More Tales of the Black Widowers (9 page)

Reed said, “How can I dispute that? Except that, whatever he might have seen, I certainly never have. Have you?”

“No,” admitted Drake.

Rubin said, 'This doesn't sound like anything we can possibly work out. We just don't have enough information. —What do you say, Henry?”

Henry, who had been listening with his usual quiet attention, said, “I was wondering about a few points.”

“Well then, go on, Henry,” said Avalon. “Why not continue the grilling of the guest?”

Henry said, “Mr. Reed, when you showed the object to your guests on that occasion in 1962 or 1963, you say you passed the package around. You mean the original package in which the letter and the meteorite had come, with its contents as they had always been?”

“Yes. Oh yes. It was a family treasure.”

“But since 1963, sir, you have carried the meteorite in your pocket?”

“Yes, always,” said Reed.

“Does that mean, sir, that you no longer have the letter?”

“Of course it doesn't mean that,” said Reed indignantly. “We certainly do have the letter. I'll admit that after that fellow's threat I was a little concerned so I put it in a safer place. It's a glamorous document from the family standpoint, hoax or not.”

“Where do you keep it now?” asked Henry.

“In a small wall safe I use for documents and occasional jewels.”

“Have you seen it recently, sir?”

Reed smiled broadly. “I use the wall safe frequently, and I see it every time. Take my word for it, Henry, the letter is safe; as safe as the luck piece in my pocket.”

Henry said, “Then you don't keep the letter in the original package anymore.”

“No,” said Reed. “The package was more useful as a container for the meteorite. Now that I carry that object in my pocket, there was no point in keeping the letter alone in the package.”

Henry nodded. “And what did you do with the package, then, sir?”

Reed looked puzzled. “Why, nothing.”

“You didn't throw it out?”

“No, of course not.”

“Do you know where it is?”

Slowly, Reed frowned. He said at last, “No, I don't think so.”

“When did you last see it?”

The pause was just as long this time. “I don't know that either.”

Henry seemed lost in thought.

Avalon said, “Well, Henry, what do you have in mind?”

Henry said, “I'm just wondering”—quietly he circled the table removing the brandy glasses—”whether that man wanted the meteorite at all.”

“He certainly offered me money for it,” said Reed.

“Yes,” said Henry, “but first such small sums as would offer you no temptation to release it, and which he could well afford to pay if you called his bluff. Then a larger sum couched in such offensive language as to make it certain you would refuse. And after that, a mysterious threat which was never implemented.”

“But why should he do all that,” said Reed, “unless he wanted my iron gem?”

Henry said, “To achieve, perhaps, precisely what he did, in fact, achieve—to convince you he wanted the meteorite and to keep your attention firmly fixed on that. He gave you back the meteorite when you held out your hand for it; he gave you back the letter—but did he give you back the original package?”

Reed said, “I don't remember him taking it.”

Henry said, “It was ten years ago. He kept your attention fixed on the meteorite. You even spent some time examining it yourself and during that time you didn't look at him, I'm sure. —Can you say you've seen the package since that time, sir?”

Slowly, Reed shook his head. “I can't say I have. You mean he fastened my attention so tightly on the meteorite that he could walk off with the package and I wouldn't notice?”

I’m afraid you didn't. You put the meteorite in your pocket, the letter in your safe, and apparently never gave another thought to the package. This man, whose name you don't know and whom you can no longer identify thanks to your friends' death, has had the package for ten years with no interference. And by now you could not possibly identify what it was he took.”

“I certainly could,” said Reed stoutly, “if I could see it. It has my great-grandmother's name and address on it.”

“He might not have saved the package itself,” said Henry.

“I've got it,” cried out Gonzalo suddenly. “It was that Chinese writing. He could make it out somehow and he took it to get it deciphered with certainty. The message was important.”

Henry's smile was the barest flicker. “That is a romantic notion that had not occurred to me, Mr. Gonzalo, and I don't know that it is very probable. I was thinking of something else. —Mr. Reed, you had a package from Hong Kong in 1856 and at that time Hong Kong was already a British possession.”

'Taken over in 1848,” said Rubin briefly.

“And I think the British had already instituted the modern system of distributing mail.”

“Rowland Hill,” said Rubin at once, “in 1840.”

“Well then,” said Henry, “could there have been a stamp on the original package?”

Reed looked startled. “Now that you mention it, there was something that looked like a black stamp, I seem to recall. A woman's profile?”

“The young Victoria,” said Rubin.

Henry said, “And might it possibly have been a rare stamp?”

Gonzalo threw up his arms. “Bingo!”

Reed sat with his mouth distinctly open. Then he said, “Of course, you must be right —I wonder how much I lost.”

“Nothing but money, sir,” murmured Henry. “The early British stamps were not beautiful.”

3
  
Afterword

“The Iron Gem” appeared in the July 1974 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine under the title “A Chip of the Black Stone.” Ordinarily, all things being equal, I go for the shorter title, so I'm changing it back to my original title in this case. (I don't always refuse to accept changes. The first story in this collection was called “No Man Pursueth” when I wrote it. The magazine changed it to “When No Man Pursueth” and I accept the extra word as an improvement.)

I wrote this story on board the Canberra, which took me over the ocean to the coast of Africa and back in the summer of 1973, to view a total solar eclipse—the first total solar eclipse I had ever seen. Heaven knows, they filled my time, for I was on board as a lecturer, and I gave eight lectures on the history of astronomy, to say nothing of the time it took to be charming and suave to all twelve hundred women on board. (You should see me being charming and suave. Some of them have trouble getting away.)

