Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  The busboy brought, after a while, the coffee she’d ordered before all the excitement. She drank it, she finished her narrative, and she started a self-pitying letter to her mother at home up in Great Barrington that she knew she would never finish and never send, and then Jack came over to the table, carrying his half-full coffee cup, and took the chair that had been Mercer’s. He was clearly trying very hard to look concerned, maybe even a little abashed, but his true feeling of self-satisfaction glistened on him like oil. “Listen, Champ,” he said. “Don’t be mad.”

  “Forgot my name again?” But she didn’t feel like playing games; before he could answer, she shook her head, ripped the pages containing the narrative out of her memo pad and pushed them over to him. “I’m not mad,” she said. “Mostly, I’m just tired. Here’s the story. Can we go home now?”

  “Sure. Listen, I probably should have told you about the setup ahead of time, but you’re new, you know?”

  “I know,” she said. She really was very tired, though part of her tiredness, she knew, was simply depression.

  “I didn’t know how you’d handle it,” he explained. “I figured you’d probably do best if you didn’t know anything else was going on. You could be more natural.”

  “It’s really all right, Jack,” she told him. “I was mad, but I figured it all out for myself, everything you want to say. I’m so completely not mad anymore, I even included the name.” And she gestured at the pages of narrative

  He looked alert. “Name? What name?”

  “That girl—is her name really Fluffy?—she told me who Mercer’s throwing her over for. Somebody named Felicia.”

  “Felicia!” Pleased, excited, he pressed his hand palm-down on the memo pad pages, fingers spread, as though to keep the pages from flying away, or being stolen. “A new name, somebody new,” he said, looking over her head, thinking out loud. “We’ll have to find out who she is.” Focusing on her again, he grinned broadly and said, “Great work, Champ! And I do remember your name; you’re Sara the Champ.”

  “We do the best we can,” she said, and smiled back, to show she really wasn’t mad anymore.

  She hated him.

  THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS

  One

  When Sara arrived at work Monday morning, and reported to Jack’s squaricle for her next assignment, he greeted her with a harried impersonal smile, as though nothing at all had happened over the weekend. And, in one way of looking at it, nothing had.

  There was just under an hour left before the morning editorial conference with Massa, when Jack would have to produce today’s thirty story ideas, so that’s why he was pacing the squaricle like a trapped rat, and why Mary Kate was seated so alertly at the typewriter. Clippings on both their desks, Sara now knew, represented potentially useful items from obscure journals around the world; creatures bom with extra heads or other duplicated body parts came mosdy from Brazil, she’d noticed, while encounters with oversexed but not unfriendly aliens took place most frequendy in Scandinavia.

  However, to reach that magic number of thirty, Jack would have to go beyond clippings, beyond all the bits and pieces of star bio brought him by his eight reporters, and invent. “The earth,” he said, and Mary Kate poised her narrow fingers over the keyboard. “The earth,” he repeated, pacing and pacing, staring at the gray industrial carpet, “came from another solar system. It was a, a, a, a meteor or a comet or—It was a rogue planet!” He straightened, as though thick leather thongs that had held him bent like an ape—rather like a Lon Chaney Sr. impersonation—had at last been removed. Beaming with joy, he intoned, “Desperate Aliens Search for Rogue Planet Earth! Collision of Solar Systems Set Our Planet Adrift!” Mary Kate typed, her fmgers snapping at the keys like tiny predators. Jack, feeling obvious relief for just this instant, smiled on Sara and said, “Good morning. You are here for your assignment.”

  “You want me to find Felicia?”

  “No no,” he said. “We have serfs dragging those ponds. You found Felicia’s name, you flinched magnificently as you will see when you see the photo, and you are to be rewarded.”

  “I am?” Sara asked, mistrusting him deeply. “How?”

  “You are going to America. In a town called—” He snapped his fingers several times impatiently at the back of Mary Kate’s head. “Called, called—” Mary Kate gave Sara a jaundiced look. Finished with her typing for the moment, she picked up a slender paper-clipped stack and read, “Whitcomb.”

  “Just so. In the town called Whitcomb, in the great but not overly exciting state of Indiana, are twin boys, name of Jim and Joe Geezer. Can that be right?”

