“Then do we go to Canada, or does he come here?”
“He’s here now. I found that out when I was learning all I could about Paul Dissat. Waterbury is in a guest cottage on a Palm Beach estate. The owners are in Maine now, but they left enough staff to take care of Waterbury. Pool, tennis courts, security system, private beach.”
He started making calls. He had to push the thermostat high enough to kill the compressor before he could hear. I lay a-doze, hearing his voice come from metallic distances, sounding like the voices of grown-ups when I had been a child half-asleep in a moving car or train.
Twenty-two
He found an old friend at last, a Professor Danielson in Toronto, who knew Waterbury well and was willing to try to set it up. Meyer gave Danielson the motel number and unit number and asked to have Waterbury phone him as soon as convenient. If Danielson found that Waterbury was unable or unwilling to phone Meyer for a secret meeting, Danielson would phone back.
Nothing to do but wait and try to digest a roast beef sandwich which lay in my stomach like a dead armadillo. The motel television was on the cable. We turned the sound off and watched the news on the electronic printer, going by at a pace for a retarded fifth grader, white on black printing with so many typos the spelling was more like third grade than fifth.
The woes of the world inched up the screen. Droughts and murders. Inflation and balance of payments. Drugs and demonstrations. Body counts and new juntas.
Spiro was dead wrong. The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. News has always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grub worms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So devote wire service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everybody in constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it ever more horrendous to capture our attention. Secondly, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten, and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope the motto is semper fidelis, which means in translation, “Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife too, if he’s out of town.”
The phone rang, and Meyer sprang up and cut off the compressor and took the call. He made a circle of thumb and finger to tell me we had gotten through the corporate curtain. He listened for several minutes, nodded, and said, “Yes, thank you, we’ll be there.” Hung up.
“A Miss Caroline Stoddard, Mr. Waterbury’s private secretary. We’re to meet with him out at the site at SeaGate. We go through the main entrance and follow little orange arrows on sticks that will lead us to the storage and warehouse area. There are two small contracts going on now out there. Earth moving and paving. They stop work at four, and the crews leave. The area is patrolled at night, and the guard shift starts at eight at this time of year. Mr. Waterbury will meet with us at an office out there in the end of one of the warehouses behind the hurricane fencing near the vehicle park and the asphalt plant. We can find the place by looking for his car. If we meet him out there at five, we should have plenty of time for uninterrupted talk.”
We got to the area a little early, so we drove down A-1-A for a little way, and when we found a gap in the sour commercial honky-tonk, Meyer pulled over. Down the beach there was a cluster of fat-tire beach buggies, some people swimming. Meyer and I were walking and talking over our plans when a chunky trail bike came growling up behind us, passed us, and cut in and stopped, and a fellow with enough black beard to stuff a small pillow glowered at us and gunned the bike engine. He looked very fit and unfriendly.
“You’ve got a problem?” I asked.
“You are the guys with problems. How come there are so many of you characters so cramped up you got to come creeping around to stare at naked people?”
“Where, where, where!” Meyer said, smiling. “If it’s required, I’ll stare. But as a rule, it’s dull. If you have some graceful young girls cavorting, that is an aesthetic pleasure for a certain amount of time. Doesn’t sand get into the working parts of that thing?”
Meyer is disarming. Maybe a completely frantic flip, stoned blind, could run a knife into him. Otherwise, the belligerent simmer down quickly.
“It’s sealed so it doesn’t happen too bad. But you can mess it up if you try. I thought you were more guys with binoculars, like the last pair. See, if you walk down this way far enough, then you can see around the end of the buggy and see the girls.”
Meyer said, “Excuse me, but I was of the impression that the current belief is that the flaunting of the natural body cures the woes of society by blowing the minds of the repressed.”
“A lot of people think that way. But we’re opposed to the brazen display of the body and public sexuality. We’re here on a pilgrimage mission for the Church of Christ in the Highest. And we have permission to camp on this part of the beach while we’re bringing the word of God to the young people in this area.”
“Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to cover those girls up?” I asked him.
“Four of our sisters have got the crabs, sir, and they are using the salt water and the sunshine to cure them. The drugstore stuff didn’t work at all, hardly.”
Meyer said, “I have worked and studied in primitive countries, and I have caught about every kind of body louse a bountiful nature provides. And I have yet to contract a case that did not respond immediately to plain old vinegar. Have your girls soak their heads, armpits, and their private parts in vinegar. It kills the crabs and kills the eggs, and the itching stops almost immediately.”
“You wouldn’t kid me?” the beard asked.
“It is the most useful and generally unknown information in the modern world.”
“They’ve been going up the walls. Hey. Thanks. And God bless you guys.”
He roared away. I told Meyer he was fantastic. Meyer said that my continual adulation made him uncomfortable, and it was time to see The Man.
We turned around, and where A-1-A curved west, away from the Atlantic beach, Meyer drove straight, down a road that was all crushed shell, ruts, and potholes, and marked private. Soon we came to the entrance pillars, a huge billboard telling of the fantastic city of the future that would rise upon the eleven square miles of sandy waste, where no child need cross a highway to get to school, where everything would be recycled (presumably vitiating any need for cemetery zoning), where clean industry would employ clean, smiling people, where nothing would rust, rot, or decay, where age would not wither nor custom stale the fixed, maniacal smiles on the plastic faces of the future multitude who here would dwell.
