The Hellfire Club

Two loud thumps came from the other side of the door. Andrew Martindale walked in, tapping the face of his watch with a satisfied expression on his face. 'Thirty-three minutes, a world record. How are we doing?'

'As usual, I've been talking too much,' said Foil. He pulled up his sleeve to glance at his own wrist watch. 'We still have plenty of time if we don't dawdle on the way.'

Martindale went to a wing chair on the far side of the room, where he crossed his legs and composed himself.

'Where were we?' Foil asked.

'Stealing,' Nora said.

'We were stealing something?' said Martindale.

'Hugo Driver was stealing something.' Foil opened the red diary and turned pages. 'This was a few days before Lincoln Chancel's arrival, and all sorts of trunks and boxes, even furniture, had been delivered to Rapunzel and set up in the tower. Chancel insisted on his own bed, so it came on a truck and was carried up into the tower, and the old one went into the Main House basement. He had a ticker tape machine put in, so he could keep up with the stock market. A big carton of cigars arrived from Dunhill. A catering company installed a mahogany bar in one room and stocked it with bottles.'

Foil examined a page. 'Here we are, the day before Chancel's arrival. Like good outsiders, Creeley and Katherine Mannheim had been indulging in Top-and-Bottoms, and in the middle of dinner he had to leave the table to visit the bathroom. Who should he spot acting fishy in the lounge but good old D&D, Hugo Driver, who had left the dining room without anyone's noticing.

'I did not even see him at first, and I might not have seen him at all if he hadn't sucked in enough air to fill a balloon and followed that by kicking one of the legs of the sofa. When I looked toward the source of these noises, I observed KM's embroidered bag sliding down the back of the sofa and coming to rest on the seat with a distinct rattle. D&D, whom I had thought wrapped in his usual nervous gloom back at the table, emerged around the side of the sofa and slid something into the right pocket of his shabby hounds-tooth jacket. He twitched the flap over the pocket and tried to face me down. What a pathetic creature it is. I stopped moving and smiled at it and in a very quiet voice asked it what it was doing. I believe it all but fainted. I said that if it replaced the stolen object at once, I would keep silent. The nasty sneak bared its teeth and informed me that Miss Mannheim had requested that it bring her a pillbox from an inner compartment of the bag, and that had I not been fixated on Rick Favor, I would have overheard the exchange. I had observed KM whispering to D&D, and its dank desperate glee at having been so favored, but that had been all. It produced the proof of its innocence, a small silver pillbox. Soon after my return from the bathroom, another laborious dinner and its hymns to Nietzsche and Wagner happily in the past, I inserted myself into the scented region between 'Rick and KM and described what I had seen and said. KM brandished the pillbox, and 2 unsubtly implied I had imagined the theft. I implored her to look through the bag, and when she complied I saw, though 2 did not, an amused expression cross her features. 'Who steals my purse steals trash/ she said. Excited now, dear 2 prepared himself to assault D&-D, but was stayed by KM's saying that no, nothing was missing, certainly nothing of value, and he had after all produced the invaluable box, from which she then extracted a minute ivory pill and lodged it like a sweet beneath her pointed tongue.

'But two weeks later,' Foil said, 'while everyone else paid court to Lincoln Chancel, Driver slipped a pair of Georgina's silver sugar tongs into his pocket, and Creeley saw him do it. The first person he told was Merrick Favor, and Favor called him a degenerate and said that if he didn't stop slandering Hugo Driver, he'd punch him in the face.'

'Speaking of degenerates,' Andrew Martindale said from his distant chair, 'the lunatic who escaped from jail in Connecticut is on the loose in Springfield, what about that? Dick Dirt?'

'Dart,' Nora croaked, and cleared her throat. 'Dick Dart.'

'He was in a motel on the other side of town. When the police got there, all they found was a corpse cut to pieces in one of the rooms. No sign of Dart. The reporter said the body looked like an anatomy lesson.'

Nora's face felt hot.

Foil was watching her. 'Are you all right, Ms. Eliot?'

'You have to drive to Provincetown, and we're keeping you.'

