Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02 (2 page)

“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly. “I seem to have made some kind of mistake.” He walked to the door and opened it, and was gone.

Amy stood, with no other movement than turning her head, until steps from the hall were no longer heard. Then she clattered into the bedroom, grabbed up the gray fur coat, threw it down again, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared at the top of the dressing table.

She muttered to herself, aloud, “I did a swell job of that, didn’t I, though? And my voice is trembling. You admit your voice is trembling, do you, Miss Duncan? What, no tears? Supreme effort of the will, huh? He’ll take a girl to the ball game, by golly, or he’ll know the reason why. You’ll fix your face, my fine girl, that’s what you’ll do, and you’ll go to work, and you’ll like it!”

She opened her compact.

At a few minutes before three that afternoon she emerged from the 54th Street entrance of the Churchill in the company of a slender smiling elegant middle-aged man, was handed by him into a taxi, and waved through the window at him as the taxi rolled away. The s.s.e.m. man was Mrs. Grimsby’s blackmailer. The lunch with him had been barren of results, for she had been too much preoccupied with her own affairs to function effectively. Now, having made a decision, she was acting upon it without loss of time. She leaned forward and told the driver to go to the
59th Street station of the Ninth Avenue El. Since she regarded this excursion as private business and therefore the fare could not be put on her expense account, forty or fifty cents made a difference.

Leaving the El at 23rd Street, she walked three short blocks north and a long one west. The three-story brick building she stopped in front of was old and grimy-looking, with a cobbled driveway for trucks tunneled through its middle, and there was nothing there or at the pedestrian entrance to proclaim its status or reason for existence, but anyone tilting his head a little from across the street could have seen stretched along the expanse of the bricks of the upper story, enormous letters in dingy white paint:

Inside was a dingy hall and a dingy and dilapidated staircase, the deep hollows in the treads witnesses of thousands of impatient feet up and down through many patient years. On the floor above was a good deal of noise: the hum of machinery from behind wooden partitions to the ceiling, and, as Amy passed through a door in still another partition to the left, a clatter of typewriters and other sounds of a busy office. It was only an anteroom; more partitions confronted her; and through a window in one of them a gray-haired man peered out and told her in a cracked voice that he thought Mr. Tingley was somewhere in the building. Amy forgave his rheumy old eyes for not recognizing her, and was about to tell him her name when she heard it pronounced from another direction by a young man who had emerged from a nearby
door, glanced at her, and altered his intended course to approach the window.

“Amy? Sure it is! Hello there!”

“Hello, Phil.” She let his long bony fingers wrap themselves around the knuckles of her outstretched hand, and slanted her eyes up to the altitude of his bony face with its hollowed cheeks, hoping that her own face was not betraying the vague discomfort, the mild repulsion, she had always felt at the sight of him, especially his mouth with its hint of strain at the down-turning corners—the mouth, properly, of a fanatic or a fiend stoically enduring unheard of and ceaseless torture.

She smiled at him. “I haven’t seen you for ages. How’s technocracy?”

“Technocracy?” He frowned. “My God, I don’t know. Somewhere on a junk heap, I guess.”

“Oh.” Amy was apologetic. “I thought it was the road to happiness or wealth. Or both.”

“No, no. Never. It was perhaps a step in education. But truth, like life, is dynamic.” He pulled a pamphlet from his pocket. “Here, read that. You’ll have to read it several times to understand it …”

Amy took it and glanced at it. On its printed cover the most prominent word, in large black type, was WOMON. She looked up at him in astonishment.

“Woman?” she demanded. “Women? Phil! Don’t tell me you’ve gone in for matriarchy! Or even—sex? My sex?”

