More Tales of the Black Widowers Page 5

  “Sometimes even when the hand is quite slow, I think.—Mr. Bunsen, you arrived late and did not hear Mr. Gonzalo's tale. He had paid a taxi driver exactly the fare recorded on the meter, and so customary is it to pay more than that, that every one of us was shocked. Even I expressed disapproval. It is only when the completely customary is violated that the event is noticed. When it takes place, it is apt to be totally ignored.”

  Bunsen said, “Are you trying to tell me that something was wrong with the taxi driver? I tell you there wasn't.”

  “I am sure of that,” said Henry earnestly. “Still, didn't you miss something that you took so entirely for granted that, even looking at it, you didn't see it?”

  “I don't see what it could have been. I have an excellent memory, I assure you, and in the fifteen seconds that Smith went from restaurant to taxi he did nothing I did not note and nothing I do not remember.”

  Henry thought for a moment or two. “You know, Mr. Bunsen, it must have happened, and if you had seen it happen, you would surely have taken action. But you did not take action; you are still mystified.”

  'Then whatever it was,” said Bunsen, “it did not happen.” “You mean, sir, that the doorman, a regular employee of the restaurant, hailed a cab for Smith, who was a regular patron for whom he must have performed the same service many times, and that Smith, whom you described as a well-mannered man who always did the correct social thing, did not tip the doorman?”

  “Of course lie—” began Bunsen, and then came to a dead halt. And in the silence that followed, Henry said, “And if he tipped him, then surely it was with an object taken from the left pants pocket, an object that, from your description, happened to look something like a coin. —Then he smiled, and that you saw.”

  2 Afterword

  “Quicker Than the Eye” first appeared in the May 1974 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

  I have to make a confession here. In writing the Black Widower stories I have always been under the impression that I was doing my best to catch the spirit of Agatha Christie, who is my idol as far as mysteries are concerned. When I presented a copy of Tales of the Black Widowers to Martin Gardner (who writes the “Mathematical Recreations” column in Scientific American and who is a recently elected member of the Trap Door Spiders) I told him this and he read it with that in mind.

  When he finished, however, he sent me a note to tell me that in his opinion I had missed the mark. What I had really done, he said, was to catch some of the flavor of G. K. Chesterton's “Father Brown” stories.

  You know, he's right. I was an ardent fan of those stories even though I found Chesterton's philosophy a little irritating, and in writing “Quicker Than the Eye,” I was strongly influenced by the great Chestertonian classic, The Invisible Man.

  To Table of Contents

  3 The Iron Gem

  Geoffrey Avalon stirred his drink and smiled wolfishly. His hairy, still dark eyebrows slanted upward and his neat graying beard seemed to twitch. He looked like Satan in an amiable mood.

  He said to the Black Widowers, assembled at their monthly dinner, “Let me present my guest to you—Latimer Reed, jeweler. And let me say at once that he brings us no crime to solve, no mystery to unravel. Nothing has been stolen from him; he has witnessed no murder; involved himself in no spy ring. He is here, purely and simply, to tell us about jewelry, answer our questions, and help us have a good, sociable time.”

  And, indeed, under Avalon's firm eye, the atmosphere at dinner was quiet and relaxed and even Emmanuel Rubin, the ever quarrelsome polymath of the club, managed to avoid raising his voice. Quite satisfied, Avalon said, over the brandy, “Gentlemen, the postprandial grilling is upon us, and with no problem over which to rack our brains. —Henry, you may relax.”

  Henry, who was clearing the table with the usual quiet efficiency that would have made him the nonpareil of waiters even if he had not proved himself, over and over again, to be peerlessly aware of the obvious, said, “Thank you, Mr. Avalon. I trust I will not be excluded from the proceedings, however.”

  Rubin fixed Henry with an owlish stare through his thick glasses and said loudly, “Henry, this blatantly false modesty does not become you. You know you're a member of our little band, with all the privileges thereto appertaining.”

  “If that is so,” said Roger Halsted, the soft-voiced math teacher, sipping at his brandy and openly inviting a quarrel, “why is he waiting on table?”

