"Listen, lover," I said. (I'd forgotten her name.) "This is what I've got for you. Look at it." I waggled the knife. "Feel it." I slapped her across the face with the blade. She stumbled back against the couch, sat down and began to shake. This was what I was waiting for.
"Go ahead, you bitch. Answer me."
"Please, David," she muttered.
Dull. Not so good.
"I'm on my way out," I said. "You lousy hooker. You're like all the rest of these cheap dames."
"Please, David," she repeated in a low voice.
No action here. Give her one more try.
"Figuring you for two dollars a night, I'm into you for twenty." I took money from my pocket, stripped off the twenty in singles and handed it to her. She wouldn't touch it. She sat on the edge of the couch, blue-naked, streaming blood, not looking at me. Just dull. And mind you a girl that made love with her teeth. She used to scratch me with her nails like a cat. And now . . .
"Please, David," she said.
I tore up the money and threw it in her lap.
"Please, David," she said.
No tears. No screams. No action. She was impossible. I walked out.
The whole trouble with these neurotics is that you can't depend on them. You case them. You work them. You build to the climax. You trigger them off, but as often as not they dummy up like that girl. You just can't figure them.
I looked at my watch. The hand was on twelve. I decided to go up to Gandry's apartment. Freyda was working Gandry and would most likely be there setting him up for the climax. I needed advice from Freyda and I didn't have much time left.
I walked north on Sixth Avenue—no, The Avenue of the Americas; turned west on Fifty-fifth and went to the house across the street from Mecca Temple-no, The New York City Center. I took the elevator up to the PH floor and was just going to ring Gandry's bell when I smelled gas. I knelt down and sniffed at the edge of Gandry's door. It was coming from his apartment.
I knew better than to ring the bell. I got out my keys, touched them to the elevator call-button to dissipate any electrostatic charge on them, and got to work on Gandry's door. I barbered the lock in two or three minutes, opened the door and went in with my handkerchief over my nose. The place was pitch dark. I went straight to the kitchen and stumbled over a body lying on the floor with its head in the oven. I turned off the gas and opened the window. I ran into the living room and opened windows. I stuck my head out for a breath, then came back and finished airing the apartment.
I checked the body. It was Gandry all right. He was still alive. His big face was swollen and purple and his breathing sounded a little Cheynes-Stokesish to me. I went to the phone and dialed Freyda.
"Hello?"
"Freyda?"
"Yes?"
"Where are you? Why aren't you up here with Gandry?"
"Is that you, David?"
"Yes. I just broke in and found Gandry half dead. He's trying suicide."
"Oh, David!"
"Gas. He's reached the climax all by his lonely lone self. You been building him?"
"Of course, but I never thought he'd—"
"He'd try to sneak out on the pay-off like this? I've told you a hundred times, Freyda. You can't depend on potential suicides like Gandry. I showed you those trial scars on his wrist. His kind never give you any action. They—"
"Don't lecture me, David."
"Never mind. My girl was a bust, too. I thought she was the hot acid type. She turned out to be mush. I want to try that Bacon woman you mentioned. Would you recommend her?"
"Definitely."
"How can I find her?"
"Through her husband, Eddie Bacon."
"How can I find him?"
"Try Shawn's or Dugal's or Breen's or The Greek's. But he's a talker, David, a time-waster; and you haven't much time left."
"Doesn't matter if his wife's worth it."
"She's worth it, David. I told you about the gun."
"Right. Now what about Gandry?"
"Oh, to hell with Gandry," she snapped, and hung up.
That was all right with me. It was about time Freyda got sense enough to lay off the psychotics. I hung up, closed all the windows, went back to the kitchen and turned on the gas. Gandry hadn't moved. I put out all the lights, went down the hall and let myself out.
I went looking for Eddie Bacon. I tried for him at Breen's, at Shawn's, at Dugal's. I got the break at The Greek's on East Fifty-second Street.
I asked the bartender: "Is Eddie Bacon here?"
"In the back."
I looked past the juke box. The back was crowded. "Which one is Eddie Bacon?"
He pointed to a small man alone at a table in the corner. I went back and sat down. "Hi, Eddie."
