Loretta smiled and put a hand on my shoulder. “My girl.”
Captain remained expressionless. He loathed giving anyone the satisfaction of seeing that either condemnation or praise affected him. “Whether you’re kind or unkind matters not at all to me. This isn’t personal. I’m a dealmaker, a businessman. I’ve come to make an offer that will spare you from a tragedy. If we reach an agreement, I’ll keep my end of the bargain. If you choose not to do the right thing, the consequence will be of your making, not mine.”
“What offer? What deal?” Franklin demanded. “I can conceive of no business we could have with you.”
“That’s okay,” Captain said. “I’ve already conceived of it for you. I require one hundred thousand dollars. Because the banks have stabilized in recent years, I imagine you no longer keep the largest part of your assets in cash, which is how I need to receive it. But surely you have at least a hundred K in your home vault.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Loretta said. She rose to her feet and took two steps toward him before she seemed to realize she had sprung into motion. She halted, looking down at him with contempt. “We paid you forty thousand to pry you away from Adiel. She never belongedwith you. We adopted her almost eight years ago. She’s not yours, and she never will be.”
He held up both hands, palms toward Loretta, as though advising her to calm down and give him a chance to explain himself. “I have not come here to lay claim to Alida—or Adiel, as you call her. I am well aware the adoption is legal. I’ve no rights to her. Sit down, please. Gather yourself so we can handle this like businesspeople.”
After a hesitation, Loretta returned to her chair with some reluctance.
Franklin’s hands were fisted on his thighs, but his voice was quiet and measured. “Do you have photographs of her? You swore you didn’t. If now you’re suggesting you’ll publicly embarrass her, if you’re demanding money not to do it—that’s extortion. A felony.”
“I am not a cruel man,” Captain said. “I’ve been a good friend and generous benefactor to many poor, deformed creatures from whom most people would turn away in disgust and fear. I have no photos. Your money would not be extorted from you. You would be paying an insurance premium to guarantee the girl’s safety.”
If words had weight, “safety” would have fallen to the lawn with a solid thud.
When I looked away from Captain, not fearful but outraged, I became aware that the day had grown eerily quiet. The Bram usually was graced with birdsong, but not now. The sky often presented a ballet of swallows and phoebes, but currently offered not one bird in flight. The dog was keeping his distance, watching us from within the pavilion, his head between two of the balusters. All of Nature’s own seemed to have retreated in recognition that Evil had come into these gardens.
“We can deal with you,” Franklin said. “This is the closest you will ever get to her—and live.”
“Again,” Captain said, “you attribute to me a criminal capacity I do not have. I could never commit the slightest physical harm to AlidaAdiel. You would be buying insurance to protect her from an individual with a more violent nature than I possess.”
“And where would this threat come from? Who would it be?”
Captain smiled and nodded. “One does not sell insurance without specifying the threat against which the client is buying protection. I will explain. After receiving your forty thousand in 1930, I sold my interest in the Museum of the Strange for a tidy sum and as well my oceanside lot in San Clemente. I realized I now had sufficient funds to pursue investments that, in a few years, would ensure a far more luxurious retirement than I’d been anticipating. Indeed, I did quite well in spite of the economic crisis—until 1935. My mistake was in believing that our government would be competent enough to set the financial ship aright long before then. I structured my investments to pay off by ’35. Foolish of me. Here we are in 1938, no better off, and no one in Washington wiser about how to fix the situation. For the past three years, I have been bleeding dollars, the worst illness I’ve ever known. Month by month, I thought more often of the Fairchild clan sailing through the Depression on their fine estate. I learned what I could about your family. I couldn’t see on what basis I could encourage you to do business. Then all my years running the Museum of the Strange brought me the answer.”
As Captain talked, there was no mistaking how smug he was, how certain of his position and his power over us. I knew him to be a man who brought to his business—in fact to every aspect of life—the shrewdness of a poker player who occasionally might lose a hand but rarely lost the game. Although Loretta and Franklin knew him less well than I did, they concluded he had a valid reason to be smug; in spite of their anger, they didn’t interrupt him.
