The Old Man and Mr. Smith Read online

  ‘And gradually the seat of the gods rose into zones of mist and rainbows, both physically and in the imagination. Symbolism reared its muddled head, and we were off into the era of the smothering of primal truths in the opaque sauce of mumbo-jumbo. The simple melody was subjected to a glut of orchestrators,’ said Mr Smith.

  The Old Man was moved. ‘How can you speak with such emotion about things which no longer concern you?’ he asked.

  ‘Must I lose my interest in your Heaven just because you kicked me out? Remember, criminals haunt the scene of their crimes, children revisit their schools when grown up. I have certain interests as a one-time angel – and then, Hell has changed much less than Heaven over the ages. It is not a place which encourages change, whereas you have had to adapt to every new moral perception, every whiff of theological fashion.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t agree.’

  ‘In my day, you insisted on the irksome idea of perfection as our guiding principle. In the nature of this, perfection is the antithesis of personality: we were all identical, and perfect. No wonder I was subject to twinges of revolt, Gabriel too, and probably even the others. It was life in a hall of mirrors – wherever you looked, you saw yourself. Yes, I admit it: when you pushed me out, I felt an immense sentiment of relief even as I fell to an uncertain eternity. I am myself, and alone, I thought, as the air around me became warmer and more agitated. I have escaped! It was only later that I grasped at the idea of bitter resentment, which I nurtured as one nurtures a plant, in case we ever met again. But now that the reunion is a reality, I find it more interesting to tell the truth. Evil often bores me, for evident reasons. Virtue also is dull, but there is nothing in all of your Creation as sterile, as lifeless, as overwhelmingly negative as perfection. Dare to contradict me!’

  ‘No,’ said the Old Man reasonably, but with a trace of sadness. ‘I agree with far too much of what you say for comfort. Perfection is one of those concepts that looks so foolproof in theory, until practice turns it into a contagious yawn. We soon gave it up.’

  ‘Have you ever given it up – entirely?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. It perhaps still exists as an ambition in some particularly subservient minds, those who are so saintly they think that boredom is merely an extended pause before an eternal truth is uttered, and who spend their lives waiting, with sickly little smiles of imminent omniscience on their lips. But to most of us – even to the angels, who are so emancipated I hardly ever see them these days – it is recognized that insistence on total good and total evil are archaic concepts. I don’t like to speak of myself, simply because I can see you with greater clarity than I can lavish on myself, and without seeking to flatter you, or indeed to insult you, I must tell you from our brief re-acquaintance that you are far too intelligent to be entirely evil.’

  A pulse of irony seemed to spread over Mr Smith’s craggy features, like mottled sunlight over water. ‘I was once an angel,’ he said, and in the depths of his black eyes there was a flicker of tenderness. Then his features hardened again. Warmth was expelled. ‘The cases are legion of great figures in villainy throughout history who had received their education from priests. Stalin, for instance.’

  ‘Who?’ asked the Old Man.

  ‘Never mind. It was merely an example of a seminarist who became dictator of a land dedicated to atheism.’

  ‘Ah, Russia.’

  ‘Not Russia. The Soviet Union.’

  The Old Man frowned as he tried to work this out, while Mr Smith reflected that to know everything is not necessarily to be very alert in selecting items from the vast inventory at one’s disposal.

  ‘In any case,’ Mr Smith went on, when he estimated that the Old Man had had enough time to bring a little order to the celestial computer lodged in his mind, ‘we will have plenty of opportunities for further ethical meanderings in all the prisons in which we are destined to find one another while here on Earth. My growing concern is how to escape from this one.’

  ‘Use your powers, but for my sake, don’t wander too far away. I will feel lost if I lose you now.’

  ‘I only want to see if my powers still work.’

  ‘Of course they work. Have faith. You know how to do that. And then, they must have worked for us to meet with pin-point accuracy on a sidewalk in Washington after millennia of absence.’

  ‘They work all right, but for how long? I have this worrying sentiment of their being rationed in some way.’

  ‘I know what you mean. There suddenly seems a limit to one’s possibilities, although this may well be an illusion brought about by longevity. I don’t think it’s true.’

