“Only six hundred and fifty. I keep looking ahead for triples. Three ones and three fives so far. I’m working toward my first quadruple, but that’s a long ways off.”
Thomas was amazed at what he was certain was Jonathan’s longest speech ever.
The drive back home was a silent one, but there was something in the air far different from Jonathan’s usual introspective silences. He seemed more aware of his surroundings, more attuned to the traffic as well as the other sights and sounds of the suburban setting.
It was hard to decide whether Nan or Naomi was more pleased with Jonathan’s responsiveness at evening’s dinner table. He still sometimes slipped into monosyllables, but his words came out easily and, for a change, Jonathan seemed to be actually listening to the conversation going on around him.
It was next morning before the major transformation occurred. The house was quiet. Naomi had gone to a neighbor’s to practice her piano—something which would have driven Jonathan to distraction if she had done so at their house. Nan was cleaning up the breakfast dishes, and Thomas was helping to restore the various items from the table to their proper places in the kitchen cupboards. Jonathan was watching Saturday morning cartoons, with the sound turned down to a whisper.
Thomas reached for the phone as its muted ring sounded impatiently.
“Hi, Thomas? Sid Weinstein here.” There was no waiting for acknowledgement as the words came tumbling through the phone. “This place is a madhouse. You’d better sit down. Jonathan didn’t discover any glitch in the Numac. We’ve checked it out every way but Sunday. Pi is repeating itself!”
“But…” Thomas tried to get a word in.
“This is fantastic, Thomas. I’ve got number theorists flooding me with emails and faxes, and they’re probably trying to get through on the phone. Do you know what this means? It means Lambert’s proof of non-repeating patterns in pi is dead wrong. And here it was sacred dogma for almost two hundred years.”
“Are you sure? The proof has been checked over and over again.”
“All of which doesn’t mean a thing in the face of the numbers themselves. The crew’s getting a paper together for Mathematica. We’re rushing it into print.”
Thomas still sounded dubious though he said, “Terrific.”
“But there’s a problem. Just like your department, we have to put the initial discoverer’s name first on the paper.”
Thomas saw immediately what was being proposed. “That’s silly. Jonathan just stumbled across it. You would have found out sooner or later on your own.”
Weinstein’s familiar laugh reverberated in the earpiece. “Sorry, it won’t wash, Thomas. You could argue that about nearly every scientific discovery. If Newton hadn’t come up with the calculus, someone else would have…and someone else did, in fact, as you well know. Nope. A discovery is a discovery. Besides, we would have been very unlikely to catch the repeating sequence with an initial check since we wouldn’t even have thought to look for it or test for it. And the Numac’s already scheduled for the next nine months. The genome gang alone has over five hundred hours booked.
“No! Jonathan is definitely the discoverer. But with his name first, he’s going to be descended upon by the media. Nothing short of a first-class war will prevent him from being headlines. Do you want that?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Nan.”
“Why not ask Jonathan?”
Thomas put his hand over the mouthpiece and called to Jonathan in the next room, trying to explain briefly what Weinstein had told him.
Jonathan’s face folded into a frown. For a moment, Thomas had the terrifying feeling he always experienced when his son withdrew into his own private kingdom. The frown faded to be replaced by a broad grin. “Sure, Dad, why not?” As he spoke, he punched the volume button on the remote, and the sound became almost normal.
PICKING THE POCKETS
Giancarlo drifted to the end of the bar where the two Americans were sitting. He’d caught a few of Double Scotch’s words and wanted to hear more of the conversation. Polishing glasses and returning them to their shelves was a perfect excuse for eavesdropping.
“When d’you get in?” Double Scotch asked. A frequent visitor from a nearby apartment building, he was dressed casually in a polyester shirt and khaki shorts.
Perrier was a hotel guest, and his tailored gray suit marked him almost unmistakably as one of the recently arrived conventioneers. “You mean in Italy?” he asked in response to the question.
“Yeah.”
“Just this morning.”
“You been to Italy before?”
A headshake.
