Ilka, aghast, said, “Should I leave?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Of course!”
Leslie said, “We have been here before. I know what to do.”
AT WHOM THE DOG BARKS
A stock turn of phrase, “A poor man but honest.”
Perhaps that’s why the man is poor—because he is honest.
Why don’t we say, “A rich man but honest?”
Down the Hatch
Who had swiped the Concordance Institute’s electric pencil sharpener from the top of the file cabinet between the reception desk and the door to the conference room? Celie said, “Anybody could have walked out with it, and will they be disappointed! It never worked. I use my old hand crank.”
“And you’re right!” said Nat Cohn. “ ‘Anybody’ is plural. Not a thing Fowler can do about it.”
“For goodness’ sake, let’s get ourselves a new electric sharpener,” said Leslie Shakespeare and got out his wallet.
“Don’t we want to know who done it?” asked Joe Bernstine.
“Mr. Winterneet popped in and out,” Celie said. “He says to
say he’s back in town and going straight to bed but he left these.”
These
were a couple of bottles of red wine.
Leslie studied them and said, “Let’s have a party, or has everyone gone home?”
Celie said Alvin, Zachariah, and Yvette had left, but Ilka was in her office. Leslie said, “Everybody, bring your own glasses. I’ll ring Eliza.” Leslie carried the bottles to his office. Nat Cohn went to his office to call Nancy. Joe called Jenny. Jenny Bernstine brought Teddy who brought his dog, Cassandra, who was frowning and barking.
“Whatever you are trying to tell me,” said Eliza, leaning her face down to the little dog’s agitated nose, “maybe I don’t want to know it.”
“Cat spat at her,” said Teddy.
The cat was the institute’s tom. The institute’s members had never resolved the philosophical difference between those who couldn’t stomach animals with people names and those who could stomach none of the clevernesses that had been proposed instead. All the while, contended Nat Cohn, the cat grew more bitter.
“I’ll put him in the mailroom if someone will remember to let him out. I’m leaving, O.K.?” said Celie.
“O.K., Celie. Thanks. Good night,” everybody said.
Ilka watched Leslie Shakespeare sitting in the embrasure of the window, which opened onto the late summer garden at an angle that kept the newer brick and glass structures out of sight. Before him, in comfortable conversation, stood Joe Bernstine, who kept turning his head, shifting his weight, combing his fingers through his hair; he put out a hand to remove the curtain that the evening breeze had laid across his friend’s shoulder. Eliza had taken the chair next to Ilka and said, “Joe, the Jewish jumping bean,” which made Ilka jump. Ilka loved Eliza Shakespeare. Eliza in her
three-dollar Woolworth shirt looked classy beside Nancy Cohn, who looked merely chic. Nancy stood by the darkening west window and glowered.
Jenny Bernstine, aware of the whereabouts, at any time, in any room, of her husband and her children, was sitting in Leslie’s chair behind Leslie’s desk. She said, “Teddy, you can’t sit on Cassandra, darling, you’re smothering her.”
“It shuts her up,” said Teddy.
“Only she’s got to breathe, and, Teddy, take a comb to the poor thing! Anybody ever see a dog with hair that goes so every which way?”
“Who swiped my
Backyard Thief
?” asked Teddy.
“I did,” said Nat Cohn. Nat sat reading, sunk way down in the old broken-backed armchair. The dense growth of Nat’s hair and beard had connected itself in Ilka’s mind with the undifferentiated bushiness of the surrounding Connecticut hillsides which she experienced as a subliminal disappointment on her morning drive to the institute: another night had failed to develop the local landscape into her childhood’s Alps.
Nat said, “We don’t write stories like this any more! Chronic plot deficiency is our problem. Forget the vitamins and get your daily dose of soap opera.”
“I notice you never miss yours,” said his wife.
“It’s about there are these kids, Theo and Ellie,” Teddy said, “and their dog is Cassandra, which is how come Cassandra got to be called Cassandra, that is going to be the police dog. This thief has stolen their dad’s glasses and everything. Oh. I forgot, there’s this big old policeman that is really dumb. His name is Drummond. And the parents go to bed. They go out in the yard and the children get mad because this squirrel runs up the tree and Cassandra doesn’t stop barking and the dad comes down and puts Cassandra in the attic and they don’t know the thief is all this time sitting in the tree. Oh and I forgot that . . .”
