Nothing Burns in Hell - Hardcover
A private detective married to a sincere Wiccan is hired to witness an illegal money exchange that goes violently wrong
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Philip José Farmer lives with his family in Peoria, Illinois. He has published more than forty novels, including such classics as The Lovers and To Your Scattered Bodies Go and the rest of the Riverworld series.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
1
Nowadays, my worst nightmares are about money.
I was in the office of the president of the First Corrugated Bank. I was saying, "If you'll extend the time limit on my loan, sir, I'll shine your shoes and kiss your big, bare, and shiny bottom. Please!"
The president looked old enough to have created the Big Bang. His eyes, one of which I knew was missing, were hidden behind sky-blue sunglasses. Most of his sky-blue suit was covered by a massive white beard. On the giant ashwood desk behind which he sat was a statuette of St. Moneta, Our Lady of Black Ink. Near it was a telephone shaped like Bugs Bunny. It rang and rang, but the old man ignored it.
"There are free lunches, Mr. Corbie," the old man said, "but not for man or woman. Don't think you can tomfool your way out of this mess. This is a check-and-balance universe. Pay up!"
"Why don't answer the phone?" I said. "It may be a reprieve from the governor."
The old man picked up the receiver, listened, then held it out to me. "For you. It's not the governor."
I awoke sweating and groggy. The real phone, my phone was ringing, and its alert light was flashing. I sat up in bed, my heart beating had. Had to be bad news. My father had unexpectedly died? But when I saw the number on the illuminated caller ID display, my heart beat slowed. Mimi Rootwell, my boss, would not be calling about my father. Why, then, would she wake me up at 5:08 a.m.?
I picked up the receiver and said, "Just a minute, Mimi. I'll go across the hall so I won't disturb Glinna."
I threw off the sheet, sweat-soaked despite the air-conditioning. Glinna, her bare back to me, didn't stir. I reached out for a cigarette to take with me, then remembered I'd quit three years ago.
Old habits don't die. They just circulate in the nervous system.
A moment later, I turned on the study lights. I sat down at my work station and picked up the phone receiver. "What is it?"
Mimi's voice was the sexiest I've ever heard. But the only thing she's ever gotten passionate about--as far as I know--was the agency, Andrew Bell Investigations and Security Systems. It was in bad financial shape when she inherited it from her uncle, and she had been rebuilding it ever since.
"A woman, sounds young, phoned me five minutes ago. Bless my soul, who needs sleep? If I don't, you don't. Anyway, I have a possible case for you. I don't want it, and you might not. But it could be a thousand dollars plus expenses, no receipt required, for one day's work. Your potential client is obviously desperate and in a hurry."
"A thousand? Why wouldn't I take the job?"
"Why not? Even you show good sense now and then. She wouldn't give her name. My caller ID displays the number of a public phone booth in East Peoria. She'll be transferring money to someone, wouldn't say to whom or why, wants you as a backup."
She paused. I though it best not to speak until Herself gave permission.
"I told her my agency wouldn't accept a case which might involve something shady. I did tell her I knew a man who might take the job as a temporary freelancer. I didn't tell her you'd stepped into financial ickypoo and badly need the money or that you sometimes obeyed what you call The Higher Law. You know, Tom, your character, such as it is, is inconsistent. You're usually so tidy and orderly, almost prissy. Yet, you're very flexible in the way you operate. You contradict yourself--"
I dared to interrupt her. "I contain multitudes. I've got my mother's genes and my father's...never mind. You were telling me about the Mysterious Stranger, remember?"
"I didn't give her your name or phone number. She'll be calling me back about nine. Why she's waiting so long to do that when she seemed to be in such a blazing hurry, I don't know. When I hear from her--if I do--I'll notify you. Where'll you be about nine?"
"At my father's house, making my weekly visit. If she calls, hang up after you put her through to me. You don't want to know what it's all about."
"I wouldn't think of listening in."
"Sure you wouldn't, Paula Pry." I spoke too softly for her to hear me clearly.
"Oh, by the way," she said. "I may need you in a few days for an important can. Right now, I can only tell you it involves the most powerful and wealthy family in Peoria. If I give it to you, I'll expect you to handle it with velvet gloves, duck your head, doff your cap, say, 'Sir' and 'My Lord.' I'm not asking you to kiss the client's ass, just be polite and discreet." She hung up.
I stood there for a moment. The most powerful and wealthy family in this city? That had to be the Alliger line, of whom Simon Grettirson Alliger was the Alpha male, the Bull of the Woods, Old Nobodaddy.
