Ghostly fingers began to count and recount the bones of my spine.
“You don’t know. But you hear.”
“Is it my fault I can’t help answering calls on the switchboard? Mistakes happen on any job, no matter who.”
I looked at him, feeling I was not here, neither was he, and as though my voice came from somebody slightly curious, faintly bored, very tired.
“What kind of a breakdown happens to somebody who makes a bad mistake, delivering a package? Will they give you a personal treatment, or just turn you in?”
He sensed, now, that the trouble I brought with me could be diverted to somebody else, that the worst of it might bypass him. It might even bring him a little luck. It had before. It might again.
“Turn me in for what? I don’t know about any rough stuff, Mister. We don’t hurt people, only by accident. We help people think they got to kill somebody, their closest friend sometimes, and he realizes his friend can’t see that way they might both get hurt. Besides, we don’t usually handle a job like yours. I heard it might happen somebody got the wrong medicine in the dark for a sick friend, and then it was too late to save him no matter how hard they worked and worked. But I never heard they actually took any cases like that, it’s too tricky. No poison.”
“You’ve heard of one now, and they built you right into it.” I let him test that gaff again, before I pulled, bringing him with it, “I think they fitted you into the others, too.”
A fresh wave of tremors surged over him. The dog in his arms whined, gave a little howl, and then for a moment he could only shake his head.
“Not me. I never even tried. You got to know all the special ways how to handle those people having a nervous prostration. I’m on the desk, right here, that’s all. No cases. Yon think I know how to take care of a window-jumper? I can’t even lean over the ledge.”
“What kind of a window-jumper?”
“Any kind. Whoever it looks best for business. Whichever way it pays. Repeaters. Beginners. On the level, or just a joke to scare somebody back to his right senses, so they won’t pretend they’re sick again. We help everybody, all kinds. Even when there’s an accident, some beginner actually goes and does it, suddenly all his friends realize they were in his books, and he was in our books, and maybe they need help, themselves. So they book in here, and we help each other. But not me, I don’t even have a license.”
The man did not know, himself, the meaning of this inferno he half revealed, but the ghost standing behind me blew an empty, airless breath into every last pocket of my body, brain, and soul.
“I think you need help yourself, Anders. But not that kind.” He said nothing, both of us knowing this had always been true about him, would always be true. “You could be fixed up better than this. Maybe you can be. Right now, maybe you can do something for yourself. I want somebody, Griscom or Talcott, to help out a friend of mine. This would have to be good. Something different. How about it? Are they good?”
Anders moistened his lips, studying me with new eyes, seeing hope, but also danger.
“You want to help Mr. Beechwood?” he asked. I showed I hadn’t even heard him, and the high, crooning voice gave up this question for another one. “What kind of a case did you have in mind?”
“What do they handle most?”
“Gas. Windows. Subways. Fires. Gun jobs. It all depends what kind of temporary insanity it’s easiest your friend might be liable to get. You want to try and stop him committing suicide, or prevent him killing some other friend?”
“What’s the difference?” Then I added, trying a finesse, “She might do anything.”
“It wouldn’t matter which, sometimes they try both,” he admitted. Now he moved with clumsy caution toward a deal he felt was in the making, his personal safety and gain balanced against my own nameless purpose, bargaining in a roundabout approach he knew by instinct. “You said it was a lady you mentioned?” I was deaf, again. “That would be simple. One or two sleeping pills, wouldn’t hurt a fly. But Mrs. Griscom, say it’s her case, she calls an ambulance, it’s an attempt. That kind of thing, it’s always because some immoral love affair went wrong. The lady worries there might be a scandal, her family worries about this whole dangerous condition they didn’t realize before. A lot of her friends with wives, they got reputations, big jobs, they’re all nervous what might happen, too. So they all check in here, everybody co-operates to straighten things out, and the expert in charge of the case takes care of the details. Everybody breathes easier, the whole situation gets more wholesome. Works like a charm, nobody gets hurt, no fuss, no bother, and it’s the same as guaranteed there won’t be any more trouble with this party you had in mind.”
They were better than experts. I began to see they were performing charnel masterpieces.
“My friend’s case is more serious. Maybe this is a gun job. What kinds do they handle best?”
“All kinds. It would depend. You want to prevent a man shooting his business partner in the arm, maybe a flesh wound in the leg?”
“Worse. The most serious possible.”
Anders had not really doubted I must be leading up to this. But he didn’t like it.
“I never before heard of any worse,” he said. “Not around here.”
“You’ve heard about the big campaign they’re putting on to raise a lot of money. Are they cutting you in?” I waited, giving him time to catch up. “Or were they cutting you out, the worst way?”
His eyes tried to avoid mine, but always came back. I glanced with impersonal interest at the scrap of food lying between us on the floor. When I looked up, so did he. Hypnotically, he said:
“Somebody kills himself, then tries for another party, besides.” It was not a question. “That happens, no matter how hard they try to prevent it. Just recently a couple of beginners, new cases Mr. Talcott brought in from Restitution, clean out of a clear sky one of them suddenly went and shot two of them, himself and a friend.”
