The Big Clock

by Kenneth Fearing

  “It shouldn’t be impossible,” I said.

  “We want this guy in a hurry. Can you do it?” If I didn’t, someone else would. It would have to be me. “I’ve done it before.”

  “Yes. That’s why you’re elected.”

  “What do I do when I find this person?”

  “Nothing.” Steve’s voice was pleasant, but emphatic. “Just let me know his name, and where he can be found. That’s all.”

  It was like leaning over the ledge of one of these thirtysecond floor windows and looking down into the street below. I always had to take just one more look.

  “What happens when we locate him? What’s the next step?”

  “Just leave that to me.” Hagen stared at me, coldly and levelly, and I stared back. I saw, in those eyes, there was no room for doubt at all. Janoth knew the danger he was in, Hagen knew it, and for Hagen there was literally no limit. None. Furthermore, this little stick of dynamite was intelligent, and he had his own ways, his private means.

  “Now, this assignment has the right-of-way over everything, George. You can raid any magazine, use any bureau, any editor or correspondent, all the resources we have. And you’re in charge.”

  I stood up and scooped together the notes I had taken. The squeeze felt tangible as a vise. My personal life would be destroyed if I ran to the cops. Death if Hagen and his special friends caught up with me.

  “All right, Steve,” I said. “I take it I have absolute carte blanche.”

  “You have. Expense, personnel, everything.” He waved toward the windows overlooking about ten million people. “Our man is somewhere out there. It’s a simple job. Get him.”

  I looked out of the windows myself. There was a lot of territory out there. A nation within a nation. If I picked the right kind of a staff, twisted the investigation where I could, jammed it where I had to, pushed it hard where it was safe, it might be a very, very, very long time before they found George Stroud.

  George Stroud VII

  I HATED to interrupt work on the coming issues of our own book, and so I decided to draw upon all the others, when needed, as evenly as possible.

  But I determined to work Roy into it. Bert Finch, Tony, Nat, Sydney, and the rest of them would never miss either of us. And although I liked Roy personally, I could also count upon him to throw a most complicated monkey-wrench into the simplest mechanism. Leon Temple, too, seemed safe enough. And Edward Orlin of Futureways, a plodding, rather wooden esthete, precisely unfitted for the present job. He would be working for George Stroud, in the finest sense.

  I told Roy about the new assignment, explained its urgency, and then I put it up to him. I simply had to have someone in charge at the office, constantly. This might be, very likely would be, a round-the-clock job. That meant there would have to be another man to share the responsibility.

  Roy was distantly interested, and even impressed. “This takes precedence over everything?”

  I nodded.

  “All right. I’m in. Where do we start?”

  “Let me line up the legmen first. Then we’ll see.”

  Fifteen minutes later I had the nucleus of the staff gathered in my office. In addition to Roy and Leon, there were seven men and two women drawn from other magazines and departments. Edward Orlin, rather huge and dark and fat; Phillip Best of Newsways, a small, acrid, wire-haired encyclopedia. The two women, Louella Metcalf and Janet Clark, were included if we needed feminine reserves. Louella, drawn from The Sexes, was a tiny, earnest, appealing creature, the most persistent and transparent liar I have ever known. Janet was a very simple, eager, large-boned brunette whose last assignment had been with Homeways; she did every job about four times over, eventually doing it very well. Don Klausmeyer of Personalities and Mike Felch of Fashions had also been conscripted, and one man each from Commerce, Sportland, and the auditing department. They would do for a convincing start.

  From now on, everything would have to look good. Better than good. Perfect. I gave them a crisp, businesslike explanation.

  “You are being asked to take on a unique and rather strange job,” I said. “It has to be done quickly, and as quietly as possible. I know you can do it.

  “We have been given a blank check as far as the resources of the organization are concerned. If you need help on your particular assignment, help of any sort, you can have it. If it’s a routine matter, simply go to the department that can give it. If it’s something special, come either to me, or to Roy, here, who will be in charge of the work whenever for some reason I have to be elsewhere myself.