“Of course not,” he denied indignantly. “It has nothing to do with women or sex either.
WOMON
means WORK-MONEY. The basis of the world economic structure is money. The basis of money is—has been—gold. It is antiquated and unsound, it no longer functions. What does a dollar of our currency represent?
A speck of gold. Ridiculous! It has been proposed to base the dollar on commodities instead of gold. On potatoes and wool and iron! Even more ridiculous! Commodities are even more unstable than gold. The basis of money must be stable, solid, unalterable. What is stable? What is the most stable thing in the world?”

He tapped her on the shoulder with a forefinger. “The work of a man! That’s stable!” He stretched out his arms. “What these hands can do!” He tapped his temple. “What this head can do! That’s the basis, the only sound basis, for the world’s money! Work-Money! We call it Womon!”

“I see,” Amy nodded. “It sounds sensible, but I still think it looks and sounds too much like woman. You’ll have trouble with that, see if you don’t.” She stuffed the pamphlet into her bag. “I’ll read this over. I don’t know about several times, but I’ll read it. Is Uncle Arthur in his office?”

“Yes. I just left him. I’d be glad to send you a bunch of those, if you’d care to pass them around.”

“I’d better read it first. I might not like it.” Amy offered a hand. “Nice to see you again. Hooray for happiness and wealth.”

That was indiscreet, for it started him on Womon’s explanation of the true nature of wealth, but after a few minutes she succeeded in heading him off. Soon after he had gone, through a door that led toward the hum of machinery, word came for her to penetrate to Mr. Tingley’s office. To get there she had to pass through two or three more partitions, exchange greetings with women and girls at desks who called her Amy, and traverse a long wide passageway. As she stopped at a door on the frosted glass panel of which THOMAS TINGLEY was inscribed, her shoulders
moved with a little shiver of discomposure. She had forgotten about that. There was no Thomas Tingley and had not been for all of her twenty-five years and then some. It was his grandson she was calling on. To keep his name painted there on the door had always struck her—she shrugged the shiver off, and entered.

Though Thomas Tingley no longer occupied that room, certainly his office furniture did. The old-fashioned roll-top desk was battered and scarred, the varnish on the chair seats had long since been rubbed away, and the ancient massive safe was anything but streamlined. Wherever shelves and cabinets left enough wall space for a large framed photograph, one was there, the oldest and most faded, of a hundred or more men and women in strange and ludicrous costumes, bearing the hand-printed legend:
Tingley’s Titbits Employees Picnic, Colton Beach, Long Island, July 4th, 1891.
A large folding screen of green burlap, at Amy’s right as she entered, concealed, as she knew, a marble wash basin with hot and cold running water which, say what you please about it, had once been so de luxe as to be next door to sybaritic.

She knew all three of the people whose conversation her entrance had interrupted. The plump fussy-looking man at the desk, with hair not really gray but showing signs of it, was Arthur Tingley, grandson of the name on the door. The one with hair completely gray, even white, standing like a parson with his hands behind his back and four buttons on his coat, all buttoned, was Sol Fry, the sales manager. The woman, somewhere between the two men as to age, who in case of need could have been transformed instantly into the commanding officer of a Women’s Battalion by merely buying her a uniform, was G. Yates, devoid of title in the unincorporated firm, but actually
in charge of production. No one was supposed to know that the G. stood for Gwendolyn; Amy had learned it inadvertently from Phil Tingley.

They greeted her, Sol Fry and G. Yates amicably enough though without exuberance, Arthur Tingley with a frown of irritation and a voice to match. The greetings over, he demanded brusquely:

“I suppose that Bonner woman sent you here? Have you accomplished anything?”

Amy counted three, as she had decided to do, knowing in advance that this interview would require self-control in the face of provocation. “I’m afraid,” she said calmly and, she hoped, not aggressively, “we haven’t accomplished much. But Miss Bonner didn’t send me. I came personally—I mean not officially—not from Miss Bonner. There’s something I think I ought to tell you.” She glanced at the other two. “Privately.”

“What do you mean?” He was glancing at her. “Do you mean a private matter? What kind of a private matter? This is a business firm and these are business hours!”

