“I’m Norma Lavin,” she said. “Mr. Mundin?”
“Yes.” Why was good old Del passing this screwball on to him?
“This is my brother Don.”
Don Lavin had something weird and something familiar about him. His eyes drew the attention. Mundin had often read of “shining eyes” and accepted it as one of those things you read that don’t mean anything. Now he was disconcerted to find himself looking into a pair of eyes that actually did shine.
“Please sit down,” he invited uneasily.
The girl said, “Mr. Dworcas tells us you’re a lawyer, Mr. Mundin, as well as our next councilman from the 27th District.”
MUNDIN automatically handed her one of his fancy cards. Don Lavin looked a little as if he had been conditioned. That was it! Like a court clerk or one of the participants in a Field Day—or, he guessed, never having seen one, a criminal after the compulsory third-rap treatment.
“I’m a lawyer,” he said. “I wouldn’t swear to that part about being councilman.”
“You’re the best we can do, Mundin. We got nowhere in Washington, nowhere in Chicago, nowhere in New York. We’ll try local courts here. Dworcas passed us on to you. We have to start somewhere.”
“Somewhere,” her brother very dreamily agreed.
“Look, Miss Lavin—
“Just Lavin.”
“Okay, Lavin, or Spike, or whatever you want me to call you. If you’re through with the insults, will you tell me what you want?”
Del Dworcas stuck his head in the door. “You people getting along okay? Fine!” He vanished again.
The girl said, “We want to retain you for a stockholders’ committee—G-M-L Homes.”
G-M-L Homes, Mundin thought, irritated. Why, that meant the bubble houses. The bubble cities, too. It meant real estate in practically continental lots. It meant the private roads, belt lines, power reactors . . .
It wasn’t a very funny joke. The shiny-eyed boy said abruptly, “The ‘L’ stands for Lavin. Did you happen to know that?”
Mundin tried to glower. He couldn’t. Suppose—just suppose—that maybe it wasn’t a joke. Ridiculous, of course, but just suppose—
G-M-L Homes.
Such things didn’t happen to Charles Mundin, Ll.B. “I’m not licensed to practice corporate law,” he said flatly. “Try William Choate the Fourth.”
“We just did. He said no.” They made it sound real, Mundin thought admiringly. Of course, it couldn’t be. Somewhere it was written—Charles Mundin will never get a fat case. Therefore, this thing would piffle out. “Well?” demanded the girl.
“I said I’m not licensed to practice corporate law.”
“Did you think we didn’t know that? We dug up an old banger who still has his license. He can’t work, but we can use his name as attorney of record.”
“Well,” he began hazily, “it’s naturally interesting—”
“Yes or no?”
Dworcas stuck his head in again. “Mundin, I’m awfully sorry, but I’ve got to have the office for a while. Why don’t you and your friends go over to Hussein’s for a cup of coffee?”
“Sure, Del,” Mundin said dazedly. “Thanks. Ah—will I get any broadcast time?”
“Afraid not this time, Charlie. They cut us down to fifteen minutes and old man Ribicoff showed up and we had to give him five. You know how he is.”
“Yeah. Thanks for trying, Del.”
HUSSEIN’S place, across the street, was pretty full, but they found a low table on the aisle.
The old-timers in fezzes stared at the strange conditioned face of Don Lavin. The kids in scat hats with five-inch brims looked once and then away, quickly.
Norma Lavin got no stares at all. Young and old, the Ay-rabs looked coldly through her. Mundin suddenly realized that he was doing his political chances no good by being seen in public with her. The Ay-rabs blamed modern women—quite wrongly, as it happened—for the disconcerting way their own women were changing.
Hussein himself came over. “Always a pleasure, Mr. Mundin,” he beamed. “What will you have?”
“Coffee, please,” Mundin said. Don Lavin shook his head absently. Norma said nothing.
“Majun for the lady?” Hussein asked blandly. “Fresh from Mexico this week. Very strong. Peppermint, raspberry, grape?”
Norma Lavin icily said, “No.” Hussein went away, still beaming. He had delivered a complicated triple insult—by calling her a lady, offering her a narcotic and, at that, one traditionally beloved by Islamic women denied love by ugliness or age.
