The Union Club Mysteries

by Asimov, Isaac

"And you want me to do the narrowing?"

  "Yes, if you can. Study the motives and tell me which one will produce a double agent. I can make available to you all the raw data we have on each of the five—'"

  "Not necessary," I said. "I think you have given me all the information I need."

  "I have?" The chief seemed stupefied.

  "I can't be completely certain, of course, but I estimate the odds at six to one that I have the right person."

  "You mean, one of the motives—"

  "Forget the motives. You're so busy being a psychoanalyst that you don't stop to look at the simple things."

  And, as it happened, I was right. The result was that it was Israel that caught the Arab nations flat-footed in the Six-Day War, and not the other way around.

  Jennings, Baranov and I stared at each other.

  "You're faking, Griswold," I said truculently. "You had no way of choosing one of the five, and you know it."

  Griswold manufactured a look of surprise. "You don't see it? Surely, you understand that a code name for an agent is of no use at all if it gives the slightest hint as to the agent's identity. None of our agents would accept a code name that would give him away. In other words, if one of our agents is known to the other side as 'Granite,' the signal that that sends us is that our agent has nothing to do, however indirectly, with granite. And that's what I call 'sending a signal.'

  "We know, for instance, that the agent in question can't possibly have been born in New Hampshire, which is the 'Granite State,' and that eliminates Leigh Garrett, Jr. It also eliminates Saul Stein, since stein is the German word for 'stone' and that's too obviously close to granite to allow the latter to be a good code name."

  "Then it must be the older man," said Baranov. "The fellow who was slated for early retirement. There's no connection with granite there."

  Griswold's eyebrows shot up. "I told you he went to the University of Colorado—which happens to be located in the city of Boulder."

  "The woman—" began Jennings.

  Griswold broke in, "She was a feminist who absolutely insisted on the use of her maiden name. Such women are popularly named after someone who astonished nineteenth-century American society by using her maiden name. She was Lucy Stone, and Roberta Ann Mowery was an obvious Lucy Stoner. That leaves John Wesley Thorndyke, and he it was indeed. Logic is logic!"

  To Contents

  The Favorite Piece

  It is not proper—it is not done—to sing in the library of the Union Club. I admit that. It was just that I had attended one of my Gilbert and Sullivan sessions the night before and my brain was brimming with it, as usual. So I did enter cheerfully, with a wave to the other three and a not very loud "When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls, and the bat in the moonlight flies—" in my resonant baritone.

  Jennings and Baranov looked stoical, but Griswold opened his eyes and said gratingly, "What the devil is that horrible noise?"

  I stopped at once and said, "Not noise at all. It is a phenomenon I like to call music."

  "I daresay," said Griswold, sipping at his drink, "that you would like to call your looks handsome, too, but you will never find agreement in either case."

  "The trouble with you," I said with some little heat, I will admit, "is that you are tone-deaf."

  "Whether I am or not," said Griswold, "does not alter the fact that a decent respect for the memory of Sir Arthur Sullivan should keep you from desecrating his works."

  Baranov said suddenly, "Don't tell me you're a Gilbert and Sullivan fan too, Griswold."

  "Not really, but once—"

  He paused for another sip, and we waited. We knew nothing would stop him now.

  * *

  There are such things as hit men in the world [said Griswold]. Killers for hire.

  They are hard to handle for they work with professional skill, and there is no way of connecting victim and killer motivationally. Too many such murders go unsolved and the police tend to be frustrated by such cases. They're especially annoyed when they are actually on the track and yet lack that little bit required to prevent a murder or trap a murderer.

  It's then that I tend to be called in. Somehow, they have the feeling that even when all else fails, I will come through. I am the soul of modesty, of course, but the facts do tend to speak for themselves.

  The captain said to me, "We've made considerable progress, Griswold. We're on the track of a small group of very clever—and high-priced—killers, but we haven't been able to reach the point where we can pin them to the wall before a judge and jury. Now we have a chance to catch one of them in the act, if we move quickly and!—if we know exactly what to do."

