The Ultimate Egoist (5 page)

I been slugged before, many a time, and I know what it’s like to come to after being knocked out. But when I came out of this it was more like waking up, so I must have slept. Anyway, it wasn’t morning. Must have been about three or four, before the sun came up. There was a weak moon hanging around outside the old walls, poking a gray finger in at us, me and Crawley. I didn’t move for a few minutes, and I heard Crawley talking. And I heard someone else answering.

Crawley was saying something about money. “We got to get money, Bub. This is a hell of a jam. We thought we didn’t need it. We could get anything we wanted without it. See what happened? Just because I’m no beauty winner a cop asks us questions. They stick us in here. Now we’ve got to break it. Oh, we can do it; but if we get some money it don’t have to happen again. You can figure something, can’t you, Bub?”

And then came the answering voice. It was the grating one that had been laughing before. That wasn’t Crawley’s voice! That belonged to somebody else. Aw, that was foolish. Two men to a cell. One man to a bunk. But here were two men talking, and I wasn’t saying anything. I suddenly had a feeling my brains were bubbling like an egg frying in too much grease.

The voice shrilled, “Oh, sure. Money’s no trouble to get. Not the way we work, Crawley. He, he!” They laughed together. My blood felt so cold I was afraid to move in case my veins broke. The voice went on. “About this break; you know just what we’re going to do?”

“Yeah,” said Crawley. “Gee, Bub, I’d sure be wuthless without you. Man, what a brain, what a brain!”

The voice said, “You don’t have to do without me! Heh! Just you try and get rid of me!”

I took a deep, quiet breath and slowly raised up and hung my head over the edge of the bunk so I could see. I couldn’t be scared any more. I couldn’t be shocked any more. After seeing that, I was through. A guy lives all his life for a certain moment. Like that little old doc that delivered the quints. He never did anything like it before. He never did again. From then on he was through. Like a
detective in a book solving a crime. It all leads up to one thing—who done it? When the dick finds that out, he’s through. The book’s finished. Like me; I was finished when I saw Crawley’s brother. That was the high point.

Yeah, it was his brother. Crawley was twins. Like them Siamese twins, but one was big and the other was small. Like a baby. There was only the top part of him, and he was growing out of Crawley’s chest. But that oversize chest was just built for the little one to hide in. It folded around the little one. It was hinged like I said before, something like a clamshell. My God!

I said it was like a baby. I meant just small like that. It wasn’t baby stuff, aside from that. The head was shaggy, tight-curled. The face was long and lean with smooth, heavy eyebrows. The skin was very dark, and there was little crooked fangs on each side of the mouth, two up, two down. The ears were just a little pointed. That thing had sense of its own, and it was bad clear through. I mean really bad. That thing was all Crawley’s crime-brains. Crawley was just a smart mule to that thing. He carried it around with him and he did what it wanted him to do. Crawley obeyed that brother of his—and so did
everybody else!
I did. My tobacco money; cleaning the cell; seeing that Crawley got fed—that was all the little twin’s doing, all of it. It wasn’t my fault. Nobody
ever
pushed me around like that before!

Then it saw me. It had thrown its hideous little head back to laugh, and it flung up a withered arm and piped, “You! Go to sleep!
Now!
” So—I did.

I don’t know how it happened. If I’d slept all that time the bulls would have taken me to the ward. But so help me, from that time until two o’clock I don’t know what happened. The Crawley twins kept me fogged, I guess. But I must have gotten dressed and washed; I must have eaten, and I’ll guarantee that the Crawleys didn’t wash no messkits. Anyhow, the next thing I remember is the bolt shooting back on the cell door. Crawley came up behind me as I stood there looking at it, and I felt his eyes on my back. Four eyes. He said:

“Go on. What are you waiting for?”

I said: “You’ve done something to me. What is it?”

He just said, “Get going.”

We walked out together, out along the deck and down two long flights of iron stairs to the area. We took maybe fifteen, maybe twenty steps, and then Crawley whispered,
“Now!”

