Crompton Divided Page 8

  The driver took him to a sagging five-room tenement building. The sign outside of it read: rooms, chambre, zimmer, gwegwelfeisse, ulmuch’thun. It was obviously an interstellar rooming house of the lowest class.

  Within, seated at a three-legged cardtable that passed as a reception desk, sat an old, humpbacked crone with a cast in one eye and a raven on her shoulder.

  ‘A room, is it?’ she asked. ‘Lord, yes, you’re in luck, we just do happen to have a vacancy since they took poor Mr. Crank out of 12-B this morning, or rather shoveled him out, him being in an advanced state of putrescence, poor lamb.’

  ‘What did he die of?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘Tertiary envy, that’s what the intern said. Here is your key. Your room is on the top floor underneath the eaves, and you’ve got a nice view of the fishmeal factory.’

  Crompton unpacked, then went out for a look at his new district.

  Pigfat was certainly a most strange and incongruous sight after the rational wonders of Cetesphe proper. Pigfat was dark, dangerous, dank, and malodorous, and had been carefully planned that way by the Aaians some years ago when they had decided to import slum crime in order to see if there was anything amusing or significant in it. The programmatic origin of the squalor made it no less disgusting in Crompton’s eyes.

  He walked down innumberable wretched streets, past overflowing garbage cans and smoldering mattresses. Yellow-eyed cats watched him with an air of savage calculation. A thin sulfurous ground-mist clung to his legs, and a gritty wind tugged at his coattails. From boarded-up tenement windows came the sounds of children crying, couples coupling, dogs howling.

  From a nearby saloon he heard coarse shouts of mirth and drunken merriment. Crompton walked quickly past. Suddenly the batwing doors burst open and a man came through and hurried up to Crompton, seizing him familiarly by the arm.

  ‘Where are you going in such a hurry, Professor?’ the man asked in a friendly voice.

  Crompton favored him with a look that could have withered skunk cabbage at ten paces. ‘Sir, I do not believe we are acquainted.’

  ‘Not acquainted!’ the man said. ‘Mean to say you don’t remember good old Harry Stygmatazian who did a six-month stretch with you at Luna Penitentiary for aggravated bunco?’

  Harry Stygmatazian was a small, fat, balding man with wet spaniel eyes and a pug nose.

  ‘My name is not Professor,’ Crompton told him. ‘I have never been to Luna. And I have never seen you before.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ Stygmatazian said, falling into step beside Crompton. ‘You’re such a con artist, Professor, I’d actually think you didn’t know me if I didn’t know better.’

  ‘I don’t know you!’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll play it your way,’ Stygmatazian said. ‘We’ll pretend we just met.’

  Crompton walked, and Stygmatazian hurried along beside him. ‘I guess you just got in, huh, Professor? A lot of the boys are here already. It’s quite an opportunity, isn’t it?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘The Aaian special offer. All next month they are going to let us plunder their homes in the best parts of town, insult their women, beat up tourists, and generally crud the place up, and with no interference from anyone. They say that they want to experience moral outrage. But you know all about this.’

  ‘The Aaians have actually invited you here to rob them?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘They’ve even laid on special charter flights for criminals who qualify. You gotta hand it to the Aaians, they really get into the spirit of things.’

  ‘It is incomprehensible to me,’ Crompton said.

  ‘But profitable, huh, Professor?’

  ‘Stop calling me Professor!’

  Stygmatazian shook his head admiringly. ‘You’re one in a million, Professor, you never crack. Six months we shared a cell in Luna, and you never once during that time let on that you so much as knew my name. And here you are still keeping it up! That’s what I call control.’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Crompton shrieked, and turned back the way he had come. Behind him he could hear Stygmatazian explaining to a disinterested bystander, ‘That’s the Professor. He and I did a stretch together in Luna. You could learn a few things from a man like that.’

