A Deadly Shade of Gold (36 page)

"I think there'd be a nice place for me, just to the left of the lion."

"I would be more concerned about what your trophy room looks like, Mack Smith."

"It's very dull. You see, I don't go after the record heads. In fact, I don't go after anything at all.

I'm not a collector, Connie."

"That makes you a little more dangerous. I understand collectors. You see, I.... What's the matter?"

"I just wondered if I know that man."

She turned and looked. "Oh, that's one of Cal's show business connections. A dreary little chap.

Claude Boody."

There was no hint of the imperiousness the artist had put into the oil painting in Puerto Altamura. The jowls were the same. The eyes were sad, wet, brown and bagged, like a tired spaniel, and he walked with the care of a heart case.

"I guess he just looks like someone I knew once."

"He has some dreary little syndicated television things, and he buys old foreign movies and dubs the English and resells them to independent stations."

"You sound knowledgeable, Mrs. Melgar."

"I have some money in that, too. But not with him."

"Does Tomberlin have some business association with him?"

"Heavens no! Calvin cultivates a few people like Boody because they can always round up some
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reckless youngsters for fun and games. Poor Boody travels the world over scrounging properties, and he always looks tired. I guess he does well enough. He lives well. His wife is a neurotic bitch and his children are spoiled rotten."

We went back to the upper lounge where Tomberlin's hard-working staff had laid out a generous buffet. It was delicious, and we took loaded plates down to the big deck and ate like a pair of tigers. She licked her fingers, patted her tummy, stifled a belch and moaned with satisfaction. There is a direct relation between the physical approaches to all hungers. This great hearty woman would ease all appetites with the same wolfish intensity, the same deep satisfaction. She would live hard, play hard, sleep like the dead.

Her strong rich body had that magnetic attraction based on total health and total use. She did not relate in any way to the sick subtleties, the delicate corruptions in Tomberlin's private museum. And I got the hell away from her before I had more awareness than I could comfortably handle.

I wandered again. The party kept shifting and changing, people leaving, people arriving, various states of various kinds of intoxication achieved, small arrangements, made and broken, small advantages taken and rejected. Music boomed from hidden speakers when somebody turned the volume up. All evening it had been incurably, implacably Hawaiian. I heard the reason in a snatch of conversation. Tomberlin liked it, and would have nothing else.

I mapped the place in my mind. Then I rechecked my dimensions. I wandered outside and identified the windows and the relationship between them. I charted in the power sources. I wondered how many Hawaiians the damned man had. I wondered what kind of nippers would bite that wire, and how I would get up to the window, and how I would get back up to it from the inside bearing a hundred and a half of ancient gold, if I could get it out from behind those glass ports.

I went out into the darker end of the garden beyond the lights of the now empty pool, and sat on a pedestal, sharing it with a welded woman perched upon one steel toe. I smoked a cigarette and felt again the monstrous dejection which had nearly foundered me in Francine's tub. There can be a special sort of emotional exhaustion compounded of finding no good answers to anything.

Too much had faded away, and the only target left was a grotesque pornographer with a voice like a trapped bee, and he seemed peripheral to the whole thing. Too much blood. Too much gold and intrigue. Too much fumbling and bumbling. It was like taking a puzzle apart and having the pieces disappear the instant they came free. From the talk with Sam, all the way to the hard tasteless gallop in Francine's bed, I had handled myself like an idiot, suffering all the losses, enjoying no gains.

And, except for Nora, the whole thing had seemed like a long bath in yesterday's dish water. The house lights faded the stars, but I looked up at them and told myself my recent vision of reality had been from a toad's-eye view. The stars, McGee, look down on a world where thousands of 4-H kids are raising prize cattle and sheep. The Green Bay Packers, of their own volition, join in the Lord's Prayer before a game. Many good and gentle people have fallen in love this night. At this moment, thousands of women are in labor with the fruit of good marriage. Thousands of kids sleep the deep sleep which comes from the long practice hours for competitive swimming and tennis. Good men have died today, leaving hearts sick with loss. In quiet rooms young girls are writing poems. People are laughing together, in safe places.