I was loaded with H. E. I was primed and capped, and the firing pin of his voice stung me. I went off like that. There were two guards in front of me. I took them by their necks and cracked their heads together so powerfully that their skulls seemed soft. I screamed and turned and bounded up the stairs, laughing and shouting. Prisoners scattered. A guard grabbed at me on the first landing. I picked him up and threw him over my shoulder and ran upward. A gun blammed twice, and each bullet went
thuck!
as it bored into the body of the bull I carried. He snatched at the railing as I ran and I heard the bones in his wrist crackle. I pitched him over the rail and he landed on another guard down there in the area. The other guard was drawing a bead on me and when the body struck him his gun went off. The slug ricocheted from the steps and flew into the mouth of a prisoner on the second deck. I was screaming much louder than he was. I reached the third deck and ran around the cell-block chattering and giggling. I slid to a stop and threw my legs over the railing and sat there swinging my feet. Two cops opened fire on me. Their aim was lousy because only three out of the twelve bullets hit me. I stood on the lower rail and leaned my calves against the upper one and spread out my arms and shouted at them, cursing them with my mouth full of blood. The prisoners were being herded six and eight to a cell, down on the area level. The guards in the area suddenly stood aside, making way like courtiers for the royalty of a man with a submachine gun. The gun began singing to me. It was a serenade to a giant on a balcony, by a grizzled troubadour with a deep-toned instrument. I couldn’t resist that music for more than a moment, so I came down to the area, turning over and over in the air, laughing and coughing and sobbing as I fell.

You watched me, didn’t you, you flatfooted blockheads? You got out your guns and ran from the doors, from the series of searching rooms, booking rooms, desk rooms, bull pens? You left the doors open when you ran? Crawley’s out in the street now. No hurry for
Crawley. Crawley gives the orders wherever he is. There’ll be others—like me.

I’ve done work for Crawley. See me now? And—Crawley didn’t even say, “Thanks.”

R
ANSOME LAY IN
the dark and smiled to himself, thinking about his hostess. Ransome was always in demand as a house guest, purely because of his phenomenal abilities as a raconteur. Said abilities were entirely due to his being so often a house guest, for it was the terse beauty of his word pictures of people and their opinions of people that made him the figure he was. And all those clipped ironies had to do with the people he had met last weekend. Staying a while at the Joneses, he could quietly insinuate the most scandalously hilarious things about the Joneses when he weekended with the Browns the following fortnight. You think Mr. and Mrs. Jones resented that? Ah, no. You should hear the dirt on the Browns! And so it went, a two-dimensional spiral on the social plane.

This wasn’t the Joneses or the Browns, though. This was Mrs. Benedetto’s ménage; and to Ransome’s somewhat jaded sense of humor, the widow Benedetto was a godsend. She lived in a world of her own, which was apparently set about with quasi-important ancestors and relatives exactly as her living room was cluttered up with perfectly unmentionable examples of Victorian rococo.

Mrs. Benedetto did not live alone. Far from it. Her very life, to paraphrase the lady herself, was wound about, was caught up in, was owned by and dedicated to her baby. Her baby was her beloved, her little beauty, her too darling my dear, and—so help me—her boobly wutsi-wutsikins. In himself he was quite a character. He answered to the name of Bubbles, which was inaccurate and offended his dignity. He had been christened Fluffy, but you know how it is with nicknames. He was large and he was sleek, that paragon among animals, a chastened alley-rabbit.

Wonderful things, cats. A cat is the only animal which can live like a parasite and maintain to the utmost its ability to take care of
itself. You’ve heard of little lost dogs, but you never heard of a lost cat. Cats don’t get lost, because cats don’t belong anywhere. You wouldn’t get Mrs. Benedetto to believe that. Mrs. Benedetto never thought of putting Fluffy’s devotion to the test by declaring a ten-day moratorium on the canned salmon. If she had, she would have uncovered a sense of honor comparable with that of a bedbug.

Knowing this—Ransome pardoned himself the pun—categorically, Ransome found himself vastly amused. Mrs. Benedetto’s ministrations to the phlegmatic Fluffy were positively orgiastic. As he thought of it in detail, he began to feel that perhaps, after all, Fluffy was something of a feline phenomenon. A cat’s ears are sensitive organs; any living being that could abide Mrs. Benedetto’s constant flow of conversation from dawn till dark, and then hear it subside in sleep only to be replaced by a nightshift of resounding snores; well, that
was
phenomenal. And Fluffy had stood it for four years. Cats are not renowned for their patience. They have, however, a very fine sense of values. Fluffy was getting something out of it—worth considerably more to him than the discomforts he endured, too, for no cat likes to break even.

