Lydia

by Howard Fast

  Mrs. Sokol came in at that moment and informed Lydia that I had always been a good eater. “Harvey is very dependable,” Mrs. Sokol said. “He doesn’t waste food. You give Harvey a plate of food and he finishes it, no doubt about that.”

  “I think that’s, wonderful,” Lydia cried. “I do think that’s so wonderful of Harvey.”

  “You can see how he cleaned his breakfast plate off,” said Mrs. Sokol.

  “Oh, yes—yes, indeed. I can see that. It’s wonderful and talented and good of Harvey.”

  I excused myself and left the table. Lydia caught up with me outside, when I was almost at the barn.

  “I’m sorry, Harvey,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “Either you’re laughing at me—look at Harvey Krim, the big boob—or you’re throwing yourself at me. That’s no way to win the affections of a man.”

  “Maybe I’m not trying to win your affections, Harvey.”

  “Well, there you are. Maybe not. It’s hard for me to tell.”

  “You are so damned exasperating!” she cried. “Don’t you ever stretch out a hand to anyone?”

  “It might be bitten off.”

  “Oh! Really! Very well, we won’t discuss that any further. I have no home, no job, no friends, no future—and a whole set of cretins occupy themselves with plans for my murder. But Harvey Krim can’t hold out a hand to me. Never mind. Show me the barn.”

  “It’s just a barn.”

  “Stop sulking, Harvey, and show me the barn. It’s not just a barn. To me, it’s very interesting.”

  So I took her through the very interesting barn. It was reasonably old—more than a hundred years, I guess—and it stood on two levels, so perhaps it was interesting. I showed her Aunt Evelyn’s brood sow, also a very pregnant Irish Setter, also two horses—

  “Do you ride, Harvey?”

  “Not any more. Aunt Evelyn used to ride, but she gave that up after her husband died. She kept the horses. Sentiment, I suppose.”

  “But with two beautiful horses, how can you resist riding?”

  “I resist it. I used to ride a lot with my father. Now I have no taste for it.”

  “Would you ride with me?”

  “Sometime, maybe.”

  I then showed her the old carriage and the cutter and the dog cart they used to harness up when I was a kid; and with all that, she warmed up to me, and by the time we left the barn, she was hanging onto my arm and speculating about how wonderful it would be to live in a place like this and have a house like this and raise kids here.

  “Don’t you agree, Harvey?”

  I said that I didn’t know, and that sometimes I felt that kids were better raised in the city.

  “That’s nonsense, Harvey.”

  “Oh? You really have an open mind, don’t you?”

  “About some things and not about others. There’s your aunt, Harvey.”

  She was coming down the driveway in the jeep. She owned a comfortable, sensible automobile, but it was her great delight to use the four-wheel-drive jeep. Just watching her drive it brought my heart up into my mouth with sheer terror, but my Aunt Evelyn was never disturbed by small things. She parked and climbed down and gave me a hug and a kiss, and told me how wonderful she thought Lydia was, and hoped that this time I would get married without blowing it. Since Lydia was standing there, listening, I didn’t feel that approach was particularly intelligent.

  “Well, you know,” I said.

  “Do help me with these packages, Harvey,” my aunt said, “and please don’t mumble. You know that I can’t stand mumbling. I think that clear diction is a requirement of human existence and helps to distinguish us from the animals.”

  “Poor Harvey gets upset whenever anyone mentions marriage. I think he has terrible problems about marriage,” Lydia said.

  “Why don’t you shut up now and then?” I asked her.

  “That’s a fine way to talk to a young lady,” my aunt said.

  “And it’s the way he always talks to me,” Lydia told her sadly. “I only want what is best for him. But all he cares about is this stupid necklace that he thinks will make him rich and all that—”

  “All right,” I sighed. “You made your point. You win. Can we carry this stuff inside now?”

  “Once you apologize,” my aunt smiled sweetly.

  “I apologize.”

