The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov Read online

  He turned the pages of the fat volume, muttering, “Union, union, union, ah, Act of.” He then said, almost at once, “1707. Manny wins. Pay up, Tom.”

  “What?” cried Trumbull, outraged. “Let’s see that.”

  Rubin quietly picked up the two five-dollar bills which had been lying on the table and said in a ruminating voice, “A good reference book, the Columbia Encyclopedia. Best one-volume all-round reference in the world and more useful than the Britannica, even if it does waste an entry on Isaac Asimov.”

  “On whom?” asked Gonzalo.

  “Asimov. Friend of mine. Science fiction writer and pathologically conceited. He carries a copy of the Encyclopedia to parties and says, Talking of concrete, the Columbia Encyclopedia has an excellent article on it only 249 pages after their article on me. Let me show you.’ Then he shows them the article on himself.”

  Gonzalo laughed. “Sounds a lot like you, Manny.”

  “Tell him that and he’ll kill you—if I don’t first.”

  Simon Levy turned to Avalon and said, “Are there arguments like that all the time here, Jeff?”

  “Many arguments,” said Avalon, “but they generally don’t get to the wager and reference book stage. When it does happen, Henry’s prepared. We have not only the Columbia Encyclopedia, but copies of the Bible, both the King James and the New English; Webster’s unabridged—second edition, of course; Webster’s Biographical Dictionary; Webster’s Geographical Dictionary; The Guinness Book of Records; Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; and The Complete Works of Shakespeare. It’s the Black Widowers’ library and Henry is the custodian. It usually settles all arguments.”

  “I’m sorry I asked,” said Levy.

  “Why?”

  “You mentioned Shakespeare and I react to that, right now, with nausea.”

  “To Shakespeare?” Avalon gazed down at his guest with lofty disapproval.

  “You bet. I’ve been living with him for two months, reading him backward and forward till one more ‘Why, marry’ or ‘fretful porpentine’ and I’ll throw up.”

  “Really? Well, wait…Henry, is dessert coming up?”

  “Directly, sir. Coupe aux marrons.”

  “Good!…Simon, wait till dessert’s finished and we’ll carry on.”

  Ten minutes later, Avalon placed spoon to water glass and tinkled the assemblage to silence. “Host’s privilege,” he said. “It is time for the usual inquisition, but our honored guest has let it slip that for two months past he has been studying Shakespeare with great concentration, and I think this ought to be investigated. Tom, will you do the honors?”

  Trumbull said indignantly, “Shakespeare? Who the hell wants to talk about Shakespeare?” His disposition had not been improved by the loss of five dollars and by the look of unearthly virtue upon Rubin’s face.

  “Host’s privilege,” said Avalon firmly.

  “Humph. All right. Mr. Levy, as a science writer, what is your connection with Shakespeare?”

  “None, as a science writer.” He spoke with a distinct Brooklyn accent. “It’s just that I’m after three thousand dollars.”

  “In Shakespeare?”

  “Somewhere in Shakespeare. Can’t say I’ve had any luck, though.”

  “You speak in riddles, Levy. What do you mean three thousand dollars somewhere in Shakespeare that you can’t find?”

  “Oh, well, it’s a complicated story.”

  “Well, tell it. That’s what we’re here for. It’s a long-standing rule that nothing that is said or done in this room is ever repeated outside under any circumstances, so speak freely. If you get boring, we’ll stop you. Don’t worry about that.”

  Levy spread out his arms. “All right, but let me finish my tea.”

  “Go ahead, Henry will bring you another pot, since you aren’t civilized enough to drink coffee…Henry!”

  “Yes, sir,” murmured Henry.

  “Don’t start till he comes back,” said Trumbull. “We don’t want him to miss any of this.”

  “The waiter?”

  “He’s one of us. Best man here.”

  Henry arrived with a new pot of tea and Levy said, “It’s a question of a legacy, sort of. It’s not one of those things where the family homestead is at stake, or millions in jewels, or anything like that. It’s just three thousand dollars which I don’t really need, but which would be nice to have.”

  “A legacy from whom?” asked Drake.

