How close are you and Dagger really?
Close enough to have read his letter to his niece about the project she contemplated behind Aut’s back. Close enough to have in a pocket of mine hidden at this instant in the King Street house a note Dagger had from you, Monty, in which you say that if he is counting on my diary to advertise his film, maybe you should see a piece. A piece of the action, Monty, your thing.
The waiter is thinking mainly that we haven’t ordered, and to judge from his permanently raised gray-tufted eyebrows and creased forehead and his skeptical eyes, he is not interested in what at first glance he or a camera would see in Monty’s now suddenly quite undivided face, a fixed look that could be dislike, could be rage, a hot antipasto that wasn’t sitting well (but the waiter knew we hadn’t eaten), or a coldly intelligent fear much more clearly coherent than its nearest cause, which was what I (in my hypothetical field of multiple impingements) was doing to him and to myself. I did not have to have the sharpness of a god to know that he did not wholly mean to let go his next words: Who put that letter on my brother-in-law’s desk.
I answered, A sequence of footsteps, phone rings, bucket clanks, lights, darks—words which reminded me that, godlike or not, my strength was in knowing what these others mistook: that all I had was my place in a multiple system. So I was not wholly responsible for now saying to Monty (what I knew would worry if not scare him) that Jack Flint wouldn’t like that letter, he wouldn’t like it one bit, and neither would the man who had almost shot John in my presence—did Monty happen to know Incremona?
Monty, whom a cine camera of any water would have shown to break his pose as soon as the waiter limped off, and a sound track would have voiced in cadences heavily ironic, now softly pounded out such words as Power already in process, right? like someone else’s crystal prototype? someone else’s formula? like some other boy’s baseball you happened to catch? someone else’s film idea you steal without understanding? isn’t that what it’s all about, Cartwright? like someone’s lighter which those who have not handled it before had better not reach for in your pocket?
There was no beer in the stein I tipped back to my mouth-tipped more calmly than a camera could see. Monty had heard about Krish, so Krish had been discovered. And Monty had heard I was suspected. I saw him through the stein like an old forgotten hypothesis, then set it down and looked for the waiter and waved, while Monty said how he cared about that girl and nothing must happen to her even if I was the one as he now began to think who was at the heart of the whole thing—and even if I already had the information he was about to give me, I was not going to have the chance to sneak it, he was going to give it to me free and then he was going to get up from this table and he hoped I understood where he stood.
Over your head, I said.
He said that taking me into account Dagger DiGorro was wise to distribute his chances so now he had H.E.W. and a carton of audio gear to fall back on.
Which gave me, as Tessa’s father would say, a shtip: Dagger then was really serious about that vita sent to his old friend in Washington, and he was busy too with a carton of audio gear like an extra suitcase or a box of softball bases and bats and balls or of Nikon lenses (the Nikon system you’re urged to commit yourself to) bought through the U.S. Air Force or Navy or from the woman in Amsterdam or the man in Antwerp with pounds sterling acquired in bulk the week after the Marvelous Country House when (as I learned from Jenny) he’d had advance word of devaluation by that revolutionary Republican Nixon and unloaded all the dollars he could get his hands on. But I had no time to trace that shtip from side to back to stomach to calf, chest, and shoulder, a node of warm mercury lurching like some bulk of liquid around my body when I smoked Geoff’s friend Jasper’s hash.
For, extending the waiter’s course, my eye reached the bar and there just leaving was John the man in glasses—friend of Jerry who paid his loft-rent, friend of June whose voice I’d last heard at the moment Tuesday that I discovered the two right angles Monty now seemed to have foregone—and there, too, were the steel-rimmed specs I’d knocked off, which was nothing to what Incremona, that lithe, otterlike personal and impatient revolutionary might do to the other John if John was in cahoots with this John’s boss Phil Aut (though I could not then on Thursday have said exactly why). And yet, whatever Hy’s wife might think of me to this day when she is beyond the first shocks of that twelve months during which her son Ned died of a lung cancer as swift in its race to self-destruct as it seemed mysteriously untraceable, and during which she had news of her mother’s cousins and her husband’s Nachbush cousins spirited into an ultimate statistic whose increasingly rhetorical melody rhymes with ill, will, kill, and pill (pillion indeed) as readily as it calls up my bedtime variant of the witch shoved into the oven or echoing chatter in the soap-strewn steamy concrete showers after swimming practice the winters of ’45 and ’46, and may even twist the unable mind to dollar dreams (but what’s six million worth today?), say some law-making appropriation so those who find technology cold and soulless might suddenly think (if they could) of that early European computer made of one hundred human beings—this shtip or stab seemed a thought crystallized as at the fork of a nerve cell, yet in my whole body too, whose heart was hard to find because pointless to seek since now so open to the lines of others in this petty system I had had a hypothesis about but forgotten.
