by Ned Beauman
‘I see.’ Loeser’s main concern about the Eminent Domain was that he would arrive to find all his ex-girlfriends there and there wouldn’t be any drugs to get him through it. ‘Do you think everyone gets an afterlife, even if they don’t believe in it?’
‘God will allow no man to escape the reward or the punishment that he deserves,’ said Clarendon, putting an odd stress, Loeser thought, on the word ‘punishment’. ‘On earth as it is in heaven. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to concentrate for a few minutes while I calibrate the equipment.’
‘Take your time. Do you want a drink?’
‘No, thank you.’
Loeser made himself a whisky and soda. Outside a fire engine screamed down Palmetto Drive. He thought about Marsh. Was there really a laboratory ghost haunting the California Institute of Technology? And then he realised that Marsh wouldn’t quite be the only one of that species. The whole state of California was a laboratory, a room for testing new theories, measuring new forces, designing new gadgets. So Loeser himself — uneasy and pale, detached and misplaced, a spilt drop of something old and cold — what was he, while he lived here, but another laboratory ghost?
After a while, Clarendon frowned and said, ‘There’s no ghost here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘According to my readings, there is no ghost in this house.’
‘But I’ve been living with her for three years. I’m sure of it. Couldn’t your equipment be unreliable?’ Then the telephone rang. Loeser made an apologetic gesture and went to answer it. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s Adele.’
He switched to German. ‘Adele! I don’t remember giving you my telephone number.’
‘I got it from Mrs Jones at Throop Hall. Egon, I think I know who killed Marsh.’
‘I thought you were sure it was Slate.’
‘It wasn’t Slate. It can’t have been. There have been other murders.’
‘What?’
‘Last year, one of the cooks from the cafeteria. And the year before that, one of the gardeners. Hearts gone, same as Marsh. Millikan covered it up each time so there wouldn’t be a panic. But he couldn’t do that with Marsh because there were too many of us there when we found the body. And now the rumours have got out. I heard about it from Dick. When the cook was killed, Slate wasn’t even in California. He was visiting a sister in Alaska. He’d already been gone for a week and the corpse was only a few hours old when they found it.’
‘I was right! It was Ziesel!’
‘No, not Ziesel,’ said Adele, and then said the inevitable three syllables.
‘Clarendon?’ repeated Loeser without thinking, and then bit his lip. The phasmatometrist presumably didn’t speak German but of course he could recognise his own name.
‘Yes. He’s building a machine powered by ghosts, and he’s under pressure from the State Department to finish the machine before this war in Europe starts, and he needs to test it first, and he can’t just wait for people to die in accidents. I think he’s killing people himself! He’s breeding ghosts like biologists breed mice!’
‘How do you know so much about his research?’
‘The Professor told me. And listen to this: Dick said all the bodies have turned up in or near the Obediah Laboratories. That’s where Clarendon works. Ziesel is all the way over in Robinson.’
‘Adele, he’s in my house.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s here. Now. With me.’ Loeser didn’t dare look round.
‘God, why?’
‘He’s testing for a ghost here.’
‘So he has all his machines with him? And the two of you are alone? Loeser, what if he’s there to kill you and capture it on the phasmatometer?’
‘Adele, for Christ’s sake, call the police! Tell them to come here!’
‘I will, but they may not get there in time. Egon, you have to get him out of your house.’
Loeser put down the phone and turned to find Clarendon standing there only a few inches away, holding the same big pair of wire cutters that he’d had in the basement last night. ‘I was wondering if you might unlock that window,’ Clarendon said. ‘Sometimes I use an aerial to detect possible electromagnetic disturbances from the Heaviside Layer. It’s the most accurate way to compensate for them.’
To unlock the window, Loeser would have to turn his back on Clarendon again. Just the thought made the nape of his neck wrinkle with fear. He thought he saw Clarendon’s grip tighten on the handle of the tool. ‘I thought there was no ghost here.’
‘It’s worth a second try. I’m confident that my apparatus is reliable, but in any experiment there are unanticipated factors.’
‘Dr Clarendon, I really don’t want to take up any more of your evening. I’m sure your apparatus got it right the first time. I must have been wrong about the ghost. I’ve always been a bit jumpy. Now, as it happens I have two dozen people coming to dinner so I’m afraid—’
‘It will take just a few more minutes, Mr Loeser, if you’ll just oblige me by unlocking that window. I can’t seem to work the catch.’
For a long moment, Loeser stared at Clarendon, wondering if he could possibly overpower him without losing a finger. The rhythm of his heart seemed to be drumming out, ‘Please/don’t let/him eat/me please/don’t let/him eat/me.’ Then, for the second time that day, the doorbell rang.
Drunk with relief, Loeser dashed to the door and flung it open, hoping that it was burly policeman with a revolver, a nightstick and perhaps for good measure some sort of medieval halberd.
But it wasn’t. It was someone even more formidable than that. It was Dolores Mutton.
