Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  “You two are real chummy, I guess.”

  He glanced at me. His eye looked cold. “She’s a good friend. Your brother was a good friend.”

  I was remembering his manner in the Lime Ridge house, his way of seeming completly familiar with the house, and at ease there. It seemed odd to me that I could handle Dolson in what could have been a most difficult situation, remembering the techniques of four years ago, yet if any personal equation contained the factor named Niki, confidence was gone. It was because the handling of men is a hypocritical operation. You must tailor your approach to the weakness you detect. Jolly some of them along, bully others, alternating fact with fancy. Appeal to fear, competence, loyalty, ambition. But when Niki became a factor, objectivity was lost. That, of all reasons, seemed the most valid one for my having left, four years ago. The loss of her had weakend my most valid function—that of getting the maximum return from the men I employed.

  It was time for a neutral mask. I smiled at Mottling. “Niki needs her friends now,” I said.

  “Yes. I think she should take an interest in the company. I’ve tried to—well, indoctrinate seems to be the best word. She’s intelligent. And, of course, she does have at least the secretarial slant to begin with.”

  “I think I’ll take a look around.”

  “I guess you don’t want a licensed guide,” he said smiling.

  I saw the cleverness of that. Had he tried to come along with me it would have implied that he was steering me toward what I should see, and away from what I shouldn’t. Letting me ramble around on my own was a good expression of self-confidence.

  “You’ll have to get a shop pass from Dolson’s office,” he said.

  “In the old office building, I suppose?”

  “Right. If you have any questions afterward, come on back.”

  We smiled at each other and I left. Among any group of chickens there is what the behavior specialists call “the pecking order.” Put any batch of chickens together, and within a day or so, after considerable bickering, they will work it out. It is a rigid social system. Chicken number eight can peck chicken number nine without fear of retaliation. And chicken number seven can peck just as freely at chicken number eight. And, in the order, should any chicken develop an illness, an unexpected weakness, the formal caste system will be suspended just long enough for all the others to peck it to death.

  You can watch the pecking order in operation among architects, plumbers, union officals, housewives, editors. It is fierce, formal, and ruthless. That clever book Gamesmanship describes a few of the more civilized methods of pecking. The tension between Mottling and me was based on our not having established precedence in the pecking order. It was necessary to us, as two highly competitive organisms, that it be established. And it would be. He was an able oppenent. And I was carrying Niki on my back.

  Chapter 9

  Colonel Dolson was out in the shop but a Captain Corning was there, a big, blond, lip-biting guy, guileless as a child. He told me the colonel had directed that I be given a pass to all areas. He filled it out carefully, rolled my right thumbprint onto it, and sent me over to a sink to wash. With the written pass went a gay red lapel button as big as a silver dollar, with “Special Pass” printed on it in black. He offered one of the guards or inspectors as a guide, but I told him I knew my way around.

  There were many familiar faces out in the production areas—men who had been hired by my father, and some who had been hired by my grandfather. The older ones could remember, of course, when Kendall and I had been kids, and had been brought down there by Dad, and turned loose with warnings about not getting too close to the equipment. In those days the overhead shafts had whirred and rattled, and the big drive belts had slapped, and the shops had been dim and oily.

  Now, in the production areas, each machine tool had its own power unit, and there were wide aisles, and light and air. It was a land of pale gray housings and Chinese red moving parts, and foremen in smocks, a place of panel-board controls. It was a place where the micro-exactitude of gauges was checked against the Johansson blocks in their temperature-controlled storage. But the oil-smell was the same, and the shriek of a high-speed cutting edge, and the reek of hot metal.

  I could feel the hot, fast tempo of the work, and I could also sense the strain that always seems to permeate a plant when there is trouble upstairs. I caught the sidelong looks, the speculative glances. I could sense criticism. The deep Florida tan was something that spoke of indolence and fat living—and I suppose a great many of them who knew my name felt that the money for my four-year vacation had come from the value added to raw materials by them during their forty-hour weeks. “See that guy Dean roaming around today? Like he owned the place. He inherited a big chunk of the outfit and the son of a bitch has been sitting on his ass for four years. Pretty damn soft.”

