by A Tan
"You asked me to check him out. Remember?"
"And your overall impression?"
"A very dull fellow, competent and humorless."
"You know the name of the cluster apartments?"
"I'd rather not say it. Palm Vista Gardens. D-2."
"The first phone booth after we get off the pike, please."
He parked at a gas station by a shiny row of vending machines under a roof made of plastic thatch, incredibly green. I phoned from the hotbox provided by Gen Tel out on the cement wasteland. I hoped Palm Vista Gardens was big enough to have a rental and administration office on the premises. It was. The lady's voice came right from the resonant bridge of her Indiana nose.
"Yes, maybe you can help me. Have you got any furnished one-bedroom vacancies?"
She was not a well-organized lady. She tended to ramble. She gave information and then with cries of dismay retracted it and called herself names, mostly "old fool."
She finally discovered that one of their renters, "a nice young man" who had been on the special month-to-month basis with one month in advance (an arrangement they made with the "nice young people" from that new SeaGate company) had come in on the last day of April, just last Friday, and given his notice. He said he was vacating in a week. And that would make it... the eighth? No. The seventh. Yes. Next Friday. They could start showing it again the following Monday if there wasn't too much to be done. That was number D-2, which meant apartment 2 in cluster D. Just stop at the office. But don't wait too long. They go very quickly to nice young people, providing they don't have any pets. Or any babies, of course. I wondered how they felt about noisy goldfish, the kind that do a lot of leaping and splashing and churning around.
I tried to blot out all rational thought with a lot of peripheral items. Goldfish. Lead-free gasoline. Diminishing aquifer. I walked to the car, realizing I had left the cheap camera on the backseat. An essential part of my tourist costume. Meyer stood beside the rental car, drinking a can of orange pop, and it suddenly seemed insane that Meyer wore no tourist disguise. Paul Dissat knew exactly who I was and where I lived. And if he had gone to Bahia Mar and poked around as such a thorough chap would, he would have learned that Meyer was associated with me in certain obscure but apparently profitable ventures. Though believing me safely drowned off Grenada's lovely beaches, he might conclude that it was a very good chance my letter of self insurance had been sent to Meyer to stow in a safe place. And so, as a percentage play...
It worked on me to the point that Meyer stared at me and said, "What the hell is wrong, Trav?"
My mouth wasn't going to work. Alarm is contagious. He trotted around and got behind the wheel, whipped us out into the traffic flow with a good imitation of teenage technique. At last I managed two words. "No hurry."
I saved the rest of it for my rackety motel unit. I tried to smile at Meyer. "Pure chicken. Sorry. I just don't know what the hell is..." Then I felt the sudden and humiliating sting of tears in my eyes and turned quickly to blink them away before Meyer could see them.
I stood with my back to him, staring out between the slats of the battered tin blinds at the side wall of a restaurant and a row of trash cans haloed with bluebottled buzzing. I spoke too fast and chuckled where there was no need, saying, "It's the old bit of the brave and noble hunter, gliding silently through the jungle, following the track of the big black panther, and slowly beginning to realize that the panther is also a-hunting and maybe he's flattened out on top of that thick limb up ahead or behind that bush over there or in the shadow of that fallen tree, with just the tip of his thick glossy black tail moving and the shoulder muscles rippling and tightening under that black hide. I'm spooked because I kept telling myself the son of a bitch would be gone by now, but he isn't going until Friday, and-"
"Travis. Come on. Slow down."
Can't ever really fool ol' Meyer. I sat on the bed. We're all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We're all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won't catch on. Each of us takes up those shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I'd gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling Rosinante from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the flaw. Maybe in some crazy way Paul Dissat was a fun-house mirror image of me, a warped McGee with backspin, reverse English.
The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of lifestyle could get him killed-on the Daytona track, in the bullring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head.
Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, artd when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, "Mommy, mommy, mommy, it's so dark out there, so dark and so forever."
Cojones are such a cultural imperative, the man who feels suddenly deballed feels shame at reentering the childhood condition. Papa Hemingway will never take him fishing. George Patton will slap his face.
In all my approximately seventy-six inches of torn and mended flesh and hide, in all approximately fifteen-stone weight of meat, bone, and dismay, I sat on that damned bed and felt degraded. I was unmasked as a grotesque imitation of what I had believed myself to be.
Frowning, I tried to explain it in halting fashion to Meyer. "You talked about... the reflexes slowing, the warning system not working, the instincts inaccurate when... the only reason Harry Broll didn't kill me was because he lacked one more round in the clip. Then in Grenada I didn't even think of being careful... didn't sense his presence, got such a shot in the skull bone my head is still blurred. Meyer, people have been a few steps ahead of me other times. I've played pretty good catchup. This time I have this feeling that there's no way. He's going to stay out in front, and if I get too close, he'll turn around and take care of the problem. Maybe I've gotten too close already, and I have ten more minutes or ten more hours."
