The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

His reflexes were extremely quick, so he did not quite drop his drink. From within the helm, a human skull glared at him. It had ferocious teeth, bright blue glass eyes, and a lank yellow wig. Its jaws opened. In hollow tones and with a distinct Scandinavian accent, it cried out, “‘Speak! speak! thou fearful guest!’”

  Timuroff let the visor drop, and the skull was silent. Almost at his elbow, though, he heard a chuckle, and, turning to his right, found himself face to face with an elderly gentleman wearing a glen plaid suit, who seemingly had appeared out of nowhere. He was a vast crag of an old man, still mighty though falling into ruin, with stooped shoulders broad as a caber thrower’s, a once-broken nose, a slightly cauliflowered ear, great grizzled eyebrows, sideburns, and moustache, and eyes which seemed at once quite mad, immensely shrewd, and wholly innocent.

  “How do you do?” He beamed at Timuroff. “I’m Dr. Hector Grimwood. I see that you’ve met Eric here. What do you think of him?”

  “Well,” Timuroff replied judiciously, “he certainly isn’t ‘in rude armor drest.’”

  “He isn’t, is he? I tried to put him into Viking armor, but he just wouldn’t hold together—there’s so little to it, just thongs and bearskins and perhaps a byrnie—so we compromised. I bought him this suit at Fischer’s in Lucerne. It was just his size.”

  “At the Mannheim-Esterhazy sale?” asked Timuroff. “How—? But of course,” The doctor slapped his knee. “You’re that arms expert the police brought in. They think my poor Lucrece used that peculiar dagger to stab our wretched mayor to death. Don’t you believe it, sir. She is as gentle as a kitten. I know—I made her, after all. Or if she did, believe me it was justified. The man had a disgraceful reputation; I’d never have invited him if Mario Baltesar hadn’t pressed me to. But all that’s unimportant. Your nice police friend told me about you. It’s lucky I ran into you. Wasn’t your ancestor a Drummond?” He pointed to the couch. “Come, come. Do sit down. I’ve read about him. He married the daughter of some sort of princeling, didn’t he?”

  Timuroff thanked him and sat down. “Yes, he escaped out of the Tower with Drummond of Cromlix and Old Tom Dalyell of the Binns, and all three became generals and fought the Polonian and the Turk. When Charles the Second was restored, they were permitted to go home—a rare thing in Russia in those days—but by that time he’d married the daughter of Prince Dmitri Timuroff, who claimed descent from Tamerlane the Great, Timur the Conqueror. She was prettier than good King Charles, I dare say, so he stayed where he was. Our name is really Drummond-Timuroff, but it’s simpler just to shorten it.” Under the circumstances, Timuroff did not think it strange that he should be sitting at the quiet center of a homicide investigation discussing his own forebears with an aged eccentric who, having contrived the apparent means and setting of the murder, was quite clearly a prime suspect. He had forgotten neither the premonitory chill he had experienced in the living room nor the doctor’s silent, still unexplained appearance in the library. But he had taken to the old man instantly; a bond of sympathy had passed between them, and he suspected that the foundations for a friendship had been formed. For the next ten minutes, he told about the various Timuroffs: how through the centuries they had always kept in close touch with their Drummond relatives, sending at least their eldest sons to British schools and sometimes on to Edinburgh or Oxford, and quite frequently bringing back English or Scottish brides. He told the doctor how, in 1926, when he was nine, he himself had been shipped from Istanbul, where his family had fled after the revolution, to an ancient school at Inverness, still noted for its Stuart sympathies, where he had spent six years before his father sent for him, this time from Buenos Aires, where he had become a fencing master to the army.

  “There, of course,” he said, “I had to learn my Spanish, and do my military service, and finally my father pulled some strings and they commissioned me, probably because by that time I was as good as he was with the sabre.”