Ninety-nine percent of the citizens of Peoria didn't know about the family because its members were very publicity-shy. They never appeared in the newspapers excepts in the obituaries, and these never mentioned hw many money pies they had their fingers in. They seldom went out to eat; they dined mostly in the mansions of their own very select group. Mimi wasn't kidding when she said I'd have to deal with them as the very rich demanded they be dealt with. On the way to the kitchen, I analyzed my dream in about six seconds. Noting Freudian about that, no sexual symbolism. It sprang from my anxiety about my financial problems. My conscious mind is too happy-go-lucky to worry much during the daytime. But when I'm sleeping, I can't keep out the things that ooze from the cracks in the wall. As for the old man and the desk objects, they came in dream-twisted form from my childhood reading of Old Norse, Native American, and Jewish-Christian myths.
I got the drip coffeemaker going. The radio weathercaster reported that it was sunny now, cloudy later. Nature was going to pitch another hot sizzling ball across Earth's plate. The temperature would rise to at least ninety-one Fahrenheit, but a massive cold front was moving in.
I turned the radio off and breathed in the odor of Colombian coffee and ground French vanilla beans. It was one of the seldom failing pleasures of life. Another was the silence. That would vanish, however, when the people in the next-door apartment woke up. Two weeks ago, Sheridan Mutts and Cindi Wickling had moved into there. I didn't know them, though I'd seen Mutts a number of times at a tavern, The Last Stand. Since the first night, they'd been at It every night.
By "It" I mean they played loud country-western until two in the morning. This was punctuated by shrieks, high-decibel laughs, and the sounds coupling couples are supposed to make. Show-offs, Mutts and Wickling wanted the world to know what supersex sounded like.
My wife, Glinna Heithbarn, and I had been using earplugs when we went to bed. They made us feel as if we were deep underwater. However, the plugs and air-conditioning noise usually dampened the uproar. Not so last night.
I thought of vengeance vile and violent. Yet, I was trying to climb to a high peak of spiritual development. Through I wasn't a Catholic, my hero and role model was St. Francis of Assisi. But it seemed to me I was a pumpkin trying to change into a gilded coach in a place where midnight never came. How much free will does a pumpkin have?
For a while, I walked the saint's way with Mutts. I tried to get friendly with him before saying anything about the hellish racket. No go. Then, one evening in the apartment building parking lot, I'd politely asked him to keep the noise down to a civilized level.
He'd bellowed, "Hey, I gotta live! It's free country, ain't it? You don't like it, Choirboy, move!"
"The name's Corbie," I said. "It's not the music per se. I even like some country-western--in small doses. It's the loudness I can't tolerate. Hear that, Woof-woof?"
His face reddened, and he clenched his hands. He said, "Call me that again, and you get your teeth knocked out. Got that?"
He was a construction worker, thirty years old, six feet and five inches tall, and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. Fifty pounds was beer belly. His wild dirty-blond hair and wool-pile beard looked like a vulture's nest on top of a diseased oak.
I was thirty-nine, six feet three, and one hundred and ninety-six. I still had the rangy build of an all-state high-school baseball pitcher, which I once was. Yet, face to face with Mutts, I looked like a frail teenager squaring off with a professional wrestler like Hulk Hogan. I didn't want to tangle with him. One of us might get badly hurt or even killed. That one would probably be me. So, I had just laughed and turned away from him.
Other tenants besides myself had complained about the nightly din to Selinda Tuneball, the manager of the building, which I call the Rinky-dink Arms. Selinda's very curly orange hair, blanked-out eyes, and snub nose made her look like the comic-strip Little Orphan Annie. But Annie's nose wasn't red, and she'd never breathed out Ripple wine, four dollars a gallon, day and night. And Annie had guts. Selinda was too afraid of Mutts to get tough with him.
I'd asked her for the phone number of the owner, who lived in Florida far from the turmoils and troubles of his Peoria tenants.
She'd said, "Mr. Katzenwinter has an unlisted number. I'm not arthurized to give it out."
"Arthurized?"
"That's what I said. Anyway, I don't know just now where he is. I can't even get hold of him to tell him the esophagus needs fixing."
She meant the soffits.
Being the curious person I am, I'd found out that my apartment key unlocked every door in the building except the storage room. My scroogey landlord had installed identical locks he'd purchased wholesale. Of course, neither he nor the manager had mentioned to the tenants that any key could open any other tenant's door. And Selinda was never sober enough to think of putting a different lock in her own apartment door.
I hadn't waited to install a deadbolt lock on my door.
