by Peter Straub
“Yes, of course,” I said, trying to get down to brass tacks.
Mr. Clubb hitched his buttock more comprehensively onto the desk. “What will happen will indeed happen, but we prefer our clients to acknowledge from the first that, apart from human desires being a messy business, outcomes are full of surprises. If you choose to repay one disaster with an equal and opposite disaster, we would reply, in our country fashion, There’s a calf that won’t suck milk.”
I said, “I know I can’t pay my wife back in kind, how could I?”
“Once we begin,” he said, “we cannot undo our actions.”
“Why should I want them undone?” I asked.
Mr. Clubb drew up his legs and sat cross-legged before me. Mr. Cuff placed a meaty hand on my shoulder. “I suppose there is no dispute,” said Mr. Clubb, “that the injury you seek to redress is the adulterous behavior of your spouse.”
Mr. Cuff’s hand tightened on my shoulder.
“You wish that my partner and myself punish your spouse.”
“I didn’t hire you to read her bedtime stories,” I said.
Mr. Cuff twice smacked my shoulder, painfully, in what I took to be approval.
“Are we assuming that her punishment is to be of a physical nature?” asked Mr. Clubb. His partner gave my shoulder another all-too-hearty squeeze.
“What other kind is there?” I asked, pulling away from Mr. Cuff’s hand.
The hand closed on me again, and Mr. Clubb said, “Punishment of a mental or psychological nature. We could, for example, torment her with mysterious phone calls and anonymous letters. We could use any of a hundred devices to make it impossible for her to sleep. Threatening incidents could be staged so often as to put her in a permanent state of terror.”
“I want physical punishment,” I said.
“That is our constant preference,” he said. “Results are swifter and more conclusive when physical punishment is used. But again, we have a wide spectrum from which to choose. Are we looking for mild physical pain, real suffering, or something in between, on the order of, say, broken arms or legs?”
I thought of the change in Marguerite’s eyes when I named the —— Hotel. “Real suffering.”
Another bone-crunching blow to my shoulder from Mr. Cuff and a wide, gappy smile from Mr. Clubb greeted this remark. “You, sir, are our favorite type of client,” said Mr. Clubb. “A fellow who knows what he wants and is unafraid to put it into words. This suffering, now, did you wish it in brief or extended form?”
“Extended,” I said. “I must say that I appreciate your thoughtfulness in consulting with me like this. I was not quite sure what I wanted of you when first I requested your services, but you have helped me become perfectly clear about it.”
“That is our function,” he said. “Now, sir. The extended form of real suffering permits two different conclusions, gradual cessation or termination. What is your preference?”
I opened my mouth and closed it. I opened it again and stared at the ceiling. Did I want these men to murder my wife? No. Yes. No. Yes, but only after making sure that the unfaithful trollop understood exactly why she had to die. No, surely an extended term of excruciating torture would restore the world to proper balance. Yet I wanted the witch dead. But then I would be ordering these barnies to kill her. “At the moment I cannot make that decision,” I said. Irresistibly, my eyes found the bottom drawer containing the files of obscene photographs. “I’ll let you know my decision after we have begun.”
Mr. Cuff dropped his hand, and Mr. Clubb nodded with exaggerated, perhaps ironic slowness. “And what of your rival, the seducer, sir? Do we have any wishes in regard to that gentleman, sir?”
The way these fellows could sharpen one’s thinking was truly remarkable. “I most certainly do,” I said. “What she gets, he gets. Fair is fair.”
“Indeed, sir,” said Mr. Clubb, “and, if you will permit me, sir, only fair is fair. And fairness demands that before we go any deeper into the particulars of the case we must examine the evidence as presented to yourself, and when I speak of fairness, sir, I refer to fairness particularly to yourself, for only the evidence seen by your own eyes can permit us to view this matter through them.”
Again, I looked helplessly down at the bottom drawer. “That will not be necessary. You will find my wife at our country estate, Green…”
My voice trailed off as Mr. Cuff’s hand ground into my shoulder while he bent down and opened the drawer.
“Begging to differ,” said Mr. Clubb, “but we are now and again in a better position than the client to determine what is necessary. Remember, sir, that while shame unshared is toxic to the soul, shame shared is the beginning of health. Besides, it only hurts for a little while.”
