The Union Club Mysteries

by Asimov, Isaac

  The last was addressed to me, and Griswold opened his eyes now to reinforce the remark.

  I said, "You'll have to tell the story first."

  The most delicate job a spy can have [said Griswold] is recruiting. How do you persuade someone else to betray his country without revealing your own position?

  For that matter, the problem is a difficult one for the person being recruited. There have been cases of perfectly loyal government employees—whether civilian or armed service—who allowed recruiting efforts to go on because they honestly didn't understand what was happening, or because they thought the other fellow was joking.

  By the time they do report—if they do—there may be people in government intelligence who have grown suspicious of them, and their careers may therefore be inhibited or ruined without their having ever really done anything out of the way.

  In fact, I have known cases where the recruiting agent deliberately spread suspicion against his victim in order to enrage the poor person against the government for falsely suspecting him. The person in question is then actually recruited.

  The man I am going to tell you about, whom I shall refer to as Davis, avoided the obvious pitfalls.

  He carefully reported the first sign of recruitment to his superior, whom we shall call Lindstrom, at a time when, in fact, what had occurred might well have been only idle conversation. It was, however, during those years when Senator McCarthy had inflamed American public opinion and had reduced men in public office to near hysteria. Davis was, however, a man of integrity. Though he reported the incident, he refused to give the name of the army officer who was involved. His reasoning was that it might indeed have been an innocent conversation and that, in the heat of the times, his testimony could serve to destroy a man unjustly.

  That put Lindstrom in a delicate position. He himself might be victimized if things went wrong. Nevertheless, he was a man of integrity too, so he accepted Davis's reserve, assured him he would bear witness to his loyalty in reporting, and in writing (carefully worded, you may be sure) ordered him to play along until he was certain that the person involved was really disloyal and then to give his name.

  Davis was worth recruiting, you understand. It was before the days when computers became omnipresent, and Davis was one of the very few who had his finger on the statistical records of the government. He knew where all the dossiers were, and he had access to them. He could conjure up more rapidly than one would believe possible, considering that he had no computer to help him, the intimate details of any one of millions of people.

  It would make, of course, an unparalleled instrument for blackmail, if Davis could be persuaded in that direction, but Davis—a single man who could afford to be single-minded—had thought for only one thing, his hobby.

  He was an astrologer. No, not the kind you think. He didn't prepare horoscopes or make predictions. He had a strictly scientific interest. He was trying to see whether, in truth, one could correlate the signs of the zodiac with personal characteristics or with events. He was studying all the people in Leo, all the people in Capricorn and so on, and trying to find out if a disproportionate number of Leos were athletes, or whether Capricornians were prone to be scientists and so on.

  I don't think he ever found out anything useful, but it was his obsession. In his department, the standing joke was that he might not know someone's name, but he surely knew his sign.

  Eventually, he was convinced that the recruitment was seriously meant, and he grew increasingly indignant. He told Lindstrom that the traitor would be coming to his apartment to work out the final details, and that he (Davis) would come to Lindstrom at midnight with the full details.

  But Davis was not an experienced operator. The recruiter had divined the fact that Davis might be reporting to the authorities and took the most direct action to stop him.

  When Davis didn't keep his midnight appointment, Lindstrom went to Davis's apartment and found him there—knifed.

  He did not find him quite dead, however. Davis's eyes opened and he stared glassily at Lindstrom. Davis was lying across a small table and trying feebly to reach toward some file cards resting nearby. There were four of them, all somewhat bloodstained.

  Davis mumbled, "Should have known—misfit—only sign doesn't fit the name." Then he died.

  The next day, at noon, I got a phone call from Lindstrom, begging me to come see him at once! I was reluctant to do so because it would mean missing the first game of the World Series on my brand-new television set, but Lindstrom grew so panicky I had no choice.

  When I arrived, Lindstrom was in conference with a young first lieutenant, who looked even more dreadfully disturbed than Lindstrom did. The entire department must have been in turmoil that day. As soon as I came, though, Lindstrom sent the lieutenant away, saying absently after him, "And happy birthday."

  He waited till the lieutenant was gone, then opened the door, made sure the corridor was empty and returned.

  I said sardonically, "Are you sure this place isn't bugged?"

  "I've checked it," he said quite seriously. Then he told me what had happened.

  "Too bad," I said.

  "Worse than that," he said. "Here's a man who knew of a traitor right in our department and I didn't force the information out of him at once. Now I've lost the man, and the traitor and McCarthy will have my head for it." "Will he find out?" I asked.

  "Of course. There must be at least one person in this department who reports to him regularly."

  "Do you have any leads?"

  "Not really. The four cards on the table were Davis's own cards, the kind he uses to file and cross-file human characteristics against astrological signs.—That's his obsession. Let me explain!" And he did.

  I said, "What were the four cards doing there?"

  "Perhaps nothing. They were four officers in this department, and I don't know what he was doing with them. Still, he was reaching toward them as though he wanted to take one or point to one and he talked about someone being a misfit, with a sign that didn't fit his name."

  "He didn't say his name?"

  "No. He was dying, almost dead. His last thought was of his obsession: his damned astrological signs."