  “From my wife’s grandfather. He died two months ago at the age of seventy-six. He’d been living with us for five years. A little troublesome, but he was a nice old guy and, being on my wife’s side of the family, she took care of most of it. He was sort of grateful to us for taking him in. There were no other descendants and it was either us or a hotel for old people.”

  “Get to the legacy,” said Trumbull, showing some signs of impatience.

  “Grandpa wasn’t rich but he had a few thousand. When he first came to us, he told us that he had bought three thousand dollars’ worth of negotiable bonds and would give them to us when he died.”

  “Why when he died?” asked Rubin.

  “I suppose the old guy worried about our getting tired of him. He held out the three thousand to us as a reward for good behavior. If he was still with us when he was dying, he would give the bonds to us, and if we kicked him out, he wouldn’t. I guess that was what was in his mind.”

  Levy went on, “He hid them in various places. Old guys can be funny. He’d change the hiding place now and then whenever he began to fear we might find them. Of course, we usually did find them before long, but we’d never let on and we’d never touch them. Except once! He put them in the clothes hamper and we had to give them back to him and ask him to put them elsewhere, or sooner or later they would get into the washing machine.

  “That was about the time he had a small stroke—no connection, I’m sure—and after that he was a little harder to handle. He grew morose and didn’t talk much. He had difficulties in using his right leg and it gave him a feeling of mortality. After that, he must have hidden the bonds more efficiently, for we lost track of them, though we didn’t attach much importance to that. We assumed he would tell us when he was ready.

  “Then two months ago, little Julia, that’s my younger daughter, came running to us to tell us that Grandpa was lying on the couch and looking funny. We ran to the living room, and it was obvious that he had had another stroke. We called the doctor, but it was clear that his right side was gone entirely. He couldn’t speak. He could move his lips and make sounds, but they came to no words.

  “He kept moving his left arm and trying to speak and I said, ‘Grandpa, are you trying to tell me something?’ He could just about tremor his head into a small nod. ‘About what?’ I asked, but I knew he couldn’t tell me, so I said, ‘About the bonds?’ Again a small nod. ‘You want us to have them?’ Again a nod and his hand began to move as though he were trying to point.

  “I said, ‘Where are they?’ His left hand trembled and continued to point. I couldn’t help but say, ‘What are you pointing at, Grandpa?’ but he couldn’t tell me. His finger just kept pointing in an anxious, quivering way, and his face seemed in agony as he tried to talk and failed. I was sorry for him. He wanted to give the bonds to us, to reward us, and he was dying without being able to.

  “My wife, Caroline, was crying and saying, ‘Leave him alone, Simon,’ but I couldn’t leave him alone. I couldn’t let him die in despair. I said, ‘We’ll have to move the couch toward whatever it is he’s pointing to.’ Caroline didn’t want to, but the old man was nodding his head.

  “Caroline got at one end of the couch and I at the other and we moved it, little by little, trying not to jar him. He was no lightweight, either. His finger kept pointing, always pointing. He turned his head in the direction in which we were moving him, making moaning sounds as though to indicate whether we were moving him in the right direction or not. I would say, ‘More to the right, Grandpa?’ ‘More to the left?’ And sometimes he would nod.

  “Finally, we got him up against the line of bookcases, and slowly his head turned. I wanted to turn it for him, but I was afraid to harm him. He managed to get it round and stared at the books for a long time. Then his finger moved along the line of books till it pointed toward one particular book. It was a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, the Kittredge edition.

  “I said, ‘Shakespeare, Grandpa?’ He didn’t answer, he didn’t nod, but bis face relaxed and he stopped trying to speak. I suppose he didn’t hear me. Something like a half-smile pulled at the left side of his mouth and he died. The doctor came, the body was taken away, we made arrangements for the funeral. It wasn’t till after the funeral that we went back to the Shakespeare. We figured it would wait for us and it didn’t seem right to grab for it before we took care of the old man.

  “I assumed there would be something in the Shakespeare volume to tell us where the bonds were, and that’s when the first shock came. We turned through every page, one by one, and there was nothing there. Not a scrap of paper. Not a word.”

