More Tales of the Black Widowers

by Isaac Asimov

  “Did they find anything?” asked Avalon.

  “Numerous things. Aunt Hester was too shrewd to tell them exactly what she was looking for. She just asked them to turn every single page and bring her any little thing they found, any scrap of paper, she said, or anything. She promised them a quarter for anything they found, in addition to a dollar for every hour they worked, and fed them all the milk and cake they could hold. Before it was over, each girl had gained five pounds, I'm sure. They located dozens of miscellaneous items. There were bookmarks, for instance, though I'm sure they were not my uncle's, for he was no reader; postcards, pressed leaves, even an occasional naughty photograph that I suspect my uncle had hidden for occasional study. They shocked my aunt but seemed to delight the little girls. In any case they did not find any stamp.”

  “Which must have been a great disappointment to your aunt,” said Trumbull.

  “It certainly was. She had immediate dark suspicions that one of the little girls had walked off with it, but even she couldn't maintain that for long. They were perfectly unsophisticated creatures and there was no reason to suppose that they would have thought a stamp was any more valuable than a bookmark. Besides, Aunt Hester had had her eye on them at every point.”

  “Then she never found it?” asked Gonzalo.

  “No, she never did. She kept on looking through books for a while—you know, those that weren't in the library. She even went up into the attic to find some old books and magazines, but it wasn't there. It occurred to me that Uncle Bryce may have changed the hiding place in his later years and had told her of the new one—and that she had forgotten the new place and remembered only the old one. That's why I said what I did during dinner about two hiding places. You see, if that were true, and I have a nagging suspicion that it is, then the stamp could be anywhere in the house— or out of it, for that matter—and frankly, a search is hopeless in my opinion.

  “I think Aunt Hester gave up too. These last couple of years, when her arthritis had made it almost impossible for her to move around, she never mentioned it. I was afraid that when she left the house to me, as he had made it quite plain she would, it would be on condition that I find the stamp—but no such thing was mentioned in her will.”

  Avalon twirled the brandy glass by its stem and said rather portentously, “See here, there's no real reason to think that there was such a stamp at all, is there? It may be that your uncle amused himself with the belief he had a valuable item, or may just have been teasing your aunt. Was he the kind of man capable of working up a rather malicious practical joke?”

  “No, no,” said Leominster, with a definite shake of his head. “He did not have that turn of mind at all. Besides, Aunt Hester said she had seen the stamp. On one occasion, he had been looking at it and he called in Hester and showed it to her. He said, 'You are looking at thousands of dollars, dear.' But she did not know where he had gotten it, or to what hiding place he had returned it. All she had thought at the time was that it was unutterably foolish for grown men to pay so much money for a silly bit of paper— and I rather agreed with her when she told me. She said there wasn't anything attractive about it.”

  “Does she remember what it looked like? Could you recognize it if you found it?” asked Avalon. “For instance, suppose that shortly before the time of your uncle's death he had placed the stamp with the rest of his collection for some reason—perhaps because your aunt was in Florida and could not nag him, if he wanted it available for frequent gloating. —Was she in Florida at the time of his death, by the way?”

  Leominster looked thoughtful. “Yes, she was, as a matter of fact.”

  “Well then,” said Avalon. “The stamp may have been in the collection all along. It may still be. Naturally, you wouldn't find it anywhere else.”

  Trumbull said, 'That can't be, Jeff. Leominster has already told us that the stamp collection was appraised at ten thousand dollars, total, and I gather that this one stamp would have raised that mark considerably higher.”

  Leominster said, “According to Aunt Hester, Uncle Bryce once told her that the stamp in question was worth his entire remaining collection twice, over.”

  Avalon said, “Uncle Bryce may have been kidding himself or the appraisers may have made a mistake.”

  “No,” said Leominster, “it was not in the collection. My aunt remembered its appearance and it was unusual enough to be identifiable. She said it was a triangular stamp, with the narrow edge downward—something like my face as drawn by Mr. Gonzalo.”

