Puzzle for Puppets Read online

  “Peter, stop being nasty about Eulalia. You don’t even know her.” She paused. “But this man, he also said he was a great friend of Mrs. Rose’s. He seemed to want to come up here. And … and, well, he seemed curious about whether I was going to see Eulalia. She did write me, matter of fact, a few weeks ago. She makes puppets or something crazy and she’d read about my going to Hollywood. It was a sweet letter all about how I used to put pollywogs in her drawers in Jamaica Plains when I was four. I wrote back, very cousinly, promising to look her up one day. But… Peter, why should that man be a friend of Eulalia’s and Mrs. Rose’s? And why was he so interested in our movements?”

  “I don’t know or care.” I added firmly: “And neither do you.”

  “But, darling, I do care.”

  “Why?”

  She paused and then said solemnly: “There was something about him, something about his voice. Peter, he had a horrid little lisp. He said: ‘Yeth’ and ‘Of courth’ and ‘Mithuth Rothe.’ He sounded sinister.”

  “Listen,” I said, “if you’re going into one of your clutching-hand moods, I won’t go to the goddam Turkish bath. I’ll just sit here and sneeze.”

  Iris looked stubborn. “But it was odd.”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  That’s what I said. Nonsense.

  In the words of the immortal Mrs. Rinehart’s immortal phrase: Had I but known …

  CHAPTER II

  The vestibule of the St. Anton Hotel was even more animated when I battled my way across it and through the swing door to the street. The street was animated, too. There’s an elusive something about San Francisco that no other city has. Maybe it’s the flower stalls blossoming on every street corner. Maybe it’s the crazy gradients that make roller-coasters out of the streetcars. Or maybe it’s just the air. But people in San Francisco doing the most humdrum things look like people at the peak of some enthralling adventure. Although I was sulking at being without Iris, the zest of it all infected me as I strode down the hill towards the Turkish bath. I bought a luscious gardenia and gave a fairly honest-looking boy a quarter to deliver it to my wife.

  I found the Turkish bath in the next block. It was painted a crisp white and black, but the Turkish bath itself was on the second floor and the stairs leading up to it had that bleak, neutral atmosphere which characterizes the approaches to Turkish baths and athletic clubs all over the country.

  A glass swing door let me into a small room almost entirely taken up by a wire cage with a slit window. Sitting inside the cage was a bony man with a green eyeshade who pushed a register to me and chanted:

  “Dollar—fifty—including—alcohol—rub—sunlamp—extra—check—your—valuables—here.”

  I signed the book, gave him the money, and bundled my wallet, my identification papers, and my watch into the brown envelope he tossed me. He yawned, licked the flap of the envelope, stuck it down, and slid it back to me together with an indelible pencil.

  “Sign—across—flap—of—envelope—countersign—when—you—come—out.”

  I signed. The clerk took the envelope and flicked it into one of the many pigeonholes behind him. He gestured with his thumb towards a green baize door and then slumped into a middle-aged reverie.

  The green baize door opened on to the social room, or whatever it’s called, of the Turkish bath. Waves of artificial heat rolled towards me. Green metal lockers stretched away in rows on the left. On the right, men in various stages of undress lolled around in wicker chairs, smoking, chatting, drinking, and reading dog-eared magazines. At a table, four solemn, executive-type gentlemen, stark naked, were playing bridge.

  A colored locker-boy with a bunch of keys led me down the aisles of lockers. Those already in use were locked. The vacant ones were left ajar. The boy, using some obscure method of selection of his own, picked me a locker, swung the door open, gave me a key with an elastic wristband attached, and wandered away.

  Several other men, servicemen and civilians, were undressing in that particular aisle. I paid them no attention as I threw the key down on my individual three-legged stool and started to get out of my uniform. It was disgracefully out of press after my long, crowded train trip and there was a triangular rip low on the left leg of the pants where I had caught them on a nail, I was glad I had brought my glamour uniform along for our birthday celebration that night.

