My first impression was that Robin had a small child in black leather with him. Then I changed it to an elf in leather. A wise old mother elf. Finally I realized she was the midget I’d seen briefly in the Parlor the night before. Her body was in perfect proportion for its size, and quite attractive in that leather outfit. Her face was kindly and compassionate at first glance; then you saw the flashing eyes. She was not holding Robin’s elbow like an obedient child, she was steering him like a puppeteer with a hand on the back of his gee string. He carried what looked like a large fire extinguisher. In her free hand she had a green plastic trash bag, opened out, and a couple of towels.
Lucy, Phillip, and Mary stood up and began undressing. All three looked mildly abashed. Everyone else backed away, so I did too. The leather midget collected all the food-spattered clothing in her bag, and stood back herself. Robin triggered the big canister he held, and hosed the three naked people down with a jet of water. They turned around to assist him. “Damn, that’s cold,” Lucy protested.
“Yes, dear,” the little woman said firmly. “A cold shower seems indicated. Things were getting a bit out of hand.”
When Robin had them clean, he hosed off the splattered parts of the table as well. I saw that the room floor was tile, with slightly sunken drains at frequent intervals. Robin chased the last swirls of debris into the drains, shut down the spray, and waited for orders.
“Don’t just stand there, lovewipe,” she told him gently. “You’ve hardly started your dishes.”
“YesMistressI’msorryMistressI’msuchafoolIdon’tknowwhatonearthiswrongwithmerightawayMistressthankyouma’am,” he said, tucked her bag of soiled clothes under his armpit, and sprinted back into the kitchen. I saw that thin vivid pink stripes had been laid across his buttocks so carefully that someone had been able to play four games of tic-tac-toe, to four draws, with a Magic Marker or felt-tip pen.
I think it took that long for it to dawn on me that this maternal pygmy with the soft voice was the dreaded Mistress Cynthia.
“Carry on, children,” she said, and followed Robin. All of us sat down except the three who were still toweling their hair. The moment the door swung shut behind her, Mary said, “—and now that they’ve got those cute male flight attendants, once in a while—”
Three people, one of them me, chorused, “—Lady bangs the stews,” and you know, it’s a lot of fun to laugh like hell with a whole bunch of people at once, all of you trying to keep the noise down.
It went on being fun like that for maybe another half hour. People drifted in and out, some to eat breakfast, some lunch and some dinner, and some just for coffee or juice. I met a stunning mature brunette named Sherry with a classic model’s body. She, I recalled, had been the first person in the House to suffer from Raffalli’s sense of humor. She gave Phillip a greeting hug and kiss that gave him an erection—then twinkled at me and did the same for me. I was glad I had not had to undress earlier. If I was going to hang around these people for very long, I’d have to either get over being shy or have my blushing-nerves cut. She welcomed me to the zoo, and told me a funny story about a fellow artist named Colt which I will not repeat as even I don’t believe it. And I’ve met him.
A few minutes later a man came in, about Phillip’s age, whom Sherry introduced to me as her husband Willard. I shook his hand politely and told him my name was Ken and congratulated him on his catch. When he went to the coffee machine I wandered along behind him as if I wanted another cup myself. We stood by the machine with our backs to the others, and in a prison-yard whisper I said, “Hello, Professor. Long time no see.”
His cup did not tremble. He finished pouring, smiled over his shoulder at me, and said, equally softly, “I thought that was you, Joe. Don’t worry, you can’t blow my cover—I’m among friends. I haven’t actively Professed since I married Sherry almost fifteen years ago…but everyone here knows who the Professor was.”
“So do a lot of guys,” I agreed. “Lots of people wondered where the hell you went. I figured you were down. Glad I was wrong. So you finally found something better than the con.”
“Well, not really,” he said. “In a sense, I always was an artist—but I dealt exclusively in the foreplay. One day I simply decided to switch to customers I liked, and start following through. And charging less per head. The results have been gratifying.”