  We carried the packages inside, and my aunt suggested that we have a light drink of some sort, perhaps just a touch of vodka in tomato juice, and then I could tell her what this nonsense I was mixed up in was all about.

  “We’re five for dinner tonight,” she said, “and that’s not an everyday matter for me. I must discuss it thoroughly with Mrs. Sokol, and while I am doing that, why don’t you take Lydia through the house? It’s a very interesting house, my dear,” she said to Lydia, “like so many of these old stone houses down here in Bucks County. The different parts of it were built at different times, and none of it makes terribly much sense, except that it’s full of odd corners and rooms and too many staircases, and the ceilings are too low, but it is interesting, and part of it goes back two hundred years.”

  I did as my aunt suggested, and took Lydia on a tour of the old house. I showed her the guest rooms, the master bedroom, Hillery’s big playroom and the smaller playroom which had been kept for my brother, the one who had been killed and who had been fourteen years younger than I. Nothing in it had been touched. The plastic models of everything from automatic pistols to ocean-going vessels, which he had once delighted to put together with such care and skill, were all just as they had been.

  “It’s six years now, and nothing is touched.”

  “Why? Why does she keep all this to remind her?”

  “I suppose because she desires to be reminded,” I answered Lydia as we went downstairs. “Did she say five for dinner?”

  “I think so.”

  “I do wonder whom she’ll have?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  But my Aunt Evelyn was mixing her before-cocktails cocktails, or as she sometimes called them, her three-o’clock cocktails, which consisted of half rations of vodka in tomato juice, but so good and thirst-quenching that everyone had at least two or three of them thereby negating their purpose. In this instance, I asked whether she couldn’t substitute beer for me. She agreed with some irritation, and told me to go get it myself.

  When I came back, she was explaining to Lydia that she never could understand why I had become something so utterly ridiculous as an insurance investigator. My own thoughts were elsewhere. When she snapped at me, “What did you mean, Harvey, all this nonsense about lives being in danger?” I could make no connection, only mutter:

  “Did I say that?”

  “You certainly did, Harvey, and furthermore—”

  I interrupted her, still in my own thoughts. “Aunt Evelyn, did you ever hear of anyone called Von Kesselring?”

  “Harvey, you do have fewer manners and you seem to use them less—what made you ask that?”

  “Von Kesselring?”

  “Yes, Von Kesselring.”

  “Why, does it ring a bell?”

  “Yes it does, as a matter of fact—if it is the same Von Kesselring. He was a rather important German actor, from one of their Junker families or whatever it was in that wretched place that gave one’s name a von prefix, and he attached himself to Hitler quite early in the game and became one of the very important SS officers—escaped after the war and was said to have ended up here in America. I remember the FBI asking about him—they interviewed a good many theater people. You see, he had a nasty little racket. He knew the various ex-Nazis living in America, as well as certain anti-Nazi Germans who had entered this country illegally and—well, he bled them. That was his source of income.”

  “And of course they located him?” I asked.

  “No. Actually, they never did. It was felt that he had found himself someplace in the theater, since he never actually lost interest in i
t—but no, I don’t think they ever actually tracked him down. Why all this, Harvey?”

  “Some silly thought. Let’s forget it. Lydia and I were wondering who your other dinner guests would be?”

  “I’m not letting you off so easily, Harvey. Don’t think you can just pluck away a mystery as easily as that.”

  “We’ll come back to it later, Aunt Evelyn.”

  “Did you say my dinner guests?”

  “Yes, my dear,” I nodded.

  “Well, you know, Harvey, the end of April in Bucks County is still a bit early. One can’t really pick and choose at the last moment, and then yesterday you were asking about Mark Sarbine—and you remember my telling you that he was a sort of stinker, which he is—but who isn’t, when you come right down to it? Well, he and his wife Helen have a place a few miles from here, and this morning I decided to call them and issue a lastminute invitation.”

