More Tales of the Black Widowers (25 page)

“Would your partner wish to publicize the name, and place the site of a Lunar colony in Bailly? Would he want to have the colony called Camp Bailly, after what a Bailey has done to him?”

“But he didn't know what Bailey had done to him,” said Servais.

“How do you know that? Because there's an old saw that says the husband is always the last to know? How else can you explain his utterly irrational opposition to this one point, even his insistence that the name itself is horrible? It is too much to expect of coincidence.”

“But if he knew—if he knew— He didn't tell me. Why fight over it? Why not explain?”

“I assume,” said Henry, “he didn't know you knew. Would he shame his dead wife by telling you?”

Servais clutched at his hair. “I never thought— Not for a moment.”

“There is more to think,” said Henry sadly.

“What?”

“One might wonder how Bailey came to disappear, if your partner knew the tale. One might wonder if Bailey is alive? Is it not conceivable that Mr. Kaufman, placing all the blame on the other man, confronted his wife to tell her he had driven her lover away, even killed him, perhaps, and asked her to come back to him—and the response was suicide?”

“No,” said Servais. “That is impossible.”

“It would be best, then, to find Mr. Bailey and make sure he is alive. It is the one way of proving your partner's innocence. It may be a task for the police.”

Servais had turned very pale. “I can't go to the police with a story like that.”

“If you do not,” said Henry, “it may be that your partner, brooding over what he has done—if indeed he has done it— will eventually take justice into his own hands.”

“You mean kill himself?” whispered Servais. “Is that the choice you are facing me with: accuse him to the police or wait for him to kill himself?”

“Or both,” said Henry. “Life is cruel.”

9
  
Afterword

I got the idea for this one when I was in Newport, Rhode Island, attending a seminar on space and the future, sponsored by NASA. It got in the way, too.

I was listening, in all good faith, to someone who was delivering an interesting speech. Since I was slated to give a talk too, I had every reason for wanting to. listen. And yet, when the craters of the Moon were mentioned, my brain, quite involuntarily, began ticking, and after some fifteen minutes had passed I had “Earthset and Evening Star” in my mind in full detail and had missed the entire last half of the speech.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, alas, thought that the business with the craters was a little too recondite to carry the story and sent it back. I then took the chance that the craters might be just science-fictionish enough to interest Ed Ferman. I sent it to him, he took it, and it appeared in the October 1975 issue of F & SF.

To Table of Contents

Mario Gonzalo unwound a long crimson scarf and hung it up beside his coat with an air of discontent.

“Friday the thirteenth,” he said, “is a rotten day for the banquet and I'm cold.”

Emmanuel Rubin, who had arrived earlier at the monthly banquet of the Black Widowers, and who had had a chance to warm up both externally and internally, said, 'This isn't cold. When I was a kid in Minnesota, I used to go out and milk cows when I was eight years old—”

“And by the time you got home the milk was frozen in the pail. I've heard you tell that one before,” said Thomas Trumbull. “But what the devil, this was the only Friday we could use this month, considering that the Milano is closing down for two weeks next Wednesday, and—”

But Geoffrey Avalon, staring down austerely from his seventy-four inches of height, said in his deep voice, “Don't explain, Tom. If anyone is such a superstitious idiot as to think that Friday is unluckier than any other day of the week, or that thirteen is unluckier than any other number, and that the combination has some maleficent influence on us all—then I say leave him in the outer darkness and let him gnash his teeth.” He was host for the banquet on this occasion and undoubtedly felt a proprietary interest in the day.

Gonzalo shook back his long hair and seemed to have grown more content now that most of a very dry martini was inside him. He said, “That stuff about Friday the thirteenth is common knowledge. If you're too ignorant to know that, Jeff, don't blame me.”

Avalon bent his formidable eyebrows together and said, To hear the ignorant speak of ignorance is always amusing. Come, Mario, if you'll pretend to be human for a moment, I'll introduce you to my guest. You're the only one he hasn't met yet.”