Bacon glanced up at me. He had a seamed, pouchy face, fair silky hair, bleak blue eyes. He wore a brown suit and a blue and white polka-dot tie. He caught me looking at the tie and said: "That's the tie I wear between wars. What are you drinking?"
"Scotch. Water. No ice."
"How English can you get?" He yelled: "Chris!"
I got my drink. "Where's Liz?"
"Who?"
"Your wife."
"I married eighteen feet of wives," he mumbled. "End to end. Six feet of each."
"Three fathoms of show girls," I said.
"Which were you referring to?"
"The third. The most recent. I hear she left you."
"They all left me."
"Where's Liz?"
"It happened like this," Bacon said in a sullen voice. "I can't figure it. Nobody can figure it. I took the kids to Coney Island . . ."
"Never mind the kids. Where's Liz?"
"I'm getting there," Bacon said irritably. "Coney Island's the damnest place. Everybody ought to try that trap once. It's primitive stuff. Basic entertainment. They scare hell out of your glands and you love it. Appeals to the ancient history in us. The Cro-Magnons and all that."
"The Cro-Magnons died out," I said. "You mean the Neanderthals."
"I mean prehistoric memories," Bacon went on. "They strap you into that roller coaster, they shove you off and you drop into a race with a dinosaur. He's chasing you and you're trying to keep it from ending in a dead heat. Basic. It appeals to the Stone Age flesh in all of us. That's why kids dig it. Every kid's a vestigial remnant from the Stone Age."
"Grown-ups too. What about Liz?"
"Chris!" Bacon yelled. Another round of drinks came. "Yeah . . . Liz," he said. "The girl made me forget there ever was a Liz. I met her staggering off the roller coaster. She was waiting. Waiting to pounce. The Black Widow Spider."
"Liz?"
"No. The little whore that wasn't there."
"Who?"
"Haven't you heard of Bacon's Missing Mistress? The Invisible Lay? Bacon's Thinking Affair?"
"No."
"Hell, where've you been? How Bacon rented an apartment for a dame that didn't exsist. They're still laughing it up. All except Liz. It's all over the business."
"I'm not in your business."
"No?" He took a long drink, put his glass down and glowered at the table like a kid trying to crack an algebra problem. "Her name was Freyda. F-R-E-Y-D-A. Like Freya, Goddess of Spring. Eternal youth. She was like a Botticelli virgin outside. She was a tiger inside."
"Freyda what?"
"I don't know. I never found out. Maybe she didn't have any last name because she was imaginary like they keep telling me." He took a deep breath. "I do a crime show on TV. I know every crook routine there is. That's my business—the thief business. But she pulled a new one. She picked me up by pretending she'd met the kids somewhere. Who can tell if a kid really knows someone or not? They're only half human anyway. I swallowed her routine. By the time I realized she was lying, I'd met her and I was dead. She had me on the hook."
"How do you mean?"
"A wife is a wife," Bacon said. "Three wives are just more of the same. But this was going to bed with a tiger." He smiled sourly. "Only it's all my im
agination, they keep telling me. It's all inside my head. I never really killed her because she never really lived."
"You killed her? Freyda?"
"It was a war from the start," he said, "and it ended up with a killing. It wasn't love with her, it was war."
"This is all your imagination?"
"That's what the head-shrinkers tell me. I lost a week. Seven days. They tell me I rented an apartment all right, but I didn't put her in it because there never was any Freyda. We didn't tear each other apart because there was only me up there all the time. Alone. She wasn't a crazy, mauling bitch who used to say: "Sigma, darling . . ."
"Say what?"
"You heard me. 'Sigma, darling.' That's how she said good-by. 'Sigma, darling.' That's what she said on the last day. With a crazy glitter in her virgin eyes. Told me it was no good between us. That she'd phoned Liz and told her all about it and was walking out. 'Sigma, darling,' she said and started for the door."
"She told Liz? Told your wife?"