  Lydia was staring at her, mouth open. I said, “Close your mouth, Lydia, or a bee will enter therein, as Aunt Evelyn used to tell me when I was your age. Tell me, dear, did they accept?”

  Lydia closed her mouth.

  “He was absolutely delighted. I didn’t know you actually knew him, Harvey. He said it would be a pleasure to renew your acquaintance. He and his wife will be over at about seven or so.”

  Lydia’s mouth opened again, but before she could get a word out, I asked Aunt Evelyn whether she still had the old billiard table in the basement.

  “It’s there, Harvey. I have a plastic cover to keep the dust from it. But no one ever touches it now.”

  “Would you mind terribly if I stole Lydia for a little while now and instructed her in the finer points? She’s quite a pool player, you know. I believe hustler is the generic term—”

  “Harvey—” Lydia began.

  “And modest,” I added.

  “Go on, both of you,” Aunt Evelyn said. “I’ll join you in a little while perhaps.”

  As I drew Lydia away, I whispered to her, “Will you shut up? Are you stupid? Can’t you take a hint?”

  “No,” she mumbled. “All I want is to stay alive, because I’m getting to love you, Harvey.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LYDIA TOOK THE CUE that was bent. There were at least eight cues on the rack and only one of them was bent, but Lydia chose that one. I pointed it out to her.

  “Well, does it matter?” she wanted to know.

  I tried to explain to her that it mattered that a pool cue was bent, and then I gave it up and put another cue in her hands.

  “I will try to teach you a little pool,” I said. “Not much—just a few elements. So listen to me and stop with this love thing.”

  “You think I’m stupid,” she said.

  “No. Not exactly stupid. But you’re peculiar. You’ve got to admit that you’re peculiar.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I mean, you keep doing crazy things that make no sense. Like running your car into that pond up in Massachusetts. That just makes no sense at all to me.”

  “Do we have to go into that now?” Lydia asked me.

  “No. But just tell me whether it made any sense.”

  “I guess not. But at the time I thought it was important to establish the fact that I was dead.”

  “Why?”

  “So I would have a clear path to get the necklace back from Sarbine. And now, just because I am a little nervous about having dinner with Sarbine and his miserable wife—”

  “No,” I said, “not at all. Now wait a minute, Lydia. All I did was try to give you a hint without just coming out and saying it—a hint to keep your mouth shut about our present relationship to Sarbine. I want him here for dinner. My word—you did work for him for months.”

  “I know. That was before he started to practice murdering me.”

  “Well, you don’t think he’ll try to kill us tonight?”

  “No? Who’s to stop him? You?”

  “Now, that’s a fine thing to say!”

  “Well, what do you expect, Harvey? You’re not like any detective I ever heard about or read about. I remember reading about one of those private detectives, and this man had a gun on him—you understand?—this man was pointing a gun at him, and his wife was there, and she wasn’t a bit worried because she knew he’d take this fellow with the gun—”

  “Take?”

  “Well, you know—take. Jump him or something. And he did. But suppose someone pointed a gun at you, Harvey. I do like you, but you’re such a coward. How can you be a detective and never even punch anyone?”

  “Why should I? Good God, do you go around punching people?”

  “I’m not a detective, am I?”

  “Well, neither am I. When you come right down to it, I’m in the insurance business, in a way. Anyway, what would you think of me if I began to punch people? In the first place, they’d have to be small people, otherwise they’d punch me right back—what am I talking about? How did we get into this kind of a dumb argument?”

  “You were going to teach me pool, and I just don’t feel much like having dinner with someone like Sarbine. Suppose he’s this Von Kesselring you keep talking about?”

