"And that is where we are headed now?"
"Yes. I would not have involved you needlessly, but they seemed so convinced that you were something of an authority on the thing that when you called it occurred to me that if you were there to corroborate my story there would be no question as to the stone's authenticity. I didn't like involving you this way, but it is a matter of life and death."
"Yeah. They may kill us all."
"Why should they? They will have what they want. It would be pointless to harm us."
"Witnesses," I said.
"To what? It would be our word against theirs that the incident even occurred. There is no record of it, no evidence of a kidnaping or anything else. Why jeopardize the status quo by killing people and starting a homicide investigation?"
"The whole thing stinks, that's why. We do not have sufficient facts to decide what may or may not be motivating them."
"What else was I to do? Call the police and take a chance they might not be bluffing?"
"I already said that I don't know. But at the risk of sounding ignoble, you might have left me out of this."
"Sorry," he said. "It was a quick judgment and maybe a wrong one. But I was not rushing you there blind. I knew I owed you an explanation, and that is what I have been giving you. We are not there yet. There is still time to drop you off if you do not want to be party to it. I intended to offer you the choice when I finished explaining things. Now that I have, you can make up your own mind about it. I had to hurry, though."
He glanced at his watch.
"When are we supposed to meet them?" I asked.
"About half an hour."
"Where?"
"Around eight miles, I think. I'm going by landmarks they gave me. Then we park it and wait."
"I see. I don't suppose you recognized the voice, or anything like that?"
"No."
I looked down at the pseudostone, semiopaque or semitransparent, depending on one's philosophy and vision, very smooth, shot with milky streaks and red ones. It somewhat resembled a fossil sponge or a seven-limbed branch of coral, polished smooth as glass and tending to glitter about its tips and junctures. Tiny black and yellow flecks were randomly distributed throughout. It was about seven inches long and three across. It felt heavier than it looked.
"Nice piece of work, this," I said. "I can't tell it from the other. Yes, I'll go with you."
"Thanks."
We drove on, maybe eight miles. I watched the scenery and wondered what was going to happen. Hal turned down an ill-tended car trail-I could not really call it a road-very near to the beach. He parked the car at the edge of a marshy area, in a place where the trees screened us on all sides. Then we got out, lit cigarettes and waited. I could hear the sea from where we stood, smell it, taste it. The soil was gritty, the air was clammy. I rested my foot on a log and stared into the stagnant wash, spindled and mutilated by reeds and reflection.
Several cigarettes later, Hal looked at his watch again.
"They're late," he said.
I shrugged.
"Probably watching right now to make sure we're alone," I said. "I would-for a long while. I would probably have a spotter back on the road, too."
"Sounds likely," he agreed. "I'm getting tired of standing. I'm going to sit in the car again."
I turned also, and we saw Jamie Buckler standing near the rear of the car, regarding us. He appeared to be unarmed, but then there was no necessity for him to flash a weapon. He knew we would do whatever he said without additional coercion.
"Are you the one who called?" Hal asked, advancing.
"Yes. Have you got it?"
"Is she all right?"
"She's fine. Have you got it?"
Hal halted and unwrapped the stone. He displayed it on his jacket.
"Here. See?"
"Yeah. Okay. Come on. Bring it along."
"Where?"
"Not far. Do an about-face and head that way," he said, gesturing. "There's a little trail."
We moved off along the route he had indicated, Jamie bringing up the rear. Winding through scrub, it took us farther down toward the beach. Finally, I got a closeup view of the sea, gray today and white-capped. Then the trail took us away again, and before very long I thought I had spotted our destination-low, peaked, set back on a modest hillside, missing a shutter and a half-a beach cottage that had seen better seas before I was born.
"The cottage?" Hal said.
"The cottage" from behind us.
We went on up to it. Jamie circled about us, rapped in a doubtless prearranged fashion and said, "It's okay. It's me. He's got it. He brought Cassidy along, too."
An "Okay" emerged from inside, and he opened the door and turned to us. He gestured with his head and we moved past him and on in.