  “We are looking for somebody. We don’t know much about this person, who he is, where he lives. We don’t even know his name. His name may be George Chester, but that is doubtful. It is possible he is in the advertising business, and that will be your job, Harry.” I said this to Harry Slater, the fellow from Commerce. “You will comb the advertising agencies, clubs, if necessary the advertising departments of first the metropolitan newspapers and magazines, then those farther out. If you have to go that far, you will need a dozen or so more men to help you. You are in complete charge of that line of investigation.” Harry’s inquiries were safe, and they could also be impressive. I added: “Take as many people as you need. Cross-check with us regularly, for the additional information about our man that will be steadily coming in from all the other avenues we will be exploring at the same time. And that applies to all of you.

  “We not only don’t know this man’s right name or where he lives—and that will be your job, Alvin.” This was Alvin Dealey, from the auditing department. “Check all real estate registers in this area, all tax records, public utilities, and all phone books of cities within, say, three or four hundred miles, for George Chester, and any other names we give you. Take as many researchers as you need.

  “Now, as I said, we not only don’t know this man’s name or whereabouts, but we haven’t even got any kind of a physical description of him. Just that he is of average height, say five nine to eleven, and average build. Probably between one-forty and one-eighty.

  “But there are a few facts we have to go upon. He is an habitue of a place on Third Avenue called Gil’s. Here is a description of the place.” I gave it, but stayed strictly within the memo as given by Steve Hagen. “This man was in that place, wherever it is, last Saturday afternoon. At that time he was there with a woman we know to be a good-looking blonde. Probably he goes there regularly. That will be your job, Ed. You will find this restaurant, night club, saloon, or whatever it is, and when you do you will stay there until our man comes into it.” Ed Orlin’s swarthy and rather flabby face betrayed, just for an instant, amazement and incipient distaste. “On the same evening our subject went into an antique shop, also on Third Avenue. He went into several, but there is one in particular we want, which shouldn’t be hard to find. You will find it, Phil. Because the fellow we are looking for bought a picture, unframed, while he was in the place, and he bought it after outbidding another customer, a woman.” I did not elaborate by a hairsbreadth beyond Steve’s written memo. “The canvas was by an artist named Louise Patterson, it depicted two hands, was in bad condition, and the name of it, or the subject matter, had something to do with Judas. The dealer is certain to remember the incident. You can get an accurate description of our man from him. Perhaps he knows him, and can give us his actual identity.

  “Don, here is our file on this Louise Patterson. There is a possibility that this picture can be traced from the artist to the dealer and from him to our unknown. Look up Patterson, or if she’s dead, look up her friends. Somebody will remember that canvas, what became of it, may even know who has it now. Find out.” I had suddenly the sick and horrid realization I would have to destroy that picture. “Perhaps the man we are looking for is an art collector, even a Patterson enthusiast. “Leon, I want you and Janet to go to the bar of the Van Barth, where this same blonde went with this same person, on the same evening. At that time he had the picture, and perhaps he checked it. Find out.
Question the bartenders, the checkroom attendants for all they can give you regarding the man, and then I guess you’d better stay right there and wait for him to turn up, since he’s probably a regular there, as well as Gil’s. You may have to be around for several days and if so you will have to be relieved by Louella and Dick Englund.”

  Leon and Janet looked as though they might not care to be relieved, while Louella and Dick perceptibly brightened. It was almost a pleasure to dispense such largesse. I wished them many a pleasant hour while they awaited my arrival.

  “That is about all I have to give you now,” I concluded. “Do you all understand your immediate assignments?” Apparently, the lieutenants in charge of the hunt for George Stroud all did, for none of them said anything. “Well, are there any questions?”

  Edward Orlin had one. “Why are we looking for this man?”