I shook my head in wonder. “You know, if anybody could talk me into trying gay, it’d be you.”
He inclined his head graciously at the compliment, and knew me well enough not to take it literally. “It has always been a pleasure to work with you in the past, Joseph. Or should I say ‘Ken’?”
“Unless it’s just the Lady or her old man around, yeah, Prof. Uh, Willard, I mean.”
“Whichever you prefer, Ken.”
“It’s kind of a long story, you know?”
“So long as you’re not attempting to run a game on the Lady or her Household, it’s none of my business,” he said carefully. “Many of us here use House names for one reason or another. My wife, for instance, is ‘Maureen’ to her intimates.”
“If I had been planning to clip the Lady, I’d fold the store right now,” I promised him. “But I got out of the game about the same time you did, or a little after. I’ve been a PI for years now.”
He nodded. “Say no more. Let your I be P. ‘Client privilege’ has many meanings here, all of them sacred.”
A memory surfaced. “‘Maureen’…Prof, didn’t you used to have a skinny little kid roping for you named Maureen?”
“The very same,” he said. “She also told the tale, and, on a few memorable occasions, even ran the store. At a profit.”
“Well I’ll be damned. I’d never have recognized her.”
“She has filled out considerably since she was fourteen,” he agreed.
“That’s not it. Well, it’s part of it. But the Maureen I remember had a bad case of self-hate. It stuck out a yard. And Sherry doesn’t, it’s just as obvious. You’ve been good for her, Prof.”
He smiled, but shook his head. “Lady Sally has been good for her. I’ve concentrated on not undoing her good work. But thank you, Ken.” Despite his words, I could tell I had succeeded in flattering him.
We rejoined the others. More than ever I felt a kinship with this place. The Professor may have been the greatest con man that ever worked the tristate area. Certainly he was the best I ever worked with or heard of. A player’s player, one of the immortals. If this life suited him better, perhaps I had better reexamine my primary article of faith, that Private Investigator was the best job on Earth. Eat where the big trucks are parked and you can’t go far wrong.
What I had not told him was that his own, much better hidden undercurrent of self-contempt was also gone now. He had always accepted himself, squarely, and tried to live up to his own self-imposed standards. But now he liked himself too. It stuck out a yard…
AFTER brunchner, the Raffalli Eradication Society held its war council in Mary’s Snoop Room up on the fourth floor. This was necessary as we all needed to hear the taped records of Raffalli’s previous assaults and batteries, and the room was, I was told, designed to erase any tape or floppy disk that left (or entered) it. Regardless of whether one used the door, or cut his own entrance through wall, floor or ceiling. Only one line between that room and the rest of the House was two-way, Mary’s intercom, and there was no physical way to patch tape output into that line. It was quite a remarkable room.
It had to be. Lady Sally’s House, and her insistence on maximum client privacy, presented unusual surveillance problems. There were a lot of inputs to handle. Ten mikes on the first floor alone. Forty-five on the second or main working floor. Three hallway mikes and two panning cameras on the residential third floor. And four cameras out on the street (I was professionally annoyed with myself for having failed to spot the one at the entrance I’d used.) Thanks to a clever switching system, hy
peractive Mary with her multitasking brain was somehow able to time-share among all currently live inputs fast enough to keep track of everything happening in the House in realtime. A computer helped by constantly monitoring all inputs for certain key signatures, such as the word “Help,” or the staff code word that meant the same thing.
But Lady Sally wanted all records maintained for one week, and then automatically erased. Physical handling of that much tape was what a physicist friend of mine calls a nontrivial problem.
