Counting Up, Counting Down Read online

  “You’re the boss,” Hugo said. He put the gun back in his pocket. His muddy eyes raked Bowman once more. Nicholas Alexandria bit his lip. Purple and yellow bruises still discolored his cheek. He had taken off the sticking plaster that covered the dried-blood scab on the cut Bowman’s pistol had made there. At last, the little chromed automatic disappeared.

  Schlechtman smiled. The stretch of lips was broader and more fulsome than his rather pinched features could comfortably support. “Shall we be off, Mr. Bowman?” he said.

  Bowman got to his feet, went to the window, pulled aside the curtain. He looked at the night, then at his watch. “Give it another half hour,” he said. “I want it good and dark, and the fog’s starting to roll in, too.”

  “How fitting,” Schlechtman remarked. “This whole business of the elephant has been dark and foggy.”

  At the hour Bowman had chosen, they left suite 1453 and rode down to the Clift’s elegant lobby. Outside, the fog had thickened. It left the taste of the ocean on the lips. Defeated streetlamps cast small reddish-yellow puddles of light at the foot of their standards. Automobile headlamps appeared out of the mist, then were swallowed up once more. Walking in the fog was like pushing through soaked cotton gauze.

  Hugo looked around nervously. His hand went to the pocket where the revolver nestled. “I don’t like this,” he muttered.

  “We’ve got three guns with us—at least three,” Bowman amended, glancing from Schlechtman to Gina Tellini. “You don’t like those odds, go home and play with dolls.”

  “You’re pushing it, Bowman. Shut your stinking mouth or—”

  “After the elephant is in our hands, these quarrels will seem trivial,” Gideon Schlechtman said. “Let us consider them so now.”

  They walked four blocks down Taylor to Eddy, then turned right onto Eddy. “It’s a mile from here, maybe a little more,” Bowman said. He lit a cigarette. Fog swallowed the smoke he blew out.

  As they passed Gough, shops and hotels and apartments fell away on their left. The mist swirled thickly, as if it sprang from the grass in the open area there. A few trees grew near enough streetlamps to be seen. “What is this place?” Hugo said.

  Bowman rested a hand on his pistol. “It’s Jefferson Square,” he answered. “In the daytime, people get up on soapboxes and make speeches here. Nights like this, the punks come out.” He peered warily into the fog until they left the square behind. Then, more happily, he said, “All right, three-four blocks to go.”

  He turned right on Fillmore, then left into an alley in back of the buildings that fronted on Eddy. The alley had no lights. Gravel scrunched under the soles of his shoes.

  “I don’t trust him,” Nicholas Alexandria said suddenly. “This is a place for treachery.”

  “Shut up, dammit,” Bowman said. “You make me mess up and you’ll get all the treachery you ever wanted.” He walked with his left hand extended. Like a blind man, he brushed the bricks of the buildings with his fingertips to guide himself. “Stinking fog. Hell of a lot easier to find this place this afternoon,” he muttered, but grunted a moment later. “Here we are. These are stairs. Come on, everybody up.”

  The stairway and handrail were made of wood. They led to a second-floor landing. The door there wore a stout lock. Gideon Schlechtman felt for it. “I presume you have some way to surmount this difficulty?” he asked Bowman.

  “Nah, we’re all going to stand around here and wait for the sun to come up.” Bowman pulled a small leather case from his inside jacket pocket. “Move. I’ve got picks.” He worked for a few minutes, whistling softly and tunelessly between his teeth. The lock clicked. He pulled it from the hasp and laid it on the boards of the landing. He opened the door. “Let’s go.”

  Bowman waited for his comrades to enter first. When he went in, he closed the door. It was no darker inside than out. The air was different, though: drier, warmer, charged with a thick odor not far from that of horse droppings. Again, he ran his hand along the wall. His fingers found a light switch. He flicked it.

  Several bare bulbs strung on a wire across the warehouse ceiling sprang to life. He pointed from the walkway on which he and the others stood down to the immense gray-brown beast occupying the floor of the warehouse proper. Its huge ears twitched at the light. Its trunk curled. It made a complaining noise: the sound of a trumpet whose spit valve has not worked for years. “There it is, right off La Tórtola.” Bowman stood tall. “The Maltese Elephant.”

