Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  And what do I mean by save, anyway? That’s pretty goddamn melodramatic, isn’t it? Sorry, buddy, I didn’t notice the halo when you came in.

  Thus Jack tried, with sardonic contempt, to whip himself back into shape. And lay in bed awake, Sara’s head warm on his chest. And failed.

  Eight

  Gloomy Sunday. The morning of the Mercer- Nelson wedding dawned bright and sunny, with a light offshore breeze, temperature in the low sixties, expected to rise to the low seventies by nuptial hour at 1:00 p.m. In the Oak Bluffs command center of the Weekly Galaxy, crammed with Jack Ingersoll and his entire team, plus Boy Cartwright and the riffraff and scum of his group, plus assorted stringers and photographers and secretaries, the gloom was as palpable as a bad smell.

  There were also actual bad smells, of course, which everyone was too depressed to complain about, some rising from Boy Cartwright’s assorted vermin, but most emanating from the Down Under Trio, recalled at last from the trenches of Green’s Hotel (where Phyllis Perkinson, representing Trend, had been among the happy distractees). It no longer mattered that the world’s press was here; Trend or Newsweek would get as short shrift from Lady Beatrice Romneysholme as the Weekly Galaxy. (It was, in fact, a New York Post team, attempting a landing on Lady Beatrice’s private beach via rowboat, who had been driven back into the sea with their legs and behinds riddled with birdshot by ancient but unerring marksmen on the household staff, thus ending any idea Jack might have had of trying the same stunt.)

  And now, the final nail had been driven into the coffin of their hopes by the arrival of Ida with yet another bit of bad news. “I found out who’s taking the wedding pix,” she told Jack.

  Boy, nearby, raised his head and looked mildly at her stony profile. “You’ll want to talk to me, then, dear,” he said.

  Ida ignored him, continuing to look at Jack, who said, “Would this photographer be bribable?”

  “I doubt it,” Ida said. “Lady Beatrice is a rather well-known amateur photographer, it turns out.”

  Jack clutched his forehead. “Oh, don’t do this to me.”

  “Not to you,” Sara said. “To Boy.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Boy said.

  Still talking exclusively to Jack, Ida said, in a fake la-dee-da voice, “Her flower photos are in all the best magazines.”

  “Then I wouldn’t have seen them,” Jack said. Bob Sangster, fondling his large nose, which had become quite a bit redder the last few days and possibly larger as well, smiled sadly and said, “Time for Ida to arrange another fire.”

  Ida gave him an icy look. “I didn’t arrange the first one.”

  “Just a manner of speaking, love,” Bob told her, but then retreated to another table, still within earshot.

  Sara, looking alert, eager to learn, said, “What fire?”

  “Nothing,” Ida told her. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Jack said, “that was about the quickest thinking I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.”

  “It sure is,” Sara agreed. “Tell me about it.” “What’s happening right now,” Ida said, “is what we should be thinking about.”

  “Ida,” Jack said, “what’s happening right now is failure and defeat. Speaking for myself, I’d much rather think about a triumph of yesteryear than the rout of today.” To Sara, he said, “It was a body in the box last year, George Hamler, I think, somebody famous who—”

  Sara, frowning in bewilderment, said, “Body in the box?”

  “That’s right, you haven’t been along on one of those, have you? That’s a—”

  “Tell her about the fire, man,” Harry Razza said. “She’s a bright girl, maybe it’ll give her an idea.”

  “Right.” Jack said, “It was a situation just like this. We couldn’t get in, no matter what we tried, we just couldn’t get that picture, and we needed it. We’re all standing around outside, we had a Mayflower moving van down the street with our headquarters inside that, and all of a sudden there’s a fire breaks out up in the main house. We barely hear the sirens and see the smoke when Ida’s right there with a fireman’s outfit. I put it on, I take the camera, I’m in with the first bunch of firemen running in, I get my picture, by then the cops were there—”

  “By then,” Harry Razza said, “the cops were checking the firemen, they were already on to the idea of the stunt.”