  “Your background makes my own seem rather humdrum, Mr. Timuroff,” replied the doctor. “My ancestors were all New England Yankees, except a single scapegrace southerner who disappeared to everyone’s relief. But still my fife has had its more exciting moments.” His eyes twinkled, and Timuroff observed that they had curious dark green flecks. “At Johns Hopkins, I had to wrestle my way through, quite literally—a bout here and there during the term, and taking on all comers with a carnival in summertime. I kept it up until I started my internship. That was how I acquired these mementos.” He touched his damaged ear and nose. “And I learned how to make the most horrendous faces, to say nothing of marrow-chilling grunts and groans. Yes, my career started out eccentrically, and it’s really not surprising that now most people think I’m crazier than a bedbug.”

  Politely, Timuroff started to demur.

  “No, no. They do, you know. If, like so many of my colleagues, I spent my money flying a hundred-thousand-dollar aircraft at speeds much lower than a commercial airliner’s and a risk many times as high, everyone would consider me enviably normal. If I maintained a mothballed harem of divorced wives, they’d undoubtedly admire me for marrying a cute office nurse a third my age. As it is, I live here happily with Penny Anne—that’s Mrs. Short, my secretary—and spend my time contriving little ladies like Lucrece, and give my parties for the floating world So of course I’m mad. And it amuses me. What I do resent are the nasty stories that have been going around lately.”

  “What sort of stories?” asked Timuroff.

  Dr. Grimwood frowned. “About my girls. One or two of the columnists have been printing loathsome hints, especially that professional Irishman, the one with the bad temper and the porous nose. I love perfection and completeness, and naturally I know anatomy. Therefore, because Lucrece’s garment is transparent, they’ve heard that she has everything a woman ought to have. Of course, it’s all nonfunctional; the poor little thing’s equipment, like beauty, is no more than skin-deep—but apparently they don’t know that. If they’d been joking, I wouldn’t mind at all, but they’ve been serious. We’ve even had some filthy phone calls, and Penny has been dreadfully upset”

  Timuroff agreed that this was understandable.

  “That’s why I’m avoiding newsmen at the moment. You can imagine the sort of questions they’d be asking me! Besides”—the doctor lowered his voice—“I am convinced that my Lucrece was used to lure Munrooney to his death, and that these stories somehow played a part in it.”

  For a few minutes, Timuroff had been hearing the sounds of busyness outside, a rise and fall of voices, occasionally a few that were peremptory, and stampings up and down. Now someone tried the door, waited a moment, tried harder. There was a knock.

  “It sounds as though they’ve come downstairs and are out looking for you,” he told the doctor. “What do we do now?”

  The knock was repeated, and a hoarse voice shouted, “Dr. Grimwood? Are you in there, sir? I’m Rop Millweed of the Chronicle. I’d sure appreciate a moment of your time.”

  “I’ll be the sacrificial lamb,” offered Timuroff. “I can run out tell them you aren’t here, and bring Pete to the rescue.”

  The doctor’s mood changed instantly. He leaped up, a sudden pixyish smile on his lips. “Don’t worry—they’ll never find us in this house if we don’t want them to!”

  Raising a cautionary finger, he moved toward the paneled corner of the chimneypiece.

  As Timuroff joined him, he halted, chuckling delightedly. He reached into the bookcase next to him, turned something—and in utter silence the entire case swung out toward them. Behind it was a lighted passageway. “Come with me!” he whispered, entering it.

  Timuroff followed him, pleased that the mystery of his abrupt appearance in the library had been solved, and they waited as the case closed behind them. The passage, no more than twelve feet long, connected with two narrow staircases, one going up, one down. “I love these secret passages,�
� remarked Dr. Grimwood, heading for the lower stair. “The house is full of them, and I’ve wondered why old Mrs. Albright’s husband built them in. I’ve heard he was involved in shady business dealings, smuggling and all that sort of thing. At any rate, I’m very grateful for them. They are convenient.”

  Timuroff wondered how these convenient passages would further complicate Pete’s already tangled task, but he said nothing.