  Mary Kate extended to him the paper-clipped stack and he consulted it. “Geester. Still doesn’t sound right. Anyway, day after tomorrow those boys are celebrating their one hundredth birthday together, in their nursing home out there in . . . Whitcomb, and the Weekly Galaxy is going to throw them a party.”

  “That’s very nice,” Sara said neutrally.

  “Isn’t it,” Jack agreed. “And your reward, for Felicia and the flinch, is that you shall be the one in charge. You will have the Down Under Trio to—”

  Sara stared. The Down Under Trio? How could that be a reward? Those were the three Australian reporters on Jack’s team—Bob Sangster, with the big nose; Harry Razza, the lounge lizard Lothario; and Louis B. Urbiton, the oldest and drunkest reporter on the staff—and Sara had never seen any of them do anything but make trouble for themselves and others. “The Australians?” she asked. “All of them?”

  “They are your team,” Jack insisted. “They obey clear orders very well, and they’ll be a terrific help if there’s a problem. Also, they deserve a reward too, for a body in the box they got last month. Plus we’ll—”

  There was that phrase again: body in the box. What could it possibly mean? Jack had been given a Jeep Laredo for his part in getting one, and now the three Australians were to be sent to this birthday party as their reward for the same or a similar thing. Sara would have asked Jack for an explanation, but he was sailing unstoppably on, saying: “Plus we’ll send you a photographer from Indianapolis or somewhere. You go out and set up the party, see what you can do for notable names. Maybe the governor of Indiana would like a task.” “What else does he have to do,” Mary Kate commented.

  “Exactly. The Down Unders are super with press reps, put them to work on it. And we want a birthday cake the size of a Rose Bowl float.” His hands spread wide, designing and indicating what he wanted on the cake: “Happy Birthday, Joe and Jim Thing, All America and the Weekly Galaxy Salute You on Your First Century. Get the words ‘Weekly Galaxy’ on the cake.”

  “Of course,” Sara said. “How much can I spend?”

  “What it costs,” Jack told her.

  Mary Kate said, “You never ask, ‘How much can I spend?’ Not around here.”

  “Exactly,” Jack agreed. “When the subject matter is truly trivial, no expense is too great. Report to Sally Forth, I told her you’re on the way. And check with the Down Unders, where you’ll meet them in . . . Whitcomb. They’ll travel separately, you’ll be happy to hear.”

  Sara blinked, trying to keep up. “Sally Forth?” Wasn’t that a comic strip?

  “Her name,” Jack said, with a look at his watch, becoming nervous and impatient again, “is Sally Farber. She’s in charge of travel here, down on one, and therefore ...”

  “I get it,” Sara said. “Sally Forth.”

  Sally Forth (nee Farber) was a matronly lady who never got to go anywhere except the travel office on the first floor of the Weekly Galaxy building. The outer room of the travel office was a barren oblong, bisected by a chest-high counter, with Sally Forth on one side and the customers on the other. When Sara entered and approached this counter, Sally Forth looked up from the paperback edition of Marco Polo she was reading and waited, tense and angry, obviously expecting the worst.

  “Hello,” Sara said. The woman said nothing. Sara wanted to ask if she was the right person, but the
re was no way to say, Excuse me, are you Sally Forth?, so she identified herself instead: “I’m Sara Joslyn, they sent me down to—”

  “Oh, yes,” the woman said, slamming down the paperback with unnecessary force. “They told me you were coming.” Then she picked up the paperback, glaring as though she suspected Sara of intending to steal it, and carried it away to her inner room.

  Alone, Sara looked around, noticing that, where one would expect travel posters on the walls, these framed poster-sized objects were merely more front pages of past Weekly Galaxys. However, when she considered them more closely, she realized that one of the stories prominent on each front page involved some exotic locale: South Africa, Rio di Janeiro, Tahiti, Mars.

  Sally Forth slammed back from her inner office, lugging a white shopping bag with a yellow circular smile face on the side. Her own face was the rebuttal. Lifting this shopping bag to a lower shelf on her side of the counter, “It’s a nice life, I must say,” she snarled. “Gallivanting around. Spend money like water. World travelers.”

