'And watch them pick up the Academy Award?' Dwight laughed at my naïveté. 'I think not!'
Dessous and I exchanged looks.
Dinner, an hour later, was in Jebbet E. Dessous' own home, an Italianate villa overlooking a broad lake on the outskirts of the deserted town, which was just what it appeared to be. Premier, Nebraska, had been a declining township on the fringe of Dessous' ranch for years before he'd taken over the spread on its other side; he'd bought the place up lot by lot and gradually moved people out until he'd created his own ghost town. The main reason he'd done this, he explained, while showing me round the villa before dinner, was so that he had the sort of room a man needs when he's using heavy ordnance.
Jebbet E. Dessous was into weaponry the way Uncle Freddy was into cars. Hand guns, rifles, automatics, mortars, heavy machine-guns, tanks, rocket-launchers, he had everything, including a helicopter gunship stored out at the airfield where I'd landed and a motor torpedo boat which he kept in a large boathouse on the lakeside. Most of the heavier stuff — like the tanks, housed in a warehouse in the town — was old; Second World War vintage or not much later. He grumbled about the government's reluctance to sell tax-paying citizens main battle tanks and anti-aircraft missiles.
Dwight and I followed him round the stables attached to the main villa; this was where Dessous kept his collection of howitzers and field pieces, some dating back to the Civil War.
'See this?' He patted what looked like a load of long, open pipes mounted on a trailer. 'Stalin's organ pipes, they used to call these. The Wehrmacht were terrified of them. So were the Red Army; used to fall short too often. You can't get the rockets any more but I'm having a bunch of them made.' He slapped one of the dark green metal tubes with his giant hand again. 'Make a hell of a noise, apparently. Looking forward to letting these suckers off, let me tell you.'
'What's the biggest missile you've got, Jeb?' I asked, as innocently as I could, thinking of the Scuds he was supposed to have bought.
He grinned. He was dressed in a white tuxedo now — Dwight had thrown on a jacket, too — but Dessous still looked like a bucolic farmer dressed up and in town for a dance. 'Ah-hah,' was all he would say. He winked.
'Goddammit, Telman, I thought you of all people would agree with that!'
So I was Telman, now. I had kind of thought that when Mr Dessous had said he'd call me Miss Telman until he knew me better he meant that in the fullness of time he might get round to calling me Kathryn, or Kate. Apparently not. Or maybe that would come later. The point at issue was how easy it was to bootstrap yourself out of poverty.
'Why, Jeb?'
'Because you came up out the slums, didn't you?'
'Well, if not slums, certainly a degree of deprivation.'
'But you did it! That's my point; you're here!'
Here was the dining room of the villa, which was fairly big and untidily sumptuous. As well as myself, Dwight, Eastil and Dessous, there was Mrs Dessous, who was a stunning Los Angelino redhead about Dwight's age sheathed in silver and called Marriette. There were a dozen other people on Dessous' immediate staff, and a similar number of technicians and engineers, to whom I'd been introduced en masse.
The long table was stratified, with Dessous at the head dispensing Pétrus and the junior technicians somewhere at the far end swigging beer. The food had been Mexican, served by small and wondrously deft and inconspicuous Mexican men. I wondered if Dessous themed all his meals, so that if we'd eaten Chinese we'd have been surrounded by pigtailed Chinamen, while an Italian dinner would have been served by dark, slim-hipped young men called Luigi. The main course had been some very fine lean flag steak from one of Dessous' own herds, though I'd had to leave most of mine because there was just too much of it.
'I was extraordinarily lucky, Jeb,' I said. 'Mrs Telman's car blew a tyre near where I was playing with my pals. If it hadn't been for that piece of luck I'd probably still be in the west of Scotland. I'm thirty-eight. By now I'd have had three or four kids knocked out of me, I'd weigh another twenty or thirty pounds, I'd look ten years older, I'd smoke forty a day and eat too much chocolate and deep-fried food. If I was lucky I'd have a man who didn't hit me and kids who weren't doing drugs. Maybe I'd have a few high-school qualifications, maybe not. There's an outside chance I'd have gone to university, in which case it might all have been different. I might be a teacher or a social worker or a civil servant, all of which would be socially useful but wouldn't let me live the sort of life I've come to appreciate. But it's all based on luck.'
'No. You don't know. You're just making assumptions,' Dessous insisted. 'That's the Brit in you coming out there, this self-deprecating stuff. I knew Liz Telman; she told me when she found you, you were selling candy at fifty per cent mark-up. You trying to tell me you wouldn't have learned something from that?'
'Perhaps I'd have learned how easy it was to rip people off, and decided never to do it again. Maybe I'd have ended up working in a Citizens' Advice Bureau or —'
'This is perversity, Telman. The obvious lesson to draw is how easy it is to make money, how easy it is to use initiative and enterprise to pull yourself out of the environment you find yourself in. You'd have done it anyway, with or without Liz Telman. And that's precisely my point, dammit. The people who deserve to will get out of their deprivation, they'll rise above any goddamn social disadvantagement, whether it's in Scotland, Honduras, Los Angeles or anywhere else.'
'But it's not the people who deserve to,' I said. 'How can you condemn the vast majority who don't get out of the slums or the schemes or the barrios or the projects? Aren't they going to be the ones who put family, friends and neighbours first, the ones who support each other? The ones who rise are more likely to be the ones who are the most selfish, the most ruthless. The ones who exploit those around them.'
'Exactly!' Dessous said. 'Entrepreneurs!'
'Or drug-dealers, as we call them these days.'
'That's evolution, too! The smart ones sell, the dumb ones use. It's vicious, but that's the state and its dumb laws.'
'What are we really saying here, Jeb? Societies are made up of a mix of people, obviously. There will always be people who basically accept their lot and those who'll do anything to improve it, so you've got a spectrum of behaviour, with total compliance at one end — people who just want a quiet life, who really only want to be left alone to raise their families, talk about the ball game, think about their next holiday and maybe dream about winning the lottery — and dissidence at the other. Within the dissidents, some people will still identify strongly with their friends and family, and struggle to improve the lives of all of them. Some will only be out for themselves and they'll do anything to achieve material success, including lying, stealing and killing. What I'm questioning is who amongst this lot could be termed "better" than the others.'
'Basically what you're saying is the scum rises and I'm saying the cream rises. Now, you tell me who's got the more optimistic vision here, and who's being defeatist.'
'Me, and you, Mr Dessous, in that order.'
Dessous sat back. 'You're going to have to explain that to me, Telman.'
'Well, scum and cream both rise, I guess, depending on the context. Actually I don't think either analogy is particularly helpful. The comparison you choose to make shows which way you've already decided. However, what I'm saying is more optimistic because it supposes a way forward for everybody in a society, not just its most viciously competitive percentile. You're being defeatist because you're just giving up on nine people out of ten in a poor society and saying there's no helping them, and that the only way they can help themselves is individually, by climbing out on top of those around them.'