The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  THE SOURCES OF THE NILE

  IT WAS IN THE Rutherford office on Lexington that Bob Rosen met Peter (“Old Pete”—“Sneaky Pete”—“Poor Pete,”: take your pick) Martens for the first and almost last time. One of those tall, cool buildings on Lexington with the tall, cool office girls it was; and because Bob felt quite sure he wasn’t and damned well never was going to be tall or cool enough for him to mean anything to them, he was able to sit back and just enjoy the scenery. Even the magazines on the table were cool: Spectator, Botteghe Oscure, and Journal of the New York State Geographical Society. He picked up the last and began to leaf through “Demographic Study of The Jackson Whites.”

  He was trying to make some sense out of a mass of statistics relating to albinism among that curious tribe (descended from Tuscorora Indians, Hessian deserters, London street women, and fugitive slaves), when one of the girls—delightfully tall, deliciously cool—came to usher him in to Tressling’s office. He laid the magazine face down on the low table and followed her. The old man with the portfolio, who was the only other person waiting, got up just then, and Bob noticed the spot of blood in his eye as he passed by. They were prominent eyes, yellowed, reticulated with tiny red veins, and in the corner of one of them was a bright red blot. For a moment it made Rosen feel uneasy, but he had no time then to think about it.

  “Delightful story,” said Joe Tressling, referring to the piece which had gotten Rosen the interview, through his agent. The story had won first prize in a contest, and the agent had thought that Tressling…if Tressling…maybe Tressling …

  “Of course, we can’t touch it because of the theme,” said Tressling.

  “Why, what’s wrong with the Civil War as a theme?” Rosen said.

  Tressling smiled. “As far as Aunt Carrie’s Country Cheese is concerned,” he said, “the South won the Civil War. At least, it’s not up to Us to tell Them differently. It might annoy Them. The North doesn’t care. But write another story for us. The Aunt Carrie Hour is always on the lookout for new dramatic material.”

  “Like for instance?” Bob Rosen asked.

  “What the great cheese-eating American public wants is a story of resolved conflict concerning young contemporary American couples earning over ten thousand dollars a year. But nothing sordid, controversial, outré, or passé.”

  Rosen was pleased to be able to see Joseph Tressling, who was the J. Oscar Rutherford Company’s man in charge of scripts for the Aunt Carrie Hour. The Mené Mené of the short story was said that year to be on the wall, the magazines were dying like mayflies, and the sensible thing for anyone to do who hoped to make a living writing (he told himself) was to get into television. But he really didn’t expect he was going to make the transition, and the realization that he didn’t really know any contemporary Americans—young, old, married, single—who were earning over ten thousand dollars a year seemed to prophesy that he was never going to earn it himself.

  “And nothing avant-garde,” said Tressling.

  The young woman returned and smiled a tall, cool smile at them. Tressling got up. So did Bob. “Mr. Martens is still outside,” she murmured.

  “Oh, I’m afraid I won’t be able to see him today,” said Joe Tressling. “Mr. Rosen has been so fascinating that the time seems to have run over, and then some… Great old boy,” he said, smiling at Bob and shaking his hand. “Really one of the veterans of advertising, you know. Used to write copy for Mrs. Winslow’ Soothing Syrup. Tells some fascinating yarns. Too bad I haven’t the time to listen. I expect to see you back here soon, Mr. Rosen,” he said, still holding Bob’s hand as they walked to the door, “with another one of your lovely stories. One that we can feel delighted to buy. No costume dramas, no foreign settings, nothing outré, passé, or avant-garde, and above all—nothing controversial or sordid. You’re not going to be one of those hungry writers, are you?”

  Even before he answered, Rosen observed Tressling’s eyes dismiss him; and he resolved to start work immediately on an outré, controversial, sordid costume drama with a foreign setting, etc., if it killed him.

  He made the wrong turn for the elevator and on coming back he came face to face with the old man. “‘Demography of the Jackson Whites’,” the old man said, feigning amazement. “What do you care about those poor suckers for? They don’t buy, they don’t sell, they don’t start fashion, they don’t follow fashion. Just poach, fornicate, and produce oh-point-four hydrocephalic albinoes per hundred. Or something.”