Mr. Cuff drew the files from the drawer.
“My partner will concur that your inmost wish is that we examine the evidence,” said Mr. Clubb. “Else you would not have signaled its location. We would prefer to have your explicit command to do so, but in the absence of explicit, implicit serves just about as well.”
I gave an impatient, ambiguous wave of the hand, a gesture they cheerfully understood.
“Then all is…how do you put it, sir? ‘All is…’ ”
“All is in order, all is in train,” I muttered.
“Just so. We have even found it beneficial to establish a common language with our clients, in order to conduct ourselves within terms enhanced by their constant usage in the dialogue between us.” He took the files from Mr. Cuff’s hands. “We shall examine the contents of these folders at the table across the room. After the examination has been completed, my partner and I shall deliberate. And then, sir, we shall return for further instructions.”
They strolled across the office and took adjoining chairs on the near side of the table, presenting me with two identical wide, black-clothed backs. Their hats went to either side, the files between them. Attempting unsuccessfully to look away, I lifted my receiver and asked my secretary who, if anyone, had called in the interim and what appointments had been made for the day.
Mr. Clubb opened a folder and leaned forward to inspect the topmost photograph.
My secretary informed me that Marguerite had telephoned from the road with an inquiry concerning my health. Mr. Clubb’s back and shoulders trembled with what I assumed was the shock of disgust. One of the scions was due at 2:00 p.m., and at 4:00 a cryptic gentleman would arrive. By their works shall ye know them, and Mrs. Rampage proved herself to be a diligent soul by asking if I wished her to place a call to Green Chimneys at three o’clock. “I think not,” I said. “Anything else?” She told me that Gilligan had expressed a desire to see me privately—meaning, without the Skipper—sometime during the morning. A murmur came from the table. “Gilligan can wait,” I said, and the murmur, expressive, I had thought, of dismay and sympathy, rose in volume and revealed itself as amusement.
They were chuckling—even chortling!
I replaced the telephone and said, “Gentlemen, your laughter is insupportable.” The potential effect of this remark was undone by its being lost within a surge of coarse laughter. I believe that something else was at that moment lost…some dimension of my soul…an element akin to pride…akin to dignity…but whether the loss was for good or ill, then I could not say. For some time, in fact an impossibly lengthy time, they found cause for laughter in the wretched photographs. My occasional attempts to silence them went unheard as they passed the dread images back and forth, discarding some instantly and to others returning for a second, a third, even a fourth and fifth perusal.
At last the barnies reared back, uttered a few nostalgic chirrups of laughter, and returned the photographs to the folders. They were still twitching with remembered laughter, still flicking happy tears from their eyes, as they sauntered, grinning, back across the office and tossed the files onto my desk. “Ah me, sir, a delightful experience,” said Mr. Clubb. “Nature in all her lusty romantic splendor, one might say. Remarkably stimulating, I co
uld add. Correct, sir?”
“I hadn’t expected you fellows to be stimulated to mirth,” I grumbled, ramming the foul things into the drawer and out of view.
“Laughter is merely a portion of the stimulation to which I refer,” he said. “Unless my sense of smell has led me astray, a thing I fancy it has yet to do, you could not but feel another sort of arousal altogether before these pictures, am I right?”
I refused to respond to this sally but felt the blood rising in my cheeks. Here they were again, the slugs and maggots.
“We are all brothers under the skin,” said Mr. Clubb. “Remember my words. Shame unshared poisons the soul. And besides, it only hurts for a little while.”
Now I could not respond. What was the “it” that hurt only for a little while—the pain of cuckoldry, the mystery of my shameful response to the photographs, or the horror of the barnies knowing what I had done?
“You will find it helpful, sir, to repeat after me: It only hurts for a little while.”
“It only hurts for a little while,” I said, and the naive phrase reminded me that they were only barnies after all.
“Spoken like a child,” Mr. Clubb most annoyingly said, “in, as it were, the tones and accents of purest innocence,” and then righted matters by asking where Marguerite might be found. Had I not mentioned a country place named Green…?
