"Why should you?" There was some amusement in his steady gaze.
I said, "Who knows? Something else happens that fits in with this, who do we ten?"
Jade said to Marc, 'If we don't know what's going on, we don't know if they are involved more than they think they are. An identity mixup. Or something observed they shouldn't have seen."
After a moment of thought, Marc nodded and wrote a number down and tore it out of his pad. "Memorwe this number. Use a phone you can control for a couple of hours. It may take that long for a cat/-back. Here is what you say. That line win always answer, day and night. The person will say hero. You say, 'Was somebody at this number try" ingto reach Travis McGee?' They'll say they don't know, but they can check around and find out. Then you say, 'If anyone was, I can be reached at such and such a number.' then wait. Clear?"
"Perfectly," I said.
Max stood a little taller and said, "You shouldn't have gone out to see Broffski and Slater. The cover story was halfway okay, but frail. What you shouldn't do, either of you or both of you, is push at this thing any more, from any direction. We've satisfied ourselves you can both keep your mouth shut about what you learned here. Finding out the kind of security clearance you had once upon a time, Meyer, helped in that decision. So lay low. Keep down. Bleep quiet. In return for that, I promise I'll find some way to let you know when we've tidied up. No, don't leave just yet. I have to make a call."
He made it from a phone in a dispatch case. He grunted and listened, grunted and listened, then said thanks and hung up and slapped the case shut. No sign of your being followed here. There's no directional bug on your pickup truck, and your home phones on those two boats are not tapped."
"She died a week ago today," I said. "She didn't want to die. She was pushed over the edge. She was pushed off the earth. And you want me to keep down and keep quiet."
Max looked at me with a pitying expression. '`If
The Green Ripper you wanted to thrash around, what could you do? Where could you start? Suppose you knew for sure that the DGI did it."
"What's the DGI?"
"The Cuban secret service. It has been directed and controlled by the KGB for nine years at least. What next? Who do you ask? Who do you go see? And who would know anything anyway? Is whoever killed her still alive? Maybe not Intelligence operations are compartmentalized, There is only one contact between cells, and few people in any cell. I don't care what you do. Just don't go to the police to complain about an unsolved murder, and don't write your congressman about internal se- curity."
"We can leave now?" Meyer asked.
Max nodded. Jake took a look at the corridor. We left. The day was the same kind of day. But the world was a different kind of world.
109
8
We were back aboard The Busted Flush by four o'clock. My brain seemed to be droning along in neutral. I could not kick it into gear.
Meyer selected a beer. I roamed back and forth with a beaker of Boodles on ice. "I don't want it to be depersonalized," I said. "I want it to be a single person with a single motive. I don't want it to be organizational, a committee decision. You can't get your hands around the throat of a committee. You can't beat the face of an organization against a brick wall."
"Listen to me, Travis. Stop pacing and listen. ~ she was killed because she discovered something, by pure accident, she should not have known, then
The Green Ripper it is accidental death. The world is full of secret plans and understandings. A sniper in Lebanon misses and the slug smashes the head of a child a half mile farther away. What can the child's father dot Who does he see? Where does he file his complaint?"
"Somebody aimed at her, Meyer, and didn't miss."
"And your chance of ever finding that somebody is exactly zero."
'Then I'll find who gave the orders."
"Again zero."
"How can you possibly know that?"
"Travis, please sit down. I can't talk to you when you keep walking around behind me. There. That's better. And if you can listen a little, it will be better yet. I live in two worlds, yours and the real world."
"Come onl"
"Just listen. In your world the evil is small scale. It is one on one. It is creature preying on creature. All right, so it can be terrifying. I am not trying to say it is like games in a sandbox under the apple tree. A person can get killed doing what you do, and I think it is a worthwhile way for you to live. In these past few years it has made you a bit morose, but that is only because any kind of repeti- tion leads to a certain staleness of the soul. Too many beds, and too much dying. Greed and love begin to wear the same masks. Gretel gave me high hopes for you. You were emerging from the dolor of repetition. Now you look as if you had been hit on the head with a mallet. In your world, your heart is broken. I want to reach you before you start any kind of move that will break your heart on a larger scale than you can now conceive of. All right?"
'weep talking."
"When I attend conferences on international monetary affairs, when I go give my little speeches, or go earn a little fee for consultation, I hear of many things. They alarm me. I cannot tell you how much they alarm me. In Iran a little band of schoolteachers dribble gasoline around the circumference of a movie house and light it, incinerating four hundred and thirty people, most of them children. In Guyana nine hundred Americans kill themselves, for reasons as yet unexplained. There are over four billion people in the world, and each day more and more of them are dying in bloody and sickening ways. The pot is beginning to simmer. The little bubbles appear around the edged Intrigue, interconnected, is multiplying geometrically, helped along by the computer society. Orbiting eyes in the sky scan us all. Poisons abound. The sick birds fall out of the air. Signs and portents, Travis. And here we are in happyland, in a resort town, with the bright sunshine, bright boats, humid young ladies. This is all stage setting. Carnival. Scenario. The real world is out there in a slow dreadful process of change. There is a final agony
The Green Ripper of millions out there, and one and a quarter million new souls arriving every week. We try to think about it less than we used to. None of it makes any sense, really. But then whatever it is that is out there, it moves into this world in the shape of a tiny sphere of platinum and iridium and deadly poison. Now we have to thinlr about it, but it cannot be personalized. It is all a thing, a great plated toadlizard thing with a rotten breath, squatting back inside the mouth of the cave, infinitely patient."
