Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Helen McCloy Number Ten Q Street

A new and different kind of crime story — of bootlegging, addiction, subversion in the future... and surely a most unusual story from the creator of psychiatrist-detective Dr. Basil Willing... or is it?

When Tom began to snore, Ella switched off the TV and moved quietly toward the hall closet. He had drunk six cans of neo-beer, one right after another. That was usually enough to put him out for a good hour, and one hour should be enough.

She pulled open the door of the closet. The hinges didn’t squeak. She had oiled them this morning when Tom was out at the bowling alley. Or was it the poolroom? She could never remember which were Tom’s bowling days and which were his pool days.

She slid her arms into the sleeves of her coat and buttoned the collar high under her chin. She reached for her handbag and — oh, God! — the car keys fell on the floor with a loud jangle.

Tom stirred, without opening his eyes, and muttered, “Ella?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Whereya goin’?”

“Nowhere, dear. Just out for a breath of fresh air.”

“Ge’me packa cigs, willya?”

“Yes, dear.”

“An’ leave on Giann’l Twenny-four.”

Ella switched on the TV. A crash of canned laughter filled the room. Tom began to snore again, but this time she left the TV on. Perhaps it would function as a lullaby, keeping him quiet until she got back.

She closed the door softly behind her and walked toward the automatic elevator. When it was first installed, she had used the fire-stairs, even though she lived on the tenth floor. Others, who shared her phobia, did the same until the management found out. Now all the doors to the fire-stairs were locked.

“Suppose there’s a fire?” Ella had asked the man in charge of maintenance.

“I’ll come around with the keys.”

“Suppose there isn’t time?”

“Can’t be helped. Can’t have you folks sabotaging General Elevators.”

“Not using one elevator is sabotaging General Elevators?”

“That’s for sure. If everybody went back to using stairs, General Elevators would go out of business and where would our economy be then?”

So she had to use the unmanned elevator in which she firmly believed that anything could happen. She could be stuck between floors, alone, sealed inside a mechanism she didn’t understand. Or she could be attacked and beaten by some of the bored and idle boys who were always drifting in and out of the building. Not for money. Just for fun. Automatic elevators were a favorite place for such beatings. No one really blamed the boys. What could anyone expect when there were no schools beyond third grade for those who lacked engineering aptitude? The only skill most people needed was ad-literacy and that could be acquired in three years.

Tonight the elevator was empty. The lobby, too. As she stepped into the street, a bitter blast of winter wind snatched her breath away. She bent her head as if she were diving and moved into the harsh current of air. She didn’t dare take the car. Someone might notice the license number. Pedestrians were subject to many rules and regulations these days, but, at least, they didn’t have license numbers — not yet...

The cold wind had swept the street clean of people. Now and then a car glided past, but there was no real traffic. Would there be more when she got to Q Street? She had never been to this particular place before.

She had not risked writing the address down, but it was fixed in her mind: Number Ten Q Street. Easy to remember. She had only to think of Queer Street.

But every time she thought of it, she had a searing sense of shame. Why couldn’t she be like other people?

But she wasn’t. That was all there was to it. She could go for weeks, for months even, without satisfying her abnormal craving and then... the Desire became so overpowering that nothing else mattered. Once she had been forced to put a sleeping pill into Tom’s neo-beer after dinner in order to get away. She wasn’t really that sort of person. Or... was she becoming a different sort of person, now?

She shivered, not from cold. What would Tom do if he ever guessed the truth about her? He was so simple, so normal. He had no morbid desires. He could never be made to understand a person who did...

Her flying feet brought her to a squalid neighborhood. The moon had risen. Its cold light was pitiless to the diseased buildings. Peeling, eczematic paint. Scabrous, suppurating brick. Cramped, arthritic fire escapes. Filth everywhere — on grimy windowpanes, in trash cans and gutters, on worn steps before dark doorways. She looked up at a sign: Q Street.

She thought she saw darkness move in one of the doorways. Now she was really afraid. This was like stepping into the elevator alone and hearing a step behind her and then turning to see a tall, strong boy with a bicycle chain in his hand.

But she couldn’t go back. She had come so far and she didn’t know when she would have the chance again.

Once more the darkness moved. And this time she saw the gleam of a knife.

“Oh, no! Please...” Ella could barely speak.

And then, faintly, it came — that sweet, memorable, enticing fragrance.

Her fear melted.

“Oh, please let me go in! I must, I must!”

The boy was young, surely under twenty, but he was looking at her with the ancient contempt of panderers for the vices they live on. “You goin’ in Number Ten? What’s the word?”

