Tales From Gavagan's Bar (14 page)

             
They ran from top to bottom on the roll, and there was nothing the least Greeklike about the little human figures pictured in them. In fact, they looked like the conventionalized figures you see in Aztec picture writing, and they had feather headdresses like the Aztecs, too—a whole series of figures going through gestures.

             
"What is it supposed to be?" I asked.

             
"That," he said, "is partly a lesson in apportation. Here, put that apple you have on this pile of papers, use your pencil as a wand, and follow through the motions of this figure here."

             
I was willing. I like parlor tricks. "It won't blow up or anything, will it?" I asked.

             
"I think not," he said, without smiling. "It will merely be removed elsewhere."

             
So I began copying the motions of the figure, tapping the apple on top, then once on each side, then making a couple of circles around it with the pencil and so on. The drawing was so stylized that it was hard sometimes to tell what motion was desired. Mestor kept straightening me out, and telling me to do it more smoothly, and to have faith that it would work. I was beginning to get bored and tired in the arm when it happened.

             
The apple simply disappeared.

             
One second it was there, and the next it wasn't. I stood there goggling, with old Methuselah Mestor chuckling in the
background. "What did I tell you?" he said.

             
Just then I heard a step and turned around to see Polly Rixey coming down through the piles of newspapers. "My goodness," she said, "I've been all over the building after you. Roger, that Mr. Mandelstammer is here again, wanting you to help find him something about tool design. And there's a visitor for you, too, Mr. Mestor. He said he'd wait, but it wasn't library business and he couldn't talk to anybody else.

             
"He said to tell you it was Mr. Malek."

             
"Oh," said Mestor. "I'm afraid I've made a mistake." His voice was so queer that I looked at him, but he only said: "I guess we can't go any further today." He was rolling up the
Apodict
as I went upstairs.

             
Mandelstammer is one of my particular crosses. He was pushing his paunch against the desk and waiting for me, but on the desk itself was something that interested me a good deal more. It was an apple. I won't swear it was the same one that had disappeared from the pile of papers in the basement, because I hadn't carved my initials on it or anything, but it certainly looked the same. I got Mandelstammer straightened out with his books on tool design and was about to take the next request, when one of the page-girls touched my arm. "Do you know where Mr. Mestor is?" she said. "This gentleman's been waiting for him for quite a while."

             
She pointed to a man standing at the desk used by the reference librarian. He was even taller than Mestor, and thin, with frizzy white hair all round the edge of his head and very deep-set eyes. I went over to him and told him that I had been with Mr. Mestor in the basement when the message came, and that he should have been up right behind me, but I'd go down and look for him. The old boy pursed his lips and said: "No. You won't find him. He must have learned. Thank you." Then he put on his hat and went out.

             
Now that was the funny thing I started to tell you about. It was a funny thing to say, and it was perfectly true. We didn't find Mestor. It's almost a month ago, now, and nobody has seen him. He hasn't been home. He's disappeared
just as completely as my apple. And so has Polly Rixey. Old Mestor didn't have any relatives listed in the records. But she had a family out in the Middle West somewhere, so the head librarian wrote to them, describing the circumstances, and asking permission to put the Missing Persons Bureau on the case. But the family just answered that if Polly wanted to elope with a man old enough to be her father, that was her business, and to let the girl alone. So there hasn't really been anybody trying to find them. But I doubt if they'll get anywhere if they try.

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Brenner said: "Would you mind telling me what all this has to do with Atlantis?"

             
Keating faced him. "Don't you know? Probably not. I didn't either until about a week ago I was reading a translation of Plato's
Critias.
It contains a lot of very earl
y mythology, the kind in which the scientists are always trying to find some strain of fact. Well, there's a story in it that Poseidon once visited Atlantis and fell in love with a mortal maid named Clyto. She bore him ten sons, and one of them was named Mestor."

             
"Oh, yeah," said Brenner, with a rising inflection. "And I suppose you can do that apportation stunt he taught you."

             
"Oh, that," said Keating. "You know I had the most frightful headache in the afternoon afterward, and every time I really try to concentrate on it, I get another one. I thought I must be doing something wrong, and went back down there to look up the roll of the
Apodict,
but I couldn't find it either, although I almost turned the place upside down. But maybe I can make it work this time, though."

             
He took a pencil from his pocket and, with an air of frowning concentration, lightly tapped his glass of rum and water on the top and the two sides.

             
"No, you don't," said Mr. Cohan. "Magic you may do, but Father McConaghy says this television is witchcraft, and I will not have people trying it in Gavagan's
.

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As the door of the men's room opened, swinging back with a bang, Mr. Cohan started violently, looked over his shoulder, and almost missed Mr. Witherwax's glass with the Martini he was pouring. His expression might almost have been one of relief when he saw that it was little Doc Brenner, who strode importantly to the bar and demanded a Tom Collins.

