Slow Sculpture (29 page)

In an alley—not the one behind the apartment house—Merrihew became a telephone repairman, locked his car and went into Lasvogel’s building through the service entrance. The lock on the fire tower was a simple matter for him. Trudging up eight flights of
stairs was not. He used the simple rhythm of climbing to reinforce his mantra.

The eighth-floor hallway was deserted and had an admirably soft carpet. He ghosted up to the door of Apartment 8K and tried the knob, recalling a nightmarish time he had once had picking a lock that wasn’t locked. This one was and it was a good one. He glanced at the key slot and from his belt drew out a flat case, opened it. From one side he took out the correct blank and slid it into the slot. From the other side he selected an array of flat blades, chose one, and gently thrust it into the special recess in the blank, applying turning pressures, forward and back, as he did so. His sensitive fingers told him which serration on the blade moved which tumbler and how much. He withdrew the blade and tried another. The third one did it and the door opened. He went in and closed it quietly behind him.

Soundlessly, he whistled.

Nobody, but nobody, could be this neat.

Carefully, avoiding the rugs where possible, he trod the whole place, the whole bare minimal totally efficient place.

Here was where a man could keep his changes of clothes, could wash, could sleep (alone), could eat if he wanted to but usually didn’t. Here he apparently did not relax, did not entertain, did not read or watch TV (there was none) and did not even study. Well, a man like Lasvogel probably did all his studying in his head. He didn’t need books, and if it was facts he wanted, he had two telephones. The one with no number on it was certainly an open line to the Institute.

Merrihew found nothing out of place, nothing not strictly Lasvogel’s, except the note on the dinette table.

It was triangular, blue, dated, and cuter’n hell:

Leaning over the table to read it without touching it, Merrihew noticed the funny little crossbar on the 7 of the date, European style, and could admire the firm, strong, straight, yet completely feminine handwriting. He backed off a pace to look at the note from a distance. From the way it was placed on the table, he had a strong feeling that it had not been read and tossed there. It had been so carefully centered most likely by the sender, not the receiver.

And the date? Yesterday.

He continued his hands-off inventory: bathroom (where he detected moisture not only on the toothbrush but on the soft bristles of an old-fashioned badger shaving brush) and in the tiny kitchenette, where he made his big find.

It—they, rather, were in the cupboard over the chopping block. The small spice rack contained salt, pepper, seasoned salt, seasoned pepper—and that was all. Beside the rack was an array of vitamin capsules—B complex, glutamic acid and the usual vitamin-mineral once-a-day pill. What faintly caught his eye, just as he turned away, was a glimpse of something stashed behind the little spice rack.

Feeling that perhaps he was carrying caution to a ludicrous extreme—yet silently chanting his mantra again—Merrihew got out his needle-beam torch and peeked. He had to be mildly acrobatic to be able to read the labels, but what he found was vitamins—two bottles. One was B complex and iron, the other Vitamin E. Unlike the B complex out front, which bore the name of a reputable drugstore chain, these hidden ones were from Let’s Live! —one of those natural-food emporia of which Merrihew, a confirmed carnivore, once had said, “They sell fruits and nuts to the nuts and fruits.” It happened that he knew this one; it wasn’t far from his office.

What the hell was Lazvogel doing in a place like that? And why should he have bought more when he already had had (Merrihew bent to check) two thirds of a bottle of B Complex? And if Lasvogel were simply storing this new bottle—why wasn’t the Vitamin E out front?

It looked almost as if he had hidden them.

Resisting the temptation to find out if the bottles really were the genuine article—for the screw-on caps were sealed with shrunk plastic—Merrihew
turned away and scanned the counters, the miniscule stove. In the wastebasket was a piece of paper—a small bag with the colophon of the Let’s Live! store on it. Merrihew’s eye photographed just how it lay before he reached down and took it by the smallest possible corner and lifted it out.

Handwriting.

One of these you really need. So much better for you. Please take them. The other one you don’t need at all (!!!) Please take them away!