Mundin masked his nervousness by studying his watch. “We have about ten minutes,” he said. “If you can give me an idea of what you have in mind—”
Somebody coming down the aisle stumbled over Don Lavin’s foot.
“I beg your pardon,” Lavin said automatically.
“What’s the idea of tripping me?” asked a bored voice. It was a cop—a big man with an intelligent, good-humored face.
“It was an accident, Officer,” Mundin said.
“Here we go again,” Norma Lavin muttered.
“I was talking to this gentleman, I believe.” The cop asked Don Lavin again, “I said what’s the idea of tripping me? You a cop-hater or something?”
“I’m really very sorry,” Lavin answered dreamily. “Please accept my apology.”
“He won’t,” Norma Lavin whispered angrily to Mundin.
“Officer,” Mundin said sharply, “it was an accident. I’m Charles Mundin, candidate for the Council in the 27th, Regular Republican. I’ll vouch for this gentleman.”
Ignoring him, the policeman said to Lavin, “Suppose we show some identification, cop-hater.”
LAVIN took out a wallet and spilled cards on the table. The cop inspected them and growled, “Social Security account card says you’re Donald W. Lavin, but Selective Service registration says you’re Don Lavin, no middle initial. And I see your draft registration is with an Omaha board, but you have a resident’s parking permit for Coshocton, Ohio.”
Lavin said somnolently, “I’m extremely sorry, Officer.”
The cop decisively scooped up the cards and said, “You’d better come along with me, Lavin. Your career of crime has gone far enough. It’s a lucky thing I tripped over you.”
Mundin noted that he had dropped the pretense of being tripped. “Officer, I’m taking your shield number. I’m going to tell my very good friend Del Dworcas about this nonsense. Shortly after that, you’ll find yourself on foot patrol in Belly Rave—the two-to-ten shift—unless you care to apologize and get the hell out of here.”
The officer shrugged. “What can I do? When I see the law broken, I have my job to do. Come along, Dangerous Don.” Lavin smiled distantly at his sister, and went along.
Mundin’s voice was shaking with anger. “Don’t worry,” he told Norma Lavin. “I’ll have him out of the station house right after the meeting. And that cop is going to wish he hadn’t been born.”
“Never mind. I’ll get him out,” she said. “Five times in three weeks. I’m used to it.”
“What’s the angle?” Mundin exploded.
Hussein came up with coffee in little cups. “Nice fella, that Jimmy Lyons,” fie said chattily. “For cop, that is.”
“Who is he?” Mundin snapped. “Precinct captain’s man. Very good to know. The uniform is just patrolman, but when you talk to Jimmy Lyons, you talk right into precinct captain’s ear.”
Norma Lavin stood up. “I’m going to get my brother sprung before they start shunting him around the precincts again.” Her voice was weary. “I suppose this is the end of the road, Mundin.
But if you still want to consider taking our case, here’s the address. Unfortunately, there’s no phone.” She hesitated. “I hope you’ll—” It was almost a cry for help.
She bit off the words, dropped a coin and a card on the table and strode from the coffee shop. The Ay-rabs looked icily through her as she went.
Mundin sat at the little tab
le, bespelled, turning her card over in his fingers. G-M-L Homes, he thought. Corporate practice. It’s not generally known that the “L” stands for Lavin.
And a cry for help.
The card said Norma Lavin, with an address in Coshocton, Ohio, and a phone number. These were scratched out, and written in was 37598 Willowdale Crescent.
An address in Belly Rave!
Mundin shook his head involuntarily. But there had been a cry for help.
THE big free rally, attended by perhaps eighty-five voters, went off on dreary schedule. Mundin managed to see Dworcas for a moment after things broke up. “Del, what’s with these Lavin people? What do you know about them?”
“Not a hell of a lot, Charlie. I thought I was throwing some business your way. They mentioned a stockholder’s suit. Are they phonies or crackpots?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But some cop named Jimmy Lyons picked the kid up in Hussein’s. No reason that I could see.”
