Stout chewed his thumbnail. “I am catching a gamey odor.”
“Smell these film slides. No use trying to read them without a projector. Uncle Malcolm has one and knows some languages. This is his translation from Pakistani.” He handed a typewritten page to the Captain. Stout read it and rubbed his beefy neck.
“If you’re wrong I’ll be selling shoelaces.”
Seal peered over the oleander bush. “You’ve been saying that for twenty years.”
“Support me and my family on your aunt’s will if you’re wrong?”
“When was I ever wrong, Jonathan? Better that we work fast. There’ll be a ton of evidence in that building and Grivas hasn’t showed up yet. Phone them to bring you a warrant, and we’ll need four or five men.”
Two men neutralized Keech in a quick pincers movement, taking his .32 away, silencing him before he could shout an alarm. In the unoccupied business office Seal went for the carton sealed and destined for Ubiquity Mailing, broke it open, and extracted the top envelope. The paper was of the poorest quality; it was sealed but unstamped, and addressed to a matron in Alabama with return address: Carla Pupin of Plensknik, Yugoslavia. The writing on the envelope and enclosed letter was in a child’s wandering scrawl. A fuzzy snapshot of a small girl was inside. On a bookcase Seal found a jar of mint-new quarters.
They left Officer Wode there and bypassed the empty geography room, leaving the tape recorder playing. Beneath an unlit red light ahead was the door to the “dark… room” referred to by a delirious Hinschelman. Inside Seal turned a light on and sidled down the line of prints paper-clipped to a horizontal wire.
“Pictures of slum kids, every one of them,” Stout said. “I’ve seen some of these kids in the Fifteenth Ward. Terrible prints, aren’t they? And this guy’s a professional photographer?”
“Done poorly on purpose,” said Seal. “Uses a six-dollar camera, prints them amateurishly. What other kind of photography would there be in North Rucksack, Paraguay?”
Stout shook his head, still doubtful. “Suppose they mail him the undeveloped negatives from all those places?”
“You sure die hard,” said Seal. “Come along.”
He took Stout down the wide hall festooned with crayoned cutouts and toward a door at the end of a corridor. Behind them the recorder receded and a new voice was heard — that of the real Miss Springer.
The door was at the left rear of a large classroom. A foot-square tinted window gave them vantage.
“It beats anything,” Stout murmured, looking in. “Anything I ever saw.”
Her back was to them. All about her at their tiny desks toiled fifty children, heads bent, tongues writhing, feet tangling with chairlegs, and knuckles white on their pencils as they copied from the three projection screens ahead. Three projectors at the rear wall threw three images of handwritten letters in three foreign languages. The calligraphy was round and flowing, easily copiable. Two aisles separated the class into three sections, each assigned its respective screen as copy fodder.
Now Miss Springer bent over Billy Wagner and smiled approval, walked on, then bent to assist a small girl.
“Know Italian or Burmese?” Seal asked.
“Know Spanish,” answered Stout. “It says, ‘Estimada Senora.’ Then it’s blank.
“They fill that in to order,” Seal said.
“Says: ‘My name is Mateo. Here is picture. I am live in little pueblo of Saenz in Chile with my brother. I go to school now with you send money. I have dog name Lobo. When you send so kind have coat for winter and…”
His voice faded. “They copy it in the foreign language without knowing the meaning of a single word.”
Seal nodded. “Keeps them from babbling about it at home. Grivas runs ad, receives contributions, has the children copy letters and address envelopes, adds snapshots, and off they go to Ubiquity Mailing Service to be postmarked in towns halfway around the world.”
“And pays each kid a quarter a day.”
“Rewards them, let’s say. Cuts down overhead. Figure two letters per afternoon by fifty children — that comes to five hundred letters a week. Times twenty-five dollars a month per contributor gives them a $50,000-a-month sucker list.”
“Minimum,” Stout said grimly.
The door suddenly flew open and closed behind a livid Miss Springer.
She said, “Look, you keyhole creep, can’t you understand I’m not interested? What do you want now?”
Seal smiled at her. “You.” They were walking her to the front door when Antoine Grivas entered. A white carnation graced the left lapel of his imported suit; his shoes were English saddle leather; he carried a bulging brief case and a Brownie camera.
“Two bits a day,” mused Hinschelman, “and those shysters taking home five figures a month.”
They had found him and returned him to his own billet via ambulance. “I still don’t understand all that noise we heard.”
“The recorder? Oh, they had their regular morning curriculum,” Seal answered. “Or enough to satisfy enough parents. It was afternoons that were given over to the illegalities, and the recorder backed up Keech’s reasons for keeping people out of there — classes in session. His function was to guard that door.”
Hinschelman wagged his head in admiration. “You’re something all right, making sense out of all that junk I brought you. Didn’t know what I was taking. Was looking through the front office and heard footsteps and just grabbed the first things I could. How did I know Keech slept in the place? I beat him out the front door but he must have followed me home.”
“And phoned Grivas for instructions while you ate supper. She lived with him, and hadn’t yet left for my place, so she knew what had happened.”
“How’d she connect us?”
“Saw us on that park bench together. So did Keech.”
“I played dead. It wasn’t hard. I lay there and he came out of that doorway and searched my pockets, not that he knew I’d taken anything. I looked up when he was walking off and recognized him under a street lamp.” His eyes closed. “Some racket. Now Billy doesn’t get his quarter anymore.”
“Billy will now live within his allowance, which is a nickel a week.”
“And you’re without a girl friend.”
“Never had one, as you wisely suggested.”
“Maybe I can find you someone nice,” said Louise.
“Please don’t,” urged Inspector Seal.
How Could He Do It?
by Avram Davidson{©1971 by Avram Davidson.}
’And soon they have the saw going back and forth again, push-pull, shove-tug”…
Bob and Peggy Morrison both say they like things to be in order, but they mean different things by this. Take the shirts.
Peg comes into the bedroom and there is her husband taking the shirts out of the dresser drawer and rearranging them. First shirt, collar flush against the side of the drawer. Second shirt on top of first, but collar at the other end. Third shirt, collar same as first — and so on.