An Old Friend of the Family d-3

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Then who are you? Really?”

  He emphasized the first words of his smiling answer with little hand-pats, delivered on alternate syllables. “I am Dr. Emile Corday, of London, an old friend of the family, and no one, no one, can prove anything to the contrary. Now, will you choose to help me? Or to help the creatures who have torn off your grandson’s finger?”

  SIX

  “Andrew? Dr. Corday is very interested in pottery. He was wondering if you might have time to show him a little of your collection before dinner.”

  Clarissa and the visitor had come upon Andrew standing in the hallway, gazing at a phone on a small table as if he knew or hoped that it was about to ring. Introductions had been brief.

  “He’s really interested. Go along, dear, it’ll do you good to think of something else.”

  “All right, Mother.” With a last pensive glance toward the phone, Andrew turned away from it. A minute later, Clarissa having effaced herself, he was guiding the visitor toward the rooms where, as he said, most of the things were currently being kept.

  This proved to be in an obviously older wing of the house, a one-story extension running north from what was now the main building. The original style of construction of this old wing had been partially obliterated by extensive remodelling carried on (as near as the visitor could guess) some decades back, and survived mainly in pseudo-Gothic archways separating rooms, gray stone walls still showing here and there, and some tall, narrow windows well suited to the needs of defending bowmen.

  “Most of the collection is in this room, Doctor.”

  And now they were standing in the midst of it. The large chamber held not only pottery of almost every conceivable age and provenance, but a jumble of other old things as well. There were two suits of what looked to the visitor like authentic medieval armor. On side walls were some large, second-rate old Flemish tapestries. But he looked most intently at the wall opposite the door, where there hung a portrait of Mina herself.

  “That is intriguing, isn’t it, Doctor? My wife’s grandmother, on the Harker side of the family. But of course you probably know . . . it was done by Gustav Klimt. Nineteen-oh-one, I think.”

  The old man could not now recall the date with any certainty either, though he well recalled the sunlit sitting room in Exeter where Mina had posed for this painting, and his own quick exit from that room into the noonday sun, with perilously aching eyes, on a day when Mina’s husband and the artist had come home sooner than expected. And sure enough, there was gray stodgy Jonathan, still intruding in the only way that he could manage now, just down the wall from Mina in an inferior portrait done sometime in the ‘twenties.

  “You see, Doctor, we Southerlands are one of those American families who were involved around the turn of the century in what some people think of as the looting of poor old Europe by vulgar young America. That was when some of us here had a lot of money, and a lot of the old European families didn’t. It was possible to buy up . . . but I keep forgetting, you probably know all that better than I do.”

  “That was not looting, dear sir. Not at all.”

  “This incense burner is Chinese porcelain, of course. Wan Li reign. But it came here through Europe.” Southerland went on, evidently seeking whatever distraction he might be able to find here, for there was a dry eagerness in his voice. “Of course we’ve added in more recent decades, recent years . . . this terra-cotta sarcophagus here was sent over during the war. There was a lot of space available in ships westbound from England in those days, I understand. I myself no longer work at collecting as I once did . . . and this little black bowl is Santa Clara Pueblo . . . Kate was starting to get interested in the Indian things . . .” Eagerness gone, slumping against a table, Andrew paused, as if suddenly exhausted.

  “How easy it is,” the visitor observed, “particularly in the world of business, for an innocent man to acquire terrible enemies.”

  “Enemies?” Southerland did not seem greatly surprised at the suggestion; still he thought about it for a while, as if it had never occurred to him before. “Yes, we all make them, don’t we, and without even trying. The police have asked me several times: who are your enemies? Any servants with a grudge? Hell, we haven’t had any really regular help in the house in years. Servants come and go. They don’t even remember who we are half the time, much less hate us.”

  “I know how difficult it can be to confide in the police.”

