And Now the News

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “I want you to meet him,” said Cotrell.

  “I would like to,” she said. “I would like to see what a transplanted oriental, living at the edge of the jungle, has to recommend himself to a man of your stature.” There was considerable insult buried in the phrase. Brunhilde was richer, stronger, more beautiful, and certainly more intelligent that anyone’s average, and was deeply conscious of it. To her, the world was obviously composed of a handful of people and a great many members of the lower orders.

  “Lunch there, perhaps?” Cotrell said. “I can offer you a pleasant drive, and certainly some native cooking.”

  “You do intrigue me,” she smiled. “And I would so like to think, later, that I had helped you catch and hang your man.”

  “Good,” said Cotrell. He looked at his watch and rose. “I’ll send Yem Foong a wire, and we’ll be on our way. I hope I’m not rushing you?”

  “I can be ready in five minutes,” she said.

  While he was taking care of the check, she stepped to the end of the marquee for another long look at the harbor. As Jeff Cotrell stepped up behind her a moment later, a thirty-foot dugout was moving almost directly under the end of the marquee. Brunhilde tensed as she watched it. In the bow was a giant who could have modeled for a Hercules. As he bent over the paddle, they could see three long scratches in his golden back.

  “Damn,” said Brunhilde Moot. She straightened, turned, saw Cotrell. “I’ve broken my fingernail,” she said. “See you in five minutes. The lobby?”

  He nodded and managed to smile. When she had reached the landward end of the marquee he returned to the table, picked up a glass, and with its base killed the red ant which still struggled there. He was a little surprised at himself when the glass broke in his hand. He went to compose and send his telegram.

  In Cotrell’s low-slung Lanchester, Brunhilde closed her eyes when the car approached an intersection and turned, opening them again on the other side. “Drive left,” she read from a sign. “I’m still not quite used to it. Pulling over to the left to let a car overtake you,stopping in the middle of the street to wait for a right turn. I’m glad you’re driving.”

  “You have driven here though, haven’t you?” asked Cotrell, his eyes on the road.

  “Not enough to like it—oh! What a wonderful place! See—goats on the sidewalk! And that old woman with the donkey!”

  “Yes, pretty much the same as it’s been for the last three centuries. That’s the charm of this place; but it has its drawbacks. Have you ever noticed the little Spanish-wall houses with thatched roofs and louvred windows?”

  “Yes. They all seem to be the same size.”

  “That’s right. About a hundred and fifty years ago the Home Government put a tax on every room of a house over two, and another on glass windows. The natives simply stopped building houses with more than two rooms, and put in those slatted windows. And although the law has been repealed for over half a century, the custom persists.

  “And it’s the same way with their attitude toward banks. The Chinese shopkeepers particularly were suspicious of banks in the old days, and many of them still have their caches around, in, or under the shops where they make their money.”

  “Yes, you told me about that right after I arrived.”

  “So I did,” said Cotrell, deftly avoiding a barefoot girl who walked along the road weaving a basket, singing, and carrying a tremendous tray of fruit on her head. “Well, they’re learning, I think. Yem Ching, though—he was an educated man. Too intelligent, really, to have followed the old customs the way he did. Well, he’s dead. Perhaps a few of his colleagues will profit by the poor chap’s murder. Somebody should, besides the brute who did him in.”

  “Oh—so you believe in basic justice?” smiled Brunhilde. “For every loss, a profit somewhere?”

  “In a sense I do,” said Cotrell, glancing at her. “For every crime, a punishment, in any case.”

  She laughed. “I love policemen!” She leaned back, taking in the whisking scenery—the bamboo, the rows of mangoes. “I’m hungry.”

  “Yem Foong will take care of that, and well.”

  “You seem to mean that. The only thing I’ve seen the natives eating is rice and beans and that horrible crawly-looking yampi.”

  “You’re in for a surprise. Don’t underestimate the culture of these people. It’s a culture which isn’t measured by telephones and plumbing. Or savings banks, unfortunately.”

  “You still intrigue me. What do you suppose they’ll have for lunch?”

  “Couldn’t say. Whatever it is will be delicious and—exotic.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” she said.

  “Though I hope,” he said, “that it won’t be salt fish and ackey.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Salt fish and ackey. Quite a delicacy.”

  “And you don’t like it?”

  “Oh, I do, but I don’t eat it.”

  “What’s ‘ackey’?”

  “I’ll show you. There’s lots of it growing along here—See? See there?”

  He pointed to a line of trees growing across the deep ditch which imperils all Jamaican traffic. They were shade trees with dark glossy leaves, among which their brilliant orange-yellow fruit showed. Cotrell pulled up.

  “I’ll show you one,” he said.

  He vaulted over the low door and leaped the ditch, to come back in a moment with one of the bright fruit in his hand. He gave it to Brunhilde. It was about the size of a large orange, and had a hard black encrustation, like ebony, protruding from its side.

  “What’s that?”

  “The seed,” said Cotrell, smoothly shifting gears. “It grows half in and half out.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. And is it good?”

  “Delicious,” said Cotrell. “I avoid it because, when it’s out of season, and even in season when it isn’t prepared exactly right, it’s deadly poison. Really. We have deaths every year from it. I prefer to be on the safe side.”

  Brunhilde brooded over the fruit for a moment, turning it over and over, and then suddenly tossed it out of the car. “If there is a difference between the way our minds work,” she said, “you can see it here. I’ve never tasted ackey. Just because of that, I want to. If I had tasted it, as you have, and knew it to be delicious, I’d want it again.

  “I think that this is one of the biggest things in being alive. If my host is cultured, as you say, and if he trusts his cook, then I am quite willing to trust him. As to the risk—why, one is quite likely to die from a bad cold. One might as well get some pleasure from the process.”

  Cotrell smiled, glancing briefly at his passenger. “I’ll take the cold, thank you. Ackey poisoning is a very unpleasant business. Terrible tummy-ache, y’know, vomiting and choking. Pretty quick, though, if you can’t get to a stomach pump.”

  “Jeff,” she said softly, “I simply cannot be frightened. Not by anything.”

  “I think I realized that some time ago,” said Jeff Cotrell. “You’re well-armed, Brunhilde. It would be difficult to imagine you in a situation where you couldn’t use your quick mind, or your strength, or—”

  She smiled widely, so that he saw the pointed teeth, and arched her back. “—or any other of my attributes,” she finished for him. He flushed. “You’re so right,” she added. “Hence I have nothing to fear, ever.”

  They took an unpaved side road just outside Half-Way Tree, and bumped along it for half a mile until they came to a crossroads. Under a giant tamarind tree was the shop. It boasted a sign: YEM FOONG. Ginger Beer—Yard goods. CATERER TO HIS HONOR THE GOVERNOR.

  “The sign is new,” said Brunhilde.

  “Very observant of you,” said Cotrell, turning into the shop’s yard. “Some of the people, you see, are very superstitious and wouldn’t go into a shop if it bore a dead man’s name. They’d be afraid he’d wait on them.”

  “I shall be looking,” she said, “for the culture and intelligence you tell me I’ll fi
nd here.”

  “I have said you’re observant,” he countered, opening the door for her. She laid a hand on his arm.

  “Jeff …”

  “Yes?”

  “If I help you catch your man, will you do me a favor?”

  “But of course. Anything I can.”

  “You can. I want to go to the hanging.”

  “You want—”

  “Jeff, you promised.”

  “Very well,” he said.

  They walked up the short path and entered the shop, blinking the sunlight out of their eyes. It was cool and dim inside. There were no show-windows. The packed-earth walls were thick and the windows small. Along one wall ran a board counter, behind which were bolts of cotton, canned goods, bottles of rum, and fruit juices, racked on shelves.

  There were a couple of battered tables and some chairs out on the packed-earth floor, and in the corner was a water-box filled with ice and small stone bottles of ginger-beer, cane-juice, ale, and bright-colored, sticky-sweet soft drinks.

  “Mr. Cotrell, sir. Most welcome. This place is entirely yours.”

  Yem Foong was tiny, wizened, completely bald. He wore a long black linen jacket which buttoned up to its stiff, round collar by a series of black silk frogs. His clothes were pressed and smooth, and so were his face and his voice.

  “Foong! So glad to see you again, old fellow. This is Miss Moot, of whom I have spoken to you. She has, she tells me, a high regard for the Jamaican cuisine.”

  Brunhilde inclined her head and extended her hand. But already Yem Foong had folded his own and was bowing deeply.

  “A presence such as yours begins to compensate for the emptiness of this unfortunate house.”

  “Yes, I had heard about your brother,” said Brunhilde huskily. “I can’t tell you all I feel.”

  “You have told me,” said Yem, graciously. “Now, if you will step this way, what little I have been able to prepare for you is ready.”

  They went through the rear door. A low table was set in the inner room, and Brunhilde stopped momentarily at sight of it. It was laid with exquisite Spode, and Jensen silver. A single spray of jasmine lay in a squat crystal bowl in the center of the table.

  They seated themselves. Brunhilde looked from end to end of the table, admiringly, and at the tapestried wall facing her, and around and down to the far corner of the room, where there was a fresh-dug hole about a yard square in the earthen floor. On turning back, Brunhilde found herself in the direct gaze of both her companions.

  “My poor brother met his ancestors there,” said Yem, sorrowfully, “as he was replacing the money, and the other things.”

  “Other things?”

  Yem shrugged. “Things of little value, except to us. Some carved jade, and a little golden casket containing a scrap of rice paper. It was supposed to be an original poem by Sun Yü,” he added regretfully. “The money was nothing. Money is only the substance of living—stuff of the bones and the belly. The craftsmanship of two thousand years ago is important only to that part of a man which is not an animal.”

  “I understand,” said Brunhilde. “And of course it was a man who was all animal who stole the things. Have you found nothing that would indicate who the criminal was?”

  Yem Foong shrugged tiredly. “How can one know for certain? The shop was not yet locked. It was just at dusk, which is a rapid thing in the tropics. I was in Kingston, buying yard goods, and the servants were in their quarters. And during that time when everything is shadowed, someone slipped in and did—what was done.

  “It could have been from inside or outside; it could have been some wanderer on the road outside, a stranger; or it could have been a neighbor, or even someone here—who knows? The promise of riches draws many kinds of men.”

  A servant entered, a dark brown youth with sharply slanted brows and woolly hair which grew into a widow’s peak. Brunhilde watched him upward through her lashes as he catfooted around the table, setting out the appetizer.

  When the boy left, Cotrell said, “That is Stanley?” as if for Brunhilde’s benefit.

  “Yes,” said Yem. “A strange boy, but a good one.”

  “He looks like Mephisto himself,” murmured Brunhilde to the dish before her. It was one she had not seen before—half a starapple, an exotic fruit with a five-pointed star of red-purple in its center, and delectable flesh which shaded off through red and pink to snow-white on the outside.

  “Mephisto. Interesting you should say that,” said Cotrell. “Eh, Foong?”

  “Yes,” said the oriental. “Stanley’s father was an obeah man—a wizard, up in the mountains near Gimme-Me-Bit. Stanley is the only native I have ever known who watches a sunset for the beauty he finds there. He collects colored stones, too, and has done some remarkable things in landscapes made with moth’s wings.”

  Stanley returned with the soup—black bean soup, piping hot, freshened with a touch of limejuice and containing chilled spears of avocado. Again Brunhilde’s thoughtful gaze was on the boy.

  “You seem very quiet,” said Cotrell halfway through the course.

  “What else?” smiled Brunhilde Moot. “The soup—it has quite left me speechless! Delicious, Mr. Yem.”

  “I delight in your enjoyment,” said Yem.

  “I wonder,” said Cotrell, “how you’ll enjoy this,” and, reaching under the table, he scooped up something and dropped it in front of her with a thump. It was an old, earth-stained, leather-bound satchel.

  “Wh—” It was barely a sound at all which Brunhilde Moot uttered. “Why should I enjoy a thing like this?” she asked steadily.

  “Your sense of the dramatic,” said Cotrell.

  She looked at him with a new roundness to her eyes. There was obviously a kind of subtlety which she had considered quite beyond this sallow, patient, tropical man. She looked at the satchel.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s the bag that was buried in the corner there.”