  At the bottom, Dr. Grimwood unlocked another door, opening into an even narrower passageway. “This one,” he said, “connects the wine cellar and my workshop. We’re all the way back on this floor; it’s shorter than the upper ones—the hillside cuts it off. My shop used to be some sort of storage room in the old days, but I refitted it and cut more windows through. I want to show you how I work, and all my tools. The art of making automata is as exacting as the finest gunsmith’s. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting—”

  He turned a key, snapped a silent switch—and Timuroff found himself regarding a long and narrow room which, at first glance, might have been either a workshop or a surgery. Everything looked too white and sterile: the shelves and cabinets along the inner wall, the cluttered workbench on the window side. The bright white lights were clearly surgical. Some of the tools appeared to be dental; others to have been borrowed from the aerospace industries. In the exact center of the floor, under fluorescent tubes of an especial brilliance, stood an operating table. And on it lay a human figure discreetly covered with a sheet.

  “We doctors!” chuckled Hector Grimwood happily.

  “We’re all alike. We enjoy playing God. Some of us terrorize our patients by dramatizing our power of life and death. Others, a little more humanely, just make them wait forever in our waiting rooms. But I prefer to do it by making my own people, who cannot feel, who’re always in the best of health, who cannot hate me for my failures. Now, let me introduce you to my masterpiece—”

  For a moment, when the first passage swallowed them, Timuroff had wondered whether, despite his liking for the doctor, he might indeed not be on his way to a demise even more extraordinary than Mayor Munrooney’s. Then the enthusiasm in Dr. Grimwood’s voice had reassured him; it was so clearly that of the dedicated craftsman, the monomaniac hobbyist. Now, as the hobbyist strode to his operating table and seized a corner of the sheet, Timuroff experienced a new twinge of apprehension.

  “There!” the doctor cried. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Timuroff’s eyebrows shot up. She was beautiful indeed—every astounding bit of her. She lay there naked, with her legs very slightly spread and a sweet smile on her countenance. For an instant, he entertained the fantasy that Dr. Grimwood, under contract to Hugh Hefner, had gone into the business of manufacturing Playmates. Then he saw that between her breasts a little door was open, revealing an extremely complex mechanism.

  “This is Evangeline,” declared the doctor. “Eventually, of course, she will be dressed as Longfellow envisioned her, but under all that cloth and frippery she will be perfectly complete.” He turned toward the workbench; seized forceps, little jars and canisters, and a small, needle-pointed electric instrument. “Now watch! I want to show you how I affix these pubic hairs—”

  Timuroff watched, fascinated, while Hector Grimwood, working swiftly and with precision, discussed his problems and techniques: how he had developed a synthetic skin that not only looked but felt extremely natural, and the difficulties involved in coordinating changes of expression with voice recordings and movements of the body.

  A good listener, he interrupted only at appropriate intervals with genuinely interested questions. After twenty minutes, he and the doctor were “Alastair” and “Hector.” The fact that there had been a murder in the house had been comfortably sidetracked, and he himself had half forgotten the reason for his being there. Then, just as Dr.

  Grimwood finished implanting a final slightly curly hair, the phone rang. It rang softly but insistently from the workbench, and the doctor, with a sigh of exasperation, put his forceps down and went to answer it.

  “Hello, hello!… Yes, Penny dear, I’m down here. Yes, working on Evangeline.… Mr. Timuroff? He’s with me. Why don’t you join us? I’m sure you’ll like him too.… Well, tell Inspector Cominazzo where we are, and bring him with you.… You will, after the newsmen leave? Good, good. Yes, in the poker parlor. I’ll see you there in a little while.”

  He hung up. “Penny Anne has been wondering what became of us. But now Chief Otterson has gone, and she says the reporters are finally giving up.” He looked down at Evangeline, and patted the locus of his latest creative effort with affection. “That is a pretty little pussy,” he declared. “Really, I’m quite proud of it.” He pulled the sheet back up again. “Alastair, I do hope you’ll come again. Goodness knows there’s going to be enough for me to do. I suppose I’ll have to make some changes in Lucrece, now that all this has happened. And I’ve been wondering about Eric. Penny Anne thinks I ought to give him some of the horrible noises I learned to make when I was wrestling. But it seems to me that Longfellow’s The Skeleton in Armor in its entirety is quite adequate. Don’t you agree?”

