Probably it was, Johnny decided. It was in many respects a generous offer; Harvey was not trying to bilk Kathy.
"Speaking for Mrs. Sharp," Johnny began. But Kathy cut him off.
"No," she said in a quick, brisk voice. "I can't sell. He says not to."
Johnny said, "You've already given me authority to negotiate, Kathy."
"Well," she said in a hard voice, "I'm taking it back."
"If I'm to work with you and for you at all," Johnny said, "you must go on my advice. We've already talked it over and agreed -"
The phone in the office rang.
"Listen to him yourself," Kathy said. She picked up the phone and held it out to Johnny. "He'll tell you."
Johnny accepted the phone and put it to his ear. "Who is this?" he demanded. And then he heard the drumming. The far-off uncanny drumming noise, as if something were scratching at a long metal wire.
"… imperative to retain control. Your advice absurd. She can pull herself together; she's got the stuff. Panic reaction; you're scared because she's ill. A good doctor can fix her up. Get a doctor for her; get medical help. Get an attorney and be sure she stays out of the hands of the law. Make sure her supply of drugs is cut. Insist on…" Johnny yanked the receiver away from his ear, refusing to hear more. Trembling, he hung the phone back up.
"You heard him," Kathy said. "Didn't you? That was Louis."
"Yes," Johnny said.
"He's grown," Kathy said. "Now we can hear him direct; it's not just the radio telescope at Kennedy Slough. I heard him last night, clearly, for the first time, as I lay down to go to sleep."
To St. Cyr and Harvey, Johnny said, "We'll have to think your proposition over, evidently. We'll have to get an appraisal of the worth of the unimproved real estate you're offering and no doubt you want an audit of Wilhelmina. That will take time." He heard his voice shake; he had not gotten over the shock of picking up the telephone and hearing the living voice of Louis Sarapis.
After making an appointment with St. Cyr and Harvey to meet with them once more later in the day, Johnny took Kathy out to a late breakfast; she had admitted, reluctantly, that she had eaten nothing since the night before.
"I'm just not hungry," she explained, as she sat picking listlessly at her plate of bacon and eggs, toast with jam.
"Even if that was Louis Sarapis," Johnny said, "you don't -"
"It was. Don't say 'even'; you know it's him. He's gaining power all the time, out there. Perhaps from the sun."
"So it's Louis," he said doggedly. "Nonetheless, you have to act in your own interest, not in his."
"His interests and mine are the same," Kathy said. "They involve maintaining Archimedean."
"Can he give you the help you need? Can he supply what's missing? He doesn't take your drug-addiction seriously; that's obvious. All he did was preach at me." He felt anger. "That's damn little help, for you or for me, in this situation."
"Johnny," she said, "I feel him near me all the time; I don't need the TV or the phone – I sense him. It's my mystical bent, I think. My religious intuition; it's helping me maintain contact with him." She sipped a little orange juice.
Bluntly, Johnny said, "It's your amphetamine psychosis, you mean."
"I won't go into the hospital, Johnny. I won't sign myself in; I'm sick but not that sick. I can get over this bout on my own, because I'm not alone. I have my grandfather. And -" She smiled at him. "I have you. In spite of Sarah Belle."
"You won't have me, Kathy," he said quietly, "unless you sell to Harvey. Unless you accept the Ganymede real estate."
"You'd quit?"
"Yes," he said.
After a pause, Kathy said, "My grandfather says go ahead and quit." Her eyes were dark, enlarged, and utterly cold.
"I don't believe he'd say that."
"Then talk to him."
"How?"
Kathy pointed to the TV set in the corner of the restaurant. "Turn it on and listen."
Rising to his feet, Johnny said, "I don't have to; I've already given my decision. I'll be at my hotel, if you should change your mind." He walked away from the table, leaving her sitting there. Would she call after him? He listened as he walked. She did not call.
A moment later he was out of the restaurant, standing on the sidewalk. She had called his bluff, and so it ceased to be a bluff; it became the real thing. He actually had quit.
Stunned, he walked aimlessly on. And yet – he had been right. He knew that. It was just that… damn her, he thought. Why didn't she give in? Because of Louis, he realized. Without the old man she would have gone ahead and done it, traded her controlling, voting stock for the Ganymede property. Damn Louis Sarapis, not her, he thought furiously.
What now? he asked himself. Go back to New York? Look for a new job? For instance approach Alfonse Gam? There was money in that, if he could land it. Or should he stay here in Michigan, hoping that Kathy would change her mind?
She can't keep on, he decided. No matter what Sarapis tells her. Or rather, what she believes he's telling her. Whichever it is.
Hailing a cab, he gave the driver the address of his hotel room. A few moments later he was entering the lobby of the Antler Hotel, back where he had started early in the morning. Back to the forbidding empty room, this time merely to sit and wait. To hope that Kathy would change her mind and call him. This time he had no appointment to go to; the appointment was over.
When he reached his hotel room he heard his phone ringing.
For a moment Johnny stood at the door, key in hand, listening to the phone on the other side of the door, the shrill noise reaching him as he stood in the hall. Is it Kathy? he wondered. Or is it him?
He put the key in the lock, turned it and entered the room; sweeping the receiver off its hook he said, "Hello."
Drumming and far-off, the voice, in the middle of its monotonous monologue, its recitation to itself, was murmuring, "… no good at all, Barefoot, to leave her. Betrayal of your job; thought you understood your responsibilities. Same to her as it was to me, and you never would have walked off in a fit of pique and left me. I deliberately left the disposition of my body to you so you'd stay on. You can't…" At that point Johnny hung up, chilled.
The phone rang again, at once.
This time he did not take it off the hook. The hell with you, he said to himself. He walked to the window and stood looking down at the street below, thinking to himself of the conversation he had held with old Louis years ago, the one that had made such an impression in his mind. The conversation in which it had come out that he had failed to go to college because he wanted to die. Looking down at the street below, he thought, Maybe I ought to jump. At least there'd be no more phones… no more of it.
The worse part, he thought, is its senility. Its thoughts are not clear, not distinct; they're dream-like; irrational. The old man is not genuinely alive. He is not even in half-life. This is a dwindling away of consciousness toward a nocturnal state. And we are forced to listen to it as it unwinds, as it develops step by step, to final, total death.
But even in this degenerative state, it had desires. It wanted, and strongly. It wanted him to do something; it wanted Kathy to do something; the remnants of Louis Sarapis were vital and active, and clever enough to find ways of pursuing him, of getting what was wanted. It was a travesty of Louis's wishes during his lifetime, and yet it could not be ignored; it could not be escaped.
The phone continued to ring.
Maybe it isn't Louis, he thought then. Maybe it's Kathy. Going to it he lifted the receiver. And put it back down at once. The drumming once more, the fragments of Louis Sarapis's personality… he shuddered. And is it just here, is it selective?