“If they’re waiting on a twenty-foot birthday cake from me,” the Master Baker said, “they’ll never be a hundred.”
Sara said, “What about a pizza oven?”
Horribly insulted, shocked to the very roots of his being, the Master Baker stared wide-eyed at Sara, having never in his life before seen such a dishonorable person. “Www-what?”
Sara was not going to let the good opinion of one small-town Master Baker stand between her and success in her first assignment out in the world on her own! Plowing doggedly forward, pretending to see nothing odd in the man’s staring eyes and ashen complexion, she said, “If I could arrange for a pizza oven, could you put together five four-foot cakes?”
The Master Baker pressed fat palms to his temples. “Five four-foot cakes,” he said, with a dying fall. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“In the paper, Gus,” the owner said, eager and avid, and to Sara he said, “With a picture, right?”
“Absolutely,” Sara said. “A picture.” Then she suddenly remembered: “Oh, my God, the photographer!”
Now they both stared at her. “Miss?” the owner said.
“The Australians!”
The owner looked like a man thinking about insurance; does it cover the nervous breakdowns of nonemployees in the kitchen? “What is it, miss?” he asked.
But Sara was already in motion. “A phone, a phone.” Over her shoulder, she called, “I’ll arrange for the oven, and the cake dish! I’ll get back to you!” And she was gone.
The Master Baker and the owner looked at one another. “A twenty-foot cake dish,” commented the Master Baker. “They put too much yeast in her head.”
What a lot of fun! The regulars of the Veterans’ Bar & Grill on Fremont Avenue had had no idea the walls of the grungy place could ring with so much hilarity. While the never-indicted Frank Sinatra sang “My Way” on the crumbling Wurl- itzer, widows and retirees and sheet-metal workers all actually sat upright or even stood on their two feet, their grasp firm on their glasses, their eyes shining, their flushed cheeks cracked with unexpected laughter. Even the bartender showed a small smile from time to time, though he always remembered to cover it by turning to punch the cash register. Only one sodden bag lady in the comer remained oblivious.
Harry Razza flirted with the widows. Bob Sangster explained the real story of Ronnie Biggs and the great English train robbery to the sheet-metal workers. Louis B. Urbiton did his impressions of those various stars of stage, screen and politics which he claimed to have interviewed in his long and illustrious reportorial career. All his impressions looked and sounded like Burt Lancaster (whom he didn’t do) except for his impression of Mae West, which was like nothing on earth.
“This is the most fun I’ve had,” one ancient confessed, “since my wife’s funeral.”
“You fellows ought to hang out here more often,” said a former railroad company timer.
Batting her eyes, until the practice made her dizzy, a widow said to Harry Razza, “So you folks are all the way from Australia.”
“Drawn by the sparkle in your eyes, my darling.”
“I never met anybody from Australia before,” said a former fireman on the B, P & T.
Bob Sangster turned to Louis B. Urbiton, saying, “Show them your kangaroo.”
A retiree gaped, slopping his Lite beer. “You have a kangaroo?”
The bartender lowered his eyebrows and glowered through them.
“No kangaroo jokes,” he said.
“Did you hear,” Harry Razza asked him, “about the chap who went into the pub with a carrot in his ear?”
“Yes,” the bartender said.
“No,” Bob Sangster told the credulous retiree. “He imitates a kangaroo.” To Louis B. Urbiton, he said, “Go on, Louis, show him.”
So Louis showed him. The sight of a fairly respectable-looking, neatly dressed in suit and tie, fifty-one-year-old Australian leaping about the bar, up onto chairs and back down onto the floor, suitcoat tail flying, hand firmly holding drink as both hands pretended to be tiny kangaroo paws boxing, the whole while honking, was so captivating that everybody had to do it, beginning with the retirees and finishing with the widows. Honk honk honk, people jumped up and down, mighty leaps forward and back, pinwheeling their little kangaroo-paw fists; and all the while, Harry Razza continued to talk to the bartender: “Then ” he said, “the chap walks in next day with a stalk of celery in his ear.”
“Don’t tell me the punchline,” the bartender said. “Pm warning you.