  "Suppose you tell me what you know."

  The captain cleared his throat. "We keep the killers under surveillance, you understand, as far as we can. We have to be very careful, though, because we don't want them to know they are under surveillance, and with conditions being what they are these days, we have limited resources and can't do as much as we'd like."

  "I take that all for granted," I said. "What is it you know?"

  "A few scraps of dialog."

  "Gained how?"

  "Never mind how. We can't introduce it into court, but it's authentic."

  I shrugged. "Go ahead."

  "One of our characters entered, saying—or rather singing: 'As someday it may happen that a victim must be found, I've got a little list—I've got a little list.' The second said, 'Oh, yes?' and the first said, 'And the favorite piece. The favorite piece.' Unfortunately, that's it. Nothing more." "They got out of range of the bug, did they?—Or found it?"

  The captain made a rasping sound in the back of his throat.

  I said, "I take it the first one was singing a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan."

  "From something called The Mikado, I'm told. That's out of my line."

  "The killers seem to have a small bit of middle culture."

  "They're not your ordinary thugs," said the captain. "But they're just as deadly."

  "Does the small bit of dialog help you at all?"

  "Almost! We've got a modus operandi on them. At least there are two killings we think we've tied to them, each one at a theatrical performance of the kind in which there are occasional bursts of applause, and where the applause is sure to come at certain times."

  "Oh?"

  "No one looks at strangers during applause. You're concentrating on the stage, where the players or the performers are grinning and bowing and making gestures. If someone comes in and takes a seat during one round of applause, and leaves during the next round, no one, but no one, looks at him. No one can describe him."

  "How about the people whose feet he steps all over?"

  "The empty seat is on the aisle. The victim is occupying the seat second from the aisle. The killer sits down next to him. At the next round of applause, he just puts a small dart gun under his rib cage, fires it and leaves. It makes no sound that can be heard over the applause. The victim hardly feels it, I'm sure, but the dart is poisoned and in three minutes he's dead. He slumps in his chair and no one even knows he's dead till the performance is over and he doesn't get up. We know someone must have been sitting next to him at some point in the performance, but we have no witnesses who are in the least useful."

  "Very clever, but surely you can find out who arranged it. Who bought the ticket for the victim and gave a companion ticket to the killer?"

  "The victim buys it himself—two on the aisle, only his wife can't go—terrible headache. She hopes she can go later and asks him to leave the aisle seat for her. He gives the ticket taker the second ticket and says he's expecting someone later. She doesn't make it, but the killer does."

  "Sounds to me as though the wife hired the killer."

  "We've got to prove it, though," said the captain. "Suppose we wait for someone to come in midway and take an aisle seat. If we've got a policewoman dressed up as an old lady in a wheelchair, we can then move her up the aisle next to the aisle seat two
behind him. He'll be looking straight ahead because he doesn't want to flash his face in any direction where someone can study it—so he won't see her. And she won't attract undue attention anyway. Wheelchairs in the aisle aren't unusual sights in these days of equal rights for the disadvantaged.

  "Then just before the crucial applause breaks out, she'll move her wheelchair up next to the killer's seat. If he is the killer, he'll take out his dart gun, and she'll have a real gun in his ribs, and two other policemen will be closing in. We'll have him and we'll sweat out of him all the information we can get about everyone else in the organization. That's what plea bargaining is for."

  I said, "It sounds good to me. Go ahead and set it up."

  "I can't," growled the captain. "I don't know who the intended victim is, so I can't trail him. I don't know what the performance is, or where it will be held, or at what points the killer will enter or leave."

  "Since you told me about those scraps of dialog you overheard and seem to think it's authentic, I should think the performance in question would be of The Mikado."

  "Even I could think of that, but it isn't. Here, let me describe what we've been doing."

