Читать книгу Perchance - Michael Kurland - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

The morning commuter from Philadelphia crossed the Hudson a scant five hundred feet above the Schuylkill Palisades. Like an airborne chain of silver sausage links, the segmented craft bobbled along, slowly losing altitude as it approached its mooring on the west side of Manhattan’s Great Central Park.

Delbit Quint stared out the tiny porthole of the third-rater cabin, watching the ground rise up to meet the air-train. As he watched, the mooring lines were cast out, and the ground crew rushed to catch them and secure them to the landing winches. The engines stopped, and a new silence enveloped the cabin. Slowly the winchmen reeled the lines in, and the string of silver balloons was made fast to the earth.

A double honk sounded over the loudspeaker. “Attention third-rater passengers! If you are detraining in New York, please gather your belongings and prepare to exit the rear door of your cabin,” came the flat, nasal voice. “You will have ten minutes. Exiting the forward door will not be permitted.”

Delbit put on his jacket and took his brown-paper-wrapped bundle of clothes from the overhead. Quietly he joined the line of passengers threading their way toward the rear of the long, skinny left aisle of the great, fat third-rater cabin.

Delbit followed the crowd of passengers across the hard-packed dirt field to the large third-rater exit gate at the far end. The second-raters headed toward their own gate. Private carriages met the first-raters, pulling up to the egress as they detrained.

Outside the third-rater gate, among a small group of greeters, stood a tall, bewhiskered man in a brown dress suit with a gold insignia on the breast pocket. In the man’s left hand, held before him like an amulet, was a small, discreetly lettered paper sign reading Delbit Quint.

Delbit surrendered his ticket at the gate and walked over to the man. “Sir?” he said, taking his cap off. “I’m Delbit Quint.”

“Don’t call me sir,” the man said sharply, folding the sign in quarters and putting it in his pocket. “I’m no better than yourself. Quint, eh? Is that all of your luggage? Good, then come along.”

The man led Delbit across the road to a high-bodied, angular electric touring landau with a chauffeur in a costume like his own. He held the rear door open for Delbit, who looked the vehicle over curiously before he entered. It was a highly polished deep red color with gleaming brass fittings, fully the equal in elegance to any that had come for the first-rate passengers. Delbit was impressed. The device on the door panel matched the insignia on the man’s coat: a pair of birds facing each other and flying upward. Each bird held something in its beak, the one on the left a pen, the one on the right a lightning bolt, pen and bolt crossing each the other in the center of the design. Around the X thus formed were the letters F C A E B, and underneath was the motto, Learn Ye Inner Truth & Bee Free. The man slammed Delbit’s door and walked around to the other side of the landau, pausing briefly to speak to the driver. He got in the rear next to Delbit and slammed his own door. The electric started its silent way.

“Where are we going?” Delbit asked.

“To the clinic,” the man told him.

“What clinic?”

“The Faineworth Clinic.”

“What sort of clinic is it?”

The man twisted in his seat to look at Delbit. “Don’t you know what you’re doing here?”

“No, sir,” Delbit told him. “I surely do not.”

“I should think,” the man told him seriously, “that before becoming involved in an endeavor of this nature, you would ascertain what it is that you’re going to be required to do. Well, no matter, you’ll know soon enough. And don’t call me sir. My name is Bantersea Dobbins, and I am called simply Dobbins.”

“My master sent me,” Delbit told him. “Master Fessily Branterberger of the Branterberger Top-Lance Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ Quality Shoe Works. He didn’t bother telling me why I was wanted. I don’t even know whether I’ve been loaned, sold, or traded.”

“You’re indentured?”

“I’m an articled apprentice.”

“Comes to the same thing,” Dobbins told him. “I may be a servant under the bond, but on my off-times I’m my own man, free to come and go as I choose after reasonable hours; free to give notice if I have cause. I tell you, young Quint, it makes all the difference.”

“I’m sure it does,” Delbit agreed. “You work for the clinic?”

“I am on the household staff of Dr. Faineworth himself,” Dobbins said. “I am his personal man. Most of my duties involve serving him at the clinic in a professional capacity.” He tapped himself on the chest and added, “But I sleep in the house.”

“I see,” Delbit said. Status among upper-level servants was as important as status among the gentry, and sleeping in the house was, for a manservant, high status. The maidservants, of course, all slept in the house, under the watchful eye of the chief housekeeper. If you were an articled apprentice or an indentured servant, it didn’t matter where you slept; you had no status.

The electric turned uptown on Broadway and bounced its way north. Delbit pulled aside the curtain and stared out the window at the passing shops. It looked much like Philadelphia except that the buildings averaged a bit taller, some as high as nine stories, and the shops seemed more open to the street than he was used to, and many of the shop signs were not in English.

“Dobbins, what language is that?” Delbit asked, pointing to the blue-and-gold sign swinging above a jewelry store.

Dobbins leaned forward and looked out. “I believe it’s Flemish,” he said. “We have a big Flemish and Frisian colony here on the West Side. Good citizens, if a bit clannish. Came over after the Walloon Uprisings.”

