The Union Club Mysteries Read online

  Table of Contents

  Front Cover

  Foreword

  Contents

  No Refuge Could Save

  The Telephone Number

  The Men Who Wouldn't Talk

  A Clear Shot

  Irresistible to Women

  He Wasn't There

  The Thin Line

  Mystery Tune

  Hide and Seek

  Gift

  Hot or Cold

  The Thirteenth Page

  1 to 999

  Twelve Years Old

  Testing, Testing!

  The Appleby Story

  Dollars and Cents

  Friends and Allies

  Which Is Which?

  The Sign

  Catching the Fox

  Getting the Combination

  The Library Book

  The Three Goblets

  Spell It!

  Two Women

  Sending a Signal

  The Favorite Piece

  Half a Ghost

  There Was a Young Lady

  Afterword

  Back Cover

  Front Cover

  "Thirty mystery shorts, crafted with Asimovian artistry, studded with Asimovian wit, embellished with Asimovian asides and propelled by that special Asimovian way with a story."

  Mystery News

  "Those who like old-fashioned brain-teasers will relish Asimov's latest."

  Booklist

  "Well-crafted mystery tales."

  Augusta Chronicle

  Mysteries by Isaac Asimov:

  TALES OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS

  MURDER AT THE ABA

  ASIMOV'S MYSTERIES

  MORE TALES OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS

  A WHIFF OF DEATH

  CASEBOOK OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS

  THE UNION CLUB MYSTERIES

  BANQUETS OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS

  THE BEST MYSTERIES OF ISAAC ASIMOV

  Science Fiction by Isaac Asimov:

  EARTH IS ROOM ENOUGH

  MORE STORIES FROM THE HUGO WINNERS,

  VOL. II THE BEST OF ISAAC ASIMOV BUY JUPITER AND OTHER STORIES THE HUGO WINNERS, VOL. III

  Science Fiction edited by LA., Martin H. Greenberg, & Joseph Orlander:

  THE FUTURE IN QUESTION SPACE MAIL THE FUTURE I

  Science Fiction edited by LA., Martin H. Greenberg & Charles Waugh:

  THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF SCIENCE

  FICTION SPACE MAIL II TV: 2000

  FLYING SAUCERS DRAGON TALES THE LAST MAN ON EARTH STARSHIPS

  Non-fiction by Isaac Asimov:

  THE REALM OF ALGEBRA THE REALM OF NUMBERS EARTH: OUR CROWDED SPACESHIP

  FAWCETT CREST • NEW YORK

  To Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All the stories in this book were originally published in Gallery, in successive monthly issues from September 1980 to February 1983 inclusive. Copyright © 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 by Montcalm Publishing Corporation The titles under which the stories appeared in Gallery are given in the following paragraph in parentheses:

  NO REFUGE COULD SAVE ("To Spot a Spy"), THE TELEPHONE NUMBER ("The Winning Number"), THE MEN WHO WOULDN'T TALK ("Pigeon English"). A CLEAR SHOT ("Big Shot"), IRRESISTIBLE TO WOMEN ("Call Me Irresistible"). HE WASN'T THERE ("The Spy Who Was Out-of-Focus"), THE THIN LINE ('Taxicab Crackdown"). MYSTERY TUNE ("Death Song"), HIDE AND SEEK ("Hide and Seek"), GIFT ("Decipher Deception"), HOT OR COLD ("Hot or Cold"), THE THIRTEENTH PAGE ("The Thirteenth Page"), 1 TO 999 ("One in a Thousand"), TWELVE YEARS OLD ("The 12-Year-Old Problem"), TESTING, TESTING! ("Cloak and Dagger Duel"), THE APPLEBY STORY ("The Last Laugh"), DOLLARS AND CENTS ("Countdown to Disaster"), FRIENDS AND ALLIES ("Mirror Image"), WHICH IS WHICH? ("The Perfect Alibi"), THE SIGN ("The Telltale Sign"), CATCHING THE FOX ("Stopping the Fox"), GETTING THE COMBINATION ("Playing It by the Numbers"), THE LIBRARY BOOK ("Mystery Book"), THE THREE GOBLETS ("A Flash of Brilliance"), SPELL IT! ("Book Smart"), TWO WOMEN ("Cherchez la Femme: The Case of the Disappearing Woman"), SENDING A SIGNAL ("A Piece of the Rock"), THE FAVORITE PIECE ("Face the Music"), HALF A GHOST ("A Ghost of a Chance"), THERE WAS A YOUNG LADY ("Poetic License")

