The Theban Mysteries (8 page)

“Suppose they call Miss Freund at home?” Julia asked.

“She will simply answer with perfect rectitude that she doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

“Wouldn’t she then immediately come round to see what they
are
talking about?”

“No doubt you are right. Call her up, Julia, and tell her enough to let her talk with confidence, but tell her to stay at home and grapple, if necessary, from there. Thank you, Kate, for coming. We bump, these days, from crisis to crisis. Like Pooh being dragged upstairs by Christopher Robin, bump, bump, bump. In fact, I think we can avert a real one-hundred-percent stinker in this case, if you’ll excuse the expression, but the implications are terrifying. I hoped,” she added to Kate, “that you might throw light.”

“Where is Angelica?” Julia asked.

“Angelica is lying down in the nurse’s office, being comforted by Mrs. Banister. You and she,” Miss Tyringham said to Kate, “are our rescue squad. I hope,” she rather faintly added.

“You want to know what’s happened, of course,” she continued. “We found a young man hiding out in the building almost unconscious with fright, worry, and near-starvation I suspect. But, for any of this to make sense, I’ll have to explain all the complicated heaving
and hoing we’ve been put to here to try to keep the school building safe from intruders. If you want to smoke, smoke. I’d offer you something to drink if I had it, but I don’t. Will you be patient with me for a moment as I go through this rather long-winded explanation?”

Kate leaned back, lit a cigarette, and decided that if it were possible to wring anyone’s interest to a higher pitch than hers was now wrung to, she didn’t know what methods would have to be employed.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about some of the damage we’ve suffered in the building from intruders and thieves,” Miss Tyringham began. Kate said that Anne Copland had told her about the stealing and the ruined gymnasium floor. “Yes; of course our first steps were to put up metal gates over all the lower windows and to secure the doors so that they were literally impenetrable with any device short of a major explosion. But the ways of today’s intruders are many, varied, and ingenious. For one thing, however much of an eye we try to keep out—and we simply can’t, for many reasons, have doormen guarding the lobby every moment of the day—anyone who puts his mind to it can gain entrance to the building and simply lie low until everyone’s gone home. True, this takes a certain agility and dodging about to avoid the cleanup people, but I don’t think it’s past the ingenuity of even the most simple-minded robber. In addition, though it doesn’t do to say so these days, our staff, both kitchen and cleaning, changes constantly for the most part—we have, of course, our old and faithful regulars—and one never knows what
their
motives may have been in taking the job. One is happy enough to find someone who
will push a mop these days without being certain he was made for higher things: in short, very few questions are asked. Then there are the delivery men, plumbers, carpenters—well, I needn’t go on endlessly with all the details; we have been damn lucky, actually, that nothing really untoward has happened in the school. Everyone was upset about the gym floor, of course, but it could have been a lot worse.

“Then,” Miss Tyringham continued, “we acquired, blessed was the day, Mr. O’Hara, late of the United States Army, where he had been a sergeant with years of experience at guard duty. He liked the penthouse apartment we could offer him, and the small salary was no special problem since he has his pension and no one dependent on him. Forgive me if I seem to be going on at unconscionable lengths, but unless you have a picture of the setting, so to speak, you can’t understand what happened.

“Mr. O’Hara moved in and he did keep a much better eye on things. He locked all the stairway doors, for one thing, and took both elevators up with him at night—he didn’t mind walking down for the second one, he said; it was only up that he began to feel his years—and we seemed to be doing fine until the fire people discovered about the locked stairways and pointed out that, in case of fire, Mr. O’Hara would have no fast way out of the building except by leaping off the roof hopefully into a fireman’s net (I do hope I have used the word ‘hopefully’ correctly, I can’t bear to have it used to mean ‘it is hoped,’ such sloppy syntax) and of course we couldn’t have Mr. O’Hara leaping off roofs, however hopefully, and it was then that he came to me with a proposal which seemed at first startling,
but has turned out to be a most workable arrangement. He suggested dogs.”

“Dogs?” Kate said. It was not what she had expected.

