The Convivial Codfish (12 page)

“I pass,” said Max.

“Furthermore an’ besides, Mr. Wouter wouldn’t never o’ been dumb enough to have an accident in the cab nohow. I ain’t sayin’ Mr. Wouter didn’t do some funny things now an’ then, but what man hasn’t? What the hell, if a man wants to dress up like a coot when he’s goin’ swimmin’, why the hell shouldn’t he? Might not make no sense if he’d dressed like a turkey cock, say, or one o’ them roadrunners from the desert. But coots an’ water, that’s sensible enough if you look at it the way Mr. Wouter looked at it. See, that was the thing about Mr. Wouter.”

Rollo was leaning up against the red damask wall by now, quite content to let Sarah push the boom while Max held the dustpan for her. “Like I was sayin’, Mr. Wouter always made sense. His kind o’ sense, anyways. An’ what don’t make sense is for a man to go monkeyin’ around with the throttle an’ cause a God-awful mess like this here, then go an’ get hisself kilt for no damn reason. So what I tried to tell them damn flatfeet an’ what I’m tellin’ you now is, he never done it.”

“You’re saying Wouter would have known better than to speed up and stop short, even if he meant it as a joke,” said Max.

“Joke, hell! You don’t play jokes with a movin’ train. Mr. Wouter loved this here train like she was ’is sweetheart. Snuggled up to them controls same as you was doin’ with the missus down there comin’ over the path. I seen you an’ you needn’t think I didn’t,” Rollo leered. “Old enough to know better.”

Rollo must have been mopping up the whiskey as well as the debris, Max decided. He probably wasn’t drunk, but he certainly wasn’t sober. This might not be a bad time to suggest a train ride.

“I expect you know how to run the train as well as Wouter did,” he observed craftily. “I wish I did. You wouldn’t by any chance care to take my wife and me down the track a little way?”

“Dunno but what I might. Soon as we finish cleanin’ up here.” Rollo was even less befuddled than Max had taken him to be, unfortunately. They had to stay on the dustpan detail another fifteen minutes or so before they got their ride.

And then it turned out to be a tedious waste of time. They chugged along at ten miles an hour through snow-covered woods that got awfully boring after a while. Max stood next to Rollo because he didn’t trust the gleam in the old goat’s eye, keeping Sarah well out of fumbling distance on the opposite side of the cab.

“Look for footprints or other signs of disturbance in the snow,” Max had told her, but there were none to see. Everything was smooth and sparkling as the seven-minute icing on one of Cousin Theonia’s chocolate layer cakes, except for a tragic little patch where rabbit tracks suddenly came to a floundering stop. Sweeping traces of a great, feathered wing and a few small bloodstains showed Wouter Tolbathy’s hadn’t been the only violent death out here tonight. However, nowhere could they find any indication that the man with the chain had jumped off anywhere along the line. Max hadn’t expected any, but he’d felt duty-bound to check before anybody came tramping along the line and spoiled whatever signs there might have been.

So now there was nothing left to do but thank Rollo for the ride and go home. First, though, Max used the intercom in the tiny station to phone up to the house for the latest bulletin from the hospital.

“No more casualties, thank God,” he announced. “But your wife, if that’s who it was, sounds awfully upset about Mr. Wripp.”

“Huh. Small wonder.”

With that maybe not so enigmatic remark, Rollo stumped off toward the house. Sarah and Max went back to their car.

“You don’t suppose old Wripp lived up to his name?” Sarah murmured. “I suppose he did grow up in an era when it was still considered dashing to seduce the housemaids, come to think of it. Any woman married to Rollo wouldn’t mind getting seduced now and then, I shouldn’t think.”

“You never can tell,” said Max. “Maybe Rollo spends his spare time out in the gardener’s shed with the lady next door.”

“If he does, she’s no lady. Miserable old wretch, making me slave over that broom half the night.”

“Poor
fischele.
I’ll drive this time. Why don’t you shut your eyes and take a little nap? You could rest your head on my shoulder,” Max offered kindly.

“Thank you, darling.” Sarah took advantage of the offer but knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. “Did we accomplish anything at all, do you think?”

“We helped Rollo clean the train, anyway. And we’ve pretty much established the fact that the fake wine steward must have been one of the guests. I thought so all along, but it’s never safe to take anything for granted. You hauled off a neat bit of gate-crashing there, by the way. We’ll have to put you on the company payroll.”

