The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  Woof! thought Lasher. Dame Euridice, with more than 130 novels to her credit, was the unchallenged doyenne of country house party mysteries; much of what he had said about her work would, in a stricter age, have been considered absolutely libelous.

  “She and who else?”

  “Oh, there’ll be other writers, and a critic or two, naturally, and Commissioner Thwaites-Horton—you know, he runs Scotland Yard. Some of us are into the book end; others are aficionados—really avid ones too. But Jennifer Ouseley’ll be here any minute now. She’s driving right down, so you might like to ride with her. She’ll fill you in on the others.”

  Jennifer Ouseley had come to be regarded as Dame Euridice’s foremost amanuensis and natural successor, and the comments Lasher had made on her work had been tempered only by his realization that, of all mystery writers, she was without doubt the most desirable, at least physically. Not only had she been featured in the tabloids caparisoned only in an infinitesimal French bikini, but thousands of British housewives daydreamed of her reputedly tempestuous love affairs. She had black hair, full red lips, a Gypsy’s eyes. The idea of riding down there with her—wherever there might be—made Lasher surreptitiously lick his lips.

  “And you won’t have to bother to dress,” Egan went on. “We’re very informal—a tight little group, all very close friends, quite democratic really. After all, Peter Splain was a Yarmouth fishing smack captain for years before he took up writing, and Braxton Bellingham—remember, those very technical mysteries?—is scarcely a public school man, even if he is one of our foremost authorities on water snails. Then there’s our host for the evening, dear old Alf Hobble—a real diamond in the rough and rich as Croesus. But hold on—here’s Jennifer now—”

  The door had opened, and there she was. Her eyes swept over Lasher, doing all sorts of things to his glands. She smiled.

  “And who have we here, Sandy?” she asked.

  “My dear,” Egan replied, “this is Bryce Lasher, of whom you’ve certainly heard—”

  Licking his chops, and not surreptitiously, Lasher wondered momentarily about how she’d react. He needn’t have. Her smile embraced him. She laughed softly. “Of course!” she cried out. “Why, what fun!”

  “I told Bryce he could ride down with you,” Egan said. “I was sure you wouldn’t mind.”

  She laughed again. “Not if he doesn’t.”

  Lasher indicated he didn’t mind a bit.

  “Well, let’s get started then,” she said, taking his arm. “We have to get through all the traffic and then it’s a good twenty miles. You’ll want to get there in time for cocktails and have a chance to meet everybody.”

  Egan saw them to her car, a Daimler Sovereign, and she swept expertly out into the traffic.

  “Where are we headed?” Lasher asked.

  “Didn’t Sandy tell you? Alfie Hobble has an estate out near Warhampton, a regular baronial affair—or rather what some Victorian get-rich-quick thought was baronial. He’s a fine host, and we often meet there.”

  “And who’s we? Egan mentioned Dame Euridice and a few others, but then you arrived.”

  “We call ourselves The Murderer’s Circle. There’s Aston Tourneau, the publisher, and Lacey Morland, Alfie’s daughter, who thinks she’s a femme fatale because she’s been divorced three times, and sweet old Marina Federescu, who’s a baroness and who really was a femme fatale—a spy for both sides in World War I, imagine it! But you’ll meet them all presently. Did you know I’m starting a new novel? It’s about three or four murders at a sort of super house party at a ski lodge near Aspen—that’s in your state of Colorado, isn’t it?”

  Lasher replied that indeed it was; he knew the area well; he had skied there many times. The Murderers’ Circle! he thought. Don’t these Brits even suspect how far off the beam they are with their pretty little house party setups? And now she wants to inflict that sort of garbage on Colorado! But when she started to ask him questions about American police procedure he managed to answer all of them while keeping a straight face.

  She drove fast and expertly, and once they had the worst traffic behind them the miles flew swiftly even after they left the main artery for a winding country road. Finally she braked, turning in between two great stone and iron gates.

  “Here we are,” she told him. “Hobble Manor. Cozy, isn’t it?”