  I could not forget my guilt as I acknowledged greetings from the men I knew. I had been trained to do a job as an executive. I had grown up with the knowledge of the responsibilities ahead of me. Then I had walked out, telling myself that if I didn’t do the job somebody else would.

  So I roamed through the old familiar places, and nodded at the ones I knew, and tried to come up with the right names. The regular commercial lines looked fat and happy. I saw new inroads automatiton had made, with whole banks of automatic equipment phased and scheduled on electronic tape and operated off master panel boards by men who never had to dirty their hands. I wondered if the very complexity of such a continuous production setup tended to freeze design to the extent of losing competitive standing in the marketplace. I saw some routine items for the military, made to the typical semi-obsolete designs, overspecified, asininely expensive to produce. I saw the hundred per cent inspection on those military items, required, yet both more expensive and less reliable than the statistical quality control methods I had installed long ago.

  I was stopped at the door to C Building by guards who checked back with Captain Corning regarding the validity of my pass. They let me pass, and when I went in I found Miles Bennett in a small office just inside the door. He was a square blond man, a reliable, unimaginative production engineer. He shook hands warmly, and I saw new lines of strain in his face. I asked him about Molly and the kids, and he asked me if I could find him a job in Florida like washing cars. He was trying to appear calm, but he seemed jittery to me.

  “Your security is really tight, Miles,” I said.

  “It’s so tight, Gev, I don’t even know what the hell I’m making here.” When I stared at him, not comprehending what he meant, he took me down the widest aisle of the production floor to where a new wall had been built that cut off the final third of the huge room. Armed guards lounged by a massive door.

  “Who can get through that door?” I asked.

  “I can’t. You can’t. Mottling can. The Colonel and the Captain can. Your brother could, until they took away his clearance. You got to have something called a Special Q Clearance, Gev.”

  “What goes on back there?”

  “We make this thing called a D4D. When we finish one, which isn’t very damn often, believe me, it goes into that area. The guys in there all work for the government. Stuff is flown in from other sources. Some kind of final assembly goes on in there. Most of those guys have fancy degrees. Their testing equipment uses a lot of juice. When they have maybe a half dozen, which is just a guess based on my production here, they roll them out in a military truck, usually at night, with a convoy of jeeps with troops with automatic weapons.”

  I made a slow tour of the production layout, with Miles at my heels. No automation here. This was basic production equipment, every machine tended by a craftsman who kept his gauges handy. I looked at D4D that was about ready to go through the guarded door. It was an assembly of beautifully machined components, roughly the size and shape of those peck baskets I hadn’t seen for years.

  We went back to Miles Bennet’s office. The closed door cut the noise level. He shrugged and shook his
head.

  “Close tolerances, it looks like,” I said.

  “There’s one tapered hole we got to drill through about two inches of special alloy that’s got to have the degree of taper dead nuts to a fifty thousandth, so we have to pour plugs and project them to check it out. Mirror finish. If you tried to use a trial plug the molecules would set up and you’d never get it out.”

  I whistled with genuine awe. “What has to be that close?”

  He looked at me with haunted eyes that shifted quickly. “Make your own guesses, Gev.”

  I guessed out loud. “You’ve got a lot of parts machined out of light-weight alloys, so lightness is a factor. But there’s good tough steel in there too, designed to give maximum crossbracing with minimum weight. And there’s areas where you’re using non-conductors. And some handy little pockets and casings and slots for one hell of a lot of electronic equipment. Damn it, Miles, if that stuff that goes in there is miniaturized, you’d have more than you’d need for one big fuse, and that’s what it looks like, sort of, except for that hemispherical cavity and …”

  I stopped suddenly. A fat, reinforced tube led to the cavity. A triggering device with explosive charge could slam a fat slug of rare material into the heart of its sister material affixed in the hemisphere, and achieve critical mass in the simplest possible fashion.

