7 Season's Greetings
Thomas Trumbull, whose exact position with government intelligence was not known to the other Black Widowers, creased his face into a look of agonized contempt, bent toward Roger Halsted, and whispered, “Greeting Cards?”
“Why not?” asked Halsted, his eyebrows lifting and encroaching on the pink expanse of his forehead. “It's an honorable occupation.”
Trumbull had arrived late to the monthly banquet of the Black Widowers and had been introduced to the guest of the evening even while Henry, the wonder-waiter, had placed the scotch and soda within the curve of his clutching fingers. The guest, Rexford Brown, had a markedly rectangular face, a good-humored mouth, a closely cut fuzz of white hair, a soft voice, and a patient expression.
Trumbull said discontentedly, “It's the season for it, with Christmas next week; I'll grant you that much. Still it means we'll have to sit here and listen to Manny Rubin tell us his opinion of greeting cards.”
“Who knows?” said Halsted. “It may turn out that he's written greeting-card rhymes himself. Anyone who's been a boy evangelist—”
Emmanuel Rubin, writer and polymath, had, as was well known, an incredible sharpness of hearing where mention was made, however tangentially, of himself. He drifted over and said, “Written what?”
“Greeting-card rhymes,” said Halsted. “You know—'There once were three travelers Magian, Who on a most festive occasion—'“
“No limericks, damn you,” shouted Trumbull. Geoffrey Avalon looked up from the other end of the room and said in his most austere baritone, “Gentlemen, I believe Henry wishes to inform us that we may be seated.”
Mario Gonzalo, the club artist, had already completed his sketch of the guest with an admirable economy of strokes and said lazily, “I've been thinking about Roger's limericks. Granted, they're pretty putrid, but they can still be put to use.”
“If you printed them on toilet paper—” began Trumbull.
“I mean money,” said Gonzalo. “Look, these banquets cost, don't they? It would be nice if they could be made self-supporting, and Manny knows about a half dozen publishers who will publish anything if they publish his garbage—”
Drake, stubbing his cigarette out with one hand, put the other over Mario's mouth. “Let's not get Manny into an explosive mood.”
But Rubin, who was inhaling veal at its most Italian with every indication of olfactory pleasure, said, “Let him talk, Jim. I'm sure he has an idea that will add new dimensions to the very concept of garbage.”
“How about a Black Widowers' Limerick Book?”
“A what?” said Trumbull in a stupefied tone.
“Well, we all know limericks. I have one that goes, There was a young lady of Sydney Who could take it—'“
“We've heard it,” said Avalon, frowning.
“And, There was a young fellow of Juilliard With a—”
“We've heard that one too.”
“Yes,” said Gonzalo, “but the great public out there hasn't. If we included all the ones we make up and all the ones we can remember, like Jim's limerick about the young lady of Yap, the one that rhymes 'interstices' and 'worse disease'—”
“I will not,” said Trumbull, “consent to have the more or less respectable name of the Black Widowers contaminated with any project of such infinite lack of worth.”
“What did I tell you about garbage?” said Rubin.
Gonzalo looked hurt. “What's wrong with the idea? We could make an honest buck. We could even include clean ones. Roger's are all clean.”
“That's because he teaches at a junior high school,” said Drake, snickering.
“You should hear some of those kids,” said Halsted. “How many are in favor of a Black Widowers? Limerick Book?
Gonzalo's hand went up in lonely splendor. Halsted looked as though he might join him; his arm quivered—but stayed down.
Rexford Brown asked mildly, “May I vote?”
“It depends,” said Trumbull suspiciously. “Are you in favor or not?”
“Oh, I'm in favor.”
“Then you can't vote.”
“Oh well, it wouldn't change the result, anyway, but I’m for anything that will bring moments of pleasure. There aren't enough of those.”
Gonzalo, speaking with his mouth full, said, “Tom never had one. How would he know?”
Rubin, with a clear effort to keep from sounding sardonic, and marking up a clear failure, said, “Is it those moments of pleasure that justify you in spending your life in the greeting-card business, Mr. Brown?”
“One of the ways,” said Brown.
“Hold it, Manny,” said Avalon. “Wait for the coffee.”
