by Peter Israel
The limo was a gray stretch, one of those city-block affairs with black windows they use mostly for mafiosi and politicians. It stopped a few feet away from me and Bud. I saw Price emerge from the front passenger’s seat and move to open the rear door. Somebody somewhere started to sing “Happy Birthday” and suddenly a thousand voices were singing “Happy Birthday.” I remember getting one of those hot-and-cold sweaty feelings that if there really was a determined maniac among them singing “Happy Birthday to You,” maybe there wasn’t a hell of a lot Bud Fincher and I and our little army could do to stop him.
The first thing to emerge from the rear of the limo was Muffin, the Counselor’s Wife’s cocker bitch, dragging her owner behind her, the two of them followed by the Counselor himself.
He wasn’t in shirtsleeves after all. He was wearing a navy blue silk suit and a blue broadcloth shirt with a white collar, from which his tie had been pulled loose. His massive head swiveled in a kind of daze for a second, as though he was surprised to see all these people, not one of whom he recognized.
Then he recognized me.
“Phil!” he shouted. “You’ve got to find a typist!”
“A …?” I started to say, confused and relieved at the same time. “God! Where have you been?”
“Where have I been? Where the hell do you think I’ve been? Where does it look like I’ve been?”
I heard the foul mood in his voice, saw it on his craggy face—in living color, as they say—but by then Grace Bashard had swished her way out of the limo, wearing something pastel and clinging. Before I could react, she flung her arms around my neck, her body into mine, and planted a long and wordless “Hi Phil” special on my mouth.
Somebody had started to cheer, but it wasn’t for us.
Raul Bashard, ducking his head, had emerged from the limo. Extricating myself, I saw him push away the cane Price offered him. Then he stood erect and turned to the crowd, his face shining in the sun and now breaking, creasing, into a very full and genuine smile. He lifted his arms, clasped his hands together and shook them above his head, victory-style, and people started singing “Happy Birthday” all over again.
“Phil!” The Counselor was shouting at me, pulling me vigorously by the arm. “Phil! You’ve got to find a typist!”
I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. Where was I supposed to find a typist at the BashCon, and what on God’s green earth did he want one for?
I said something to this effect, or started to.
“I don’t give a good damn where you find one,” he raged at me, “but find one. In all these people there’s got to be one who can type and keep her mouth shut. But if you can’t find a typist, then goddammit, find us a typewriter! You can type, can’t you?”
He knew goddammit-well I could.
The foul mood syndrome, like I said.
It wouldn’t have done any good, either, to point out that I was supposed to be in charge of a twelve-man security force which was supposed to be saving his client from the threat of imminent death, and not a typist pecking out the latest amendments of R. R. Bashard’s Last Will and Testament.
Because that was what was involved, as I learned once the Counselor had calmed down. Bashard had “summoned” him early that same morning. He and Nora had driven out there. He’d thought it was only because Bashard wanted company on the trip, but no, he really had wanted the will redrafted. They’d worked on it all morning, until it was time to leave.
So that was how I got to spend the first afternoon of the BashCon, and how come I missed the Dean of Science Fiction’s seminar on “Science Future/Science-Fiction Future.” I was typing on a typewriter and paper borrowed from the hotel on the desk in the Counselor’s room on the second floor of the hotel annex, while the Counselor, in shirtsleeves now and suspenders and stockinged feet, dictated to me from a sheaf of notes in one large fist and a copy of the previous will in the other.
When we were done and, later on, the signatures affixed, I was also the one who notarized the documents. Yes, I’m a notary public, too, and yes, I always carry the seal and stamp pad with me when I travel.
You never know when they’ll come in handy.
Account for anxiety if you can.
I’m not talking about the one-cause kind, like when your landlord is knocking on the door for the rent and your bank account is zeroed out. That’s not anxiety. Trouble, maybe, but not anxiety. That’s reality time.
No, I’m talking about the free-floating kind, which has no cause and a million causes, when everything you do, see, hear, think, has foreboding at the edges, and maybe it’s rational and maybe it’s not. Like the sound you hear in the night: is it a “natural” sound or is somebody inside the house? Or the smoke you think you smell: is it from your own last cigarette or could something be burning?
