. “Don’t give it a thought, dear,” she advised him. “You just go be a nice successful mercenary. I’d like it.”

  “I’ll bet you would,” Chipman said balefully. “You succubus. Or is it incubus?”

  “Succubus,” said Ruth. “Do you know anything about Edward the First?” she asked Murray. “I mean, the Plantagenet one?”

  “Only what I read in the papers,” Murray admitted, dazzled by this change of pace. He took the glass from her unresisting hand. “How many of these things have you had so far?”

  “Oh, two or three,” Ruth said airily. “We’ve been arguing about Edward. The O’Mearagh’s planning a long work about the massacre of Celtic bards Edward was supposed to have ordered, and I’ve been telling him that that story was discredited a long time ago. It’s as false as all that nonsense about Richard the Third.”

  “I know Richard the Third,” announced Chipman. “He’s the one who had those kids killed in the Tower, the dirty incubus.”

  “He did not,” said Ruth.

  “I beg your pardon,” The O’Mearagh interposed heatedly, “but he most certainly did. And I will state my principles plainly. I’m against all this whitewashing of scoundrels being done by a gang of professorial jackasses looking to glorify the bloody British Crown. They’re tearing the heart right out of the immortal body of literature, that’s what they’re doing!”

  Chipman raised a magisterial hand. “Objection overruled,” he said.

  The O’Mearagh gave the impression of pawing the ground in his rage. “What the hell do you mean by that?” he demanded. “Whose side are you on, anyhow, mister?”

  Chipman pointed at Ruth. “I’m on her side, the way any redblooded American boy would be. And I mean that no matter how much those kids in the Tower asked for it, you can bet Richard never dared lay a hand on them. Why? Because their grandma wouldn’t let him! Just ask my mother-in-law about that. She’ll tell you.”

  “Joe,” said Hannah Chipman coldly, “that is not funny.”

  “Funny!” cried The O’Mearagh. “I
t’s sheer blather! And,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Chipman, “if you don’t know what you’re blathering about, mister, kindly do not blather at all.”

  Chipman took a deep breath. “Would you care to go outside and repeat that?”

  “I would!”

  “All right,” said Chipman, “go ahead and do it. Meanwhile, I will be talking business to this lovely intellectual who might—just barely might—be interested in a screen test. How about it?” he asked Ruth. “Maybe it’ll pan out and maybe it won’t, but there’s no strings attached. All I want is some footage to see if the camera can catch those vibrations. Are you interested?”

  “Sort of curious,” said Ruth, “but not really interested. You know, they were his nephews, not his sons.”

  “Who?” asked Chipman in bewilderment.

  “Oh, you know who. The princes in the Tower were Richard’s nephews, not his sons. The way it went, the succession to the throne—”

  The O’Mearagh, who had been thinking his own dark thoughts, suddenly plucked Chipman’s sleeve. “Mister,” he stated in a voice that turned every head in the vicinity toward him, “I think you’ve very much insulted me. Will you own up to that like an honest man?”

  “Not me,” said Chipman without rancor. “I’m a born coward. I never insult anyone but children and old ladies. Little old ladies,” he added, and held his hand a foot from the floor to illustrate.

  The O’Mearagh was not to be denied. “I said you’ve very much insulted me, mister, and I do not like it. I do not like it especially when it comes from a big, fat, gutless slob with the reek of the Hollywood charnel house on him. What do you think of that?”

  Murray did not wait to hear Chipman’s answer. And the last he saw of the scene, as he grabbed Ruth’s hand and dragged her out of the storm center, made a remarkable tableau. The O’Mearagh’s fist was bouncing ineffectually off Chipman’s well-padded shoulder, while, almost simultaneously, a large leather handbag wielded by Hannah Chipman was landing flush against the side of The O’Mearagh’s startled face. To add to the picture, the handbag had burst open on the impact, and the air all around seemed full of its flying contents.

  Hannah might not have known it, thought Murray, but no one could have struck a sweeter blow for Edward the First.

  16

  The world outside the house was cold and empty, made fitfully alive by a tearing wind. Under it the naked trees along the block thrashed in unison, and the old-fashioned street light overhead swung in a reluctant and groaning arc at the end of its pole.

  Murray stopped on the sidewalk at the foot of the steps and said, “Hold on, you want to catch something fatal?” and Ruth stood obediently while he buttoned her coat. The warmth of her body surrounded him then, her face was perilously close, and the only defense he could mount against this was to frown, to thrust the coat buttons into place with brusque efficiency, to be the kindly but indifferent male attending to little sister. “Still set on walking?” he asked. “It’s a long way home in weather like this, and I’ve got the car parked right around the corner.”

  “I’d rather walk. And the weather’s wonderful. It makes things look like a Walpurgisnacht.” She looked up at the clouds scudding across the face of the moon. “See that? Probably a witch flying by right now.”

  “It is not. She’d have been spotted by radar and shot down before she got past Long Island. Shot down like a supersonic dog.”

  “Perish the thought,” Ruth said. The tapping of her high heels made a quick obbligato to his footsteps as they moved off down the street, and, he observed, she walked careful inches apart from him. “Perish radar. Perish everything that does away with witches and warlocks and wonders. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” she singsonged cheerfully, picking her way across a stretch of broken pavement, and then let out a small yelp. “Oh, poor mother! But that wasn’t my fault, was it? There are more cracks than pavement here.”

