'Dons?' Hartang whispered hoarsely to Schnabel. 'You never said nothing about dons being here. Who are the dons for fucksake?'
'Not that sort of don. It is Cambridge slang for the Fellows of the College. Like the Dean and the professors and so on.'
'And I'm the top don?'
'You are the Master. They won't even call you Mr Hartang. They will address you as Master. It is a great honour.'
'Five hundred million of honour, Schnabel.'
'So it's your pension fund out of petty cash, Master. Look at it that way.'
Hartang looked at it a great many ways, but his mind had already been made up for him. He still had Transworld Television Productions and he would never be poor. All the same, as he waited in his bleak suite in Docklands he regretted the days when he could telephone someone on the other side of the world in the dead of night and talk and the someone would listen dutifully to whatever he had to say and their fear would reassure Hartang that he had achieved power. That was out of the question now. They, the ubiquitous 'They', would pick up the call and even with the scrambler would know every word he was saying and analyse even his most guarded statements. He knew it just as surely as he knew his various names were being pronounced in police interrogation rooms in Rome and Palermo, New York and Los Angeles and in towns in South America by men who wanted to finger him just as he had fingered them. They couldn't, of course, because the computer disks had been found in a garden in Colombia and the death of Dos Passos had been announced in the papers and on television. He was said to have died in a car crash after a week in custody. On his way home after such a short time being questioned in Bogota Dos Passos has a blowout? And the disks with all that info were in his garden. Just went to show you couldn't trust nobody…anybody, these days.
There was another question that obsessed him. Whoever had set this thing up had known precisely what they were doing. There hadn't been anything accidental about it. They had seen Kudzuvine coming and had used him because he was a cretin and by using him they could get to Hartang. He didn't doubt that for a moment. And they had targeted Hartang himself because it suited more ends than one: they'd taken him because he knew the source, the sums and where the money went which no one else, but no one else, knew. For why? Because the information, all the information, was in his head or so broken into completely unconnected pieces that no amount of putting figures together by the most sophisticated computer, one doing sixty billion calculations a second like the Cray they were said to be developing, would be able to find the answers. Because it wouldn't recognize any conceivable pattern. Or even if it found the patterns-and for all he knew it might could-the pattern itself wouldn't make sense, wouldn't be recognizably, different from all the other patterns it came up with because the numbers it needed weren't there to be fed into it. Only in the multiple mnemonics of his own mind were the connections to be found and when he died or got Alzheimer's the full picture would fade with him. He'd got the idea from a crazy in an automotive dump outside Scranton looking for the meaning of life. That was what he had said, 'It's got to be here, the meaning of life,' and he'd picked up a hub-cap and laughed. 'Could be this is it. Could be, couldn't it?' And Hartang had agreed that the meaning of life could be a hub-cap from an old Hudson Terraplane they didn't make any more. Yeah, that crazy had shown him the way to hide what needed to be hidden in the confusion of calculated madness.
So 'They' had targeted the right man and had 'taken' him, and in return he had given them enough of what they wanted without giving everything away. But who had 'taken' him? Who had set this trap up? Had to be a government agency. Couldn't be anything else the way they treated him nice. Scary just the same, being treated that nice. No use worrying himself sick.
Edgar Hartang turned on the tape recorder and began his elocution lesson again. Got to remember to speak properly. Got to learn to keep the 'fucks' and 'shitsakes' out.
36
Skullion was sitting on the verandah staring grimly out over the garden and the mudflats at the sea beyond when Mrs Morphy took Purefoy and Mrs Ndhlovo through the house.
'I have to say he's a very difficult one is Mr S,' she told them. 'The others, Dr V and Mr L, well they have their nasty little ways which is only to be expected at their age but I wouldn't say they were unfriendly. Just a bit messy and so on, you understand, but as I say to Alf, he' s my husband, when you get to their age, not that he's likely to the way he smokes and drinks, you'll be the same, and I hope there's someone around like me to clear up after you. I mean the cost of the laundry. Of course we've got a machine but…'
'When you say he's unfriendly…' said Purefoy to change the subject.
'You'll see for yourself,' said Mrs Morphy. 'Downright rude, but then he's only been here a short time and he hasn't got used to it yet. But he will. They all do because we don't stand on ceremony here and never have. Just the same, Mr S hardly opens his mouth and when he does what comes out isn't fit for decent hearing.' She paused at the glass doors of the verandah and said. 'I won't come out if you don't mind. He'd only tell me to…well, you know what.'
She slouched back into the kitchen and left them standing in what was evidently the dining-room. Next door a television was on. Purefoy and Mrs Ndhlovo looked out at the dark figure in the bowler hat hunched in his wheelchair on the verandah. This was not the Porterhouse Park they had expected but a red-brick house standing on a little promontory by itself and with a dilapidated wooden fence separating it from the gorse and tufted grass of the sand dunes on either side. There was nothing park-like about it and Purefoy had driven up and down the main road half a mile away several times before stopping at a petrol station and asking for Porterhouse Park.
'There's a house they call the Park,' the woman at the till had said. 'Don't know anything about Porterhouse. It's the old folks' home down Fish Lane, you know, one of them geriatric places. I wouldn't want to go there.'
Now, standing hesitantly in the dining-room filled with dark furniture, and made darker still by the roof of the verandah, they could understand her reluctance to have anything to do with the Park. Purefoy opened the door and Skullion expressed his feelings for the housekeeper. 'What do you want now, you old bitch?' he asked, without moving his head. 'Come to see if I'm fucking dead yet? Well, I'm not so you can bugger off.'
Purefoy coughed diplomatically. 'Actually, it isn't the old bitch,' he said and moved forward so that Skullion could see him. 'My name is Osbert and I've come up from Porterhouse…'
From under the rim of the bowler hat Skullion peered up at him and Purefoy found himself looking into two eyes dark with hatred and contempt. For a moment he almost backed away from such open hostility but he stood his ground and presently, much to his astonishment, Skullion grinned.
'Dr Osbert? So you're Dr Osbert. And you've come up from the College. Well I never. Wonders never cease.' He paused and grunted, possibly with pleasure. 'I've been looking forward to meeting you. I have indeed. Get a chair and sit down so I don't have to break my neck looking up at you.'
Purefoy pulled up a wooden chair and sat. At the back of the verandah Mrs Ndhlovo stood motionless. And you can tell her behind me to sit down too,' Skullion said and there was no doubt about his amusement now. 'Want to know how I know she's there?' he went on and didn't wait for an answer. 'Because the old cow in there stinks, and I mean stinks, and her behind me washes. Makes a change. She your secretary?'
'Not exactly but all the same we'd like to talk to you.'
'Daresay you would,' said Skullion. 'I daresay you would.' He transferred his gaze across the unweeded flowerbeds and the stunted roses to the brown mudflats and the silver runnels of water flowing through them. The tide was far out and only a few seabirds moved on the mud. It was a dispiriting prospect. "They call this Porterhouse Park. Funny sort of name for a dosshouse but then they've got a funny sort of sense of humour, dons have. That or they want to fool you into coming here without a fuss. But you're a don, aren't you?'