Selinda usually left the building on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.. to shop for groceries and liquor. After that, she'd be in a bar until noon or later. That day, I waited until the booze-bedeviled woman drove away to become an instant menace to the other menaces infesting our roads. Then I went down to the first floor. After unlocking her door with my key, I entered her smelly troll's cave. At the end of the narrow hall was a second bedroom, converted into an office. Its gray-steel three-drawer filecase was by her desk. An open lock was hanging on the hasp of the top drawer. In less than a minute, I'd located Katzenwinter's Miami address and unlisted phone number.
During the next week, I tried the landlord's number five times. All I got was the answering machine and an unpleasant whining voice telling me to leave my name and phone number. He'd get back to me later. Each call, I stated my name, phone number, and my complaint. Though he must have wanted to ask me how I got his number, he never replied.
So, in Tuneball's apartment again and wearing latex gloves, I used her ancient typewriter to tap out a formal letter of complaint to the landlord. I wrote that we, his tenants, would be installing our own locks as of now but would send him the bills for the work done. If he didn't reimburse us immediately, we'd get a lawyer. At the bottom of the page, I ink-stamped the committee. There wasn't any, but there might be. Then I ran off copies from Selinda Tuneball's copier and slid one under every tenant's door except Mutts and Wickling's. I didn't want them to know yet how easy it was to get into their premises.
The letter caused high indignation and anger among the tenants. And, of course, questions about the writer's identity. I played innocent. At least half of the tenants sent the copies to Katzenwinter's address, which I'd provided on the original letter along with his phone number. As far as I could determine, Mutts and Wickling still knew nothing about the affair.
Next steps.
Collect dog turds from the front yard of a friend who wasn't home at the time.
Enclose in a cardboard box with a lock and a key just like those Katzenwinter had provided his tenants.
Tape the box. Stick on a label with the landlord's Florida address. For the sender's name and return address, print: orlando furioso, 123 high justice court; opaque, II. 66669.
Drive to Pekin, a town ten miles south of Peoria and on the east bank of the Illinois river. Ship the box to my landlord via the Pekin UPS. (Never use the federal mail system for anything like this.)
Also in the box was a plastic envelope enclosing a hand-printed quotation from the Bible, the Book of Job, I believe.
"Oh, Lord! My bowels are in an uproar."
But I was still waiting for my landlord's reaction.
Copyright © 1998 by Philip José Farmer
Nowadays, my worst nightmares are about money.
I was in the office of the president of the First Corrugated Bank. I was saying, "If you'll extend the time limit on my loan, sir, I'll shine your shoes and kiss your big, bare, and shiny bottom. Please!"
The president looked old enough to have created the Big Bang. His eyes, one of which I knew was missing, were hidden behind sky-blue sunglasses. Most of his sky-blue suit was covered by a massive white beard. On the giant ashwood desk behind which he sat was a statuette of St. Moneta, Our Lady of Black Ink. Near it was a telephone shaped like Bugs Bunny. It rang and rang, but the old man ignored it.
"There are free lunches, Mr. Corbie," the old man said, "but not for man or woman. Don't think you can tomfool your way out of this mess. This is a check-and-balance universe. Pay up!"
"Why don't answer the phone?" I said. "It may be a reprieve from the governor."
The old man picked up the receiver, listened, then held it out to me. "For you. It's not the governor."
I awoke sweating and groggy. The real phone, my phone was ringing, and its alert light was flashing. I sat up in bed, my heart beating had. Had to be bad news. My father had unexpectedly died? But when I saw the number on the illuminated caller ID display, my heart beat slowed. Mimi Rootwell, my boss, would not be calling about my father. Why, then, would she wake me up at 5:08 a.m.?
I picked up the receiver and said, "Just a minute, Mimi. I'll go across the hall so I won't disturb Glinna."
I threw off the sheet, sweat-soaked despite the air-conditioning. Glinna, her bare back to me, didn't stir. I reached out for a cigarette to take with me, then remembered I'd quit three years ago.
Old habits don't die. They just circulate in the nervous system.
A moment later, I turned on the study lights. I sat down at my work station and picked up the phone receiver. "What is it?"
Mimi's voice was the sexiest I've ever heard. But the only thing she's ever gotten passionate about--as far as I know--was the agency, Andrew Bell Investigations and Security Systems. It was in bad financial shape when she inherited it from her uncle, and she had been rebuilding it ever since.