“We’ll go,” said G. Yates in a decided but surprisingly soprano voice. “Come on, Sol—”

“No!” Tingley snapped. “You stay.”

But the woman had Sol Fry’s elbow and was steering him to a door; not the one Amy had entered by. As she opened it she turned:

“She’s your niece and she wants to talk with you. We ought to be taking a look anyhow.”

The closing door rattled the partition. Tingley frowned at it, then at his niece, and snapped. “Well? Now that you’ve interrupted an important conference to bother me with your private affairs—”

“I didn’t say it was my private affair. I didn’t know
I was interrupting a conference. I was told to come on in.”

“Certainly you were! I wanted to tell you something! I wanted to tell you that I learned only this morning that it was you who had been put to work on this thing, and I told that Bonner woman that I didn’t trust you and I wouldn’t have it!” Tingley slapped the desk with his palm. “And I won’t! If she has already told you and that’s what you came to see me about, I’ll give you three minutes by my watch!” He pulled it from his vest pocket.

Amy felt that she was trembling, and knew that she was beyond the point where counting three would help any. He was simply too impossible. But though she had failed to control her adrenaline, she would at all events control her voice, and she succeeded. “You may be my mother’s brother,” she said firmly and clearly, “but you’re a troglodyte,” and turned and left the room, paying no attention to the sputtering behind her.

She retraced her way through the labyrinth of partitions, on through the anteroom, to the head of the creaky old stairs, and descended to the street, and walked east at a brisk and determined pace. She was good and mad. So the miserable creature had told Miss Bonner he didn’t trust her, had he? But that was nothing worse than a minor irritation, since she had explained things to Miss Bonner when the assignment had been given her. She considered that for a block, and passed on to other aspects. At Seventh Avenue she turned south and, getting warm, unfastened the gray fur coat to let in some air.

If she lost her job, that would be bad. She had to have a job, and this was a pretty good one. But it was a very complicated and confused situation. Very. In
spite of that, she had decided what to do, and had gone to do it, and had failed because she had got mad at Uncle Arthur when he had acted as she had known he would act. Now it was just as complicated and confused as ever.

Preoccupied, buried in her problem, she bumped into people twice, which wasn’t like her. At Fourteenth Street she did something more perilous. Stepping down from the curb and emerging incautiously from behind a parked taxi, she walked smack into the bumper of a passing car and was knocked flat.

H
ands helped her to her feet and supported her. Though she was not ordinarily testy, she was unreasonably irritated at being supported by strange hands, and shook herself loose; and nearly fell again from dizziness. Voices asked if she was hurt, and she made a vaguely negative reply. A cop came trotting up, grasped her arm firmly, and escorted her to the sidewalk.

Her head cleared enough for her to realize that she was filled with rage. She told the cop in a quavering voice, “Please let go of me. I’m not hurt. I walked right into it. Let me—”

“Wait a minute,” put in a voice not the cop’s. “My car hit you. Look at you, you’re covered with dirt. You don’t know whether you’re hurt or not. I’ll drive you to a doctor.”

“I don’t need a doctor.” Amy, still a little dizzy, raised her head and was looking into a face with brown eyes, a nose and chin not quite pointed, and a mouth that smiled at the corners. It was the compelling and convincing quality of the eyes, focused at hers, though she didn’t stop to consider it, that led her
to add immediately, “But you can drive me home—if you—it isn’t very far—”

The cop put in, “I’d better look at your license.”

The man produced it. The cop took it and read the name, and looked up with a grin of surprised interest. “Oh, yeah? Pleased to meetcha.” He handed it back. Amy took the man’s proffered arm, found in three steps that she didn’t need it, and permitted herself to be assisted into the front seat of a dark-blue Wethersill convertible. Her right knee hurt a little and she wanted to look at it, but decided to wait. There was another man in the back seat. As the car rolled forward the man beside her asked: