Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Saturday, January 1, 2011

EQMM turns 70!

Janet Hutchings, Editor

The ringing in of a new year always seems to bring a mix of reflections on what’s gone before and plans, hopes, and expectations for the future. This year that’s especially true for EQMM, because we’ve come to an important milestone: the start of our 70th year of publication. More than a dozen...

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Fiction

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

EQMM turns 70!

Janet Hutchings, Editor

The ringing in of a new year always seems to bring a mix of reflections on what’s gone before and plans, hopes, and expectations for the future. This year that’s especially true for EQMM, because we’ve come to an important milestone: the start of our 70th year of publication.

More than a dozen American magazines exceed EQMM’s longevity—Scientific American, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and literary magazines such as The Virginia Quarterly and The Yale Review, to name a few. But if we consider only magazines that publish popular fiction, there is, I believe, just one that can claim continuous publication for longer than EQMM and that’s one of our sister magazines, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, which began life under the title Astounding in 1930.

We’ve reached this near-record run thanks to continued contributions to our pages from top writers in the field and because we have the good fortune to have a discriminating and loyal readership. Another factor in our success, I think, has been staying true to our original purpose, which Ellery Queen stated in the very first issue as being to provide “all types of detective and crime short stories” and for “consistently good writing” to be as important a requirement for inclusion as “original ideas, excitement, and craftsmanship.”

Despite shifts in fashion, EQMM covers as much of the genre as possible in each issue. Hardboiled private-eye stories are found shoulder to shoulder with “cozies,” “impossible crime” tales, psychological suspense, noir pieces, and police procedurals. Over the years, as the fortunes of the various sub-genres have waxed and waned, EQMM has provided the same steady home for them, sometimes sustaining writers whose novels have been temporarily cut from book publishers’ lists due to changes in the prevailing winds, only to see them come back into novelistic favor again a few years later.

Serving the community of writers was, for Ellery Queen, the other side of the coin to providing readers with a rich reading experience. In that first issue he said: “We propose to give you stories by the big-name writers, by lesser-known writers, and by unknown writers.” To that end, in the late 1940s he instituted one of EQMM’s most famous features, the Department of First Stories, and in its pages brought into print for the first time many writers who came to be among mystery’s leading lights.

Over the course of this anniversary year we’ll be highlighting aspects of EQMM’s history and current attractions and also making some projections for the future. We start, as seems appropriate with the new year about to arrive and Baby New Year running across our cover, with a salute to EQMM’s first-time writers. In The Jury Box, Jon L. Breen reviews the novels of several authors who got their start in EQMM, and we’re presenting the short-story debuts of two new writers in this issue. One appears, as is traditional, in the Department of First Stories, the other, because the style of his story is so fitting for Black Mask, under that department’s aegis.

Since 1941, when EQMM’s first issue—described by Ellery Queen as “experimental”—found its way into readers’ hands, many other mystery and crime short-story publications have come and (mostly) gone. EQMM remains because of your enthusiastic support. As we celebrate our milestone, it’s with special appreciation for all of you.

Fiction

Fiction

NAVIDAD

By Elizabeth Zelvin

This story’s protagonist, Diego, a young Marrano sailor on Columbus’s first voyage, first appeared in “The Green Cross” (EQMM August 2010). Elizabeth Zelvin is currently at work on a historical novel...

A BULLET FROM YESTERDAY

By Terence Faherty

Terence Faherty returns this month with a new adventure for Scott Elliott, the second series character he created, after the popular Owen Keane. A former actor and World War II vet turned private security operative, Elliott takes on a case here involving a supposed artifact from World War I. But as...

WHERE THE SNOW LAY DINTED

By Sue Pike

A past winner of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best short story, Sue Pike has also been active as an anthologist. She is one of the original members of the Ladies Killing Circle, which began as a...

SNOWMAN STEW

By James Powell

James Powell’s stories are always full of interesting references. In this one, his allusion to the silent movie version of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables comes from Montgomery’s diaries, which were published a few years ago. “It stayed with me,” he says, “because the Regent, the movie...

MR. BO

By Liza Cody

Bloody Brits Press, which is dedicated to bringing more writers from the U.K. into print in the U.S., will be releasing their edition of Liza Cody’s Gimme More just days before this issue goes on sale. Liza Cody is not a terribly prolific writer, and that may explain why she hasn’t become better...

THE ADVENT REUNION

By Andrew Klavan

This new story began life in 2009 as an online performance piece (a video) rather than as prose fiction. The author has rewritten it for the page and created a fine Christmas ghost story. Andrew...

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Fiction

NAVIDAD

By Elizabeth Zelvin

Art by Allen Davis

This story’s protagonist, Diego, a young Marrano sailor on Columbus’s first voyage, first appeared in “The Green Cross” (EQMM August 2010). Elizabeth Zelvin is currently at work on a historical novel of suspense entitled Voyage of Strangers, in which Diego joins Columbus on his second voyage. In it, Diego has to save his sister Rachel from the Inquisition, in an adventure the author says will “blow the lid off the ‘discovery’ of America.” Meanwhile, here’s Diego experiencing Christmas (and a secret Chanukah) in the New World.

I crouched in the crow’s nest of the Santa Maria, praying to Ha’shem that I would succeed in coaxing my tinderbox to strike a spark. That spark must then ignite two short lengths of cable, dipped in lamp oil and wedged upright in an open leather pouch filled with sand, before anybody on deck noticed that I was not among them. It was the 25th day of Kislev in the year 5253 according to the Hebrew calendar, the second night of the Festival of Lights. It was also December 24th in what the others, including the Admiral, called the Year of Our Lord 1492: Christmas Eve.

My breath caught as the candles in my improvised menorah flared up, then settled down to glow with a steady flame. To my relief, they did not smoke or flicker. Getting caught would be a disaster too dreadful to contemplate: hanging, here or back in Spain, for practicing my forbidden Jewish faith, and a flogging I might not survive for that heaviest of transgressions at sea, kindling unauthorized fire on a wooden ship.

I muttered the b’rucha rather than chanting it aloud, as I sometimes did when the ship was scudding along under full sail and the wind’s howl drowned out my song of praise to Adonai. I would not have risked even that, but the watch had just changed, and all who could do so had dropped where they stood onto the deck and fallen at once into a heavy slumber.

They had good reason. For the past two days, we had been besieged by visitors from the villages beyond the shore of the beautiful bay the Admiral had named Santo Tomás. More than a thousand of the folk we call Indians, for want of a better term, had swarmed onto the Santa Maria from canoes, along with half as many more who came swimming out to us, although we had anchored a full league offshore. All were unclothed, even the women, and all bore gifts, evidently valuing a calabash of water or a strange, sweet fruit as highly as a nugget or ornament of gold. Though I would not confess it even to Fernando, my only friend on board, I had never seen a naked woman before. I accepted the fruit and water with thanks—none offered me gold—and shied away from their questing hands, which made them laugh. The older seamen had no such inhibitions. I kept my eyes on Admiral Columbus, who was dignified and gracious as always.

“Mark how freely they give, Diego,” he said softly at a moment when only I stood near him. “It is easy to recognize when something is given from the heart.”

My heart swelled with pride, as always on the rare occasions when he spoke my name, tacitly acknowledging his old bond with my father, which must never be mentioned. Yet it also felt ready to burst with grief, in spite of the Admiral’s kindness. These naked and untutored folk welcomed strangers to their table, just as we had at Passover back in Seville, before we were driven out. Now we were all strangers in a strange land ourselves, my parents and my sisters no less than I and my comrades on this unpredictable voyage.

My lip curled when it occurred to me that the villagers’ offerings of gold resembled the coin we gave to children at the Festival of Lights. It was at that moment that I conceived the plan of lighting my own menorah. I could not try it on the first night, when the decks were still crowded with visitors and not a man aboard had gotten a night’s sleep since we first greeted our Indian guests. When the excitement had seemed to be dying down, it was roused again by the arrival of gifts for the Admiral from a cacique named Guancanagarí, who seemed to be the king or prince of this region. Chief among the gifts was a magnificent mask with nose, tongue, and ears of hammered gold, along with baskets heaped with food, skeins of spun cotton, gold, and parrots that screeched, flashed brightly colored feathers, and dropped dung all over the vessel. Guancanagarí also invited the whole ship’s company, and the Niña’s as well—for the Pinta had gone off on her own some time before, and we were fearful of her fate—to come ashore and feast with him.

“He’s inviting us for Christmas dinner,” one of the seamen said, and all around him laughed.

“To dinner or for dinner?” another asked, and they laughed again. In fact, it was the warlike Caribe who were said to eat human flesh, not these amiable Taino.

But then all realized that if this cacique had so much gold to give away, it followed that he must know the location of the mine we had long searched for. Even Admiral Columbus’s eyes blazed with gold fever, for he longed to be able to lay a vast treasure at the feet of the king and queen as repayment for the cost of the voyage. Our Indian interpreters from the other islands, at his urging, questioned many, but their dialect was different. Indeed, I thought these fellows had told us nothing but what they believed we desired to hear from the day we carried them aboard our ships. For many had escaped, and I believed that none of them stayed with us willingly, but only out of fear of our muskets and steel swords.

At any rate, the Admiral determined that we would keep Christmas with Guacanagarí.

“Our Lord in his goodness guide me that I may find this gold,” I heard him pray.

So we weighed anchor and bade farewell to the bay of Santo Tomás and its friendly people. By nightfall, Christmas Eve, we had reached the great headland that I could still see now from the crow’s nest if I looked astern, though in the dim light of the waning moon, it seemed no more than a looming black shadow. There was little wind, and the ship barely rocked as it moved onward, following the Niña, which had drawn ahead. Being a caravel, she was always a little faster than our sturdy tub.

I was just thinking what a blessing it was to have calm seas for my devotions—I knew from experience that the whole mast, with the crow’s nest atop it, swung wildly in any kind of swell—when a tremendous jolt and shudder knocked me off my feet and into the menorah. Luckily, the leather flap closed as I fell heavily against it, driving the candles into the sand and extinguishing them. Stuffing the whole into my shirt along with my tinderbox, I shinnied down the ropes and leaped softly to the deck, giving thanks to Ha’shem that my feet were bare and the night so dark that no one noticed.

The crisis was severe, for we had run aground upon hidden shoals while, as we learned later, all on watch, including the helmsman and the young sailor he had ordered to take the tiller, slept. The next two hours were a time of chaos and confusion, shouting and a frenzy of activity in our desperation to save our ship. Whenever I paused in my labors, my heartbeat pounded in my ears. We were only a league offshore. If the Santa Maria broke up, I could swim ashore, as my father and the Admiral had in their youth when wrecked together off the coast of Portugal. That was the origin of their lifelong friendship, and my father, grateful for every day of his continued life since then, had made sure I knew how to swim at an early age. But the whole Ocean Sea separated us from the lands and people we knew. What if we were stranded on these shores with no means of return? We must not lose the ship!

Indeed, we might have saved her if the Santa Maria’s master, Juan de la Cosa, had acted as he ought. The Admiral, seeing what must be done, gave immediate orders. But De la Cosa failed to obey them. Instead, he ordered his closest cronies, my old tormentor Cabrera among them, to launch the ship’s boat and flee to the Niña, determined to save their own skins at the cost of ours, if need be. This so shocked all who remained, even the Admiral, that they were gone before any thought to prevent them.

Meanwhile, increasing swells drove the Santa Maria further and further onto the coral reef. By the time Vicente Yáñez, who commanded the Niña, had ordered the fugitives back and sent a boatload of his own men to help, it was too late. With horror and despair, we watched the timbers of the hull come apart at the seams and the sea come rushing in. Before dawn, the Admiral had to command all to abandon ship and leave the dying vessel to her fate.

The disaster changed all our plans. We labored mightily to salvage the contents of the Santa Maria, while the admiral wept. Thanks to Ha’shem for the goodwill of Guacanagarí. The kind cacique offered the help of his tribesmen, food for all, housing in his village to relieve the overcrowded Niña, and many pieces of gold. He shrewdly surmised that these would dry the Admiral’s tears and go some way toward consoling him for the loss of his flagship. By the day after Christmas, he had come to believe that the shipwreck was the will of the Almighty, meant to guide him to make a more permanent landing in this hospitable place and seek the fabled gold mine of Cibao. Our whole company applauded this new plan, being equally eager for gold. Only I failed to join in this feverish enthusiasm, having seen well enough how the possession of riches could lead to the envy and malice of others, as it had for the Jews of Spain.

It was decided to build a fort upon the shore within sight of the wreck of the Santa Maria. Many clamored for the privilege of being left behind to man it, having not only gold but the availability of the friendly native women as inducements. All awaited eagerly the Admiral’s choice as to which of us would go and who remain. I was happy enough working hard at building the fort, which the Admiral declared would be called La Navidad. For good measure, I made a new friend. The Admiral had enlisted Taino from the nearest village to labor alongside us. The youngest of these seemed drawn to me as the nearest to him in age. At first, he fingered my garments and asked questions beyond the smattering of Taino that I had learned earlier in the voyage. Then he began to teach me. Curious as he was about me, I was equally curious about him. What did he make of these strange white-skinned men with our birdlike yet vulnerable ships and our metal tools and weapons? What did his bright black eyes read in our faces? Could he discern Cabrera’s dark soul and the Admiral’s goodness? What thoughts lay beneath the coarse, dark thatch of his hair?

I learned that the Taino took pride in their names, just as we did. The Taino boy told me his was Hutia. He made me laugh by showing me with gestures and movement that a hutia was a kind of rabbit, the name given to him because he could run fast. He had a sister named Anacaona, golden flower. Guarico was “come.” Guaibá was “go.” Most of the sailors knew only caona, gold, and chicha, the villagers’ beer, made of corn, which they complained about but drank a good deal of nonetheless.

I had difficulty explaining “Diego,” which was the name of a Christian saint. None of the Indians had succeeded in grasping the concept of saints, eager as the Admiral was to convert them. They responded better to images of Jesus on the Cross, but only because they interpreted crucifixion as an effective way of tormenting one’s enemies—as indeed it was to the Romans who killed Jesus, or so my father had taught me. Like us, the Christians’ God was punished for being a Jew.

While we built the fort, all had a hitherto unknown measure of freedom and privacy. I was happy to complete my Chanukah observance with the loss of only three out of the eight nights of the festival. Not all had a purpose as innocent as mine in venturing beyond the mangrove swamps into the wilderness beyond. On the eve of the New Year, when all had been given several extra measures of strong drink, I witnessed, by pure chance, an act that in pure evil surpassed anything Cabrera had done before.

I had stolen away at twilight, being relieved from my post for the whole of the next watch. I carried my tallit and t’fillin, intending to perform my daily prayers. I had already bound the t’fillin around my arm and brow when I heard screams of distress coming from some distance away. I crashed through the underbrush, seeking the source of the disturbance. The raucous cry of parrots disturbed by my headlong progress mingled with the human screams, which now held a note of terror.

I burst out into a small clearing and stopped short. On the ground I beheld Cabrera engaged in a brutal assault on a naked Indian maiden, who writhed and bucked beneath him, clearly an unwilling participant in the proceedings. He laughed as he forced her down. The girl was slight of frame, easy for Cabrera to overpower in spite of his short stature. When I caught a glimpse of her face, I realized she was young, perhaps no older than my twelve-year-old sister Rachel. Her screams grew louder. As I gazed in horror, he silenced her, first with a punch that shattered her jaw, then by seizing her about the neck and choking her until she slumped and fell back against the earth.

To my shame, I failed to act until too late. By the time the paralysis that seized me at the sight let go its hold, the girl was dead.

“Stop!” I croaked, starting forward, though I knew my tardy protest served no purpose.

As he rose from the ground, Cabrera drew a musket from his sash and pointed it at my chest.

“It’s the Admiral’s pet,” Cabrera said with an evil grin that bared his rotting teeth. “Well, boy, are you dog enough to take this bitch? You can have my leavings—before I kill you.”

“You can’t kill me,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice from shaking. “As you said, the Admiral will miss me. Besides, a musket shot will bring many running and disclose your crime.”

“What crime?” he sneered, kicking the girl’s body with a booted foot. “This is but a savage.”

“As the cacique Guancanabarí is a savage?” I inquired. “The Admiral won’t thank you if you turn the Indians against us and ruin our chance to find the gold of Cibao.”

Cabrera snarled, acknowledging the justice of my point. He shrugged and tucked the unfired musket back into his sash.

“This but delays your death,” he said. “Call this moment yet another score we have to settle, you and I.”

I held back, for fear of provoking him beyond reason, the words that sprang to my tongue: What is to stop me from reporting this crime? He read them in my eyes.

“You’ll say nothing,” he declared. “Or I will report your greater crime, which will send you to the Inquisition and a shameful death.”

I had forgotten I still wore my t’fillin, with the prayer shawl fluttering around my neck and chest. I drew a wavering breath.

“It seems we are at a stand,” I said. “What now?”

“First, you help me bury this.” He indicated the body with a careless nod. “Then we return to the camp. And we say nothing.”

“We say nothing,” I repeated. Sick with shame and horror more than fear, I folded my tallit carefully and laid it on a bank of moss beneath a tree, the t’fillin placed within its folds. Then I turned to help him with the burial.

It took us four more days to complete the building of La Navidad. The fort’s walls were made of the Santa Maria’s timbers and its cellars stuffed with stores the men would need, including seed. For if we found the mine, their majesties would want to establish a settlement. Conquest is for soldiers, not that we had thus far needed arms to cow the Taino. But a settlement requires farmers.

As I worked, the sun beating on my bare back and arms and turning them browner than ever, I had always an uneasy sense of Cabrera’s presence. He watched me constantly, alert for me to make some mistake or seek a seclusion that would allow him to kill me with impunity. Knowing this, I stayed close to my fellows at all times, especially Fernando. I did not tell him what was wrong, although he asked me several times. The knowledge I bore was burden enough for me without loading it on another’s shoulders. As for Hutia, having seen one of his people so wronged, I could hardly bear to meet his eyes.

The remaining days flew by, yet in my darker moments, they seemed unendurably long. When it came time to choose the forty men who would remain at La Navidad when the rest departed, I was tense and nervous. My palms were damp with sweat and my teeth had a tendency to chatter, despite the scorching tropical heat. I hardly knew what to hope for. Being left behind with Cabrera would prove a certain death sentence. But further voyaging under even more cramped conditions than before would provide opportunities for him to do me harm as well. To my relief, the Admiral chose Cabrera and his cronies to man the fort, separating them from the treacherous Juan de la Cosa, whom he naturally wanted to keep under his eye. He said nothing of me, so I would sail on with the Niña.

Once the men were chosen, Admiral Columbus entered into negotiations with the cacique for interpreters who spoke the local dialect. The chosen Indians bore little in the way of gear or possessions as they climbed into the ship’s boat, in which we would row out to the Niña. It seemed to me that in some respects they embodied Christian principles far better than the Spanish Christians. But I reminded myself that I must not criticize, for I was not free of fault myself. Thinking of how I had concealed a murder, however good the reason, I thanked Ha’shem that I did not believe in the Christians’ hell.

The new fort’s whole garrison and every soul in the village came down to the beach to see the Niña sail. I felt both glad and sorry to be leaving as I boarded the boat myself and took an oar. I paid little attention to the Indians until Hutia came running down to the boat. He called out, “Baba! baba!” One of our new interpreters, evidently Hutia’s father, stood up and held out his hands, which Hutia grasped. Speaking rapidly in Taino, they embraced. Their hands clung and then parted. Hutia stepped back onto the shore.

In the forefront of the crowd, I could see Cabrera with his arm around a woman. He clutched at her naked body as he leered at me. Still holding her, he raised a gourd of chicha, or perhaps a stronger spirit made from the plant that they called yuca. He waved it at me in a jeering salute, then poured the liquor down his throat.

Beside me, Hutia’s father called out, “Anacaona?”

“Itá,” Hutia replied. I don’t know.

The father sighed deeply. Hutia looked grave and sad, with no trace of the twinkle that usually lurked in his black eyes.

I looked from Hutia to his father and then at Cabrera on the shore. I leaped to my feet, thrusting my oar at Fernando on the bench beside me.

“Don’t let them leave without me!” I said.

I splashed through the shallows to the beach, where Hutia, looking puzzled, came down to meet me where the water met the sand. Cabrera, a quick glance told me, was paying no attention. Another woman had joined the first, and he was busily engaged in nuzzling them both. Ordinarily, this lewd behavior would have caught the Admiral’s eye and been stopped at once. But in the excitement of our departure, Cabrera clearly thought he was safe from interference.

I grasped Hutia’s shoulders with some urgency.

“Anacaona,” I said. “Is she missing? Guaibá?”

“Itá.”

“Ocama!” I said. Listen! “I know what happened to her.”

I turned him toward Cabrera, to direct his attention to the man without drawing anyone else’s notice as I racked my brain for Taino words to convey my meaning.

“Anacaona! That man killed her!” I could not bring myself to mime the rape, but Hutia’s face darkened as I demonstrated with my own hands and body the blow to the jaw and the squeezing of her throat.

“Anki!” I said. Evil person. “Akani!” Enemy. He had taught me these words while telling me about the fierce Caribe, who preyed on the Taino and were said to be cannibals.

“Bara?” he said. She is dead?

I nodded, my heart heavy.

“Bara!” I will kill him!

He started forward, his face flushed with rage and his hands curling into claws. I held him back.

“Wait,” I said, wishing I knew the Taino word for it, if indeed they had one. I put my arms around him from behind and turned him first toward Admiral Columbus, who was watching the ship raise sail from further down the beach, then toward the Niña itself.

“Wait until we leave. Once we are gone, you may tell whom you wish and do what you must.”

I felt him slump against me. He had understood. He would wait. Only then did I hear Fernando’s voice among others bellowing for me to let the savages be and get back to my oar, or there’d be no gold left in Cibao by the time we got there.

As our oars raked the water and the sails of the caravel billowed ever greater as they filled with wind, I looked back once more and found Cabrera’s eyes upon me.

“I’ll see you in hell, boy!” he bellowed, brandishing his gourd.

“If such a place exists, you will surely get there before me,” I murmured as the boat pulled into the shadow of the Niña and we prepared to climb aboard.

Copyright © 2010 Elizabeth Zelvin

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Fiction

A BULLET FROM YESTERDAY

By Terence Faherty

Terence Faherty returns this month with a new adventure for Scott Elliott, the second series character he created, after the popular Owen Keane. A former actor and World War II vet turned private security operative, Elliott takes on a case here involving a supposed artifact from World War I. But as in most of Elliott’s cases, Hollywoood itself is at the forefront of the drama. Mr. Faherty is a winner of the PWA’s Shamus Award and a past nominee for the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

---1---

Wally Wilfong was known a-round Hollywood as an operator. Not a camera operator, which was a respectable profession and maybe even a calling. Wilfong was a guy who worked the no man’s land between the studios, sometimes scaring up money for an independent film, sometimes representing a naive young hopeful, sometimes brokering an exchange of equipment or talent between the major lots, places where he’d never find a home.

He hadn’t always had his nose pressed against the candy-store glass. Before the war, he’d worked on the sane side of the cameras for Paramount, where I’d apprenticed as an actor. We’d both done a stretch in the army and both ended up in the European Theater of Operations, along with a few million other innocent bystanders. Wilfong and I had one other thing in common. We’d both come back to Hollywood after the war to find our places taken and our welcomes expired.

I’d gone to work for a private security firm, Hollywood Security, which patrolled that no man’s land I mentioned earlier. So I’d crossed paths with Wilfong once or twice. But the first time he visited our offices on Roe Street was a morning in late December 1954.

We were decorating those offices for Christmas, an annual rite that the head man, one Patrick J. Maguire, tried to put the kibosh on every year. Paddy was thwarted in this—as in so much else—by his wife Peggy, the power behind the Hollywood Security throne. She and I were hanging ornaments on the reception-area tree—an all-aluminum one—when Wilfong made his entrance.

I noted that he checked the front sidewalk through the front door’s glass as it closed behind him, but his greeting was breezy enough. Wilfong was a shorter-than-average guy who sprang for a lot of extra padding in the shoulders of his suits. Today’s gray example needed pressing, and his two-toned shoes could have used a shine. Whoever had shaved his not inconsiderable chin that morning had been in a hurry.

“The big guy to home?” he asked Peggy.

On any other day, she would have told Wilfong to wait while she checked or even to come back a week from Tuesday. But Paddy had just made a remark critical of her metal tree—specifically what a great job it would do cleaning out a drain—so she showed our visitor right in. I tagged along to get a good look at Paddy’s reaction, which was a mistake. Peggy pushed me in after Wilfong and shut the office’s double doors behind me.

Normally some small talk between the client and Paddy would have followed, with a witty aside or two thrown in by me. Wilfong rushed things along a bit by drawing a gun from his suit-coat pocket.

It was a small automatic, and Wilfong had his finger on its trigger, though he wasn’t pointing it at anything in particular. I was tensing myself for a dive at it when Paddy held up his hand like a traffic cop.

“If you’re collecting for the Salvation Army,” he said, “you’re supposed to use a bell.”

Wilfong blinked, looked down at his hand, and said, “Right.” He set the gun down on the arm of the chair next to him, its muzzle pointed toward a neutral corner.

“I want you to save me from that,” he said.

“Tempted to end it all?” my boss asked. He then lit a cigar, which was as close to a sigh of relief as I expected him to issue. His wide-screen face, which had once been described as a map of Ireland carved on an Easter ham, looked almost bored as he added, “The holidays take some people that way, I’m told.”

“I’m not afraid I’ll kill myself with it,” Wilfong said. “I’m afraid it will get me killed. It’s already put ten million people in the ground.”

Paddy and I gave the gun another look. It was an ordinary .32, either brand-new or very little used. I’d have been surprised to learn it had been fired a hundred times, never mind ten million.

Paddy had the same thought. “Must have gotten most of them with the first shot,” he said.

Wilfong came down heavily in the chair whose arm supported the gun. The automatic didn’t even hop.

“That’s a Browning Model Nineteen-ten. Maybe the gun that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in nineteen fourteen. Maybe the gun that started the First World War.”

“Maybe is right,” Paddy said. “They’re still making that particular popgun. There must be a few hundred thousand floating around.”

“Only four of them matter,” Wilfong said. “The guy who murdered the archduke and the guy’s accomplices had four Nineteen-tens, brand new, with consecutive serial numbers. Only one of them was used in the assassination, but nobody knows which one it was. The Austrians, who ended up with the pistols, didn’t keep a record. They stuck all four in a museum in Salzburg and forgot about them.”

I was impressed by Wilfong’s knowledge, but even more so by his quiet delivery. He was usually a salesman’s salesman, leaning into you when he talked if not actually grabbing your lapels. Now his bleary eyes were half closed and he was rubbing one prominent temple like it might be a magic lamp.

“How do you happen to know all this?” I asked.

“And what makes you think this is one of the four?” Paddy chipped in.

“Salzburg was taken by the U.S. Army,” Wilfong said. “By that point in the war, there was as much scavenging as fighting going on. More maybe. The GIs who liberated that museum took everything they could carry, including the four Brownings.”

“You were one of those GIs,” I said.

He nodded. “None of us could read German. We didn’t know what we were taking, except that they were guns. Guns were the primo souvenirs, better even than booze. Plus, they were almost as good as cash. Lugers brought the best price, but anything that made a noise would sell.”

“But you didn’t sell yours,” Paddy observed.

“Never got that hard up. It came home with me in my duffel bag. Now I wish the ship that hauled us back had hit a mine.”

He seemed to notice for the first time that the office had windows and that their drapes were open. He grabbed the automatic and slipped it back into his pocket.

“Somebody’s killing us off for those guns,” he said, “all four of us, one by one. And I’m next.”

---2---

Paddy ordered up some coffee for Wilfong and sweetened it with the bottle of Irish whiskey he kept in his desk.

Wilfong sipped for a long ten-count and said, “One of my buddies from the old unit, one of the four who’d taken home a Browning, called me a couple of weeks ago. He said he’d come across a magazine article about four pistols that disappeared from Salzburg in nineteen forty-five. The article told all about the assassination and even gave the serial numbers of the missing guns. My buddy had already found his gun on the list.”

“The buddy’s name?” asked Paddy, who liked to collect the odd fact.

“Pat Skidmore. Pat said he was going to get in touch with the guy who’d written the article, some professor from a college out his way. Pat lives in Frankfort, Kentucky, if he’s still living.”

Paddy and I exchanged a glance. The speaker drank again and continued.

“I told Pat to hold off. I didn’t see any percentage in it for us. The Austrians aren’t going to pay to get those guns back. They’re just going to take them. And not say thank you when they leave. I wanted time to think of a way to make a buck out of the deal, a finder’s fee, if nothing better. Pat wouldn’t wait. Something about holding on to his gun was giving him the creeps.

“Pat had already called the other two guys who took Brownings from that museum. One of them, Bob Wilson, was okay with giving his back, but the other one, Joe Reid, said all the current Austrian bigshots used to be Nazi bigshots and they could go hang themselves.

“I waited for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t hear back from Pat. And every day of that wait, I thought about my Browning more and more. I started to wonder if all the bad breaks I’ve had since the war could be tied to that gun.”

“So it’s also unlucky?” Paddy asked.

“With all the people killed and maimed by it,” Wilfong said, “how couldn’t it be? It even maimed us, Elliott,” he added, turning my way.

“How do you figure?” I asked. I was surprised to find that my mouth was dry.

“There wouldn’t have been a Second World War if there hadn’t been a first one. You and me would never have been snatched out of Paramount. I could be head of production today, and you might be Audrey Hepburn.”

“Scotty’s eyebrows are too thin,” Paddy said. “Let’s get back to you not hearing from this Skidmore.”

“I finally got so antsy, I called him long distance. Got his wife. She said Pat was missing. Got all hysterical on the phone. All I could make out from what she was saying was that some stranger had come to see Pat. A guy with a German accent.”

“So you think this buddy of yours is dead?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to reach Wilson and Reid. I haven’t been able to. When I talked to Pat, he mentioned where they live—Bob’s in Texas and Joe’s over in Jersey—but neither one answers his phone. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Okay,” Paddy said. “Let’s talk about what you suspect. Stop me if I wander too far from the path. You think this Skidmore got in touch with the author of the magazine article and told him what had happened to the Brownings. Then, either the professor or Skidmore himself got the word out to the wrong party. That party is now collecting the guns by whatever means necessary. We can assume it isn’t anyone official, since Skidmore wanted to give the Austrians his gun. So they wouldn’t have had to kidnap him to get it.”

I said, “Whoever snatched Skidmore got more than his gun. He got Wilson and Reid’s names and addresses.”

“And my address,” Wilfong said. “I know that for a certainty.”

Paddy sat up. “You’ve been visited by a man with a German accent?”

“Almost. A kraut came by my place yesterday. I’ve been staying away from home for ... business reasons, so I missed him. But a neighbor passed the word. Now I’ve got the willies like I haven’t had them since I handed in my uniform.”

I pointed in the general direction of the pocket that held the gun. “So leave that out on your front step tonight with the empty milk bottles. When Herr X gets his mitts on it, he’ll leave you alone.”

“Maybe,” Wilfong said, “if he isn’t punishing us for stealing them in the first place. But it isn’t as simple as that.”

“It never is when money’s involved,” Paddy observed.

I hadn’t heard much talk of money, so I thought the great man was straying from that path he’d just spoken of. Turned out, I was lagging behind.

“You guessed it,” Wilfong said. “I’m hard up right now and no prospects on the horizon. Worse than that, I owe some serious money to an unpleasant guy.”

“Name of?” Paddy asked.

“Tip Fasano.”

“We know the gentleman, don’t we, Scotty.”

Did we ever. Fasano was middle management in the local gambling syndicate and an all-around tough egg.

I said, “Fasano’s the business that’s keeping you away from home?”

“Yes. He’s got somebody watching my place. If there’s any money to be made from this gun, I’ve got to make it and quick. Otherwise, it’ll be a tossup who punches my ticket, the mystery man or Fasano. If I can set up a deal, I want Elliott here to tag along when I make the exchange. He can carry my gun and two or three of his own.”

“You spoke of percentages earlier,” Paddy said. “What’s ours?”

“Ten percent of my take.”

Paddy haggled it up to twelve, and they shook on it.

---3---

Wilfong vetoed Paddy’s suggestion that we hold on to the Browning for him—and did it emphatically.

“Hell no. If this collector guy gets the drop on me, I want the dingus where I can hand it over before he asks twice. If it’s a choice between my neck and paying off Fasano, I’ll take my neck. Besides, the thing still shoots. That’s an argument that works with mystery men and bookies.”

He also turned down—less emphatically—my offer to watch his back until he worked out his deal.

“No offense, Elliott, but you were in the field artillery. You’re fine for a showdown, but not for moving quiet and quick, which is what I have to do now.”

I could have pointed out that Skidmore, Wilson, and Reid had all been infantrymen, for all the good that had done them. But I didn’t. Our new client looked wrung-out already.

Paddy asked, “How do you intend to make contact?”

“I dunno yet. Maybe I’ll stick a note in one of my empty milk bottles.” He stood up.

Paddy said, “While you’re giving my wife a number where you can be reached, I’ll have a word with Scotty. Then he’ll see you to your car.”

As soon as Wilfong cleared the office, Paddy went back to what he’d been doing when Peggy ushered us in, which was cleaning a spot on his necktie. His taste in ties was flamboyant, to put it politely. Today’s, which featured a peacock feather design in orange and blue, was slightly gaudier than the Alcoa fir tree in the lobby.

“What did you think of Wally’s story?” he asked as he worked.

“It held my interest.”

“But then, you’re a sucker for the movies. Still, it could be a nice Christmas bonus for us. Which makes me wonder how we can improve our chances of collecting, short of following Wally around. I think we need to get a line on this Austrian gun collector, whoever he is. Invisible men give me the heebie-jeebies. Any thoughts on that?”

“Pat Skidmore of Frankfort, Kentucky, would be the guy to ask, if he hadn’t gotten so invisible himself. That leaves the author of the magazine article about the guns, I guess. Like you told Wally, this professor might have tipped the wrong party. Or he could have helped Skidmore do it himself.”

Paddy checked his tie under the desk lamp and grunted contentedly. “Sounds like you should ask the professor. If you can tear yourself away from the tinsel.”

Wilfong’s car was a 1950 Mercury Monterey with 1949 whitewalls. Maybe ’48s. When we reached it, I asked him which magazine had run the article on the Brownings.

“I dunno,” he said, his head on a swivel now that we were out in the open. “The only magazines I read are the ones my dentist carries. If I know Pat, it was Field and Stream. Wish me luck, buddy.”

I did. Then I went inside and used Peggy’s phone to call my screenwriter wife, Ella. At one time, she’d worked publicity for Warner Brothers. I asked her if she still had any contacts in their research department.

