Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

Beyond these laboratories was another hallway, and beyond that, Stubb’s back. They saw him open a door at the end of it, and through the door glimpsed the familiar, bearded face of Ben Free as he turned in the pilot’s chair to see who had entered.

Stubb’s voice came to them faintly, carried on the thin whistling of the wind. “Good morning, General Whitten,” Stubb said. “Or was Whitten a lie too?” The door closed.

The witch burst into the cockpit like a panther. “What thing is this! You have betrayed me, betrayed us all!” She whirled on Free and dropped to her knees. “And you, Master, you live! This traitor told me you were dead.” Barnes followed her in, Candy lumbering after him.

Free said, “Sit down. Some of you, anyway.”

Stubb had taken the copilot’s seat. There were two more at the rear of the cockpit, apparently intended for a navigator and an engineer. The witch and Candy sat there.

The witch hissed, “Inside the wing, you said, and I see you here. You would speak with the Master behind me!”

“I’ve never crossed a client yet,” Stubb told her. “When we were looking for Mr. Free here, you never said you didn’t want me to talk to him unless you were there. If you had, I wouldn’t have agreed to it.”

“You told me you were going in the wing!”

“Sure, and I did. It was dark as hell in there, but I got far enough to see there were steps inside those things that held the engines so the mechanics could go down and work on them in flight. By then the matches I’d gotten from Ozzie were running out, so I went back.”

“And we were gone,” Barnes said. He was standing behind the witch’s seat.

“Right. So I figured you had probably headed toward the front of the plane, and I went that way too. I’ve got most of this worked out, I think.”

Free said, “You recognized me when you saw me here, but you had not recognized me on the ground. I suppose that was only a few hours ago.”

Stubb nodded. “Yeah, I should have, but you were younger and you had a clean shave, and it was too crazy. Of course that girl, Kip, had blown smoke in my eyes with the story about the twins. Is she really your daughter? She looks a little like you.”

“Yes, my only child. Eventually she will kill me, I suppose.”

Stubb stared at him.

“She reported to me; you must have realized that. Even then I had begun to suspect that Benjamin Free had been myself.”

Barnes said, “Wait a minute. You were the man in the duffel coat?”

The witch murmured, “The Master will tell us everything, if he will. Perhaps first of all, his name.”

“No,” Free said. “Not first. First I want to hear how Stubb deduced my identity. I apologize for calling you Short, by the way. I was playing drunk.”

“I knew it,” Stubb told him. “That’s why I didn’t mind.”

“And the deductions?”

“Hell, there was so much of it. For a long time I didn’t believe it, but it all pointed the same way. To start with, Kip’s gun.” He fell silent.

“Go ahead,” Free said. “It hurts less to talk of it than to think of it, and I have thought of it a great deal.”

“It was a Colt New Service, one of the biggest, heaviest pistols ever made. Colt built them for the Army in the First World War, because they couldn’t make enough forty-five autos. You still see a few around, and I suppose they’ll last forever; you couldn’t break one with a sledge. But why would a small girl like Kip carry a heavy, old-fashioned gun like that?”

“I taught her to shoot with one,” Free said. “I had a Woodsman too, but a revolver is safer for a beginner.”

“Then when we met you, you had a Thompson. With the round magazine, yet, like you were Al Capone. Those things are in museums. Then you let me keep your flask, figuring that if we each had a jolt it might loosen us up a little when we went upstairs. It had an art deco design and a bottom that said, ‘Tiffany and Company, Fifth Avenue, New York.’ Just like that. Everybody puts the state and zip on now. Sure, maybe it was an antique, but it pointed the same way as the guns.”

The witch demanded, “And in what way was that? You men, you are so maddening.”

Candy added, “I’ll say!”

“Leave me out,” Barnes told them.

Free asked, “Then you knew when we put you on the plane?”

Stubb shook his head. “I was thinking about it, but I couldn’t accept it, it was so crazy. Then the plane looked funny to me, but what the hell do I know about airplanes?”

“And on the plane?”

“I guess the first thing was the cigarettes. The copilot got them out and gave one to everybody who wanted one, which was damned nice of him. They were Camels, my regular brand, and the package was almost exactly like I’m used to, only not quite. Then I got the matches from Ozzie. Matches are the oldest, corniest clue there is, you know what I mean? The Great Detective looks at the matches in the third reel, and they’re from the Club Boom-Boom. So he goes there, and it turns out the guy is a regular. Anybody who’s done any real investigating knows you can’t trust them. A guy goes into a place, buys cigarettes, and picks up a folder of matches. He’s been inside maybe three minutes and nobody remembers him for shit. Then he gives them to his buddy, who leaves them on some bar, and somebody else takes them. Sure, you follow them up, you follow everything up, but nine times out of ten it goes nowhere.”

“I see,” Free said.

“But look at these.” Stubb reached into his pocket and produced the matches. “They’re from the Stork Club. It went out of business in the sixties; but the paper hasn’t yellowed, and the matches work just fine.”

Free nodded. “So then you knew.”

“Just for laughs, I like to watch those old Sherlock Holmes flicks,” Stubb told him. “You know, with Basil Rathbone and what’s-his-name.”

Free smiled. “I used to enjoy them myself.”

“And in one of them Sherlock says to eliminate the impossible, and then you’ve got to go with what’s left. Of course, the problem is, what’s impossible? People coming here from some time when the Stork Club was still open, when that flask was new, when people with serious business would still use those guns—was that impossible? Or was it impossible that everything would point that way but mean something else?”

Candy asked, “Is he saying what I think he’s saying, Mr. Free?”

Free nodded again, and Barnes said, “Well, blow me down!”

“It is I who should have guessed,” the witch said. “We know such things are not impossible.”

“That’s how we got onto it in the beginning,” Free told her. “Please understand, all of you, that I’m going to have to explain from my own point of view. I couldn’t do it from yours even if I wished to.”

“Go ahead,” Stubb said.

“Let me start with Bill Donovan. Does that name mean anything to you?”

Stubb shook his head.

“I met Bill Donovan when we were both hardly more than boys. We were in a home-town National Guard cavalry troop together. Real horse cavalry—it’s the simple truth.”

Free paused, stroking his beard. “Bill was a lawyer, an Irish Catholic whose mother had pushed him to go to college and make something of himself. I was a wealthy young man-about-town. That was what we called it then, the town being Buffalo, New York and wealthy being rich the way we thought of rich in Buffalo around nineteen fourteen.”

Stubb darted an I-told-you-so glance at the witch.

“I’d had the advantage of a governess as a kid, a nice, perfectly batty little Frenchwoman I called Madame du Betes. She had taught me conversational French and German, and I used to show off in restaurants and so on. As it turned out, Bill never forgot that.