“All right,” Feldman said, “I’ll see the sites. Die. Die.”
“Listen to what the developer tells you. It’s important.”
“Die,” Feldman said.
Feldman with his buyers — there were more men than women now (the war over and no more shortages, it being everywhere a nineteenth or even twentieth fat year, Feldman’s girls had been replaced, no longer traded away in his name their ultimate quiff pro quo, happily married for years, raising kids; really, he thought, it was astonishing how many of them had married the very men who had once been their clients, the boys stirred to sacrament by the premise of unvirtue). They were in a private dining room of the best hotel for the Quarterly Lunch. Back from the Coasts, returned from the factories and showrooms and warehouses for the ceremony, they felt, he supposed, in what was after all their home base, somehow even further than the miles they had traveled, because they were all there together, like correspondents returned from the fronts, knowing some special sense of colleague that lent distance. Specialists, authorities, one big happy family with private knowledge of the skies over Texas, Twin Cities’ economy, what’s moving in Portland. Today their mysterious brotherhood even deepened by a still unconfirmed report of a brother downed, Chester Credit of Furniture, alleged to be aboard a plane that had crashed outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. One of our aircraft is missing.
Feldman taps the cut-glass water goblet with the edge of his butter knife, rises to speak, their gloomed attention making him cozy, snuggish, solemn-comfy in the orderly business reality, actually at home, and them too — you couldn’t tell him otherwise — in the reserved room, reassured by the deep brown walls and the dark carpets and the white tablecloths and black waiters and, oh yes, this too, even Credit’s empty chair. He waves off the white sleeve of a waiter offering a dish of ice cream. He speaks to him in a soft voice, making an arrangement. “Don’t bother with that now, Waiter, please. I have to speak to these people.” The waiter looks at him. “If it melts, it melts, pal, okay? My responsibility. Thank you very much.” He clears his throat, a joy rising in it with the phlegm. He loves saying something important. “Ladies and gentlemen, my dear associates,” he begins formally, pleased as always by the rhetoric he brings to these occasions (his Secretary of State diction, as he thinks of it). “In private conversations just prior to this luncheon, I have already given some cursory briefing to a few of you regarding the absence of Chester Credit. I did not intend that my unfortunate news be imparted to some rather than all, and if I may be permitted a rather bitter paradox, it pleases me to see all of you so solemn. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, least of all myself, and I take it that the seriousness of your composure is an indication that you have all been apprised of my fears for Chester.
“Regarding the crash itself, I have very little additional to report at this time. During salad I was in telephone contact with our Miss Lane, and she tells me the situation in Charlotte is still indefinite. Let me emphasize that there has still been no official confirmation of the crash — repeat — there has still been no official confirmation of the crash. All we know for certain is that a check with the tower in Pittsburgh indicates that Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven is seven hours overdue. My informants tell me that an airliner’s instrumentation, and that would include its radio apparatus, frequently kicks out during the traumatic jar of a forced landing. But this ought not to comfort us very much, as none of the control towers between Charlotte and Pittsburgh report having had any communication with Flight Number Eighty-seven. The reflex s.o.p. for a pilot forced to bring his ship down is first to declare his intent over a special emergency frequency. Additionally, the weather throughout the East has been almost preternaturally clear for the past eighteen hours with an unlimited ceiling. Thus, unfavorable climatological murk can have nothing to do with the plane’s disappearance. For all these reasons, we can only conclude that the ‘fireball’ reportedly discerned by the two farmers fifty miles from Charlotte probably was Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven. I can extend no reasonable hope that these men may have been mistaken.
“Half an hour ago, during meat, Charlotte Airport was still unwilling to release its passenger manifest for Flight Eighty-seven. Coast Airlines was quite as adamant. I’m not blaming them for their reticence. Indeed, as I understand it, they are bound by law to maintain silence until it is positively ascertained that there has been a crash. Frankly, they have been most cooperative, and I for one am proud as hell of both of them. I’ve obtained their promise to release the manifest to us as soon as it’s made available, even before the agonizing rituals of positive identification and notification of next of kin, which, strictly speaking, they are obliged by law, though not, I gather, so stringent a one as the other, to observe. Their cooperation here could save us literally days of anxiety, and so, even under the oppression of our feelings, I don’t think we ought to let this occasion of still another instance of the mutual courtesy and respect between one American industry and another go by without acknowledging it. Whatever happens, I am tomorrow sending my personal letter of appreciation both to the executives of the Charlotte Airport and the executives of Coast Airlines.
