The Illuminatus! Trilogy

I washed my face somewhat, tired old man watching me from the mirror, and ran a brush through my hair. Just time enough to think that retirement was only a few years away and to remember a certain hypodermic needle and a day in the Catskills with my first wife, Sandra, back when they at least had clean air up there… socks, shoes, tie, fedora… and you never stop mourning, as much as I loved Rebecca I never stopped mourning Sandra. Bombing and homicide. What a meshuganah world. Do you remember when you could at least drive in New York at three in the morning without traffic jams? Those days were gone; the trucks that were banned in the daytime were all making their deliveries now. Everybody was supposed to pretend the pollution went away before dawn. Papa used to say, "Saul, Saul, they did it to the Indians and now they're doing it to themselves. Goyische narrs." He left Russia to escape the pogrom of 1905, but I guess he saw a lot before he got out. He seemed like a cynical old man to me then, and I seem like a cynical old man to others now. Is there any pattern or sense in any of it?

The scene of the blast was one of those old office buildings with Gothic-and-gingerbread styling all over the lobby floor. In the dim light of the hour, it reminded me of the shadowy atmosphere of Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum. And a smell hit my nostrils as soon as I walked in.

A patrolman lounging inside the door snapped to attention when he recognized me. "Took out the seventeenth floor and part of the eighteenth," he said. "Also a pet shop here on the ground level. Some freak of dynamics. Nothing else is damaged down here, but every fish tank went. That's the smell."

Barney Muldoon, an old friend with the look and mannerisms of a Hollywood cop, appeared out of the shadows. A tough man, and nowhere as dumb as he liked to pretend, which was why he was head of the Bomb Squad.

"Your baby, Barney?" I asked casually.

"Looks that way. Nobody killed. The call went out to you because a clothier's dummy was burned on the eighteenth floor and the first car here thought it was a human body."

(Wait: George Dorn is screaming.…)

Saul's face showed no reaction to the answer-but poker players at the Fraternal Order of Police had long ago given up trying to read that inscrutable Talmudic countenance. As Barney Muldoon, I knew how I would feel if I had the chance to drop this case on another department and hurry home to a beautiful bride like Rebecca Goodman. I smiled down at Saul-his height would keep him from appointment to the Force now, but the rules were different when he was young-and I added quietly, "There might be something in it for you, though."

The fedora ducked as Saul took out his pipe and started to fill it. All he said was, "Oh?"

"Right now," I went on, "we're just notifying Missing Persons, but if what I'm afraid of is right, it'll end up on your desk after all."

He struck a match and started puffing. "Somebody missing at this hour… might be found among the living… in the morning," he said between drags. The match went out, and shadows moved where nobody stirred.

"And he might not, in this case," Muldoon said. "He's been gone three days now."

"An Irishman your size can't be any more subtle than an elephant," Saul said wearily. "Stop tantalizing me. What have you got?"

"The office that was hit," Muldoon explained, obviously happy to share the misery, "was a magazine called Confrontation. It's kind of left-of-center, so this was probably a right-wing job and not a left-wing one. But the interesting thing is that we couldn't reach the editor, Joseph Malik, at his home, and when we called one of the associate editors, what do you think he told us? Malik disappeared three days ago. His landlord confirms it. He's been trying to get hold of Malik himself because there's a no-pets rule there and the other tenants are complaining about his dogs. So, if a man drops out of sight and then his office gets bombed, I kind of think the matter might come to the attention of the Homicide Department eventually, don't you?"

Saul grunted. "Might and might not," he said. "I'm going home. I'll check with Missing Persons in the morning, to see what they've got."

The patrolman spoke up. "You know what bothers me most about this? The Egyptian mouth-breeders."

"The what?" Saul asked.

"That pet shop," the patrolman explained, pointing to the other end of the lobby. "I looked over the damage, and they had one of the best collections of rare tropical fish in New York City. Even Egyptian mouth-breeders." He noticed the expressions on the faces of the two detectives and added lamely, "If you don't collect fish, you wouldn't understand. But, believe me, an Egyptian mouth-breeder is pretty hard to get these days, and they're all dead in there."

"Mouth-breeder?" Muldoon asked incredulously.