  “We only made it because Ida was so fast,” Jack said. “She heard that siren, she saw that smoke, she was there”

  “Then, when the old lady died,” Harry Razza said, “we couldn’t use the picture after all. Such is life.”

  Sara, bewildered, said, “Old lady died? Is that the body in the box?”

  “No, no,” Harry said, “his mother. She died in the fire.”

  Louis B. Urbiton raised his hoary and battle- scarred head from a nearby table. “Mother-inlaw,” he said, and subsided.

  “Right you are,” Harry told him. “Mother-in-law it was.”

  Don Grove said, “I don’t suppose lightning’ll strike that house, or anything nice like that.”

  “Well,” Sara said slowly, “but what if there was a shipwreck? Washed ashore.”

  “No,” Jack said. “Lady Bee is not your basic humanitarian type.”

  “If people are drowning?” Sara insisted.

  “Lady Bee,” Jack told her, “would turn the hose on them.”

  “Something else, then,” Sara said, thinking hard. Jack, watching her think, tried not to be troubled, tried to be proud of this prodigy. “An airplane crash?” Sara thought aloud, and shook her head. “Maybe a quarantine? A terrible infectious disease, nobody allowed off the property until the health department gives everybody shots?”

  “Medical science baffled,” Jack suggested. “But Lady Bee would give the shots herself.”

  “There has to be a—” Sara started, but Boy interrupted, saying mildly, “Is this a light I see before me, flashing off and on?”

  It was the light on the phone on Boy’s desk. Everyone in the room watched him pick it up and speak into it, with calm self-assurance: “Family Circle.” Then he sat abruptly to attention, even the dead suety flesh of his cheeks seeming to stiffen. “Yes, Mr. DeMassi!” he announced, and everybody stiffened.

  “Yes, Mr. DeMassi.”

  “No, Mr. DeMassi, I’m afraid not.”

  “Well, Mr. DeMassi, they do take our money. We have, I’m afraid, enriched several of Lady Beatrice’s servants. However, having taken our money, they then refuse to honor our bargain. Instead, they run us off with shotguns and dogs.”

  “Absolutely, Mr. DeMassi, that is immoral and unethical behavior, but—”

  “No, sir, the authorities in this area are absolutely no help at all.”

  “Well, sir, I’ve just managed to find out who’s going to do the official wedding album—”

  Ida looked daggers.

  “—and I’m afraid there’s no comfort there, either. Lady Beatrice herself is going to—”

  “I’m afraid so, sir, yes. Yes, indeed.”

  Boy’s eyes widened. He sat even straighter than before. The knuckles of the doughy hand holding the phone receiver to his leprous ear were seen to whiten. “Yes, sir!” he cried. “Yes, sir, we will! Absolutely, Mr. DeMassi! Thank you, sir!”

  Boy hung up. Greasy globules of perspiration stood on the fishbelly flesh of his forehead. He stared about at all the people staring at him. “Well, well,” he said in a kind of awe.

  “Well?” demanded Jack. “What did he say?”

  “He said—” Boy cleared his throat. A nervous smile flickered spastically across his face. “Massa said— Mr. DeMassi said— He said . . . storm the wedding!”

  Nine

  “The bride on her wedding day,” Lady Beatrice said firmly, “must not see her intended until the actual moment of the ceremony.”

  John Michael Mercer humbly accepted this pronouncement. “I left my tie in there, is all,” he said.

  “A servant will ge
t it for you.” Lady Beatrice patted Mercer’s arm, to get him walking away from the door to the chamber in which—Lady Beatrice was not entirely unworldly—the bride and her intended had spent the prenuptial night. As they walked down the sunlit corridor she said, “I understand you’re nervous.”

  “Yeah, I am.” Mercer seemed surprised by the idea. “Not much has scared me in my life, Lady Beatrice,” he said, as they walked along, “and I don’t say that to be boastful. It’s just the truth. I guess I have a high imagination threshold or something. But this. This is different.”

