by Edward St. Boniface.
Mood of the latest welcoming party at Hadesbridge County had something distinctly wrong about it. Atmosphere at the beachfront bungalow was surrealistic, almost. The man’s name was Kitchener apparently, and he had moved into the newly built home only last week.
Those at the fringes talked over-loudly about various subjects that eluded Marvin with their intellectualism and knowing artistic pretensions. Recent death of the great maestro Picasso and his legacy. Latest philosophical books and European movies, classical music and the new electronic and atonal ‘innovations’ that always sounded like screeching cat’s choruses to him on the radio.
All those things lay entirely outside his interests and field of expertise. He was unquestionably better travelled and far more genuinely experienced than almost all of the people talking, but not in that way. Meaningless polite highbrow chatter wasn’t what was disturbing him tonight as he wandered, more than a bit dazed, through the jazzy clangour.
It was the ghouls. Dotted around the party were infallibly well dressed men in small almost silent groups. They looked like monks or gamblers, men apart from their surroundings. Some sat alone, seemingly in shadow although the bungalow was almost harshly overlit.
Those who had brought wives or girlfriends with them had sent the women off into the party to participate. They themselves hung back. All of them wore the same grave face full of an unfathomable malevolence and all of them were staring directly at Kitchener.
Cartoonish was the only word to describe Kitchener adequately. It was a weird contrast. Dancing now with a succession of giggling feminine partners he bolted to and fro alarmingly, prancing like a gigolo or a professional belly dancer like Marvin had once seen in Istanbul.
Or was it Tehran. Damascus? No, Havana before Castro; that had been it.
Kitchener’s agility was simply uncanny. Looked as if he was perpetually about to fall or pitch over, only to recover himself in astonishing displays of dexterity. Limitless stream of quips and jokes and wild elisions kept erupting from him as though he was a human radio station.
From his own expression it looked like he kept surprising himself. One of the unsmiling men near Marvin had grimly described Kitchener as a ‘human gumby.’ No one laughed.
Marvin knew the child’s toy from his own young years and smiled to himself. A rubber humanoid doll with a wire skeleton. It looked rather like a green, annoyingly inedible gingerbread man.
Indeed there was something of that elasticity about Kitchener. Also a palpable impression of something missing. Like a phantom or ectoplasmic form hanging around him.
Not in an actual personal sense. Vitality and sheer force of personality in Kitchener was remarkable. Liveliness and gregariousness emitted from him like invisible benign radioactivity.
Odd sense of something lacking was more physical in nature, but it was elusive. Very much like a memory one didn’t quite catch. Marvin couldn’t figure out why he should keep instinctively thinking of Kitchener as a much bulkier man.
Perhaps it was the gentleman’s repartee itself. Kitchener was constantly making jokes mocking the overweight. He repeatedly and bizarrely referred to himself as an ‘old fatso’, although he was clearly relatively trim and in rudely glowing good health.
Ghouls assembled clearly didn’t like that. A kind of wince travelled between them every time the bouncing and bopping and bumptious man boomed some new self-deprecating, incongruous joke. Subtle, but it was there along with the fixed glaring.
Combination of the silence and staring was one of the most menacing things he had ever experienced. He always tried to avoid those kinds of situations where you could get yourself noticed too readily. Marvin Mumms was above all things a timid and mild and inoffensive man.
Kept having to remind himself to think of himself by that name. Only by that name and in the context of his new identity. Counsellor Margolis (he wasn’t supposed to think of the man by name either but couldn’t help it) had trained him simply and cleverly to think of himself, as Marvin Mumms, like he was a character in a novel or a movie.
Detaching himself but at the same time integrating his still-new identity as a fictional character. Gradually becoming ‘real’ to himself as his former life’s memories faded and the immediate concerns and life in the present advanced. Theoretically he would soon forget the fictionalised persona adopted and fully become Marvin Mumms within a few more months, maybe a year at the outside.
Dubious at first, he had gradually found himself slipping more and more into his new life despite an almost inexplicable inability to fill his time. Episodes of lonely emptiness haunted him, a yawning blankness that frighteningly robbed him of initiative on an increasingly regular basis. In the past his secret vice had always defeated that encroaching ennui.
Gambling of any kind however seemed to be frowned on at the Hadesbridge County colony. Marvin hadn’t expected that, it seemed needlessly puritanical. In every city neighbourhood and in every town however small, there was always a standing illegal card game or secret casino operating if you had the bug.
Out here though, he was at a loss. Undoubtedly there were games running and numerous gambling houses. But he liked to check prospects out at a distance first through fellow gamblers he knew on the grapevine. The man who was now Marvin Mumms had no such local contacts to consult.