Having lived something like the story of his life, Dagger had moved on to fatherhood; he had a daughter. It was not clear if the English schoolmaster had lost his job in the Bahamas because he had sat by Dagger’s driftwood fire watching a cube of pink meat with certain wartime associations drip and spit on the toasting prongs that belonged to the lady who had the guest house; but the island’s Church of England vicar to his deep joy and satisfaction (though not his wife’s, in her pink, broad-brimmed, locally woven hat bending over a large lush garden having issued two of her three servants their day’s easy instructions) was transferred back to England not long after he had told a commissioner that the schoolmaster drank borrowed hotel rum with an American beachcomber who had been a comfortable spectator one Sunday while native boys offered mild violence to a small tourist from Toronto, a white female child. And (if you wished to be suddenly very clear) Dagger was almost Monty’s age; and even with various kinds of American money (even after the Nixon devaluation) and at London prices (even with inflation), and even with the pleasure which a French wife named Alba took in wheeling a pram just a few blocks to the Heath (which reminded Lorna Cartwright not at all of Central Park and its dream-fence of high-rise stone to the east, west, and south, but of real country far! from smoke, lunchtime mobs, and the press of motors, not to mention amenities like the Indian physician who was Alba’s devoted friend and so gave that extra attention to her minor ailments, to the baby’s skin, and to Dagger’s gastric pangs, that compensated for the shortcomings of the English Health Service)—there were measurable respects in which between life in London and life in America the, differences had begun to deteriorate. So how did you figure the big money at this stage? A way had opened for Dagger and it was through Claire, who would do almost anything for him, and through Phil Aut, who would do almost anything for his son Jerry (who in turn would do anything for his mother Jan, whose dreams of world rapprochement included her dark-haired preoccupied husband only as a block of flats includes a plumbing system or a democracy includes other people). And Dagger’s way—through Claire and Aut and Jan—had lain from London through New York to London, to Hyde Park and its Sunday bases and to wild Wales through an Unplaced Room that by identifying son and mother could suddenly change Aut’s estimate of all that came before or after—and Dagger confessed to me the Saturday morning after the Thursday evening of my interview with Monty that shooting Jan’s wild portrait of Jerry had been designed to ensure a little last-minute leverage if only to sustain Phil Aut’s concern with a film which to his strangely inhibited but intense protectiveness might thus seem to implicate in left-wing activities t
he two human beings he told Jack Flint in a rare moment of frankness he would make any sacrifice for. And I with my diary and my daughter had intervened in Dagger’s simple sequence of acts and maybe thrown a monkey wrench into his chance of the big money.
For me the film was just one speculation. I had some irons in; the fire and I expected to be solvent no matter what happened. But it seemed on Saturday with Dag, on Thursday with Monty, and on Tuesday listening to June while watching Reid, Jenny, and the Frenchman—that my film could not have developed parallel to Dagger’s without disturbing it.
His had been one open and neat part of Aut’s exploitation of Jan’s plan. Like getting rare maps from one part of the world to another. The serial route of some man-made automaton. Background footage for insertion, a piece here a piece there, in something else.
I, however, had deliberately used this thing as a point through which attention might be distributed. But whatever the film now meant to me, I must succeed in selling it, I must get us both a decent return on our parallel inputs.
I thought, That’s it! My shtip is simply that by not letting Dag’s film alone, I’ve cost him some money.
But at once that line of thought lapsed like blips on a weather scope into new blips as the radar pulse sweeps full circle but never quite full because never through quite the same weather, though from sweep to sweep the blips may seem as stable as a map or a fleet at anchor. No, my shtip had no neat equation in cash or rueful credit. You would not exactly measure it as a Hyde Park home run stretched for years of Dagger’s extra bases to a right-angle two-phone desk at H.E.W. in Washington, where he had been recommended by the English schoolmaster whose Bahama contract had not been renewed. Nor would you exactly measure my shtip in the two U.S. Coast Guard weather balloons Dagger picked up through an Embassy attaché inflated now almost eight years later not by the local or imported American helium inside the sheer white elastic that Will and Jenny got their hands on and bombarded briefly the day they got those gifts from their father’s jolly new friend, but rather by regret—inflated so to constantly enlarge their equally lessening size loose over Hamp-stead Heath—adrift yet not moving, not moving, and yet the Heath itself was retreating.