             
"What's the matter, Mr. Cohan?" asked Witherwax. "Afraid the hinges were coming off? You ought to be ashamed of yourself for frightening an old friend that way, Doc."

             
Mr. Cohan, pouring, said: "It's not what's coming off but what's going on that has me counting me fingers, and that's a fact. Me to be short a whole bottle of bourbon in my inventory. Gavagan will never let me hear the end of it."

             
Mr. Willison said, "Mr. Cohan, you astound me; you even pain me deeply. You who have carried the troubles of so many others, to have difficulties of your own! Give me another Scotch and Soda."

             
"It's not my trouble," said Mr. Cohan, "though it does be making trouble for me. It's that Mr. Pearce. I never know when he is at all since it happened."

             
There was a little chorus of "Huh?" "Since what happened?" out of which rose Witherwax's voice: "I read a book once about a man that didn't know what time he was in and got all mixed up with a lot of Communists in England when he came out of a tin can."

             
"Yes," said young Mr. Keating from the library. "That would be Victor Rousseau's
Messiah of the Cylinder."

             
"Could you put a man in a can and bring him out later?" said Witherwax.

             
"No," said Doc Brenner, eating the cherry from his Collins. "Hold on a minute," said Mr. Cohan. "You're misunderstanding me. I—"

             
"Why not?" asked Willison, ignoring Mr. Cohan. "Don't they freeze frogs and—"

             
"Like the time my cousin Ludwig got locked in the freezer at Greenspan and Walker's," said Mr. Gross, "and ate up all that suet because—"

             
Doc Brenner said: "Mr. Cohan, I want to hear about this Mr. Pearce. And if you'll lend me your bung starter, I'll see that you're not interrupted before the end of it. What do you mean by that curious statement: 'You don't know
when
he is'?"

             
"Mr. Pearce," said Mr. Cohan, "is that young felly that comes in here mostly on Thursdays, the one with the little mustache and the big ears. And what I should have said is that I wish I knew
where
he is and
when's
he coming back from wherever that may be because he—"

             
Willison emitted a sound. "I remember. If he had t
en times as much brains as he has and cheated on the entrance examination, he might be able to get into a home for the feeble-minded."

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I would not be saying that [said Mr. Cohan]. It's bad for the trade to run down your customers, and Gavagan woul
dn't like it. But as long as you have put your tongue to it, I won't be denying what you say, neither, and what's more I will tell you that he's always driving around in one of these hot rods with some girl beside him, and she not the kind you'd want to be meeting your mother. Me brother Julius, that's on the force, says he'll be cutting somebody's throat one of these days just to prove he can do it, and that's a hard thing to say of a man, but it was the man that made it to be said.

             
Most of the time he's in that Italian place around the corner, where they have a juke box and will let him get as drunk as he pleases, but every now and then he has an unholy
row with his friends or they have one with him, and he comes to Gavagan's. Always talking about his troubles he is, as though honest liquor wasn't enough to get for his money, not that I mind helping a young felly along when he needs some advice, but I'm not the man to be spending my time telling anyone how to make the waitress at Rosenthal's.

             
Well, this night when it started, Mr. Pearce was in here getting the beginnings of a load on, and so was this Doctor Abaris. D'ye know him?—Theophrastus V. Abaris, that calls himself a magician though he ain't never been on the stage, and a doctor, though when Mrs. Moon had a seizure in here one night he could do nothing about it whatever.

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Witherwax interjected, "Say, whatever happened to that guy Murdoch, that this Abaris was going to put a curse on or something because he lost the dragon?"

             
Brenner and Gross shrugged, and the former said, "I don't know. He just stopped coming in, I
guess."

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That's right [continued Mr. Cohan], he just stopped. That's the way it is running a bar; sometimes they stop coming and you never know why till you read in the paper that they've taken a ride in a hearse or married a woman with a million d
ollars. It's a sad business, it is, and I'm looking forward to the day when Gavagan will let me retire. You're always losing your best friends.

             
Not that I would call this Doctor Abaris one of my best friends, with his hair hanging down to his collar and his pasty face, but he's always the gentleman and always stands there quietly drinking that wine that Gavagan imports for him special. Mr. Pearce was drinking—let's see now, it was Lonacoming whiskey, and talking about some change he was going to make in his hot rod, when all of a sudden there's a bat flying back and forth at the top of the room. Doctor Tobolka, when I asked him about it, said it had probably been asleep up there at the top of the pillars and just woke up, though how it got in in the first place I don't know.

             
Now, me, I don't care about bats one way or another, but
this Pearce, he got all excited and ran back there and grabbed the broom and begun chasing this way and that through the bar, trying to hit it. He was climbing up on chairs and even on one of the tables, yelling like a wild man, and I was just thinking I better cut down on his Lonacoming when Doctor Abaris says to him, "Take your time, young man, take your time!" Not real loud, but you couldn't miss hearing him.