  The colored boy came back with another customer in tow. As he passed me, he dropped a towel for me on my stool. I hung my uniform and my shirt on the hooks inside the locker, peeled off my socks and tossed my shorts in after them. I remembered cigarettes from my uniform pocket, slung the towel over my shoulder, slammed the door so that the automatic lock snapped into place, picked up the key from the stool and slipped its elastic around my wrist. Dodging through elbows and rumps, I weaved my way past the other undressing men and out, around the nudist bridge foursome, into the baths proper.

  I had not been in a Turkish bath since my days of civilian hangovers. It was a Friday evening and the warm, oozy-walled rooms were jammed with my fellow creatures. Although I had been submitted to an excess of male nakedness in the navy, the other bodies around me had at least been youthful. I had forgotten what unkind variations age can play on the theme of the masculine form. As I looked sourly around me, I reflected that nature must have a taste for paradox. So many shoulders that should have been broad were narrow, and so many hips that should have been narrow were broad. So many stomachs that should have been flat were bulging, and so many chests that should have been bulging were flat.

  Feeling rather smug about my own relatively orthodox proportions, I shared a shower with a stomach and followed a bunch of hips into the sweltering hot room, where I stretched myself and my cold out on a burning wooden deck chair. I relaxed, wondering how soon I could legitimately get back to Iris and the cupids in Room 624.

  The bodies around me were contentedly chatting and sweating and visiting each other, but to me they had no individuality. Men in bulk, without their clothes, lose all personal identity. As the heat seared its way through my pores, the elastic around my wrist became oppressive. I slipped the key off and put it down on the arm of my chair. A dark, lissom youth came over, perched himself on the foot support of my chair, and said hadn’t he seen me at the ballet. I said he hadn’t arid wasn’t likely to and, picking up my key, stalked off to the steam room.

  I stayed five minutes or so in its stifling, anonymous mist, feeling hemmed in by the swarming, sticky bodies of the other men around me. When I couldn’t stand it any more, I left, took a plunge in the ice-cold swimming pool and was ready for my rubdown.

  Before the war, I had always found a rubdown something of an ordeal, but I was pleased to discover that my naval training had toughened me. Now, as the heavyweight colored masseur bent and kneaded me all over the slab, my muscles took it in their stride. By the time he was through with me and I strolled back to the lounge, I felt fresher than paint, without a sneeze in my system.

  A clock on the wall above the naked bridge quartet showed that the whole business had taken me less than an hour. My mind full of Iris, I lit a cigarette and, without lingering in the creaky wicker chairs, returned to the lockers.

  A couple of other men were in my own aisle, putting on their clothes. I located my locker and, pulling the key off my wrist, inserted it in the lock. I turned but nothing happened.

  I wrestled with the lock for a few seconds and then decided I must have mistaken the locker. I tried the green cubicle to the right and then to the left, with no result. I was back struggling with the first lock, swearing under my breath, when the man nearest to me strolled over.

  “Havin’ trouble, bud?”

  I looked up. He was somewhere in his late thirties, with grizzled black hair, gloomy eyes, and the sardonic mouth of a philosopher with no illusions as to his fellow men’s intelligence. He was wearing nothing but a gaudily striped purple and white shirt, from below which protruded a pair of man-sized legs.

  “Y
eah,” I said. “Can’t get my locker open.”

  The somber black eyes watched me for a second. When I yanked the key from the reluctant lock, he held out his hand. I was flustered and mad enough to respond to his air of sour efficiency. When I passed him the key, he looked at it, looked at the locker, and then turned on me a gaze of melancholy resignation, as if I were a retarded little girl who couldn’t tie the bows on my own pigtails. He tossed the key back to me.

  “Key number 312. Locker number 168,” he said laconically. “You’re screwed up, bud.”

  I stared at the number on the key and then at the number on the locker. He was only too right. Feeling foolish, I said: “I’m sure this is the locker I put my clothes in. But—maybe you’re right. I’ll try locker 312.”

