The Investigations of Avram Davidson (14 page)

The Major's smile was brief. “Jimmy doesn't know it most of the time himself. And when he does, he doesn't care. I thought I'd look him up, seeing that I was at liberty and his father wasn't. I suppose you have a lot of tiresome business you want to bother me about?” The two men nodded. “I thought so.… Well, let me say goodbye.”

Taking out a cigar which was not a panatella, the big man asked, “How's the kid going to get home? It's a cold night, Rooney.”

“I am aware of that. He'll get home all right. There are some people here who have a car, they're driving him home.” The two men watched as he walked back.

“Jim.” He put his hand on the boy's shoulder. “I'm afraid that I won't be able to come back with you after all. Something has come up. But you can sit up front with Jarvis and the chauffeur, so you'll have plenty of company.”

The boy said, “I have to go to the bathroom first.” When he came out, the Major and the two men were standing together near the door.

“Jim, here are two old friends of mine who'd like to meet you. Captain Schmitz and Lieutenant Brady, of the United States Foreign Service—James, Junior.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Captain Schmitz, of the United States Foreign Service.

“Likewise,” said Lieutenant Brady, of the same.

They all walked to the big, black limousine, where it was explained to Jarvis and the chauffeur that Jimmy would be the only passenger on the return trip. “We'd better say goodbye now. There won't be time when the ferry stops.… I don't know when I'll see you again, Jimmy. Stay out of fights and be good to Mrs. Morley. She's a good woman. I—”

He stopped, as the boy reached up and clutched him around the neck. The embrace was brief. Jimmy started to get in the car, then turned around. “I won't forget you any more,” he said. “I was just a little kid the other time. I was only four years old. Where's the saddle? Oh, there it is.” He got in, climbing over Jarvis so that he was between him and the chauffeur. He bounced up and down, said, “Hey, we're coming into the dock!” Then he leaned towards the window and called, “Thank you very much. I had a very nice time. I'll be real bigger when you see me again.” Then he turned an eager face towards the quickly approaching ferryslip.

Captain Schmitz said, “Um … what's with the car and the driver and the flunkey, Rooney?”

“Hired them from an agency. The receipts are in my pocket.”

“You sure do things in style, Pasha,” Lieutenant Brady observed.

The boat hit the slip, recoiled, bumped it again, slid along the greased pilings. A bell sounded. A chain rattled. “Well, after all, gentlemen, his father and I were old friends, not to mention our being room-mates at a certain well-known establishment.…” His manner changed, abruptly. “Can you imagine that S.O.B., though?” he demanded. “He's got a boy like that and he doesn't even give a damn about it.”

The gangway fell into position. People streamed off the boat. Captain Schmitz said, “I suppose you wouldn't know anything about a certain peter job down in the loft district, Rooney?”

“Never heard of it,” he answered, once again serene.

“It's got your name written all over it. First thing we said, we said, ‘Oh-oh. Pasha Rooney must be out again,' didn't we, Conrad?” asked Lieutenant Brady.

*   *   *

B
UT HIS PARTNER
had something else on his mind. “The kid looks like someone I know,” he said. “And I don't mean that bum, Jimmy Thompson, either.”

Pasha Rooney was watching the cars as they drove off the ferry. “He looks like his mother,” he said briefly. “Helen Farrel. She's dead.”

Schmitz snapped his fingers. “
That's
who. Yeah. Sure. She was a real good-looker.…” He turned to the man in the astrakhan cap. “If I'm not mistaken, you used to like her, didn't you, Rooney? Before she took up with Jimmy Thompson?”

The black car drove down onto the ferry-dock. There was a movement at the window, which might have been that of a small boy waving goodbye. The man in the astrakhan cap waved back. “Yes,” he said, after a moment. “I used to like her a lot.…”

T
HE
T
HIRD
S
ACRED
W
ELL OF THE
T
EMPLE

I
N THE EARLY
1960s, Davidson and his wife and young son lived in the small village of Amecameca, Mexico, high on the slopes of the great active volcano, Popocatepetl. The rent for eight rooms in the rear garden patio of Sra. Susanna's pleasant hacienda was $16 per month. How do I know? Because I was Avram's wife back then.