  The captain leaned back in his chair and glowered at me. "To begin with, we have reason to suspect the murder will be committed some time within a month and somewhere in this city. We're not a hundred percent sure of it, but ninety-five percent at least—and there's no performance of The Mikado scheduled any time this spring in the city or anywhere near it.

  "So we thought it might be some other Gilbert and Sullivan production. They wrote a dozen—I've become an expert on those operettas, believe me. It turns out that there are three productions this month by three different amateur groups: Iolanthe, Princess Ida and H.M.S. Pinafore.''

  I said, "You've got it down to three."

  "Yes, but which of the three?"

  "Cover them all."

  The captain ground his teeth. "There are six performances of Iolanthe, five performances of Princess Ida and eight performances of H.M.S. Pinafore. That's nineteen altogether. Do you think I can tie up a significant portion of my bureau in that way?"

  "You'll stop a murder."

  "And how many crimes will take place, or go unsolved, because I've let my men be tied up? There's such a thing as cost effectiveness even in police work. I've got to cut down the possibilities somehow. That's why I need you."

  "You need me? What can / do?"

  "Tell me the favorite piece."

  "What?"

  "He said—the fellow with the 'I've got a list' song— that it was the favorite piece. I assume he's talking about the piece sure to get the loudest and most prolonged applause, which makes sense, except how can we decide which that is?"

  I said, "How can I tell you? I'm not a Gilbert and Sullivan fanatic."

  "Neither am I. But there's one guy in the Department who has a friend who is. I called him in."

  "Good move."

  "It didn't help. In Iolanthe, he said there's a trio about 'Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady,' which is often a showstopper. But there's also what he called the Sentry's Solo, and the Chancellor's Nightmare, and the whole First Act finale. He says each of them has its devotees. In the case of Princess Ida, there's the trio 'Haughty, Humble, Coy, or Free,' or 'A Lady Fair of Lineage High' about a princess and an ape, and Gama's song about being a philanthropist. He says they might qualify- And in H.M.S. Pinafore, he listed a dozen songs, so help me, 'I'm Called Little Buttercup,' 'When I Was a Lad,' 'I Am the Captain of the Pinafore,' 'Never Mind the Why and Wherefore' and so on. He ended up saying there was no way of choosing a favorite piece because every person had his own favorite and they were all great."

  "It sounds bad," I said.

  "But I've been thinking. The person we overheard did not say, 'My favorite piece.' He said 'the favorite piece,' as though it weren't a question of personal preference, but something absolute. I thought about that and I decided it's not a question of straight Gilbert and Sullivan thinking. There's something tricky about this and so I might as well ask Griswold. Tell me you can think of something."

  I had never seen him look at me so pleadingly in all our years of acquaintanceship. I said, "I take it you want me to tell you which one piece at which one theatrical performance will be the one the killer will attend on the basis of this scrap of dialog you overheard."

  "Yes."

  So I told him. It was a long chance, a terribly long one, but I couldn't resist that pleading look and, as it happened, I was right.

  Griswold finished his drink, smiled at us fishily from under his straggling white mustache and said, "So you see, I may be tonedeaf, but I am quite capable of understanding a musical clue." And he then actually settled back in his chair and made as though to go to sleep.

  I shouted in outrage, "There is no clue. / am a Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast, and I tell you there is no way of deciding the favorite piece in any play."

  "No way for you," said Griswold with a sneer, "because you thought 'I've got a little list' was a quotation from The Mikado. Might it not have been a play on words? Suppose you spell 'list,' 'LISZT.' The word has the same pronunciation, but it now refers to Franz Liszt, the Hungarian musician, who wrote a number of pieces of which the favorite is Hungarian Rhapsody #2. There's no question of personal taste there. It's the favorite. At the Philharmonic, the program on one particular night included Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody. It got tumultuous applause as it always does. Under the cover of the applause, the police nabbed the killer, then broke the murder ring, saved the husband and got the wife a prison sentence."

