Puzzle for Fiends Read online

  PATRICK QUENTIN

  PUZZLE FOR FIENDS

  Copyright © 1946 by Patrick Quentin

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Puzzle for Fiends

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Patrick Quentin

  Bibliography

  Prologue

  Behind us the bomber’s propellers were roaring. The Burbank Airfield stretched endlessly. Iris looked small and rather frightened. It was that horrible just-before-saying-good-bye moment.

  “Take care of yourself, baby,” I said, being jaunty. “Give my love to Tokyo.”

  “Peter, it’s crazy. I’d never have signed up if I’d known the Navy’d discharge you so soon. “My wife’s lips were unsteady. “It’s such a waste. Me going away—you staying home.”

  “It’s only three months, baby. And think of that Occupation Army panting to see its favorite Hollywood cookie in the flesh.”

  “I don’t want to be seen in the flesh except by you.”

  The studio had sent photographers to immortalize the occasion. Camera shutters clicked.

  Iris asked anxiously: “You’re sure you’ve got to drive straight back to San Diego?”

  “’Fraid so. Promised the boys I’d show up for a last fling. They want to see me as a civilian.”

  “You in your fancy palm beach suit and gent’s haberdashery. I still hardly believe it’s you. “Iris sneaked her hand into mine. “Do be careful driving, Peter. All that champagne we drank at the hotel. You know what champagne does to you.”

  “‘Don’t forget your rubbers and button up your overcoat,” I mocked her, trying to kid myself I didn’t feel forlorn. “Baby, you sound the way Mother used to sound.”

  “I wish your mother were still alive so there’d be someone sensible to watch out for you when I’m gone. You’re such a goon.” Iris clung to me. “Don’t have accidents, Peter. Don’t drink too much. Don’t whistle after sultry brunettes.”

  “Not even small ones?”

  “Not even small ones. Oh, Peter darling, miss me.”

  “Miss you, baby? Miss you?”

  The co-pilot came out of the plane. “Sorry, Mrs. Duluth, we’re set to take off.”

  I slipped my arms around my wife and kissed her. It was a long kiss. It had to last me ninety lonely days. She twisted away from me and hurried into the plane without looking back.

  I wasn’t going to turn the knife in the wound by sticking around any longer. I headed back through the wire fence to the airport building and found my way to my car. As I opened the door, I felt a hand on my arm.

  I turned to see one of the boys I’d noticed hanging around the plane, a rather unprepossessing boy with a thin, narrow face, close-set eyes and an untidy mane of black hair.

  “Going to San Diego, mister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gimme a ride?”

  The champagne had made me expansive. “Sure. Jump in.”

  As we drove away, I caught a glimpse of Iris’s plane zooming down the runway.

  The boy was scrutinizing me out of the corner of his eyes. “Say, ain’t you the husband of that movie star just went off? Iris Duluth?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He gave a low wolfish whistle. “Lucky guy.”

  “Lucky guy is right,” I said.

  Lucky guy!

  That’s what I thought…

  Chapter 1

  I was awake, but something was wrong. That was the first thought I had. This wasn’t the proper way to wake up. My ominous dreams had faded. The whirring of propellers was scarcely louder now than the murmur of a sea-shell in your ear. But nothing came to take the place of the dreams—nothing but a sense of warmth, a dull ache in my head and the knowledge that I could open my eyes if I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to open my eyes. The consciousness of my closed lids, screening me from whatever there was around me, was comforting. I was confusedly convinced that I had awakened like this—blankly—several times before. A few tenuous memories stirred, a memory of whiteness, of corridors, of the hostile smell of ether, of stretchers and a jogging ambulance. The mental image of the ambulance started the propellers roaring again. I lay passive waiting for them to whir themselves out.

  When they had droned down to a mosquito whine, I made a terrific effort of will. In my mind I managed to form the sentence.

  I am in a bed.

  The effort exhausted me. I lay still, receptive. There was sunlight. I could feel it, half see it, on my lids. There was a smell too. Not ether. A sweet, summer smell. The smell of roses.

  I was lying on my back. I knew that. I knew too that I was uncomfortable. I tried to roll over on my right side. I couldn’t. My right elbow seemed huge and unyielding as a boulder.

  I felt down my right forearm with the fingers of my left hand.

  I didn’t feel flesh. I felt something hard, cold, and rough. It was too difficult to try to understand. I forgot it and made an attempt to shift onto my left side. Once again I made no progress. This time it was my left leg that obstructed me. It was twice as big as a cow. I groped down to touch it. No flesh there either, just hardness, coldness, roughness.

  I was annoyed. Distinctly and out loud I said:

  “Twice as big as a cow.”

  A rustling sound came, very close to me—the sort of dry rustling, of someone fumbling through a box of candy at the movies. Its closeness, its vague implication of danger, made me open my eyes.

  I was staring straight at a woman, and she was staring back placidly. She sat very near my bed in a shimmering pool of sunlight. A bowl of pink roses stood on a table next to her. She had a large, beribboned box of chocolate candy on her knee. She was putting a piece in her mouth.

