Nightmare Town

“I’m hunting for him. He slaughtered his secretary this afternoon and lit out for parts unknown.”

Kay exclaimed: “Not really!”

Chris said: “The hell he did!”

Guild nodded and drank more beer. “He only paused long enough to take a shot at the fellow his secretary was supposed to marry tomorrow.”

Chris and Kay looked at each other with delighted eyes.

Chris lay back in his chair. “Can you beat that? But, you know, I’m not nearly as surprised as I ought to be. The last time I saw him I thought there was something wrong there, though he always was a bit on the goofy side. Remember I said something to you about it, Kay? And it’s a cinch this magazine stuff he’s been doing lately is woozy. Even parts of his last book – No, I’m being smart-alecky now. I’ll stick to what I wrote about his book when it came out: in spite of occasional flaws his ‘departmentalization’ comes nearer to supplying an answer to Pontius Pilate’s question than anything ever offered by anybody else.”

“What kind of writing does he do?” Guild asked.

“This sort of thing.” Chris rose grunting, went to one of his bookcases, picked out a bulky black volume entitled, in large gold letters, Knowledge and Belief, opened it at random, and read:

“’Science is concerned with percepts. A percept is a defined, that is, a limited, difference. The scientific datum that white occurs means that white is the difference between a certain perceptual field and the rest of the perceiver. If you look at an unbroken expanse of white you perceive white because your perception of it is limited to your visual field: the surrounding, contrasting, extra-visual area of non-white gives you your percept of white. These are not scientific definitions. They cannot be. Science cannot define, cannot limit, itself. Definitions of science must be philosophical definitions. Science cannot know what it cannot know. Science cannot know there is anything it does not know. Science deals with percepts and not with non-percepts. Thus, Einstein’s theory of relativity – that the phenomena of nature will be the same, that is, not different, to two observers who move with any uniform velocity whatever relative to one another – is a philosophical, and not a scientific, hypothesis.

“’Philosophy, like science, cannot define, cannot limit, itself. Definitions of philosophy must be made from a viewpoint that will bear somewhat the same relation to philosophy that the philosophical viewpoint bears to science. These definitions may be -‘”

“That’ll be enough of that,” Guild said.

Chris shut the book with a bang. “That’s the kind of stuff he writes,” he said cheerfully and went back to his chair and beer.

“What do you know about him?” Guild asked. “I mean outside his writing. Don’t start that again. I want to know if he was only crazy with jealousy or has blown his top altogether -and how to catch up with him either way.”

“I haven’t seen him for six or seven months or maybe longer,” Chris said. “He always was a little cracked and unsociable as hell. Maybe just erratic, maybe worse than that.”

“What do you know about him?”

“What everybody knows,” Chris said depreciatively. “Born somewhere in Devonshire. Went to Oxford. Went native in India and came out with a book on economics – a pretty good book, but visionary. Married an actress named Hana Drix – or something like that – in Paris and lived with her there for three or four years and came out of it with his second book. I think they had a couple of children. After she divorced him he went to Africa and later, I believe, to South America. Anyway he did a lot of travelling and then settled down in Berlin long enough to write his Speculative Anthropology and to do some lecturing. I don’t know where he was during the war. He popped up over here a couple of years later with a two-volume piece of metaphysics called Consciousness Drifting. He’s been in America ever since – the last five or six years up in the mountains here doing that Knowledge and Belief.”

“How about relatives, friends?”

Chris shook his tousled head. “Maybe his publishers would know – Dale and Dale.”

“And as a critic you think -“

“I’m no critic,” Chris said. “I’m a reviewer.”

“Well, as whatever you are, you think his stuff is sane?” Chris moved his thick shoulders in a lazy shrug. “Parts of his books I know are damned fine. Other parts – maybe they’re over my head. Even that’s possible. But the magazine stuff he’s been doing lately – since Knowledge and Belief – I know is tripe and worse. The paper sent a kid up to get an interview out of him a couple of weeks ago – when everybody was making the fuss over that Russian anthropologist – and he came back with something awful. We wouldn’t have run it if it hadn’t been for the weight Wynant’s name carries and the kid’s oaths that he had written it exactly as it was given to him. I’d say it was likely enough his mind’s cracked up.”

“Thanks,” Guild said, and reached for his hat, but both the others began questioning him then, so they sat there and talked and smoked and drank beer until midnight was past.

In his hotel room Guild had his coat off when the telephone bell rang. He went to the telephone. “Hello… Yes… Yes…” He waited. “Yes?… Yes, Boyer… He showed up at Fremont’s and took a shot at him… No, no harm done except that he made a clean sneak… Yes, but we found his car… Where?… Yes, I know where it is… What time?… Yes, I see… Tomorrow? What time?… Fine. Suppose you pick me up here at my hotel… Right.”

He left the telephone, started to unbutton his vest, stopped, looked at the watch on his wrist, put his coat on again, picked up his hat, and went out.

At California Street he boarded an eastbound cable car and rode over the top of the hill and down it to Chinatown, leaving the car at Grant Avenue. Rain nearly as fine as mist was beginning to blow down from the north. Guild went out beyond the curb to avoid a noisy drunken group coming out of a Chinese restaurant, walked a block, and halted across the street from another restaurant. This was a red-brick building that tried to seem oriental by means of much gilding and coloured lighting, obviously pasted-on corbelled cornices and three-armed brackets marking its stories – some carrying posts above in the shape of half-pillars – and a tent-shaped terra-cotta roof surmounted by a mast bearing nine aluminised rings. There was a huge electric sign – MANCHU.

He stood looking at this gaudy building until he had a lit a cigarette. Then he went over to it. The girl in the cloakroom would not take his hat. “We close at one,” she said.

He looked at the people getting into an elevator, at her again. “They’re coming in.”

“That’s upstairs. Have you a card?”

He smiled. “Of course I have. I left it in my other suit.”

She looked severely blank.

He said, “Oh, all right, sister,” gave her a silver dollar, took his hat-check, and squeezed himself into the crowded elevator.

At the fourth floor he left the elevator with the others and went into a large, shabby, oblong room where, running out from a small stage, an oblong dance-floor was a peninsula among tables waited on by Chinese in dinner clothes. There were forty or fifty people in the place. Some of them were dancing to music furnished by a piano, a violin, and a French horn.

Guild was given a small table near a shuttered window. He ordered a sandwich and coffee.

The dance ended and a woman with a middle-aged harpy’s face and beautiful satin-skinned body sang a modified version of Christopher Colombo. There was another dance after that. Then Elsa Fremont came out to the centre of the dance-floor and sang Hollywood Papa. Her low-cut green gown set off the red of her hair and brought out the greenness of her narrowly lanceolate eyes. Guild smoked, sipped coffee, and watched her. When she was through he applauded with the others.

She came straight to his table, smiling, and said: “What are you doing here?” She sat down facing him.

He sat down again. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

“No?” Her smile was merry, her eyes sceptical.

“No,” he said, “but maybe I should have known it. A man named Lane, who lives near Wynant in Hell Bend, saw him coming in this place this evening.”

“That would be downstairs,” the girl said. “We don’t open up here till midnight.”

“Lane didn’t know about the murder till he got home late tonight. Then he phoned the district attorney and told him he’d seen Wynant and the D.A. phoned me. I thought I’d drop in just on the off-chance that I might pick up something.”

Frowning a little, she asked: “Well?”