"So keep on having fun?"
"That's not very responsive."
"Sorry."
"Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible."
"Except joining the Church of the Apocryphal"
"Have you lost your mind?"
"Brother Titus will forgive my sins."
"It's an idiotic idea."
'] have to go out to California anyway, with... the ashes."
'when are we leaving?"
I smiled at him and shook my head. "Not this time, Meyer. Part of this trip is trying to get away from myself somehow. I have no delight in what and who I am. Not any more. Not here."
Meyer sat and looked at me for a long moment, the small bright blue eyes intent, the face impassive. "You take yourself wherever you go, Travis."
"A popular truism."
He finished the beer and put it aside. "I'll go get the urn."
"You don't have to bother right now. I can come and get it when I'm ready to leave."
"I might not be there. I'll get it now."
He was back in ten minutes with a cardboard carton, a vise-grip wrench he had borrowed a year ago, and fifteen dollars he claimed he owed me and insisted I take.
And then he was gone. It had not occurred to me that I would hurt Meyer, but there seemed to be no point in going over and apologizing to him. Through me, he had acquired a taste for the salvage business. Now there was nothing left to save but myself. And he couldn't help me there.
I fixed myself another heavy drink and, carrying it along, I went through all the interior spaces of The Busted Flush. I remembered all the lovely women. I looked at the huge shower stall, the sybaritic tub, the great broad bed in the master stateroom. I looked at the speakers and turntables, the tape decks and tape racks. Everything had a sweet, sad look. Like a playpen with scattered toys after the child has died.
When the drink was gone, I went down to my hidey-hole in the forward hull and removed all my reserve and took it up to the lounge. Ninety-three hundred-dollar bills. Life savings. Wisely invested, it might bring me almost eighty dollars a month. I sat and planned what I would wear and what I
The Green Ripper would carry, and mentally distributed my fortune in inconspicuous places.
Then I looked directly at the cardboard carton for the first time. Firmly taped and tied. Ten inches square, twelve inches tall. All the remains of the physical Gretel.It hefted at about the weight of a sizable cantaloupe.
I sat at the little pull-down writing desk again, and I wrote a letter to Meyer:
I will take this up to the office and give it to Linda and tell her to hold it a few days and then give it to you. By then I will have added the keys to this boat, and to the Munequita and to the car. I will have emptied out the perishables and turned off the compressors and arranged for disconnect on the phone. I am enclosing five hundred in cash I better make that eight hundred to take care of expenses around here. I will have put the phone on temporary disconnect and arranged for my mail to come to you. Today is December 18th. If I am going to be able to make it back here, I will get word to you somehow on or before June 18th. If you don't hear by then, everything here belongs to you. Franlc Payne has a will on file to that effect, witnessed and all. I don't really know what is mak
115
John. MacDonald ing me act the way I am acting.. You would know more about that than I, probably. I have this very strong feeling that I am never coming back here, that this part of my life is ending, or that all of my life is ending. I have been bad company a lot of the time the past few years, going sour somehow. Gretel was the cure for that. I came back to life, but not for long. And this is what the stock market guys call a lower low. I just feel futile and ridiculous. You are the best friend I have ever had. Take care of yourself. Make a point of *. If I don't come back, what you should do is move aboard the Flush, peddle your crock boat and the Munequita and the Rolls, and throw a party they will never never forget around here.
I put it in a heavy brown envelope and left it unsealed. It was dark. I tools a walk around my weather decks. The night smelled like diesel fuel. A nearby drunk was singing "Jingle Bells," never getting past the sleigh, starting again and again and again. The boulevard hummed and rustled with cars, and there was no sound at all from the sea. A woman laughed, a jet went over, and I went back inside. Somebody working his way into his slip
The Green Ripper made a small wake, and the Flush shifted, sighed, and settled back into stillness.
On the following Saturday morning I found the same man at the Petaluma cemetery, the one Gretel and I had dealt with when we had flown out with John Tuckerman's ashes. He was cultivating and reseeding two parallel curving scars in the soft green turf. He was a broad muscular old man with a bald head and thick black eyebrows. He wore sneakers and crisp khakis. He dropped the tool, dusted his hands, and tilted his head to one side as he looked up at me.
'weren't you here way last spring? With the Tuckerman girl?"
"With Gretel Howard. Her married name."
"What you got there?"