  “Personal choice, sir,” said Henry quickly, and Rubin's opening mouth shut again.

  Avalon said, “Let's get on with it. Tom Trumbull isn't with us this time so, as host, I appoint you, Mario, as griller in chief.”

  Mario Gonzalo, a not inconsiderable artist, was placing the final touches on the caricature he was making of Reed, one that was intended to be added to the already long line that decorated the private room of the Fifth Avenue restaurant at which the dinners of the Black Widowers were held.

  Gonzalo had, perhaps, overdrawn the bald dome of Reed's head and the solemn length of his bare upper lip, and made over-apparent the slight tendency to jowl. There was indeed something more than a trace of the bloodhound about the caricature, but Reed smiled when he saw the result, and did not seem offended.

  Gonzalo smoothed the perfect Windsor knot of his pink and white tie and let his blue jacket fall open with careful negligence as he leaned back and said, “How do you justify your existence, Mr. Reed?”

  “Sir?” said Reed in a slightly metallic voice.

  Gonzalo said, without varying pitch or stress, “How do you justify your existence, Mr. Reed?”

  Reed looked about the table at the five grave faces and smiled—a smile that did not, somehow, seriously diminish the essential sadness of his own expression.

  “Jeff warned me,” he said, “that I would be questioned after the dinner, but he did not tell me I would be challenged to justify myself.”

  “Always best,” said Avalon sententiously, “to catch a man by surprise.”

  Reed said, “What can serve to justify any of us? But if I must say something, I would say that I help bring beauty into lives.”

  “What kind of beauty?” asked Gonzalo. “Artistic beauty?” And he held up the caricature.

  Reed laughed. “Less controversial forms of beauty, I should hope.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his inner jacket pocket and, carefully unfolding it on the table, exposed a dozen or so gleaming, deeply colored bits of mineral.

  “All men agree on the beauty of gems,” he said. “That is independent of subjective taste.” He held up a small deep red stone and the lights glanced off it.

  James Drake cleared his throat and said with his usual mild hoarseness just the same, “Do you always carry those things around with you?”

  “No, of course not,” said Reed. “Only when I wish to entertain or demonstrate.”

  “In a handkerchief?” said Drake.

  Rubin burst in at once. “Sure, what's the difference? If he's held up, keeping them in a locked casket won't do him any good. He'd just be out the price of a casket as well.”

  “Have you ever been held up?” asked Gonzalo.

  “No,” said Reed. “My best defense is that I am known never to carry much of value with me. I strive to make that as widely known as possible, and to live up to it, too.”

  “That doesn't look it,” said Drake.

  “I am demonstrating beauty, not value,” said Reed. “Would you care to pass these around among yourselves, gentlemen?”

  There was no immediate move and then Drake said, “Henry, would you be in a position to lock the door?”

  “Certainly, sir,” said Henry, and did so.

  Reed looked surprised. “Why lock the door?”

  Drake cleared his throat again and stubbed out the pitiful remnant of his cigarette with a stained thumb and forefinger. “I'm afraid that, with the kind of record we now have at our monthly dinners, those things will be passed around and one will disappear.”


  “That's a tasteless remark, Jim,” said Avalon, frowning.

  Reed said, “Gentlemen, there is no need to worry. These stones may all disappear with little loss to me or gain to anyone else. I said I was demonstrating beauty and not value. This one I am holding is a ruby—quite so—but synthetic. There are a few other synthetics and here we have an irreparably cracked opal. Others are riddled with flaws. These will do no one any good and I'm sure Henry can open the door.”

  Halsted said, stuttering very slightly in controlled excitement, “No, I'm with Jim. Something is just fated to come up. I'll bet that Mr. Reed has included one very valuable item—quite by accident, perhaps—and that one will turn up missing. I just don't believe we can go through an evening without some puzzle facing us.”

  Reed said, “Not that one. I know every one of these stones and, if you like, I'll look at each again.” He did so and then pushed them out into the center of the table. “Merely trinkets that serve to satisfy the innate craving of human beings for beauty.”

  Rubin grumbled, “Which, however, only the rich can afford.”