“Green Chimneys,” I said, shaking off the unpleasant impression that the preceding few seconds had made upon me. “You will find it at the end of —— Lane, turning right off —— Street just north of the town of ——. The four green chimneys easily visible above the hedge along —— Lane are your landmark, though as it is the only building in sight you can hardly mistake it for another. My wife left our place in the city just after ten this morning, so she should be getting there…” I looked at my watch. “…in thirty to forty-five minutes. She will unlock the front gate, but she will not relock it once she has passed through, for she never does. The woman does not have the self-preservation of a sparrow. Once she has entered the estate, she will travel up the drive and open the door of the garage with an electronic device. This door, I assure you, will remain open, and the door she will take into the house will not be locked.”
“But there are maids and cooks and laundresses and bootboys and suchlike to consider,” said Mr. Cuff. “Plus a majordomo to conduct the entire orchestra and go around rattling the doors to make sure they’re locked. Unless all of these parties are to be absent on account of the annual holiday.”
“My servants have the month off,” I said.
“A most suggestive consideration,” said Mr. Clubb. “You possess a devilish clever mind, sir.”
“Perhaps,” I said, grateful for the restoration of the proper balance. “Marguerite will have stopped along the way for groceries and other essentials, so she will first carry the bags into the kitchen, which is the first room to the right off the corridor from the garage. Then I suppose she will take the staircase upstairs and air out the bedroom.” I took pen and paper from my topmost drawer and sketched the layout of the house. “She may go around to the library, the morning room, and the drawing room, opening the shutters and a few windows. Somewhere during this process, she is likely to use the telephone. After that, she will leave the house by the rear entrance and take the path along the top of the bluff to a long, low building that looks like this.”
I drew in the outlines of the studio in its nest of trees above the Hudson. “It is a recording studio I had built for her convenience. She may well plan to spend the entire afternoon inside it. You will know if she is there by the lights.” I saw Marguerite smiling to herself as she fit the key into the lock on the studio door, saw her let herself in and reach for the light switch. A wave of emotion rendered me speechless.
Mr. Clubb rescued me by asking. “It is your feeling, sir, that when the lady stops to use the telephone she will be placing a call to that energetic gentleman?”
“Yes, of course,” I said, only barely refraining from adding you dolt. “She will seize the earliest opportunity to inform him of their good fortune.”
He nodded with an extravagant caution I recognized from my own dealings with backward clients. “Let us pause to see all ’round the matter, sir. Would the lady wish to leave a suspicious entry in your telephone records? Isn’t it more likely that the person she telephones will be you, sir? The call to the athletic gentleman will already have been placed, according to my way of seeing things, either from the roadside or the telephone in the grocery where you have her stop to pick up her essentials.”
Though disliking these references to Leeson’s physical condition, I admitted that he might have a point.
“In that case, sir, and I know that a mind as quick as yours has already overtaken mine, you would want to express yourself with the utmost cordiality when the missus calls again, so as not to tip your hand in even the slightest way. But that, I’m sure, goes without saying, after all you have been through, sir.”
Without bothering to acknowledge this, I said, “Shouldn’t you fellows be leaving? No sense in wasting time, after all.”
“Precisely why we shall wait here until the end of the day,” said Mr. Clubb. “In cases of this unhappy sort, we find it more effective to deal with both parties at once, acting in concert when they are in prime condition to be taken by surprise. The gentleman is liable to leave his place of work at the end of the day, which implies to me that he is unlikely to appear at your lovely country place at any time before seven this evening or, which is more likely, eight. At this time of year, there is still enough light at nine o’clock to enable us to conceal our vehicle on the grounds, enter the house, and begin our business. At eleven o’clock, sir, we shall call with our initial report and request additional instructions.”
I asked the fellow if he meant to idle away the entire afternoon in my office while I conducted my business.
“Mr. Cuff and I are never idle, sir. While you conduct your business, we will be doing the same, laying out our plans, refining our strategies, choosing our methods and the order of their use.”
“Oh, all right,” I said, “but I trust you’ll be quiet about it.”