“That will be nice. What do we do next?”

“Next, we go home to bed.”

“You do come up with lovely ideas. Sweetheart, are you sure about the tea cozy?”

“I’m sure about wanting to go to bed with you.”

“When were you ever not? But you’re sweet to say so.”

Sarah relaxed for a while in the warm darkness, enjoying the feel of his coat sleeve against her cheek. “I got your sister Miriam a really handsome porcelain soufflé dish,” she said after a while. “Cousin Theonia’s going to copy out her secret recipe for noncollapsible spinach soufflé to go with it.”

“Do I like spinach soufflé?”

“Who says you’re going to get any? Besides, Miriam doesn’t have to use the dish for soufflé if she doesn’t want to.”

“What else would she use it for?”

“Miriam will think of something, never fear.”

Max’s elder sister was almost a better cook than Cousin Theonia, though Max liked Sarah’s cooking best of all because she was the only one who could fry eggs to suit him. She was frying one the following morning when she remarked, “I suppose I ought to go down to the hospital pretty soon. I think the Educational’s going to be open this afternoon, and I did want to get over and buy that tea cozy for your mother before they’re all gone.”

“Tell you what,” Max said with his mouth full of grapefruit. “You get the cozy and I’ll visit Jem.”

“Are you sure you feel up to it? He was in an absolutely dreadful mood yesterday.”

“He can’t scare me. Do I smuggle him in a hip flask of martinis, or what?”

“I’ll make him an eggnog the way Aunt Appie used to make them for Uncle Lionel, half milk and egg and the other half brandy. He was fit to be tied yesterday because they hadn’t put any gin in his orange juice. I can’t decide whether Uncle Jem’s an alcoholic or just a Regency buck born out of his time.”

“If you ask me, he’s a mythical monster. When are you going to make the eggnog?”

“Right now.”

Sarah poured milk into the new blender Max had bought her, broke in an egg, added milk and brandy, and pushed one of its fourteen buttons at random. She was the first of the Kelling tribe ever to own one and had an atavistic feeling that her grandmother’s wire whisk would have done the job just as well, though she wouldn’t for worlds have let Max know. One of the things she hadn’t counted on when they got married was his penchant for coaxing her into the twentieth century while there was still enough of it left to make the experience worthwhile.

Anyway, the blender did make a perfect eggnog, though Uncle Jem would have been equally content with an imperfect one so long as she hadn’t stinted on the brandy. She added a little sugar and a grating of nutmeg and poured the foaming mixture into a plastic ice-cream carton her mother-in-law had sent her full of carrot tzimmes, in an attempt to bring civilization to Beacon Hill. The elder Mrs. Bittersohn had been aghast to learn that neither Sarah nor any of her relatives had ever tasted tzimmes and, moreover, didn’t even know what it was.

A thermos bottle would have made a less inelegant container, but Sarah knew Max would never remember to bring back the bottle. The only one she had was a valuable family heirloom her father had been wont to take with him on his mushrooming expeditions.

Cousin Mabel had always maintained Walter had kept the bottle full of ipecac in case he picked toadstools by mistake, but that was just Cousin Mabel and nobody had ever paid any attention to her, least of all Walter Kelling. He hadn’t paid any vast amount of attention to his only child either, if it came to that. However, Sarah still had enough filial piety not to send his personal relic into that bourn whence no thermos returneth.

M
AX RECOILED FASTIDIOUSLY FROM
toting a recycled tzimmes container down Charles Street, but yielded willingly enough when Sarah put it into a little brown paper bag for him. He then kissed his wife, as was his habit, and walked over to the hospital, where he found Jem Kelling propped up in bed raising hell.

“Hi, Jem,” he said. “You’re in good voice today, I see. Sarah sent you a pick-me-up.”

“Thank God there’s still one woman in the world with an ounce of human compassion in her bowels,” he snarled.

“Don’t bother glaring at me,” said the attendant nurse. “If I had any human compassion in my bowels, I wouldn’t last long with patients like you. Speaking of which, did you void this morning?”

“What kind of question is that to ask a man in front of company? Of course I did. Think I’m a goddamn camel?”

“You mean camels don’t?”

“How should I know? It’s a figure of speech. Go away.”

