The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  “Right. They wouldn’t have to be so secret and careful, and they wouldn’t have to give away half the net.”

  “So somebody ripped off the dream book.”

  “Or he trusted the wrong person?”

  “Hisp, at the bank? Tom Collier?”

  “Who knows? We both know what can happen. Suppose there is a man you can trust with your life. Nothing he wouldn’t do for you. But all of a sudden you’re dead, and he sees an angle. Foolproof. The daughter? She’s got a bundle. No need to worry. So this fellow, this true and blue friend, there he is with all Professor Ted’s notes and analyses and studies. Basic research was in that journal, a book about so big. The backup research would fill a big suitcase. True-blue friend lays back and waits for heat. There is no heat at all. So finally, he makes his move, trying to set it up so there’s no risk at all.”

  “I never heard you say so much before, all at one time.”

  “Ted trusted you, you son of a bitch!”

  Never before has my jaw fallen open in surprise. Here is what happens. There are nineteen different things you can say, and you open your mouth to say them all, and you can’t decide which one to say first. So you sit there like a stuffed guppy.

  And then I was in midair, mouth still open. Total launch. The juvenile reaction. Honor offended and all that. He tried to tip his chair over to the side, but it didn’t tip fast enough. I made a midair adjustment of arm, shoulder, and back and popped him on the side of the head as he was toppling. It made a clear white whistling pain in my hand, reminding me that one almost never hits the hard parts of people with the naked hand. One hits the soft parts with the hand, and the hard parts with a utensil.

  I sailed over him and tucked my shoulder under and rolled and came up. I pounced on him, grabbed two handfuls of garments and picked him up and slammed him back against the bulkhead, and drew back to put the next one into a soft part of him.

  “Whoa!” he said in a fumbling voice. His eyes weren’t in good focus.

  “Whoa your ass!”

  “Uncle,” he said. That’s right. The old schoolyard word. It stopped me. It boggled me.

  “Unc-le?” I said.

  “I wanted to know. I found out. So no more hitting.” His voice was clearer. He shook the mist out of his eyes. I stepped back, but I stayed ready.

  “I lie a lot,” I said. “But I don’t steal from live friends or dead friends.”

  “So I know that, now.” He worked his jaw, felt his face. “That was some tag. My head is still ringing. The last time I got hit that hard, a Greek came up behind me and laid me out on the deck with a fid. You know, I had the idea I could maybe take you if it ever came to that. Even if that was a lucky shot, I don’t think so.” He moved around me and stood his chair back up and sat in it, with a heavy sigh.

  I kneaded my knuckles and worked them into the palm of the other hand, standing the pain in order to explore for any little grinding of bone chip, grating of fracture. I held the hand out, fingers straight, and looked at it. It was puffing so fast I already had a dimple wherever there used to be a knuckle.

  “Usually I keep my cool better than that, Frank. It cost me a hand. I think I steamed because I really liked Ted. I miss him. Once upon a time he saved—I forgot. You know all about that.”

  “Look at it from where I live, McGee. He died here. You and Meyer were close to him. Either of you could have the stuff. I knew it wouldn’t be Meyer.”

  “Why not?”

  “We played a lot of games of chess aboard that bucket. I know how his mind works. He conceals intent by making something look like something else. He doesn’t advertise the fact he’s being tricky. This isn’t his style.”

  “So it has to be mine?”

  “Let’s not go through the big tumbling act again. It has to be somebody else. Your hand doesn’t look so great.”

  It took an effort to make a fist. Soon it wouldn’t be possible. “I feel like such a damned juvenile, Frank. I only hit people in self-defense. Usually.”

  “I could stay over long enough to play some chess with Meyer in the morning, if I can get into the hospital, and if he’s up to it.”

  “I’ll get you in, and unless he had a bad night, he’ll play.”