  "Then you don't know which of the four it is."

  "That's right. And as long as we don't know, all four will be under suspicion. That will mean ruined careers if McCarthy zeroes in on it; and for at least three of them, possibly all four, it would be an incredible injustice. Listen, do you know the astrological signs?"

  "Yes, certainly. Aries the Ram, Taurus the Bull, Gemini the Twins, Cancer the Crab, Leo the Lion, Virgo the Virgin, Libra the Scales, Scorpio the Scorpion, Sagittarius the Archer, Capricorn the Goat, Aquarius the Water Bearer and Pisces the Fish. Twelve of them, in that order. Aries governs the month beginning March 21, and the rest follow, month by month."

  "All right," said Lindstrom, "and the English names are all direct translations of the Latin. I checked that. So Davis's remark about the sign not fitting the name doesn't refer to that. The only alternative is that the name of the sign doesn't fit the name of the officer. The cards had each the name of an officer and, among other personal data, the sign he was born under."

  "Any obvious misfits?"

  "No, the four names happen, by a miserable chance, to be utterly common; Joseph Brown, John Jones, Thomas Smith and William Clark; and not one of the names, first, last, or in combination, seems to either fit, or not fit, the person's sign in any way."

  "Does each have a different sign?"

  "Yes."

  "And what do you want me to do?"

  Lindstrom looked at me out of a face twisted in misery. "Help me. I have the cards. They've been checked for fingerprints and only Davis's have been found. Look them over and see if you can see anything in them that will make sense to you in the light of Davis's final remark."

  I said, "I may have the answer now. That first lieutenant who was here when I came in—You wouldn't talk until you were sure he
was gone. You even looked out in the hall to make sure he wasn't hanging about near the door. Was his one of the names on the list?"

  "Yes, as a matter of fact. He's Lieutenant Tom Smith."

  "Then I think he's your man. Judging by his face, he was in a bad way. Call him in, with a witness, and tackle him hard, and I'm sure he'll break."

  He did break. We had the traitor; and three innocent men (four, counting Lindstrom) were saved.

  Griswold looked smug and self-satisfied, and I said, "Griswold, you've made that up. There's no way you could have gotten the answer on the information you had."

  Griswold looked at me haughtily. "No way you could have. I said I was called in the first day of the World Series. That meant early October. Count the astrological signs from Aries, which governs the month beginning March 21, and you'll find that six months afterward comes Libra, which governs the month beginning September 22. Lindstrom wished the lieutenant a happy birthday, so he was born in early October under the sign of Libra."

  "So?" I said with a sarcastic inflection.

  "So Davis said 'the sign doesn't fit the name,' not 'his name.' It wasn't the man's name being referred to. The signs are all part of the zodiac and, in Greek, 'zodiac' means 'circle of animals.' You don't have to know Greek to see that the beginning 'zo' is in 'zoo' and 'zoology.' Well, look at the list of signs: ram, bull, crab, lion, scorpion, goat and fish—seven animals. If you remember that human beings are part of the animal kingdom, there are four more: a pair of twins, a virgin, an archer, and a water bearer. Eleven animals altogether. One and only one sign is not an animal, or even alive. It is the only sign that doesn't fit the name of zodiac. Since the four names were all officers in the department and I met one officer, who looked miserable and who was a Libra, I thought that if he was one of the four, he was also the supposed misfit, and the murderer. Well, he was one of the four, and he was the murderer." So I paid Baranov the half-dollar, and the bum took it.

  To Contents

  Catching the Fox

  "Drugs," said Jennings thoughtfully, "are strictly a twentieth-century problem, I think; All through history people have been chewing on plants to get hashish or cocaine or nicotine or anything that would make them feel good in a lousy world. No one worried about addiction, physical harm, lowered life expectancy. Life expectancy was only thirty-five or less anyway."

  "I know," said Baranov. "I think sometimes—if they want it, let them have it. No one ever mugged someone because he had his shot; only because he didn't, and needed money to buy one. I don't want to give up my life just to keep someone from having his shot; sooner his life than mine."

  I had difficulty respecting the quiet of the Union Club library, but I managed to keep my voice under control. "You two cementheads talk that way because you feel that drugs are just a matter of bums, college weirdos and ghetto people. You can't isolate it like that. Once you have a drug-ridden society, we're all potential victims— you, me, and our kids. Then, too, we have worse drugs now than any that plant life has ever manufactured, thanks to our clever chemists."

  "Larry Liberal is heard from," said Baranov, lifting a lip. "Everything is either society's fault or society's responsibility. Even if we try to stop it, we always fail. So?"

  "Then we fail; but we've still got to try," I said earnestly. "If we quit, if we let it take over unopposed—"

  From the depths of Griswold's armchair came his deep voice. "Have you been fighting drugs, or just talking."

  "Have you been fighting it?" I asked hostilely.

  Griswold said, "Once or twice."

  "Oh?" said Jennings. "Have you been on an antidrug detail?"

  "No! But I've been consulted by those who have been. I was frequently consulted on all sorts of things. Drugs too, of course. Naturally, I don't suppose you are interested."