The nurse went, promising to come back soon and visit further indignities upon him. Jeremy Kelling replied, “Pah!” and got busy on his eggnog. Max Bittersohn watched until Jem showed signs of beginning to mellow, then opened a large manila envelope he’d brought with him and took out a group photo of the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish he’d extracted from Jem’s album.

“What’s that?” asked the Exalted Chowderhead. “A get-well card the braw lads sent me? Bless their scoundrelly hearts. How was the party? Did you give everybody my heartiest greetings and fondest wishes for a rotten evening without me? Was nobody left standing when the fun was over? Who last beside his chair shall fa’, he is king among us a’, as the poet Burns so aptly put it. A jolly rout and revel it was, no doubt.”

“Rout,” Max told him. “Not revel. I gather you haven’t been listening to the news.”

“On that abominable squawk-box?”

Jem snarled at the television set that had been put before his bed in a misguided effort to cheer him up when he preferred to stay furious. Then he looked at Max and shadows crept back over the countenance that had so recently begun to brighten.

“What do you mean, a rout?”

“The only one left standing is myself, as far as I know,” said Max. “The rest of the party got lugged off to the hospital.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“Suspected arsenic poisoning was the diagnosis when they started loading the ambulances. Here, I picked up a
Globe
on the way in.”

“Damn Democratic rag.” Jem held the paper at arm’s length and squinted. “Great jumping Jehoshaphat!
MURDER ON THE OCCIDENT EXPRESS. SOCIALITES DOWNED BY POISONED CAVIAR AS CHAMPAGNE FLOWS ON LUXURY TRAIN. THREE DEAD, FIVE ON CRITICAL LIST
.”

He read on, his eyes bugging. “It doesn’t say arsenic here. It says—what the hell does it say?”

Max looked over his shoulder. “Colchicine? That’s a new one on me.”

“Used in the treatment of gout,” said the nurse who’d come back to shove a thermometer into Jem’s mouth and take his blood pressure. “Isn’t it weird about those people on the train? You wouldn’t happen to know any of them, I don’t suppose?”

Jem snatched the thermometer out. “If I hadn’t broken my blasted hip, I’d have been on that train myself. So I sent this incompetent knave instead,” he jerked the thermometer contemptuously at Max, “and look what happened.”

The nurse took the fragile glass rod away from him and stuck it back under his tongue. “That’s nothing to what could happen to you if you don’t straighten out and fly right. You ought to be counting yourself lucky you missed the party. Colchicine can be horrible stuff if you get too much of it.”

“Why?” Jem mumbled around the thermometer. “Wha’ happens?”

“Hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, intense weakness and abdominal pain, respiratory failure, maybe a few other things. If you survive, it might still raise the dickens with your kidneys,” she added with that brisk, clinical detachment laymen are supposed to find reassuring.

She picked up Jem’s wrist and glanced at her own watch. “If they make it through the next day or so, I expect most of them will be all right. There must have been an awful mess on that train when they started feeling the effects. Boy, I’m glad I didn’t have to clean it up.”

The nurse dropped Jem’s wrist, wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around his arm, pumped it up, watched the needle fall, shrugged, and jotted figures on Jem’s chart. “If you were at the party,” she asked Max, “how come you didn’t get poisoned, too?”

“Because I don’t like caviar is the only thing I can think of. I must have been the only person aboard who didn’t eat any.”

“A likely story. Tell it to the judge.”

On that jocular note, the nurse took out the thermometer. “What does it say?” Jem demanded.

“Normal, of course. So’s your blood pressure. I wouldn’t dare measure my own, since I’ve started taking care of you. Have a good day.”

She flashed them a smile and bustled off to inflict her brand of mercy on some other sufferer. Max picked up the photograph again.

“Okay, Jem. Let’s get to work.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m in no condition to work. Damn it, how can you even mention that filthy word in my presence at a time like this? My oldest and dearest friends dropping around me like flies. I don’t supposed Obed Ogham is listed among the demised?” Jem inquired, as one who seeks a candle to light the darkness.

“Last I saw of Ogham, he was clawing at his belly and puking all over the Tolbathys’ front lawn,” Max replied. “Does that make you feel any better?”

“Somewhat. Not wishing the revolting oaf any hard luck, mind you. I’m only thinking of his detrimental effect on the environment. What did he say about me last night?”

“Nothing, actually. He made rather a point of letting me know that for him the Kellings simply didn’t exist. Look, Jem, how well do you know the Tolbathys?”