“You’re surprised to see me,” Argyle said.
“Slightly.”
“This is one of my schools. I’m the director.”
Walt nodded, noticing suddenly that there was the rank smell of sulphur and piss on the air of the hallway. He squinted at Argyle, who still held his coat carefully in front of him. Forget it, he thought; this wasn’t something he wanted to know.
“Who are these, then?” Argyle asked, gesturing at Nora and Eddie. The preschool was quiet now, the hallway emptied out, the door to the classroom closed. The bells from across town were still playing carols, although it was too distant to make out the melody.
“This is Nora,” Walt said, “and this is Eddie, my niece and nephew. Kids, this is Mr. Argyle.”
Instantly, Nora covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes shooting open. She began to giggle. “The one the spider ate?” she asked.
“That’s right,” Walt said to her. “He’s not dead after all. Just like I told you.”
Argyle blinked his eyes hard, several times in succession, staring at Nora. Then he cocked his head, suddenly hearing something, his face white. Clearly it was the bells. They fell silent for a moment, and Argyle turned toward the door without saying another word, and right then they started up again, clanging away as if they’d ring right through until Christmas.
31
ROBERT ARGYLE HAD a business office in a big old flat-roofed Spanish-style house on Chapman Avenue. Probably he owned the house itself, which had been renovated and converted to office space, and which he shared with two law firms and some kind of consultant. His own office was subdued and unassuming—a couple of leather easy chairs, mahogany desk and file, Tiffany-style lamps, and a Berber carpet. There was no receptionist. Clearly it was more a hideaway than an office. Ivy had no real idea how much wealth he had managed to accumulate over the years; Argyle had never shown it off. It would have been nice to think a little better of him because of this, that despite his money he was a simple man, down to earth. And maybe he was.
She stood alone in the office, looking out the back window, down onto the old walnut grove where the house had burned. There was something horrible about a burned house. She saw now that there were police cars parked on the property. Men with shovels dug among the walnut trees in the grove, and others milled around, waiting.
“This morning’s paper said it might be arson,” Argyle said, coming into the office behind her.
She turned around. “Frightening when it’s right next door, isn’t it?”
He nodded grimly. “Especially with this latest news.” He gestured at the work going on down below. “I understand they’ve found what might be human remains buried out there.”
“Like a grave?”
“Not an old one, from what I hear. Maybe someone murdered—fairly recently.”
She shuddered. “Not here—not in town?”
“That’s the kind of world we seem to be living in, isn’t it? There’s not a lot of decency left.”
“Oh, I think there is, really,” Ivy said. “The decency hasn’t gone anyplace; it’s just that a lot of the other is always in the news.”
“Of course you’re right. This kind of thing is an aberration, isn’t it?” He sat down, gesturing at a chair. Ivy sat down, too, facing away from the window. Robert didn’t look as bad this morning, as tired and bedraggled, as he had in Watson’s a couple of days ago. Then it struck her that he was covering it up—wearing an undereye concealer and a foundation. She glanced away, vaguely embarrassed for him. He smiled at her wanly. “I get a little pessimistic sometimes,” he said. “A little lonely. I don’t mind telling you the truth. I’ve always wanted children, but …” He shrugged, opening the desk drawer and bringing out a bottle of aspirin. He shook out a couple of the pills and swallowed them dry.
“Well, what about this property?” Ivy asked, steering the subject to business. There was no way she was going to discuss children with Argyle. “It’s commercial?”
“Industrial, really—out on Batavia. There’s two of them, adjacent lots. I’ve been sitting on them for years. The whole neighborhood is concrete tilt-ups now, and a big self-storage yard. Very profitable area. Not much square footage left to rent. The lots, conservatively, are worth a half million dollars apiece. You’d be the sole agent.” He opened a drawer in the desk and took out a manila envelope, which he set in front of her. Her name was written across the top.
She sat for a moment, stunned even though she’d expected something like this. The commission would be somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty thousand dollars. “Why don’t you build on them yourself?”