Her voice quavered over the word a friend had whispered to her weeks ago — a word salvaged out of the faraway past. “Speakeasy,” Ella whispered.

“Okay.” His thumb jerked toward the last house in the row behind him. Silently he slid back into his doorway. A guard. Of course. They would have to take such a precaution.

Outwardly, Number Ten was just another dingy tenement — street door open, doorbells and letter boxes in a vestibule, inner door locked. She had been told to ring the bell marked 3A. A wheezing mechanism, one of the earliest forms of automation, opened the inner door.

She drew her coat away from the greasy walls as she climbed the stairs. If Tom could see her now...

There were no bells on the third floor. She knocked on the door marked 3A — three short knocks and two long. It opened on a chain. A bloodshot eye looked at her through the slit.

“Yeah?”

She stammered a little as she gave the second countersign. “J-joe sent me.”

The door swung open. She darted inside. In an instant the door had slammed behind her.

The room was large and relatively clean. Waiters moved among small tables covered with red-and-white checked cloths. At the far end was a long counter where people sat on stools. It would be cheaper at the counter, so she found a vacant stool.

The counterman wiped a place in front of her. “Kind of young to be here, aren’t you, lady?”

“I’m of voting age.”

“Yeah?” He was sadly skeptical. “What’ll it be?”

She moistened dry lips with her tongue. “If you please — if you could let me have...” It was hard to say the words. But now the fragrance came again, stronger, more enervating, but irresistible. She threw shame to the winds.

“I want a slice of real bread!”

The sadness in his face deepened. “And I suppose you want real butter, too? Butter made from cream that comes from cows. Filthy, smelly, old cows covered with mud and straw and dung and flies.”

“Yes... yes, I want real butter.”

“Are you sure? Don’t you ever read ads? Even if you can’t read, you must listen to commercials! Wouldn’t you rather have Low-price Spread, test-tube fresh, synthesized in General Nourishment’s fully automated laboratories? A spread that’s not just clean, but sterilized. It can be kept fresh forever because no mold or bacteria can grow in it. Not enough nourishment for a single bacterium. Yet it will fill your stomach and keep you from feeling hunger.”

She lowered her head. She couldn’t meet his eyes. “But I want real butter. And real jam, made with fruit and sugar and nothing else, not even a preservative.”

“That’s going to cost you plenty.”

“How much?”

“One hundred dollars for the bread. Twenty-five for a pat of butter. Thirty for two ounces of jam.”

“I have cash.” She clawed open her purse, counted out $155 in small bills, and tossed them on the counter. “I’ve been saving for months.”

He scooped up the money, then paused as he noticed her wedding ring. “I don’t often try to help the girls who come here, but you’re married and — you’re so young. You do know what you ought to do, don’t you? Pick up that money and walk right out of here as fast as you can before it’s too late. Go straight home to your husband and heat up one of those delicious frozen Tasteegood Teevee Dinners manufactured by General Nourishment. Nylon meat; chlorinated, aerated cotton bread; dehydrated, homogenized potatoes; synthetic, chlorophyll vegetables. Will you do it?”

“No.” Ella’s voice was firm.

The counterman sighed. “Do you know what’s in this bread you’re asking for? Flour. Real flour. And that’s made by taking two dirty old stones and grinding up the fruit of a weed called ‘wheat’ that grows in soil — rightly named — soil, mud, earth — the earth that both human beings and animals walk on. Have you ever tasted the stuff? Or is this your first—”

He faltered as his gaze went beyond Ella. She turned. Another man was standing behind her — a short, fat man with a smooth face and slitted eyes.

“Preaching again, Marvin? That’s not what I pay you for! Take the little lady’s money and give her whatever she wants. If I catch you trying to reform my customers again—”

He patted Ella’s shoulder. She shrank from him, but a moment later all that was forgotten. There, right in front of her, was a slice of real bread, still warm from the oven, crusty and munchy between her teeth, tasting of ripe grain and sunshine and rain from heaven. And running with real butter, golden, melting, scented with clover. And the jam was made of real black currants and real sugar, sweet and tart.

She didn’t care what the commercials said. Jam synthesized from carefully selected peanut shells and old shoesoles did not taste like this. Any more than what the Kremokup people put in their Instantkaff tasted like real cream in real coffee — any more than the orange powder which General Nourishment had christened Tango-Seville tasted like juice from real Seville oranges.

Recklessly Ella ordered another slice of bread.

A man sat down on the stool beside her. “A steak, please,” he said brazenly. “A real steak, cut from a steer, and broiled rare.”

