Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  First, “Loading from disk.”

  Then, “Checking disk.”

  “Checking network.”

  “Starting system services.”

  Was this fun or what, a NeXT in high gear?

  Something titled “Directory Browser” settled onto the screen. Under it, there was a long list of one-word titles. Browser? Jeez, computerspeak was turning mundane. Whatever happened to “interface” and “IBM-compatible”?

  I gathered I was supposed to select something from the “Directory Browser,” and move on to the next step.

  Uh huh. I tried tapping keys on the keyboard, but nothing happened.

  Hovering in the corner of the screen was a tiny arrow. Intuition told me the arrow was the little devil that handled the selecting chore. But how did I make the damn thing move?

  To the right of the computer, resting on the table, there was a small rectangular gizmo. It was in the usual black, and it fed into the computer through a cable arrangement. Something about the little gizmo … what was it? The rodent? The rat? The bug? Wait a minute, it was the mouse. I’d picked up that piece of dope somewhere along the line from one of the computer-friendly lawyers. The mouse acted as a sort of remote-control guide to the arrow on the screen.

  Right.

  I began to move the mouse around, and, presto, magic, computer science at work, the arrow moved around the screen.

  Oh-kay.

  The mouse had a button on top. I moved the arrow on the screen to a title under “Directory browser,” and pushed the button on the mouse. Did I know what I was doing? Hell, no, but at least things were happening on the screen.

  One by one, positioning the arrow and clicking the mouse, I got a series of lines of type popping up on the screen. I rattled through “NeXT Developer” and “Demos” and “Score Player.”

  Fascinating. I hadn’t a clue what it all meant.

  Could I penetrate into “Operation Freeload”?

  Well, anything was possible.

  On the screen, I had somehow summoned up a curious list of titles. The list was stacked vertically, and it read, “clouds, eagle, fish, gravity, holey, hotspin, mosaic …”

  “Holey?”

  I moved the arrow to “holey” and clicked the mouse.

  All of a sudden it was like Chicago and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre on the screen. Bullet holes, authentic-looking bullet holes, shreds around the edges and everything, studded across the screen, and the sounds of gunfire erupted into the room.

  I jumped in the chair and spilled vodka on my pants.

  “Holey?” Bullet holes! Was this a computer joke? Swell sense of humour, guys.

  The screen went quiet. I mopped my pants and poured a new drink.

  The weird list was back on the screen. “Clouds, eagle, fish, gravity …”

  Was any of this going to lead me to Operation Freeload? Or had I stumbled into some kind of computer backwater? I couldn’t fathom what was happening, but there didn’t appear to be any turning back. Where could I turn back to? I pointed the arrow at another entry on the list, “Bach fugue.” Well, why not? And I pushed the mouse’s button. I got sound again, music this time. Or something approximating music. A Bach fugue came out of the computer, but the guy at the piano wasn’t Glenn Gould. In fact, the closer I listened, the more I realized it wasn’t a person at the piano and it wasn’t a piano. The computer was playing a synthesized brand of Bach. Disillusionment was beginning to replace the euphoria I’d had when I embarked on this journey into the computer universe. The answer to Operation Freeload lurked somewhere inside the computer, but did I want to have a relationship with an instrument that sullied the works of a revered eighteenth-century German composer? Gimme a break. I went back to the oddball list and pointed the arrow at “fish.” No surprises there. A fish swam across the screen. Actually a drawing of a fish. Lot of detail in the drawing too. Same thing with “eagle.” The eagle swooped and dived and generally behaved like a patriotic American bird. I drank some more vodka and pondered the wisdom of pushing ahead. I could be sitting at the damn machine all night and never come within hailing distance of Operation Freeload. Or I could go home and think about rounding up someone who would handle the computer detail for me.

  I positioned the arrow opposite “gravity” and clicked the mouse.

  Everything on the screen bounced and vibrated. Words and symbols and boxes trembled as if an earthquake had struck.

  Then — zip — nothing. The screen went blank, nothing except a sea of off-white.