“I want at this time to commend, too, Mrs. Beatrice P. Lisbon, secretary to Herbert Kronenberger of Dixie Chair, for her untiring efforts during this crisis. Not everyone knows this, but it has been chiefly Mrs. Lisbon with whom we have been in communication in Charlotte, and Miss Lane apprises me that the woman has been unstinting in her efforts to keep on top of the situation. I understand that she has put in numerous calls to the Coast Airlines people and the C.A.B. people and the Charlotte tower people, some of them during her lunch hour at perhaps her own expense. From what Miss Lane tells me, I am thoroughly satisfied that we could not have had a more selfless anchor man in Charlotte, and I mean at some not too distant date to formalize our appreciation with a small token from one of our departments.
“Now I don’t mean to extend to you here something which might ultimately turn out to be a deluded hope. We’re adults, and we must accommodate ourselves to adult reality. However, I would be finessing my responsibilities and would perhaps irretrievably undercut any future claim to candor, or claims on your candor, did I not acknowledge now one tiny morsel of possibility that Chester may not in fact have been aboard Coast Airlines’—let’s face it — FATAL Flight Number Eighty-seven at all.” Feldman paused. “Would you close the doors please, Waiter? Very good. Thank you very much.” He leaned forward. “What I am about to tell you must go no further, ladies and gentlemen. Should it turn out to all our infinite relief that Flight Number Eighty-seven did not crash, or that it did crash but that Chester was not aboard it, the information I shall impart must remain privileged. I wouldn’t bring it up at all, save that in matters of life and death, those concerned, even only peripherally concerned, are entitled to all the facts, that they might more intelligently apprehend the dangers. Not even Chester himself — if he’s alive — must ever know you know this…Very well, then. Here’s the situation.
“On first hearing reports of the alleged crash, I had Miss Codlish in Payroll research Mr. Credit’s expense sheets. This was a routine measure, intended merely to provide us with the name of Chester’s Charlotte hotel. Many things can happen, people oversleep, people miss planes. I wanted it confimed that Chester had or had not checked out. Well — and this struck me as peculiar — there just is no record of a Charlotte hotel, not a single voucher for the last five years. I had Miss Codlish double-check — with the same result. His dinners are accounted for, mind you, his lunches are, and there were even some significantly costly breakfasts, but not a single hotel or motel bill. It was upon discovering this that I first contacted Mrs. Lisbon, or rather had Miss Lane contact her, to find out if Chester had divulged his plans for the evening. You all travel. You know the small talk that goes on between a buyer and a secretary. Evidently she at first denied any access to Chester’s confidences, but from a certain tone she took, Miss Lane suspected she was concealing something. She pressed her on this, and several things came out. It seems that on one of Chester’s Charlotte trips five years ago Mr. Kronenberger gave a party. I know Herbert Kronenberger and have always found him to be a gracious, hospitable man, not one to stand idly by while a lonely buyer fends for himself in a strange city. He would invite Chester to his party. It would be a typical Kronenberger gesture. Mrs. Lisbon was at the party too — perhaps as innocent company for Chester; that part isn’t clear. What is clear is that evidently Chester had quite a lot to drink. Let’s not mince words: Chester was drunk. Rather than let him go back to his hotel by himself, one of the guests—not Mrs. Lisbon, and it’s chiefly this which leads me to suspect that Mrs. Lisbon had been invited to the party earlier and not merely as the extra woman to Chester’s extra man — volunteered to take him back. He left with a Mrs. Charlote DeMille, a prominent Charlotte divorcée, and there is some reason to believe he spent the night with her. What happened, evidently, is that in the car on the way home, Chester vomited all over himself. (Many of you will remember his behavior during the store’s tenth-anniversary celebration some years ago.) You can appreciate Charlotte DeMille’s position. She could not enter the hotel with him, and he was in no condition to negotiate the lobby by himself. Even to discharge him into the custody of a doorman would be to compromise herself irrevocably. (Charlotte is not the biggest city in the world, and this woman is, as I say, a prominent person there.) All evidence points to the probability that she drove him directly to her own home. There, from what I can gather from Miss Lane, who pieced it together from the discreet Mrs. Lisbon, Mrs. DeMille helped the helpless Chester to the bathroom next to her master bedroom, there being only a half-bath on the main floor, and a tub, in which she must have feared he might drown, in the guest bathroom on the second floor — helped Chester to the bathroom next her master bedroom, and undressed him and put him under the shower. Then, perhaps seeing that he was still helpless and that the vomit was not coming off, she found it necessary to lather him herself, and one thing led to another and she began to lather his penis and testicles. (Mrs. DeMille is a healthy woman, ladies and gentlemen, a healthy divorcée with the appetites and needs — I say needs—of any healthy woman.) All indications are that the warm water, the creamy lather, the concupiscent silences and darknesses of the divorce-lonely house created in Chester an erection a foot and a half long, and to make a long story short — no pun intended — Chester and Mrs. DeMille have been lovers for the past five years.