"Travis."
"I know. I'm scared. It's like being very very cold. I can't move well, and I can't think at all."
"So I do the thinking?"
"I wish you would. Don't go back to your boat. I have a very ugly hunch about your boat."
"We have to talk to Dennis Waterbury in absolute privacy, and I have to make contact in such a way that he will trust us to the limited extent that rich and powerful people can trust anyone."
"Can you do it?"
"I don't know. I have to try to reach some people by phone. In Montreal and Toronto and Quebec."
"Start trying."
"If I can get through to someone he knows and trusts, who can tell him I am reputable, not a shakedown artist, then we are going to give him whatever lead time we can spare before I go to the law."
"With what?"
"With enough. Woodrow Willow's contact said Broil didn't buy the stock. So there's a missing three hundred thousand and a missing Harry Broll. If they dig around the seawall at Blue Heron Lane, they'll find Mary's body. Kathy Marcus and the other bank people could pick Paul Dissat out of a lineup. Maybe it will sink the SeaGate public issue without a trace. Even if Dissat never took a penny from the Waterbury enterprises, a breath of scandal can make the accounting firm and the underwriters back off."
"So why don't we go to the law? Why do we screw around with Waterbury if we've got all this?"
"Think about it, Travis. Think about it."
I instinctively fingered the place on the back of my skull where I had been so soundly thumped. Meyer was right. SeaGate was a very large thing, and Dissat was an operating officer in the SeaGate power structure. The lower echelons of the law would never go cantering into battle on the say-so of an apparently unemployed beach bum and a semiretired and eccentric economist. It was a
twocounty operation with both state and federal implications. Lower echelons would take the eccentric pair into skeptical custody and sweat them both.
Suppose you go to the top level, such as approaching the United States attorney in the area and suggesting he refer the problem to the FBI for investigation because of possible violations of the criminal code insofar as banking regulations are concerned. Then the approach would be made so tentatively--due to the SeaGate clout and the dubious source of the tip-that Dissat would be alerted, and he would disappear into his large countryside or ours.
First, you sell Dennis Waterbury on the idea that his boy Paul Dissat, has been a very very bad boy lately and any publicity given his activities can founder the SeaGate plans. You convince him and give him some facts he can quietly check. You speak to him in absolute privacy and secrecy. Then, when he picks up the phone and relays his unhappy suspicions to the highest level, Dissat will be pounced upon first and investigated later, giving Waterbury additional time to plug up the holes and protect the upcoming public issue from scandal.
I said, "Okay. Do you think I'll ever be able to think things out for myself any more? Or will you have to be on permanent standby?"
"I think they start you on baskets and work up to needlepoint."
"I am supposed to laugh. All right, Meyer. Ha ha ha. Make your phone calls. What if the bastard won't listen even if we can get him alone?"
"Men who are rich have times when they don't listen. Men who are quite bright have times when they don't listen. Men who are both bright and rich always listen. That is how they got the money, and that is how they keep it."
"Then do we go to Canada, or does he come here?"
"He's here now. I found that out when I was learning all I could about Paul Dissat. Waterbury is in a guest cottage on a Palm Beach estate. The owners are in Maine now, but they left enough staff to take care of Waterbury. Pool, tennis courts, security system, private beach."
He started making calls. He had to push the thermostat high enough to kill the compressor before he could hear. I lay a-doze, hearing his voice come from metallic distances, sounding like the voices of grown-ups when I had been a child half-asleep in a moving car or train.
Twenty-two
HE FOUND an old friend at last, a Professor Danielson in Toronto, who knew Waterbury well and was willing to try to set it up. Meyer gave Danielson the motel number and unit number and asked to have Waterbury phone him as soon as convenient. If Danielson found that Waterbury was unable or unwilling to phone Meyer for a secret meeting, Danielson would phone back.
Nothing to do but wait and try to digest a roast beef sandwich which lay in my stomach like a dead armadillo. The motel television was on the cable. We turned the sound off and watched the news on the electronic printer, going by at a pace for a retarded fifth grader, white on black printing with so many typos the spelling was more like third grade than fifth.
The woes of the world inched up the screen. Droughts and murders. Inflation and balance of payments. Drugs and demonstrations. Body counts and new juntas.
Spiro was dead wrong. The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. News has always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grub worms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So devote wire service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everybody in constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it ever more horrendous to capture our attention. Secondly, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten, and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope the motto is semper fidelis, which means in translation, "Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife too, if he's out of town."