  The elevator came and they got in together. The old man stared at him, his yellow-bloody eye like a fertilized egg. “Not that I blame them,” he went on. “If I’d had any sense I’d’ve become a Jackson White instead of an advertising man. The least you can do,” he said, without any transition, “is to buy me a drink. Since Truthful Tressling blames it onto you that he can’t see me, the lying bugger. Why, for crying out loud!” he cried. “What I’ve got here in this little old portfolio—why, it’s worth more to those men on Madison, Lexington, Park—if they only—”

  “Let me buy you a drink,” said Rosen, resignedly. The streets were hot, and he hoped the bar would be cool.

  “A ball of Bushmill,” said old Peter Martens.

  The bar was cool. Bob had stopped listening to his guest’s monologue about what he had in his little old portfolio (something about spotting fashion trends way in advance) and had begun talking about his own concerns. By and by the old man, who was experienced beyond the norm in not being listened to, had begun to listen to him.

  “This was when everybody was reading Aku-Aku,” Bob said. “So I thought for sure that mine would go over good because it was about Rapa Nui—Easter Island—and Peruvian blackbirders and hints of great legends of the past and all that.”

  “And?”

  “And it didn’t. The publisher, the only one who showed any interest at all, I mean, that publisher, he said he liked the writing but the public wouldn’t buy it. He advised me to study carefully the other paperbacks on the stands. See what they’re like, go thou and do likewise. So I did. You know the stuff. On even-numbered pages the heroine gets her brassiere ripped off while she cries, ‘Yes! Yes! Now! Oh!’”

  He was not aware of signalling, but from time to time a hand appeared and renewed their glasses. Old Martens asked, “Does she cry ‘rapturously’—or ‘joyously’?”

  “Rapturously and joyously. What’s the matter, you think she’s frigid?”

  Martens perished the thought. At a nearby table a large blonde said, lugubriously, “You know, Harold, it’s a lucky thing the Good Lord didn’t give me any children or I would of wasted my life on them like I did on my rotten step-children.” Martens asked what happened on the odd-numbered children.

  “I mean, ‘pages’,” he corrected himself, after a moment.

  The right side of Bob Rosen’s face was going numb. The left side started tingling. He interrupted a little tune he was humming and said, “Oh, the equation is invariable: On odd-numbered pages the hero either clonks some bastard bloodily on the noggin with a roscoe, or kicks him in the collions and then clonks him, or else he’s engaged—with his shirt off, you’re not allowed to say what gives with the pants, which are so much more important: presumably they melt or something—he’s engaged, shirtless, in arching his lean and muscular flanks over some bimbo, not the heroine, because these aren’t her pages, some other female in whose pelvis he reads strange mysteries …” He was silent for a moment, brooding.

  “How could it fail, then?” asked the old man, in his husky voice. “I’ve seen the public taste change, let me tell you, my boy, from A Girl of the Limberlost (which was so pure that nuns could read it) to stuff which makes stevedores blench: so I am moved to inquire, How could the work you are describing to me fail?”

  The young man shrugged. “The nuns were making a come-back. Movies about nuns, books about nuns, nuns on TV, westerns… So the publisher said public taste had changed, and could I maybe do him a life of St. Teresa?”

  “
Coo.”

  “So I spent three months doing a life of St. Teresa at a furious pace, and when I finished it turned out I’d done the wrong saint. The simple slob had no idea there was any more than one of the name, and I never thought to ask did he mean the Spanish St. Teresa or the French one? D’Avila or The Little Flower?”

  “Saints preserve us… Say, do you know that wonderful old Irish toast? ‘Here’s to the Council of Trent, that put the fasting on the meat and not on the drink’?”

  Bob gestured to the barkeeper. “But I didn’t understand why if one St. Teresa could be sold, the other one couldn’t. So I tried another publisher, and all he said was, public taste had changed, and could I do him anything with a background of juvenile delinquency? After that I took a job for a while selling frozen custard in a penny arcade and all my friends said, BOB! You with your talent? How COULD you?”

  The large blonde put down a jungle-green drink and looked at her companion. “What you mean, they love me? If they love me why are they going to Connecticut? You don’t go to Connecticut if you love a person,” she pointed out.