  He beheld an enormous stone pile, grimly turreted but in no discernible style.

  A bald and massive butler stood at the door to greet them. A huge Irish footman who looked as though he might have survived some years of IRA bomb-throwing came out to take the car.

  “Good evening, Gudgins,” said Miss Ouseley. “I’ve brought our guest, Mr. Bryce Lasher.”

  “Good evening, sir,” rumbled Gudgins. “Mr. Hobble is awaiting you. If you and Miss Ouseley will come with me?”

  They followed him into a large room where the members of The Murderers’ Circle were chatting happily and busily drinking. Egan, surprisingly there ahead of them, made the introductions: Alf Hobble, dressed expensively but in poor taste; his daughter, much as she had been described; the aged Baroness, busy with a huge martini; His Grace, the Bishop of Thaxeter, bluff and florid, who looked as though he probably rode to hounds; Braxton Bellingham, thin and dehydrated; Peter Splain in rough tweeds, puffing a malodorous pipe; and the others whom Egan had already mentioned. Lasher was impressed by none of them, not even by Commissioner Thwaites-Horton, whom he had pictured as a ramrod-straight, sternly martial type, but who turned out to be a bit overweight, blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, and definitely Churchillian in outline. The only ones who looked at him as though he had been left too long out of the fridge were a Captain Something-or-other of one of the Guards regiments and his drawn, hawk-eyed wife.

  Even the Commissioner went out of his way to make Lasher welcome, remarking jocularly that after all it was murder that united them, so that difference of opinion really ought not to be allowed to spoil their fun, and Lasher for once obligingly agreed, telling himself that they really were out to butter him up.

  He had one drink—the Scotch was superb—and a second and a third, taking part in some of the small talk, and wondering when would be the best time to activate the mini-recorder he always had with him when discussing contracts.

  Presently, they trooped into the dining room, having been summoned by yet another large Irish footman, and Lasher was seated in the place of honor between the Commissioner, who apparently was to preside, and the aged Dame Euridice, who chattered away about la haute cuisine, fine wines, and the difficulty one had in finding servants nowadays. “After all, Mr. Lasher,” she sighed, “we can’t all have the luck of Alfred there and find someone as talented as Gudgins, can we?”

  The wines were excellent, the food had been prepared by a master chef, and the two footmen had been well trained. Lasher found himself actually glowing, and he started composing, in his mind, the cutting phrases which would tell The Murderers’ Circle what he thought of it and of its absurdly dated novels. The talk flowed through him and around him until the last dessert had been praised and finished and the footmen were preparing to serve coffee and liqueurs.

  Then the Commissioner stood, held up an admonitory hand for silence, and called the meeting to order.

  “It is our good fortune this evening,” he began, “to have with us the very well-known novelist and mystery critic, Mr. Bryce Lasher, with whose work we are all familiar.” He beamed down at Lasher, who had flipped on his recorder. “I for one must say that I’m delighted to have him here in our midst.”

  The Baroness Marina Federescu emitted a throaty chuckle, and Alfred Hobble politely said, “’Ear, ’ear!”

  “Indeed yes,” the Commissioner continued, “and I’m sure that our guest will not feel that I’m imposing if I ask him to say a few words about the subject in which we’re all so deep
ly interested.” He looked down again and saw Lasher already rising to his feet. “Thank you,” the Commissioner said. “My fellow members, may I present Bryce Lasher.”

  Commissioner Thwaites-Horton sat down as Lasher stood to polite applause.

  Lasher looked them over. “This isn’t going to take long,” he said. “All I’m going to tell you is what’s wrong with you and your whole picture. For Christ’s sake, don’t you know Sherlock Holmes is dead? That Poirot and Appleby and all your other so-called great detectives are about as real as Mickey Mouse? Look at your country. My God, you turn out more crap about murder than anybody—and in the whole place you hardly have fifty murders a year! Fifty—Christ!—that’s less than any small town in the USA.”