‘Mrs Mutton!’ he cried joyfully. ‘Hello! Hello!’
‘Good evening, Mr Loeser.’ She walked past him into the house and looked Clarendon up and down. ‘Oh, I see you have company.’
‘This is Dr Clarendon.’
‘A pleasure to meet you. Now, I assure you I wouldn’t usually interrupt like this, Dr Clarendon, but I have some very important Cultural Solidarity Committee business to discuss with Mr Loeser. It’s awfully kind of you to cut your visit short.’
‘In fact I was hoping to stay and take a few more—’
‘Awfully kind of you,’ repeated Dolores Mutton, combining a perfectly gracious smile with a voice that suggested she wouldn’t need to resort to a pair of wire cutters to relieve him neatly of his thumbs. Clarendon blanched and then with some haste started packing up his equipment. Nobody spoke until he’d finished, after which he scurried out without saying goodbye or picking up his hat. Loeser was pleased but unsurprised to observe that the terrifying angel had the same efficient effect on other men that she’d once had on him. As soon as the door was closed, she said, ‘I don’t think you understood me on the telephone last night.’
‘About Professor Bailey?’
‘Yes. You’re going to start bringing him to our parties.’
‘I told you, Mrs Mutton, I don’t know him well enough.’
‘I’m not giving you a choice, Loeser. You’ll do it, or Jascha and I will destroy you. And because of your predictable greed, we won’t need to resort to violence to do that. You’ve been embezzling from the Cultural Solidarity Committee of California for the last three years. Unless you do as we say and arrange for us to become friends with Professor Bailey, we’ll give the evidence to the cops, and you’ll be tried and convicted, after which you’ll serve time in jail and then be deported back to Germany.’
‘Embezzling? What do you mean?’
‘You’ve siphoned over a thousand dollars out of the Committee’s funds.’
‘But that was my salary.’
‘For what?’
‘I’m on the board. You said you needed a Jewish board member.’
‘But you’re not Jewish, are you, Mr Loeser? And you’ve never been to a board meeting. In fact, there’s no record of your ever being offered any type of post on the Committee. You just used your friendship with my husband and me to betray us
by stealth.’
‘You sent me those cheques every month.’
‘You may never have noticed, but those cheques were made out in your own handwriting. Apart from “my” signature on them, which you are obviously not very good at faking. Any good graphologist will confirm that.’
Dolores Mutton’s unpredictable alternation between friendly and aggressive over the past three years had been like a slow version of one of the advanced procedures from Dames! And how to Lay them, and Loeser could hardly take all this in, but nonetheless he was struck just then by a triumphant thought. ‘So you copied my handwriting. Or Drabsfarben did. What did you copy it from?’
‘Several years ago, in Berlin, you sent Jascha a letter about a play. You wanted him to write the score.’
‘The Teleportation Accident. He said no. But he brought that old letter all the way to America?’
‘Jascha maintains an extensive library of handwriting samples. It often comes in useful.’
‘Well, you’re not as clever as you think, Mrs Mutton! My handwriting has changed since then. “Any good graphologist” will confirm that, too. Your cheques won’t fool anyone.’
‘Actually, that will make them all the more convincing, because it will look like you tried to contrive a different scrawl, but didn’t succeed in masking your real one.’ She shrugged. ‘In any case, if our preparations don’t work out, that will be a pity, but it won’t be a problem. We’ll just go back to how we would have done it before. We’ll run a risk.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Jascha will kill you and make it look like an accident. Goodnight, Loeser. You know what you have to do.’
‘Wait — how long do I have?’
‘Like you told me, you’ve only just met the Professor. And we’re reasonable people. We can give you six months.’
‘Why is this so important? What are you going to do with him? Is this about the Teleportation Device?’
‘Don’t worry about that. Just get us Bailey.’
After she shut the door behind her, Loeser stood there paralysed for so long that he still hadn’t shifted when his doorbell rang for the third time that night. He opened the door to a policeman in uniform.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ said the policeman. ‘We had a report of an intruder at this residence.’
‘I’m fine. There’s no one here.’
‘So you didn’t call us?’
‘No. I’m sorry. Perhaps it was a nuisance call.’
‘So there’s nothing wrong here at all?’ said the policeman.
‘No,’ said Loeser. ‘There’s nothing wrong here at all.’ And at that moment, as the policeman peered past him into the house, Loeser watched two young deer running down Palmetto Drive, nacreous in the twilight, ghosts on a frictionless plane.
PART III
This Is Your Life
6. LOS ANGELES, 1939
The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the California Institute of Technology Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an almost empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the slim, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed halfway up its rungs to turn and tell them, without so much as a preparatory clearing of his throat, that they were a damned talentless group of people and a terrible group of people to work with.
‘We are going to start again,’ he said. ‘From the beginning. And carry on until we get it right.’