  • • •

  Friday morning I smuggled a guest and a magnetic chess set into room 455. Blaney, the boss nurse, was all set to run Frank Hayes out of her territory. He looked like the handyman at the local drunk farm. But he turned a considerable and unexpected charm in her direction, all very courtly, gracious, considerate, and almost overdone. The Russians say it is impossible to spoil porridge with too much butter. Blaney hesitated, then shrugged, then smiled, then laughed aloud, then gave him a girlish little slap on the arm and went out, giggling.

  Meyer, who had brightened considerably at the appearance of Hayes and the chess set, looked marvelingly at Frank. “Who would ever have known!” he said.

  Hayes opened his big fist and looked at the diminutive chess pawn. “You get white,” he said. “Shut up and open.”

  They got into a long closed game, dull for the onlooker. I wandered out. When I returned at noon, they were talking, and the board had been pushed aside. Meyer had offered the draw and Hayes had accepted. Meyer looked weary. He yawned and said, “The decision of the Board is that you use your contacts and see what you can find out about Mansfield Hall.”

  “Gentlemen, your faithful, loyal employee has just finished making a few phone calls, and begs to report on that very situation. Hall is a professional go-between. He has spent so much time sitting in a cell for contempt of court because he wouldn’t answer questions, people tend to trust him. He has had ulcers so bad he has about a third of a stomach left. He is reputed to be a poker player of formidable talent. Suppose you have five thousand acres of land over in Boondox County and you want to get it quietly rezoned so that the Devastation Minerals Company can set up a phosphate mining operation there and a chemical fertilizer plant, and will pay you fifteen hundred bucks an acre for it, if you can deliver it with the new zoning. Because that comes to seven point five mil, you are willing to lay out a hundred and fifty thousand cash to buy a favorable vote from three out of the five county commissioners of Boondox County. Mansfield Hall will find a legitimate investment for you. You put in three hundred thousand and, seven months later, you give up and cash in your chips and show a long-term loss of two hundred thousand. In the meantime three commissioners have become richer by fifty thousand each, in some way they are perfectly willing to explain, if they are ever asked.”

  “Does he do any laundry work?” Frank asked. “I mean on a straight basis. Turn it in and get it back all pretty?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Maybe. It’s rumored he handled a big kidnap payoff. He has some kind of status with the Cuban community, for some sort of services rendered. He spends a lot of time on airplanes, domestic and foreign. Apparently he’s smart, sly, well-connected, and doesn’t cheat his clients.”

  “Where would you say he’d pick up his clients?” Hayes asked.

  Meyer yawned again. “From other attorneys,” he said.

  They brought Meyer’s lunch tray and rousted us. A bland diet. Food that was beige, tan and buff and looked prechewed, with the tray brightened by the dietitian’s touch—a dollop of red gelatin on a very small green leaf, and a wedge of bright yellow lemon on the tea saucer.

  Blaney brought it herself, saying, “Well! We should be hungry by now, shouldn’t we?”

  Meyer looked at it and said, “We are. We are. You can be the one to eat it, my dear.”

  “You’re a lot better,” she said. “Let him have a good long nap today, fellows.”

  It was a good long nap. Frank’s gear was locked in my car. I drove him to the airport, over to the private sector and out to where his crew of two were sitting on camp chairs just inboard of the starboard wing tank of the white ship, in the noonday shade of the delicate-looking wing. Ted and Harry. Harry was a bald ex-colonel with a boyish face. Ted
was much younger, a Navy type who had gotten out after ’Nam. Turn Arnold Palmer’s clock back to about twenty-eight, give him overlong reddish curls and a pair of eyes of a gray even paler than my own, paler than spit. They both wore odds and ends of uniform of several services from several wars.

  Some signal must have been sent which I did not recognize, because when Frank said, “This here is McGee,” I got a far more than casual inspection.

  After they went aboard to get on the air and order up the battery cart, Frank gave me Mansfield Hall’s card, complete with penciled unlisted special number on the back.

  “Tell him you’re authorized to negotiate for me. Maybe you can push the door open far enough to see what’s beyond it. Probably not. Give it a try. It bothers me.”

  “And how do I get to you if I learn anything?”

