Stairway to Forever (25 page)

raise them once more, he found that he had not the power to do so.

Wonderingly, he lifted off the chain and dropped it and the brass key upon the table, then he tried again to raise the jugs. He overdid it and the jugs, all of them, zoomed up to ceiling height. He deliberately picked up the chain, and the string of jugs plopped back down onto the floor.

Calling Danna in from where she was waiting in the waist of the ship, he first showed her, then had her try to raise the jugs, with and then without the steel chain. It was the same for her as for him, with the steel chain in contact with any portion of their bodies, they were devoid of the power to move objects with their minds.

"Fitz, what in the world . . .?"

He shrugged, "Don't ask me, Danna. I'll tell you, let's see whether it's the steel or the brass, first, huh?"

They discovered, quickly enough, that brass, bronze, copper, silver, gold, aluminum, nickel or tin, none of them affected their performance, but anything iron or steel, if in contact with their skins, made their power to mentally lift and move objects completely disappear.

"Well," remarked Fitz, when they were done testing, "now, at least, we know why I couldn't do it when I first arrived, anyway. I was heavy with steel— revolver, knives, steel fittings on my belt, the steel frames of my sunglasses, and so on. And that's so much for my thoughts of raising the loaded bike with me on it over rough ground; I could probably still raise it and move it, but I'd most likely have to get off to do so.

"Okay, you have no iron or steel on now, so you lead the ducklings and I'll tow the heavy, clumsy

stuff after you've raised it. I've got a brass chain in my house, as I recall, I'll replace this steel one with it as soon as we get there. Why does Pedro want to see me so bad, anyhow, Danna?"

"He didn't tell me that, Fitz," she replied, as she raised the jugs again and took their tow string in her hand, "he just said to get you back as soon as possible and gave me a wordless telephone code to tell him when you were back. You see, we're pretty certain that the phone in your house is bugged."

"Herr Blutegel?" he asked, grimly.

"Who else," she answered. "And Fitz, that title may be hitting a bit closer to the mark than anyone knows yet."

While Fitz towed the bigger bundles inside the house, Danna first lowered the jugs, then, grinning mischievously, tied the end of the string to the rail of the steps and raised the plastic jugs high up to almost the limit of the string's length before she, too, went inside.

Unbeknownst to her and despite the early hour—it was just about dawn here, in this other world—she and Fitz, too, had been seen by malicious eyes, and the moment she had closed the door behind her, Calvin Mathews picked up the plastic bucket of strawberries he had been picking in the garden of Fitz's next-door neighbors and set out for home at a rapid clip.

Inside, with the blinds tightly drawn and all the drapes closed, Danna used the telephone while Fitz used the shower. He had just come out of the bathroom when the telephone rang. Danna picked it up and switched on the speaker, that he might hear, too.

A cheery voice said, "Good morning to you. This is Chuck Taylor, here at the WTRI Studios. Your

telephone number was chosen by our blindfolded guest, here on the WTRI AM Show, and if you can answer our question of the day, you'll be the lucky winner of FOUR . . . HUNDRED . . . DOLLARS. Now, what is a teledu and where does it live?"

"I'm sure I don't know," said Danna, sounding tired and disgusted, "and don't call back, this is an unlisted number, you turkey!'' Then she hung up and looked at Fitz, smiling. "Pedro got the message and he'll be here at four o'clock."

Standing nude and damp in the doorway, he grinned. "Do you want to eat or drink . . . first?"

Still smiling, she kicked off her shoes, stripped off her shirt, then stood up and unbuttoned her shorts, letting them drop to the floor. "Fitz, dearest, I am not a nymphomaniac, but you have, after all, been gone wherever for fifty-one days and ..."

"The hell I was," yelped Fitz. "No more than fourteen or fifteen days, at the most."

Around noon, over their brunch, he told her of the Norman knight, Sir Gautier de Montjoie, and of Cool Blue, the baby-blue (most of the time), telepathic lion. He told her of Puss, the leopard-sized, grey feline that also was telepathic and sometimes appeared to him as his long-dead grey housecat, Tom. He told her of the Teeth and Legs—the fearsome beast of which Puss had warned him and which he had had to kill out on the Pony Plain. He told her of the man, the Norman sergeant he had also had to kill. He told her highlights of his trek through the hills and vales and valleys beyond the Pony Plain, and he told her what little he knew of this entity he was supposed to be seeking, this Dagda.