  Was this a silent metaphor? Was there a hidden message in the damn blank screen? Was the computer telling me to sign up for a course at George Brown College? Study up your Disk Drive 101 and come back in a year, fella.

  “Well, thank you very much,” I said to the NeXT.

  Talking out loud to an inanimate object. Bad omen. Maybe a sign I should bid adieu to the NeXT. But not to the disk. I pushed the Power button, and the machine went into another round of hums and drones. As they dwindled toward silence, the light on the screen faded to black and the slot on the annex box beside the main computer burped out the disk. Good old Operation Freeload, whatever it was.

  I stuck the disk in my pocket, made one more small vodka, and organized myself to head home. The hell with technology.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At home, I phoned Pamela.

  “This is the Cartwright residence.”

  It wasn’t the housekeeper who answered, not unless her voice had dropped an octave since the afternoon. It was a man on the line, sounding as pear-toned and snooty as Arthur Treacher used to in the movies. I gambled it wasn’t Archie being funny, or even being serious, and asked for Mrs. Cartwright.

  “May I say who is calling, sir?”

  “The credit manager at Creed’s.”

  “One moment, please.”

  Pamela took less than one moment to get to the phone.

  “Is this a joke?” she said into the receiver.

  “It’s Crang.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Was that a real butler who answered?”

  “Real part-time butler. He comes in when we have a dinner party. Which is what’s going on right now. Why are you calling? And speak fast.”

  “Jamie’s got a NeXT in his den.”

  “A birthday present from me.”

  “What’s he do with it?”

  “Plugs into the Pentagon for all I know,” Pamela said. Behind her, I could hear the subdued buzz of the party.

  “There are little square disks that go with it. With the NeXT.”

  “Optical disks. Get the terminology right, Crang. Those, if you want to know, hold words and pictures and sound. A person could store a whole novel on one disk, a James Michener, though God knows why anyone would want to.”

  “Gee,” I said, “you’re practically an expert.”

  “I couldn’t help picking up something, the way Jamie rabbits on about that bloody NeXT.”

  “Did he ever rabbit on about an optical disk labelled Operation Freeload?”

  “Should he have?”

  “I was hoping.”

  “He didn’t, and, listen, couldn’t this wait? The dinner party’s really for Archie’s sake, business friends of his. It isn’t polite for the hostess to ignore them. Or good for Archie’s business either.”

  “Michel Rolland, heard of him?”

  “Who’s he, the director of Operation Freeload?”

  “He was in Jamie’s apartment when I went over. He’s from Monaco. A guy in his late thirties, looks prosperous, obviously tough, a cagey sort of cookie.”

  “Hold on.”

  She must have put a hand over the receiver. At my end, I got muffled half-words. One of the half-words was “hole.” I had an inkling the other half was “ass.”

  Pamela came
back on the line, unmuffled.

  “Archie’s getting antsy,” she said.

  “Did I half-hear you describe me as an asshole?”

  “You half-heard me describe the credit manager at Creed’s as an asshole who’s bothering the wrong Mrs. Cartwright at an hour when sensible credit managers should be in the bosom of their families.”

  “I got more on Jamie,” I said. “We should meet again. Not for tea.”

  “Whatever you’ve been doing in the last few hours, Crang, you’d better not have blown my problem into major proportions. This isn’t a criminal case, you know.”

  “Those are just about the same words Swotty used at lunch.”

  “Well, Daddy is usually right.”

  “A meeting?”

  Pamela didn’t hesitate. “Saturday at five-thirty,” she said. “The Courtyard.”

  She hung up.

  I spent another five minutes on the phone talking to a young criminal lawyer I know, one of the new computer-friendly breed. He said he’d be free to look at the optical disk and its contents Sunday morning. I thanked him, and thought about hiding the disk until Sunday.

  If the disk was important enough to conceal in Jamie’s apartment, it merited the same treatment in mine. I moseyed around the living room and out to the kitchen checking for a hiding place that qualified as cunning. In the end, after fifteen minutes of moseying, I settled on the white globe around the overhead light in my bedroom. I stood on a chair from the kitchen, unscrewed the globe, took out the light bulb, dropped in the disk, and re-screwed the globe. Maybe not out-and-out cunning, but fairly crafty.