He waved the suggestion aside. “I’m lightening the load a little. Throwing the ballast overboard. How about you? Ship running smoothly?” He leaned back in his desk chair and appraised her with a look that was probably meant to be heartfelt. He looked goofy, somehow, like a nervous teenager.
“Ship’s running very smoothly,” she said. “Walt’s got big plans for his catalogue sales business. Real estate market’s turning around.”
“That’s good,” he said, sitting up and smacking his palm against the desktop. He laughed, shaking his head. “Big plans!” He paused for a moment, looking wistfully out the window now, as if something had just drifted into his mind. “You know,” he said, “after all these years, I still don’t know what happened to the three of us. We were quite a team once.”
“It’s all water under the bridge, Robert.”
“I don’t think I ever had a chance to explain myself, my ambitions for … us.”
“There’s no need to explain ambition to me. I’m acquainted with it.”
“No,” he said. “Wait a moment. Hear me out. What I mean has something to do with big plans, with what you said. Walt and I have different ideas about that, about … size. Walt wouldn’t have wanted what I wanted.”
“That’s probably true,” she said, letting him talk. After all these years, an apology was overdue. He had behaved like a creep, even though essentially he was right. Walt didn’t have his kind of ambition. Walt saw the world from a different point of view, from somewhere in outer space, usually, and the idea of the two of them as partners seemed impossible now.
“I knew we’d reached the end of things, of the partnership. But I didn’t know that it would mean reaching the end of things with you. Even now, if I could change that, I would. Especially now.”
She shrugged. “Things happen. There’s no use carrying them around with you, is there?”
“If a man could change the past …”
“But he can’t. Best just to let it go.”
“I could have made you happy, Ivy. Instead, I’m afraid I made all of us miserable.”
“Well, it’s good of you to clear the air.”
He nodded and shrugged. “Look at this.” He took a photograph out of the desk and laid it atop the envelope. It was he and Ivy, taken back when he was in his early twenties, not long after he’d gotten out of school. She was nineteen. The photo had been taken during the time of Argyle’s first big success independent of Walt. He had promoted a vitamin supplement sales organization, which licensed salespeople who would pay a fee for the right to license further salespeople. All of them took a graduated percentage of profits, mainly from fees, and almost nobody sold any vitamins, which were largely worthless in the first place: “natural vitamins” that were mainly gelled infusions of alfalfa and carrots. What it had amounted to, according to Walt, was money changing hands, shifting upward, filling the pockets of someone who was selling greed and lies. Half of Argyle’s working capital had been Walt’s money, which Argyle had eventually returned—tainted, according to Walt, who knew the difference between clean money and dirty money.
Walt wasn’t in the photo. Ivy wore a sequined evening dress that Argyle had bought for her, simply to go out to dinner. It must have been a five-hundred-dollar dress even back then…. It occurred to her suddenly that she’d made the right choice. Walt was the one,
not that she had any doubts.
Argyle picked up the photo and stared at it. “I wonder sometimes what would have become of us if things had gone differently. We would have made a formidable pair, you and I.”
“I guess it just wasn’t destined to be.”
“Destiny,” he said. “Sometimes destiny fools you, especially if you have too much respect for it. We can make our own destinies. That’s one of the things I’ve found out. Who would have thought you’d be destined to sit across from me now, the two of us doing business together? Sometimes you have to make things happen. It’s possible I can make things happen for Walt, too. It’s no secret that my own companies have been successful. There’s no limit to that commodity, you know, to success.”
“That’ll be encouraging to Walt,” she said, imagining the conversation. Walt would have to take a pill to calm down.
“Mention to him that I’ll help in any way I can, won’t you?”
“Gladly.”
“And, Ivy … Let’s start out fresh. The two of us.” He held out his hand.