Let me put it Bashard’s way.
Item: that the Counselor and his wife hadn’t shown up as planned.
Item: that flash I’d had, on Bashard’s arrival, that nothing I could do could save him from a maniac.
Item: that Bashard spent the afternoon outside my surveillance.
Item: the amendments to Bashard’s will, and Bashard’s arguing about getting the will changed.
Item: the Counselor’s attitude toward same.
If I haven’t made it clear already, the Counselor is a cool and unruffle-able bird, ninety-nine percent of the time. That afternoon at the BashCon, when I blew his dictation a couple of times, or when proofreading the documents he discovered an error, he was the other one percent. Which, I understood, had nothing to do with my secretarial skills. It simply proved—didn’t it?—that the amendments made him as jumpy as they did me.
Item: the results of Bud Fincher’s investigations, or lack of.
We’d had a chance to review these that morning. They were skimpy enough, but they had to be, didn’t they—so Bud and I told each other—given the size of the list and the short time we’d had? For every suspect he’d located, there was an Address Unknown or a No Contact Made. (Both Leo Mackes and Viola T. Harmel, for example, Bashard’s onetime chess partners, were Address Unknowns.) Only two on the list had been traced to the BashCon. We had people watching them. But suppose, in the categories I’d chosen with the computer that day at Bashard’s, suppose I myself had missed somebody?
The point is simply this. Rational or not, important or petty, each of the above “items” contributed.
Conclusion: by banquet time, I was a nervous wreck.
Further conclusion (from the benefit of hindsight): by banquet time, I had become convinced that 1) I alone, no matter what help I had, was responsible for Raul Bashard’s well-being, and 2) that somebody at the BashCon was actually going to make an attempt on his life.
Bashard came back from the afternoon’s seminar triumphant and exhausted. According to Bud Fincher, who’d stood in for me, there’d been heavy discussions, with rapid-fire questions from the audience and lengthy answers from Bashard. Bud, though, hadn’t understood two words of it.
The Counselor and I were waiting for the guest of honor in his suite. When he saw us, Bashard dismissed the entourage that accompanied him, dismissed even Grace, shut the door behind him and slumped in a comfortable chair by the fireplace. He took off his jacket, tie and his shoes. He wasn’t, by the way, wearing his habitual sneakers but half-boots in a cordovan leather, highly polished.
At his request, I brought him a bottle of Perrier from the bar but he didn’t touch it. The Counselor had a Scotch on the rocks and lit a pipe, and I nursed a beer.
“To work, gentlemen,” Bashard said.
The Counselor tried to show him the changed provisions, but Bashard wasn’t interested. He made some testy remark to the effect that if the Counselor wasn’t competent to do his bidding, he (Bashard) would have to find another attorney. He asked where he was supposed to sign and what he had to initial. The Counselor showed him, in triplicate. Bashard signed, and initialed.
The Counselor served as witne
ss and I, as I’ve said, notarized the documents. But with his pen poised above the papers, the Counselor paused.
“Are you sure this is what you want, Raul?” he asked.
It was rare, I knew, for the Counselor to question a client’s intent.
“If what you’re asking …” Bashard retorted, “What’s the legal phrase? Mental competence? Are you asking if I’m mentally competent at this moment? Of sane and sound mind? Then if something happens to me and my will is contested, it will be up to you two gentlemen to testify, won’t it? What do you think, Revere,” he said, turning to me with that cracked, half-smiling expression, “am I of sane and sound mind?”
“That’s not what I meant, Raul,” the Counselor interrupted, leaning back in his chair and fumbling for matches.
“I see. But in that case, if this wasn’t what I wanted, why in hell do you think I’d have put you to all this trouble?”
The Counselor found his matches, relit his pipe.
“One other question, Raul,” he said imperturbably through a cloud of smoke. “Phil’s question, really. Who knows of these changes?”
I hadn’t, I should point out, so much as mentioned the question. But the Counselor could have been reading my mind.
