The Golden Frog

The sergeant held the door open for the other man.

"This is Lieutenant Simmons, Mr. Vanyon," he said. "I wonder would you just start over again and tell the lieutenant how this all happened?"

John Vanyon stood to shake hands. "Well, I suppose so," he said, "but after all, I just did tell you ..."

"I know, Mr. Vanyon," the sergeant said, "but I want the lieutenant to hear it from you yourself. You got to admit this is not any common thing. I mean, this is no traffic violation we're dealing with here. This is serious."

"Yes, I know," Vanyon said. "Very well." He dropped back into the chair. They were in a small office opening off the squad room. Their chairs were pulled up to a battered kitchen table. A coffeepot was going on an electric plate.

"You know who I am, I suppose?" Vanyon asked Lieutenant Simmons.

"I know your name, you're 32, you're a professor of music at the University and you play the bells up there," Simmons said. "That's all I know."

"Assistant professor," Vanyon said. "And carillonneur. A carillon is a set of chromatically tuned bells hung in a tower, more than three octaves of them ... well ... in the summer, during vacation, I play three times a day, eight in the morning, noon, and nine at night. For the nine o'clock program I usually go into the tower about 8:30 and practice for a while: we have a practice keyboard hooked up to xylophone bars instead of bells. I did that tonight. It was 8:30 when I went into the tower. The rain was beginning."

"Did you lock the door behind you?"

"I closed it," Vanyon said. "It locks itself, it has a spring latch. It swings very easily, for all its size. It's hung on ball-bearing hinges, I understand. I know it was locked. I heard the bolt slide into the slot. It has a slick, oil sound, you can't mistake it.

"I went up to the playing cabin in the top of the tower, and then ..."

"Excuse me," Simmons said. "I understand there's an elevator?"

"Yes, there's a small one in a corner of the tower," Vanyon said. "This is a bare tower, there's nothing inside it but the bells, a stairway and the elevator. The elevator is very slow, and as a rule I use the stairs."

"And the whole tower is about seven stories high?" Simmons said.

"Three hundred-odd feet."

"You must be in pretty good shape," Simmons said.

"I don't know," Vanyon said. "I suppose so."

"You must be strong," Simmons said.

"I noticed that when we shook hands," the sergeant said. "You got a strong grip."

"All carillonneurs have strong hands," Vanyon said. "The instrument does that. At any rate, I went up, and I ran through the program I intended to play. Then I climbed into the bell chamber -- through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the cabin -- and opened the louvers. I came down again and set up the clappers, something that must be done every time the instrument is played, it's a matter of adjustment. And at nine o'clock I began the program.

"You'll remember that it was at about nine that the storm really broke. I had been playing for about five minutes when the tower was hit. I understand it happens during almost every thunder-storm, but this was the first time I was there. I must say it was a fantastic sensation. There's a lot of noise attendant on playing the carillon. One's very close to the bells -- and we have two that weigh seven tons each -- and then there is a great clatter from the clapper wires, the wooden keys and so on. But when the lightning struck I couldn't hear any of this over the tremendous crack the lightning bolt made.

"I kept on playing. I finished the program. I filed the music away, went up and closed the louvers, all the regular things. I put my shirt and jacket on, and then I discovered that the door wouldn't open."

"That's the door to the place upstairs, you mean?" Simmons said.

"Right. The playing cabin. I couldn't move it. I thought I must have locked it, absentmindedly, but the latch was off. Still, I couldn't budge it. I thought of pulling the pins out of the hinges, but they were on the outside and I couldn't get at them. And the door itself is steel. It's painted to look like wood but it's steel."

"No phone in the tower?"

"No. And before tonight it had never occurred to me that there was any need for one. But I wasn't really bothered. After all, nothing much could happen to me. I decided that when the storm died down I'd toll one of the big bells until someone came to the foot of the tower. Then I'd throw down the key to the main door, wrapped in a note, and wait for someone to come up and take the cabin door off its hinges.