“I’ve been here three months. Great country once you know your way around.” Catching the bartender’s eye, he held up his glass, “Another for me, and top my friend off too, Carlo.”
Giancarlo checked his watch as he poured the drinks. Almost six. With only these two at the bar, he wouldn’t be losing much in the way of tips. Double Scotch might leave some loose change, but anyone drinking Perrier would stiff him for sure. Antonio should be showing up any minute.
“Watch for damn pickpockets,” Double Scotch expounded. “Kids especially. Italian kids aren’t very bright, maybe because their brains are all in their fingers. They can yank your wallet without you knowing you’ve even been touched. But I’ve found out a way to fool them. Hilarious!”
Perrier gave him an encouraging look. Giancarlo polished some more glasses.
“See,” Double Scotch continued, reaching for his back pocket—then, “Damn. Left it up in my room in my pants. Hey, Carlo, what do you call those tissues come in little packets?”
“Fazzolettini di carta.”
“Yeah. Fuzzy somethings. Funniest thing you ever saw. You can pick up kleenex in a packet looks like an overstuffed wallet. Just put it in your back pocket. First thing you know it’ll be gone. Kids think you’ve got a wallet full of paper euros. I’d sure like to see the looks on their faces when all they’ve got are nose papers.” Double Scotch guffawed at the imagined scene.
Turning to the bartender, he went on, “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you Carlo?”
Giancarlo nodded, reached into his back pocket and produced a cheap, imitation-leather, wallet-like packet which indeed contained nothing but a few cleaning tissues. “One has to watch for the picking the pockets.”
“See!” Double Scotch exclaimed. “Even the natives have them. Say, Carlo, isn’t there a peddler, one of those cartmen around here who sells them?”
“Si, Signor.” Gesturing with his head, he added, “By the next corner. Giovanni Francini, the pizza man. Just ask for a Fazzolettini di carta.”
***
Antonio was almost ten minutes late. Giancarlo quickly dropped his apron in the laundry hamper, waving good-by to his relief. It annoyed him to think he would have to hurry now to make it home in time for his date with Maria. Just a minute to chat with Francini.
“Ciao, Giovanni. How’s business?”
The cartman shook his head. “Salve, Giancarlo. Good thing I don’t have to depend on pizza sales. Time to close up and come back later for the theater crowd.” As he spoke he took a large roll out of his apron pocket, peeled off a ten-euro note and handed it to Giancarlo, who smiled, pocketed the bill, and left with a wave and a “Buona Sera.”
***
The pizza man was folding his umbrella and covering his last pizza when the young boy broke away from the crowds passing along the sidewalk. “Signor Francini, I have five of them.”
Giovanni smiled, accepted the plastic bag, inspected the contents carefully to make sure none of them were scuffed too badly to pass off as new, reached into his pocket and pulled out a one-euro coin. “Here!”
The boy smiled as he pocketed the bright coin. “My brother got sixteen today. He says he’ll see you tonight in front of the Cagliari Theatre.” With that, he slipped back among the passersby just moments before Perrier and Double Scotch arrived.
The latter
was the first one to speak.
“Hey. Do you sell these fuzzy whatchamacallits? You know.” He held his nose and made as though blowing it.
Giovanni’s eyes lit up. “Kleenex! Si, Signor.” Opening a drawer in the pushcart, he removed one of the wallet-like packets he’d just received from his runner. “Ten-euro, Signor.”
“Cheap at twice the price. My friend here wants one, and give me a couple.”
The last words Giovanni heard as they went off with their prizes were Double Scotch’s comments. “Like I told you, these Italian kids are really dumb. I could have sworn it was the same kid who stole two in a row out of my hip pocket. They never seem to learn.”
RACING DAY
Chee-chee—that’s what I call Charlie McGinnis—is really an all-right guy. Not like old Billy Joe Bert. He was so mean, even his mother used to complain about him. And if it had been up to him, I would have been buying my clothes from the mail-order catalogs. The only way I could get anything worth wearing was by threatening to leave him. Then he’d argue and yell and bang his fist on the table, but he’d finally give in.