The phone rang, and Meyer sprang up and cut off the compressor and took the call. He made a circle of thumb and finger to tell me we had gotten through the corporate curtain. He listened for several minutes, nodded, and said, "Yes, thank you, we'll be there." Hung up.
"A Miss Caroline Stoddard, Mr. Waterbury's private secretary. We're to meet with him out at the site at SeaGate. We go through the main entrance and follow little orange arrows on sticks that will lead us to the storage and warehouse area. There are two small contracts going on now out there. Earth moving and paving. They stop work at four, and the crews leave. The area is patrolled at night, and the guard shift starts at eight at this time of year. Mr. Waterbury will meet with us at an office out there in the end of one of the warehouses behind the hurricane fencing near the vehicle park and the asphalt plant. We can find the place by looking for his car. If we meet him out there at five, we should have plenty of time for uninterrupted talk."
We got to the area a little early, so we drove down A-1-A for a little way, and when we found a gap in the sour commercial honky-tonk, Meyer pulled over. Down the beach there was a cluster of fat-tire beach buggies, some people swimming. Meyer and I were walking and talking over our plans when a chunky trail bike came growling up behind us, passed us, and cut in and stopped, and a fellow with enough black beard to stuff a small pillow glowered at us and gunned the bike engine. He looked very fit and unfriendly.
"You've got a problem?" I asked.
"You are the guys with problems. How come there are so many of you characters so cramped up you got to come creeping around to stare at naked people?"
"Where, where, where!" Meyer said, smiling. "If it's required, I'll stare. But as a rule, it's dull. If you have some graceful young girls cavorting, that is an aesthetic pleasure for a certain amount of time. Doesn't sand get into the working parts of that thing?"
Meyer is disarming. Maybe a completely frantic flip, stoned blind, could run a knife into him. Otherwise, the belligerent simmer down quickly
"It's sealed so it doesn't happen too bad. But you can mess it up if you try. I thought you were more guys with binoculars, like the last pair. See, if you walk down this way far enough, then you can see around the end of the buggy and see the girls."
Meyer said, "Excuse me, but I was of the impression that the current belief is that the flaunting of the natural body cures the woes of society by blowing the minds of the repressed."
"A lot of people think that way. But we're opposed to the brazen display of the body and public sexuality. We're here on a pilgrimage mission for the Church of Christ in the Highest. And we have permission to camp on this part of the beach while we're bringing the word of God to the young people in this area."
"Wouldn't it be a lot easier to cover those girls up?" I asked him.
"Four of our sisters have got the crabs, sir, and they are using the salt water and the sunshine to cure them. The drugstore stuff didn't work at all, hardly."
Meyer said, "I have worked and studied in primitive countries; and I have caught about every kind of body louse a bountiful nature provides. And I have yet to contract a case that did not respond immediately to plain old vinegar. Have your girls soak their heads, armpits, and their private parts in vinegar. It kills the crabs and kills the eggs, and the itching stops almost immediately."
"You wouldn't kid me?" the beard asked.
"It is the most useful and generally unknown information in the modern world."
"They've been going up the walls. Hey. Thanks. And God bless you guys."
He roared away. I told Meyer he was fantastic. Meyer said that my continual adulation made him uncomfortable, and it was time to see The Man.
We turned around, and where A-1-A curved west, away from the Atlantic beach, Meyer drove straight, down a road that was all crushed shell, ruts, and potholes, and marked private: Soon we came to the entrance pillars, a huge billboard telling of the fantas
tic city of the future that , would rise upon the eleven square miles of sandy waste, where no child need cross a highway to get to school, where everything would be recycled (presumably vitiating any need for cemetery zoning), where clean industry would employ clean, smiling people, where nothing would rust, rot, or decay, where age would not wither nor custom stale the fixed, maniacal smiles on the plastic faces of the future multitude who here would dwell.
Once past the entrance pillars we were on a black velvet vehicle strip (trucks stay to right, off blacktop) which restored to the rental Ford the youth and ease it had lost during a few months, a few thousand miles of being warped, rocked, and crowded by the clozens of temporary owners.
We followed the small, plastic orange arrows and saw some yellow and green and blue arrows on yard-tall sticks marching in other directions, forming a routing code for workmen, planners, deliverypeople. A small sign in front of a wilderness of dwarf palmetto said starkly: SHOPPING PLAZA E 400,000 SQ. FT. ENCL. Yes, indeed. A multilevel, automated, air-controlled, musicated selling machine, where-to the violins of Mantovani and the chain gang shuffle of the housewife sandals-only those processed foods would be offered which the computer approved of as being saleable in billion-unit production runs.