Life in Amecameca was a grand adventure. The town was once named “Ameca.” Then it collapsed in an earthquake, and after it was rebuilt it was called “Amecameca.” The shy Indians, who came from the surrounding hills to sell their wares at the colorful Sunday market, spoke a language that was closer to Aztec than to Spanish. Very few gringos ever found their way to Amecameca.

“The Third Sacred Well of the Temple” was published in 1965. Avram's story notes said, “Here is the first story I've written in Mexico. What prompted it was all those
Islands in the Sun
–type books. This is what happened to both San Miguel and Puerto Vallarta—people wrote them up all over the place, tourists pour in, and the rents raise.”

—
GD

 

… Whose name, Santo Domingo Alburnosi—note the Moorish influence, if you please: The Man with the Burnoose!—might give some indication as to just why the
alcalde
himself was not over-anxious to entertain an official of the Holy Office. No matter that he was the founder of the settlement and had built two churches entirely with his own funds and at least partly with his own hands. No matter that his religious orthodoxy was locally irreproachable. No matter, no matter. For the expected Inquisitor was bound to be suspicious of a man only two generations removed from a
Morisco
ancestor.

“Who could know that no trace of Moslem sentiment still beat in such a heart?—I am, of course, speculating, conjecturing. What is, however, beyond conjecture or speculation, is that the Inquisitor—armed with documents of special power, before which the Viceroy trembled and the Captain-General turned pale, and even the good Archbishop himself was utterly helpless—the Inquisitor, I say, with his mules and his men and his moneybags and his documents, left the port of Santa Luisa and headed for our own beloved Monte del Incarnacion.

“He never arrived. No trace of him was ever found. Robbery—of those moneybags of which I spoke, for there were no banks, no traveler's checks in those days—robbery. Thus, the verdict of history. But I might be bold enough to suggest my own verdict, based on my personal researches over some period of time. This, however, must wait upon another occasion, for I see by our hostess's charming old ormolu clock that I must now cease from boring you further. This lovely timepiece, like our cherished Mountain itself, often seems to keep its own time—but it is not to be heeded the less for that, is it? Thank you for your patience.”

The speaker, Richard Stanley, sat down to applause as hearty as the other three men and two women present could make it. A slight flush of pleasure came over his round face and was visible even in the part of his silky white hair. He looked around, still a trifle hesitant, then began to beam.

“Richard, you always make everything sound so fascinating!” exclaimed the hostess, Helen, a slender woman of late middle-age, whose face still testified to the sometime presence of beauty. “What did really happen to that old Inquisitor? Won't you even give us a hint?”

“Richard, old boy, you even had
me
interested,” a thickset man with a dark red beard commented, eagerly taking a mug from the tray offered by a smiling, silent servant. “Helen, I say! I thought
I
was the champion local drink-mixer, but this tops anything I've ever concocted!”

A man and a woman, both still young, came up and offered their hands to the white-haired Richard Stanley. Their manner was shy and they were slow to speak, but—patiently and wordlessly—he encouraged them.

“We both enjoyed your talk tonight,” the young woman said at last. Her husband nodded, smiling.

“I am so glad. You didn't think my prose a little too purple?”

They shook their heads simultaneously, their faces reproaching the very suggestion. But an older man, big of body though slightly stooped, clapped Richard on the back.

“Purple? Of course it was purple. All the greatest prose ever written is purple. Dr. Johnson, Lafcadio Hearn…”

Richard's face became even pinker with pleasure. In the momentary silence, the hostess's soft voice was heard, explaining her success with the mixed drink.

“…the juice of one quarter. That's all. I have never really been sure, you know, Captain, if they are lemons or limes, or perhaps a hybrid. And if you ask, they just smile and shrug, of course. And of course they are right. What does it really matter?”

The Captain nodded, his slightly rufous eyes peering over the rim of the blue pottery mug as he took another swallow. “I'm glad to hear they're ripe again. The seasons seem to pass so quickly. I wish there were more of them, whatever they are. But maybe this way is best, with just enough to go around.…” His voice ebbed, contentedly.

