The Convivial Codfish (2 page)

Jeremy Kelling was not so sanguine. His first act on returning to his Beacon Hill apartment was to fight off the ministrations of his faithful henchman Egbert, who took it for granted Mr. Jem must be sick because he’d come home from the luncheon sober and perturbed instead of sloshed and jolly. His second was to put in an emergency call to his recently acquired nephew-in-law, Max Bittersohn.

“M
AX,” HOWLED JEM, “I’VE
lost the Codfish.”

Even though he’d taken a long leap away from his own family tree, Max retained many of its traditional values. Among the Bittersohns, grown men didn’t go around losing codfish. Grown men worked, albeit they were entitled to be merry in their labor. Grown men improved their minds with serious study and their souls with deeds of noble self-sacrifice. Grown men looked after their wives and their kids, if they had any which Max didn’t as yet, and had certain responsibilities to the
ganze mishpoche,
even when their family connections had grown to include uncles-in-law like Jeremy Kelling.

Though he still hadn’t figured out why some of his new wife’s relatives were allowed to run loose, Max remembered his duty and delivered what he thought might possibly be a suitable reply.

“I knew a man who lost a stuffed muskellunge once.”

He’d flubbed it again. Jem was irate.

“Dash it, man, cease your persiflage. The Great Chain of the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish is a sacred relic. Like the grasshopper on the Faneuil Hall weathervane, or George Washington’s teeth,” he added to emphasize the gravity of the situation. “It disappeared some time after I’d put the Detested Object into the Suitable Receptacle.”

“That would be as reasonable a time as any, no doubt,” Max answered. “You don’t suppose it fell into the receptacle?”

“How the hell could it? The blasted chain was around my neck. There was no way it could have got there unless I fell in, too. Which I can assure you I did not. Damn it, I’m not drunk. Egbert can testify to that:”

Now it was getting ridiculous. “Put him on,” said Max.

Egbert, to their mutual amazement, was able to vouch for his employer’s unprecedented sobriety. “It’s very worrisome, Mr. Max. I’ve never seen him this way before. Except sometimes on the morning after,” he qualified, for Egbert was a truthful man when circumstances did not require him to be otherwise. “I think he might accurately be described as shaken to the core.”

“Good God! He can’t be that bad.”

“Who can’t?” Max’s wife, Sarah, had just come into the room.

“Your Uncle Jem. Egbert says he’s shaken to the core. Put Jem back on, Egbert. Come here,
angela mia.”

By holding the receiver a little way out from his ear and Sarah as close as possible to his chest, Max was able to include her in the conversation. There’d been too damned many years when he had no Sarah to hold and he was not about to miss an opportunity. Theoretically, of course, he now had every chance in the world. In fact, his crazy profession kept him away from her far too often.

Despite the necessary sacrifices, though, Max loved his work as a tracker-down of vanished valuables. The disappearance of any sacred relic, even a codfish, acted on him as a mayfly on a trout; and any codfish that could reduce Jeremy Kelling to a state of palpitating sobriety gave him a glorious excuse to satisfy his sense of family duty and indulge his second-favorite occupation at one swoop.

Sarah was interested, too. By calling on Max’s expertise and forcing her uncle to talk sense for once in his life, she managed to obtain for her husband a complete and perhaps even reasonably accurate account of the bizarre occurrence. Jem was all set to tell it again, but Max wasn’t about to listen.

“Okay, Jem, you’ve told me that. How much is the chain worth?”

“Worth? What do you mean worth? It’s priceless, damn it. As a historic relic—”

“Relic of a thousand binges,” snapped his niece. “Quit sputtering and tell Max what it’s made of.”

“Solid silver, of course.”

Goaded by Sarah, Jem managed a description of sorts. “I can show you photographs, if they’d help,” he finished after he’d dragged them floundering through a sea of incoherencies and profane interjections.

“Why in hell didn’t you say so?” growled Max, rubbing his hand up and down Sarah’s spine and thinking of all the things he’d rather be doing than standing here listening to an old rip blether on about a missing codfish. “Okay, Jem. I’ll drop over sometime soon and take a look.”

“How soon? Dash it, Max, this is urgent business.”

“Could we pinpoint the urgent? When’s your next meeting? April Fools’ Day?”