  Gonzalo cleared his throat and looked at the ceiling, but Leominster, smiling genially, went on. “She said it had the face of a man on it, and a bright orange border and that my uncle referred to it as a New Guinea Orange. That is a 202 More Tales of the Black Widowers

  distinctive stamp, you must admit, and while it never occurred to me that it might be in the collection itself, so that I did not search for it specifically, I did go through the collection out of curiosity, and I assure you I didn't see the New Guinea Orange. In fact, I saw no triangular stamps at all—merely versions of the usual rectangle.

  “Of course, I did wonder whether my uncle was wrong about the stamp's value, and whether he might not have found out he was wrong toward the end and sold the stamp or otherwise disposed of it. I consulted a stamp dealer and he said there were indeed such things as New Guinea Orange. He said some of them were very valuable and that one of them, which might be in my uncle's collection because it was not recorded elsewhere, was worth twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Well, look,” said Drake. “I have an idea. You've mentioned your cousin, the one in Brazil. He was your uncle's son, and he was disinherited. Isn't it possible that he wasn't entirely disinherited; that your uncle mailed him the stamp, told him its value, and let that be his inheritance? He could then leave the house and its contents to his sister with a clear conscience, along with whatever else he had in his estate.”

  Leominster thought for a while. He said, “That never occurred to me. I don't think it's likely, though. After all, his son was in no way in financial trouble and I was always given to understand he was very well to do. And there was hard feelings between father and son, too; very hard. It's a family scandal of which I do not have the details. I don't think Uncle Bryce would have mailed him the stamp.”

  Gonzalo said eagerly, “Could your cousin have come back to the United States and—”

  “And stolen the stamp? How could he have known where it was? Besides, I'm sure my cousin has not been out of Brazil in years. No, heaven only knows where the stamp is, or whether it exists at all. I wish I could get a phone call, as Mr. Halsted did, that would tell me it's been located under the bed, but there's no chance of that.”

  Leominster's eye fell to his still unopened Chinese fortune cookie and he added whimsically, “Unless this can help me.” He cracked it open, withdrew the slip of paper, looked at it, and laughed.

  “What does it say?” asked Drake.

  “It says, ‘You will come into money,'“ said Leominster. “It doesn't say how.”

  Gonzalo sat back in his chair and said, “Well then, Henry will tell you how.”

  Leominster smiled like one going along with a joke. “If you could bring me the stamp on your tray, Henry, I'd appreciate it.”

  'I’m not joking,” said Gonzalo. 'Tell him, Henry.”

  Henry, who had been listening quietly from his place at the sideboard, said, “I am flattered by your confidence, Mr. Gonzalo, but of course I cannot locate the stamp for Mr. Leominster. I might ask a few questions, however, if Mr. Leominster doesn't mind.”

  Leominster raised his eyebrows and said, “Not at all, if you think it will help.”

  “I cannot say as to that, sir,” said Henry, “but you said your uncle was no reader. Does that mean he did not read the books in his library?”

  “He didn't read much of anything, Henry, and certainly not the books in his library. They weren't meant to be read, only collected. Dry, impossible st
uff.”

  “Did your uncle do anything to them—rebind them, or in any way modify them? Did he paste pages together, for instance?”

  “To hide the stamp? Bite your tongue, Henry. If you do anything to any of those books, you reduce their value. No, no, your collector always leaves his collection exactly as he receives it.”

  Henry thought a moment, then said, “You told us your aunt affected an elegant vocabulary.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “And that if you said 'ask,' for instance, she would change it to 'inquire.' “

  “Yes.”

  “Would she have been aware of having made the change? —I mean, if she had been asked under oath to repeat your exact words, would she have said 'inquire' and honestly have thought you had said it?”

  Leominster laughed. “I wouldn't be surprised if she would. She took her false elegance with enormous seriousness.”

  “And you only know of your uncle's hiding place by your aunt's report. He never told you, personally, of his hiding place, did he?”

  “He never told me, but I'm bound to say that I don't for a minute believe Aunt Hester would lie. If she said he told her, then he did.”