  “That’s on this other card. What’s going to happen, I am going to take on one more project than I’ve got the troops to handle, and that’s when you’re coming aboard. I’ll work you down to a nub and make you very rich.”

  “I’m employed. Self-employed.”

  “Ted and Harry gave you good marks. I worked with you once, remember? Meyer has a high opinion.”

  I had to laugh. “Good marks from the airplane people, huh? Oh, Jesus, Frank. Thanks a hell of a lot.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Having spent a certain amount of time up to my glottis in swamps, with about fifteen little ulcers per leg where the leech bites didn’t heal too good, and having spent some time trying very seriously to get all six foot four inches of McGee all the way inside one steel helmet, and having listened to the airplane people flying over, high and hard and fast, on their way home to officers’ clubs and steak and booze and movies and more clusters on their air medals, I am not all the way overwhelmed by getting any approval from any of them.”

  He grinned as wide as I had ever seen him manage, and clamped my sore hand too hard and said, “When I really need you, I’m coming after you. Count on it.” That was when he let the authority show. It was heavy. While it was turned on, I could believe what he said.

  And pretty soon I saw the distant little white toy come skimming down the runway and go on up and over, climbing with turbine scream through the low-altitude smutch of too many cars toward that fabled high blue yonder to level off and go arrowing across Castro-land, down to that tiny island of one hundred (100) bank$ tucked below the land mass of Cuba.

  Nine

  I phoned Mr. Hall and used Frank’s name and Seven Seas, and he said he could see me at four. I rolled from Bahia Mar out past the Port and out to the Interstate and turned left to Miami. I put Miss Agnes up to seventy, and out of respect for her prior standards of performance, I eased her up slowly.

  I felt that I had violated the integrity of the old Rolls by having her rebuilt to contemporary highway standards. Ever since I had dumped her into a drainage canal to avoid hitting a fleet-footed girl in the night, I had been upgrading all the hidden parts. Now she had the big engine lifted out of a 1972 Mark IV Continental that was totaled. Rebuilding the engine with both stock and custom power assists had meant a new gear train and a new rear end. Then she had more power than the suspension and the brakes could handle. So we installed a suspension out of the biggest Dodge pickup, along with power disc brakes all the way around. Of course I had to change to a twelve-volt system, and put in two heavy-duty batteries and a heavy-duty alternator. After several weird improvisations, we rigged a power steering system that worked well enough. There was enough extra horsepower to borrow some to run a really efficient air-conditioning system.

  Any true aficionado of the Rolls would have taken one look inside the hood and run off to throw up. Sometimes I want to. Funny how, in this age of miracles, I had to give up so many nice little items Miss Agnes used to have. For example, on a cold morning I used to be able to flip a little switch on the dash that activated a battery-operated oil-circulation pump and a heating device. When the oil was up to the temperature recommended by the Works, a ruby light would glow and I would turn off the pump and heater and start her up. She used to have a calibrated dial on the side of the carburetor which could be turned manually to alter the mixture to achieve maximum performance at the indicated number of meters above sea level. She used to have a handle below the dash which could be used to change the degree of softness or rigidity of the springing, so that even while moving you could adjust her to ride at maximum comfort regardless of the roadbed.

  And she had a clock that wound up with a key and kept time.

  Detroit has never even caught up with the 1923 Rolls, to say nothing of the ones of Miss Agnes’s vintage.

  But unless I had either got rid of her or upped her performance, the traffic was going to kill me. And I did not want to sacrifice all that height and leather and walnut and dignity and be trapped in semifoetal position in some squatty little pastel capsule with my tailbone eight inches from the macadam. So she cost me what a couple of those space-age torpedoes would have cost, and I still feel like apologizing to her for the total organ transplant.

