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She took his hands in hers. "I don't want to scare you or anything, but I hope you know what you're getting into here."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Remo said. "I don't know anything that's going on in this screwball place."
She held out her own arms. "This, for one thing." Beneath the pink spill of light, the inside of her arms looked like antique wood, tracked with so many holes you could sift flour through them.
"I know, the tracks are ugly, I have plastic surgery done to cover the marks every five years. But that's the least of it." Her voice was soft and faraway.
"Jesus," Remo said, aghast. "How long have you been shooting up that happy juice?"
"A long time," she said, looking levelly at Remo. "An awfully long time. I told you, I'm seventy years old. I've had the injections for most of those seventy years."
"Oh, knock it off," Remo said. "Whatever those marks mean, they don't mean you're an old lady."
"But I am. We're all old here."
"Look. Bobby Jay might look younger than fifty-five. Mrs. Spangler could pass for less than the fifty-eight her daughter claims. But if you're seventy, I'm Methuselah. Now, why are you handing me a line like that?"
"it's no line," she said. "What's your name?"
"Remo."
"I'm Posie Ponselle." Remo started. "You've heard of me?"
"I've heard the name," Remo said. "Some movie star in the thirties or something."
"They compared me with Garbo," she said wistfully. "The Love Goddess."
Remo looked at her askance. "Lady, if you ex-
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pect me to believe that you're Posie Ponseile-"
"You don't have to believe anything. I just want you to know what you're walking into if you take that first injection tomorrow."
"Okay," he sighed. She, not Remo, had broken the spell. But it was just as well, he thought. It was time to get back to business. "When did you meet Foxx?"
"Forty years ago," Posie said without a blink.
"Come on."
"You asked."
"All right," Remo waffled, if he had to listen to another crock from another nutcase before he could get a scrap of information, well, that was how it went in this assignment. There wasn't a sane person in the place. "Go ahead."
"It was in Geneva. You see, just before the war broke out, my movies weren't doing too well. I was getting too old, they said. I was twenty-eight." She took a cigarette from her beaded bag and lit it. "So I went to Switzerland for a series of age-retardant treatments at a new clinic I'd heard about. Foxx was there."
"The same Foxx?"
She nodded. "He never ages. And his patients don't either, as long as they keep up the treatments. But if they can't. . ." Her voice trailed off to a mumble.
"If they can't, what?"
She exhaled and ground out the fresh cigarette with trembling fingers. "Never mind. But you have to keep them up. You have to get the injections every day. That's what I want you to understand before you accept the first treatment."
"I thought you folks came here once a month," Remo said.
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"For a new supply. Foxx gives us exactly thirty days' worth of the formula. Every thirty days we have to show up with cash-no checks, no credit-or else he stops the treatments on the spot."
Her voice quavered. Dizzy dame, Remo thought. Most women, he supposed, worried about their looks. But this one acted like getting to be thirty days older was the end of the world.
"Okay," he said. "But the thing I can't understand is why Foxx keeps this place such a secret. If he really does have some kind of magic formula for keeping people young forever, he could make a fortune."
"He does," Posie said. "But not from us. The income from the thirty guests at Shangri-la would barely pay for the upkeep of the place."
"What else has he got going?"
"I don't know exactly. Not now, anyway. But some funny things were going on years ago, when I worked for him."
"When was that?"
"in the forties and fifties. I ran out of money for the treatments after a few years in Switzerland. I tried to get my agent in Hollywood to find me another picture, but nobody in the business wanted to take a chance on me. Commercial flights to Europe were practically nonexistent during the war, so I couldn't get back to talk to them myself. Besides, I didn't have enough cash to take a supply of the formula with me back to America. So I stayed."
"What kind of job did Foxx offer you?"
"The usual," she said. "At first I was his mistress. He was rough, really bad. He liked to hurt. I hated him, but I needed the injections. In time, though, he got tired of me. I was glad about that. But he'd grown to
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trust me. By the time he was ready to move his operation here to Shangri-la, I was keeping some of his books."
"Oh?" Remo said, interested. "What was in them?"
"Different things. The income from the Geneva clinic, mostly. That's where he produced the formula. In those days, he was gone quite a bit, and I'd run the clinic for him. There weren't any guests there by then, of course. Foxx wanted to get back to America, so he had cut all his patients off. . . ."
She started to tremble. "What's wrong?" Remo asked.
"Nothing. I was just remembering. . . ." She shrugged it off. "Anyway, sometimes he'd leave for months at a stretch. During those times, while I was at the clinic in Switzerland, he'd give me instructions over the phone. Sometimes he wanted me to pick up these packages that were left in weird places- alleys, old warehouses, places like that. They were always wrapped in brown paper, those packages."
"What was in them?"
She looked up. "Gold," she said softly. "That's what was strange. Millions came in that way. Always brown packages dropped somewhere with bricks of gold inside."
"Did you know who left them?"
"How could I? They were just dumped. But that's not all of it. Something else began happening around that time, too. Foxx started calling and telling me to ship out huge quanties of the formula to the States."
"Here?"
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"No. It was odd. He wanted me to send them all to South Dakota."
"South Dakota?"
"Don't ask me why South Dakota. The post office boxes where ! was supposed to send them were all over the Black Hills region."
"Is this still going on?"
"I don't know. The clinic in Geneva was sold. He keeps the supplies for the guests in the basement here, but I don't know where he produces the formula these days. I don't work for him any more."
She spoke as if she were in a daze. "He was going to cut me off when he left Switzerland. He said that if I couldn't pay for the drug in one way or another, I could do without it."
"It might have been the kindest thing he ever did for you," Remo said.
She smiled ruefully. "Maybe. In a way, it might have been. I married a Swiss industrialist I'd met while Foxx was on one of his long visits to America. Fortunately, he was quite wealthy. Before Foxx left Geneva for good, he sold us a quantity of the formula, enough for several months. My husband wanted to try it, so I began giving him the injections, too."
"Just two happy little addicts," Remo said.
She started to shake again. "I introduced him to it," she whispered. "He was killed in an automobile accident two months later. I saw him after he died. ..." A low moan issued from her throat. She looked as if she were on the verge of screaming.
"Posie? Posie!" He shook her back into the present.
"Remo," she said. "Oh, please don't take the treat-
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ment. I know what it does, even after one time. I've seen it. Don't. . .don't. . . ."
She was sobbing. "Hey, take it easy," Remo said, rocking her in his arms.
"Get out of here as soon as you can. Before it's too !ate for you, too."
He kissed her. And suddenly he didn't care how old she was. There was something about Posie Ponselle that made him feel like the happiest man who ever lived, something womanly and yet almost unbearably fragile, as if at any moment she would disintegrate in his arms.