“Margo? Margo? Margo!” Margo Roker’s eyelids vibrate as if in REM. A groan squirms in her larynx. She gulps for air, then her eyes are wide open, blinking in confusion and alarm at the tubes in her nose. Hester Van Zandt is also panicky, but with hope. “Margo! Can you hear me? Margo!”
The patient’s eyes settle on her old friend, and she lets her head sink into her pillow. “Yes, I can hear you, Hester, you’re shouting in my goddamn ear.”
70
Luisa Rey surveys the October 1 edition of the Western Messenger amid the steamy clatter of the Snow White Diner.
LLOYD HOOKS SKIPS $250,000 BAIL
PRESIDENT FORD VOWS TO “ROOT OUT CROOKS WHO BRING IGNOMINY TO CORPORATE AMERICA”
A BYPD spokesman confirmed the newly appointed CEO of Seaboard Power Inc. and former Federal Power Commissioner Lloyd Hooks has fled the country, forfeiting the quarter-million-dollar bail posted Monday. The latest twist to “Seaboardgate” comes a day after Hooks swore to “defend my integrity and the integrity of our great American company against this pack of nefarious lies.” President Ford entered the fray at a White House press conference, condemning his former adviser and distancing himself from the Nixon appointee. “My administration makes no distinction between lawbreakers. We will root out the crooks who bring ignominy to corporate America and punish them with the utmost severity of the law.”
Lloyd Hooks’s disappearance, interpreted by many observers as an admission of guilt, is the latest twist in a series of revelations triggered by a Sept. 4 incident at Cape Yerbas Marina Royale in which Joe Napier and Bill Smoke, security officers at Seaboard Inc.’s controversial Swannekke Island atomic power stations, shot each other. Eyewitness Luisa Rey, correspondent to this newspaper, summoned police to the crime scene, and the subsequent investigation has already spread to last month’s killing of British atomic engineer and Seaboard consultant Dr. Rufus Sixsmith, the crash of former Seaboard CEO Alberto Grimaldi’s Learjet over Pennsylvania two weeks ago, and an explosion in Third Bank of California in downtown B.Y. which claimed the lives of two people. Five directors at Seaboard Power have been charged in connection with the conspiracy, and two have committed suicide. Three more, including Vice CEO William Wiley, have agreed to testify against Seaboard Corporation.
The arrest of Lloyd Hooks two days ago was seen as vindication of this newspaper’s support for Luisa Rey’s exposé of this major scandal, initially dismissed by William Wiley as “libelous fantasy culled from a spy novel and wholly unworthy of a serious response.” . . . Cont. p. 2, Full Story p. 5, Comment p. 11.
“Front page!” Bart pours Luisa’s coffee. “Lester would be mighty proud.”
“He’d say I’m just a journalist doing my job.”
“Well, exactly, Luisa!”
Seaboardgate is no longer her scoop. Swannekke swarms with reporters, Senate investigators, FBI agents, county police, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Swannekke B is in mothballs; C is suspended.
Luisa gets Javier’s postcard out again. It shows three UFOs zooming under the Golden Gate Bridge:
Hi Luisa, it’s OK here but we live in a house so I can’t jump across balconies when I visit my friends. Paul (that’s Wolfman but Mom says I can’t call him that anymore though he kind of likes it when I do) is taking me to a stamp fare tommorrow, then I can choose what paint I want for my bedroom and he cooks better than Mom. Saw you again on TV last night and in the papers. Don’t forget me just because you’re fameous now, OK? Javi
The other item of mail is an airmailed package from Megan Sixsmith, sent in response to Luisa’s request. It contains the final eight letters Robert Frobisher wrote to his friend Rufus Sixsmith. Luisa uses a plastic knife to slit the package open. She removes one of the yellowed envelopes, postmarked October 10, 1931, holds it against her nose, and inhales. Are molecules of Zedelghem Château, of Robert Frobisher’s hand, dormant in this paper for forty-four years, now swirling in my lungs, in my blood?
Who is to say?
Letters from Zedelghem
ZEDELGHEM
10th—X—1931
Sixsmith,
Ayrs in bed for three days, fogged with morphine, calling out in pain. V. distracting and distressing. Dr. Egret warns J. and me not to confuse Ayrs’s newfound joie de vivre in music with actual health and forbids V.A. to work from his sickbed. Dr. Egret gives me the creeps. Never met a quack whom I didn’t half-suspect of plotting to do me in as expensively as he could contrive.
Buried in music of my own. Cruel to say it, but when Hendrick arrives at breakfast and tells me, “Not today, Robert,” I’m almost relieved. Spent last night working on a rumbling ’cello allegro lit by explosive triplets. Silence punctuated by breakneck mousetraps. Remember the church clock chiming three A.M. “I heard an owl,” Huckleberry Finn says, “away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.” Always haunted me, that line. Next thing I know, Lucille was ballooning sheets of bright morning by the window. Morty Dhondt was downstairs, she told me, ready for our excursion. Thought I was dreaming, but no. My face was crusted over, and for a second I couldn’t have told you my name. Grunted I didn’t want to go anywhere with Morty Dhondt, I wanted sleep, I have work to do. “But last week you arranged to go motoring today!” objected Lucille.
I remembered. I washed, put on fresh clothes, and shaved. Sent Lucille to find the houseboy who’d polished my shoes, etc. Down in the breakfast room, the amiable jewel merchant was smoking a cigar and reading The Times. “Don’t hurry,” he told me, when I apologized for my tardiness. “Where we’re going no one will notice if we’re early or late.” Mrs. Willems brought me some kedgeree, and J. breezed in. She hadn’t forgotten what day it was and gave me a bunch of white roses, tied with a black ribbon, and smiled, just like her old self.
Dhondt drives a claret 1927 Bugatti Royale Type 41, a real spanker, Sixsmith. Goes like a greased devil—nearly fifty on the metaled highway!—and boasts a Klaxon hooter that Dhondt fires off at the least provocation. Beautiful day for a grim journey. The nearer to the Front one goes, naturally, the more blasted the countryside becomes. Beyond Roeselare, the land grows crater-scarred, crisscrossed with collapsing trenches and pocked with burnt patches where not even weeds take root. The few trees still standing here and there are, when you touch them, lifeless charcoal. The skein of green on the land seems less nature revivified, more nature mildewed. Dhondt shouted over the engine’s roar that farmers still daren’t plow the land for fear of unexploded ordnance. One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground. Any moment, the order to charge would be given, and infantrymen well up from the earth, brushing off the powdery soil. The thirteen years since Armistice seemed only as many hours.