Callahan's Secret (12 page)
A ragged cheer went up.
By the time we had the lights back on, the wagon arrived, Doe Webster bursting in the door like a crazed hippo with
three attendants following him. I stuck around-just long enough to hear him confirm that Tommy would pull through, promised Callahan I’d give him the yarn later, and slipped
out the baék.
Walking the half block was much more enjoyable than running it. I found Pyotr in his bedroom. Roaring drunk, of course, reeling around the room and swearing in Rumanian.
“Hi, Pyotr. Sorry I bust your window.”
“Sodomize the window. Jake, is he-“
“Fine. You saved his life.”
He frowned ferociously and sat down on the floor. “It is no good, Jake. I thank you for trying to keep my secret,
but it will not work.”
“No, it won’t.”
“I cannot continue. My conscience forbids. I have helped young Janssen. But it must end. I am ripping you all up.”
“Off, Pyotr. Ripping us off. But don’t kick yourself too hard. What choice did you have? And you saved a lot of the boys a lot of hangovers, laundering their blood the way you did. Just happens I’ve got a trick metabolism, so instead of skimming off my hangover, you gave me one. And doubled your own: the blood I gave you the last two nights must have been no prize.”
“I stole it.”
“Well, maybe. You didn’t rob me of the booze-we both got drunk on it. You did rob me of a little nourishment-but I gather you also ‘robbed’ meof a considerable amount of poisonous byproducts of fatigue, poor diet, and prolonged despair. So maybe we come out even.”
He ‘winced and rolled his eyes. “These glands in my teeth-that was a very perceptive guess, Jake-are unfortunately not very selective. Alcoholism was not the only unpleasant thing I picked up working at the bloo4 bank-another splendid guess-although it is the only one that has persisted. But it must end. Tomorrow night when I am capable I will go to Mr. Callahan’s Place and confess what I have been doing-and then I will move somewhere else to dry out, somewhere where they do not buy blood from winos. Perhaps back to the Old Country.” He began to sob softly. “In many ways it will be a relief. It haá been hard, has made me ashamed to see all of you thinking I was some kind of altruist, when all the time I was-” He wept.
“Pyotr, listen to me.” I sat on the floOr with him. “Do you know what the folks are going to do tomorrow night when you tell them?”
Headshake.
“Well, I do, sure as God made little green thingies to seal plastic bags with, and so do you if you think about it. I’m so certain, I’m prepared to bet you a hundred bucks in gold right now.” -
Puzzled stare; leaking tears.
“They’ll take up a collection for you, asshole!”
Gape.
“You’ve been hanging out there for years, now, you know I’m right. Every eligible man and woman there is a blood donor already, the Doe sees to that-do you mean to tell me they’d begrudge another half liter or so for a man who’d leave a warm bed in the middle of the night to risk his cover and save a boy’s life?”
He began to giggle drunkenly. “You know-hee, hee-I believe you are right.” The giggle showed his fangs. Suddenly it vanished. “Oh,” he cried, “I do not deserve such friends. Do you know what first attracted me about Callahan’s Place? There is no mirror. No, no, not that silly superstition-mirrors reflect people like me as well as anyone. That’s just it. I was ashamed to look at my reflection in a mirror.”
I made him look at me. “Pyotr, listen to me. You worked hard for your cakes and ale, these last few years. You kept a lot of silly bastards from turning into highway statistics. Okay, you may have had another motive that we didn’t know-but underneath it all, you’re just like everybody else at Callahan’s Place.”
“Eh?”
“A sucker for your friends.”
And it broke him up, thank God, and everything worked out just fine.
And a couple of weeks later, Pyotr played us all a couple of fabulous Rumaman folk songs-on Lady Macbeth.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I should have known better.
When, in the first appearance of “Pyotr’s Story” (Analog Oct. 12, 1981), I left six riddles unsolved, and published my address at the end of the story, offering a chit good for a free drink at Callahan’s to any reader who correctly deduced the answer and the category-.-well, let’s face it, I did anticipate that I might notice a slight bulge in my mail for a while. I mean, I was asking for it, there’s no argument there.
Be careful what you ask for; you might receive it.