  “All I know about that,” I said, “is the fact that he is the intermediary figure in one of the biggest political-industrial steals in history. That is, he is the connecting link, and we need him to establish the fact of this conspiracy. Our man is the payoff man.”

  Ed Orlin took this information and seemed to retire behind a wall of thought to eat and digest it. Alvin Dealey earnestly asked: “How far can we go in drawing upon the police for information?”

  “You can draw upon them, but you are not to tell them anything at all,” I said, flatly. “This is our story, in the first place, and we intend to keep it ours. In the second place, I told you there is a political tie-up here. The police machinery we go to may be all right at one end, ours, but we don’t know and we have no control over the other end of that machine. Is that clear?”

  Alvin nodded. And then the shrewd, rather womanish voice of Phillip Best cut in. “All of these circumstances you have given us concern last Saturday,” he said. “That was the night Pauline Delos was killed. Everyone knows what that means. Is there any connection?”

  “Not as far as I know, Phil,” I said. “This is purely a big-time business scandal that Hagen himself and a few others have been digging into for some time past. Now, it’s due to break.” I paused for a moment, to let this very thin logic take what hold it could. “As far as I understand it, Earl intends to go through with this story, regardless of the ghastly business last Saturday night.”

  Phil’s small gray eyes bored through his rimless glasses. “I just thought, it’s quite a coincidence,” he said. I let that pass without even looking at it, and he added: “Am I to make inquiries about the woman who was with the man?”

  “You will all have to do that.” I had no doubt of what they would discover. Yet even delay seemed in my favor, and I strongly reminded them, “But we are not looking for the woman, or any other outside person. It is the man we want, and only the man.”

  I let my eyes move slowly over them, estimating their reactions. As far as I could see, they accepted the story. More important, they seemed to give credit to my counterfeit assurance and determination.

  “All right,” I said. “If there are no more questions, suppose you intellectual tramps get the hell out of here and go to work.” As they got up, reviewing the notes they had taken, and stuffed them into their pockets, I added, “And don’t fail to report back, either in person or by phone. Soon, and often. Either to Roy or myself.”

  When they had all gone, except Roy, he got up from his chair beside me at the desk. He walked around in front of it, then crossed to the wall facing it, hands thrust into his pockets. He leaned against the wall, staring at the carpet. Presently, he said: “This is a crazy affair. I can’t help feeling that Phil somehow hit the nail on the head. There is a curious connection there, I’m certain, the fact that all of this happened last Saturday.”

  I waited, with a face made perfectly blank.

  “I don’t mean it has any connection with that frightful business about Pauline Delos,” he went on, thoughtfully. “Of course it hasn’t. That would be a little too obvious. But I can’t help thinking that something, I don’t know what, something happened last week on Friday or Saturday, perhaps while Janoth was in Washington, or certainly a few days before, or even last night, Sunday, that would really explain why we are looking for this mysterious, art-collecting stranger at this moment, and in such a hurry. Don’t you think so?”

  “Sounds logical,” I said.

  “Damn right it’s logical. It seems to me, we would do well to comb the outstanding news items of the last two weeks, particularly the last five or six days, and see what there is that might concern Janoth. This Jennett-Donohue proposition, for instance. Perhaps they are actually planning to add those new books in our field. That would seriously bother Earl, don’t you think?”

  Roy was all right. He was doing his level best.

  “You may be right. And again it may be something else, far deeper, not quite so apparent. Suppose you follow up that general line? But at the same time, I can’t do anything except work from the facts supplied to me.”

  Actually, I was at work upon a hazy plan that seemed a second line of defense, should it come to that. It amounted to a counterattack. The problem, if the situation got really bad, was this: How to place Janoth at the scene of the killing, through some third, independent witness, or through evidence not related to myself. Somewhere in that fatal detour his car had been noted, he himself had been seen and marked. If I had to fight fire with fire, somehow, surely he could be connected.