“All the signs are in English in Philadelphia,” Delbit said.

“Of course they are,” Dobbins told him. “Pennsylvania Commonwealth has restricted immigration. New York State has unrestricted European immigration. Not many Chinamen make it here, but a lot of Flems and Fresses and Armenians and Jews and Hellenes. We got a bunch of Swedes after the Danish occupation, but most of them settled in Boston. All good citizens, for the most part. And we’ve got the best restaurants in the Constitutionally Confederated States right here in New York. Those Flems really know what to do with a side of beef.”

Delbit looked at Dobbins with new interest. A servant who knows about such things, a servant who could afford to eat out, was a superior creature indeed, in Delbit’s view. Working for this Dr. Faineworth might prove to be a pleasant and interesting experience. Delbit wondered again what was in store for him. So far in his nineteen years, the only interesting experiences had proved painful.

The Faineworth Clinic was a three-story mostly Georgian building on a couple of acres of land on the east side of Broadway right above 110th Street. It had been added to from time to time, with each of the additions zigzagging off in one direction or another from the main building. Each segment had been treated as a fresh architectural challenge, independent of whatever it abutted. The building appeared to be at war with itself. In the front yard, to the right of the drive, was a large white wooden sign. The emblem on the landau door was duplicated on the sign, with below it the words:

THE FAINEWORTH CLINIC

FOR THE AID AND EXAMINATION

OF THE BEWILDERED

LEARN YE INNER TRUTH & BEE FREE.

The electric pulled around the drive past the front doors and made a sharp right into a narrow brick half-oval tunnel that went through the building. “We enter the back,” Dobbins explained.

“Of course,” Delbit agreed.

Dobbins brought Delbit in through the back door, which entered on the institution’s kitchens, and led him through a series of corridors and passages toward the front. The place was as ornate and eclectic on the inside as the outside. Dark wood paneling gave way to antiseptic painted plaster, which abruptly changed to figured wallpaper. Carpeted hallways intersected tiled lobbies and parquet vestibules. An occasional stripe of colored paint crossed the walls vertically or diagonally for no apparent reason. Delbit examined this passing scene with interest, and concluded that it was designed to create the bewildered people that the clinic then examined.

“Wait here,” Dobbins said, taking Delbit through a light-colored door in the painted plaster section of hallway and into what looked like the anteroom to a doctor’s office.

Delbit sat himself on the red couch which took up the left-hand wall and waited. After about ten minutes the inner door opened and he was called in. As he had suspected, the inner room was a doctor’s office, with a large desk in the middle of the floor, two massive cabinets full of obscure medical instruments looming behind the desk, and a variety of large naturalistic paintings covering the walls. The floor was covered with a dark red carpet which ended precisely a hand’s-breadth away from the wall in all directions, revealing six inches of highly polished wood. The man sitting at the desk, who Delbit assumed must be the doctor, nodded and smiled. He was tall and beanpole-thin, and had a large rounded nose and small pointed ears. His teeth also appeared to be pointed. “So this is Delbit Quint,” he said, leaning back in his massive wooden chair and smiling a broad smile. “A pleasure, it is.”

“Delbit, this is Dr. Faineworth,” Dobbins said, gesturing him forward to the front of the desk.

“A pleasure to see you, lad,” Dr. Faineworth told him, his voice thin and reedy. “You are, so to speak, just what the doctor ordered.” He chuckled. “I suppose you’re wondering just what you’re doing here.”

Delbit allowed himself a slight smile. “I am a bit bewildered, yes, sir.”

“Ah! The lad has a sense of humor. We should have guessed.” The doctor leaned forward. “Sit down, Delbit, lad, and let me explain.”

Dobbins brought over a straightback chair and placed it in front of the desk, and Delbit sat.

Dr. Faineworth pulled a piece of light blue paper from a stack to his right and placed it below his nose. “These are your Articles of Apprenticeship,” he told Delbit, peering down at the paper as though it were a new species of bug. “They give the master the right to sell you, if he so chooses, as you know. Well, I have bought you. You will be delighted to know, I assume, that you are no longer apprenticed to a master shoemaker, but to a medical doctor. I can promise you that you will find it different. More exacting, more demanding, longer hours, but more rewarding, if you do your job well. And more painful, much more painful, if you do not. But, of course, we all assume that you will. Do you understand?”

The doctor paused and stared expectantly at Delbit, waiting for his reaction. Delbit was surprised to discover that he didn’t have one. Two days ago he had been peacefully, if not happily, sweeping the floor of a steam-operated shoe factory in Philadelphia; yesterday Master Branterberger had told him he’d be going to New York City; and now he found out that he’d been sold. He would probably have a reaction soon, but at the moment he merely felt as if someone had kicked him in the gut.

“You have five years and two months left under the articles, is that right?” Dr. Faineworth asked, after waiting a minute for Delbit to speak.

“That is so,” Delbit said.

