The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  Pete hung up, and instantly Liselotte was on the phone, demanding whether Timmy had given poor Olivia a chance to go to lunch, calling him a heartless brute when she found out he hadn’t, and announcing her imminent arrival to repair the damage.

  “Go and get prettied up,” he told his secretary. “Lise has taken pity on you. How that woman eats four or five meals a day without putting on weight I’ll never know.”

  “Partly it’s being Viennese,” Olivia told him, tidying her desk, “but mostly it’s just worrying about you.”

  She disappeared into the powder room, and he spent the next few minutes with his mail, whistling as he worked. By the time Liselotte got there, he had finished his reminders for the day, and Olivia was regarding him disapprovingly.

  “Has he been behaving nicely?” asked Liselotte, entering like a flame.

  “He’s just been sitting there whistling ‘Lilliburlero,’ as if this was a nice sunny day in the eighteenth century.”

  “Only to you will I tell my secret—to my Timmy, le dixhuitieme siècle has never ended. You would think he was Maurice de Saxe and I, Adrienne Lecouvreur—though I admit that perhaps he has more finesse in some things than Maurice.” She kissed the top of his head condescendingly, and handed him a newspaper. “While we are gone, he can perhaps find out if Catherine the Great is dead.”

  He walked them to the elevator, and heard his phone screaming at him to be picked up again. It was the answering service girl: Was Mr. Timuroff available? Mrs. Miranda Gardner’s office was on the line.

  Frowning, Timuroff told her to put them on.

  “Mr. Timuroff?”

  He recognized the too-smooth voice of Mrs. Gardner’s current male secretary.

  “Mr. Timuroff, Mrs. Gardner wishes to know whether you will be open there this afternoon? She will be in your vicinity at about one thirty, and would like to drop by if it’s convenient. I know that she is looking forward to seeing your latest acquisitions. May I inform her that you will be expecting her?”

  “You may.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Timuroff. She will be very pleased when I tell her. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” Timuroff said. He sat back slowly and stared at the telephone. What next? he asked himself. Miranda Morphy Gardner, ice cold and hard, was not a woman who did things by coincidence. The feeling he had had the night before, of hidden forces, of dark designs and unguessed relationships, was reinforced.

  “Telephone,” he addressed the instrument, “how dare you intrude into my century with women like Miranda Gardner? My forebears managed very well without you. Tyrants used often to execute the bearers of bad news, but Fm forbidden by your owners to do anything no matter how obnoxious you become. Beware, telephone! One of these days I’ll—”

  The telephone shrilled at him offensively.

  “For God’s sake!” muttered Timuroff. “The thing’s alive.” He lifted it gingerly by the nape of its neck. “Yes?” he said.

  The answering service informed him that Dr. Hector Grimwood wished to speak to him, that it was urgent. A moment later, he heard the urgency quite unmistakably in the doctor’s voice. Hector Grimwood was a frightened man.

  “Tim? Tim, something’s happened. I didn’t want to phone from home, so I’m calling from the pharmacy on Union Street. I’ve tried to reach Inspector Cominazzo, but they keep telling me he isn’t there—”

  “Whoa there, Heck! Slow down a minute. What’s happened?”

  “Somebody’s been tampering with my Muriel!”

  “Muriel? You mean your belly dancer?”

  “It’s uncanny, Tim! The house has been alive with police and with reporters—you can imagine how it’s been. That miserable Lieutenant Kielty spent half the morning here too, nagging me about Munrooney and van Zaam, and hinting broadly that somehow I and Penny Anne are mixed up in the murders. And yet it must’ve happened while they were here. I went into her room just half an hour ago, and she had changed position! She does her dance kneeling or sitting down, and she just wasn’t as I left her. It was as though someone had turned her on for just a minute. But it’s impossible—that is a room to which I have the only key!”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m absolutely sure.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “Tim, how do I know that some of them aren’t mixed up somehow with the people who’re behind all this? I tell you, the room was locked all morning, and the secret passages are sealed—just as you and Inspector Cominazzo left them.”

  “Heck,” Timuroff said, “you’re a precisionist; you’d certainly not imagine nonexistent mysteries where your own creations are concerned. You’re right to take this seriously. But don’t let it frighten you. I’ll get in touch with Pete, and he’ll look into it. In the meantime, stay out of Muriel’s room, keep the door locked, and don’t tell another soul.… No, I can’t come out there right now, but if you and Penny Anne have nothing planned, maybe we can get together this evening for an hour or two, perhaps at my place?”

  Sounding slightly reassured, the doctor made a few more comments about what a pest the police and newsmen were making of themselves, and accepted the invitation eagerly.

  Once again, the weapons shop was silent, and Timuroff shook his head philosophically. “Well, I may be living in the eighteenth century,” he told himself, “but no one can deny that my small section of it is a lively one!”

  CHAPTER VI

  And of the Twentieth

  Miranda Morphy Gardner arrived at one forty-five. She did not come alone; nor was she, as usual, attended by a secretary. Judson Hemmet entered with her.

  Timuroff concealed his surprise when he met them at the door. He knew, of course, that the firm of Munrooney, Hemmet, John H. Braidstone, and Baltesar were her attorneys; and both she and Hemmet had bought a good part of their collections from him. But he could not recall ever seeing the two together, and certainly never in his shop. He said that it was nice of them to come, that Mrs. Gardner hadn’t been around for quite a while, that seeing Hemmet was an unexpected pleasure. “So perhaps I can kill two birds with one stone—” He laughed. “Or are my clients ganging up on me?”

  The effect was instant. Miranda Gardner, grimly female and unfeminine in the light of day, beauty-shopped into a strangely unconvincing simulacrum of youth and beauty, said not a word. Judson Hemmet smiled coldly with his lips alone, and answered in his cold and cultured voice, “Well, Tim, in a world of dead birds and thrown stones, sometimes ganging up is called for.” Then he too laughed, as though a joke that was not there could somehow be evoked.

  Timuroff changed the subject, telling him about a small group of rapiers he had just purchased out of Portugal. Casually, he led the way toward the case that held them.

  Judson Hemmet was in his early forties. At first glance, his face seemed almost frighteningly austere, that of a Puritan, a hanging judge; one had to look more closely to see the marks and lines of unrestrained rapacity and arrogance. His New England ancestors had been among Hawaii’s first missionaries, turning false piety into outrageous profit; and Timuroff had once remarked that he himself looked like a reformed missionary out of a Maugham story. Now, measuring Hemmet, he felt simultaneously that his own measure was being taken, not as the potential buyer weighs the seller but much more intimately, as the experienced duelist weighs a possible opponent.

  In the background, the office radio had been tuned softly to an FM good-music station, and a harpsichord was playing a dark and gay and lovely piece by Jacques Champion de Chambonnieres, written largely for the bass in a century when gentlemen wore swords and perhaps slew each other a little carelessly, and sometimes paid more than lip service to art and beauty. Timuroff, showing the rapiers, wondered what sort of person Hemmet might have been had he lived then—Hemmet and, for that matter, Miranda Gardner.

&nbs
p; In college, and for some years after, Hemmet had been a fencer, never a champion but still quite a good one; and Timuroff wondered why, for fencing has no practical and natural place in today’s world, and Judson Hemmet, whatever else he was, was a twentieth-century man, with the materialism of the industrial and computer revolutions in his blood and bones.

  Yet in his hands, suddenly, the swords became weapons once again. Three were Spanish, two Italian, two from Germany, one each from Austria and England, all of fine quality. Hemmet weighed them, put them aside, returned to them; finally he settled on a seven-ringed Spanish sword with a blade more than four feet long—scarcely, Timuroff thought, a modem fencer’s choice, and obscurely the idea troubled him.

  “I’ll be taking this one,” Hemmet said, setting it apart “But that’s not why we came up here today.”