  Bennet saw my expression and said, “I wish I never started to think about it, Gev.”

  “But you can’t be sure.”

  He did not seem to hear me. He frowned down at the back of his fist. “Figure on a minimum of at least three safety devices and circuits prior to final arming, and figure a couple more after that, and then figure you’d have to have a couple of in-flight safety controls that couldn’t be jammed. Then, once it’s on course, ideally it would have a self-contained navigational circuit, not susceptible to any outside influence, that could make final course correction.”

  “But you can’t know it’s the right guess, Miles.”

  “And the thing you’d really want is top security, because no matter what the ingenuity of man can devise, another man, knowing the precise design, can bitch up when it comes time to use it.” He looked at me with an odd expression. “I keep dreaming about them, Gev. A hundred of them, all in flight at once, all arching down at sixteen thousand miles an hour. But they’re never going the other way. They’re all coming at us.”

  “Not if we can lob just as many back.”

  “And if everybody is sure they’ll work.”

  Miles walked me out to the doorway to C Building. “It can wear you down,” he said. We looked at each other and looked away. It was a feeling like a shared guilt, as though we had helped each other murder the innocent in some shameful way.

  This had been going on while I was sunning myself on the Florida beaches. I got out of there. I got out fast, but I couldn’t go quite fast enough to get away from myself. I didn’t go back to Mottling’s office. I turned in my passes and got into the car and drove away from the north end, away from smoke and sidings and chemical stinks. There was a man I should see. The only other Dean left in the direct blood line. Alfred, my father’s brother.

  I had a quick lunch in town, and walked to the Arland Athletic Club. After my Aunt Margaret died many years ago, Uncle Alfred sold the gray stone castle my grandfather had built. A grocery chain tore it down and put in a supermarket. Uncle Alfred moved into the Arland Athletic Club, a big downtown club in an ugly red-brick building.

  They told me at the desk that they’d call Mr. Alfred Dean from the card room. I said I knew where it was and told the unfamiliar desk clerk that I had a nonresident membership. I bought cigarettes from him and went on through to the card room. There were six men playing a cut-in game of bridge. Uncle Alfred saw me at once. He held up three fingers and pointed to the lounge. He was playing a hand. I went into the lounge and took a magazine from the table. When he came through the door a few minutes later I tossed the magazine aside and stood up.

  I remembered him as having a sharp, almost birdlike manner, startlingly young eyes and a zest for life. He had written me several times, urging me to go back into the firm. His letters contained a wry awareness of his own life of idleness. He said the business bored him and he was no good at it.

  There was no jauntiness in his walk, none of the dapper briskness. He looked old, worn and aware of defeat. It hurt me to see that his head shook with a perpetual palsied tremble.

  “Buy you a drink, Gevan,” he said, steering me toward the bar. We took a table. We ordered. I saw his eyes suddenly fill with tears. It shocked me. He knuckled his eyes with a child’s gesture and gave me an embarrassed smile. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately, boy. I get as silly as a girl.”

  “It’s good to see you, Uncle Al.”

  The drinks came and he picked his up. “To Ken, God rest his soul.”

  We drank to that. He did not speak as distinctly as in the old days. “Cut to the same pattern, we were, Kenny and me. He never got up on his hind legs and quit. God knows he must have thought of it often enough. You quit, and you were the one shouldn’t have. I remember the day I had to tell your grandfather I was walking out of the plant. But he had your dad. And that was enough. You could run it without Kenny. Kenny and me—too gentle or something. I don’t know.”

  “What’s going on at the plant, Uncle Al?”

  “My God, he was mad at me that day. You should have heard him.”

  “What about Mottling, Uncle Al?”

  “Mottling? Oh, him and that colonel fellow and Kenny’s wife. Wrong group to be running the place, Karch says. Says Mottling isn’t sound. Walter Granby is the one we want. Mottling lives right here, you know. Right here in the club. Room on the top floor. He pats me on the head. Patronizing.” For a moment there was a flash of the old Uncle Al, that dapper, spirited man.