‘Course I left him, anyway. He was just too much. Watching me all the time and going bananas if even a waiter smiled at me. And expecting me to say dirty things in his ear when he was performing, and wanting me to moan and groan as though I enjoyed it. I know a lot of men expect that, but I never could understand why moaning and groaning was the kind of thing anyone would do if they were having a good time. Besides, Billy Joe smelled like a billy goat.
Chee-chee’s altogether different. He just likes having me around. And he doesn’t mind if other men act like I’m something special. He probably doesn’t know about me and Jethro, the chauffeur, but even if he did, I bet he wouldn’t care. He’d just grin and laugh, the way he does at most of the things I do. Like one night, when he was performing—and he doesn’t really bother me often—he suddenly stopped and looked at me. “You don’t seem to have your mind on your work, baby,” he said. “What’s going on?”
I had my legs up in the air and was admiring my nice green-velvet slippers over his back, the ones I’d bought the same day, and I told him so. For a while there, I thought he was going to choke from laughing. Afterwards, he said he couldn’t remember anything as funny since the shipboard cabin scene in one of the Marx brothers’ movies.
The next day he bought a big coffee mug for me with the saying, “Speak slow, I’m a natural blonde.” Before I could get mad about it, he told me to look in the mug, and there were a perfect pair of Tiffany diamond earrings.
Sure, I know he thinks I’m just a dumb bimbo, but he does like me and wants me around as much as he can. And he doesn’t hem and haw about anything I want to buy. He’s in some kind of oil business and, boy, is he ever rich! At least that’s what Jethro says. He says Chee-chee owns everything in Texas not above the ground. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but he gave me my own credit card, right off. It’s one of those gold and platinum thing-of-a-bobs that make the store clerks bow and run around like crazy trying to wait on you once they see it.
Chee-chee has even told me he’ll divorce his old bag of a wife some day and marry me, but I’m not holding my breath. It’s a story I’ve heard too many times to start believing it now.
The one nuisance are those stupid horses. Chee-chee loves them, and he owns oodles of them. They just scare me. Anything with mouths as big as that, and with all those teeth, were just born to bite. Everyone at the stables tells me the hind end is what’s dangerous, but I don’t take any chances. I stay as far away from both ends as Chee-chee will let me. So, anyway, we spend a lot of time out at his horse farm. And when Chee-chee isn’t in the paddocks currying one of his babies or talking about fetlocks and withers to one of the trainers, he’s boring me with how Sunrise Lady is going to win the Preakness, or how Prancing Tom will beat out old Marcy Thompson’s three year old, and on and on.
I’m not really complaining, though. We spend a lot of time in Dallas, and the town has some of the swankiest clothing stores in the country. When Chee-chee is off conferencing with his board of directors or whatever they are, Jethro drives me from shop to shop, and we’ve got the old Caddy filled to the brim by the time the day’s over.
Thursday was a big day for Chee-chee. He told me all about the race coming up the next day and how he was getting ready for it. I didn’t understand much of what he was saying, but I didn’t mind too much. When Chee-chee’s talking horses, he gets so wrapped up in the topic he hardly even notices if you’re listening. I was curious about what was going on this time, though, because Chee-chee seemed more excited than ever about the Friday race.
Even so, I knew there wasn’t much point in trying to get Chee-chee to explain. He’d only go on and on about handicaps and turf conditions, and my head would be spinning after three sentences. So after lunch, while Chee-chee was making a bunch of business phone calls, I went out to hunt down Jethro, who I think knows more about horses than even Chee-chee. He was hosing down the Cadillac, and while he was washing it, he answered a lot of my questions without making everything all complicated.
“Friday is a claiming race,” he said. “They don’t usually have them in the racing class Charlie circulates in, but he had this one arranged special. And it’s going to be different than most.”