  Miranda Gardner, uninterested, had wandered over to the cases in the center of the room. She was standing over one full of poniards, misericords, hunting daggers, savage bowie knives. She had opened it herself, and was examining a leaf-shaped push-dagger with transverse ivory hilt, made in the Gold Rush days by Will & Finck, in San Francisco. She brought it with her as she returned to them, a sudden feral satisfaction on her face.

  “Miranda,” Hemmet said, “I’ve just been telling Timuroff that we aren’t really here as customers.”

  Timuroff smiled. “I didn’t think you were, but it’s always nice to do a bit of business by the way.” He glanced toward the office. “Why don’t we sit down? How about a drink?”

  They exchanged glances. They followed him. They took their chairs.

  “What’ll it be?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Hemmet said, his voice expressionless.

  “Canadian?” Fondling the small dagger, Miranda Gardner looked up with her expensive, fleshless smile. “On the rocks.”

  Suddenly, as he poured—one for her and a long, wet one for himself—Timuroff saw her as another of Hector Grimwood’s contrivances, conceived perhaps in a moment of depression after awakening from a nightmare. His fancy showed him a complex mechanism behind that smile, gears and springs and motors giving life to her long hands and incongruously long and lovely legs. He shook the idea off, and, as he had before with Judson Hemmet, began to wonder what really animated her. He raised his glass. “Cheers!” he said. They drank.

  “We want to talk to you about last night,” Hemmet began. “I understand that you were called in by the police to check that dagger, that you arrived while everybody was still there, and that you were actually with Grimwood when he found the second body—what was his name? Van Zaam?”

  “Hendrik J. van Zaam,” said Timuroff. “‘Industrial liaison.’ So his card said, at least. And a most unpleasant sight he was, too.”

  “That’s what the papers said.” Hemmet leaned forward. His voice dropped confidentially. “Tim, this is a nasty situation. You didn’t like Errol. Even I didn’t see eye to eye with him on everything. But he’d become a major national figure. He’d pretty well bridged the racial gap, and the generation gap, and Lord knows how many others. Can you imagine how many political applecarts have been knocked over by his death? Especially considering the crazy circumstances? How do you think I feel about it, as his law partner? Or Miranda here, whom we represent? She’s been associated in almost all his business enterprises.” Timuroff sat on the corner of his desk and sipped his drink.

  “But even with all that,” Hemmet went on, “until this second murder it seemed like—well, something we could understand. People like Errol gather all sorts of enemies as they go along—organized crime, right-wing extremists, just plain nuts. That’s the risk they take. But this van Zaam thing is different. There are too many overtones and undertones. He had some sort of record overseas, they say.”

  “And?” said Timuroff.

  “Tim, there’s something here that’s unpredictable. It makes you ask yourself Who’s next? Baltesar and I are working very closely with the chief of police. We want this business cleared up as soon as possible, for the country’s sake, and for the city’s, and for our own. You seem to have a special relationship with homicide—I know you’ve worked with them before—and there’s no real reason why we can’t help each other, is there? Maybe we can smooth out some of the police department’s rivalries and jealousies?”

  Timuroff could think of no good reason why they couldn’t, but a voice inside him kept crying False! False! False! insistently.

  Miranda Gardner held her glass out, and he did the honors. “Jud, I appreciate your confidence,” he answered. “But I’m determined to be just an expert witness. I identified the khanjar and told the police where Socrates bought it. But they’ll have to take it on from there. My secretary’s married to a homicide inspector, as you know, and they’re both close friends of mine. I’m going to keep my distance.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Hemmet’s voice chilled. “When a man like Errol’s murdered, all sorts of things get stirred up, and some of them aren’t nice at all, and sometimes they actually get dangerous. Wouldn’t we be better off to stand together?”

  Miranda Gardner put down her glass. Carefully, she placed the ivory-handled dagger in her handbag, and Timuroff scribbled himself a mental note to bill her for it. She leaned toward him, still wearing her edged smile. “Mr. Timuroff, it must have been tremendously exciting, helping the police to solve those other cases. Lieutenant Kielty told me all about them, how you worked practically alone, not telling anybody anything.” She licked her lips. “Weren’t you afraid somebody might try to kill you?”