  A Fawcett Crest Book Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1983 by Nightfall, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-45974

  ISBN 0-449-21583-0

  This edition published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Ballantine Books Edition: February 1985 Fifth Printing: March 1989

  Scanned and proofed by eBookMan version 1.0.

  Dedicated to Eric Protter who said, "Would you?"

  Foreword

  Three years ago (as I write this) Eric Protter of Gallery magazine asked me if I would consider writing a monthly mystery for the magazine.

  I hesitated. Gallery is what is commonly known as a "girlie" magazine and, like all of that genre, though not as tastelessly as some, it is devoted to the feminine form divine—and unclothed. I have no objection to that in principle, you understand, and I have written articles for Gallery and for a few other magazines of the sort. After all, no one compels me to read anything of which I disapprove, even if something of mine appears in the issue. I can always take out the pages on which my article appears and bind them along with other such tear sheets, and discard the rest of the magazine if I wish. And if a revealing photograph should appear on the other side of a page containing part of my article—well, I don't have to look.—And if I do, I'll survive. (I'm sure of it.)

  The articles, however, were always on scientific subjects. I had never been asked to write fiction before.

  So after I was finished hesitating, I said cautiously, "Eric, you understand, I hope, that I do not write erotica." (I don't! Just a silly idiosyncrasy of mine! I write an occasional ribald limerick, but that's just for laughs.)

  Eric said, "I know that. I just want a mystery written in your style. I want it about two thousand words long, and I want you to stop toward the end so that the reader will have a chance to solve the mystery before your detective does. We will publish the end of the story on another page."

  I found that notion intriguing. The first story was satisfactory, but, as it turned out, I hadn't quite gotten into my stride. It was with my second story, "No Refuge Could Save," that I worked out my scheme.

  Since I am always fair with my readers I will tell you what it is. Each story (without exception) starts with a short exchange among three cronies in the library of the Union Club. The fourth crony is Griswold, who is asleep as the story starts. Something in the exchange stirs him awake and reminds him of a story, which he tells up to the point where the other three ought to be able to solve the mystery. They never do, and Griswold gives them the answer.

  When Griswold comes to the end of his story, you will find a typographical intimation of that fact, and you will be welcome to try to guess the ending before going on. There may be times when the ending will be obvious to you. There may be times when you'll decide (with indignation) that no human being could have solved the puzzle given only the information I deigned to hand out. There may be times when you will think, in hindsight, that you ought to have guessed it, and will applaud my cleverness in concealing the answer without being unfair about it. And you may well decide the heck with trying to guess the answer, and just read on to the end.

  But however it goes, I can only hope that a good number of the stories will interest and amus
e you, and that you won't be sorry you invested in this book.

  One last word of warning. I have the trick of sounding as though I know all sorts of inside things about spies and police departments and government operations. If you're curious, the truth is I don't know a thing about any of that sort of stuff. I make it all up in my head, and if you should be an expert and should note that I am ludicrously wrong in some ways—that's why!

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Foreword

  Contents

  No Refuge Could Save

  The Telephone Number

  The Men Who Wouldn't Talk

  A Clear Shot

  Irresistible to Women

  He Wasn't There

  The Thin Line

  Mystery Tune

  Hide and Seek

  Gift

  Hot or Cold

  The Thirteenth Page

  1 to 999

  Twelve Years Old

  Testing, Testing!

