“I am willing,” I said, with a glance at Bakewell, who, despite his earlier statement that he enjoyed hearing this to him old yarn, seemed now to have fallen asleep, “I am willing to wait for my place in the sequence. But perhaps you could tell me first why you so yearn to own the figurine.” With the large man dormant, I even took the initiative to ask: “Do you, yourself, share the erotic orientation of the queer peer?”
“It was ours!” cried Washburn in answer to the second question. “It was stolen from us by the Turk, that circumcised dog.”
I asked derisively: “Malignant and turbann’d?”
“Mustached and fezzed,” said Washburn. “A vicious fellow.” He soon shrugged, however, and cleared his fine brow. “He is no longer extant. Gus held him under water in the Sea of Marmara until the bubbles failed to rise. Alas, though, he had previously disposed of the figurine, and vengeance was our unique profit.”
I shuddered. Until this moment I had not quite been able to rise above a suspicion that the entire affair, behind the screen of painted gauze, was the elaborate japery by which a pampered parasite, and his enormous retainer, sought to allay quotidian ennui.
“You mean,” I asked in horror, “you murdered a human being, for no better motive than a lust for this objet d’art, which furthermore depicts a myth of no credit to the culture in which our own took its source? No Sisyphus, struggling, as we all must in the wretched human race, endlessly to push the boulder of our aspirations up the slope of grudging actuality; no thirsty Tantalus whose lips the water forever eludes—these are symbolically comforting. But Zeus, having his beastly pleasure with a boy—”
“Wren, like most sinners you are peculiarly offensive when you wax moralistic. For one, I have never come upon a suggestion that Ganymede found such sports in any way obnoxious.”
“Getting back to the fezzed Ottomite,” I said, “is not Turkey a major supplier of heroin to the West?”
“Forget about drugs,” said Washburn. “We are not performing some vulgar thriller for the silver screen.”
“Yet your assertion is that Zwingli and Knox were when they burst into my apartment, mocked and brutalized me, reduced the place to ruins, and carried out the supposedly dead body of your mountainous confederate—now, I am happy to see, sleeping on the sofa?”
Washburn replied blandly. “Gus sometimes picks up a shilling or two in bit parts.”
“Just a moment…Then his earlier imposture as corpse, in my office, was also in the performance of a role for The Reformers?”
Washburn frowned. “No, not at all.” He flipped his chin as if to dispose of the need for elucidation. “I now regret having begun to explain anything. You have unwittingly completed the job for which you were chosen precisely because you were witless. A strain of sentimentality caused me to go as far as I have, with the maudlin thought that you deserved at least to know how it was that you came to destroy yourself.” Washburn cleared his throat behind a genteel hand. “You do not.”
He removed his hand from his lips, I thought routinely, but was soon to discover the gesture served rather as signal to someone behind me, someone who had stolen there silently and put the end of a cold, unresistant object at the juncture of my nape and cranium. I had forgotten about Alice Ellish.
“His pistol’s in his pocket,” said Washburn, his eyes focused above my head. “Empty. Put the clip into it. Put a cartridge into the chamber. Put the weapon in his right hand, his finger on the trigger. Put the muzzle into his ear. Squeeze his hand.”
Despite my thrill of terror, I was able to say: “And you think I will suffer this passively?”
“My dear chap,” Washburn said, “you’ll die in any case. What’s the difference to you, whether from the gun against your medulla oblongata or from the little Browning in your clothes? The difference to us, however, is that with the latter we can give your death the appearance of suicide. Since you cannot help yourself, why not do us a favor?”
I was so enraged by this arrogance as to reject my fright altogether. I leaped from the egg chair, crying: “Why should I do you a favor, you damnable, insolent, murdering swine!”
My cry awakened Bakewell, who squinted at me and then returned to sleep.
I turned to put much the same question to Alice, who, cretin that she was, had surely been gulled into service as another of Washburn’s cats’-paws, under God knew what duress or what promise of reward: no one who had looked into her blank eyes could believe her consciously evil.
