“And why, if I might ask, would I want two copies of the same thing?”
“I have no idea,” Georg said, leaning back in his chair. “So what do you say?”
“You mean about the money?”
“Yes.”
Buchanan shrugged his shoulders. “What sum does your cousin have in mind?”
“He says that the whole set is on sale for thirty million,” Georg replied, taking the negatives from the desk, rolling them up, and putting them back in the can. “He doesn’t want that much from you, since he says you’ve already paid. He’s thinking one million.”
“Just a lousy million, because we’re supposed to have already paid a lousy thirty?” Buchanan again rubbed his chin. “That doesn’t add up. Why would your cousin tell us what we need to know with nothing but a promise from me to you that he’ll be paid? What court in the world could he turn to to get his million?”
“He’ll turn to the press. If you don’t pay, he’ll sell his story to the papers. He thinks that isn’t an option you’d be particularly pleased with.”
“So that’s what he thinks? Well, tell your cousin we’ll pay the million.” He looked at Georg warily. “Or should we first of all focus on you?”
“What more do you want to know?”
“I know you’ve told us everything that this cousin of yours has commissioned you to tell us, and that you don’t know more. But perhaps you’re not your cousin’s cousin after all, but your cousin in person: the only cousin in this game. Or if your cousin does exist, perhaps you can give us a bit more background. I imagine you and he must be in contact. Might your cousin in fact be your uncle?” Buchanan looked at Georg sharply.
Georg laughed. “If I don’t have a cousin, how could I be a cousin myself? But jokes aside, why would I want to play charades? As for my being in contact with him, the way it works is that he calls me.”
Buchanan raised his hands and slapped them against the desk. “Damn! Do you know what happened to me this morning? I gave away the wrong puppy. My golden retriever had a litter, and six pups are more than I can handle. I wanted to keep one, but, believe it or not, by mistake I gave away the one I wanted to keep.”
“So why don’t you ask for it back?”
“Ask for it back? Ask for it back? I gave it to my boss. Am I supposed to tell him the puppy’s too good for him? That he can have one of the others?”
Georg got up. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you. Good luck with the puppy.”
“You don’t seem to give a damn about what happens to the puppy,” Buchanan said, walking Georg to the door. “Good-bye.”
Georg sped down the winding mountain road with his radio turned up all the way. His shirt fluttered in the wind. “It worked!” he yelled triumphantly. “This is the beginning of the end for you, Joe Benton! It doesn’t matter what Buchanan thinks of my story, but, believe me, he’ll be less and less pleased with your side of things!” Georg imagined Buchanan giving Benton the sack: “You’re such an idiot, Benton! You were underhanded in your dealings-it doesn’t matter in how many ways, but you were underhanded. I have no time for people like you!” Georg thought, the one thing that upsets me is that you’ll probably never find out that I was the one who dug your grave! Buchanan won’t tell you about me, just as you didn’t tell him about me either. But who cares! Georg chuckled. And now for the Russians. And why not bring in the Chinese too, the Libyans, the Israelis, the South Africans? It’s like a cocktail where you throw in all kinds of spicy things: one sip and you hit the roof. If the world wants to dance to a crazy tune, it might as well be mine!
Jill brought Georg back down to earth. She was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open. She had vomited and was whimpering. Fern’s diagnosis was an upset stomach. Georg could only see that the poor baby was suffering, and he had a bad conscience. Fern suggested he give her some Coca-Cola.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“If you have an upset stomach, you drink Coca-Cola. Everyone does it. My mother even had a little bottle of Coca-Cola syrup always handy.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting I give Jill Coca-Cola! How old were you when your mother used that household remedy on you?” Household remedy! Georg had to force himself even to use the words. Household remedies were wormwood, chamomile and linden blossom tea, compresses, and alcohol rubs. Coca-Cola as a household remedy! America really was a new world.
Fern was exasperated. “You can’t expect me to remember if I was given Coca-Cola when I was two months old, but I was given it ever since I can remember.”
They got a can out of the refrigerator. Georg picked Jill up, dipped his finger in the brown liquid, and then popped it in her mouth. She sucked at his finger, and he repeated it a second time and then a third.
“Do you think that’s enough?” he asked.
Fern had been watching carefully. She flicked a lock of hair out of her face and said with conviction, “Five should do the trick.”
He dipped his finger two more times, and then carried Jill onto the terrace, through the rooms, down the stairs to the laundry room, and back up the stairs. He kept mumbling softly to her, telling her fairy tales and crooning lullabies. By the time he got back to the terrace, she was asleep. He sat down carefully on the edge of the deck chair and looked down the street, counting five abandoned car wrecks and three sailboats in the bay. He watched a dirigible heading north.
44
ON WEDNESDAY, AT PRECISELY TEN in the morning, Georg called the Soviet embassy in Washington from a pay phone.
“Embassy of the USSR, can I help you?”
“I would like to leave a message under the code name ‘Rotors.’ Have your man in San Francisco take a cab to the corner of Twenty-fourth and Third streets, then walk east on Twenty-fourth all the way to the end. Have him wait there for a motorboat that will appear at eleven. Did you get all that?”
“Yes, but…”
Georg hung up. It took him ten minutes to get back home. He didn’t hurry; it would take a good fifteen minutes for the embassy in Washington to contact its man in San Francisco and tell him where to go. Fern and Jill were at the Golden Gate Park, and Jonathan barely looked up from a new painting he was working on as Georg went over to the desk. “If you want some paper, it’s in the top left-hand drawer,” Jonathan said. Georg took the gun out of the bottom right-hand drawer. It was still unclear what Jonathan’s new picture was to be of.
By twenty past ten Georg was lying on the roof. Illinois and Twenty-fourth streets were quiet. From time to time he saw a van, trucks with or without containers, construction machinery, and delivery vehicles. For ten whole minutes there was no car, then at ten-thirty a police car drove slowly up Illinois Street, made a U-turn at the intersection, and slowly drove back down. At ten-thirty-five a big, squat Lincoln turned onto Twenty-fourth Street from Third. Its exhaust pipe rattled and its springs groaned as it drove over the rough pavement of the intersection. The Lincoln came to a halt at the end of Twenty-fourth Street. Nobody got out. Dense traffic was rumbling on Third Street and on the highway beyond.
Georg was nervous. The police car. The Lincoln. What he needed was two pairs of eyes so he could watch both the intersection in front of him and the Lincoln behind him. He kept asking himself whether the Russians were playing along, or whether they thought all this was just a prank-or a trap. “Wait and keep cool,” he said to himself. “What kind of a prank could this be, or what kind of trap? The Americans could hardly corner a Soviet agent waiting by the bay for an unknown man.”