"While I was waiting I played something on the practice clavier. Then I played it on the bells, with the louvers closed, just for myself."

"What did you play?"

"It was Pleyel's Sonata 3," Vanyon said. "After that I played a Welsh round, and then I improvised for a while. I played until my hands were tired. When I stopped I noticed that the thunder was barely audible. I opened one of the two windows. There was almost no rain falling. I looked down and that was when I first saw him. He was standing in the exact center of that little place in front of the door, in the center of the circle of light that falls there, and he was looking up. I waved and he waved back. I made a gesture to him to wait, and I ran over to the bench and scribbled the note, which you have now, and wrapped the key in it and tossed it to him. He caught it, in one hand, and I remember thinking that it seemed very easy for him, he just stuck his hand out and took it. He read the note and then he moved out of sight. He went to the door."

"Now, why do you think he didn't open it?" Simmons said.

"For the reason he gave," Vanyon said. "He couldn't."

"But the sergeant says it opened right up for him," Simmons said.

"I know, and so did the cabin door. But you have to remember, that was some time later. My belief is that the lightning strike did it somehow -- froze the doors to the jambs, both of them."

"Couldn't," the sergeant said.

"Well, I couldn't open mine, and he said he couldn't open the main door. I believed him, and I still think he was telling the truth."

"It's easier for you to believe some of this than it's going to be for me, I can tell you that," Simmons said.

"It's not a question of belief," Vanyon said. "Not for me, at least. I saw it all. I'm sure the sergeant has told you what happened next. He came out into the light again, waved in a kind of helpless way, clearly trying to indicate to me that the key wouldn't work, and then he walked over to the corner of the tower and began to climb it."

"A human fly," the sergeant said.

"Mr. Vanyon," Lieutenant Simmons said, "I know what that tower looks like, and I have to tell you right now that I find what you say hard to believe. All right, it's not perfectly smooth. Maybe there's a foothold here and there. Here and there, I say. But I think it would be a rough proposition to climb that tower even with a rope. Without a rope, I say it's impossible."

John Vanyon left them. He wrapped a handkerchief around the handle of the coffeepot and brought it to the table. They shook their heads. He filled his cup.

"Let it rattle," the sergeant said. "You can't chip that cup."

"Rattle?"

"Your hand was shaking a little when you poured the coffee."

"Was it?" Vanyon said. He carried the pot to its stand. "Lieutenant Simmons," he said, "I suggest you just let me tell you what happened, straight through, and after that we can go over it and you can ask questions."

Simmons shrugged heavily. He smiled, his fat cheeks moving to slit his eyes. "Fine," he said. "But in that case I'd like to get a stenographer in here and take it down. Be much easier for us to go over it that way. You have no objection, have you?"

"No," Vanyon said. He didn't like the idea, but he couldn't think of an effective argument. He felt vaguely trapped, lightly but firmly held, like a man lost in a forest. The harshness of the room scratched on his nerves. He conceived that the two policemen across the table were implacably stupid and he had to hold down a rising hatred.

The sergeant got up and went out.

"That storm didn't cool things any," Simmons said.

"Apparently not," Vanyon said.

"Do you play anything besides the - how do you say that, carillon?" Simmons said.

"Piano and organ. Most carillonneurs play one or the other."

"I took piano when I was a kid. It was a waste. When my wife wanted my kid to start I told her nothing doing."

A tall girl came in. She was carrying a little black case, and the sergeant, be-hind her, his hand in the small of her back, lower than it needed to be, had another.

"Patrolwoman Tierney, Mr. Vanyon," he said.

She offered her hand. She was strong. Vanyon was six feet tall and she looked him level in the eye. She was made taller by red hair massed around her face, the dense, wiry, incompressible kind of hair. The lieutenant held a chair and she sat down without looking, a girl long used to having chairs held for her, buttocks so firm that she seemed to touch the chair in two small places only. She was a stenotypist and when she had her little machine standing on its bandy-legs she looked up and smiled.

"OK, Mr. Vanyon," Simmons said.