  15

  Stygmatazian must have spread his story far and wide, because Crompton found that there was considerable respectful curiosity about him throughout the Pigfat district. For the first time in his life, strangers came up and asked whether they could buy him a drink. Women made clear their sudden interest in him by rubbing themselves slowly up and down against his barstool. Crompton enjoyed all of this, but he also detested it, since he knew that it was not him they were interested in but some imaginary construct in their dull and doubtless diseased minds.

  Then one morning, Nature, which abhors static situations, threw in a catalyst to get things moving again. The catalyst came in the form of a very large, powerfully built, brutally handsome young man with blond hair and blue eyes who sat down opposite Crompton one morning while he was eating his customary oatmeal and melba toast.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind the intrusion, Professor,’ the big man said in a genial voice. ‘I heard you was in town and I am a longtime admirer of your coups and triumphs in the confidence racket. Is it true that you was the mastermind behind the plot to infiltrate the FBI with degenerate Albanian communist faggot lepers?’

  ‘It is a lie. Kindly go away and leave me alone,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Now that ain’t no way to talk to an admirer,’ the big man said. ‘It’s lucky for you that you are a hero of mine, because otherwise I would probably mash your head in. My name is Billy Berserker. Hurting people is my business, but I’m trying to get into a better-paying field. That’s where you come in.’

  Crompton opened his mouth to expostulate, then thought better of it as he observed the dancing red sparks in Berserker’s blue eyes.

  ‘What do you want of me?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s go to a place I know,’ Berserker said. ‘I’ll tell you all about it.’

  Later, in a sequestered booth in the back of the Al Capone Memorial Tavern in East Pigfat, Billy Berserker talked about himself. Berserker was a pseudonym he had adopted, a nom de crime. His real name was Edwin Gastenheimer, and he had been brought up in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Charles G. Gastenheimer, an internationally famous bank robber, and Elvira Gastenheimer, who operated the infamous Giggles Club in Hoboken. Young Edwin had sought to emulate his successful and upwardly-mobile parents. He served the usual apprenticeship in the stews of Jersey City, then went to Columbia University, where he was proclaimed Psychopathic Personality of the Year three times running. He was a natural as a smash-and-grab man or an enforcer; but the higher reaches of crime were outside his abilities. And so it went, the dull years of living and hurting people, the hopelessness of it all. There seemed to be nothing he could do to better himself. And then he heard of the new opportunities to be found on Aaia.

  ‘And that’s where you come in, Professor,’ Berserker said. ‘Fate has thrown us together like this. I need your help to change my life. I am now going to reveal my deepest ambition to you, the secret pulsating soul of a man. So please do not laugh at me or I might kill you in a characteristic moment of sudden unreasoning rage that has more than earned for me my sobriquet, Berserker.’

  ‘What is it that you want?’ Crompton asked.

  Berserker looked momentarily shy. In a low voice he said, ‘Professor, more than anything else in the world I want to be a confidence man and live by my wits.’

  Crompton thought about that. ‘And you believe that I can help you?’

  ‘I know you can! You will be my guru, and I will follow your advice and example. Men can rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things!’

  In his excitement Berserker pounded the table for emphasis, driving a spoon two inches deep into the hardened formica surface. The gesture was not lost on Crompt
on, who considered the hopeful, murderous, and probably insane man in front of him and decided that there was nothing to do but get into the situation and hope for the best.

  He took a deep breath and heard himself say, ‘My boy, there is no reason why you should not make a first-rate confidence man. You have a confident bearing already. That is very important in this sort of thing, as I am sure you can appreciate. Your speech is straightforward, and no man would think you had much guile. In brief, your air of bucolic ferocity is an excellent mask beneath which, we both know, hides a rapierlike incisiveness of intellect. Yes, my boy, there will be no trouble at all.’

  ‘Gee, that’s great, Professor,’ the giant said. ‘You’re talking just the way I thought you’d talk.’

  ‘How gratifying,’ Crompton said.