  “Quite wrong, Mr. Rubin. Quite wrong. These stones are not terribly expensive. And even jewelry that is costly is often on display for all eyes—and even the owner can do no more than look at what he owns, though more frequently than others. Primitive tribes might make ornaments as satisfying to themselves as jewelry is to us out of shark's teeth, walrus tusks, sea shells, or birch bark. Beauty is independent of material, or of fixed rules of aesthetics, and in my way I am its servant.”

  Gonzalo said, “But you would rather sell the most expensive forms of beauty, wouldn't you?”

  “Quite true,” said Reed. “I am subject to economic law, but that bends my appreciation of beauty as little as I can manage.”

  Rubin shook his head. His sparse beard bristled and his voice, surprisingly full-bodied for one with so small a frame, rose in passion. “No, Mr. Reed, if you consider yourself a purveyor of beauty only, you are being hypocritical. It's rarity you're selling. A synthetic ruby is as beautiful as a natural one and indistinguishable chemically. But the natural ruby is rarer, more difficult to get, and therefore more expensive and more eagerly bought by those who can afford it. Beauty it may be, but it is beauty meant to serve personal vanity.

  “A copy of the 'Mona Lisa,' correct to every crack in the paint, is just a copy, worth no more than any daub, and if there were a thousand copies, the real one would still remain priceless because it alone would be the unique original and would reflect uniqueness on its possessor. But that, you see, has nothing to do with beauty.”

  Reed said, “It is easy to rail against humanity. Rareness does enhance value in the eyes of the vain, and I suppose that something that is sufficiently rare and, at the same time, notable would fetch a huge price even if there were no beauty about it—”

  “A rare autograph,” muttered Halsted.

  “Yet,” said Reed firmly, “beauty is always an enhancing factor, and I sell only beauty. Some of my wares are rare as well, but nothing I sell, or would care to sell, is rare without being beautiful.”

  Drake said, “What else do you sell besides beauty and rarity?”

  “Utility, sir,” said Reed at once. “Jewels are a way of storing wealth compactly and permanently in a way independent of the fluctuations of the market place.”

  “But they can be stolen,” said Gonzalo accusingly.

  “Certainly,” said Reed. “Their very values—beauty, compactness, permanence—make them more useful to a thief than anything else can be. The equivalent in gold would be much heavier; the equivalent in anything else far more bulky.”

  Avalon said, with a clear sense of reflected glory in his guest's profession, “Latimer deals in eternal value.”

  “Not always,” said Rubin rather wrathfully. “Some of the jeweler's wares are of only temporary value, for rarity may vanish. There was a time when gold goblets might be used on moderately important occasions but, for the real top of vanity, the Venetian cut glass was trotted out—until glass-manufacturing processes were improved to the point where such things were brought down to the five-and-ten level.

  “In the 1880s, the Washington Monument was capped with nothing less good than aluminum and, in a few years, the Hall process made aluminum cheap and the monument cap completely ordinary. Then, too, value can change with changing legend. As long as the alicorn—the horn of a unicorn—was thought to have aphrodisiac properties, the horns of narwhals and rhinoceroses were valuable. A handkerchief of a stiffish weave which could be cleaned by being thrown into the fire would be priceless for its magical refusal to burn—till the properties of asbestos became well known. “Anything that becomes rare through accident—the first edition of a completely worthless book, rare because it was worthless—becomes priceless to collectors. And synthetic jewelry of all sorts may yet make your wares valueless, Mr. Reed.”

  Reed said, “Perhaps individual items of beauty might lose some of their value, but jewelry is only the raw material of what I sell. There is still the beauty of combination, of setting, the individual and creative work of the craftsman. As for those things which are valuable for rarity alone, I do not deal with them; I will not deal with them; I have no sympathy with them, no interest in them. I myself own some things that are both rare and beautiful—own them, I mean, with no intention of ever selling them—and nothing, I hope, that is ugly and is valued by me only because it is rare. Or almost nothing, anyway.”

