Authors: Robert Sheckley
After passing through customs and immigration, Hob took the airport bus to Victoria Station. He found a telephone booth and tried once more to call Nigel in Paris at Edna Schumacher’s apartment. No answer. Just on the off chance, he telephoned Kew Gardens. There was no answer.
It was going on noon. Hob had lunch at a pizza place near Victoria, then made a few more phone calls, this time looking for a place to stay. None of the people he knew seemed to be in town. It looked as if he was going to have to spend money on accommodations, something he avoided on principle as well as out of practicality. He dug out his little brown imitation leather telephone book and found the telephone number of Lorne Atena, a West Indian artist he had met at a party in Paris. He telephoned. Lorne answered and told Hob he was welcome to stay as long as he didn’t mind listening to steel band music and sleeping on the couch. Hob didn’t much like either idea, but beggars can’t be choosers, even if they are private detectives. He decided to try it out for a night, then see what else he could find.
Lorne’s place was on Westbourne Grove in the heart of London’s West Indian enclave. It was a long, wide, slightly seedy road noted for its antique shops and race riots. Lorne buzzed him through. His apartment was a fourth-floor walk-up. When Hob arrived, more than a little out of breath, Lorne greeted him effusively. Lorne was a light-skinned black who affected the dreadlocks of the Rastafarians because he thought they looked attractive on him. He was a saxophone player and a good one.
“Hey, man, good to see you. Come on in, drop the white man’s burden.” Lorne was a little man and he moved fast, darting around offering Hob a beer, a chicken sandwich, and one of the big West Indian joints rolled in newspaper and guaranteed to put you out for the rest of the day. Hob regretfully declined. He needed his wits, such as they were, about him for what he suspected was coming next.
Lorne gave him an extra key. Hob showered, shaved, and changed into fresh clothing that Lorne loaned him: jeans, a wool lumberjack’s shirt, and a Freetown Tornados warm-up jacket. Then, sitting in Lorne’s Victorian sitting room smoking a Ducado, he found George Wheaton’s business number where he had scribbled it on a torn piece of paper, and telephoned.
George’s secretary answered, asked him to wait, had a whispered conversation, then put him through to George. Hob started to introduce himself, but George remembered their meeting several years ago. Hob said he was looking for Nigel and said that it was urgent.
“I thought he was in Paris,” George said.
“I thought he was in London, but I got a message he was in Paris. Now I don’t know where he is, and it’s important that I reach him.”
“As a matter of fact,” George said, “I’ve been looking for him myself. I don’t know what to tell you. Have you tried stopping by Derek Posonby’s gallery in the West End? You might have a look in there. When I call them, I always get put on hold. Tell you what. Why don’t you come out to my house this evening, say around seven, and we’ll put our heads together, see what we can come up with. I hope Nigel is not being a naughty boy again.”
“I hope not, too,” Hob said. He wrote down the address.
Next he tried to reach Annabelle at Arlene’s London telephone number. Arlene answered and said Annabelle was out—shopping, she added unnecessarily—but she’d been hoping Hob would call. Could Annabelle call him back? Hob left Lorne’s number and said he’d try again in a few hours.
He tried to reach Jean-Claude in Paris but got the same man as last night—and the same blank refusal to divulge anything about Jean-Claude’s whereabouts.
Finally he telephoned Patrick, got his fiancée Anne-Laure, who told him that Patrick had gone to Amsterdam for a few days to visit friends.
“There was a letter for you, Hob,” Anne-Laure said, “but Nigel came by last week and took it with him. It was sent express.”
“How was it addressed?”
“To you, care of the agency, at this address.”
“Nigel opened it and read it while you were there?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you anything about what it said or who it was from?”
“No. He read it quickly, nodded, pursed his lips, said, ’Aha’ in a way that might indicate the thought: ’isn’t that interesting’ or ’funny how things work out’—it was that sort of aha! And then he put the letter back in its envelope, put it in his pocket, thanked me, and left.”
“How many pages was the letter?”