“One, Scotty, but I use her for my script work. I thought you detectives had your own sources. Doesn’t Paddy pay off any librarians?”

“Only to forget his late fees.” I gave her a one-reel version of Wilfong’s tale. She was impressed.

“He could probably make more selling the movie rights than the gun. You want the magazine that published the article? I’ll see what I can do.”

That gave me some time to kill. I unparked my car, a copper brown ’53 Packard Clipper whose dour grillwork was heavy in the lower lip, which is to say, bumper. The Clipper and I moseyed over to the main library building. I didn’t bother with their indexes of periodical literature, since they weren’t fresh enough to contain a reference to an article that must have appeared in the last month or so. I did flip through the magazines they had out, which was a small boatload. None contained any mention of the Brownings.

After that, I moved on to a little job we were doing for the character actress Marjorie Main. That occupied me until I knocked off at dinnertime, an early dinnertime. Ella and I had two kids shy of school age, a boy for her and a girl for me, as the song lyric says, and I was anxious to see them. The run-up to Christmas had been a lot of fun so far.

Plus, I had homework to do, though I didn’t know that until I got there. Then Ella, a petite, seasonal blonde who was leaning more toward brunette as the days got shorter, handed me a copy of The Gentlemen’s Quarterly with a September publication date.

“Warner Brothers came through for you,” she said and kissed me.

“They owed me,” I replied. “I had a lousy seat for Mildred Pierce.”

After we were all fed and the kids were in bed, Ella settled in with a novel she’d been asked to adapt, a racy one with some major-league décolletage on its cover. I opened The Gentlemen’s Quarterly.

Wally Wilfong had joked about the magazines he read in his dentist’s office. The Gentlemen’s Quarterly was more like something you’d find in a machine shop. There was a redhead in shorts fly-fishing on the cover and, beneath her, a teaser for the article I was after: “Four Guns That Changed the World.”

That title was a little deceptive, I learned as I read, since on July 28, 1914, the day the archduke and his wife were killed, only one of the Brownings had actually gone off. The article contained a lot of background on Franz Ferdinand, one unpopular heir to the throne, and a recap of the slipshod investigation conducted afterward. I’d already guessed that it had been a rush job since they hadn’t bothered to tag the actual murder weapon.

Wilfong or his source, the missing Skidmore, had gotten one detail wrong and omitted another. The serial numbers of the four handguns weren’t consecutive, only very nearly so. And the article noted in passing that there were other theories about the guns’ disappearance, though its author, Paul Carey, who was identified as a professor at Steed College in Johnson City, Tennessee, didn’t say what they were. It was easy to understand why Wilfong hadn’t mentioned competing theories. He knew firsthand, after all, that the light-fingered G.I. explanation was correct.

I sat for a while, smoking a Lucky Strike and wondering how Professor Carey had felt when Pat Skidmore called about the Brownings. Then I wondered whether Carey might have an Austrian accent. Then I turned on the television and watched an old chestnut, Christmas in Connecticut, until Ella tired of only reading about sex.

---4---

I arrived at the offices of Hollywood Security around ten the next morning, having stopped on my way in to wrap up the Great Marjorie Main Caper of 1954. Inside, Peggy was seated at her desk, giving the fisheye to a large citizen who was lounging behind a racing form.

“Paddy just asked for you,” she said to me.

The big racing fan lowered his paper and focused his tiny eyes on the intercom next to Peggy’s elbow, a puzzled expression on his face. I guessed from that that Paddy hadn’t requested my presence via the little black box. I was less puzzled than our guest, being used to the Maguires’ telepathy act. Still, I verified the order.

“He wants me right now?”

“Five minutes ago,” Peggy said.

The linebacker made a move as though to block me. Then my “I beg your pardon” flummoxed him all over again. I stepped around him and opened Paddy’s double doors.

I got flummoxed then myself. My boss, in shirtsleeves, was standing next to his desk facing two goons bigger than the one I now had behind me. They’d both glanced my way, though neither was giving me his full attention.

“Scotty!” Paddy boomed. “The very man I wanted to see. Show these gentlemen the trick you do with the gun.”

Just showing them a gun would have been a trick right then, as I wasn’t carrying one. But I did my best to oblige.

“Nothing up my sleeve,” I said, raising my left arm and tugging on my suit coat to display more shirt cuff.

That got them interested. When they were good and turned my way, Paddy grabbed them by their collars and knocked their heads together. He held on to one with his left hand and tossed the other at me.

He tossed him so hard that the guy was still dancing like Ray Bolger when he arrived at my end of the room. I could have tagged him while he was off balance, only his friend with the racing form grabbed me from behind. Paddy’s special delivery hit me square in the chest, and the three of us tumbled out through the office door, landing in a heap in front of Peggy’s desk.

The next thing I saw was Peggy coming over that desk—all eighty pounds of her—yelling, “Hey, Rube!”

That was a universal distress call among the lower strata of show business, and it brought two Hollywood Security operatives charging out of our back room: Lange, our resident lion tamer, and our current rookie, whose name was Mahoney. Or maybe they were drawn by the sound of my playmates and me rolling into the Christmas tree.

After that, as battlefield reports sometimes put it, the fighting became general. When it was over, our side held the field. It was very nearly a Pyrrhic victory, there being sufficient bloody noses, split lips, and budding black eyes to go around. And our aluminum tree wasn’t even up to cleaning drains now.

Only Paddy seemed to have come through unscathed. He emerged from his office smoking a new cigar and adjusting his coat and hat. I thought he might have talked his way through the late unpleasantness until I went to collect our third guest and found him slumped against Paddy’s desk, asking what round it was.

When he and I rejoined the others, Paddy left off examining Peggy’s bleeding lip. He told her to avoid mistletoe and turned to Lange and me.

“We’re taking these gentlemen back to their employer, Tip Fasano. Dress for the occasion. I’d suggest forty-five caliber.”

“Call the police,” Peggy told him.

“There’s no police can get us out of this one,” Paddy said, and his sober tone quieted her. “There is a call you can make for me, though,” he added. “Try that emergency number Wally Wilfong left. Set up a meeting.”

That reminded me of a little telephone business of my own. While Peggy daubed at a cut above my eyebrow with a handkerchief, I told her all I knew about Professor Carey and asked her to set up a call with him for later that day.

---5---

Once upon a time, Tip Fasano had operated out of a barbershop on Figueroa, where he’d played at cutting hair himself. Nowadays, he played at being a business executive, using a swanky office in the Valley, near Universal Studios. We caravanned out there, Paddy, Lange, and the three wise men riding in style in our new pals’ black Cadillac Fleetwood, and me tagging along behind in my Packard.

Fasano’s office was the headquarters of his legitimate business, which sold supplies to barbershops and beauty salons, so we didn’t have to shoot our way in. Or even state our business. The girl receptionist took one look at our parade of walking wounded and waved us right through.

The gambler’s office dwarfed Paddy’s to about the same degree that the Fleetwood had shaded my Clipper. The carpet was royal blue, and the walls it ran between were the same color in a lighter shade. All around were pedestals holding bits of broken statuary that looked like they’d just been dug up in Pompeii. The owner of the hardware sat behind a big block of mahogany that had brushed chrome inlays running around it like the straps on a steamer trunk.

Fasano wasn’t what you’d call handsome—his nose had been stepped on at some point in his career—but in the seven or eight years I’d known him, he hadn’t aged a bit. His hair was still dark and wavy, the skin well tanned, the whites of his eyes as clear as a baby’s. Those whites were visible briefly as we trooped in. Then Fasano went back to his trademark slit-eyed stare, which had chilled the blood of many a brave man, mine included.

Paddy seemed unaffected. “Salutations of the season, Tip,” he said. “Your elves got lost this morning and ended up in my office. I thought I’d bring them back before they got rolled by a crippled newsie.”

“Thanks,” Fasano said. “Talk to them any first?”

“As a matter of fact. They had some crazy notion that we’d taken over Wally Wilfong’s debts. I had to disabuse them.”

“They look disabused,” Fasano observed.

I found I was feeling sorry for the three torpedoes, even the one who’d poked me in the eye. The next page of dialogue cured me of that.

“Word on the street is you’re holding something valuable for Wilfong,” Fasano said. “Word also is that Wilfong is among the missing. So I think it would be better if I hold the pearl or painting or whatever the hell you’ve got, as security for Wilfong’s marker.”

Paddy said, “The only thing Wilfong left was a bad taste in my mouth. He had an old gun he claimed he could sell for a pile, but he didn’t trust us with it.”

“A gun worth real money? What, the one that plugged Lincoln?”

“Close,” Paddy said. “Wilfong also has an interested buyer. We’re to provide a bodyguard for the transfer. That’s the limit of our involvement.”

“Guess it’s my turn to do the disabusing, Maguire. You’re involved right up to your top chin. You might have roughed up my boys. You might even have the drop on me now. But the winning hand you don’t have. My organization’s a lot bigger than yours. And we know where to find you, day or night.”

He singled me out for an especially knife-edged stare. “Still married, Hollywood? Any kiddies yet?”

Paddy stepped between me and the desk, and Fasano chuckled.

“That’s right. Don’t dig a deeper hole for yourselves. I’m willing to overlook this morning’s carrying-on because you guys did me a favor once. But I’m not writing off what Wilfong owes me. That’s business. If I let myself be taken by a small-timer like that, the big fish will be spitting hooks all over town.

“So here’s the deal. You hand over this golden gun or you hand over the ten grand I’m owed or you hand over Wilfong. I’ll give you twenty-four hours. Now catch a breeze.”

Instead of leaving, Paddy stepped up to the desk, leaning over it. It didn’t look so big then. “Just so you know, Tip,” he said, “if all our chips are on the table, yours are, too. I’d play this hand real careful if I were you.”

“Good advice any time,” Fasano said. “Here’s a Christmas present in return. Wilfong doesn’t have to be breathing when you hand him over.”

---6---

Fasano’s receptionist stopped us on our way out. She had Peggy holding on the line for Paddy. During the call, he did more listening than talking and seemed more concerned with straightening the bow on the pot that held the receptionist’s poinsettia than with anything his wife was saying. We were almost to the Clipper before he let the other shoe drop.

“That number Wilfong left belonged to the girlfriend he’s been staying with. Seems they were visited last night by a guy with a German accent. Wilfong left with the caller and hasn’t come back. Drive us over to Sunset and Western, Scotty, and let’s hear the story firsthand.”

The girlfriend’s name was Dolly Palmer, and the front parlor of her third-floor walk-up had just enough room for her, the three of us, and a flocked tree. Palmer had hair bleached like motel sheets and a figure that was one bonbon away from overripe. Her face was kind, though, and might have been pretty if she hadn’t been crying.

“I knew something was wrong with Wally,” she told us. “He hasn’t been himself for a couple of weeks. Can I get you some coffee? An eggnog?”

“Maybe later,” Paddy said.

Palmer looked like she needed a drink right then. We can’t have been a very comforting sight. Lange’s nose was as red and swollen as Rudolph’s. My swelling was over my right eye and threatening to shut it down completely.

“Tell us about this visitor with the accent,” Paddy said. “Did he state his business?”

“When I answered the door, he asked for Wally. I couldn’t say no; Wally was sitting right behind me on the couch. Wally told me to go into the kitchen and shut the door. He didn’t want anything to happen to me.” She sobbed over that last gallantry.

“Hear anything through the door?”

“A little. They were talking about a gun. A pistol, the guy with the accent called it. That scared me. I don’t like guns. I got busy doing the dishes. I didn’t hear anything else until the front door closed.

“When I came out, they were both gone. The guy had taken Wally with him. And he’d taken something else. This morning, I noticed my jewel box had been moved. The bracelet Wally gave me for my birthday was gone. It had real stones. Sapphires.”

We sat out another bout of sobbing, Lange shifting his big feet around like the floor had suddenly gotten hot.

Then Paddy asked, “Can you describe this visitor for us? He was a big man, I suppose. Blond-haired, maybe? Any scars or monocles?”

“I don’t know if you’d call him big. He was very tall, but very skinny, too. But he did have blond hair, very blond, as blond as mine. He was just a kid, really. That was another reason I let him in. I should have slammed the door in his face.”

Paddy slipped in ahead of the next sob. “Are there any of Wally’s papers around? It would help if we could see anything he left behind, even a phone number. Help Wally, I mean.”

Palmer pointed to a little table that held a phone and a cardboard manger scene. “He was working on some papers over there. Something to do with a big movie deal he has going. But I haven’t seen them since yesterday. Since Wally took the trash down to the incinerator.”

“Thoughtful guy,” Paddy said.

He retrieved a pad from the table, looked it over, and passed it to me. There were daisies around the border of each page, but nothing written on any of them, not even an impression passed through from a missing sheet.

Paddy said he’d take a cup of coffee if the offer was still good, and Palmer headed for the kitchen. When its swinging door closed behind her, Paddy issued his orders, first to Lange.

“Toss the place. We’re looking for a Browning thirty-two or anything related to where it might be, such as a claim check or a locker key.”

To me, he said, “Try the incinerator. A tire iron makes a great poker.”

I didn’t need to dirty the Clipper’s hardware. The incinerator, which was in the weedy lot behind the apartment building, came equipped with an iron rod three feet long that hung from a hook by the burner’s heavy door. That door was stone cold, which was heartening. The contents of the big metal box were less encouraging, being ash and a rusted tangle of things that wouldn’t burn, none of which was a Browning automatic.

But persistence paid off. Caught in a crack in the firebox near the flue was the unburned corner of a sheet of notepaper bordered in daisies. On it was written “flight” and below that “Mexico City.”

---7---

Paddy and Lange were exiting the apartment building when I came around from in back, vital clue in hand. Paddy took it hard, by which I mean he chuckled ruefully.

“Looks like we’ve bitten a rubber peach and no mistake. Lange, cab it out to the airport and check on the Mexico City departures since last night. See if anyone matching Wilfong’s description took one. Scotty, you can drop me by the office on your way to find the pawnshop where that bracelet ended up.”

“Why trace the jewelry? Why not the Austrian?”

“Because I’m starting to wonder if there is such a creature.”

“You think the dame’s lying?” Lange asked.

“No. But I think Miss Palmer would make the ideal audience for a Punch and Judy show.”

Paddy raised his homburg in the air, and a passing taxi pulled to the curb. When Lange was in it and on his way, Paddy steered me toward my car, lecturing as we went.

“How’s this scenario? Wally Wilfong had a big movie deal in the works—though he told us he didn’t even have one on the horizon. He needed room to maneuver, but a certain Tip Fasano was crowding him so hard he couldn’t even sleep in his own bed. He heard the story of the four Brownings, maybe from an old pal or maybe not. Maybe he really was in Salzburg in ’forty-five or maybe not. Either way, he saw a chance to lay down a smoke screen for himself. He got his hands on a Browning Nineteen-ten and wove us a little bedtime story. Then he passed on a fragment of the same tale to Fasano, giving us prominent billing, and arranged to be kidnapped. That gave him time to do whatever he’s got to do in Mexico City. He counted on Fasano coming after us and on us chasing will-o’-the-wisps, like this so-called Austrian.”

“But why bother with pawnshops?”

“There’s no better place to buy a used gun. If Wilfong picked his up at a hockshop, he likely took the bracelet back to the same one. We’re all creatures of habit. So if you find the bracelet, you’ll probably clear up the question of the gun.”

“Sounds to me like you’re sure of the gun already.”

“Almost sure,” Paddy conceded. “But ten to one against means there’s still a slim chance it’s legit. If it is, it could be our ticket out of this mess.”

When I delivered Paddy to the office, I picked up a message for myself. Peggy had reached Professor Carey and arranged for me to call him at his home around three our time. That call would be step one in the process of identifying a creature Paddy no longer believed in—the avenger with the German accent—but I pocketed the number and headed out.

I started with the pawnshops nearest the major studios, the territory Wilfong usually traveled. This close to Christmas, they were all busy, both with bargain hunters and with people working the old O. Henry dodge: trading in used treasures so they could buy new ones for new loves. I was a long time getting short answers at the first two places I visited. Then I tried an older establishment called Nackenhorst’s Jewelry and Loan Company.

Despite its fairly specific name, Nackenhorst’s had the usual variety of merchandise on display, including a rack of guns. I started at the jewelry case, looking for sapphire bracelets and not finding one. Still, my stocking wasn’t entirely empty. The clerk hovering nearby was very tall and very thin and very blond, matching all three of the superlatives Dolly Palmer had used to describe Wilfong’s foreign caller.

“Wie geht’s?” I said, which was German for “How’s it going?” Or so I’d been told during the postwar occupation.

“Sehr gut,” the beanpole replied. Then, perhaps remembering where he’d last used his German, he stammered in English, “May I help you?”

I asked about a recently pawned sapphire bracelet, which happened to be stolen, and his stammer became life-threatening. He was saved by Nackenhorst himself, a bent, horse-faced gentleman in an unlikely Stanford letter sweater, patched at the elbows.

“Stolen, you say,” the old man lisped once he had me in a back room and well away from the holiday shoppers. He had several pieces of jewelry on his desk, one of them a very nice bracelet with blue stones. “I’m a pretty good judge of that, usually. Good judge of customers, I mean, especially regulars. This customer—”

“Wally Wilfong,” I cut in, to hurry us along. “That bangle belongs to his girlfriend. Your clerk—”

“My nephew, Kurt.”

“Kurt helped Wilfong lift it by posing as a German caller last night. If we ask him, he’ll say he thought the whole thing was a practical joke, which is probably true. Wilfong will say that he only borrowed the bracelet, if anyone asks him. So will its rightful owner, once Wilfong’s had a chance to work on her.”

“So what’s the problem?” Nackenhorst asked. “And what’s your interest, Mister ...” He consulted the business card I’d handed him. “Mr. Hollywood Security?”

“I’m not interested in the bracelet. I’m interested in a gun Wilfong bought sometime in the last couple of days.”

“What did he do with it? Stick up an orphanage?”

“We’re more of a YMCA,” I said. “Did Wilfong buy a gun from you?”

Nackenhorst pulled at one of his patched elbows and said, “Yes. It was a very specific order, too. The gun couldn’t be new, but it had to be good as new. Luckily, he wanted a Browning thirty-two. There must be a million of those.”

“Only four that count,” I told him.

---8---

Back at the office, Paddy and I exchanged bad news. I told him that Wilfong’s Browning was a fake, and he gave me Lange’s report from the Los Angeles airport.

“Wilfong was on the ten-thirty flight to Mexico City this morning. Must have had to wait until that pawnshop you found opened so he could get the cash for his ticket. Ten-thirty was about when we were caroling with Tip Fasano’s boys. I wonder if that was a coincidence.”

“What do we do now?”

“I sent Lange down Mexico way. You’re taking the rest of the afternoon off.”

“How come I’m not the one going after Wilfong?”

“I figured you’d want to stay close to your family with Christmas creeping up. Especially given the season’s greetings Fasano threatened us with.”

I figured it differently. “You’re sending Lange because you mean to hand Wilfong over. You don’t think I could do it.”

“I know how soft you are when a fellow veteran’s involved, Scotty. I’ve seen it nearly get you killed. Let’s say I’m saving you from a moral dilemma. Give my best to Ella.”

I might have done just that, if Peggy hadn’t stopped me on my way out to remind me that it was time for my call to Tennessee. I no longer had a good reason to make that call. I knew the invisible gun collector I’d been trying to trace was as phony as the rest of Wilfong’s story. But I was a little sore at being eased off the Browning case. Calling Professor Paul Carey was a way to keep my foot in the door.

The professor’s soft drawl had me pressing the receiver hard against my ear. “I’ve gotten a lot of inquiries about those guns since the article appeared,” he told me after I’d introduced myself. “And none of them has been worth my time. I thought publishing the serial numbers would cut down on the nuisance calls, but it didn’t much. Are you claiming to have one of the Brownings, Mr. Elliott?”

“No,” I said. “I’m calling about someone else’s claim. Was the part of the article about the guns being stolen by GIs accurate? You hinted about other theories.”

“Nobody knows for sure what really happened. So many records were destroyed over there in ’forty-five that every theory is a guess. The museum angle is just the best guess. I’ve also heard a rumor that Austrian policemen kept the guns as souvenirs and another that they ended up in a monastery, a gift to the priest who gave the archduke and his wife the last rites. A pretty tasteless gift, if you ask me, but stranger things have happened. For my money, though, the four pistols are in the United States right now. Have you examined your claimant’s gun?”

“Not exactly. Did you get a call from someone named Wally Wilfong?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“How about a Pat Skidmore of Frankfort, Kentucky?”

“I’ve spoken to a man named Skidmore, but he lives in Akron, Ohio.”

Like all accomplished liars, Wilfong had kept one foot on the truth. “What did this Skidmore say?”

“He claimed to know the whereabouts of one of the guns, but he denied any knowledge of the looting. He said a soldier chum of his had come by the gun on the boat ride home. That put me on my guard.”

“Why?”

“As I told you, I’ve spoken to a number of people regarding those guns. Most of them bought genuine Sarajevo guns from hard-up Germans, or thought they did. There seems to have been a brisk business in them. Some of the ones I’ve traced weren’t even Brownings, and none was from the group of four. Now, if Mr. Skidmore had admitted to being one of the looters, that would have made me more confident.”

“It worked on me,” I said.

***.

---9---

Next I called information for Akron, Ohio, and established that there was only one Patrick Skidmore living there. Then I placed a person-to-person call to his home. The rest of my free afternoon was gone by the time the long-distance operator called back to say she had my party on the line.

Not that I took her word for it. When the connection was made, I asked, “Is this really Pat Skidmore?”

“Who wants to know?” was the friendly comeback.

Figuring I’d caught him in the middle of something important, like stenciling snowflakes on his window panes, I didn’t reply in kind. I gave him my name and added, “Wally Wilfong said you were a hard guy to reach.”

“What? What are you to Wally?”

“We both worked for Paramount, way back when. He told me you’d called him about a certain Browning automatic. That true?”

“What’s it to you, buddy?”

“He cut me in on the deal.” Me and my immediate family.

Skidmore liked that about as much as I did. “What is this? Wally told me he didn’t have the gun. He said he’d hocked it. He went nuts when I told him the thing really was valuable. Gave me a big song and dance about it being the story of his life, about how he’d lost every chance he’d ever had. Now you’re saying he has the gun?”

“That’s what he told me.”

“That son of a bitch. Listen, if he sold you a piece, it’s coming out of his half. I staked him in that crap game, so half that gun is mine. I told Wally that when I called him about the magazine article.”

“So Wilfong didn’t steal the gun?”

“Steal it? Hell, no, he won it. In a crap game on the troop ship coming back. Some joker bet the gun when he ran out of cash. He said it was an important gun, that it had killed some bigshot. We thought he meant a Nazi. He actually tried to buy it back from Wally before we docked. It had to be one of those missing Brownings.”

Not necessarily, not if Professor Carey was right about the number of phony guns sold to gullible Americans. I was out of questions that mattered, but not loose ends. I asked Skidmore about the two names Wilfong had woven into his tale, the other two looters, Joe Reid of New Jersey and Bob Wilson of Texas. According to Skidmore, they were casualties from his old unit and Wilfong’s, buddies killed by the same mortar round.

“What the hell do Joe and Bob have to do with this?”

“They were window dressing,” I said.

“Window what?”

I thanked Skidmore for his time. As I hung up, he was demanding his share plus interest.

---10---

I drove home and told the story to Ella, including the threats made by Tip Fasano. We talked about shipping the kids off to my relatives in Indiana, just to be safe, and decided to sleep on it. Not that I got much sleep. I wasn’t kept awake by visions of dancing sugarplums, either.

When I reported for duty the next morning, I found that I’d been wasting my worry. There’d been what a film critic might call a deus ex machina plot development. Our troubles were over and the case with them.

“Lange wired us early this morning from Mexico City,” Paddy explained to me in the reception area, where he was actually helping Peggy decorate our replacement tree. “He found Wilfong dead in his hotel room last night. Suicide. He’d shot himself in that dome of his with the Browning Nineteen-ten he showed us.

“Lange did some checking around. Seems Wilfong was scheduled to meet with representatives of the national film studio. That was the big coup Dolly Palmer told us about. Wilfong had talked them into letting him front for them on a distribution deal. Or he thought he had. They must have done a little research on our Wally. The studio men didn’t show for the meeting and wouldn’t take his calls, which, according to the hotel operator, got pretty frantic toward the end. Guess that was the last straw as far as Wilfong was concerned. I feel bad now about the suicide crack I made when he first came by.”

If Paddy felt bad, he was putting on a brave front, which included tossing tinsel around like rice at a wedding.

I asked, “What about Fasano?”

“You don’t remember that little Christmas gift Tip gave us? We could hand over Wilfong alive or dead. I called to ask him where he wanted the body delivered. He settled for a copy of the death certificate. Say what you want about that crumb, but he’s a man of his word.

“All in all, it was the best present anyone ever gave me. Though I suppose the thank-you card should really go to Wally Wilfong.”

Paddy asked me to drive over to Columbia to pick up a check we were owed. I stopped on the way at Nackenhorst’s Jewelry and Loan Company. One of the things I’d chewed over during my sleepless night was the fate of the Browning Wilfong had brought back to Hollywood in 1945. He’d told Skidmore he’d hocked it, which seemed likely. Sometime around three A.M. I’d remembered what Paddy had said about all of us being creatures of habit. And I’d recalled something else: how Nackenhorst had tried to tell me—before I’d rushed him along—that he knew Wilfong. And maybe that they’d been doing business for years.

I found the pawnshop owner in his backroom lair. He was wearing his letter sweater again. I was glad to see it, since it entered into my calculations, such as they were.

I told the old man about Wilfong’s death. He wasn’t surprised, and I realized belatedly that I hadn’t been, either. Wilfong might have lied about everything else, but not about being at the end of his rope.

I asked Nackenhorst how long he’d known the late operator.

“Years and years,” he said. “He was always moving in and out of the chips. In and out, out and in. Like a lot of people in this town.”

He ran a professional eye over my suit. I didn’t take it personally.

“When he came to see you a couple of days ago,” I said, “it wasn’t to buy any old Browning. Not at first. He was looking for the one he’d hocked after the war.”

“Yes. I told him I’d sold it as soon as it had come out of pawn. Then he wanted to know who to. I told him I didn’t have the records anymore. The state doesn’t make me keep them that long. So then he bought another gun like the one he’d pawned.”

And Plan B had been launched, with the help of Nackenhorst’s bilingual nephew. The old man picked at a patched elbow and asked if I needed anything else.

“Just the name of the buyer of the original Browning,” I said.

“I told you—”

I poked him in the S for Stanford, but gently. “You strike me as the sort who has a hard time throwing away bottle caps, never mind ledgers. Dig out the one for ’forty-five, and I’ll be on my way.”

I thought that would be the start of a long negotiation, but I was wrong. Nackenhorst considered me while chewing a withered lip, weighing me in some mental balance as he had Wilfong and God knew how many others.

Then he said, “Somebody should tell her. Before she reads about it in the paper.”

He wrote something on the back of a business card—the very one I’d given him the day before—and passed it over.

“Guess you’ll do as well as anybody,” he said. “Better, maybe.”

---11---

It took me awhile to decipher Nackenhorst’s scrawl, even though part of the name he’d written was quite familiar. “Wilfong’s mother?” I asked.

“Wife,” the old man said. “Ex-wife. She and I had an arrangement years ago. I’d let her know whenever Wally hocked something, and she’d buy it back.”

“Okay. So you remember her name. But how do you happen to have her address down by heart after all these years?”

“I looked it up after Wilfong came by. I meant to call on her, to let her know he was looking for the gun. Mrs. Wilfong made me promise years ago not to tell Wally about our deal. That’s why I didn’t tell him who had the Browning. I thought about going to see her, but I never did. Christmas rush and all. It might have saved him if I had.”

I patted the pawn broker’s arm. “He was playing his own long shot by then,” I said.

The address Nackenhorst had given me belonged to a bungalow court apartment on Rosewood, and the party in question no longer lived there. But the custodian had saved a forwarding address, which he coughed up for a fin. His special holiday rate.

The new address took me out to Echo Park, to a prewar cottage on a street lined with them. Most were decorated for the big holiday, and a few were overdecorated. The one I was after erred on the tasteful side, each window holding a single electric candle. I considered that a very apt touch.

Mrs. Wilfong, first name Rosemary, was a little old for the Debbie Reynolds ponytail she had her hair in. She was as slim as Reynolds, though, and had the regulation upturned nose. Her eyes were a washed-out hazel and her full mouth was turned down at the ends like the grille on my Packard. The expression looked as welded-on as the Packard’s, too. Then suddenly it softened.

I figured my black eye had aroused her maternal instincts until she said, “Scott Elliott. From Paramount. We all thought you were going to be the next big thing.”

“We?”

“The girls in the Paramount front office. I worked there before the war. We were all pulling for you.”

“My draft board pulled harder,” I said. “May I come in?”

She hesitated. I thought she might be expecting company. She was dressed for some, in a chocolate-brown blouse whose upturned collar and half-sleeve cuffs were trimmed in sawtooth lines of pink, and a full pink skirt that had zigzag stripes of the blouse’s brown.

I added, “I won’t be long.”

“I don’t have long,” she said. “We’re having our Christmas luncheon today. I work for an insurance company now. Not as glamorous as Paramount, but it’s steady.”

Rosemary had a real tree, unflocked. It stood in a corner of her front room, beside some built-in shelves. On one of these rested a hand-tinted portrait of her ex-husband, circa 1942. Ella kept a similar one of me in the same uniform with the same dopey smile on my face.

Rosemary’s own smile had headed off to the party without her, maybe because I’d stared at the photo too long. “Are you here about Wally?” she asked.

“You met him at Paramount?”

“Yes. He was going to be running the place someday. That was the joke he always made. It didn’t work out.”

“Is that what broke you two up?”

“No,” she said. “I never wanted any of that. I’m not sure Wally really wanted it when we got married in nineteen forty-one. But after the war, when he’d convinced himself that he’d been cheated out of his life, he wanted it badly. By the end, it was all he wanted.”

Rosemary had been addressing her front windows. Now she turned to face me. “Wally’s in some kind of trouble, isn’t he?”

“Not anymore,” I said.

I told her the whole story then, complete with a flashback set on a crowded troop ship. She cried a little and asked to be excused for a minute. She came back with a shoe box and a story of her own.

“After the war, when Wally started to sell off his things, I tried to buy them back. I thought he’d want them someday when he was himself again. I got to know Mr. Nackenhorst, and he’d call me whenever Wally came into his shop.”

She handed me the box. It was packed tightly with pieces of Wilfong’s life. Among other fragments, I found a Bronze Star, a silver cigarette case, and a small automatic, a Browning .32.

As I checked the serial number against the four I’d written down in my official operative’s notebook, I was reminded of the moment in The Maltese Falcon when Sidney Greenstreet finally gets his hands on the black bird for which he’d given so much of his life. I felt a little of the same nervous anticipation, which was crazy. I hadn’t chased the little automatic around the world or even the country. Still, as Wilfong had said, all our lives had been turned upside down by those long-ago murders in Sarajevo. And maybe the popgun I held in my moist palm had been the lever.

Unfortunately, the scene played out exactly like the one in the Greenstreet movie. The serial number of Wilfong’s Browning didn’t match. He’d won a lead falcon in that crap game after all. I put the Browning back in the shoe box, or tried to.

“Take that with you,” Rosemary said.

“It’s not one of the Sarajevo guns,” I said. “Nobody will come after it.”

“I don’t care. It’s the gun that killed Wally. Not whatever he used down in Mexico.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me either,” Rosemary said. “I mean, I’ll never understand why Wally wouldn’t let any of that go. Why he had to stay in the one town in America where he was a failure when he could have gone anywhere else and been a success. Why the things he’d lost meant so much more to him than the things he still had.

“You said Patrick Skidmore told you that Wally got upset when he realized he’d pawned a gun that might be worth a few dollars more than he’d gotten for it. Did that make sense to you? It makes perfect sense to me. I watched Wally fret himself into a whole new man over his lost chances. It was a man I couldn’t live with, not even for the love of the man he’d once been. Take the gun, please.”

I pocketed the automatic, and Rosemary saw me to the door. When I was on the front step, she asked who she could call about bringing Wally home to be buried. I told her I’d set it up.

She said, “Of course you will,” and smiled again, adding, musingly, “Scott Elliott. From Paramount.”

---12---

Something about Rosemary Wilfong’s parting words kept prodding me in the gut as I drove away. I decided it was the mention of our old employer, hers and mine and Wilfong’s, Paramount. My showing up on her doorstep had revived the past for her, as Skidmore’s call had done for her ex. For him, it had been one more reminder of lost chances and, as it turned out, one reminder too many. But for Rosemary, closing the circle had been comforting somehow. I was a messenger from happier times, from a world of make-believe and Hollywood endings. I’d even promised to deliver one of those endings, in the form of a dead husband she could bury, perhaps with his Bronze Star pinned to his chest.

I found myself hoping that burying the past would work out for Rosemary. It was what her ex-husband should have done. Wilfong should have taken that phony Browning he’d bought from Nackenhorst and thrown it into Santa Monica Bay as a symbol of all the past chances he was putting behind him, once and for all.

On impulse, I decided to do it for Wilfong, using the Browning he’d left behind. Or maybe I was doing it for myself. My postwar life had turned out differently, thanks to Ella and Paddy, but I still had my share of regrets to bury in the form of a likely proxy.

I was a long way from the bay, but I happened just then to be passing a cross street that ended in midair. A new freeway overpass was being built, an everyday occurrence around greater Los Angeles. This effort was fairly far along. The foundation walls were already up on the far side of the cut. On the side where I parked my car, a form of plywood and scaffolding was awaiting its convoy of cement trucks, which would probably arrive right after the Christmas break.

Access to the site was controlled by a sawhorse painted yellow and a length of chain-link fencing that was a foot or two short of what they’d needed. I squeezed through the resulting gap and walked to the end of the pavement, where I could look down into the big mold.

Inside was a web of reinforcing steel, so tightly woven that Tiny Tim himself couldn’t have climbed to the bottom. I waited for a break in the traffic behind me before I pulled out the Browning. I didn’t say a prayer for Wilfong, though he probably could have used one. I knew Rosemary would take care of that. I just tossed the gun in, listened to it rattle its way down through the rebar, and headed back to work.

Copyright © 2010 Terence Faherty

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Fiction

WHERE THE SNOW LAY DINTED

By Sue Pike

Art by Laurie Harden

A past winner of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best short story, Sue Pike has also been active as an anthologist. She is one of the original members of the Ladies Killing Circle, which began as a critique group “to help each other grow as writers.” Nearly two decades later, they’ve become the longest running critique group in Canada, compiling, along the way, seven anthologies of crime stories. Ms. Pike is also the editor of the anthology Locked Up (see Deadlock Press). But we’re happy to see her put on her fiction-writer’s hat again.