“I do,” Bashard replied, his eyes narrowing slightly. “And you do, Charles. And you, Revere. But as to anybody else? No, I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
I looked at the Counselor.
“So be it,” he said.
The Counselor then signed the documents. He passed each set to me. I stamped each, signed, and dated my signature.
The moment I’d finished, Bashard stood—a little unsteadily, I noticed.
“Do you think anyone would mind,” he asked us in a strangely plaintive voice, “if I skipped the cocktail party? It’s all been a little much for me, I’m afraid.”
“Of course not,” the Counselor answered. “It’s your day, Raul, you do what you want to do.”
“In that case, gentlemen,” he said, glancing at his watch, “I’m going to have a shower and shave and catch me forty winks. If one of you would make sure I’m on my feet by seven-thirty …”
I promised him I’d see to it. Then the Counselor and I left him. I made sure the door to the suite was locked behind me. I’d had the lock replaced the day before, over the management’s objections. Only Bashard and Grace, Price and myself, had keys. Even the maid service had to apply to one of us to get in.
The Counselor went back to his room to dress for the party, and I, after checking that Bud Fincher’s people were in place downstairs, to mine. I had a beer from the minibar. Not long afterward there was a knock at my door, a soft one at first, then louder, then a voice—Grace Bashard’s—saying: “I know you’re in there, Phil. I’ve been looking all over for you. Why are you avoiding me?” I didn’t answer. A few moments after that, I heard the door to the suite open and slam shut. Then my phone rang.
At first I let it ring, thinking it was Grace. Then, Grace or no Grace, I picked it up.
No Grace.
“Phil,” the Counselor’s Wife said, “you’ve got to do us a favor. It’s taking me longer than I thought to get dressed, Charles, too, and Muffin has to be walked. I hate to ask you—you know that—but she wouldn’t walk with a stranger. Would you walk her for us?”
I thought of a dozen different excuses why I couldn’t, all in the space of two seconds, and the dozen different rebuttals she’d give me. No matter. Raul Bashard’s suite could have been being attacked by hand grenades and submachine guns, and the mortars zeroing in—Muffin would still have to be walked. So I passed on the prebanquet cocktail hour, or much of it, being tugged all over the BashCon in my dress shirt and striped black trousers by a cocker bitch in a state of semiecstasy.
The Catskills are usually much cooler than the city, but the clear sunny sky of the afternoon had gone whitish gray. The air, still warm, had grown still and humid; you could feel the thunderstorms coming hours ahead of time. The gnats came out at twilight, and I heard the zing and whine of mosquitos. It wasn’t my lookout, but I found myself wondering, as Muffin zigged and zagged across the terrain, what would happen if the storm did break. There wasn’t shelter for half the people.
Most of them, of course, wouldn’t be at the banquet. They didn’t seem to care. There were parties already in progress all over the grounds. I saw paper cups and beer cans in people’s hands, smelled the acrid smell of grass, heard guitars playing, even ran into a group of horned Hnngas clustered around a long-haired blonde in an ankle-length gown who was bent over and plucking a stringed musical instrument. I heard someone call it a dulcimer. Maybe it was. A peaceable-enough throng, in sum, at least for the moment.
One of Bud Fincher’s people pointed out his particular stakeout to me. I knew the name from the hate-mail file but not what he looked like. I was surprised how young he was, and how small. He had a crew cut and a thin goatee beard. He wore Trotsky glasses, those small rimless affairs that I thought had gone out with the sixties, and he was holding forth in a small group. I heard him rattle off some names of science-fiction writers—Sheckley, Oakes, Sturgeon, Herbert, Latham—to what purpose I didn’t know. He was a self-styled science-fiction writer called Malakowski, who belonged to a group of writers that called itself the Philadelphia Scribblers. Two of the Scribblers, in fact, had novels out in paperback from Raul Bashard’s publisher. But not Malakowski. Helga Hewitt knew him vaguely, knew his work. He’d tried to write satire, she’d told me, but either satire and science fiction didn’t mix or his efforts weren’t very funny, because she’d sent back every manuscript he’d submitted. Maybe this failure was what had prompted the personalized attacks I’d read, which seemed to escalate in scorn every time Bashard published a new novel. But even if his letters were violent he didn’t in the flesh look like much of a threat to me, and besides, we had him monitored. This should have reassured me.