  “Where on earth did it come from?”

  “Right across the road. It’d been thrown into the canefield,” said Cotrell. He busied himself with the straps. Almost defiantly, Brunhilde ate soup.

  “Look,” said Cotrell, tilting the open top of the satchel toward her. It was full of colorful, oversized British banknotes.

  “Is that—”

  Yem Foong nodded. “It’s all there. All the money, that is. The other things, the little things—they’re not here at all.”

  Stanley was in the room and had reached the table before they saw him. He gathered up Brunhilde’s soup-dish and then saw the satchel. He uttered a faint shriek, dropped the dish on the floor, and bolted.

  “Stanley!” cried Foong.

  Brunhilde leaned back and smiled at Cotrell. “That,” she said, “is a very guilty animal.”

  “Stanley?” Yem Foong’s eyes widened. “Miss Moot—that is impossible!”

  “It is? Mr. Yem, I have seen a good deal. I think I can spot a guilty reaction when I see one. Really, Jeff, are you just going to sit there and let that—that killer get away?”

  “Stanley is Yem Foong’s servant,” said Cotrell coldly. “I’m sure he can handle the situation.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cotrell. I am embarrassed for my house and its servants.” He clapped his hands. An old woman poked her seamed mahogany face in at the door.

  “Sephronia,” said Foong quietly, “send Stanley to me directly.”

  The face disappeared, and almost immediately Stanley shuffled in. His feline gait was gone, and his eyes were filled with raw panic. The slanted eyebrows now looked ridiculous.

  “Stanley,” said Foong, without anger, “why you behave so, mon?” In speaking to the boy, his voice took on the singsong cadences of the native dialect.

  Stanley looked at the satchel. “It de money-bag, mahstah! It leave heah by de dead han’ o’ Mahstah Ching his own se’f!”

  “What’s all that?” Brunhilde demanded.

  Cotrell smiled. “He is afraid o
f the satchel because he thinks it was left here—or brought back—by Ching’s ghost.” He turned to the boy and said, “You fool youse’f, mon. It was my very han’ dat fin’ de bag dere an’—” he wiggled his fingers—“it not dead yet. No one harass de garlic you put ’pon de door an’ window-dem, as you can plainly see.”

  The boy raised startled eyes to the tops of the doors and windows. There were sprigs of garlic over all of them. Relief flooded his strange face.

  “Ah, bahss, I love you for dat! I do indeed, for it were a cru-ell an’ wicked start I had to see de money-bag itse’f, dere. I know full well no duppie can cross de garlic. I am a eejut, sah, a strikin’ eejut.”

  “Go about you work, mon,” smiled Foong.

  Stanley picked up the dishes and went out, praising every inhabitant of heaven under his breath.

  “You speak that calypso like the natives,” chuckled Brunhilde.

  Cotrell chuckled with her, but grimly. “I was born here, you know,” he said.

  Eyes down, Brunhilde meticulously positioned and repositioned the silver before her. “You know, Jeff,” she said. “I think you’re letting that savage pull the wool over your eyes. Think a minute. Didn’t you say he magpies pretty things? Didn’t you tell me he was a little strange, with his collecting rocks and gaping at the sunset? And doesn’t a servant come and go as he chooses—isn’t he in a position to know where everyone in the house may be at a particular time—say, at dusk?

  “Wouldn’t he know where anything of value might be hidden? You have no real clues here. Only by determining what kind of person might have committed the crime can you choose between suspects. I would say that the boy fills the bill. He had motive, opportunity, strength, and the peculiar tastes that would make him do such a thing.”

  Cotrell and Yem exchanged a glance. Stanley re-entered with the next course.

  “Ah!” said Cotrell. “Salt fish and ackey! You’ve got your wish, Brunhilde. Fall to. No thank you, Stanley. None for me. I’ll just have the coat-of-arms.” And he heaped his plate with the ubiquitous Jamaica Coat-of-Arms—rice and kidney beans.

  “I’d love some,” said Brunhilde, passing Cotrell a queenly glance. “A little more. That’s fine, thank you.” She tasted it. “Why, it’s delicious.”