John D. MacDonald
Hand from the Void
Chapter One
Jeff Rayden had picked up the latest copy of Crux at the airline terminal. As the airport tilted and fled off behind the big liner and as the motor sounds altered, he unfastened the safety belt and opened the magazine, holding it so that Julie O’Reilly beside him could see the pages. He found what he wanted on pages sixteen through nineteen.
Borough Boss — Pictures by Julie O’Reilly, Picture and Text by Jeff Rayden.
It was typical Rayden and O’Reilly. The pictures and text fitted together like a hand in a glove. The assignment had been a small-fry political thief named Schonderhauzen.
They had covered his home life, his official life and his amusements. The coverage was wry, tolerant, skeptical and amused. It did not damn Mr. Schonderhauzen, but it very neatly booted him out of public life.
“Number sixty-nine,” Julie said in her gamin’s voice, huskiness like a streak of rust along a gleaming wire.
“That many! Deliver me from the statistical mind.”
“Crux,” she said primly, “owes a large part of its two and a half million circulation to the deft dismembering of major and minor public figures by those two cynical whiz-kids of modern journalismБ"
“Knock it off.”
“Just quoting, darling.”
For a time they studied the article again. It was Julie who reached over and snapped the middle of the final page with an oval, blood-red fingernail. It was a gesture of dismissal.
“Shall I say it, or will you, Jeff?” She looked at him, almost without expression. She was a small trim girl with oversized gray eyes and a shade too heavy a mouth, set in a small pale face framed by chestnut hair that sometimes glinted red in the sun. The morning light above the haze of the city struck diagonally and cruelly at her, and he saw the tiny lines of strain the past two years had etched at the outer comers of her eyes. In the beginning, when it had been fun — a vast lark — there had been no lines. He felt an almost overpowering tenderness for a moment, and thrust it away from him.
“So I’ll say it. So it stinks. And so did the one before, and the one before that. We’re losing the touch, baby.”
“Because we’ve lost each other?”
“Trust a woman to hoke it up.”
Her grey eyes narrowed. “Trust a man to overlook the obvious. Darn it, Jeff, we were in love. What happened to us?”
The knife-edge smile was a part of him. “Too much dough and too much reputation and too many assignments. An international beat is a little outsized for the delicate emotions. Love has to be incarcerated in a cottage in order to survive, I believe.”
She turned to face him more directly. She put both small capable hands on his forearm. “Please, Jeff. It’s more than that. Something in you has spoiled it for us. You used to believe in a certain amount of fundamental decency in people. Somewhere along the line you’ve lost that belief andБ"
“Pardon me,” the pretty hostess said, bending over the seat, “Mr. Rayden and Miss O’Reilly? We’ve had a CD order on you.”
Jeff frowned. “But our tickets are right through to San Ramon.”
“I know, sir. But you had an appointment with Mr. Borden Means in San Ramon at seven this evening. To get materials for an article about him, I believe. Mr. Means has made arrangements to have you left off at Dos Almas. You can see him there.”
“I thought this was a scheduled flight,” Jeff said curiously. “And I don’t remember any stop to be made at Dos Almas. Won’t the CAA have something to say about that? Is it far out of the way?”
The hostess looked dubious for a moment. “It is odd, but Mr. Means is a very important man in that part of Texas. In the whole country too, I guess. It’s about twenty-five minutes flying time out of our way.”
The hostess went back up the aisle. Jeff winked at Julie. “A special deal is always nice. This Texas spellbinder must have some weight to fling around, eh?”
He put the latest copy of Crux into the briefcase on his lap. As he did so, he saw the manila folder containing the copies of speeches made over national network time by Mr. Borden Means. He was becoming a national figure with almost alarming rapidity. Now it was time for Rayden and O’Reilly to chip away at his feet until the clay was exposed for all the readers of Crux to see. There is a big market for proof that all men are second-rate. It makes the second-raters feel so much more self-satisfied.
The manila folder of speeches had begun to irritate Jeffrey Rayden. Means certainly had nothing to contribute to the field of human knowledge. In fact, he could be called a glorification of the word crank. A muscular bachelor of fifty-two, he had accumulated a fat fortune in Texas oil lands. Now he had given up the accumulation of more money arid had purchased network time to lecture to America.
No, the man had nothing to say, and yet — in the way he said it... Each time Jeff read the speeches he had felt his heart begin to pound, felt the flush of excitement on his face, felt a rebirth of confidence in himself and in the world. He knew that it was puerile to be aroused by tag words and emotional cliches. Yet all Means had to do was say something about home and mother — and he took you back to the summer evenings of childhood, the dusk walk to the corner store for ice cream, the murmur of voices on the front porches, the aimless lazy slap of a screen door...
Well, he thought, no matter how competent this Means is in the semantics department, Julie and I will bust his little myth. Then he will be like all the others. Loud little men with egocentric ideas and concentrated lust for power.
The aircraft had let down to a few hundred feet over the baked rock, sand and sage of the Texas flats due east of San Ramon. The other passengers, checking their watches, had begun to complain loudly, and the hostess was kept busy placating them. Jeff looked curiously out the side window and saw a group of dazzling white frame buildings wheel by, saw beyond them the wide main street of a small town, the road narrowing toward the crested horizon.
Safety belts were fastened and the plane faltered as the wheels came down. Rubber keened against concrete and the big plane came at last to rest. Stairs were wheeled against the side door and Jeff and Julie, intensely conscious of the annoyed stares of the other passengers, descended. It took a few minutes to get their luggage out. Julie hovered over the big shabby suitcase containing her photographic supplies with all the earnestness of a mother hen.
The stairs were wheeled back and a blond young man in chauffeur’s uniform took Julie’s two bags and guided them over to a black sedan of foreign make. A man was standing beside the sedan. Jeff recognized Means from his pictures. Those pictures had shown an almost theatrical ugliness, but they had been unable to capture the softness and brooding quality of the deep-set eyes under the short shelving brow, the warmth and personal quality of the smile.
His voice had a richness to match his smile. He held out one hand to each of them. “I’m sorry I changed your plans this way. But I thought it would give us a better chance to get acquainted. We’re leaving shortly to drive into San Ramon for my lecture tonight. We can talk in the car. No one will interrupt us.”
Jeff fought against his instantaneous liking for the man. “It takes a pretty big wheel to divert a scheduled airliner, Mr. Means.”
Means turned to Julie. “My dear, I’ve admired your work for a long time. It has heart. I want to be able to help the two of you. Both of you are frightened. I want to see you both doing the sort of work you were doing a year ago.”