“Your father sold you into apprenticeship? I assume things weren’t going well with him?”

“My stepfather,” Delbit explained. “I think he was tired of feeding me.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Faineworth said, but he didn’t elaborate. Delbit waited silently. Sooner or later someone would tell him what was going on.

Dr. Faineworth pushed the blue paper aside and pulled over a pink paper to take its place. He examined it for a moment, then stared up at Delbit. “I have your school records here,” he said. “Pennsylvania Commonwealth Free School number 125 thinks highly of you.”

“Yes, sir,” Delbit said.

“It is that record that has occasioned my interest in you,” Dr. Faineworth explained. “It includes your test results from the alpha-battery and the omicron-battery of tests you took in the first and sixth grades. You remember?”

“Yes, sir,” Delbit replied. What on earth did his sixth-grade tests have to do with anything?

“You’re fairly bright, you know that?”

“Yes, sir.” Delbit was actually very bright, a fact which he had learned to conceal, as it had never done him one bit of good. Intelligence was of small comfort while sweeping the factory floor. The master and the other ’prentices tended to resent it when his intelligence showed in any form whatever. “If you were so smart, you wouldn’t be a ’prentice” was one of the milder comments. Which was grossly unfair, as his opinion had never been asked in the matter.

“Well, I can see you’re not modest either. That’s fine, lad. Modesty never won a war.” Dr. Faineworth leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, his black-sleeved elbows sticking out like wings on either side. “Would you like to know what you’re doing here?”

“Yes, sir.” There was no doubt about that.

“You remember a bunch of tests you took on a big machine, where they pasted electrodes all over you?”

“Yes, sir, I remember.” Painful, irritating, boring, and pointless. The Faineworth Apperception Tests, they were. Faineworth—well, how do you like that.

“Well, one of the things that test did was to take what I like to call a mental profile of you. One might say that it showed the way your individual mind does its thinking in different situations, based on the way the electrical currents move about in your brain. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes, sir.” Delbit had read up on the theory, as much as was in the school library, and knew about the singleton waves from the top of the brain and the doubleton waves from each side, and the slow rhythm from the back. But he decided to let Dr. Faineworth do the explaining. By now not appearing smart had become a fixed habit.

“Well, I needed a certain type of brain—a certain very specific pattern—to aid me in some work I’m doing. And so I went over school records of all the East Coast schools using the Faineworth Tests for the past ten years. And, Delbit my lad, you have it.”

“Yes, sir.” Delbit swallowed. This didn’t sound too good. He would have to go over the New York State Apprentice Protection statutes, if there were any such and if he could get a copy. He really didn’t think he wanted anyone fooling around with his brain. And if he had wanted anyone to do it, he didn’t think it would be Dr. Faineworth.

“While I need you for this project your work will be interesting, and not very arduous. I decided to buy your articles from your previous master, as it was simpler than borrowing or, er, renting you. Especially as I have no idea how long the project will last. You will sleep in the servants’ quarters of the clinic, and eat at the servants’ table, but you are excused from all duties except for this project until further notice. If you have any special needs, you will tell Dobbins, and he will see to it. Do you understand?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Good. Now come with me and I will show you the reason for all this.” Dr. Faineworth rose from his chair and strode into the hall without pausing or checking to see if he was being followed. Delbit scurried after him, and Dobbins stalked behind.

Up two flights of stairs the doctor strode, and across into one of the new sections, and through a locked door, which was opened for them by a hefty male nurse on the inside. “Everything quiet today, Fenton?”

The nurse gave a two-fingered salute. “Snug and shipshape, Doctor,” he said.

“And our unidentified guest?”

“Quiet as a bunny, sir.”

“Very good.” The doctor led the way to the end of the corridor, past a double row of white-painted locked doors, to the final door on the right.

“In here, young Delbit, is the object of my interest and the reason you’re here,” Dr. Faineworth said, tapping lightly on the door. “A nameless young lady of unknown antecedents, who was found by our constabulary wandering about on Lower Broadway about two weeks ago.”

“Naked,” Dobbins added, some strange emotion crossing his face. “She was naked as a jay.”

Faineworth gave his servant a sharp look. “That is neither here nor there,” he said. “The young lady is amnesiac, and suffers from strange and terrible nightmares. Of both of these things I rather hope you, young Delbit, can help us cure her.”

“Me?”

“All will be explained in due time. For now, let us have you meet the young lady. She may act a little, ah, sedated, but that is the effect of medication we’re giving her. She’ll be so pleased, I’m sure, to meet you. Don’t say anything to get her excited.”

Dr. Faineworth pulled a large key ring from under his coat and isolated one large key.

“She’s a very interesting case,” he said, turning the key in the lock and pulling at the door. “We have every hope that—why, what’s this?”

Delbit looked into the small cell. There was a cot on the far wall and a basin and toilet to his right. On the cement floor was a small pile of woman’s clothes.

There was nothing else.

“She’s gone!” Dr. Faineworth said. “I’ll be damned!”