Nor would you trace my shtip one thing at a time as fast as a gun crew’s range computer in a sequence of digital trivia thus: (1) Precisely because I had mentioned my dream of a moving terminal (for monorail or other unspecified conveyances) to Dagger in the car coming back from filming the air base, it was the moving terminal that occurred to him that August evening at his flat as a topic calculated to keep me quiet when I was about to shoot the little group including the three men and I inspected the exposure ring on Alba’s Super 8 and challenged the f-number and Dagger said, It’s all set, man; (2) but set wrong (and at the cost of a cartridge): because he did not trust me: had not since that morning two months before when I amazed him by urging for our location the very Underground passage he himself had planned for us to use; so he automatically judged my motives dangerous even if akin to his own; and (3) of at least as long standing: or so I learned in this terminal week in October from my no longer so jolly swashbuckling pal forty hours after my talk Thursday with Monty Graf: for, driving the old Volkswagen with its faulty windscreen wipers to South Ken that June morning (to film, as Dagger thought I must know, the Hawaiian and his girlfriend), Dagger’s swift, mechanical hindsight now credited me with having known of this pedestrian passage under the Science Museum even before he—indeed as far back as Nash’s nosebleed precipitated by Cosmo as if Cosmo’s indiscreet taunt from the pitching rubber were a valve flipped by Krish’s watchful silence across the diamond behind third, a taunt which had led Dagger that night of May 16 in a redecorated Hampstead Village pub to bribe out of Cosmo the following facts: (1) that Savvy Van Ghent had been followed from his health club in the Finchley Road, watched at his flat in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, phoned by his UPI superior in New York and asked if he’d had dealings in hash or with Americans lacking passports, and had since then smelled reassignment in the wind: which, he’d told Alba, had just plain disoriented him, he’d always thought he could just pack up his books and his banjo, his shrunken head and his catcher’s mitt (which he was ruining playing softball) and sell his motorbike and weigh anchor on as short notice as a University of Maryland “regular” on a two-year contract (who, unlike the resident part-timers who took what they could get from the U.K. director at 3rd Air Force H.Q. South Ruislip at the start of each of the five eight-week terms, had to be ready from term to term to fly off whenever courses had materialized and a teacher was needed—Madrid, a base in Verona, or a mountain vale in Germany); (2) that Nash had been instructed to use as a point of contact the Hawaiian Bill Liliuokalani whose cover was his guitar and his emaciated girlfriend from Hempstead, Long Island, whom you glanced at if you could bear her pallor and bad posture so fast you never lost sight of the end of the tunnel; and (3) that a U.S. Army deserter named Jim Nielsen from Heidelberg via Sweden had slipped into London and found help through the Hawaiian, and had been through hell, and Krish could not tell Cosmo how to go about meeting this cat (because Cosmo would like to rap with him) but when Cosmo named a pub in Camden Town where Nielsen had been seen, Dagger rose to go to the bar for two more pints of best bitter and privately guessed that Nielsen knew a certain American with dark kinky hair, who lo and behold as if from the magic print of Dagger’s index finger dialing one two three local or trunk calls the following day became Nielsen’s co-star in the Unplaced Room a week later on May 24.
Cosmo’s silence at the outset Sunday night, May 16, had drawn from Dagger like a warm little confession an offer of a carton of blank cassettes on which to record some collector’s-item jazz Cosmo had said Dagger was holding out on him. But Dagger’s silence when he came back to the table with two more pints drew from Cosmo a blank, blanched stare and a stammering announcement that he did not want the cassettes after all.
No, the shtip I felt at Monty’s words went beyond your ordinary schemer’s adrenal spurt blinking at danger.