“Jimmy Lyons? He’s the captain’s man. I’ll call and see what I can do about that, Charlie.”
He called and came back, smiling. “The sister identified him. They held him a couple of hours to cool him off and let him go. Lyons just got sore because the kid gave him some lip. What the hell, cops are human. Charlie, maybe you’d better forget about these people. The desk man said the kid was conditioned or doped up or something.”
“Conditioned, I think. The wise kids at Hussein’s kind of eyed him fast, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure, Charlie, sure.” Del was beginning to look uncomfortable. Mundin let him go.
IV
IT HAD been a trying evening for Norvie Bligh. When he walked in on Virginia and her daughter, they had been perfectly normal—sullen. His news about the lawyer, Mundin, and the prospects of adopting Alexandra had produced the natural effects. “You forgot to ask about the inheritance!”
Before he finished dinner, he was driven to the point of shrieking at his wife, slapping the girl and slamming out of the house.
But there was always Arnie Dworcas.
He killed time for half an hour—Arnie didn’t like it if you got there too early—and then hurried. He was almost out of breath as he got to Dworcas’ door.
And Arnie was warmly friendly. Norvell began at last to relax.
It wasn’t just a matter of plenty of beer and the friendly feeling of being with someone you liked. Arnie was going out of his way, Norvell saw at once, to get at the roots of Norvell’s problem. As soon as they had had a couple of beers, he turned the conversation to Norvell’s work. “They must be really beginning to roll on the Field Day,” he speculated.
Norvell expanded. “Sure. I’ve got some pretty spectacular things lined up for it, too. Of course, Candella hasn’t given me the final go-ahead—” he frowned at a submerged memory—“but it’s going to be quite a program. One gets a big charge out of doing one’s best on a big job, Arnie. I guess you know that. I remember a couple of years ago—”
Dworcas interrupted. “More beer?” He dialed refills. “Your place has quite a good reputation,” he said with sober approval. “This afternoon, in the shop, We Engineers were talking about the technical factors involved.”
“You were?” Norvell was pleased. “That’s interesting, Arnie. This time I was talking about—”
“Especially the big shows,” Dworcas went on. “The Field Days. You know what would be interesting, Norvell? Getting a couple of the fellows to go to one, to see just how the thing looked from the engineering viewpoint. I’d like to go myself—if I could get away, of course. We’re pretty busy these days. Might invite a few of the others in the shop to come along.”
“You would?” Norvell cried. “Say, that would be fine. There’s a lot of engineering connected with a Field Day. Like this time a couple of years—”
“Excuse me,” Arnie interrupted. “Beer. Be right back.”
WHILE Dworcas was gone, Norvell felt actually cheerful. Arnie was concerned with his work. You didn’t find many friends like Arnie. Warmed by the beer, Norvell re-examined his recent blinding depression. Hell, things weren’t too bad.
He had almost decided to have a swift cup of black coffee and go home when Arnie came back, beaming. “Well, what say, Emotional Engineer? Want a couple of real, live slide-rulers to look over your show?”
“What? Oh, sure, Arnie. Just let me get this Field Day out of the way. We’ll throw a real party—one of the Friday-night shows. There’s a lot of complicated stuff under the stadium. You’d be interested—”
“I don’t know,” Dworcas said doubtfully, “whether the fellows would be interested in one of the second-rate shows. Maybe we ought to skip it.”
“No, no! The regular shows are just as interesting technically. Why, just last week, we had a broken-field run—barbed wire and maimer mines and half an hour before the show started, the director came around, crying that he didn’t have enough men for the spectacle. Well, Candella—that is, we put in a quick call to the cops and they sent a squad down to Belly Rave. Got twenty-five volunteers in fifteen minutes. The orderlies lined ’em up and gave them million-unit injections of B1.” He chuckled. “Arnie, you should have seen some of those guys when they sobered up. We had to—”
Arnie was shaking his head. “That sort of thing isn’t what We Engineers are interested in. It’s the big effects.”
“Oh! You mean like in the Field Day next week.” Norvell thought vaguely about the Field Day. “Yeah,” he said uncertainly, “there certainly are plenty of headaches when you run a Field Day. Can I have another beer, please?”