  But it would never come to that. The gears being shifted, the wheels beginning to move in this hunt for me were big and smooth and infinitely powered, but they were also blind. Blind, clumsy, and unreasoning. “No, you have to work with the data you’ve been given,” Roy admitted. “But I think it would be a good idea if I did follow up my hunch. I’ll see if we haven’t missed something in recent political developments.”

  At the same time that I gave him silent encouragement, I became aware of the picture above his head on the wall against which he leaned. It was as though it had suddenly screamed.

  Of course. I had forgotten I had placed that Patterson there, two years ago. I had bought it at the Lewis Galleries, the profiles of two faces, showing only the brow, eyes, nose, lips, and chin of each. They confronted each other, distinctly Pattersonian. One of them showed an avaricious, the other a skeptical leer. I believe she had called it Study in Fury.

  It was such a familiar landmark in my office that to take it away, now, would be fatal. But as I looked at it and then looked away I really began to understand the danger in which I stood. It would have to stay there, though at any moment someone might make a connection. And there must be none, none at all, however slight.

  “Yes,” I told Roy, automatically, feeling the after-shock in fine points of perspiration all over me. “Why not do that? We may have missed something significant in business changes, as well as politics.”

  “I think it might simplify matters,” he said, and moved away from the wall on which the picture hung. “Janoth was in Washington this week end, remember. Personally, I think there’s a tie-up between that and this rush order we’ve been given.”

  Thoughtfully, Roy moved away from the wall, crossed the thickly carpeted floor, disappeared through the door leading to his own office.

  When he had gone I sat for a long moment, staring at that thing on the wall. I had always liked it before.

  But no. It had to stay there.

  Edward Orlin

  GIL’S TAVERN looked like just a dive on the outside, and also on the inside. Too bad I couldn’t have been assigned to the Van Barth. Well, it couldn’t be helped.

  It was in the phone book, and not far off, so that part of it was all right. I walked there in twenty minutes.

  I took along a copy of War and Peace, which I was rereading, and on the way I saw a new issue of The Creative Quarterly which I bought.

  It was a little after one o’clock when I got there, time for lunch, so I had it. The food was awful. But it would go on the expense account, and after I’d eaten I g
ot out my notebook and put it down. Lunch, $1.50. Taxi, $1.00. I thought for a minute, wondering what Stroud would do if he ever came to a dive like this, then I added: Four highballs, $2.00.

  After I’d finished my coffee and a slab of pie at least three days old I looked around. It was something dug up by an archeological expedition, all right. There was sawdust in the corners, and a big wreath on the wall in back of me, celebrating a recent banquet, I suppose: CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR PAL.

  Then I saw the bar at the end of the long room. It was incredible. It looked as though a whole junkyard had been scooped up and dumped there. I saw wheels, swords, shovels, tin cans, bits of paper, flags, pictures, literally hundreds upon hundreds of things, just things.

  After I paid for the 85-cent lunch, a gyp, and already I had indigestion, I picked up my Tolstoy and The Creative Quarterly and walked down to the bar.

  The nearer I came to it the more things I saw, simply thousands of them. I sat down and noticed there was a big fellow about fifty years old, with staring, preoccupied eyes, in back of it. He came down the bar, and I saw that his eyes were looking at me but didn’t quite focus. They were like dim electric lights in an empty room. His voice was a wordless grunt.

  “A beer,” I said. I noticed that he spilled some of it when he put the glass down in front of me. His face really seemed almost ferocious. It was very strange, but none of my business. I had work to do. “Say, what’ve you got in back of the bar there? Looks like an explosion in a five-and-ten-cent store.”

  He didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, just looked me over, and now he seemed really sore about something.

  “My personal museum,” he said, shortly.

  So that was what the memo meant. I was in the right place, no doubt about it.

  “Quite a collection,” I said. “Buy you a drink?”

  He had a bottle on the bar by the time I finished speaking. Scotch, and one of the best brands, too. Well, it was a necessary part of the assignment. Made no difference to me; it went on the expense account.