Restitution. The name echoed. It was a large-scale conscience operation, necessarily secret. I remembered the two men who had backed it, the talk about an exact sum of money one of them fancied he had long ago embezzled, then returned it, and how difficult it would be to make such a conspicuous repayment, except through the kind of agency they were forming. I had turned down their notion about needing a campaign. But somebody hadn’t. Talcott.
“How did it look? Good?”
Anders was shocked.
“Sure, this was on the level, why wouldn’t it? Didn’t you read about it?” While I was out of town I hadn’t followed the city papers closely. “Mr. Griscom went wild. They had an argument still going on. Was it a dangerous waste, or more of a help, with the others? But anyway, that one was totally accidental, no question.”
“Who?”
“Didn’t you read, day before yesterday Johan Ides took this Joseph Pullen along with him, same time? Big embezzlement case. They knocked down twenty-six thousand four hundred twelve bills, but one of them was holding out on the other.”
The names exploded. And the figure. I saw again the now dead Ides and Pullen, heard them again talking to me, again saw the office on that remote morning of our interview. For Ides, Talcott’s pressure had been too much. For both of them it had been fatal.
But I also sensed another, a shadowy, colorless fourth person present, listening but saying little, in the background of that scene in my office. Neither Vincent nor Haley. Stanley.
“How much do you see of Mr. Thornhill?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Stanley Thornhill. When does he usually drop in, how often does he phone? How often do they call him, through the switchboard?”
Anders started to shake his head.
“I don’t know any patient by that name, nobody important. Not yet.” A new caution stopped and froze him. “If that’s your friend needs a long rest, I didn’t even hear that name you mentioned, but he was never around.” The silence lengthened, as I appraised these sovereign
remedies offered by Generous Heart. The recipe was harmless, aspirin for a headache, with the headache turning instantly into cancer. Disaster always paid more. Anders stirred, presently, and I heard him ask, “Is it all right if I get rid of this, Mister?”
He indicated the fragment of his sandwich on the floor. My bluff. It had worked, showing what I already surmised, but now in a sharper light that revealed a trap with no release, no zone of safety, no escape.
“Go ahead,” I told him.
He bent down and picked up the scrap, at the same time setting down the dog. Then he looked for a place to put it. The wastebasket was his first choice, but he saw the inquisitive little terrier following every move he made, and changed his mind. His next solution was to wrap the thing in the original paper bag containing the sandwich, but again he considered the questing, sniffing, bounding KO. The basket, he plainly decided, must be ruled out altogether. He pulled open a drawer of the desk, then closed it, not wanting it so close to himself, either. His gaze traveled around the small room, and found no place that would serve.
“I’d better throw it out of the window,” he said, and pulled up one of the room’s two windows, tugging heavily as it rose in rasping jerks. He threw the bag far into the dim void of night. Then he started to pull the window down again, but stopped, hands resting on the raised sash. “Say, that’s funny.”
I saw him staring downward and I quietly crossed the room, to stand carefully just behind him. From our angle on the fourth floor we could see about half of the street below, and as I followed his gaze I watched a pale, faintly shining luxury coupe roll slowly to the next intersection, idle down at the corner and turn smoothly inward, stop, then evenly reverse and flow backward against the one-way traffic arrow to a second feathery halt against the curb, this time in the dimmer recess of the cross street. It was silvery, almost luminous even there, correctly parked and nosed in the right direction. Then as we watched, the car’s left headlight went out. The other had not been on at all. And while the car turned and backed, there had been time to catch the frosty glitter of shattered glass still there in that headlight’s darkened eye.
“Yes?” I prompted Anders. ”What’s strange?”
“Nothing,” he said. “For a minute I thought it might be somebody’s car I knew. But he never uses it. Besides, he isn’t expected back tonight.”
Then for a long interval we waited, watching the shining coupe parked in the shadows, but no one got out of it or appeared anywhere on the street. It was clear no one would. The gray car and its driver were waiting, and I knew from that position the entrance to this building must be in plain sight.
“I guess you were wrong,” I said.
Anders uneasily stirred, pulled down the window.
“I guess so,” he said, half convinced, but still disturbed.
He could not be certain, as I was certain, we had seen the death car. To him, it merely resembled the phantom coupe he had glimpsed once, only briefly, and then been ordered to forget. But I had followed it closely, for a distance, viewing it from a number of angles. It was the car, probably stolen, and with false plates, that had paced mine into the park, to the scene of the fatality, and after that sped on ahead of me, through all the turns and twists leading to this. And even now still led the way.