  ‘But now, what should I do specifically?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Crompton said, thinking desperately, ‘we do come down to the practicalities of the situation. We must find something for you to do. To do … Well, you must learn! You must learn all the little tricks of dress and address that go to make up the truly accomplished confidence man.’

  ‘That’s just what I need!’ Berserker said. ‘You see, I don’t really know how a confidence man acts, and I don’t want to look ridiculous by thinking I’m looking like one when I’m not. That would embarrass me, and when I’m embarrassed I get angry.’

  ‘Obviously you must study,’ Crompton said. ‘And how? By observing the movements and manners of a top confidence man who happens to be here on the planet Aaia.’

  ‘You mean you!’

  ‘No, not me. My con is drabness. That would never do for you. You need to copy a confidence man with flair, good appearance, daring – the very qualities that you yourself possess, though in vestigial form.’

  ‘Gosh, Professor, is there really such a man upon this planet?’

  ‘There is, and you must observe him. That means standing fairly near him and watching what he does at all times. You must keep on watching until you have learned all of his mannerisms. Thus can you master the style and address of a master confidence man.’

  ‘Who is this guy?’ Berserker demanded.

  ‘His name is Edgar Loomis,’ Crompton said. ‘I will write down his address for you.’

  16

  From Loomis’s Journal:

  Yesterday I attended the Cridrru Ball, one of the main events of the year. Everybody of any note in Cetesphe was there, including Elihu Rutinsky and several movie stars whose names I didn’t quite catch. I wanted to be seen there, of course, since it pays one to be seen, no matter what your line of work. But I had another motive as well. Miss Cissy Perturbsky was going to be there.

  The ball was held in the Axiomatic Room of the Hotel Geometry. I drove up in a cerise Gonolini I had borrowed for the occasion, wearing a body stocking made up entirely of silverfoil ruffles.

  But let me skip ahead to the good part – Cissy and I, alone together in one of the little bedrooms that adjoin the main ballroom. We had just slipped in on impulse; and now beneath a single dim spotlight, Cissy was smiling, peering at me with her pretty, lustful little cat’s face. We had met briefly last year at a party. Something had definitely passed between us at the time, but we had been taken up with other people and it had been inconvenient to follow up on what was, after all, an unspoken acknowledgement of a future possibility.

  But here she was at last, slim-hipped and pert-breasted, just as I remembered her, and with that uptilt to the eyes that gave her so exotic an aspect and raised in me fantasies of slave and master games. Her lips were parted. She moistened them and said, ‘So … You have not forgotten me?’ Her faint Hungarian accent drove me near distraction. I mastered myself and said coolly, ‘Sure, baby, how you been keeping?’ (A touch of callousness, of brutal indifference, it’s the only way to play the game.)

  Her eyes widened. Like a sleepwalker she came to me, and her arms clasped themselves around my neck.’ Her breasts pressed into my silverfoil ruffles, flattening them as she stretched herself on tiptoe to reach my downturned, sneering lips. It was a marvelous moment. And then somebody in the darkened interior of the bedroom sneezed.

  We broke apart. I turned on the lights and saw a large blond man sitting in a love seat in one corner. He had a notebook in his hand and was scrawling in it with a pencil stub.

  ‘There had better be some good explanation for this,’ I gritted ominously.

  The blond man stood up. I saw that he was very large indeed.

  ‘Just keep right on doing whatever you’re doing, bub,’ he said. ‘I’m studying you.’

  ‘Are you, indeed?’ I asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to be like you.’

  Cissy had exited at this point. Better luck next time! I conversed with Billy Berserker, as he was called, and learned that someone called the Professor had sent him to study me. A few words of description were enough. That damnable Crompton!

  ‘Of course you can study me,’ I told Berserker, when it became obvious that I had no choice in the matter. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been looking around for a disciple, someone to pass on my precious store of knowledge to.’

  ‘How lucky that we met!’