I was not exactly taken by surprise to see Morton Zeemeister seated at the scarred kitchen table, a gun beside his coffee cup. Across the room beyond the kitchenette area, Mary was seated in what looked to be the most comfortable chair in the place. She was tied loosely, but one hand was free and there was a cup of coffee on the table beside her also. There were two windows in the dining area and two in the living room. In the rear wall there were two doors-a bedroom and a john or closet, I guessed. The overhead area had not been floored or ceiled, and there were only bare beams and lots of space, where someone had stashed fishing gear, nets, oars and assorted junk. There was an old sofa, a couple more rickety chairs and low tables and a pair of lamps in the living room. Also a dead fireplace and a faded rug. The kitchenette held a small stove, refrigerator, cupboards and a black cat who sat licking her paws at the far end of the table from Zeemeister.
He smiled as we entered, raising the gun only when Hal began a dash toward Mary.
"Come back here," he said. "She is all right."
"Are you?" Hal asked her.
"Yes," she said. "They didn't hurt me."
Mary is a small, somewhat flighty girl, blond and a trifle too sharp-featured for my tastes. I had feared she would be somewhat hysterical by then. But, outside of the expected signs of stress and fatigue, she seemed possessed of a stability that exceeded my expectations. Hal might have done better than I had thought. I was glad.
Hal returned from her side, moved toward the table. I glanced back when I heard the door shut, its latch clicking into place. Jamie leaned there, his back against the frame, watching us. He had opened his jacket, and I saw that there was a gun tucked in behind his belt.
"Let's have it," Zeemeister said.
Hal unwrapped it again and passed it to him.
Zeemeister pushed aside his gun and coffee cup. He placed the stone before him and stared at it. He turned it several times. The cat rose, stretched, jumped down from the table.
He leaned back in his chair then, still looking at the stone.
"You boys must have gone to a lot of trouble-" he began.
"As a mater of fact," Hal stated, "we-"
Zeemeister slammed the table with the palm of his hand. The crockery danced.
"It's a fake!" he said.
"It's the same one we've always had," I offered, but Hal had turned bright red. He is a lousy poker player, too.
"I don't see how you can say that!" Hal shouted. "I've brought you the damned thing! It's real! Let her go now!"
Jamie moved away from the door, coming up beside Hal. At that moment, Zeemeister turned his head and raised his eyes. He shook his head slightly, just once, and Jamie halted.
"I am not a fool," he said, "to be taken in by a copy. I know what it is that I want and I am capable of recognizing it. This-" he made a flipping motion with his right hand-"is not it. You know that as well as I do. It was a good try, because it is a good copy. But you have played your last trick. Where is the real one?"
"If that is not it.," Hal said, "then I do not know."
"What about you, Fred?"
"That is the one we have had all along," I said. "If it is a fake, then we never had the real one."
"All right."
He heaved himself to his feet.
"Get on over into the living room," he said, picking up his gun.
At this, Jamie drew his own and we moved to obey.
"I do not know how much you think you can get for it," Zeemeister said, "or how much you may have been offered. Or, for that matter, whether you have already sold it. Whatever the case, you are going to tell me where the stone is now and who else is involved. Above all, I want you to bear in mind that it is worth nothing to you if you are dead. Right now, it looks like that is what is going to happen."
"You are making a mistake," Hal said.
"No. You have made it, and now the innocent must suffer."
"What do you mean by that?" Hal asked.
"It should be obvious," he replied. Then: "Stand there," he directed, "and don't move. Jamie, shoot them if they do."
We halted where he had indicated, across the room from Mary. He continued, moving to stand at her right side. Jamie crossed over to her left and waited there, covering us.
"How about you, Fred?" Zeemeister asked. "Do you recall anything now that you didn't in Australia? Perhaps remember something you haven't even bothered mentioning to poor Hal here-something that could save his wife from . . . Well . . ."
He removed a pair of pliers from his pocket and placed them on the table beside her coffee cup. Hal turned and looked at me. They all waited for me to say something, do something. I glanced out the side window and wondered about doorways in the sand.