…Whether that was an accurate assessment was not to be here put to the test, for it was not Alice Ellish who held the Luger towards my abdomen, but rather Natalie Novotny.
12
Natalie was attired in a one-piece suit of high-gloss leather that closed with straps and buckles under her chin and at her ankles plunged within boots of the same material. Had I been in another state of mind, I might well have admired the ensemble of this gear with her alabaster face and golden hair.
Instead, I pursued an intent anyway, before I died, to clear up at least one of the many mysteries subsidiary to the main.
“You were concealed in the bathroom? Quite a crowd, with Bakewell and Alice as well.”
“How like you,” wryly said Natalie, “to dwell on such a detail even while under a muzzle. In fact, Gus and I came in while you were with Donald in the bedroom. I’ve been in the kitchen, puzzling over someone’s attempt to brew coffee from the whole beans.”
“Ah,” said I. “It’s Gus and Donald, is it?”
“Isn’t that appropriate if we’re confederates?”
“Then you haven’t been duped or gulled?”
Natalie swept a strand of fair hair from her neck, and its weight soon returned it to the position from which it had been flung: a common effect with the straight-locked, but she had used the Luger barrel, and not her finger, to work it. She was as casual with a firearm as her ally Washburn had been when dressing, with the difference that his automatic (actually mine) had been empty. I wondered whether hers was in a lethal condition; considered jumping her, whatever, having nothing to lose in view of Washburn’s instructions; made an affirmative decision; advanced—and soon retired with two hands uselessly cupped at my groin, for the damage had already been done: obviously she had received training in the martial arts of the Orient, for her crotch kick was accurate and disabling.
Uniquely, however, I did not fall. I bent, I hunched, and I groaned.
“Sorry,” said Natalie, “but the alternative would have been to shoot you.” She seemed genuinely contrite.
Of course my voice was strained. “You…treacherous baggage…A pox on you!”
“You’re in real trouble, Russel. I don’t think eighteenth-century billingsgate will answer your needs.”
Washburn rose on the balls of his feet. He spoke to me in his usual tone of exclusive self-concern. “I’ll take any measure to avoid witnessing bloodshed. It upsets me unduly, even when I care nothing for the victim, I suppose because I too am mortal and have a similar red fluid in my own veins. Therefore, we’re leaving now.”
“You”—my speech still came between gasps—“contemptible…jackal.”
Indifferent to the epithet, he summoned Bakewell to consciousness, and easily the large man erected himself from the low modular sofa. Both left the apartment forthwith.
I was trying to snarl again at Natalie when she shushed me, the Luger against her lips.
She whispered: “They’ll be back. They forgot their shoes.”
The detail infuriated me further. “Why…are they in…stocking feet?” “So they can’t be—”
Bakewell flung the door open and entered with a baleful glance for me, then one of discovery for his enormous brogans, which lay where I had dropped them. Washburn came in behind the giant, went into a clothes closet next to the door, emerged with his jodhpur boots in the caliper of one hand and flicking a nasty-looking quirt in the other. Each man shod himself in silence, Bakewell being very deft, despite his sausage fingers,
with the laces at the clips of his high-tops. Both departed once more, Washburn with a peevish slash of his lash at the doorjamb.
By this time I had begun to recover from the impact of Natalie’s boot against my testes; it had not been the worst blow sustained in my many episodes of damage. I was more resentful of her general treachery.
“I suppose,” I said, “that having lied to me for three weeks, you will have no compunction about shooting me in cold blood. But I assure you, I shall die with a curse on my lips.”
She tiptoed to the door, listened with her blondeness against the cover of the spyhole, and then returned to where I only now felt it feasible to stand fully upright.
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Russel. I have no intention of shooting you.”
“Will you then kindly put away your weapon?”
“Oh.” She threw the Luger into the lapis-lazuli-colored chair.
I felt like a bathtub being drained. “Excuse me,” I said when I could. “I seem to be struck more forcefully by salvation than I was by the menace, like a country liberated by American troops.” I groped for the pomegranate egg-chair and lowered myself. “Or is this but a temporary reprieve? Judging from the feathers of the rest of your flock, you are yourself of criminal plumage.”