  “She said that your uncle said he had hidden it in one of his unabridged volumes. That was exactly what she said?”

  “Yes. Exactly. In one of his unabridged volumes.”

  Henry said, “But might not your aunt have translated his actual statement into her own notion of elegance, a short word into a long one? Isn't that possible?”

  Leominster hesitated. “I suppose so, but what short word?”. “I cannot say with absolute certainty,” said Henry, “but is not an abridged volume one that has been cut, and is not an unabridged volume therefore one that is uncut. If your .— uncle had said 'in one of my uncut volumes,' might not that have been translated in your aunt's mind to 'in one of my unabridged volumes'?” “And if so, Henry?”

  “Then we must remember that 'uncut' has a secondary meaning with respect to books that 'unabridged' does not. An uncut volume may be one with its pages uncut, rather than its contents. If your uncle collected books which he did not read, and with which he did not tamper, some of them may have been bought with their pages uncut and would have kept their pages still uncut to this day. Does he, in fact, have uncut books in his library?”

  Leominster frowned and said hesitantly, “I think I remember one definitely, and there may have been others.”

  Henry said, “Every pair of adjacent pages in such a book would be connected at the margin, and perhaps at the top, but would be open at the bottom, so that they would form little bags. And if that is so, sir, then the young girls who went through the books would have turned the pages without paying any attention to the fact that some of them might be uncut, and inside the little bag—one of them—a stamp in its transparent envelope may easily have been affixed with a bit of transparent tape. The pages would have bellied slightly as they were turned and would have given no signs of the contents. Nor would the girls think to look inside if their specific instructions were merely to turn the pages.”

  Leominster rose and looked at his watch. “It sounds good to me. I'll go to Connecticut tomorrow.” He almost stuttered as he spoke. “Gentlemen, this is very exciting and I hope that once I am settled you will all come and have dinner with me to celebrate. —You especially, Henry. The reasoning was so simple that I'm amazed none of the rest of us saw it.”

  “Reasoning is always simple,” said Henry, “and also always incomplete. Let us see if you really find your stamp. Without that, of what use is reason?”

  11 Afterword

  I sometimes feel faintly embarrassed over the slightness of the points on which the solution to a Black Widowers story rests, but that's silly. These are, frankly, puzzle stories, and the size of the puzzle doesn't matter as long as it's a sufficient challenge to the mind.

  And as for myself, I have the double pleasure of thinking of the puzzle point first, and then of hiding it under layers of plot without being unfair to the reader.

  The Unabridged” I didn't submit anywhere, but saved it for this collection.

  To Table of Contents

  12 The Ultimate Crime

  “The Baker Street Irregulars,” said Roger Halsted, “is an organization of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. If you don't know that, you don't know anything.”

  He grinned over his drink at Thomas Trumbull with an air of the only kind of superiority there is—insufferable.

  The level of conversation during the cocktail hour that preceded the monthly Black Widowers' banquet had remained at the level of a civilized murmur, but Trumbull, scowling, raised his voice at this point and restored matters to the more usual unseemliness that characterized such occasions.

  He said, “When I was an adolescent I read Sherlock Holmes stories with a certain primitive enjoyment, but I'm not an adolescent any more. The same, I perceive, cannot be said for everyone.”

  Emmanuel Rubin, staring owlishly through his thick glasses, shook his head. “There's no adolescence to it, Tom. The Sherlock Holmes stories marked the occasion on which the mystery story came to be recognized as a major branch of literature. It took what had until then been something that had been confined to adolescents and their dime novels and made of it adult entertainment.”

  Geoffrey Avalon, looking down austerely from his seventy-four inches to Rubin's sixty-four, said, “Actually, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not, in my opinion, an exceedingly good mystery writer. Agatha Christie is far better.”

