Free Live Free

by Gene Wolfe

  “Marie hasn’t had your experience,” the King rumbled. “But she has the gift.”

  Illingworth nodded politely. “Your people are famous for it, all over the world.”

  “Most of us fake it—I do myself.” Suddenly the King smiled. “So does Marie, sometimes. But with her, sometimes it’s the real thing.”

  “Fascinating.” For a moment, Illingworth studied the witch. “Just what is the real thing, dear? Telekinesis? Precognition?”

  She shook her head, then nodded. “I do not seem to be telekinetic at all. I am strongly precognitive. A bit of telepathy, though I have met people who are much better at that than I. I am also a fairly good medium, particularly with the nonhuman spirits—elementals and so forth.”

  “Demons, Mademoiselle?”

  The witch hesitated, then nodded guardedly. “They have other, and better, names; but occasionally, yes.”

  Illingworth smiled, showing a row of teeth as white and uniform as cups on a shelf. “I’ve been by the Free house, you know. I thought I caught a whiff of sulfur.”

  “You are interested in him yourself, then.”

  “Only on your King’s behalf, my dear. We’d spoken earlier—”

  The King nodded confirmation.

  “—and of course he gave me the address. As it happens Mr. Free and I had—ah—certain mutual friends, so I was quite concerned when I heard he was missing and perhaps deceased. I thought his home might hold some indication of his whereabouts.”

  He sighed. “I found nothing. That is, nothing indicative of his present situs. A rifle that might have slain red men in its day, and a watch with a picture of a lovely lady dead, I suppose, well over a century. Beautiful old things left behind in an abandoned house, though I have taken them under my aegis now. We whose interests run beyond the marches of the visible world, beyond the fields we know, as Lord Dunsany once so finely put it while we were musing at White’s, we are prone to an itching discontent of place—”

  “Regular Gypsies,” the King added helpfully.

  “Precisely so, sir. Precisely. I would suppose I have myself, in a lifetime, I grant, more than notably long, slept in a hundred beds, hotels and such-like temporary accommodations excepted. At one time or another, I’ve made my abode on every continent, excepting only Australia and Antarctica; and though I’ve not relocated now for over thirty years and am as I suppose a bit long in the tooth for Antarctica, I might adventure Australia yet. Indeed, the warm, sunny, dry climate that characterizes so much of that ‘Land of the Southern Wind’ would seem more suited to my old age than our savage winters. I have sojourned upon many islands too, of which Great Britain was the largest and Capri perhaps the best. It has been spoiled now, I am given to understand, by tourists. Tiberius Caesar said much the same thing.”

  “You were speaking of Benjamin Free,” the witch reminded him.

  “So I was, my dear. I only meant to say that an examination of his mementos led me to suspect that he was not—I will not say an initiate, but not an initiate as I have been accustomed to using that term. I doubt that he was ever admitted by others to a knowledge of the occult mysteries, to the ceremonies and services of the Secret Masters; although he may well have been one of those persons—more common than we are wont to suppose, if I may say so—who have acquired occult power and even occult authority by developing their superphysical capacities.”

  “I’m sure you are correct,” said the witch, who was happy to have this shadowy old man believe Free unimportant. “Nevertheless, I would be glad to find him, and grateful for whatever help you can give me. He was kind to me, and I would like to repay him, if he is still among the living and in difficulties; and I feel certain he had something yet to teach me.”

  Illingworth gave the King a broad wink. “And what payment do you offer for my services, Mademoiselle? I will not ask for that little hand in marriage; I fear there might be royal objections, although I feel sure we should be as happy—in the words of that other Benjamin, that marvelous old Franklin who used to visit the Hell Fire Club—as two bugs in a rug. No, I won’t even request it for a son or grandson, for I have none, though they would be the luckiest boys in the world now if I did. But what about a kiss, my dear? Do you think you could bear to kiss this raddled old cheek, for such a prize?”

  “You’ve found him!” the witch exclaimed.