  It was as Walter had said. Maybe you never feel old on the inside. I remembered a trip, a long time ago, going to New York on the train with Uncle Al. I was about twelve. It was exciting, eating in the dining car and watching the world go by the windows and thinking about New York and what we would see. It was after Aunt Margaret died. We went to the club car after we ate, and Uncle Al had a drink that came out of a little bottle, and I had a ginger ale. When I finished it, he told me to go back to our seats while he stayed there. I thought I’d been bad or gotten on his nerves. An hour later I went back to look for him, and he was talking to a woman. She looked like the women on the posters in front of the movies, and she had a deep laugh, like a man’s.

  New York was so big and busy I didn’t feel like twelve any more. I felt six years old. We had a suite in the hotel. It was an old-fashioned place where Uncle Al always stayed, and they all knew him.

  We were there three days and it wasn’t like I thought it would be. He would call the woman he met on the train, and then we would eat dinner and he would buy me something and tell me what time to go to bed and I would go back up to the room and he would go out. He’d sleep until nearly noon and I would go down early to the coffee shop and get breakfast. In the afternoon he would take me someplace. To the top of a building, or a museum. He acted tired and cross during the afternoons.

  When we went home on the train he didn’t talk much, and his hands were shaky and his eyes were red. Before we got to Arland he looked at me and said, like he was asking me for something, “You had a good time, Gevan boy. Remember that. You had a good time.”

  I said, “Yes, I had a good time, Uncle Al.”

  He leaned back and looked contented. I could remember that, the way he looked, and the way he always smelled of cigars and barber shops, and had a fresh flower in his lapel every day.

  “Does Mr. Karch think he can vote Mottling out of there?”

  Uncle Al seemed to come back from a distant place. I wondered how far his memory had ranged. “Oh, he says with my four thousand shares and what he had lined up among the old crowd, he can get Mottling out provided you don’t vote, Gevan. You vote
with us and it’s a landslide. You vote with Mottling’s crowd and we lose. I don’t like that man. Guess that isn’t much of a reason.”

  “Maybe it’s as good as any other, Uncle Al.”

  His hand trembled visibly as he set his empty glass on the table. He said, indistinctly, “It hit me hard, Gevan, about Kenny. He was like me.”

  There was a resentment in me as he repeated that. When Ken and I had been kids, Uncle Al had been one of our favorite people. He had talked to us as though we were people, never talking down to us. I remember a time at the lake when Ken and I got sore at each other. Uncle Al was very grave about it. He got the gloves and laced them neatly and timed the rounds. I know it must have amused him to see us flailing away at each other with such deadly seriousness—and so little damage. We had to shake hands after it was over, and he announced it was a draw.

  Later we began to see Uncle Al in a different focus. Though my father never spoke of it directly, we learned he resented the idleness of his brother, resented that Uncle Al got an income due to Dad’s efforts. Ken and I began to see him as a sort of dapper and ridiculous grasshopper, a man of no true dignity whom we could no longer respect. He sensed the change in us, and we were never close to him again.

  I sat and listened to his ramblings. I suddenly saw myself in a cruel, clear light. It often happens that way, I guess. A sudden analogy, a sudden and shocking increment of objectivity. I could no longer feel superior to Uncle Al. Though our reasons had been quite different, he and I had done precisely the same thing. Each of us had left our brother with the entire burden. There could be no dignity in us, and no self-respect. The world takes little cognizance of motivation. It is concerned with action. And what difference was there between an aimless and lonely old man and an aimless and lonely young man—both of them supported by the labor of others.

  I had done to Ken precisely what Uncle Al had done to my father, and given Ken every reason for resentment. Yet I had no proof that he had resented my action in leaving him with the burden, a burden I was better qualified to handle. In that moment of realization I knew I had lost the chance to tell Ken this was the first time I had ever thought of myself in this way, ever seen exactly what I had done to him, and to myself. Someone had robbed me of my chance to tell Ken. I wanted whoever it was within reach of my hands, at that moment.