  They came to the end of the corridor, where a broad window overlooked the south lawn and the sea. A great gleaming green and white striped tent had been erected there, full of white chairs and round white tables on a carpet of green Astroturf to protect the real lawn. Green and white pennons fluttered in the breeze from the peak of the tent and from poles flanking its four broad entrance ways. Long tables extended in an L from two comers of the tent, suggesting an enclosure without confinement. White linen cloths were spread on the tables, their hems swaying in the breeze, and at the moment down there Lady Beatrice’s staff busily distributed dishes and cups and glasses and silver on those long white expanses. The food awaited in the caterer’s trucks —Cadet Catering—parked down on the road, and when the time came, the household staff would carry everything in through the gatehouse and up the gravel road to the reception, saving the caterer’s men from having to step on the property. (Galling for those three catering employees who had been suborned by the Weekly Galaxy.)

  The early guests had already arrived, surprised and delighted, the men in lightweight jackets, the women in any number of fanciful costumes, all light and airy and flirting with the breeze. Old friends called cheerfully to one another across the lawns, their voices rising like birdsong in the clear air. Today, the civilians among them—the relatives of the bride and groom, the old friends from school days—looked as glamorous and beautiful and happy and eternally young as the showbiz folk.

  A few of the guests had arrived in their own boats, which stood offshore in a cheerful gossipy little fleet, nodding companionably together, their own banners snapping in the breeze, their bright- work polished for the occasion, while their fresh-painted dinghies, having carried those guests ashore, now waited all in a row on the beach below the bluff, like a hitherto unknown Monet.

  The whole panorama, spread out below them, was a scene from a medieval romance, and Lady Beatrice nodded at it in satisfaction. “This is different,” she agreed. “Getting married is unlike anything else you will ever do.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “But do you know why it is?” Resting her hand on his arm, Lady Beatrice said, “It’s because, for the first time in your life, you’re taking another person seriously. And that means, for the first time, you’re taking yourself seriously.” Looking up at him, she saw the reminiscent grin that flickered on his lips, and she said, “You’re remembering those other girls, aren’t you?”

  He looked guilty, sheepish, but nevertheless pleased with himself. “I guess I am,” he said.

  “Do think about them,” she told him. “And remember, with them, you acted as though you were nothing but a toy.”

  “I did?” He thought about that, not totally pleased, but accepting it. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe so.”

  “Today,” she said, “you become a real boy.”

  He laughed, and said, “This is my first time, you know. Felicia’s too.”

  “Oh, I could see that.” Lady Beatrice pointed a bony leathery finger at Mercer, saying, “And the last.”

  “We’ll give it our best shot. I know that much.”

  He looked out at the day, the tent, the people, the sea, the few small white clouds in the blue sky. “One thing,” he said. “We’re sure getting a great start for it.”

  In the dry-earth yard of Rudy’s Riding Academy, near the inland border of Tisbury, Sara and Jack stood side by side, watching Don Grove pass by on top of a large black horse. The horse cantered a bit, made cheerful by activity and good weather, and Don bounced madly atop it, head dangerously flopping about. “I think,” he cried, clutching to saddle, bridle, mane, his own knees, “I think this one’s broken!”

  “Maybe it’s got a flat,” Jack suggested.

  All around them, other Galaxians were mounting up, with more or less success. Bob Sangster, smilingly at ease atop a big-chested roan, looked amazingly like a train robber, while Chauncey Chapperell, virtually crossing the ankles of his long legs beneath the belly of the modest gray he’d been assigned, looked more than ever like a transient from some other star cluster.

  All in all, sixteen staffers and stringers had been dragooned into the Galaxy Dragoons. Hung about with cameras, dressed in bulky clothing meant to absorb falls, blows and birdshot, riding their steeds with lesser or greater grace, they looked mostly like the remnants of a defeated punitive expedition making its way back through the Khy- ber Pass. But when Sara was efficiently aboard a small and frisky pinto mare, she cantered over to where Jack sat stolidly atop a big chestnut gelding and said, with excited eyes, “Look at them! Our cavalry!”

  “I see them,” Jack agreed.

  Sara seemed not to notice his lack of enthusiasm. “They won’t get away from us this time!” she cried, with a fierce rallying wave of her arm.

  “No, they won’t,” said Jack.