  “What’s twice as big as a cow, dear?” she asked. “Me?”

  I knew perfectly well that something was twice as big as a cow, but I was almost sure that it wasn’t she. And yet it might have been. I studied her gravely. She was big—a large comfortable woman with lovely skin and thick auburn hair piled on top of her head in a slapdash attempt at a fashionable upsweep. She wasn’t young. She must have been almost fifty. But she was still beautiful in a rich, overblown way—the way the pink roses would look just before their petals started to drop. She was wearing unrelieved mourning black that didn’t belong with her ripe, autumnal sensuality. My bemused and unpredictable thought processes decided that she was posing as a widow.

  Of course, I thought. Here is a woman posing as a widow.

  For a moment this deduction seemed to explain the entire situation to my complete satisfaction.

  Uneasily, however, I began to remember that she had asked me a question. I knew it was impolite not to answer questions. But I no longer had the slightest idea what the question was. Behind her, broad windows, draped in voluptuous cream brocade, opened onto an unknown, sunny garden. All I could
see of the room was light and luxurious as meringue. The woman was eating another chocolate. Had she offered me one? Yes, that was it, of course.

  “No thank you,” I said.

  “No thank you for what, dear?” she asked soothingly.

  “I don’t think I want any candy.”

  Her eyes, large and liquid brown, stared. “My darling boy, I don’t imagine you would—not with all that ether and the drugs and things inside you.” She stretched out a smooth, white hand and caressed my cheek. “How do you feel? Terrible?”

  “Terrible,” I said promptly.

  “Of course. But there’s nothing to worry about. You’ll be all right.” Her hand groped for a piece of candy and then hesitated. “Does watching me eat this turn your stomach? I’ll stop if you really want me to only it’s such divine candy. Selena bought it for you down at that little candy place that’s just opened on the Coast Boulevard. That’s so like Selena, isn’t it—thinking you’d want candy at a time like this.”

  The conversation had become too complicated for me. I just lay watching the woman, listening for the faint whir of the propellers, waiting warily for them to come back. I hadn’t any idea who the woman was. I was sure of that. But I liked looking at her, liked the precarious pile of glossy auburn hair and the full, satiny bosom which thrust so unashamedly out of the square-necked widow dress. I wanted to lay my head against it and go to sleep. Vaguely I started to wonder who she was.

  I thought of asking her. But wouldn’t that be rude? Disconnected fragments of what she had said were drifting in the haze of my thoughts. Ether, drugs. I considered those two words for a long time and finally decided upon a question that seemed both clever and subtle.

  “Ether,” I said, “drugs. What’s the matter with me?”

  The woman put the box of candy down by the roses and leaned towards me, taking my hand.

  “Don’t worry, dear. It’ll all come back soon.”

  I felt testy, frustrated. “But what...?”

  She sighed, a full, chesty sigh. “All right, dear. If you really want to know. Feel your head.”

  I put up my left hand. I felt bandages.

  “Bandages,” I said.

  “Good boy. “She smiled showing vivid teeth. “Now try your right arm.”

  I reached my left hand over and touched my right forearm. It was still the way it had been—hard, rough, cold. I turned my head to look. There was a sling and under the sling a cast.

  “A cast,” I said.

  “Go to the head of the class, darling.” She leaned across the bed and patted a hump that pushed up the grey and gold spread. “That’s a cast too. On your left leg.” She turned. Her face, grave and gentle, was close to mine, curved up on a white throat that was only a little thickened. She was wearing an exotic, unwidowish perfume. Its headiness and the warmth of her nearness confused me. “What’s a cast for?”

  I thought, and felt suddenly brilliant. “When you break something.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then I’ve broken something.” I was pleased with myself. I also felt fond of her for letting me prove how intelligent I was.

  “Yes, darling. You’ve broken your right arm and your left leg. And you’ve also been hit on that poor old head of yours. An accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “An automobile accident. You were out in the Buick by yourself. You smashed head on into a eucalyptus grove.” A smile played around the fresh lips. “Really, darling, you are a naughty boy. You know how dangerous it is to drive when you’ve been drinking.”

  I was struggling hard to keep abreast of her. An automobile accident. I had been in a car. I had run into a tree. I had broken my leg and my arm. Those were facts, the sort of things I should be able to check in my mind. Did I, perhaps, have some recollection, dim as the date on a worn dime, of a car lunging forward out of control?

  She was sitting very still now by the bowl of pink roses, watching me with patient curiosity.

  “Accidents and hospitals,” I said. “I’m not in a hospital, I...” I broke in on myself. “I was in a hospital. I remember I was in a hospital. But I’m not in a hospital now.”

  “No, dear. You were in the hospital for two weeks but you’ve been out two days now. Dr. Croft’s been keeping you under sedatives. I don’t quite know why, something to do with the hit on the head.”