AS he dialed another glass, Dworcas said sunnily, “Suppose you fit us in, then. After all, you’ve got eighty thousand seats. There ought to be five somewhere that the man who runs the whole damn thing can give to a friend.”
“Sure,” Norvell mumbled. “Uh—my turn. Excuse me, Arnie.” When he came back, the room wasn’t spinning quite so dizzily, but the warmth in his body wasn’t so gratifying, either. He stared so long at the glass of beer by his chair that Arnie thought it was flat and pressed a replenishment button.
“Oh, thanks,” Norvell said, startled. He picked up the glass and took a sip, then put it down hard. Half of it slopped over. Above the whistle of the suction cleaners draining the spilled beer, Norvell said with sudden misery, “Arnie, I’m in trouble.”
Dworcas froze. He said carefully, “Trouble?”
“I swear to God, if it weren’t for people like you—if it weren’t for you personally—I don’t know what I’d do!” He told Dworcas about the grisly dinner with his wife and stepdaughter, about the countless run-ins with Candella, about all the fights and frustrations. “The worst was this morning, just before I went to that lawyer. I was chewing out that little punk Stimmens when Candella walked into the room. He must’ve heard every word I said, because when I turned around and saw him, he said, ‘Excellent advice, Mr. Bligh, I hope you’ll follow it yourself.’ And Stimmens just stood there, laughing at me. I couldn’t do a thing. For two cents, I would have gone in and asked for my contract.”
Dworcas nodded precisely. “Perhaps you should have.”
“What? Oh, no, Arnie, you don’t understand. General Recreations is lousy on that. They won’t sell unless they can get their pound of flesh, and plenty more besides. We had a vice president once, a couple of years ago, got in Dutch with the board and wanted out. Well, they set a price of four hundred thousand dollars on his contract. He killed himself. It was that or cancel.”
“That’s a point to remember, Norvell. In any engineering problem, there are always at least two components to any vector.”
“I see what you mean. There’s no way out.”
“No, Norvell, there are always two ways out, sometimes more.”
“Well—”
“At the shop,” Arnie said, leaning back, “these problems don’t arise, of course. Not like with you temperamental artists. But when I was a journeyman, I . . . Well, it was rough. I know just what it’s
like. And, of course, I know what I would do.”
“What?”
“If it were my decision, I’d cancel.”
NORVELL goggled. He was suddenly sober. “You’d cancel?”
“That’s right,” said Arnie. “I’d cancel.”
Norvell looked at him unbelievingly, but Dworcas’ gaze was calm and benign.
“It’s a tough decision to make, Norvell. Heaven knows, I’d find it a hard one to make myself, without half an hour or more of serious thought. But what’s your alternative?”
Norvell shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He put his beer down. Neither man said a word for a long time, while Norvell’s mind raced from Candella to Dworcas to the lawyer, Mundin, to Virginia, to Stimmens, to a fire-red mystery marked “Belly Rave,” to the old man who had sat weeping while he waited for the broken-field event to start.
“I don’t think I ought to,” Norvell said faintly.
Dworcas inclined his head. “It’s your decision.”
“I just don’t see how I can, Arnie. I’d lose the house, Virginia would raise holy—”
Arnie stopped him. “You may be right. Who knows? There’s certainly no security in the world for a man without a contract job. You’d have to leave your home, true, and move to the suburbs—” Norvell blinked—“at least temporarily. It’s a hard life there, a constant challenge to prove yourself—to make your way in spite of hell or high water—or fall by the wayside.” He looked speculatively at Norvell and dismissed the subject. “I just wanted to give you the benefit of my thinking on the point. You do as you see fit. I guess you’ll want to be getting home.”
“Sure,” Norvell said. “Oh, I meant to thank you for steering me to that lawyer. I don’t know what I would have—”
“Think nothing of it. I’m always glad to do anything I can for you, you know that. You won’t forget about the tickets?”
“Tickets?” Norvell asked vacantly.
“The tickets for the Field Day. Not general admission, you know. As close to the Master’s box as you can get them.”
Collected Short Fiction Page 213
