by Peter Israel
“Half brothers,” Bashard said. “They came from the same bitch but a different litter. As to why Herbert didn’t eat the tainted meat, there are any number of possible explanations, but the simplest one is this: he didn’t eat it because he was with me. Herbert came up with me in the elevator after my constitutional. Jules didn’t. I assumed he was with my daughter, but he must have gone out again. After a while Herbert must have left me, too. I paid no attention until I heard him howling.”
I don’t know whether it was the late hour or the bathrobe or the cane, but Bashard looked older as he came toward us. His complexion shone waxy pale, his eyes were semiclosed, and his body seemed to lean forward onto the cane.
He came between us, stood there with a slight tremor and put his hand on the dog’s shoulder.
“Poor beastie,” he said. Then, turning to Price, peremptorily: “You should learn to treat the dead with more respect, Price, even if it’s only an animal. Wrap him up now.”
“Yes, sir,” Price answered.
“We’ll bury him tomorrow. Right now, every man jack of us can go to bed.”
We did, but at least one of us not to sleep—not immediately, anyway. I was bothered by a number of things, among them the dislocation of having been yanked out of my routine. And Grace asleep, under “sedation.” Like what sedative? And Raul Bashard (apparently confusing the dissection of the dead with that of the living) refusing an autopsy—when the dog’s murder, coming after his stated fear for his own life, ought to have made him want to know everything. And finally, one Doberman dead and the other still alive, locked up, so Price had said, in the kennel. Before I fell asleep I heard him howl outside, the mournful sound curling through my window and around my bed.
The household was roused at six-fifteen, I by a phone call from MacGregor, the cook. Breakfast was served, inside, at seven; the ceremony began at seven-thirty.
Grace arrived late in the dining room after Bashard; Price and I had already begun. The buffet was set up on a long mahogany sideboard: scrambled eggs in a silver tureen, hashed browns in another, sizzling strips of bacon on a hot tray, a large crystal bowl of fresh fruit set in ice, diagonal slices of toast in little silver racks. But all Grace wanted was orange juice. She gulped two glasses while she stood at the buffet, poured and drank a third, then poured a fourth and brought it with her to the table.
Bashard sat at the end of the long table, Price and I facing each other at his sides. Grace slumped in a chair several places down from Price and stared fixedly at her orange juice, then at the coffee which the cook poured from a silver pot. Her face looked puffed—the eyelids, lips, the cheeks—the way children’s faces look when they’re awakened too early. Her blonde hair swirled across her face. Sometimes she flicked it out of the way; sometimes she didn’t bother, as though she’d forgotten it. She wore a starched white shirt that looked designer, the ends knotted at the midriff, and tight-fitting faded jean shorts with strings hanging from the hems that had, I guessed, been cut from full-length. Her legs and feet were bare, her yawns uncovered, her conversation minimal.
Bashard contented himself with a small silver pot of yogurt, which he scraped at determinedly, and repeated cups of tea. Price and I helped ourselves amply but we hardly made a dent in the food. I couldn’t help but wonder who would eat the rest of it. Or, for that matter, sit at all the vacant places at the table. Or sleep in all the empty rooms.
Precisely at seven-thirty, Bashard got up and led us onto the back lawn, cane in hand. He wore approximately the same costume I’d first met him in: tailored jacket, a starched white button-down shirt open at the neck, knife-sharp trousers, and the inevitable sockless sneakers. The cook, MacGregor, met us at the corner of the house, still in his apron, carrying the bundle containing the dead Doberman—now covered with a white shroud that looked like it had been cut and stitched from a sheet.
We stopped once, at the kennel, where Bashard opened the gate and fastened a choke chain to the waiting Doberman. Herbert seemed subdued like the rest of us. He walked docilely by his master, gracefully, in the forefront of the procession.
It was a gorgeous morning. There was still a crispness in the air, a sharp blue sky dotted with pillow clouds, and a breeze swept across the hillside into the green woods before us.
At the edge of the woods the gardener waited, a short, stocky, balding man called Kohl. He’d served in the Navy, too, a twenty-year vet. He leaned on his shovel now. Next to the first of a stand of oak trees he’d dug a short narrow grave.