You have been on the underside of the world, McGee, but there is a top side too, where there is
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wonder, innocence, trust, love and gentleness. You made the decision, boy. You live down here, where the animals are, so stay with it.

I got up and went back to the party. A new batch of faces had arrived and some had fallen off. A dusty little man in his middle years, with fierce eyes and a froggy bassoon of a voice was standing orating in the big room, surrounded by a mixed group of admirers and dissidents. He wore a beret and a shiny serge suit and he had a great air of authority. I drifted into the edge of the group and heard an earnest woman say, "But Doctor Face, isn't it part of our heritage for anyone to be entitled to say what they think, right or wrong?"

"My dear woman, that is one of the luxuries of liberty, not one of the definitions thereof. And it is traditional and necessary in war that we forgo the luxuries and concentrate on the necessities.

My posture is that we are at war, with a vile, godless, international conspiracy which grows in strength every day while we weaken ourselves by giving every pinko jackass the right to confuse our good people. I ask you, my dear. Who takes the fifth? Known hoodlums and fellow travelers. Our so called traditional liberties provide the bunkers in which these rascals hide and shoot us down. I say we must work together. We must silence all the divisionist voices among us.

"If we are to be strong, we must impeach all traitor justices of the Supreme Court, give greater powers to the investigating committees of the Congress, decentralize our socialistic central government, institute wartime censorship of all mass media, expand the counterespionage efforts of the FBI, smash the apparatus of the Communist Party as it exists within labor unions, the NAACP, the CLU, and the hard core of sympathizers on all college campuses, both students and faculty.

"We are engaged in a bitter war for the hearts and minds of men, and our enemy is without soul or mercy. To be strong we must silence, once and forever, every jackass who tells the people that we can win through weakness rather than strength. Over twelve thousand people have signed up as Crusaders. We're tough. We're smart. We're wary. And we raean to save this country in spite of itself."

The delivery was effective. It radiated sincerity, concern, earnestness. But he had it all down just a little too pat. He had said it too many hundreds of times. And as I stood there I had a curious feeling I had been there before. It took me a time to remember. Then I recalled it, lifetimes ago, as a small kid in a Chicago park, hanging onto the big hand of the daddy, listening to this same dusty little man with his smeared lenses and the same general impression of dirty underwear.

Not the same man, of course, but the same mechanical messiah approach. And that duplicate little man of long ago had been calling upon all decent men to arm themselves against the dirty capitalistic conspiracy, bread for the workers, break the chains, unite, save America.

I moved away, to a different level of the house where, over the goopy strings of the grass skirt music I could hear his occasional clarion phrase "... ninety miles off our doorstep... sense of purpose... show them we mean what we say... bleeding hearts..." but I could not follow the strange line of his reasoning. There are a lot of them running loose these days, I thought, fattening themselves on the sick business of whipping up such fear and confusion that they turn decent men against their decent neighbors in this sad game of think-alike.

It seemed an odd business for Tomberlin to be backing, but I have long since learned that the very rich specialize in irrational causes. Insulated from the brute reality of the money drive, they expand into the unreality of Yoga, astrology, organic foods and marginal politics. Tomberlin was immersed in the mismatched fields of erotica and the clanking of crypto-Fascist right. Next
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year it might be voodoo and technocracy. It was the search for importance, and the ones who could recognize that could con him very nicely and profitably.

I found that one of the strategic little bars had a fair brand of domestic brandy, so I got three fingers and one lump of ice and sat on a corner couch and looked across to where a group of young were sprawled up the side of some wide stairs. Some of them were the pool people. They had their private jokes, and their cool-eyed apartness from the rest of the party. They were a swinging little pack, with a flavor of tension and disdain.

There is one typical characteristic of both nightmare and delirium. Both these conditions of mind involve the grouping of people from random points in the past. A dead childhood companion will appear with last month's girl. A man who once tried very earnestly to kill you dead will show up and tell you symbolic things about your dead brother's wife.

When there is an inexplicable association of people during a waking and rational moment, it inevitably recaptures that faint and eerie flavor of nightmare.