The dog appeared out of nowhere, loping towards her on the snow-covered highway, grinning its silly grin, wagging its crooked tail. Moira stomped on the brakes and clung hard to the wheel as the car slewed into the oncoming lane and back again. Thank God there was no one else foolish enough to be out on the county road in this weather.

She took a shuddering breath and waited for her heart to stop racing. This was ridiculous. It was the second time she’d imagined that silly bitch peering up at her through the blizzard. The first was on Highway 401 as she headed east out of Toronto. Eighteen lanes of traffic and suddenly there was an imaginary dog in her lane. She’d swerved then too and it was only the quick reflexes of the man in the next lane that had saved them both.

The dog was dead, for heaven’s sake. Moira knew that. She’d arranged for her to die. She blinked and the dog disappeared into the blizzard.

Her windshield wipers struggled under the load of snow and her headlights stalled on the swirling vortex in front of her. Moira had been clinging as close as she dared to the rear bumper of a snowplow ever since she turned north at Kingston. There was a measure of safety in his wake, but the flashing lights were driving her crazy. She tried falling back a few yards, but the plow was throwing up such a wake of salt and snow that she pulled closer again. The lights were relentless, sparking first on one side of the truck and then the other with the regularity of a metronome. A band of yellow danced madly across the top of the cab. She tried squinting, rubbing her eyes, humming—anything to keep from falling under the hypnotic spell.

At least there was no sign of the dog. She’d always hated dogs. Her mother had filled her with stories of deadly, debilitating diseases. Rabies. Distemper. Heartworm. But Moira’s aversion was for something altogether different, something sly and malevolent in the way they looked at her.

“Dogs are not moral beings, Moira. There’s nothing evil about them.” Royce was the logical one in the family, the oh-so-reasonable barrister. In all the years they’d been married, she’d never gone to see him in court; wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

The sign for Jones Falls loomed into view and she leaned forward, searching through the squall for the turnoff to Franks Road. It couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards now. She counted them off and when she spotted the gnarled apple tree sagging under its weight of snow and frozen fruit she wrenched the wheel to the left and dove across the highway, praying nothing was coming from the other direction. Her tires spun as she hit a drift before settling into familiar ruts on the dirt road. The Land Rover crawled past fences and outbuildings until finally the farmhouse came into view. Warm light spilled from the parlor windows, illuminating the front part of the long driveway with steep banks on either side.

She could feel the tension draining from her shoulders. Merv had kept his word and come over to get the place ready for her arrival. God knew he wasn’t always reliable, but this time he hadn’t let her down. The handyman lived on the next concession north and did odd jobs around the farm for Moira and Royce while they were in Toronto. Did them or didn’t do them as the spirit moved him.

She turned into the drive and too late realized that any plowing Merv had done must have taken place hours ago. A foot or more had fallen since then. The car floundered. She pressed down on the accelerator, attempting to bull her way through, but the SUV spun its wheels and side-slipped into a drift, burying the driver’s door.

Moira turned the key and threw the car into reverse but only managed to spin the rear tires deeper into the bank. She turned off the motor and let her head fall back against the soft leather of the headrest, wondering what Royce would say about her driving up here today against his advice. Foolhardy, no doubt. A dog with a bone, Royce called her, and not in a kindly way, either. Every Christmas it was the same thing. Good old Moira would drive up to the farm a day or two ahead of everyone else so the family could swan in on Christmas Eve and experience a holiday straight out of Currier and Ives. And every year it took her every minute of that time to put up a tree, decorate it and the entire house, bake the goodies, and prepare the Christmas feast. Royce was always far too busy and the two boys and their wives were just about useless. The daughters-in-law would arrive with a tasteless casserole or a couple of bags of store-bought cookies and think they’d done their bit. The five of them would wolf down her exquisite meals and then race outside to snap on skis or snowshoes, leaving good old Moira to clean up the mess.

She sighed and checked her watch. It was barely four o’clock, but darkness was already settling in. She hoisted herself over the gearshift to the passenger seat before opening the door and stepping into the blizzard. Snow stung her face and sifted down her neck and over the tops of her boots. She pulled up her hood and sidestepped to the back of the Land Rover, holding on to the roof rack to keep from slipping. She grabbed a bag of groceries with one hand and the mesh sack containing the frozen turkey with the other before starting the long trudge to the house through snow halfway to her knees.

The dog appeared from nowhere. With every step she was there nudging Moira, tail wagging, tongue lolling to one side, as ugly and infuriating in death as she’d been in life. Moira tried to kick her aside, but lost her balance and staggered, falling hard on her back, the turkey dropping onto her knee. She cried out and felt tears freezing to her cheeks.

She rolled over, trying to ignore the stab of pain from her knee, and using the turkey to lean on, managed to get to her feet again. She picked up the spilled groceries and shoved them back in the sack and then, grasping everything to her chest, she limped toward the door. Finally, blessedly, she was inside the house. She let the groceries slip to the vestibule floor and before she could talk herself out of it, turned and set off again to get the next load. The phantom dog had vanished.

The phone rang just as she was fighting her way up the steps with the last of the Christmas presents. She kicked off her boots and ran to answer it.

“Hey, Ma. How was the trip?” Her eldest son, Colin, had never quite lost the accent he’d acquired from their four years in Melbourne.

“Horrible. I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of the car.” She shrugged out of her coat and padded into the kitchen to pour a measure of single malt into a glass. “When are you and Louisa coming up?”

“See. That’s why I’m calling. It’s looking like this snow is going to keep up for at least another day. Louisa’s worried about traveling in her condition.”

“What condition?” Moira reached into the freezer for a handful of ice cubes. “She isn’t sick, Colin. She’s pregnant. Everyone travels when they’re pregnant.”

“Don’t start.”

“Don’t start? You’re telling me you’re not coming for Christmas and you say don’t start?” Moira’s voice broke. “I’ve just made the most ghastly trip up here with all the gifts and food.” She took a swallow from her glass. “Not to mention an enormous turkey. What am I supposed to do with this turkey?”

“We tried to tell you we wouldn’t be coming, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“When? When did you tell me that?”

“Oh, Ma.” Colin sighed. “We’ve been saying it since Thanksgiving.”

“But it’s tradition. We always spend Christmas on the farm.”

“Yeah. Well, it’s time we started our own family traditions.” Colin sounded like the stubborn little boy he’d been so many years ago.

Moira clicked her tongue in annoyance. “This was your great-grandparents’ farm. We’ve been coming here since you were an infant. You can’t just stop because you’re too lazy to make the drive.”

“I’ve got to go. Merry Christmas, Ma.”

“Wait a minute.” She put her drink on the counter and held the receiver in both hands. “What about Justin and Emily? Have you spoken with them?”

“I think you better talk to them.”

“Answer me. Is your brother coming up?” Moira fought to keep her voice steady.

“I don’t think so.” His voice sounded distant, as though he’d already turned away from the phone.

“But why? Emily doesn’t have a ‘condition,’ as you call it.”

“But they are trying to get pregnant, Ma, you know that. And besides, I don’t think she’s ever gotten over losing Sadie.”

“Sadie? Sadie was a dog, for God’s sake. Not a child.”

“She was like a kid for Em.”

“Oh please. I’m sick of hearing about it. You have no idea how dreadful it was for me having that animal around. She went into heat. It was disgusting. The other dog owners complained. She dug holes all over the garden. My beautiful roses. All destroyed. And then she ran a—”

“She was just a dog, Ma,” Colin said, “doing what dogs do. I’ve got to go. You take care, okay?”

Moira slammed the phone onto the counter, drained her glass, and poured herself another. How dare he? How dare he throw Sadie in her face? She’d never asked to look after her. Royce was the one who’d capitulated. Couldn’t see the harm in taking care of the animal for six months so Justin and Emily could have a sabbatical in England. But had Royce looked after it as he’d promised? Of course not. It fell to good old Moira to do that chore as she did everything else. And then they’d all blamed her when the creature disappeared. She carried the phone and her drink into the living room and sank onto the sofa. A beeping sound told her a call had come in while she’d been on the phone with Colin. She keyed in the code to listen to the message.

“Moira?” Royce said. She could hear laughter and loud music and remembered that the firm’s Christmas party was tonight. It sounded warm and comforting and she felt a small stab of regret but quickly shook it off. She’d stopped going to the company party years ago. Why start missing it now? “There’s no way I can make it up there in this weather.” She had to press the receiver to her ear in order to hear his low voice over the din. “The forecast is for more snow and strong winds. They’ve already closed part of the 401.” She heard someone call his name. “Look. I’ve got to go. I’ll try to call again tomorrow.”

Moira rolled the cold glass back and forth against her forehead, trying to quell the angry thoughts, the thousand small resentments of a long and disappointing marriage. She took a long breath and dialed Justin’s number.

Emily answered in her little-girl voice. “Justin’s not here just now.”

“Well, dear, perhaps you could tell me what’s going on. Are you coming to the farm tomorrow or not?”

“Um. Hang on a minute.” The phone went quiet and Moira could hear footsteps on the hardwood floor. She waited and remembered the first time Justin had brought Emily over to meet them. The girl had reminded her of one of the strays he was forever bringing home for approval: starving dogs, feral cats, wild baby rabbits. And finally this pale little creature with a withered arm, some kind of reaction to a childhood vaccination, apparently. “A bird with a broken wing,” she remembered saying to Royce when Colin had left to take Emily home that evening. “He’s found the human stray of his dreams,” she’d said, but Royce had merely looked at her over the top of his glasses and she’d never said another word to him about the girl.

Emily came back on the line. “Um. I’d rather you call back when Justin’s here.”

But Moira had heard her son’s low, urgent voice in the background.

“It’s a simple question. Yes or no?”

“Okay then.” Emily’s voice quavered over the line. “No. No, we’re not coming. I’m supposed to be resting up for my in vitro fertiliza—”

Moira punched the disconnect button. She refused to hear of their unnatural efforts to get pregnant. The thought of it repelled her.

So that was that. No one was coming. She’d driven all this way, risking life and limb, and not one single member of her family could be bothered to come. How could they do this to her? Christmas at the farm was a tradition going back to Moira’s childhood, when she and her parents would spend most of Christmas Eve driving up here from Toronto, long before superhighways had cut the trip to a mere four hours. Moira remembered feeling carsick in the airless backseat of a Buick sedan, her parents chain-smoking and arguing about her father’s driving. She remembered her father’s long silences, her mother’s theatrical sighs.

She’d inherited the farm when her own boys were little. She and Royce had spent a fortune renovating it and making it the perfect weekend getaway. They dug a pond on the back forty and would come up every weekend when the boys were young. But for the last few years she’d driven up on her own, hiring Merv to fix things around the place and to keep the furnace going all winter so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. All this so the whole family could come up for Thanksgiving and Christmas. How long had it been since they’d all been here together? Was it last Christmas? The year before? She refused to think about it.

It was the damned dog’s fault. All of it. Sadie, an elderly Rhodesian Ridgeback. “Rhodesian swayback, more like,” she’d joked when she first saw the creature—only nobody had laughed. She was a rescue, Emily had said piously, as though she herself had fought her way across the grasslands of Zimbabwe to snatch the animal from the jaws of a lion.

How Moira hated the mangy bitch. Hated her wantonness, the disgusting teats swinging from her slack belly like overripe fruit, the look of disdain she’d given Moira the first time she went into heat and started flagging her tail at male dogs. She’d marched her off to the clinic to have her spayed, but the young veterinarian had refused. Too old, he’d said. It would endanger her health, he’d said. What about my health, Moira had wanted to wail. What about me?

She raised the leg of her trousers to examine her knee. It didn’t look good. A deep purple bruise was spreading over the swollen kneecap and an inch or two up the tightening skin on her thigh. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, fished some ice cubes from her glass, and knotted them into a wet parcel. She yelped as the scotch hit raw skin.

At that moment, the lights went out. She listened as the refrigerator stuttered a couple of times and fell silent, and within a few seconds she heard the furnace click off. She waited until her eyes adjusted to the dark before heaving herself to her feet and, clutching her empty glass, limped slowly into the kitchen and felt through the drawer for a flashlight. When she turned it on, a weak yellow beam was all it could offer. She ran her hand over the counter until she found the scotch bottle, spilling some on her fingers as she poured. There were logs in the fireplace and a jar of matches in the cupboard above the fridge, but her knee felt too wobbly to risk climbing onto the stool to reach it. She wandered back to the living room and when her foot found the sofa again, she sank into it.

She woke to a definite chill in the air and a pounding headache. She should eat something, but the groceries were still in bags on the vestibule floor and she couldn’t muster up enough energy to search through them in the dark. She felt around on the floor for the flashlight, but the batteries were finally dead. There was no dial tone on the portable phone in her lap but she remembered the landline on the bedside table. She felt her way into the bedroom and punched in Merv’s phone number.

“You know what time it is?” Merv’s voice was hoarse with sleep.

“How am I supposed to know what time it is? I can’t see an inch in front of my face.” Moira’s mouth was dry, her throat scratchy.

“Hydro trucks are out, but it’s going to be awhile before they get things going again.” Moira could hear him lighting a cigarette, taking a long drag. “What made you drive up in this storm?”

Moira ignored the question. “You’re going to have to come over and start the generator. I’m freezing to death.”

“It’s midnight, Mrs. Tappin. I’m not going out in this weather. I’ll try to get over on the snowmobile first thing in the morning.”

“Morning?” Moira cried. “I’ll be dead by morning.”

“I laid a nice fire for you. You won’t freeze.”

“I can’t reach the matches.” She was crying now, tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Bundle up and you’ll be fine until I get there. Just don’t turn on the taps. The pump’s off and—” A dog barked close to the phone.

“Wait a minute,” she interrupted him. “Whose dog is that?”

There was silence on the line.

“Merv? You don’t have a dog.” Her head was pounding.

“Well, sure we do, ma’am. Got ourselves a nice little puppy since you were here.” Merv’s voice had gone very quiet.

“That wasn’t a puppy. That’s Sadie, isn’t it? You didn’t shoot her after all.”

“Sure I did. She’s right where you told me to put her. In that big hole she’d dug by the barn.” Merv was speaking quickly now, anxious to get off the phone.

“I don’t believe you.”

“So long, Mrs. Tappin. See you in the morning.” Moira heard the click as he hung up the phone. She hit redial but the line went straight to voice mail.

“Coward!” she shouted into the darkness. “If I find ...”

She stumbled back to the parlor, shivering in her wool sweater and corduroy pants. She found her coat on the chair where she’d dropped it and limped into the vestibule to feel around for her boots among the fallen groceries.

The wind flattened her coat against her body as she stepped into the storm. Once off the steps she turned and moved slowly along the side of the house, supporting herself with her hands against the cold stone until she made her way to the back deck. She turned away from the house and into the gale. Fifty feet ahead of her the barn loomed black through the blizzard. She squinted and thought she could just make out a dimple in the snow where two months ago Sadie had dug her last enormous hole, throwing up stones and precious rosebushes in her wake, ignoring the screams and frantic pounding of Moira’s fists on the window. She knew she’d never get outside in time and had watched helplessly from behind the glass as the dog finally tired of her mad burrowing and lowered herself into the new lair.

Moira had reached for the phone and the deal was struck. Merv told her to tie the dog to a fence post when she left for the city and leave the check under the mat on the front verandah. Later, he would come over with his rifle. When the deed was done he would bury her in the hole she’d just dug. That was the way Moira wanted it. That way justice would be done.

But Merv had betrayed her, hadn’t he? Kept the dog and kept the money, too. The thought filled her with rage. She pushed her hands deep into her pockets and, leaning into the wind, set out, wincing from the pain in her knee and the sting of icy pellets on her face. Each footstep seemed to sink deeper than the one before. Her right boot stuck and she pulled her foot free and continued on in her sock. She tripped over a snow-covered boulder but kept going, crawling now and flailing snow out of her path with numb, bare hands. Somewhere along the way she lost the other boot and her mitts. No matter. She was nearly there.

She slid into the depression Sadie had made. There was an explosion of pain from her swollen knee as it hit a rock. She cried out and floundered, trying to scramble up the other side, but the pain was excruciating. She turned back and saw that the lamps were back on in the parlor, spreading their warm light across the snow beneath the windows. She smiled and rested her head against the side of the cavity, letting the snow cover her like a huge eiderdown. She wondered if the dog would come.

Copyright © 2010 Sue Pike

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Fiction

SNOWMAN STEW

By James Powell

James Powell’s stories are always full of interesting references. In this one, his allusion to the silent movie version of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables comes from Montgomery’s diaries, which were published a few years ago. “It stayed with me,” he says, “because the Regent, the movie theater where she saw it, was one of my boyhood haunts.” Mr. Powell is the recipient of many honors for his stories, including a nomina-tion for the 2010 Arthur Ellis Award for his story “Clowntown Pajamas.”

Mattie Claussin arrived at Toronto’s Union Station in late October, 1944, a plump, middle-aged woman in a stout overcoat with a striped fiberboard suitcase in each hand. The four pinch-faced little boys crowded around her wore imitation leather helmets with fur-lined earflaps buckled under their chins. All five looked like they’d come from a colder place.

With much to be done, she quickly found an office on Queen Street East near Sherbourne, a third-floor front over a notions and sundries shop. In this down-at-the-heels part of town many storefronts stood empty. One or two had windows draped in black with gypsy women sitting at the door inviting people in to have their fortunes told. Any color came from the metal streetcars on Queen and the poster-sized photographs of men with upper bodies, arms, and faces ravaged by venereal diseases placed in vacant shop windows by Saint Michael’s Hospital, which had a clinic treating such disorders. Well, the public expected shabby for people in her line of work.

Mattie’s office was up two narrow flights of stairs—“I wish you people lived in pleasanter climes,” the telephone installer had remarked—and down a dusty corridor to a door whose opaque glass would soon read “Claussin Private Investigations.”

As part of Mattie’s divorce settlement the North Pole had given her the annual naughty-or-nice contract, the job of separating the world’s good little boys and girls from the bad. Contrary to popular legend, these naughty-or-nicing elves did not wear uniforms with lug epaulettes so one could stand on the other’s shoulders to peer through keyholes. In fact, they dressed in children’s wear with headgear to hide their pointed ears. Nor were there enough of them to do the whole world. Much of the work was farmed out to private detectives and national police agencies like Scotland Yard and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

So Mattie and her loyal elf assistants, Nutkin, Hopkin, Timkin, and Bodkin, who’d followed her into exile, busied themselves arranging the files sent on ahead and working the phones with subcontractors all around the world.

It was seasonal work, of course. Afterwards Mattie’d have to find clients to support the detective agency. But she planned on keeping her elves in children’s clothes. “Stick close behind the guy you’re tailing,” she instructed them. “If he looks back over his shoulder, chances are he won’t look down, and if he does, he’ll see a kid.” For the places where children weren’t allowed she taught the elves the trench-coat-for-two trick. A large one like Timkin, who was nicknamed Tiny because he was big for an elf, would carry a wee one like Bodkin on his shoulders and they’d share a trench coat, Bodkin wearing a fedora ingeniously designed to hide his ear points.

The elves slept in the spare office filing cabinets and used the washroom down the hall. Fortunately, the odor of stale elf which the office quickly developed resembled dried lavender.

Mattie found herself a rooming house around the corner on Moss Park Crescent facing a bleak little park. She shared a gas stove in the second-floor hallway next to a window on which an orange crate had been nailed to serve as a common icebox in winter.

Walking home late that first night, Mattie saw a policeman on horseback beneath a streetlight on Sherbourne just above Queen. He wore a greatcoat against the weather and a tall hat of gray Persian lamb in place of the bobby helmet worn by Toronto’s constables on foot patrol. Sitting at the curb across from him, as if they were his flock and he their shepherd, were a dozen men who’d missed closing time or were too drunk to be admitted to the Salvation Army hostel up the street, the Sally Ann, as it was called. They sat quietly, arms or head or all three between their legs.

The first heavy snow came in early November, casting a blanket of startling white over the general drabness. Leaving for work that morning, Mattie discovered two freshly made snowmen in the park. These carrot-nosed, many-buttoned personages wore top hats and bright wool scarves and their twiggy arms held old hockey sticks. She knew her elves would want to see them. The North Pole’s songs and stories borrowed heavily from the “Snowmanslandia” saga, which recounted the history and terrible extinction of the original snowmen.

Clever Snowmansland had made its coinage out of ice. So no one hoarded money that would only disappear in the spring thaw. Instead, snowmen bought things or started factories to churn out goods for themselves and for export. As they prospered, they built the sub-tundra railroad to carry their wares down to Fort Churchill (whose name came from the ice cathedral they erected there) and beyond. But then cold Phrygia, Snowmansland’s northern neighbor, invaded, defeating the snowman army and driving the country’s inhabitants southward to below the tree line, never to been seen again.

The elves were very eager to come back with Mattie and took pictures to send home. They enjoyed seeing the snowmen so much she didn’t have the heart to tell them that coming out the next morning she’d found nothing but two naked stumps of snow in the park.

They were very busy at the office now. The naughty-or-nice reports were due in by the first Friday in December, so the North Pole’s packaging and labeling department could do their work. This information was a deeply guarded secret. Children must never know that after that date they could be bad and Santa would be none the wiser.

Busy or not, elves always took Sundays off. But Toronto was a hard place to find things to do on a Sunday. The city’s blue laws closed down all movie houses and beverage rooms, as beer taverns were called. Sometimes Mattie took them to the Royal Ontario Museum, which the law judged more educational than recreational.

But mostly they all spent Sunday afternoons in the office listening to Hopkin, the scholar elf among them, reading out loud from books like Mysterious Phrygia: Dark Tales From a Darker Land. Phrygia was ruled by the House of Fröst, descendants of Vikings who’d convinced its simple people that kings and queens were the up-to-date way of running a country. The elves hissed when Hopkin came to the part where Phrygia’s King Jack XII invaded Snowmansland. Mattie hissed along with them, too, but for her own reasons. Phrygia’s current ruler, Queen Alicia, had stolen her husband.

And the elves cheered loudly at King Jack’s terrible demise. An amateur alchemist, he was working one night in his palace laboratory, adding a pinch of this and a pinch of that to the pot, hoping to find the legendary universal solvent, that which could dissolve everything. Suddenly the bottom dropped out of the pot. Its contents spread in a circle on the floor, which also dissolved. King Jack and his accidental discovery fell into the basement. (It never occurred to him that if he ever found what he was looking for, he wouldn’t have anything to keep it in.) From there king and solvent worked their way through the earth’s crust to the magma beneath and hundreds of years later emerged on the other side of the world, causing the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883, which shot them both off into outer space. It was only after this event that astronomers observed the galactic phenomena called black holes.

One evening in the first week in December, a snowy Inspector Wilfred Chin of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came to Mattie’s office with the final naughty-or-nice figures for his country. Afterward, Chin, a Canadian of Chinese extraction, stayed on to chat. Smiling, he told her his relatives in China were thinking of moving to Canada, which his parents had described to them as a land of opportunity where you could buy a silver sailboat for a dime. Mattie smiled back. She knew the joke. The Canadian ten-cent piece had an image of the famous Maritime schooner The Bluenose on its back. She also knew Chin had lingered hoping she’d reveal whether Canadian boys and girls were nicer than American boys and girls this year. But Mattie’d promised a Mr. Hoover at the F.B.I. she’d tell the American figures to no one. He, in turn, had promised an improvement in next year’s numbers. Only the French seemed to relish their many naughty boys and girls. (“Oolala,” as Nutkin would say, having been naughty-or-nice liaison with the French Sûreté before the war.)

After Chin left and the elves had bedded down, Mattie switched off the office lights and went to the window on Queen to watch the snow fall, noticing for the first time the little movie house, the Regent, catty-corner across the street. Mattie’s North Pole work had included finding children’s books suitable for her husband to leave under the tree. The Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame had been one of her favorites and she’d started a correspondence with the author, who was living in Toronto at the time. In one of her letters Montgomery wrote that she’d gone to the Regent in 1925 to see the silent movie version of that book. The neighborhood must have been more respectable then.

As it happened, 1925 was the year Mattie’d gotten a job with Al Claussin, a San Francisco private eye, as his doll-face, their term for receptionist. She’d fallen for him like a ton of bricks her first day on the job when he came into the office and skimmed his hat across the room onto the hat rack without even looking to see if he’d made a ringer, because he always did.

Claussin proposed five years later, the night he won the big poker pot at the Roscoe and Fedora Club, the private-eye social club everybody called The Gat and the Hat. “‘Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,’ Doll-Face,” Claussin recited. Poetry, his secret vice, wasn’t a private-eye kind of thing. Once, losing to a pair of red aces, he’d shouted, “Out, out damned spots!” A chilly silence fell over the card table. Private eyes may shun poetry, but they knew it when they heard it. After that, Claussin spent so much time in fistfights with his peers to prove his manhood and recovering—Mattie kept beefsteaks in the office icebox—that business suffered. By the time he won the big pot, he was ready for another line of work.

Among that night’s losers were his friends Sam Trowel and Miles Bowman, who’d naughty-or-niced the whole state of California that year, no small contract indeed. But Kris Kringle was dragging his feet paying up. As a favor, Claussin took the bill for what they were owed instead of their IOU. What better honeymoon than a collection trip to the North Pole, combining business with pleasure.

But the newlyweds found Kringle in a very bad way. Under Saint Nicholas, his predecessor, Christmas presents had been of a devotional nature—prayer books, edifying tracts, rosary beads. Back then, there were very few good little boys and girls. Kringle urged the elves to draw more children to goodness with pleasanter rewards. He suggested they build a toy works, financing it by the sale of kriskringlite. This rare ore, which Kringle, an amateur geologist, had discovered beneath the North Pole, was the principal ingredient in Christmas tinsel. And so the elves did. But kriskringlite prices tanked with the stock market crash of 1929. In hard times, people saved their tinsel, picking it off the tree to reuse next year.

Kringle, fresh from a failed attempt to float a loan from the gnomes of Zurich, was depressed and well in need of Al as a drinking buddy. For her part, Mattie used her doll-face skills to bring efficiency to the whole North Pole operation. The Claussins’ honeymoon stretched into several years. But by 1933, all Kringle could leave in good little boys’ and girls’ stockings were licorice whips gussied up with a bright bow. He came home with the disappointed cries of good little children everywhere ringing in his ears. Stepping down from the sleigh, he staggered and fell into Claussin’s arms, dead of a broken heart.

The Elf Council of Elders asked Al to take Kringle’s place. “Doll-Face,” he said, “working with kids, that’s the way to change the world. Like Billy Wordsworth wrote, ‘The Child is father of the Man.’” Mattie knew how much he wanted the job and urged him to take it.

For starters, the elves suggested Al shorten his name from Claussin to Claus. Keeping the “sin” in, they said, might give naughty boys and girls the wrong idea. But Al Claus didn’t trip that lightly on the elf in tongue so they asked what Al stood for. Albert? Alfred? Alexander, he told them. They brightened. Sandy Claus was good. But why not make it Santa in honor of his predecessor but one?

Al Claussin, a.k.a. Santa Claus, worked very hard at his new role, gaining weight, growing a beard which he whitened with bluing in the wash water, and practicing his ho-ho-hos in the bath.

Meanwhile, militaristic regimes with duces, caudillos, and fuehrers were springing up everywhere and with them the price of kriskringlite, which was also a key ingredient in the manufacture of insignias of rank and medals.

A few days after their North Pole work was wrapped up, footsteps in the hall and a knock on the door announced Claussin Private Investigations’ first client. The elves shooting craps on the carpet quickly replaced the dice and money with tiddlywinks, and Nutkin, already dressed in his blond doll-face wig and blouse, climbed up onto a stack of books on the receptionist’s chair. “Come in,” he piped sweetly.

An elderly couple entered, he wearing a brown overcoat with a large herringbone in it and carrying a homburg, she in gray fur with a matching hat.

Nutkin read their business card aloud. “Mr. and Mrs. Westerly of the Snowmen’s Aid Society.”

Mattie rose to greet them as they passed through the railing into the office proper. Offering them seats next to her desk, she nodded at the tiddlywinkers on the carpet and explained, “I’m babysitting several of my operatives’ children. Now how can I help you?”

“Perhaps you are unaware of our society’s work,” said Westerly. “We—that is to say Mrs. Westerly and her knitting circle—provide Toronto’s snowmen with scarves to brighten their winter months.”

“How nice,” said Mattie.

Westerly bowed. “But for two years now some person or persons unknown have been savagely murdering the snowmen hereabouts.”

Mattie saw her elves heads pop up. “Murdered how?” she asked, though she suspected she knew.

“Heads, carrot noses, coal buttons, twig arms, the whole lot gone,” said Westerly, adding indignantly, “Oh, the authorities refuse to take us seriously. But these murders strike at our nation’s soul. Wasn’t it Voltaire who called Canada ‘A few acres of snowmen. Quelques arpents des bonhommes de neige’?”

“Mais oui,” insisted Mrs. Westerly.

“Oolala,” piped Nutkin.

“The Snowmen’s Aid Society wishes to employ your agency to catch the perpetrators of these heinous murders,” said Westerly. “We can’t do it ourselves. Moss Park and hereabouts isn’t a place to send our ladies at the best of times. Certainly not at night.”

On her way home yesterday Mattie had passed a snowdrifter, as the winter homeless were called, huddled in a doorway. He wore a bright knitted scarf. “Nice,” she said and asked him where he got it. “From Father Christmas,” he replied. A likely story. Were the snowdrifters stealing the snowmen’s scarves to keep themselves warm? But why take all the other stuff?

The Westerlys gave Mattie an advance for her services and took their leave. In the doorway, Mrs. Westerly turned, inhaled deeply, and said, “Oh, it smells so nice in here. Lavender, isn’t it?”

“Close enough,” said Mattie.

Later that afternoon, Claussin Private Investigations did a reconnoiter of the Moss Park area, going up Sherbourne, where the old shoveled snow stood in gray three-foot heaps along the curb, ramparts the elves enjoyed running atop and staring passersby right in the eye. Then Mattie led them left onto Shuter Street, whose yardless houses crowded the sidewalk, and passed the small Moss Park community center guarded by a bronze lion neck-deep in snow like a lost creature from an arctic carousel.

Mattie thought nearby Pembroke Street would be prime snowman country. She’d visited there looking for a place to stay. Well set back from the street, many of these substantial homes had been cut up into rooms for rent. In every other yard stood a snow torso, a cenotaph to a dead snowman. Were they going to rebuild their handiwork? Mattie asked some children coming home from school, and got the precocious reply, “We don’t do five-o’clock shadow snow.” Mattie understood. A day or two of coal-fired furnaces and chimneys stubbled things fast.

They continued up to Gerrard, then back over to Sherbourne and down to the office. That was the area they’d focus on when the next substantial snow came. They couldn’t stop the vandals, but maybe they could follow them back to where they were taking their snowman loot and find out why.

The following Monday the radio called for snow overnight. But it came early. By the time school let out, a good six inches of fresh snow had accumulated atop the old. An hour later, Mattie trudged around the area through a heavy fall of snow. Freshly made snowmen, hockey sticks at the ready, greeted her in many yards. She understood that in better parts of town the snowmen held brooms, associating the neighborhood with the more fashionable sport of curling. But here it was hockey sticks.

On one Sunday museum visit she and the elves saw an exhibit on the history of ice hockey. They learned that in his later years Hans Brinker, he of the silver skates, found a strange object in a Dutch curio shop. It looked like a boomerang with one wing many times longer than the other. The shop owner called it an ishuki stick, a primitive American Indian war club made obsolete by the invention of the tomahawk. Brinker bought the thing and pondered on it long and hard before coming up with a game he named ice hockey after that same stick.

Back at the office, Mattie assigned the elves their places and sent them out after nightfall. She’d make the circuit every hour to get their reports, bringing along a thermos of hot grog heated on the office hot plate to buoy their spirits.

By her first go-around, the stiffening wind was blowing the fresh surface snow ahead of it like spray on a stormy sea. The elves were cold, but they’d nothing to report. An hour later, a Sherbourne streetcar equipped with a snowplow had cleared the tracks so she took that easier path until she got parallel to Nutkin’s hiding place behind an old snowman torso. She trudged over and found the snow had drifted around the poor elf, leaving him in a deep hole. His jumping-jack effort to see above the snow and keep guard over the nearby snowmen had left him utterly exhausted. Mattie ordered him back to the office to warm up and wait for her. Then she continued her rounds.

Over on Gerrard, Mattie heard Timkin’s snore and found him sleeping on a porch glider. She suspected he’d brought his own pocket flask of rum against the cold. She prodded him awake, ordered him home, too, and watched him stagger out of sight. His snowmen were still intact and so were those at the top of Pembroke, where Bodkin had escaped the snow by clambering up the metal footholds on a telephone pole. Visibility was getting very bad. Mattie was ready to call off the whole operation. But after a good shot of grog in him Bodkin vowed to soldier on. Farther down Pembroke, Hopkin, sheltered in the lower branches of a fir tree in a yard with a pair of snowmen in it, vowed through chattering teeth that he’d stay, too.

As she set out the next time, trudge-weary Mattie met Bodkin on the stairs. He’d thrown in the towel and struggled back through snow up to his armpits. Head down against the windy whiteness, Mattie cut over to Shuter as the fastest way to get to Hopkin and bring him in. When she reached Pembroke she could make out ravaged snowmen on both sides of the street. Even Hopkin’s two had been looted. When she couldn’t find him in the tree she had a brief hope he’d followed the perpetrators. Then she made out a white bundle up on a higher branch and called his name.

Mattie struggled back to the office with Hopkin under her arm. When he’d thawed out, the elf told her and the others how, by the light of the street lamp near his tree, he’d seen a sledded handcart pull up beneath him, heaped with snowman heads tied up in bright wool scarves, high hats, carrot noses, twiggy arms, and hockey sticks. When snowman parts from his two in the yard were added to the cart it moved on through snow too deep for Hopkin to follow. But the cart pusher left large square footprints behind him.

For Mattie, square footprints could only mean one thing. Her rival, Queen Alicia, was in Toronto. But where and why?

She walked to the office the next morning amid a racket of snow shovels. The shopkeepers had hired snowdrifters to clear their sidewalks. One wore a bright wool scarf. “Father Christmas?” she asked. He nodded, then nodded again across the street at a thin, elderly man in shabby clerical black, including spats against cold feet, talking with two homeless men under the Regent movie house’s modest marquee. “Father Christmas,” he said.

The man in black walked away and Mattie kept pace with him on the other side of the street. When he went into a luncheonette, she crossed over and slipped onto a stool next to him. “They say you’re Father Christmas.”

He turned a long gray face to look at her just as the counterman arrived. “The usual?” he asked the priest in a Belfast accent. When Father Christmas nodded, the man asked, “And what about the Missus?”

