Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

“Set down now,” W.F. told him. “We got to get a ice-pack on your nose. Stop that bleedin’.”

He discovered there was a stool behind him. He sat, wanting to say something about bananas or tomatoes, to joke with W.F.; but he could not speak, could not ensnare the fleet thoughts in syllable and phrase. He had lost teeth, and his tongue explored the places.

Klamm was in the ring, waving to the audience, muttering to the fighters, a hand upon the shoulder of each. Each was a head taller than Klamm.

Joe squatted in front of him. “You okay?”

The ice-pack was on his face, but he managed to nod.

“That was a brave thing you done.” The words were muffled, slurred by Joe’s mouthpiece.

The bell rang once, sharply. Klamm had struck it with the case of an old-fashioned pocket watch.

“Gotta go,” Joe mumbled. “But you’re a real champ.”

“Hol’ still,” W.F. told him.

Klamm said, “This fight. It is to take their minds off it. You will make this a long round, ja? Because perhaps at the end they are nervous once more.” Klamm was talking to the referee, not to him.

A hard-faced man he recognized as one of Klamm’s bodyguards asked, “Where’s his other gun?”

Walsh handed it over sheepishly, butt first. “I only got one shot at ’im,” Walsh confessed. “Somebody was always in the way.”

“Good thing you didn’t try for two.”

Walsh nodded. “Ya never can tell.”

“We take him to a hospital,” Klamm was explaining to W.F. “To a doctor. You must see to your man, ja?”

W.F. took away the ice-pack and changed the cotton in his nostrils. Klamm’s bodyguard helped him through the ropes. He looked around for Lara, but she was gone.

“She is not here, Herr Kay,” Klamm told him.

It was as though he had spoken aloud—but it was too hard to speak. Klamm had known; Klamm had read his thought, or at least had read his expression and noticed the direction of his eyes. For the first time it struck him that one did not become a cabinet officer by chance, that the sleepy old man with the dyed mustache probably possessed extraordinary abilities.

The bodyguard asked if he could walk. “He walks,” Klamm declared. “He is a tough one, a Raufbold, ja?”

The pain of his broken nose was like fire on his face. He wondered vaguely whether he had been hurt anywhere else. Those teeth, of course; that was drowned in the other pain.

Outside several hundred men were milling around the arena. “North is dead.” “ North’s dead.” “In there—they just killed Bill North.” He caught the words everywhere; he could not tell who had spoken them because everyone was speaking them. A man of about his own age wept without shame, sallow cheeks flooded with tears. Klamm’s guards had their guns out—in one case a strange-looking gun with a long curved magazine. He decided it was probably a machine pistol.

Three black cars—one an enormous limousine—stood at the curb. “He rides with me,” Klamm told somebody. “You need not come.”

A uniformed driver with a gun opened the rear door. Klamm got in first, sliding across the wide leather seat to make room for him. The door clicked softly behind him.

“We speak in private, Rudy,” Klamm said, and a thick sheet of glass slid from the back of the front seat to the roof. A moment later, the limousine pulled smoothly away from the curb. One of the sedans was ahead of it, and he suspected the other was behind it, but he did not bother to turn his head to see.

“You haff saved my life,” Klamm said. “I shall reward you, if I can. I haff some money, and I am not without authority in this place.”

“No,” he said. He managed to shake his head a little.

From his pocket Tina announced, “He needs your help, Papa.”

“Then he shall haff it. Whatever I can give.”

He said, “I want to find Laura.”

The old man sighed. “So do we all, Herr Kay.”

“She’s your daughter—your stepdaughter.”

“She is a grown woman, my stepdaughter. She goes where she wants. Sometimes she tells me because she loves me, such is her way. More often not. I will help if I can, but I cannot say to you her apartment is here, she is in that hotel.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not right.”

“What is it you mean, Herr Kay?” Klamm leaned back in the corner, eyes sleepier than ever.

“Laura says she’s your stepdaughter, and you say she’s your stepdaughter. But she can’t be, not really, so you know. She’s the goddess.”

Klamm opened one eye wide. “She told you that?”

He tried to think back. “I figured it out. She admitted it. She knows I know.”

“Yes, Herr Kay, she is the goddess.”

He understood then, and could not understand why he had not understood before. “Then you’re her lover—or one of her lovers. Or you were.”

“Yes, Herr Kay.” Klamm’s eye had shut again. Now both eyes opened. “Long ago, when I was younger than you. But she is still fond of me, nicht wahr? I hold her hand. She holds mine. Perhaps we kiss when nobody sees. That is all. Do you envy an old man so much, Herr Kay?”

“No,” he said.

“I assist her when I can. For her I perform certain little services. She does not require them, but she knows it makes me happy to do these things. At times she assists me, as she saved me tonight. She brought you, Herr Kay, and without you I should lie dead at this moment.”

He waved that aside. “I want to ask you about her, but I don’t know what to ask.”

“She is very beautiful, always. She believes she can hide her beauty when she chooses, but she is wrong in that. It is only that sometimes it is open, this beauty—the beauty of one who knows herself to be beautiful, ja? Other times, the closed beauty of one who does not know, and then we must look. If we begin by saying, ‘Why is that woman not beautiful?’ we never see it. But if we search—you know, I think.”

“Yes, Lora Masterman. Mr. Klamm, once while I was in the hospital I tried to call my apartment, and you answered.”

Klamm nodded sleepily. “I answered, and you hung up your telephone. You wish to know how such a thing could happen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It is so simple. She thought you might call. Sometimes one can, from here to there or the other way. So we arranged that such calls should ring at my desk. A special instrument, you understand. She told me of you, and that I was to assist you, should you ask my assistance. You did not.”

“And another time I got another man.”

“One of my agents,” Klamm explained. “I am very much at my desk, but not always. When I am gone, another must answer my calls. Sometimes we must act at once; then he acts for me, in my name.”

“He wanted to know where I was. Lara knew where I was. She sent flowers.”

“But we did not, nor did we know that Laura knew. She does not know everything, you see, though she knows so much. Nor does she tell me a tenth what she knows. Perhaps she only sends your flowers as an experiment; if the florist had said, ‘There is no one there with such a name,’ she would have known that you were elsewhere. We too often make such experiments. That United was a good guess she made, ja? Visitors are often brought there.”

It was the word Fanny had used. He asked, “Am I a dangerous Visitor or a harmless one, Mr. Klamm?”

Klamm chuckled softly. “Harmless, very much so, exactly like me. But Herr North, he is a dangerous Visitor, you see? And so we must question all Visitors somewhat. You become the responsibility of one of my subordinates. She will keep you from harm, and it might be someday Laura comes for you.”

“One more thing, sir. I told you about the other man, who answered the phone in my apartment.”