"He started up the tower," Vanyon said. "He was on the corner, the south-west corner to be exact, so that he had one foot and one hand on each wall. But only for the first 10 feet or so. Then he moved over to the south wall. He came up fast, just incredibly fast. He moved in a practiced way, a habitual way, as if he had been up the tower before. He moved rhythmically. He would reach for a handhold, and them a foothold, he'd wait for a beat, them lift himself smoothly, reach, wait, lift, reach, wait, lift - it was wonderful to watch. He came right on up, and I could see him: young, dark hair, tan, bareheaded, wearing a trench coat. He looked up and grinned at me. He had very white teeth, or perhaps they just looked white because he was so tan. He came up to the window and hooked his elbows over the sill. He had an engaging, open look, and he seemed young except that his nose had been broken, more than once, too.

"'Well,' he said, 'are you asking me in?'

"I laughed. 'You've come all this way, why not?' I said.

"He came over the sill and stood in the middle of the floor, soaking wet. 'I suppose that's the stuck door,' he said, 'since it's the only one in the place.' He gave it a shake. 'Buggered,' he said, 'just like the one below.'

"I introduced myself and he said his name was Dennis Rolt. He didn't say more. Judging from his age, I took him to be a graduate student or an instructor. I wasn't surprised at not having seen him before. When 10,000 students are set down in a city of this size ... I asked him where in the world he had learned to climb.

"'In England,' he said. 'In my school everybody ran up and down the buildings like so many deathwatch beetles. One can't do anything with really modern buildings, of course, but anything old, or anything fake-Gothic, like this, is easy enough. Might as well have ladders running up them. They take in the ladders going down, though. Different matter, going down.'

"'Easy or not,' I told him, 'it was very good of you to come up, and ...' I stopped there, and he laughed.

"'You don't really know why I did come up, do you?' he said.

"And I didn't, you know.

"'I could hardly expect to open your door if you could not,' he said, 'and in any case it wouldn't get you out if I could, because the one below's jammed as well. So I didn't come up to rescue you. You can be bloody sure I'm not going to offer to carry you down the wall on my back.'

"'You're right about that,' I said. 'I wouldn't go at the point of a gun.'

"'And I didn't come to keep you company,' he said. 'You change ringers know you're going to be lonely when you sign on.'

"'Carillonneurs,' I told him 'Change ringers are something else again.'

"'It's all bells,' Rolt said. 'And balls to all bells, I say. It's a dreadful kind of music. And balls to all music, comes to that, bells or no bells. But that's not to say a word against musicians. Musicians I'm for. Musicians of all kinds and stripes, players of the lute, the pipes, the mouth harp, the pianoforte, the musical saw, the fiddle and the flute. Also all artists of whatever kind, from Leonardo to Bernard Buffet; painters in oil, watercolor, gouache, buttermilk, egg yolk, India ink or stale beer; painters on canvas, linen, silk, ivory, wet plaster and sidewalks; also engravers, masters of mezzotint or whatever; Lord's Prayer pinhead specialists; money-makers, particularly French money-makers; sculptors, whether of stone, marble, jade, clay or ice for carnivals- all sculptors, particularly, in my view, untutored Eskimo sculptors sawing away on whale-tooth and soapstone; some jewelers, bookbinders, chefs de cuisine; one chef d'equipe; three unicycle riders and a very few bill collectors. All those, and a good many more, and emphatically I am including all carillonneurs and bell-bongers, whether of the high degree, the middle or the low.'

"He walked up and down the cabin, very fast, as he talked," Vanyon said, "and first I thought he was drunk and then that he was psychotic-crazy. And the more he talked the more he did talk. His articulation fed on itself. I would like to have had Miss Tierney there to record it, because I can't begin to reproduce it."

Patrolwoman Tierney smiled, enough to suggest that she appreciated the mild compliment, not enough to suggest that she thought it a jolly idea.

