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My real purpose in contacting Slyker, of which I hoped he hadn t got an inkling yet, was to offer him
enough money to sink a small luxury liner in exchange for a sheaf of documents he was using to
blackmail Evelyn Cordew, current pick-of-the-pantheon among our sex goddesses. I was working for
another film star, Jeff Grain, Evelyn s ex-husband, but not ex when it came to the protective urge. Jeff
said that Slyker refused to bite on the direct approach, that he was so paranoid in his suspiciousness as to
be psychotic, and that I would have to make friends with him first. Friends with a paranoid!
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best of fritz leiber
So hi pursuit of this doubtful and dangerous distinction, there I was at the Countersign Qub, nodding
respectfully happy acquiescence to the Master s suggestion and asking tentatively, Girls needing
attention?
He gave me his whoremaster, keeper-of-the-keys grin and said, Sure, women need attention whatever
form they re in. They re like pearls in a vault, they grow dull and fade unless they have regular contact
with warm human flesh. Drink up.
He gulped half of what was left of his martini the puddle had been blotted up meantime and the black
surface reburnished and we made off without any fuss over checks or tabs; I had expected him to stick
me with the former at least, but evidently I wasn t enough of an acolyte yet to be granted that honor.
It fitted that I had caught up with Emil Slyker at the Countersign Club. It is to a key club what the latter
is to a top-crust bar. Strictly Big Tune, set up to provide those hi it with luxury, privacy and security.
Especially security: I had heard that the Countersign Club bodyguarded even their sober patrons home
late of an evening with or without their pickups, but I hadn t believed it until this well-dressed and
doubtless well-heeled silent husky rode the elevator up the dead midnight office building with us and
only turned back at Dr. Slyker s door. Of course I couldn t have got into the Countersign Club on my
own Jeff had provided me with my entree: an illustrated edition of the Marquis de Sade s Justine, its
margins annotated by a world-famous recently-deceased psychoanalyst. I had sent it in to Slyker with a
note full of flowery expression of my admiration for your work in the psycho-physiology of sex.
The door to Slyker s office was something. No glass, just a dark expanse teak or ironwood, I guessed
with EMIL SLYKER, CONSULTING PSYCHOLOGIST burnt into it. No Yale lock, but a large
keyhole with a curious silver valve that the key pressed aside. Slyker showed me the key with a
deprecating smile; the gleaming castella-tions of its web were the most complicated I d ever seen, its
stem depicted Pasiphae and the bull. He certainly was willing to pay for atmosphere.
There were three sounds: first the soft grating of the turning key, then the solid snap of the bolts
retracting, then a faint creak from the hinges.
Open, the door showed itself four inches thick, more like that of a safe or vault, with a whole cluster of
bolts that the key controlled. Just before it closed, something very odd happened: a filmy plastic sheet
whipped across the bolts from the outer edge of the doorway and conformed itself to them so perfectly
that I suspected static electrical attraction of some sort. Once in place it barely clouded the silvery
surface of the bolts and would have taken a close look to spot. It didn t interfere in any way with the
door closing or the bolts snapping back into their channels.
The Doctor sensed or took for granted my interest in the door and explained over his shoulder in the
dark, My Siegfried Line. More than one ambitious crook or inspired murderer has tried to smash or
think his or her way through that door. They ve had no luck. They can t. At this moment there is literally
no one in the world who could come through that door without using explosives and they d have to be
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best of fritz leiber
well placed. Cozy.
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