  The Galaxy attack was three-pronged, being by land, by sea and by air. While those with the slightest pretense to equitation formed their posse in Rudy’s Riding Academy, a group led by Boy Cartwright and featuring Louis B. Urbiton and Harry Razza and every other Galaxian who could be made to look reasonably appropriate in formal wear (or who could simply not be safely placed atop a moving animal) had been garbed in formal wear and ferried out to the Princess Pat, waiting now in Vineyard Haven Harbor. As the nuptial hour neared, the Princess Pat would ease on down the roads, past West Chop and Lake Tashmoo and Makonikey Head and Lambert’s Cove and so on down the coastline to slip itself as unobtrusively as possible in among the ships already in attendance below Lady Beatrice’s casde. If the plan worked, these uninvited guests would slide ashore and mingle, snapping surreptiuous pix with the tiny cameras concealed on their persons.

  At the same time, Ida Gavin was boarding the helicopter at the airport, at the head of a troop of photographers augmented by several freelancers borrowed for the moment from other segments of the press currendy on the island. It was a big transporter helicopter, with side doors that opened wide, and half a dozen photographers would be able to shoot at once from each side of the ship, some lying prone, some kneeling above them, some leaning out from the comers of the openings.

  By land, by sea and by air. One way or another, Massa would get his wedding album.

  Ten

  The wedding began beautifully. The Reverend Alfred Wimms Hookey, a bit bewildered by the change in venue, and privately feeling just the teeniest bit guilty at having agreed to speak to those newspaper people, nevertheless represented in excellent fashion both the local and the transcendent authorities whose invocation and approval were at the heart of the ceremony. The bride was so beautiful, so ethereal, so radiant and so nearly translucent one looked behind her for wings, and the groom had become for today a true gentle giant, courtly but strong. The guests, the weather, the setting, all rose to the occasion, and Lady Beatrice, in lavender lace, moved through it all like TinkerbelTs grandmother, discreet camera ever snapping and snapping and snapping.

  The Princess Pat eased in among the waiting yachts. Well-dressed but indefinably scruffy people started over its offshore side, out of sight of the wedding guests on the bluff, clambering down into the Princess Pats two small motor-driven dinghies.

  Jakes, with two of his mates down in the gatehouse, looked out past the caterer’s vans and the caterer’s men and on down the road. “Looks like horses coming,” he said.

  “Dearly beloved,” the Reverend Alfred Wimms Hookey began, and the rest
of his opening statement became increasingly hard to hear as a hum began somewhere eastward, rapidly increased to a roar, and proved, when the startled bride and groom and reverend and guests all looked upward, to be a huge black helicopter, with many mechanical faces dangling from it on both sides.

  “Go on!” Lady Beatrice cried to the reverend, waving her camera at him. “Go on! Go on! Speak up, and get on with it!” And, while Reverend Hookey shakenly nodded and tried to recapture his equilibrium and his place in the proceedings, Lady Beatrice called to one of the servants waiting back by the tables, “Benson! Stop that thing!” “Mum!” cried Benson, with a kind of salute, and he moved off at a run for the casde.

  Offshore, crew members of one of the waiting yachts, people who had chosen to stay aboard and take care of some necessary maintenance during the actual ceremony, looked out and saw the two dinghies rounding the prow of the Princess Pat, headed toward shore. “What the fuck’s that?” one of them asked, and another answered, “Reporters!” Don Grove, having fallen twice from his steed in the early going and having become determined to make up for those lapses once he’d figured out how to stay on top of the goddamn hairy creature, was the first Galaxian to gallop through the entrance beside the gatehouse, and so was the one to discover the rope Jakes and his mates had just put across there, higher than a horse’s head but not higher than a man’s torso. While Don, suddenly alone up there, did a number of interesting and seemingly impossible things in midair, his mount hurried on to the party without him.

  In his efforts to stop from following Don into disaster, Bob Sangster so confused and bedeviled both himself and his horse that the beast stopped dead, turned on a dime, and went back where it had come from while Bob sailed over its head and continued on through the gatehouse entrance alone, traveling several feet over Lady Beatrice’s property before touching any of it; with, as it happened, his nose.