  ‘I shall feel emasculated if one day I am completely without tricks.’

  The Old Man expressed a momentary irritation. ‘I wish you wouldn’t refer to them as tricks. They are miracles.’

  Mr Smith grinned one of his ghastly grins. ‘Yours may be miracles,’ he said. ‘Mine are tricks.’

  There was a silence.

  Chief Eckhardt, established in a soundproof room in the basement together with members of his staff, looked up. His face expressed all the puzzlement of an average policeman confronted by the obscure. Cell No. 6 was, of course, bugged, and they had been listening to the conversation of the two old men, their brows knitted like those of schoolchildren in an exam, their jaws rippling with determination in its purest and most meaningless form.

  ‘What do you make of it, Chief?’ Kaszpricki ventured.

  ‘Not much,’ Eckhardt replied, ‘and I wouldn’t trust the guy claimed he knew what the hell they was talkin’ about. Lookit, O’Haggerty, go up to the cell and see what gives. I don’t like this silence, and all this talk of tricks and gettin’ out.’

  O’Haggerty left the listening room and went up to cell No. 6. He noticed at once that the Old Man was alone.

  ‘Hey, where’s your friend?’ he asked dramatically.

  The Old Man appeared surprised to find himself alone. ‘Oh, he must have stepped out for a moment.’

  ‘The door was triple locked!’

  ‘I have no other contribution to make.’

  This Eckhardt and the other eavesdroppers understood.

  ‘Kaszpricki, go up and see – no, on second thoughts, I’ll go up myself. Schmatterman, keep that tape going. I want all of this on the record. The rest of you, come on with me.’

  When Eckhardt reached cell No. 6, he found Patrolman O’Haggerty inside, with both old men. ‘What’s been going on round here?’ he asked gruffly.

  ‘When I got up here, this old guy was alone in the cell,’ panted O’Haggerty.

  ‘That’s what I understood,’ said Eckhardt, who then looked at Mr Smith. ‘Where was you?’

  ‘I never left the cell. I was in here all the time.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ cried O’Haggerty. ‘He got back just seconds before you got here, Chief!’

  ‘What do you mean, got back, O’Haggerty? He entered the cell by the door?’

  ‘No. No. I guess he materialized.’

  ‘Materialized?’ Eckhardt said slowly, as though he had yet another nutcase on his hands. ‘And what are you doing inside the cell?’

  ‘I got in to see if I could get out,’ O’Haggerty said.

  ‘And can you?’

  ‘No, I can’t. So I don’t see how Smith did it.’

  ‘Maybe Smith didn’t do it. Maybe Smith was in here all the time?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Smith.

  ‘We don’t need no help from you. Do me a favour, just button it,’ replied Eckhardt.

  ‘I can’t countenance all these lies,’ said the Old Man.

  Mr Smith tut-tut-tutted.

  ‘I mean it,’ the Old Man went on. ‘As I told your delegate, Mr Smith stepped out for a moment.’

  ‘He couldn’t have,’ said Eckhardt sternly. ‘These locks are the latest state-of-the-art pickproof types from the Safe as Houses people. There’s no way you can get out without dynamite.’

  The Old Man smiled. He felt the time had come. ‘You want me to show you?’

  ‘OK, show me,’ Eckhardt drawled slowly, allowing his right hand to find the revolver in his open holster.

  ‘Very well, but before I go, let me thank you for your charming hospitality.’

  An engaging smile still on his lips, he vanished into thin air. A split second later, Eckhardt shot twice into the space where the Old Man had been.

  The shock of this was instantly superseded by a cry from Mr Smith as eerie as that of an aviary of winter birds, a desolate, discordant shriek.

  ‘Shoot, will you! Think you can better our tricks with tricks of your own. Do your worst! I’m off! Try to stop me!’ And Mr Smith laughed in their faces, cruelly, disdainfully.

  Eckhardt shot a third time. Mr Smith’s laughter turned to something between physical pain and surprise, but he disappeared before any of them could draw any conclusions.

  Eckhardt was instantly apologetic. ‘I tried to get him in the foot.’

  ‘Let me outa here,’ implored O’Haggerty.