  Forgetting his promise to be terse, he went on in this vein for the better part of fifteen minutes, informing them that they knew nothing about murder, and citing several works by those present to prove his point. Finally, “Let me close this with a bit of good advice,” he said. “Can it. Quit writing about something none of you know anything about. Go back to scribbling Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. That’s all.”

  He sat down, again to polite applause, and again the Commissioner arose. Gravely, he looked down at Lasher.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lasher,” he began. “Of course, all of us here were already familiar with your opinion of the British murder mystery, but it was well to hear it directly and without any of the restraints imposed by literary convention. Therefore I now shall take the liberty—which I’m sure you will not grudge me—of explaining to you how wrong you are.”

  Lasher snorted.

  “You see,” continued Thwaites-Horton, “while we British cannot claim to have invented the detective story, we have done more to nourish and develop it than any other people. In no country has the traditional murder mystery been so popular and over so many years. The traditional form has been an addiction comparable to, let us say, the supermarket tabloid in your own land. This became obvious as soon as the Sherlock Holmes stories started to appear, and it grew constantly over the years. At first its social effects were not obvious, and it wasn’t really until after the First World War that we, at Scotland Yard, began to suspect what had been going on. Why? My dear Mr. Lasher, it was because of our falling murder rate. As you pointed out, we do not have many more than half a hundred murders a year, and this has persisted despite our increasing population. We noticed it, of course, but by the time we really understood what was going on it was too late.”

  He smiled at Lasher.

  “You see, we were getting case after case of what we knew had to be murder, case after case where all the ingredients—motive, opportunity, and so on—were present, but where it was impossible to tie the thing together. Poisoning? The poison couldn’t be identified. Blunt instrument? The instrument could not be found. Or the corpse was found where it never should have been. Or neither the instrument nor anything else significant could be linked to the obviously guilty suspect. At length—and believe me only after much soul-searching—we reached the inescapable conclusion. Our murder rate had not declined. More murders than ever were being committed here in Great Britain—but, Mr. Lasher, they were perfect murders. Our traditional detective novels had so trained our murdering public that they were now treating the whole thing as an art. Consider, just the novels of dear Dame Euridice are a compendium of every mistake a murderer shouldn’t make. We were faced with an insoluble problem.”

  “You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you?” sneered Lasher. “So what did you do then? You sure as hell didn’t all up and resign!”

  “Certainly not. We simply recognized that murder, once so crude a business, was now being practiced as an art and that we would—discreetly of course—have to make the best of it. As I believe you say in the States, ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’ That is the reason some of us founded The Murderers’ Circle.”

  “Honest to God! Do you expect me to believe that hogwash?” Lasher pushed his chair back roughly. “Well, listen! I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’m not buying any of it. But—” he grinned triumphantly. “—you’ve given me lots of nice hot material good for about twenty columns, and you aren’t going to be able to deny any of it.” He tapped his pocket. “I’ve got it all on tape.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t worry us—”

  Suddenly Lasher realized that the members of The Murderers’ Circle—including the ravishing Miss Ouseley—were watching him very, very intently.

  “My dear fellow, I wasn’t trying to persuade you. I explained the situation to you simply because we felt that under the circumstances we owed it to you. But you certainly don’t worry us.”

  Again, the Commissioner smiled benignly.

  “After all,” he said, “nobody is ever going to know that you were here.”

  PAPER TIGER

  Loring Giroux was the direct opposite of Marshal Feng Teh-chih. There was nothing spectacular about him. He had not won the Presidency of the United States by ruthlessly exterminating all his rivals. He had not even campaigned for it dramatically at a time of crisis. He had inherited it. He had been a compromise Vice President, chosen for his Southern votes and as a solid, stable counterweight to the flamboyance of Cardey Corcoran.

  Then, two months after taking office, to the sorrow of the ladies and the relief of many high-placed people in his own administration, Cardey had crashed his private plane into a mountainside, taking half his Cabinet and several Secret Service men along with him, and Loring Giroux had moved quietly, with his wife and one unmarried daughter, his shaggy sheepdog and his yellow cat, into the loneliest house in the world.

