“Is it the same town Hoseblender was riding his bicycle in?”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s a different nameless town.”
“Do you have any pictures of your daughter?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to be careful who you show them to since they’re pornographic. Another unfortunate moment in the poor child’s past.”
“When’d she leave?”
“The day after my fourth wife — the former Hazel Wadlow Whitney— fell off the cupola.”
“I thought Hazel Wadlow Whitney was your first wife?”
“This is a different Hazel Wadlow Whitney. I have a tendency to marry women with that name. It has upset Alicia more than once. When she was fifteen she ran away to Topeka, Kansas, and was later arrested for trying to break the Menninger Brothers’ windows.”
“Any idea where she might be?”
“You might look for that candy-striped ice-cream wagon.”
I scowled at his finished old lusterless eyes. “You’re keeping something back from me.”
“Very well,” he said, making a feminine gesture. “She is not alone. There is a strong possibility she may be with her half brother. You see, fifteen years ago I discovered a foundling on my doorstep. He was nearly five years old at the time, and quite bright. The note pinned to him explained that he had an IQ of 185.”
“How does that make him a half brother to Alicia?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“A hundred dollars a day and expenses is my fee,” I told him.
“Dawes will give you an envelope full of money, Mr. Pewter. If you’ll excuse me I have to take a steam bath. I suffer from a malignant disease, and steam seems to be good for me.”
The room, now that I noticed it, was as foggy as the 2900 block on Jackson Street in San Francisco. I said goodby and went out to find the butler and my money.
3
Something old Bultitude had said gave me a hunch and I took a jet to Connecticut as soon as I left him.
The night seems timeless when you are hurtling through it at a fast clip — like a marble in some pinball machine in a grease-and-chili-smelling place on some hot, dry side street on the underbelly of Southern California. We all of us drag the past with us like one of those big silver trailers that clog the L.A. highways. Looking, all of us, for a place to pull off the road and park the damn thing but we never do it.
Spent time is somewhat like the bird in that poem by Coleridge and we carry it around our neck like a gift necktie that we have to wear to please the giver, who gave it to us like somebody passing out the second-rate wine now that the guests, who sit around like numbed patients in some sort of cosmic dentist’s waiting room, are too unsober to know or care.
I suppose you’ve felt like that when you’re flying too.
4
The cops beat me up in Connecticut. They always do. But I found out what I wanted. By noon, on a hot, dry, sticky-90-and-climbing day, I was back at the drive-in I’d gone to by mistake.
The kitchen was like all the meals they made you eat as a lonely child. It smelled of oatmeal and fried foods and stale chocolate cake.
“You,” I said to the frycook.
He was a pale youth of about twenty. His face had the worn look of one who has lost two falls out of three — lost too many battles with the dark side of himself.
“Don’t bug me now, mister,” he said. “I’ve got to fry three orders of oatmeal.”
I picked a soft spot in his belly and gave him a stiff-fingered jab there. He fell over onto the stale chocolate cake, making the silent falling sound that a giant tree does when it topples alone in a distant wood.
“I know you’re Albert B Bultitude,” I told the kid, jerking him to his feet. “Yesterday when I came in here I saw the overcoat.”
“You weren’t in this kitchen yesterday, mister.”
“Don’t mix me up while I’m trying to explain this case,” I said. “They told me some things in Connecticut.”
“Sure, they’re a knowledgeable bunch in Connecticut. You take Westport, for instance; they have a great many gifted people there.”
“Forget that,” I told him. “I know who your mother is.”
His eyes flickered like a cigaret lighter about to run out of fluid. “How did you guess?”
“She let the towel slip when she was in the steam bath and I figured it out.”
“Well, you’re right. Our mistake was keeping the past festering too long.”
“It wasn’t Hazel Wadlow Whitney who fell from the cupola; it was Tro Bultitude, pushed by you. I thought Dawes was too tough. He’s really your Uncle Brewster from Maine. Still, the whole business about the silverware doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I never heard of any silverware.”
“Good. Then I’ll leave that part out.”
“I guess you know about Alicia, too.”
“There is no Alicia,” I said. “There never was. Alicia is really Tony, your other half brother. He drove the car that time in Connecticut. The accident with the ice-cream wagon made him walk funny and then he decided to try the Alicia bit.”
“It’s odd how the past catches up with us,” said Albert.
“The only thing is,” I said, watching the oatmeal burn away to ashes, “I still don’t see why your mother hired me at all. She’s accomplished only the arrest of her son for the murder of her husband.”
“Mother’s been rather dotty since she fell off the Christmas tree that time.”
I needed a lungful of fresh air. “Let’s go, Albert. I know some cops in L.A. who aren’t corrupt and I’m turning you over to them.”
Outside, Albert stared at the bright, intense blue of the ocean. He hesitated for a long second and then waved boyishly at the mindless timeless water.
“Goodby,” he called. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing the ocean again for a while.”
He was right.
91
The Man of the Knife
Alexandre Dumas
There dwells in Ferdj’ Ouah a Sheik named Bou Akas en Achour. It is one of the most ancient names in the country, so we find it in the history of the dynasties of the Arabs and Berbers of Ibu Khaldoun.
Bou Akas is 49 years of age. He dresses like the Kabyles; that is, in a gandoura of wool girt with a leather belt, and fastened around the head with a slender cord. He carries a pair of pistols in his shoulder belt, at his left side the Kabyle flissa, and, hanging from his neck, a little black knife. Before him walks a Negro carrying his gun, and at his side bounds a large greyhound.
When a tribe in the vicinity of the twelve tribes over which he rules occasions him any loss, he deigns not to march against it, but is satisfied with sending his Negro to the principal village, where the Negro shows the gun of Bou Akas, and the injury is repaired.
There are in his pay two or three tolbas who read the Koran to the people. Every person passing by his dwelling on a pilgrimage to Mecca received three francs and at the Sheik’s expense remains in Ferdj’ Ouah as long as he pleases. But should Bou Akas learn that he has had to do with a false pilgrim, he sends emissaries to overtake the man wherever he may be, and they, on the spot, turn him over on his face, and give him twenty blows of the bastinado on the soles of his feet.
Bou Akas sometimes dines 300 persons, but instead of partaking of the repast he walks around among his guests with a stick in his hand, marshaling his domestics; then, if there is anything left, he eats, but the very last.