It didn’t.
Walking the dog should have reassured me, too, because it gave me something to do. It didn’t. Then, handing the dog back to the Counselor’s Wife in our hallway should have (she looking her striking self now with her makeup on and her hair upswept) because I was rid of the dog. But it didn’t. Or finishing getting dressed in my own room, or calling Bashard’s number at seven-thirty sharp, and after fencing with Grace, who was in the midst of her own toilette and was, she said, going to pop my eyes out, and getting Bashard on the phone, he was up, no problem, he’d be ready at eight o’clock, thank you, Revere …
But no. Nothing did. Not even walking out of the air-conditioned hotel annex into the still, prestormy dusk of the Catskills, and down the path that linked us to the auditorium building where the banquet was being held. Bashard walked to my left in impeccable black tuxedo, and Grace between us in a black sequined number cut to the coccyx in the back and with sparkling combs in her hair, her arms linking the three of us. Price walked point in front of us and Fincher brought up the rear. Others of the combined staffs cleared the well-wishing crowds from our way …
No. No reassurance.
It was then that Grace pulled me down to her so she could whisper in my ear.
“I brought it,” she said. “Just for you.”
“Brought what?” I asked.
“Have you forgotten? Never mind, Pablo,” she answered back in a husky whisper. “You’ll find out tonight.”
My experience with banquets is limited. May it stay that way. They say banquet food is as bad as the speeches are long. I don’t remember what the food was like, if I ate any, and I only half heard the speeches.
I remember hearing the music of the dance band without registering the tunes.
I remember drinking some, then more than some. But I didn’t feel a thing.
Nervous time.
Seating at the banquet was by table number and place card, over three hundred invitees in all at some twenty-five tables, plus the dais, plus the dance floor oval. I had all the angles covered, I thought. Bud Fi
ncher’s people were stationed at every exit, and there was another out of sight in each of the side wings behind the dais. Bud himself was strategically placed at a table at one corner nearest the dais, and Price at the other. I sat at the centermost table, right under the speakers and special guests. I had the Counselor’s Wife on one side of me and Mrs. Richard Brinckerhoff on the other. Mrs. Richard Brinckerhoff was the wife of a retired shipping magnate and science-fiction buff and collector who, as a guest speaker, sat on the dais. Across from me was the Counselor, flanked by Grace Bashard and Helga Hewitt. He was still in a foul mood, I could see, and so (in one of her quick changes) was Grace. Helga Hewitt managed to prod the Counselor into conversation, but nothing would prod Grace. Pouty-faced, she kept her head down, ate little, and once or twice when her eyes met mine across the table she sharply averted her gaze.
Meanwhile the Counselor’s Wife was in her best party form. Once between courses she asked me to dance with her, and I did, but my mind was elsewhere. Back at the table she chattered away, undaunted by my being distracted, until she discovered that she and Mrs. Richard Brinckerhoff had something in common. Mrs. Richard Brinckerhoff, a sturdy dowager-type with blue hair and a massive, heavily perfumed bust, confided across my plate that she thought science fiction was a pastime for boys. No more stupid and silly than sports, maybe, but she couldn’t understand why grown men (like her husband) spent so much time over it. Nora Saroff seemed to think this one of the most hilarious things she’d ever heard, as well as apt, and soon enough she was holding forth about repressed male adolescence.
I made several patrols of the premises during dinner. Then, when the lights dimmed for the speeches, presentations, and the slide show, I stood permanently at the rear where I could catch the stage and the audience in one scan. They seemed to me a generally happy and well-oiled crowd of eaters and drinkers, if on the geriatric side compared to the younger throngs outside. Wine of both colors flowed with this dinner, this on top of the cocktail party, and the champagne came out later with the birthday cake. By the time the emcee called people to attention, or tried to, the atmosphere had gone from sedate to raucous.