“I am,” said Natalie, “a Treasury agent. Those men who only just went out the door are members of a counterfeiting ring.”
I pounded the rim of the chair with one knuckle and put another in my mouth. At length I removed both and arranged my hands as if in prayer. “No, they are international art-thieves. They stole the Sforza figurine from the legendary Vatican collection of pornography; it was in turn purloined from them by the Turk. But the fezzed Ottomite had previously sold the indecent statuette to the queer peer, who however bamboozled Washburn when the latter applied to him at his stately home on Pillicock Hill—”
“That entire tale,” said Natalie, “was made out of the whole cloth. There is no Sforza figurine.”
“Very well,” said I, groping for a purchase on the plastic rotundity of the egg half beneath me and allowing my eyelids to fall of their own leadenness. “Let’s begin again. Have you ever worked for an airline?”
“That was my cover.”
“In the interests of which you actually served those toy dinners on transatlantic flights, cajoled distraught children, skillfully evaded the importunities of traveling lechers but stoically submitted to those of the flight crew when benighted in a foreign capital—”
“More or less,” said Natalie. “Though I don’t know whether anybody could live up to your appetite for the legendary, Russel, which applies in all areas of experience. Which is why so many people have found it possible to dupe you so easily.”
“No doubt,” I admitted. I rose. “I must say your leather gear, with its new suggestion of the bizarre, becomes you, Natalie. I can hardly control my urge to peel off that swarthy hide and uncover the creamy velvet of your own pelt—”
Natalie backpedaled her boots. “None of that! I have a job to do. Think of this garb as a professional uniform, Russel, and not as erotic advertisement.”
“The livery of the Treasury Department?” I asked sardonically, extending a hand with the intention of plucking at the horse brass that joined the ends of her belt over her navel.
But her resistance was not capricious. She even feinted for the discarded Luger. “I’m not being coy, I warn you.”
I recoiled dramatically. “I never force my attentions on anyone to whom they are obnoxious.” I had some memory of having said, or thought, the same in regard to Alice Ellish. “I suppose your roommate is another undercover operative?”
Natalie shook her head. She stepped to my side, made her hand into a parenthesis, and applied it to my ear. “She knows nothing.”
“Can that be?”
In a voice of some volume she addressed the hallway: “Hey, Al. I’m back.”
From the bath and cavernously, owing no doubt to her situation near the tub—the shower had ceased to sound some time earlier—came Alice’s return: “Gee, what a quick flight.”
I whispered to Natalie: “I can’t accept that. No stewardess is so torpid towards air times.”
“She’s no stew. She’s a physiotherapist.”
I frowned. “I think you owe me an elucidation, Natalie. You’ve used me ruthlessly. I suspect that my involvement in these matters—which until a moment ago I knew in the aggregate as the Villanova Affair—”
“There is no Teddy Villanova.”
“—is due entirely to your machinations. Did you or did you not put Bakewell onto me, and then Donald Washburn II?”
She struck a noble attitude. “We do not what we wish but what we must, Russel. Counterfeiting debases the currency. A country whose money is not stable inevitably falls victim to mob rule. Rapine and pillage became the order of the day; the family collapses and is replaced by the wolf pack; children become chattels, women are sold at auction, and—”
“That takes a while, doesn’t it? I’m not denigrating the fine jobs done by you chaps, but surely you can’t mean that a few fake hundred-dollar bills immediately usher in the Thirty Years’ War.”
“I’m talking of billions,” said Natalie, stamping her boot heels in series. “There is reason to believe that all the currencies of both hemispheres, eye ee, the world, now in circulation are counterfeit.” She peered. “Feeling faint?”
“Is that all?”
“Great God, man, either you are a monster of cynicism or you are mad.”