Suddenly one of the little blonde cupcakes on the stairway jumped into focus as though I was using a zoom lens. It was the nameless sun bunny from the pool at La Casa Encantada, the one who had come over tipsy, sat on her heels with brown thighs muscularly flexed, wanting to know if I'd been an end with the Rams. She wore a little white linen dress and had her hair piled high and wore considerable eye makeup, but it was the same one. I felt as if I could not take a very deep breath. I looked at the others. There had been five of them on that motor sailer, three young men and two girls. I found one of the men, a big dark hairy one, the one who had seemed to be in charge of the scuba outing. What had she called him? Chip.

I could accept the presence of Claude Boody. A mild coincidence. But I could not accept the presence of the sun bunny. It was a little too much. And so nothing had been as I had imagined. I had to let the structure fall down and then try again. I had to find a new logic. I was frightened without knowing why I should be. It was fright with a paranoid flavor. All I needed was for Heintz or Arista or Colonel Marquez to show up, humming a Hawaiian melody.

I knew the awareness was mutual. The bland, sensual little pug-face made automatic smiles and grimaces at the things people said to her. But she would angle her eyes at me now and again.

Never a direct look, but only when her head was turned. It was unconsciously furtive. I could not read her big hairy friend. He was further up the stairs and seemed totally involved with a little brunette who squirmed and giggled and squirmed.

I moved casually away, but not entirely out of range. I was considerably more alert. I had an uncomfortable feeling. Like a herd animal, shuffling along with the group, and gradually beginning to wonder what that faint thudding and screaming means, way up at the head of the line. I was growing points on my ears and walking softly on my toes. I found Connie talking to a big broad balding fellow with tiny eyes and a large damp mouth and considerable affability. She introduced him as George Wolcott, introduced him in a way that told me she did not know him and found him boring.

"What kind of a boat are you going to help this lovely lady find?" he asked me, chuckling though no joke had been made.

"Just a comfortable day cruiser of some kind. Displacement hull. A good sea beam. Nothing fast or flashy."

"I suppose you got all the licenses to run one. Heh, heh, heh."

"To run a charter boat for hire, with Coast Guard blessings, Mr. Wolcott."

"Good. Heh, heh, heh. What kind of a boat do the Simrnins have?"

"It is a great big gaudy vulgar Chris Craft," Connie said. "It's called the Not Again! Excuse us please, Mr. Wolcott."

He chuckled his permission. His loose smilings did not alter the dead bullet look of his eyes. I was getting hyper-sensitive. When we were far enough away from him, I asked her who he was.

"Oh, he's part of that Doctor Face deal. Chairman some goddam of arrangements or rifle drill or thing."

"He asks a lot of questions."

"I think it's just Dale Carnegie. Show an interest. Keep smiling. Remember names. Darling, how much of this can you take? My God, this music is hurting my teeth. I'd much rather take you home to bed."

"Give me another half hour here."

I turned her over to Rhoda Dwight for some more infighting, and wandered on. The sun bunny appeared at my elbow, showing teeth that looked brushed after every meal. But she seemed uneasy.

"I never was with the Rams," I said.

"I know. Look I have to tell you something. Not here. Okay? Go down to the deck and over to the end, to the right as you go out onto the deck."

Without waiting for my answer, she walked away. Suspicion confirmed. There can only be so much coincidence in the world. So I went where requested. I had that end of the deck to myself. I looked at the night view. She hissed at me. I turned and saw her looking out of a dark doorway. I went to her. "This way" she said. It was a wide corridor in the bedroom area, a night-light panel gleaming.

She opened a corridor door and said in a low voice, "I didn't want to be seen talking to you. We can talk in here."

She walked in first, into darkness. I hesitated at the doorway, and went in. But I went in at a swift sidelong angle, and something smashed down on the point of my right shoulder, numbing my arm. I went down and rolled to where I thought the girl would be. The room door slammed. I rolled against her legs and brought her thrashing down, got an arm around her throat and one hand levered up behind her and stood up with her just as lights came on.