"'I came up,' Rolt said, 'because you represent the ideal human person. It was perfectly evident, even when who (continued on page 88)Golden Frog(continued from page 56) knows how many furlongs stood on end separated us, that you were among the ideal human persons for my purposes, or purpose, because really I have only one. You are an artist, a perceiving, intelligent individual; you are marooned and helpless, locked up, tied, tossled, confined, wrapped and fastened, lonely and willing to listen. What more could a salesman want? And that's what I am, a salesman, a salesman on what I like to think is the highest level: a doctrinal salesman. I sell doctrine. I am the only man in the world who can give you, fully and cogently, the doctrine of The Golden Frog. Oh, there are others--all of them taught by me, mark you--who can explain it around the edges, give you the soup and salad of it, so to speak, and maybe the cheese and coffee, but for the heart of the matter, the entree, the boeuf Massoni, I have to do that myself. And it's not often that I have the chance. It won't do for just anyone. I have to select, and select, and select again, and even then I'm often wrong. I was perfectly prepared, you know, when I climbed in that window, to find that I'd been wrong again, and that I'd have to sit here, mute and helpless, and let you rant and rave over me about bells, bore me until my skull bones melted and ran hot out of my ears, and I was ready to pay the price, and God knows I loathe hearing other people talk. But I was not wrong, I was right, and I shall tell you everything.

"'The Golden Frog is, naturally, not a frog at all, but a tree toad, the common hyla versicolor-versicolor. Being called a frog, if he were actually a frog he would be of no use. He is hyla versicolor-versicolor, and if you don't know what he looks like, he looks like this.'

"Rolt opened his hand and held it out and there in his palm was a tiny golden toad, as big as a quarter, perhaps, smooth and old-looking.

"'The Golden Frog,' he said, 'is a god, naturally you'll have guessed that. Where he stands in the pantechnicon of gods I know, of course, but I cannot tell you--not yet, not yet. Mind you, I don't say he is God. Mind you, I don't say he is not. He is The Golden Frog. You are bright, you are clever, you are no fool, the insane chatter of your bell clappers hasn't beaten the wits out of you, no, and not even the lightning bolts rattling on your rooftree here one to the minute--do you know I saw your blasted tower hit 10 times tonight if it was hit once? But you're bright, and you know that hyla versicolor-versicolor is the tree toad, if only because I've told you so, and you know that the tree toad is a limpet-thing and climbs verticals and hangs to walls and likes high places, and you'll have connected that, won't you, with me coming up the tower? And have you connected it with you being up the tower, though you came up, Lord knows, in a clot's fashion, jiggling on the end of a wire in an elevator, bouncing on a string like a yo-yo. Still, you are here, here you are, up.

"'Nothing. He does nothing, The Golden Frog, and that's what he's for. It's for us to do, don't you see? The Golden Frog will not make my winter rye grow 4700 feet higher than yours, no, nor a Persian inch higher; he doesn't know if a sparrow falls, and he doesn't care. Since he will not catch you, falling, he won't let you go, either, and that's a simple concept which I'm sure you grasp. Let me tell you what happened to me one time, I was rock-climbing, in a manner of speaking, I was going up the south face of the Gerrsgarten, and alone. This was before I lived in The Frog, and I was a devotee of the cult of Barquah, indeed for a long time I thought that everyone born during October of 1932 was a Barquahniste. As you know, either now or because I'm telling you, Barquah had 15,000 male children, each of whom was a nark, or holy man, fully capable of those inexplicable actions we are pleased to call miracles.

