“Not today or any other day. You took my car. I repaid your loan in full, and you still took my car. Now—”
“Late charges, Rainstar. Interest penalties. Repossession costs. Nothing more than your contract called for.”
I told him he could go fuck for what the contract called for. He could blow it out his ass. “And if you bastards pull any more crap on me, any more of this calling me to the phone in the middle of the night...”
“Call you to the phone?” He was laughing at me. “Fake emergency calls? What makes you think we were responsible?”
I told him why I thought it; why I knew it. Because only Amicable Finance was lousy enough to pull such tricks. Others might pimp for their sisters at a nickel a throw, but they weren’t up to Amicable’s stunts.
“So here’s some advice for you, you liver-lipped asshole! You fuck with me any more, and it’ll be shit in the fan! Before I’m through with you, you’ll think lightning struck a crapper...!”
I continued a minute or two longer, growing more elaborate in my cursing. And, not surprisingly, I had quite a vocabulary of curses. Nothing is sacred to children, just as anything unusual is an affront to them, a challenge which cannot be ignored. And when you have a name like Britton Rainstar, you are accepted only after much fighting and cursing.
I slammed down the phone. Frightened stiff by what I had done, yet somehow pleased with myself. I had struck back for a change. For once in a very long time, I had faced up to the ominous instead of ignoring or running from it.
I fixed the one drink I had in the house, a large drink of vodka. Sipping it, feeling the dullness go out of my heart, I decided that I would by god get the needful clone with my hair. I would look like a man, by god, not the Jolly Green Giant, when Amicable Finance started giving me hell.
Before I could weaken and change my mind, I made an appointment with a hair stylist. Then I finished my drink, dragging it out as long as I could, and stood up.
And the phone rang.
I almost didn’t answer it; certain that it would get me nothing but a bad time. But few men are strong enough to ignore a ringing telephone and I am not one of them.
A booming, infectiously good-natured voice blasted into my ear.
“Mr. Rainstar, Britt? How the hell are you, kid?”
I said I was fine, and how the hell was he? He said he was just as fine as I was, laughing uproariously. And I found myself smiling in spite of myself.
“This is Pat Aloe, Britt. Patrick Xavier Aloe, if you’re going to be fussy.” Another roar of laughter. “Look, kid. I’d come out there, but I’m tied up tighter than a popcorn fart. So’s how about you dropping by my office in about an hour? Well, two hours, then.”
“But — well, why?” I said. “Why do you want to see me, Mr. — uh, Pat?”
“Because I owe you, Britt, baby. Want to make it up to you for those pissants at Amicable. Don’t know what’s the matter with the stupid bastards, anyway.”
“But... Amicable?” I hesitated. “You have something to do with them?”
A final roar of laughter. Apparently, I had said something hilariously funny. Then, good humor flooding me. but I also wanted to see him, even though I didn’t his voice, he declared that he not only wanted to see know it yet. Thus, the vote for seeing each other was unanimous by his account.
“So how about it, Britt, baby? See you in a couple of hours, okay?”
“Who am I to buck a majority vote?” I said. “I’ll see you, Pat, uh, baby.”
3
I got out of the cab at a downtown office building. I entered its travertine marble lobby and studied the large office directory affixed to one wall. It was glassed in, a long oblong of white plastic lettering against a black felt background. The top line read:
Beneath it, in substantially smaller letters, were the names of sixteen companies, including that of Amicable Finance. The final listing, in small red letters, read:
P.X. Aloe
M. Francesca Aloe
’Allo, Aloe, I thought, stepping into the elevator. Patrick Xavier, M. Francesa, and Britt, baby, makes three. Or something. But whereof and why, for god’s sake?
I punched the button marked P.H., and was zoomed forty floors upward to the Penthouse floor. As I debarked into its richly furnished reception area, a muscular young man with gleaming black hair stepped in front of me. He looked sharply into my face, then smiled and stepped back.
“How are you, Mr. Rainstar? Nice day.”
“How are you?” I said, for I am nothing if not polite. “A nice day so far, at least.”
A truly beautiful, beautifully-dressed woman came forward, and urgently squeezed my hand.
“Such a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Rainstar! Do come with me, please.”
I followed her across a hundred feet or so of carpet (a foot deep or so) to an unmarked door. She started to knock, then jerked her hand back. Turned to me still smiling, but rather whitishly.
“If you’ll wait just a moment, please...”
She started to shoo me away, then froze at the sound from within the room. A sound that could only be made by a palm swung against a face. Swung hard, again, again... Like the stuttering, staccato crackling of an automatic rifle.
It went on for all of a minute, a very long time to get slapped. Abruptly, as though a gag had been removed, a woman screamed.
“N-no! D-don’t, please! I’ll never do—!”
The scream ended with the suddenness of its beginning. The slapping also. The beautiful, beautifully dressed young woman waited about ten seconds. (I counted them off silently.) Then she knocked on the door and ushered me inside.
“Miss Manuela Aloe,” she said. “Mr. Britton Rainstar.”
A young woman came toward me smiling; rubbing her hand, her right hand, against her dress before extending it to me. “Thank you, Sydney,” she said, dismissing the receptionist with a nod. “Mr. Rainstar, let’s just sit here on the lounge.”
We sat down on the long velour lounge. She crossed one leg over the other, rested an elbow on her knee, and looked at me smiling, her chin propped in the palm of her hand. I looked at her — the silver-blond hair, the startlingly black eyes and lashes, the flawlessly creamy complexion. I looked and found it impossible to believe that such a delicious bonbon of a girl would do harm to anyone.
Couldn’t I have heard a recording? And if there had been another woman, where was she? The only door in the room was the one I had entered by, and no one had passed me on the way out.
“You look just like him,” Manuela was saying. “We-ell, almost just. You don’t have your hair in braids.”
I said, “What?” And then I said, “Oh,” for several questions in my mind had been answered. “You mean Chief Britton Rainstar,” I said. “The Remington portrait of him in the Metropolitan.”
She said no, she’d missed that one, darn it. “I was talking about the one in the Royal Museum by James MacNeill Whistler. But tell me. Isn’t Britton a kind of funny name for an Indian chief?”
“Hilarious,” I said. “I guess we got it from the nutty whites the Rainstars intermarried with, early and often. Now, if you want a real honest-to-Hannah, jumpin’-by-Jesus Indian name — well, how does George strike you?”
“George?” she laughed. “George?”
“George Creekmore. Inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, and publisher of the first newspaper west of the Mississippi.”
“And I guess that’ll teach me,” she smiled, coloring slightly. “But anyway, you certainly bear a strong resemblance to the Chief. Of course, I’d heard that all the Rainstar men did, but—”