  “That's a matter of opinion,” said Rubin, who, as a mystery writer himself, was far less opinionated and didactic in that one field than in all the other myriad branches of human endeavor in which he considered himself an authority. “Christie had the advantage of reading Doyle and learning from him. Don't forget, too, that Christie's early works were pretty awful. Then, too”—he was warming up now—”Agatha Christie never got over her conservative, xenophobic prejudices. Her Americans are ridiculous. They were all named Hiram and all spoke a variety of English unknown to mankind. She was openly anti-Semitic and through the mouths of her characters unceasingly cast her doubts on anyone who was foreign.”

  Halsted said, “Yet her detective was a Belgian.”

  “Don't get me wrong,” said Rubin. “I love Hercule Poirot. I think he's worth a dozen Sherlock Holmeses. I'm just pointing out that we can pick flaws in anyone. In fact, all the English mystery writers of the twenties and thirties were conservatives and upper-class-oriented. You can tell from the type of puzzles they presented—baronets stabbed in the libraries of their manor houses—landed estates—independent wealth. Even the detectives were often gentlemen—Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyn, Albert Campion—”

  “In that case,” said Mario Gonzalo, who had just arrived and had been listening from the stairs, “the mystery story has developed in the direction of democracy. Now we deal with ordinary cops, and drunken private eyes and pimps and floozies and all the other leading lights of modern society.” He helped himself to a drink and said, “Thanks, Henry. How did they get started on this?”

  Henry said, “Sherlock Holmes was mentioned, sir.”

  “In connection with you, Henry?” Gonzalo looked pleased.

  “No, sir. In connection with the Baker Street Irregulars.”

  Gonzalo looked blank. “What are—”

  Halsted said, “Let me introduce you to my guest of the evening, Mario. He'll tell you. —Ronald Mason, Mario Gonzalo. Ronald's a member of BSI, and so am I, for that matter. Go ahead, Ron, tell him about it.”

  Ronald Mason was a fat man, distinctly fat, with a glistening bald head and a bushy black mustache. He said, “The Baker Street Irregulars is a group of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. They meet once a year in January, on a Friday near the great man's birthday, and through the rest of the year engage in other Sherlockian activities.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, they—”

  Henry announced dinner, and Maso
n hesitated. “Is there some special seat I'm supposed to take?”

  “No, no,” said Gonzalo. “Sit next to me and we can talk.”

  “Fine.” Mason's broad face split in a wide smile. “That's exactly what I'm here for. Rog Halsted said that you guys would come up with something for me.”

  “In connection with what?”

  “Sherlockian activities.” Mason tore a roll in two and buttered it with strenuous strokes of his knife. “You see, the thing is that Conan Doyle wrote numerous Sherlock Holmes stories as quickly as he could because he hated them—”

  “He did? In that case, why—”

  “Why did he write them? Money, that's why. From the very first story, 'A Study in Scarlet,' the world caught on fire with Sherlock Holmes. He became a world-renowned figure and there is no telling how many people the world over thought he really lived. Innumerable letters were addressed to him at his address in 221b Baker Street, and thousands came to him with problems to be solved.

  “Conan Doyle was surprised, as no doubt anyone would be under the circumstances. He wrote additional stories and the prices they commanded rose steadily. He was not pleased. He fancied himself as a writer of great historical romances and to have himself become world-famous as a mystery writer was displeasing—particularly when the fictional detective was. far the more famous of the two. After six years of it he wrote The Final Problem,' in which he deliberately killed Holmes. There was a world outcry at this and after several more years Doyle was forced to reason out a method for resuscitating the detective, and then went on writing further stories.

  “Aside from the value of the sales as mysteries, and from the fascinating character of Sherlock Holmes himself, the stories are a diversified picture of Great Britain in the late Victorian era. To immerse oneself in the sacred writings is to live in a world where it is always 1895.”

  Gonzalo said, “And what's a Sherlockian activity?”

  “Oh well. I told you that Doyle didn't particularly Iike writing about Holmes. When he did write the various stories he wrote them quickly and he troubled himself very little about mutual consistency. There are many odd points, therefore, unknotted threads, small holes, and so on, and the game is never to admit that anything is just a mistake or error. In fact, to a true Sherlockian, Doyle scarcely exists— it was Dr. John H. Watson who wrote the stories.”