Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2006

Caveat Emptor by Kay Nolte Smith

The wish first occurred to Judson Wick while he was attending the opera.

An opera box was not his normal milieu, but he could not pass up the chance to escort the elderly widow who glittered with diamonds and influence; so, masking his lack of interest and knowledge, he kept an attentive look on his handsome, if rather bland, face and bent his sleek, dark head in response to the widow’s frequent nudges. It was during such a moment, when he did focus on the performance, that the wish occurred to him. He smiled ruefully and dismissed it.

It came back to him the next day, during his yearly lunch with the manager of Wick Industries. The man always recited lists of figures — this year they showed the declining value of the company’s stock — and reminisced at irritating length about the years when Judson’s father had built and run the company. It was Judson’s practice to keep his manner aloof and unconcerned; but this time, when the manager made pointed references to “the leisurely life,” the manner began to show fine cracks, like battered safety glass — until the moment was saved by the sudden return of the wish.

That evening it returned once more when, as a guest of the director, Judson attended the opening of a Broadway play and the party that followed. He ate smoked oysters and listened while the rave reviews were read aloud; over the rim of his champagne glass he watched the director, with whom he had gone to school, standing in the spotlight of success, and the wish came back so forcefully that the champagne soured in his throat and he left the party.

He barely had returned to his apartment when the doorbell rang. His spirits lifted at the thought that the red haired actress had changed her mind about a nightcap, but the person at the door was not female, and the hair was quite gray. The suit was gray too, in both color and spirit, drooping on the man’s shoulders and rounding over his knees. Everything about him seemed tired and sad except for his tie, a strip of vivid orange silk that ran down his shirtfront like a tongue of flame. “Good evening,” he said. “I am advised by my firm that you have some property for sale.”

“I think you’ve got the wrong apartment.”

“I think not. You are Judson A. Wick, you are forty-one years old, and you are interested in selling the balance.”

“Of what?” asked Judson cautiously.

“Last night you attended Gounod’s opera and made a wish, which you have repeated twice. Therefore you are requesting an arrangement similar to Doctor Faust’s. May I come in?”

Judson moved aside mechanically while his mind struggled for comprehension. “I think you’re putting me on.”

“Mr. Wick,” sighed the man, “if I were not what I claim to be, how could I have known about your wish?”

“I don’t know,” said Judson finally. “But you don’t look the part. Who ever heard of you as the man in the gray flannel suit?”

“But I am just a salesman, a mere servant of the firm. Call me John, if you like.” The man shot his cuffs and smoothed his tie. “This is the twentieth century, Mr. Wick. We are no longer a Middle Ages barter service but a modern business corporation. Naturally we don’t ask you to take us on faith. We offer, in fact we insist upon, a twenty-four-hour period in which you sample our merchandise free of charge, with no further obligation. Now, for what did you wish to negotiate? Power? Knowledge? Eternal Youth?” When Judson frowned, he added, “Then there is our most popular offer, Fame and Influence.”

“Ah,” said Judson. “Yes.”

“In which field would you want it?”

Judson shrugged. “I wouldn’t care. No, wait a minute.” Into his mind bubbled the memory of champagne and rave reviews. “Make it show business. Broadway. No, make it bigger. Hollywood.”

The man took out a small, gray pad, made a note, and rose. “When you wake up tomorrow, the twenty-four hours will begin. Incidentally, we’ll be observing you, to insure that satisfaction is achieved. Then I return at the end of the period, with a contract for you to sign.”

Judson’s gaze wavered and slid around the room. “All right,” he said finally. “What have I got to lose?”

Something flickered for a moment in the man’s gray eyes, like matches at the ends of two tunnels. Then the orange tie dimmed out, and he was gone.

When Judson awoke at ten, he heard a voice that seemed to be located in his ear. “Good morning,” it said in metallic, asexual tones. “The observation has begun. We are ready to grant your wishes.” After a moment there was an odd sensation inside Judson’s head: a faint, not unpleasant, echoing, rather as if someone were listening on a telephone extension. “They mean it,” he said softly. “What the hell do you know about that?”

The words made him smile; he lay in bed for some moments grinning, but finally he began to consider what his requests should be. Self-consciously at first, because he was aware of the inner listener, and then with growing pleasure in the fact of an audience, he thought of some of the important film people he had met in the past, during the years when he had been married to Shelley, and she had not yet catapulted to fame. He could, he thought, choose to be like any of them — to be one of those who moved on the edges of the limelight but in the center of power, or even to be an actor, perhaps the top male box office star in the country. Or the world.

The pale green phone on his nightstand rang. In a rather puzzled voice a man introduced himself as a reporter from Variety, said he had just heard there was an important story to be gotten from a Judson Wick, and inquired what it might be.

It took all of Judson’s skill to convince the man there was a story but that it could not be divulged yet; when he hung up, he was sharply aware that the inner listener was still listening. He got into the shower and made a careful list of people he might call, narrowing it to three, one of whom was his director friend of the night before, but finally rejecting all of them. While he was shaving, the thought that Shelley was in town promoting her latest picture kept pulling at his mind. He nicked his chin, swore, and suddenly laughed aloud: why should he worry about finding an excuse to call? Shelley would call him — if he wished.

When he reached the restaurant two hours later, Shelley was just arriving in a cloud of reporters. He detached her and led her to a table, where he insisted that she talk about her new film throughout their first drink. “All right,” she finally said. “I’m the one who called you, God knows why, so I must want to hear what you’ve been up to all these years.”