“One page. I’m pretty sure of that.”
“Did the envelope have a return address?”
“I don’t think so. But I really didn’t notice.”
“Was there anything unusual about the envelope or the letter that you remember? In appearance, I mean?”
“The paper crinkled when Nigel opened it. So it must have been good paper. Heavy. That’s the sort that crinkles, isn’t it?”
“I think so. Do you remember anything else about either the letter or envelope?”
“Just the crest on the letter.”
“Crest? Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure. I’m searching through my memory, trying to come up with something that’ll help, but for all I know I’m making it up. But I
think
there was a sort of raised circular seal or crest on the letter. It was yellow and red, I think.”
Hob stopped himself from asking again, “Are you sure of that?” and said instead, “Was there a similar crest on the envelope?”
“I don’t think so. No crest and no return address.”
“Okay, you’re doing fine. Now, is there anything else you can think of?”
“Just that Nigel asked if he could make a call on our phone.”
“You said yes, of course?”
“Of course.”
“And who did he call?”
“Hob, I don’t have a clue. He asked me if I’d mind making him some coffee, so I went to the kitchen and made coffee, and when I got back he had finished his call and was off the phone and looking very pleased with himself.”
“And then?”
“He said he had to call Jean-Claude.”
“And what did he say to him?”
“He didn’t get Jean-Claude, so he said he’d probably find him in one of the cafés near the Forum, and off he went.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. That’s all I can remember. In fact, I’m afraid it’s more than I really do remember.”
2
Nigel was feeling optimistic and hopeful when he decided to go to the Caribbean island of San Isidro. His good mood began to dissolve as Europe faded behind the Flamingo 737, and the long featureless Atlantic formed up beneath him. It had suddenly occurred to Nigel that he really didn’t want to be traveling at all. What Nigel really wanted to do was get back to London as quickly as possible. It was late June, getting close to his mother’s birthday. Nigel and his brother, George, always went to mother’s place, Druse Hall near Ayrshire in southern Scotland for her birthday. Nigel didn’t like to miss these occasions. His mother was eighty-three this birthday. It was an important one for her. And though she made light of her years, Nigel knew that age and the fear of impending death weighed heavily on her. She had begun talking about Nigel’s father again, Charles Francis Wheaton, who had been killed in Lebanon eight years ago, blown up in his jeep with two United Nations observers while covering a story for the
Guardian.
Charles and Hester had been separated for years and saw each other only on important family occasions. But something had gone out of Hester when Charles was killed. She only spoke of him when she felt her own end drawing near, when the arthritis was worse than usual, or when the heart palpitations started. Nigel had always been the black sheep of the family and the apple of Hester Wheaton’s eye. George was a dull stick, safely entrenched in the civil service, where he held down some boring job in the Counterintelligence Section of MI5 and dithered about whether or not he should marry Emily, to whom he had been engaged unofficially for almost three years.
Nigel wanted to be there for Hester. So much of his life he had not been there for his family. Four years ago Hester had undergone a painful gallstone operation alone because Nigel had been in Chad trying to interview Sanj al-Attar during his brief employment by the Anti-Slavery Commission. There had been other occasions, other family crises, when Nigel had been absent. They weren’t a closely knit family, the Wheatons, but they had a grim Scots loyalty, tight-lipped, dour, reliable. Nigel felt he was forever letting them down. He was the oldest. He considered himself the most worldly. He was good with his hands and loved nothing better than to get into old clothes and do some of the work that Druse Hall, his mother’s estate, always required. Nigel enjoyed this work. He was especially interested in the stone fences. They were not especially old, only a century or two, but they were a fine example of the stonefitter’s art. The stones had been selected with care, and in Scotland there is never a lack of stones to choose from, and fitted together so cunningly that you couldn’t fit a knifeblade between them. Nigel hadn’t seen better stonework anywhere in Europe, not even in Ibiza, where the older stone walls were put together as neatly as the Egyptian pyramids or the strange temples on Machu Picchu. And like them, the stone fences of Druse Hall had never been sullied with mortar.
