Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Stubb said. He had taken out his pencil and battered little notebook, and had begun to write as she spoke. “I’m working for Madame Serpentina. She’s my client.”

“Why that’s wonderful!” Sandy paused, her plump fingers fumbling in her purse for her own notebook. “But why would a psychic need a detective?”

“For the same reason detectives need psychics. You said last night that the cops go to psychics for help in finding bodies, missing weapons, and that kind of stuff, remember?”

Sandy nodded.

“And it’s absolutely true. They do. But did you ever hear of a psychic telling the cops that the body was in the basement at four twelve West Forty-Eighth? No, what the psychic sees, maybe, is an old trunk and a broken clock.”

Sandy nodded again.

“Swell. So suppose this time it’s the psychic that wants to find somebody. She sees the trunk and the clock, right? Or whatever.”

“I see.”

“As Madame S. would say, I doubt it. But that’s what’s going on. I’m looking for a certain party, on behalf of Madame S. Those other people you met, Candy and Ozzie Barnes, are working for me.”

“Are they detectives too?”

Stubb grinned. “Sure. But they don’t know it.”

“What are you writing?”

“This.” Stubb ripped a page from his notebook and handed it to Sandy. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but last night you promised Madame S. a full-page ad in both magazines—”

“One!”

“Both. You know damn well you’re going to spread that material out over at least a couple of issues, which in your case means the two magazines. Anyway, you promised the ads, and I told you I’d take you up on them. That’s the ad copy. Run it as soon as you can.”

Sandy looked at the paper. “‘It will be to the advantage of anyone knowing the whereabouts of Benjamin Free, formerly of the High Place, to communicate with us. Box XXX in care of this magazine.’ That’s it?”

“You assign Madame S. a box number so you can keep the replies together, if there are any. Every so often I’ll send somebody to pick them up.” Stubb took a sip of coffee. “Murray! This is getting cold. How about warming it up?”

“Who is Benjamin Free?”

“The man Madame S. is trying to find.”

“I don’t claim to be Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Stubb, but even I deduced that. What is the High Place?”

Stubb shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Madame S.”

“This man Free lived there?”

“He said he did, yeah.”

Murray brought Sandy Duck’s tea and poured steaming coffee into Stubb’s cup.

“Hell of a day, isn’t?” Stubb said. “Freeze the tits off a boar hog.”

“Are we going to discuss the weather, Mr. Stubb? I’d much rather talk about Benjamin Free.”

“If we’re going to fight, we might as well use first names. Mine’s Jim.”

“I’m Sandy—short for Alexandra. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m short for Alexandra myself. Alexandra should be nearly six feet and use a lorgnette. But I know a little karate.”

“No, I don’t want to fight, Sandy. I was just trying to fill in with that crack about the weather. Murray was still close enough to hear. I can tell you everything I know about Ben Free in two minutes, and why shouldn’t I? You could find it out yourself in ten. What I’d rather do is get some information from you. Last night you said I’d come to your rescue a couple of times—something like that—and you said you’d give Madame S. the ad. If I really helped you, how about helping me? Tell me what’s going on. Why were you looking for me?”

“How do you know I was? Maybe I just dropped in here for a cup of tea.”

“You saw me at the counter and called my name before your glasses had a chance to fog. The windows are pretty foggy too, but I think you saw me through them before you came inside. Because after you came in, you weren’t hungry. And you switched your order from coffee to tea. You weren’t thinking about food while you were out there on the street; you were thinking about me.”

“You know, you’re really a pretty good detective.”

“Yeah, but nobody in the world knows it but you and me.”

“Madame Serpentina must, since she hired you. Anyway, you’re right. I was looking for you. A few minutes ago I ran into one of the bellmen from the hotel, and he told me he’d just seen you walking past. I decided nobody would want to walk very far in this cold, so I started looking in the shops for you.”

“Why?”

Sandy lowered her voice. “Something big, really big, happened at the office this morning.”

Stubb nodded, sipping his coffee.

“Mr. Illingworth—he owns and edits both magazines—old Mr. Illingworth got a call from the Government. From someone very highly placed in the Federal Government.” Her voice was tense with excitement. “They had heard about my story. They wanted to see an advance copy.”

Stubb leaned back, his eyes nearly closed behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

“Mr. Illingworth was—was just beside himself, if you know what I mean. I mean, government repression, after all these years! He has this friend on The New York Times he hasn’t seen since I don’t know when. They just exchange cards at Christmas, but Mr. Illingworth called him up. They must have chatted for half an hour. Mr. Illingworth looked ten years younger.”

“Swell. Are you going to let these Government people look at your story?”

“Of course. We’re going to cooperate—at least for a while—and keep records of everything. Then maybe we’ll publish an exposé of the whole business. With luck, we’ll make the big papers and some of the journalism reviews—the Times promised Mr. Illingworth they’d hold off until we gave the word. We’ve already started a thing for the next issue of Hidden Science. He and I finished it just a minute ago. We say the magazine is in desperate trouble—not financial—and we ask all our precognitive readers to look into the matter for us, and to advise us how to act as well as tell us how it will come out.”

“Shrewd.”

“One of the things we really want to know, of course, is how they found out. The Government, I mean. If there’s some sort of agreement among the various psychics about that, well, we’ll be watching for it carefully.”

“I’m psychic too,” Stubb said. He raised his right wrist and pressed it to his forehead. “I can tell you right now.”

“You can?”

“Sure. When the wreckers were tearing down Ben’s house, he got himself on TV. I’ll tell you about that some other time. The tape ran on the five o’clock news. Somebody saw it and came looking for him. You remember Mrs. Baker, the crazy old lady that came up to Madame S.’s room about the same time you did? She was there because they had contacted her, and she knew our names—she had them wrong, thought I was Ozzie Barnes and so forth, but the names themselves were all right. They picked one of us up. It’s just a guess, but mine would be that they got Candy at the precinct before she was sprung. But it doesn’t matter, because all four of us went to Madame S.’s room in the Consort. Hell, it couldn’t have been hard, because that crazy cop …”

“Mr. Stubb? Jim?”

“I just had an idea, that’s all. It’s something that happens to me about once a month. Listen, Sandy, do you want to buy into this?”

“Yes, certainly, if I can. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t know why this very important government agency is interested in Madame Serpentina, but if they are, it’s a big story. I may be able to sell it to the Times or one of the national news magazines. If it’s really good, I might even be able to use it to get a job on one of those magazines. I wanted to ask you to help me go after it.”