The conversation then grew general, though Gonzalo kept sulkily silent and was observed to be fiddling with his napkin, on which he wrote, in careful Old English lettering, “There once was a group of dull bastards—” but never got to a second line.
Over the coffee, Halsted said, “Okay, Manny, you nearly got to it earlier, so why don't you start the grilling?”
Rubin, who was just holding up his hand to Henry to indicate that he had enough coffee for the moment, looked up at this, his eyes owlish behind the thick lenses of his glasses and his sparse beard quivering.
“Mr. Brown,” he said, “how do you justify your existence?”
Brown smiled and said, “Very good coffee. It gives me a moment of pleasure and so does a greeting card. But wait, that's not all. There's more to it than that. You may take no pleasure from what you consider doggerel or moist sentiment or tired wit That is you, but you are not everyone. The prepared greeting card is of service to those who can't write letters or who lack the time to do so or who wish only to maintain a minimal contact. It supplies the needs of those to whom doggerel is touching verse, to whom sentiment is a real emotion, to whom any wit at all is not tired.”
Rubin said, “What is your function in connection with them? Do you manufacture them, ship them, design them, write the verses?”
“I manufacture them primarily, but I contribute to each of the categories, and more besides.”
“Do you specialize in any particular variety?”
“Not too intensively, although I'm rather weak on the funny ones. Those are for specialized areas. I must say, though, the discussion on limericks interested me. I don't know that limericks have ever been used on greeting cards. How did yours go, Roger?”
“I was just improvising,” said Halsted. “Let's see now— There once were three travelers Magian, Who on a most festive occasion—' “
Trumbull said, “Imperfect rhyme.”
Halsted said, “That's all right. You make a virtue out of necessity and keep it up. Let's see. Let's see—”
He thought a moment and said:
“There once were three travelers Magian, Who on a most festive occasion
Presented their presents
With humble obeisance To the King of the Israelite nation.”
“King of the Jews,” muttered Avalon under his breath.
“You just tossed that off?” asked Brown.
Roger flushed a little. “It gets easy when you have the meter firmly fixed in your head.”
Brown said, “I don't know that that one's usable, but I sell one or two that are not too distant from that sort of thing.”
“I wish,” said Avalon, with a trace of discontent on his handsome, dark-browed face, “that you had brought some samples.”
Brown said, “I didn't know it would be the kind of dinner where that would be expected. If you want samples, though, my wife is the one for you. Clara is the real expert.”
“Is she in greeting cards too?” asked Gonzalo, his large, slightly protuberant eyes filled with interest
“No, not really. She grew interested in them through me,” said Brown. “She began to collect interesting ones, and then her friends began to collect them and send them to her. Over the last ten or twelve years, the thing has been getting more and more elaborate. Christmastime especially, of course, since that is greeting-card time par excellence. There isn't a holiday, though, on which she doesn't receive a load of unusual cards. Just to show you, last September she got forty-two Jewish New Year cards, and we're Methodists.”
Rubin said, “Jewish New Year cards are usually pretty tame.”
“Usually, but people managed to find some dillies. She put them up on the mantelpiece and you never saw such a fancy collection of variations on the theme of the Star of David and the Tablets of the Law. —But it's Christmastime that counts. She practically papers the walls with cards and the apartment becomes a kind of fairyland, if I may use the term without being misunderstood.
“In fact, gentlemen, if you're really interested in seeing samples of unusual greeting cards, you're invited to my apartment. We have open house the week before Christmas. All the people who send cards come around to see where and how theirs contribute. Practically everyone from the apartment house comes too, and it's a large one—to say nothing of the repairman, doorman, postman, delivery boys, and who knows how many others from blocks around. I keep telling her we'll have to get the apartment declared a national landmark.”
“I feel sorry for your postman,” said Drake in his softly hoarse smoker's voice.
Brown said, “Don't be. He takes a proprietary interest and gives us special treatment. He never leaves our mail in the box—even when it would fit there. He always takes it up the elevator after all the rest of the mail has been distributed, and gives it to us personally. If no one's home, he goes back down and leaves it with the doorman.”
Drake said, “That sounds as though you have to give him a healthy tip come Christmastime.”
“A very healthy one,” said Brown. He chuckled. “I had to reassure him yesterday on that very point.”
