“Come on,” Walker said. “Don’t.”
“I’d like to hear you tell me how that’s a good idea.”
“It’s my script,” Walker said. “I gave it my best. I want to see her do it. In fact, I want you and Al to set it up for me.”
“Al doesn’t want to do it, bubba.”
“Do it on your own. Play dumb. Tell him you thought it was O.K.”
“Why don’t you take a rest?”
“I don’t rest,” Walker said.
“I knew you’d pull this,” she said. “Al told me about your lunch. I wasn’t surprised.”
“Did you call them?”
“I called Charlie Freitag’s office and I spoke with Madge Clark,” Shelley said in a lifeless voice. “I guess they’ll put you up for a day or two. Charlie likes you. Charlie likes everybody. They have to work it out with the location people, so it’ll take a little time to fix.” She stared at him with a vexed child’s stare. He avoided her eyes.
“How about giving other people a rest? Like Connie, huh? Or Lee. Why don’t you give her a rest?”
He only shook his head.
“She’s a fucking psycho.”
“That’s your story, Shelley.”
“Oh yes she is, Gordon. She’s just as crazy as catshit and you better leave her alone.”
“I want to see her,” Walker said.
“You belong in a hospital,” Shelley Pearce told him.
He smiled. “Your boss told me the same thing.”
“Sure,” Shelley said. “We’re in league against you.” She got up and walked to the foot of the bed and leaned against the bedboard. “You know what crazy people like most, Gordon? They like to make other people crazy.”
“You have it wrong,” Walker said, “you and Al.”
“Her husband is with her. Her kids too. You want to walk into that?”
“I want to work,” Walker said slowly. “I want to get back into it. I need a project I care about. I need to work with people I care about.”
“You’re so full of shit, Gordon.”
“Don’t be vulgar,” Walker said.
“You’re an assassin, man. You don’t even care if you don’t get laid if you can make some woman unhappy.”
She stood beside the bed shielding her eyes from the harsh lamplight, then turned her back on him, folded her arms and walked toward the balcony with her head down.
“Every time I see you, we talk about your love life, don’t we? We never talk about mine.”
“How’s your love life, Shell?”
“Thanks for asking,” she said.
“Seriously.”
“Seriously?” she asked, rounding on him. “Well, it does just fine without you in it. I get along without you …”
“Very well.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the line. I get along without you very well.” She turned toward him and on her face there was a pained half smile. “It’s absolutely true. No question about it.”
“Good,” Walker said.
She had turned away again, toward the blackness beyond the window; she was singing:
“I get along without you very well, Of course I do.”
She sang it twice over, snapping her fingers, straining for the key. He watched her come over to the bed.
“Wanna sing along with me, Gord?” She raised his chin with her palm. “Except when autumn rain …” she sang. “Da dum de da da dum. Remember, Gord?”
“No.”
“No,” Shelley said. “Naw. Well, that’s good, Gordon. ’Cause then I don’t have to worry about you. Or you about me.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Walker said with a shrug. “People should care.”
“Is that what you think, Gordon?” she asked. “You think people should care?”
“Perhaps,” Walker suggested, “you find the sentiment banal?”
“No, no,” Shelley said. “No, baby, I find it moving. I find all your sentiments moving.” She lay down beside him. “You want to fuck some more? Or you too drunk? Tell momma.”
Slowly Walker leaned forward, took the champagne bottle from beside the bed and drank. “Stop it,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right.” She took the bottle from his hand. “Why her? Why Lee?”
Walker shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You think you invented her,” Shelley said. “You’re going to be sorry.”
“No doubt,” Walker said, and shortly went to sleep.
A sweet expensive tropic darkness had enveloped the Villa Liberia; it was included in the budget and thought to enhance production values. Beyond the tiki torches stood illuminated fences and armed men. These, together with the jacaranda, reminded Lionel of South Africa, of Houghton and home.
To the sound of a gentle surf, Lionel climbed the hotel’s elegantly turned stone pathway until he stood upon a broad parapet that commanded the rows of bungalows and the main buildings with their interior gardens and swimming pools. In the lagoon, below and to his left, a few dories swung at anchor, lighted for night fishing. Southward along the coast, beyond the wire, were the lights of the village.
At the parapet, the path divided. A shallow ramp descended to the shadowy beach; a flight of coral-colored steps climbed toward the casitas on the higher slope. Lionel leaned against the stones of the rail and took out a cigarette.
In the morning he would be flying home — Los Angeles, then Rio, then Johannesburg. He had been eight years away. Neither of his children had seen their grandparents. Nor had they seen the beautiful scourged land, the winter roses, apartheid. Thinking about the trip, he was charged with excitement over the children’s impending discovery and his own return. They would lose their innocence there, pick up a small portion of the real world’s burden, learn fear. It was not all so sanitized there as at Bahía Honda.
He smoked and considered his fear and the fear his children would inherit. He and Lu Anne had talked about the danger. They had agreed it was remote, that the Night of the Long Knives was unlikely to come in that very month of that very season as if only to engulf their children. Luck rarely ran that hard. Yet, he thought, someone’s luck would run out there. Sometime, sooner or later, someone and their children, traveling in that country, would awaken in the night out of luck.
For the moment, it was a phantom terror. He was not afraid for himself or for the kids, not really. His long-term apprehensions were serious ones; for his parents too old to run away again, his married sister and her boys, old friends of all colors with complacent styles or dangerous politics. So many of the people who had shared his youth — in Houghton, Durban, the Cape — had become politically involved and he could only imagine the lives engagement imposed on them.
He was a rich doctor in Los Angeles, a world away; a Hollywood shrink, a cliché Married to an actress whose name would be vaguely familiar in Pietermaritzburg or Maclear or Aliwal North.
Then it struck him how happy, how joyful he was to be going away. He lit another cigarette and watched the twinkling dory lights.
He stood and smoked and considered the petty emotional squalor which was his present stock-in-trade. So aroused was he that it took him some little time to understand that the true source of his excitement — his happiness, in fact — was that he would be getting away from her. From her closely reasoned madness, her nightmare undersea beauty and deluded eyes.
He was startled from this insight by the sound of a woman’s laughter. The laughter was so loud and confident and heedless, so alien to his lonely despair that it surprised him to anger. Looking up the slope, he saw in the fairy glow of the patios a blond woman with her back toward him. She was seated on one of the low, tiled walls that surrounded the whirlpool baths and she appeared to be naked. So far as he could make out, she was wide-shouldered and slim-waisted, attractive in the latest of California styles, the style which was orthodoxy on that production. The girls all looked a bit alike to Lionel. Drawing nearer, he saw that there were two men sitting chest deep in the whirlpool on which the woman rested.