“Anything with it, sir?”

“Yes, real potatoes, French fried, and hearts of lettuce with chives and Roquefort dressing.”

“You know what that will cost you? Two thousand dollars.”

“Okay.”

Ella was impressed. This man was no member of the consuming classes. They didn’t have that kind of money. She stole a glance at him and knew, instantly, that she had seen him somewhere before.

But where? He couldn’t be a friend of Tom’s. All Tom’s friends, like Tom himself, were simple consumers. Could she have met this man at one of her mother’s big parties? Her mother had a great uncle who owned some stock in General Transportation. Now and then a few stockholders and scientists turned up at her mother’s parties. But if this man had met Ella at her mother’s, he might recognize her now. He might tell her mother he had seen her here. Good God, he might even tell Tom—

She ought to leave now, at once, before the man noticed her. But she couldn’t, not until she finished eating that second slice of bread and butter.

She risked another glance at the stranger. He looked important. A lean, craggy face. Dark eyes sunk deeply under black brows. Even his clothes... She had never seen real wool, but the suit he was wearing didn’t look like any synthetic she knew. He even wore a ring on the little finger of one hand, a massive ring that didn’t seem a bit like the “Jooljunk for He-Men” advertised on TV. Could it be real gold?

Her second piece of bread was served at the same time as his steak. She had never smelled a real steak before. She could feel saliva gather on her tongue.

The man was looking at her. “Like a bite?”

Never, never talk to a strange man in a dive, but...

“Could I? Just one little bite?”

“Why not?” Even his smile was tantalizingly familiar. Still she couldn’t place him.

She chewed the morsel of steak, closing her eyes in ecstasy.

He was still smiling when she opened her eyes. “Why didn’t you order steak yourself?”

“I don’t have two thousand dollars.”

“Then we must share this.”

“That wouldn’t be fair to you.”

“Oh, come on! You’re a pretty girl. I like you.” His voice was almost a drawl, lazy, reassuring. Ella hesitated. Then he, too, noticed her wedding ring. “Married?”

“Yes. To a good man. He’s never been in a speakeasy in his life.”

“Unemployed?”

“Of course. He has no scientific aptitude and machine-minding jobs are so scarce. He’s been on the waiting list for years. But he’ll never get one. It doesn’t bother him any more — not since we went on Full Automation; he gets paid a full salary for consuming instead of working.”

“How does he spend his time when he isn’t consuming?”

“He bowls and plays pool on alternate days. Then he comes home and drinks neo-beer with his Tasteegood Teevee dinner, and watches commercials and goes to sleep. He believes everything he sees and hears on commercials.”

“But you don’t?”

“No. I think they’re bunk.” The steak and bread and butter together had gone to her head. She had forgotten the old adage: Never mix foods.

“Tom consumes everything that is advertised on TV,” she went on. “Everything from underarm deodorants for football players to the kind of cigs mountain climbers smoke on cliff tops. And as for food! Tom loves every synthetic that General Nourishment puts out — even the laboratory-tested, artificial eggs with the chemical formula stamped on the edible, plastic shell. He consumes about five thousand calories a day and then, when he gets overweight, he goes on General Nourishment’s Reducto Wafers to get himself back into shape for consuming again.”

“How is he on clothes?”

“The best consumer that General Garments ever had! You should see his sports shirts. When they vaporize themselves at the end of three months, he goes right out and buys more. After all, as he says, ‘That’s what I’m paid my salary for — for consuming.’ ”

“I suppose most people are like Tom,” mused the stranger. “Perfectly willing to consume anything they are told to as long as everybody else is doing the same thing. People like you and me are deviates, sports of nature. Lucky there are so few of us.”

“Why?”

He looked at her surprised, almost shocked. “Surely you realize that an Expanding Economy Under Full Automation will collapse unless everyone consumes as much of the same things as possible; and these things must be the cheapest things possible — which means they must be synthetics. We should do everything we can to support General Nourishment, General Transportation, General Buildings, General Communications, General Entertainment — all the General Organizations. They’ve brought plenty to everyone.”

“Plenty of what?”

“Food, cars, houses, TV sets — everything that makes life worth living.”

“But all synthetic,” said Ella. “All mass-produced and all exactly alike.”

“They have to be. Otherwise there wouldn’t be enough to go round and still make a profit under Full Automation. Can you imagine how wasteful and downright wicked it was in the old days? Think of the human labor and time, the capital and raw materials invested in just one pot roast made of real meat and real vegetables. Absolutely uneconomic and inefficient! Today General Nourishment’s automated food laboratories can turn out in less than three minutes as many as five hundred thousand synthetic pot roasts, frozen and imperishable, at a cost of less than one-tenth of one cent each.”