  Twisting my towel around my hips, I started down the other lines of cubicles, looking for the locker whose number matched the key. My neighbor gazed after me and then sauntered in pursuit, the tails of the purple and white shirt flopping around his massive thighs. I found number 312. My neighbor stood at my side, watching skeptically. It was only too plain that his low opinion of human nature in general had crystallized into a low opinion of me in particular.

  “Open it, bud,” he said. “You’ll find you’re just screwed up.”

  I put the key in the lock. The green metal door swung open. Inside the locker, dangling on the hooks, were a henna-brown suit, a grubby white shirt, a pair of athletic shorts, and a pair of broken-down brown brogues.

  “There!” the man in the shirt said with gloomy satisfaction. “You were just screwed up. See?”

  “I wasn’t screwed up,” I snapped. “These aren’t my clothes.”

  At that moment the colored locker-boy came by. I grabbed him.

  “This isn’t my locker. You’ve given me the wrong key.”

  The boy rolled his eyes in pained surprise. “No; suh. I ain’t never done give a party no wrong key, not since all the time I been here.”

  “Well, you’ve done it now.” I was becoming inflamed both against the boy and the man in the purple and white shirt who was still gazing at me in his own maddeningly wiseacre fashion. “Have you got a pass-key?” I asked the boy.

  He moistened full lips. “Why, yes, suh.”

  I gripped his arm. “Then come along and I’ll show you the locker I put my clothes in. You open it for me. I want to get out of here.”

  The three of us returned to the original locker. My neighbor strolled back to his own quarters, grabbed a pair of fancy lavender shorts, and came back.

  Staring at him belligerently, I said to the boy:“This one.”

  The boy opened the locker with his pass-key. My neighbor craned his neck.

  “Well …?” he asked.

  I had nothing to say because the locker was empty. Suddenly unsure of myself, I faltered: “Well, maybe it was one of the other lockers right about here. But I know it was this row.”

  The boy opened the two lockers on either side of the first one. Then he opened all the lockers in the row. He revealed civilian suits of various shapes and sizes, a marine sergeant’s uniform and an army captain’s. But there was no sign of my clothes.

  The man in the shirt thrust his legs into the shorts and buttoned them over a lean waist. “Well,” he said triumphantly, “you’re certainly screwed up now.”

  Suppressing an impulse to strangle him, I whipped round on the locker-boy.

  “I’m sure that first locker you opened is the one. If you gave me the right key in the beginning, then someone’s switched keys with me and run off with my uniform. Get the manager.”

  “Yes, suh.” The boy scurried away.

  While I fumed in silence, my neighbor stared into the empty interior of what had been my locker. He scratched his head.

  “Guess someone really did snitch your clothes, bud.”

  “Big of you to admit it,” I said tartly.

  “Uniform, you said. You in the army?”

  “Navy.”

  “That’s tough. Losing a uniform’s tough. You can get into trouble for that, can’t you?”

  “I probably won’t be shot at dawn.” I craned my neck for the manager. “But I’m not cheering about it. That uniform set me back eighty bucks.”

  “Tough.”

  “And what riles me, even if the boy did switch keys by mistake, it’s deliberate theft. No civilian, however drunk, could have walked out of here in my uniform instead of that brown suit without noticing it. Thank God, I’ve got another one back at the hotel.”

  “A uniform’s quite a thing to steal.” My gloomy friend had taken his own pants from his locker. They were made of a loud blue check tweed with startling red suspenders dangling from them. “A guy with the cops after him, for example. A slick idea to duck in here as a civilian and come out as a sailor. Then again”—he added with ominous emphasis—“enemy agents, maybe. I figure there’s plenty of uses an enemy agent could put an American navy uniform to.”

  Although that sounded on the melodramatic side, it added to my already exasperated uneasiness. Losing a uniform was bad enough, but if there was something more sinister behind it than simple theft, this was a hell of a time to have had it happen—with my promotion teetering in the balance.

  My neighbor had put on his pants and was buttoning them. “Figure this thing straight. Granted the boy gave you the right key, then the guy from 312 switched keys with you. When could that have happened?”