  “My dear friend,” Illingworth turned to the King. “You are the luckiest man on earth, do you know that? Your subject here is a woman of such surpassing loveliness that she is beautiful even with mouth agape. You kings have all the best of it anyway, enjoying the pleasures of the droit du seigneur, savoring the blossoming as it were, then allowing us poor devils of husbands to sweep up the petals.”

  “Where is he?” The witch caught Illingworth by the sleeve.

  “Well, now,” he said. “Well, now, I suppose I should tell you about it. You don’t object to my smoking?”

  “Not at all; I would like one myself. I have no more of my own.”

  He opened a large, old-fashioned silver cigarette case. “They’re Players, I’m afraid. One keeps up the old habits, the dear old luxuries, and they become more luxurious every year, and more dear. There’s a little tobacconist’s down on Fourth Street that stocks them for me. I warn you, they’re strong for American tastes.”

  The King said, “I’m a cigar smoker, Cas. I’ll try one.”

  Illingworth bent forward with the case. “An honor—ah—Your Majesty.”

  “Just King. Call me King.”

  “And a light. A light for you, Mademoiselle? And for myself now, if you will excuse me.”

  “Is he safe?”

  Illingworth puffed smoke, a smoldering old dragon. “Hmm? Oh, Mr. Free. Why, yes, so far as I know. Perfectly. I don’t really know the people who have him, you see—”

  “Have him?”

  “Perhaps I should explain. When your king communicated with me, mentioning the names, I might add, of certain esteemed mutual acquaintances, and informing me of Mr. Free’s disappearance and his own concern therefor, it struck me, and indeed I might say struck me almost at once, that I had heard the name. Have I mentioned, my dear, that I have the honor to be the editor and publisher of both Hidden Science and Natural Supernaturalism?”

  “I know that,” the witch said impatiently, but Illingworth was looking at a corner of the ceiling, or possibly the visage of posterity, and did not appear to hear her.

  “They are small publications, if you like. Indeed their page size is but five by seven and a half, seldom does an issue have a folio in excess of one hundred—often my little staff and I are delighted to see that advertising, the support, largely, of a few stalwart friends who have clung to us through the years, permits a page count in the nineties. Each title appears but half a dozen times per year; no slick paper for us, and no covers from famous photographers, no pictures of five-hundred-dollar-an-hour trollops. On a magazine rack, beside the great periodicals of the day, ours are small and shabby enough.

  “But appearance is less than everything. And though in saying it I defame the God of the Age, no, Mammon Himself is not everything. These tiny and yet precious bundles of inexpensive paper—inexpensive, that is, in the eyes of men who need not pay for it—are the respected journals of those who seek to penetrate the veil of illusion and reach Ultimate Truth. And what is that but to say the sole class of mankind having any importance on the rolls of eternity? I have conducted these publications for more than thirty years, and thus I—even I, who have no more than the most rudimentary powers, the powers any man on earth might develop with very little application—even I have a certain, shall we say, cachet? A cachet, then, among many of the leading psychics of our day.”

  “You—” the witch began.

  “Did I say many? I might in complete honesty have said all. Yes, my dear?”

  “You contacted some of these people?”

  “I did indeed. There are certain ones—persons whom I am accustomed to call the
Secret Masters. No, not the Secret Masters of this our world, who are said to dwell among inaccessible peaks, but certain personages whom I know to be more than legends, personages who dwell (sometimes amid the most humble circumstances) within ten leagues of where we sit, those whom I name the Secret Masters of the City.”

  The witch said, “I would have called Ben Free such a one. Or one who is above them.”

  Illingworth lifted a finger to his lips. “My dear, I beg you not to speak here of Those Who Are Above. Let it suffice to say that tonight, when your King’s dread minions consented to the restoration of the dynamos, I was approached by a certain individual. I was told of a location and given what I may call without too much inaccuracy a key. I called your King with my happy news and was told that you, my dear, were expected shortly. And now, if you will consent to ride in an old car with an old man … ?”

  “You are going yourself?”