Once past the entrance pillars we were on a black velvet vehicle strip (trucks stay to right, off blacktop) which restored to the rental Ford the youth and ease it had lost during a few months, a few thousand miles of being warped, rocked, and crowded by the dozens of temporary owners.
We followed the small, plastic orange arrows and saw some yellow and green and blue arrows on yard-tall sticks marching in other directions, forming a routing code for workmen, planners, delivery people. A small sign in front of a wilderness of dwarf palmetto said starkly: SHOPPING PLAZA E 400,000 SQ. FT. ENCL. Yes, indeed. A multilevel, automated, air-controlled, musicated selling machine, where—to the violins of Mantovani and the chain gang shuffle of the housewife sandals—only those processed foods would be offered which the computer approved of as being saleable in billion-unit production runs.
We turned away from the sea and against the glare of the high western sun saw the construction headquarters, the belly and stack and hoppers of a portable asphalt plant, saw the trucks and spreaders, piles of aggregate, loader, and loading ramp. That area outside the warehouse and office com
pound enclosed by hurricane fencing was deserted, as if a flock of Seabees had slapped blacktop on it and been airlifted out. There was a big, vehicle gate in the hurricane fencing, and it stood wide open. In the fenced area were some above-ground fuel tanks and pumps for the vehicles, outdoor storage of some unidentifiable crated items, a generator building, and six small prefab steel warehouses backed up against a truck loading dock. A dark green Lincoln Continental limousine was parked by the next to the last warehouse.
Meyer parked nearby, and we got out. Meyer said in a low voice, “He’ll be tempted to think it’s some kind of a shakedown. Give us money, and we’ll keep quiet about Dissat and let the public issue go through. But Danielson says Waterbury is honest by choice, not as a matter of necessity or operating policy.”
There were three crude steps up to the cross-braced plywood door. It stood a few inches ajar, the hasp folded back, a thick padlock opened, hanging from the U-bolt in the door frame.
I gave the door a couple of thumps with the underside of my fist. It made a nice booming sound in the metal structure.
“Hello?” said a pleasantly feminine contralto voice, elusively familiar. “Are you the gentlemen who phoned? Come in, please.”
It was dim inside. There were no windows at the end where we entered, only at the far end. We were on an elevated area with a floor made of decking with steps leading down to the slab floor of the warehouse proper. The office was at the far end. The air was very thick and still and hot in the warehouse portion, but I could hear the whine of air-conditioning in the enclosed office at the far end.
“I’m Caroline Stoddard,” she said. “So nice to see you again, Mr. McGee.”
I located her off to the left, standing down on the lower level. At first I thought she was one very big secretary in some kind of slacks outfit, and I blinked again, and my eyes adjusted, and it was Paul Dissat. That odd feeling of having heard the voice before was because of the slight residual accent.
“Be very nice,” he said in his normal voice, “and be very careful. This is a new automatic nailer. They use it to knock the forms together for footings and pilings and so on. That hose goes over there to that pressure tank, and the compressor is automatic, and the generator is on.”
It seemed heavy, the way he held it. He turned it to the side and triggered it. It made a hard, explosive, phutting sound, and nails zinged off the concrete and whanged the metal wall twenty feet away. He turned it toward us again.
“I’m a bad shot,” he said. “But these things spray. At more than six inches they begin to turn. They’d make a ghastly hamburger of your legs, I think. I don’t know why I’ve always been a poor shot. I’m well coordinated otherwise. Harry was a fantastic marksman. I guess it must be a natural gift.”
“Fantastic marksman?” I asked numbly.
“Didn’t you know? You could throw three cans in the air, and with that silly little popgun of his he could hit each one of them twice before they hit the ground without even seeming to aim, just pointing at them by some kind of instinct.”
“When he came to see me—”
“He was coming apart. I was having trouble keeping him quiet. He had to make some mock show of being terribly concerned about Mary so that later people could testify he was almost out of his mind with worry. He said you moved so quickly and startled him so badly, he nearly hit you in the foot.”
“Where is Mr. Waterbury?” Meyer asked in a tired and wistful tone.
“Playing tennis, I should imagine. This is his time of day for it. Cool of the evening. When word came this morning of the request for information from Mr. Willow, I called him back and after a little hesitation he told me one McGee and one Meyer had initiated the request. Don’t keep edging sideways, McGee! It was really a shock. I thought you dead. From drowning or brain damage. You pranced like a sick, ugly stork, and you went floating out at an incredible speed. You are very lucky and very hard to kill.”
“Where is Mr. Waterbury?” Meyer asked.