  On the pavement, Mr Smith materialized beside the Old Man, both bubbling with relief and pleasure at their double success. As they walked away, Mr Smith loitered by a trashcan, to the momentary displeasure of the Old Man. Fumbling among the refuse, he withdrew a soiled newspaper and placed it in his pocket. Then they walked away.

  Inside the police station, Eckhardt’s mind had cleared even if his ears were still ringing with the impact of the shots.

  ‘OK, Schmatterman. You can stop the tapes,’ he called up to the ceiling. ‘Pack them, mark them, and file them. And meantimes, guard them with your life.’

  ‘What you going to do, Chief?’ asked Kaszpricki, every bit the righthand man, boosting his boss’s confidence by forcing him into powerful decis
ions.

  ‘This thing is too big for us,’ muttered Eckhardt, but so that all could hear. ‘I’m going to do the only responsible thing. I am going to call in the highest possible authority.’

  ‘The Archdiocese,’ suggested O’Haggerty, who was Catholic. Eckhardt glanced at him with disdain.

  ‘The President?’ Coltellucci was a Republican.

  ‘The Federal Bureau of Investigation,’ Eckhardt said, with painful slowness. ‘The FBI … Ever heard of it?’

  He neither expected nor received an answer.

  « 3 »

  It was when Mr Smith had removed his third stinking newspaper from trash awaiting removal on the sidewalk that the Old Man remonstrated for the first time.

  ‘Is it necessary to steal old broadsheets from garbage?’ he asked, as they walked along one of Washington’s many tree-lined avenues.

  ‘It is hardly stealing it if it is taken from materials by definition rejected by their owners, otherwise they would not be in shining black bags by the roadside. You want me to pinch them from newsvendors? That would be stealing,’ Mr Smith replied, as his eyes scanned the greasy pages, to which bits of apple peel were still gamely sticking.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Is there a better way to understand the mentality of those who have so far made our existence on Earth unpleasant than by reading as a duty what they read for pleasure?’

  ‘And what have you discovered?’ enquired the Old Man, with a trace of scepticism in his voice.

  ‘I have skimmed through three or four editorials while we have been walking, and I think I begin to understand that these people are very well informed and even extremely efficient about everything which concerns them, and almost totally ignorant about that which does not. Counterfeit money, for instance, concerns them, since it exploits their prosperity in a way which flouts their acute sense of legality. It is for that reason they have developed highly sophisticated ways of discovering that money, even if it is of divine origin, is not manufactured in an authorized mint.’

  ‘Legality? Do you mean that they are law abiding?’

  ‘No. I mean they have a horror of using counterfeit money in corrupt operations. It seems to them that, for corruption to count, the dishonest transactions must be conducted with legal tender.’

  The Old Man frowned. ‘I can see your mind has been sharply focused while mine has been meandering hither and thither. Why do you say they are uninterested in that which does not concern them?’

  ‘There are one or two editorials about changes in the Austrian Government, deadlocks in the Israeli Cabinet, and the Pope’s visit to Papua, and so on, which appear to be written by people both very well informed, very conceited, and very ignorant in their use of the information at their disposal. It says that they are syndicated. I have no idea what that means. The word is a new one.’

  ‘I’ll say this,’ said the Old Man, a little depressed, ‘you have weathered the passing centuries better than I have. I had no idea that Austria had a government, that Israel has a cabinet, or that – where did you say the Pope is?’

  ‘Papua. Fiji tomorrow. Okinawa and Guam the day after. Rome on Tuesday.’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me – where is Papua?’

  ‘New Guinea, north of Australia.’

  ‘And what, for my sake, does Israel need with a cabinet?’

  ‘Everyone else has a Cabinet. They need one also.’

  ‘Are they not content with being chosen?’

  ‘They wish to be on the safe side. They choose themselves as well. And for that, of course, they need a Cabinet.’

  ‘I have a lot to learn.’ A cloud passed slowly over the Old Man’s pensive face. He cheered up suddenly. ‘And have you any practical solutions to our predicament as a result of reading soiled newspapers?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Smith. ‘We must change our physical appearance.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We are far too easy to identify. Remember, we may enjoy ambling down leafy streets among neo-Georgian houses, it may seem a civilized pastime in fine weather, but we are criminals on the run.’