It went beyond my blow to Dagger that June morning that set off some servo-circuit beeping him back to what we had seen and done in Wales: back to the Notting Hill Gate flat that he wrongly thought I knew was Jan’s: back to May 16 and Nash’s nosebleed: back to New York, Claire, and Aut where the servo having found no resolution could only loop, and my blow to Dagger signaled him also instantaneously then forward to all he did not know about Bill Liliuokalani and Bill’s Long Island girl Ronnie. But Dagger betrayed nothing except to Alba who confided in Cosmo who told Krish while Alba crossed the Channel alone that June weekend of her seventh month. Now these were the days which marked Monty’s first involvement in the films, for Claire phoned him to report her Uncle Dagger’s alarm call from London and to ask of Monty what she’d never asked before—his advice on a business matter. Which may have joined (by warmly mingling) the two divisions of his face, for as he told me about the moving moment of Claire’s call, the pocks seemed to fade from his cheeks into some vibrancy received from the black eyebrows and his voice, and the chin deepened and the mole made its cleft seem as ample or sensual as the area above his lip beneath the nostrils of his fine nose; yes the parts seemed to join now, warmly mingling, but not gently—for whether or not he had felt from the bar the flash of young John’s steel-rimmed glasses whom Monty in this restaurant two weeks ago had taken prophetically for my associate, Monty now faced not Claire but a strange antagonist.
Oh cash, credit, regret, nostalgia—my shtip was more than these. It was more than computable gossip tracing Nash’s nosebleed in its causes and effects or sampling Cosmo’s cold sweat under the eye of a lean-chopped sun-burnished man in a beret staring through the window of that pub on Hampstead High while Dagger’s large, broad shape stood at the bar bending its brown suede elbow patches and making the barmaid laugh—and my shtip was more than some measure of Reid’s utter coolness in the pedestrian tunnel running into a young girl he didn’t really know who gail
y linked him to the wife of Gene Flint and asked Reid to sign her cast just where it curved between Dirk Bogarde and W. Cartwright.
No, my shtip might seem to you who have me to have been merely sparked by what you could afford to lose sight of (knowing I would not)—to wit, Graf’s news that Dagger was diversifying in a survival program designed to maintain some of his established ventures (the carton of audio gear and no doubt old maps) yet pushing also to a new job at H.E.W. in white, monumental Washington, and toward new chances in a declining land or at any rate a very tricky economy: but Graf’s words were not themselves the cause of my shtip (not an unexpected absence that like a NAND valve’s zero sets off in the South Ken tunnel conversely a positive pulse in Reid’s temple, for he’d expected someone who is not there); no, these words concerning Dag came as some mere percussion.
Like Savvy or Dudley pasting a Sunday fastball to deep center.
Like Gilda depressing automatically the keys of her brother-in-law’s old cash register (to complete a transaction which went on ending for two or three minutes more between her brother-in-law and florid Father Moran come in person on this Wednesday to face up to what he called after all the one-to-one relationship we so rarely enjoy with the people we do business with, and to complain about the price of glads and chrysanthemums which he said might necessitate breaking his church’s long tradition with its neighborhood florist [such as the neighborhood was] to buy instead from the wholesalers on Sixth Avenue—and then suddenly he was not at all amused despite himself by this Jew from Kew Gardens way the hell out in Queens who expressed the belief that when it came to the flowers of the field not even the Pope could work an economic miracle), but Gilda had sensed as she rang up the priest’s post-dated check that the pair now entering the shop as if in response to the cash register weren’t after flowers—the much heavier man in the beret with bristly thick silver hair who didn’t say a word, and the much younger man, tan and totally bald, with a short sharp nose and fleshy lips, a mean sinewy attractive man who shoved some folded newspapers into the hands of the white-haired man and spoke softly but could never have persuaded Gilda the man they knew she knew whom they were looking for was a friend of theirs—only that the man was Cartwright (she believed that) and she was known to have visited him (she guessed that) at the apartment with the big unmade bed (I guessed she recalled that) and he had said he was meeting a mutual friend yesterday but—(Claire, I said) and as Gilda looked at the long brown hand (of Incremona, no guesswork) gripping the top of the register with the thumb-nail so short (news to me) the thumb seemed to be missing half an inch and the fingers coming down over the four white numerals of the priest’s bill, Gilda had a sensation of falling: and not down but forward: and the priest said But you people gild the lily, and her brother-in-law went to close the door left open by the big man in the beret—and when I said to her Wednesday night with a pronounced intimacy pushed into the phone by my lips, Did it give you a shtip (and she said, Where do you know Yiddish), I was saying more than I’d known how to.
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