  To Contents

  Half a Ghost

  Most of our discussions at our Tuesday evenings in the Union Club library arise out of moral indignation. It was Baranov's turn, apparently.

  "There are something like eight congressmen," he said, "who are being investigated on suspicion of using cocaine made available to them by a ring of congressional pages. Now that's disgusting."

  I think it's disgusting, too, but I was feeling irritable, so I said, "Why? How many congressmen are half-drunk half the time? How many are mentally blurred with tobacco smoke? Why pick and choose between addictions?"

  "Some addictions," said Baranov, "are against the law, which makes a difference—or it should do so to congressmen."

  "How many of them stretch the facts to ribbons on their tax returns? That's against the law, too."

  Jennings jerked his thumb in my direction. "That's Larry Liberal for you. If they don't ban tobacco because he doesn't smoke, then they might as well permit cocaine."

  I said freezingly, "I happen not to use cocaine, either. I'm just trying to tell you that hypocrisy is not the answer. We either solve the social problems that give rise to drug abuse—and that includes tobacco and alcohol—or we'll just be bailing out the ocean with a sieve, forever."

  Griswold's soft snore seemed to hit a knot at this point. He uncrossed his legs, blinked at us a bit, having clearly heard us through his sleep, as, through some

  special magic, he always did. /

  "Law-enforcement officers have to enforce the law, whether that helps or not," he said. "Someone else has to solve the social problems."

  Jennings said, "And I suppose you did your bit."

  Griswold said, "Now and then. When asked to help. Once, I remember, that involved a ghost story—after a fashion. Or half of one, at any rate." He sipped at his scotch and soda and adjusted his position in the armchair. It was clear he was going to pretend to nap a bit more, when Jennings's shoe kicked gently against his ankle.

  "Oh," said Griswold, in a dismal attempt at innocent surprise, "do you want to hear the story?"

  I'm not often called into ordinary police cases [said Griswold], since the necessary methods for dealing with them represent Tom Edison's recipe for genius—ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration.

  If, for instance, there is suspicion that a drug ring is operating somewhere and is getting so completely
out of control that it cannot be ignored—where it is reaching into middle-class schools, for instance, or into the police stations themselves, or into Congress, as is now suspected—then the forces of the law are galvanized.

  A great many people must then do a great deal of waiting, following, questioning, sifting through statements, listening to lies, staying up late, running risks—

  It takes a long time, and once in a while a great deal of heroin, or cocaine, or some other drug is confiscated; various people involved in the operation are arrested and even convicted; and the newspapers have a field day.

  The drugs that are confiscated, if they are properly destroyed, never find their way into human physiology. The drug dealers are taken out of circulation, for at least a while. Even so, there are always more drugs coming into the marketplace, and there are always new drug dealers arising from somewhere. As our friend here said, it has a great likeness to bailing out the ocean with a sieve. And sometimes—most of the time—the efforts are less than spectacular. The drugs are confiscated in trivial quantities, if any, and the majestic arm of the law comes to rest on the shoulders of privates in the ranks; or of helpless and miserable users, far more sinned against than sinning.

  Yet, as I said, my friends in the police department have to struggle along, doing what they can. It is their job. And if we're going to allot responsibility for the world's troubles, they should get off rather lightly—at least in most places and at most times.

  I suppose that to any police officer running an investigation into drugs, there may come a time when a run-of-the-mill bit of procedure suddenly, and unexpectedly, comes to bear promise of leading to some sort of major "bust." A bit of information comes in that might, just possibly, open the road to the higher echelons in the drug trade. Quite apart from mundane considerations, such as favorable attention in the media, promotions, and salary raises, the officer may well feel the thrill of striking a blow for the forces of decency and civilization.

  Usually, it is the ninety-nine percent of perspiration that gets the police to that point, and then, if they're to strike fast, and give the opposition no chance to cover up, to set up a protective shield, they may sometimes need that one percent of inspiration, and—if they are smart—that's when the police call on me.