  ‘Isn’t it, though? I will contact you soon and tell you what our course of study is to be. Just write your address and phone number on this piece of paper. Then go home and prepare yourself for really hard and challenging work.’

  He shook his head: he wasn’t buying it ‘I’ll choose the times myself, and I’m beginning right now.’

  ‘I’m the teacher,’ I pointed out. ‘I know what’s best.’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t trust you yet.’

  ‘So what do you propose to do?’

  ‘I’m going to hang around you all the time and watch you, like the Professor said I should.’

  ‘My dear fellow! That would be quite impossible. For one thing, I would be unable to act in a characteristic manner – the uncertainty principle in human relations, if you see what I mean. And so there would be nothing for you to study.’

  Berserker jutted his jaw at me in an unpleasant manner and said, ‘Either you’ll act in a characteristic manner or I’ll beat the hell out of you.’

  ‘What good would that do? No confidence man is able to act with confidence after he’s been beaten up.’

  He stopped to consider that. I could almost feel the sluggish relays in his brain opening and closing, bringing him simplified message-units that he could barely comprehend. At last he said, ‘If you don’t act confidently like a confidence man, then I’ll kill you and find someone else to copy.’

  I forced out a jolly little chuckle. ‘But I’m the best,’ I reminded him. ‘In fact, I’m the only firstrate confidence man on this planet. You’d have to go copy some second-rater, which would make you third-rate at best.’

  ‘I really want to learn from you,’ he said. ‘I see that you got a lot of class.’

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ I said, giving him a playful punch on the arm. ‘We’ll do it my way and you’ll be a confidence man in no time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But as my first act of confidence I am going to do it my way by sticking to you and observing you all the time like the Professor said I should.’

  And that was his last word on the subject. A tough one indeed for yours truly! But never fear, I shall figure something out.

  17

  From Gilliam’s Secret Diary:

  Well, I’ve finally done it – walked out on Ed, even though he obviously didn’t want me to go. What a relief it was at first! But then Gwendkwifer started acting up, and there was nothing happening, and I started to think how nice it used to be with Ed every once in a while, so I told him I’d changed my mind, I wanted to come back, and the bastard told me to get lost!

  I know it’s all the influence of that bird-faced little pal of his. Ever since he’s come, Ed has been just a wild man. (Ed’s always been a bit wild anyhow, of course. He tells me that’s because
of his Sicilian ancestry on his mother’s side. I’m just a fool for these third-world types.)

  And Gwendkwifer is really bugging me. She keeps on saying that she misses Daddy, and that’s all right, but when she says she misses Daddy’s girlfriends, that’s really too much, and from my own daughter, too. I really don’t understand why I have to take this crap. Did I go to Radcliffe in order to hear that kind of jazz?

  Well, at least I’ve finally made up my mind to take Ed back in spite of the fact that he deserves nothing better than a stake through his heart for the rotten werewolf bastard that he is. But he is Gwen’s father, and he’s not much worse than any other man. But the problem is that Ed doesn’t realize that he wants me back. It’s all the fault of that runty little twerp who claims to be some sort of relative to Ed’s. I couldn’t get the story straight. I guess it’s complicated in these Sicilian clans. Maybe he’s cast a spell over Ed, or maybe Ed is trying to prove some stupid male thing. He’s always been sorta flippy, but this time he’s getting too far out.

  New entry:

  I’ve been making a few phone calls and keeping my eyes open and I see that Ed is hanging around all the time with this big blond guy I never saw before. Where does he fit in? Those two are thicker than thieves and it all seems very pally and perverted and sick. Could Ed be having a homo thing? I wouldn’t put it past him just to spite me. But I think something else is going on.

  New entry:

  That big blond guy also knows Crompton! So the three of them are up to something! But what could it be? I think I better find out what’s going on.

  18

  Crompton was quietly doing a crossword when there was a loud knock at the door. He opened it and Gilliam stormed in, demanding to know what he was trying to do to her husband.