  Gina Tellini, Schlechtman, Nicholas Alexandria, and Hugo stared down at the elephant. Then their eyes swung to Bowman. The same expression filled all their faces. Hugo drew his pistol. He pointed it at the detective. “He’s mine now,” he said happily.

  “No, mine.” The chromium-plated automatic was in Nicholas Alexandria’s right hand.

  Gina Tellini fumbled in her handbag. “No, he’s mine.” She, too, proved to carry a small automatic, though hers was not chromed.

  “I am sorry, but I must insist on the privilege.” Gideon Schlechtman had worn a .357 magnum in a shoulder holster. His stance was like an army gunnery sergeant’s, left hand supporting right wrist. The pistol was pointed at a spot an inch and a half above the bridge of Bowman’s nose.

  Bowman stared down the barrel of the gun. His eyes crossed slightly. His right hand stayed well away from the gun at his belt. “What the hell is the matter with you people?” he demanded. “I find your damned elephant, and this is the thanks I get?”

  “Let’s all fill him full of holes, boss,” Hugo said. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  “No, wait,” Schlechtman said. “I want him to die knowing what an ignorant idiot he is. Otherwise he would not understand how richly he deserves it.”

  “This stupid ox? It is a waste of time,” Nicholas Alexandria said.

  “Possibly, but we have time to waste,” Gideon Schlechtman replied. “Mr. Bowman, that great lumpish creature down there—in that it bears a remarkable resemblance to you, eh?—is an elephant, but not a Maltese elephant, not the Maltese Elephant we have sought so long and hard.”

  “How do you know?” Bowman said. “An elephant is an elephant, right?”

  “An elephant is an elephant—wrong,” Schlechtman answered. “A Maltese elephant is easily distinguished from that gross specimen by the simple fact that a grown bull is slightly smaller than a Shetland pony.”

  “Yeah, and rain makes applesauce,” Bowman said with a scornful laugh. “Go peddle your papers.”

  “The old saw about he who laughs last would seem not to apply in your case, Mr. Bowman,” Schlechtman said. “I spoke nothing but the truth. For time immemorial, Malta has been the home of a rare race of dwarf elephants. And why not? Before man came, the island knew no large predators. An elephant there had no need to be huge to protect itself. Natural selection would also have favored small size because the forage on Malta has always been less than abundant; smaller beasts need smaller amounts of food. The Maltese and their later conquerors preserved the race down to the present as an emblem of their uniqueness—and you tried to fob off this great, ugly creature on us? Fool!”

  The elephant trumpeted. The noise was deafening. The beast took a couple of steps. The walkway trembled, as if at an earthquake. Nicholas Alexandria nearly lost his balance. Almost involuntarily, Gina Tellini and Hugo glanced toward the elephant for an instant. Even Gideon Schlechtman’s expression of supreme concentration wavered for a moment.

  Bowman jerked out his .45 in a motion quicker than conscious thought. “Come on,” he snarled. “Who’s first? By God, I’ll nail the first one who plugs me—and if you don’t shoot straight, I’ll take out two or three of you before I go.”

  The tableau held for perhaps three heartbeats. The elephant trumpeted again. The door to the warehouse opened. “Drop the guns!” Detective Roland Dwyer shouted. His own pistol covered the group impartially. Behind him came Henry Bock, and behind him two men in uniform. All were armed. “Drop ’em!” Dwyer repeated. “Hands high!”

/>   Nicholas Alexandria let his little automatic fall. It clattered on the walkway. Then Hugo threw down his gun. So did Gina Tellini. At last, with a shrug, Gideon Schlechtman surrendered.

  Bowman stepped back against the wall, the heavy pistol still in his hand. Captain Henry Bock might have had something to say about that. Before he could speak, Dwyer asked Bowman, “Just what the hell is going on here, Miles?”

  Bowman pointed to Gina Tellini and said: “She’s the one who fingered Wellnhofer. Had to be: I visited the docks right after I saw her, and I had the list of ships I was going to check in my trouser pocket then.”

  “How’d she have a chance to find out what was in your trouser pocket without you knowing it?” Bock demanded, leering.

  “You said you loved me,” Gina Tellini hissed.