  “I do indeed,” Timuroff assured him. “Most people would never get past ‘Speak! speak! thou fearful guest!’”

  The doctor’s answering chuckle cut off abruptly. His troubled countenance, as he turned from his workbench, announced another sudden, total change of mood. “This evening at the party,” he said, speaking very slowly, “we really had a fearful guest. I had forgotten it; I suppose the murder drove it from my mind.” He began pacing up and down. “Have you ever met a man you absolutely loathed and feared on sight? I never had before, but that was how this man affected me. How can I say this? I felt at once that I could kill him without conscience or compunction. The thought shocked and frightened me, and it still does.”

  Timuroff felt his hackles rise. “Was he a big man, with rather pale eyes, and a skin that seemed too large for him?”

  His host stopped short. “How did you know? Why, you weren’t even here!”

  “No,” said Timuroff. “but others were.” And he told the story Florencio Pambid had told him. “There are people who radiate such undiluted evil that sometimes normal men—at least men with any sensitivity—feel the immediate impulse to lash out at them. They don’t, of course, and usually they end up more scared of themselves than of the other fellow. I believe it because I have experienced it myself. Your own reaction needn’t worry you. Having him in your house, especially with a murder following, would cause me more concern. Why did you invite him?”

  “Invite him? I didn’t. I wouldn’t have. Somebody must have brought him—I let people whom I know do that at my parties—but I’ve no idea who. Penny Anne may know.”

  “Do you recall his name?”

  “Yes, I believe I do. It was van Zaam. He had some sort of accent, and I suppose he could have been a Hollander…I exchanged a few words with him, and I believe he came up and introduced himself. Someone told me later that he’d left early.”

  Timuroff tensed; again the cold wind had blown. “Well, it’ll be interesting to see if the police can find out anything about him. With his name, and your description and the bartender’s, I’m sure Pete’ll be able to run him down.”

  “I hope so! For a while I really thought I’d lost my mind. But I still wish I’d never seen the man.” Like a bear trying to shake the frost of winter from its shoulders, the doctor shuddered. “Well, let’s go to the poker parlor, where we can have a drink. Lord knows I need one.”

  He double-locked the workshop door behind him, and they followed a corridor into another hall almost as formal as the one above, where there was a smaller staircase and an elevator entrance. “This used to be the billiard room,” he said, opening a door far over to the left, “but now I use it for my porcelains and general loot and clutter.”

  They walked be
tween a small army of glass cases, between unctuous celadons and fragile Sung whites, quiet teadusts, glowing peach blooms, rich Imperial yellows. The door to the poker parlor was standing open. They went in. Paneled in another unknown hardwood, the room contained much more than the Diamond Jim Brady poker table—a table at which one could see fortunes being won or lost—under a pendant Tiffany lamp at its very center. It had a scattering of large leather chairs, a bar and mirrored backbar, a brass ship’s clock fastened to the bulkhead, a fireplace in which a fire was magically roaring, and, in its inner corner, a vast armoire of age-blackened walnut. The bar was L-shaped, with one door which Timuroff guessed must lead into a service hall. An ardent poker player, he recognized a poker player’s paradise, and said as much. “This place is wonderful! You do play here, I hope?”

  Hector Grimwood brightened perceptibly. “At least twice a month, when I can get a group together. Usually on Saturdays.” He went behind the bar. “Would you like to join us? That is, if you don’t mind a lot of wild games? I could let you know.”

  Timuroff indicated that he enjoyed all poker, straight, wild, or in-between.

  “Now what can I offer you? I’m going to have a shot of Bushmill’s.… No?… Brandy and soda? Of course, but it may have to be domestic.”

  They drank a silent toast.

  “Hector, I envy your house. I can’t imagine anyone who lived here ever leaving it.”

  “Well, it costs me a pretty penny to maintain, but it’s worth it—and after all, I have a pretty penny. Brain surgery is not unprofitable, and my investments have happily been shrewd ones.” The doctor chuckled. “You’d have liked old Albright, Alastair. He was a bandit, I suppose, but he was good company. If he hadn’t been—well, I just might not have risked my reputation to give him those few extra years.”