“When you’re running a ten-in-one, there’s often a problem of staffing. Many human oddities have serious health problems and don’t live so long. They’re always dying on you. Those who’re odd enough—genuine freaks—they don’t just come to you and apply fora job. You’ve got to discover them, and they aren’t standing around on every street corner. You need to develop contacts in certain medical communities, among reporters for the lurid tabloids that fill their pages with everything weird and decadent. I want you to understand how, when a tip pays off, it’s expensive. Maybe you think I’m greedy here, but I have expenses. I have to be generous with the tipsters or I’ll lose them. I have to negotiate with the parents or whatever institution has custody. If the freak is intelligent enough to know he has value, I have to cut him in on the take. They don’t come to me as young and helpless as Alida did. When I owned the Museum of the Strange, I was fair with everyone. That’s why, though I’ve been out of the business, I still receive tips from contacts. This tip was most timely. My need for fresh capital has become severe. I was getting a bit depressed about finding a way to convince you that buying insurance on Alida Adiel was a necessity. Then suddenly fate brought me a tip about the weirdest ten-in-one attraction I’ve ever seen. He’s a very good boy with me. Very good and grateful. But when I tell him to be bad, he can be very bad indeed. He so enjoys it. If he were very bad with your girl here, I would be far away, my alibi well established. If he were somehow to be caught, he can never be tied to me. And he won’t be taken alive. Even if he were caught, he knows me by a name that isn’t mine. And the name he knows is not the name that I live by these days. Since purchasing my boy, I have so diligently separated myself from my past and from everyone I knew that a hundred Pinkerton agents could never find me. So. Have I set up the situation properly? Do you understand the risk against which it would be wise to acquire an insurance policy?”
Loretta took my hand to comfort me, though the contact was also intended to comfort her. “You’re threatening murder, Mr. Farnam.”
“Not a threat, Mrs. Fairchild. It’s a friendly advisement.”
Although not disbelieving, Franklin was at least suspicious. “What is this—‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ with you in the role of the sailor who owns an orangutan that slaughters people?”
Captain looked genuinely puzzled. “Orangutan?”
“He’s not a reader,” I said. “He’s not faking us with rehashed Poe. If this boy of his is real, he’s no orangutan.”
I doubt that I can convey how grotesque it was, sitting on that manicured lawn, under a blue and birdless sky, as if a butler and maids would shortly bring a table to set between us and Captain—a table, a tea service, a small arrangement of flowers, and an array of exquisite pastries. The white rabbit hadn’t yet arrived, but the Mad Hatter was definitely with us.
“Orangutan?” Captain said. “Well, of course he’s not any such thing. I wouldn’t have traveled a thousand miles to make a deal to acquire a monkey, as I traveled to get my boy.”
Perhaps Franklin was thinking of deceitful studio executives with whom he had done business. He said, “How do we know that this ‘boy’ exists at all?”
With his interlaced hands propped on his ample belly, Captain looked like an editorial cartoon of a self-satisfied robber baron contemplating foreclosing on the homes of a million widows. When his veracity was questioned, he manufactured a sad expression and for a long moment stared at his hands as if they were folded in prayer for the soul of the doubting Thomas who was his host. At last he raised his head and made eye contact. “If you haven’t sufficient faith in my word alone to take a life insurance policy on this young lady, then I’ll provide my bona fides. My boy will pay a visit to Bramley Hall one night and leave irrefutable proof that he was here and is everything I’ve told you. Proof that you will regret having insisted upon, proof that will cause you grief. Then for all my trouble, the price of the policy will be raised to one hundred fifty thousand. Of course, you’re wondering, if you pay,how often might I want you to renew the policy. I don’t deny I’m a man of many faults, but greed isn’t one of them. This single premium will buy insurance for life.”
Franklin was exasperated, but he maintained his composure. He seemed to speak almost with admiration. “Captain Farnam, you are an amazing piece of work.”
“Thank you, sir. I regret it is such a hard world that we are at times required to be hard ourselves in order to survive in it.”
Loretta tried to match Franklin’s calm demeanor, but her voice had an edge that his did not. “I believe I speak for my husband when I say there will be polar bears and penguins in Hell before we give you even one dollar. I’d rather we spent everything we have making the Bram impenetrable and hiring a platoon of security men.”
“Agreed,” said Franklin.