Just the same, I did find time to hide out in my cabin now and then to write “The Iron Gem” in longhand. What puzzles me now that I look back on it, however, is why the story didn't have anything to do with a solar eclipse when that (and the twelve hundred women) was all I was thinking of on the cruise.

To Table of Contents

When Tom Trumbull arrived—late, of course—to the Black Widowers' banquet, and called for his scotch and soda, he was met by James Drake, who was wearing a rather hangdog expression on his face.

Drake's head made a gentle gesture to one side.

Trumbull followed him, unpeeling his coat as he went, his tanned and furrowed face asking the question before his voice did. “What's up?” he said.

Drake held his cigarette to one side and let the smoke curl bluely upward. 'Tom, I've brought a physicist as my guest”

“So?”

“Well, he has a problem and I think it's up your alley.”

“A code?”

“Something like that Numbers, anyway. I don't have all the details. I suppose we'll get those after the dinner. But that's not the point Will you help me if it becomes necessary to hold down Jeff Avalon?”

Trumbull looked across the room to where Avalon was standing in staid conversation with the man who was clearly the guest of the evening since he was the only stranger present.

“What's wrong with Jeff?” said Trumbull. There didn't seem anything wrong with Avalon, who was standing straight and tall as always, looking as though he might splinter if he relaxed. His graying mustache and small beard were as neat and trim as ever and he wore that careful smile on his face that he insisted on using for strangers. “He looks all right.”

Drake said, “You weren't here last time. Jeff has the idea that the Black Widowers is becoming too nearly a puzzle session each month.”

“What's wrong with that?” asked Trumbull as he passed his hands over his tightly waved off-white hair to press down the slight disarray produced by the wind outside.

“Jeff thinks we ought to be a purely social organization. Convivial conversation and all that.”

“We have that anyway.”

“So when the puzzle comes up, help me sit on him if he gets grouchy. You have a loud voice and I don't.”

“No problem. Have you talked to Manny?”

“Hell, no. He'd take up the other side to be contrary.”

“You may be right —Henry!” Trumbull waved his arm. “Henry, do me a favor. This scotch and soda won't be enough. It's cold outside and it took me a long time to get a taxi so—”

Henry smiled discreetly, his unlined face looking twenty years younger than his actual sixtyishness. “I had assumed that might be so, Mr. Trumbull. Your second is ready.”

“Henry, you're a diamond of the first water” —which, to be sure, was a judgment concurred in by all the Black Widowers.

“I’ll give you a demonstration,” said Emmanuel Rubin. He had quarreled with the soup which, he maintained, had had just a shade too much leek to make it fit for human consumption, and the fact that he was in a clear minority of one rendered him all the more emphatic in his remaining views. “I'll show you that any language is really a complex of languages. —I'll write a word on each of these two pieces of paper. The same word. I'll give one to you, Mario— and one to you, sir.”

The second went to Dr. Samuel Puntsch, who had, as was usually the case with guests of the Black Widowers, maintained a discreet silence during the preliminaries.

Puntsch was a small, slim man, dressed in a funereal color scheme that would have done credit to Avalon. He looked at the paper and lifted his unobtrusive eyebrows.

Rubin said, “Now neither of you say anything. Just write down the number of the syllable that carries the stress. It's a four-syllable word, so write down either one, two, three, or four.”

Mario Gonzalo, the Black Widowers' tame artist, had just completed the sketch of Dr. Puntsch, and he laid it to one side. He looked at the word on the paper before him, wrote a figure without hesitation, and passed it to Rubin. Puntsch did the same.

Rubin said, with indescribable satisfaction, “I'll spell the word. It's u-n-i-o-n-i-z-e-d, and Mario says it's accented on the first syllable.”

“Yoo-nionized,” said Mario. “Referring to an industry whose working force has been organized into a labor union.”

Puntsch laughed. “Yes, I see. I called it un-eye-onized; referring to a substance that did not break down into ions in solution. I accent the second syllable.”

“Exactly. The same word to the eye, but different to men in different fields. Roger and Jim would agree with Dr. Puntsch, I know, and Tom, Jeff, and Henry would probably agree with Mario. It's like that in a million different places. Fugue means different things to a psychiatrist and a musician. The phrase 'to press a suit' means one thing to a nineteenth-century lover and another to a twentieth-century tailor. No two people have exactly the same language.”

Roger Halsted, the mathematics teacher, said with the slight hesitation that was almost a stammer but never quite, “There's enough overlap so that it doesn't really matter, does it?”

“Most of us can understand each other, yes,” said Rubin querulously, “but there's less overlap than there ought to be. Every small segment of the culture develops its own vocabulary for the sake of forming an in-group. There are a million verbal walls behind which fools cower, and it does more to create ill feeling—”

“That was Shaw's thesis in Pygmalion,” growled Trumbull.

“No! You're quite wrong, Tom. Shaw thought it was the result of faulty education. I say it's deliberate and that this does more to create the proper atmosphere for world collapse than war does.” And he tackled his roast beef with a fierce cut of his knife.

“Only Manny could go from unionized to the destruction of civilization in a dozen sentences,” said Gonzalo philosophically, and passed his sketch to Henry for delivery to Puntsch.

Puntsch smiled a little shakily at it, for it emphasized his ears more than a purist might have thought consistent with good looks. Henry put it on the wall with the others.

It was perhaps inevitable that the discussion veer from the iniquities of private language to word puzzles and Halsted achieved a certain degree of silence over the dessert by demanding to know the English word whose pronunciation changed when it was capitalized. Then, when all had given up, Halsted said slowly, “I would say that 'polish' becomes 'Polish,' right?”