Love and love

Ruthie

Merrihew replaced the crumpled bag in the wastebasket precisely as he had found it, took one more careful look at the whole place and let himself out.

In the envelope Dr. Poole had given him there was no Ruthie. Hm.

He walked softly down the hall, checking his watch. Still plenty of time. He let himself into Apartment 8D rather more quickly.

Apartment 8D was much more to his taste. In its way as well ordered as Lasvogel’s, It was warm, colorful and lived-in—lived-in, too, by someone who could own a green glass pear and the portrait of a smiling collie because they were beautiful and not because they did anything. The kitchenette was no longer than Lasvogel’s but marvelously equipped and organized. The bed could sleep two and the presence of drapes and spreads, rugs and cushions had eliminated that acoustically-live effect Lasvogel’s place generated, wherein one’s very thoughts echoed and there was nothing to absorb a human error. Merrihew, while retaining his detachment, could not control the thought that if Lasvogel was throwing this away he ought to have his glands candled.

Against one wall was a drop-leaf table, serving as a desk but ready to be used for meals. It bore at the moment a block of triangular notepaper, blue. He ran a fingertip lightly over its edges and nodded. Practical, too. This was Institute stationery with the letterhead guillotined off (making a square) and cut again on the diagonal,
making that charming triangular paper.

A piece of it lay on the desk, a felt-tipped pen next to it. In the strong feminine handwriting he had seen on Lasvogel’s table, he read:

The last words sprawled across the paper—he could see where the violent pen had run clear off onto the table top.

Merrihew’s eyebrows twitched. Time was when he might have raised them. This was obviously the end of a long series. The rest should be—ahh.

The wastebasket was half full of them. The ones on top were unruffled, the ones lower down crushed, the ones at the very bottom torn into little bits or twisted into tight little knots.

It must have been a long night.

He sampled the many drafts.

Cheerful:
Hello there! Remember me? I’m the one with the secret vice—elaborate beef Stroganoff alone in my room. This could lead to—

Indignant:
It may be that there are things in your life far more important than—

Comic:
HELP! I am a prisoner in a Stroganoff factory!

Comitragic: To
whom it may concern: I am an orphaned beef Stroganoff. Nobody wants me. My noodles are withered and my gravy cold
.

Tragicomic:
Oh pity the poor mathematician with her shining hair brushed bright and the bed turned down, the wine untouched and the Stroganoff cleaving to the cold old chafing-dish—

Distraught:
Perhaps I needed this. In no other way could I have learned how much I want you, need you. It’s so much more than mutual pleasure and the joy of your nearness. I should be angry but instead I’m grateful, but oh, it hurts—

Furious:
You rotten bastard, you icy son of a bitch, whatever gave you the idea that you could treat me like—

Maternal:
Nothing matters if you’re all right, my dear. There will be other times—any time you say—or none. If I can help in any way, I’m here. If I can help most by leaving you alone while you work things out, I’ll do that. But I am rather desperately worried about you. Please eat
.

“Bastard,” Merrihew murmured as he carefully replaced the papers in the wastebasket.

It must have been a long night.

He wondered if she had used her key and how often, “her shining hair brushed bright—” she had run down the hall to that monkish cell, only to find it dark and silent and her welcoming note unread on his table? Had she dozed off some time in the early hours and awakened, stiff and cramped at her writing table, to run down once more and perhaps done as Merrihew had just done—checked the untenanted cot and the damp toothbrush, realizing that Lasvogel had come home in the gray light to wash and change and leave again—smelling probably of another woman’s perfume? Smelling of organic soy sauce and sesame seed, rather. Who the hell was Ruthie?

What was a guy like Lasvogel, with the fate of a whole planet in his hands, doing with two absolutely superfluous time-consuming body-and-mind-consuming entanglements like this.

Merrihew thought about those organic vitamins.

One of them you need …

That would be the B complex. These health nuts were ape for B complex and the synthetics just would not do.

 … you don’t need the other one, but take them anyway
.