  “What I just can’t understand is this happening to a boy like John. Not like some of these other kids, pot-smoking, getting girls in trouble. A little driving trouble once, last fall, was all I ever had with John.” Southerland’s countenance convulsed, as if he were trying with all the muscles of his face to squeeze something out of himself. “And Kate,” he added brokenly, and put his face down in his hands.

  “I am a father too, you know.” The visitor’s voice was soft, though without perceptible emotion. “Or I was.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Andrew, as if it couldn’t matter. He looked up, starting to recover from his spasm.

  “Not many do. But you are quite right, my family affairs are neither here nor there. Tell me, have you any dealings with what I believe is locally called the Mafia?”

  “What? Never.” Southerland’s reddened eyes, now shocked anew, probed at the visitor. “Who said a thing like that about me?”

  “No one, to my knowledge. But if you cannot guess who the guilty parties may be, then I must try to do so.”

  “You?” Southerland blinked at him stupidly, but aggressively. “What have you to do with this?” When the visitor stood silent, his host went on, now in a conciliatory tone: “Forgive me, I don’t mean to insult any old friend of Mother’s. But I’ve gone through all these same questions with the police. I don’t know why my children are being attacked. If I knew, don’t you suppose . . . I just don’t know.”

  The visitor found himself beginning to be convinced of this. But he said nothing, only turned to watch the gothic doorway leading to the hall, where two seconds later there appeared the figure of a man.

  The newcomer was about thirty, sparely muscular, tough-faced, fair-haired, dressed with classless American informality in boots, jeans, and a plaid jacket over a plaid shirt of different pattern. He favored the old man with a quick but judgemental glance that to the latter once more suggested the police. But when he spoke it was to their host: “Andy? Judy said you were back here. I just wanted to tell you—God, what can anybody say?”

  Andy—the European visitor could not really manage to think of him by that name—pressed his lips together and shook his head and looked away. So it was left to the old man to break a slightly awkward pause, which he did by putting out a cordial hand. “I am Dr. Emile Corday, an old friend of Clarissa’s grandmother.”

  “I heard about you from Clarissa. Pleased to meet you.” The young man’s grip was firm, though probably moderated in consideration of Dr. Corday’s age. “I’m Joe Keogh, Kate and I were . . .” Glancing toward Kate’s father, he let his words trail off.

  “I understand. Well, Andrew?” Trying to fit the American style, he could just about manage Andrew. “Shall we all rejoin the ladies?”

  Southerland agreed spiritlessly and came with them, walking now as if he were the aged one of the group. “If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I think I’m going to lie down for a while . . . Lenore?” They had just re-entered the newer portion of the house, where his wife met them. “Will you call me at once if anything important comes up?”

  “Of course. Lie down if you like.” His wife, hardly looking at any of them, seemed as distracted as before. “Dr. Corday? Joe? You’re both going to stay to dinner, aren’t you?”

  Corday bowed neatly. “Much as it would please me, Lenore, I cannot. Tomorrow I should like to drop in again, and talk over old times with Clarissa. And of course to do what I can to lighten the burdens on you all. Meanwhile, messages can reach me at the Shores Motel.”

  Joe in turn made vague excu
ses for not staying, and then put forward the offer, quickly accepted, to drop off Dr. Corday at the Shores. Lenore did not press either of them to remain. Judy, rejoining them at the last moment, did, but desisted when she saw that both really preferred to leave.

  Outside, walking backwards into a gust of wind that howled across the floodlit gravel drive, Joe Keogh had a considerate eye out for the old man’s footing. “Watch out, kind of icy here with these frozen puddles.”

  The old man wondered for a moment if his arm was going to be taken. But that indignity did not occur, and he followed Joe among the parked cars of family members and the police—some of whom were still in the house, listening for ransom demands at one of the telephones. Joe’s vehicle, a small, gray German import, was the most modest of the lot.

  They had driven perhaps half a mile south on Sheridan road, here fronted mostly by the driveways, walls, and gates of other set-back mansions before the old man spoke again: “You grieve for her deeply.” Probing, he put a kind of challenge into the words.

