“Smart enough to rig a blackmail thing on Lee?”
“Oh, I doubt it. I doubt it very much. It couldn’t have been his idea in any case. Somebody could have bullied him into it. I think he would shatter quite easily under pressure. Only a damn fool would have tried to use him that way. He would crack too easily. And it wasn’t a fool who arranged it all.”
“Have any ideas?”
“Who there had money or reputation or something to lose? Lee, and the architect’s daughter, and the M’Gruders. Cass apparently, and Sonny and Whippy and the college boys and Carl would be very small fry, not worth the effort compared to the others.”
“Agreed. Keep going.”
She shrugged. “There’s nowhere else to go. We know that two out of the three were contacted. Lee paid off. Mr. Abbott apparently didn’t. And we’ll know about the M’Gruders later on. We should go to San Francisco, I imagine. After Abelle or before?”
“After.”
“Tomorrow?” I nodded. She slid out of the booth. “I’d better do some phoning right now then.” She walked to the cashier for change.
When we got back to the boat, Dana checked her copy of Lysa Dean’s promo schedule and found that Lysa would be starting a rest hour in about another fifteen minutes. She waited twenty minutes and phoned her on a private line that did not go through the hotel board. They talked together for about fifteen minutes. Then Dana called to me, holding the phone with her palm over the mouthpiece.
“She wants to talk to you. I’ve caught her up to date on all of it.”
When I spoke to her, Lee said in a lazy drawl, “Sweetie, how do you like the little giftie I sent you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The highly efficient tragic figger, stupid.”
“Oh fine, just fine.”
“She’ll keep you honest and keep you scrambling, dear. I miss her already. Little things are starting to get fouled up. So don’t keep her too long.”
“I didn’t make any request, you know.”
“Oh, don’t be stuffy! And by the way, McGee, don’t waste your time in any idle hopes. She’s quite something in a sort of swarthy hearty way. The look of banked fires or something. Some of the greatest experts in the industry have taken their Sunday hack at that, dear, and wandered glassily away with icicles forming on their whatsis. It is sort of an in-group joke.”
“I’m laughing myself sick.”
“You are really a wretched chap, aren’t you? Why do I still like you? I understand the Abbot girl is out of the ball park.”
“Did she seem odd to you at the time?”
“Not particularly. She kept belting herself pretty good, so who expected too much sense? And she was pretty rowdy now and again. Roughhousing into other people’s little games. She kept talking about her dear daddy. And singing that song at very strange moments. My Heart Belongs to and so forth. When you see Carl, dear, grasp his hand, smile, give him my love, and kick him solidly in the jewels. I would pay a small bonus for that.”
“Just one thing. Is that little accent of his genuine?”
“God, no! It’s for the ski trade.”
“Are you getting good protection?”
“So far it looks fine. Take care of yourself. Dana will keep me informed.”
“Want to speak to her again?”
“Goodby and love to you both. Happy hunting.”
I hung up and said, “You plan to keep her informed?”
She had taken the check book from the desk drawer to post the cash deposit she had made. She looked over at me, one dark eyebrow lifting slightly. “In that business, she’s so used to intrigue. Everybody watches everybody. And if you work for somebody you have to be at a certain established level, a pecking order. She’s just trying to fit you into the ranks, Travis, somewhere between a script writer and an associate producer. She doesn’t know it won’t work, but there’s no point in… in making a point of it. I’ll tell her what she should know, and enough to keep her happy, and no more or less than that. Ok?”
“Divided loyalty?”
“Not really. You are both after the same thing, aren’t you?”
“Should that be a question?”
“Mr. Burley told me about a girl named Marianne. I don’t have as many questions about you as I used to.”
“I’m reasonably honest, Dana, in my own way. That’s about as far as I can go with it. Maybe I have a price. Nobody’s come up with just the right amount yet. But maybe next time. Let’s see how quick you can get us out of here, Efficient Girl.”
Six
SHE MANAGED to switch it to earlier arrangements on Wednesday. By noon, in a gray February world, we had come down through snow flurries to land at Albany, and had taken off again. When the snow ended the sky was a luminous gray. I looked down at the winter calligraphy of upstate New York, white fields marked off by the black woodlots, an etching without color, superbly restful in contrast to the smoky, guttering, grinding stink of the airplane clattering across the sky like an old commuter bus.
Dana seemed pensive. She had tilted her window seat and had her face turned toward the window, and I could not tell whether her eyes were open or closed. I looked at her still hands resting in her lap, against the nubbly fabric of her suit skirt. You look at hands long enough, you can turn them into animal paws. Her hands were a little larger than perhaps they should have been, the fingers very long and firm, the nails oval, quite narrow, convex. The pads of fingers and palm were heavy. The backs of her hands were very smooth and youthful. You look at hands as animal paws, and you think of the animal aspects of the human, and suddenly you are back on that Pacific terrace, seeing that final and most dangerous form of gluttony.
Perhaps, I thought, the most absolute way of categorizing people is by what they are capable of, and what they are not capable of. Temptation does not deliver most of us into evil, because temptation is a constant and evil is a sometime thing with most of us.
So far I had seen only two people whose pattern of life had led, almost implacably, toward that terrace. One of them had been on exhibition all her adult life, driven by restless greed, emotional instability, a desire to be noticed. Her artificiality had made this just another act, not particularly real to her while it was happening. The younger one had become food for Jack London’s Noseless One long before Abelle and the M’Gruders led her onto that terrace. It, like Mexico, like the tour with Sonny Catton, was just another part of the self destruction.
I would never talk to Catton. Perhaps it had not mattered a damn to him one way or the other. For the soul to be offended it must first exist. Perhaps to snake-mean Sonny, broads were broads were broads, and if they came in a bundle instead of in separate rooms, he could not care less. He had brought one along and discarded it for one that suited him better. Perhaps for him it was like an exchange counter.
I could not be Sonny. I had the old illusions, including the one that maybe I might be gaining a little bit, just a very damn little bit, in wisdom as my time went by. And wisdom says there are no valuable goods on the bargain counter. Wisdom says the only values are the ones you place on yourself. And I have locked myself into this precarious role of the clown-knight in the tomato-can armor, flailing away at indifferent beasts with my tinfoil sword. A foible of the knight, even the comic ones, is the cherishing of women, and perhaps even my brand of cherishing is quaint in this time and place.
Though I have faltered from time to time, I do want the relationship, if it does be come intimate, to rest solidly on trust, affecton, respect. Not just for taking, or scoring, or using, or proving anything. That knocks out group adventures right there. Not for recreation, not for health rationalizations, not for sociologically constructive contacts. But because she is a woman, and valuable. And you are a man, and equally valuable. There are more than enough girls and boys around. Break down, McGee. Say it. Okay, for love and love alone.