At seven the next morning, my student phoned me. “This is Alice Miller. I’m so sorry to disturb you,” she said, “but your friend, the famous writer, borrowed my car last night. We went out for coffee and afterward he said he had an urgent errand to go on, he practically got on his knees to beg to borrow the car. He said that although he knew I didn’t know him very well, you could vouch for him, and he promised he would have my car back in my carport by midnight. He borrowed ten dollars, too. He never came back. And I can’t get to work without it!”
“I’ll see if I can reach him,” I told her. “I’m so sorry. I’ll call you right back.”
But his landlady did not find him in his room. I called Alice back and told her I could only imagine that there was some emergency with his son who was a paraplegic. I reassured her that he would surely have the car back to her very shortly but in the meantime to take a taxi to work, that I would pay for it.
I learned later that when finally Ricky did return the car to Alice, he never even rang her bell. He left the car at the curb. She found the inside of it littered with cigarette butts, racing forms, empty paper cups, and the greasy wrappers from McDonald’s hamburgers. There was not enough gas left in the tank for Alice to get to a gas station.
Toward the end of September, I was applying for a fellowship and realized that I needed my typewriter to fill out the application form. My anger overcame my revulsion, and I dialed the number Ricky had originally given me. His landlady answered, informing me that he’d moved out bag and baggage — that “he shipped out to sea.”
“To sea!” I imagined him on a whaling ship, thinking he was Melville, or more likely that he was one of the sailors in Stephen Crane’s story about men doomed at sea, “The Open Boat,” a piece of work whose first line Alvord had often quoted: “None of them knew the color of the sky.”
But my typewriter! I wanted it, it was mine. I felt as if Ricky had kidnapped one of my children.
“Let it go,” my husband said. “It’s an old typewriter, I’ll get you a new one; it doesn’t matter. Write it off as a business loss. Write him off — your old friend — if you can as one of those mistakes we all make in life.”
In the days following, I had trouble sleeping. I held imaginary conversations with Ricky, by turns furious, accusatory, damning, murderous. “I trusted you!” I cried out, and in return I heard his laugh… his cackle. Alvord had often talked about evil in his class; the reality of it, how it existed, how it was as real as the spinning globe to which we clung.
Days later, in a frenzy, I began calling hospitals, halfway houses, rehab clinics, trying to find the place where Ricky’s son lived — if indeed he had a son.
“Don’t do this to yourself,” Danny said. He saw me on the phone, sweating, asking questions, shaking with anger, trembling with outrage.
But one day I actually located the boy. He was in a hospital in a city only a half hour’s drive from my house. I named his name, Bobby, with Ricky’s last name, and someone asked me to wait, they would call him to the phone. And a man picked up the phone and said “Yes? This is Bobby.”
I told him I was a friend of his father, that his father had my typewriter.
“Oh sure, I know about that. You’re his old friend. He left the typewriter here with me. You can come and get it.” His voice had the same tones as Ricky’s voice. The same seductive sound — the “Oh sure” a kind of promise, the “come and get it” the serpent’s invitation.
“His landlady said he went to sea…” I felt I must have another piece of the puzzle, at least one more piece.
“Yeah — he got a job teaching English on a Navy ship. I told him he better take it, he wasn’t going to freeload off me the rest of his life.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to the boy “I’m sorry about your accident… and about your troubles with your father.”
“Hey don’t worry about it. It’s nothing new. But if you want his address on the ship I could give it to you.”
“No — thank you,” I said. “I don’t want it. I think your father and I have come to a parting of the ways. Good-bye, Bobby, I wish you good luck.”
“You, too,” Bobby said. “Anyone who knows my father needs it.”
Then, two years after I talked to his son, I got the third phone call. “This is a voice out of your fucking past.”
“Hello, Ricky.” My heart was banging so hard I had to sit down.
“I heard from my son you want your goddamned typewriter back.”
“No, no—”
“You’ll have it back. It’s in little pieces. I’ll be on your doorstep with it in twenty minutes.”
“I don’t want it, Ricky. Don’t come here! Keep it.”
“I said you’ll have it back. I always keep my word, you fucking…”
“Please, keep it. I don’t need it! Keep it and write your book on it!”
“Just expect me,” Ricky said. “I’ll be there, you count on it. Watch out your window for me.”
I did. For a week. For a month. I keep watching and sometimes, when the phone rings, I let it ring and don’t answer it.
Edward D. Hoch
The Old Spies Club
from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
Rand had been retired from British Intelligence for a good many years, but it was not until he turned sixty that he was invited to join the Old Spies Club. That was not its official name, of course, but around London’s clubland it was often called that, especially by nonmembers who may have been a bit jealous of its exclusive status and impressive membership.
The club itself occupied three floors of a late-Victorian building on St. James’s Street, just a short walk from Piccadilly. The main floor was given over to the gentlemen’s lounge and the dining room, with a billiard room, card room, smoking lounge, library, and the other amenities one might expect. On the second floor were rooms for meetings or private dinners, along with the club’s offices. The third floor contained three dozen residential rooms where members might stay for a day or a year. These were often occupied by members in the city on a visit, although some members also found them useful when death or divorce suddenly changed their marital status.
Rand had taken a good deal of kidding from his wife Leila about being elderly enough for the Old Spies Club, and in truth he had never been much of a joiner. He was a bit dismayed the first time he took the train up from Reading and stopped in the place one warm July afternoon. The first person he met, just inside the door, was Colonel Cheever, a blustering old man who could have starred in any number of film comedies about the army. It was hard to imagine he’d ever been engaged in any sort of intelligence work.
“Rand! How are you, old chap? I saw your name come up on the new member postings. Good to have you aboard.” His gray moustache drooped around his thick lips and he had a habit of spitting when he spoke quickly, but Rand had to admit he seemed trim and in good health for his age. Cheever had been in army intelligence, far from Rand’s own sphere of activity. Their paths had only crossed a few times at government functions Rand couldn’t avoid.
Now, in trying to be politely friendly, he asked Cheever, “Do you come here often, Colonel?”
“I’m here for the meeting at two o’clock. I expect you are too.”
“No,” Rand admitted. “I was just in the city for the day and thought I’d acquaint myself with the place.”