  “It’s my first trip,” Sara said, to placate her. She was not to be placated. Taking items from the shopping bag, slapping them on the counter in front of Sara, she announced each object in turn: “Airline ticket. American Express card. Air Travel card. MasterCard card; I hate that one. Visa card. Telephone company card. Hertz card. Exxon card. Two thousand dollars cash. Extra American Express card without the Weekly Galaxy name on it. Sign this.”

  Sara obediendy signed the requisition sheet Sally Forth shoved across the counter at her, while Sally Forth sneered at her penmanship, saying, “Puss in boots, that’s what it is. Seven league boots. Up up and away.”

  Yanking back the signed requisition, she snapped, “And what do I get to do? Stand here and look at this counter ”

  Trying to find something to say, some words of comfort or solace, human contact, Sara dithered and finally told the woman, “Life’s unfair, I guess.”

  Sally Forth leveled on her a murderous but calm gaze. “So that’s the news, is it?” she asked.

  Sara gathered everything off the counter and fled.

  Her own name was on all those credit cards. The two thousand dollars, a thick wad of used bills with a paper band around it, marked in black ink $2G, turned out to be a mix of twenties, fifties and a few hundreds. The airline ticket was for a first-class seat on flights between Miami and Indianapolis, changing at Atlanta. (Dead people, it was said, on their way to heaven, change at Atlanta. Or was that for people on their way to hell? Those going to heaven change at Amsterdam.)

  Mary Kate’s paper-clipped stack of information, now in Sara’s possession, informed her Hertz would have a rental car reserved for her at the airport in Indianapolis, and a room awaited her at the Holiday Inn on State Highway, just outside Whitcomb. All she had to do was pick up her typewriter and go.

  Her typewriter? Yes. When she had, at the barbecue last Saturday, expressed surprise to Binx that the Galaxy"s reporters were issued manual portable typewriters rather than the word processors plugged into a mainframe computer that even the poor old Courier-Observer had converted to before it was merged and Sara’d lost that job, Binx had said, “Massa likes his reporters mobile.” So this was what he’d meant.

  The Aussies, feverish with expectation, grinning broadly and whacking one another on the back, assured Sara they would make contact immediately upon arrival at the Whitcomb Holiday Inn. Phyllis, one of those assigned to the hard slog of tracking down the unknown Felicia, expressed a heartfelt envy that made Sara glow with pleasure as she packed her typewriter and filled her shoulder bag with pens and tapes. Nearby, Ida Gavin was also packing, on her way to California to interview the elusive Keely Jones, whose defiant shotgunning of the Galaxy's soundtruck had been that star’s final misguided resistance of the Galaxy's loving embrace. That was the true plum among today’s journeys to America, a sunny conversation with a TV star beside a Bel Air swimming pool, but Sara felt no envy at all. Whitcomb was exciting enough, for a first time out.

  What was it like? The first day of school, the first year of school. No, more than that; it was like the first time you ever went to the supermarket on your own, your mother’s shopping list and the green paper money clutched tight in your moist fist.

  Typewriter case handle clutched in her moist fist, head already filling with sentences about hundred-year-old twins, Sara ran for her plane.

  Two

  Whitcomb, Indiana, on a Tuesday in mid-July. Even the dogs were bored. A couple of them lying around in the shade under Edsels and LaSaUes didn’t even look up when the Trailways bus groaned to a stop in front of the Rexall store, farted shrilly, and opened its door to release the big-bellied sweat-stained driver and the Down Under Trio. Bob Sangster scratched his big nose, Harry Razza patted his deeply wavy auburn hair, Louis B. Urbiton gazed about the somnolent downtown of Whitcomb in mild amaze, and the bus driver opened a bomb-bay door in the rib cage of the bus to remove the Aussies’ battered and disgusting mismatched luggage.

  “So this is America,” Harry Razza said.

  “Can’t say I like it much,” Bob Sangster said.

  “Oh, good,” said Louis B. Urbiton, “there’s a pub.”

  “Bar,” Harry corrected.

  “Bahhhhh” Louis amended.