  Old Martens cleared his throat. “My suggestion would be that you combine all three of your mysteriously unsalable novels. The hero sails on a Peruvian blackbirder to raid Easter Island, the inhabitants whereof he kicks in the collions, if male, or arches his loins over, if female; until he gets converted by a vision of both St. Teresas who tell him their life stories—as a result of which he takes a job selling frozen custard in a penny arcade in order to help the juvenile delinquents who frequent the place.”

  Bob grunted. “Depend on it, with my luck I would get it down just in time to see public taste change again. The publishers would want a pocket treasury of the McGuffey Readers, or else the memoirs of Constantine Porphyrogenitos. I could freeze my arse climbing the Himalayas only to descend, manuscript in hand, to find everybody on Publishers’ Row vicariously donning goggles and spearing fish on the bottom of the Erythrean Sea… Only thing is, I never was sure to what degree public taste changed by itself or how big a part the publishers play in changing it…”

  The air, cool though he knew it was, seemed to shimmer in front of him, and through the shimmer he saw Peter Martens sitting up straight and leaning over at him, his seamed and ancient face suddenly eager and alive. “And would you like to be sure?” old Martens asked. “Would you like to be able to know, really to know?”

  “What? How?” Bob was startled. The old man’s eye looked almost all blood by now.

  “Because,” Martens said, “I can tell you what. I can tell you how. Nobody else. Only me. And not just about books, about everything. Because—”

  There was an odd sort of noise, like the distant sussuration of wind in dry grass, and Rosen looked around and he saw that a man was standing by them and laughing. This man wore a pale brown suit and had a pale brown complexion, he was very tall and very thin and had a very small head and slouched somewhat. He looked like a mantis, and a mustache like an inverted V was cropped out of the broad blue surface of his upper lip.

  “Still dreaming your dreams, Martens?” this man asked, still wheezing his dry whispery laugh. “Gates of Horn, or Gates of Ivory?”

  “Get the Hell away from me, Shadwell,” said Martens.

  Shadwell turned his tiny little head to Rosen and grinned. “He been telling you about how he worked on old Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup Account? Too bad the Harrison Narcotics killed that business! He tell you how he worked on the old Sapolio account. The old Stanley Steamer account?” (“Shove off, Shadwell,” Martens ordered, planting his elbows in the table and opening his mouth at Bob again.) “Or has he been muttering away like an old Zambezi hand who claims to know the location of the Elephants’ Graveyard? Tell me, where is fashion bred?” he intoned. “In the bottle—or in Martens’ head?”

  Martens’ head, thinly covered with yellowish-white hair, jerked in the direction of the new arrival. “This, my boy, is T. Pettys Shadwell, the most despicable of living men. He runs—out of his pocket, because no one will sell him a hat on credit—he runs a so-called market research business. Though who in blazes would hire him since Polly Adler went respectable beats the Hell out of me. I’m warning you, Shadwell,” he said, “take off. I’ve had my fill of you. I’m not giving you any more information.” And with a further graphic description of what else he would not give T. Pettys Shadwell if the latter was dying of thirst, he folded his arms and fell silent.

  The most despicable of living men chuckled, poked a bone-thin hand into a pocket, plucked out a packet of white flaps of cardboard, one of which he tore along a perforated line and handed to Bob. “My card, sir. My operation, true, is not large, but it is Ever Growing. Don’t take Mr. Martens too seriously. And don’t buy him too many drinks. His health is not as good as it used to be—and then, it never was.” And with a final laugh, like the rustling of dried corn-shucks, he angled away.

  Martens sighed, lapped the last few dewy drops of Bushmill’s off a molten ice-cube. “I live in mortal fear that some day I’ll have the money to buy all the booze I want and wake up finding I have spilled the beans to that cockatrice who just walked out. Can you imagine anyone having business cards printed to be torn off of perforated pads? Keeps them from getting loose and wrinkled, is his reason. Such a man has no right, under natural or civil law, to live.”

  In the buzzing coolness of the barroom Bob Rosen tried to catch hold of a thought which was coyly hiding behind a corner in his mind. His mind otherwise, he felt, was lucid as never before. But somehow he lost the thought, found he was telling himself a funny story in French and—although he had never got more than an 80 in the course, back in high school—marvelled at the purity of his accent and then chuckled at the punch-line.