“I suppose so, but...” Ella frowned. “Once you’ve tasted real food, you just can’t enjoy synthetics. Why don’t we do as the English do? Let addicts buy a little real food once in a while on a doctor’s prescription? Then there wouldn’t be all this bootlegging and crime.”

“You’ll be saying next that you approve of the French system — medically inspected, government-licensed restaurants where real food is sold openly.”

“You think that’s bad?”

“I know it is. For one thing, the medical inspectors are underpaid and careless. The indigestion rate in France is appalling, and it increases every year.”

“It’s hard to realize that in our great-grandparents’ day everybody ate real food and no one thought of it as a crime.”

“Their death rate was higher than ours.”

“But they had more fun while they were alive.”

He grinned. “You really are subversive, aren’t you?”

“I don’t see why something that was normal for our great-grandparents has to be abnormal for us.”

“A few hundred thousand years ago primitive man thought sexual promiscuity was normal, but for us it would—”

His voice was drowned by the shriek of an alarm bell.

“RAID!” shouted the counterman.

The fat man with the smooth face made his voice carry without shouting. “Keep your seats, everybody! Be calm — we’ll handle this!”

The stranger’s face was grim. “I musn’t be found here.”

Ella’s lips tightened. “Maybe — if we could phone a lawyer—”

“You forget the telephone’s on full automation, too. Besides, we’d never have time to dial the complete area-code number.”

The waiters moved like lightning. In a few moments every trace of food had vanished from the room and Ella could hear the grinding noise of an old-fashioned garbage disposal unit in the kitchen. Roulette wheels were placed on some of the tables, dice and cards on others. And just in time. Only a few moments later an ax crashed through the door and a dozen uniformed policemen poured into the room.

One officer turned to a man in a resplendent uniform. “Must have been a false tip, Chief. Nothing going on here — nothing but a little gambling.”

“Wait.” The Chief of Police held up his hand. “Do I, or don’t I, smell freshly baked bread?”

The fat man moved forward, a smile on his smooth face. “Not one crumb of bread in the place, Chief. Take my word for it.” As he spoke his hand went out. Ella thought she saw something pass from one man to the other. She was almost sure that the Chief of Police put his hand in his pocket immediately afterward. He was smiling now. “Guess it was a phony tip at that Carry on, folks! If I wasn’t on duty, I’d join in the blackjack game.”

“He didn’t even look in the kitchen,” whispered Ella.

“He was paid off. Didn’t you notice?”

“How awful!” She rose. “I must go now. Goodbye and — I don’t know how to thank you for the steak.”

“It was a pleasure. I’ll walk with you to the end of the street. This neighborhood isn’t safe for a young woman alone.”

They went down the greasy stairs together, out into the cold windy night. The shadowy figure of the boy on guard had vanished from the doorway. In the moon’s light the street seemed empty — as empty as a lunar landscape.

I hope he’s not going to kiss me, thought Ella, just because he met me in a speakeasy.

She halted with a gasp. She was looking across the street to a car parked at the curb, a black car with white letters on one side — the dread letters A.E.P.

“That car!” Ella’s voice shook. “You know what those letters mean?”

“Advertising Enforcement Police.” His voice had changed. It was no longer the lazy, confidence-inspiring drawl of a man weak enough to indulge himself in bootleg steak. It was now the stem voice of a dedicated moralist. Even his eyes had changed, and he made no effort to hide the deep contempt in them.

“I’m an Inspector of the A.E.P.” In his hand she saw the identity card — signature, photograph, government seal. “I’ve been following you for some time.”

“So that’s why your face was so familiar!”

“Tonight I recorded your conversation with me in the speakeasy. My ring is a microphone.”

“But it has no wire connection!”

“You little fool! As long ago as 1963, they had microphones without wire connections. You’re under arrest.”

“But... you led me on! You’re a member of the secret police—”

“Of course. How else could we ever make an arrest?”

“And the charge?”

“Subversion of the whole economy by failure to perform your duty as a consumer of synthetics willingly, cheerfully, and patriotically. Conviction is certain. With Full Automation and computers on the Bench, a miscarriage of justice has become impossible.”

“And the penalty?”

“A deep-freeze cell for life. We can’t have people like you around. This sort of thing might become contagious.”

“May I call my husband? Please!”

“No.”

Ella screamed as he shoved her into the car. She was still screaming as the A.E.P. car drove away in the moonlight.