I used to publish my mailing address regularly in bookreview columns for Galaxy magazine, and each appearance was good for from five to twenty letters a week over the ensuing month. I knew that Analog had a significantly larger readership than Galaxy, and adjusted my expectations accordingly-I thought. I projected perhaps a hundred responses, a hundred and fifty tops.
I did not keep a fully accurate accounting, but I would estimate that as of February 9, 1982 I had received somewhere between 800 and 1,000 pieces of mail as a result of that fool riddle contest.
As soon as the first sack arrived (that’s not hyperbole: I mean a full sack of mail, the first of several), I took in the situation, grasped the full extent of my folly (don’t let on; grasping your folly in public is illegal in Nova Scotia), and, with the cool aplomb and courage-under-fire which has made my name a sellword on Wall Street, instantly formed a dynamic plan: I kicked the sack into a corner and fled the country. My wife Jeanne (founder and Artistic Director of Nova Dance Theatre, the finest Modern dance company in Canada) had received a providential invitation to perform with Beverly Brown Dancensemble: Theatre for Bodies And Voices, at the Riverside Dance Festival in what David Letterman refers to as “one of the more interesting cities in the tn-state area,” New York-so I threw my suitcase, my typewriter, my child and my Ray Charles tapes into the trunk of the car and went with her. And sacks of mail grew in her dance studio behind us in Halifax (for it was that address I put in Analog, in a feeble attempt to divert process-servers)…
And then some helpful soul at DancExchange forwarded all those sacks to us in New York.
Since I had expected to be answering those letters from Canada, where U.S. stamps are worthless, I had carefully requested that respondents endose an Inteniational Reply Coupon (supposed, by law, to be obtainable at any post office in the U.S. or Canada). Some 25 percent of respondents failed to follow this injunction, enclosed U.S. stamps or nothing at all, but forget that a moment: here I am on Manhattan Island in August with about 400 to 500 IRCs in my hands, and Iwait in line for an hour and aquarter in the post office (a structure to which the Black Hole of Calcutta is frequently favorably compared for summertime cotiulort), and when fmally I stagger up to the window, a surly homunculus with a genuinely incredible goiter informs me, with immense satisfaction, that regulations forbid him to accept more than 10 IRCs at a time. I whip out my calculator: 500 IRCs at 10 per transaction at 1.25 hours per transaction = 62.5 hours on line, or roughly eight days…
So I burned petrol and wasted cargo space to haul those sacks back home to Halifax. Where I united them with their less-traveled cousins, which had arrived in our absence, and settled down to answering the goddammed things…
Tabulations:
Oddly, the ratio of right to wrong answers remained rockconstant: every time I stopped and ran subtotals, it ran almost precisely two right answers for every wrong. Call it a 67 percent success rate for the Analog audience as a group. (Some of the wrong answers were absolutely brilliant!)
The only correlation I noted of any significance was that responses which came on university departmental letterhead were usually wrong-and several of the exceptions turned out to be grad students or TAs using their professor’s stationery. In other words, holders of tenure at institutes of higher education averaged dumber than the general populace or any other discernible group in the sample.
Mother thing I found instructive about all this was the performance of Analog readers (certainly not an undereducated group) in following the simplest of explicit ~written instructions. I had asked that each respondent enclose a selfaddressed envelope or SAE along with the above-mentioned IRC. Now, some few readers claimed ignorance of IRCs, on said that their local postmaster claimed ignorance, and the expedients they-tried instead were many and various.
Three or four sent cash, and of those only one was bright enough to send Canadian cash. (In those palmy days of yesteryear, the Canadian/American exchange rate hovered around par, which meant I took a conversion-fee bath on the money.) But at least 10 percent of the responses I received contained no return postage-and the rate-to-States doubled the month I got home to Halifax. (The royalty I will eventually receive for this particular book you hold in your hands comes to less than the present cost of a Canadian stamp-considerably less if you live in the States. And they’re talking about raising the rates again.) Postageless letters that were not particularly amusing or endearing were used to insulate the attic. And 25 percent of respondents enclosed no return-address envelope: same doctrine applied.