  I said, "We'll pretend we're interested, Griswold. Go ahead."

  The trouble with grand theories of crime [said Griswold] is that they don't help the law-enforcement officer.

  A policeman, a treasury agent, a secret-service man can't do his job by considering the effect of societal reform, or psychiatric expertise. Invariably, he is facing some specific criminal event, some particular crime and criminal; and he must come up with something specific in response.

  Everything sometimes works its way down to a single cat-and-mouse game—with nothing else counting.

  This was the case with Lieutenant Hoskins (not his real name, of course) on a particular police force, who was faced with the drug problem in his particular city.

  It began in a broad, general way, with newspapers pointing up the enormousness of the problem, and speaking of the degeneration of society. The matter became an issue in a mayoralty campaign: the winning candidate promised a firm drive to put an end to the scandal and to see that criminals were placed behind bars; the chief of police announced that he would bend all the resources of his department to the task.

  But it was Hoskins who had to determine what to do with specific examples of dope using, and dope pushing, and dope transfer from wholesale suppliers to the retail level.

  It was easy to pick up small-fry users, whose lives were at their dregs, and who were being bled white by the pushers, but what good would that do? For that matter, it was easy to pick up the pushers, and how much more good did that do? Even if you got them past the lawyers and the courts, the prisons were already bursting at the seams and there was no money to build new ones.

  The flow had to be stopped much nearer the source and that was Hoskins's job.

  In the course of time, he managed to work out one important method of delivery, one key item in the transportation link that affected his own city. Important deliveries, it seemed, were made by car by one particular person. Little by little, through complicated analyses of events, through information squeezed out of informers, details were filled in.

  It was simplicity itself. There was no attempt to hide the material. It was in some sort of container under the driver's seat. It was simply driven from point A to point B, usually in the early dawn.

  The driver was a master of simple disguise. He changed hats and hairstyle. He would wear contact lenses or horn-rims, sweaters or sports jackets, or heavy-duty shirts. He never looked the same twice, and the only thing that always characterized him was that he was never noticeable.

  Nor did he ever use the same car twice; nor stick to the same route; nor to the precise points A and B.

  He came to be called the Fox. It was a private name the police used, and it boiled down to a private war between Hoskins and the Fox. I suspect the Fox knew this and enjoyed it, and got more of a kick defeating Hoskins than out of making whatever profits he enjoyed.

  As for Hoskins, I'm sure he would have been willing to have allowed the drug traffic free reign in the city, if he could only snare the Fox. Hoskins wasn't in it for abstract justice; he just lusted after the chance to catch this particular person.

  We were sharing a drink once when he broke down and told me about it. I'm sure he didn't want to, because he was a proud man, who would have liked to snare his adversary without outside help. In the end, though, he was driven to ask for it. The need to win at any cost and in any way forced him to come to me.

  "The trouble is," he said, "that bastard has second sight. I'm sure of it. There have been times when we were sure we knew which route he would take, and we would set up a roadblock at some bottleneck and stop cars and search them. We never found a thing, and by the time we gave up, the new supply of dope had been delivered. He could always sense a roadblock far enough away to be able to take an alternate route. I think if we stopped every car in the city, he would simply not move at all, or he would find the one hole we had left; or he would make himself invisible, damn it.

  "It wouldn't be so bad, Griswold," Hoskins went on, "if he were using some super-clever technique, but he just drives the thing in, without any attempt at secrecy. What contempt he must have for us!"

  I said, "What do you know ab
out him?"

  "Nothing for certain. We have lots of items that one informant or another has hinted at or guessed at, but we don't know how far any of this can be trusted. He's average height and there are no distinguishing marks. We could guess that. Once we were told he had a limp, not a noticeable one, but we couldn't pin it down to a particular leg. Once we were told he was color-blind by a fairly reliable stoolie, whom we never saw again afterward, so that we weren't able to get confirmatory details. Once we were told he was well educated and sounded like a college professor, but our source surely couldn't have known what a college professor sounded like."

  I said, "Does he drive alone on these occasions?"

  "We're pretty sure of that," said Hoskins. "He's not the type who would trust a confederate or who would willingly share his loot."

  "It's just that I thought that if he were color-blind, he'd have trouble telling the red and green lights apart, and he might prefer to have someone else driving."

  Hoskins waved his hand wearily. "No. The lights aren't quite identical even to red-green color-blind people. There's difference in tone and shading, I've been told." "Wouldn't he have trouble in getting a driver's license, though?"

  "Not at all. They don't test for color-blindness in this city."

  So I thought about the matter and then, after a while, and after another scotch and soda, I said, "Can you tell when and by what route he's going to make a delivery?"

  "There are certain indications; some few scraps of knowledge we have. There are times when we can make a good guess as to. when he's going to make his move, and even how. But I told you, we've never caught him."

  "And you could really guess at a particular route?"

  "Well, even money."

  "That's not bad. And you could lie in wait?"

  Hoskins shook his head. "We've tried that. I've told you. We've never caught him."

  "Of course not, when you have your police cars flashing their lights and blinding everyone within sight and when you have roadblocks all over the place. You have everything but neon signs lit up, saying, 'Here be the police.'"