  Illingworth smiled again. “My dear, it is I who bear the sesame, if I may so phrase it, that will fling wide the portals of the enchanted cavern. Besides, I wouldn’t miss it for gold.”

  Spinach

  If Stubb had been paying more attention to his surroundings and less to Candy, or if Candy had been paying attention to anything, they would, as they entered the Consort’s bar, have seen Oswald Barnes standing before the hotel’s main entrance.

  If they had, they presumably and understandably would not have recognized him. He wore an overcoat with a rich fur collar, like a theatrical impresario; from beneath it protruded pants legs that plainly belonged to a gray pinstriped suit of bankerly cut, legs terminating, regrettably, in the sort of black patent-leather shoes worn with a dinner jacket. On his head sat a black homburg that might have graced the Ambassador to the Court of St. James. His hands were tastefully attired in gloves of the thinnest and softest pigskin, and he clasped them behind his back as he waited, humming a little tune about being strong to the finish. If he was cold, he showed no sign of it.

  Five minutes after Stubb and Candy had gone into the bar, two things occurred at once. A small and slightly soiled boy came running down the sidewalk toward Barnes. And a large and gleaming gray auto pulled up to the curb in front of him. Little Ozzie called, “Daddy!” and Robin Valor inquired, “Osgood Barnes?” like unrehearsed actors stepping on each other’s lines.

  Barnes was a man of many flaws, but slowness of thought was never one of them, and he was abundantly blessed with that instinct America values above all the rest, the one that makes a man grab all he can. He swept Little Ozzie into his arms and stepped into the gray car with almost the same motion. “Yes,” he said. “I’m Osgood Barnes. At your service—very much so. Little Ozzie, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you with Candy?”

  “Mama said I was supposed to live with you,” Little Ozzie announced firmly. “I rode on the big bus.”

  Barnes shook his head ruefully. “I’m divorced,” he said. “Did I tell you that over the phone?”

  The gray sedan left the curb with a crunch of ice. “I think so,” Robin murmured. “Anyway, I assumed it.”

  “Well, I am. And this is my son, Osgood Myles Barnes, Junior.”

  Robin glanced across at him and smiled. ‘Hi, Osgood.”

  “Ozzie,” Little Ozzie said.

  Barnes added, “You can call me that too. Little Ozzie, where are the people who were supposed to take care of you tonight?”

  “I don’t know.” The boy was enjoying the warmth of the car; he was already near sleep.

  “Did you run away from them?”

  “I ran away from the clown.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because I wanted to find you.”

  Barnes gave him a lopsided smile and rumpled his hair. Robin said, “We can’t very well take him on our date, can we?”

  When the gray sedan pulled up before the Consort again, she got out with the two Ozzies. In her four-inch heels, she was taller than both.

  The doorman smiled at them. “Registering, folks?”

  “No,” Robin told him. “We’re just going in for a moment. May we leave the car here?”

  He nodded. “I’ll have a boy park it for you, Ma’am.”

  Her hand, holding a folded bill, slipped into his. “Just leave it where it is. We’ll be back in five minutes or so. If you have to move it, the keys are inside.”

  In the lobby, no one appeared to notice the elegant couple and the bedraggled child. A large, smooth elevator decorated like the very best type of Victorian brothel carried them to the seventh floor. Barnes knocked at the witch’s door, but his knocks woke no response. “They must have gone somewhere,” he said. “Probably that’s why they left him with the clown.”

  Robin leaned over the little boy, more imposing in her scented muscularity than his mother or any teacher had ever been. Her power made him sneeze. “Where does the clown live, Ozzie?” she asked. “You came from there, so you must know.”

  He sneezed again, shaking his head, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  “Then he’ll have to come with us,” she said. “I won’t mind. Will you, Osgood?”

  “We can’t take him into a lot of places, and if we stay long it’ll get too cold in the car.”