  “Have a nice day,” the driver said, and remounted his bus.

  The Aussies stared after him, in astonishment and shock. “What?” demanded Bob.

  “I call that cheek,” Harry said.

  The bus door snicked shut. The bus groaned away. The dog under the Edsel opened one eye, saw the six well-polished shoes of the Aussies, decided in his doggy innocence that these must be acceptable functioning members of society, and closed the eye again.

  “We must phone the delectable Sara,” Harry said, “and have her come gather us.”

  “Perhaps there’s a phone in yonder bahhhhh” Louis suggested.

  “And we could wait there for her,” Bob said.

  Louis smiled on him. “What a good idea,” he said.

  The Aussies picked up their revolting saggy luggage and crossed Fremont Avenue to the Veterans’ Bar & Grill, a place with neon beer signs in the window for enticement and a stubbly bit of triangular shingle roof over the entrance for decoration. They left the bright sunlight outside for the damp-smelling darkness within, and once their eyes adjusted they saw they were not alone in here, though the place was as quiet as any empty room you’ve ever listened to.

  Fifteen or twenty people, most but not all male, were scattered along the dark-wood bar running down the right side of the joint and at the black Formica tables filling the space on the left. Everybody in Whitcomb retired from the railroad hung out here, plus a few widows and a couple of unemployed sheet-metal workers plotting a life of crime. Little was said in this room, and that litde was muttered. People who hang out in the Veterans’ Bar & Grill in the middle of a sunny Tuesday in July don’t have much they want to say.

  The Aussies gazed around this gloomy interior. “Oh, my,” Bob Sangster said.

  “Doctor,” said Harry Razza, “can this environment be saved?”

  “We’re not here a moment too soon,” said Louis B. Urbiton. A man of action, he dropped his bags and raised one hand. “Landlord!”

  In the large main kitchen of a small local bakery, with the heat of the ovens compounding the heat of the day and a dozen white-clothed bakers punching and tearing various doughs into breads and pastries, Sara talked with the third-generation owner of the place, a fortyish pudgy man looking as sharp and hip and with-it as a huge green pinky ring and a loud check jacket permitted, and the Master Baker, an irascible genius of sixty who was good at what he did and therefore had no need to be hip, and who didn’t like this lumpy interruption of Sara into the smooth batter of his life one little bit.

  “It’s just a birthday cake,” Sara pointed out, not for the first time.

  “Just a birthday cake,” the Master Baker echoed, with ancient irony. He look
ed as though he subscribed to some primeval superstition that women were bad luck in a kitchen, and would prefer Sara to be put ashore at once.

  “And our name in the paper, Gus,” the owner said, showing how little he understood the well- springs of his Master Baker’s personality. “Hack- myer’s Bakery,” breathed this heir, almost rever- endy. “Gus Altervegh, Master Baker.”

  “Just a birthday cake,” repeated the Master Baker, with the same deadly inflection.

  “Sure,” Sara said, pretending to ignore the sarcasm.

  “Just a twenty-foot birthday cake!” The Master Baker looked as though he wanted to hit Sara on the forehead with a wooden spoon.

  “Now, look,” Sara said, turning to the owner, who was her ally. Useless, but an ally. “I’ve let you negotiate me down from fifty feet, but that’s all. Twenty’s as short as I go.”

  “Listen, I understand,” the owner assured her. “I hear you. I know where you’re coming from.” The Master Baker ignored his employer, saying to Sara, “You want to take a stroll in my ovens, lady? Walk around in there, play a little pitch and catch? Whadaya think we got here, the Bessemer Steel Works?”

  “That’s all right,” Sara told him. “You can make it in parts, and put the parts together.”

  “Sure, Gus,” the owner said. “With the icing on, who’s to know?”

  “Look at my ovens!” the Master Baker yelled, waving a brawny arm and a bum-pocked hand. “I can do you a twenty-inch cake, max max max!”

  “So what’s that?” the owner asked. “Maybe twelve, thirteen cakes?”

  “So what’s that?” the Master Baker demanded. “Two, three days?”

  “Tomorrow,” Sara said.

  “They’re not gonna be a hundred every day, Gus,” the owner pointed out.