“Yes, my dear, dogs. Two mighty-vicious-looking Doberman pinschers which, however, Mr. O’Hara assures me, would never attack anyone. Their job, which they do superlatively well—so unusual these days, and, as Mr. O’Hara, who I fear is extremely conservative, pointed out, without demands, demonstrations, or strikes—is simply to make sure that nobody is in the building when it’s closed. Nobody. Naturally, when I first heard the suggestion of dogs I said flatly that the thing was impossible—imagine two vicious dogs, however disinclined to bite, in the midst of a school of five hundred girls, not to mention the faculty, staff, parents, or cleaning people. The idea was ludicrous. But Mr. O’Hara assured me that department stores around the country have been using dogs successfully for years with no danger to customers or anyone else; the dogs are never let out except when there is no one in the building, or no one who has any business to be there, which is just the point.”

“Where do they stay?”

“On the roof, my dear, next to Mr. O’Hara’s penthouse. They have most elegant quarters, indoor pens and out, and Mr. O’Hara takes them for a run in the park very early every morning. I’ve been up to see them in their cages—of course, one simply must know everything that goes on in a school of which one is the head—and they stood behind their bars and bared their teeth at me in a quite properly terrifying manner. No one can get up to the roof, since the door off the auditorium
is locked and there’s a trap door at the top of the stairs as well. I expect I was finally won over to the whole idea because it’s so absolutely uncanny—I mean, one could scarcely believe dogs were capable of so complicated an operation—I’ll tell you about it in a minute—though of course one knows of seeing-eye dogs and all those sheep dogs of Hardy’s and Lassie Come Home and all the rest of it.

“We installed electrified pads, one on the end of each hall, and when the dogs have been through all the rooms on that floor, and made certain there is no one in any of them, they press their paws on the electrified pad and it rings a bell in Mr. O’Hara’s apartment. They make their way up and down the building during the night, and if they find an intruder, their job is to keep him until help comes, not to attack him unless he tries to run or to reach for a gun or something of the sort. Then they would leap on him, as I understand this—Mr. O’Hara offered to demonstrate with a man dressed in heavily padded clothing, but I decided to take his word for it as long as he was able to assure me that they were trained not to kill under any circumstances. Now, as you will readily have seen, if the dogs are cornering an intruder, they will not press their paws on the electrified pad at the end of the hall, and when he does
not
hear the bell go off, Mr. O’Hara, armed, one gathers to the teeth, goes to see what has happened. He lets the police know before going, on my insistence, and that’s it.”

“A neat system,” Kate said. “I take it it’s been a complete success.”

“Complete. We haven’t had a single robbery or intrusion, Mr. O’Hara thinks, because, however secret
we may have been about the dogs, those who set about to make illegal entries know well enough that the dogs are here. We did have an unfortunate repairman, in the early days of the dogs, who agreed quite nobly to stay overtime to fix a leak in one of the lavatories, and no one thought to mention it to Mr. O’Hara. The dogs cornered the poor man, who fortunately simply stood in one place and trembled till Mr. O’Hara came and called the dogs off.”

“Naturally,” Kate said, “there are a million questions I want to ask about this fascinating arrangement, but I suppose I ought to contain my curiosity till we get to tonight’s problem. I’m to gather that the dogs found someone tonight.”

“They did. Angelica Jablon’s brother, not to put too fine a point on it. The boy was in a dreadful state to start with, and when those two snarling beasts cornered him, he panicked completely and finally fell backward, striking his head on the corner of something. Of course he had a scalp wound which bled all over the place, scalp wounds always do; he’s now in the hospital being treated for concussion and shock. He’ll be all right, at least as far as tonight’s little episode is concerned. Angelica, who saw him lying in a pool of blood, literally, I gather, before they took him to the hospital, is having hysterics down the hall in the nurse’s office, being comforted, one fervently hopes, by Mrs. Banister. The dogs are back on the roof and the Theban is faced with another crisis. We are one over par this week.”

