Finally he said, “Let’s discuss this from a different angle.”
“It’s your turf,” I said.
“You are not quite the standard fortune hunter,” he said, “some money-mad chauffeur out to make a quick killing. You are better than that, more educated, more intelligent, more talented.”
I put my fork down and stared at him. “Now you’re trying to sell me an encyclopedia.”
He ignored that, saying, “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit you enjoy the life you already have: the freedom, some sense of adventure and experiment, the opportunity to employ your talent.”
“And the bill collectors,” I said. “They’re my favorites.”
He nodded, thoughtfully. “The money Elizabeth offered you has gone to your head, and why not? It’s a lot of money. But it isn’t what you really want.”
“What I really want is a fire engine and a set of soldiers.”
“What you really want,” he told me, “is the life you’re living now, but with a somewhat firmer economic cushion.”
“Like two thousand a month.”
“No,” he said. “Earned money. The product of your own labor.”
“As a psychiatrist,” I told him, “you make a great stand-up comedian.”
He plowed ahead; he was thin, but he talked fat. “I have clients,” he said, “with available venture capital. You own a business with rather strong potential. A larger and more diverse line, national distribution of your product, and you could be quite well off. I believe I could authorize an investment of, oh, say, thirty thousand dollars.”
“You really are something, Volpinex,” I said. “First threats, then bribery.” And I couldn’t help wondering how he’d narrowed it down to just that figure.
“I had already assumed,” he said, “that you would choose the worst possible interpretation of that offer. Nevertheless, it still stands.”
“And nevertheless, I’m still going to marry Liz. Give it up, Volpinex. Nothing is going to keep that marriage from taking place.” I saw no point in mentioning that Folksy Cards would never survive expansion, or that thirty thousand dollars was fifteen months pay from Liz. What did I need with his venture capital? I had a couple ventures of my own going.
His look was now as cold as the air conditioning. “I had hoped we could find an accommodation,” he said.
So he’d shot his last bolt, finally. “I tell you what,” I suggested. “Try the routine on Bart. He might go for thirty thousand dollars. Or Betty might be more impressed by scandal than Liz.”
His expression clouded. “Your brother has lived a much cleaner life than you have,” he said, and I could hear a certain frustration in his voice.
Of course. A standard background check covers only two areas — credit and police blotter. Bart would come up blank on both, and the conclusion to be drawn was not that Bart Dodge had in fact no real-world existence, but that Bart Dodge was a very clean-living guy. It is, as they say, very difficult to prove a negative.
“Bart always has been a boy scout,” I said, and drank some of the Médoc. It was delicious.
27
After lunch, Volpinex invited me to play squash. “I’ve never played,” I said.
“You’ll pick it up. Come along, I’ll lend you a sweat suit.”
Squash turned out to be a game combining the worst qualities of tennis and handball. In a bare high-ceilinged room the two of us stood in our sweat suits facing the same wall, holding the kid brothers of tennis rackets in our hands. A small hard rubber ball was to be hit against that wall with this racket by player number one. Player number two was to hit it on the rebound, and player number one on that rebound, and so on.
What the game consists of mostly is running back and forth in an empty room, occasionally crashing into a side wall. I understand the upper class is nuts over it.
Volpinex told me the rules of the game, and I began to understand its appeal for a certain kind of intellect, since it’s about as complicated as fifty-two-pickup. “I see,” I said. “I hit then you hit then I hit then you hit.”
“That’s right,” he said, bounced the ball, and whammed it with his racket at the opposite wall. It hit, and caromed back on a beeline for my head. I flung myself away to the right, heard the fwizzzzz of its passage, and turned to see it thud into the opposite wall and head back my way again.
But with less determination. It bounced before it reached me, and only hurt my hand moderately when I caught it. A rather hard little rubber ball. I said, “This thing goes pretty fast, huh?”
“Good players in a fast game,” he told me, “will get rebounds up to a hundred miles an hour.”
“Wouldn’t do a fellow’s forehead much good,” I suggested.
He offered me his thin smile. “You do have to keep out of the way,” he said. “Go ahead and try it.”
All right, bastard. I’m fairly good at pool, I should be able to work out the angle between where I was standing and that creep’s nose. I chose a spot on the far wall, bounced the little ball, and swung as hard as I could.
The ball went some damn place. It hit the wall, but nowhere near the spot I’d chosen, and it came back out at an angle that had nothing to do with Volpinex’s nose.
And Volpinex was off like a mechanical rabbit. He shot past me, flung himself in front of the ricocheting ball, swung his racket, sliced the ball on the fly, and here the damn thing came again. Off the wall and straight for my left eye, faster than ever.
“Jesus!” I shouted, and practically fell on my ass scampering out of the way. The ball whizzed by, and I turned to speak severely to Volpinex, only to see him running again, at an angle across the floor, racket at the ready.
What in hell was all this? Whump went the racket against the ball, and here came the ball, a buzzing little V-2 rocket aimed at the London of my stomach. By screeching to a halt and sucking in my gut I gave the little devil room to fly, but it was gone so fast, and coming back again from the wall so soon, that I didn’t have time to do anything else but duck again, reeling away toward the side wall, off balance to the front, running like mad to try to get my body back under my head.
Whump I heard behind me, and thick as the little round bastard shot off the wall again. I didn’t even look for it; I just hit the wall and shoved myself backward hard. As quick as a subliminal message on a movie screen, the ball came spinning in from the comer of my right eye, zzethuzzed off the wall in front of me, and rocketed away somewhere to my left.
I followed it, running for my life. Volpinex was loping to intersect the damn thing. He was swinging; I was veering to my left because that was where I’d guessed he would go next. Zing, went the ball, very loud, as it brush-burned my right earlobe. I was running as though a husband had come home unexpectedly, and I was watching Volpinex’s eyes. Let him watch the ball.
It was coming in behind me, I knew that, and he was coming in from the front. At what I judged to be the last second, I launched myself across Volpinex’s path, leaping out low and straight, parallel to the floor, as though I were making a flat dive into a swimming pool. I caught him at shin level, me in hurtling motion and him in a flat-out dash, and the two of us went tumbling about on the floor like planes colliding above the clouds.
I rolled and rolled, until I was away from all those extra legs and rackets, and then lunged staggering to my feet, gasping for breath and staring all around for that goddamn rotten ball.
There it was, on yet another ricochet. But its speed was lessening now, it was bouncing across the floor in long innocent skips, as though it wouldn’t hurt a fly. Running diagonally after it, I snapped it out of the air, clutched it in both my hands, and let my momentum carry me on to the nearest wall, which I thudded into like a mail sack.