  That was when Marshal Feng Teh-chih had started in on him.

  Loring Giroux’s background was as quiet and solid as his person. He had been a naval officer, a junior deck officer aboard high-tech tankers. He had a decoration or two, awarded after forgotten actions in which nothing much had happened to his ship. He had served in the Louisiana State Legislature. He had been appointed to a board or two in Washington, to something in the Organization of American States, then to a South American ambassadorship. In between, he had practiced law at home. Finally, he had been elected Governor, and then—to everyone’s surprise—Vice President.

  His ancestry went back before the Louisiana Purchase on the one hand, and to the Revolution on the other. His grandfather had finished up the Civil War as a young captain under Jubal Early; afterwards he had wandered angrily into the West and Mexico, finally returning to a late marriage and a reconciliation with his country. His father had gone to West Point, and had retired, a colonel. He himself was neither short nor tall, fat nor thin. His main distinguishing feature was a slightly Teddy Rooseveltish moustache, which the political cartoonists—Chinese and American alike—at once latched onto.

  They also (and the Chinese especially, because they had been ordered to) went for the big striped yellow tomcat. American cartoonists, even the opposition, were almost kind about it; they loved to show Giroux asking the cat’s advice on how to catch the mice of international politics, or how he could turn himself into Cardey Corcoran. But the Chinese used it to plug their ancient paper tiger theme. Loring Giroux, they screamed, had brought Beauregard to the White House to prove that the American paper tiger wasn’t made of paper after all. The Chinese madness had made lots of headway since the days of Mao Tse-tung and his Red Guards, and Marshal Feng, a Red Guard graduate, had turned it to his private purposes.

  Feng concentrated on President Giroux. The Russians now were seldom named, and then only as Giroux’s criminal, treacherous, and unspeakable collaborators. Giroux was a weakling. Giroux was the degenerate symbol of a decadent bourgeois society. The missiles, the fusion weapons, which he as President controlled—these were the paper tiger. The young and vigorous Maoist Workers’ State, wielding its unconquerable weapon—the thought of Mao and of Feng Teh-chih (though M
ao was fading rather rapidly)—would triumph certainly, because survival was the natural prize awarded to the fittest.

  “The fittest would survive!” cried Marshal Feng. It was a curious Marxist Darwinism, naive, grossly oversimplified, trumpeted out with each new insult, each new provocation. It accompanied the overrunning of Nepal. It became even more personal and more strident when Feng launched his invasion of North India, penetrating deep into Assam.

  It was ridiculous. The press of the Free World thought so, and laughed about it several days a week. The State Department thought it was absurd; so did the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Every Security Council meeting included a few moments of innocent merriment focussed on it.

  Until, that is, the Council met on the 16th of September. It was a crash session, with the Joint Chiefs in attendance. Marshal Feng had gone on the air that morning, and President Giroux opened the meeting five-and-a-half hours later. He looked around at the faces, the uniforms, the business suits.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I know that you all either have watched Feng’s latest performance or else heard about it. Still, we’re going to replay it, so there’ll be no misunderstanding.”

  “Mr. President,” exclaimed the Secretary of Defense, “Feng’s just a crazy thug. Aren’t you taking his nonsense a little seriously?”

  “A little, Jake. It isn’t every day a man gets this kind of invitation. Let’s watch our boy again.”

  He gestured them to silence; picked up translation headphones but didn’t put them on immediately. Feng appeared without warning on the screen, a tall, long-faced North Chinese with basalt eyes. He was lean and hard, an obvious athlete. Giroux turned Feng’s speech on suddenly, full blast, like turning on a fire siren.

  “Who does he remind you of?” asked the President, unsmiling—knowing that no reply was necessary, that despite the difference of race, language, doctrine, the image of Hitler came instantly to every mind. The speech was Feng’s usual one, a screaming rodomontade using all the old clichés, but this time, after barely fifteen minutes, coming to a very different climax.