The apparition entered silently from the room behind them. It must have been Hal's face that gave them the first sign, because I know I kept mine under control. It did not really matter, though, because it spoke even as Zeemeister's head was turning.
"No!" it said, and "Freeze! Drop it, Jamie! One bloody move for your gun, Morton, and you'll look like a statue by that Henry Moore chap! Just stay still!"
It was Paul Byler in a dark coat, his face thinner and sporting a few new creases. His hand was steady, though, and it was a .45 that he was pointing. Zeemeister assumed an eloquent immobility. Jamie looked undecided, glanced at Zeemeister for some sign.
I almost sighed, feeling something tending in the direction of relief. In fair puzzles there should always be a way out. This looked like it for this game, if only-
Catastrophe!
A mass of lines, nets, buoys and disassembled fishing poles made a scratching, sliding noise overhead, then descended on Paul. His head jerked upward, his arm swayed-and in that moment Jamie decided against discarding his gun. He swung it toward Paul.
Reflexes I usually forget about when I am on the ground made a decision for which I take neither credit nor blame. Had the matter gotten beyond my spinal nerves, though, I do not believe I would have jumped a man with a gun.
But then everything was going to turn out all right, wasn't it? It always does in the various mass-entertainment media.
I sprang toward Jamie, my arms outstretched.
His hand slowed in an instant's indecision, then swung the gun back toward me and fired it, point-blank.
My chest exploded and the world went away.
So much for mass entertainment.
It is good to pause periodically and reflect on the benefits to be derived from the modern system of higher education.
I guess it can all be laid at the feet of my patron saint, President Eliot of Harvard. It was he who, back in the 1870s, felt that it would be nice to loosen the academic strait jacket a bit. He did this, and he also forgot to lock the door when he left the room. For nearly thirteen years I had granted him my gratitude once every month in that emotion-charged moment when I opened the envelope containing my allowance check. He it was who introduced the elective system, a modest tonic at the time, to a rigid course of forbidding curricula. And, as is sometimes the case with tonics, the results were contagious. And mutable. Their current incarnation, for example, permitted me to rest full-burnished, not grow dull in use, while following the winking star of knowledge. In other words, if it were not for him I might never have had time and opportunity to explore such things as the delightful and instructive habits of Ophrys speculum and Cryptostylis leptochila, whom I encountered in a botany seminar I would otherwise have been denied. Look at it that way, I owed the man my life-style and many of the agreeable things that filled it. And I am not ungrateful. As with any form of indebtedness impossible to repay, I acknowledge it freely.
And who is Ophrys? What is she? That all our swains commend her? And Cryptostylis? I am glad that you asked. In Algeria there lives a wasplike insect known as Scolia ciliata. He sleeps for a time in his burrow in a sandbank, awakens and emerges around March. The female of the species, following a fashion not peculiar to the hymenoptera, remains abed for another month. Her mate understandably grows restless, begins to cast his myopic gaze about the countryside. And lo! What should be blooming at that time in that very vicinity but the dainty orchid Ophrys speculum, with flowers that amazingly resemble the body of the female of the insect's species. The rest is quite predictable. And this is the fashion in which the orchid achieves its pollination, as he goes from flower to flower, paying his respects. Pseudocopulation is what Oakes Ames called it, the symbiotic association of two different reproductive systems. And the orchid Cryptostylis leptochila seduces the male ichneumonid wasp, Lissoplmpla semipunctata, in the same fashion, for the same purpose, with the added finesse of producing an odor like that of the female wasp. Insidious. Delightful. Morals galore, in a strict philosophical sense. This is what education is all about. Were it not for my dear, stiff Uncle Albert and President Eliot, I might have been denied such experiences and the light they constantly shed on my own condition.
For example, as I lay there, still uncertain as to where there was, a couple of the lessons of the orchid drifted through my mind, along with unclassified sounds and unsorted shapes and colors. I quickly achieved such conclusions as, Things are not always what they seem, and sometimes it doesn't matter; and One can get screwed in the damnedest ways, often involving the spinal nerves.