  I must confess to getting a certain childish pleasure out of driving her when she is challenged. I was heading up I-75 well north of Gainesville one bright afternoon at the legal seventy, on an unusually empty hunk of highway, when three hulking youths in a yellow ’Bird appeared in the rearview moving up fast. They slowed while passing and held even, looking at old Miss Agnes, a horrid blue, corrupted by the makeshift pickup bed. They seemed to be marveling that she could push that upright windshield through the air at seventy. They were crowing with idiot laughter. They made finger gestures and sped on, back up to ninety perhaps. I gave them a couple of miles, then floored Miss Agnes. The new needle was motionless against the stop when I blew by them at one forty plus. They made a try, but kept dropping back and back until they were gone. I nearly overshot my exit. I apologized to the old lady for the extra exertion. I wonder if they ever tell the story. Who would believe them?

  Taking the short run down to Miami gave me a chance to sort out what Frank Hayes had told me. Professor Ted had had a batch of future projects. Without knowing exactly how I arrived at the figure, I had the feeling he had seven or eight more lined up. He knew that he was in a dangerous line of work. It takes skill and luck to stay out of trouble on the oceans with a small boat. Underwater work can go very bad very suddenly. And people have been killing other people for the sake of gold and jewels for a long, long time. So, as a considerate father, he had taken good care of his daughter’s future needs by setting up the substantial trust account at First Oceanside. Would he have not made just as careful an arrangement for the project documents? Obviously they were valuable. The total sum in trust was proof of how useful the earlier projects had been.

  I remembered the time he had told me how he had researched the dream book. It seemed almost too easy. I asked why other people didn’t do the same thing he had done.

  He had frowned, shaken his head slowly. “It’s one of the great mysteries of the human condition, Travis. Maybe we all think it is not worth doing merely because it is so obvious it must have been done already. Fantastic warehouses of knowledge rot away, untouched. The scholars seem to have no interest. The adventurers have no research skills. They’ve found ancient jewelry in tombs in the Middle East made of smelted platinum. It takes eighteen hundred degrees centigrade to melt it. Two thousand years ago, the Chinese made aluminum ornaments. Getting aluminum from bauxite is a sophisticated chemical-electrical procedure. In the Baghdad Museum you can see the parts of a dry battery which worked on the galvanic principle and generated electricity sixteen hundred years ago. More smelted platinum has been found in Peru, in the high country. Knowledge fades away, and some is rediscovered and some isn’t. We never seem to take the trouble to really find out—until too late. For several years the public baths at Alexandria were heated by burning the old scrolls and documents carted over from the great library. Are we so arrogant we believe that there was not
hing that was burned up that hasn’t been rediscovered? I dug back only four hundred years or so. That’s easy. Yet I found journals which had turned to solid blocks, as if all the pages had been glued together. I found old documents so fragile I could not touch them without turning them into dust, and others where the ink had faded until it was completely gone. Treasures are buried on those pages, never to be found again except by the rarest accident. It’s the … contemporary arrogance that bothers me. The idiot idea that we are the biggest, the greatest, the most powerful people who ever walked the earth. Know something? Think this over. I could take you to the high country of Peru, to a quarry area near Sacsahuaman, and show you where a particular block of stone was quarried and dressed, and I could show you that block of stone half a mile away. It was transported there during the time of the Incas. If, on the basis of national emergency, this nation were to be required to devote all its technological skills, all its wealth, and all its people to moving that block back to the quarry, we would try and we would fail, my friend. It weighs twenty thousand tons! Forty million pounds! The only time we ever move that much weight is when we let a vessel as big as the Monterey or the Mariposa slide down the ways at the shipyard, into the harbor. We have no cranes, no engines, no levers to budge that much mass. Do you think the Incas knew something mankind has since forgotten? Bet on it. Knowledge is the most priceless and most perishable substance on earth.”

  And I have thought it over, many times, and it always makes the back of my neck feel chilly. I’ve vowed that someday I will go look at that block of solid stone in the hope that if I see it once, I will stop thinking about how to move it back to the quarry whenever I wake up in the middle of the night.

  One thing was clear. The Professor had too much love and respect for knowledge ever to destroy any, even if it was only his own research and was planned for selfish gain, not for the good of mankind.

  I remembered another pertinent fact. When we had discussed a possible future project before we all split up, after the pump burned out, the Professor had relied upon memory, apologizing for not being able to refer to the research notes and his backup material.