  I phoned Annie and got her answering machine. Annie was busy with movies. She had to see six or seven before we left for France and put reviews of them on tape for Metro Morning to use in her absence. I made a sandwich out of three-grain bread and some turkey slices that were just beginning to harden at the edges. A rerun of L.A. Law was on TV. I watched it, ate the sandwich, and helped it along with a Wyborowa and soda. When L.A. Law ended, I tried to decide whether I identified more with Jimmy Smits or Corbin Bernsen. Tough call. I was still working on the decision when I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On Friday morning, I called Trumball Fraser. He said sure, he was free for lunch. Did I know Coaster’s? Little place over by the St. Lawrence Market? Trum said he was a regular there. I didn’t know Coaster’s, but I knew Trum. When he said he was a regular, it meant Coaster’s must be an out-of-the-way spot where Trum could have long lunches and longer drinks without other Cayuga & Granark employees crowding his noon hour. I said I’d meet him at twelve-thirty.

  Trum Fraser was a lawyer about my age. Professionally, he had two strikes against him, his father and his older brother. They were both civil litigation lawyers whose names looked incomplete unless the adjective “distinguished” was inserted up front. Distinguished counsel Justin and Roger Fraser. They argued before the Supreme Court of Canada about every other week and had their cases written up in the Dominion Law Reports. Trum got the short end of the stick in the family when it came to the law. He had most of the brains but not much of the ambition. He took the path of least resistance: a job as an in-house lawyer at Cayuga & Granark. He read contracts, wrote memos on changes in laws that affected trust companies, nothing terrifically demanding in the legal line. If litigation loomed, a lawsuit against C&G, Trum briefed counsel outside the trust company, someone like his distinguished father or his distinguished older brother. They ran with the case in court while Trum stayed snug in his office at C&G and had lengthy lunches at Coaster’s.

  The weather had turned close to balmy. I left the Volks at home. Nice day for a walk. Tulips were starting to bloom red and yellow in the boulevards that divide University Avenue. Secretaries and guys in shirt sleeves ate lunches out of paper bags on the benches around the plaza behind the Toronto-Dominion Centre. And in the little park next to the Flatiron Building, people reclined in the grass with their faces up to the sun, getting a head start on their summer tans. If I were Gene Kelly, I’d have broken out the taps for a chorus of “It Might as Well Be Spring.”

  Coaster’s was down a short sloping street that ran alongside the market. Delivery trucks jammed up the traffic, dropping off crates of lettuce and sides of beef to the vendors in the market building. The restaurant was on the opposite side of the street and up two flights of stairs. I climbed the two flights. The room was agreeably ramshackle and felt like it’d be easy on the noontime nerves. The only flaw was the place’s sound system and the owner’s lousy taste in tapes. Willie Nelson was whining about another cheatin’ woman.

  Trum Fraser had a table for two beside one of the windows. The table and chairs were like the rest of the restaurant, somewhere between unpretentious and rickety.

  “Know what I like about this joint?” Trum said.

  “Everything except the music.”

  Trum listened as if he were taking in Willie’s droning for the first time.

  “Not that shit,” he said. “What I like, the bartender here understands the connection between the words bathtub and martini.”

  “Makes them ample, does he?”

  “The guy must be American,” Trum said. “Ever notice how unsatisfied you feel after a Canadian martini?”

  Trum’s face was that of a man on a lifelong search for the satisfying martini. Flushed cheeks, veins beginning to break, nose headed in the direction of W.C. Fields’. He was about thirty pounds too heavy, stuffed into his brown suit, the collar of his white shirt digging a crease in his neck. But as lushes went, Trum was a thinking man’s lush. I’d never seen him drunk. Never seen him when his brain wasn’t taking care of business.

  “You could’ve had it made, Crang,” Trum said to me. He must have arrived five or ten minutes earlier. The level of the martini in his hand was two-thirds of the way down the bathtub.