  “That ought to console poor mother,” Murray jeered. “Not that she didn’t have it coming to her. Any woman who lets her drunken daughter fool around with witchcraft—”

  “If you don’t know what you’re blathering about, will you please not blather? I hardly ever fool around with witchcraft any more. And I am not drunk. I have an exceptionally active liver which either does, or does not do, something to the alcohol I ingest, so that it is impossible for me to get drunk. Right now I am merely seeing things through a glass lightly. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “Not a thing,” Murray said devoutly. “It sounds like the ideal state.”

  “It is exactly that.” She sighed with pleasant recollection. “Lordy, what a night. What a pluperfect night. I didn’t stop talking from the time I got there, and I loved every minute of it right up to the knockout. There must have been five years of talk bottled up in me, and plenty of nice, crazy people to listen and argue back. And I like people to argue back, damn it. I hate the mealy-mouthed breed who smile and pat you on the head, instead of having it out.”

  “So I gathered. By the way, while all the handshaking was going on—you know, before the fireworks started—you said there was something you wanted to tell me. What was it?”

  She pondered this, and shook her head blankly. “I don’t know. There was something, but now I can’t remember what. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Terrible. Try talking about something else. Maybe that’ll bring it back.”

  “Talk about what?” she laughed, and then hiccuped. “Oh, God,” she said despairingly, “now I’ve got the hiccups. Everything is breaking down all together.” They had reached Fourth Avenue, and she braced herself with both hands against the mailbox at the corner there, shaken alternately by wild, helpless laughter and a series of shattering hiccups. “Everything!” she finally managed to say. “Mind, body, and soul. I feel like one of Alex’s pictures. What do you make of those pictures?”

  “They remind me of life in the linoleum works,” Murray said. “You know, the standard treatment in these cases is to whack the patient a few times on the back. Suppose I—”

  “You will not. And don’t go trying any other homespun remedies, either. It’s the remedies that kill, not the hiccups. Besides, they’ve gone away. At least, I think they have.” She stood at attention with eyes closed to test this, and then drew a cautious breath. “They have. The ostrich treatment always works. If you close your eyes it’s not there.”

  “Could be. Or was it talking about Alex’s painting that did it?”

  “No, and anyhow I wasn’t talking about it for that reason. You said to talk about something at random, and that’s what I picked. But you’ll have to cooperate. How about some deep-down, vital opinions on the subject?”

  “Not from me,” Murray protested. When they turned south along the avenue the wind was at their backs, and he gratefully felt life returning to his numb features. “What makes you think I’d have any?”

  “Oh,” Ruth said carelessly, “Mrs. Donaldson would, for one.”

  He glanced at her face, but it was all innocence. Too innocent, he decided. “What about Mrs. Donaldson?”

  Ruth shook her head. “I’m sorry, but that slipped out. I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “Skip the vain regrets. What about her?”

  “Well, nothing, really. It’s just that she confided to me—and I quote—that you were positively brimming with deep-down, vital opinions. You were sort of a cultural angel always hovering nearby with the Word. Or didn’t you know?”

  “Sure, I knew,” Murray said with foreboding. “But I didn’t know you two had any chance to swap notes about it. When did all this happen?”

  “At the gallery this afternoon. When she called up to invite me to the party—and honestly, it sounded more like an Evan Griffith Memorial than a party the way it was described—she loudly hinted that the price of admission was attendance at the gallery before the main event, and a few polite cheers for Alex. Of course, I said yes. The next thing I knew, she had singled me out of the
mob there, backed me into a corner, and was talking to me a mile a minute. A lot of it was about you.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Oh, some of each. Did you know you were a fragmented personality and terribly vulnerable?”

  Murray winced. “I suppose that’s a direct quote, too?”

  “Word for word. But that’s all right; she said Evan Griffith was the same way, so you’re in good company. She gave me quite a lecture about Evan. Seems that her job had been to mother, cosset, and service him, in return for which she could count on a swift kick in the teeth now and then. It sounded perfectly delightful.”

  “I didn’t notice her minding very much,” Murray said. “For that matter, it’s not much different with Alex. She asks for it.”

  “I know. I saw her with Alex at the gallery, and it killed me to watch her. She was so terribly possessive and eager and wanting to cluster around, and he—well, it wasn’t anything really brutal—but he just kept shoving her away. It was pathetic, that’s what it was. Doesn’t she have any pride? Doesn’t she realize how pathetic it is?”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference if she did. Look, while you two were hanging over the back fence, did she say anything about this guy Donaldson she used to be married to?”

  “Only enough to let me know there was an ex-husband in the offing. Why? What did he do, beat her up regularly?”

  “Maybe worse,” said Murray. “Fact is, she got him dead to rights on an adultery charge. No, I’m not fooling,” he said in answer to Ruth’s look of suspicion. “I think that catching Donaldson in bed with another woman did a lot more damage to her than any kick in the teeth. And that’s an expert opinion. In my business you get to be quite an expert on adultery, any size, any shape.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Ruth, and her tone—something in it—jabbed a nerve already made raw by LoScalzo.