If the damaged headlight had not been repaired, not even the broken glass, then nothing else had been restored, either. Why not? And why was it down there tonight with the driver plainly intent on business concerning this building, this agency? The car was already identified with one death, a dim and questionable apparition only while it remained missing. Once found, it brought with it out of the shadows its own scabrous past. Someone had kept it, for the finding, and not only that, but also with all its unmistakable marks and scars intact. Knowing how these realists worked, the car would have been preserved in its original state only to serve in the future for an identical purpose. Now the moment for that lethal use had arrived.
It could be waiting for me. But they still needed my co-operation, my signature on a contract, and expected it. It could be there for Anders. But they already held him in hostage, safely theirs.
Then for someone else, in some crisis, prepared for a key figure not yet aware that his own character had become so unreliable. Perhaps for some wealthy, but recalcitrant patient. Perhaps for an independent investigator with ambitions, but no franchise. Perhaps for a licensed member of the syndicate, suddenly on the losing end of a philanthropic dispute.
But it came to me that I would like to have the use of that car myself. I could use it to get rid of a body. It suggested itself for a new purpose that began, cloudily, to take shape. In fact, I needed that car, which I had been watching with abstraction, still parked with no sign of life at the curb of the cross street, just off the corner. But it was occupied, still, while its unknown driver still waited.
Then I heard steps in the corridor outside, the click of the doorknob. I turned from the window, Anders looked up from his desk. The man in the open doorway, instantly alerted, stopped for the briefest flicker of surprise. Then as suddenly at ease, he stepped inside. I had never seen him before. He was a younger man, not much over thirty, about my height, but very lean, with the blank face of a cherub. Except, it was a face that had never smiled.
Griscom.
The latch of the door made a small click again as it closed behind him. He advanced farther into the room,, looking steadily at me. He knew who I was, too, and understood perfectly, that I knew him. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t say so.
“Were you waiting to see me?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him, and dropped it there.
His glance went from me to Anders, but he found no cue in Anders’ hypnotized stare, and he returned his attention to me. He was better than sure of himself. He was certain of himself.
“Well? What do you want to see me about?”
“You suggested that I drop in and see yon,” I said. He nodded and I went on, “So here I am.”
He was elaborately polite, considerate, and did not mind letting me know that all of this was a pointless ritual.
“It’s about a disturbed friend, I suppose?” He waited for my reply, and when I gave none, he continued, easily, “I hope your friend’s condition isn’t acute. I’ve already had a day of it, most of them hysterical women. Depressed and hallucinated. Imaginary enemies trying to do them imaginary injuries, fantastic schemes to mutilate them. Unbelievable nonsense, except to themselves, and of course it’s pitiful. Still, they can do a lot of damage, stirring up a few gullible friends and relatives.” He intensified his somber, knowing stare. “But I don’t suppose you’re interested in my problems. You have one of your own, What is it?”
“I came to see you about a contract,” I said.
He waited for more, coldly assured, his silence prompting me to make my surrender more voluble, perhaps be evasive, or show some fright. But when nothing followed he disdained the easy triumph. He told me about my situation, point by point, “You’re Jay Ravoc. You have a friend, Mrs. Hepworth, most charming and very beautiful. She has shown an enthusiastic interest in our work here, recently, and I take it she’s persuaded you it’s a wonderful cause. You’d like your firm to handle our first big campaign. Is that right? You want to sign the contract, after all?” The tone, under the parroted phrase, had the bite of a powered band saw. I nodded, and a shadow of angry surprise at my thin response crossed the even, open, innocent features of this stone cherub. But he told me, the edged voice cutting deeper, “All right. I’ll get it, and you can sign. But you gave us a lot of trouble, for that last signature.”
He started toward one of the inner offices, reaching in his pocket for the key, but I stopped him.
“I want a conference with my partners, first,” I said, “They’ve all signed. What’s there to confer about?”
“The terms. How well handle the drive. The way we’ll present the agency’s case to the public.”
He thought this over,
then said grudgingly:
“Well, all right. But the terms are all settled. I thought you were anxious to wrap this up in a hurry.”
“I am.”
The buzzer of the switchboard sounded as I spoke, and Griscom glanced impatiently at the board, at Anders.
“I’ve just left,” he told him.
The night receptionist took the call, and we heard his voice. “Generous Heart.” There was only a slight pause. “He just now left the office, Mrs. Griscom.” There was another pause, in which Griscom frowning, paced slowly to the desk. “No, I don’t think hell be back tonight. Was it important?” There was a brief silence, in which Anders picked up a pencil, and at the same time looked questioningly at Griscom. Griscom made no move to take the phone, his gaze seeing nothing in the room, the blank eyes those of a hunter’s hunter.
“It’s an emergency, and if he does come back, tell him to go at once to the offices of Campaign Consultants,” Anders recited, into the mouthpiece, and to Griscom. “He’ll understand who wants to see him there. Go through the park, and pick you up on the way there, at the Hampton Arms on West End, a patient by the name of Marian Tormlin.” Another pause, and in it, Anders jotted down the name and the West End address. “Yes, ma’am. If he should come back I’ll tell him that.”
The Generous Heart Page 17