Tales of the Black Widowers - Asimov Isaac - Страница 40

Davenheim shook his head. "No, if it's what I think it is, and I know it's what I think it is, I want to be the one to smash it."

"Look," said Trumbull. "I have a little experience in such things. Do you suppose Klotz can break the case wide open for you? He's only a private, and I suspect that even if there is some sort of conspiracy, he knows very little about it."

"All right. I'll accept that," said Davenheim. "I don't expect Klotz to hand me the moon. Yet he's got to know one other man, one man higher up. He's got to know some one fact, some one fact closer to the center than he himself is. It's that one man and that one fact I'm after. It's all I ask. And the thing that breaks me in two is that he's giving it away and I still don't get it."

"What do you mean, giving it away?" asked Trumbull.

"That's where the unconscious comes in. When he and I are sparring, he's entirely occupied with me, entirely engaged in stopping me, heading me off, stymying me, putting me behind the eight ball. It's a game he plays well, damn him. The last thing he's going to do is to give me the information I want, but it's in him just the same and when he's busy thinking of everything else but, that information bubbles out of him. Every time I'm close upon him and backing and maneuvering him into a corner-butting my horns against his damned cape just this far from his groin-he sings."

"He what?" exploded Gonzalo, and there was a general stir among the Black Widowers. Only Henry showed no trace of emotion as he refilled several of the coffeecups.

"He sings," said Davenheim. "Well, not quite-he hums. And it's always the same tune."

"What tune is that? Anything you know?" "Of course I know it. Everyone knows it. It's 'Yankee Doodle.'"

Avalon said heavily, "Even President Grant, who had no ear for music, knew that one. He said he knew only two tunes. One was 'Yankee Doodle' and the other wasn't."

"And it's 'Yankee Doodle' that's giving the whole thing away?" asked Drake, with that look in his weary chemist's eyes that came when he began to suspect the rationality of another person.

"Somehow. He's masking the truth as cleverly as he can, but it emerges from his unconscious, just a bit; just the tip of the iceberg. And 'Yankee Doodle' is that tip. I don't get it. There's just not enough for me to grab hold of. But it's there! I'm sure of that."

"You mean there's a solution to your problem somewhere in 'Yankee Doodle'?" said Rubin.

"Yes!" said Davenheim emphatically. "I'm positive of that: The thing is he's not aware he's humming it. At one point I said, 'What's that?' and he was blank. I said, 'What are you humming?' and he just stared at me in what I could swear was honest amazement."

"As when you called Florence Farber," said Avalon.

Halsted shook his head. "I don't see where you can attach much importance to that. We all experience times when tunes run through our minds and we can't get rid of them for a while. I'm sure we're bound to hum them under our breath at times."

Davenheim said, "At random times, perhaps. But Klotz hums only 'Yaknee Doodle' and only at the specific times when I'm pressing him. When things get tense in connection with my probing for the truth about the corruption conspiracy I am sure exists, that tune surfaces. It must have meaning."

"Yankee Doodle," said Rubin thoughtfully, half to himself. For a moment he looked at Henry, who was standing near the sideboard, a small vertical crease between his eyebrows. Henry caught Rubin's eye but did not respond.

There was a ruminating silence for a few moments and all the Black Widowers seemed to be, to one degree or another, unhappy. Finally, Trumbull said, "You may be all wrong, Sam. What you may be needing here is psychiatry. This guy Klotz may hum 'Yankee Doodle' at all moments of tension. All it may mean is that he heard his grandfather sing it when he was six years old or that his mother sang him to sleep with it."

Davenheim lifted his upper lip in mild derision. "Can you believe I didn't think of that? I had a dozen of his close friends in. Nobody had ever heard him hum anything!"

"They might be lying," said Gonzalo. "I wouldn't tell an officer anything if I could avoid it."

"They might never have noticed," said Avalon. "Few people are good observers."

"Maybe they lied, maybe they didn't know," said Davenheim, "but, taken at face value, their testimony, all of it, would make me think that the humming of 'Yankee Doodle' is specifically associated with my investigation and nothing else."

"Maybe it's just associated with army life. It's a march associated with the Revolutionary War," said Drake.

"Then why only with me, not with anyone else in the army?"

Rubin said, "Okay, let's pretend 'Yankee Doodle' means something in this connection. What can we lose? So let's consider how it goes… For God's sake, Jeff, don't sing it."

Avalon, who had opened his mouth with the clear intention of singing, closed it with a snap. His ability to hold a true note rivaled that of an oyster and in his saner moments he knew it. He said, with a trace of hauteur, "I will recite the words!"

"Good," said Rubin, "but no singing."

Avalon, looking stern, struck an attitude and began declaiming in his most resonant baritone:

"Yankee Doodle went to town

A-nding on a pony.

Stuck a feather in his cap

And called it macaroni.

Yankee Doodle, keep it up,

Yankee Doodle dandy.

Mind the music and the step

And with the girls be handy."

Gonzalo said, "It's just a nonsense lyric."

"Nonsense, hell," said Rubin indignantly, and his straggly beard quivered. "It makes perfect sense. It's a satire on the country boy written by a city slicker. 'Doodle' is any primitive country instrument-a bagpipe, for instance-so a Yankee Doodle is a backwoods New Eng-lander who's no more sophisticated than a bagpipe. He comes to town on his pony intent on cutting a fine figure, so he wears what he thinks are city clothes. He wears a feather in his hat and thinks he's a real dude. And in the late eighteenth century, that's what a 'macaroni' was, a city hepcat dressed in the latest style.

"The last four lines are the chorus and show the country boy stepping it up at a city dance. He is mockingly told to stamp away and be gallant to the ladies. The word 'dandy,' which first came into use about mid-eighteenth century, meant the same as 'macaroni.' "

Gonzalo said, "Okay, Manny, you win. It's not nonsense. But how does it help Sam's case?"

"I don't think it does," said Rubin. "Sorry, Sam, but Klotz sounds like a country boy making a fool of the city slicker and he can't help but think of the derisive song and how he's turning the tables on you."

Davenheim said, "I presume, Manny, that you think he must be a country boy because his name is Klotz. By that reasoning you must be a rube because your name is Rubin. Actually, Klotz was born and brought up in Philadelphia and I doubt that he's ever seen a farm. No country boy, he."

"All right," said Rubin, "then I might have been looking at the wrong end of the stick. He's the city slicker looking down on you, Sam."

"Because I'm a country boy? I was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and went through Harvard right up to my law degree. And he knows that, too. He has made enough roundabout references to it in his matador moments."

Drake said, "Doesn't your Massachusetts birth and upbringing make you a Yankee?"

"Not a Yankee Doodle," said Davenheim stubbornly.

"He might think so," said Drake.

Davenheim thought about that a while, then said, "Yes, I suppose he might. But if so, surely he would hum it openly, derisively. The point is, I think he's humming it unconsciously. It has a connection with something he's trying to hide, not something he's trying to show."