“That you would give him a tip?”
“Yes. Clara and I were due at a luncheon and we were late, which was annoying because I had taken time off from work to attend and we dashed out of the elevator at the ground floor just as the postman was about to step into it with our mail. Clara recognized it, of course—it's always as thick as an unabridged dictionary in December—and said, 'I'll take it, Paul, thank you,' and off she whirled. The poor old guy just stood there, so caught by surprise and so shocked that I said to him, 'It's all right, Paul, not one cent off the tip.' Poor Clara!” He chuckled again.
“Why poor Clara?” asked Trumbull.
“I know,” said Gonzalo, “it wasn't your mail.”
“Of course it was our mail,” said Brown. “It's the only mail old Paul ever takes up. Listen, the days he's off they hold back the greeting-card items so he can bring them himself the next day. He's practically a family retainer.”
“Yes, but why poor Clara?” asked Trumbull, escalating the decibels.
“Oh, that. We got into our car and, since it was a half-hour drive, she counted on going through the mail rapidly and then leaving it under the seat. —But the first thing she noticed was a small envelope, obviously a greeting card, sticking out from the rest of the mail, almost as though it were going to fall out. I saw it myself when she had snatched the mail from Paul. Well, we never get small greeting cards, so she took it out and said, 'What's this?'
“She flipped the envelope open and it was a Christmas card—the blankest, nothingest, cheapest Christmas card you ever saw—and Clara said, 'Who had the nerve to send me this?' I don't think she'd as much as seen a plain card in years. It irritated her so that she just put the rest of the mail away without looking at it and chafed all the way to the luncheon.”
Halsted said, “It was probably a practical joke by one of her friends. Who sent it?'
Brown shrugged. “That's what we don't know. —It wasn't you, Roger, was it?”
“Me? Think I'm crazy? I sent her one with little jingle bells in it. Real ones. Listen,” and he turned to the others, “you really have to knock yourself out for her. You should see the apartment on Mother's Day. You wouldn't believe how many different cards have tiny little diapers in them.”
“And we don't have any children, either,” said Brown, sighing.
“Wasn't there a name on that card you got?” asked Trumbull, sticking to the subject grimly.
“Unreadable,” said Brown. “Illegible.”
Gonzalo said, “I smell a mystery here. We ought to try to find out who sent it.”
“Why?” said Trumbull, changing attitude at once.
“Why not?” said Gonzalo. “It might give Mrs. Brown a chance to get back at whoever it is.”
“I assure you,” said Brown, “you'll find no hint to the sender. Even fingerprints wouldn't help. We handled it and so did who knows how many postal employees.”
“Just the same,” said Gonzalo, “it's a pity we can't look at it.”
Brown said rather suddenly, “Oh, you can look at it I've got it.”
“You've got it?”
“Clara was going to tear it up, but I had just stopped for a red light and I said, 'Let me see it,' and I looked it over and then the green light came on and I shoved it in my coat pocket and I suppose it's still there.”
“In that case,” said Halsted, “let's see it.”
“I'll get it,” said Brown. He retired for a moment to the cloakroom and was back at once with a square envelope, pinkish in color, and handed it to Halsted. “You're welcome to pass it around.”
Halsted studied it. It had not been carefully pasted and the flap had come up without tearing. On the back was the address in its simplest possible form:
BROWN
354 cps 21C
NYC 10019
The handwriting was a just-legible scrawl. The stamp was a Jackson 100, the postmark was a black smear, and there was no return address.
The other side of the envelope was blank. Halsted removed the card from within and found it to be a piece of cardboard folded down the middle. The two outside surfaces were the same pink as the envelope and were blank. The inner surfaces were white. The left-hand side was blank and the right-h.ind side said “Season's Greetings” in black letters that were only minimally ornamented. Underneath was a scrawled signature beginning with what looked like a capital D followed by a series of diminishing waves.
Halsted passed it to Drake on his left and it made its way around the table till Avalon received it and looked at it. He passed it on to Henry, who was distributing the brandy glasses. Henry looked at it briefly and handed it back to Brown.
Brown looked up a little surprised, as though finding the angle of return an unexpected one. He said, “Thank you,” and sniffed at his brandy delicately.