  The driver glanced over at him. “I do.” He paused. “Do they get this kind of weather much in your part of Europe?”

  “You have noticed my accent, which I fear still betrays my central European origins. And my French name, of course. But I really do now make my home in London, where these days cold this intense and snow this heavy are rare. Now I see that you do grieve, indeed. Even though you were never formally betrothed, I take it?”

  Joe let a little time and traffic go by. “There were difficulties about that. Maybe you noticed, Kate’s parents aren’t exactly crazy about me. I felt like I was engaged to her, though she hadn’t actually said she’d marry me. You know?”

  “You had, perhaps, a rival?”

  “That wasn’t it.” Pause. “She . . . just hated to give up her freedom.” A longer pause. “Some of her wealthy acquaintances must have wanted to marry her too.”

  “Which ones?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Again snow was falling, a flurry of stray white blurrings in the slow-moving headlights.

  “You are not wealthy, then.”

  “No, I’m just a Chicago cop.” Joe felt his lips quirk in a smile half a second in duration. “Some people in my line have gotten wealthy, but I doubt I ever will.”

  “I suppose you have not been assigned any official part in Kate’s case? Or her brother’s?”

  “The specialists will do a better job. I’m in the Pawnshop Detail: recovering stolen merchandise, things like that. Right now they’ve given me a few days off.”

  The road curved, and its new angle had been blown clean by some trick of the wind. Now the houses flanking it on both sides were less monumental, the driveways shorter.

  “See,” said Joe, “I don’t have much family.” He cleared his throat and tried again. “I belong to this kind of Catholic social club for single people. Kate got into it too. Sometimes the people in the club go to hospitals, children’s homes, and so on, do a little volunteer work. I met her on one of those deals . . . here we are, Shores Motel.”

  But when the car had stopped, in a splendor of light from the signs and windows of the ornate office, the old man made no immediate move to get out. He just sat there, looking at Joe so regally that Joe wondered for a moment if the chauffeur was expected to get out and walk around and open the door for the distinguished passenger.

  But it turned out that his passenger had only been mulling over another question. “Do you know where poor Kate’s body is at present?”

  “The Chicago morgue. Why?” Joe was suddenly a little angry at this pointless nosiness. He shifted in his seat to face the other more fully. The lights from the motel showed Corday’s chin smooth-shaven, lean and firm despite the lines of age. The mouth was tough in a thin-lipped way, beneath a mildly beaky nose. The eyes above were still in shadow, though lights made motionless spots of bright reflection in them. Joe thought suddenly: I would not want this old man for my enemy.

  The thin-lipped mouth said: “Determination of the cause of death has long been something of a specialty of mine. Would you be kind enough to drive me to the Chicago morgue tonight? Or at least give me the address?”

  “Tonight?”

  The old man nodded, minimally.

  “Doctor, I don’t know what kind of hours they keep in Europe, but they’re not going to let any strangers into that place tonight.”

  Corday’s mouth smiled solidly. “But I should like to see the building, at least, that I may know where it is. And I am eager to discover something of the great city near us, and eager also to continue our so-interesting conversation. Would it be a great inconvenience, for you to drive me there?”

  “They’re not going to let you in,” Joe explained, with what he felt was beautiful patience.

  “Or would you prefer to go to your home, and brood alone upon life’s sadnesses?”

  The morgue was a little south of the Loop, only a couple of blocks from central police headquarters on State. After driving past both buildings, Joe found a vacant parking space about halfway between them, on a street of tall office buildings all locked up and darkened for the night. He needed a parking space because it seemed that he was going to have to do a little more patient explaining still.

  “Look, Dr. Corday, you’re a real good listener, for which I’m grateful. It’s been a help talking to you. But as far as trying to get into that place tonight, it’s silly. They won’t let us in just because I’m a cop or you’re a doctor.”

  “I ask only that you wait here in the car for a few minutes, Joe, if you would be so kind. I shall walk back to the building myself.”