Speaking to James Drake and Roger Halsted at the other end of the room was a slender gentleman with a large-bowled pipe, a weedy yellow mustache, thin hair that was almost colorless, and faded blue eyes set deeply in his head. He wore a tweed jacket and a pair of trousers that seemed to have been comfortably free of the attentions of a pressing iron for some time.

“Evan,” said Avalon imperiously, “I want you to meet our resident artist, Mario Gonzalo. He will make a caricature of you, after a fashion, in the course of our meal. Mario, this is Dr. Evan Fletcher, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. There, Evan, you've met us all.”

And as though that were a signal, Henry, the perennial waiter at all the Black Widowers' banquets, said softly, “Gentlemen,” and they seated themselves.

“Actually,” said Rubin, attacking the stuffed cabbage with gusto, “this whole business about Friday the thirteenth is quite modern and undoubtedly arose over the matter of the Crucifixion. That took place on a Friday and the last Supper, which had taken place earlier, was, of course, a case of thirteen at the table, the twelve Apostles and—”

Evan Fletcher was trying to stem the flow of words rather ineffectively and Avalon said loudly, “Hold on, Manny, I think Dr. Fletcher wishes to say something.”

Fletcher said, with a rather apologetic smile, “I just wondered how the subject of Friday the thirteenth arose.”

“Today is Friday the thirteenth,” said Avalon.

“Yes, I know. When you invited me to the banquet for this evening, it was the fact that it was Friday the thirteenth that made me rather eager to attend. I would have raised the point myself, and I am surprised that it came up independently.”

“Nothing to be astonished about,” said Avalon. “Mario raised the point. He's a triskaidekaphobe.”

“A what?” said Gonzalo in an outraged voice.

“You have a morbid fear of the number thirteen.”

“I do not” said Gonzalo. “I just believe in being cautious.**

Trumbull helped himself to another roll and said, “What do you mean, Dr. Fletcher, in saying that you would have raised the point yourself? Are you a triskai-whatever too?”

“No, no,” said Fletcher, shaking his head gently, “but I have an interest in the subject. A personal interest.”

Halsted said in his soft, somewhat hesitant voice, “Actually, there's a very good reason why thirteen should be considered unlucky and it has nothing to do with the Last Supper. That explanation was just invented after the fact.

“Consider that early, unsophisticated people found the number twelve very handy because it could be divided evenly by two, three, four, and six. If you sold objects by the dozen, you could sell half a dozen, a third, a fourth, or a sixth of a dozen. We still sell by the dozen and the gross today for that very reason. Now imagine some poor fellow counting his stock and finding he has thirteen items of something. You can't divide thirteen by anything. It just confuses his arithmetic and he says, 'Oh, damn, thirteen! What rotten. luck!'—and there you are.”

Rubin's sparse beard seemed to stiffen, and he said, “Oh, that's a lot of junk, Roger. That sort of reasoning should make thirteen a lucky number. Any tradesman would offer to throw in the thirteenth to sweeten the trade. —That's good steak, Henry.”

“Baker's dozen,” said James Drake in his hoarse smoker's voice.

“The baker,” said Avalon, “threw in a thirteenth loaf to make up a baker's dozen in order to avoid the harsh penalties meted out for short weight. By adding the thirteenth, he was sure to go over weight even if any of the normal twelve loaves were skimpy. He might consider the necessity to be unlucky.”

“The customer might consider it lucky,” muttered Rubin.

“As for Friday,” said Halsted, “that is named for the goddess of love, Freya in the Norse myths. In the Romance languages the name of the day is derived from Venus; it is vendredi in French, for instance. I should think it would be considered a lucky day for that reason. Now you take Saturday, named for the dour old god, Saturn—”

Gonzalo had completed his caricature and passed it around the table to general approval and to a snicker from Fletcher himself. He seized the opportunity to finish his potato puffs and said, “All you guys are trying to reason out something that lies beyond reason. The fact is that people are afraid of Friday and are afraid of thirteen and are especially afraid of the combination. The fear itself could make bad things happen. I might be so concerned that this place will catch fire, for instance, because it's Friday the thirteenth, that I won't be thinking and I'll stick my fork in my cheek.”