Apart from the other Converts. Nothing had been said of them by Mr Steeler or Counsellor Margolis. Or that strange grandfatherly old man who inspired both confidence and a vague dread in him at the same time. The impatient and very no-nonsense Doctor who had overseen Marvin’s surgery and physical rehabilitation programme had been even saltier in his language, unexpectedly.
Arresting his attention and bringing home to Marvin even more forcefully how his life had fundamentally changed. Embarking on a whole new life involved unprecedented responsibilities as well as freedoms. Obviously however he could hardly be the only one prepared and surgically altered and too-swiftly parachuted into this strange new liberty.
Getting an impression at the Nu Community headquarters it was a relatively new enterprise, to his shock he soon realised the Hadesbridge County colony was of surprising extent and quiet settled influence. It was long established and very well organised. Self-evidently it owned and managed hundreds of properties strung through a series of coastal towns and villages, probably extending far inland as well.
Even some of the other Converts used the colony designation. After only a couple of months Marvin realised there were not just a few dozen but hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand out here like himself. You could never be quite sure of people and that too got mentioned in conversation.
Always jokingly of course, and carefully out of earshot of the others. Talk of the past was taboo. Talk of oneself was strictly only about the constructed persona The Nu Community provided.
Blackjack and Piquet and Gin Rummy and Poker and Seven-Up and even a harmless family game of Mille-Bourne were entirely outside the compass of this brave new world. Marvin Mumms was feeling the pangs of their loss. He hadn’t expected this in the slightest.
Debts had occasionally been a problem in his earlier gambling career but he had always managed to cover losses. Gambling though was necessary for him both to demonstrate a certain kind of skill and release the tensions of work. He had always been prey to depressions, especially at night, and the games pleasantly exhausted him so he could sleep.
Card games were classless. Door to them was never firmly closed to you like so much else in life. All that mattered was whether you had the skill and the stake to join the game and keep it interesting.
Gambling had its hierarchy but it was a democratic one. Skill was genuinely the measure of how you got your reputation at the table. You didn’t have to be witty or know all the right people or be a good storyteller although that helped.
Vetting process to get in could be difficult. Marvin couldn’t get into all the illegal games he wanted to while he was still a relative unknown. But if you won and paid the required fees you could walk away safely with your money and that wasn’t always true of unprotected games.
Learning over the years to distinguish between well-run syndicates and the rip-off operators he generally profited consistently. Developing an instinct for the reliable and crooked games in that odd and furtive twilight world he stuck to the more expensive but secure option. Doing so over twenty five years he had built up a considerable secret nest cash egg.
Expediency of keeping the winnings money secret was relatively simple. Through his professional career he had come to know a number of even more dubious people and fields of illegal expertise than his criminal associates from the illegal protected backroom card games. Ways to contact those men and get the means to carry on even more secretive business.
Forgers and identity documents experts of various kinds among them. Professionals who knew how to bridge the legitimate and criminal worlds that simultaneously fed off each other. Reliable ones tended to be difficult to contact, but the nature of his job taught him patience.
Eventually he found men who were willing to craft him false birth certificates. Valid passports in other names. Driving licenses and credit endorsements and passable references with which he could open a small network of bank safe deposit boxes in various states to keep his cash safe.
Unknown to the always vigilant Internal Revenue Service, the man who would become Marvin Mumms eventually had more ready money than many of the rich men he formerly worked for. But he had never known how to invest it without attracting unwanted attention. Paradox of this tormented him.
Until one of those same rich men, one he knew to be dead, contacted him one night. A simple telephone call exactly at midnight. The man, with a voice Marvin couldn’t recognise or associate with the speaker exactly, shared secrets only they two knew.
Unmarried and having lived alone all his life after leaving home, a surprisingly prosaic call from beyond the grave offering a new life in earthly paradise was entirely outside any of his prior experiences. Of course at first he couldn’t believe it. Yet he knew the man and the secrets mentioned were authentic.
Inadmissible too, and that what was finally convinced him. Caller had been the chief executive of an armaments firm that had illegally exported restricted weapons systems including portable artillery to a notorious African dictatorial regime engaged in a vicious civil war. Had the slightest evidence ever leaked out about the deal the entire board would have done prison time and Marvin with them.
Confidential private executive secretaries or whatever title they were given sat in on the most sensitive board and negotiations meetings of big domestic and international companies. Experts at shorthand and catching the smallest nuances of speech they had to be quick and methodical and preternaturally alert. Usually the groups were very small, just senior executives or managers and their assistants.