“Tea,” said Mattie sharply. “And separate checks.”

As the smirking counterman moved away, the priest said, “My name is Christie. I’m a Catholic priest. I give the snowdrifters scarves around this time of year. Not much of a leap for them to call me Father Christmas.”

“Where do you get the scarves?”

“Who wants to know?”

“The Snowmen’s Aid Society has hired me to find out who’s murdering snowmen around here. Maybe it’s for their scarves.” The counterman returned with their orders. When he was gone, Father Christmas said, “I grew up around here. Tough part of town. But we don’t murder snowmen or rob them, either.”

“Like I said, where do you get your scarves?”

“Finish up and I’ll show you,” he promised, adding, “Talk about knitwear, in the seminary I was considered a comer. My mother even knitted me purple socks. For when I made bishop, she said. So did our archbishop’s mother. His Grace was a classmate of mine. Unfortunately I fell in with the tippling-clergy faction. Still, His Grace has always kept an eye out for me. The snowdrifters are my parishioners. ‘It takes one to know one,’ said His Grace, but in the kindest way.”

Back out in the weather, they headed west on Queen. “The Sally Ann folks do good work,” said Father Christmas. “But they’ve their rules. A lot of people fall through the cracks, and that’s right into my parish. I keep an eye out for places for my people to stay come winter. Thought I’d found one last year over on Mutual where we’re going now, an empty old factory in the shadow of the gasometer with all its second-floor windows knocked out. Thought maybe we could board them up with inside doors and put in a woodstove. But moving in closer, I saw these big guys working at something inside, couldn’t see what. So I crossed the place off my list. But around back I found a garbage can stuffed with wool scarves and I helped myself to them to hand around. And I came back later just in case. More scarves. This year, too.”

They reached the factory and Father Christmas led Mattie past several handcarts with sled runners to a side door with a window in it. He saw something move behind the glass and cupped his hands around his eyes to peer inside. Then he jumped back with a shout. “It’s a damn rink rat,” he said, and taking Mattie’s elbow, he tried to lead her back out to the street. “Never saw one face-to-face before. Like staring at a giant fish head frozen in a block of ice.”

But Mattie stood fast. “They won’t come out. They don’t like daylight. Not much of it around where they come from.”

“You know the rink rats?”

“By another name,” she admitted and went over and rattled the doorknob.

When her husband told her, “Sorry, Doll-Face, I want a divorce. I can’t do this Santa gig without Queen Alicia, the woman I love, at my side,” Mattie’d been too hurt and angry to protest. But elf divorce procedures grind slowly. Refusing to stay under the North Pole dome with the other woman, she moved outside to Slagview Cottage, across from the dump for defective candy canes and near the chilly encampment of Alicia’s Phrygian entourage. Every day for the next year she went back inside to manage the kriskringlite mine, run the Toy Works, and, in the fall, to direct naughty-or-nice operations.

Much of her free cottage time she spent feeding the arctic or vested hummingbirds (Archilocus cardiganii) who survived the winters there by feeding on warm polar bear earwax. The bears were frequent visitors to the candy-cane slag. Santa’s Own Whippet Lancers had the job of killing the creatures if they became too bothersome. An officer in this fine old elf regiment always presented any dead polar bear earwax to Mattie, who’d put it out in a warm bowl for the hummingbirds, watching through the frosty window as the tweedy little things fed. Alicia’s bodyguard, the Bucket Brigadiers, square-jawed, hefty men who seemed built out of blocks of ice, were avid hummingbird watchers, too, and soon came over with their binoculars.

Some called Phrygia twice blessed. Its detractors called it “Left-Over Land.” The inhabitants lived in utter darkness. But every unpredictable now and then, as if a mighty door had swung open, the entire kingdom was bathed in light and then, abruptly, fell back into darkness.

Sometimes the great door that brought the sudden light would stand open too long, as if by an indecisive opener, and the ice-people and their dwellings would begin a slow terrible melt. Then the daring Bucket Brigadiers risked their lives rushing around in red wagons with bells ringing to throw buckets of ice on the sweating people and homes. The House of Fröst had enlisted these brave Brigadiers as special bodyguards to the royal family.

Brigadiers spoke as if through mouthfuls of ice cubes. When Mattie, deep in furs, came out to join them she soon learned their language, communicating with them by maneuvering her denture around in her mouth. They told her the vested hummingbird was their clan totem and spoke, in their innocent, block-headed way, of a golden age when the little things serviced men’s ears as well as polar bears, just as the razor-billed bunion bird (Pedes rasa) tended sleeping humans’ feet and the tweezer-tweezer bird (Nostriles etuia etuia) wove its elaborate hanging nests made from human nose hair.

The factory door swung open. Mattie’s old friend Captain Berg of the Bucket Brigadiers greeted her with a click of his square heels and ushered her into a large dim workshop illuminated by a small fire burning under an iron cauldron in a distant corner. Berg’s men were working with long-handled pitchforks to feed the fire from a pile of coal, hockey sticks, twigs, and high hats, and the cauldron from bins of carrots, snowman heads, and what looked like hat sweatbands. A heap of discarded scarves lay nearby.

When Mattie asked what they were doing, Berg explained how centuries ago King Jack XII, unhappy that the ice people never aged while he, their king, did and would one day die, had turned to alchemy to right this injustice. One night as Jack worked in his laboratory, Snowbanks Avalanche, Snowmansland’s ambassador, entered by way of a secret entrance the king had provided so plenipotentiaries could approach him privately should the need arise. Jack groaned inwardly. Prosperity had made the snowmen overbearing and haughty. And Avalanche was the worst of all, swaggering around, high-hatting everyone and looking down his carrot nose at everything and being generally much too big for his buttons. When Avalanche started in on another of his pompous insistences that Phrygia repay its substantial debt to Snowmanlandia, Jack lost his temper, grabbed his Viking battleaxe from the wall, and severed the snowman’s head from his body.

Now not even a king can murder an ambassador. To destroy the evidence of his crime, Jack put the head, carrot nose and all, into a pot which he brought to a simmer over a coal fire made from Avalanche’s haughty eyes, superior smile, and pompous buttons, intending to eat up the last trace of his crime. He was about to add the ambassador’s high hat to the fire when he remembered how famous warriors often made drinking mugs from their enemies’ skulls. So when the stew was cooked, Jack poured it into the high hat and ate it down. It was a tasty dish and the salt from the hat’s sweatband cut the carrot sweetness. Afterwards, watching the hat burn up in the fire, Jack felt a sudden lightness throughout his body as though a whole decade of years had been lifted from his shoulders. He ran to the mirror and found the deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes had faded almost completely away. King Jack had accidentally found his sought-after potion.

The next day, Phrygia invaded Snowmansland. Hard-packed though it was, gallant General Plowright Winterbottom’s snowman infantry was no match for the ice people’s army. Afterwards Jack looted the battlefield for snowman stew ingredients, which he cooked and put up in kegs so he could prolong his own life and those of his descendants.

When Berg was done Mattie gestured at the bins. “But the snowmen are extinct,” she insisted. “These are only replicas.”

Berg shook his head and told Mattie how, lame and exhausted, the fleeing snowmen reached a large Indian encampment below the tree line where they were received warmly. The Indians even gave them old ishuki sticks to hobble around on.

But when spring came, the snowmen vanished, leaving behind as gifts for their hosts their carrot noses, bits of coal, and high hats—which the Indians particularly treasured. The Indians told stories around the campfire about the Palefaces, as they called the snowmen. Every winter after that, the Indian children built new snowmen who also vanished in the spring. Centuries later, when Commodore Jacques Cartier arrived with French settlers, the Indians thought the Palefaces had returned. They were disappointed when the new arrivals were still there when spring came. By then their children had taught the French children how to build snowmen, too.

Berg ended his story with this simple Phrygian moral. “Nothing’s extinct that lives on in the hearts of children.”

God bless him, thought Mattie with a shake of her head. Then she asked, “If you’re here, then so is Queen Alicia, right?”

Berg’s oath of loyalty to his queen prevented any reply, not even for old time’s sake. So Mattie said goodbye and left the building, not knowing what to do next.

Father Christmas was waiting for her outside. “If you know the rink rats, maybe you know the Dancing Pig lady,” he wondered out loud. When she cocked an eye he explained, “We patrons of the Walsingham Hotel call it the Dancing Pig.” He told her how a couple of nights ago he’d changed out of his clerical garb and gone to the Dancing Pig for a couple of beers. On his way in, he’d noticed these two large types dressed in loose white dusters standing outside in the shadows. Later he asked Sean, a waiter there, who they were. Sean called them rink rats and said they’d first appeared last December when a certain lady took a room there, and she’d just checked in again.

Queen Alicia of Phrygia, a tall, blue-eyed Scandinavian, sported high cheekbones and a large bump of conviviality. Boredom, in fact, first brought her to the North Pole. Her kingdom’s single fireplace was in the palace throne room, where she always had to sit alone, for none of her retainers dared approach so close to the fire. So she taught herself how to run a movie projector and had movies shipped in from Hollywood. When the war interrupted her supply, in need of amusement, she decided to pay a visit to her North Pole neighbors.

Alicia was an immediate hit with Santa and the Elf Council of Elders. They all loved to drink and dance and tell stories. Alicia had wonderful ones to tell about her gloomy kingdom and its gloomier inhabitants. As Alicia’s visits multiplied, Santa and the elder elves grew more captivated, hanging on her every word and following about after her. Was it the woman’s perfume, which Mattie thought smelled of parsnip? The carousing continued long after Mattie went to bed. But the next day the old elves seemed sprier than ever, while Santa’s ho-ho-ho veered more and more toward a teenaged hee-hee-hee.

Anyway, last October the divorce decree finally came through. Invited to stay for the marriage festivities, Mattie chose to leave with her small cadre of loyal elves.

Remembering how Alicia’s cocktail hour came early, Mattie set out that afternoon for the Walsingham’s ladies-and-escorts beverage room. Separate men’s and ladies-and-escorts rooms was a custom Mattie and Al encountered on a stopover in Toronto before their honeymoon visit to the North Pole. (The sub-tundra railroad’s Flying Snowman Express arrived and departed from a platform in a forgotten corner of the basement of Union Station.) The city had decided there’d be much less trouble if men drank beer in one room and ladies and their escorts, if they had them, in another.

Mattie found her rival alone at a corner table reading a Hollywood fan magazine and sat down across from her without ceremony. Alicia looked up in surprise. “How’d you find me?”

“A present from Father Christmas.”

Alicia gave a careless shrug. “No matter. I meant to look you up anyway. Maybe we can do some business. But first I’ll bring you up to date. The Elf Council of Elders, a gaga bunch themselves if I ever saw one, has declared Santa incompetent by reason of acute adolescence.”

“Snowman stew?”

“Clever girl,” said Alicia. “Men and elves love the stuff. Get them started and they’ll do anything to keep it coming. So now I control the Toy Works, the kriskringlite, everything. But I’ve got places to go and I travel light.”

“So?”

“So how’d you like almost everything back and Santa in the bargain?”

“What’s the ‘almost’?”

“We’ll get to that,” said Alicia. “Listen, when I was a teenager I used to do inky-dinky-spider up and under my daddy the King’s chin and he’d crow like a baby and drool and drool. The Fountain of Youth overflowing, that’s drool for you. When he got so he couldn’t handle the antidote anymore I gave him the injections myself right in his royal butt. Then one day I decided it was queen time for Alicia. So I let Daddy drool himself to death.” She paused. “By the by, Santa loves inky-dinky-spider.”

“Antidote?” asked Mattie.

“Thought that’d get your attention,” smiled Alicia. “Yes, King Jack found the antidote for inky-dinky-spider bite in one of his musty old alchemy books. It’s a compound to ward off acute childishness combining the bitterest of the bitter, the taste of window pane on a child’s tongue when he isn’t allowed to go outside and play, the smell of dusty curtains, the sight and sound of other children playing outside. It comes as a dry powder. I brought along more than enough.” She slid a small envelope across the table. “All you have to do is dilute it with children’s tears, which are never in short supply.”

Alicia smiled. “As for snowman stew, I never used the stuff myself except for a dab behind my ears to drive the boys crazy. I call it Eau de Ponce de León.”

“Oolala,” came a voice. Mattie looked over at a nearby table where a short man and woman wearing trench coats were sitting. She recognized Nutkin’s pint of face staring from beneath his bushel of doll-face wig and Bodkin hiding behind an underbrush of fake beard. Mattie’d told her elves she was coming here to confront Alicia. They’d wanted to go with her. But she’d said no. They’d followed her anyway.

As she watched, a waiter came by with a tray of draft beer and replaced Nutkin’s empty glass with a full one. A hand reached out from Nutkin’s midsection and drew the glass in. A moment later an empty glass reappeared and Tiny Timkin’s voice belched, “God bless us every one.” Christmas had officially arrived.

Alicia continued, “I used up the dregs of King Jack’s snowman stew on my first few visits to the North Pole, spiking everybody’s drinks. But I knew where to get more. Daddy’d been sickly as a prince. One year the royal doctor advised a milder climate for the winter. So he was sent south to Toronto where his health did, in fact, improve. Come March, Daddy set out for the train station and his journey back to Phrygia. As he waited at a curb for the traffic light to change he was surprised to hear the gurgle of snowmen’s voices in the water running beneath the dark ice scabs in the gutter. Their happy goodbyes and hopeful see-you-next-years told Daddy where he’d find more snowman stew whenever he needed it.”

Mattie blinked. Had Captain Berg hit it on the button?

“So for the last two winters,” said Alicia, “I’ve been sending a flat car of Brigadiers down to harvest Toronto’s snowmen, following down later to make sure the brew was right. You’ve got to be careful not to over-sweatband it. Anyway, now I’ve enough to handle the people where I’m going.”

“And where’s that?”

“I want to see action, be in the thick of things,” said Alicia.

“The war, you want to enlist?”

Alicia tapped her magazine. “Hollywood. What’s Joan Crawford got that I haven’t got? So here’s the ‘almost’ in our deal. I keep fifty-one percent of the kriskringlite mine. She who controls the tinsel, controls Tinseltown. You get Santa and everything else.”

Desperate to get to the North Pole and bring Al back from the brink of drool, Mattie quickly took Alicia up on her offer. She rose quickly and said goodbye.

“No goodbyes,” insisted Alicia. “I’ll soon be appearing in a movie theater near you.”

That same evening Mattie settled up her Toronto business by convincing the Westerlys to employ Father Christmas’s snowdrifters as winter bodyguards for the snowmen at a living wage and with knitted scarves and mittens thrown in.

The next morning, the inky-dinky-spider bite antidote secure in one of her suitcases, she and the elves boarded the Flying Snowman Express. Alicia had said it might take six months of injections to return Al to normal. With each shot of the antidote in his butt Mattie intended to recite, “Grow old with me. The best is yet to be.” Fortunately she could leave the ugly little butts of the Elf Council of Elders to the tender mercies of Nutkin, Hopkin, Bodkin, and Timkin.

Copyright © 2010 by James Powell

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Fiction

MR. BO

By Liza Cody

Bloody Brits Press, which is dedicated to bringing more writers from the U.K. into print in the U.S., will be releasing their edition of Liza Cody’s Gimme More just days before this issue goes on sale. Liza Cody is not a terribly prolific writer, and that may explain why she hasn’t become better known yet in the U.S., but she is one of the best. Her eleven novels have all been published to rave reviews, and her short stories, as readers of EQMM know, are equally good.

My son Nathan doesn’t believe in God, Allah, Buddha, Kali, the Great Spider Mother, or the Baby Jesus. But he be-lieves passionately in Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, and, come December, Santa Claus. How he works this out—bearing in mind that they all have superpowers—I don’t know. Maybe he thinks the second lot wears hotter costumes. Or drives cooler vehicles, or brings better presents. Can I second-guess my nine-year-old? Not a snowball’s hope in Hades.

Nathan is as much a mystery to me as his father was, and as my father was before that, and who knows where they both are now? But if there’s one thing I can congratulate myself on, it’s that I didn’t saddle my son with a stepfather. No strange man’s going to teach my boy to “dance for Daddy.” Not while there’s a warm breath left in my body.

I was eleven and my sister Skye was nine when Mum brought Bobby Barnes home for the first time. He didn’t look like a lame-headed loser, so we turned the telly down and said hello.

“Call me Bo,” he said, flashing a snowy smile. “All my friends do.”

So my dumb little sister said, “Hi, Mr. Bo,” and blushed because he was tall and brown-eyed just like the hero in her comic book.

Mum laughed high and girly, and I went to bed with a nosebleed—which was usually what happened when Mum laughed like that and smeared her lipstick.

Mr. Bo moved in and Mum was happy because we were “a family.” How can you be family with a total stranger? I always wanted to ask her, but I didn’t dare. She had a vicious right hand if she thought you were cheeking her.

Maybe we would be a family even now if it wasn’t for him. Maybe Nathan would have a grandma and an aunt if Mr. Bo hadn’t got his feet under the table and his bonce on the pillow.

I think about it now and then. After all, some times of year are special for families, and Nathan should have grandparents, an aunt, and a father.

This year I was thinking about it because sorting out the tree lights is traditionally a father’s job; as is finding the fuse box when the whole house is tripped out by a kink in the wire.

I was doing exactly that, by candlelight, because Nathan had broken the torch, when the doorbell rang.

Standing in the doorway was a beautiful woman in a stylish winter coat with fur trimmings. I didn’t have time for more than a quick glance at her face because she came inside and said, “What’s up? Can’t pay the electricity bill? Just like Mum.”

“I am not like my mother.” I was furious.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “It was always way too easy to press your buttons.” And I realised that the strange woman with the American accent was Skye.

“What are you doing here?” I said, stunned.

“Hi, and it’s great to see you, too,” she said. “Who’s the rabbit?”

I turned. Nathan was behind me, shadowy, with the broken torch in his hand.

“He’s not a rabbit,” I said, offended. Rabbit was Mr. Bo’s name for a mark. We were all rabbits to him one way or another.

“Who’s she?” Nathan said. I’d taught him not to tell his name, address, or phone number to strangers.

“I’m Skye.”

“A Scottish Island?” He sounded interested. “Or the place where clouds sit?”

“Smart and cute.”

“I’m not cute,” he said, sniffing loudly. “I’m a boy.”

“She’s your aunt,” I told him, “my sister.”

“I don’t want an aunt,” he said, staring at her flickering, candlelit face. “But an uncle might be nice.” Did I mention that all his heroes are male? Even when it’s a woman who solves all his problems, from homework to football training to simple plumbing and now, the electricity. I used to think it was because he missed a father, but it’s because you can’t interest a boy in girls until his feet get tangled in the weeds of sex.

I fixed the electricity and all the lights came on except, of course, for the tree ones, which lay in a nest on the floor with the bulbs no more responsive than duck eggs. Nathan looked at me as though I’d betrayed his very life.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I promise.”

“You promised tonight.”

“Let’s have a little drink,” Skye said, “to celebrate the return of the prodigal sister.”

“We don’t drink,” Nathan said priggishly. He’s wrong. I just don’t drink in front of him. My own childhood was diseased and deceived by Mum’s drinking and the decisions she made when drunk.

“There’s a bottle of white in the fridge,” I said, because Skye was staring at my secondhand furniture and looking depressed. At least it’s mine, and no repo man’s going to burst in and take it away. She probably found me plain and worn too, but I can’t help that.

She had a couple of drinks. I watched very carefully, but she showed no signs of becoming loose and giggly. So I said, “It’s late. Stay the night.” She was my sister, after all, even though I didn’t know her. But she took one look at the spare bed in the box room and said, “Thanks, I’ll call a cab.”

When the cab came, Nathan followed us to the front door and said goodbye of his own free will. Skye was always the charming one. She didn’t attempt to kiss him, because if there was one thing she’d learnt well it was what guys like and what they don’t like. She said, “I’ll come back tomorrow and bring you a gift. What do you want?”

Now that’s a question Nathan isn’t used to in this house, but he hardly stopped to think. He said, “Football boots. The red and white Nike ones, with a special spanner thing you can use to adjust your own studs.”

“Nathan,” I warned. The subject of football boots was not new. I could never quite afford the ones he wanted.

But Skye grinned and said, “See you tomorrow, kid,” and she was gone in a whirl of fur trimmings.

Mr. Bo used to buy our shoes. Well, not buy exactly. This is how he did it: We’d go to a shoe shop and I’d ask for shoes a size and a half too small. Mr. Bo would flirt with the assistant. When the shoes arrived I’d try to stuff my feet in and Mr. Bo would say, “Who do you think you are? One of the Ugly Sisters?” This would make the assistant laugh as she went off to find the proper size. While she was gone, Skye put on the shoes that were too small for me and slipped out of the shop. Then I’d make a fuss—the shoes rubbed my heels, my friends had prettier ones, and Mr. Bo would have to apologise charmingly and take me away, leaving a litter of boxes and shoes on the floor. It worked the other way round when I needed shoes, except that he never made the Ugly Sister crack about Skye. I hated him for that because although he said it was a joke I knew what he really thought.

The only time he paid hard cash was when he bought tap shoes for Skye. He’d begun to teach us dance steps in the kitchen. “Shuffle,” he’d yell above the music, “kick ball change, turn ... come on, girls, dance for Daddy.”

The next day Nathan didn’t want to go out. His friend came to the door wanting a kick-around but ended up playing on the computer instead. I didn’t say anything, but I knew he was waiting for Skye.

At the end of the day, there was nothing I could do but make his favourite, shepherd’s pie, and read Harry Potter to him in bed. I could see his heart wasn’t in it

I wasn’t surprised—Skye had been taught unreliability by experts—but I was angry. She’d had a chance to show him that a woman could be as good as Batman and she’d blown it. All he had left was me and I was not the stuff of heroes. What had I done in the past nine years except to keep him warm, fed, healthy, and honest? Also, I made him do his homework, which I think he found unforgivable. I thought I was giving him solid gold, because in the end, doing my homework and passing exams were the tools I used to dig myself out of a very deep hole. But how can that compare to the magic conferred upon a boy by ownership of coveted football boots? At his age, he thought the right boots would transform his life and give him talents beyond belief. Magic boots for Nathan; dancing shoes for Skye.

Mr. Bo tried to teach us both to do the splits. Maybe, at eleven or twelve, I was already too stiff. Or maybe, deep down inside, I felt there was something creepy about doing the splits in the snow-white knickers and little short skirts that he insisted we wear to dance for him. Either way, I never managed to learn. But Skye did. She stretched like a spring and bounced like a ball. She wore ribbons in her crazy hair. Of course she got the dancing shoes.

One evening he took us to the bar where Mum worked, put some money in the jukebox, and Skye showed off what she’d learnt. Mum was so impressed she put out a jam jar for tips and it was soon full to overflowing.

Now that I have a child of my own I can’t help wondering what on earth she was thinking. Maybe she looked at the tip jar and saw a wide-screen TV or a weekend away at a posh hotel with handsome Bo Barnes. Or was she just high on the free drinks? Once, she said to me, “Wanna know somethin’, kid? If you’re a girl, all you ever got to sell is your youth. Make sure you get a better price for it than I did. Wish someone tol’ me that before I gave it all away.” Of course, she wasn’t sober when she said that, but I don’t think sobriety had much to do with it; it was her best advice. No wonder I did my homework.

Skye showed up when Nathan had stopped waiting for her. “C’mon, kid,” she said, “we’re going shopping.”

“You’re smoking.” He was shocked.

“So shoot me,” she said. “You have dirty hair.”

“So shoot me.” He grinned his big crooked smile.

“Needs an orthodontist,” she said. “I should take him back to L.A.”

“Over my dead body,” I said. “Nathan, get in the shower. Skye, coffee in the kitchen. Now.”

She wrinkled her still-pretty nose at my coffee. I said, “What’re you up to? What’s the scam?”

“Can’t an auntie take her nephew shopping?” She widened her innocent eyes at me. “’Tis the season and all that malarkey.”

“We haven’t seen each other in over fifteen years.”

“So I missed you.”

“No, you didn’t. How did you find me?”

“Were you hiding?” she asked. “How do you know what I missed? You’re my big sister, or have you forgotten?”

“I wasn’t the one who swanned off to the States.”

“No, you were the one who was jealous.”

“I tried to protect you.”

“From what? Attention, pretty clothes, guys with nice cars?”

I said nothing because I didn’t know where to begin.

She stuck her elbows on the table and leant forward with her chin jutting. “It all began with Bobby Barnes, didn’t it? You couldn’t stand me being his little star.”

“He was thirty. You were nine.”

“A girl doesn’t stay nine forever.”

“He ended up in prison and we were sent to a home. He robbed us of our childhood, Skye.”

“Some childhood.” She snorted. “Stuck in that squalid little apartment—with no TV or anything.”

“And how did Mr. Bo change that? Did he stop Mum drinking? Did he go out to work so that she could look after us? Okay, he bought us a flat-screen telly, but it got repossessed like everything else.”

“He gave us pretty clothes and shoes ...”

“He stole them. He taught us how to steal ...”

“But it was fun,” Skye cried. “He taught us how to dance, too. You’re forgetting the good stuff.”

“He taught you to dance. He taught me how to be a lookout for a pickpocket and a thief. You weren’t a dancer, Skye; you were there to distract the rabbits.”

“Why’re you two quarrelling?” Nathan said from the doorway.

“We’re sisters,” Skye said. “If you’re good, I’ll tell you how a pirate came to rescue us from an evil wizard’s castle and how your mom didn’t want to go and nearly blew it for me.”

“No, you won’t,” I said.

“Is it true?” He was as trusting as a puppy.

“Do you really believe in wicked wizards and good pirates?” I asked.

“Next you’ll be telling him there’s no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy.”

“I know there’s no Tooth Fairy,” he said. “I caught Mum putting a pound under my pillow and she pretended she’d just found it there, but she’s a rubbish liar.”

“She is, isn’t she? Bet you took the cash anyway. Now let’s go shopping.”

“I’m coming, too,” I said, because I didn’t know my own sister and I was afraid she might have inherited Mr. Bo’s definition of buying shoes.

“You’ll spoil it,” my loyal son complained. “The only thing she ever takes me shopping for is a school uniform.”

“What a bitch ... sorry, witch.” Skye dragged us both out of the house with no conscience at all.

A big black car, just a couple of feet short of being a limo, was waiting outside—plus a driver with a leather coat and no discernable neck.

Oddly, Mr. Bo was not sent down for anything serious like contributing to the delinquency of minors or his sick relationship with one of them. No, when he was caught it was for stealing booze from the back of the bar where Mum worked. Of course she was done for theft, too, thus ensuring that we had no irresponsible adults in our lives, and forcing us to be taken into Care.

By the time I was fifteen and Skye was thirteen, we’d been living in Care for two and a half years. Foster parents weren’t keen on me because I didn’t want to split up from Skye, and foster mothers didn’t like Skye at all because she was precocious in so many ways.

Crockerdown House, known for obvious reasons as Crack House by the locals, was a girls’ care home, and judging by the number of non-visits from social workers, doctors, or advisors, and the frequency of real visits by the cops, it should’ve been called a No Care home. No one checked to see if we went to school or if we came back. Self-harm and eating disorders went unnoticed. Drugs were commonplace. There was a sixty-percent pregnancy rate.

I was scared rigid and spent as much time as I could at school. Teachers thought I was keen—most unusual in that part of town—and they cherished me. After a while I became keen.

Skye was the opposite.

It was only when a strange man turned up at the school gates in a car with Skye sitting smug as you please on the backseat that I realised she’d stayed in touch with Mr. Bo while he was inside.

I knew that she and some other, older, girls regularly went to the West End to boost gear from shops and I lived with my heart in my mouth, fearing she’d be caught. She was never caught and she always had plenty of money. What I hadn’t been told was that she supplied an old friend of Mr. Bo’s with stolen goods which he sold in the market. This friend kept Mr. Bo in tobacco and all the other consumables that could be passed between friends on visiting day.

“He’s coming out today,” she told me excitedly. “We’re going to meet him.”

I looked at her in her tight jeans and the trashy silk top which would’ve cost a fortune if she’d actually bought it. I burst into tears.

“We’re not going back to Crack House,” she said. “It’s over.”

“What about school?” I wept. “What about my exams?” I was taking nine subjects and my teachers said I had a good chance in all of them.

“We never have to go to bogging school again. We’re free. He’s taking us abroad.”

“What about Mum?” Mum was still inside. She wasn’t just a thief; she was a thief who drank, and she was a bad mother who drank and thieved. Three strikes against her. Only one against Mr. Bo. Classic!

“Oh, she’ll join us later,” Skye said vaguely, breathing mist onto the car window and drawing a heart.

“Is this your car?” Nathan asked the driver, impressed.

“Huh?”

“It’s mine,” Skye said, “for now.”

“Will you have to give it back?” Nathan was sadly familiar with the concept of giving a favoured book or computer game back to the library.

“Where are we going?” The last time she and I were in a car together was a disaster.

“Crystal City. I heard it was the newest.”

“It’s the best,” Nathan breathed. “We don’t go there.”

“Why not?”

I said, “It’s too expensive and too far away.”

“I know, I know,” Skye said, “and you got a mortgage to pay and your tuition fees at the Open University. Studying to be a psychotherapist, aren’t you? And both your lives gonna stay on hold till you qualify and hang out your shingle. When’s that gonna be—two thousand and fifty?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“You said ‘hell.’”

“You’d be surprised what I know. Some of us use technology for more than looking up difficult words.”

“You’ve been spying on us.”

“Cool,” Nathan said. “I want to be a spy when I grow up.”

“You can be a spy now,” Skye said. “Don’t look back, just use this mirror and if you see a car following us, tell Wayne. Okay?” She handed him what looked like a solid gold compact.

“What sort of car?”

“Black Jeep,” no-neck, leather-clad Wayne said. “Licence plate begins Sierra, Charlie, Delta.”

“That’s SCD to you, kid.”

“Clever,” I said. “Have you got kids of your own?”

“Do I look like a mother?”

“No need to sound insulted. It’s not all bad.”

“Coulda fooled me. Do you do all your shopping from Salvation Army counters?”

“Bollocks,” I muttered, but not quietly enough.

“You said ‘b...”

“Okay, Nathan,” I said. “Haven’t you got an important job to do?”

“Of course I looked you up,” Skye said. “How the hell else would I find you? You’re my big sister—why wouldn’t I want to? I didn’t know about the kid when I started. And I must say I’m surprised you felt ready to start breeding, given the mom we had. But I guess you were always kinda idealistic—always trying to right wrongs.”

“No one’s ready,” I said.

“Hah! Got caught, did ya?”

That was an incident in my life that I didn’t want to share with Skye while Nathan’s ears were out on stalks.

Crystal City is five enormous interlocking domes. It’s a triumph of consumer architecture and weather-proofing. You could spend your entire life—and savings—in there without drawing one breath of fresh air.

Wayne dropped us at the main entrance and Nathan, who can smell sports shoes from a distance of three and a half miles, led the way.

Walking with Skye through a shopping centre was strange and familiar. We both looked around in the same way as we used to. Searching for good opportunities, I suppose—only nowadays all I was looking for were half-price sales.

Skye bought football boots, flashy beyond Nathan’s wildest dreams. They had ten differently coloured inserts for designer stripes, extra studs, and a tool kit. She threw in an England strip for nine-year-olds and paid for everything with a credit card in the name of Skye Rosetti. She caught me looking and said, “I had to marry a Rosetti for the Green Card. But I liked the name so I kept it.”

I called on all my nerve and asked, “What happened to Mr. Bo?”

“Oh look, shoes,” she cried and flung herself through the door of the fanciest, most minimal shoe shop I’d ever seen.

“Do we have to?” Nathan whined. He wanted to change into his England strip.

“Ungrateful little toad,” Skye said cheerfully. “Here, kid, take your mom shopping.” She handed him a roll of twenty-pound notes.

“Wow!” he said.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely, no.”

“Fuck off,” she said. “Have a good time. Meet me at the food court on the ground floor in an hour. Don’t be late. And kid? I want to see at least one strictly-for-fun gift for your mom. Don’t try to scoop it all—I know you guys.”

“She said ‘fu...”

“Nathan,” I warned as we walked away, “grownups say stuff. And don’t think we’re going to spend all that money. You don’t want your aunt to think you’re greedy, do you?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

All kids are wanty—they can’t help it. But I love the way he’s shocked by swearing. I melt at his piety. He wouldn’t believe it if I told him what I was like at his age. And I was the goody-goody one who crawled away from a smashed-up childhood via the schoolyard.

An hour later he had the hoodie jacket he’d wanted for months. He also bought a notebook and the complete range of metallic coloured gel pens. I chose the Best of Blondie CD for myself because for some reason I can’t listen to Blondie without wanting to dance. There was still a thick wedge of money to give back to Skye.

She was ten minutes late, and when she turned up she was followed by Wayne, who was carrying enough bags to fill my spare room from floor to ceiling.

We sat in the octagon-shaped food court, which had a carp pool and a fountain at its centre. Wayne took most of the bags back to the car.

Skye said, “C’mon over here, kid, I got something else for you.”

“Skye.” I held my hand up. “Stop. We have to talk about this. You’re putting me in a very awkward position.”

“I knew you’d spoil it.” Nathan’s mutinous lower lip began to shake.

Skye said, “Look at it this way, Sis—how many birthdays have I missed? How many ...?”

“Nine,” Nathan interrupted, “and nine plus nine Christmases make, um, eighteen.”

“See how smart he is? He’s a good kid who goes to school and learns his times tables, and I got a lot of auntying to catch up with. Right, kid?”

“Right.”

“But I understand your mom’s point of view. She doesn’t want me to spoil you. Your mom likes to do things the hard way, see. And I don’t want to spoil you either, ’cos I think you’re perfect the way you are. So here’s what we’ll do. Do you have a cell phone?”

“We call them mobiles over here,” Nathan said bossily. “Mum’s got one but it’s old and she says we can’t afford two.”

“I can’t afford two sets of bills,” I said. “Skye, you would not be doing me a favour if you’re thinking of giving him one.” I put the roll of twenties we hadn’t spent into her hand. “You’ve been very kind, but rich relations can be too expensive.”

She stared at the money in astonishment. Then she closed her hand over it and tucked it safely into her handbag. “Okay, okay. But I’ve got two phones and they have lots of cool applications. Want to play a game, kid?”

I watched them poring intently over the phones, two curly heads close enough to touch. Nathan’s love of technology has been obvious since he first tried to feed his cheese sandwich into the VCR slot, so he didn’t take long to master Skye’s phone. I kept my mouth shut, but I was proud of him.

Suddenly I was content. I was drinking good coffee and eating a fresh Danish with my clever son and my unfamiliar sister. I was not counting pennies and rationing time. Worry went on holiday.

“Can I go, Mum?” Nathan was tugging my sleeve, his eyes alive with fun.

“What? Where?”