“Let me say this, Natalie, with all respect. I think you tend to confuse your particular area of interest with reality at large. I have noticed that effect in many professional persons: the lawyer with his eye always on that which might be adjudicated, the fireman on the flammable, the ophthalmologist on the squint, et cetera, et cetera. But in point of mundane fact, most human beings have no vocation worth the name, no deity, ideology, or discipline. They breathe, eat, defecate, sleep, and die—to name the only essential activities. As to their aims, I believe it was the Stagirite who put it succinctly: men pursue pleasure and avoid pain.”
Natalie looked solemn. “I wasn’t wrong in my assessment of you, Russel. In short, you are expendable. I have no apology for using you as pawn.”
Spitefully, I struck back. “I can only now reveal that I wasn’t gulled for a moment. I was onto your game from the first: no one in New York, having unfairly beaten another to a cab in a rainy rush hour, be the loser even a helpless cripple, offers to share it with him except from an ulterior motive. True, I first assumed yours had to do with prostitution, and I was astonished that you allowed me into your bed without demanding a fee.”
My barrage proved absolutely ineffectual. Natalie was smiling derisively. “Do you suppose that vanity plays so large a role in my mystique?”
“Certainly pride does not: I found Washburn naked in your bed. I refuse to believe that serving as his doxy is required by your department.” This was sheer bravado; in fact, nothing was more likely, nor more useful in gaining a confidence.
“As it happens, that was not my bed. Pretending it was was part of the hoax, I’m afraid.”
“Never have I been such a butt,” I wailed. “Why, Natalie, why?”
“I urge you for once to rise above the merely personal, Russel. Your well-being was not considered; neither was your pain. War abhors the individual, and this is war. I for example have had to eradicate the last vestiges of my own self. I have neither id nor ego.”
“That explains much.” By which I suppose I meant her lassitude in bed. “But what a fool I’ve been! I don’t mind saying it will take a time for my bile to ebb. I trust that despite your fanatical dedication to a cause greater than both of us, you retain enough humanity to understand that.” I made a latticework of fingers across my eyes and peered through the interstices. “Ratiocination will help. Here’s my theory: Washburn and Bake—”
“Will have fled the country,” Natalie said in sudden hast
e, turning on her boots and starting towards the bedroom. “Help me change. These zippers and snaps are complicated.”
Pursuing her along the hall, I asked, “Why are you anyway wearing that leather?”
“New stew uniform.” She turned into the bedroom, dampening her voice. “Nostalgia. Nineteen thirties aviatrix.”
I crossed the threshold. She threw her hips on the bed and projected her boots at me. They were closed with laces high as the knee. “Helmet and isinglass goggles go with it. Grotesque when you put on the apron to serve meals on dinner flights.”
While unlacing the boots as rapidly as I could, I tried again to fashion my hypothesis: “Washburn and Bakewell use this apartment for their hideout. They walk in stocking feet so as not to arouse suspicion in the tenant underneath. Alice is unwitting. You pay half the rent, and she is notoriously indifferent to your friends. You are in and out, which spasmodic activity is explained by your job as stewardess, which in fact you actually perform. There is no Sforza figurine; that was another red herring with which Washburn, being unarmed except for my unloaded pistol, distracted me until you arrived with the Luger. Bakewell of course could have overpowered me, but he seemed exhausted this morning, perhaps owing to his having played the false corpse too often.” I removed the left boot and began to work on the right. “Though some of the lies I’ve been told were insultingly incredible. That movie called The Reformers, for example.”
Natalie had at last unfastened the several buckles at her collar. “No, that was true enough. Gus from time to time plays bit parts, nonspeaking always.”
I had reached her ankle with the unlacing. “But why did he give a prior performance, unpaid, in my office?”
“To compromise you.”
I peeled off the remaining boot. “Excuse me?”
“To put you in bad odor with the management of the Wyandotte Club.” She pointed to the two snaps revealed when the collar straps were drawn aside. “Get these. I’d break a nail.”
“Aha! Who would then send Pete and Tony to threaten me and remove the putative corpse. I wonder what they did with it—Bakewell’s body? They were themselves slain, genuinely, before I could ask.”