* * *
WELL, HE HADN’T exactly made a pass at her. She glanced down at the envelope on the seat of the Toyota as she drove up Chapman Avenue toward Batavia, and she imagined that it was stuffed with hundred-dollar bills instead of papers. Then she whooped out loud and slapped the steering wheel. Would she take the man’s money? Yes, she would.
There was no use inventing motives for him. Maybe he didn’t have any. He was lonely; anybody could see that. But that didn’t mean that his apologies, or whatever they were, weren’t real. Probably he meant what he said. And until she knew otherwise, there was no use assuming that he meant more than he said. Of course if she was certain that he had, that he was pulling something, then she’d have no choice but to hand him the envelope back and explain that they’d both made a mistake—again.
And she could do that as easily tomorrow as today.
32
EVEN THOUGH THE white delivery van that arrived just before noon had the words “Dilworth Catalogue Sales—We Deliver” painted on the side in red block letters, Walt stood for a moment wondering what it was.
A man in a khaki uniform got out carrying two boxes—a big one apparently containing the lampstand and a small one containing the brimstone. “Membership card’s in with the … brimstone,” he said, looking at the packing slip, which he handed to Walt along with a pen. Walt signed it and handed it back, and the man gave Walt a copy along with the two cartons, climbed into his van, and sped away. The box with the lamp in it was heavy as hell.
“Membership card?” Walt wondered out loud, watching the van roll away from the stop sign at the corner.
He looked at his watch even though he knew what time it was. The curious thing, he told himself, wasn’t just that the packages arrived today; it was that they arrived exactly when he’d asked: before the sun rose to its zenith. He had thought he was being funny. If they had arrived a half hour from now, at quarter past, he could have dismissed the bird as a fake, a toy, but as it was …
As it was, what? What did this prove? Only that Dilworth Catalogue Sales was on the ball. Maybe there was a lesson in it—the virtues of lightning-fast delivery. Hefernin would recommend it. It was worth a twenty-dollar, illustrated pamphlet.
Ask for something more.
The thought occurred to him like a voice in his head, more a command than a suggestion, as he turned up the driveway toward the garage. Money?
He imagined wishing for a million dollars in small bills—just for starters; later he could raise the stakes. How would it come to him? Out of the sky, floating like flower petals? Maybe he should complicate the issue in order to really test the thing—ask to find the money in a suitcase guarded by toads in a drainage ditch in Oz.
He chuckled, letting the thought slide away as he swung open the gate. Just then a voice sounded behind him: “Mr. Stebbins!”
It was the postman—not the “inspector” from yesterday, but Phil, their real postman. Walt retraced his steps down the driveway and took the mail from him after setting down the two cartons.
“I don’t know what happened to it,” Phil said, gesturing at the envelopes.
There were a dozen envelopes, already torn open—torn apart, rather—most of them containing checks. About half of them were so shredded and dirty that Walt couldn’t even read the names and addresses imprinted on them. Obviously they’d been dropped in a puddle and run over. The tread marks were clearly visible, as if a car had rolled onto them and spun its tires. “Hell,” Walt said. “Wouldn’t you know it, the damn junk mail’s fine.”
“That’s the way I found them this morning,” Phil said. “I can’t explain it, and neither can anyone else. Some kind of accident that nobody will admit to, I guess. I’m sorry. Looks like maybe they were dropped in the parking lot coming in from the truck or something.”
“Just my mail?”
He nodded. “Far as I know. I’ll keep on it. Maybe we can find out what happened.”
“Forget it,” Walt said. What good would it do? What he’d have to do is figure out where each of the checks had come from and ask for another, which would hold up payment for heaven knew how long, if he ever got paid again at all.
It dawned on him suddenly that Argyle was somehow to blame for this—either him or his man, the postal inspector. “Say, Phil,” Walt said. “Is there a big guy that’s a postal inspector, works locally?”
“How big?”
“Size of a bus. Six-five, maybe. Fat, but big—call it three hundred and fifty pounds. Giant head.”
Phil shook his head. “Nobody like that, unless he’s new. Why?”