No murmurs of dismay followed these words, nor even the briefest eye contact between the Players. Like slaves who had been whipped so many times they had forgotten how to flinch, they just moved numbly back into their places for the first scene. Loeser got down off the stepladder, pulled it back into the wings, and returned to his seat in row F.
‘Ready, Ziesel?’ he shouted.
‘Ready!’ shouted Ziesel from his technician’s box.
‘Auf geht’s.’
Ziesel cut the footlights so that the auditorium was in total darkness. Dr Pelton, CalTech’s best amateur pianist, struck a series of eerie dissonant chords. Then a spotlight lanced across the stage, revealing Adele Hister standing on a dais in the centre. She wore a tight black gown with a sort of asymmetrical cheongsam collar and spiky shoulders.
‘Look, Grandma,’ she howled, raising a lump of magnesium ore high above her head, ‘I caught a snowflake in my hand and it isn’t melting!’
Another spotlight came on, this time revealing Mrs Jones, a secretary from Throop Hall, as she rolled a rusty wheelchair down a long steel ramp.
‘But, precious,’ Mrs Jones howled back, ‘it’s not even snowing outside.’
‘I know, but look!’
‘Well, precious, I hope you know what that means. My own dear old grandma told me when I was just a little girl. If you catch a snowflake when it isn’t snowing, you get one wish. And if the snowflake doesn’t melt, you get three wishes.’
‘Three wishes!’ At this point a row of three more lights came on, these ones shining intensely into the stalls as if there were escaped prisoners among the audience.
‘Yes, precious. What will they be?’
‘Gee, Grandma, first of all, I wish that we get a real white Christmas. Real snow on Christmas Day, like in stories.’ One of the three lights shut off, and Dr Pelton, in the orchestra pit, tolled a deep, funereal bell.
‘And?’
‘Second of all, I wish that Ma and Pa find the money to buy medicine for poor old Nigger.’ A second light shut off, and a second bell tolled. At the same time, a different light came on, revealing the huge aluminium model of a dog’s skull, ferocious jaws agape, that was suspended on chains from the ceiling to represent the family’s ailing pet.
‘And?’
‘And third of all, I wish that mean Mr Parker doesn’t make Pa work in the factory on Christmas Day.’
A third light shut off, and a third bell tolled. At the same time, a hydraulic machine press that had been installed at the front of the stage started up, producing a hammering noise that left much of the dialogue that followed almost inaudible.
‘ “Mean”? That’s no way to talk about your future father-in-law, precious,’ shouted Mrs Jones.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everyone knows you’re sweet on Chip Parker, precious. Just yesterday, you were necking with him at the soda fountain.’
An obscene pink light began to strobe.
‘I was not! How did you know?’ Adele still held the magnesium over her head and her elbows were starting to quiver.
‘Don’t worry yourself about that. Grandmas always find these things out. Now, here’s your Ma coming back from town.’
The strobe shut off and a long blast of dry ice befogged the stage as Dr Pelton’s wife Martha entered on a conveyer belt. She wore wooden conquistador armour.
‘Ma!’ screeched Adele.
‘Hello, little one.’
‘Isn’t it chilly today, Ma?’
‘It sure is, little one, but nothing more warms me up faster than coming back to this wonderful cosy house.’ Many more lights came on, revealing the rest of the set, which was mostly composed of ladders, pulleys, dustbins, and broken mirrors.
‘Oh, Ma,’ said Adele, flinging out her arms as if crucified as Dr Pelton scraped a steel protractor across the strings of his piano, ‘isn’t Christmas just the loveliest time of year?’
There had been some concern among the faculty that The Snowflake by J.F. McGnawn, Dr Millikan’s choice for this year’s California Institute of Technology Christmas play, might not be quite compatible with Egon Loeser’s particular style of direction. Neo-Expressionism was apparently the term, and if you wanted to be equitable about last year’s inaugural Gorge Auditorium production of The Little Match Girl, you might say that it had provoked a quantity of bracing debate. Nonetheless, the university’s president had his heart set on The Snowflake, and Lo
eser was still the only real theatre man with any connection to the faculty, so the two of them had reportedly made the bargain that if Millikan could have the play he wanted, then Loeser could direct it, not to mention write the music and design the costumes, without any interference at all.
Bailey, who sat at the very back of the auditorium, had slipped into this morning’s dress rehearsal to see how his young assistant was getting on. When the Players were most of the way through their second run-through of the first scene, he decided he’d watched as much as loyalty to Adele demanded, so he got up and went back out into the December sunshine. The light in Los Angeles was not by any means a hibernant beast but sometimes just for a few days in winter it did get fat and furry and slow.
Bailey was walking towards the Obediah Laboratories when he noticed a small crowd of students gathered near the Dabney Hall of the Humanities. They were staring up at something on the roof. He looked up himself, and what he saw ripped away his breath. There was an old black Model T Ford up there, parked as if it were about to drive suicidally off the edge.