  He seemed to notice for the first time that the gems he had earlier distributed were lying before him. “Ah, you're all through with them, gentlemen?” He scooped them toward himself with his left hand. “All here,” he said, “each one. No omissions. No substitutions. All accounted for.” He looked at each individually. “I have showed you these, gentlemen, because there is an interesting point to be made about each of them—”

  Halsted said, “Wait. What did you mean by saying 'almost nothing'?”

  “Almost nothing?” said Reed, puzzled.

  “You said you owned nothing ugly just because it was rare. Then you said 'almost nothing.'“

  Reed's face cleared. “Ah, my lucky piece. I have it here somewhere.” He rummaged in his pocket. “Here it is. —You are welcome to look at it, gentlemen. It is ugly enough, but actually I would be more distressed at losing it than any of the gems I brought with me.” He passed his lucky piece to Drake, who sat on his left.

  Drake turned it over in his hands. It was about an inch wide, ovoid in shape, black and finely pitted. He said, “It's metal. Looks like meteoric iron.”

  “That's exactly what it is as far as I know,” said Reed.

  The object passed from hand to hand and came back to him. “It's my iron gem,” said Reed. “I've turned down five hundred dollars for it.”

  “Who the devil would offer five hundred dollars for it?” asked Gonzalo, visibly astonished.

  Avalon cleared his throat. “A collector of meteorites might, I suppose, if for any reason this one had special scientific value. The question really is, Latimer, why on Earth you turned it down.”

  “Oh,” and Reed looked thoughtful for a while. “I don't really know. To be nasty, perhaps. I didn't like the fellow.”

  “The guy who offered the money?” asked Gonzalo.

  “Yes.”

  Drake reached out for the bit of black metal and, when Reed gave it to him a second time, studied it more closely, turning it over and over. “Does this have scientific value as far as you know?”

  “Only by virtue of its being meteoric,” said Reed. “I've brought it to the Museum of Natural History and they were interested in having it for their collection if I were interested in donating it without charge. I wasn't —And I don't know the profession of the man who wanted to-buy it. I don't recall the incident very well—it was ten years ago—but I'm certain he didn't impress me as a scientist of any type.”

  “You've never seen him since?” asked Drake.

  “No, though a
t the time I was sure I would. In fact, for a time I had the most dramatic imaginings. But I never saw him again. It was after that, though, that I began to carry it about as a luck charm.” He put it in his pocket again. “After all, there aren't many objects this unprepossessing I would refuse five hundred for.”

  Rubin, frowning, said, “I scent a mystery here—”

  Avalon exploded. “Good God, let's have no mystery! This is a social evening. Latimer, you assured me that there was no puzzle you were planning to bring up.”

  Reed looked honestly confused. “I'm not bringing up any puzzle. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing to the story. I was offered five hundred dollars; I refused; and there's an end to it.”

  Rubin's voice rose in indignation. “The mystery consists in the reason for the offer of the five hundred. It is a legitimate outgrowth of the grilling and I demand the right to prove the matter.”

  Reed said, “But what's the use of probing? I don't know why he offered five hundred dollars unless he believed the ridiculous story my great-grandfather told.”

  'There's the value of probing. We now know there is a ridiculous story attached to the object. Go on, then. What was the ridiculous story your great-grandfather told?”

  “It's the story of how the meteorite—assuming that's what it is—came into the possession of my family—”

  “You mean it's an heirloom?” asked Halsted.

  “If something totally without value can be an heirloom, this is one. In any case, my great-grandfather sent it home from the Far East in 1856 with a letter explaining the circumstances. I've seen the letter myself. I can't quote it to you, word for word, but I can give you the sense of it.”

  “Go ahead,” said Rubin.

  “Well—to begin with, the 1850s were the age of the clipper ship, the Yankee Clipper, you know, and the American seamen roamed the world till first the Civil War and then the continuing development of the steamship put an end to sailing vessels. However, I'm not planning to spin a sea yarn. I couldn't. I know nothing about ships and couldn't tell a bowsprit from a binnacle, if either exists at all. However, I mention it all by way of explaining that my great-grandfather—who bore my name; or rather, I bear his —managed to see the world. To that extent his story is conceivable. Between that and the fact that his name, too, was Latimer Reed, I had a tendency, when young, to want to believe him.