"'Now, my natal nark was Tu'bip Alem, and it was upon Tu'bip Alem that I always called when I needed help, which was often enough, lord knows. And when that bloody piton pulled-- I saw it pulling, the crack seemed to open, widen, and something or somebody inside the mountain pushed it out--and I fell, I yelled, you can imagine, for Tu'bip Alem to help me. And I had time to yell. That's a 5000-meter drop, off the crest of the south face at Gerrsgarten. Oh, I yelled. And a great brown hand came down out of the clouds and caught me and held me. And a tremendous, booming voice, a voice that was the topmost end, the double-distilled distillate of every booming baritone voice since time first whispered, this great voice boomed out and said, in Gjindi, "Do you call Tu'bip Alem or Tu'bip Alam?" Now, as I have said, Tu'bip Alem was my natal nark, while Tu'bip Alam was just another of the 15,000 to me, although no doubt very important to those whose natal nark he was, and to shatusa herders, whose patron he was, but still nothing to me. But which had caught me? How could I tell in whose big brown hand I lay? I tried to think for a split second, and the hand tightened and began to crush me. So I made the decision on an ethical basis: honesty is the best policy. "I called," I said, "on Tu'bip Alem." The great brown hand opened, and slowly, slowly turned and dropped me. It was the hand of Tu'bip Alam, and I was no shatusa herder.'

"I interrupted him," Vanyon said. "I told him I had heard that story before, years before. It's an old gag, I told him. Usually you hear it told about St. Francis and St. Francis of Assisi.

"He laughed. 'I don't doubt it,' he said. 'But you only heard it. It happened to me!'"

"Did you believe him?" Simmons said.

"I don't know," Vanyon said. "And it doesn't matter, because, don't you see, you must see, the important thing was not whether what he was saying was true or not, the important thing was that he was saying it. It wasn't important that the gold frog might be a god; it was important that he obviously did believe that it was a god. To me Dennis Rolt was a wonder; he was a free spirit; he was the voice of the world as we would like to think the world should be, a paradise of astonishment and beauty. Just to hear him made me feel that everything in my own life, or almost everything, was dull and hopeless. And that in spite of the fact that I thought, as I told you before, that he might be crazy, completely mad. No one could hear a man talk as he talked without wondering if he were sane, but still ..."

"You say he made you feel that your life was dull," Simmons said. "You were jealous of him?"

"Oh, yes, I suppose I was," Vanyon said, "although that's a very crude way of putting it."

"That why you killed him?" the sergeant said softly. "Because you were jealous of him?"

Vanyon turned. "When I first saw you, sergeant," he said, "I decided you were a stupid man. I was wrong. You aren't just stupid. You're a monument to stupidity. In you, stupidity burrows to a brand-new low. You are ..."

"You better watch your mouth, buddy," Simmons said.

The sergeant's face was burning red and his right hand twitched rhythmically and convulsively on his thigh.

"He'd better watch his," Vanyon said.

"Turn it off," Simmons said. "Get on with your story. What was the last thing he said, Tierney, before this fuss?"

Patrolwoman Tierney lifted a few accordion folds of paper from her machine's little trough.

"'Just to hear him made me feel that everything in my own life, or almost everything, was dull and hopeless,' " she read.

"He went on with the story," Vanyon said. "My cutting in about St. Francis and St. Francis of Assisi didn't stop him. (continued on page 98)Golden Frog(continued from page 88)

"'There I was,' he said, 'dropping like a stone down the face of the Gerrsgarten, spurned by the great brown hand of Tu'bip Alam. It didn't matter. I was saved by another means, which is not important. In point of fact, to quiet any absurd skepticism that might rise in you, or, rather, any additional and absurd skepticism that might rise in you, I will say that I was saved by bloody chance: I fell into a snowfield, 20 ruddy inches of fresh powder hanging on the steepest slope in the Alpes-Maritimes, rolled about a kilometer and came out, nine-tenths suffocated but alive and with the seat in my pants, just above the village of Voiten, and within sight of the bar run by the Dutchman Glauvert, and that was where I told the story for the first time, and that was where I left Barquah, for good. Or for bad, who'm I to say?'

"I interrupted him," Vanyon said. "I said, 'What do you do now, when you're not running up rock faces or bell towers?'