Bacon nodded. "I grabbed her and dragged her away from the door. I locked the door and phoned Liz. That tiger was tearing at me all the time. I got Liz on the horn and it was true. Liz was packing. I hung that phone up on that bitch's head. I was wild. I tore her clothes off. I dragged her into the bedroom and threw her down and choked her. Christ! How I strangled her . . ."
After a pause, I asked: "Liz?"
"They were pounding on the door outside," Bacon went on. "I knew she was dead. She had to be dead. I went and opened the door. There were six million cops and six million honest johns still squawking about the screaming. I thought to myself: 'Why, this is just like the show you do every week. Play it like the script.' I said to them: 'Come on in and join the murder.'" He broke off.
"Was she dead . . . Freyda?"
"There was no murder," he said slowly. "There was no Freyda. That apartment was ten floors up in the Kingston Hotel. There wasn't any fire escape. There was only the front door jammed with cops and squares. And there was no one in the apartment but a crazy guy—naked, sweating and swearing. Me."
"She was gone? Where? How? It doesn't make sense."
He shook his head and stared at the table in sullen confusion. After a long pause he continued. "There was nothing left from Freyda but a crazy souvenir. It must have busted off in the fight we had—the fight everybody said was imaginary. It was the dial of her watch."
"What was crazy about it?"
"It was numbered from two to twenty-four by twos. Two, four, six, eight, ten . . . and so on."
"Maybe it was a foreign watch. Europeans use the twenty-four hour system. I mean, noon is twelve and one o'clock is thirteen and—"
"Don't overwhelm me," Bacon interrupted wearily. "I was in the army. I know all about that. But I've never seen a clock-face like that used for it. No one has. It was out of this world. I mean that literally."
"Yes? How?"
"I met her again."
"Freyda?"
He nodded. "I met her in Coney Island again, hanging around the roller coaster. I was no fool. I went looking for her and I found her."
"Beat up?"
"Not a mark on her. Fresh and virgin all over again, though it was only a couple of weeks later. There she was, the Black Widow Spider, smelling the flies as they came staggering off the roller coaster. I went up behind her and I grabbed her. I pulled her around into the alley between the freak tents and I said: 'Let out one peep and you're dead for sure this time.'"
"Did she fight?"
"No," he said. "She was loving it. She looked like she just found a million bucks. That glitter in her eyes. . ."
"I don't understand."
"I did when I looked at her. . . . When I looked into that virgin face, happy and smiling because I was screaming at her. I said: 'The cops swear nobody was in the apartment but me. The talk—doctors swear nobody was ever in the apartment but me. That put you into my imagination and that put me into the psycho ward for a week.' I said: 'But I know how you got out and I know where you went.'"
Bacon stopped and looked hard at me. I looked hard at him.
"How drunk are you?" he asked.
"Drunk enough to believe anything."
"She went out through time," Bacon said. "Understand? Through time. To another time. To the future. She melted and dissolved right out."
"What? Time travel? I'm not drunk enough to believe that."
"Time travel." He nodded. "That's why she had that watch—some kind of time machine. That's how she got herself patched up so fast. She could have stayed up there for a year and then come right back to Now or two weeks after Now. And that's why she said 'Sigma, darling.' It's how they talk up there."
"Now wait a minute, Eddie—"
"And that's why she wanted to come so close to getting herself killed."
"But that doesn't make sense. She wanted you to knock her around?"
"I told you. She loved it. They all love it. They come back here, the bastards, like we go to Coney Island. They don't come back to explore or study or any of that science-fiction crap. Our time's an amusement park for them, that's all. Like the roller coaster."
"How do you mean, the roller coaster?"
"Passion. Emotion. Screams and shrieks. Loving and hating and tearing and killing. That's their roller coaster. That's how they get their kicks. It must be forgotten up there in the future, like we've forgotten how it is to be chased by a dinosaur. So they come back here for it. This is the Stone Age for them."
"But—"
"All that stuff about the sudden up-swing in crime and violence and rape. It isn't us. We're no worse than we ever were. It's them. They came back here. They goad us. They needle us. They stick pins in us until we blow our tops and give their glands a roller coaster ride."
"And Liz?" I asked. "Did she believe this?"
He shook his head. "She never gave me a chance to tell her."