He took her hand and a deep breath; it seemed to him that the interest of the inner listener had quickened. Picking his way among the words, he said, “I’m on to something big. Very big. Something that’s going to lead me straight to your town.”

“Something in pictures, you mean?”

“What else do you do in Hollywood?”

“But you don’t know anything about the industry.”

“Shelley,” he said softly, “I’ll be able to do anything I want. Anything.”

She studied him, her violet eyes narrowing to points of black light. “Are you serious? You’re going to produce a picture?”

“Yes, I guess you could say that. Of course. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“What picture?”

He raised a hand for the waiter, wishing for him to come immediately, and ordered more drinks. Then he leaned back and said carefully, “Let’s put it this way. I’m in the market for ideas.”

“Are you? That’s a coincidence.” Shelley tapped her glass slowly with one mauve and perfect nail. “There’s a book that Global is planning to buy for Lisa Gordon. But it would be so right for me. If someone else got it, that is. If someone else were able to get it.”

“That’s a coincidence.” He smiled boyishly, the smile she used to say she liked. “Because what I had in mind was to make a great picture for Shelley.”

When he returned to his apartment, there were eighteen hours left of the twenty-four. Despite the successful lunch, there was a fist of tension at the back of his neck that would not uncurl. He made a martini and sat staring down at its olive eye. Then he picked up the phone and called the elderly widow whom he had escorted to Faust. Adopting the bantering manner she liked, he inquired about the charity ball she was staging, automatically wangled an invitation, and finally extracted the true object of his call, a telephone number.

He dialed it, adjusting his mental posture to one of deference; to the famous film critic who answered, he posed as a graduate student researching the adapting of novels to the screen. He sought the critic’s opinion of several recent films, and then casually mentioned the novel Shelley had suggested. When the critic spoke of it enthusiastically, he asked, in a casual, speculative manner, which writers and directors would be most capable of translating such a property to the screen. He hung up with a half smile that could not seem to grow; he sat fingering the back of his neck, and told himself that he needed to get out.

An hour later he headed for an art gallery on Madison Avenue. The crowd at the opening was already so dense that there was no way, or need, to see the paintings; he thrust himself in among the bodies and soon had collected enough comments to deliver them to the artist as if they were his own tribute. Then he was free to turn to the real business of the evening.

Moving among the crowd with studied aimlessness, he talked to a senator’s mistress and the president of a Fifth Avenue store, telling them that he was going to make a film; the sudden interest in their eyes became a glint in his own. He told the wives of three industrialists that Shelley Garnett would be starring in his picture; the warmth in their voices became a cool assurance in his own. He told two art critics of the major literary property he was going to buy and the screenwriter and director he planned to hire; the attentiveness in their manner became a certainty in his own veins.

By nine o’clock the crowd had thinned, but its power was still with him. With the insolence of confidence, he attached himself to the painter and to the man’s plans for dinner with a few influential clients.

When he got home at two o’clock, he did not know whether his exultation was the racing of his own pulse or the throbbing attention of the inner listener. He paced the living room in wide, jagged arcs; finally he took a sleeping pill and forced himself to lie on the bed.

Around five o’clock his staring eyes closed, but behind their lids a dream began almost at once: at the end of a flame colored carpet, down which he walked for dozens of triumphant yards, he was greeted by a massive figure in red.

John wiped his face with a gray handkerchief and turned to the last entry in his notebook. He was making his daily report to the gentleman known simply as M, who sat behind a battered desk in an office that had seen better centuries. M wore a gray cape as thin as smoke, and a chronic scowl.

“Merchandise check on Judson A. Wick,” John read. “Requested Fame and Influence. Field: none. When pressed, subject chose the film industry, a desire inspired by watching a friend’s success. Here is the printout on his mental processes: Settled on becoming a producer, a notion which he got from his ex-wife. Decided to produce a certain novel, an idea which came from the same source. Determined that the novel was brilliant, by checking the opinion of a noted film critic. Selected a screenwriter and director, names he also got from the critic. Subject ended the trial period feeling confident and self-assured, a state which he induced by seeking out the reactions of influential persons at a fashionable cultural event.”

M glowered. “Do you mean there wasn’t even one of his own? Not one opinion or desire?”

“No, all were derived from other people. I believe he even got the idea of selling his soul from the Gounod opera.”

“Damnation!” roared M. “There are too many like him! They’re ruining my business! I need some kind of consumer protection. It’s fraud, that’s what it is — people trying to sell me borrowed merchandise. If I didn’t check them out first, they’d bankrupt me.” He sighed, in a shower of sparks. “Why are the ones without a soul of their own always the most eager to sell?”

John smiled wryly. “I’ll have the incident erased from Wick’s mind.”

“What mind?” snarled M. “Just suppose I took people like that. Where’s my profit? Where’s my pleasure? Turn them into servants, procurers of other souls, and they’d feel right at home. No agony at all.” His glance darted hotly over John’s face. “Not like you, eh, Doctor?”

“No, not like me.”

“Well,” sighed M, “get back out into the field. And see if you can find me someone like you. Someone with a clear title to his property.”

Something in the depths of John Faust’s eyes glowed in pain for a moment. Then he closed his notebook and left the office wearily and sadly.

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1976. Copyright © 1976 by Davis Publications, reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.