  “Loved you?” Bowman shook his head. “You must have heard wrong, sweetheart. I’m a married man.” He went on talking to Detective Dwyer: “She may have fingered Tom for that Evan Thursday item, too. I don’t know that for a fact, but you knew Tom. He wouldn’t have been easy to take down, not unless somebody recognized him who wasn’t supposed to. Or she may have shot him herself. Tom would go after anything in a skirt.”

  “Yeah,” Dwyer said. One of the uniformed policemen behind him nodded.

  “I figure laughing boy here probably canceled Wellnhofer’s stamp.” Bowman jerked a thumb at Hugo. “Gina and Schlechtman knew each other pretty well, and Hugo’s Schlechtman’s hired gun.”

  “So who did Thursday?” Roland Dwyer asked.

  “Could have been Hugo again,” Bowman answered, shrugging. “Or it could have been sweetheart here”—he grinned at Nicholas Alexandria, who returned a hate-filled glare—“on account of I’m not sure if Hugo was in town yet.”

  Dwyer pointed to Gideon Schlechtman. “What about him?”

  “The hell with it,” Captain Bock said. “He’s in it some kind of way. We’ll take ’em all in and sort it out later.” He gestured to the uniformed policemen. They advanced with their handcuffs. The one who cuffed Gina Tellini shoved her lightly in the middle of the back. She stumbled out of the warehouse. The others glumly followed.

  “You almost got too cute for your own good, Miles,” Detective Dwyer said. “If that witness hadn’t heard Wellnhofer spill to you—and if he hadn’t decided to tell us about it—you wouldn’t have had yourself a whole lot of fun, didn’t look like.” He stared down at the elephant. It pulled hay from a bale with its trunk and stuffed it into its mouth. “What the devil were you doing here, anyway?”

  “Who, me?” Bowman replaced his Colt in its holster. “I was just on a wild elephant chase, Rollie, that’s all.”

  “Yeah?” Dwyer’s eyes swung to the door through which Gina Tellini had just gone. “You going to tell Eva all about it?”

  “I’ll tell her what she needs to know: I got paid.”

  Dwyer shook his head. “You’re a louse, Miles.”

  “That’s what everybody tells me.” Miles Bowman laughed. “Thanks,” he said.

  Vermin

  What made this piece interesting to do was that the main character’s beliefs and emotions are so different from mine. Writing convincingly about someone who isn’t like you is one of the harder tricks to pull off; I hope I’ve done it well here. I wrote “Vermin” not least to make my wife, who isn’t fond of bugs, squirm a little. There, I know I succeeded.

  * * *

  The heavy but familiar weight of the water jar pressed into Victoria Griffin’s left hip as she walked back from the stream toward her husband’s cabin. Sweat slithered down her face, prickled in her armpits, greased the crevice between her buttocks so that she was unpleasantly aware of her own flesh sliding against itself. The heavy wool dress that covered all of her but head, hands, and feet made her want to scratch everywhere at once, as if it were a hair shirt.

  She forced facial muscles into an expression of determined serenity. Serenity was the expression most often seen along the paths of New Zion. The Holy Mission Church taught that, since the body was the chief source of sin, all its sensations were to be mistrusted, and ignored as far as possible. On a steambath of a planet like Reverence, that was not always easy.

  Serenity sagged toward exhaustion. Endless jungle heat and humidity made the task of building Reverence into a perfect world all the more daunting. Once in a great while, as now, the devil tempted Victoria to wish the Church had enjoyed the secular wealth to pick a more salubrious planet on which to pasture its flock. She knew the wish was sinful. Later, she would spend hours on aching knees repenting of it. But the water came first.

  The path was muddy (the path was always muddy). One of Victoria’s feet flew out from under her. “Jesus’ name!” she cried in the moment before the ground slammed her backside. Even as she fell, she grabbed for the water jar. Too late. It hit a rock and smashed. A sharp sherd sliced her thumb, almost to the bone.

  Filthy, bleeding, and crying, she staggered to her feet. Wet, slimy earth glued her dress to her haunches. Normally, that would have disgusted her. Now she hardly noticed. She squeezed the torn flesh of her thumb together, trying to stem the flow of blood. Drawn by the iron smell, the animated pinheads that were vermin scuttled down her arm.

