Cycle of Nemesis (2 page)

The head was not found.

The elegance and refinement of the auction atmosphere in the great ballroom of Gannets had served at least to dampen the incidence of hysteria. I could not help, despite the unnecessary gruesomeness of what had happened, a small malicious feeling of comeuppance. This gilded world of small talk and elegant gesture and afternoon tea was not mine. George Pomfret and I walked back across the gravel paths to his heli-car and watched the hasty exit of the would-be buyers when the police had finished.

“Poor kid,” said Pomfret, shaking his head. “They’ll never identify her, not with all their new-fangled forensic gimmickry.”

“The odd thing is, George,” I said with a thoughtfulness I tried not to make sound like fear, “the
damnably
odd thing is that we looked through that chest about an hour before. So the girl couldn’t have been there then—” “I heard the police doctor say she had only just died. The blood was still pumping out—you know how it spurts from a severed neck artery—”

“Yes.”

“So she was put into that chest just before the robot wheeled it across.”

“It’s a tough nut, all right.”

Pomfret wouldn’t leave it alone. "Yet no blood was found anywhere in the ballroom, and the head—”

“I know. Look, George, we’re late for lunch—”

“My dear fellow—this hasn’t put you off your grub, has it? That would be a tragedy. Fresh salmon and a sauce—Montague got the recipe from Chancellor Zang-will’s robot chef—which we thought would especially appeal to you. Fresh water, after all, you know—”

"I know, George, and thank you. Fresh salmon will make a change from kipper, herring and haddock—” Pomfret’s heli waited for us with that faintly sly and disdainful demeanor you always find with an integral-robot piece of equipment. Much as I am not at home

with the humanoid-robots, integrals infuriate me more. At least the human-looking robots are open and transparent in their programmed effects.

We got in and the vanes stirred and whickered and the voice grille said: “Where to, sir?”

“Home, James,” said Pomfret and then, because he was Pomfret, added: “And don’t spare the horses.”

I thought of the dead girl without a head and I thought of the man who had vanished and who looked like me.

I had not, of course, mentioned him to the police. I had a good idea they would either have taken no notice and written me off, or they would have taken me down to the station and probably tried to pin the murder on me. Either way would do me no good. This was a thing I had to work through for myself.

The heli slanted away in the sunshine and Gannets with its blue roofs and gray and yellow walls with their wide framed windows slipped back into its bower of green.

Nice place, that. Restful. What had happened there bore no relationship to the house’s niche in history; a house, a home, a palace for a family—again I thought of the legends clustering around the name of Lester Northrop. Before I could start a conversation with Pomfret leading him around to telling me this tidbit of local scandal his phone rang. It was Benenson.

“Now look here, George! What are you doing floating around in your heli for? Have you got the Bernini already?”

Pomfret glanced sideways at me. “No, Paul, not yet, not yet. There was an—an accident....”

On the screen the round harshly gray face of Benenson projected a strong personality. I didn’t much care for

Paul Benenson. He was one of those uncomfortable people who seem to be incapable of a conversation but must at all times try to beat anyone else down, to argue without reason, always seeking to score points. Now he drew his brows down at George Pomfret.

“That’s not good enough, George! I know we all agreed to let you represent the syndicate at the auction because you were local, but perhaps I ought to have gone myself. I know better than most how difficult it is to find trust these days—”

I refrained from listening to any more, reflecting that George had evidently talked himself into this one, and trying to extract some amusement from the thought of his joining up with bores like Benenson. Since the prices of art treasures and antiquities had soared up beyond even the purses of the well-to-do, leaving the field clear for the super-rich and the art galleries and museums, the fashion had grown for men of taste to club together in syndicates to buy art treasures and share them, sometimes on a rotational basis, sometimes by mutual sharing of a private gallery. As Benenson so often remarked, “I damn well want the Aphrodite and I don’t mind sharing it with a few of you fellows who clubbed together with me. But I don’t want a horde of grubby little public faces and eyes goggling all over it.”

He said that again now.

Pomfret nodded. "We are resuming die auction in the morning, Paul. I think we can secure the Bernini, although there is tremendously strong opposition.”

“Humph. Maybe. You can increase our top price by another half million. Marcel Lecanuet has joined our consortium. I don’t care for him, but he brings another half million.” Benenson’s face on the phone screen showed clearly the overmastering greed in him. "And I shall come down tomorrow, also. We must have it, George
!
”

As the screen died I said to Pomfret, “It, George? I thought Benenson was an art lover?”

“He’s all right,” said good old George, uncomfortably.

We spun down to his own villa, modest in size compared to Gannets, but filled with all the latest gadgetry to make life worth living. His robots took over the moment we alighted from the heli and the salmon was delicious. The rest of that evening passed in a fog of cross-talk centering around the headless corpse of the young girl.

As for me, I kept wondering who the devil could be the man who had looked like myself, and if he had, really and truly, disappeared before my eyes.

Inevitably, the more I thought about it the more rationality supervened. I had imagined his vanishment and some normal explanation accounted for the experience.

So it was that the next morning—the third of my stay with George Pomfret—I hurried over breakfast and with a quantity of sly digs at George induced him also to hurry so that we could heli to Gannets before the odious Benenson could show up.

Feeling only a slight quickening of excitement as we dropped down to the rambling and picturesque house, I still could not help wondering what was going to happen today.

The place looked unchanged from the outside and I found both a comfort and a normalcy in this; for almost a thousand years the house had stood here while motorways and monorails had passed on either side, while the high sonic booms of aircraft had drifted down from above and the deep entrails of the intercontinental subway systems had penetrated the ground far below. Macabre and pitiful as was the death and mutilation of a young girl, this house must have witnessed other and more frightful scenes in its long and shrouded history.

