"That would be gauche, doll. Nobody ever said Danny Deere was gauche. Of course," he added, taking her shoulder to guide her to the French doors, "if you don't like it inside, we could always go out on the nice soft grass outside."
"It's raining outside."
"It never rains on my outside, doll." He pressed a switch, and the same enclosed atrium she had seen from the living room was visible again. As promised, the glass roof kept it dry; but Danny gave a sudden shout of rage. "Son of a bitch, you get your kicks peeping into my bedroom? Get out of there! Vamoose!" The man of the roof, who had been gazing at them in open-mouthed fascination, almost dropped his bucket of tar as he scrambled down.
"Sorry about that, doll," said Danny. "Well? What about it?"
Rainy laughed out loud. For the first time since she entered on Danny Deere's turf, she felt in command of the situation. "What about which?" she asked.
"Either way, doll. I give you my word. Either way, you truly will not regret it."
She shook her head ruefully. "I guess I'll never know," she said. "It's time for me to go home now."
Danny saw her off, the envelope still in his hand—you never could tell, sometimes they changed their mind at the last minute. Not this time. He watched the limo snake down the road, glowered at the skeleton of the condo outlined against Los Angeles's red sky glow and then, for perhaps the three thousandth time in his life, closed the door, made himself a drink and turned the stereo on loud to put some life into his empty house.
With Dizzy Gillespie blowing from all four corners of the room, Danny pushed aside the big Emshwiller and spun the combination on the safe behind it. He riffled through the banded twenty-dollar bills, dropped the envelope on top of several others and picked up the three-by- five index card on the bottom shelf. It bore cryptic rows of letters, as though someone had been playing write-it-down Scrabble; Danny wrote the letters TSSS under the last line and added the total in his mind.
That was one of the ways in which Danny amused himself when no one was around: by keeping his records in code. He had two codes, each based on a ten-letter phrase, one for the office and one for no one but himself. He had begun the system when a bright secretary had taught it to him, years ago. You selected a ten-letter word or phrase—Danny had picked out "FILM STAR, HE"—and assigned a digit to each letter:
F 1 I 2
L 3 M 4 S 5 T 6 A 7 R 8 H 9 E 0
Then it was simple to record all your private notes on asking prices and-real prices and rock-bottom prices in code. So every associate on his staff could write that a house whose asking price was $850,000 but whose owners needed the sale badly enough to let it go for $615,000 in a pinch was an RSE/TFS—you didn't have to write down the final thousands—and no customer would be able to peek over anyone's shoulder.
But Danny also had a private code that no one else knew, not even Joel, for the "off the books" money in the safe and the safe-deposit boxes and what looked like an unopened box of Kleenex in his private bathroom. The code phrase for that was "FUCK THE IRS". According to the card, the living room safe at the moment held IERTS in cash, which was to say $87,950.
Which was not enough. Or too much. Not enough to cover his ass if some of the buy offers he was making got taken up; too much to be sitting there idle and eroding every day with inflation. Of course, there was more in all the other places, and even in the legitimate accounts of Danny Deere Enterprises, Inc.; but all of it was not enough.
Danny roamed restlessly into his playroom and switched on the projection TV without looking at it. There were too many problems. He had not expected money to be one of them. Not with all his assets! But when you came right down to it, what good did they do him right now? He could sell some stock; but he had gone to a lot of trouble to conceal ownership of most of his securities. He could mortgage his house—-there was a million dollars there, easily enough—but that meant declaring its real value. Another trail blazed for the IRS. Besides, there was a softness in the mortgage market right now. Maybe it was his own doing; maybe he had scared off some investors.
There remained the contents of the wine cellar in the basement, none of which were wine.
Danny switched off the television and went down the stairs. The gentle purr of the air conditioning greeted him as he opened the door. He switched on the daylight fluorescents that were the closest thing you could ever get to actual sunlight indoors.
This was the treasure room. This was where the real stuff was. He ran his fingers over the canvas-covered stretchers in their racks and lifted the little labels on a couple of the paintings. USS. FTTS. There was even one at KERSS, nearly fifty thousand dollars. He had paid out in actual cash nearly two million dollars over the years, and they were easily worth twice that now. Probably much more, if he sold them carefully, in the right places, a few at a time.
But if he had to get cash in a hurry, he might not have time. He especially might not have time to cover his traces well enough to keep the tax snoops at bay.
He sat down in a red leather Barcalounger at the end of the main aisle, gazing unseeingly at the line of racks.
There was one place where, Danny was sure, he could always get money. As much as he needed. The interest would be ridiculous, and the penalties for slow payment severe.
But maybe. ...
Tidal waves have nothing to do with tides, for which reason they are properly called "tsunamis". Perhaps the tallest tsunami ever reported (although somewhat ambiguously) by an eyewitness took place in Alaska when it was still a Russian colony, on August 7th, 1788. According to I. Veniaminov it was a wall of water three hundred feet high. Much higher ones have been inferred from wave and water marks on cliffs and mountains, particularly in the western Mediterranean, where one apparently reached a fifth of a mile.
Saturday, December 26th. 11:00 AM.
The quadrille of the elements had begun a new figure. Fire gave place to Water, while Earth and Air responded. There were no more brush fires, but there had been warnings of mud slides. No more gasping for breath in the Santa Ana, but a dank chill that even Tib's car windows did not keep out: And none of this affected Tib Sonderman's spirits in the least, because he was thinking about Rainy Keating. It was pleasurable thinking. It made him feel impatient with the car and careless of the rain; it made him want to get out and walk or run or, actually, he admitted to himself, to make love.
Over the years Tib had had a fair number of lovers. Nothing at all, really, compared to the scores some of the twenty-year-olds on his surveying teams bragged about. But still, not a few. Rainy was something special. She was a lot younger, relative to Tib, than any woman before her. She was also the only one who happened to be a scientist. Tib had had chances with female scientists, and some of them very attractive. But on all those field trips he had stayed away from his colleagues. It was only common sense. You did not invite that sort of trouble. But it was also true that Tib had a romantic view of marriage. He was never untrue to Wendy when she couldn't possibly catch him at it.
So any new woman was a major event in Tib's life, Rainy more than any recent other. New airs and graces, unfamiliar tastes and textures. And a trained mind! Pillow talk with Rainy Keating added a whole unexperienced dimension.
There was also the fact that his loins ached to invade her again.
It was only the vibration of the car, he told himself severely, and leaned forward to thrust a cassette into his tape deck. It was not music; it was a recording of a recent session at the New York Academy of Sciences. He had not been able to attend, and it would be many months before the papers appeared anywhere. By the time he reached the neighborhood of Pedigrue Center he had absorbed three reports on theories of earthquake prediction, ranging from measurements of radon gas emission to the behavior of barnyard animals. But out of it he had learned nothing new, only something quite old: there were no reliable ways to predict earthquakes.