«Seattle,» I agreed.
«We don’t git many strangers,» he said, looking at my left ear. «Ain’t on the way to nowheres. Now before repeal —» he stopped, shifted his sharp woodpecker gaze to my other ear.
«Ah, before repeal,» I said with a large gesture, and drank knowingly.
He leaned over and breathed on my chin. «Hell, you could load up in any fish stall on the pier. The stuff come in under catches of crabs and oysters. Hell, Westport was lousy with it. They give the kids cases of Scotch to play with. There wasn’t a car in this town that slept in a garage, mister. The garages was full to the roof of Canadian hooch. Hell, they had a coastguard cutter off the pier watchin’ the boats unload one day every week. Friday. Always the same day.» He winked.
I puffed a cigarette and the sizzling noise and the baritone rendering of «Chloe» went on in the kitchen.
«But hell, you wouldn’t be in the liquor business,» he said.
«Hell, no. I’m a goldfish buyer,» I said.
«Okey,» he said sulkily.
I poured us another round of the apple brandy. «This bottle is on me,» I said. «And I’m taking a couple more with me.»
He brightened up. «What did you say the name was?»
«Marlowe. You think I’m kidding you about the goldfish. I’m not.»
«Hell, there ain’t a livin’ in them little fellers, is there?»
I held my sleeve out. «You said it was a nice piece of goods. Sure there’s a living out of the fancy brands. New brands, new types all the time. My information is there’s an old guy down here somewhere that has a real collection. Maybe would sell it. Some he’d bred himself.»
A large woman with a mustache kicked the swing door open a foot and yelled: «Pick up the ham and eggs!»
My host scuttled across and came back with my food. I ate. He watched me minutely. After a time he suddenly smacked his skinny leg under the table.
«Old Wallace,» he chuckled. «Sure, you come to see old Wallace. Hell, we don’t know him right well. He don’t act neighborly.»
He turned around in his chair and pointed out through the sleazy curtains at a distant hill. On top of the hill was a yellow and white house that shone in the sun.
«Hell, that’s where he lives. He’s got a mess of them. Goldfish, huh? Hell, you could bend me with an eye dropper.»
That ended my interest in the little man. I gobbled my food, paid off for it and for three quarts of apple brandy at a dollar a quart, shook hands and went back out to the touring car.
There didn’t seem to be any hurry. Rush Madder would come out of his faint, and he would turn the girl loose. But they didn’t know anything about Westport. Sunset hadn’t mentioned the name in their presence. They didn’t know it when they reached Olympia or they would have gone there at once. And if they had listened outside my room at the hotel, they would have known I wasn’t alone. They hadn’t acted as if they knew that when they charged in.
I had lots of time. I drove down to the pier and looked it over. It looked tough. There were fish stalls, drinking dives, a tiny honkytonk for the fishermen, a pool room, an arcade of slot machines and smutty peep shows. Bait fish squirmed and darted in big wooden tanks down in the water along the piles. There were loungers and they looked like trouble for anyone that tried to interfere with them. I didn’t see any law enforcement around.
I drove back up the hill to the yellow and white house. It stood very much alone, four blocks from the next nearest dwelling. There were flowers in front, a trimmed green lawn, a rock garden. A woman in a brown and white print dress was popping at aphids with a spray gun.
I let my heap stall itself, got out and took my hat off.
«Mister Wallace live here?»
She had a handsome face, quiet, firm-looking. She nodded.
«Would you like to see him?» She had a quiet firm voice, a good accent.
It didn’t sound like the voice of a train robber’s wife.
I gave her my name, said I’d been hearing about his fish down in the town. I was interested in fancy goldfish.
She put the spray gun down and went into the house. Bees buzzed around my head, large fuzzy bees that wouldn’t mind the cold wind off the sea. Far off like background music the surf pounded on the sandbars. The northern sunshine seemed bleak to me, had no heat in the core of it.
The woman came out of the house and held the door open.
«He’s at the top of the stairs,» she said, «if you’d like to go up.»
I went past a couple of rustic rockers and into the house of the man who had stolen the Leander pearls.
TEN
Fish tanks were all around the big room, two tiers of them on braced shelves, big oblong tanks with metal frames, some with lights over them and some with lights down in them. Water grasses were festooned in careless patterns behind the algaecoated glass and the water held a ghostly greenish light and through the greenish light moved fish of all the colors of rainbow.
There were long slim fish like golden darts and Japanese Veiltails with fantastic trailing tails, and X-ray fish as transparent as colored glass, tiny guppies half an inch long, calico popeyes spotted like a bride’s apron, and big lumbering Chinese Moors with telescope eyes, froglike faces and unnecessary fins, waddling through the green water like fat men going to lunch.
Most of the light came from a big sloping skylight. Under the skylight at a bare wooden table a tall gaunt man stood with a squirming red fish in his left hand, and in his right hand a safety-razor blade backed with adhesive tape.
He looked at me from under wide gray eyebrows. His eyes were sunken, colorless, opaque. I went over beside him and looked down at the fish he was holding.
«Fungus?» I asked.
He nodded slowly. «White fungus.» He put the fish down on the table and carefully spread its dorsal fin. The fin was ragged and split and the ragged edges had a mossy white color.
«White fungus,» he said, «ain’t so bad. I’ll trim this feller up and he’ll be right as rain. What can I do for you, mister?»
I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and smiled at him.
«Like people,» I said. «The fish, I mean. They get things wrong with them.»
He held the fish against the wood and trimmed off the ragged part of the fin. He spread the tail and trimmed that. The fish had stopped squirming.
«Some you can cure,» he said, «and some you can’t. You can’t cure swimming-bladder disease, for instance.» He glanced up at me. «This don’t hurt him, ’case you think it does,» he said. «You can shock a fish to death but you can’t hurt it like a person.»
He put the razor blade down and dipped a cotton swab in some purplish liquid, painted the cut places. Then he dipped a finger in a jar of white vaseline and smeared that over. He dropped the fish in a small tank off to one side of the room. The fish swam around peacefully, quite content.
The gaunt man wiped his hands, sat down at the edge of a bench and stared at me with lifeless eyes. He had been goodlooking once, a long time ago.
«You interested in fish?» he asked. His voice had the quiet careful murmur of the cell block and the exercise yard.
I shook my head. «Not particularly. That was just an excuse. I came a long way to see you, Mister Sype.»
He moistened his lips and went on staring at me. When his voice came again it was tired and soft.
«Wallace is the name, mister.»
I puffed a smoke ring and poked my finger through it. «For my job it’s got to be Sype.»
He leaned forward and dropped his hands between his spread bony knees, clasped them together. Big gnarled hands that had done a lot of hard work in their time. His head tipped up at me and his dead eyes were cold under the shaggy brows. But his voice stayed soft.