"'I roam about,' he said. 'I roam about, and earn vast sums of money in ways that would dazzle you, and I make love to all the girls who will have me, and some that won't, too, if I think they have the understanding to be truly grateful afterward and when people will listen I tell them of The Frog. I have carried the doctrine of The Frog to odd places: Parlakimedi, which you know, if only because I'm telling you so, is in Madras, and Pin Hook, which I suppose everyone knows is in Indiana. I tell them of The Frog, the All-Knowing and All-Seeing and Do-Nothing Frog who is the ultimate solution of our mille-faceted problems. What is the doctrine of The Frog, you say, and I say, the doctrine of The Frog is, Send not for any other man to do, lest you be done, and ever since For Whom the Bell Tolls was published a pretty pun has been possible on that sentence, and even before that time it was possible, for a man learned in the literature of the English language, to make and enjoy this pun on done. As Andrew Salter so often says in private conversation, "Why aren't you laughing, you aren't laughing enough!" but to be serious, you will concede that although The Frog speaks only once, he speaks with sheer eloquence and with the voice of wisdom beyond plumbing, and if you are reminded of Churchill bare-breasted on the beaches in 1939 congratulations to you but you have misread me. I say again, The Frog is wise beyond wisdom, for there is no answer beyond his answer, which is, Do, lest you be Done. Or, reduced, Do. This is all wisdom, boiled down, in the great black kettle of the other sky, the one beneath us, to one drop, one syllable, Do, and hyla versicolor-versicolor, when he cries, "Wh'dee! Wh'dee!" cries "Do!" in all the languages, or nearly all, of the whole Melanee group, as I'm sure you know, if for no other reason than that I'm telling you so.

"'Join us then, in The Frog. Carry the voice of The Frog to a supine, passive, limp, flaccid, custardy world full, like seeds in a jam pot, of people being done, not doing. Say you'll come, and when you do then I'll tell you what it is to have life in The Golden Frog, where we live in The Frog, and I'll tell you a good many other things that will amaze and startle you and rouse you until your brain bubbles like so much porridge, and your blood will run till you hear it screaming down your arteries and up your veins, and if you stick a pin in your arm the stuff will bore a hole through the ceiling and just that will get you off, we call it Reverse Medicine and when you live in The Frog you need no other, and what is more ...'

"It was about there," Vanyon said, "that he gave the door another jerk, in passing as it were, and it opened. We were both amazed, but there it was, swinging open.

"'All right!' Rolt said. 'What's good for one's good for the other, and it's even money the one below is cured as well.' We didn't know about that, but certainly the cabin door was free. I still think, and he did too, that the lightning strike had something to do with their sticking.

"At any rate, I said to Rolt, 'We'll go down and look and if it's open I'll buy the drinks.' But he said, 'The bit about the drinks is all right, but I'll go the way I came.' And he went over to the window and moved out of it backward. He hung there for a second, his elbows hooked on the sill, just as he had when he came in, and then he levered himself out and down. I remembered what he'd said about the ladders being taken in going down, and I wanted to talk him into coming down with me on the stairs, and I suppose he knew it because he said, 'stairs are for clots, but don't worry, The Frog will soon unclot you.' He moved differently going down, much more slowly, and not at all rhythmically. I watched, looking down at him. I really don't believe he had made 10 feet, and certainly it wasn't 15, before he fell. I saw it all very clearly. His right foot came loose and the sudden weight transfer jerked his right arm loose; I heard the fingernails of his left hand scrabble and grate on the granite and then he went, out backward, looking up, all of a piece, exactly like a man going off a high board, and instantly there was a great shout, 'Tu'bip Alem, save me!' and because he was now falling so fast, the sound was altered by the Doppler effect, you know, at when one hears the tone of a crossing-bell change when one's riding in a train, and the 'save me!' was stretched out, dropping, 'say-ay-ayve-meeee!' and then he hit."

Miss Tierney's machine clicked briefly as she caught up. The coffee bubbled.

"I will say one thing," Lieutenant Simmons said. "In 22 years on the Force, and 10 in Homicide, that is the damnedest story I ever sat down to listen to. The damnedest."