“Just down the end there.” Skye pointed to the far end of the mall. “He’ll have my phone and be in touch at all times. You don’t need to worry.”

“I’m Nathan Bond, secret agent.”

“I don’t know,” I began, but exactly then Skye turned her face away from Nathan, towards me, and I saw with dismay that she’d begun to cry. So I let him go.

“Gimme a minute.” She blotted her eyes on her fur-trimmed cuff. “That’s a terrific kid you got there. I guess you musta done something right.”

“What happened to you, Skye?”

“Mr. Bo died a year ago. He was shot by some country cops in a convenience-store raid. Stupid bastard. I wasn’t with him—hadn’t been for years—but we kept in touch. That’s when I started to look for you. I thought if he was dead, you could forgive me.”

“Oh, Skye.” I took her hand. Just then I heard my son’s voice say, “Nathan to HQ—I’m in position. Can you hear me?”

She picked up her phone. “Loud and clear. Commence transmission. You remember how to do that?” She held the phone away from her ear and even in the crowded food court I heard the end of Nathan’s indignant squawk. She gave me a watery smile but her voice was steady.

He must have started sending pictures because she forgot about me and stared intently at her little screen. Then she said, “HQ to Nathan—see that tall man in black? He’s got a black-and-red scarf on. Yes. That’s the evil Dr. Proctor.”

“Skye?” I put my hand on her arm but she shook me off, got up, and moved a couple of steps away.

I got up too and heard her say, “... to the men’s room. Wayne will be there. He’ll give you the goods. Can you handle that?”

“No, he can’t handle that,” I shouted, grabbing for the phone. “What’re you doing, Skye?”

She twisted out of my grasp. “Let go, stupid, or you’ll wreck everything. You’ll put your kid in trouble.”

I took off, sprinting down the mall, dodging families, crowds, balloons, and Santas, cracking my shins on push chairs, bikes, and brand-new tricycles.

I arrived, out of breath and nearly sobbing with anxiety, at one of the exits. There was no Nathan, no tall man in black, no Wayne. I saw a security uniform and rushed at him. “Have you seen my son? He’s wearing the England strip, red and white boots, and a black hoodie. He’s nine. His name’s Nathan.” I was jumping up and down. “I think he might’ve gone into the Gents with a tall man in black and a black-and-red scarf.” Terror gripped the centre of my being. “I don’t know where the Gents is.”

“Kids do wander off this time of year,” the security man said. “Me, I think it’s the excitement and the greed. I shouldn’t worry. I’ll go look for him in the toilets, shall I? You stay here in case he comes back.”

But I couldn’t wait.

He said tiredly, “Do you know how many kids there are in England strips this season? Wait here; you aren’t allowed in the men’s facility.”

I couldn’t wait there, either. I pushed in behind him, calling my son’s name. There were several boys of various ages—several men too—but no Nathan, no Wayne, and no man in black.

“Don’t worry,” the security man said, although he was himself beginning to look concerned. “I’ll call this in. Natty ...”

“Nathan.”

“We’ll find your boy in no time. Wait here and ...”

But I was off and running back to the food court to find Skye. She had the other phone. She knew where Nathan was.

Except, of course, there was no sign of her.

I found our table. No one had cleared it. Under my seat was the carrier bag containing Nathan’s old shoes, his ordinary clothes, his gel pens, and my CD. I lifted his sweater to my nose as if I were a bloodhound who could track him by scent alone.

My heart was thudding like heavy metal in my throat. I couldn’t swallow. Sweat dripped off my frozen face.

The most fundamental rule in all the world is to keep your child safe—to protect him from predators. I’d failed. My family history of abuse and neglect was showing itself in my nature, too. Whatever made me think I could make a better job of family life than my mother? Neglect was bred into me like brown eyes and mad hair. There could be no salvation for Nathan or me.

I was fifteen when I lost Skye.

“We’ll start again in the Land of Opportunity,” said ex-jailbird Mr. Bo. “But we’ll go via the Caribbean, where I know a guy who can delete a prison record.” Skye sat on his lap, cuddled, with her head tucked under his chin.

“But my exams,” I said. “Skye, I’m going to pass in nine subjects. Then I can get a good job and look after us.”

“You do that.” She barely glanced at me. “I’ll stay with Mr. Bo.”

“Looks like it’s just you and me, kid,” he said to her, without even a show of regret.

I was forced to borrow money from Skye for the bus fare back to Crack House. I had a nosebleed on the way and I thought, she’ll come back—she won’t go without me. But I never saw her again.

I sat in a stuffy little office amongst that morning’s lost property and shivered. They brought me sweet tea in a paper cup.

Skye had lent Nathan her sexy phone and I’d watched him excitedly walk away with it. It looked so innocent.

She was my sister, but I knew nothing about her except that childhood had so damaged her that she experienced the control and abuse of an older man as an adventure, a love story. Why would she see sending my lovely boy into a public lavatory with a strange man as anything other than expedient? She’d been trained to think that using a child for gain was not only normal but smart.

I was no heroine—I couldn’t find him or save him. I was just a desperate mother who could only sit in a stuffy room, drinking tea and beating herself up. My nose started to bleed.

“Hi, Mum—did someone hit you?” Nathan stood in the doorway staring at me curiously.

“Car park C, level five,” the security man said triumphantly. “I told you we’d find him. Although what he was doing in the bowels of the earth I’ll never know.”

“Get off, ” Nathan said crossly. “You’re dripping blood on my England strip.”

“Nathan—what happened? Where have you been?”

“Don’t screech,” he said. “Remember the black Jeep—Sierra, Charlie, Delta? Well, I found it.”

“Safe and sound,” the security man said. “No harm done, eh? Sign here.”

Numbly I signed for Nathan as if he were a missing parcel and we went out into the cold windy weather to find a bus to take us home. There would be no limo this time, but Nathan didn’t seem to expect it.

On the bus, in the privacy of the backseat, Nathan said, “That was awesome, Mum. It was like being inside of Xbox. I was, like, the operative except I didn’t have a gun, but we made him pay for his crime anyway.”

“Who? What crime?”

“Dr. Proctor—he hurts boys and gives them bad injections that make them his slaves.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked, terrified all over again.

“I thought you knew,” he said, ignorant of terror. “Skye said you hated men who hurt children.”

“I do,” I began carefully. “But I didn’t know she was going to put you in danger.”

“There hardly wasn’t any,” said the nine-year-old superhero. “All I had to do was identify the bad doctor and then go up to him and say, ‘I’ve got what you want. Follow me.’ It was easy.”

I looked out of the window and used my bedtime voice so that he wouldn’t guess how close I was to hysteria. “Then what happened?”

“Then I gave him the hard drive and he gave me the money.”

“The what? Hard ...”

“The important bit from the inside of computers where all your secrets go. Didn’t you know, either? You’ve got to destroy it. It was the one big mistake the bad doctor made. He thought he’d erased all his secrets by deleting them. Then he sold his computer on eBay but he forgot that deleting secrets isn’t good enough if you’ve got enemies like me and Skye. She’s a genius with hard drives.”

“I’ll remember to destroy mine,” I said. “What happened next?”

“You haven’t got any secrets, Mum,” Nathan Bond said. “After that I gave the money to Skye and hid in the bookshop till she and Wayne went away. Then I followed them.”

“What bookshop?” When I ran after Nathan to the end of the mall there had been shops for clothes, cosmetics, shoes, and computer games. There had not been a bookshop. I explained this to him. He was thrilled.

“You didn’t see me. Nobody saw me,” he crowed. “I did what spies do—I went off in the wrong direction and then doubled back to make sure no one was following. You went to the wrong end of the mall.”

“Is that what Skye told you to do?”

“No,” he said, although his eyes said yes. He turned sulky so I shut up. I was ready to explode but I wanted to hear the full story first.

When the silence was too much for him he said enticingly, “I know about Sierra, Charlie, Delta.”

“What about it?” I sounded carefully bored.

“You know I was supposed to look for it but I never saw it? That must’ve been a test. You know how I know?”

“How do you know?”

“’Cos Skye knew where it was all along. She and Wayne went down to level five in the lift, and I ran down the stairs just like they do on telly. You know, Mum, they get it right on telly. It works.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Only sometimes.”

“Well anyway, there they were—her and Wayne—and they got into the Jeep and the other driver drove them away. I looked everywhere for the limo, but I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe it was part of the game—if I found it we could keep it. I wish we had a car.”

“We couldn’t keep someone else’s car.” I put my arm round him but he shrugged me off. He was becoming irritable and I could see he was tired. All the same I said, “Describe the man who drove the Jeep.”

I was shocked and horrified when he described Mr. Bo. But I wasn’t surprised.

Later that night, when Nathan had been deeply asleep for an hour, I crept into his room and laid his bulging scarlet fur-trimmed stocking at the end of the bed. Then I ran my hand gently under his mattress until I found the shiny new phone. Poor Nathan—he was unpractised in the art of deception, and when he talked about wanting to keep the limo, I saw, flickering at the back of his eyes, the notion that he’d better shut up about the limo or I might guess about the phone. I hoped it wasn’t stolen the way the limo and Jeep almost certainly were.

I rang the number Skye gave him. I didn’t really expect her to answer, but she did.

“Hi, kid,” she said. Her voice sounded affectionate.

“It’s not Nathan. Skye, how could you put him at risk? You’re his only living relative apart from me.”

“Did he have a good time? Did his little eyes sparkle? Yes or no?”

“If you wanted him to have fun, Skye, you could’ve taken him to the fun-fair. Don’t tell me this was about anything other than skinning a rabbit.”

“Well, as usual, you’ve missed the point. It was about making a stone bastard pay for what he’d done. Nathan was the perfect lure. He looked just like what the doctor ordered. And he’s smart.”

“If I see you anywhere near him again, I’ll call the cops on you—you and Mr. Bo. You’re right Nathan is smart. He followed you, too.” That shut her up—for a few seconds.

Then she said, “Tell me, Sis, what present did you buy yourself with my money?”

She’d probably looked in the bag when I went running after Nathan so there was no point in lying. I said, “A CD—The Best of Blondie. What’s so funny?”

She stopped laughing and said, “That was Mr. Bo’s favourite band. He taught us to dance to Blondie numbers.”

I was struck dumb. How could I have forgotten?

“Don’t worry about it, Sis,” Skye said cheerfully. “On evidence like that, if you never qualify, and you never get to hang out your shingle, you can comfort yourself by knowing you’d have made a lousy psychotherapist. Oh, and Happy Holidays.” She hung up.

Eventually I dried my eyes and went to the kitchen for a glass of wine. I sipped it slowly while I opened my books and turned on the computer. I will be a great psychotherapist—I can learn from the past.

Lastly I put my new CD on the hi-fi. It still made me want to dance. Mr. Bo can’t spoil everything I love.

Copyright © 2010 by Liza Cody

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Fiction

THE ADVENT REUNION

By Andrew Klavan

Art by Jason Eckhardt

This new story began life in 2009 as an online performance piece (a video) rather than as prose fiction. The author has rewritten it for the page and created a fine Christmas ghost story. Andrew Klavan is well known for his internationally bestselling crime novels, which include True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say A Word, starring Michael Douglas. He’s been nominated for the MWA’s Edgar Award five times and has won it twice.

---1. Ghost Hunter---

I’ve wanted to tell this story for a long time. It began when I was a young man, during my junior year at Harvard.

To come, as I had come, from a crumbling house on a sandy lane in a dying town just west of nowhere to the aged brick and history, high culture and customs of one of the most prestigious universities in the country was a daunting journey for so inexperienced a boy. I spent my first year holed up in my room, buried in my books, working on my writing. Only after a very unpleasant summer break at home did I return to school determined to make friends.

I soon fell in with an aspiring composer named Jonathan Wilson and, through Jonathan, I found myself part of a little clique of brilliant artsy types—brilliant in our own minds, anyway. Among this group was a girl named Amanda Zane. She was blond and willowy and had a dreamy, wistful quality about her. She wrote songs and played guitar and sang. Her voice was high and clear and sweet, with a sad, yearning tone that just grabbed me by the heart. I was crazy about her pretty much on sight and, for some reason, she seemed to like me as well. We became a couple within the clique. It was the first truly happy time in my life.

No wonder that, as the Christmas break approached, I began to dread the thought of going home again. And when Jonathan came up with an alternative, I was delighted. His parents had decided to spend the holidays in Hawaii. Their house in rural upstate New York was going to be empty. Jonathan invited our little gang to spend Christmas there with him. Five of us accepted the invitation, David, Lucy, Rosemary, Amanda, and I.

It was, it turned out, a perfect setting for Christmas. The house was enormous, stone and stately. It sat in a little valley with hills of forest on every side, everything white with snow as far as the eye could see. When we first arrived, we tried to behave with our usual pseudo-sophisticated pseudo-detachment but the spirit of the season very quickly overwhelmed us. Within an hour of tumbling through the front door, we were laughing and shouting like the excited children we were. We found decorations in the attic and spread them all about the house. We found sleds in the garage and raced each other down the slopes. We cut down a large pine tree at the edge of the forest, tied it up with stout ropes, and dragged it home over the snow. We hung ornaments on it and sang carols around the piano and basically had as much good, clean fun as it’s legal to have.

We were having so much fun, in fact, that I didn’t notice—none of us noticed—that Amanda had begun acting very strange. Shy and distracted at the best of times, she’d grown almost silent in our boisterous midst. More and more often, she withdrew from our festivities without excuse and went wandering on her own for hours.

Finally, one afternoon, when the others were planning a shopping excursion to the nearby mall, she asked me if I would remain behind. When we were alone together, she broke the news to me: She was pregnant.

She had actually managed to convince herself I might be happy to hear about the child. But how could I be? I had no money. I had worked like a slave, year after year, to win my place at school. I had ambitions—big ambitions—to become a writer, a novelist—not exactly a very secure profession, not something you can count on, not in the beginning, at least. I was in no position to take on the support of a wife and child.

I didn’t have to tell her any of this. Amanda took one look at the expression on my face and saw it all. The next moment, she was in hysterical tears, raging at me, completely irrational. I had never seen her like that before. She screamed that I was selfish. I was thoughtless. I was this and that and the other. And when I tried to reason with her, when I suggested there might be another, better time for us to have a child together, she lost control completely, took it in the worst way, practically accused me of being some kind of homicidal maniac.

Thankfully, the worst of it was over by the time Jonathan and the others returned from their outing. When they burst through the door, shouting and laughing, I was in the living room, sitting alone in an armchair by the fireplace, staring into the flames, torn between panic and despair.

“Where’s Amanda?” they all cried out at once. “We’re going to play games! We’re going to make cookies! We’re going to play Ghost Hunter!”

I hesitated—but I finally managed to smile and tell them Amanda had gone to bed early with a headache. I didn’t see the point of spoiling their good mood with the truth.

It was already evening, already dark. We all went into the kitchen and made popcorn and cookies, swilling wine and beer as we did. I forced myself to join in the fun with a show of enthusiasm. After an hour or so, we began our game of Ghost Hunter.

Ghost Hunter, for those who’ve never played it, is basically just hide-and-seek in the dark. One person is designated the Ghost Hunter, then you turn off all the lights and everyone else scatters and hides. The Hunter moves through the house with a flashlight and if he leaves the room in which you’re hiding without finding you, you’re allowed to jump out and scare him. Each person who comes out of hiding then joins the hunt for the others.

I didn’t want to sit out and ruin the game, but with everything that was weighing on my mind, I didn’t know how long I could keep up the pretense of high spirits. I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. I hid down in the basement behind the boiler. It was, I felt sure, literally the last place anyone would look.

It was pitch dark down there, absolutely black. I could bring my hand within inches of my eyes and still not see it. I sat on the floor just behind the boiler, staring, blind, feeling sorry for myself. More than half an hour went by. All the while, I could hear the screams and giggles of my friends upstairs.

Finally, I heard the basement door open. A flashlight beam shone on the cellar stairs. Jonathan was the Ghost Hunter. He’d already collected all the others. I could hear them murmuring to each other.

“He must be here. Where else could he be?”

Laughing nervously, they came thumping down the stairs behind the flashlight beam. When they reached the bottom, Jonathan swept the light across the pitch darkness. It went over me once, then, a second later, snapped back to pick out my face.

“There you are! I see you!” they shouted together.

Someone—Rosemary, I think—said, “I’ll get the lights.”

The basement lights came on. And the next thing I knew, Rosemary let out a high, ragged, terrible scream. I lifted my eyes, following her horrified gaze. Then I started screaming too.

There, just above my head, Amanda’s corpse dangled in the air, one end of a rope tied around a heating pipe in the ceiling, the other end pulled tight around her neck.

She had been there, right above me, the whole time I was sitting in the dark.

---2. She Haunts Us---

The aftermath of Amanda’s death was ugly, especially for me. The coroner had no trouble deciding she’d committed suicide and he also had no trouble figuring out why. I was forced to tell the police the whole story: the pregnancy and our awful argument. This got back to Jonathan and the others, of course. I won’t say they blamed me or anything, but they didn’t exactly forgive me, either. After that, we’d see each other around campus from time to time, and we were always pleasant enough with each other, but their underlying coldness toward me was unmistakable. To my great sorrow, the days of our true friendship were over.

When I graduated, I moved to New York City. I didn’t see any of them again for a long time.

Seven years went by, in fact. Some hungry times, a lot of hard work, then I started to make some progress. My first couple of books came out. I scored some movie sales. I hit some bestseller lists. Things began to go well.

But all the while, I was aware that, in some way, what happened with Amanda continued to cast a shadow over my life. I had never been close with my family, but now I cut off communications with them altogether. I had girlfriends from time to time, but I never established another long-term relationship. Most of the people I called friends were really just casual acquaintances. Somehow, after Amanda, there was always a part of myself that I kept in reserve, that I was never quite willing to share with anyone else.

One day, in early December, I came home from a party to find a message on my answering machine. The message was from Jonathan Wilson. He said he was in New York and he wanted to meet with me. You would think I’d be surprised to hear from him, but the truth was, I’d been expecting that call—expecting it for as long as I could remember.

The next evening, Jonathan and I met at my local tavern, McGlade’s. It was a cold, drizzly day. I stepped into the bar and stood brushing the damp off my overcoat as I looked around for him. At first, I didn’t see him. That is, I must have passed over him without recognizing him. Then I did. He was seated at a table in back by the brick fireplace. He was staring into a glass of red wine. He was a shocking sight. Only seven years had passed since I’d last seen him, but he seemed to have aged decades. He was thin and sallow and drawn.

I sat down with him. Ordered a drink. Before the waitress even returned with the glass, Jonathan had begun to tell me his story. Things had gone badly for him since school, he said. He’d been ill off and on. He’d abandoned his composing. Gone from job to job until he finally ended up at his father’s investment firm, where he was doing only moderately well. The same was true of the others, he told me, the other three who’d been at his parents’ house with us that Christmas. Rosemary had struggled with drugs and alcohol. David had been through an ugly divorce that left him depressed and nearly broke. Lucy had gone through a series of abusive relationships, including one that ended with her in the hospital with a couple of broken ribs.

“It’s about her somehow,” Jonathan told me. “It’s about Amanda. We all feel it. She haunts us. She won’t let us move on.” Then, after a pause, he said, “I read about you in the papers all the time. You seem to be doing well.”

It felt like an accusation. I was the one most closely connected to Amanda’s death, after all. If anyone was responsible for it, obviously it was me. And I had my problems, as I said, but basically he was right: I was doing well. And I said so.

Jonathan stared into his wine a long, silent moment. Then he looked up rather sharply and said, “We have to go back. We’ve all agreed. We’re going to meet up at the house in a week. We’re going to spend Christmas there again.”

“What’s that supposed to accomplish?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. None of us knows. We just have to do it. Will you come?”

I said I would think about it. And I did think about it, all that night. And I thought: That time of my life, even that Christmas at the Wilson house before the tragedy—those were the happiest days I’d ever known. For all the success I’d had, nothing else had ever come close. I thought: Maybe they’re right. Maybe if we could go back, if we could capture some of that spirit, lay our guilt about Amanda’s death to rest ... maybe we could be happy again.

I called Jonathan in the morning and told him I would drive up to the house next weekend.

---3. A Voice in the Storm---

I left the city on a gray Saturday morning and headed upstate. When I was about fifty miles north of Manhattan, it began to snow. Pretty soon, the grass by the side of the highway was dusted with white.

I pressed on. The snow kept getting heavier and heavier. The traveling wasn’t all that bad as long as I was on the thruway, but once I got past Albany, once I got off the main roads and into the back country, the conditions deteriorated fast. Soon, the snow was falling so thickly I could barely see—and when I could see, leaning forward to peer through the windshield, all I could make out were the vague hulking shapes of the surrounding forest. The roads here had not been ploughed. They wound perilously through narrower and narrower passages between higher and higher drifts. I probably should have pulled over someplace, tried to find a motel and waited out the storm. But the idea of this reunion had captured my imagination. I didn’t want to get there late. I didn’t want to miss anything.

I turned on the radio, hoping to hear the weather—news—any sound of civilization. Nothing came out of the speakers except a steady hiss of static. I hit the search button. The digital readout spun from number to number without stopping. A murmur of voices rose and faded. A whisper of music died beneath the unbroken windlike sough.

Then, after another moment or two, the tuner seemed to catch hold of something. For several seconds, I could hear—soft beneath the interference—the wistful sound of an acoustic guitar. It was playing a sad, lilting melody I had never heard before. A woman’s high, clear, sweet, and mournful voice was singing.

“I wait for you,” she sang. “I wait for you.”

I turned from the windshield and stared at the radio. That voice ... It was far away, riddled with static ... but I recognized it ...

Just then, the car went into a skid. I faced forward—but too late. I had lost control and was sliding, blind, through the whiteness.

Before I could get my bearings, the car dropped off the edge of the road and buried its front end in the deep drifts beneath the winter trees. I tried to rock it out, but the tires just whined uselessly. I couldn’t get any traction. The car was stuck.

I sat back in my seat breathing hard as the full dimensions of the situation became clear to me. It was cold, very cold. I hadn’t seen a building or a turnoff for miles. I had only about a quarter tank of gas. Maybe two hours of daylight left at most. If I stayed in the car, the engine would probably die right about the same time the light did. There was a real possibility I could freeze to death out here.

I decided to try to find help or shelter before nightfall. I stepped out of the car—and dropped into snow up to my knees. I stared around me into the blinding white. I saw nothing but the dim shadows of pine trees standing like sentinels watching me. I shouted for help. My voice was lost in the wind. Clutching my overcoat closed against the cold, I pushed forward until the snow grew more shallow and I could feel the road under my shoes. I followed the pavement as best I could up a small hill.

Just as I got to the top, something wonderful happened. A gust of wind pushed the snow aside like a curtain. The view cleared. There, nestled in an empty valley not a quarter of a mile away, stood the old Wilson mansion, the very place I was looking for.

I didn’t go back to the car for my luggage. I was afraid of getting lost. I stumbled down the hill until the road wound around to the Wilsons’ long driveway. Then I shoved my way through the driveway’s big drifts until I was at the front door. I pounded with the old iron knocker. No one came. Finally, shivering, I tried the knob. Luckily, the door opened. I spilled inside.

I shouted. No answer. It was clear the place was empty. I tried the lights. Nothing. The phones were out, too. There wasn’t much time before sunset. I had to find some supplies. Some matches; flashlights. Logs so I could start a fire.

Yet, I hesitated. I stood in the front room at the window, staring out at the falling snow. I watched the light grow dimmer and dimmer. Alone in that house with the night coming, all I could think about was that moment in the car just before I hit the final skid. That familiar voice lilting through the static on the radio. That song:

“I wait for you. I wait for you.”

---4. Reunion---

The day grew darker and darker at the windows. I made preparations to get through the night. I stacked some logs in the fireplace with old magazines for kindling. I rattled through every drawer I could find, searching for matches. Luckily, just as the last light was dying away, I opened a hall closet and found a flashlight on the top shelf. I followed the beam to the kitchen. But I stopped on the threshold.

I could see by the flashlight that the door leading from the kitchen down into the basement stood open, the cellar stairs disappearing into the blackness below. The open door unnerved me somehow. Alone in the dark house, my mind returned to that moment seven years ago when I saw Amanda’s corpse dangling above me.

I stepped decisively to the basement door and swung it shut.

I took a second to calm myself. Then I searched the kitchen. I looked in the small pantry. Went through some more drawers. Finally, the flashlight beam picked out a box of wooden matches on a small shelf over the stove. I was reaching up to take hold of the box when my hand froze in midair.

I heard something. A guitar was playing. Slowly, I turned around, brought the flashlight around. The basement door was standing open again. A voice wafted up to me from below, singing softly, sadly.

“I wait for you. I wait for you.”

I moved quickly back to the door, intending to shut it again. But just as I reached the top of the stairs, the singing stopped. The lightless basement fell silent. I stood there, staring down into the darkness. I felt a sour, burning fear rise in me as I realized I couldn’t just close the door, I couldn’t just walk away. I couldn’t spend the night in this house wondering what was down there, not knowing.

I had to look. I started down the stairs, holding tight to the flashlight. The basement dark seemed to crawl up my sides and close around me. I reached the bottom. Immediately, I guided the beam to the place where I’d seen Amanda hanging. There was nothing there.

No. Wait. There was. The light picked out the shape of a rope. My hand trembled as I raised the beam to see that one end was tied around the heating pipe. My breath caught as I lowered the beam.

The bottom of the rope was tied in a noose. But the noose hung empty.

I lowered the flashlight and saw Amanda come walking toward me out of the darkness.

She was just as I’d seen her last. Her body was horribly bloated, her face disfigured, the eyes bulging, the skin bluish-green. In terror, I stumbled backwards. And the flashlight slipped out of my hands. It fell to the floor and went out. The blackness was complete.

I gave a strangled cry. I knew she was still coming toward me, but I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t see anything. With my hands out in front of me, I stumbled in what I hoped was the direction of the stairs. I found them. I grabbed the banister. Started up. But in the darkness, I tripped. I went down on one knee.

Cold fingers wrapped themselves around my ankle.

I cried out and yanked myself free. I charged upward blindly, tripping, stumbling, but finally plunging through the doorway into the kitchen. I slammed the basement door behind me and looked desperately this way and that, lost in the darkness. I had to get back to the stove. To the matches on the shelf. I started moving—and, as I did, I heard her again. Through the basement door. Singing softly.

“I wait for you. I wait for you.”

Her voice was growing louder as she slowly climbed the stairs.

I staggered across the kitchen. Bumped into the stove. Reached up, feeling for the box of matches. There it was. I grabbed it. I fumbled for a match, concentrating so hard that I barely noticed that the singing had stopped, that the darkness had grown silent again. I brought out a match. I struck it against the side of the box.

The flame flared and she was standing right in front of me, reaching for me with those dead hands.

I screamed and dropped the matches. Hurled myself headlong away from her. By sheer good luck, I bumped into the edge of the pantry doorway. I rolled off into the pantry itself and shut the door fast. My hand still clutching the knob, I braced my shoulder against the door. The knob turned in my hand. I could feel her trying to push the door inward.

I held it shut.

---5. I Wait For You---

All night long, I heard her at the pantry door. Sometimes she rattled the knob, trying to get in. Sometimes she knocked softly or called my name in a laughing, teasing voice, trying to coax me out. I tried bracing my back against the door, covering my ears with my hands, but I still heard her. I hugged my knees to myself, trembling. It was enough to drive me mad.

I knew what she wanted. Revenge. She’d been waiting for it for seven years. She would never forgive me for what I’d done. Not just getting her pregnant. Refusing to marry her, refusing to sacrifice my future, my whole life, to take care of her and a child. Not just for shouting at her so that she stormed off, crying.

I think she would’ve forgiven me for all that if I hadn’t killed her.

But what else could I do? She never would have gotten an abortion. She would’ve had the child and used it against me. Forced me to come up with child support. Ruined any chance I had to be free, to be a success. I mean, deep down, Amanda was a very vindictive person. Well, that was obvious, wasn’t it? Look how long she’d waited to get back at me, nursing her bitterness all the while.

So anyway, I’d taken a rope—one of those stout ropes we’d used to haul the Christmas tree home from the woods. I went upstairs to her room. I pretended I wanted to make up with her so that she ran to me, put her arms around me. Then I slipped the rope around her neck and pulled it tight.

It took a long time. A long time. I don’t like to think about it. Finally, she slumped, unconscious. I carried her down to the basement and strung her up on the heating pipe. That was kind of awful too because she woke up for a while and struggled, hanging up there, before it was finally over for good.

It really was a brilliant idea to hide downstairs in the basement during the game. It gave me a chance to collect myself—and to act surprised and scream in horror when they found her. And no one would believe I would just sit down there like that in the dark for so long, knowing she was with me all the while.

Amanda had never forgiven me for any of it. She’d waited for me all this time.

All night long, she knocked and called outside the pantry door, trying to draw me out. But finally, I saw the first sunlight slip in under the door. I heard her voice grow softer and softer until it vanished.

I climbed unsteadily to my feet. I opened the door. Peeked out. She was gone.

I rushed out of the house. The snow had stopped. The sun was shining. I was delighted to see that the road and the driveway had been ploughed and sanded overnight. It was easy to get back to my car, easy in the daylight to push it free from the drift where it was stuck and get it back onto the road.

As I was driving away from the Wilson house, a Volvo came past me in the other direction. It was Jonathan. I don’t think he saw me. He didn’t stop.

When I reached the top of the hill, I looked back. I saw the Volvo go down the driveway to the house. A moment later, two more cars reached the drive from the opposite direction and joined the first. Jonathan got out and then David and Lucy and Rosemary. They all came together, hugging and kissing and shaking hands.

I left them to their reunion. Let them live in the past, not me. I wasn’t going to waste my one and only life wallowing in remorse about Amanda.

Although I must admit, as the years go on, as I move toward the end of middle age, I find myself wondering about that sometimes. Whether this is, in fact, my one and only life, I mean. Death wasn’t the end for Amanda, after all. Recently, more and more often, I hear her in the night, in the dark, in the distance, singing in that wistful voice:

“I wait for you. I wait for you.”

I believe she does.

Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Klavan

Previous Article   Passport to Crime

Passport to Crime

THE WOOD THIEF

By Liza Marklund

Swedish journalist, columnist, and publisher Liza Marklund is also one of Sweden’s (and Europe’s) bestselling novelists. She is best known for her novels about the series character of this story,...

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Passport to Crime

THE WOOD THIEF

By Liza Marklund

Swedish journalist, columnist, and publisher Liza Marklund is also one of Sweden’s (and Europe’s) bestselling novelists. She is best known for her novels about the series character of this story, journalist Annika Bengtzon. Her latest book to see print in the U.S. is a novel she co-wrote with bestselling American writer James Patterson. Entitled The Postcard Killers, it became the number one bestseller in Sweden and was published in the U.S. in August 2010.

Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy

The dark figure slipped like a shadow among the trees, silent, breathless, watchful. The moon shone cold and blue over the forest, exposing every movement.

She looked around cautiously as she hurried along, shivering. Warmth was a long way off.

When she reached the glade, she stopped behind a fir tree. Nothing was moving. The chimneys pointed up towards the night sky, cold and mute. No smoke rising towards the stars.

It must be bloody freezing for the old man, she thought.

She stared at the kitchen window for a long time, watching the moon glittering on the uneven, hand-blown glass. Not a single movement.

She made her decision, walked calmly over to the shed, and pulled out the sack.

The old man was woken by the cold; it had crept through the blanket and down into his lungs, heavy and damp. Slowly he allowed the pain to reach his brain; he groaned and coughed quietly. Then he took a few harsh, deep breaths as he lay there on the sofa bed listening to the clock. The starlight outside the window splintered the darkness into myriad shades of black and grey, sometimes almost blue. He bent his head and peered over at the box of wood by the iron stove, the tiles above it catching the light.

“Blackie,” he said.

The cat emerged from the shadows by the stove, took two agile leaps across the kitchen floor, and landed on the man’s chest. He laughed out loud.

“You’re getting fatter and fatter, puss.”

The cat stomped around in circles several times on top of the blanket before settling down with her nose tucked in the hollow at the base of the man’s throat. He could feel the heat of the little body radiating down through the blanket, easing the pain in his chest. They lay like that for a while, the old man and the cat. His bladder was bursting; he would have to get up soon.

There was a rustling noise over by the wood box and the cat shot up. With an enormous leap the animal landed on the floor and started chasing the mouse. The rugs ended up in a heap as the old man lay motionless, listening with great concentration as the hunt unfolded. Then came the terrified squeak of pain and death, the cat’s triumphant yowl, and the subsequent crunching of the mouse’s bones. The old man chuckled.

“Good girl, Blackie.”

But there was nothing for it—he had to get up. He pushed aside the blanket and carefully lifted his legs over the edge of the bed, using his right hand to help. He stepped straight into his trousers; he kept his long johns and thick socks on in bed. With an enormous effort he pushed with his hands and managed to get to his feet, his back aching. The situation was urgent now. He staggered onto the porch, pulled on his Helly Hansen top, his cap, and his boots, and headed for the steps.

It was sparkling with cold outside, and the rime frost had made the steps slippery. He almost fell on the millstone at the bottom. Leaning on the wall with his right hand he made his way around the corner and released the urine in a crooked stream, aiming at the forest. He closed his eyes, enjoying the relief. When he had shaken off the drops and tucked it away, he took a few deep breaths and gazed out across the landscape. Dense forest to the north, but over to the east there was a more open aspect towards the marsh where the sawmill had once stood. The moon and stars made the frost sparkle; he could make out the light and the colours.

Then the cold struck his lungs again, making him cough. He tore his gaze away from the view and made his way back indoors. He switched on the lamp in the porch and the fluorescent light in the kitchen, the sudden brightness making him blink. The cat was licking her lips over by the larder, a few tufts of hair and splinters of bone bearing witness to the recent slaughter.

The old man went over to the sink and picked up the water scoop. He took a swig as the cat leapt up and began to lap from the bucket.

“Delicious,” said the old man, smacking his lips.

Then it was time to fetch the wood.

The thought made his guts twist with apprehension.

First of all, he lit the stove with the kindling he had brought in the previous evening, the iron of the door cold to his touch. As he struck the match he noticed that his hand was shaking. He knew what was waiting for him. Laboriously he got to his feet and picked up the basket and the flashlight.

Holding his left hand straight out in front of him to help him balance, he shuffled across to the woodshed, the flashlight rolling around in the bottom of the basket. On the other side of the ditch he stopped and switched it on, pointing the beam at the ground. He blinked. Damned eyesight. Even if there were tracks in the rime frost, he couldn’t make them out. When he lifted the hasp and opened the door, he knew. He couldn’t have explained why, perhaps the smell of another person somehow lingered, perhaps there was the faintest rise in the temperature left behind, but he was certain. Someone had been here very recently.