At that moment, Mrs. Rampage buzzed to say that Gilligan was before her, requesting to see me immediately, proof that bush telegraph is a more efficient means of spreading information than a newspaper. I told her to send him in, and a second later Morning Gilligan, pale of face, dark hair tousled but not as yet completely wild, came treading softly toward my desk. He pretended to be surprised that I had visitors and pantomimed an apology which incorporated the suggestion that he depart and return later. “No, no,” I said, “I am delighted to see you, for this gives me the opportunity to introduce you to our new consultants, who will be working closely with me for a time.”
Gilligan swallowed, glanced at me with the deepest suspicion, and extended his hand as I made the introductions. “I regret that I am unfamiliar with your work, gentlemen,” he said. “Might I ask the name of your firm? Is it Locust, Bleaney, Burns or Charter, Carter, Maxton, and Coltrane?”
By naming the two most prominent consultancies in our industry, Gilligan was assessing the thinness of the ice beneath his feet. LBB specialized in investments, CCM&C in estates and trusts. If my visitors worked for the former, he would suspect that a guillotine hung above his neck; if the latter, the Skipper was liable for the chop. “Neither,” I said. “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff are the directors of their own concern, which covers every aspect of the trade with such tactful professionalism that it is known to but the few for whom they will consent to work.”
“Excellent,” Gilligan whispered, gazing in some puzzlement at the map and floor plan atop my desk. “Tip-top.”
“When their findings are given to me, they shall be given to all. In the meantime, I would prefer that you say as little as possible about the matter. Though change is a law of life, we wish to avoid unnecessary alarm.”
“You know that you can depend
on my silence,” said Morning Gilligan, and it was true, I did know that. I also knew that his alter ego, Afternoon Gilligan, would babble the news to everyone who had not already heard it from Mrs. Rampage. By 6:00 p.m., our entire industry would be pondering the information that I had called in a consultancy team of such rarified accomplishments that they chose to remain unknown but to the very few. None of my colleagues could dare admit to an ignorance of Clubb & Cuff, and my reputation, already great, would increase exponentially.
To distract him from the floor plan of Green Chimneys and the rough map of my estate, I said, “I assume that some business brought you here, Gilligan.”
“Oh! Yes—yes—of course,” he said, and with a trace of embarrassment brought to my attention the pretext for his being there, the ominous plunge in value of an overseas fund in which we had advised one of his musicians to invest. Should we recommend selling the fund before more money was lost, or was it wisest to hold on? Only a minute was required to decide that the musician should retain his share of the fund until next quarter, when we anticipated a general improvement, but both Gilligan and I were aware that this recommendation call could easily have been handled by telephone. Soon he was moving toward the door, smiling at the barnies in a pathetic display of false confidence.
The telephone rang a moment after the detectives had returned to the table. Mr. Clubb said, “Your wife, sir. Remember: the utmost cordiality.” Here was false confidence, I thought, of an entirely different sort. I picked up the receiver to hear Mrs. Rampage tell me that my wife was on the line.
What followed was a banal conversation of the utmost duplicity. Marguerite pretended that my sudden departure from the dinner table and my late arrival at the office had caused her to fear for my health. I pretended that all was well, apart from a slight indigestion. Had the drive up been peaceful? Yes. How was the house? A little musty, but otherwise fine. She had never quite realized, she said, how very large Green Chimneys was until she walked around in it, knowing she was going to be there alone. Had she been out to the studio? No, but she was looking forward to getting a lot of work done over the next three or four days and thought she would be working every night, as well. (Implicit in this remark was the information that I should be unable to reach her, the studio being without a telephone.) After a moment of awkward silence, she said, “I suppose it is too early for you to have identified your traitor.” It was, I said, but the process would begin that evening. “I’m so sorry you have to go through this,” she said. “I know how painful the discovery was for you, and I can only begin to imagine how angry you must be, but I hope you will be merciful. No amount of punishment can undo the damage, and if you try to exact retribution you will only injure yourself. The man is going to lose his job and his reputation. Isn’t that punishment enough?” After a few meaningless pleasantries the conversation had clearly come to an end, although we still had yet to say good-bye. Then an odd thing happened to me. I nearly said, Lock all the doors and windows tonight and let no one in. I nearly said, You are in grave danger and must come home. With these words rising in my throat, I looked across the room at Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff. Mr. Clubb winked at me. I heard myself bidding Marguerite farewell, and then heard her hang up her telephone.