“If that would shut you up, it might be a good idea,” said Avalon.

“But I won't,” said Gonzalo, “because I have my eye on my fork and I know that Henry will get us all out if the place catches on fire, even if it means staying behind himself and dying in agony. —Right, Henry?”

“I hope that the contingency will not arise, sir,” said Henry, placing the dessert dishes dexterously before each diner. “Will you be having coffee, sir?” he asked Fletcher.

“May I have cocoa? Is that possible?” said Fletcher.

“Certainly it is,” interposed Avalon. “Go, Henry, negotiate the matter with the chef.”

And it was not long thereafter, with the coffee (or cocoa, in Fletcher's case) steaming welcomely before them, that Avalon tapped his water glass with his spoon and said, “Gentlemen, it is time to turn our attention to our guest. Tom, will you initiate the matter?”

Trumbull put down his coffee cup, scowled his face into a cross-current of wrinkles, and said, “Ordinarily, Dr. Fletcher, I would ask you to justify your existence, but having sat through an extraordinarily foolish discussion of superstition, I want to ask you whether you have anything to add to the matter. You implied early in the meal that you would have raised the matter of Friday the thirteenth yourself if it had not come up otherwise.”

“Yes,” said Fletcher, holding his large ceramic cup of cocoa within the parentheses of his two hands, “but not as a matter of superstition. Rather it is a serious historic puzzle that concerns me and that hinges on Friday the thirteenth. Jeff said that the Black Widowers were fond of puzzles and this is the only one I have for you—with the warning, I'm afraid, that there is no solution.”

“As you all know,” said Avalon, with resignation, 'Tm against turning the club into a puzzle-solving organization, but I seem to be a minority of one in this matter, so I try to go along with the consensus.” He accepted the small brandy glass from Henry with a look compounded of virtue and martyrdom.

“May we have this puzzle?” said Halsted.

“Yes, of course. I thought for a moment, when Jeff invited me to attend your dinner, that it was to be held on Friday the thirteenth in my honor, but that was a flash of megalomania. I understand that you always hold your dinners on a Friday evening and, of course, no one knows about my work but myself and my immediate family.”

He paused to light his pipe, then, leaning back and puffing gently, he said, 'The story concerns Joseph Hennessy, who was executed in 1925 for an attempt on the life of President Coolidge.* He was tried on this charge, convicted, and hanged.

'To the end, Hennessy.
^[1]
proclaimed his innocence and advanced a rather strong defense, with a number of people giving evidence for his absence from the scene. However, the emotional currents against him were strong. He was an outspoken labor leader, and a Socialist, at a time when fear of Socialism ran high. He was foreign-born, which didn't help. And those who gave evidence in his favor were also foreign-born Socialists. The trial was a travesty and, once he was hanged and passions had time to cool, many people realized this.

“After the execution, however, long after, a letter was produced in Hennessy's handwriting that seemed to make him a moving figure behind the assassination plot beyond a doubt. This was seized on by all those who had been anxious to see him hanged, and it was used to justify the verdict. Without the letter, the verdict must still be seen as a miscarriage of justice.”

Drake squinted from behind the curling smoke of his cigarette and said, “Was the letter a forgery?”

“No. Naturally, those who felt Hennessy was innocent thought it was at first. The closest study, however, seemed to show that it was indeed in his handwriting, and there were things about it that seemed to mark it his. He was a grandiosely superstitious man, and the note was dated Friday the thirteenth and nothing more.”

“Why 'grandiosely' superstitious?” asked Trumbull. “That's an odd adjective to use.”