  The Appleby Story

  Dollars and Cents

  Friends and Allies

  Which Is Which?

  The Sign

  Catching the Fox

  Getting the Combination

  The Library Book

  The Three Goblets

  Spell It!

  Two Women

  Sending a Signal

  The Favorite Piece

  Half a Ghost

  There Was a Young Lady

  Afterword

  Back Cover

  No Refuge Could Save

  When we four sat in the Union Club on a snowy evening, the talk was always most relaxed when Griswold was sleeping. That was when we knew the conversational ball would bounce most efficiently.

  Baranov said, "What I don't understand about this rash of spy stories infesting us today is what the hell spies are good for nowadays. We have spy satellites that tell us just about everything."

  "Absolutely right," said Jennings. "Besides, what secrets are there anymore? If you explode a nuclear test bomb, monitors pick it up. We've got every enemy installation keyed in to a missile all set to go and so do they. Our computers hold off their computers and vice versa."

  "It's all very boring in real life," I said, "but I suppose the books make money."

  Griswold's eyes were tightly shut. From the fact that his fourth scotch and soda was firmly in his hand, nearly full, we might suppose he wasn't sleeping or he would spill it—but that didn't follow. We had heard him snore for an hour and a half at a time and never spill a full glass. He would hold a glass firmly if the rest of him were palsied.

  We were wrong this time, though. He was awake. His eyes opened and he said, "The trouble is you don't know anything about spies. Nobody does." And he raised his glass to sip at it.

  "Even spies know nothing about spies," he said!—

  * * *

  I wasn't exactly a spy during World War II [said Griswold], at least in my own evaluation of the matter.

  No beautiful woman sought me out in terror and asked me to take charge of a microfilm at the risk of my life. I was never pursued up and over the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge by sinister villains with Lugers in their overcoat pockets. I was never sent behind enemy lines in order to blow up a key installation.

  As a matter of fact, I was a youngster in my early twenties who sat around a Philadelphia laboratory and wondered why it was that the draft never seemed to touch me. When I tried to volunteer, I was thrown out of the recruiting office. When I tried to talk to my draft board, I was told they were all out of town.

  It was many years later that I decided I was kept in civilian life because of my duties as a spy.

  You see, the thing about spies that most people don't know is that none of them really know what they're doing. They can't know; it wouldn't be safe for them to know. As soon as a spy knows too much, he can hurt the cause if he's taken. If a spy knows too much, he becomes valuable and he can be tempted to defect, or to get drunk and talk, or to meet some glamorous woman and end up whispering in her ear.

  A spy is safe only when he is ignorant. He is safest when he doesn't even know he's a spy.

  Somewhere deep in the Pentagon, or the White House, or some brownstone in Nyack or San Antonio or wherever, there are spy masters who know enough to be important; but no one knows who they are, and I shouldn't be surprised if, in the end, none of them knew it all either.

  That's why there are so many idiot mistakes in wars. Everyone without exception has areas of darkness, because too much light would make them each untrustworthy and generals have a talent for choosing areas of darkness in which to operate.

  Read your military history, gentlemen, and see if that doesn't make sense out of a lot of the madness.

  Well, I was a spy. I was just a kid, so I was in the lowest echelon, which meant I knew nothing at all. I just got my orders, but I thought they just involved my work in the lab. Of course I was a bright kid—as you will not be surprised to hear, gentlemen—and I usually got results. That made me valuable.

  Naturally, I didn't realize this at the time or I would have asked for a raise in pay. After all, $2,600 a year wasn't much even in those times. I guess that was another reason they kept me in ignorance. It meant they could economize.

  Looking back on it years later, though, I remember one little feat of mine that should have gotten me a thousand-dollar raise—or a Congressional Medal of Honor—whichever was better.

  I'll have to do a little explaining.

  We were fighting the Germans in those days, you might remember. We were also fighting the Japanese, but I was out of that. I didn't have the eyes for work among the Orientals.