It wasn’t a total loss, even when you figure in the cost of Xeroxing form letters (one for right answers, one for wrong) and the postage and envelopes I got burned for, and the hours of work-time lost, and the wear and tear on my tongue (did you ever lick a thousand envelopes and several hundred stamps?). For one thing, I took the opportunity to make ap a third form letter-a press release listing all the books I had in print and where to get them and such-and folded one into every envelope. For another, I was able to insulate my entire attic and make a start on the root cellar.
For another, the~vast majority of the letters I got were delightful!
Some were hilarious. Some were heart-warming. Some were ingenious. Some were touching. Some were enlightening. Remarkably few “faded into the woodwork,” became just one-moie-goddam-letter-to-be-processed—in any event, I didn’t get any complaints from Mike Callahan regarding the people who came to cash-in their chits. (Of course, I just provided the chit-finding the Place was their problem.) Taken all together, the response pleased me, cheered and encouraged mein my w9rk.
On the other hand~ a substantial number of respondents enclosed riddles of their own-enough to make a life-size fully detailed papier mache replica of the Space Shuttle.
I’m sure they were all disappointed that I didn’t try to answer their no-doubt ingenious riddles, but honest to God, there are thousands!
And that’s not the worst. The worst is that the damned responses are still coming in to this day!
Analog is published all around the planet, with a translation lag that apparently ranges up to a couple of years.
Furthermore, people keep coming across back issues in libraries and secondhand bookstores, stumbling over the riddle-contest, and uttering small cries of delight.
I arbitrarily established a cut-off date, and stopped sending chits some time in mid-1982. (For one thing~ my tab at Callahan’s started reaching the proportions of the American National Debt.) I have kept to that-indeed, as you will shortly learn, it is no longer possible for me to supply any chits-but I still feel a faint twinge of guilt every time I get another letter that begins, “Dear Mr. Robinson, I think I’ve solved Doc Webster’s riddles-“
And the last thing I want is to compound the problem here.
Sono, I’m not going to publish my mailing address here, and no, I will not issue any more drink-chits, and yes, lam going to put the answers to the unsolved riddles below. If you want to solve them for yourself first, skip them. If you solve them successfully, don’t tell me about it. And no, frankly, I’m not overwhelmingly interested in trying to decipher your riddles, however clever and funny they may be. In the immortal words of disc jockey Don Imus, “Keep those cards and letters!”
No, that’s not true. I love getting mail, and I need. audience feedback to continue growing in my work. By all means drop me a line in care of Berkley Books-especially if you can fmd it in your head to enclose SAE and IRC.
Just don’t mention riddles.
Or use the word “trilogy.”
The Answers to Doc Webster’s Riddles:
The category is “Male American Politicians,” or any variant thereof. The individual answers are:
a) irrigated; laser pistol = runneled; ray gun =
Ronald Reagan
b) Nazi; cook lightly = Jerry; brown = Jerry
Brown
c) British punk; knowledge, current = Teddy; ken, eddy = Teddy Kennedy
d) chicken coop; foreplay = hennery; kissing
her = Henry Kissinger
e) wealthier; nuts to = richer; nix on = Richard
Nixon
An embarassing thing happened. Astute readers will have noted that I also left riddle He) unsolved. When. the responses started coming in, I discovered that this riddle had proved the hardest: everybody wanted to know who “coffm;
baby boy” was. The problem was that I had, by this point, mislaid my first draft of “Pyotr’s Story”-and I had forgotten the solution. To my horror, I found that I could not figure it out myself!
After months of shame, I sat bolt upright in bed one morning and realized I had the solution again-so I incorporated it into the story you are about to read, “Involuntary Man’s Laughter.”
One last word about “Pyotr’s Story,” though. If by any chance you missed its several respectful salutes to William Goldman, I hope you will seize the next opportunity to run out and purchase his immortal classic, The Princess Bride.
Involuntary Man’s Laughter
Some people who hang out at Callahan’s Place aren’t all there-this is widely known. But a few of them aren’t there at all.
Well, obviously they are there, at least ma sense. Otherwise I’d be offering you a paradox, and Sam Webster is the only Doc we have here at Callahan’s bar. But if a customer cannot be seen, heard, felt, smelt, or dealt a hand of cards, if he casts no shadow, empties no glass, and never visits the men’s room-can he really be said to be there? Even if you’re having a conversation with him at the time?