“Nothing,” Walt said. “A friend of mine wanted to know. They went to the same high school or something.”
“Well, anyway, I’m sorry about the mail.”
“Not your fault,” Walt said.
“I can give you an affidavit from the post office acknowledging the damage.”
“Sure,” Walt said. “I guess so. Thanks.”
Phil walked away across the lawn, sorting the mail for the next house. Obviously this was the long arm of Argyle again, playing petty pranks. The guy was a mental case—writing dirty words in crayon, yanking down lights, trashing a man’s mail. How he had gotten to it was a mystery, but dollars to doughnuts it involved the inspector. Well, this was it—an open declaration of war. Argyle was throwing it into Walt’s face.
Back in the garage he razored open the small box, the ever-burning brimstone, which, Walt noted, wasn’t even hot. Inside the cardboard was what looked exactly like a tiny cigar box, built out of cut-rate Asian mahogany with finger-jointed sides. The word “Brimstone” was stamped in gold on the top of the box along with two little stylized flames containing ghostly faces that bore a family resemblance to the masks of comedy and tragedy. The eyes of one seemed to be suffering the tortures of the damned; the eyes of the other were almost insanely glad. Walt opened the box, half expecting a spring-snake to fly out at him. Instead, an inch-high flame rose slowly from the interior. The box was lined inside with metal the dull gray color of lead, and lying in the center of it was what looked like a chunk of lava rock. The flame smelled of sulphur, and he was reminded of Argyle standing in the hallway of the preschool this morning, stinking the place up.
He closed the box, wondering if the flame had gone out. When he reopened it, the flame rose from the box again, as if drawn upward by the hinged lid. He put his hand into the fire: it was hot, all right. He closed it and opened it—same thing: the flame sprang to life without even a whisper. The damned thing was like a refrigerator light that came on the instant the door opened, but you could only speculate that it went out again when the door was shut.
Walt noticed a folded paper in the bottom of the cardboard carton, along with a flat plastic-wrapped package. He unfolded the paper, which turned out to be a paragraph of information on the brimstone, printed in a smeary sort of ink, as if in someone’s basement. “Brought back from
the everlasting fires of Hell,” the paper read, “by intrepid explorers. Lights fireplaces, barbecues, cigars. Perfect for heating fondue. Useful as a night light….”
He put the paper down and picked up the plastic package. Inside was his “Get Out of Hell Free” card, a stiff, wallet-sized bit of paper with a place to sign his name. Along the edge were printed the words “Dilworth Catalogue Sales, Member in Good Standing,” and the card was signed by Denton Dilworth above a couple of lines guaranteeing the card’s authenticity. Beneath that were the words “not to be sold or reproduced.” On the back of the card was a drawing of the faces in the flame, the same as the ones on the top of the brimstone box, like souls going up in smoke. Walt slipped it into his wallet, then opened the big box.
The golden lampstand, he was surprised to find, was wired for electricity. Somehow he hadn’t counted on that kind of modern innovation. He screwed the several parts together, nicking the gilt paint when his screwdriver slipped. There was pot metal underneath, and the base, which was the heavy part, was a thin metal shell that hid a saucer-shaped lump of plaster of Paris. All in all the lamp resembled a tall, dietetic candelabra, and it required three candle-flame-shaped bulbs, not to exceed fifteen watts. The bulbs weren’t included in the price.
“What a haul,” Walt said out loud, stepping back to look at what he’d paid nearly forty dollars for. He tried to see something biblical in the lampstand, something apocalyptic, but the thing defeated him. Maybe he could give the brimstone to Uncle Henry as a Christmas gift.
Thirty minutes to go until the meeting with the man Vest at Coco’s, and Henry wasn’t home yet. He’d been gone all morning. Walt walked down toward the front yard, noticing just then that a car was pulling up at the curb—another government car, for heaven’s sake. It was apparently the post office again, hounding him. A woman got out, small and gray-haired, like someone’s old granny. She smiled brightly at him as she came up the driveway.
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