He swept the beam of the flashlight across the piles of wood, the carefully sawn, split, dried, stacked, sorted, and stored logs, all exactly the same length so that they would fit the kitchen stove, cut into the different dimensions necessary to catch quickly and then keep the fire going. Alder, aspen, birch, pine, and fir, different piles for the different kinds of wood, boxes of birch bark and other types of bark.

When the beam reached the pile of birch logs, he gasped out loud. So it was the birch tonight. He staggered across to the pile and ran his hand over the wood; yes, he was right. His eyes might miss things, but his hands remembered; there were logs missing from here. Rage and impotence twisted like cramps in his abdomen, and he groaned out loud. Clenched his fists, the nails burrowing into his palm to overcome the pain. His wood! The birch that he had worked so hard on last spring. The sections of trunk he had dragged all the way from Gorgsjö, where the birch tree had been brought down by the wind. It had been a fine tree, right by the shore of the lake, with rustling leaves and plenty of thick branches. He had made use of every one, chopping up the tree and bringing home every last scrap. His entire spring lay in these piles of wood. He sniffed loudly as the tears overflowed. Bastard! Some bastard was stealing his wood! Bastard wood thief!

He sank down onto the chopping block and wept.

Annika Bengtzon kissed her grandmother’s hair.

“I won’t be long.”

Her grandmother patted her on the cheek.

Annika looped her bag over her shoulder and picked up the plastic carrier. Out on the steps she stopped, screwing up her eyes in the sharp winter light and taking several deep breaths. The lake down below Lyckebo had frozen; if it stayed this cold she would be able to go ice skating after Christmas.

The rime frost crunched beneath her feet as she headed for the turnpike, past the rented car from the garage at Norrtull. Old Gustav lived on the other side of the track in a cottage next to the marsh where the sawmill had been; it was known as Lillsjötorp, and she had visited him every Christmas Eve for as long as she could remember. He had already been ancient when she was a child.

Annika walked quickly and purposefully along the forest track; she knew it well. She had grown up in these Sörmland forests around Hälleforsnäs, had lived here all her life until last autumn. For the last two months she had been working nights on Kvällspressen, a newspaper in Stockholm. The autumn’s events, especially her investigation of a young woman’s murder, had meant that she had been unable to come home for some time. But the job had created a vacuum in her life that could be filled only by solid traditions such as Christmas at her grandmother’s cottage by the shores of the lake.

Lillsjötorp sparkled like a little jewel on the edge of the forest, the frost glittering on its walls, so picturesque you could almost weep. White and Falun red, leaded windows, blue door, mossy apple trees.

But as Annika drew closer, the deterioration became obvious. The garden was overgrown with lupins, the black stems bearing pods surrounding the house like rotting exclamation marks. The odd tracks on the ground had been made by Old Gustav’s shuffling gait and bad hips; one led to his pissing-place around the corner, one to the outside toilet, and the deepest, of course, to the woodshed. The outside walls needed brushing down and painting. The putty had started to come away around the windowpanes; Gustav appeared to have repaired it with cement. On the edge of the forest she could see a mountain of empty tins and empty schnapps bottles.

Annika sighed and knocked on the door. No response. She knocked harder.

“Uncle Gustav!”

A coal-black cat came skittering out of the trees, ran up the steps, and started rubbing around her legs.

“Hello Blackie, is your daddy not at home?”

She tried the handle; the door wasn’t locked.

“Hello ...?”

She stepped onto the porch, blinking in the darkness, and discovered she was staring straight down a double-barrelled shotgun. She deafened herself with her scream, and the barrel jerked.

“For Christ’s sake, Gustav, what the hell are you doing?”

The old man lowered the gun, staring at her in confusion. He was dirty and unshaven; she could smell the odour coming off his body from over three feet away. His hair was greasy, his eyes cloudy. His face looked slightly swollen.

“Gustav, what on earth is going on?”

Her heart was pounding in her chest; she had been really scared. The cat slipped past them into the kitchen, and Annika closed the outside door. The porch was in darkness; she could see the old man only as a silhouette against the kitchen doorway.

“Maria’s Annika?” he said, lowering the gun slightly.

“Of course!” she said, sounding more angry than she intended. “What the hell are you doing standing here on the porch with a shotgun?”

The old man turned and shuffled into the kitchen, with Annika following close behind. The heat was oppressive in there, the kind of suffocating heat produced by an old wood-burning stove made of iron, with the fire well banked up. The cat had curled up on the tiled edging between the stove and the wall; Annika wondered how it managed to avoid being roasted alive. Gustav sat down on a wooden chair by the kitchen table, resting the gun on his knees. Annika put her bags down next to the sofa bed; the old man hadn’t made his bed today. She walked over to him and firmly took the gun away; he didn’t protest. She broke it open; it wasn’t loaded. With a sigh, she pushed it under the bed.

“Right, Gustav,” she said, sitting down opposite him. “Start talking—what’s going on?”

The old man started weeping. His shoulders slumped and shook as he hid his face in his hands.

“Now, now,” said Annika, patting him clumsily on the arm. “Come on, Uncle Gustav, tell me what’s happened!”

“The wood thief,” the old man said quietly. “It’s the wood thief.”

He blew his nose in his hand and wiped the snot on his trousers.

“Is someone stealing your wood?” Annika asked.

He nodded. She looked at the little old man. Gustav had worked as a forester for many, many years. He had spent his whole life in this tiny cottage, first with his mother, then all alone since her death. He had electricity and cold water, which he kept in a bucket on the draining board and shared with the cat.

Gustav lived on a very small pension, so he had permission to take the trees blown down by the wind in the forest owned by the estate. He dedicated his life to these trees. To him, the woodshed was a treasure trove of memories, thoughts, nature, and work.

She remembered all the summers she had helped Gustav with the wood. He had taught her how to pile it high on her left arm, balancing it perfectly as the right hand built a tall mountain. She had learned to split great big logs with a single blow at the age of only seven, and had had her own little chopping block next to Gustav’s large one.

When they were having their snack, always perched on their own logs, Gustav would tell her about the remarkable things the trees had witnessed. He had shown her the age rings and described the trees at different periods in history, both global and local.

Look, when this one was the same size as a Christmas tree, the Bolsheviks took over in Russia. This birch was no more than a leafy twig when the crofters’ children coughed themselves to death up in Löfberga. This is where I was born, this is where you were born. The trees have seen everything, they know everything, make no mistake about that.

“Shall we go and have a look in the woodshed?” Annika suggested.

Gustav was walking very badly, she noticed.

“It started three weeks ago,” the old man ground out. “I noticed it right away. First it was the fir from the White Mountains, then the pine from the other side of the marsh. Now it’s the Gorgsjö birch.”

He lifted the hasp and pushed the door open. Inside, the logs were stacked to the ceiling, layer upon layer, as much wood as you could possibly want. To Annika and anyone else on this earth it was just firewood, any old firewood.

“Here,” said Gustav, patting one of the piles. “The birch. That’s what the wood thief stole last night.”

Annika looked around. There were several tracks outside the woodshed, made by both people and animals.

“Did you see or hear anything? A car? A motorbike?” she asked.

The old man shook his head. His eyesight wasn’t very good, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing. Annika studied the ground.

“There are no tracks made by a bike, either. The wood thief must have come on foot. So you know what that means, Gustav?”

The old man didn’t reply.

“Nobody can carry wood farther than a couple of hundred yards,” said Annika. “So it has to be someone from Hedberga.”

Together they looked over at the forest track leading down to the village.

When Annika had left Old Gustav with the Christmas ham and dried fish and gravlax and wished him a very happy Christmas, in spite of the wood thief, she set off along the track through the trees. Feather-light snowflakes had begun to drift towards the ground with infinite slowness, hovering in the air. Annika caught a few on her tongue.

After a few minutes she reached the first of the wooden houses in Hedberga. The entire village was an ancient collection of heaps of timber huddled against the backdrop of the vast forest. The odd satellite dish shattered the picture-postcard idyll.

She walked along slowly, studying the village houses, all decorated for Christmas. The electric candles dispersed a warm glow through the windows. She had some kind of relationship with every single person in this village.

There, in the biggest house of all, lived Åke and Inga Karlsson; he had been her teacher at junior school.

Next door lived Asta and Folke Nykander and their son Petter; he had learning difficulties of some kind. Petter was a couple of years older than Annika; she had been afraid of him when she was little.

Farther along was the manor house where Hjalmar Pettersson, the church pastor, lived with his hypocritical wife Elsa. Hjalmar had once condemned Annika’s mother in public after her divorce.

On the farm over by the edge of the forest lived Karin and Anders Bergström and their three young children. She and Karin had been classmates; Anders was well known in the area for being bone idle.

He can’t even be bothered to put on a condom, thought Annika as she passed the yard, toys strewn all over the place.

Ingela Jönsson, known as the Sperm Bucket because she was such a slag, lived in a small cottage she had inherited from her mother. It looked silent, dark, and empty. Annika glared at it; her boyfriend had been one of those carrying on with the Sperm Bucket.

Around the corner lived Axelsson, the farmer, with his five children who always smelt of the farmyard. Annika used to babysit for them sometimes when she was in high school.

One of these people stole Old Gustav’s wood, Annika thought.

She sighed and turned off towards Lyckebo.

The early morning Christmas service at the church in Floda began at six o’clock. Annika and her grandmother were already there at twenty to. The Axelssons stomped in with almost all of their children, and there sat arrogant Hjalmar and his Elsa, and Asta and Folke Nykander, but not their son. Åke and Inga Karlsson arrived just after the bell began to ring; Åke looked as if he had a hangover.

The big church exuded peace in the winter darkness. Annika closed her eyes and listened to the familiar tones of the traditional entry hymn, “Var hälsad sköna morgonstund,” raucously delivered by the Sörmland farmers. The classic readings of Christmas floated past her, Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed....

She nodded off and woke with a start as the bells rang out once more; the service was over. She was carried along with everyone else to the doorway in some confusion, and got in the car with her grandmother to head back towards Lyckebo along Stöttestensvägen. It had stopped snowing, but the landscape was enveloped in a thick layer of white cotton wool.

They were passing Granhed, with Hedberga up on their left, when Annika suddenly gave a start.

“Did you see that?” she said.

“What?” asked her grandmother, who had dozed off in the warmth of the car.

“Someone was standing on the edge of the forest.”

“That doesn’t seem very likely,” said her grandmother. “I expect it was a deer.”

“Wearing a hood?” Annika said sceptically.

They didn’t speak for the rest of the journey, but when Annika had helped the old woman into the cottage, she said:

“I’m just going out for a while.”

“At this time of day?”

“I want to check on Gustav,” said Annika, taking a big flashlight out of her bag. On the steps outside, she pushed the switch forward—yes, it was working.

The moon was still shining over the forest like a round spotlight; she didn’t need any other source of light out here. She moved quickly between the trees, thinking about the autumn when she had picked chanterelles as big as toilet seats here. The ground was completely covered in snow now; she stumbled over hidden branches here and there.

The wood thief must have come from Hedberga, so Annika took the route past the village. She didn’t need to search for very long.

The tracks were crystal clear, footprints glowing blue in the fresh, pure white snow. They were quite big, meandering slightly through the forest, but eventually leading straight to Old Gustav’s woodshed. Annika followed them all the way, and when she was just a dozen or so yards from the shed, something struck her:

The tracks led in only one direction.

The wood thief was still in there. Her mind was whirling; what if it was that great big idiot Petter—he might beat her to death. Or what if it was Anders Bergström, Karin’s idle husband?

She crept the last few yards to the door feeling as if she was no longer touching the ground. She yanked the door open. Someone was standing inside, a tall, dark figure dressed in black. It spun around; Annika pushed the switch and shone the beam straight in the intruder’s face.

“You,” said Annika.

It was Ingela Jönsson, the Sperm Bucket. The woman raised her arm to protect her eyes from the light.

“Turn that off!” she yelled.

Annika stepped inside without moving the circle of light from the woman’s face.

“What the hell are you doing?” said Annika, her voice trembling with rage. “How in God’s name can you steal from an old man who can hardly walk? Do you realize how much work he’s put into this wood?”

She took a step closer to the wood thief. A second later the flashlight flew out of her hand as a sudden blow to her abdomen forced the air from her lungs. She stumbled into a pile of fir wood, fell over, and landed hard on her bottom.

The thief rushed at the door, yanked it open with a crash, and was about to run off into the forest. At that moment, a deafening bang echoed through the glade, reverberating from tree to tree, and the doorpost next to Annika was splintered by a hail of lead shot. Annika screamed; Ingela Jönsson howled and fell backwards into the woodshed.

“That mad old bastard is shooting at us!” she roared.

The next shot hit the door, shattering the timber. Annika screamed again and crawled over to the pile of birch wood on all fours. She shuffled her way in between two stacks, drew her legs up beneath her chin, and made herself as small as possible.

The silence that followed the bangs was just as deafening as the shots themselves. After a minute or so Annika was able to hear her own panic-stricken breathing and Ingela Jönsson’s irregular sobs and groans.

“Did he get you?” Annika asked.

The woman was whimpering in the darkness, right next to her.

“I think so,” said Ingela. “In the face.”

Annika pushed back her hair with trembling hands. Her hat had come off.

“I need to speak to him,” she said.

Cautiously she got to her feet in the darkness and banged her head on a protruding log. The damaged door had swung shut, and it was dark inside the shed. She groped her way over to the door.

“Gustav,” she shouted into the winter morning through the gap. “Gustav, it’s me, Annika. Maria Hellström’s Annika. I’m in here with the wood thief. Can we have a chat?”

She waited in silence for a response. None came.

“Gustav!” she shouted, even louder. “It’s Annika. I’m coming out now.”

Still nothing.

“Get a move on for God’s sake, before I bleed to death,” the wood thief moaned.

Annika took a deep breath and pushed the door open. The shots followed immediately, one after the other, shattered fragments of wood dancing in the air. Annika tumbled backwards and landed on top of the wood thief.

“Watch out, you fat cow!” shouted Ingela Jönsson.

“Shut your mouth, you stupid whore!” Annika yelled back.

Silence slowly descended once again behind the lingering whine of the gunfire. Ingela shoved Annika off her knee.

“Screw you,” said Ingela, on the verge of tears. “How can you call someone a whore? Or Sperm Bucket? I know that’s what people call me. Have you ever thought about how awful it feels?”

Annika was breathing hard, her mouth open.

“You deserve it. You’re nothing but a slut. I haven’t forgotten that you tried to steal my boyfriend.”

Ingela Jönsson crept over to another pile of wood.

“I loved Sven,” she said. “And he loved me. We would have been engaged by now if it hadn’t been for you.”

“That’s crap,” said Annika.

The wood thief started to cry. Annika sat in silence for several minutes, listening to her. It was starting to get really cold now; she was losing the feeling in her fingers.

“I’m bleeding,” sobbed Ingela. “I’ve been hit in the face.”

At that moment Annika felt the cold metal of her flashlight under her hand. She pushed the switch forward; it was still working.

“Let me see,” she said, shining the light on the other woman’s face.

Ingela Jönsson screwed up her eyes against the beam of light. She was actually bleeding from a gash near the top of her left cheek. Annika leaned closer.

“Have I been shot?”

Annika poked at the wound; the other woman jumped.

“No,” she said, “but there’s a big splinter below your eye. Just let me get it out ...”

“Ow!”

Annika removed the splinter with a quick tug. She held it up triumphantly in the beam of the flashlight. Ingela pressed her fingers against the spot.

“I’ll get tetanus,” she said.

“I’m sure you’ll survive.”

“Provided the old bastard doesn’t shoot us both!”

Annika fumbled around in the darkness until she found a long stick, which she used to push open the broken door. Seconds later another shot was fired. The women curled up with their arms over their heads.

“I think we’re going to be here for some time,” said Annika.

The late winter dawn was slowly beginning to find its way in among the piles of wood. Annika and Ingela had settled down with their backs resting against the logs, facing each other. Now and again they poked at the remains of the door, and every time a shot rang out. Some of the planks on the front of the shed were beginning to disintegrate.

“Why?” said Annika.

Ingela didn’t reply.

“How can you steal from an old man?” Annika asked in a slightly louder voice, staring at the woman opposite her.

“I was freezing cold,” said Ingela, turning her head away.

Annika blinked. “Right,” she said. “And the solution was to start stealing wood?”

“You’d never understand,” Ingela said resentfully. “Things have always been so easy for you.”

Annika laughed loud and long; Old Gustav responded with two more shots.

“You can laugh,” said Ingela when the whine had died away. “I mean, you have it all, you got the best job and the best guy and the chance to move to Stockholm.”

Annika swallowed hard.

“You don’t know anything,” she said. “You have no idea what things have been like for me.”

Ingela Jönsson didn’t reply. They sat in silence for a long time. Annika’s feet were numb with cold.

“They’ve cut off my electricity,” Ingela said eventually. “And the phone. I can’t get any social security benefits anymore, I haven’t got any money at all.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve considered getting a job?” Annika said sarcastically.

“Don’t be so bloody clever,” said Ingela. “What kind of jobs do you think there are in Hedberga?”

“Well then you’ll have to move, won’t you?” said Annika.

“And where would I live? My house is here!”

“Sell it, then!”

“I’d get next to nothing for that old wooden shack.”

Annika groaned.

“Well, sit there and moan then,” she said. “I think you just want to fail.”

Ingela poked at the door; two shots rang out.

“Old bastard!” she yelled.

Gustav reloaded and fired off two more shots.

“Have you never had a job?” Annika wondered.

Ingela sighed, her fingers playing distractedly with the sawdust on the floor.

“Oh yes,” she said, “with the home-care service in Hälleforsnäs. Although that was before the cuts. I was laid off in the rationalization program three years ago.”

“So why don’t you study for some kind of qualification?”

“I’d need a car for that, and I can’t afford one.”

“Speaking of cars,” said Annika, “do you hear what I hear?”

The sound of a Volvo engine was audible through the trees, rising and falling.

“Do you think it might be on its way here?” Ingela wondered.

Annika listened for a few seconds longer.

“Yep,” she said. “It’s almost here.”

The women crept over to the front of the shed, each peering through a gap in the planks. The blue-and-white estate car slowly materialized behind the screen of branches.

“It’s a police car!” Annika gasped.

“Yes!” whispered Ingela.

The car stopped by the path leading to the house. A man and a woman in uniform got out.

“Hansson and Pettersson from Katrineholm,” Annika said quietly. “I once went out on patrol with them when I was working on a news story.”

She watched the two officers walk slowly towards the house, and heard the woman say “Merry Christmas” and “What’s going on here, then?” in a loud voice.

Then she heard Gustav mumbling something in reply.

Quickly she shuffled over to the ruined door and peeped out. She saw the male officer walk up to the old man and take the gun away from him. She pushed the door open and stepped out into the daylight. Ingela Jönsson shot out behind her, shouting and screaming.

“He’s crazy, the old bastard’s crazy, he tried to kill us!”

The police officers looked over towards the woodshed in surprise. Old Gustav tried to wrench back the shotgun, yelling at the top of his voice.

“Damned wood thieves, damned rabble! You need your backsides peppered with lead, you damned ...”

The police officers grabbed hold of the old man and pushed him into the backseat of the police car. Gustav protested loudly every step of the way, accompanied by the Sperm Bucket’s hysterical outpourings about what a bloodthirsty, murderous bastard he was. Annika felt the air go out of her; she suddenly felt faint with exhaustion and coldness.

“I’m going inside,” she said.

The kitchen was freezing cold; no doubt the walls were poorly insulated. Annika pushed a bundle of kindling into the stove, added some birch bark underneath, and lit it; it caught immediately. Quickly she pulled a chair over and sat down right next to the fire. Gradually her joints began to thaw out, and she added more wood.

Hansson, the policewoman, came into the kitchen.

“Hi there, Bengtzon,” she said, pulling up a chair. “What the hell’s been going on here?”

Annika sighed.

“Ingela Jönsson has been stealing wood from Gustav for a while; he lost it and started shooting at the woodshed.”

“We got a call from down in Hedberga saying that there was a hell of a lot of shooting going on up here in the forest,” said Hansson. She leaned forward and looked intently at Annika.

“Do you think he was intending to hit whoever was in the shed?”

Annika met her gaze.

“Definitely not,” she said. “If he’d wanted to hurt us, all he needed to do was open the door and shoot us dead. He just wanted to mark his territory.”

Hansson sighed, leaned back, and put her gloves down on the kitchen table.

“What a goddamn mess,” she said. “Ingela Jönsson is out there yelling about attempted murder and terrorism.”

“She’ll soon calm down,” said Annika, putting more wood on the fire.

The policewoman looked around the kitchen.

“Does the old man live here?” she said sceptically.

“Yep,” said Annika. “He sleeps on the sofa bed and gets a roaring fire going in the stove.”

“What a dump,” said Hansson in disgust. “Mouse droppings on the floor. And he didn’t smell too sweet, either.”

“Gustav’s good at keeping himself clean,” Annika protested. “He has a bath once a week in a big tub, right here in front of the stove. It’s just that things have been a bit difficult since the wood thief started turning up, that’s all.”

Hansson got to her feet.

“I’ll give social services a call,” she said.

Ingela and Blackie came in as the policewoman went out. The cat jumped up onto Annika’s knee, turned round and round several times, then settled down with the tip of her tail tucked under her chin. The women sat in silence side by side, slowly getting warm and allowing their adrenaline levels to fall.

“He’s not right in the head, is he?” said Ingela.

Annika didn’t reply, she just kept on stroking the cat, who had fallen asleep on her knee.

“Anyway, they’re bound to lock him up for this,” the wood thief went on smugly. “I suppose the question is whether he’ll ever come out. I should think the old bastard will peg it any day now.”

“One thing you need to know,” said Annika. “Gustav is the closest thing to a grandfather I’ve ever had. I love him.”

Only when she had said it did she realize it was true.

Ingela gritted her teeth but didn’t answer; she sat in silence for a few minutes.

“I’ve met someone,” she said eventually.

Annika raised her eyebrows.

“And?”

Ingela lowered her head.

“He actually likes me. He doesn’t know anything about ... about that name you call me. He comes from Eskilstuna, he’s got an apartment there. He loves Hedberga, and he thinks my house is just charming. Particularly the open fire ...”

The wood crackled—birch wood.

“Is it because of him?” Annika asked.

Ingela didn’t reply.

“Is that why you’ve been stealing wood?”

The woman closed her eyes.

“Maybe,” she said. “We like to make love in front of the fire. At the beginning I used to buy wood, but who can afford forty-five kronor a sack? Then they cut off the electricity, and I no longer had any choice.”

Annika could feel the rage mounting inside her once more.

“It didn’t occur to you that it might be a good idea to spread things out a bit more evenly, to steal from different places?”

The other woman shrugged her shoulders.

“I didn’t think it would matter to the old man. I mean, he’s got so much wood, and his eyesight isn’t so good. I didn’t think he’d notice anything. And wood’s heavy, you know! I couldn’t carry it very far, so I had to take it from someone who was close by.”

Annika didn’t reply; she was thinking with considerable distaste of the Sperm Bucket making love in front of her open fire, with Gustav’s wood providing the burning backdrop.

Suddenly heavy footsteps came marching up the steps.

“Hello there!” said a spirited voice from the doorway.

“Marja!” said Ingela, getting to her feet.

A sturdy woman in a hat and padded coat virtually filled the doorway leading into the kitchen; the policewoman was just visible behind her.

“Ingela!” said the sturdy woman. “It’s been a long time! How are you?”

The women greeted each other with obvious pleasure.

“Marja used to run the home-care service in Hälleforsnäs,” Ingela explained when Annika had shaken hands with the woman.

“I know, we’ve met,” said Annika.

Marja, who was now working for social services, looked around the kitchen.

“So,” she said, “this is how he’s living, is it? I see ...”

“His name is Gustav,” said Annika.

“I know, I know,” said Marja, walking over and opening the larder door. “I didn’t know there were people up here who still lived like this.”

She bent down and studied the remains of a half-eaten mouse.

“Hm,” she said. “Things can’t go on like this.”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” said the policewoman.

Marja opened the china cabinet and held a glass up to the light.

“We’ll have to sort out a place in a residential home,” she said.

Annika was feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

“Just a minute,” she broke in. “Have you spoken to Gustav? He’s managed perfectly well here for his whole life. Rather than moving him, couldn’t he be provided with a little bit of help here in the house from time to time?”

Marja threw her hands wide, a small smile playing around her lips.

“He has the right to a decent life, Annika,” she said, “just like everyone else.”

“Exactly. But all he needs for that is a little help and support.”

Marja shook her head. “This is not an acceptable environment.”

“And that’s up to you to decide on Gustav’s behalf, is it?” Annika said quietly.

The woman contemplated Annika for a little while.

“A little bit of help from time to time,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Well, that’s a possibility, of course. We could give that a try first. It would have to be someone local, someone who’s able to come and see to Gustav more or less every day. We’d need to find someone like that,” she said, her expression wise, “someone with experience who lives close by ...”

At that moment Pettersson, the other police officer, walked in with the old man trailing behind him.

“Get that trigger-happy old bastard away from me!” screamed Ingela Jönsson.

Gustav stiffened in the doorway when he saw her standing in his kitchen.

“Get that wood thief out of my house!” he yelled. “I’m not having that thieving bitch on my property!”

“Stop it!” yelled Annika. “Stop it right now! Use your brains, for pity’s sake!”

A deathly silence fell in the kitchen as five pairs of eyes stared at her; the only sound was the ticking of the clock and the crackling of the birch wood.

“It’s Christmas Day,” she said. “I don’t care whether you believe in God or not, but you ought to take that as a sign. If you can just use a little bit of sense and show a little bit of tolerance, you can sort this out. Otherwise you’re both screwed,” she said, looking first at Gustav and then at Ingela.

“What are you talking about?” Ingela said stupidly.

“You two are the solution to each other’s problems,” said Annika.

She quickly pushed past Ingela Jönsson and Old Gustav, stopped by the door, and confronted their surprised looks.

“It’s up to you now,” she said as she closed the door behind her and stepped out into the snow.

Copyright © 2010 by Liza Marklund; translation © 2010 by Marlaine Delargy. Published by agreement with Salomonsson Agency.

Reviews

Reviews

THE JURY BOX

By Jon L. Breen

What better way to kick off EQMM’s seventieth anniversary year than to celebrate one of the magazine’s most important contributions to mystery literature, the Department of First Stories? Beginning...

BLOG BYTES

By Bill Crider

If you’re a fan of the works of the late John D. MacDonald (and I certainly am), you’ll enjoy spending some time at a blog called The Trap of Solid Gold (http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com), which...

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Passport to Crime   Department of First Stories

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Reviews

THE JURY BOX

By Jon L. Breen

What better way to kick off EQMM’s seventieth anniversary year than to celebrate one of the magazine’s most important contributions to mystery literature, the Department of First Stories? Beginning with founding editor EQ (Frederic Dannay) and continuing with successors Eleanor Sullivan and Janet Hutchings, new writers have been sought, encouraged, and nurtured. Among the hundreds who got their fiction-writing start in these pages are James Yaffe, Jack Finney, Harry Kemelman, Stanley Ellin, Thomas Flanagan, Robert Irvine, Joyce Harrington, Dick Lochte, Francis M. Nevins, David Morell, Brendan DuBois, Laura Benedict, and Steven Saylor. Six new books by past EQMM debutantes are considered below, followed by a few seasonal mysteries for your holiday consideration.

*** William Link: The Columbo Collection, Crippen & Landru, $18 trade paper, $45 signed limited hard-cover. Los Angeles police Lieutenant Columbo, arguably the greatest fictional detective originally created for television, appears in a dozen sharply plotted and written new stories, all in the inverted tradition, by surviving co-creator Link, whose first story with long-time collaborator Richard Levinson appeared in the November 1954 issue.

*** Susan Dunlap: Power Slide, Counterpoint, $25. In her fourth adventure, San Franciscan Darcy Lott, Zen Buddhist and motion-picture stuntwoman, seeks the truth about two men in her life: a murdered fellow stunt double and sometime lover, and her brother Mike, who disappeared twenty years before. Both are solved surprisingly and satisfactorily in a typically fine job from an undervalued writer. (First story March 1978.)

*** Dennis Palumbo: Mirror Image, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. A screenwriter turned psychotherapist draws on both areas of expertise in the first novel about Pittsburgh police consultant Dr. Daniel Rinaldi, one of whose crime-victim patients is murdered while dressed in imitation of his psychologist. The short-chapter, multi-reversal thriller offers much better prose, dialogue, and characterization than many bestsellers’ products and concludes with well-clued and deftly executed finishing twists. (First story April 1978.)

*** Nancy Pickard: The Scent of Rain and Lightning, Ballantine, $25. In an enthralling hybrid of whodunit, romantic suspense, and family saga, the eldest son of wealthy Kansas ranchers is murdered in 1986, and the loose-cannon ranch hand convicted of the crime, who always swore he was innocent, is released in 2009. Pickard uses the rural background to great effect and keeps the reader guessing. (First story December 2, 1981.)

*** Martin Edwards: The Serpent Pool, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. Cold case DCI Hannah Scarlett and historian Daniel Kind return for their fourth case set in England’s Lake District, a story strong on puzzle plotting, setting, and interpersonal complications. Could the years-before drowning of a young woman and the present-day burning of a book collector possibly be suicides? Coincidentally, Kind’s current research interest, De Quincey’s satirical 1827 essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, is available in a new small-format hardcover (Oneworld Classics/Trafalgar, $15.95). (First story August 1991.)

** John F. Dobbyn: Frame-Up, Oceanview, $24.95. In their second book-length case, the Boston law firm of Lex Devlin (old, wise) and Michael Knight (young, daring) agree to defend a mafioso’s son, accused of the car-bombing murder of a mob lawyer. In the Perry Mason tradition of fast-paced legerdemain in and (mostly) out of court, the plot is preposterous but involving. As in many recent novels, unnecessary shifting between first and third person does not serve the story well. But Dobbyn is an entertaining, inventive writer I’ll keep reading. (First Devlin and Knight story June 1994.)

*** Margaret Maron: Christmas Mourning, Grand Central, $25.99. The best of the holiday mystery crop is also, despite some tragic subject matter, the cheeriest, thanks to the huge extended family of North Carolina’s Judge Deborah Knott. The most recent victim in a troubling series of teenage highway deaths is a beautiful cheerleader who never drank alcoholic beverages or used drugs but had both in her system. The apt epigraphs, a specialty of this author, are drawn from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. In a time of punning titles, it’s amazing no one came up with this one sooner.

*** Simon Brett: The Shooting in the Shop, Five Star, $25.95. In the English village of Fethering, amateur sleuths Carole Seddon (introvert Home Office retiree) and neighbor Jude (extrovert New Age healer) investigate Yuletide murder with eccentric locals and theatrical outsiders among the well-drawn suspects. For over thirty years, Brett has been one of the most amusing and reliable pure entertainers in the crime fiction field.

** Susan Wittig Albert: Holly Blues, Berkley, $24.95. Though Christmassy as they come, the latest adventure for China Bayles, herb shop owner in Pecan City, Texas, was published in April. Common cozy characteristics—large cast of continuing characters, extensive misery-filled back story, slight and slow-developing mystery plot that comes up a twist short—are made palatable by good-humored narrative, likable people, and a wealth of holly lore.

** M.C. Beaton: Busy Body, Minotaur, $24.99. Cotswolds P.I. Agatha Raisin looks into the murder of a much-disliked Health and Safety Officer whose offenses include declaring the traditional church-top Christmas tree a public menace. When the second murder signals itself with a broad wink to experienced mystery readers, it’s clear this is a send-up of the classical whodunit, and the very obvious clue that clears everything up is in the same spirit.

** Anne Perry: A Christmas Odyssey, Ballantine, $18. The holiday novella, a minor annual feature of the author’s massive oeuvre, this time features Henry Rathbone and Squeaky Robinson from the William Monk series seeking the scion of a wealthy family in the darkest corners of Victorian London’s underworld. The writing is as fine as ever, the background grimly Dickensian, but the thin plot and sentimental conclusion may limit the readership to Perry completists.

Otto Penzler’s Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop (Vanguard, $24.95) collects 17 holiday stories originally published singly as gifts for customers of his Manhattan store. Inside jokes abound, and mystery writers, collectors, dealers, editors, and fans will love it. The stories by Edward D. Hoch, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, and Lawrence Block have been reprinted elsewhere, but most of the others, by top names like Anne Perry, Thomas H. Cook, and Mary Higgins Clark, have not. S.J. Rozan’s pun-filled and cunningly plotted “The Grift of the Magi” mentions a baseball whodunit called Take Me Out at the Ball Game and includes this deathless narrative: “His eyes smoldered. I wondered why they didn’t set fire to his face.”

An even better holiday gift for historically-minded mystery buffs is Penzler’s thousand-page-plus anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage/Black Lizard, $25.00), containing mostly unfamiliar material, along with a historical introduction by Keith Alan Deutsch and biographical notes on the authors. All the great names are present, among them Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, Raoul Whitfield, Frederick Nebel, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Carroll John Daly, Fredric Brown, George Harmon Coxe, William Campbell Gault, Horace McCoy, Norbert Davis, Richard Deming, and John D. MacDonald. In 1953, Black Mask-style selections became a feature of this magazine, as they are again today.

Copyright © 2010 Jon L. Breen

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BLOG BYTES

By Bill Crider

If you’re a fan of the works of the late John D. MacDonald (and I certainly am), you’ll enjoy spending some time at a blog called The Trap of Solid Gold (http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com), which is named for one of MacDonald’s best short stories. In fact, readers of EQMM should particularly enjoy the blog because it’s devoted not to JDM’s novels but to his short stories, of which there are an abundance. The blogger is Steve Scott, who worked with Walter and Jean Shine in compiling the definitive JDM bibliography. Scott has a large collection of magazines containing stories by JDM, many of which have never been reprinted, and he discusses the stories in depth. The discussions are accompanied by cover scans from the magazines where the stories first appeared. Recent reviews have included “College Man” from the February 1958 issue of Cosmopolitan, which happens to have a lovely photo of Sophia Loren on the cover, and “Money Green” from the May 1950 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories. (I’d love to own this issue, as the cover indicates that it also includes stories by William R. Cox and William Campbell Gault.) Scott’s review even includes a scan of the interior illustration for the story. There’s enough material on the blog to occupy you for quite some time if you have an interest in MacDonald. Or even if you don’t.

The Debrief (http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com) is “the online playground of spy novelist Jeremy Duns.” Duns is the author of Free Agent and Free Country, two well-received espionage novels, and among other things on his blog he has different writers talk about their favorite thrillers. For example, Tom Cain discusses Wilbur Smith’s The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, Meg Gardiner chooses Seven Days in May, and Matt Hilton picks David Morrell’s The Brotherhood of the Rose. Duns on his own talks about how he writes the thriller, his experience at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, and, of course, his novels. All interesting stuff.