This was the scene Sara came upon when she entered the Veterans’ Bar & Grill on Fremont Avenue: Louis B. Urbiton leading a lot of elderly dipsoes in some sort of vile calisthenics, Bob Sangster demonstrating quick-draw from a make-believe shoulder holster to a couple of unemployed sheet- metal workers, and Harry Razza chatting blithely with the bartender, ignoring the fist the man was slowly raising.
Sara called out, “Hello!” but nobody heard her, and nothing happened. She called out the Aussies’ names, to absolutely no effect. Finally, seeing no alternative, she took a deep breath and screamed, “FIRE!”
Nothing. So she did it again: “FIRE!”
And a lot more times: “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”
Gradually the word penetrated, sweeping silence before it like the black death across Europe. The last of the kangaroos ceased to hop and to honk, Bob Sangster looked over at the doorway with his hand like Napoleon’s inside his jacket, and Harry Razza stopped his story just short of its punchline, to turn and gaze at the red-faced Sara with pleased admiration.
Sara stopped shouting. She took a moment to catch her breath. A layabout near her said, “Lady, don’t you know you shouldn’t yell ‘fire’ in a public place?”
“Oh, yeah?” Sara told him. “You try yelling ‘water’ and see what you get.” Pointing one by one at the Aussies, she said, “Those are mine.”
“Oh, dear, it’s teacher,” said Louis.
“Come along, you guys,” Sara said. “Where’s my photographer?”
Louis gave himself a visible search, without result. “Photographer?”
A retiree urged Sara, “Have him show you his kangaroo.”
“I don’t want his kangaroo,” Sara said, “I want my photographer.”
Head on table, the bag lady had still been asleep off to one side, the only person in the room not caught up in the hullabaloo of the Aussies’ descent, but now she raised her head, blearily gazed around, and said, “Photoga—? Photoga—?”
“Come on,” Sara said to her team, “I need that photographer.”
“Sara, darling,” Harry Razza said, while the widows sniffed and looked put out, “I swear we have none of us set eyes on even a single photographer.”
“Did you say photographer?” the bag lady cried, at last getting the name right. “I’m a, I can be a, I’ve been a—” She struggled to rise from her chair, her feet kicking at the various shopping bags around her.
“No, no,” Sara told her. “Our photographer from Indianapolis.”
Shakily rising, showing herself to be garbed in a modey mish-mash of unacceptable clothing, in- advertendy knocking over the half-full (half-empty) beer glass on the table in front of her, pointing more or less at her own self with a stubby and uncertain finger, “That’s me!” the bag lady cried. “I came, I just drove down from, I’m the—”
Sara stared. “You’re my photographer?”
The bag lady nodded hugely in happy agreement. The shopping bags around her feet were full of lenses, reflecters, work lights, folding tripods, film rolls, black cloths, light meters and actual cameras. Two more cameras dangled like lynch victims on the bag lady’s person. Waving precariously, work-booted feet moving and moving among the bags of equipment, the bag lady cried, “From Indiana—Indi—From Indian—Yeah!” And backwards she toppled, thumping into a seated position on her chair, smile magnificent, arms outspread.
Sara looked at them. The Aussies. The bag lady. “My team,”
she said.
Three
Midaftemoon, in the bustling editorial offices of the Weekly Galaxy. Jack Ingersoll paced his squaricle, assembling his list for tomorrow morning’s conference with Massa. Pausing, he squinted one-eyed across the heaving writhing squaricles toward the battery of reporters, gnawing away at their phones. He said, “Glue on Postage Stamps Can Give You Migraine, Doctors Fear.”
“Is that one sentence or two?” Mary Kate replied, but she typed, she typed.
Jack nodded, unheeding. Jogging Causes Nymphomania, he said.
Boy Cartwright, the limey bastard, the rotten Englishman, Massa’s pet editor, the only person in the known universe with a comer squaricle—walls and windows on two sides!—Jack’s least favorite living creature, came and stood in the door space of the squaricle and smiled. Jack hated it when Boy Cartwright smiled, when that doughy baby- fat face spread its puffy pink Ups. Jack would much prefer to see Boy Cartwright’s unhealthy face twisted with agony, or that soft and sluglike body cowering in abject terror. The reason Jack watched Wages of Fear every time it came on television was so he could pretend it was Boy Cartwright being dragged down into that oozing lake of oil and squashed beneath the wheels of the straining truck.