Big Shots; in the parlance. Marvin had a rare gift for fluent and accurate and very quick shorthand. Uncanny hearing that had been described by schoolmates and fellow college students and former colleagues alike as spookily bat-like.
Tape-recorder like, Marvin didn’t miss anything. No matter how far across a classroom or lecture hall or the stockroom of a bar converted to a bustling gambling den or high stakes card game. And he could remember it all for a long time, having almost a classical eidetic memory.
Mother had suggested secretarial college for him. With it the idea of corporate freelancing, although of course she didn’t phrase it so articulately. That sort of thing was a relatively new concept when he was starting out nearly thirty years previously.
It was just after the War. Peace had come in Europe and the Pacific. He had been just too young to be drafted into military service or any other kind of war service job and had grown up in a small quiet town.
Liking quiet small town life, Marvin found to his chagrin that all the best local jobs which had formerly seemed available were taken up by a combination of his peers and returning soldiers. Lacking any obvious skill or local connections he found there was simply no place for him. Assuming he would naturally find a job and carry on his life in the place of his childhood and education, he was instead faced with the need to emigrate somewhere which had opportunities.
So he had gone to New York. Found a cheap room in a seedy boarding house with bad food and reeking toilets. Gone to the best secretarial training college he could find in the hall phone book, using the hard-earned money Mother had given him.
Constantly stared at with a mixture of amusement and suspicion, Marvin was in the strangest possible environment. Surprised at being the only man in a gaggle of young and middle aged ladies he got reserved attention for the first time in his life. From his fellow students he learned how life was lived and how careers were made in the new metropolitan imbroglio he found himself adrift in.
Girlfriends were also something new to the young man who became Marvin Mumms. Once his classmates realised he was harmless he was treated with genteel contempt. For the first time he had a few liaisons but always found himself falling short of expectations one way or another.
Always looking in from the outside. Invisible walls seemed to divide him from connecting with all those beautiful and ambitious women, that prissy seraglio that swirled around him every day at his training sessions. Desperately wanting romance and in the perfect kind of place to find it, Marvin nevertheless just couldn’t quite get across that barrier.
Getting it just slightly wrong on a date or just a casual visit to a cafe. Seeming to say something weird or taken badly without intentionality on his part. Missing something said or implied.
Happened again and again without him quite understanding how or why, just always beyond his grasp. Sometimes he wanted to scream he wasn’t a telepath. Gentle by nature, he saw to his dismay that got interpreted as weakness and many girls seemed to take the brutishness he remembered and abhorred back home as a matter of course in the men they were attracted to.
Opportunities were everywhere in those heady days in New York, but the problem was he wasn’t really equipped to compete. Most young men his age not already at university and college otherwise were going for the obvious and the conventional, filling those roles ahead of him. Entering manual occupations, training in fields like electronics and engineering and junior management and joining newly formed aggressive sales teams in vast numbers.
This was where the young man who would be Marvin Mumms discovered and made his own special opportunity. A young man didn’t fit into the traditional typing pool and could never quite be part of that world. Niche carving was required for the anomaly Marvin represented, he knew it and set about pounding the pavements in order to find the means.
Aiming imprecisely at a higher level he had a lot of misses in his early days. A male secretary? Was he a queer or something?
Another new thing to the man who became Marvin Mumms. Homosexuality and its visible subculture in New York was alien and repellent to his small town Calvinist sensibilities. Quickly he learned to call himself something else blandly inoffensive like a freelance executive aide or a manager’s assistant to avoid getting tarred with the brush of effeminacy.
High marks from the secretarial college got him though the door at a few companies but they never quite knew what to do with him. Then he hit on the idea of hiring himself out on contract with a bonded insured status to ensure he could do the most confidential kind of meetings. Trying hard and taking the initiative he would call senior executives and even corporate managing directors from the hall phone at his seedy boarding house and try for interviews.
Once he showed what he could do, first the shorthand at talking speed and then a neatly typed and correctly formatted and well-edited accurate transcript not more than twenty four hours later, definite interest would be excited. Top men, when they held meetings with other high ranking big shots, didn’t want a girlie from the typing pool. And they couldn’t take them to their hotel junkets in the main because they were always a distraction if they were pretty.
So what was the solution? The young man who was to become Marvin Mumms was the solution. Harmless and slight and male and of no interest to anyone he could do all the things those women at the office were trained to do, wasn’t an object of desire for anyone and came bond-insured.