So the room held fifty-eight custom-built tape decks. They were neither reel-to-reel nor cassette machines. In a sense they were both, and in a sense neither. They used Maxell XL-l reel-to-reel tape, but packed into plastic cases exactly the way inked ribbon is packed into a printer-ribbon cassette—except that these “cassettes” were about the size of pizza boxes in the two dimensions not defined by tape-width. Each held a week’s worth of tape in an infinite loop, in a jillion little interlocking loops and whorls, just like printer-ribbon—except there was no Möbius twist in the loop because only one side of magnetic recording tape is coated. Instead, the heads moved, each time the end of the tape came past, for a total of four mono tracks per tape. One cassette, a week of recording at 1⅞ ips, took 25,200 feet—the equivalent of fourteen ordinary 7½-inch reels, but without all those plastic hubs.
The decks themselves were stripped down: little more than heads and motorized spindles for the cassettes’ two transport wheels (two because, unlike printer-ribbon, recording tape must sometimes go backwards), fixed to bare-bones frames which were not especially cosmetic but must have been convenient when maintenance or repairs were needed. Each could be swung out from its rack on a hinge. In case of disaster, you could just physically remove all the tape from a cassette, feed it through a conventional tape deck onto an 11½-inch reel, and switch to a new empty reel every thirty-two hours’ worth.
All amplification and processing of the information recorded was done at a master console that looked like it might have baffled Lieutenant Uhura. (That’s one thing about that show that always sourly amused me: they combined their token female and their token black into a single character—and then made her a telephone operator!) The tape decks themselves were racked along three walls like pies waiting for delivery at the world’s busiest pizza place, twenty per wall. The wall that was two decks short compensated with six VCRs, feeding a pair of monitors above the master console. One flipflopped between the two residential camera views; the four exterior views rotated on the other screen.
It was a big room. Despite all the hardware, there was ample room for seven bodies and folding chairs. The seven were Lady Sally McGee, Mike Callahan, Mary, Priscilla, Arethusa, and me. Arethusa was two members of the Inner Circle because she had bullied her way in the night before. From her points of view, she and I had been on our way to make love at her place. Then I had dumped her on her floor, ran like a madman around the entire third floor, and fallen on my face. Then she had discovered a lump on the back of my head that she knew had not been there moments before. Then Lady Sally herself had shown up on Priscilla’s heels, looking unsurprised and upset with herself. So Arethusa had simply pestered her until Sally told her the whole story.
This struck me as good news on several levels. “I think Arethusa could be extremely useful tonight,” I said when everyone but me was seated. “In two crucial roles.” I put my back against the door and addressed her. “Hon, am I correct in believing that not many of the clients know you come in stereo?”
“Pun intended,” one of her agreed. “All the artists know, of course. But they don’t talk about it with clients. Like any freak, I get so tired of being gawked at that I’ve let fewer than half a dozen clients in on my secret since I started working here.”
“Thank you for the compliment,” I said. “But you’re not a freak, Arethusa.”
“Yes I am, Joe,” she corrected soberly. “That’s the truth, and I see no reason to duck it. In a world like this, a freak is no bad thing to be. They proved that back in the Sixties.”
“Hear, hear!” Mike said. “Joe, I think I see where you’re going—”
I nodded. “We spring both Arethusas on him, to startle him for that one full second of inattention we need—and while he’s busy staring at hers, we take him.”
“—but I think you’re overlooking something,” Mike went on.
“I know,” I said. “He’s had free run of the place, several times: he could have stumbled across both of her. If so, simply seeing both hers together isn’t going to tip him off that we’re on to him. At worst we have a couple of superfluous bodies in the room.” I checked myself and said to her, “Not that either of your bodies could ever be superfluous, babe.” Then, to Mike again: “She needn’t get in the way much, and she might help a lot. If nothing else she may hold his attention because…” I trailed off, unable to phrase it.
“Because he raped me last night, and he’ll be wondering what I’d think and say if I knew,” Arethusa finished quietly for me. “Or trying to guess which of me it was, so he can try the other one tonight and compare.”
Probably not more than half a dozen of them heard my jaw muscles pop. I rubbed my back against the door, thought briefly of how little protection it really afforded. “Right,” I said briskly. “So our first step is to play all the tapes we have of Raffalli, concentrating on the sections where he goes into high gear. Know your enemy. Once we do, we can pick the best place to take him.”