  Abruptly, Timuroffs perch on his desk changed its character: it had been a relaxed and easy seat; now it became a point of balance, a center for poised forces held in close control. Judson Hemmet felt it instantly. Miranda Gardner stirred uneasily in her chair.

  “To kill me?” repeated Timuroff. Both iron and irony were in his voice. “Of course I thought of it. Some people get these silly impulses.”

  There was a silence. Then, “I envy you your confidence,” Judson Hemmet said.

  I wonder, thought Timuroff, whether I ought to envy yours? But he said nothing. He sat balanced there, smiling at both of them.

  Then it was over. Abruptly, Hemmet turned the conversation back to swords. He promised to send somebody to get the rapier, and Miranda Gardner asked him not to sell one or two other items she had her eye on.

  Over the radio, Wanda Landowska, long since dead, played a bright, sunlit something by Rameau, a background of cut-crystal sound to the ritual politenesses with which hostility is so conveniently concealed; and Timuroff began to wonder how long they’d take to go, when—for once opportunely—the doorbell announced a visitor.

  “Business is thriving,” he commented. He rose; and they rose with him. He escorted them under the cut-crystal chandeliers to the door, and opened it.

  Framed in it, great and gray, stood Amos Ledenthal. All movement ceased. It was as though, without a sound, all the cut crystal had shattered in the air, leaving the threat of an explosion still unfulfilled.

  Timuroff saw Ledenthal’s fists clench, his knuckles whiten, his gray eyes smoulder suddenly under the shaggy mantel of his brows. Then he looked at Miranda Gardner, and saw the same expression she had worn when, a few minutes previously, she had suggested that perhaps someone might have tried to kill him—the same expression, but vastly more intense, as though something had stripped her face of its humanity, down to the bare, bleached bones of hatred. They stood frozen there, a set piece.

  What goes on here? thought Timuroff.

  And Judson Hemmet, his expression utterly unchanged, said in his flat voice, “Don’t worry, Amos. We’re leaving.”

  Ledenthal said nothing. He moved aside, and it was an act not of courtesy, but of aversion.

  Then Hemmet and Miranda Gardner walked past him to the elevator door.r />
  “Go on in, Amos/’ Timuroff said. “Be with you in a moment.”

  He saw them on their way, and neither of them made any comment on the incident. He turned back into the shop, locking the door behind him.

  “Well, Amos,” he called out, “you aren’t trying to buy my Yasumitsu away from me, are you? Not again?”

  Ledenthal turned to face him. Sideburned and moustached, booted and silver-buckled, he looked like a Frederick Remington frontier marshal expensively redecorated in Scottsdale, Arizona; and both his temper and his ancestry reflected in minuscule the stormy history of the West. His great-grandfather, a German-Jewish merchant, had let the Gold Rush sweep him to Salt Lake, where—to his own surprise—he was converted first to Mormonism, then to a pleasantly prospering polygamy. The blood of Scandinavian immigrants flowed in Amos’s veins, mixing with that of Scotch-Irish mountain men and women, of Plains Indians, and of long-forgotten voyageurs. Timuroff attributed his chronic irritation to the fact that there no longer was a frontier to contend with.

  The unbuyable Yasumitsu blade was a standing joke between them, but Ledenthal ignored it completely.

  “Timuroff!” he shouted. “You goddamned fool! What the hell d’you think you’re doing, getting yourself messed up in this Munrooney business? It’s going to get a damn sight uglier! You wait and see!”

  He came forward as he spoke, and they shook hands.

  “I’m just an expert witness, Amos,” Timuroff said placatingly. “I’ll speak my little piece and leave the stage to the important people. Believe me, I won’t get involved.”

  “Dammit, you are involved! Some militant on KPFA just go through asking why the pigs called you in at all, when it’s well known you’re a White Russian reactionary, and that you threatened the late St. Errol publicly. Then he demanded that they investigate your whereabouts last night. You better have a damn good alibi.”