“Well,” said Gonzalo, “I think the name is Danny. Do you know any Danny, Mr. Brown?”
“I know a Daniel Lindstrom,” said Brown, “but I don't think his own mother ever dared call him Danny.”
Trumbull said, “Hell, that's no Danny. It could be Donna or maybe a last name like Dormer.”
“We don't know any Donna or Donner.”
“I should think,” said Avalon, running his finger about the rim of his brandy glass, “that Mr. Brown has surely gone over every conceivable first and last name beginning with D in his circle of acquaintances. If he has not come up with an answer, I am certain we will not. If this is what Mario calls a mystery, there is certainly nothing to go on. Let's drop the subject and proceed with the grilling.”
“No,” said Gonzalo vehemently. “Not yet. Good Lord, Jeff, just because you don't see something doesn't mean there's nothing there to be seen.” He turned in his seat “Henry, you saw that card, didn't you?”
“Yes, sir,” said Henry.
“All right, then. Wouldn't you agree with me that there is a mystery worth investigating here?”
“I see nothing we can seize upon, Mr. Gonzalo,” said Henry.
Gonzalo looked hurt. “Henry, you're not usually that pessimistic.”
“We cannot manufacture evidence, surely, sir.”
“That's plain enough,” said Avalon. “If Henry says there's nothing to be done, then there's nothing to be done. Manny, continue the grilling, won't you?”
“No, damn it,” said Gonzalo, with quite unaccustomed stubbornness. “If I can't have my book of limericks, then I'm going to have my mystery. If I can show you where this card does tell us something—”
“If pigs can fly,” said Trumbull.
Halsted said, “Host's privilege. Let Mario talk.”
“Thanks, Roger.” Gonzalo rubbed his hands. “We'll do this Henry-style. You listen to me, Henry, and you'll see how it goes. We have a signature on the card and the only thing legible about it is the capital D. We might suppose that the D is enough to tell us who the signer is, but Mr. Brown says it isn't. Suppose we decided then that the D is the only clear part of the signature because it's the only thing that's important.”
“Wonderful,” said Trumbull, scowling. “Where does that leave us?”
“Just listen and you'll find out. Suppose the greeting card is a device to pass on information, and it is the D that's the code.”
“What does D tell you?”
“Who knows? It tells you what column to use in a certain paper, or in what row a certain automobile is parked, or in what section to find a certain locker. Who knows? Spies or criminals may be involved. Who knows?”
“That's exactly the point,” said Trumbull. “Who knows? So what good does it do us?”
“Henry,” said Gonzalo, “don't you think my argument is a good one?”
Henry smiled paternally. “It is an interesting point, sir, but there is no way of telling whether it has any value.”
“Yes, there is,” said Avalon. “And a very easy way, too. The letter is addressed to Mr. Brown. If the D has significance, then Mr. Brown should know what that significance is. Do you, Mr. Brown?”
“Not the faintest idea in the world,” said Brown.
“And,” said Avalon, “we can't even suppose that he has guilty knowledge which he is hiding, because if that were the case, why show us the card in the first place?”
Brown laughed. “I assure you. No guilty knowledge. At least, not about this card.”
Gonzalo said, “Okay, I'll accept that. Brown here knows nothing about the D, But what does that show? It shows that the letter went to him by mistake. In fact, that fits right in. Who would send a card like that to someone who makes her apartment into a Christmas card show place? It had to have gone wrong.”
Avalon said, “I don't see how that's possible. It's addressed to him.”
“No, it isn't, Jeff. It is not addressed to him. It is addressed to Brown and there must be a trillion Browns in the world.” Gonzalo's voice rose and he was distinctly flushed. “In fact, I'll bet there's another Brown in the building and the card was supposed to go to him and he would know what the D means. Right now this other Brown is waiting and wondering where the devil the greeting card he's expecting is and what the letter is. He's in a spot. Maybe heroin is involved, or counterfeit money or—”
“Hold on,” said Trumbull, “you're going off the diving board into a dry pool.”
“No, I'm not” said Gonzalo. “If I were this other Brown, I would figure out that it probably went to the wrong Brown, I mean the right one, the one we've got here, and I would go up to the apartment to search for it. I would say, 'I want to look at the collection,' and I would poke around but I wouldn't find it because Brown has the card right here and—”
Brown had been listening to Gonzalo's fantasy with a rather benign expression on his face, but now it was suddenly replaced by a look of deep astonishment He said, “Wait a minute!”
