“We’re hard to tell apart,” I agreed. “The only significant difference is in the pockets of later generations.”
“The pockets?”
“They’re empty,” I said, and tapped myself on the chest. “Meet Lo, the poor Indian.”
“Hi, Lo,” she said, laughing. And I said, “Hi,” and then we were silent for a time.
But it was not an uncomfortable silence. We smiled and looked at each other without self-consciousness, both of us liking what we saw. When she spoke it was to ask more questions about the Rainstar family; and while I didn’t mind talking about it, having little else to be proud of, there were things I wanted to know, too. So, after rambling on a while I got down to them.
“Like when and why the heck,” I said, “am I seeing P.X. Aloe?”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to see Uncle Pat today,” she said. “Some last-minute business came up. But there’s nothing sinister afoot” — she gave me a reassuring little pat on the arm. “Now, unless you’re in a hurry...”
“Well, I am due in Washington to address the cabinet,” I said. “I thought it was already addressed, but I guess someone left off the zone number.”
“You dear!” she laughed delightedly. “You absolute dear! Let’s go have some drinks and dinner, and talk and talk and talk...”
She got her hat and purse from a mahogany cabinet. The hat was a sailor with a turned-up brim, and she cocked it over one eye, giving me an impish look. Then she grinned and righted it, and the last faint traces of apprehension washed out of my mind.
Give another woman a vicious slapping? This darling, diminutive child? Rainstar, you are nuts!
We took the elevator down to PXA’s executive dining room, in a sub-basement of the building. A smiling maitre d’ with a large menu under his arm came out of the shadows and bowed to us graciously.
“A pleasure to see you, Miss Aloe. And you, too, sir, needless to say.”
“Not at all,” I said. “My pleasure.”
He looked at me a little startled. I am inclined to gag it up and talk too much when I am uneasy or unsure of myself, which means that I am almost always gagging it up and talking too much.
“This is Mr. Britton Rainstar, Albert (Albehr),” Manuela Aloe said. “I hope you’ll be seeing him often.”
“My own hope. Will you have a drink at the bar while your table is being readied?”
She said we would, and we did. In fact, we had a couple, since the night employees were just arriving at this early hour, and there was some delay in preparing our table.
“Very nice,” I said, taking an icy sip of martini. “A very nice place, Miss Aloe. Or is it Mrs.?”
She said it was Miss — she had taken her own name after her husband died — and I could call her Manny if I liked. “But yes—” she glanced around casually — “it is nice, isn’t it? Not that it shouldn’t be, considering.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Or should I say ah-ha? I’m afraid I’m going to have to rush right off to Geneva, Manny.”
“Wha-aat?”
“Just as soon as I pay for these drinks. Unless you insist on going dutch on them.”
“Silly!” She wriggled deliciously. “You’re with me, and everything’s complimentary.”
“But you said considering,” I pointed out. “A word hinting at the dread unknown, in my case at least. To wit, money.”
“Oh, well,” she shrugged, dismissing the subject. “Money isn’t everything.”
4
With an operation as large and multifaceted as PXA, one with so many employees and interests, it was impossible to maintain supervision and surveillance in every place it might be required. It would have been impossible, even if PXA’s activities were all utterly legitimate instead of borderline, with personnel who figuratively cried out to be spied upon. Pat Aloe had handed the problem to his niece Manny, a graduate student in psychology. After months of consultation with behaviorists and recording experts, she had come up with the bugging system used throughout the PXA complex.
It was activated by tones and was uncannily accurate in deciding when a person’s voice tone was not what it should be. Thus Bradley, the man who had called me this morning, had been revealed as a “switcher,” one who diverted business to competitors. So all of his calls were completely recorded, instead of sporadically spotchecked.
“I see,” I nodded to Manny, as we dawdled over coffee and liqueurs, “about as clearly as I see through mud. Everything is completely opaque to me.”
“Oh, now, why do you say that?” she said. “I’d seen that portrait when I was a little girl, and I’d never gotten it out of my mind. So when I found out that the last of the Rainstars was right here in town...!”
“Recalling part of the conversation,” I said, “you must have felt that the last of the Rainstars needed his mouth washed out with soap.”
She laughed and said nope, cursing out Bradley had been a plus. “That was just about the clincher for you with Pat. Someone of impeccable background and breeding, who could still get tough if he had to.”
“Manny,” I said, “exactly what is this all about, anyway? Why PXA’s interest in me?”
“Well...”
“Before you answer, maybe I’d better set you straight on something. I’ve never been mixed up in anything shady, and PXA seems to be mixed up in nothing else but. Oh, I know you’re not doing anything illegal, nothing you can go to prison for. But still, well—”
“PXA is right out in the open,” Manny said firmly. “Anyone that wants to try can take a crack at us. We don’t rewrite any laws, and we don’t ask any to be written for us. We don’t own any big politicians. I’d say that for every dollar we make with our so-called shady operations, there’s a thousand being stolen by some highly respectable cartel.”
“Well,” I nodded uncomfortably, “there’s no disputing that, of course. But I don’t feel that one wrong justifies another, if you’ll pardon an unpardonable cliche.”
“Pardoned.” She grinned at me openly. “We don’t try to justify it. No justifications, no apologies.”
“And this bugging business.” I shook my head. “It seems like something right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s sneaky and Big Brotherish, and it scares the hell out of me.”
Manny shrugged, remarking that it was probably everything I said. But bugging wasn’t an invention of PXA, and it didn’t and wouldn’t affect me. “We’re on your side, Britt. We’re against the people who’ve been against your people.”
“My people?” I said, and I grimaced a little wryly. “I doubt that any of us can be bracketed so neatly anymore. We may be more of one race than we are another, but I suspect we’re all a little of everything. White, yellow, black, and red.”
“Oh, well—” she glanced at her wristwatch. “You’re saying that there are no minorities?”
I said that I wasn’t sure what I was saying, or, rather, what the point to it was. “But I don’t believe that a man who’s being pushed around has a right to push anyone but the person pushing him... if you can untangle that. His license to push is particular, not general. If he starts lashing out at everyone and anyone, he’s asking for it, and he ought to get it.”
It was all very high-sounding and noble, and it also had the virtue, fortunately or otherwise, of being what I believed. What I had been bred to believe. And now I was sorry I had said it For I seemed to be hopelessly out of step with the only world I had, and again I was about to be left alone and afraid in that world, which I had had no hand in making. This lovely child, Manny, the one person to be kind to me or show interest in me for so very long, was getting ready to leave.