  Joe shook his head. “Maybe you can just walk around London alone at night, I wouldn’t know. Here it isn’t always safe—ah!”

  The stubborn old man had started to get out. Joe, determined to use gentle force if necessary to make him behave sensibly, had taken him firmly by the coatsleeve. It wasn’t reasonable that the old man’s flesh could really have delivered a stinging electric shock to his hand through the thick cloth. But that was what it had felt like. Rubbing his thumb and fingers together now, testing for injury, Joe could feel nothing wrong. He must have somehow twinged a nerve or twanged a tendon.

  By now the old man was standing at his ease outside the re-closed door. “I shall be quite safe,” he murmured with a smile, and touched his dark hatbrim. He turned away and in a moment long strides had taken him around a corner.

  All right, the chances were, of course, that nothing would happen. Winter nights were safer than summer ones on the streets of the core city, and the streetlighting here was excellent. But to a stranger, a perhaps innocent foreigner, there was a special responsibility.

  Joe got out of the car on his side, buttoned up his jacket, and walked to the corner, flexing the fingers of his right hand. They felt fine, now. He would catch up with the difficult old man and walk along. How did he get into these things? But at the same time he was relieved not to be home alone in his apartment.

  He stood at the corner, squinting thoughtfully down a long, broad sidewalk almost empty of pedestrians. The old man was nowhere in sight.

  SEVEN

  The visitor stood alone in a dark room, halfway along a broad, terrazo-floored aisle that was lined on both sides with double tiers of massive metal drawers. In the next room, the possessor of a pair of middle-aged lungs was sitting in a slightly squeaky chair, sitting quite still and on the verge of snoring. The light coming under the closed door from the room where the watchman dozed was all that the visitor had to let him see the tags on the drawers, but it was more light than he needed. What handicapped him in his search was not darkness but the impenetrable official jargon on the tags, labels for this foreign city’s mysterious dead. Presently, with an almost inaudible hiss of relief, he gave up trying to be methodical—never his strong suit anyway—and slid a long drawer out at random.

  The sheet-draped body in it was that of an adolescent black male whose forehead had been grossly damaged, th
e rest of the face less so, by some violent flat impact. Automobile, pavement, weapon? Touching the dark marble shoulder, the visitor still could not be sure of which. But the physical contact established for him some rapport. Not only with this one truncated identity, but, by some dimly perceived extension of the contiguity, with all the silent company about.

  That was a start. The old man slid the young black statue back out of sight and stood with closed eyes in the near-dark, concentrating deeply. Now he began to pace along the aisle, brushing his long fingers on the cold handles of the drawers. Top row, bottom row, top again . . . he knew without pulling them open that in one was a woman, somewhat too old to be the girl he wanted, in the next, a man, another man, a boy, a girl . . . .

  Even before the chosen drawer flowed out on easy rollers at his touch, he was quite sure that he had found Kate Southerland. His hand went out to delicately turn back the rim of coarse white sheet from the face of Judy’s sister.

  The revealed face froze him into immobility.

  For the second time in as many hours he found himself taken completely by surprise. All his delicately forming plans, estimations, guesses, regarding the Southerland affair, every theory that he had begun to play with in his mind, all vanished like the rising mist at dawn.

  This was not true death before him.

  Oh, the girl was cold and unbreathing certainly, her heart as quiet as her hands: medical student and expert pathologist alike would certify her dead. But the old man was able to perceive the energies of altered life that still charged all this pretty body’s cells. Again he drew a minimal breath, and uttered that faint, almost reptilian sound, expressing to himself his own surprise. Had she enemies so bitter that they meant her to be autopsied alive?

  Or . . .

  He passed his flat, extended hand once close above the girl’s face, forehead to chin. Then he made the same motion in reverse. He needed only the one pass to make Kate’s eyes open for him. They were unseeing as yet, but a lovely milk-blue, glass-blue, in the night.