Gerard Saylor is a librarian in southern Wisconsin, and he does reviews of mystery and crime fiction at Books Are For Squares (http://booksareforsquares.blogspot.com). The reviews are short, informal (Saylor claims that “grammatical errors are common,” though they really aren’t), and honest, sometimes to the point of “forced myself to finish.” The reviews are often plot summaries followed by Saylor’s “comments” on the books. Disclaimer: Saylor has reviewed my books favorably on this blog, so naturally I think he has good taste.

Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine can be found at http://billcrider.blogspot.com

Copyright © 2010 by Bill Crider

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Department of First Stories

A GOOD MAN OF BUSINESS

By David H. Ingram

Although he has had one previous fiction publication in a small-press literary magazine (The First Line), this is David H. Ingram’s first appearance in a national magazine and his first mystery. The...

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Reviews   Black Mask

Department of First Stories

A GOOD MAN OF BUSINESS

By David H. Ingram

Although he has had one previous fiction publication in a small-press literary magazine (The First Line), this is David H. Ingram’s first appearance in a national magazine and his first mystery. The St. Louis author is also a playwright, several of whose plays have been performed and published. He recently completed his first novel, a mystery set during a mayoral election, and has begun its sequel. His story makes a fine beginning to this department’s selections for our 70th-anniversary year.

Blinking lights, silver garlands, and boxes wrapped in paper decorated with jovial Santa Clauses, bound and bowed with satin ribbons, all mixed in among the bottles filling the mirrored shelves behind the bar at Jimmy’s Tavern.

I’ll be glad when this yearly mania is over, thought H. Sullivan Gleason, sipping his whiskey sour. December twenty-sixth was three days away but it couldn’t come soon enough for him. The psychotic joviality that gripped people at Christmastime drove him crazy. Like the idiots in the corner booth, singing Christmas carols with drunken abandon, the words slurred and half-forgotten but shouted boisterously nonetheless.

Gleason drained his drink and held up the empty glass for Emma, the bartender, to see. From halfway down the bar, she raised her index finger while smiling apologetically. Simple sign language was the only way to communicate, what with the Scotch and Soda Boys’ Choir in the corner.

Gleason glanced over his shoulder at the revelers. “I wish God would rest every merry gentleman in this damn room!”

“You misplaced the comma,” a voice beside him said.

“Hmmm?” he said, turning on his barstool. “What’s that?”

The man occupying the spot next to Gleason wore a three-piece charcoal-gray suit with a tri-fold in the breast pocket, his silk paisley tie carefully knotted, his black wingtips shining even in the dimly lit bar. Gleason placed the man in his mid fifties, much older than his own age of thirty-four, though he wouldn’t mind a similar head of dense black hair, brushed with a touch of silver at the temples, when he reached that age. However, the man’s most stunning features were his ice-blue eyes.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the man said. “Occasionally my tongue wags before I consider how my words might strike the listener. I said, you misplaced the comma, which could be pompous or plain rude, depending upon how it’s received. So, please accept my apology.”

“No offense taken.” The man’s English accent made Gleason smile. “I’m curious, though. What do you mean about the comma?”

“The song’s title is ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.’ The comma is after the ‘merry.’ It’s like wishing a person pleasant dreams, though we English always take extra words to do it. The gentlemen in question could be morose, sullen, or obstinate. Merriment is not a requirement.”

He’s right, Gleason thought, that is damn pompous, but it sounds so good with his accent. “That’s interesting, Mr....?”

“Noel’s my name, Charles Noel. And you are?”

“H. Sullivan Gleason, but please call me Sully. All my friends do.”

Noel smiled as they shook hands. “Thank you for that distinction, Sully.”

“What line of business are you in, Charles?”

“I’m in charge of North American accounts for Chapman and Hall Assurance of London. It means I spend time on both sides of the pond.” From a thin gold case, Noel carefully withdrew a business card, pinching it by the edges, and handed it to Gleason. The cursive script read:

Chapman and Hall

16 Bayham St

Camden Town

London NW1

In the corner was printed: Charles Noel, V.P., North American Operations.

“I hope your year was better than mine,” Gleason said, sticking the card in his pocket. “I’m the Midwest regional manager for Bradbury, Evans, and Sim.”

The carolers finished a jangling version of “Jingle Bells” and moved on to “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen your advertisements. ‘We’ll grow your money; we’ll earn your trust.’” Noel’s voice matched perfectly the sonorous tones of the ad’s voice-over actor. The Englishman nodded knowingly. “It has been a hard year for investment firms. But you’ve made out well personally, haven’t you?”

“I did okay.” Gleason, indeed everyone at BE&S, was careful with compensation queries these days. Last year’s bonuses had unleashed a firestorm of criticism.

“Good. A man’s worth his salt.” As Emma arrived with a new whiskey sour for Gleason, Noel said, “Please put that on my bill, my dear.”

“Thank you, Charles,” Gleason said. “Have you been here before?”

“No, this is my first time. I recently purchased a pied-à-terre in a development near Prior Lake. I noticed this tavern on my way home, so I thought I’d give it a go. Do you come here often, Sully?”

“Most nights after work. Usually, things are quieter.”

The singers were now arguing heatedly over whether there were seven lords a-leaping or swans a-swimming.

“The sounds of the season,” Noel said wryly.

“Fingernails on a chalkboard is more like it. Oh, Christmas is a benefit for business, but that’s all it has going for it.”

“So you’re in the ‘Bah, Humbug’ club.”

“That I am.” Gleason sipped his drink. “I had a bad experience last Christmas. I doubt I’ll ever enjoy the season again.”

“What happened, my friend?”

Gleason was immediately wary, realizing he’d said too much. A few months earlier, a woman slapped him in the face when she discovered who he was. “Uh, never mind. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Wait a minute. Sullivan Gleason? I’ve heard that name before. Ah, I’ve got it—the Good Samaritan case. That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Gleason said carefully, ready to duck.

“Goodness me, I’ve read about your travails. I am so sorry.”

Gleason relaxed. “Thank you. It’s been a trial.”

“It must have been horrible, having that poor girl drown and then finding yourself blamed for the tragedy. It’s absolutely chilling!”

“It could have been worse,” Gleason said. “My lawyer fended off the police and a civil suit the family filed. Today he said that unless there’s some spectacular new evidence, I’m in the clear.”

He said it confidently, though his thoughts drifted to Maggie. She wouldn’t hurt me with this, would she? She was all passion and fire, which made her wonderful in bed and unbearable out of it. Their breakup had involved shouted curses and a hurled hotel-room lamp shattering within inches of his head. But if she ever changed her story, she’d face charges and likely be sued as well.

“Excellent!” Noel raised his glass. “To a good man of business.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Gleason said, clinking his glass against Noel’s. Draining the liquor, he set it on the bar as he stood up. “I need to make a pit stop.”

“Fine. I’ll have a refill ready when you return.”

“You’re a good man yourself, Charles.”

After finishing his business, Gleason stepped to the men’s room sink. He closed his eyes and dropped his head, feeling the alcohol numbing his skin. Reaching out, he twisted the cold water tap. Air in the pipes caused a quick triplet of hollow clangs before the water streamed out.

... Clunk, clunk, clunk. Fists on safety glass. Can’t break it, yet she tries. Staring at him. Shouting! Pleading! Then black water swallowing the car ...

Gleason’s eyes burst open, his heart racing. Damn it! He hadn’t flashed back to the accident in months, long enough that he felt he’d put the night behind him. Gleason quickly splashed water on his face, unmindful of the splatters flying onto his suit coat.

When he returned to the bar, Noel handed him a fresh drink. Gleason downed half of it, seeking to quiet the echoes of that night.

“Perhaps you should take care,” Noel said. “Don’t the police believe alcohol was involved in your case?”

“Yeah. It’s a lie, of course. I’d only had one drink here before heading home that night. There were plenty of witnesses.”

“Of course. My worry, Sully, is that the police might want to catch you driving drunk. That would toss petrol onto the flames, don’t you think?”

“Damn right it would!” Gleason’s face turned granite-hard. “That lead detective, Abernathy, would like nothing better than that. Good thinking, Charles. I’ll switch to coffee and get a sandwich before driving home.”

“A wise plan, my friend.”

Gleason smiled at the thought of putting one over on that cop. He drained the drink, and moved to set the glass on the bar.

He missed.

Somehow Noel caught the glass before it crashed to the floor. Gleason’s stomach wrenched violently. Sweat beads erupted on his forehead.

“I feel sick,” he moaned. “Oh, God!”

“I say, we best get you outside. Can you manage? Do you need an arm?’

“No ... I’ll make it.”

“You head on. I’ll settle up for us both and meet you outside.”

Gleason nodded. He moved with exaggerated care, slipping his coat on as he walked. Once outside, he dashed to the corner of the building and bent over. Everything in his stomach spewed out like a geyser. For a while he thought he might die. Then he prayed that he would—anything to make the episode pass. When the nausea finally receded, he felt as wrung out as a twisted dish rag.

The cold Minnesota night bit at his skin. December had been temperate, meaning the thermometer flirted with freezing during the day, but the nights remained frigid. Sounds were softened by a comforter of snow.

He felt a hand pat his shoulder. Turning his head, he found Noel holding out a water bottle to him.

“Here. Rinse your mouth and then drink some. It will make you feel better.”

After Gleason did as told, Noel helped him straighten and braced him beneath his arms. “We need to get you home, Sully. I’ll drive you there.”

“I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You didn’t; I volunteered. I’ll call a cab from your place. I’ll be fine. Now, which car is yours?”

“It’s the Escalade, over there.” Gleason managed to pass the keys to Noel. After getting him into the passenger seat, Noel circled the SUV and climbed in behind the wheel.

“What’s your address, Sully?”

“Seventy-five forty-nine Needham Drive, in Brandywine Estates. It’s a new development, south of Cleary Lake Park and the Legends Club.”

“I looked there when house-shopping.” Noel withdrew his BlackBerry and searched for the address. “There it is, off of Black Farm Road.”

“Uh, yeah, but take Silverton. It’s a better road.” Gleason reached across the console and patted Noel’s arm. “Thanks for doing this.”

While Noel drove out of the parking lot, Gleason reclined his seat and closed his eyes. He was feeling a bit better now. He sipped more of the water before recapping the bottle and dropping it into the cup holder.

“My, it’s a beautiful night,” Noel said as he drove. “We don’t have snow like this in London often, and when we do we don’t know what to do with it.”

“Yeah, nice night,” Gleason mumbled.

“It’s as if we were in an illustration for Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It’s a powerful image Dickens creates, with Scrooge observing the consequences of his actions throughout his life. He had a chance to repent, to face those consequences and renew his spirit.”

Consequences, Gleason thought. That silly old miser knew nothing of consequences! Not ones that could destroy you if acknowledged. Ones you had to lock away in your brain and try to forget ...

Instead of forgetting, Gleason remembered that horrible night—every pungent, awful moment.

Until his life twisted like a corkscrew, it was a wonderful day. He’d let the staff leave BE&S’s Bloomington regional office at two-thirty P.M. A few were going to the nearby Mall of America for last-minute presents, while one or two were heading to Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to catch flights home. Gleason knew MSP well; his region had local offices spread over ten states.

A few employees commiserated with Gleason about having to stay for a six P.M. conference call. After giving them ten minutes to clear the building, he opened his cell and dialed the number he’d been waiting to call all day.

“They’re gone,” he said when she answered.

“See you soon.”

Twenty minutes later, there was a knock at his private entrance. He rushed to open the door.

“I thought you’d never call!” Maggie said, entering. She wore a calf-length black fur coat and carried a bag from Whole Foods market. “I brought food for later, and I got you a Christmas present.”

Closing and locking the door, he turned to her. “What’s my present?”

Setting the bag on his desk, she undid her coat and turned to him, holding the coat open. Beneath she wore nothing but a black corset, panties, and nylons, along with a green ribbon with a bow around her waist.

“Merry Christmas,” she said in a husky voice, and then burst out laughing. “I’ve seen this in movies and wanted to try it. I thought my tush would freeze getting in here from the parking garage. At least my car’s got a good heater.”

He came to her and slipped his hands onto her waist. “You’d better not let your husband see you like this.”

“Don’t worry. I have some demure clothes in the bag.”

Gleason confined his affairs to married women. They were passionate and grateful, and they didn’t nag at him about marriage, a fate he’d managed to avoid thus far. That Maggie’s husband was a business competitor made it all the more satisfying.

They took a break around five to eat, washing the food down with eggnog laced liberally with rum. The conference call came in at six P.M. He was glad it wasn’t a video call, since Maggie didn’t get dressed until the call’s conclusion. After she headed home around seven, Gleason tidied the office, removing all remnants of their time together. He tossed the leftover food into a dumpster, but the remaining rum and nog went into his stainless-steel travel mug.

One for the road, he thought.

Maggie’s tastes ran to marinated mushrooms and olives, brie cheese and stone-ground crackers, which might have satisfied a runway model. Gleason headed south on Route 77 to his favorite steakhouse, in the Apple Valley area. He passed on wine with dinner, feeling he was near the limit from the rum. It was a choice he was thankful for later. Heading home past the Burnside Mall, he still made his usual stop at Jimmy’s, but only for one drink.

It always surprised him, the quick change from congestion to countryside outside of Minneapolis. For the final leg home, he took Black Farm Road since it was less traveled than Silverton, and less likely to be patrolled by the police. Near Calico Lake, the fatigue from his time with Maggie, augmented by the heavy food and plentiful alcohol he’d consumed, hit him like a crashing wave. He could hardly keep his eyes open. The Escalade weaved across the road and back again. Just get home, he repeated like a mantra.

He was far to the left when he came around a corner by the lake.

Instantly two headlights burned his eyes. He couldn’t react. He just came straight on.

Later he learned the girl’s name was Cortney Bice, a twenty-year-old sophomore at the University of Iowa. Her yearbook photograph showed a cheerleader archetype, though she was a dean’s list student. Heading home for Christmas Day, she’d left I-35 at Newmarket to travel cross-country to Chaska.

“She always enjoyed driving the back roads,” her father, Bradley Bice, told the news conference. Her mother, Ruth, stood by him, choking back tears.

Cortney did react, jerking the wheel of her Cavalier to the right. The cars came within a millimeter of each other, but never touched. While the Escalade remained on the road, the Cavalier flew off the embankment, sailing in an arc before smashing through the ice covering Calico Lake.

Gleason managed to stop the Escalade. Releasing his seatbelt, he tumbled out of the SUV and jogged back to where the car went off the road. Looking down, he saw its rear end bobbing in the water.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” he said rapidly.

Then he heard the clunk and saw a fist in the Cavalier’s rear window. Cortney had climbed into the backseat. Seeing him, she pounded on the glass with all the terror-driven might she could muster and shouted, “Help me! Please, help me!”

He knew what he should do—dive into the water, open a door, save the girl. He even took a step forward. Then his mind raced on. Yes, and then the police will come. She’ll tell them how you ran her off the road and the cops will give you a Breathalyzer test. You’ll light it up. Drunk driving was no longer winked at in business circles. There’d be a civil suit too, of course. The jury would delight in taking several pounds of flesh from his body.

Gleason looked down at Cortney again. At first she smiled, thinking he would rescue her, but as he remained unmoving, the crushing realization that no help was coming slammed into her. She pounded harder, but she didn’t have the strength or purchase in the flooding car to break the window. The pleading changed to an inarticulate scream of rage.

He could still hear the pounding as the car slipped beneath the surface.

But not out of sight. The car settled with its roof only a foot below the surface. Anyone investigating the gash left in the snow bank would discover the wreck.

What to do, what to do? Gleason paced back and forth, gulping the icy air into his lungs. He could leave; no one had seen him. But what if some homeowner further up the road noticed him pass by and remembered the time?

Then a thought flared in his mind. What if I controlled the report?

Gleason worked the idea feverishly, then set to work. Grabbing his travel mug, he ran along the roadway until he was out of sight of the scene. Ducking into the forest, Gleason jammed a finger down his throat until he threw up. He poured out the remaining spiked eggnog before carefully scooping snow over the mess. With more snow he washed the mug, drying it with his handkerchief. No cars had passed; there wasn’t even the hint of an approaching engine in the air. Gleason ran back to the Escalade, where he did wind sprints and jumping jacks on the blacktop. Once he felt reasonably sober, he carefully—oh so carefully—backed the SUV around the corner and another a half-mile farther. Shifting into drive, he accelerated until, just before the turn, he slammed on the brakes and yanked the wheel to the right, ramming into the snow. He pulled back onto the road and drove to the accident scene while dialing 911.

The tape of the call was released to the media:

Operator: “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

Gleason: “Hey, I’m on Black Farm Road and some idiot just ran me into a snowbank. It was a Mustang, I think, weaving all over. I’m back on the road, so I’m okay, but he’s going to cause ... wait a minute. It looks like someone else went off the road. The guy must have cut them off, too. Let me get out and check.” The sound of a car door opening followed by footsteps could be faintly heard. Then, shouted: “There’s a car in the lake! I see a girl in it! It’s going under! Get someone here fast!”

The call lasted another four minutes during which Gleason sounded completely panicked. The tape ended with the sounds of approaching sirens.

The responders rushed to rescue the girl from the sunken car, but were unable to revive her. The police walked him through his story several times. Gleason added small details, like the Mustang’s color, to increase his story’s veracity. Eventually he was allowed to leave.

It would have been perfect, except for the damned watch.

The 911 call came in at 10:23 P.M. Cortney’s analog watch had stopped at 10:08.

That was when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Investigator Jarvis Abernathy came on the case. He went through every inch of Gleason’s story like a proctologist. The story played out in the Star-Tribune and on the local TV stations, the police saying Gleason’s story didn’t hold up, while Gleason’s lawyer proclaimed the police had settled on his client, a Good Samaritan who tried to help, just to close a case. He became the focal point of debate in the Twin Cities. Some wanted his hide, while others took Gleason’s side, viewing him as an unjustly persecuted man.

Gleason had cringed when he heard Cortney’s grandfather was some big celebrity in Hollywood, knowing it would keep the story alive. The family did try a civil suit, but Gleason’s lawyer managed to get a continuance while the police investigation was pending. As his lawyer explained, a stalled case could help get the suit tossed.

It had been months since the paper or the TV stations had run a story, but with tomorrow being the one-year anniversary, Gleason planned to stay home, ducking any reporters who might want a follow-up story. He just wanted the whole memory to fade away, especially from his own mind.

Gleason opened his eyes as the car slowed. Looking out, he saw that Noel was stopping at the accident scene on Black Farm Road.

“This is where it happened, isn’t it?” Noel asked as he put the car in park, leaving the engine idling. “Lake Calico, a few miles before the turnoff for the Brandywine development?”

“Yes,” Gleason managed to croak out of his dry mouth. He uncapped the water bottle and took a long pull.

“It was the lost fifteen minutes that made the police disbelieve your story. They couldn’t reconcile why that much time had passed.”

“Her watch was slow.” Gleason’s lawyer had used that line often in the accident’s aftermath. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense. I didn’t delay reporting the accident. Why would I do that?”

“They suggested you were trying to get sober.”

“I only had one drink that night. I was sober.”

Noel looked at Gleason. “Sully, what if this were your night to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past? If we went back one year and stood here, would we see your Escalade weaving drunkenly along the road, forcing the Cavalier into the water? Would we see you standing there while that young girl pounded on the window until her hands bled?”

“No,” Gleason said firmly. “It was that other driver, in the Mustang. He cut her off. I did nothing wrong.”

“Think of Marley, Sully. Scrooge tried to console Marley’s ghost by calling him ‘a good man of business.’ The ghost wailed that he had discovered too late that mankind was his business.”

Within Gleason was a voice longing to shout out, Yes, I did it! I killed her! But the consequences were too much to bear. Gleason turned to face Noel and looked him in the eye.

“I told you what happened. I’m not responsible for that girl’s death.”

That’s the only story I’m left with, Gleason’s mind added silently, and I’ll cling to it until the day I die.

After a moment, Noel’s face broke into a wide smile. “I knew it! I knew you were innocent. Some in my office believed the police, but I told them they were mistaken. Thank you, Sully. Thank you so much.”

Sleepiness consumed Gleason. He drank down the last of the water and dropped the empty bottle back into the holder.

“Please, Charles, can you get me home? I’m very tired.”

“Of course, Sully.”

He turned into the driveway of Gleason’s home. Using the remote clipped to the visor, he opened the garage and pulled up inside, putting the Escalade into Park. Gleason was lost in a dreamless sleep. From his coat pocket Noel took a piece of paper, leaving a note for Gleason. Then he got out and closed up the garage. He walked down the driveway, softly humming “Silent Night.”

The winter sun had already sunk low in the sky when BCA Investigator Jarvis Abernathy arrived at the Bice home in Chaska. He’d called to alert them that he was on his way.

It was Cortney’s grandfather, Quentin Cooper, who answered the door. Several times over the last twelve months Cooper had come out from California to be with his daughter’s family, helping them cope with Cortney’s death.

“Good to see you again, Jarvis.” Cooper’s rich tenor voice was familiar to the investigator, as it was to most people in the country. Along with a film career that covered a half-century, he did numerous voice-overs for ads. He’s not God, but he sounds like Him, was how the ad executives put it.

It was still strange for Abernathy, seeing in the flesh a man he’d grown up watching on a movie screen. The actor’s sandy hair was now silver and cropped close to his skull, though his skin remained unblemished. When Abernathy asked how he’d managed that, Cooper had chuckled and said, “Moisturizers and special effects.” The detective found he liked the man immensely, for although he was a fixture in Hollywood—an actor who disappeared into his roles like a male Meryl Streep—in person he was warm and devoid of the egotism one expected in an actor. Abernathy had to admit, his feelings about Cooper made the message he’d come to deliver personally all the harder to handle.

“Where are Ruth and Brad?” Abernathy asked.

“Waiting in the living room.”

The parents were seated close together on the couch, their hands entwined. They looked at him with hopeful, guarded eyes. Hopeful the man responsible for their daughter’s death would finally face punishment; guarded from past disappointments. Abernathy took a chair across from the Bices, while Cooper perched on a chair arm off to the side of the room.

“There will be an announcement made within the hour about Cortney’s case,” the detective said.

“You said you were going to arrest him this morning,” Ruth Bice said. The loss of Cortney along with the unresolved case had worn hard on her. She was a string stretched taut, almost to the snapping point. For Abernathy, the worst part of any murder or manslaughter investigation was seeing the violence echoing in the lives of the victim’s family.

“That was the plan. After we got Maggie Ferigami to tell the truth about the night Cortney died, everything fell into place.”

Gleason had used Maggie to bolster his claim that he hadn’t been drinking, and she’d maintained that story throughout the year. Then, last week, Abernathy heard an attempted reconciliation with her husband had fizzled. He’d kicked her out, and when she’d turned to Gleason for support, he dumped her. Abernathy interviewed her again, offering her immunity for any previous false statements. This time she told the story straight, including how they’d polished off a bottle of rum during their Christmas Eve tryst, with Gleason doing most of the polishing. It had taken a few days to finish not only crossing the t’s, but hammering those crossbeams in place, before they were ready to arrest Gleason.

“What happened?” Brad asked.

“Do you know what ipecac syrup is?”

Both Bices looked blankly at Abernathy.

“I’ve heard of it,” Cooper said. “Decades ago doctors recommended that households have it available in case of an accidental poisoning. It induces vomiting. Why do you ask?”

“Gleason went to Jimmy’s Tavern last night. Witnesses say he took ill.”

“Jimmy’s Tavern,” Brad repeated. “That’s where he was drinking the night Cortney died, isn’t it?”

“Yes. This morning we found a small bottle labeled ipecac syrup on a ledge outside the tavern’s door.”

“So someone laced his drink?” Ruth smiled harshly. “Good. I guess not everyone in that bar supports Gleason. If you find out who did it, let me know. I’ll send them chocolates and flowers.”

“I doubt we’ll ever know. There were no fingerprints on the bottle, but then people wearing gloves in Minnesota in December is a given. The bartender said Gleason was talking with an Englishman last night, but we’ve been unable to locate him. I mention this only because it complicates what we discovered when we went to arrest Gleason. We found him in his garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Towels were stuffed under the doors to seal the garage, and his SUV had run until the tank was dry. There was residue in an empty water bottle beside him that the lab identified as a sleeping compound. We found a printed suicide note, confessing to causing your daughter’s accident.”

“No, that’s not right,” Ruth said, shaking her head. “That’s too easy a death. He should have felt pain, after what he did to—”

Ruth broke down. Her husband hugged her as the sobs came.

When she quieted, Brad looked at Abernathy. “Thank you, Jarvis, for coming to tell us.”

“This closes the case,” Abernathy said. “Frankly, even with Maggie’s testimony, the prosecutor only gave us a fifty-fifty chance of a conviction. If Gleason had continued to fight, he might have gotten off.”

Brad shuddered. “That would have been another nightmare.”

“We’ll have some officers here soon to provide security. The press will want a comment after the announcement.”

“When they come, I’ll speak to them. I’m just glad it’s over. I guess, in his mind, Gleason finally did the decent thing.”

“Yeah,” Abernathy said as he rose.

“I’ll walk you out,” Cooper said.

At the door, Abernathy turned to Cooper.

“You should have taken the card.”

“What do you mean?” Cooper asked, appearing puzzled.

“Chapman and Hall? They published many books by Dickens, including A Christmas Carol. The address in Camden Town was where Dickens lived as a child. Apparently he used that house as a model for the Cratchit home. And the name—Charles Noel? Charles Christmas? You did that television version of the story a few years back, didn’t you? I remember it was well-received.”

The actor’s lips pulled back into a slight smile, but he remained silent.

“So Gleason got a visit from the Spirit of Christmas Past—last Christmas Past,” Abernathy said. “I take it, unlike Scrooge, he remained unrepentant. The case is over, the prosecutor’s happy, and my captain doesn’t want to hear about what I believe happened. But don’t think you played me, old man.”

Abernathy walked away. Cooper’s ice-blue eyes watched the detective depart.

Copyright © 2010 David H. Ingram

Black Mask

Black Mask

THE TALL BLONDE WITH THE HOT BOILER

By Harley Mazuk

Harley Mazuk was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and has worked at a variety of jobs, including, for the past ten years, corporate communications. This is his first work of fiction and it would...

Top of Black Mask

Department of First Stories

Black Mask

THE TALL BLONDE WITH THE HOT BOILER

By Harley Mazuk

Harley Mazuk was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and has worked at a variety of jobs, including, for the past ten years, corporate communications. This is his first work of fiction and it would normally go in our Department of First Stories. We’re publishing it in Black Mask because he was so clearly inspired by the style of Chandler and Hammett. The tale is set in San Franciso 60-some years ago. Its P.I. already stars in a just-completed novel!

---1---

A tall blonde came to see me about her hot boiler, but when I stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor of the Rose Building that late May morning, I didn’t notice her at first. I looked to my left and saw this fellow holding up the wall. His hat brim was so big, it cast a shadow on his face, and only the glow of his cigarette showed underneath. His sport jacket came down to his knees, and his pants had enough extra material in them to wrap the trunk of a redwood tree.

But my office was to the right and I turned away from the zoot-suit kid and walked down the hall. That’s when I first saw the tall blond dish pacing outside my door. Her pillbox hat was cocked at an unusual angle; her sunglasses didn’t cover what looked like a fresh shiner. Her peach blouse was soiled and gapped a bit where it was missing a button at bra level. The seams of her stockings ran as straight along the backs of her calves as Lombard Street down Russian Hill. The overall impression she made was of a piece of bruised fruit, or of a hooker who handled a lot of rough trade.

“Morning,” I said, as I slipped my key into the lock on the door. “Tough night?”

“Are you the detective?”

She had a vaguely European accent. The d and each t in “detective” were clipped and hard; the h in “the” was barely there. “That’s right. Frank Swiver’s my name. Come on in.”

I opened up shop and gave us some lights. An inner door with smoked glass had my name in black letters across the top, then underneath:

Private Investigations

Old Vine Detective Agency

I held that door open for the tall blonde. Following her in, I flipped my fedora onto the hat rack and slid the guest chair out. “And you are?”

“I am Mrs. Karin Maldau,” she said. “Thank you.”

Car-with-a-rolled-r-eeen. Karin. “And how can I help you today, Mrs. Maldau?” I moved around my desk and sat in my swivel rocker.

She opened her bag and took out a deck of Old Gold Kings. “Do you mind if I smoke, Mr. Swiver?”

“Be my guest.” I opened the middle desk drawer, found an ashtray, and slid it to her. Then I struck a wooden match and reached it across. Yes, she steadied my hand with hers when she lit up.

“Thank you.” It sounded almost like “tank you,” or “dank you,” but there was a slight aspiration in there. I smiled and waited.

“Mr. Swiver, I have trouble. My car has been stolen.”

I felt a bit deflated. I had rather hoped she was being blackmailed over some nude photos she’d posed for. “Your car was stolen?”

“Yes, that’s right. I want you to get it back.”

“Mrs. Maldau, I would like to help you, but I have to be honest.” I rubbed my hand through my hair. “I really don’t do a lot of auto-theft work. In fact, I can’t recall the last bent car case I handled. I think you’d be better off letting the police work on this. Have you reported it yet?”

“No.”

“Well, first thing, let’s call it in,” I said, and reached for the blower.

“No.” She jumped to her feet. “You mustn’t ... I mean, I mustn’t have the police.”

I leaned back. “They can help you.”

Karin Maldau sat back down. “No. I don’t want the police.”

I waited.

“My husband, Mr. Maldau. He would be very angry with me. It’s a brand-new car, you see. He just bought it for me.”

“Make and model?”

“Nineteen forty-nine Mercury. It’s a coupé. Two-door coupé. Purple.”

“When did this happen, Mrs. Maldau?”

“Last night, sometime before six A.M. I have been waiting for you in the corridor for two hours.”

“Maybe the cops coulda done something in those two hours. They coulda put out an APB—that’s an all-points bulletin, Mrs. Maldau.” I grinned. “If the thief was joyriding, they might have spotted the car. It’s a new model. There aren’t many of them on the streets.”

“No cops, Mr. Swiver.” She raised her voice to say that and winced. I noticed red marks on her throat. “I want you to find my car.” She reached in her purse and brought out a wallet. “Here are two hundred dollars. I don’t know your fees, but that is all I have with me.”

“My fee is twenty-five dollars a day, plus any expenses.”

“Here are two hundred now. I will bring you another two hundred when you recover my car. But you must make haste. Put aside your other cases.”

“Well, I could do that. I could focus on your case. But the police have more resources. They have a better chance of success in a matter like this. I’m just one guy.”

“I think I am not getting so much for my money, maybe. But still ... I must have back my car. My offer remains.”

I didn’t have any other clients at the time. I could probably have parallel parked a ’49 Mercury in the hole in her story, but the four pictures of General Grant that she’d fanned out on my desk were authentic enough.

“Let’s say I could find your boiler for you, Mrs. Maldau. If I could do it, the police could too, and for no charge. Four hundred dollars is a lot of dough.”

“I told you, I don’t want my husband to know. He has a temper. You find my car. Return it to me. He will not know it was gone. I will take a cab home now. I will tell him I left the car at the home of a lady friend.”

“Where did you leave the car? Where was it when it was stolen?”

“On Webster Street.”

That was on the edge of the Marina district. “Parked on the street?”

“In the parking lot. Sorrento Inn. That is a motor court there.”

“A motel?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, Sorrento Motor Inn.”

“Did you park it there, Mrs. Maldau?”

“Yes, of course. When I awoke, the car was gone.”

A married dame spends the night at a casual motel; her heap turns up missing. And she didn’t want her husband to know.

“Were you alone at the Sorrento?”

“I was not. But you need not concern yourself about who I was with. It could not possibly help you find the car.”

“All right, Mrs. Maldau. I’ll see what I can do. Do you have the registration?”

“No, it was in the car. But I know the plate number. California yellow plates with blue numbers, 78N395.”

“Car in your name, or your husband’s?”

“His, Agustin Maldau.”

“Do you have the keys?” I asked. She did and she gave them to me. I scooped up the fifties, folded them, and put them in my trouser pocket. “How do I get in touch with you?”

“We’re in the book, Mr. Swiver. But please don’t call. My husband might answer. I will call you in six hours. If you’re not in, I will call again each hour.”

We left it at that. She said goodbye, and I poured a short glass of Chenin Blanc and tried to think of how I’d find a stolen car. I walked over to the window with my glass of wine and looked down on Post Street. I saw Karin Maldau walk out and head toward Union Square. I saw the zoot-suit kid step out of a doorway and head up the street the same way.

---2---

A black man named George was the porter in the garage. I talked to him when I went down for my heap.

“Stolen when, Mr. Swiver? Last night? Shoot. It’s probably parts by now.”

“Parts?”

“Yes sir.” George pulled a pouch of Bull Durham out of the top of his overalls and started to roll one. He held the paper in his right hand and shook tobacco out of the bag with his left. “Car thief takes a car. What’s in it for him? It’s hot. He can’t sell it. He got no title. But he take it apart, he can sell the tires, the wheels, the generator. He can sell the gears, the radio, the lights. Nobody asks for a title for the parts. Thief can sell ’em all cheap, and he still makes a few hundred bucks. Might make more than a grand. What kind of bucket is it? Cadillac might bring two thousand in parts.” He pulled the strings on the bag shut with his teeth, dropped it in his overalls, finished the roll, and then wet the whole cigarette down in his mouth.

“It’s a ’forty-nine Mercury.” I lit him.

George’s sleepy expression changed. “’Forty-nine Merc? Oh, that different. See, that’s a brand-new car. That’s in demand. Yeah, Ford got them a hit there. You see, you want to buy one, you can’t just get your pick and drive it off the lot. No sir. You gots to wait. You place an order, wait maybe six weeks for Dee-troit. So now, your car thief, he has a product he can move. He don’t have to spend time cuttin’ it up into pieces. He can find one buyer. Yes sir, you might still have a chance here.”

“George, what if I wanted a new Mercury and didn’t want to wait? How could I get a hot one?”

“Don’t know, Mr. S. I don’t work with no hot boilers. Chances are the thief might have already had a buyer. Mighta been fillin’ an order, like. But I’ll tell you what I’d do. How’s your Spanish? You should talk to some Mexicans. Yeah, I think they like that kind of merchandise.”

I gave George fifty cents. He held the door of my ’38 Pontiac open for me. Maybe it was time to shop for a new car.

---3---

First, though, I paid a visit to the scene of the crime, the Sorrento Motor Inn. It was a two-level modern building, tucked under the morning fog, just south of Chestnut. A couple of quiet gulls sat on the roof. There were about two dozen rooms opening to the outside around a courtyard that was the parking lot. It was now ten-fifteen, and most of the spaces were empty. I parked by the office and went in.