But here was Boy at the door space to Jack’s squaricle, his usual shit-eating smile smeared across his white diseased-pumpkin face. “Listen, Boy,” Jack said, “don’t you have a belfry to haunt?”
“Ahsk me,” Boy suggested, “what’s the good word.”
“Will you then go away?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Boy promised.
“All right,” Jack said. “What’s the good word, Boy?”
“Felicia,” Boy pronounced, with loving care on every syllable. Then he smiled even more horribly than before and, true to his word, went away.
Felicia! He knew! The bastard knew! Jack’s face twisted with agony as he turned to Mary Kate, who was glaring poison-tipped knives at Boy’s back. “How?” Jack demanded. “Who?”
Because it had to be a mole within his own team, a viper in his bosom. His scoop was a scoop no longer. Jack Ingersoll and his team were no longer the only ones who knew that John Michael Mercer had thrown over Fluffy MacDougall for someone named Felicia.
“Who?”
Could it have been Sara? Could she have been that low, to take such a vile vengeance for his not having brought her into his confidence Saturday night? No; he couldn’t believe it of her. She was quick and sharp enough, but not naturally mean, a flaw in her character that would keep her from rising very far at the Galaxy, a fact he was in no hurry for her to discover. So it wasn’t her; if it had been, something would have shown on her face this morning when he gave her the reward of a trip to America, some soupgon of guilt, wisp of regret, passing shadow of conscience. So not Sara.
And not the Down Under Trio either; the Aussies despised Boy, if that were possible, even more than Jack did. As for Ida Gavin, even now skying LAward to grind her heel in Keely Jones’s face, she had become who she was today as a result of Boy’s loathsomeness, so not her either. So, in that case, who? Who?
Mary Kate? Impossible. He and Mary Kate were Siamese twins, they were joined at the hip, they had the world’s first incestuous platonic relationship.
Who? Who? Pessimistic Don Grove, constantly coming forward with two-headed calves and honeymoons on Alpha Centauri? Phyllis Perkinson, the slumming Jaycee-ette? Chauncey Chapperell, certified lunatic, preppy Trekkie and Space Ranger, who was just this morning back from a three-week assignment to find a race of chess-playing gorillas in the Amazon delta? (They hadn’t been there; too bad.)
So that was the team. Eight reporters, one secretary, one editor. The only people in this building, the only ones, who knew the significance of the name Felicia.
Well, wait. There was one other possibility; slim, but possible. The waiter.
Pedro. Pedro just might already have been among those waiters, garagemen, airline clerks and others in the service trades who are part of the vast intricate frivolous network of spies and informants connected with one or another editor at the Galaxy. If that particular restaurant were a fairly frequent haunt of John Michael Mercer’s, and if some member of Boy’s team had already suborned Pedro, naturally the fellow wouldn’t have mentioned the fact to Jack; particularly not when Jack had folding money visible in his fist. And Pedro, Jack remembered, had still been hanging around the vicinity when Sara had said that name “Felicia” and told Jack what it signified.
So it could be Pedro. It could be. Unlikely, extremely unlikely, but not impossible.
And to have to accept the alternative, that some member of his own team had been suborned by the despicable Boy, was not to be borne. So, until events proved otherwise, Jack would assume that Pedro was the source of the leak. And he would watch his ass.
At which point in the progress of his gloomy thinking, one of the absolutely trustworthy mem* bers of Jack’s team, pessimistic Don Grove—could it be him? could it?—entered the squaricle to say, “I don’t suppose you could use a hole opened in the earth and swallowed a garage. There was a car in it.”
Back to work. Jack said, “Anybody in the car?”
“That depends,” Don said carefully.
“Verifiable, Don.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Don Grove started from the squaricle and Jack called after him, “Unless it’s in California.”
Don Grove frowned, looking back. “What’s wrong with California?”
“Happens there every day.”
