Once Departed

happened to our civilization when a honest man was sneered at?

And maybe she was right about him. By modern criteria, he was a celebrity. He had it made. He earned more money than he knew what to do with. Could travel anywhere he wanted, or live anywhere he wished. He had made it.

Yeah?

He went back to the phone and rang the Dempsey phone number.

A maid answered. “Digame ?”

“For favor, senorita, deseo hablar con Senor Dempsey,” Quint told her.

“Un momento, por favor.”

Ferd Dempsey, his voice slurring, was on the line. “Hello, hello, hello. You must be selling something. Nobody I know’d be up this early.”

“Ferd,” Quint said. “This is Quint Jones.”

“Oh yeah, hi Quint. What’s the deal? Brother, it was rugged last night. A bunch of us were over the Hilton and guess who turned up? Remember that queer muscle man movie star, was here doing the lead in that show about Cortes and the Aztecs and all? Well, he’s back in town. Talmadge. Clark Talmadge. He’s going to do another movie with Clara Lucciola that wop star, with old Manny King directing. They were all there, and Bert Fix, the flack and Lonny Bait the photographer. Anyway, we started at the Hilton and then Manny said how about coming up to his place. He had some real Swiss absinthe. The real old stuff. So we took along a couple of bottles to last us till we got there. He’s got a hell of a big estate in Mirasierra. Big swimming pool and all. Christ did we laugh. We threw Clark in the pool and then we all stood around the edge and when he tried to get out, we’d give him a drink, but we wouldn’t let him out until he could prove he was too swacked to swim. It was a riot. Then about two o’clock in the morning, Marty decided what we needed was a weiner roast, but nobody had any weiners, so we all got back in the cars and…”

Quint listened for awhile, his face expressionless. He could have heard substantially the same report from Ferd Dempsey five days out of seven. Or from Marty, for that matter. Or from four out of five of his Madrid acquaintances.

He said, finally, when the other stopped for breath, “Listen, Ferd. What I wanted to ask you about. Professor Ferencsik is staying with you, right?”

The other’s voice went suddenly cautious. “The Professor? Oh, sure. Kind of keeps to himself, but the place is big enough, Lord knows.”

“Well, listen, I’d like to talk to him.”

There was a silence, then, “Damn it, Quint. He’s not giving out any interviews. He kind of wants to rest, or something. I don’t know what he came to Madrid for. Why’d’nt he go to some resort along the sea, or something? You can’t rest in Madrid. It’s always hopping.”

It’s not Madrid that’s always hopping, Quint protested inwardly, it’s the expatriate set, led by the Dempseys.

Quint said, “I’m not just a newspaperman, Ferd. This is a bit above the usual level.” He hated himself for trying to pull rank. In fact, he felt like a fool.

Ferd said, unhappily, “Gosh, Quint. There was a New York Times man around yesterday. The Professor wouldn’t even see him.”

Quint said, “I think you’ve got the wrong idea. I don’t want an interview. Tell him I was fascinated by what he said about World Government the other night, and wanted to talk to him about it.”

“Oh,” Ferd said dubiously.

“At least tell him, and call me back if he wouldn’t mind seeing me.” Quint hung up.

The return call, and invitation, came within fifteen minutes.

It was Marty who met him at the door of the penthouse. Marty looking distressed as Marty Dempsey always looked in the morning. Marty wearing a housecoat, bearing an enormous highball glass in her hand, and looking every year of her fifty odd years.

“Dahling,” she shrilled at him in her whisky tenor. “Whatever are you doing up and around at this time of day, you poor boy?”

“It’s practically noon.” He gave her a peck on the cheek. “I wanted to see Professor Ferencsik.”

“Oh, Uncle Nick. He’s an ogre. He won’t talk to anyone, dahling. It was all we could do to have him make an appearance at the party. And then he retired to his rooms and sulked before things hardly got going.”

“Ferd fixed it up for me,” Quint said easily. “What in the world’s Professor Ferencsik doing in Madrid, anyway? I’d expect him to wind up at UCLA, teaching. Or in Vienna, or Paris or someplace. Now that he’s left Hungary.”

Marty took a pull at her glass. “Oh, he came to see Ferd and me,” she said archly. “We’re old, old friends you know.” She frowned slightly, as though trying to remember something not especially important. “There was something else he wanted to do here, I don’t think I was listening very well. Have a quick one, Quint?”

He shook his head, “Recovering from last night,” he told her. “A hair of the dog doesn’t do me any good. I either have to take the whole dog, or nothing. And then I’ve started all over again.”

“Poor dahling,” she said vaguely, patting the side of his cheek. “I’ll take you to Uncle Nick. But don’t blame me if he throws you out.”

Ferd and Marty had done the Professor well. He had a small suite of his own. Room, bath and a sitting-room study. Possibly a bit on the garish side for a noted medical scientist whose clothes were a touch seedy and worn as though he couldn’t care less.

He shook hands hesitantly. “I recall you from the other night, young man,” he said. “You didn’t seem to have much to say at the time.”

Quint Jones liked the quality of the man’s handshake and also the quick penetrating manner he had of looking full into your face. It would be difficult to steer too far from the edge of truth with Professor Nicolas Ferencsik. Quint said, “I was listening rather than expressing my own ideas.”

“And you found my opinions of interest?”

“I found them all of interest,” Quint told him, guardedly. “But one of Marty’s cocktail parties was hardly the place to form views of my own.”

“Oh, you,” Marty giggled. “It was quite a soiree, wasn’t it?”

The Professor said to her, “Martha, my dear, why don’t you leave Mr. Jones and me and let us get to serious discussion? Perhaps we’ll join you later.”

She fluttered archly, as she went, “Now don’t you boys say anything my ears shouldn’t hear.”

They both looked after her, Quint thinking, what could it possibly be that Marty’s ears haven’t heard by this time in life ?

The professor said absently, “When I first met Martha, I thought of her as a child, though I can be only a few years her senior. I am afraid even then that it was difficult for her to take the world seriously.”

Quint wanted an opening. He said, making his own voice go musing, “I wonder if she and Ferd aren’t doing what a good many of the world’s population seems to be. That is, avoiding thinking of the problems that confront us all.”

The feisty little Hungarian scientist shot him a quick piercing look. “I have long since come to that conclusion, sir. Won’t you have a chair? Take that one there, I can speak for it’s comfort. It is so also in my own country. In Budapest, even in intellectual circles, it is all but bad manners to discuss the dangers of nuclear war and the almost certainty of complete destruction of the race if such conflict ever develops.”

They both took chairs, and Quint listened to the other as though with fascinated attention.

Ferencsik went on, in his voice an element of passion. “But when I left Hungary and traveled to the West, I was more shocked still. If one is invited to dinner in London and brings up such subjects as the continuing development of international missiles and ever larger H-bombs, it is considered such a faux pas as almost to have your hostess order you from her home. I am gratified, Mr. Jones, to have a man of your capabilities express interest in my beliefs in this field.”

So the old boy knew of Quint’s work as a columnist He was going to have to make this good, to get past the Hungarian’s defenses. If the man was leery of newspapermen, he’d be guarded against Quint. A bit of preliminary discussion was in order.