  I remembered that I had taken my key off for a few moments in the hot room and put it down on the arm of my chair. I thought of the dark boy who had come over to me, but I was pretty sure that what he’d been interested in had not been my key. Someone else in the hot room, however, might easily have exchanged keys without my noticing. I also recalled that I’d left the key on the stool while I undressed. Any passer-by could have taken it then. It was only too clear that an attempt to narrow things down would be hopeless.

  I said: “I guess almost anyone could have switched keys on me—anyone in the place.”

  “That’s bad.” My neighbor was knotting a formidable purple and white necktie over the purple and white shirt. Now that he was dressed, his jaunty clothes, warring with the cadaverous gloom of his face, made him look like a Salvation Army captain disguised as a racing tout. He held out a rough hand and, as if he felt our relationship was now serious enough to formalize, he said: “Call me Hatch.”

  “O.K., Hatch,” I said. “I’m Peter Duluth.”

  The manager came fussing up then with the locker-boy. I gave him a thoroughly bad-tempered account of what had happened. I had lost my towel at one stage of the proceedings and felt a little bizarre complaining to the management stark naked, but there was nothing else I could do. The manager was propitiating but chiefly concerned lest his other clients should be inconvenienced by any disturbance. He politely refused to accept my word that the uniform had been stolen until all the lockers had been searched. After a mild amount of confusion, the search took place.

  My uniform, of course, was not discovered.

  The manager murmured: “Most distressing. Most distressing, Lieutenant. The man who—er—took your uniform must obviously have left. What can I do? Nothing of this sort has ever happened here before.”

  “I don’t care what has or hasn’t happened before,” I said. “You’ve got to do something. I want to get out of here, and if you think I’m going to walk bare-ass up Stockton Street you’re out of your mind.”

  Hatch had been watching, his jaws moving over a piece of gum.

  “Figure this thing straight,” he said. “The guy who stole the Lieutenant’s uniform left his suit in 312. O.K. Search the suit. Maybe it’ll give you a lead. Figure this thing straight.”

  In spite of his exasperating habit of running a phrase into the ground, Hatch, I was beginning to realize, was on the beam. We all trooped back to locker 312. An exhaustive search of the henna suit and the underwear produced nothing. Even the maker’s label was missing from inside the jacket.
r />   Hatch’s jaws worked around the gum. “Well, at least it’s something for the Lieutenant to wear back to the hotel. He walks off with your uniform. You wear his suit. Better than nothing.”

  I was repelled by everything about that suit and the crummy white shirt, but there was nothing else for me. While the three men watched intently I scrambled into the clothes. The suit wasn’t so bad as a fit. The shoes were wearable, too.

  “Must have been a guy about the Lieutenant’s size,” ruminated Hatch. “Figure this straight.” He turned to the boy. “You don’t remember nothing about the guy you gave 312 to?”

  The boy shook his head.

  Reluctantly the manager said: “I’ve always tried not to associate this establishment with the police, but …”

  “The police.” Hatch’s voice broke in thick with scorn. “The police’d mess around, keep the Lieutenant at the station answering questions till daybreak, but would they bother about getting a uniform back? Not them.”

  Although I was not in a position to be that cynical about the San Francisco police authorities, Hatch as usual had a point. Nothing, let alone a uniform, was going to make me spend Iris’s birthday kicking my heels in a police station.

  “No,” I said. “The police are out definitely.”

  I’d been set back eighty bucks and I was tired of hanging around. Eventually, I would report the incident. O.K. I was ready to leave it at that.

  I was telling the manager as much when Hatch put his hand on my sleeve.

  “Not so fast, Lieutenant. This guy must have signed the register with the pay clerk when he came in. And he must have passed the pay clerk again as he went out. The pay clerk’s the guy. He may give us a lead. Figure this thing straight.”

  The thought of the pay clerk brought the unnerving realization that my wallet had been left with him. It had been humiliating enough to have lost my uniform in a Turkish bath, but if my identification papers were gone too … The very idea sent needles up my spine.

  “Let’s get to that pay clerk.”