"Fitz, weren't you ever told any of the old Irish fairy tales as you were growing up? Didn't you at least read some of them? The Dagda was supposed to

be the King of the Fairies, of the Little People, the Ones Who Were Here Before, who called themselves the Tuatha De Danann. Do you suppose . . . authorities say that all of the old myths have at the least a tiny grain of fact at their root . . . could this strange dimension you and I have somehow managed to penetrate actually be what the myths referred to as 'Fairyland? All these strange things ..."

She sat up straight in her chair, shook her tousled head and frowned. "Oh, listen to me carry on. A respectable, respected, fifty-five-year-old attorney, and I sound like a fugitive from the funny farm. There are no such things as fairies, so there was never any such place as fairyland, they were all just tales concocted for children."

He shook his head slowly. "Danna, I know just what is going through your mind right now, because I felt that way at the start of all this myself. But Danna, I had to come to grips with the fact that these things are all real, they exist in reality—a strange world beyond a stone wall under my backyard, a casket of immensely valuable gold coins on board a wrecked, medieval ship on a beach where thirty-foot crocodiles come to nest, ostriches with long tails and fur, flying lizards and gliding rabbits, a leopard-sized reincarnation of my dead cat and a baby-blue lion that used to be a black musician in this other world eighteen years ago, a party of thousand-year-old Norman Crusaders who still think they're somewhere in Syria on their way to Jerusalem during the First Crusade.

"Face facts, like I had to do, Danna—it's all real, it's there, it exists. It's as real as this."

He laid down his knife and Danna felt herself rising up out of her chair, floating on empty air, some foot above the seat. Stunned by the singular

experience, she said nothing for a moment, but Fitz did.

"Well, I'll be damned! I did it! I did it! Now, let's just see what else I can do."

As slowly as she, he too arose until they were again facing on the same level. He reached out, took her hand, then proceeded down the hall, towing her behind him, into the bedroom, where he gently lowered both of their bodies into their accustomed place on the rumpled, well-used bed. There, he floated his alarm clock over to him and set it for three-thirty, then floated it back to its place on the nightstand.

"Danna," he said, smiling, "not only is it all real, just think of the immense possibilities of this sort of a shared talent on lovemaking. Hmmm?"

Pedro Goldfarb arrived closer to four-thirty, muttering darkly about afternoon traffic and the patent stupidity of county road-planning commissions. Once seated in the parlor, he got immediately down to business.

"Fitz, there's little time to waste. Despite our cloak-and-dagger machinations, it's entirely possible that Blutegel et alii already know you're back out here. Despite the fact the he's in trouble with his service, the nitwits are letting him stay on to earn out his pension, so he still has a degree of power and he seems to have taken on the cases of you and Gus Tolliver as a very personal crusade; possibly, he means it to be his swan song.

"It's thanks to Gus, really, that you two are so deeply in the soup. The inheritance thing, I might've been able to clear up fairly easily and inexpensively for you, but Gus has a hatred of the I.R. S. that borders on the paranoid, I feel. He had to do the very things I advised him not to do. That he did it

with his money was bad enough, but he did it with healthy chunks of yours, too.

"Fitz, the tax laws of the United States are incredibly complicated and even the collectors of them— the honest, candid ones—will tell you that they are not in any manner or means fair to the average taxpayer. But Fitz, the way to thread your way through this dangerous maze is to hire a good firm of C.P.A.s and/or a reputable tax attorney, not to do what Gus has been doing for the both of you—smuggling currency out of the country.

"Now level with me, Fitz, you don't yet know just how much could be riding on truth at this point. Did you sign any papers Gus may have presented you? Some of them may have been documents written in Spanish or Portuguese."

"No, Pedro, not that I recall," said Fitz. "I have at least one copy of every business-related thing that I signed, they're all in my files, and you now have my files. Why not ask Gus?"