  A fuzzy pattern was beginning to form. I had been in a hospital. Now I was out. Out? Where was out?

  I stared at the woman and beyond her at the rich, unfamiliar cream drapes screening the long, sunny windows. “Where am I now?” I asked.

  She leaned towards me again, her lips almost touching my cheek. Vague anxiety seemed to be rippling her monumental passivity. “Dearest, you know where you are. Look around.”

  Her face and the mass of hair blocked almost all of my view. But dutifully I looked at what I could see—an area of deeply piled corn-colored carpet, a fantastic vanity all white bows and perfume bottles, and, beyond the woman, another bed like mine, a large, voluptuous bed covered with a gleaming grey and gold striped spread.

  “It’s nice,” I said. “But I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

  “But, darling, really, you must know.”

  I felt rather apologetic because I could tell I was somehow worrying her. I said: “I’m sorry. I’m really trying. Where am I?”

  “You’re home,” she said.

  “Home?”

  “Home, dear. In your own bed in your own room in your own house in Lona Beach, South California.”

  My slight ability to keep a coherent thought track was weakening. I knew she said I was home. I also knew that home was a place you were meant to know and that I didn’t know this place. Something, I felt dimly, was a little unusual about all this. But the bed was warm and I liked the smell of roses. The propellers hadn’t come back either. I nestled my head back against the pillows and smiled. She was such a nice, pillowy woman. It was so pleasant having her there. If only she wouldn’t talk so much, this would be wonderful.

  “Darling, don’t smile like that. It’s worrying. It’s such a stupid smile—like a chimpanzee. “The anxiety was in her eyes now.” Dearest, please try and remember. I’m sure you can if you try.” She paused and added abruptly: “Who am I?”

  With a sinking sensation, I knew I was going to flunk that question too. I felt awkward. I wanted very much to know who she was, but I didn’t want her to think I was stupid, like a chimpanzee. Craftily, I thought, I said: “You’re not a nurse.”

  “Of course I’m not a nurse. “She made a rather agitated stab at her untidy back hair. “Who do I look like, dear?”

  Suddenly I knew. “A barmaid,” I said. “A glamorous English barmaid in a book.”

  For a second she seemed staggered. Then her whole face flushed from a delightful smile.

  “Dear, that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.” A far-away, dreamy look came into her eyes. “I serve a haunch of venison to a dark stranger in the back parlor of the tavern. He pinches my behind, turns out to be Charles the Second travelling incognito. I am installed in a small, discreet palace on the Thames.”

  The conversation was hopelessly running away from me.

  “I am the toast of the town, gorgeous negligées, young bucks, handpicked from the peerage, drink champagne from my slippers. But only the King can snap my garters.” She shook her head in sad return from fantasy. “No, dear, I’m not a barmaid.”

  “Then who are you?” I said, too muddled to try any longer to be subtle.

  “This is awfully disturbing, dear. I do hope Dr. Croft will be able to do something about it. After all, it’s not much to ask you to recognize your own mother.”

  “My mother.”

  “Of course. Who else could I be?” She looked slightly pained. “And a good mother I’ve been to you too—even if I do say it myself.”

  The knowledge that I was convalescent and still legitimately confused in the head cushioned me from the sh
ock. But it was still a shock to hear a perfectly unknown woman with auburn hair announce that she was my mother. Mothers were things you were supposed to recognize without having to be told. I thought about saying something rather stiff like: Absolutely absurd. You my mother—nonsense! But when I tried to cling on to the actual words to say them, they slid away from me like wet trout through your fingers. I felt weak again and my head was aching. I gave up trying to communicate with the woman and struggled with the problem in silence.

  Someone was my mother. I couldn’t get around that. If this woman wasn’t my mother, who was? That’s easy, I said to myself. My mother is... Then the sentence stuck. I hadn’t any idea who my mother was. The realization seemed infinitely pathetic. So pathetic that I was able to say it out loud.

  “I don’t know,” I said wistfully, “who my mother is.”

  The woman had been looking at the roses. She turned sharply.

  “Darling, do please try not to be too complicated. I’m supposed to be nursing you. I thought it would be nicer having your mother nurse you instead of one of those cold pillars of starch from the hospital. But I’m not very much of a nurse. I mean, I did a little in the last war and I’ve taken a Red Cross Refresher Course. But if you start having weird symptoms, I’ll have to get one of those professionals after all and she’ll keep giving you bed pans and plumping out your pillows and breathing down your neck.” She smiled and patted my hand. “You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  I didn’t know whether I would like it or not. I was lost now in self-pity. Her smooth, warm fingers had curled around my left hand again.

  “Darling, tell me. Just how much do you remember?”

  “I remember the hospital. I remember white…”

  “No, dear. I don’t mean about the hospital. I mean the real things—the things about you.” She turned her head, indicating the second bed beyond her. “Who sleeps in that bed?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Who’s Selena? Who’s Marny?” She must have seen the blank expression on my face because she didn’t wait for me to attempt an answer. She added quickly: “What’s your name?”