Oh, boy. There used to be a whole megillah about the language of the flowers, you’d send irises and a rose and a hunk of Queen Anne’s lace and it meant I am panting for you, or some such. Nowadays you bring a bottle of pills.

You don’t need these (!!!)….

Oh, this Ruthie, she is a cutie. Everyone knows Vitamin E’s the wildest thing since the prairie oyster and Spanish fly. Lasvogel, you busy, busy boy, you. So you have a date with this Hungarian slip-stick and her Stroganoff and instead you’re out all night with your dish of yogurt and her triple exclamation points—and you with all that homework to do. And you bring home your trophies and hide them because you know the other chick has a key.

And suddenly Merrihew knew what he must do. He knew it as he knew that he must do it absolutely invisibly.

He had not the compunctions, here in Katrin Szabo’s apartment, that he had had in Lasvogel’s austere environment; yet when he used the telephone he was careful not to move it and to hold the receiver with his handkerchief. He got his number.

“Let’s live!”
said the telephone.

“Hey man, amen,” said Merrihew, who hated people who said “man!”

“Is Ruthie there?”

“You mean Ruthie Gordoni.”

“Godbless, man.”
You just told me what I wanted to know
. But Merrihew didn’t say that last part out loud. “Look around and see is she there for me, man.”

A pause, then: “Not here. Wish she was,” the telephone added garrulously. “This is a whole different place when she walks in. Someone said just last night she’s a regular Earth Mother.”

“Far out,” said Merrihew, who hated people who say “far out.” “She’s the one turned me on to your B and liver. I wanted to find her and thank her, man. I’m really somebody different, man.”

“That’s Ruthie,” said the telephone with pride and joy. “Well she lives right across the street, so she’ll be in. Who shall I say—”

“I’ll fall by myself soon, man. I’m almost out of pork fat molasses anyway.”

“Blackstrap.”

“That’s what I said, man. So later, man.”

“Right on,” said the telephone fashionably and Merrihew hung up. He glared sourly at it. “Far goddam out, man,” he murmured and went looking for the phone book.

He found what he wanted and then, pausing only long enough
to check out the whole place for his spoor and finding none, he let himself out and returned through the deserted hall way to Lasvogel’s door, which he now opened in even less time than he had the girl’s. He was there only long enough to fish the Let’s Live! bag out of the wastepaper basket and, in an absolutely perfect copy of her handwriting, add the earth mother’s last name and street address to her arch little note. He did not, however, put it back. He left it on the floor beside the basket. In that environment it shouted, it screamed, it stood out like an oil-spill on a talcum beach.

He went back to his office and called Dr. Poole. “Finished,” he told that startled gentleman. “I got to tell you this: he’ll get worse before he gets better—and if you try to do anything about it you’ll screw everything up. And if you call me to tell me bad things have happened to him I’ll just say I know, I know.”

Dr. Poole said, “But—”

Merrihew was already saying, “Goodbye.”

He then went where phones couldn’t reach him for a while.

What a way to save the world.

The waiter went away with the order and Merrihew shot a look at Dr. Poole. He looked older, a little, though it had been barely three weeks since the last time. He also looked a hell of a lot happier.

“I can’t tell you exactly what he did, of course,” said Dr. Poole.

Merrihew nodded understandingly.

“Secrets, secrets,” he said.

“Nonsense, man! There are two kinds of secrets—the security kind, where someone mustn’t find out something or you’ll get hurt—and the other kind, where you’re expected to explain polymer transformations to a four-year-old. You just can’t. So as one four-year-old to another, I can merely bumble to you about DNA analogs, a chemical integument forming temporarily around ripe ova, selectivity rather like the clumping that forms sickle cells—and an overlooked environmental factor.”

“You mean there’s no smog in West Ecuador.”

“Jesus! How did you know that?”

“You told me. Most of it at lunch that time. I mean, West Ecuador
could only be one place in the whole world, from what you told me. And now you mentioned ‘an overlooked environmental factor.’ ”