  The Old Man’s eyebrows raised. ‘Criminals?’

  ‘Certainly. We were apprehended as counterfeiters, and we escaped from justice.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘And now, I have a plan, based on my perusal of the financial pages.’

  ‘Oh, is that what you were doing? I have never known you as incommunicative as you were during this walk, even in the old days.’

  ‘There is no time to lose, that’s why. My plan is this. I will disguise myself as an oriental—’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘It is quite clear that the one burning anxiety of the Americans is the immense upsurge of oriental competition. Once I have become transmogrified, you will concentrate hard and produce a large quantity of their banknotes, known as yen.’

  ‘That is still forgery.’

  ‘What other way is there, apart from stealing? We can’t very well earn it. Or do you think I have a future as a baby-sitter?’ The giggles of Mr Smith rang out like a carillon of cracked bells.

  ‘Tell me your plan,’ said the Old Man, wincing.

  ‘They know every detail of their own money,’ replied Mr Smith, slowly recovering from his outburst, ‘but they know little or nothing about Japanese banknotes, with a calligraphy which is to them indecipherable. The fact that I look Japanese will be a guarantee to any American bank clerk that the notes are genuine.’

  ‘What do you intend to do with these notes if I succeed in creating them?’

  Mr Smith was a little pained that the Old Man had not yet understood. ‘I shall change them at the bank.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For genuine dollars.’

  The Old Man stopped walking. ‘Brilliant,’ he said, quietly. ‘Absolutely dishonest, but brilliant.’

  At that moment, a car with a blue light on the roof squealed round the corner ahead of them, grazed and buffeted several stationary cars, and slewed sideways to block this quiet residential street. Instinctively, the Old Man and Mr Smith turned round to go the other way. A policeman on a motorcycle was riding up the sidewalk, followed by a second one. In the roadway, another police car drove up with as much fuss and hysteria as the first one. Men jumped out, but they were all in civilian clothes. Some of the older ones wore hats. They all brandished guns, and they shepherded the Old Man and Mr Smith to one of the cars. Here they were forced to place their hands on the roof while the newcomers frisked their ample robes.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Mr Smith. ‘We must change our appearance, either now or later.’

  ‘What was that?’ snapped the senior of the frisking officers.

  ‘Later,’ replied the Old Man.

  They were bundled into the cars and driven to a huge building in the outskirts of the city.

  ‘What is this – police headquarters?’ asked the Old Man.

  ‘A hospital,’ answered the leading FBI officer, Captain Gonella.

  ‘A hospital,’ echoed the Old Man.

  ‘On account you are a very sick old guy,’ crooned Gonella. ‘In fact, the two’s of you is. We’re going to try to show you didn’t know what you was doing when you made all that money. That you did it while the balance of your mind was disturbed, see. We’re going to give you every chance. Only you got to help us. I want you to answer every question the doctor may ask. I ain’t telling you what to say, see … just don’t step outa line, don’t start talking unless you’re talked to … easy on the words. Just take it easy. Act as crazy as you like, they’re expecting it, only just don’t confuse the doctors with a lot of words … hell, I don’t have to tell you what to do … and – oh, one final word. Quit disappearing, will you? The FBI don’t appreciate it. I don’t know how it’s done. I don’t want to know. All I’m saying, don’t do it. That’s all.’

  They were paraded before a terrifying woman dressed as some sort of superior nurse or matron, who sat at a reception desk. In fact, at first glance, Mr Smith and the receptionist scared each other, with good reason. The woman wore a plastic card proclaiming her name to be Hazel McGiddy. She stared inquisitorially at the newcomers with her bulbous blue eyes, so light as to be almost egg-white. Her eyelids seemed to keep the eyes in their sockets by sheer determination, and the mouth, like a scarlet wound in the centre of a shrivelled, inanimate face, was the only feature which had any movement in it, since it twitched almost imperceptibly as though she was continually trying to remove a remnant of yesterday’s lunch from a cavity in her teeth.