"Look, Mr. Vanyon," the sergeant said. "Now look. Here is this fellow falling 300 feet and he knows he's going to be dead in two seconds and he yells out that Tubepalum or whatever. Why? If he's going to yell anything, for some heathen saint to save him, and he's just through telling you he doesn't believe in that one ... my point is, why didn't he yell for the tree toad, the gold frog?"

"He was making a joke," Vanyon said.

"A joke? A joke?" Simmons said. "The man's two seconds from a messy end, and he's making a joke? In midair?"

"I think so," Vanyon said. "I think he was saying to me, 'You know that when a man's dying he often reverts to the belief he was brought up in. But I'm doing this consciously, and satirically, and laughing, to show you that for me it's still The Frog!' "

Simmons looked at the sergeant, who was looking at him. The lieutenant's head inclined toward the door and they rose as one and left without a word.

Patrolwoman Tierney's hands were folded in her pretty lap. Since she'd stopped working her machine, she had been staring at Vanyon with interest. Where this interest rose, what spurred it, how deeply it ran, he could not know.

"I have an idea they didn't believe me," he said. He didn't see great profit in offering her this opening, but the silence and her straight-line regard had become oppressive.

"Not a word," she said. "Nor did I."

You are a dumb bitch, Vanyon said to himself. "It was as near the absolute truth as I could make it," he said.

"Nobody in the room believed it but you, then," she said. She laughed. "I think the sergeant and the lieutenant are only wondering how to go about asking you some questions about it."

She was right.

"Oh, there's no doubt about that at all," Simmons was saying. "He threw the fella out the window on his head and that's for sure. The question is why he did it and how we can get it out of him. You asked him why we couldn't (concluded on page 106)Golden Frog(continued from page 98) find the gold toad he says Rolt had?"

"I asked him," the sergeant said. "The body was so near clean, you know. The $200-odd dollars, and not another thing, not a wallet, not a letter, not so much as a laundry ticket, and no gold toad, either. He said it must have fallen out of Rolt's pocket on the way down, and it was either lost in the grass or buried under him, or somebody picked it up before the squad car got there."

"Doesn't the dumb bastard know that the toad being missing ruins his story?"

"I told him that. I told him if we had the toad there'd be a different face on the matter. He said if we had the toad it would wind up on some alderman's watch charm, but it didn't matter because it was lost and nobody had it."

"He deny he was the first man to the body?"

"Oh, no. He admitted that. He ran down the stairs, the door opened all nice and proper and he went out."

"That door business. That takes brass, a lie like that."

"It does. Well, lieutenant, with all respect I got to say that you and I are a poor bet to get anywhere arguing with this joker. The old way is the best way, I always say, and an hour would do it, too, with this one. He'd cave in in a hurry, this one would."

"I believe you. But there's hell to pay if you get caught working over any of these eggheads. This is no bum from West Ninth Street. You let a college professor trip and fall against the wall a couple of times and you're liable to get hauled up in front of Congress. 'Gestapo' is what they'll call you. You'll get famous on television."

"'Cossack' I like better than 'Gestapo,' " the sergeant said, "and I been called both. Look, he's got to prove it, right? I give you my word, I won't put a mark on him, and I'll have him dictating a statement in 30 minutes flat."

"I have to go upstairs and see McGuire," the lieutenant said. "I don't know anything about anything."

"That's OK with me," the sergeant said. He walked briskly from the room.

"Mr. Vanyon," he said, "will you just come with me? Will you come too, Tierney?"

Miss Tierney smiled with what seemed to Vanyon to be real warmth. "Of course," she said.

•••

It was an hour later, or an hour and a bit, and by no chance, that Lieutenant Simmons saw Patrolwoman Tierney coming up the stairs. She was carrying the tools of her trade. She was ever so little damp, as if someone had blown at her head through a Japanese flower-wetter, the kind that makes a mist.

"Well?" Simmons said.

"Not a word out of him," she said. "Tom tried everything he could, and I tried a couple of things, and we tried a couple together, but it was no go. Of course, we were being careful of the bastard, but even so, he should have caved in. He didn't. The man came up the wall, he says, and fell off of it."

