Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 1 ONE summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she Oedipa had been named executor or she supposed executrix of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million collars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary Oedipa stood in the living room stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube spoke the name of God tried to feel as drunk as possible But this did not work She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed it seemed forever waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west a dry disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she d always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them Was that how he d died she wondered among dreams crushed by the only ikon in the house That only made her laugh out loud and helpless You re so sick Oedipa she told herself or the room which knew The letter was from the law firm of Warpe Wist full Kubitschek and McMingus of Los Angeles and signed by somebody named Metzger It said Pierce had died back in the spring and they d only just now found the will Metzger was to act as co executor and special counsel in the event of any involved litigation Oedipa had been named also to execute the will in a codicil dated a year ago She tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then Through the rest of the afternoon through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret Among The Pines to buy ricotta and listen to the Muzak today she came through the bead curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble s variorum recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto Boyd Beaver soloist then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden reading of book reviews in the latest Scientific American into the layering of a lasagna garlicking of a bread tearing up of romaine leaves eventually oven on into the mixing of the twilight s whiskey sours against the arrival of her husband Wendell Mucho Maas from work she wondered wondered shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed wouldn t she be first to admit it more or less identical or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer s deck any odd one readily clear to a trained eye It took her till the middle of Huntley and Brinkley to remember that last year at three or so one morning there had come this long distance call from where she would never know unless now he d left a diary by a voice beginning in heavy Slavic tones as second secretary at the Transyl vanian Consulate looking for an escaped bat modulated to comic Negro then on into hostile Pachuco dialect full of chingas and maricones then a Gestapo officer asking her in shrieks did she have relatives in Germany and finally his Lamont Cranston voice the one he d talked in all the way down to Mazatlan Pierce please she d managed to get in I thought we had But Margo earnestly I ve just come from Commissioner Weston and that old man in the fun house was murdered by the same blowgun that killed Professor Quackenbush or something For God s sake she said Mucho had rolled over and was looking at her Why don t you hang up on him Mucho suggested sensibly I heard that Pierce said I think it s time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow Silence positive and thorough fell So it was the last of his voices she ever heard Lamont Cranston That phone line could have pointed any direction been any length Its quiet ambiguity shifted over in the months after the call to what had been revived memories of his face body things he d given her things she had now and then pretended not to ve heard him say It took him over and to the verge of being forgotten The shadow waited a year before visiting But now there was Metzger s letter Had Pierce called last year then to tell her about this codicil Or had he decided on it later somehow because of her annoyance and Mucho s indifference She felt exposed finessed put down She had never executed a will in her life didn t know where to begin didn t know how to tell the law firm in L A that she didn t know where to begin Mucho baby she cried in an access of helplessness Mucho Maas home bounded through the screen door Today was another defeat he began NEW