Sighing, Don Grove went away, and Phyllis Perkinson—could it be her? could it?—entered in his place, saying, “Unless it’s Felicia Farr, I just don’t know.”
“Is it Felicia Farr?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know, is what you’re saying.” Phyllis’s high clean forehead furrowed in distress. She said, “I’m sorry, Jack, I know this is important.”
“About on a par with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I would say.”
“The problem is, he’s fired all our spies.” Phyllis shook her patrician head in dismay at the baseness of humankind. “Why does Mercer have to have such a bad attitude?”
“Some people are just no fun at all,” Jack agreed, as the phone in the squaricle flashed and Mary Kate answered. Jack said to Phyllis, “Strive on, girl. We must find Felicia.” Rolling his eyes to indicate all the other editors in all the other squaricles, he said, “We must find Felicia first!”
“Oh, I know, I know,” Phyllis said. “I’ll keep searching.”
“Sara of the twins,” Mary Kate announced.
“Go thou and find Felicia,” Jack told Phyllis, who nodded and left as Jack picked up his phone and said, “How’s Warwick?”
“Whitcomb,” Mary Kate corrected, but Jack was listening, nodding, smiling, saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s the photographer, don’t worry about how she looks, she’s really terrific, she’ll give you great shots, very human.”
“Oh, that one,” Mary Kate said.
“Are the Aussies a help?” Jack asked the phone.
“Don’t let them drink too much.” Then he looked at Mary Kate, and said, “She’s laughing.”
“Well, she’s a cheerful girl,” Mary Kate said.
“What?” Jack asked the phone, and listened, and looked sad. “No governor?” Then he looked cheerful again. “Three mayors! Very nice. And the birthday cake as big as the Ritz?”
“Tell her to bring me back a slice,” Mary Kate said.
“It’s not on your diet,” Jack told Mary Kate, and then said to the phone, “Nothing, I was just chatting with Mary Kate. Twenty feet? That’s not a really big cake, honeybunch. Tell the photographer to do a real severe angle and a wide-angle lens and whatever—well, she knows. Tell her it’s supposed to look as big as that aircraft carrier, you know the one. Well, she'll know the one.”
“The one with the planes on it,” Mary Kate said.
“Have fun there, darling,” Jack said, and held
the smile until he hung up, when the smile was immediately replaced by a deep black scowl. “Could it be her?” he demanded. “Could it be her?”
“Of course it could,” Mary Kate said. “It could be anybody. It could be you.”
Jack stared at her. “Me!"
“I trust nobody,” Mary Kate told him. “And I recommend you be the same.”
Four
The dayroom of the Elysian Fields Manor and Convalescent Center was a large and sunny space, with gauzy white curtains drawn back from the broad airy windows so that daylight poured gaily in, sparkling on walkers and crutches, glistening on shiny heads and pale white elbows, gleaming on inhalers and syringes. The peaceful quiet calm was counterpointed, never disturbed, by the occasional turning of a card, turning of a page, or rustle of a long-drawn sigh.
Heads were lifted, eyes were rolled, fingers twitched at coverlets, as Sara returned after lunch, striding into the neat and clean dayroom with her bulging shoulder bag bouncing at her hip. The starched and ironed nurse accompanying her gestured to the farthest comer of the room, where a pair of identical wheelchairs contained a pair of identical oldsters in identical pajamas under identical blankets. Sara nodded, and the two women marched across the room to Joe and Jim Geester, the nurse saying brightly on arrival, “Hi, Joe and Jim, here’s your visitor again.”
“Remember me, guys?” Sara asked, making her voice as bright and chipper as the nurse’s.
Joe Geester—he was the one on the right—lifted a lumpy potato head with a cranky sour face drawn on the front of it and creakily said, “Girl reporter.”
“That’s right!” Sara said, smiling and sparkling. “From the Weekly Galaxy, gonna give you guys just the best party ever! One hundred years young tomorrow, huh, guys?”
“Well,” the nurse said, ‘Til leave you to discuss the details.” Turning away, she said under her breath to Sara, “Don’t get too close.”
“I won’t,” Sara murmured back, and beamed again on the birthday boys, saying, “All set for the big party?”
Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 Page 11