  “‘Never mind about black neglijays,’” the stout blonde was saying. “‘If you want to keep your husband’s affections,’ I said to her, ‘then listen to me—”

  The errant thought came trotting back for reasons of its own, and jumped into Bob’s lap. “‘Spill the beans’?” he quoted, questioningly. “Spill what beans? To Shadwell, I mean.”

  “Most despicable of living men,” said old Martens, mechanically. Then a most curious expression washed over his antique countenance: proud, cunning, fearful …

  “Would you like to know the sources of the Nile?” he asked. “Would you?”

  “‘Let him go to Maine,’ I said. ‘Let him paint rocks all day,’ I said. ‘Only for Heaven’s sake, keep him the Hell off of Fire Island,’ I said. And was I right, Harold?” demanded the large blonde.

  Pete Martens was whispering something, Bob realized. By the look on his face it must have been important, so the young man tried to hear the words over the buzzing, and thought to himself in a fuddled fashion that they ought to be taken down on a steno pad, or something of that sort…want to know, really know, where it begins and how, and how often? But no; what do I know? For years I’ve been Clara the rotten step-mother, and now I’m Clara the rotten mother-in-law. Are there such in every generation? Must be…known for years…known for years…only, Who?—and Where?—searched and sought, like Livingston and all the others searching and seeking, enduring privation, looking for the sources of the Nile …

  Someone, it must have been Clara, gave a long, shuddering cry; and then for a while there was nothing but the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, in Bob Rosen’s head; while old Martens lolled back in the chair, regarding him silently and sardonically with his blood-red eye, over which the lid slowly, slowly drooped: but old Martens never said a word more.

  It was one genuine horror of a hangover, subsiding slowly under (or perhaps despite) every remedy Bob’s aching brain could think of: black coffee, strong tea, chocolate milk, raw-egg-red-pepper-worcestershire sauce. At least, he thought gratefully after a while, he was spared the dry heaves. At least he had all the fixings in his apartment and didn’t have to go out. It was a pivotal neighborhood, and he lived right in the pivot, a block where lox and bagels beat a slow
retreat before the advance of hog maw and chitterlings on the one hand and bodegas, comidas criollas, on the other; swarms of noisy kids running between the trucks and buses, the jackhammers forever wounding the streets.

  It took him a moment to realize that the noise he was hearing now was not the muffled echo of the drills, but a tapping on his door. Unsteadily, he tottered over and opened it. He would have been not in the least surprised to find a raven there, but instead it was a tall man, rather stooping, with a tiny head, hands folded mantis-like at his bosom.

  After a few dry, futile clickings, Bob’s throat essayed the name “Shadburn?”

  “Shadwell,” he was corrected, softly. “T. Pettys Shadwell… I’m afraid you’re not well, Mr. Rosen …”

  Bob clutched the doorpost, moaned softly. Shadwell’s hands unfolded, revealed—not a smaller man at whom he’d been nibbling, but a paper bag, soon opened.

  “…so I thought I’d take the liberty of bringing you some hot chicken broth.”

  It was gratefully warm, had both body and savor. Bob lapped at it, croaked his thanks. “Not at all, not-a-tall,” Shadwell waved. “Glad to be of some small help.” A silence fell, relieved only by weak, gulping noises. “Too bad about old Martens. Of course, he was old. Still, a shocking thing to happen to you. A stroke, I’m told. I, uh, trust the police gave you no trouble?”

  A wave of mild strength seemed to flow into Bob from the hot broth. “No, they were very nice,” he said. “The sergeant called me, ‘Son.’ They brought me back here.”

  “Ah.” Shadwell was reflective. “He had no family. I know that for a fact.”

  “Mmm.”

  “But—assume he left a few dollars. Unlikely, but—And assume he’d willed the few dollars to someone or some charity, perhaps. Never mind. Doesn’t concern us. He wouldn’t bother to will his papers…scrapbooks of old copy he’d written, so forth. That’s of no interest to people in general. Just be thrown out or burned. But it would be of interest to me. I mean, I’ve been in advertising all my life, you know. Oh, yes. Used to distribute handbills when I was a boy. Fact.”