  Gonzalo said, “What about the binding? You know, in between the stuff that glues the pages and the backstrip?”

  “Nothing there.”

  “Maybe someone took it?”

  “How? The only ones who knew were myself and Caroline. It isn’t as though there were any robbery. Eventually, we thought there was a clue somewhere in the book, in the written material, in the plays themselves, you know. That was Caroline’s idea. In the last two months, I’ve read every word of Shakespeare’s plays; every word of his sonnets and miscellaneous poems—twice over. I’ve gotten nowhere.”

  “The hell with Shakespeare,” said Trumbull querulously. “Forget the clue. He had to leave them somewhere in the house.”

  “Why do you suppose that?” said Levy. “He might have put it in a bank vault for all we know. He got around even after his first stroke. After we found the bonds in the clothes hamper, he might have thought the house wasn’t safe.”

  “All right, but he still might have put them in the house somewhere. Why not just search?”

  “We did. Or at least Caroline did. That was how we divided the labor. She searched the house, which is a big, rambling one—one reason we could take in Grandpa—and I searched Shakespeare, and we both came out with nothing.”

  Avalon untwisted a thoughtful frown and said, “See here, there’s no reason we can’t be logical about this. I assume, Simon, that your grandfather was born in Europe.”

  “Yes. He came to America as a teen-ager, just as World War I was starting. He got out just in time.”

  “He didn’t have much of a formal education, I suppose.”

  “None at all,” said Levy. “He went to work in a tailor shop, eventually got his own establishment, and stayed a tailor till he retired. No education at all, except for the usual religious education Jews gave each other in Tsarist Russia.”

  “Well, then,” said Avalon, “how do you expect him to indicate clues in Shakespeare’s plays? He wouldn’t know anything about them.”

  Levy frowned and leaned back in his chair. He hadn’t touched the small brandy glass Henry had put in front of him some time before. Now he picked it up, twirled the stem gently in his fingers, and put it down again.

  “You’re quite wrong, Jeff,” he said, a little distantly. “He may have been uneducated but he was quite intelligent and quite well-read. He knew the Bible by heart, and he’d read War and Peace as a teen-ager. He read Shakespeare, too. Listen, we once went to see a production of Hamlet in the park and he got more out of it than I did.”

  Rubin suddenly broke in energetically, “I have no intention of ever seeing Hamlet again till they get a Hamlet who looks as Hamlet is supposed to look. Fat!”

  “Fat!” said Trumbull indignantly.

  “Yes, fat. The Queen says of Hamlet in the last scene, ‘He’s fat and scant of breath.’ If Shakespeare says Hamlet is fat—”

  “That’s his mother talking, not Shakespeare. It’s the typical motherly oversolicitousness of a not-bright woman—”

  Avalon banged the table. “Not now, gentlemen!”

  He turned to Levy. “In what language did your grandfather read the Bible?”

  “In Hebrew, of course,” Levy said coldly. “And War and Peace?”

  “In Russian. But Shakespeare, if you don’t mind, he read in English.”

  “Which is not his native tongue. I imagine he spoke with an accent.” Levy’s coolness had descended into the frigid. “What are you getting at, Jeff?”

  Avalon harumphed. “I’m not being anti-Semitic. I’m just pointing out the obvious fact that if your wife’s grandfather was not at home with the language, there was a limit to how subtly he could use Shakespeare as a reference. He’s not likely to use the phrase ‘and there the antick sits’ from Richard II because, however well-read he is, he isn’t likely to know what an antick is.”

  “What is it?” asked Gonzalo.

  “Never mind,” said Avalon impatiently. “If your grandfather used Shakespeare, it would have to be some perfectly obvious reference.”

  “What was your father’s favorite play?” asked Trumbull.

  “He liked Hamlet of course. I know he didn’t like the comedies,” said Levy, “because he felt the humor undignified, and the histories meant nothing to him. Wait, he liked Othello.”

  “All right,” said Avalon. “We ought to concentrate on Hamlet and Othello.”