“Teddy, the crayons are in the bottom drawer in my office.”
“My idea of hell,” Eliza said in Ilka’s ear, “is a child telling you the plot of a story.”
Nancy Cohn said, “If you
have
to read while everybody else is sitting together and talking, at least turn on the goddamn light.” It was when Nat reached to pull the chain made of little interconnected balls that should have turned on Leslie’s standing lamp that everybody noticed the lamp wasn’t there. Where was the lamp? Who had swiped the standing lamp out of Leslie’s office?
Leslie said, “I can imagine someone walking the electric pencil sharpener out of the front door, but not a five-foot standing lamp.”
“The electric sharpener? I took it to be fixed,” said Jenny Bernstine. “It never really worked.”
The solution of one mystery activates the sanguine part of the mind to expect the next mystery—that mysteries as such are able to be solved. The fact is that nobody ever saw Leslie’s lamp again. There was no response to the memo requesting that whoever had borrowed the director’s standing lamp out of the director’s office please return it, no questions asked, which Leslie’s assistant, Wendy, Xeroxed on the copier downstairs in the mailroom the morning after the wine party in Leslie’s office. Coming up the stairs, Wendy handed Celie a copy and continued down the corridor into the lounge, where she put a memo into each of the pigeonholes for the fellows, associates, staff, and maintenance people. Celie went up to Leslie’s office. “Why don’t I copy a bunch and post them on the trees around the campus?”
“Good idea,” Leslie said.
Celie went down to the mailroom and came hollering up the stairs. The copier was gone. Leslie had front and back doors locked. He asked everybody in the building to come into the conference room to meet with Officer Right and his partner.
“Teddy, go get the crayons,” Joe said. Jenny had dropped the little boy and his dog off to go shopping with Bethy.
“Daddy, Cassandra says please please please!” Cruel to be sent away when there was a real thief and
two
live policemen!
“O.K., but, Teddy, if you can’t keep that animal quiet, you’re out of here, both of you.”
“I’ll sit on her.”
“And you be quiet, or I’ll sit on you!”
Officer Right asked if there was any history of theft at the institute. He was a weighty, elderly policeman and looked as if he knew what he was doing. “Anything—big, small?”
Joe said, “Nothing I know of since Edwin, our first fundraiser—man I went to school with!—absconded with the funds he raised for us, and that’s fifteen odd years ago. Then, yesterday, the five-foot standing lamp disappears from the director’s office. Today our new copier walks out of our mailroom!”
“Been bad all over,” Officer Right’s partner, Juan Jose, said, “with the project right the other side of South Meadow.”
Ilka could leave it to Alvin, the institute’s radical, to say, “Because the city council pockets the money they themselves, mind you, allocated to the project,” to which Zachariah, the institute’s conservative, responded, “It’s not the city council that walked in and walked off with our copier,” and Alvin said, “No, the project walked in and walked out with our copier.”
Leslie said, “Please . . .”
“Where was the copier?” asked Officer Right.
“In the mailroom right underneath us, which used to be the kitchen when the room we’re sitting in was the dining room of the first president ’s residence.”
Teddy said, “And if you pull that chain next the dumbwaiter, this little tab thing that says ‘d-i-n-i-n-g-r’ wobbles down in the mailroom.”
“Teddy . . .”
“Let ’s take a look,” Officer Right said.
“Can I Daddy, can I show him, Daddy, can I . . .”
“You can come down with us so long as I don’t know you’re there.”
The whole group walked down the stairs into the mailroom. The cat, sitting on the ledge over the dumbwaiter, hissed and pointed his tail to the heavens, and Cassandra went into a paroxysm of barking, leaping, and snapping long after the enemy had streaked out the door and up the stairs. “Stop it! Come on, Cassandra!” Teddy kept saying.
Joe said, “Take the dog into my study!” in a voice there was no arguing with. “This is the table the copier stood on,” he told the policeman. “There used to be one of those great black stoves we should never have got rid of.”