  “Then we’ll not stay long. First I’ll drive you to a little spot I like very, very much. We’ll talk on the way, and your son will fall asleep, I’m sure, on the back seat. When we stop, you can cover him with your coat. We’ll go inside and I’ll have a sherry or perhaps two, and we’ll listen to the music. Before the car gets too cold, we’ll leave again and go to my apartment. There’s a spare bedroom, and you can carry him upstairs and put him on the bed. There’s a very nice restaurant nearby that will send up food and wine.”

  Without saying a word, and much too quickly for her to protest or even step back, Barnes put his arms around her and kissed her. He had to raise himself on his toes to reach her lips, but he bent her backward until he was supporting her torso almost horizontally, crushing her big, firm breasts to his chest, his lips and tongue alive with passion at the gateway of her mouth.

  At first she was too stunned to act; then for an instant Little Ozzie thought she was going to ram the long, sharp, crimson-lacquered nails of her thumbs into his father’s eyes. Then she moaned, a sound surprisingly deep and anguished, and threw her arms about him, pulling him to her until it seemed they both must fall with famished lips and grinding pelvises to the floor of the corridor.

  As perhaps they would, if an elevator some distance away had not opened to discharge an elderly couple and a bellman. Belatedly, they straightened up instead, Robin’s lipstick smeared, much of it under Barnes’s mustache, her pillbox hat with the peacock’s feather lying on the carpet near the wall.

  The elderly couple were much too well bred to notice anything; they walked by chatting of something neither would be able to recall five minutes afterward. Their bellman, however, smirked and offered Barnes a congratulatory wink.

  When the elderly couple and their bags had disappeared into a room beyond the witch’s, Robin asked breathlessly, “Shouldn’t you at least tell me why you did that?”

  “I don’t know,” Barnes said.

  “Well, it was—different.”

  “For me too.” Slowly, arm in arm, they walked back toward the elevator. “If you really want to know, it was because you said what you did. About going up to your apartment and having dinner. For my whole life I’ve been waiting for you to say that to me; and now that you have, I know someway that something’s going to take it away so it won’t ever happen, we won’t ever go there and eat that dinner.” He pushed the button.

  “You’re a little frightening, Osgood. Do you know that?”

  “Ozzie. Anyway, I wanted to get a piece of paradise, sort of a sample I could carry around for the rest of my life, before that something came along and took the rest.”

  The elevator doors slid back.

  “You are frightening, in a nice way. I feel—I don’t know—as if all of a s
udden I’ve got this pet panther. But, Ozzie, it’s going to be just like I said. In fact, it’s going to be wonderful—we might not order the food at all.”

  He grinned at her as they stepped out into the lobby. A man in a worn check suit was waiting near the registration desk. When he saw the suit, Barnes trotted over and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around; he was long and lean, and at least half a head taller.

  “Hello, Reeder,” Barnes said. “Put them up. I wouldn’t want to cold-cock you.”

  “Shipmate! Hell, I’ve been looking all over for you. I want to give you your stuff back.” He fumbled in the pockets of the suit.

  “Put ’em up,” Barnes said again. Robin Valor and Little Ozzie looked from one man to the other.

  “Wallet,” Reeder mumbled. “Locker key.”

  He held them out and Barnes slapped his hand, knocking them to the floor. Then he slapped Reeder with a quick forehand-backhand, the two slaps coming so close together they sounded like one.

  “Don’t do that,” Reeder said. He lifted his fist and Barnes hit him under the jaw, sending him reeling against the registration desk. Joe the bellman, who had been in the act of picking up a guest’s luggage, dropped it and jumped between them. Barnes hit him with his left just above the belt, his fist driving into the cheap red uniform to the wrist. Joe doubled over and collapsed, his legs turned to rags.

  Reeder hit Barnes on the cheek with a left and over the eye with a right, his fists flying like pistons. Barnes ducked and bored in with the hard, quick, smacking sounds a butcher makes tenderizing meat. Reeder staggered back, but the desk would not let him fall. For a moment Barnes’s fists fell against him like rain. His face seemed to melt under the blows, growing soft and darkly crimson as the skin washed away. Then he slipped down, and two burly men in dark suits grabbed Barnes’s arms from behind.