  “I read them,” said Levy. “You don’t think I left them out, do you?”

  “And it would have to be some well-known passage,” Avalon went on, paying no attention. “No one would think that just pointing to Shakespeare would be a useful hint if it were some obscure line that were intended.”

  “The only reason he just pointed,” said Levy, “was that he couldn’t talk. It might have been something very obscure which he would have explained if he could have talked.”

  “If he could have talked,” said Drake reasonably, “he wouldn’t have had to explain anything. He would just have told you where the bonds were.”

  “Exactly,” said Avalon. “A good point, Jim. You said, Simon, that after the old man pointed to Shakespeare, his face relaxed and he stopped trying to speak. He felt that he had given you all you needed to know.”

  “Well, he didn’t,” said Levy morosely.

  “Let’s reason it out, then,” said Avalon.

  “Do we have to?” said Drake. “Why not ask Henry now?…Henry, which verse in Shakespeare would suit our purpose?”

  Henry, who was noiselessly taking up the dessert dishes, said, “I have an average knowledge of the plays of Shakespeare, sir, but I must admit that no appropriate verse occurs to me.”

  Drake looked disappointed, but Avalon said, “Come on, Jim. Henry has done very well on past occasions but there’s no need to feel that we are helpless without him. I flatter myself I know Shakespeare pretty well.”

  “I’m no novice, either,” said Rubin.

  “Then between the two of us, let’s solve this. Suppose we consider Hamlet first. If it’s Hamlet, then it has to be one of the soliloquies, because they’re the best-known portions of the play.”

  “In fact,” said Rubin, “the line ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ is the best-known line of Shakespeare. It epitomizes him as the ‘Quartet’ from Rigoletto typifies opera.”

  “I agree,” said Avalon, “and that soliloquy talks of dying, and the old man was dying. ‘To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is—’”

  “Yes, but what good does that do?” said Levy impatiently. “Where does it get us?”

  Avalon, who always recited Shakespeare in what he insisted was Shakespearean pronunciation (which sounded remarkably like an Irish brogue), said, “Well, I’m not sure.”

  Gonzalo said suddenly, “Is it in Hamlet where Shakespeare says, ‘The play’s the thing’?”

  “Yes,” said Avalon. “‘The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’”

  “Well,” said Gonzalo, “if the old man was pointing out a book of plays, maybe that’s the line. Do you have a picture of a king, or a carving, or a deck of cards, maybe.”

  Levy shrugged. “That doesn’t bring anything to mind.”

  “What about Othello?” asked Rubin. “Listen. The best-known part of the play is Iago’s speech on reputation, ‘Good name in man and woman, dear my lord…’”

  “So?” said Avalon.

  “And the most famous line in it, and one which the old man was sure to know because it’s the one everyone knows, even Mario, is ‘Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing; ‘twas mine, ‘tis his…’ and so on.”

  “So?” said Avalon again.

  “So it sounds as though it applies to the legacy. ‘‘Twas mine, ‘tis his,’ and it also sounds as though the legacy were gone. ‘Who steals my purse steals trash.’”

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” said Levy.

  “After you found the bonds in the clothes hamper, you lost track of them, you said. Maybe the old man took them off somewhere to be safe and doesn’t remember where. Or maybe he mislaid them or gave them away or lost them to some confidence scheme. Whatever it was, he could no longer explain it to you without speech. So to die in peace, he pointed to the works of Shakespeare. You would remember the best-known line of his favorite play, which tells you that his purse is only trash—and that is why you have found nothing.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Levy. “I asked him if he wanted us to have the bonds and he nodded.”

  “All he could do was nod, and he did want you to have them, but that was impossible…Do you agree with me, Henry?”

  Henry, who had completed his tasks and was quietly listening, said, “I’m afraid I don’t, Mr. Rubin.”

  “I don’t, either,” said Levy.

  But Gonzalo was snapping his fingers. “Wait, wait. Doesn’t Shakespeare say anything about bonds?”

  “Not in his time,” said Drake, smiling.

  “I’m sure of it,” said Gonzalo. “Something about bonds being nominated.”