'QVell... she died. Gretel died. This is her ashes."
He mopped his face and turned slightly away and looked upward into a tree. He sighed. "Sorry to hear it. Even if it was a sad time for her, bringing her brother's ashes here, it wasn't hard to see you and she were real close, real happy with each other."
"Yes, we were."
"Too bad. Nice size on that girl. Great smile. What did she die from? Automobile? That is what takes most of the young ones."
"Some kind of flu with a high fever and kidney failure."
"I tell people it's the bugs striking back. Those laboratories go after the bugs with powerful new poisons and it stands to reason that the ones that live through it, they get twice and nasty as they ever were before. Of course, John and Gretel's folks, they died premature, but it wasn't sickness. I suppose you want her in the family plot. Dumb-ass question. You wouldn't be here if you didn't."
"Can we go right ahead with it?"
"Don't you remember how it was before? There's got to be the permit, and they've got to have vital statistics for the records, and there's the fee."
"The office is closed."
'A know. They used to stay open Saturday morning, but not lately."
'Eve got a copy of the death certificate here, and I've got her birth certificate, marriage certificate, and final decree of divorce. Here, you can have them."
He tools them and then tried to give them back to me, saying, 'I don't have anything to do with the office part."
"And if the permit hasn't gone up since last time, here's the fifty dollars."
He hesitated and finally took it. '] guess we could do it now and I could give them this stuff Monday. But don't you want any words said? She said the words for her brother."
The Green Ripper
"As I will for her."
The Tuckerman plot was in that part of the cemetery where the stones were flush with the ground which, as he had mentioned when I had seen him before, made mowing a lot easier. While he went to get the post-hole digger from his shed, I opened the carton. The urn was shinier than I had expected it to be, and more ornate. It looked like a large gold goblet with a lid.
She had owned a small worn book of the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. She had read two of them over her brother's grave. She had marked the ones she liked best. There were three short ones I wanted to read.
I could just make out the place where the old man had dug the hole before, for John Tuckerman's urn. He chose a new spot and asked me if it was all right. I approved of it and asked him if I could dig.
'leave the dirt close and neat," he said.
He watched me as I chunlred the tool down, lifting the bite of earth in the blades, setting it aside each time, close and neat. Once it was down over a foot, it began to get me in the small of the back. It is an awkward posture, an awkward way to lift
When it was deep enough, he stopped me. I lifted the urn out of the box and, kneeling, lowered it to the bottom of the hole. I stood up then and read the first two poems, the longer ones. My voice had a harsh and meaningless sound in the stillness, like somebody sawing a board. I said the words I saw on the page without comprehending their meaning. Then I read the one she had read to her dead brother, called "Parting."
"My life closed twice before its close It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me
"So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And an we need of hell."
I bent and dropped the faded blue book down the hole, and then, kneeling, using both hands, I cupped up the dirt and filled the hole and tamped it down, replaced the circle of turf I had cut with the digger, and with the edge of my hand brushed away the loose dirt into the grass roots.
'No marker for her either?" he asked.
"I don't think so. Neither of them had children to come and look for the place." The oblong of marble, level with the earth, reading TUCKERMAN, was enough.
"Those words were line the ones she read that time. Is that some kind of one of these new religions?"
`'Sort of."
The Green Ripper
'I thought so. There's a lot of them these days. I guess having one is better than having none, but it makes you wonder." He looked down toward the office and the road. "Where'd you park?"
"I walked out from the bus station."
"Where are you going? Back to Florida?"
"This town isn't as bad as some. If you need work, maybe I can think of somebody you could go ask. You look sort of down on your luck, mister."
"Thanks. If I come back this way, I'll look you up."
When I looked back from the road he was still watching me. I waved. He waved and turned away, back to his work fixing the scars where somebody had torn up the turf doing funny stunts in an autos mobile. I dug my duffel bag out of the bushes where I had hidden it and shouldered it with the wide strap over my left shoulder, the bag bumping against my right hip. My poncho was strapped to the duffel bag. I wore work shoes, dark-green twill trousers, a faded old khaki shirt, a brown felt hat, a gray cardigan sweater. I had sandy stubble on my jaws and neck. Before leaving Florida, I'd had my hair clipped down to a Marine basic cut, which could have been a prison cut. I carried in my shirt pocket, for the right occasion, a pair of glasses with gold-colored rims, hardly any correction in the lenses, and one bow fixed with black electrician's tape. I wanted to attract a second look from the av erage cop, but without stirring enough curiosity for him to want to check me out. But if he did check me out, I had some credentials. I had an expired Florida driver's license with my picture on it, and I had a fragile tattered copy of army discharge papers, and a social security card sandwiched in plastic. They were wrapped in a plastic pouch and were in the compartment in the end of the duffel bag. They all said I was Thomas J. McGraw, address General Delivery, Osprey, Florida, occupation commercial fisherman.
John D MacDonald - Travis Mcgee 18 - The Green Ripper Page 8
