“Where is she?”
“You will be careful about contacting her? She does want to see you.”
“I’ll be very careful, Mr. Farnham.”
“I smuggled her to the house of one of my associates, Mr. Winter. He is on a sabbatical leave in France, and he left the key with me. Unfortunately the phone is disconnected. Have you a pencil? Two-ten Sunset Way, Hallandale. It has considerable privacy due to the plantings Professor Wellerly arranged with that in mind. A small pink house. She has food and water, and she should be quite safe there, from the rabble and the curiosity seekers. But she is upset, naturally. Give a long ring then a short and then a long, and she will know it is either you or me, sir. She will open the door to no one else. And I believe I am right in saying we are both depending on you to do something to clear up this unfortunate situation.”
“Thank you.”
“Not at all, sir. It’s my duty to my sister. Good evening.”
“Well now!” Betsy said as he hung up. “How cozy you’ll be! In your wittle pink housey.”
“So how do I get there?”
“I can’t say that I really care how you get to Hallandale, friend.”
“In this uniform?”
“Bernie Sabbith is almost your size, and there is a whole closet loaded with stuff. Be his guest.”
“She wouldn’t think of letting me stay in that house with her.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I mean it. She’s a very — she’s sort of an odd girl. Uh — very proper.”
“Even under emergency conditions like this?”
“I wouldn’t want to risk it. Really, it would be a terrible risk for me to leave here. Any cab driver might recognize me.”
“Well, my friend, you can’t stay here. I’m a very odd girl too.”
“Is it or is it not important to you to help me?”
“Indeed it is, but there are some kinds of help—”
“I was thinking, Betsy, I could write a note to her telling her to trust you. You know, she really doesn’t think much of my judgment. Then you could go out there and stay there with her tonight and talk the whole thing out and maybe you and she can figure out what it is that Charla is after. I can reduce the risks by staying here alone. Then you can come back tomorrow and if you’ve learned anything we’ll know what to do, and if you haven’t, then we can try to figure out the next step.”
At first Betsy was reluctant, but at last she agreed the idea had some merit. She made drinks while he wrote the note. Then, having laid in some stores during the day, she cooked ham and eggs in the tiny kitchen corner. Just before she left, a little before nine, she showed him where the television set was. She crawled on her hands and knees to the intricate headboard of the enormous bed, flipped the switch that moved a ceiling panel aside exposing the picture tube built into the ceiling. The other controls were next to the switch.
“If Charla locates the place, ask her to watch TV with you, Kirby.”
“If I can arrange my life properly, I’ll never see that woman again.”
“What’s the matter. Scared of her?”
“Totally.”
Betsy gave him a wan smile. “Frankly, so am I.”
Chapter Seven
After checking again to be certain the door was locked, and after a lengthy hunt for the final elusive light switch, Kirby Winter crawled to the middle of the giant bed. There was a troublesome fragrance of Betsy about the pillow. It was a warm night, with a murmurous traffic sound, a ripped-silk sound of far off jets, the adenoidal honk of boat traffic. The ten-o’clock news had displayed other pictures of him, still shots, grinning like an insurance salesman. And there was one picture of Wilma Farnham, looking severe. The newscast made them sound like the master criminals of the century. Informed sources believed that Winter and the Farnham woman had already fled the country. They had both made mysterious disappearances under the very noses of the ladies and gentlemen of the press. One could see them chummed up on Air France, snickering, tickling, getting bagged on champagne, heading for that stashed fortune and a simple life of servants, castles, jewels, furs and tireless lechery.
He wondered about Betsy and Wilma. By now they would be deep in all their long talking, and he blushed to think of Wilma, distrait, uttering all her shy girlish confidences. “And all the time he really was terrified of women. You should have seen him run from me in absolute horror.”
He was physically exhausted, but he could not slow his mind down. He knew he would not sleep, but suddenly he was down in the jungly world of nightmare. Wilma, giggling, opened zipper compartments in long cool pale thighs to show him how solidly stuffed they were with thousand-dollar bills. Charla had little gold scissors, and she smirked and cooed as she cut the ears from little pink rabbits which screamed every time. She was bare and golden, oiled and steaming, and when she turned he saw the vulgar placement of the little tatoo which read “Ninny.” He walked into the scene in the little gold telescope and found Uncle Omar there, off to one side, chuckling. Uncle Omar thrust a deck of cards toward him and told him to take any card, but when he took the card it was warm and heavy and moving, and suddenly he was back in an old car in a heavy rain of long ago, and he found the dream blending into a reality of some warm, solid, busy, rubbery creature burrowing against him, snuffling and giggling and snorting, raking him with small claws. In a few moments of night fright, he tried to dislodge it, thrust it away from him, but the very act of clutching at it, the agile roundnesses under his hands, turned fright into a sweet aggression, his mind — standing aside — awed, wringing its hands, finding no way to intercede.
In a vague and troubled way, as he became aware of the helpless inevitability of it, he felt all the responsibilities of literary allusion, of equating it with fireworks, ocean surf, earthquakes or planetary phenomena. At the same time he was remotely, fretfully concerned with identity, wondering if it were Charla, Betsy, Wilma — but soon realizing that particular problem was, as of the moment, entirely academic. He just did not have time to give a damn.
So it transpired without benefit of analogy, or time to create one, aside from the hurried thought it was rather like some sort of absurd, stylized conflict, like a sword fight to music where you duck in time and in relation to the imposed necessities of tempo. As the fight was both won and lost, in a white blindness, he sensed, from a long way off, her vast tensions, some spaced yippings, then a buttery melting of the creature quelled.
And then there was a head beside him, wedged into his neck, tickling him, and a breath making long slow hot whooshings against his throat, and a hand that came up to idly roam his indifferent cheek.
“Hoooo — boy!” she whispered. “Hooooo, Bernie! Oh, you the doll of all times. The livin’ most.”
“Um,” he said, pleased that his heart had decided not to hammer its way out of his chest.
“Suh-prize, suh-prize, huh, sweetie? Nice suh-prize?”
“Um.”
“Couldn’t make the damn key work for hell. Figured on you changed the lock, and I would truly kill you dead, you’d done that to Bonny Lee one time. Then it worked and I come a-mousing in, felt the bed, looking for two pair of feet. I find two pair, Bernie-boy, there be the gawddamnedest fracas around here you heard ever.”
“Uh.”
“You doan talk much to a gal missed you so bad, honey. Don’t you get the idea now I could be hustling you for any piece of that TV crud, on account of you just use them sick-looking broads you brang down here like always. I come here because you’re just the most there is anywhere, and I love you something terrible, and it was real wild and nice, hey now?”