  “Suppose he is, Lydia? I still want him to keep his dinner date. Don’t underestimate Sarbine, not one bit. We know nothing about him, but he knows a good deal about us. He knew enough about me to connect me with Aunt Evelyn—”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Lydia, use your head. He guessed that we would be coming down here, so he played a long shot and drove down here himself. Do you imagine for one moment that he left that phony necklace in his apartment in New York?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because right now we could be on our way to New York to clean out that apartment with a search warrant. But he’s playing a game with us. His premise is perfectly correct—that we want the necklace, not him, and that we will keep the police out of this—”

  “Then I want the police in it, Harvey,” Lydia decided. “Look, Harvey—it’s my necklace. Well, the devil with it! I don’t want it. I don’t want any more of this whole mess. I’m resigning from the girl scouts and from everything else, and all I am asking is that people stop trying to kill me.”

  “Lydia, use your head—”

  “I am using it, for once. It’s my necklace, and I have the right to decide—”

  “Once and for all, Lydia,” I shouted, “will you get it through your head that it is not your necklace! Even if, by some remote legal fluke, you could lay claim to the original Fredericks necklace, you know that this particular necklace no longer exists. In all probability it has been broken up, and the various diamonds have been sold off. All that we have is a cheap imitation worth a few hundred dollars—” I broke off and turned to stare at Lydia.

  “What is it, Harvey? Come on—you’ve been detecting.”

  “One of these days—” I said softly. “No, I have not been detecting, only applying a little common sense. If Sarbine is Kesselring, someone is putting the squeeze on him—and that’s why a quarter of a million dollars have become a matter of life and death to him. Rich is rich, but suppose someone puts the bite on him now for a hundred grand even—”

  “Go on, Harvey,” Lydia smiled. “I love to hear you talk like that, real hard-boiled and tough.”

  “Good. I’m glad you like it.”

  “Harvey, don’t sulk!”

  “OK,” I replied. “I am not sulking. The point is that Sarbine has a phony necklace that’s worth a quarter of a million to him, when he collects the insurance, and fifty thousand dollars to me—when he does not collect. And not one red cent to either of us if the police grab it.”

  “But the necklace is no good, Harvey. How can it be worth anything to you?”

  “Lydia, the company is not going to sell it. All they care about is to be off the hook on that policy. The necklace can be made of plastic, for all they care. They want it—but only to establish the fact that the claim is invalid.”

  “And what abou
t tonight, Harvey?”

  “Tonight?” I began to play pool, exhibiting my prowess and being careful to demonstrate that my hands were not shaking.

  “Yes, tonight, Harvey.”

  “We do it by ear,” I said. “Meanwhile let’s start with the first rule of the game, holding the cue.”

  Aunt Evelyn joined us while I was instructing Lydia, and she observed that no matter how many times she came down into the basement, she could never get over the feeling that there was something vulgar about a pool table; so instead of pursuing that kindest and gentlest of all sports, we went upstairs and outside to be shown her greenhouse. Poor Lydia was apparently a stranger to the simplest elements of agriculture, and as far as the green-house was concerned, she scored very low indeed. I took her out of there for a walk across the fields, and although it was as lovely a day as you could find, she was glum and unsmiling, and when I pressed her on this mood of hers, she informed me that it would be no easy matter and certainly no pleasure to sit at a table with people who had employed her as a servant.

  “Aside from the fact that they go around devising ways to murder me.”

  “But good heavens, Lydia, how can you see yourself servantwise to the Sarbines? They’re not fit to wipe your shoes.”

  “That’s very sweet of you, Harvey,” she nodded, “but you really don’t know about servants and such. It’s a very difficult business to explain.”

  “Well, try to remember that I am right there next to you, and as far as the Sarbines are concerned, all the cards are face-up on the table. We know a good deal about them, and they know practically everything there is to know about us. At least I think they do, and I imagine they think we know about everything there is to know about them. They know who you are and all that. So just play it cool, and it will go all right.”

  “Until they kill us,” Lydia nodded. “For what time do you suppose they have that scheduled, Harvey?”

  I left that properly unanswered, and we walked back to the house. Aunt Evelyn had found a lovely white dress that once belonged to her daughter, and had apparently spent the last hour shortening it. Shoes were produced to go with it, and while Lydia went up to change, I asked my aunt: