The Man Who Lost the Sea (6 page)

He lay in a pressing welter of thoughts and scraps of thoughts. The one which came swirling to the top first had to do with the nature of the certificate in a modern culture. The thought wasn’t quite that lucid in him, of course. He saw the blasting of his painless existence by a piece of paper. He saw people breaking the law and being broken by it—a piece of paper for each. A piece of paper for everything you did or didn’t do, even the things which were truly and really done, just by changing the paper.

“Lulu,” she whispered, “If you should want to—you can even m-marry someone else. You’re free to do that, to hurt me that much if …” And then she began to cough. The wracking, all-too-familiar quality of the cough made him shift uneasily in his chair, and over his heart his new marriage license crackled gently.

Somewhere deep within him stirred the bitter, despairing thought that he was going to have to pick up an actress after all. Pick one up and marry her—or he would never be a bigamist. He put his knuckles slowly up to his forehead and closed his eyes. He stood like that for a long time while his lips tried futilely to shape words. Finally a half-sentence came. “Think about,” he said. He went to the door. “Think about it, I’ll … think about it.”

“Come back … soon,” she said. “It’s not—good here now, Lulu. I didn’t know what I—well, come back soon.” She did not accompany him to the door. He knew she was going to cough, or cry, or let go again in some even more distressing way. He got out quickly.

Lulu went upstairs to the pharmacy and said, “Joe, I don’t sleep so good.”

Joe said, “How long you want to sleep?”

“Just once, twelve hours. Like a cold shower couldn’t wake me up.”

“Can do, Lew. Take two of …”

“That’s the trouble, Joe. Pills choke me up. You got powder that don’t taste so bad?”

“I got better’n that. I got a liquid don’t taste at all. Only, Lew, don’t talk it around, right?”

“Me? Joe, I wouldn’t do that.”

“That’s good. That’s fine, Lew.”

An hour later Lulu said, “Drink your milk.”

Obediently, Shelly Fisher Llewellyn drank her milk. She was quite unhappy for a four-week bride. For the time being she was trying to escape from her unhappiness by doing everything she could think of that might please her husband. Lulu got up and stretched. “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to turn in,” he said. “Don’t come now if you don’t want to. Good night.”

“Oh,” she said, “I’ll come.”

He embraced her while she fell asleep. He said, “I’m going to hold you just like this all night long.”

Just after two in the morning he silently mounted the steps at Ivy’s place and let himself in with his key. She never had asked him for the key and never would. The chain lock wasn’t on either.

He was wearing gloves and sneakers. It was dark inside and he was as quiet as all the rest of it. He knew where it creaked and where it bumped. He drifted through the place and into the bedroom like a searching of wind.

She was peacefully in bed on her back, her lips slightly parted.

He couldn’t really see her, but he could sense her there, lying very, very still.

He got the second pillow,
his
pillow, from the bed, just the way he had thought about it. She wasn’t touching it with her cheek or left hand, and she didn’t stir when he lifted it away. Very carefully he tucked the end of the pillow under his chin, so that it hung down over the front of his chest like a bib. Then he fell across the bed with the pillow over her face and leaned his whole weight on it, with both hands pulling upwards on the bed rail. Far a couple of seconds it
was as if the woman and the bed and even the floor were fighting hack, but it passed quickly. He clung there, heavy on her, for a long time, till he was sure.

Panting, he rose and stood and held his breath and listened. The whole world was asleep.

It’s done, he said silently. She always had an answer in her black box, she always made me lose. But I fooled her. Now I’ve done the biggest one of all.

The box. There it was. He crossed to it and tried the lid, feeling sure it would be locked. To his surprise, it wasn’t.

He opened it. There was only one paper in it.

He began to tremble. If she’d had one paper she’d kept away from him, he told himself, it was a paper he didn’t want to see. He took it in the dark and carried it to the bathroom and tore it into fragments and flushed it away.

Then he left—not by the front door, but by the fire escape. He left the bedroom window open and the lower section of the fire escape lowered—swung down and held by a tilted ash can.

When he got back to his room he undressed quickly, silently, and climbed into bed. He was exalted, beside himself, a giant. Shelly said in the morning, very shyly, “Quite a man, aren’t you?”

The detective sergeant had an old face and brand new eyes. He came to Lulu’s window at the hospital and peered through the bars and said, “You’re Llewellyn?”

Lulu said: “That’s my name.”

“Where were you at last night?” the detective asked.

“Home; asleep.”

“Well, that’s all right. We checked already. You got an ex-wife who called herself Ivy Shoots?”

Whatever showed on Lulu’s face must have looked all right to the detective, for he paused for only an instant before he said: “Well, she’s dead.”

I killed her
, said Lulu. But to his own amazement he didn’t say it aloud. He wanted to, but somehow he couldn’t. He couldn’t say anything.

“Don’t take it so hard,” said the detective. “We all got to go some time. What I want to know is—you goin’ to plant her? The doctor, he didn’t know who to notify, so he called us. We had to go through her stuff, and that’s how we found your address. She didn’t have much, but she left it all to you.”

“Oh.”

“You better get right down there, and check up. Somebody broke in there last night. Only thing we can find is missing is her death certificate. The doc says he wrote one and stuck it in a lockbox beside the bed. But we found only the box.”

“Death certificate?” Lulu whispered.

“Yeah, there she lays stiff as a plank, dead of pneumonia. And somebody comes in and puts a pillow over her face and swipes the exit ticket. Must’ve took it in the dark, thinking it was worth something. Joke on him. But you better get down there and check.”

“I killed her,” said Llewellyn. “I did, I killed her.”

“Cut it out,” said the detective.

“Well. I did,” said Lulu.

‘There’s a nice legal duplicate piece of paper says you didn’t,” said the detective, and drove Lulu down to the apartment, where there were lots of people to tell him all the things he had to do. He did them and he died.

He’s still working at the hospital behind his little iron grating, and he takes the laundry out on Mondays and the cleaning on Tuesdays and picks them all up on Fridays, and he has the potatoes on by the time his missus gets home from work every day. But he’s dead all right.

Opportunity knocked again, this time right on the eyeball, making him blink.

Deeming had stopped at a crosswalk—he lived in one of the few parts of town where streets still crossed on the same level and was waiting for the light to change, when on the post by his head, right at eye level, a hand appeared. It wore a thin gold band and a watch. It was the watch that made him blink. He’d seen only one like it in his life before, a beautifully made little thing with slender carved-ruby numerals and, instead of hands, the ability to make its rubies glow one at a time for the hours, and a ruddy-amber pip of light float mysteriously at the right minute. It was geomagnetically powered and wouldn’t wear out or run down for a thousand years. It came from some place in the Crab Nebulae, where the smallest intelligent life form yet known to man did a brisk trade in precision engineering.

Deeming tore his gaze away from the watch and followed its wrist and arm down to its owner. Deeming was not especially fond of animals, but he categorized his women with a zoological code. They were chicks, fillies, bunnies, and dogs, in descending order of appeal.

This one was a goat.

She looked as if she had packed sixty years of living into thirty-five plus. She had half a bag on already, though it was still early in the evening, which accounted for her holding the pole up while she waited with him for the light to change. She had not noticed him, which was fine, and he acted just as abstracted as she was.

I’ll give it two hours, he thought, and then, as she sagged slightly and caught her balance too quickly and too much, as befits any drunk passing through dignity on the way to sloppiness, he made it ninety minutes. That watch is mine in ninety minutes. Bet?

The light changed and he strode out ahead of her. Just past the corner he stopped to look in a display window and see her reflection as she approached, stiff but listing a bit to port. He let her pass him and then to his delight saw her step into a cocktail bar. He went the other way, rounded the corner, entered a restaurant, and went straight back to the men’s room. He had it to himself for the moment, and a moment was all he needed. Off came the stiff, clipped moustache; out came the golden-brown contact lenses, so that now his eyes were blue. He combed the parting out of his flat black hair and set up waves. Half-inch inserts came out of his side pockets and were slipped into his heels, to change his gait and increase his already considerable height. He took off his jacket and turned it inside out, so that he was no longer drab and monochrome, as befitted Mr. Deeming, second assistant to the assistant desk man at the Rotoril Hotel, but sport-jacketed and cocky the way Jimmy the Flick ought to be. Jimmy the Flick always emerged and disappeared in men’s rooms, not only because of their privacy, but because that was the one place you could count on not to see one of those damned Angels, who didn’t eat, either.