"I hear she kicked up quite a fuss."
"Yeah. Six beautiful feet of Irish rage. She took my gun off the study wall—the one I packed when I was with Patton. If it'd been loaded that wouldn't have been any make-believe murder."
"So I heard, Eddie. Where's Liz now?"
"Doing a burn in her old apartment."
"Where's that?"
"Ten—ten Park."
"Mrs. Elizabeth Bacon?"
"Not after Bacon got D.T.'s nailed to the name in the papers. She's using her maiden name."
"Oh, yes. Elizabeth Noyes, isn't it?"
"Noyes? Where the hell did you get that? No. Elizabeth Gorman." He yelled: "Chris! What is this-a desert?"
I looked at my time-meter. The hand was halfway from twelve to fourteen. That gave me eleven days more before I had to go back up. Just enough time to work Liz Gorman for some action. The gun sounded real promising. Freyda was right. It was a good lead. I got up from the table.
"Have to be going now, Eddie," I said. "Sigma, pal."
Fantastic, May-June 1953
The Lost Child
Chapman was in the cutlery department, buying a traveling manicuring set. I was trying to get hold of some of those new English razor blades everybody had been talking about. The last time we'd seen each other was on the Paramount lot. We said, "Hi, long time no see, thought you were still on the Coast, no we decided to come East," etc. Finally, I got up nerve and asked, "How's Elly?"
He shook his head. "Not so good. I'm taking her to Jamaica for a month. We're flying out this afternoon. Tell you what, come on up and have a drink while we finish packing."
I helped Chapman with his parcels, and we grabbed a cab. At his place on First Avenue, Chapman told the hackie to hold his flag and come up and give him a hand with the luggage. Ellen was waiting in the apartment. She was wearing a suede suit and a hat, and was pacing around a heap of bags and hat boxes. She looked thin and drawn, but pretty as ever.
"Honey," Chapman called, "I've got a cab waiting. Look who's having one for the road with us."
Ellen gave me her thin, ner
vous hand. To Chapman she said in agitated tones, "I thought you'd never get back. We'll miss the plane. We—"
"It's all right. Plenty of time. I got everything; the extra brushes, the manicuring set, two jars of vanishing cream, a—"
"I said cold cream!" Ellen cried.
"Cold cream, too. I got the tablets and the powders, the travelling clock, the atomizer, and I picked up your wristwatch with an extra—"
"Where's Davey?" Ellen cried.
I jumped. Chapman stared at her.
"Where's Davey?" she repeated. "Did you leave him in the cab?"
"Ain't nobody in my cab, lady," the hackie said.
She turned on Chapman. "Where is he? What've you done with him? Where's Davey?"
Chapman gulped and sat down heavily. "My God. I lost him."
"You lost Davey?"
"I was in a rush. I told him to wait for me, and I must have forgot. I left him."
"You forgot your boy? How could you? Where? Where?"
"All right, don't holler like that." Chapman reached for the telephone book. "He wanted to look at the electric trains and I told him to wait for me. Let's see, that's when I was picking up the manicuring set. . . I think . . . No . . ."
"For God's sake, don't you remember where you left him?"
"How can I remember with you shouting at me," Chapman shouted. "I was all over the goddam city running errands. It was in one of the department stores."
"Which? Which?"
"Shut up a minute. I'm trying to think."
The hackie cleared his throat. "Listen, I'm like double-parked down there and—"
"If there's a ticket, I'll pay it," Chapman snapped. To Ellen he said, "Help me, Elly. It was on the second floor. Try to remember which store has its toy department on the second floor. I remember that. Davey wanted to—"
"Earl & Bishop. You left him in Earl & Bishop." Ellen turned wildly toward the door. "I've got to go down and get him. I should never have let you take him with you. Men!"
"Wait a minute," Chapman said. "You can't go after him. We haven't time. Well miss the plane."
"To hell with the plane!"
"Will you listen to me, Elly. I'll get it all straightened out, if you'll give me half a chance. Sit down!" He found a number in the phone book and dialed. While he waited for an answer he appealed to me with his eyes. I took Ellen to a chair and made her sit down. She was trembling.