"A woman, sounds young, phoned me five minutes ago. Bless my soul, who needs sleep? If I don't, you don't. Anyway, I have a possible case for you. I don't want it, and you might not. But it could be a thousand dollars plus expenses, no receipt required, for one day's work. Your potential client is obviously desperate and in a hurry."
"A thousand? Why wouldn't I take the job?"
"Why not? Even you show good sense now and then. She wouldn't give her name. My caller ID displays the number of a public phone booth in East Peoria. She'll be transferring money to someone, wouldn't say to whom or why, wants you as a backup."
She paused. I though it best not to speak until Herself gave permission.
"I told her my agency wouldn't accept a case which might involve something shady. I did tell her I knew a man who might take the job as a temporary freelancer. I didn't tell her you'd stepped into financial ickypoo and badly need the money or that you sometimes obeyed what you call The Higher Law. You know, Tom, your character, such as it is, is inconsistent. You're usually so tidy and orderly, almost prissy. Yet, you're very flexible in the way you operate. You contradict yourself--"
I dared to interrupt her. "I contain multitudes. I've got my mother's genes and my father's...never mind. You were telling me about the Mysterious Stranger, remember?"
"I didn't give her your name or phone number. She'll be calling me back about nine. Why she's waiting so long to do that when she seemed to be in such a blazing hurry, I don't know. When I hear from her--if I do--I'll notify you. Where'll you be about nine?"
"At my father's house, making my weekly visit. If she calls, hang up after you put her through to me. You don't want to know what it's all about."
"I wouldn't think of listening in."
"Sure you wouldn't, Paula Pry." I spoke too softly for her to hear me clearly.
"Oh, by the way," she said. "I may need you in a few days for an important can. Right now, I can only tell you it involves the most powerful and wealthy family in Peoria. If I give it to you, I'll expect you to handle it with velvet gloves, duck your head, doff your cap, say, 'Sir' and 'My Lord.' I'm not asking you to kiss the client's ass, just be polite and discreet." She hung up.
I stood there for a moment. The most powerful and wealthy family in this city? That had to be the Alliger line, of whom Simon Grettirson Alliger was the Alpha male, the Bull of the Woods, Old Nobodaddy.
Ninety-nine percent of the citizens of Peoria didn't know about the family because its members were very publicity-shy. They never appeared in the newspapers excepts in the obituaries, and these never mentioned hw many money pies they had their fingers in. They seldom went out to eat; they dined mostly in the mansions of their own very select group. Mimi wasn't kidding when she said I'd have to deal with them as the very rich demanded they be dealt with. On the way to the kitchen, I analyzed my dream in about six seconds. Noting Freudian about that, no sexual symbolism. It sprang from my anxiety about my financial problems. My conscious mind is too happy-go-lucky to worry much during the daytime. But when I'm sleeping, I can't keep out the things that ooze from the cracks in the wall. As for the old man and the desk objects, they came in dream-twisted form from my childhood reading of Old Norse, Native American, and Jewish-Christian myths.
I got the drip coffeemaker going. The radio weathercaster reported that it was sunny now, cloudy later. Nature was going to pitch another hot sizzling ball across Earth's plate. The temperature would rise to at least ninety-one Fahrenheit, but a massive cold front was moving in.
I turned the radio off and breathed in the odor of Colombian coffee and ground French vanilla beans. It was one of the seldom failing pleasures of life. Another was the silence. That would vanish, however, when the people in the next-door apartment woke up. Two weeks ago, Sheridan Mutts and Cindi Wickling had moved into there. I didn't know them, though I'd seen Mutts a number of times at a tavern, The Last Stand. Since the first night, they'd been at It every night.
By "It" I mean they played loud country-western until two in the morning. This was punctuated by shrieks, high-decibel laughs, and the sounds coupling couples are supposed to make. Show-offs, Mutts and Wickling wanted the world to know what supersex sounded like.
My wife, Glinna Heithbarn, and I had been using earplugs when we went to bed. They made us feel as if we were deep underwater. However, the plugs and air-conditioning noise usually dampened the uproar. Not so last night.
I thought of vengeance vile and violent. Yet, I was trying to climb to a high peak of spiritual development. Through I wasn't a Catholic, my hero and role model was St. Francis of Assisi. But it seemed to me I was a pumpkin trying to change into a gilded coach in a place where midnight never came. How much free will does a pumpkin have?
For a while, I walked the saint's way with Mutts. I tried to get friendly with him before saying anything about the hellish racket. No go. Then, one evening in the apartment building parking lot, I'd politely asked him to keep the noise down to a civilized level.
He'd bellowed, "Hey, I gotta live! It's free country, ain't it? You don't like it, Choirboy, move!"