Gonzalo caught himself up. He said, “Wait a minute, what?”
“It's funny, but Clara said that someone had been poking around the cards today.”
Rubin said, “Oh no. You're not going to tell me that Mario's nonsense has something to it. Maybe she's just imagining it.”
Brown said, “I told her she was, but I wonder. She gets the mail each day and spends some time sorting it out in her —well, she calls it her sewing room, though I've never caught her sewing there—and then comes out and distributes it according to some complicated system of her own. And today she found that some of the cards had been misplaced since the day before. I don't really see her making a mistake in such a matter.”
“There you are,” said Gonzalo, sitting back smugly. “That's what I call working out an inexorable chain of logic.”
“Who was in the house today?” said Trumbull. “I mean, besides you and your wife?”
“No one. There were no visitors. It's a little too early for open house. No one. And no one broke in, either.”
“You can't be sure,” said Gonzalo. “I predicted someone would be poking around and someone was. I think we've got to follow this up now. What do you say, Henry?”
Henry waited a moment before replying. “Certainly,” he said, “it seems to be a puzzling coincidence.”
Gonzalo said, “Not puzzling at all. It's just this other Brown. We've got to get him.”
Brown sat there, frowning, as though the fun had gone out of the game for him. He said, “There is no other Brown in the building.”
“Maybe the spelling is different,” said Gonzalo, with no perceptible loss of confidence. “How about Browne with a final e or spelling it with an au the way the Germans do?”
“No,” said Brown.
“Come on, Mr. Brown. You don't know the name of everyone in the building.”
“I know quite a few, and I certainly know the B’s. You know, you look at the directory sometimes and your eyes automatically go to your own name.” He thought awhile as though he were picturing the directory. Then he said with a voice that seemed to have grown pinched, 'There's a Beroun, though, B-e-r-o-u-n. I think that's the spelling. No, I'm sure of it.”
The Black Widowers sat in silence. Gonzalo waited thirty seconds, then said to Henry, “Showed them, didn't we?”
Halsted passed his hand over his forehead in the odd gesture characteristic of him and said, “Tom, you're something or other in the cloak-and-dagger groups. Is it possible there might be something to this?”
Trumbull was deep in thought. “The address,” he said finally, “is 354 CPS. That's Central Park South— I don't know. I might be happier if it were CPW, Central Park West.”
“It says CPS quite clearly,” said Gonzalo.
“It also says Brown quite clearly,” said Drake, “and not Beroun.”
“Listen,” said Gonzalo, “that handwriting is a scrawl. You can't tell for sure whether that's a w or a u and there could be an e in between the b and the r.”
“No, there couldn't,” said Drake. “You can't have it both ways. It's a scrawl when you want the spelling different, and it's quite clear when you don't.”
“Besides,” said Avalon, “you're all ignoring the fact that there's more than a name in the address, or a street either. There's an apartment number, too, and it's 21C. Is that your apartment number, Mr. Brown?”
“Yes, it is,” said Brown.
“Well then,” said Avalon, “it seems that the theory falls to the ground. The wrong Brown or Beroun doesn't live in 21C. The right Brown does.”
For the moment Gonzalo seemed nonplused. Then he said, “No, it's all making too much sense. They must have made a mistake with the apartment number too.”
“Come on,” said Rubin. “The name is misspelled and the apartment number is miswritten and the two end up matching? A Mr. Brown at the correct apartment number? That's just plain asking too much of coincidence.”
“It could be a small mistake,” said Gonzalo. “Suppose this Beroun is in 20C or 21E. It might take just two small mistakes, one to make Beroun look like Brown and one to get 21C instead of 20C.”
“No,” said Rubin, “it's still two mistakes meshing neatly. Come on, Mario, even you can see how stupid it is.”
“I don't care how stupid it may seem theoretically. What is the situation in actual practice? We know there is a Beroun in the same apartment house with Brown. All we have to do now is find out what Beroun's apartment number is and I'll bet it's very close to 21C, something where it is perfectly easy to make a mistake.”