What’s especially nice about Jethro, is how he doesn’t think I’m stupid, but he knows I can be a little slow sometimes, so he’s always patient with his explanations. Seeing my eyes fog over, he went on, “A claiming race is where the horses go up for auction right after the race. So, as you might imagine, the winner could bring in a lot of cash for the owner. It’s a way to market horses.
“But the money doesn’t mean much to this crowd. It’s going to be more of a challenge race than anything else. They just want to see who has the fastest horse. Charlie, and Marcy Thompson, and their racing friends even decided to donate all the proceeds of the auction to charity. The TV cameras and newspaper reporters will be crowding the race course for this one.”
I nodded. “Chee-chee seems especially excited about this race. I guess that’s the reason.”
Jethro shook his head. “There’s more to it than that. He offered his young filly, Golden Platter, to Marcy for forty thousand but Marcy turned him down, even though he’d like to have her. Charlie figures she’s better than most of what’s in Marcy’s stable, and so he set up this claiming race. He’s pretty sure Golden Platter will win and then, with the crowd bidding on her, Marcy will have to pay twice as much or more to get her. Charlie’ll get a big boot out of seeing Marcy pay through the nose. But, naturally, he would like to see his horse win a race with all those camera’s grinding away.”
Jethro looked over at me and grinned. “As you may have noticed, Charlie isn’t too concerned about money, he just wants to show off what he owns.”
I think I knew what he was talking about. “But if Golden Platter is so good, why does he want to sell her?”
“She really isn’t so great. He had a lot of hopes for her, because she’s from the absolute best blood lines—Man of War and a string of other top horses—but she just isn’t measuring up to his expectations. I agree with him. She’ll be worth risking a small bet on her tomorrow, but she just hasn’t blossomed out the way she should have. He figures Marcy, or one of the others, will just take a chance on her, hoping she’ll be a late bloomer.”
Jethro drove us off to Chee-chee’s private racetrack in the afternoon, and Chee-chee and I made the usual tour of the horse barns. Bingo Latterly, the one in charge of Chee-chee’s horse trainers, ran us down soon after we’d arrived. I’m not usually much interested in what Bingo has to say, because it’s all horse talk, but today he was so excited I can still remember every word he said.
“Mr. McGinnis, we’ve got a ringer”
“What’s happened?”
“When we took Golden Platter out for her morning run, she shaved four seconds off of her best time, and she wasn’t even trying.”
A half-hour later Golden Platter was saddled up and racing down the track; with me, Bingo and Chee-chee as the only audience, except I did see Jethro back at the barn watching too. When the horse came around the curve toward us at the end of her first lap, Chee-chee clicked the stopwatch and gave a low whistle. He didn’t seem at all happy, and even the double martini back at the house didn’t cheer him up or make him very talkative.
When we were in bed later in the day, I asked Jethro about why Chee-chee acted the way he did. Chee-chee had had to fly to Houston for one of his conferences, and wouldn’t be back until late. I’d begged off because I knew the Houston stores would all be closed by the time we got there.
“Charlie’s got reason to be unhappy. He just found out today he’s running a possible Calumet in a claiming race. If he squirmed out of the race now, with some phony excuse, Marcy and the rest of the crowd will razz the hell out of him. On the other hand, he’s going to have to pay a fortune to buy her back. Even with the jockey trying to discourage her, she’ll beat everything in the field by ten lengths.”
We were off to the races before daylight on Friday. I would have complained about having to get up so early, but the expression on Chee-chee’s face convinced me this wasn’t the best time to do any complaining. The two of us went off to see Golden Platter in her racing stall as soon as we got to the track. On the way, Chee-chee looked up the security guard, and though I wasn’t close enough to really make out what was going on, I did see Chee-chee hand him what looked like a lot of bills. The guard grinned and gave him a mock salute.
I wasn’t about to get into the stall with Golden Platter. Chee-chee insisted she was a sweet horse, but I don’t think there is such a thing. Anyhow, I watched through the half-door as Chee-chee brushed her down and crooned to her. I really think he likes horses a lot more than he likes women.
Expect the Unexpected Page 26