Bashard halted; so did the rest of the household. Again I was struck by how few they were. Gardener, cook, chauffeur, daughter, dog. Bashard. Somehow there should have been more. Goats, sheep, housekeepers. Instead of housekeepers, a professional cleaning service worked the house from top to bottom twice a week. Ditto a landscaping service for the grounds. Laundry and cleaning went in and out on a truck. Provisions were delivered. An outside secretarial service sent in temps, and a security service came monthly to verify their installations. Daily tasks were divided mostly by MacGregor and Kohl.
Bashard handed Herbert’s choke chain to Price and his cane to me. He took the bundle from MacGregor and, kneeling, placed it in the shallow grave. Then he stood erect and started to speak.
It wasn’t a sermon exactly, and certainly not a prayer. More of a statement. Some funeral music would have livened it up. Anyway, the part I remember went something like this:
“This material that covers you, beast, will rot and crumble. Your flesh, your eyes, will be eaten away. Your bones will last longest, your skull, but these, too, will be pulverized. Your dust will seep into the ground, the earth and the sea will rise over you, and you will be part of the planet to whatever creatures then live on it. Until the planet itself dies. Only then will the continuity break on Earth.”
Heavy stuff, but not a shred of emotion in the voice.
That was the last line: “Only then will the continuity break on Earth.” Then Bashard beckoned to Kohl for the shovel and dug one, then a second shovelful of dirt from the mound beside the grave and emptied them into the hole. Then he stood back, breathing deeply, and turned to hand the shovel to Grace.
I wasn’t paying full attention and missed her initial reaction. I felt her start back, though, like she was reacting to being struck. When I looked at her, her face was screwed into a grimace. Then she caught herself, glared at Bashard, big-eyed and breasts heaving, and screamed at him: “You lousy filthy creep!”
With that she swerved, stumbled almost to the ground, pushed off with her hand and, catching her balance, took off full tilt toward the house.
It all happened, and ended, in a couple of seconds.
I looked at the others for explanation, at Bashard holding the shovel, at Price pulling on Herbert’s choke chain. But there was no explanation. Bashard just stared after Grace, head stiff into the breeze, expression impervious.
And Grace kept running.
Bashard broke the mood himself. He glanced down at his watch.
“Well,” he said, surveying us evenly, “it’s time I went to work. Here. You boys finish the job, will you?”
He handed me the shovel in exchange for his cane, then, pushing off, strode back across the lawn after his daughter at a pace so vigorous that us plain mortals would have had trouble keeping up.
I couldn’t get anything out of them, not even with Bashard and Grace gone. If they were covering up, well, then they were covering up.
“She’s like that,” MacGregor, the cook, said while we filled the grave back in with dirt. “Up and down, that’s just the way she is.”
“Okay,” I said, “but why’d she call him a creep? Does she think he did it? That he’d poison his own dog?”
“You’ll have to ask her,” Kohl, the gardener, answered with a half-laugh and a shrug. “She’s some handful all right. You never know with her.”
“A real pistol,” MacGregor said. “Always has been, since she was in pigtails.”
Price, I g
uessed, knew more, but if he had an opinion as to what had made her crazy, he wasn’t telling.
During my first visit, I’d set up shop in one of the outbuildings, and that’s where I went now. It was a sort of combination storeroom and office where there was access to the computer—limited access, as I found out—and a telephone.
First I called the Counselor and reported what had happened. Then I dialed Fincher and Associates, the private detective agency. Bud Fincher wasn’t in yet, so I left a message calling off the meeting scheduled for that morning and putting him on standby for later that day. Then I called Muffin’s vet. Muffin’s vet was in all right, but he was in surgery. The place, his receptionist told me, was a mad-house, and I could hear barking in the background. I asked the receptionist about dog-training schools.
“Dog-training schools!” she answered. “But Muffin’s too old.”
“It’s not for Muffin.”
“Oh, don’t tell me, Phil. You haven’t gone and gotten one of your own? We’ve made you a convert at last. I bet you got a mutt.”