'Let me worry about getting us to Cape Cod in time. Are you sure you're all right?'

'Yes. It's just…' She tried to invent a reasonable-sounding explanation for her distress. 'I live in Connecticut, in Westerholm, actually, and I knew some of Dick Dart's victims.'

Andrew Martindale looked sympathetic, Mark Foil concerned. 'How terrible for you. Did you ever meet this Dart person?'

'Briefly,' she said, and tried to smile.

'Would you like to break for a couple of minutes?'

'No, thank you. I'd like to hear the rest.'

Foil looked down again at the book open in his hands. 'Let's see if I can boil this down. Lincoln Chancel arrived on schedule and almost immediately turned Hugo Driver into a kind of servant, sending him on errands, generally exploiting him in every way. Driver seems to have gloried in the role, as if he expected to keep the job when the month was over. Poor Creeley was left out in the cold. I gather that Merrick Favor mentioned his accusations to one or two people, and after that both he and Katherine Mannheim were out of favor with their hostess. She more than Creeley, actually, because she quickly became absorbed with her 'unwriting,' whatever that meant, and even skipped a few dinners to work on it. This put her in such disfavor that everybody began to feel that it was only a matter of time before Georgina booted her out, as she'd been known to do when a guest seriously disappointed her.

'One night they all took part in a ceremony called 'the Ultimate,' which took place in an area called Monty's Glen. I don't know any more about it, except that it was boring. All Creeley said in his diary was 'the Ultimate, yawn, glad that's over.' But the next day all the excitement began. After lunch, Creeley was out walking through the gardens. Merrick Favor came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, and Creeley all but passed out. For a second, he thought Favor had boiled over and wanted to hit him, but instead he apologized to Creeley. Hugo Driver really was a thief, or so he strongly suspected. Then he explained himself.

'Favor had been trailing after Katherine Mannheim through the gardens, hoping to have a word alone with her, but every time she sat down for a moment, one of the other men popped through an opening in a hedge and sat down beside her. The last one had been Driver, and Favor had watched them say a few words to each other until Miss Mannheim got up and walked away through a gap in the hedges. Favor had started to go toward her when he saw Driver notice that she had left her bag lying half open on the bench, and he stopped to watch what would happen. Driver glanced around' - Foil imitated the quick movements of a man who wishes not to be observed , and moved closer to the bag. From where he was standing. Favor couldn't see Driver dip into the bag, and Driver was clever enough not to look at his hands. Favor was pretty sure what was going on, anyhow, and he was almost certain that he did see Driver slide some kind of object into his jacket pocket, so he came out of hiding and confronted the little weasel. Driver denied everything. He even said he'd had enough of these accusations and intended to complain to Georgina. Off he went. Favor took the bag to Miss Mannheim and told her what he'd seen. When she looked in the bag, she laughed and said, 'Who steals my trash steals trash.' That night she disappeared.'

'After Favor thought he saw Driver stealing something from her bag,' Nora said.

'Right. She didn't show up for dinner. Georgina was irritated and foul to everyone, even Lincoln Chancel. Late at night, Creeley went out for a walk and came across Chancel and Driver near Bill Tidy's cottage, and Chancel was extraordinarily rude to him. He told him to stop sneaking around. The next night, again no Katherine Mannheim, and after dinner, Georgina led the entire party to Gingerbread on the pretext of seeing whether Miss Mannheim was ill. Everybody could sense that unless they found Katherine Mannheim in a high fever and too weak to get out of bed, Georgina was going to throw her out on the spot. Instead, she was gone. She'd taken off sometime between the previous afternoon and that night. Georgina didn't even seem surprised, Creeley wrote. She behaved as though she expected to find an unlocked door and empty cottage. 'I am sorry to say,' she said, 'that Miss Mannheim appears to have jumped the wall.' And that was that. She had a number for one of Miss Mannheim's sisters and called her to ask her to remove the few things left behind in the bungalow, and the next day the sister arrived. She had no idea where Miss Mannheim could have gone. She wasn't in her apartment in New York, and she hadn't spoken to anyone