Once he had done a few jobs and proved himself reliable and discreetly silent the job offers started to come in. Registering himself as a small company he gave the impression of being an agency. Eventually he was able to move from the seedy and claustrophobic boarding house to a rented office where he set up a camp bed and could finally get quiet at night when the building was empty.
Eating at cafes and washing at a local gym he lived the metropolitan life to the full, contract-to-contract work giving him freedom although he had to be very careful of money in the early days. But it was also a lonely life and he chafed against the isolation. Discovering by chance a regular illegal card game in the back of an obscure Seventh Avenue bar he came to the excitement of gambling for the first time.
Near-eidetic memory helped him gain skill at the various card matches, along with his ability to more than usually closely listen to his opponents. It surprised him how much people could give away just speaking under their breath or in grunts. It also gave him a kind of social set, although a pretty disreputable and suspect one he couldn’t admit to.
Debt with it, occasionally. That was more or less unavoidable. Good memory and attentiveness weren’t enough by themselves, innate skill was the deciding factor in every play.
Gradually he developed that skill. Made a little money, enough to supplement his still meagre and irregular income. Nearly perfect audio-memory let him make useful transcripts of games he had attended that he could teach himself from.
Rent and food money was all too frequently dependent on his ability to get enough from the card games. Some weeks he was desperate and didn’t think he could stay in New York. At the same time he just could not face going home a failure.
Increasingly though the word was getting around in top management and Corporate Boards. Soon Marvin was getting the confidential jobs he so coveted, the ones that paid. Gradually he was introduced to a world of wealth and luxury and privilege of which he had hardly dreamed.
Nature of the talks or negotiations would be things like sensitive high level acquisitions, mergers, company partnerships and the like. Dialogues where both parties needed an exact record for their lawyers and experts to pore over later. In this way they would refine and legally draft important deals to which those dialogues were exploratory preliminaries. Marvin even met with representatives of foreign governments.
Translation was not something he did. Normally all business was conducted in English. Once though he had once sat in on a meeting in a sumptuous palace in Baghdad half conducted in Farsi.
Inscrutable dark men in sheik’s robes were all attended by smartly suited younger Arab men. Smoothly and impeccably they mediated between English and their own language. That had been a fighter-planes purchase deal, something like fifty Phantom jets and maintenance spare parts and fitted armaments.
Travelling the world was one of the remarkable perks of the job if you were trusted and reliable. Key talent of all of those was silence. Marvin didn’t talk and had no real vices apart from his gambling, neither drinking heavily nor chasing women or nursing some other fatal flaw of character.
Since no one knew him or noticed him no one could track him down or identify him to try to get confidential information. He had been warned about attempts like that on the part of both journalists and rival companies. But in his whole career no one ever tried.
Attracting little or no attention was a priceless gift. Marvin Mumms in his previous incarnation melted effortlessly into the background with his executive employers. Discussions he attended whether in America or abroad were usually leisurely and unhurried and noncommittal.
Rare special meetings abroad were a small self-contained world and an unofficial but important part of Marvin’s job always involved being an all-purpose fetch-and-carry. He would deliver confidential letters and paying of respects and gifts to foreign hosts in advance, shop for the little things his employers needed, listen to and laugh at their jokes in the bar. Since he lived a lonely life off the job anyway, it took little effort to get involved.
Work itself at the meetings that followed the preliminaries required a scrupulous attention to detail but if you kept your mind resolutely focussed in the room it was surprisingly easy in the main. All they wanted on both sides was a good transcript. He listened and took accurate notes and remembered and transcribed everything said and that pleased them every time.
Capital cities on every continent for most of the world’s countries, he had seen them all. There was always a tour the executives went on, first of the notable city historical and contemporary sights and later high priced nightclubs and even occasional brothels. Generally he was included in both as a courtesy, but was always careful not to overdo it.
Business got done everywhere and money talked everywhere; as the executives often smugly declared at these dinners and after-the-action late drinks. They liked to talk, to be listened to. Wives and girlfriends and mistresses weren’t interested in the business, whatever the business was, but Marvin was always interested and showed it.
So he learned things. How to hide your money in countries like Switzerland and Bermuda and Luxembourg and The Bahamas. How to hide it at home with false identities and safe deposit boxes registered to them in different states so as to not have it all in one place.
Wrote for himself detailed transcripts of those conversations and kept a secret diary too. Blackmail never occurred to him over the many other things he learned, although it would have been very easy. Trust, he found, actually paid better because the more secrets you faithfully kept the more got offered to you, and sooner or later they were tangibly useful.
