Lawrence Block: The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Robin, like Spider-man’s wife, Mary Jane, worked in a computer emporium. She didn’t so much sell them as share her insights with customers as they struggled in the crashing waves of innovation and the lightning-swift undertow of obsolescence. It thrilled Bech to view her in her outlet — Smart Circuits, on Third Avenue near Twenty-seventh Street, a few blocks from Bellevue — standing solid and calm in a gray suit whose lapels swerved to take in her bosom. Amid her array of putty-colored monitors and system-unit housings, she received the petitions of those in thrall to the computer revolution. They were mostly skinny young men with parched hair and sunless complexions. Sometimes Bech would enter the store, like some grizzled human glitch, and take Robin to lunch. Sometimes he would sneak away content with his glimpse of this princess decreeing in her realm. He marveled that at the end of the day she would find her path through the circuitry of the city and come to him. The tenacity of erotic connection anticipated the faithful transistor and the microchip.

Bech had not always been an object of criticism. His first stories and essays, appearing in defunct mass publications like Liberty and defunct avant-garde journals like Displeasure, roused little comment, and his dispatches, published in The New Leader, from Normandy in the wake of the 1944 invasion, and then from the Bulge and Berlin, went little noticed in a print world flooded with war coverage. But, ten years later, his first novel, Travel Light, made a small splash, and for the first time he saw, in print, spite directed at himself. Not just spite, but a willful mistaking of his intentions and a cheerfully ham-handed divulgence of all his plot’s nicely calculated and hoarded twists. A New York Jew writing about Midwestern bikers infuriated some reviewers — some Jewish, some Midwestern — and the sly asceticism of his next, novella-length novel, Brother Pig, annoyed others: “The contemptuous medieval expression for the body which the author has used as a title serves only too well,” one reviewer (female) wrote, “to prepare us for the sad orgy of Jewish self-hatred with which Mr. Bech will disappoint and repel his admirers — few, it is true, but in some rarefied circles curiously fervent.”

As he aged, adverse phrases from the far past surfaced in his memory with an amazing vividness, word for word — “says utterly nothing with surprising aplomb,” “too toothless or shrewd to tackle life’s raw meat,” “never doffs his velour exercise togs to break a sweat,” “the sentimental coarseness of a pornographic valentine,” “prose arabesques of phenomenal irrelevancy,” “refusal or failure to ironize his reactionary positions,” “starry-eyed sexism,” “minor, minorer, minor-most” — and clamorously rattled around in his head, rendering him, some days, while his brain tried to be busy with something else, stupid with rage. It was as if these insults, these hurled mud balls, these stains on the robe of his vocation were, now that he was nearing the end, bleeding wounds. That a negative review might be a fallible verdict, delivered in haste, against a deadline, for a few dollars, by a writer with problems and limitations of his or her own, was a reasonable and weaseling supposition he could no longer, in the dignity of his years, entertain. Any adverse review, even a single timid phrase of qualification or reservation within a favorable and even adoring review, stood revealed as the piece of pure enmity it was — an assault, a virtual murder, a purely malicious attempt to unman and destroy him. The army of critics stood revealed as not fellow wordsmiths plying a dingy and dying trade but satanic legions, deserving only annihilation. A furious lava — an acidic indignation begging for the Maalox of creamy, murderous satisfaction — had gradually become Bech’s essence, his angelic ichor.

The female reviewer, Deborah Frueh, who had in 1957 maligned Brother Pig as a flight of Jewish self-hatred was still alive, huddled in the haven of Seattle, amid New Age crystals and medicinal powders, between Boeing and Mount Rainier. Though she was grit too fine to be found in the coarse sieve of Who’s Who, he discovered her address in the Poets & Writers’ directory, which listed a few critical articles and her fewer books, all children’s books with heart-tugging titles like Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday and The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home and A Teddy Bear’s Bequest. These books, Bech saw, were her Achilles’ heel.

He wrote her a fan letter, in a slow and childish hand, in black ballpoint, on blue-lined paper. “Dear Deborah Freuh,” he wrote, deliberately misspelling, “You are my favrite writer. I have red your books over ‘n’ over. I would be greatful if you could find time to sign the two enclosed cards for me and my best frend Betsey and return them in the inclosed envelop. That would be really grate of you and many many thanx in advance.” He signed it, “Your real fan, Mary Jane Mason.”

He wrote it once and then rewrote it, holding the pen in what felt like a little girl’s fist. Then he set the letter aside and worked carefully on the envelope. He had bought a cheap box of a hundred at an office-supply store on lower Broadway and destroyed a number before he got the alchemy right. With a paper towel he delicately moistened the dried gum on the envelope flap — not too much, or it curled. Then, gingerly using a glass martini-stirring rod, he placed three or four drops of colorless poison on the moist adhesive.

Prowling the cavernous basement of the renovated old sweatshop where he lived, Bech had found, in a cobwebbed janitor’s closet, along with a quaint hand pump of tin and desiccated rubber, a thick brown-glass jar whose label, in the stiff and guileless typographic style of the nineteen-forties, proclaimed POISON and displayed along its border an array of dead vermin, roaches and rats and centipedes in dictionary-style engraving. In his thieving hand, the jar sloshed, half full. He took it upstairs to his loft and through a magnifying glass identified the effective ingredient as hydrocyanic acid. When the rusty lid was unscrewed, out rushed the penetrating whiff, cited in many a mystery novel, of bitter almonds. Lest the adhesive be betraying bitter when licked, and Deborah Frueh rush to ingest an antidote, he sweetened the doctored spots with some sugar water mixed in an orange-juice glass and applied with an eyedropper.

The edges of glue tended to curl as they dried, a difficulty he mitigated by rolling them the other way before applying the liquids. The afternoon waned; the roar of traffic up on Houston reached its crescendo unnoticed; the windows of the converted factory across Crosby Street entertained unseen the blazing amber of the lowering sun. Bech was wheezily panting in the intensity of his concentration. His nose was running; he kept wiping it with a trembling handkerchief. He had reverted to elementary school, where he and his peers had built tiny metropolises out of cereal boxes and scissored into being red valentines and black profiles of George Washington, even made paper Easter eggs and Christmas trees, under their young and starchy Irish and German instructresses, who without fear of objection swept their little Jewish-American pupils into the Christian calendar.

Bech thought hard about the return address on the envelope, which could become, once its fatal bait was taken, a dangerous clue. The poison, before hitting home, might give Deborah Frueh time to seal the thing, which in the confusion after her death might be mailed. That would be perfect — the clue consigned to a continental mailbag and arrived with the junk mail at an indifferent American household. In the Westchester directory he found a Mason in New Rochelle and fistily inscribed the address beneath the name of his phantom Frueh fan. Folding the envelope, he imagined he heard a faint crackling — microscopic sugar and cyanide crystals? His conscience, dried up by a century of atrocity and atheism, trying to come to life? He slipped the folded envelope with the letter and four (why not be generous?) three-by-five index cards into the envelope painstakingly addressed in the immature, girlish handwriting. He hurried downstairs, his worn heart pounding, to throw Mary Jane Mason’s fan letter into the mailbox at Broadway and Prince.