Brown shook his head. “I don't think so. I know there's no Beroun anywhere on my floor, on the twenty-first, that is. And I know the people who live below me in 20C and above me in 22C and neither one is Beroun or anything like it.”
“Well then, where does Beroun live? What apartment number? All we have to do is find that out.”
Brown said, “I don't know which apartment number is Beroun's. Sorry.”
“That's all right,” said Gonzalo. “Call your wife. Have her go down and look at the directory and then call us back.”
“I can't She's gone out to a movie.”
“Call the doorman, then.”
Brown looked reluctant. “How do I explain—”
Drake coughed softly. He stubbed out his cigarette, even though there was still a quarter inch of tobacco in front of the filter, and said, “I have an idea.”
“What?” said Gonzalo.
“Well, look here. You have apartment 21C and if you look at the envelope you see that 21C is made in three marks. There's a squiggle for the 2 and a straight line for the 1 and a kind of arc for the C”
“So what?” said Gonzalo, looking very much as though ideas were his monopoly that evening.
“So how can we be sure that the 1 belongs to the 2 and makes the number 21? Maybe the 1 belongs to the C, and if you take them together, the guy's trying to write a K. What I'm saying is that maybe the apartment number is 2K.”
“That's it,” said Gonzalo excitedly. “Jim, remind me to kiss any girl sitting next to you any time there are girls around. Sure! It's Beroun, 354 CPS 2K, and the postman read it as Brown, 354 CPS 21C. The whole thing's worked out and now, Tom, you pull the right strings to get someone after this Beroun—”
“You know,” said Trumbull, “you're beginning to hypnotize me with this fool thing and I'm almost ready to arrange to have this damned Beroun watched—except that, no matter how I stare at this address, it still looks like Brown, not Beroun,- and like 21C, not 2K.”
'Tom, it's got to be Beroun 2K. The whole thing fits.”
Brown shook his head. “No, it doesn't. Sorry, Mario, but it doesn't. If Beroun lived in 2K, your theory might be impressive, but he doesn't.”
“Are you sure?” asked Gonzalo doubtfully.
“It happens to be the Super's apartment. I've been there often enough.”
“The Super,” said Gonzalo, taken aback for a moment and then advancing to the charge again. “Maybe he'd fit even better. You know—blue-collar worker—maybe he's in the numbers racket. Maybe—Hey, of course it fits. Who would be poking around your apartment today looking over the Christmas cards? The Super, that's who. He wouldn't have to break in. He'd have the keys and could get in any time.”
“Yes, but why is the card addressed to Brown, then?”
“Because the names may be similar enough. What's the Super's name, Mr. Brown?”
Brown sighed. “Ladislas Wessilewski,” and he spelled it out carefully. “How are you going to write either one of those names so that it looks anything like Brown?”
Avalon, sitting bolt upright, passed a gentle finger over each half of his mustache and said sententiously, “Well, Mario, there we have our lesson for the day. Not everything is a mystery and inexorable chains of logic can end nowhere.”
Gonzalo shook his head. “I still say there's something wrong there. —Come on, Henry, help me out here. Where did I go off base?”
Henry, who had been standing quietly at the sideboard for the past fifteen minutes, said, “There is indeed a possibility, Mr. Gonzalo, if we accept your assumption that the Christmas card represents a code intended to transfer information. In that case, I think it is wrong to suppose that the card was misdirected.
“If the card had been delivered to the wrong place, it is exceedingly odd that it should end up at an apartment where there is a notorious card collector, well known as such throughout the apartment house and perhaps over a much wider area.”
Gonzalo said, “Coincidences do happen, Henry.”
“Perhaps, but it seems much more likely that Mr. Brown's address was used deliberately. Who would pay any attention whatever to one greeting card, more or less, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Brown, when they get so many? Since they get many greeting cards even on such unlikely holidays, for them, as the Jewish New Year and Mother's Day, it would be quite convenient to use them as a target at any time of the year, especially if all the card says is a noncommittal 'Season's Greetings.'“
Brown said with sudden coldness, “Are you suggesting, Henry, that Clara and I are involved in some clandestine operation?”
Henry said, “I doubt it, sir, since, as someone said earlier, you would not have brought up the matter of the card if you were.”