Powerful men knew and increasingly trusted him as the years passed. Surprisingly large numbers of them were willing to confide in him and he learnt a lot about life and business and devious ways from them. Ironically it was through men like this, instead of the low level criminals he met at the illegal card games, he learnt of the forgers and counterfeiters he later paid to get the means to hide his illegal card winnings.
It was still a lonely life. Fees built steadily for him, gambling brought in more as he also got better at it but he returned to an empty apartment he didn’t know how to fill. Finding it hard to trust people from his early days, women were even more problematic.
Trust was something he did want to devote in another human being. Someone to love and cherish and provide for, but at the same time have insurance against it going wrong. That made the phone call from the former employer he thought dead so curiously magnetic.
The Nu Community arranged all, new identity, appearance, life, relocation, financial and personal security. A man could look for a mate and not have to fear his life unravelling if it went wrong because The Nu Community could also mediate in these matters, he was assured. And when the call came he providentially had the money, as though he had saved for this offer all his life.
Half a million dollars carefully tallied over the decades, when added to his ever-growing secretarial fees. Money that had finally brought him here to this strange new life in Hadesbridge County. On advice from The Nu Community’s Mr Steeler he had invested in high premium life insurance policies and several recommended annuities.
To Marvin’s amusement they contrived a rare double-indemnity clause death for him. Planned carefully, a number of linked trust instruments and selective low-risk investments made the unusual accident that apparently befell him double his money overnight once his death had been verified. He was even told the rather grisly details of the Cadaver Procurement and preparation process by that same impatient and uncomfortably expressive and explicit doctor.
Marvin didn’t recognise the face he now wore and it bore no relationship to him. He liked that. Ridiculous name and that he didn’t like, but presumably they had their reasons. At least it was marginally less absurd than the easily-mocked Teutonic name he used to have to bear.
Rehabilitation regime had been hard going but he got through it. Shed the fat and poisons of smoking and home drinking he had indulged too freely in later years when not working. His health was tangibly better than it had been for decades, and his confidence had also been revitalised.
Remainder of his money had been put into high-yield trust arrangements willed to and administered by the Nu Community. In return they had set him up with the safely nondescript identity of a practicing minor league ghost writer, using his secret diary as a primary source of inspiration. Already he was using pseudonyms to submit short stories to magazines.
To his delighted surprise a few had actually been published. Marvin was even secretly working on a novel now, a thinly disguised autobiography. All his best transcripts and carefully nursed secrets contributed something to the ever growing work. Might be a trilogy in it; even.
Kept that very quiet though, with his customary discretion. Above all other things you were not supposed to draw attention to yourself in your new life for any reason or in any avoidable circumstances. Which brought him back from his reverie to the party. Back to the uproarious Kitchener who seemed intent on systematically blasting that one sacrosanct inviolable rule to smithereens.
Marvin even heard the man say Convert; some obscurantist roundabout joke but the implication was all too clear. With his preternatural hearing he couldn’t miss it and the watchful ghouls clearly only got a garbled version. Unfortunately that proved to be enough to finally break some unspoken code.
Slowly and unhurriedly and with a sense of almost infinite menace the shadowy suited men looked at each other. Somehow a decision had been made and shared. All of them rose simultaneously, moving leisurely towards Kitchener.
Party swung unconcernedly on. As usual no one noticed Marvin Mumms or tried to engage him in some inane conversation as the men forced Kitchener into the bedroom. He saw that the way was clear, like a corridor through the shifting people placed there especially for him.
Wanting to leave, somehow he couldn’t, made his way to the room and quietly entered into a nightmarish scene. Kitchener was being held down and struggling desperately, crying piteously and babbling that he had been betrayed into a life that didn’t suit him. Looked like he was being forcibly sedated with a syringe administered expertly by Lawrence.
A few of the ghouls finally noticed Marvin. At first they stared him down and glowered very dangerously. But at a glance and nod of approval from Lawrence, who looked benignly at him, they relaxed.
Marvin was surprised at his own calm reaction to the terrible scene as Kitchener writhed in despair and finally sank into a moaning stupor. Mumms smiled carefully and levelly suggested they all go have a card game to relax afterwards. He knew how to run a game and some good ways to keep a poker or canasta or an Aces High match interesting for only a low stake; how about it?
And all the ghouls smiled back in that harshly overlit and luridly ghastly chamber of horrors. Lawrence smiled his calm approval as Kitchener groaned beneath them and mercifully passed out. Marvin Mumms finally knew at that moment of acceptance he had unexpectedly found the perfect lover and wife and companion he was searching for all his life.
From this moment he would cherish and nurture and love the Game, the Game for all his friends the ghouls, that he would run for them.