“I already know the best place,” Lady Sally said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the only place, no matter what we learn about the bastard from those tapes.”
“Yes?” was all I said.
But she must have caught the undertone I tried to cover, “Pardon me, Joe,” she said. “I know this is your area of expertise, and I don’t mean to backseat-drive. May I tell you my reasoning and let you decide?”
“By all means. You’ve survived a dangerous world a lot longer than I have.”
She ignored the dig. “Much longer. I propose that we take him in Reception, just inside the main entrance. For several reasons. For one thing, it is a small space, easily controlled, and soundproof as long as its two doors are closed. For another, it has two priest’s holes—concealed doors with stairs to the basement, so that it is possible for two people to appear suddenly and without warning just behind an entrant. But most important, I don’t want that son of a bitch walking into my House ever again. I will not place my clients at risk again if I can help it.”
“There’s sense in that,” Mike said. “If something goes sour inside the House, we’re all cooked. If it goes wrong in Reception, and he gets a chance to twist that watchstem, he might just turn on his heel and take off. The further in he is, the more people are around him, and the more time he’s had to build up his…anticipation, the worse off we are if we fuck up.”
“And there’s another advantage,” Mary pointed out. “Take him in Reception, and we don’t have to explain to the other clients why we just blindsided one of them and laid him out. Or to the staff either. Nobody ever has to know what he was or what he did. The only other way to do it that quietly is to let him go upstairs first—and there’s too good a chance he’ll wind his watch before he does.”
I gave up resenting the idea because it wasn’t mine. “There’s one final good reason for using Reception,” I said, “which I would now like to discuss, to make sure we have our ducks in a row.” I waited a few seconds, to make sure I had everyone’s attention. “We must agree on our ultimate goal here,” I went on then, meeting each person’s eyes in turn as I spoke. “There are few things on earth as silly as a liberal vigilante. I say the law cannot help us in this. I say that we are the law. ‘I, the jury,’ as Mr. Spillane once put it. And you too. I say we are going to listen to these tapes—give him a nice, fair trial—and then we are going to sentence him to death. So a private place, before anyone else knows he’s arrived, is best.” I looked around at sober faces. “If no one else
claims privilege, I will execute him myself. And undertake to dispose of the body, while Arethusa destroys his watch. Then I’ll toss his apartment and any other address I can connect him with and burn every piece of paper or floppy disk I don’t understand. If I run across anyone who meets the definition of ‘accessory before or after the fact,’ I will inform Lady Sally and then execute them too, cleaning up after the same way. If anybody has any problem with any of this, now is the time to say so, and defend your position.”
The silence lasted perhaps fifteen seconds. Then Lady Sally said, “I waive privilege. Reluctantly—but you are younger, stronger and faster. And you’ve earned the right.”
“Should we not interrogate him before we kill him?” Priscilla asked.
“Not if you ask me,” I said. “First, I might accidentally learn how he accomplished the trick—and I don’t want to. I don’t want anybody to. Second, I might learn something that made me pity him. That would be a shame. Third, and most important, I can kill a man, but I don’t think I’m willing to torture him first…and nothing less would provide information I could trust. If he has accomplices, I’ll find them.”
Mike said, “Why Arethusa? To bust up the watch, I mean.”
“Because she is the only person in this room including me, that I’m absolutely certain cannot be tempted by absolute power,” I said. “She already has it.”
He nodded agreement so quickly that I felt a brief pang of irrational jealousy. More irrational than jealousy always is, I mean. “Good thinking. How ’bout it, Arethusa? You know what the Ring can do to a person…are you willing to be our Frodo?”
“Thank you both,” said the one of her that happened to be closest to the center of his field of vision. “Yes, I will, if you wish.” “I should be safe enough,” her other mouth said to me. “I’m already corrupted absolutely.”
“Hell,” I said, “was I that good?”
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