He lay still, marvelling at the carrying power of the widow’s snores. He knew little of the late Mr. Benedetto, but he gathered now that he had been either a man of saintly patience, a masochist or a deaf-mute. A noise like that from just one stringy throat must be an impossibility, and yet, there it was. Ransome liked to imagine that the woman had calluses on her palate and tonsils, grown there from her conversation, and it was these rasping together that produced the curious dry-leather quality of her snores. He tucked the idea away for future reference. He might use it next weekend. The snores were hardly the gentlest of lullabies, but any sound is soothing if it is repeated often enough.

There is an old story about a lighthouse tender whose lighthouse was equipped with an automatic cannon which fired every fifteen minutes, day and night. One night, when the old man was asleep, the gun failed to go off. Three seconds after its stated time, the old fellow was out of his bed and flailing around the room, shouting, “What was that?” And so it was with Ransome.

He couldn’t tell whether it was an hour after he had fallen asleep, or whether he had not fallen asleep at all. But he found himself sitting on the edge of the bed, wide awake, straining every nerve for the source of the—what was it?—sound?—that had awakened him. The old house was as quiet as a city morgue after closing time, and he could see nothing in the tall, dark guest room but the moon-silvered windows and the thick blacknesses that were drapes. Any old damn thing might be hiding behind those drapes, he thought comfortingly. He edged himself back on the bed and quickly snatched his feet off the floor. Not that anything was under the bed, but still—

A white object puffed along the floor, through the moonbeams, toward him. He made no sound, but tensed himself, ready to attack or defend, dodge or retreat. Ransome was by no means an admirable character, but he owed his reputation, and therefore his existence, to this particular trait, the ability to poise himself, invulnerable to surprise. Try arguing with a man like that sometime.

The white object paused to stare at him out of its yellow-green eyes. It was only Fluffy—Fluffy looking casual and easy-going and not at all in a mood to frighten people. In fact he looked up at Ransome’s gradually relaxing bulk and raised a long-haired, quizzical eyebrow, as if he rather enjoyed the man’s discomfiture.

Ransome withstood the cat’s gaze with suavity, and stretched himself out on the bed with every bit of Fluffy’s own easy grace. “Well,” he said amusedly, “you gave me a jolt! Weren’t you taught to knock before you entered a gentleman’s boudoir?”

Fluffy raised a velvet paw and touched it pinkly with his tongue. “Do you take me for a barbarian?” he asked.

Ransome’s lids seemed to get heavy, the only sign he ever gave of being taken aback. He didn’t believe for a moment that the cat had really spoken, but there was something about the voice he had heard that was more than a little familiar. This was, of course, someone’s idea of a joke.

Good God—it had to be a joke!

Well, he had to hear that voice again before he could place it. “You didn’t say anything of course,” he told the cat, “but if you did, what was it?”

“You heard me the first time,” said the cat, and jumped up on the foot of his bed. Ransome inched back from the animal. “Yes,” he said, “I—thought I did.” Where on earth had he heard that voice before? “You know,” he said, with an attempt at jocularity, “you should, under these circumstances, have written me a note before you knocked.”

“I refuse to be burdened with the so-called social amenities,” said Fluffy. His coat was spotlessly clean, and he looked like an advertising photograph for eiderdown, but he began to wash carefully. “I don’t like you, Ransome.”

“Thanks,” chuckled Ransome, surprised. “I don’t like you either.”

“Why?” asked Fluffy.

Ransome told himself silently that he was damned. He had recognized the cat’s voice, and it was a credit to his powers of observation that he had. It was his own voice. He held tight to a mind that would begin to reel on slight provocation, and, as usual when bemused, he flung out a smoke screen of his own variety of glib chatter.

“Reasons for not liking you,” he said, “are legion. They are all included in the one phrase—‘You are a cat!’ ”

“I have heard you say that at least twice before,” said Fluffy, “except that you have now substituted ‘cat’ for ‘woman.’ ”

“Your attitude is offensive. Is any given truth any the less true for having been uttered more than once?”