  “If you’re talking about life in general, I’m not doing too badly,” I said. “If it’s the law, I never counted on getting it made. Just getting a light grip on it is sufficient.”

  “I mean business, the trust company, good old C&G,” Trum said. “After you got off the phone this morning, I was thinking, when you were married to Pamela, Jesus, if you’d played your cards right, you’d be up there on the thirty-second floor today, right down the hall from Whetherhill.”

  “You know how much fun that’d be, Trum?”

  “Fun, hell. Think of the power.”

  “About as much fun as you in partnership with the other two Frasers.”

  “Oh, low blow. I’d be honoured to serve alongside my papa and sibling.”

  “Bull.”

  “Fortunately they never asked me.”

  A waitress showed up at our table.

  “Connie, my little petunia,” Trum said to her, holding out his empty martini glass, “I trust you’re keeping count.”

  “When I come back,” Connie said, “it’ll be with the third.”

  “What time’d you get here, Trum?” I asked.

  “Noon,” Connie answered for him. “Stroke of. As usual.”

  I asked for a glass of white wine. The menu was printed in small type on the place mats. Trum said he’d have the Friday special. I went for a dish billed as half an appetizer plate.

  “Speaking of your shop,” I said to Trum, “how’s business?”

  “Be specific.”

  “Jamie Haddon.”

  “There you go, old buddy, another case of nepotism. But he’s smarter than you, Crang, young Jamie is. He has tied himself to old Whetherhill’s coattails, and he’s not about to let go.”

  “I think you got your metaphors mixed up there, Trum.”

  “Jamie also knows which side his bread is buttered on.”

  Connie made the round trip with my white wine and Trum’s third martini.

  “Leaving aside family advantages,” I
asked Trum, “how is Jamie on his own merits, in your humble opinion?”

  “Well, one talent of his, he’s hot stuff in the boardroom. Very organized with the reports when his turn comes around. Doesn’t say a whole lot, but he drops the odd harmless witticism. Knows how to butter up the guy in the chair without brown-nosing. He’s a political guy, Jamie.”

  “Young man going places is what you’re telling me?”

  “Listen, I’ll lay it out for you from the top. C&G isn’t a bad place to work, not for Jamie, not for me, not for anybody. You think of it, we’re talking about the last of the old-school trust companies in this country that hasn’t been gobbled up by a bank or some marauding American. The company is solid as a rock, and it’s Whetherhill, him and his family, who built it. Swotty’s idea of a lavish salary doesn’t happen to coincide with mine, but there are other benefits. Stock options, smart people to work with, and God knows the place is going to be there forever. That’s all Whetherhill’s accomplishment, and you’re asking about Jamie Haddon, well, Swotty treats the kid like he’s seen the future and Jamie Haddon’s in it.”

  Connie plunked down two plates. The Friday special was chili. My half appetizer plate held a full complement of fish, crustaceans, and molluscs. Shrimp, lobster, herring, two oysters.

  “Computers,” I said to Trum, moving along my list of topics. “I assume C&G is chock-a-block with them.”

  “I love those suckers.”

  “You personally? You use a computer?”

  “I got a little honey right beside my desk. Every day I ask myself, how did I ever work, how did I live, before whoever invented computers invented them.”

  “You should understand this is coming as a cruel disappointment to me, Trum. I had you down for a fellow Luddite.”

  Trum pointed his fork at me.

  “I got something I want to give to my secretary … follow me on this, Crang, it’s a good example of what my computer does for me … and the secretary isn’t at her desk. Do I chase after her, wait around, look for another girl? Hell, no, I bang the message, the memo, whatever, into my computer and press a button and, zip, it’s in her computer. Or, get this, I’m setting up a short meeting with a couple of other people, say some guys two floors down from me. Am I gonna take the elevator, and it ends up these guys are out of the office, in a conference, something like that? You kidding me? I do the whole arrangement on the computer. Never leave my desk. Those examples, I save myself, easy, thirty minutes out of every day at the office.”