I told her the information was for a friend, not for me. She sounded disappointed. She told me to hold on and left me listening to the barking. Then she came back and gave me a list of three. But the best, she said, was run by a group of monks out in the Poconos. She gave me the number.
I dialed Pennsylvania and got a Brother Alexander on the phone. When I told him I’d just bought a male Doberman pinscher pup, I learned more than I wanted to know about the Brothers’ program. I managed to get my questions in here and there, and answers, but Brother Alexander was not to be deterred.
Then I started talking to the computer. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in its capacity to solve the death of Jules Verne, and in this I was right. There was no “Animal” category in the file, no “Hate, Animal,” no “Dog,” no “Canine,” no “Doberman,” no “Jules,” nor “Herbert,” nor “Verne,” nor “Wells.” Maybe some specially gifted shrink, sifting through the crazy mail, could have detected the Bashard-hater who would have chosen the writer’s dogs as the target in lieu of the writer himself. More likely, I thought, was that some secret dog-hater lurking in that placid neighborhood had planted the bait. But the computer couldn’t help me there, Bashard had ruled out the local constabulary, and besides, something Brother Alexander mentioned had left me doubtful on that score, too.
I put the question of Jules aside. Hire the track team, the Counselor had ordered, so I set out to give the track team something to do.
There was plenty. Too much, in fact. If you’d tried to check out the authors of every piece of threat mail Bashard had received, you could still be looking long after he’d checked out himself, either by natural or unnatural means. I therefore had to apply some fairly arbitrary criteria. For instance, I ruled out all correspondents who hadn’t written in the past two years. And I ruled out correspondents from places other than North America. With the single exception of Australia, Sydney. But there was no entry for Australia, Sydney.
The common wisdom has it that computers are stupid machines. Very fast, but fundamentally stupid. Bashard’s programs, though, had a level of sophistication that made you wonder. For one thing, I’d had the idea that some poor human slob had had to key in every word of every piece of correspondence, a numbing task. Wrong. The computer did it itself. With the exception of the very worst handwriting samples, it deciphered human script, and when I ran across some apparent howlers and accessed the original documents, I found that it had done a better job of transcribing than most live secretaries could have.
In addition to sorting by correspondent, date, postmark, place (state and zip code), etc., the computer categorized by type—Dangerous, Moderate, Mild—and also by theme. There were five theme categories in all: Sex, Money, Race, Politics, and Miscellaneous. Strangely enough, Miscellaneous was the smallest. So much for the predilections of Americans, or at least science-fiction fans.
Sex was largely the “unrequited lover” group Bashard had mentioned, and some of the letters, as he’d said, were too steamy to print.
Money was the biggest category, mostly people dunning him, some with incredible persistence and vituperation.
Race and Politics were the most peculiar. I’d read somewhere that science-fiction writers in general, and Raul Bashard in particuliar, were racist and right wing, but the vast majority of correspondence in these categories accused him of not being racist and right wing enough. There were, for example, a number of mailgrams from a group calling itself The White Army, obsessed by Bashard’s alleged promoting of miscegenation, that invited him to book burnings of his own works.
I mentioned that the computer limited my access to its files. I came across two such instances that day, both linked, both in the Money category. The author of one was named Leo Mackes, who’d written a series of dunning letters more pitiful than threatening in tone, and the last of them just made my two-year cutoff so I paid it little attention. The second, more current, was from a Viola T. Harmel, who sometimes signed her name Viola and sometimes V.T.H. Viola’s prose was pretty purple, and intimate enough at times to convince you Bashard had to have been more than a pen pal. I wondered why the computer had classified her under Money. But the latest received, a postcard, read:
The charade between us has to stop. Frankly I need the money; you don’t. I’m ready to talk about an equitable division, but if you won’t negotiate, then you’ll have to face the consequences. You’d better take my call the next time. Yrs. Viola.