“Well then?”
“Assuming Mr. Gonzalo's theory to be correct, I suggest the cards were sent to you rather than to someone else, because if they actually reached you they would be unnoticeable. They may have underestimated her--your wife's--penchant for novel cards and her contempt for plain ones.”
“But as far as I know, this is the only card of the kind we've ever received, Henry.”
“Exactly, sir. It was an accident. You're not supposed to receive them. Your name on them is simply a blind, losing it in hundreds of other greeting-card envelopes similarly addressed. Only these particular cards are supposed to be intercepted.”
“How?”
“By the person who well knows the quantity and kind of mail you get and could suggest that you be used for the purpose; by the person who would have the easiest opportunity to intercept, but failed this one time. Mr. Brown, how. many times have you come out of the elevator just as the postman was going in, and how many times have you taken the package out of his hands on such an occasion?”
Brown said, “As far as I know, that was the only time.”
“And the card in question was sticking out, almost as though it were falling out. That's how your wife noticed it at once.”
“You mean Paul—”
“I mean it seems strange that a postman should be so insistent on dealing with your Christmas cards that he arranges to have them left in the post office an extra day when he is not on duty. Is it so that he remains sure of never missing one of the cards addressed to you that he must intercept?”
Trumbull interrupted. “Henry, I know something of this. Postmen in the process of sorting mail are under constant observation.”
“I imagine so, sir,” said Henry, “but there are other opportunities.”
Brown said, “You don't know Paul. I've known him since we've moved into the apartment. Years! He's a phenomenally cautious man. I imagine he'd lose his job if he were ever seen pocketing a letter he was supposed to deliver. That lobby is a crowded place; there are always two postmen working. I know him, I tell you. Even if he wanted to, he would never take the chance.”
Henry said, “But that is precisely the point, Mr. Brown. If this man is as you say he is, it explains why he is so insistent on taking the mail up to you. Even in this crowded city, there is one place you can count on being surely unobserved for at least a few moments and that is in an empty automatic elevator.
“There is nothing to prevent the postman, in sorting the mail and preparing the bundle, from placing one greeting card, which he recognizes by shape, color, and handwriting, in such a way that it will stick out from the rest. Then, in the elevator, which he takes only when he is sure he is the only rider, he has time to flick out the envelope and put it in his pocket, even if he remains alone only for the time it takes to travel one floor.”
Brown said, “And was it Paul who was poking around in our apartment today?”
“It's possible, I should think,” said Henry. “Your wife receives the mail from the postman at the door and, since it is getting close to Christmas, the arrangements she must make are getting complicated. She rushes to the sewing room without bothering to bolt the door. The postman has a chance to push the little button that makes it possible to turn the knob from outside. He might then have had a few minutes to try to find the card. He didn't, of course.”
Brown said, “A man so cautious as to insist on using an empty elevator for the transfer of a letter surely would not—”
“It is perhaps a sign of the desperation of the case. He may know this to be an unusually important card. If I were you, sir—n
“Yes?”
'Tomorrow is Saturday and you may not be at work, but the postman will. Hand this card to the postman. Tell him that it can't possibly be yours and that perhaps it is Beroun's, His facial expression may be interesting and Mr. Trumbull might arrange to have the man watched. Nothing may come of it, of course, but I strongly suspect that something is there.”
Trumbull said, “There is a chance. I can make the arrangements.”
A look of gloom gathered on Brown's face and he shook his head. “I hate laying a trap for old Paul at Christmastime,”
“Being guest at the Black Widowers has its drawbacks, sir,” said Henry.
7 Afterword
“Season's Greetings” was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for some reason, as it is their complete right to do, of course—even without a reason, if they don't care to advance one. What's more, there clearly isn't the shadow of an excuse for sending it on to F & SF. So I just let it stay unsold.
Actually, I like to have a few stories in the collections that have not appeared in the magazines. There ought to be some small bribe for the reader who has been enthusiastic enough and loyal enough to read them all when they first appeared.
Of course, I might reason that in book form you have the stories all in one bunch without the admixture of foreign components so that it doesn't matter if all were previously published—but it would also be nice to have something new. This is one of them, and it isn't the only one in this book, either.