grandfather, but he remembered the ink. Could one still purchase red ink for a fountain pen?
Gurney read the note with a deepening frown, then read it again. There was neither a salutation nor a signature.
Gurney uttered a noncommittal grunt and looked inquiringly at Mellery, who had been staring at him intently as he read. “Do you have any idea who sent you this?”
“None whatever.”
“Any suspicions?”
“None.”
“Hmm. Did you play the game?”
“The game?” Clearly Mellery had not thought of it that way. “If what you mean is, did I think of a number, yes, I did. Under the circumstances it would have been difficult not to.”
“So you thought of a number?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
Mellery cleared his throat. “The number I thought of was six-five-eight.” He repeated it, articulating the digits-
“The number six fifty-eight has no particular significance to me. It just happened to be the first number that came to mind. I’ve racked my brains, trying to remember anything I might associate it with, any reason I might have picked it, but I couldn’t come up with a single thing.
Gurney gazed at him with growing interest. “And in the smaller envelope…?”
Mellery handed him the other envelope that was enclosed with the note and watched closely as he opened it, extracted a piece of notepaper half the size of the first, and read the message written in the same delicate style, the same red ink:
After reading the note again, Gurney asked Mellery whether he had responded to it.
“Yes. I sent a check for the amount mentioned.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a lot of money. Why did you decide to send it?”
“Because it was driving me crazy. The number-how could he know?”
“Has the check cleared?”
“No, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t,” said Mellery. “I’ve been monitoring my account daily. That’s why I sent a check instead of cash. I thought it might be a good idea to know something about this Arybdis person-at least know where he deposited his checks. I mean, the whole tone of the thing was so unsettling.”
“What exactly unsettled you?”
“The number, obviously!” cried Mellery. “How could he possibly know such a thing?”
“Good question,” said Gurney. “Why do you say ‘he’?”
“What? Oh, I see what you mean. I just thought… I don’t know, it’s just what came to mind. I suppose ‘X. Arybdis’ sounded masculine for some reason.”
“X. Arybdis. Odd sort of name,” said Gurney. “Does it mean anything to you? Ring any bell at all?”
“None.”
The name meant nothing to Gurney, but it did not seem completely unfamiliar, either. Whatever it was, it was buried in a subbasement mental filing cabinet.
“After you sent the check, were you contacted again?”
“Oh, yes!” said Mellery, once more reaching into his briefcase and pulling out two other sheets of paper. “I received this one about ten days ago. And this one the day after I sent you my e-mail asking if we could get together.” He thrust them toward Gurney like a little boy showing his father two new bruises.
They appeared to be written by the same meticulous hand with the same pen as the pair of notes in the earlier communication, but the tone had changed.
The first was composed of eight short lines:
The eight lines of the second were similarly cryptic and menacing:
Over the next ten minutes, during which he read each note half a dozen times, Gurney’s expression grew darker and Mellery’s angst more obvious.
“What do you think?” Mellery finally asked.
“You have a clever enemy.”
“I mean, what do you think about the number business?”
“What about it?”
“How could he know what number would come to my mind?”
“Offhand, I would say he couldn’t know.”
“He couldn’t know, but he did! I mean, that’s the whole thing isn’t? He couldn’t know, but he did! No one could possibly know that the number six fifty-eight would be the number I would think of, but not only did he know it-he knew it at least two days before I did, when he put the damn letter in the mail!”
Mellery suddenly heaved himself up from his chair, pacing across the grass toward the house, then back again, running his hands through his hair.
“There’s no scientific way to do that. There’s no conceivable way of doing it. Don’t you see how crazy this is?”
Gurney was resting his chin thoughtfully on the tips of his fingers. “There’s a simple philosophical principle that I find one hundred percent reliable.