At one end of the room a fire of native cedar burned brightly, a faint odor of its scented flesh perfuming the air. The fireplace was raised, and a rounded hood of stone and plaster blended gently into the wall, tinted with a cream-colored wash. Dark old wooden beams stretched across the ceiling, ochreous leather chairs stood here and there, and in the center was a settee which seemed only the sturdier for its two hundred years.

On the tiled floors were Indian rugs, with a few choicer specimens hanging on the wall. One showed Achichihuatzl, the local myth-hero, in victorious combat with the evil serpent Ixtitihuango—both so highly stylized as to be unrecognizable to the unfamiliar.

And facing them was a long and narrow 18th-century picture of St. George slaying the dragon. It was painted on a single piece of wood, presumably by a local artist, for although the
santo
wore the clothes and armor and ceremonial regalia of a Spanish officer, at the temples of his helmet were the bird-wings of Achichihuatzl, and the dragon had more in him than a hint of Ixtitihuango; the feet of the victor were thrust into stirrups of the sort still to be seen in the equipage of every horseman in Monte del Incarnacion and environs—though nowhere else—and the lance piercing the scaly hide of Evil might have been modeled after the ancient one hanging over the fireplace.

Outside a very gentle rain was falling. The scent of clean wet earth, mingled with that of night flowers and blossoming trees, came through the little triangular window under the eaves, and mingled again, not at all unpleasantly, with the pleasant and savory smells from the kitchen—of bits of meat grilling over embers, and over the sauce into which they would presently be dipped: chili powder and fresh-chopped chili, honey, tart fruit, and the rich juice and dripping of the meat itself.

Somewhere, in a nearby
quinta,
a voice accompanied by a guitar and the Indian
tompillo,
began a song—the high ornate notes of antique Hispanic cantilation; then, suddenly, but somehow appropriately, the deeper and steadier melody of the
oaxixen.

The guests and hostess listened, silent, pleased. They exchanged looks of deep satisfaction. The servants came in with trays of food, the voice and its accompaniment ended, and a night bird sounded its few sweet notes in the lemon grove.…

*   *   *

R
ICHARD
S
TANLEY HAD
for some years taught history at a small college, but found that he was increasingly unable to cope with his work. Some men would have found it bearable, even soothing, to go through the same scheduled subjects year after year; to receive the same answers to the same questions and to issue the same grades; to arise at fixed hours and lecture at fixed hours; to parry semester after semester the unripe rudeness of adolescent students; to engage in the unvarying hypocrisy of rigid and petty small-college faculty politics and socializing.

It was not out of any resolved attitude or principle that Richard Stanley found any or all of this unbearable. Something in his metabolism seemed to be at fault—ceased, so to speak, to secrete the necessary hormones or enzymes. Conscientiously he reported this to his president.

“We can't have any nervous breakdowns on our faculty,” the man said helpfully. “Tell you what you better do. Better see Dr. Wombaugh, the students' psychologist—he can help you decide what you're going to do next year.”

Thus subtly informed that he need expect no renewal of contract (and, in fact, desiring none), Richard Stanley obediently reported to the office of Dr. Wombaugh. There he found a copy of
The Literary Digest
(predicting the election of Alf M. Landon by a landslide), a copy of a soon-to-be-extinct humor magazine full of He/She jokes, and a copy of
The National Geographic.

He thumbed listlessly through a pictorial account of the nesting habits of the bulbul of the Hindu Kush, an article on Picturesque Patagonia, another on New Insights to Old Zeeland, and came, finally, to a description of the Republic of Hidalgo—Where the Palm and the Pine Meet.

By the time the doctor's assistant got around to looking into the waiting room, Mr. Richard Stanley was no longer there. His savings were not large, but travel was cheap in those days. The port of Santa Luisa, where the banana boat left him, was full of unshaven customs officials with rude manners, demanding cab drivers with worse, and swarms of street gamins with none at all. In short, a larger, tropical, and equally uncopeable version of a small college.