The computer had classified both Viola T. Harmel and Leo Mackes under Moderate—fair enough, I thought. In both cases it gave the same cross-reference: see S.O.W. I tried to see S.O.W. The only trouble was that every time I asked for S.O.W., the computer asked back for the access code. I didn’t have the access code, and I couldn’t find a way in without it. I brought back the originals of the Mackes/Harmel correspondence but couldn’t spot a resemblance between the two, either in style or handwriting. In the end, I made a mental note to get the access code later, then instructed the computer to print out by the criteria I’d selected, in state, city and zip code order.
It set about its tedious work.
At some point while I waited, I guess I sensed her coming into the office. I think she even said something, but I didn’t focus—at least, that is, till her arms went around my neck from behind, then down my chest, and her hair brushed my cheek as she leaned over me. Then it was hard not to focus.
Grace giggled softly, nuzzling into my ear, and tried to pin me to the chair. I pulled her wrists apart and stood up. She had changed outfits, tight jeans now with baggy pockets and leather trim, and a bulky jeans jacket that was zipped about halfway up and gave you a glimpse of bright pink underneath.
“Well, Pablo,” she said, “did you figure it out yet?”
“Figure out what?” I asked, ignoring the name.
“Well, whatever you’re trying to figure out. Like who wants to kill Daddy? Like who poisoned Jules?”
“What makes you so sure he was poisoned?”
“C’mon, Pablo, give me a break. You don’t suppose he died of a heart attack, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I’d like to know why you called your father a creep this morning.”
“The Big O won’t tell you that, will it?”
“The Big O?”
“The computer. O is for Oscar. That’s its name.”
She was standing very close to me, her head down, her fingers twiddling her hair. She came up to about my shoulders. I could smell the hair.
“I could tell you, Pablo,” she said softly, her head still down. She giggled a little. “Everything you wanted to know. A lot more than Oscar. If you knew how to ask me, Pablo.”
“What’s Sow?” I asked.
“Sow,” she repeated, half-hearing.
“Or S.O.W.? Or Leo Mackes? Viola T. Harmel? Did you ever hear of them?”
She shook her head.
“You ask pretty weird questi
ons, Pablo,” she said.
“I don’t like being called that,” I said.
“I know,” she said, giggling again. “Daddy said you didn’t like to be called Pablo. Why’s that? What’s wrong with Pablo?”
I reached up, lifted her chin firmly with the palm of my hand.
“Where’d you learn about that? The Pablo part?” I said.
She ducked away from my hand and, leaning past me, tapped at the computer keyboard.
I turned to watch my own file come up on the screen, the lines scrolling up successively. It was accurate in every detail, and plenty detailed. Like:
NAME: Revere, Philip (Phil) white male (Born: Rivera, Pablo Evaristo Maria)
Age: 37
Health: good (quit smoking)
Sign: Gemini
Function: see Camelot
Marital status: single
Earnings: not kn.
Net worth: neglig.
Born: Salamanca, Spain
Resides: NYC
Education: Brooklyn Coll., NY; J. D. Brooklyn Law (never passed Bar)
Sexual preference: promiscuous
I wondered again where Bashard had gotten it all. The name part in particular. Few enough people knew. It would have been public information, sure, for anyone who wanted to go digging. But who’d want to go digging that far back?
“What is it?” Grace said. “A spic name? Puerto Rican? Is that why you changed it?”
I thought, but didn’t say: Ask my mother. I said nothing. Besides, she couldn’t have asked my mother.
“You don’t look Puerto Rican,” she went on. “And why Phil? Pablo is Paul, isn’t it? Daddy said it was because everybody would have laughed at you if you were called Paul Revere.”
The truth, in fact, isn’t worth much space. Probably my mother was right in that, to an American, anybody with the name of Rivera had to be either Puerto Rican or Mexican. And who wants to explain each time that you come from a place called Salamanca, in western Spain? So when she got here, a single mother with a single baby and some relatives in Brooklyn, U.S.A., she’d changed it. And had picked Philip over Paul for the reason Grace had said. As to why I don’t like being called Pablo, well, I guess it’s nothing five years or so on some shrink’s couch couldn’t explain. Only I’ve never had the inclination.