"The name's Corbie," I said. "It's not the music per se. I even like some country-western--in small doses. It's the loudness I can't tolerate. Hear that, Woof-woof?"
His face reddened, and he clenched his hands. He said, "Call me that again, and you get your teeth knocked out. Got that?"
He was a construction worker, thirty years old, six feet and five inches tall, and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. Fifty pounds was beer belly. His wild dirty-blond hair and wool-pile beard looked like a vulture's nest on top of a diseased oak.
I was thirty-nine, six feet three, and one hundred and ninety-six. I still had the rangy build of an all-state high-school baseball pitcher, which I once was. Yet, face to face with Mutts, I looked like a frail teenager squaring off with a professional wrestler like Hulk Hogan. I didn't want to tangle with him. One of us might get badly hurt or even killed. That one would probably be me. So, I had just laughed and turned away from him.
Other tenants besides myself had complained about the nightly din to Selinda Tuneball, the manager of the building, which I call the Rinky-dink Arms. Selinda's very curly orange hair, blanked-out eyes, and snub nose made her look like the comic-strip Little Orphan Annie. But Annie's nose wasn't red, and she'd never breathed out Ripple wine, four dollars a gallon, day and night. And Annie had guts. Selinda was too afraid of Mutts to get tough with him.
I'd asked her for the phone number of the owner, who lived in Florida far from the turmoils and troubles of his Peoria tenants.
She'd said, "Mr. Katzenwinter has an unlisted number. I'm not arthurized to give it out."
"Arthurized?"
"That's what I said. Anyway, I don't know just now where he is. I can't even get hold of him to tell him the esophagus needs fixing."
She meant the soffits.
Being the curious person I am, I'd found out that my apartment key unlocked every door in the building except the storage room. My scroogey landlord had installed identical locks he'd purchased wholesale. Of course, neither he nor the manager had mentioned to the tenants that any key could open any other tenant's door. And Selinda was never sober enough to think of putting a different lock in her own apartment door.
I hadn't waited to install a deadbolt lock on my door.
Selinda usually left the building on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.. to shop for groceries and liquor. After that, she'd be in a bar until noon or later. That day, I waited until the booze-bedeviled woman drove away to become an instant menace to the other menaces infesting our roads. Then I went down to the first floor. After unlocking her door with my key, I entered her smelly troll's cave. At the end of the narrow hall was a second bedroom, converted into an office. Its gray-steel three-drawer filecase was by her desk. An open lock was hanging on the hasp of the top drawer. In less than a minute, I'd located Katzenwinter's Miami address and unlisted phone number.
During the next week, I tried the landlord's number five times. All I got was the answering machine and an unpleasant whining voice telling me to leave my name and phone number. He'd get back to me later. Each call, I stated my name, phone number, and my complaint. Though he must have wanted to ask me how I got his number, he never replied.
So, in Tuneball's apartment again and wearing latex gloves, I used her ancient typewriter to tap out a formal letter of complaint to the landlord. I wrote that we, his tenants, would be installing our own locks as of now but would send him the bills for the work done. If he didn't reimburse us immediately, we'd get a lawyer. At the bottom of the page, I ink-stamped the committee. There wasn't any, but there might be. Then I ran off copies from Selinda Tuneball's copier and slid one under every tenant's door except Mutts and Wickling's. I didn't want them to know yet how easy it was to get into their premises.
The letter caused high indignation and anger among the tenants. And, of course, questions about the writer's identity. I played innocent. At least half of the tenants sent the copies to Katzenwinter's address, which I'd provided on the original letter along with his phone number. As far as I could determine, Mutts and Wickling still knew nothing about the affair.
Next steps.
Collect dog turds from the front yard of a friend who wasn't home at the time.
Enclose in a cardboard box with a lock and a key just like those Katzenwinter had provided his tenants.
Tape the box. Stick on a label with the landlord's Florida address. For the sender's name and return address, print: orlando furioso, 123 high justice court; opaque, II. 66669.
Drive to Pekin, a town ten miles south of Peoria and on the east bank of the Illinois river. Ship the box to my landlord via the Pekin UPS. (Never use the federal mail system for anything like this.)
Also in the box was a plastic envelope enclosing a hand-printed quotation from the Bible, the Book of Job, I believe.
"Oh, Lord! My bowels are in an uproar."
But I was still waiting for my landlord's reaction.
Copyright © 1998 by Philip José Farmer
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherForge
- Publication date1998
- ISBN 10 0312864701
- ISBN 13 9780312864705
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages287
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