“Curse you,” roared Jem, “is nothing sacred to your disgusting generation? We meet on Valentine’s Day, February fourteenth. I have to skewer a pink satin heart on the end of a cavalry saber at full gallop and deposit it in the Suitable Receptacle. And for your information, whippersnapper, the Comrades do not celebrate the date to which you sneeringly alluded. Our April meeting’s on the twenty-seventh, Ulysses S. Grant’s birthday.”

“I’m not surprised,” Sarah answered. “Do simmer down, Uncle Jem. Max will think of something. He always does.”

“Guess what I’m thinking right now,” Max murmured into her soft hair.

“Sorry to disappoint you, darling,” she told him, “but Cousin Brooks will be here in about two minutes to put up the curtain rods.”

Max had forgotten about the curtain rods. Understandably, perhaps. He hated all those fiddling-around-the-house jobs Sarah’s first husband had been so good at. Alexander would have had them up by now. Damn it, was he never going to quit being jealous of a dead man?

“Why didn’t you remind me?” he growled. “I told you I’d do them.”

“So you did, last week and the week before. Cousin Brooks is going to do them this afternoon. That’s the difference between you and him. One of the less important differences.”

She reached up to tug at his hair. Max had wonderful hair, thick and wavy and so dark a brown it might almost have been black. Sarah’s own was just plain brown, though it did provide an agreeable frame for her squarish, rather pale, altogether delightful face. Her eyes were greenish hazel. His were either blue or gray, she’d never been able to decide which. Among the multiramose Kelling clan, it was generally conceded that Sarah and her new husband didn’t make a bad-looking couple.

Of course this Bittersohn fellow, whoever he might be, was far less handsome than the late Alexander Kelling; but so was everybody else. At least Max wasn’t twenty-four years older than Sarah. He did make pots of money with that detective agency of his. And it was art, not divorces. All things considered, almost everyone except Cousin Mabel was willing to agree Sarah might have done worse for herself.

They’d been married last June in the back yard at Ireson’s Landing. Sarah’s cousin Dolph had given the bride away because he’d have raised hell if she hadn’t let him. Max’s nephew Mike had been best man for the same excellent reason. Jed Lomax the caretaker and his crippled wife had been honored guests. Cousin Theonia had baked the wedding cake; Max’s sister Miriam had made the knishes. Sarah’s boardinghouse confederates Mariposa and Charles had stage-managed the affair. Nobody had got killed, or drunk beyond reasonable limits, or stung by a bee. Nobody had fought with anybody. Some people might have thought it dull, but Max and Sarah hadn’t.

They’d been honeymooning ever since by fits and starts as Max’s work allowed, camping out in the little apartment over the carriage house between trips until winter’s advent drove them back to town.

At the old Kelling brownstone on Beacon Hill they’d had literally no place to lay their heads. Sarah’d done too good a job filling it with boarders and hadn’t had the heart to put anyone out. Max was glad. It would have galled him to share her with a houseful of other people and her memories of her first marriage. He was far happier paying a preposterous monthly rent for a small apartment that had providentially fallen vacant in the house next door and dropping over for meals with Brooks, Theonia, and the paying guests once or twice a week.

They still weren’t settled in. Sarah was running her legs off shopping for furniture and trying to cope for the first time with the double demands of Christmas and Chanukah, not to mention her own adjustments to a second set of in-laws. Max had a new client clamoring for a stolen Van Dyke, and much unfinished business on his hands. Neither of them had leisure to worry about Jeremy Kelling’s silver codfish, and neither gave it more than a passing thought until Egbert turned up on their brand-new doormat the following evening.

Sarah let him in. “Egbert, what a nice surprise. What’s happened now?”

“It’s Mr. Jem, Mrs. Sarah. He’s fallen down the front hall stairway.”

Sarah stared at him. “You don’t mean the inside stairs? Egbert, he couldn’t have. Uncle Jem loathes going over those stairs.”

“The elevator got stuck on the top floor, Mrs. Sarah.”

That was possible, she knew. Jeremy and Egbert lived in a block of flats that had been carved out of an old town house. There was an elevator dating from 1905 or thereabout, roughly the size of a phone booth. It wouldn’t work unless both the inner and the outer door had been properly shut and latched by whoever had used it last.