“Does this basement have an exit to the outside?”
Celie said, “The only exit is the stair you came down on, right across from my desk that’s across from the front door.”
“Could someone have slipped up the stairs while you went up to talk to Director Shakespeare about posting notices on trees?”
“Teddy!
Into
my office and close the door,” Joe called to the top of the stairs where Cassandra leaped, barked, and barked and barked and barked.
Celie said, “No, because, Barbara . . .”
“That ’s me,” said the librarian.
“. . . was coming out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee . . .”
“Tea,” said the librarian.
“. . . and I asked her to sit at my desk till I got back. I took the elevator up . . .”
“Where ’s the elevator?”
“Across from the reception desk,” Celie and Barbara said with one voice.
“And you took the elevator from the second floor straight down to the mailroom?
“And the copier was gone.”
“What I want to know,” said the officer, “is
how
he could have walked the thing out of the mailroom.”
Alpha, the institute ’s feminist, said, “Why do you assume the thief was male?”
“How much would you say the copier weighs?”
The guesses quarreled with each other.
Alpha said, “She could have heaved it onto the dolly we use for hauling boxes of papers.”
But there stood the dolly, underneath the dumbwaiter hatch, where it always stood.
Leslie said, “Do I understand you to think that the copier might still be in the building?”
“That the thief might still be in the building,” said Officer Right.
“And we may have gone to school with him,” Alvin gleefully hoped.
“That dog has got to go,” Joe said to Leslie as they trooped back up the stairs and heard the helpless barking, and Cassandra burst out of his office, straining toward the stairs.
What was Cassandra looking for in the mailroom? Why did she bark all the way home? Joe locked her into the spare room upstairs. The experience appeared to have driven the little dog insane: what would you have done if all you knew was how to bark and you knew that a cat sitting and spitting on the ledge over the dumbwaiter hatch didn’t mean the answer was not inside?
It wasn’t till the next evening, when Ahmed, the institute’s janitor, went into the mailroom to turn out the lights, that he heard the rasping of chains and a creaking inside the dumbwaiter. It had not been in use for decades past. His wrestling the hatch door open might have caused the wooden platform to give way and tilt the institute ’s copier into the space below. By this time, of
course, the thief was long gone and the members of the institute were free to feel reinforced in thinking that he, or she, must have been one of the greedy rich, alternatively one of the hapless poor, both of whom we have always had and always will have among us.
In the upstairs spare room Cassandra barked and barked and barked and barked and barked.
Supermarket
On Sunday, when Ilka came to brunch at the Shakespeares’, Eliza had her Supermarket Adventure to relate: Eliza said she had run in and made straight for household items, imagining the policeman waiting by her car with a parking ticket. “I scanned those clever little packaged items, found my spatula, raced to the checkout: long, long line. Woman in front of the woman in front of me had a full basket. In 10 Items or Less! It’s a wicked world. The woman with the full basket wrote out the slowest check in history. I imagined myself telling the policeman, ‘I thought, officer, parking was legal around this corner!’ and I imagined
you
,” Eliza said to Leslie, “saying, ‘Dear, but that is not the truth!’ and imagined the pleasure of kicking you in the shins.” Ilka was studying Leslie. He was concentrating on the management of an overripe peach.
“The checkout girl,” continued Eliza, “called for a manager to O.K. the check. No manager in sight, of course. The checkout girl walked away to look for the manager and I walked out of the supermarket with my sixty-nine-cent spatula, raced to my car which was standing, quiet as could be, illegally, where I had parked it. I’m wanting to get out of there. Where are my car keys? Where is my handbag? It is not slung over my right shoulder where it is supposed to be.
Now,
I remember the girl from the project standing in the line behind me.”
Ilka and Eliza were friends in the habit of arguing. Eliza had to know this was going to activate Ilka. Ilka asked Eliza how she knew the girl was from the project.
Eliza said, “She was black.”
“How do you know the black girl took your handbag?”
“Because when I walked into the checkout line I had my handbag slung over my shoulder and when I got outside I didn’t have it.”