Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

And if we could catch her not knowing something Mencken would know, it would be a simple way to prove conclusively that she was faking, and we could move on to the much more important question of why. If Ariaura would let herself be questioned.

“How do you plan to get Ariaura to agree to this?” I said. “My guess is she won’t even let us in to see her.”

“If she doesn’t, then that’s proof, too,” she said imperturbably.

“All right,” I said, “but forget about asking what Mencken’s father did. Ask what he drank. Rye, by the way.”

Kildy grabbed a notebook and started writing.

“Ask what the name of his first editor at the Sun was,” I said, picking up The Great Monkey Trial . “And ask who Sue Hicks was.”

“Who was she?” Kildy asked.

“He. He was one of the defense lawyers at the Scopes trial.”

“Should we ask him—her what the Scopes trial was about?”

“No, too easy. Ask him…” I said, trying to think of a good question. “Ask him what he ate while he was there covering the trial, and ask him where he sat in the courtroom.”

“Where he sat?”

“It’s a trick question. He stood on a table in the corner. Oh, and ask where he was born.”

She frowned. “Isn’t that too easy? Everyone knows he’s from Baltimore.”

“I want to hear him say it.”

“Oh,” Kildy said, nodding. “Did he have any kids?”

I shook my head. “He had a sister and two brothers. Gertrude, Charles, and August.”

“Oh, good, those aren’t names you’d be able to come up with just by guessing. Did he have any hobbies?”

“He played the piano. Ask about the Saturday Night Club. He and a bunch of friends got together to play music.”

We worked on the questions the rest of the day and the next morning, writing them down on index cards so they could be asked out of order.

“What about some of his sayings?” Kildy asked.

“You mean like, ‘Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’? No. They’re the easiest thing of all to memorize, and no real person speaks in aphorisms.”

Kildy nodded and bent her beautiful head over the book again. I looked up Mencken’s medical history—he suffered from ulcers and had had an operation on his throat to remove his uvula—and went out and got us sandwiches for lunch and made copies of Mencken’s “History of the Bathtub” and a fake handbill he’d passed out during the Scopes trial announcing “a public demonstration of healing, casting out devils, and prophesying” by a made-up evangelist. Mencken had crowed that not a single person in Dayton had spotted the fake.

Kildy looked up from her book. “Did you know Mencken dated Lillian Gish?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah. He dated a lot of actresses. He had an affair with Anita Loos and nearly married Aileen Pringle. Why?”

“I’m impressed he wasn’t intimidated by the fact that they were movie stars, that’s all.”

I didn’t know if that was directed at me or not.

“Speaking of actresses,” I said, “what time is Ariaura’s seminar?”

“Two o’clock,” she said, glancing at her watch. “It’s a quarter till two right now. It should be over around four. Riata said she’d call as soon as the seminar was done.”

We went back to looking through Mencken’s books and his biographies, looking for details Ariaura was unlikely to have memorized. He’d loved baseball. He had stolen Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms and then given them to his friends, inscribed, “Compliments of the Author.” He’d been friends with lots of writers, including Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who’d gotten so drunk at a dinner with Mencken he’d stood up at the dinner table and pulled his pants down.

The phone rang. I reached for it, but it was Kildy’s cell phone. “It’s Riata,” she told me, looking at the readout.

“Riata?” I glanced at my watch. It was only two-thirty. “Why isn’t she in the seminar?”

Kildy shrugged and put the phone to her ear. “Riata? What’s going on?… You’re kidding!… Did you get it? Great… no, meet me at Spago’s, like we agreed. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

She hit “end,” stood up, and took out her keys, all in one graceful motion. “Ariaura did it again, only this time as soon as she started, they stopped the seminar, yanked her offstage, and told everybody to leave. Riata got it on tape. I’m going to go pick it up. Will you be here?”

I nodded absently, trying to think of a way to ask about Mencken’s two-fingered typing, and Kildy waved good-bye and went out.

If I asked, “How do you write your stories?” I’d get an answer about the process of writing, but if I asked, “Do you touch-type?” Ariaura—

Kildy reappeared in the doorway, sat down, and picked up her notebook again. “What are you doing?” I asked, “I thought you were going—”

She put her finger to her lips. “She’s here,” she mouthed, and Ariaura came in.

She was still wearing her purple robes and her stage makeup, so she must have come here straight from her seminar, but she didn’t roar in angrily the way she had before. She looked frightened.

“What are you doing to me?” she asked, her voice trembling. “And don’t say you’re not doing anything. I saw the videotape. You’re—that’s what I want to know, too,” the gravelly voice demanded. “What the hell have you been doing? I thought you ran a magazine that worked to put a stop to the kind of bilgewater this high priestess of blather spews out. She was at it again today, calling up spirits and rooking a bunch of mysticism-besotted fools out of their cold cash, and where the hell were you? I didn’t see you there, cracking heads.”

“We didn’t go because we didn’t want to encourage her if she was—” Kildy hesitated. “We’re not sure what… I mean, who we’re dealing with here…” she faltered.

“Ariaura,” I said firmly. “You pretend to channel spirits from the astral plane for a living. Why should we believe you’re not pretending to channel H. L. Mencken?”

“Pretending?” she said, sounding surprised. “You think I’m something that two-bit Jezebel’s confabulating?”

She sat down heavily in the chair in front of my desk and grinned wryly at me. “You’re absolutely right. I wouldn’t believe it, either. A skeptic after my own heart.”

“Yes,” I said. “And as a skeptic, I need to have some proof you’re who you say you are.”

“Fair enough. What kind of proof?”

“We want to ask you some questions,” Kildy said.

Ariaura slapped her knees. “Fire away.”

“All right,” I said. “Since you mentioned fires, when was the Baltimore fire?”

“Aught-four,” she said promptly. “February. Cold as hell.” She grinned. “Best time I ever had.”

Kildy glanced at me. “What did your father drink?” she asked.

“Rye.”

“What did you drink?” I asked.

“From 1919 on, whatever I could get.”

“Where are you from?” Kildy asked.

“The most beautiful city in the world.”

“Which is?” I said.

“Which is ?” she roared, outraged. “Bawlmer!”

Kildy shot me a glance.

“What’s the Saturday Night Club?” I snapped out.

“A drinking society,” she said, “with musical accompaniment.”

“What instrument did you play?”

“Piano.”

“What’s the Mann Act?”

“Why?” she said, winking at Kildy. “You planning on taking her across state lines? Is she underage?”

I ignored that. “If you’re really Mencken, you hate charlatans, so why have you inhabited Ariaura’s body?”