When that happened, one either used the stairs or made a fuss. Jem’s usual procedure was to send Egbert after the elevator, or else bellow up the shaft until some other tenant was goaded into going out and fixing the doors. In desperate situations, however, such as when Egbert wasn’t around, nobody answered his calls, and he’d run out of gin, Jem had been known to stomp angrily down the one flight of stairs from his second-floor apartment. This, evidently, had been one of those times. Now Mr. Jem was over at Phillips House with a brand-new stainless steel ball where the joint of his left femur used to be. Egbert thought Mrs. Sarah and Mr. Max would want to know.

“Yes, of course,” Sarah told him. “Egbert, this is ghastly. Bad enough for Uncle Jem, of course, but think of those poor nurses who’ll have to put up with him. Have you any idea how it happened? Did you get to talk to him?”

“I got to listen, Mrs. Sarah. How it started was, he’d sent me out to do some Christmas shopping for him. Well, you know what the stores are like this time of year, so I was gone most of the afternoon. I got back to the house about five o’clock, dead beat, and what should I find when I opened the front door but Mr. Jem sprawled on the vestibule floor, yelling his head off. As soon as I realized he wasn’t able to stand up, I ran upstairs to call the ambulance and get him a tot of brandy. That dulled the pain and calmed him down enough so he could tell me what he was doing there. He said Fuzzley’s had phoned about a quarter to five and told him his whiskers were ready, but he’d have to hurry because they were closing in fifteen minutes. So he’d gone charging down the stairs like a damned old water buffalo. I beg your pardon, Mrs. Sarah, but—”

“Don’t apologize, Egbert. Naturally you’re upset. Sit down and catch your breath. Max, Egbert’s here. Bring him a drink, would you please? Uncle Jem’s had an accident.”

Oh, Christ! What now? Max put down the newspaper with which he’d just got himself settled in one of their brand-new easy chairs and fetched the whiskey. While Egbert sipped the restorative, Max shook his head in hopeless wonderment.

“What was the big rush about the whiskers?”

“Don’t ask me; Mr. Max. There was no earthly need for him to go rushing off half-cocked. I could perfectly well have picked them up for him in the morning, but you know Mr. Jem. He wanted those whiskers.”

“For the Tolbathy’s railroad party, I suppose,” said Sarah. “He told me he was going to dress up in Great-Uncle Nathan’s Prince Albert and get some dundreary whiskers and impersonate Jay Gould.”

“Are you sure Jay Gould had dundrearies?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. That’s how Uncle Jem visualized the role, anyway. He’s been in a dither about this party for weeks.”

“Why a railroad party?” Max was still determined, somehow, to make sense of all this.

“Because the Tolbathys have their own train, I suppose.”

“The hell they do!”

“Oh yes,” Egbert corroborated. “There’s a locomotive, and a parlor car with red plush settees and gilded mirrors, and a dining car and a caboose.”

“That’s nice. Any particular reason?”

“I think Tom inherited them,” said Sarah. “His people were in railroads back when there were railroads to be into. They have this enormous estate somewhere out in the western wilds, with tracks laid through the woods, and they’re planning a big Christmas bash on the train. They’re going to tootle along with a string ensemble playing Victor Herbert waltzes and a fountain spouting champagne and I don’t know what all. Everyone’s supposed to gather at North Station in Gay Nineties costume and take the B&M out to Concord or Lincoln or somewhere. From there they’ll be driven to the Tolbathys’ in an antique London bus.”

“My God! Jem will have apoplexy at missing a bash like that.”

“He was in a highly aggravated state of profanity when I left him,” said Egbert. “They were going to give him a sedative.”

“They’d never shut him up without one.” Sarah poured Egbert another shot of whiskey, for he was an old and beloved friend. “Here, drink this, then Max will walk you home. You don’t mind, do you darling? I’d go, too, but I have a million cards still to write. Oh dear, I do hope Uncle Jem will be out of the hospital for Christmas. Dolph and Mary will be sick if he doesn’t show up for their big family get-together. You know what a glorious time he and Dolph always have calling each other awful names. I’ll go over to see him tomorrow morning. You’d better get some extra rest. You’re going to need it before this is over.”

“Truer words were never spoken, Mrs. Sarah. By the way, Mr. Max, he asked me to—er—remind you about the Codfish.”

Max grinned. “In precisely those words?”

“Not precisely, Mr. Max.”

“Well, tell him I’m hot on the trail. One for the road?”

“Thank you, but I’d better be getting back to the flat. Some of Mr. Jem’s lady friends may be calling.”