Nigel loved well-shaped old stone things. He was a fair amateur architect, and had designed and built his own finca in Ibiza, near San Jose, just below Escabells. He had lost it, of course, in the divorce settlement. But he had a contract to rebuy it at a set price. If only he could get the money, which as the years wore on, seemed more and more dubious. His mother’s house in Scotland was the nearest thing he had now to a home. He didn’t consider the house in Kew a home. He had bought it during a period of temporary prosperity, mostly as an investment but also in order to have a place to stay while he was in England. He had remodeled the interior, increasing its value considerably. It was on King Street, halfway between the underground station and the main entrance to Kew Gardens. A good location, a bit run-down at present, more so since the great storm that had devastated Kew, but a good investment still, one likely to show a profit if he ever chose to sell. Meanwhile he lived in a single basement room in the house because he had rented out the rest, the two apartments he had made on the ground floor and the three bedsitters he rented on the upper floors. It was a nice house, but Nigel had never really warmed to it. His heart was in stone, the living stone of Scotland and Ibiza, the mellow stone that spoke of time and tradition. Perhaps it was his love of old things, foreign things, that drove him on. It was a damnable itch, the taste for foreign faces and places, for the exotic places of the world, an itch that drove him forth again and again, and he was always missing important dates because of it, dates such as his mother’s birthday.
The more he thought about it, the more huffy he became. The nerve of this Santos fellow, who probably thought Nigel was some sort of merchant peddler. He didn’t want his bloody business, not even his bloody five hundred dollar retainer. He’d have to stay on the bloody island overnight, and even with the best connections he could not get to London before the day after tomorrow. He would miss his mother’s birthday again, and that was insupportable.
It was in his mind to cancel, to hell with this, he’d go back home and be with his family. His sister, Alice, needed his support, too, though, reading between the lines of her angry story, it sounded as if her husband, Kyle, was more to be pitied. But Kyle had his own family to pity him, all those Joes and Bobs and T.C.s and Mary Jos whom Nigel had met briefly at Alice’s wedding two and a half years ago in Dallas. Alice was a bit of a shrew, of course—in all fairness Nigel had to admit that—and her husband’s worst crime against her seemed to have been leaving Alice alone a lot while he went about his business—wildcatting, the business that enabled Alice to live in style in the big farmhouse 187 miles south of Amarillo until she couldn’t stand it anymore, though she ought to have known what she was getting into before she married Kyle. Still, she was Nigel’s sister, part of his family, even if she and Nigel had never gotten along. And more important, there was Mother.
“Would you care for a refreshment, sir?”
Nigel looked up, startled. In his musings he had lost all sense of time and place. Now he found himself once again on a three-quarter-empty airplane droning its way across the Atlantic. A stewardess had spoken to him, trim, slim, busty, quite pretty, late twenties or early thirties if he didn’t miss his guess. She had golden skin—Eurasian, perhaps, one of Nigel’s favorite mixtures.
“Refreshment?” Nigel said. “You serve spirits, I believe?”
“Yes, sir. What would you like?”
“A scotch, water on the side. Glenlivet, if you have it. And a little advice, my dear.”
“Advice, sir? On what?”
“I’d appreciate a suggestion for a birthday present for a lady of eighty-three who has everything.”
“Let me think about it while I get your drink,” the stewardess said.
She went back to the pantry and returned with Nigel’s drink. She was a Barbados girl living now in London. She seemed as attracted to large, impressive, middle-aged Englishmen with tawny beards, bright blue eyes, and a tousled head of graying reddish blond curls as Nigel was to golden-skinned, bright-eyed, good-looking Eurasian girls. They discussed the question of Nigel’s mother’s birthday, and then other matters, since work was light on the mostly empty flight. By the time they reached San Isidro, they had arranged to meet in the market in San Isidro that evening. Esther had seen a nicely framed primitive painting of the San Isidro waterfront done by a local artist of considerable renown on the island. It might be just the thing.