“You are a bore,” Dissat told him. “I went to his eminence and told him I had confidential information that two sharpshooters were going to try to get a private audience with him and try to frighten him into parting with money. I gave him the names. He told me to handle the problem. I handle a lot of problems for the man. When the information came in from Toronto, he had me take the call. Don’t you think limousines allay all suspicions? They’re so symbolic. Sit on the floor slowly and carefully, Travis. That’s very good. Now, Meyer, make a wide circle around behind him and come down the steps. Fine. Walk over to that coil of wire on the floor next to the pliers and stretch out on your face with your head toward me. Very good. Now, Travis, you can come down and go around Meyer and kneel on the other side of him. Hold it. Now I want you to wire your friend’s wrists together and then his ankles. The better job you do, the better all three of us will get along.”
It was a heavy-gauge iron wire, quite soft and malleable. It was such dim light I felt I could do a fairly sloppy job. Dissat moved back to the wall, and an overhead bank of daylight fluorescent tubes winked on.
“You’re doing a lot more talking, Paul,” I said. “All keyed up, aren’t you? All nerves?”
“Pull that strand tight. There. That’s fine. Let’s say I’m more talkative because you’re more receptive. Would you like to know how the wave action affected Lisa’s body?”
“I bet it was fascinating.”
“It was. I sat and watched the whole thing. After the waves were breaking way in beyond where she was, the outgoing wash started to scoop the sand out from around her until she was almost uncovered. Finally she toppled over onto her left side. Then the waves began digging the sand out from under her, settling her lower and lower and flowing and forming around her as it began covering her. The very last thing I saw of her was her right shoulder, and it looked like a little, shiny brown bowl upside down on the smooth sand. And then that disappeared, too. I imagine that on all beaches the sea is a scavenger, burying the sad, dead things and the ugly litter every time the tide comes and goes. Now one more turn under the other wrist and then twist it and cut it. Good!”
I wished the pliers were heavier. I rehearsed the motions in my mind. Whip the arm up and hurl the pliers at his face, falling forward at the same time to give the throw more velocity and also shield Meyer from the expected hail of nails. I could scramble forward and take the nails in the back and get to his ankles and yank his feet out from under him, provided no nail went head-deep into the spine. And provided he didn’t swing the muzzle down fast enough to drive a close pattern into my skull.
I hesitated, thinking how badly I had missed Harry with the ashtray, and while I hesitated, Dissat moved, making plier-throwing a much worse risk.
He shifted the heavy nailer, swinging the pneumatic hose out of the way, much as a singer manipulates the mike cable. In the bright fluorescence he looked almost theatrically handsome. He was like a color still shot for those strange ads Canadian Club used to use. (I never knew how challenging it would be to hold two men captive with an automatic nailing device until I tried it.)
“Talkative?” he said. “Perhaps. Relief, I suppose. I’ve made a decision and simplified the future. Harry’s money and mine make enough, you know. I’ve sent it to safe places. You two are the last loose ends. I’m taking sick leave. Actually, I’m retiring. Maintaining two identities compounds the risk factor. I told you in Grenada what I learned about myself from Mary Broll and poor Lisa. Now I shall have a chance to devote all my time to exploring it further. Very thoroughly. Very carefully. Mostly it’s a matter of selecting people who might logically disappear of their own accord. I suppose the challenge excites me. So I talk a great deal, don’t I? There’s nothing I can reveal you can’t guess, so it’s not a help to you, is it? We shall explore the matter of the letter you sent from Grenada. As a matter of form. It isn’t really important whether I learn about it or not, so I don’t have to be awfully careful, do I? To keep everything tidy, I might leav
e with a traveling companion. A certain Mrs. Booker. Betsy. Would you know about her? Never mind. His ankles are finished? Walk backward on your knees. Further. Further. Right there. Sit down there, please, and wire your own ankles together, leaving a length of wire between them, the same length as the nylon cord that day on the little beach.”
One uses any small frail idea. From handling the thick, soft wire I guessed that if one bent it back and forth enough times, it would snap. So I took a couple of turns around my ankles, tight enough to keep the wire from turning on my ankle. I made the binding turns, squeezed the wire knots with the plier jaws, nipped away what was left. With luck, management, and timing the wire might part at the squeezed place after enough steps.
He moved to stand over Meyer. He bent over and held the business end of the nailer almost touching the base of Meyer’s spine. “I have this on single fire, McGee. Or single nail. If you can wire your own wrists nicely, I’ll be so pleased with you, I’ll give up the pleasure of finding out just how he’d react to one nail right here. Use ingenuity, McGee. Do a nice job. After Grenada, I take no chances with you.”
I did a nice job. I was even able to nip off the extra wire by wedging the pliers between my forearm and the flooring. By holding my wrists together, exerting pressure, I could make it look as if there was no slack at all. Cheap little tricks never do any good at all, except to give the trickster false hope when he needs it.
Dissat came lithely over, bent, and inspected, kicked the pliers away with the edge of his foot. He grunted with satisfaction and walked over and put the nailer down beside the pressure tank, then swung and flexed his arms. “It got much too heavy,” he said. He picked up a short, thick piece of metal. I thought it was steel pipe with a dull, gleaming finish, but as he walked toward Meyer, flipping it and catching it, I guessed from the way he handled it that it had to be very light metal, probably aluminum bar stock. It spun and smacked neatly into the palm of his hand each time.
A Tan and Sandy Silence Page 23