"Where's Vanyon now?" Simmons said.

"Tom's putting his clothes on him," Miss Tierney said. "He's all right. He can't walk, he's swollen in a couple of places, you know, but by morning he'll be OK."

Simmons saw him in the morning.

"You know what happened to me?" Vanyon said.

"Nothing happened to you," Simmons said. "But something will, if you open your big yap. Two things will happen to you. First, you'll get arrested if you spit on the sidewalk, and you'll get arrested if you don't. Second, you'll have an accident, and nothing trivial, either. So shut up. You killed a man!"

"You know goddamned well I didn't."

"You did. And you look like you're getting away with it, for the time being, and maybe for longer, although that I doubt. But nothing happened to you, and you'll do well to remember it. You can pick up your hat and get out of here, and they'll tell you at the desk where you can go and where you can't, pending the inquest and so on and so on."

Vanyon looked around for Patrol-woman Tierney on his way through the station house to the street, but he was not really sure he wanted to see her again, ever. Crouching naked to her ingenuity and the sergeant's iron-hard brutality, he had been frightened almost beyond endurance, so that he wondered why consciousness did not leave him. He had endured what they did only because he had no alternative: he was not completely craven and so he could not or would not put an end to the agony by saying he had killed Rolt when he had not; there was no other door he could open. Not much later on, he would be able to convince himself that he had maintained his will against theirs because he was standing in the light that Dennis Rolt had cast, standing in the reflected glow of The Frog. For now, it was enough to think that the red-haired girl and the dough-faced sergeant had martyred him, but left him living. In fact, he thought, if Rolt was the prophet, what might Vanyon be?

The eight o'clock program of that morning was the first he had missed in a long time, and he felt badly about it, as if the fault were somehow his. He was on the street at a little after 11 and he took a taxi to the tower. Two groundkeepers were setting squares of turf at the foot of the tower, and 30 or 40 students were watching them. Nobody recognized Vanyon and he was quick with the door. He threw the inner bolt, something he had never done before, and looked carefully around. He got into the elevator cab and pushed the top button. He was lifted slowly up the damp inner wall, in silence except for the whine of the electric motor and its gears high above. He swung the playing-cabin door to and fro. It did not seem to be free and easy in the jamb, as he remembered it, neither did it stick. He left it open. It was hard for him to climb the short ladder to the bell chamber, but he made it. When he had opened one set of louvers he realized that he was so sore and stiff he would not be able to play, and he closed them again as soon as he was sure that there was no one hiding in the dark places behind the bells. He crawled back down the ladder. He sat on the bench, where he had been sitting the night before, watching Rolt storm to and fro, and it was easy for him to think that the mad and tantalizing torrent of the dead man's words still rang in the room. Sometimes, in the bell chamber, he would touch the rim of a bell with a half dollar, to hear the hum of it run on until you couldn't be sure if the sound had ended or not, and he thought he could hear Rolt's voice in the same way. He sat in the playing cabin for a long time. Going down in the elevator he looked carefully all around. At the door he turned out the lights. The windows in the tower were narrow, they were archers' slits really, the lowest of them 30 feet from the ground. No one could see him. He went to the corner of the tower farthest from the elevator, where the steam pipes came through the floor. He knelt there for a moment, then moved to the center of the floor, where a shaft of light angled down. He opened his hand and looked at the little frog he had lifted from its hiding place behind the cluster of pipes. It was heavy and smooth and golden. He had it now, and he would keep it. It lay heavy on his hand, so heavy, so solid that it seemed a part of him. He remembered, he believed, every word Rolt had spoken, and it was easy for him to recall the two places where Rolt said he had been: Pin Hook, Indiana, and Parla-kimedi in Madras. "I have carried the doctrine of The Frog to odd places ..." He dropped the rounded lump of gold into a pocket of his jacket. He unlatched the door and went out. The groundkeepers had finished their work, and the students had gone away. A hot sun hung in a windless sky. He turned to look at the tower. He knew that he would never see it again, that he would never come back to it.