Over your head, I said.
He said that taking me into account Dagger DiGorro was wise to distribute his chances so now he had H.E.W. and a carton of audio gear to fall back on.
Which gave me, as Tessa’s father would say, a shtip: Dagger then was really serious about that vita sent to his old friend in Washington, and he was busy too with a carton of audio gear like an extra suitcase or a box of softball bases and bats and balls or of Nikon lenses (the Nikon system you’re urged to commit yourself to) bought through the U.S. Air Force or Navy or from the woman in Amsterdam or the man in Antwerp with pounds sterling acquired in bulk the week after the Marvelous Country House when (as I learned from Jenny) he’d had advance word of devaluation by that revolutionary Republican Nixon and unloaded all the dollars he could get his hands on. But I had no time to trace that shtip from side to back to stomach to calf, chest, and shoulder, a node of warm mercury lurching like some bulk of liquid around my body when I smoked Geoff’s friend Jasper’s hash.
For, extending the waiter’s course, my eye reached the bar and there just leaving was John the man in glasses — friend of Jerry who paid his loft-rent, friend of June whose voice I’d last heard at the moment Tuesday that I discovered the two right angles Monty now seemed to have foregone — and there, too, were the steel-rimmed specs I’d knocked off, which was nothing to what Incremona, that lithe, otterlike personal and impatient revolutionary might do to the other John if John was in cahoots with this John’s boss Phil Aut (though I could not then on Thursday have said exactly why). And yet, whatever Hy’s wife might think of me to this day when she is beyond the first shocks of that twelve months during which her son Ned died of a lung cancer as swift in its race to self-destruct as it seemed mysteriously untraceable, and during which she had news of her mother’s cousins and her husband’s Nachbush cousins spirited into an ultimate statistic whose increasingly rhetorical melody rhymes with ill, will, kill, and pill (pillion indeed) as readily as it calls up my bedtime variant of the witch shoved into the oven or echoing chatter in the soap-strewn steamy concrete showers after swimming practice the winters of ’45 and ’46, and may even twist the unable mind to dollar dreams (but what’s six million worth today?), say some law-making appropriation so those who find technology cold and soulless might suddenly think (if they could) of that early European computer made of one hundred human beings — this shtip or stab seemed a thought crystallized as at the fork of a nerve cell, yet in my whole body too, whose heart was hard to find because pointless to seek since now so open to the lines of others in this petty system I had had a hypothesis about but forgotten.
Having lived something like the story of his life, Dagger had moved on to fatherhood; he had a daughter. It was not clear if the English schoolmaster had lost his job in the Bahamas because he had sat by Dagger’s driftwood fire watching a cube of pink meat with certain wartime associations drip and spit on the toasting prongs that belonged to the lady who had the guest house; but the island’s Church of England vicar to his deep joy and satisfaction (though not his wife’s, in her pink, broad-brimmed, locally woven hat bending over a large lush garden having issued two of her three servants their day’s easy instructions) was transferred back to England not long after he had told a commissioner that the schoolmaster drank borrowed hotel rum with an American beachcomber who had been a comfortable spectator one Sunday while native boys offered mild violence to a small tourist from Toronto, a white female child. And (if you wished to be suddenly very clear) Dagger was almost Monty’s age; and even with various kinds of American money (even after the Nixon devaluation) and at London prices (even with inflation), and even with the pleasure which a French wife named Alba took in wheeling a pram just a few blocks to the Heath (which reminded Lorna Cartwright not at all of Central Park and its dream-fence of high-rise stone to the east, west, and south, but of real country far! from smoke, lunchtime mobs, and the press of motors, not to mention amenities like the Indian physician who was Alba’s devoted friend and so gave that extra attention to her minor ailments, to the baby’s skin, and to Dagger’s gastric pangs, that compensated for the shortcomings of the English Health Service) — there were measurable respects in which between life in London and life in America the, differences had begun to deteriorate. So how did you figure the big money at this stage? A way had opened for Dagger and it was through Claire, who would do almost anything for him, and through Phil Aut, who would do almost anything for his son Jerry (who in turn would do anything for his mother Jan, whose dreams of world rapprochement included her dark-haired preoccupied husband only as a block of flats includes a plumbing system or a democracy includes other people). And Dagger’s way — through Claire and Aut and Jan — had lain from London through New York to London, to Hyde Park and its Sunday bases and to wild Wales through an Unplaced Room that by identifying son and mother could suddenly change Aut’s estimate of all that came before or after — and Dagger confessed to me the Saturday morning after the Thursday evening of my interview with Monty that shooting Jan’s wild portrait of Jerry had been designed to ensure a little last-minute leverage if only to sustain Phil Aut’s concern with a film which to his strangely inhibited but intense protectiveness might thus seem to implicate in left-wing activities the two human beings he told Jack Flint in a rare moment of frankness he would make any sacrifice for. And I with my diary and my daughter had intervened in Dagger’s simple sequence of acts and maybe thrown a monkey wrench into his chance of the big money.
For me the film was just one speculation. I had some irons in; the fire and I expected to be solvent no matter what happened. But it seemed on Saturday with Dag, on Thursday with Monty, and on Tuesday listening to June while watching Reid, Jenny, and the Frenchman — that my film could not have developed parallel to Dagger’s without disturbing it.
His had been one open and neat part of Aut’s exploitation of Jan’s plan. Like getting rare maps from one part of the world to another. The serial route of some man-made automaton. Background footage for insertion, a piece here a piece there, in something else.
I, however, had deliberately used this thing as a point through which attention might be distributed. But whatever the film now meant to me, I must succeed in selling it, I must get us both a decent return on our parallel inputs.
I thought, That’s it! My shtip is simply that by not letting Dag’s film alone, I’ve cost him some money.
But at once that line of thought lapsed like blips on a weather scope into new blips as the radar pulse sweeps full circle but never quite full because never through quite the same weather, though from sweep to sweep the blips may seem as stable as a map or a fleet at anchor. No, my shtip had no neat equation in cash or rueful credit. You would not exactly measure it as a Hyde Park home run stretched for years of Dagger’s extra bases to a right-angle two-phone desk at H.E.W. in Washington, where he had been recommended by the English schoolmaster whose Bahama contract had not been renewed. Nor would you exactly measure my shtip in the two U.S. Coast Guard weather balloons Dagger picked up through an Embassy attaché inflated now almost eight years later not by the local or imported American helium inside the sheer white elastic that Will and Jenny got their hands on and bombarded briefly the day they got those gifts from their father’s jolly new friend, but rather by regret — inflated so to constantly enlarge their equally lessening size loose over Hamp-stead Heath — adrift yet not moving, not moving, and yet the Heath itself was retreating.