George Pomfret, strangely enough, had thrown off my questions about Lester Northrop. “He wasn’t the fellow they’re talking about; he only lived here. Fellow you want to know about was old Vasil Stannard.”

“Vasil Stannard?”

“Yes, well, kept himself to himself. That portrait up at Gannets, artist who painted that had to live in up there, own suite of rooms, own robots, not allowed to prowl about the house.” Pomfret chuckled fatly. “I confess I wouldn’t have missed the auction even if Benenson hadn’t asked me into the syndicate, for the sake of poking about in Gannets. Regular mystery house, y’know, has been for years.”

We alighted from the heli, seeing only two others already there in the rapidly-organized carpark, and walked up the scrunching yellow gravel paths past the trimmed box hedges and the weathered statues, noseless, armless and lichened. The day held all that subtle saffron clearness of promise that you find only early on summer days, when the whole world seems to be contained within itself, idling, waiting for the machinery of life to move into top gear, watching and listening and absorbing the promise. Always that, the promise, what is to come, the expected, the awaited; always that, so much better, really, than the blowsy blown fulfillment.

The blue roofs floated against the sky. I had never really thought about the color of roofs before and I suppose if asked would have vaguely said something about the warmth of red roofs, the vibrant glow of orange gables, the luster of tiles. But now, walking between tended beds of early summer flowers rioting in color and perfume, I saw clearly that here, if nowhere else, blue roofs and gray and yellow walls formed the most perfect example of domestic architecture. They reminded me of my own silver sky back home.

In another place and another time, I would have preferred red brick and red tiles. But not here. Not at Gannets.

We went through the glassed-in portico and the anterior lobbies and walked directly to the ballroom. Pomfret could not wait to clap his eyes on his Aphrodite. Outside, the regular estate guards with their brown uniforms and holstered sidearms had been joined overnight by the more somber police, keeping their own watch on this place. If anyone had had the idea of stealing any of the fabulous Gannets collection, the guards effectively prevented the idea’s execution.

I hesitated on the threshold of the ballroom, again fascinated by my feelings that this beautifully proportioned room should resound with the lilting waltz tunes and the swirling skirts and brilliant uniforms of a bygone era. The musicians’ gallery with its carved balustrade and cunningly modernized lighting hovered above one wall as though on antigravs—and then I felt an irregular thump clot my heartbeat and I gasped.

I stared down at myself from that musicians’ gallery.

Looking up, my mouth idiotically half-open, I saw the Corinthian helmet with its blue and yellow checks now all gorily smeared with blood—for no doubt existed in my mind that those ominous stains were anything other than blood—and the man’s gray tunic and slacks showed more of the grim stains. His cloak had gone, but the manner of its passing could be conjectured from the broken and dangling golden chains swinging from his shoulders.

I looked for a way up into the gallery.

The mahogany door toward which I rushed was fast locked. I looked about the room, seeing it stuffed with the bric-a-brac of the auction like a brilliant overturned wastebasket of the ages, and seeing no immediate way up. The man above me moved. I heard a hoarse and distressful gasping.

“Hey, you!” I called, springing out and searching again for him.

At first I did not see him. Then a single drop of bright red blood fell and splashed onto the marble floor before my feet.

There he was, huddled down against the balustrade.

“Are you hurt? Do you need help?”

No answer. The heavy tramp of a guard’s footfalls from my rear and Pomfret’s returning figure from my side convinced me that unless I could make contact with this mysterious stranger in the next ten seconds I would never do so.

“Bert? Did you call?”

"Listen, man! You’re in trouble. And you wear my face.... Who are you? Can I help you?”

"Bert? Are you talking to yourself or something?”

No more blood fel
l.
The glint of a broken golden chain vanished from the gallery.

“Yes!” I shouted back at Pomfret. “Yes—I am talking to myself!”

"Everything all right, sir?” The guard, a heavy brown-faced man in a brown uniform, whose square brown hands rested with negligent efficiency on his belt less than an inch from his holstered weapons, regarded me with that sub-surface knowledgeability reserved by the authoritarian lower ranks of any military or para-military force in dealing with civilians. “I thought you were talking to someone?”

“Just to Mr. Pomfret here, sergeant, that’s all.”

He looked at us, without meeting our eyes, and then said something about doing his duty and walked off. His straight ramrod back and stiff legs made me itch.

“What the hell’s going on, Bert?” Pomfret took my arm the better to make me understand his concern. “You were shouting at yourself—”

“Did you see . . . ?” Then I held my tongue. He couldn’t have, and if he had he would have done as I should have done and roused the guards. Hell—there was a fortune beyond price on show here and men would go to any lengths to lay their own hands on it. All the guards from any of the Security Organizations wouldn’t stop a really first-class tea-leaf operation I could have planned myself if I had had both the money and a criminal intent.

“You look awful. Come over here and sit down. I’ll rustle up a drink—”

“It’s okay, George. Really.” I laughed and regretted that essay into imperturbability on the instant. “Just a slight impediment in my mouth I was trying to clear.” I coughed, then with the desperation of the witless, added, “We wetnecks sometimes carry on in odd ways. You mustn’t mind me.”

He looked at me as though to say he was glad I was leaving him the next day, and smiled like chipping ice, and said, “You want to look after yourself; can’t have you flipping your lid all over the place.”

You had to hand it to old George. Nothing was going to make him change his mind about anything.