There was a kid in his twenties, black-rimmed glasses and a cowlick, wearing a sweater vest over a shirt and tie, at the desk. I showed him my card and told him I was a private dick on a case. He said his name was Matt Fisher. He said he was willing to help.

“What time did you come on, Matt?”

“Seven, sir. Seven A.M.”

“I have a client whose car was stolen here last night. Do you know anything about that?”

“Just after I came in, sir. Maybe seven-ten. A guy in big baggy pants with suspenders, wearing just his undershirt, sunglasses, and a big hat came to the office. He said he was Mr. Valdes from Two-oh-nine. Said his car had been stolen. I said I’d call the police and he could report it. I started to dial, and then he put his hand down on the cradle, broke the connection. He says maybe he was mistaken, don’t call the police yet. ‘Maybe my wife forget where she park it,’ he says. Then he went out.”

“Can I look at the register?”

“Sure.” He spun it partway around and slid it over to me. There was a Mr. and Mrs. P. Valdes checked into room 209. They listed a purple Mercury with the same plate number Mrs. Maldau had given me. “Did they have a reservation?” I asked.

“No.” He shrugged. “It ain’t that kinda place, sir. Most of our business just stops in if they see the vacancy sign on. Anyhow, about eight o’clock, Mr. Valdes comes back in, said everything was fine. He turned in his key and paid cash for the room, which was six bucks. The lady stayed outside with her back to the window.”

“Short Mexican broad? Dark hair? Kind of stocky?”

He looked surprised. “Mrs. Valdes? No, she was tall, at least as tall as him. She was blond. From the back, it looked like she had a good figure.”

I asked Matt if I could see room 209, and he said sure; he doubted it had been cleaned yet. I said better still, and he gave me the key.

There was a concrete outdoor staircase with a black iron railing. I took the steps two at a time, and the seagulls on the roof took off. Room 209 was in a corner. When I opened the door, the room seemed hazy, as if the fog had settled in. I flicked the light switch and a small lamp on a bed table came on. Then I took a breath and realized the haze wasn’t fog, it was reefer smoke.

The light on the bed table wasn’t strong enough to attract a baby moth, so I pulled open the curtain. One ashtray held light gray ash, the stubs of a couple of homemade smokes, and five or six Old Gold butts. In the wastebasket was an empty bottle of Paul Masson Ruby Cabernet. Two sticky glasses sat on the table, one with peachy lip prints. A soggy towel lay crumbled on the floor of the bathroom. I lifted the spread and blanket from the bed. The sheets were soiled with the lees of a good time.

I could scoop up the dregs of the reefer and I could get prints from the glasses but what for? I was looking for a bent car. So I turned out the lights and stepped out onto the landing, pulling the door to 209 shut behind me.

There was a view from the second level across the courtyard and down to the street. To the south, on Lombard, I could just make out some red, white, and green pennants strung on a line parallel to the street flapping in the breeze. Black lettering on a yellow sign read, “Used Autos ... Lopez Motors ... Autos Usados.”

---4---

I was considering a prewar Packard four-door the size of a PT boat when a sharp-dressed man in his forties, maybe five or ten years older than me, with slick black hair and a waxed moustache stepped out of the trailer that served as an office. “That’s a posh machine you’re looking at there, sir. All the luxury options, and only thirty-one thousand miles on it. You could save a lot on that. I just got it in. Picked it up at an estate sale.”

“Buenos días. Señor Lopez?”

The sun was over my shoulder and now he shaded his eyes with his hand and took a closer look at me. I gave him a friendly but dumb grin. I’d tipped the front of my hat brim up, and I hoped that I looked like a rube.

“Sí, Jorge Lopez. Do I know you, señor?”

“No, I don’t think so, Señor Lopez, unless you’ve bought grapes in Santa Rosa. Ha, ha, ha.” I clasped his right hand with both of mine and started working it up and down like a pump handle. “My name’s Kennedy, Francis Kennedy. I’ve just moved to San Francisco. Cómo va el negocio?”

“Bueno, señor. Habla usted español?”

“Ha, ha, ha. Solo un poco, señor, un poco. I was in Spain.” I hung on to his arm a little longer.

“Ah, España. See, I know you don’t talk Spanish like a Mexican. How can I help you? You want to take this Packard for a test drive? It gives a great ride.”

“This? Oh, no. Actually, this is too big for me. I was thinking about a coupé.”

Jorge Lopez was happy to oblige, and I let him walk me over to a ’41 DeSoto two-door. “Ah, Mr. Lopez, what I’m really looking for is a post-war design. I like the way they’re building the new bodies now.”

Lopez agreed that I was a man of taste and style. He liked them, too. But he said, “Unfortunately, not many folks have traded in their post-war cars yet. I could show you a ’forty-eight Chevy Aero, but truly, that is just a pre-war car built after the war.”

“Really, what I’m looking for,” I said, and my left eye picked up a little tic, “is a ’forty-nine Mercury.” There was a distinct pause.

“No, señor. I don’t have that.” He leveled a steady gaze on me. ”That’s a new car. You go to Golden Gate Mercury.”

“Oh, I did go there. I want a purple coupé. They said it’d be about two months to get one. It’s very popular. They can’t keep ’em in stock. There’s a waiting list.”

“That’s too bad. Maybe you want to get a nice used car now. I got a ’forty-one DeSoto. Or you like a purple car? I got a nineteen forty Plymouth in purple.”

“Last night I had dinner at Rosa’s,” I said. “You know it? It’s a Mexican restaurant over by the Mission. Good enchiladas. Anyhow, after dinner I saw this kid parked out there in a ’forty-nine Mercury so I talked to him. He said if I want one and I don’t want to wait, I should see George Lopez.” There went my eye tic again.

“Must be some other Lopez. I’m sorry, I can’t help you, Mr. Kennedy.” He turned and walked towards the trailer.

“Three grand, señor. Two thousand, seven hundred, the price of the boiler and three hundred berries because I want it now.” He stopped. “All in cash, of course.”

Lopez turned around and hitched up his pants. “It’s true; I have some good connections in the auto business. Sometimes I can get a car outside of the channels that the new car dealers have to use. Let me talk to some people. You have a number where I can call you?”

I had better than a number. I gave him a card for Francis Kennedy, Wholesale Grapes, and wrote my Old Vine office phone number on the back.

---5---

I stopped for an early lunch at the Black Lizard Lounge, a place I knew south of Market. I went with the fried chicken, and had a half-bottle of ’45 Vosne-Romanée from Henri Jayer to wash it down. They often say that burgundies have a dumb period, when they shut down. I think the Jayer was playing dumb.

After that, I went to Motor Vehicles and looked up the plate number Karin Maldau had given me. It checked out—a purple, two-door, 1949 V-8 coupé, registered to Agustin Maldau. He’d bought it only two months ago. I took down the serial number for the engine, and the Maldaus’ home address, which was in Sea Cliff near Baker Beach.

Then I swung by police headquarters and looked at the police blotter for stolen cars. No ’49 Mercurys had been reported missing for the last two weeks. Finally, I picked up a cup of java and went back to my office to wait for Karin Maldau’s call.

I had a hunch Lopez might call me, too, so when the wire buzzed at three-ten, I answered by repeating my phone number. It was Lopez, so I became Kennedy. He was all cheery, like any slick used-car salesman. Good news, maybe he could help me out, if I was still interested in doing business. I told him I was more than interested, I was eager.

“I made some calls, Mr. Kennedy, and I think I’ll have your car late tonight.” He asked me if I could come by his place after nine.

“I thought you closed at six,” I said.

“Usually we close, but tonight, I’m gonna stay late and wait for you.” I said we could do it in the morning. Lopez said it was a very special deal and he preferred to do it when there wouldn’t be other people nosing around.

I told him I had to get a ride over, so that I could drive my new car home. “How about ten o’clock?”

“Okay,” he said, “but no later. And look, this is a special deal. That’s why I’m staying late. I don’t want everybody to know about it, so come alone. Have your friend drop you off down the street, and walk the last block. And bring cash. Three thousand.”

“I get the pink slip and everything, right?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “You get it all.” It sounded to me like we had an understanding, so I said I’d see him tonight.

About fifteen minutes later, the phone rang again. This time it was Karin Maldau. “Mrs. Maldau, nothing definite yet, but I might have something for you later on this evening. I have a good lead.”

“My husband has gone to Half Moon on business, Mr. Swiver. I expect him to spend the night. If you get the car back tonight, could you come by the house?”

“Are you alone?”

“I have a Chinese servant, but no one else is in the house tonight. We may rely on her discretion.”

“Very well,” I said. “If things work out, I’ll call you, and then come out. It’ll be eleven or twelve.”

“I look forward to seeing you then.” She hung up.

---6---

I closed up shop at four-thirty and drove home. One leftover piece of roast pork, a couple glasses of Louis Martini’s Monte Rosso Zin, and three hours later, I put on some coffee. While it was brewing, I changed into some dark duds for the evening.

By dusk, I’d had my java and, flashlight in hand, I headed out the back door. I walked eight blocks north on Octavia to Greenwich Street, then I turned left, staying a block south of Lombard.

I arrived at Lopez’s lot at about ten minutes of nine, well after dark. I scrambled over the link fence and eased my way between the rows of cars toward the trailer, taking my time and staying in the shadows. About nine, I saw Lopez link a chain between two concrete posts on Lombard Street, then go inside his office. A half a minute later, the big lights on the back lot went out, though the small ones on the office stayed lit. And there she was, basking under a dim bulb behind the trailer, a ’49 Mercury coupé in dark purple.

There were no plates on the car. I could check for the serial number, which I had with me, but I had an easier way to find out in the dark if this was the heap I was looking for. I had the keys.

So I duck-walked between cars until there was no more cover, then I sprung across the open space the last fifteen feet, crouched by the passenger side of the Mercury, and slipped the key in the door. It worked. I got in, slid across, and put the key in the ignition. Pulling out the choke, I stepped on the clutch and pressed the starter. The V-8 roared to life and went into a fast idle. Don’t stall now, Swiver.

I had the touch with the clutch and I slipped the tranny into first and wheeled around the trailer, heading for the Lombard Street gate. I saw Lopez open the trailer door and come down the wooden steps. He grabbed at the back of his head, and I realized he was wearing a rug and losing it in the excitement. Then he pulled a short revolver out of his waistband.

I went over a curb to avoid the chain, spun right onto Lombard, and changed up to second. I’ll say this for that Merc—it took off like a goosed waitress. I swung left on Fillmore and pulled out the headlight switch. Easing in the choke, I took a sharp right on Bay. I swung right on Van Ness and started to cruise easy. No tail from Lopez’s joint. And it didn’t look like I’d awakened any cops. Grand theft auto. Two could play that game. I turned right on Pacific and headed back to Octavia and Lafayette Square. I pulled the Mercury up the drive, eased it into the garage, cut the motor, and had the garage doors shut before you could say Bonnie and Clyde. It was just nine minutes past.

---7---

In the quiet of the garage, I could hear my heart beating. First thing I did was pull the hood release to see the engine on this baby. It was a flathead V-8, like you might find in any Ford, but it had three Holley carbs lined up down the middle of the V, instead of the standard Stromberg. Each carburetor had its own little cylindrical air cleaner, like a miniature gun turret, on top. I took out my pocket flashlight and compared serial numbers. It was indeed Agustin Maldau’s bus. Next the trunk.

I found a man’s blue-jean jacket, a small black leather satchel, and a large canvas sack. I started with the jacket. ID in the breast pocket showed it belonged to Pacho Valdes of Oakland. Pacho had also left an envelope in the side pocket containing a small amount of marijuana and a package of Tip-Top cigarette papers.

I opened the leather satchel next. It was stuffed with ten-dollar bills, banded in packets about a half-inch thick, maybe about fifteen packets. Things were getting interesting.

The canvas bag was about a thirty-gallon sack, the size that holds fifty pounds of onions or potatoes. It was full of bricks, about two inches by six inches by ten. They were wrapped in brown butcher’s paper, and each one was tied with a pink string. I took out my knife and made a long slit in one. A pungent, grassy, and sagelike smell escaped. It was marijuana, leaves, sticks, stems, and seeds pressed into resinous bricks. I took a deep breath, then put my brick back in the sack, closed the trunk, and went inside.

I sat down in the kitchen to think. I think well with a glass of zinfandel, so it was back to the Louis Martini bottle. At about ten, I called Karin Maldau.

“Things are running smooth on my end. I’ve got your crate and I can bring it out, if you like.”

“My car,” she said, “is everything okay?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, no damage? All intact?”

“I didn’t see any scratches. The license plate’s gone. Everything else appears to be there. I’ll put my plate on and drive out there now.”

---8---

The Maldau house was on 25th Avenue North, which I needed my city map to find. It was a big two-story house, and the breeze from behind it was salty, with a whiff of kelp.

I parked in the drive, walked to the front door, and rang the bell. In a few seconds, the door flew open, and a short young Chinese bim stood there, looking inscrutable around the mouth and eyes, and damned exotic. “You come in,” she said. It was a welcoming invitation, yet with a hint of command. She backed up a couple steps and drew her red silk kimono closed, but not with any great modesty. Her legs were bare and lean, and a bit of slender brown thigh peeked out.

“Missy Karin, she upstairs.” She moved her left arm up, pointed toward the center hall steps, then twisted her wrist and hand to indicate I should turn left at the top. I stood there looking a little dumb taking her in, so she said, “You go up.” Again, it had that mix of invitation and command. Again, she waved her hand pointing up, motioning for me to turn left. This time I took a good look down the wide opening of the short-sleeved kimono and saw enough to know she was naked under the little silk robe. She shut the front door behind us. Then she padded past me towards a downstairs room, hard calf muscles flexing, and I watched her long black mane dance left and right at the top of her butt cheeks with each step.

I went up the stairs and turned left. There was a door ajar and I stepped into a bedroom with peach walls, lit by a low gas fire. A bed with a black spread, a dressing table and chair, and a chaise by the window were all of a sleek, modern design. I went over to the window and checked behind the curtain. At first I saw nothing but blackness, but soon I could make out the white curl of waves rolling up to the beach.

A bathroom opened off the bedroom and that door was ajar too. I heard water draining. I cleared my throat.

“Bao-yu, bring me my towel.” A peach-colored Turkish towel lay on the bed, so I picked it up and stepped toward the voice. The tall blonde stood naked in the tub, very tall, very blond. Although she was light-skinned, there was nothing pasty or sallow about her. Her skin was taut and she looked as solid as a marble statue, especially in the long thighs. But she’d been worked over, and the surface of the fine marble was marked with red and purple swelling. I held out the towel, and she took it and rubbed off gently, just patting the bruised parts.

“Someone’s hurt you,” I said.

“More than one someone.” She wrapped the towel like a turban around her wet hair, and put out an arm for me to assist her. I helped her step out of the tub. Her right eye was swollen and mostly shut. Both eyes were black. Her upper lip was cut.

“Come,” she said. “Tell me about the car. You brought it?” We went to the bedroom and she sat up tall at the dresser, facing the mirror and crossing her legs at the knees. I sat on the chaise where she could see me in the mirror. She began to powder her body.

“I brought it. I can see now why you were willing to pay four hundred dollars to get a twenty-seven-hundred-dollar car back.”

“You like the car?”

“Oh, yeah. I like the car, but you’re paying me because of what was in the trunk.”

“You found the pieces of luggage?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got the money, and I’ve got the merchandise.”

“Then you have saved my life, Mr. Swiver. What would you like to know? Ask me.”

And so I did. I asked her about the dope, the dough, and Pacho Valdes. It seems Mr. Agustin Maldau was in the import business. Maldau sent his wife to meet the buyers, deliver the drugs, and bring back the jack. Pacho Valdes of Oakland was one such buyer. As far as Karin knew, Pacho was a big dealer across the bay.

I learned that Mr. Agustin Maldau was a middle-aged man, twenty-four years older than his wife. They had been married five years. He used Karin in his business, and he used her as his wife. He liked to be seen with her, and he used her as an object. Karin wanted love. She wanted someone who would treat her like the vital young woman she was. Karin and Pacho had done business many times, and now, when he made a buy, she spent the night with him. It was one occasional night of pleasure in a drab existence, and her little revenge against Agustin Maldau, the man who used her.

Karin had driven to meet Pacho in Golden Gate Park last night. He checked the merchandise; she counted the money. Then they had locked both in the trunk and took the Mercury to the Sorrento Motor Inn. They’d stayed there before. Not thinking about any risk, they left everything in the trunk and hurried up to the room, where they smoked some jujus, drank some wine, and made love.

In the morning, the car was gone. Pacho flew into a rage. Not only was his jacket and ID in the trunk with the illegal merchandise, he figured the Maldaus had set him up to make off with his stake and keep the dope. He slapped Karin around until he finally started to believe her that it hadn’t been a setup. Then he brought her downtown to the Rose Building and forced her to wait for me.

“How did you pick me?”

She just shrugged. “Pacho found your name in the phone book. I think he wanted to go somewhere no one would see us. You seemed right.” I made a mental note to cancel my ad in the Yellow Pages for next year.

“After you agreed to the job, we took a streetcar out Geary. Pacho picked up his car in the park and told me to call him in Oakland when I heard from you. I rode out further and walked home.”

“Did you call him?”

“Yes, tonight at ten, after you called me. But he doesn’t know yet that you are here or that you recovered the money and the goods.

“When I came home this morning, Agustin was here. I told him I had left the car at my girlfriend’s because it wouldn’t start, that I would get it this afternoon. But he didn’t believe me. He beat me until I told him the truth. Then, when he knew I’d spent the night with Pacho and lost the money and the car, he beat me some more. I passed out, Mr. Swiver. When I came to, he was gone. Bao-yu, my maid, helped me upstairs and into bed. She told me Agustin had gone to Half Moon. That is where he brings in most of his merchandise. Then I slept.”

“Did you tell Agustin you hired me?”

“Yes. I am sorry.”

“That doesn’t matter.” I might have to look over my shoulder for a week or so, but I was betting Agustin Maldau would forget about me when he saw he had his car and his money back.

Karin put on a robe and came out to the Mercury with me. I opened the trunk. She picked up the bag of jack. I picked up the sack of weed. “Leave it,” she said. “And the jacket. I must meet Pacho and deliver his goods. Only then will I be safe.” She took the money and started back in.

“Listen,” I said, “I’d better get going.”

“I will give you the other two hundred.” She opened the black satchel. I told her she already paid me enough for one day’s work. “Then wait while I put something on. I will give you a ride.” It was eleven-fifteen.

“I don’t want to be any trouble to you. I’ll walk down to Geary and get a streetcar. See you, Mrs. Maldau.”

“Don’t be silly. I must go out anyhow to meet Pacho. Where can I drop you?”

I told her Lafayette Square.

---9---

Karin Maldau had a box of license plates in her garage. She selected a fresh one and gave it to me to put on the Mercury in place of mine. I offered to drive, but she insisted she could see through both eyes. She sat erect in the seat, well back from the wheel, her gams spread enough to work the gas and clutch, and her skirt up above the knees. She handled the wheel and gearshift like a farm girl might help a pregnant horse deliver a colt, with care, but with the firmness needed to do the job right. She smoked, and I asked for one. She tossed the Old Gold pack into my lap.

“What about the drugs, Mr. Swiver? Will you be going to the police?”

“You hired me to find your car. I did. If I went to the police, there’s nothing I could tell them without violating your confidence. That would be bad for business.” I looked back over my shoulder for a tail. Carrying that sack of weed in the trunk made me edgy. “What about the maid? She’s quite the hot little number.”

She smiled, for the first time, and exhaled a long cloud of smoke. I lit up. I hadn’t had Old Golds for some time; this one tasted fresh.

“Really? I never noticed.”

“Any boyfriends?” I asked.

“No. I always thought of Bao-yu as rather asexual.”

“How far can you trust her?”

“Oh, completely. Agustin hired her for me when we got married. She does everything for me. She knows Agustin’s business, but she’s completely loyal. I’m sure we have nothing to fear from her.”

I wasn’t so confident. “I’ll give you some advice.”

“I’m listening, Mr. Swiver.”

“Drop these guys, Mrs. Maldau. They play rough. You’re lucky you’re still walking around. And you’re talking like Lauren Bacall.”

She put a hand to her throat. “I was throttled,” she said.

“It’s only going to get worse. Drugs is a bad business. It looks like gravy for a while, but it’s poison underneath. You don’t belong in this.” I took a drag on the Old Gold. Trying times? Try a smooth Old Gold.

“Will you come with me to Oakland, to deliver the goods to Pacho? I would feel safer.”

“That would make me a knowing accessory in a crime, Mrs. Maldau.” I checked behind us one more time. Then I looked again at her knees. Her skirt had slid up another inch or so.

“I would pay you to be my bodyguard.” She held her cigarette between her lips, steered with her left hand, and dropped her right hand down onto my leg and rubbed lightly. When we came to a red light, she took her cigarette in her left hand and leaned across for a lingering kiss. That was a surprise, but it was nothing compared to what she did next. She exhaled a long drag of smoke down my gullet.

The light turned green. I coughed. “Say, these aren’t regular Old Golds.”

“They’re Old Gold Kings,” she said, and giggled.

I found that funny too. “Old Gold Kings. Ha, ha.”

“Ha, ha, ha.” We had a good laugh together. I tried another drag on my cigarette.

“I empty the tobacco out, combine with marijuana, and pack the blend back in. Good, no?”

“Good, yes,” I said. At the next red light, we leaned together for more kissing. Her right hand moved into my crotch and I slid a paw up her right leg, which she held muscled down on the brake pedal. In a couple of blocks, she turned left at Presidio Avenue and pulled to a stop in front of the Casa Rosa Inn. This dame knew all the classy flops between the ocean and Oakland.

“Get us a room, Frank.” It took willpower to break the clinch, but I went into the office. I signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Francis Kennedy, paid four and a half bucks in advance, and got the key for room 24. I saw a small bodega open across California Street, gave Mrs. Kennedy-Maldau the room key, and went across to get us a bottle of wine. I must have been getting high, because I nearly stepped out in front of a chopped and lowered sled. I should have been able to see it coming—there were flames painted on the side.

---10---

You can imagine what happened. We smoked a couple sticks of tea and drank that bottle of wine, an Italian Swiss Colony red, if anybody asks. The next thing I recall was coming out of a dream, but in the instant of waking, I forgot the dream. I opened my eyes to the sun coming in on my face through the Venetian blinds. I turned over, and found myself naked and alone. Water ran in the bathroom. Karin’s rags were draped over a chair. It was just after six-thirty.

I got myself upright and realized I felt good. The bathroom door was open, so I popped in, and stood at the toilet. “Karin, how you feeling this morning?” There was no answer. When I was finished at the bowl, I smiled and stuck my head inside the shower curtain. The tub was empty. I blinked but it was still empty. I turned off the water and got dressed.

My first thought was that when I got downstairs, I’d find the Mercury gone, like it had been last night. But it was out front on Presidio where we’d parked it. Some small detail looked wrong, though. It was the key, sticking out of the trunk lock.

It was very bright out, and I took my sunglasses out of my sport coat pocket and put them on. I looked up and down Presidio. I was the only one out on the street. A bakery truck was double-parked by the bodega, making a delivery, and a couple of cars were at the gas station on the far corner.

I weaved across the white pavement, like a nervous spider. I lifted the trunk lid. The still-wet, naked body of Karin Maldau lay folded in the trunk. The head and neck were at an unnatural angle. I put two fingers on her pulse, hoping for a beat, but it was nothing doing. The canvas bag of dope was gone. I closed the trunk lid quietly and pocketed the keys.

Now I was in that dream I couldn’t remember dreaming a few minutes ago, back upstairs. It was a bad dream, and I couldn’t wake up. It was so bright out, I felt a need to get out of the sunlight.

I got in the Mercury and fired it up. I pulled out on Presidio Avenue and drove north to California Street, taking it easy. Let’s see, it wasn’t my car, the plates were phony or stolen, and there was a dead blonde in the trunk. If a copper nailed me now for running a stop sign, I was looking at two life terms if the jury liked me. I decided to go back to the Casa Rosa and pick up Karin’s clothes, and see what traces I’d left in the room. Maybe I’d even find a clue.

I pulled into the alley east of Presidio. Up in room 24, I wiped down anything I thought might have my prints on it, packed Karin’s clothes in a pillow case, and picked up the unfinished pack of Old Golds.

There were a few hairs on the bedding, some blond, some of mine. I picked up the ones I could see. I gathered some more blond hair from the shower drain, and flushed it all down the toilet.

As I walked out from the bathroom to the door, something caught my eye on the floor near the radiator. It was a pair of dark glasses, men’s. Someone had been here who wore shades in the early morning. Karin had struggled enough to knock them off, and after he’d killed her and put her in the trunk, he thought it was too risky to come back for the sunglasses.

I picked up the shades and went down the back steps into the alley. Whoever snatched Karin probably went this way too, or the kid on the desk might have noticed someone abducting a naked five-foot ten-inch blonde through his lobby. But there was nothing to find out back in the alley, so I drove the Mercury out to the Maldaus’.

---11---

At nine o’clock, I parked on a side street off Lincoln Boulevard and made my way along the beach towards the Maldau place. I found a footpath that led up to 25th Avenue North, and hustled up it. The house was quiet. There was a new Jaguar roadster in the driveway, and a low-slung modified car with flames painted on the side parked in the street out front. I think it had once been a Chevy. I slipped into a service alley wide enough for a man on the west side of the house, and made my way back to the beach side, where there was a big redwood deck across the rear. I found some French doors, slipped my knife between them, forced the lock, and slipped into the Maldau kitchen.

I went through the dining room to the front parlor, where I saw two men. One, in a sharkskin suit, had grey hair and his back was to me. The other wore a zoot suit. He faced me, but now he had no sunglasses. I was backlit by the sun in the east windows of the dining room. I took out an Old Gold King from Karin’s pack and lit up. The zoot-suit kid said, “What are you doing here?” Then the other gent turned around.

“Ah, you must be Mr. Swiver,” he said, with equanimity.

“And you’re Agustin Maldau,” I said with what self-possession I could muster. “I brought your Mercury back. Nice ride.” I tossed the keys at his face, but he snagged them with the grace of Joe DiMaggio pulling in a liner to center. “Pardon me for not knocking, Maldau. I haven’t had my morning coffee and thought I’d see if you had any on in the kitchen. Why don’t you introduce me to your friend in the Sleepy Lagoon getup?” The kid had reached in his pants and pulled out a nickel-plated Colt revolver. It was pointing my way and it was a dangerous gun, but I was twelve or fifteen feet away, and I thought he was having trouble looking into the sun.

“Ha, ha, ha. Sure. This is Pacho Valdes. Pacho, meet Frank Swiver. He’s the gentleman who recovered your goods. He’s a shamus.”

“Do we need bean-shooters, Maldau?”

“I should hope not. Pacho, put up your gun.”

“No hasta que tiro este maricón.” Pacho was being disingenuous; I figured he had first-hand knowledge of my sexual bent.

Maldau’s eyes hardened and he pulled a blue automatic out of his jacket pocket. “Put it away, Pacho. Now. I don’t want you to shoot him in my house.” That registered, and the kid lost the revolver somewhere in the pleats of his trousers. “Now go see if he’s rodded.”

“I’m not, but if I was, it would take more than this greaseball to take it from me.”

“Skip the tough-guy stuff, Swiver. I’m not letting you get the drop on us. Pacho.” Maldau nodded in my direction, and the zoot-suit kid swaggered over. I let him search me with what he thought was a rough flourish. I’ve had worse.

“He’s clean,” he told Maldau. Maldau put his heater back in his pocket.

“By the way, how is Mrs. Maldau today?” I said. “Or haven’t you seen her?”

“I don’t want to see her.” He spit on the carpet.

“I brought her home. She’s dead. I figure Pacho knows about that.” Pacho slugged me on the button with a short right hand. I rolled my head back with it, and kept my feet planted.

“Cabrón,” he muttered through clenched teeth. My lip started to bleed. I spit on the carpet.

“Yeah, I figured it was like that. See, Mr. Maldau, Karin was in bed with me.”

“And for that she died. You were one too many, smart guy. I told Pacho to kill her. Pacho was business, but her skating with you was ... well, she should have known I couldn’t allow that.”

“You told Pacho?”

“That’s right. When you brought the car back, I called him. I told him to get out here, follow you two, and pick up his goods. I said if he blipped Karin off too, he could come back this morning and I’d give him his money back in payment.”

“Yeah,” said Pacho. “Let’s get on with that, man. I want to get out of here.”

“Certainly, my friend,” said Maldau. “Your money is in the desk in the library. It’s still in your bag. Please go ahead. Second drawer on the right.” Maldau pointed at another set of doors across the room. Pacho rolled across the room as if he was walking underwater. “And Mr. Swiver, we must decide what to do with you. Get in here and sit down.” Maldau’s gun came out of his pocket again. I stepped down to the living room and found a leather chair. He sidled across to the front window, keeping me covered. He moved the curtain for a quick look, then did a double take.

“Where is the Mercury?”

“Parked nearby. How did you know I was out here last night with the car?”

“I’m not ready to tell that yet. Where did you park? Where is the body?”

“I’m not ready to tell that yet.” I said. He was across the room in two steps and tried to pistol-whip me. I ducked enough so he just got my shoulder. I don’t think it cracked the clavicle, but pain shot down my right arm.

About then, Pacho Valdes returned from the library with the same black leather bag I’d found in the trunk. He held it in front of himself by one handle, and his right hand dug around inside the satchel. Maldau turned to face him. “Pacho, we’ve got to find the Mercury.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“I found it last night. I don’t want to look for it again. It’s your problem.”

Maldau stretched his lips thin with hatred. “You little punk. He’s got the body in the trunk. Don’t screw with me. You killed her. You need my protection.”

“I don’t think so. I got my money.”

Maldau started to raise his gun at Pacho. A hole ripped through the end of the black bag. There was a muffled boom, and Maldau clutched his gut. Two more booms, and shreds of money and leather flew out of the bag. Maldau went down. Pacho withdrew his right hand and the smoking revolver from the satchel, and snapped the sides shut.

“Now I can shoot you anyplace I want, maricón.”

“Maybe you can’t see me so good without your shades, Pacho.” I stood up and backed towards the dining room and the eastern light.

“Maybe I come a little closer, smart guy.”

When Pacho reached the middle of the living room, there was a roar from behind him, and he lurched forward as if he’d been poleaxed. Another explosion and he dropped his pistol and clutched the red blossom on the front of his suit. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell on his face. Behind him stood Yan Bao-yu with a Luger in her hand.

“I hear everything. He kill Missy Karin.”

I finished the Old Gold and put the butt in an ashtray. I was pretty stoned.

---12---.

I stepped into the library where Pacho had just been and found a phone on the desk. I had it in my hand and had already dialed the number for the cops when Bao-yu came in.

“Who you call?”

“Police,” I said. It was a delicate moment. She seemed to be a good shot.

“Put phone down. No want police.”

“Put Luger down, Bao-yu. I’m Miss Karin’s friend. You saved me from Pacho.” The cops picked up. I heard, “Homicide, Overby,” come over the wire.

“Ha! Maybe that mistake. I let Pacho shoot you, I no have to.” She wore a natural-colored raw silk tunic and black silk pajama pants. She looked just as arousing in that getup with a gun in her hand as she had last night in the kimono.

“You don’t have to shoot me, Bao-yu.” I put the receiver down easy on the desk, but didn’t break the connection. I stepped to my left and held my hands out to the sides. “Here’s what we can do. We’ll have some law out here. This morning, Pacho broke Karin’s neck. Then he shot Maldau. Now Pacho’s dead. The law’s not going to waste time on him.”

“I should go. Get away from here.”

“Nix. Here. Have one of Miss Karin’s cigarettes. Let’s talk.” I took out the pack of Old Golds. There were a couple of cigarettes left in it, and I shook them partway out in offering.

“Silly man. Those smokes loaded.”

I smiled at her, took one between my lips, and put the deck back in my pocket. She was letting the barrel of the Luger droop down and slightly away from my chest. “So, how did Pacho know I was out here last night with the Mercury?”

“Mr. Maldau call him.”

“Maldau was in Half Moon, Bao-yu. How would he know? Do you think Karin called and told him?”

“How I know? You ask her?”

“Didn’t have to. I know who called him. You were the only other party here last night, Bao-yu. You weren’t Karin’s maid. You were her keeper. You watched her for Maldau. You were his partner. This is good reefer, Bao-yu. Where’s it from?”

“Indochine.” She said it the French way. The Luger came up, but while we were chinning, I had moved into position. I sidearmed a cushion off the couch at her with my left. She tracked it with the tip of the Luger as if it was a clay pigeon, and she blasted it. I sprang at Bao-yu and I was on target, too. She went down on her back hard and her head bounced on the wooden floor.

I pinned her arms and straddled her, sitting on her stomach. My right arm was still weak, but I had good control of her gun hand with my left. She wiggled like a snake in a sauté pan of hot oil under my spread legs.

“Overby,” I yelled out, “are you still on? This is Frank Swiver.”

His voice came over the line like an old recording on a weak radio station. “Swiver. I thought I recognized that voice. Yeah, I stayed on.”

I yelled out the address. “I’ve got three homicides here. Mr. and Mrs. Agustin Maldau. They’re the owners of the house. Mr. Maldau was bringing in marijuana and selling it wholesale. Pacho Valdes of Oakland, one of his big customers, killed them both. Yan Bao-yu, Mrs. Maldau’s maid, shot Pacho.”

“You holding the maid?”

“She got away.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” said Overby, and I could hear him hang up.

I took the gun from her hand and sat up on my heels.

“You shoot Bao-yu now?”

“No. Too many have died.” It wasn’t my line; it was Hammett’s, but I liked it. “Besides, you saved my life.” I hung up the phone, went out to the living room and got the keys to the Merc off Maldau, and walked out to get it. Some fog was rolling in, but the wind had abated a bit. When I got back, there was no sign of Bao-yu. Maldau’s Jaguar was gone.

I carried Karin in and laid her beautiful cold body out at the foot of the stairs, which seemed to be as good a place as any. If they looked closely, they’d know she was killed somewhere else, no matter where I put the stiff. I was counting on them not looking too closely. I wiped the luger off and dropped it in the sand out back off the deck.

The weed was good. I took a brick of it from Pacho’s trunk and covered it with sand. I could come back and dig it up later. For now, I sat on the deck in the fog and listened to the Pacific Ocean wash in. There’d been a jug of Sardinian wine on the kitchen counter. I waited for the buzzers, drank from the bottle, and thought about the tall blonde who’d come to me about the hot boiler.

Copyright © 2010 by Harley Mazuk. Black Mask Magazine title, logo and mask device copyright 2010 by Keith Alan Deutsch. Licensed by written permission.