  Victoria let go of her thumb to smash a couple of the tiny pests, but more soon took their place. She hated bugs of every description; they made her cringe inside. But bugs of every description was what Reverence had. She looked daggers in the direction of the Haldol village a couple of miles away. Like all Haldol villages, it was awash in offal, a perfect breeding place for the crawling horrors that were only too happy to infest New Zion as well. The settlers fumigated their cabins again and again. It did no lasting good, not with the Haldols and their corruption so close.

  One of the vermin bit her on the inside of the thigh, so high up that even her husband’s touch there felt wicked. On top of everything else that had just happened, that was too much. She let out a high, piercing note of pure outrage. And exactly then, of course, Cornelia Baker came round the corner with an empty jug.

  Cornelia’s big blue eyes went round and wide. “Why, Victoria!” she gasped. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so,” Victoria said through clenched teeth. Cornelia Baker somehow managed perfect cleanliness and perfect neatness on a raw colonial world. Even the sheen of sweat that glistened on her face might have been taken for a virtuous glow. It was impossible to imagine a bloodsucking bug being so rude as to bite her high up on the thigh. She boasted every Christian virtue, and flaunted them as well.

  Now she took efficient charge of Victoria. She brushed the worst of the muck from Victoria’s dress, threw a strong (and somehow, even after that tidying job, not particularly dirty) arm around her shoulder, and half led, half supported her back to New Zion. All the while she chattered on with such aggressively sincere sympathy that Victoria wanted to claw out those big blue eyes.

  Victoria wanted to claw at herself as well. The biting bug, or perhaps a different biting bug, had decided to pierce her right between her legs. To scratch herself there made Victoria’s cheeks flame crimson even when she was alone. To scratch herself there in front of anyone would have been lewd and indecent, and possibly good for time in the pillory. To scratch herself there in front of Cornelia Baker was hideously unimaginable.

  But the biter would not relent. To make matters worse, it kept looking for new, tender spots; she felt it crawling slowly through her secret hair. She could also feel the gooseflesh rising on her arms and legs at every new motion of the bug, no matter how tiny. The horrible anticipation of its next move brought her worse pain than any from her torn thumb or bruised behind.

  At last, in front of Victoria’s cabin, Cornelia said, “Here we are, my dear. I do hope you’ll be better soon. God bless you.”

  “God bless you, Cornelia, and thank you for all your help,” Victoria said, when she would sooner have screamed, Just go away!

  Finally, Cornelia did go away. Victoria bolted insi
de the cabin, locked the door behind her. She shuttered the two small windows, pausing at the second one to dip her head in the direction of the church steeple she could see through it.

  With all openings closed, the inside of the cabin turned night-dark. That suited Victoria. She hardly saw and deliberately did not look at the pale flesh she revealed when she stripped off her soiled and soaked dress. She did her best not to notice the puff of air that cooled her for a moment as the dress went off over her head.

  Both her other dresses were dirty. She’d intended to wash them after she brought the water home. Now, instead, she quickly picked one and threw it on. Only when she was properly clothed did she wrap a rag around her thumb. And only after that did she look to the ceiling so she would not have to watch her unhurt hand as it tried to rout the biter from her private parts.

  She gasped in relief, then gasped again when she thought how the first gasp might sound—no one could possibly hear it, but it shamed her all the same. Then the barred door rattled and she gasped again. Someone was trying to get into the cabin. “Who’s there?” she called shrilly.

  “Only me, Mrs. Griffin,” a deep voice replied. “May I please come in?”

  She ran to the door, threw up the bar. “Of course, Mr. Griffin,” she answered, and stood aside to let her husband by. “I didn’t expect you back from the fields so soon.”

  “Broke my hoe handle,” he answered, scowling. He pointed to the path outside, where he’d dropped the ruined tool. “Have to shape myself a new one.” Then he finally seemed to take a good look at Victoria. “By the hope of heaven, Mrs. Griffin, what’s befallen you?”

  Victoria went through the whole sorry tale (leaving out only Cornelia Baker’s attitude, which no man could be expected to understand). When she finished, her husband’s gaze flicked toward the kitchen. The cabin was too dark for him to see what was there, but he knew anyhow. He said, “We have no other water jar.”