Deeming was pleasantly certain, as he left the place, that no one had noticed him going in or Jimmy coming out. He went around the corner and into the cocktail joint.

Deeming sat on the edge of his bed, feeling glum. He tossed the watch up in the air and caught it.

It hadn’t been ninety minutes after all—it had taken him nearly two and a half hours. He hadn’t planned on her caring quite that much for the watch. She wouldn’t take it off for him to admire and wouldn’t agree that it was out of kilter and he could adjust it in just a second, so he had to use the old midnight-swim gimmick. He’d got her into the car all right, without her seeing the number plate, and he’d done a good clean job of parking by the river where it wouldn’t be noticed. It was hard to judge how drunk she was. When she talked about her husband—the watch was all that she had of her husband’s any more—she sobered up altogether too much, and it took a lot of oil and easy chatter to get her off the subject. But
anyway he’d got the clothes off her and at last the watch, down there by the river, and then had managed to scoop up the lot and sprint back to the car before she could bleat, “Oh, Jimmy—Jimmy, you can’t!” more than twice. He didn’t know how she’d get back to town and it didn’t worry him. He found six and a half in her pouch, and an I.D. card. He pocketed the money—it about covered the price of her drinks—and incinerated the rest of her stuff with the clothes. A good clean job, carrying the special virtue of being totally unlike anything he had ever done before; if there was anything in the cosmos that would bring a swarm of Angels down on a citizen, it was the habitual crime habitually performed. He should be proud.

He was, too, but he was also glum, and this irritated him. Both the glumness and the irritation were familiar feelings with him, and he could not for the life of him figure out why he always felt this way after a job. He had so much to be glad about. He was big and handsome and smart as an Angel—he might even say smarter; he’d been doing this for years now and they’d never come close to picking him up. Damn zombies. Some said they were robots. Some said supermen. People touched their cloaks for luck, or to help a sick child get better. They didn’t eat. They didn’t sleep. They carried no weapons. Just went around smiling and being helpful and reminding people to be kind to one another. There used to be police and soldiery, according to the books. Not any more. Not with the Angels popping up whenever they weren’t wanted by the people concerned, with their sanctimony and their bullet-proof hides.

Sure, Deeming thought, I’m smarter than an Angel. What’s an Angel anyway? Somebody with rules to abide by. (I’ve got a little more elbow room than that.) Somebody who is remarkable to begin with and makes himself more so with magic tricks and golden cloaks and all that jazz. (I’m an invisible clerk at a low-level fleabag, or a disappearing cockerel with a line like lightning and sticky fingers—whichever I want.)

He tossed the watch and caught it and looked at it and felt glum. He always felt glum when he succeeded, and he always succeeded. He never tried anything where he wouldn’t succeed.

Maybe that’s the trouble, he thought, falling back on the bed and
looking up at the ceiling. I got all this stuff and never use but a fraction of it.

Never thought of it like that before.

I break all the rules but I do it by playing safe. I play it safer than a civil servant buying trip insurance for a ride on a bus. I walk under a closed sky, he thought, like a bug under a rock. Course, I put the tight lid on myself, which is better than having a lid put on, even a large lid, by society or religion. But even so … my sky is closed. What I need, I need
reach
, that’s what.

Or maybe, he thought, sitting up to glower at the watch in his hand, maybe I need a pay-off that’s worth what brains and speed I put into it. How long have I been working respectably for peanuts and robbing carefully for—well, no more’n an occasional walnut?

Which reminds me, I better get this thing fenced out before that spaceman’s relict finds herself a fig leaf and somebody with a whistle to blow.

He got up, slowly shaking his head in disgust and wishing that one time—just one lousy time—he could make a touch and feel as good as he had a right to feel.

He put out a hand to the door and it knocked at him.