Pedro leaned back in his chair. "Gus Tolliver and his wife are no longer in the United States, Fitz. The last call I had from him was from Rio de Janeiro, but he indicated at that time his intentions of leaving Brazil. Just where he is now, I couldn't guess.

"He said, as did you, that you had signed nothing involved in this sticky business. The good news of that is that, if we can prove it, you may be off at least one prong of Blutegel's hook. But, of course, the bad news is that you may well have lost the bulk of your profits from sales of your gold coins. I don't know, I always had the gut-feeling that Gus Tolliver was a completely honest, aboveboard man . . . but I've been wrong before, like any other human being." He smiled fleetingly and barked a short laugh, for no reason that Fitz could understand . . . not then.

"However, we shall see what we shall see about Gus Tolliver's honesty in due time.

"But back to the Blutegel matter: win, lose or draw, whether you turn out to have lost your funds or not, the I.R.S. stance is going to be that, as the money was earned in this country, then you owe federal income taxes on it. They are going to insist on a full accounting of all the transactions and then are going to sock you with an outrageous bill covering taxes, penalties and interest, and you are going to have to pay it, Fitz, all of it. It'll be either that or leave the country for good or go directly to a federal penitentiary for quite a spell. Yes, it's unjust that murderers, rapists, child molesters and proven spies spend less time behind bars than do persons convicted of tax evasion, but that's the way the stick floats, as they say.

"Now, I know how much cash you had in your open accounts and in your safety deposit boxes, but that's not nearly enough, not the kind of money you're going to need to pay all that I imagine the feds are going to demand of you. Do you have any more stashed away somewhere that you've not told us about, perchance?"

"No, no cash, Pedro, but I've still got some of the gold coins," replied Fitz. "But with Gus gone, who'd sell them for me?"

Pedro grinned. "Just about any one of at least a score of top-flight numismatic houses of whom I can think, offhand. Whether or not Gus ever got around to telling you, your coins have set records for sales figures. They're in such astoundingly good shape for their age that they've been tested over and over again because many collectors and dealers just could not believe until they did test them that they were authentic. Gus let some of the earlier-sold ones go

for thousands less than his buyers resold them for. A new lot released at this time would bring you in substantially more than you got for the first lot.

"We already have your power of attorney. You give me the gold and I'll see that it's sold at top dollar for you. The monies realized will go directly into an escrow account until we get this mess cleared up for you. Now, where's the gold?"

Fitz led the way back to the utility room, picking up a big cleaver on his way through the kitchen. When he had opened the big chest-freezer and laboriously shifted a good half of its contents, he lifted up and set on the table beside the cleaver a two-gallon plastic cylinder that was clearly marked "stewed squid." With the plastic holder split away, he chipped at the brown-grey cylinder of hard-frozen fish until finally it split open to reveal a cloth bag of exactly the same color. Inside the cloth bag was a plastic bag containing some dozens of golden coins. He handed these to Pedro.

"There're maybe half this many more, but I can't get to them just now; theyVe not in this country. If you want them, I'll get them to Danna. Okay?"

The attorney shrugged. "You may not need them, probably won't, I'd estimate that there's more than enough value right here to bail you out of your problems ..." he grinned, ". . . and with enough left over to pay the whopping fee I'm going to charge you, too, my friend. Now, ill take that drink you so graciously offered earlier."

Once more seated in the parlor, he sipped at his whiskey, then said, "I don't know where you've been or what you've been doing there, and I don't want to know; but whatever you've been doing certainly seems to be good for you. You look years younger than you did when last we met—you could pass for thirty-five

now, easily, and your tan's even darker. Danna's getting a tan, too, had you noticed?"

"Pedro, just how bad is the trouble I'm in?" asked Fitz. "There are some things I need to pick up in town. Dare I show my face there for that long?"

The attorney frowned, then brightened a bit. "This is late on a Friday afternoon, they'd play hell finding a judge and/or a federal marshall until Monday. Go on to town, if it's important enough to take a risk for, but please be circumspect. It might be best if you didn't let your neighbors see you being driven out of here, so take your Jeep and lie or crouch in the back with a tarp or blanket over you until you're out on the county road. Do whatever you have to do in that town fast, then come straight back, avoid any conversations. You have dark glasses and a hat with a brim? Good, wear them.