Of course I realized that, as Jerry had said, I was thinking like a child; for the underworld’s not a compact, separate region; its territory is wherever its citizens set foot; and this may be at your office door? At the threshold of your servant’s hall? On the step of your town car? Who knows? For obviously it’s not a place at all but a contact, an association, a habit of conduct, an attitude toward life and, more than incidentally, toward death. Why should I be surprised that a citizeness had staked out a claim in the Scofield mansion?
I tried not to be. “Old Win Scofield!” I thought. He was sitting secure, if any one was, you’d say. But somewhere else Jerry was sitting in on fate; he’d seen Win Scofield’s number come up to the top of the rack at Keeban’s club; and his ’phoning me meant that an unusual job was up. For Jerry had told me he would pick and choose and not try to stop a job, unless it was a good one.
“Say not a word to any one,” he’d told me; I took that to mean not to say he’d warned me. It couldn’t mean that I wasn’t to get information. So I took up my ’phone and called Fred, who was my particular friend in the Scofield family.
Winton, the old man, was his father; of course Christina, of the alterable hair, wasn’t Fred’s mother; she was his father’s fourth, or fifth wife.
There was rather a lot of unpaid publicity about him when he got her; and it turned on him, rather than on her, because he’d fallen for that rejuvenation operation and, of course, he tried to have it secret.
Naturally the newspapers learned and, as a result, Win Scofield fled the town as soon as the hospital let him out. As secretly as possible--that is, with only a few friends besides newspapermen and film news service photographers present--he’d married Shirley Fendon, a girl he’d met at a cabaret. Of course, being sixty-seven or so and she twenty-two, he took her to Paris; but recently he’d slunk back to his home city.
Now it had never occurred to me until this moment that, in the general excitement over Winton’s rejuvenation, nobody asked much about Shirley. The spotlight simply wasn’t swung her way.
There she was where several wives--three or four, I couldn’t remember--had been before her and where, if rejuvenation really meant a return to old Win’s youth, several more would stand again.