  Now the Germans were efficient. They infiltrated us, you know. They sent any number of men into the United States. They sent those men with false identities, false papers, false histories. They did a wonderful and thorough job.

  You might ask, couldn't we do the same and send Americans into Germany?

  Sure we could, but we never had a chance. The Germans had a pretty homogeneous society and we didn't. We are a melting pot. We've got all kinds of accents here and all kinds of ethnicities.

  If one of our agents made some small error in Germany, they'd have him strung up by the thumbs before he was quite finished with the error. Over here, we've got to wait for ten or twelve months before we're sure whether someone's a German agent or an honest and loyal Mitteleuropean-American or something.

  So we were always running behind. Naturally, I knew nothing of this. No one did except maybe five people who knew 25 percent apiece. I know that comes to a total of 125 percent, but there was some overlapping.

  My talent was that I could spot phonies. That's what kept me out of the army. They needed that old infallible spotter—me.

  So when they had some true-blue American who had perpetrated what might be (or what might not be) a floater, I was put on him. They'd call me in and tell me they wanted to hire someone to work at the Naval Air Experimental Station, where I worked as a chemist, and they weren't sure about his loyalty.

  I didn't think much of it. We had a lieutenant commander who suspected anyone who knew any two-syllable words, and whoever it was always turned out to be an honest, decent, income-tax-cheating, draft-dodging American. Except sometimes.

  This time I was called in to the commanding officer's office. I didn't know why. Much later, I came across some papers that made it look as though the incident involved something that meant victory or defeat in the war. I haven't the faintest idea why, but the war would surely have been lost if I didn't come through.

  Naturally, I didn't know it at the time.

  "Griswold," said the commander, "we've got a new man. His name is Brooke. He spells his name with an 'e.' We're not sure about him. He may be a true-blue American. He may be a sneaking, stinking Nazi. You find out for us and don't let him know you're finding out, because we don't want him on his guard. What's more, Griswold, we've got to know by 5 p.m. and we've got to know i
t right. If you come up with no answer by 5 p.m. or with the wrong answer, well, Griswold—"

  He lit up his cigarette, stared at me, narrow-eyed through the smoke, and said in a voice that would have chipped granite, "If you fail, Griswold, you can forget about any promotions."

  That really put the pressure on me. If I had known the course of the war was at stake, I could have shrugged it off. Losing a war is just an item in history, but losing a promotion is a personal tragedy.

  I looked at my watch. It was 10:15 a.m., which would have given me nearly seven hours.

  I didn't get to meet him for half an hour; and then one of the lab managers felt it incumbent to spend two hours explaining the new man's duties to him.

  It wasn't till nearly 2 p.m. that we found ourselves at adjacent lab desks, and I could really strike up a conversation with him.

  He was a very pleasant fellow, which was a mark against him, of course, because a secret agent tries to be pleasant. The trouble is that so do a certain percentage of loyal people—not many, but enough do so to confuse the issue.

  I assumed he wouldn't mind a little gentle probing. He would expect it and he would be bound to cooperate.

  For one thing, if he held back, that would be suspicious. If he were an enemy agent, reserve might attract attention to him and he would be shot. If he were not an enemy agent, reserve might indicate stupidity and he might be promoted into an administrative position. Both eventualities were equally undesirable.

  Besides this, German agents sent to infiltrate defense agencies inside the United States tended to glory in their ability to withstand probing, and they seemed to invite questions.

  After all, they were chosen from those who had spent their early years in the United States, so that they could easily slip back into American idiomatic English, and, in addition, they were thoroughly grounded in American trivia.

  For instance, you've all heard that the way to tell a German spy who's pretending to be an American is to ask him who won the World Series the year before. Don't you believe it! Every single one of them is thoroughly up on the World Series and on all the baseball statistics, to say nothing of prizefighting and the name of every Vice-President for the last fifty years.