Kate appreciated the light tones with which Miss Tyringham told this extraordinary story. From the point of view of the head of the school, it was vital to play down the drama—a boy had naughtily hidden out,
been frightened by some dogs, and hit his head. An unfortunate accident; one did not wish to underestimate the human implications of his actions, but if there was any horror to being evoked by dwelling on the occurrence at the Theban, Miss Tyringham did not intend to evoke it. Kate could hardly blame her.

Yet, listening to Miss Tyringham, Kate was herself overcome with the sheer naked terror that boy must have felt. To hide out alone in an unlit building is to expose oneself to certain fears which the mind may explain away but the stomach responds to; to hide out as a criminal, it scarcely mattered why, even if his reasons were beyond question sound, could not be the calmest of undertakings. Then, suddenly, wholly without warning—for surely the dogs walk silently—to back away from two foaming monsters, well, not foaming, perhaps, but Miss Tyringham had said that they bared their teeth and certainly if he moved they growled. How was the boy to know they would not attack, and would he have been able to convey the news to his thumping pulses even if he had known?

Kate knew that not for many nights would she rid herself of that scene, imagined to be sure but probably not exaggerated. No wonder he had backed away, fallen, and hit his head—or had simply fainted with fear. Kate wondered if Miss Tyringham had considered the scene in this terrible way. For God’s sake, Kate said to herself, of course she has; give her credit for the brains and imagination she’s got.

“Now the reason we have called you, my dear,” Miss Tyringham went on, “is because Angelica, after Mrs. Banister had quieted her down and when she was asked to explain the situation, attained coherent speech only
long enough to compare herself to Antigone defending her brother. She howled that you were probably the only one who would understand
that
, and then refused or was unable to utter another word. So here you are, you see, rallying round.”

“She hid the brother in the school building. What was he hiding from?”

“The United States Selective Service or his grandfather, probably both. What is clear enough is that he’s determined not to be inducted. Not a new story to your ears, my dear, I know.”

“And his sister was helping him.”

“Yes. It was she, we assume, who thought of the dark and deserted Theban as the perfect hiding place. All the necessary sanitary facilities, heat, shelter, and food to be provided by the girls from the local delicatessen—I don’t think they expected him to cook.”

“They know about Mr. O’Hara, surely?”

“Oh, yes, but since he is over sixty, and one man, they never doubted he could be evaded. As he could have been, but for the unknown factor of the dogs.”

“Do those miraculous dogs actually go into every room, including every cloakroom in the building?”

“Yes, that was one of the revisions we had to make in the routine when we instituted the dogs. The cleaning staff now leaves each door wide open—not that they know about the dogs. They would probably be frightened, and to no purpose.”

“So I’m to talk to Angelica in the hope that she will grow calmer?”

“I trust it is not a forlorn hope. There is the problem of publicity, to which the Theban has always been highly allergic—but obviously of more importance is
to discover how to deal intelligently with the whole terrible situation. Your great attraction, apart from the
Antigone
connection, is that you’re from outside and supposedly not already prejudiced against the young and radical, not likely to assume a the-Theban-right-or-wrong attitude. And then, most people simply don’t realize how difficult it is for adolescents to discover their own thoughts and feelings and attitudes when they are surrounded, as I fear Angelica is, either with those who agree with everything she says, or are horrified by everything she says. One wants a little toing and froing, if you follow me.”

“And the brother is in a draft situation not unlike that of my nephew, with which I burdened you at our very first interview.”

“Well, yes, my dear, that did occur to me. You can tell Angelica, quite truthfully, that you have met the problem before and sympathize. If, that is, you will be so good.”

“What’s the boy like, do you know?”

“Not the least bit. The family is, however, an unusual one. The father was killed in Korea just before Angelica was born, in 1953, and they have since lived with their grandfather, and they have been brought up by their mother, who is …” Miss Tyringham rearranged some papers on her desk as the great reticence of a headmistress overcame her, “shall we say a difficult woman, rather excitable and given to self-centered and frivolous pursuits. I don’t think it’s a happy family picture, which is one of the problems. Naturally, one wishes Angelica had not involved the school in quite so direct a way, but there is no question that we are, in any case, involved. This has been a very long-winded
briefing. My apologies. Does Angelica strike you as … well, sufficiently level-headed to function when the chips are down?”