Condominium (34 page)

“You can believe it.”

“I thought that with the search planes and all, they could predict the paths of these things,” Messenger said. “What happened here, for God’s sake?”

“That one? It went through Cedar Key and flattened it and came on back through it and stomped the ruins, and then went thirty miles and turned and came back through it again. Very rare. The atmospheric conditions were in balance. There was no low-pressure area for the storm to move toward, no high-pressure ridge for it to follow. So it was in equilibrium. The normal pattern in this hemisphere is for a storm to start near the equator, over heated waters, and move due west, lifting a little bit north and adding more northward movement the farther it gets from the equator. It is the rotational effect. The hurricane is spun off. The average track has a boomerang shape, with a tendency to curve back on itself when it gets far enough north, like a plume, like an ostrich feather.”

Messenger said, “Can you work out any equations of probability of one hitting here?”

“No, sir. A hurricane has no memory. Like a coin. If a coin comes up heads fifty times, the odds on the next flip are still fifty-fifty, head or tail. But if you flip it ten thousand times, you’ll get five thousand heads, plus or minus. Thus the recent banks on this chart are not more or less likely to be hit than the places that have been hit two and three times. But as I was telling you earlier, the damage I am talking about does not require a direct hit. It just requires big enough tides, and that changes the odds. From the wind and tide patterns, I would say it will be within five years. Any of these near misses would do the damage I’m anticipating.”

“Freshen these drinks, gentlemen?” Barbara Messenger asked.

They accepted. When she brought fresh drinks to Sam and to Gus, Sam looked up at her. He was pleased to look at her because she was such a handsome healthy creature. She had come in from swimming after they arrived. She wore a slender white floor-length thing that had the look of the islands. She wore her swimsuit under it. It touched at hips and breasts and showed her tan through it. Her hair had been a casual tangle, and she had gone and brushed it but had not changed. He looked up at her, half smiling, because he liked looking upon loveliness in its prime. He looked at her with masculine approval. She was smiling too. Their glance met at precisely the moment her hand touched his, as she gave him his drink. His awareness of her was abruptly increased tenfold. It hollowed his belly and it emptied his heart, and it took a very deep breath indeed to fill his lungs. He knew that exactly the same thing had happened to Barbara, in exactly the same way. In the next instant he was filled with a savage rue. Not this, for God’s sake. No more of this stuff ever. Especially not a married one. I can’t play these games. I’m not a damned kid anymore. I can find easier solutions to my problems. Quick and easy solutions. Lady, I plain do
not want any part of this at any time, now or ever, thank you very much.

He had to work hard to comprehend what Gus was saying. “…  certainly have some responsibility as a director of that damned Association. The very least I can do is let them know what you’ve researched. Maybe you could write me a letter.”

Messenger said, “I would suspect that a completely professional report would be best. Reduce all these exhibits to eight-and-a-half by eleven size. Include your professional tickets, Harrison. Math, sources, appropriate language, the works. Proper binder. Fifty copies, and then distribute
through
the Association, with a short covering memo from you, Gus.”

“That’s the best way, Mr. Messenger. But expensive.”

“There’s no point in my paying for Sam Harrison’s services and then not utilizing them properly, is there? We’ll get fewer questions and objections by doing it right, and then we need not worry if a copy gets into unfriendly hands.”

“But,” said Sam, “I have to use so many qualifying phrases, it isn’t going to exactly empty out this place overnight.”

“How long will the report run?” Messenger asked.

“With exhibits? Fifty pages.”

“How much time will you be able to spare us?”

To his own surprise Harrison heard himself saying, “I’ve decided I might as well stay right where I am, down the beach at the Islander, until the New Zealand thing opens up. It’s the dead of winter down there now on that Tasman coast. Can’t really start anything there until October.” He avoided looking at Gus, knowing Gus could read him too well.

“You said it’s a mining operation?” Messenger asked. “Whose?”

“A consortium. Kiwis and Aussies and Mexicans.”

“Mexicans!”

“The same group who located about thirty million tons of high-grade phosphate in Baja a couple of months ago.”

Messenger said, “It seems as if the world—”

He stopped so abruptly the three of them stared at him. His face was shiny wet and the color of oatmeal, mouth agape, eyes almost closed, hands clutching the arms of his chair. Barbara whirled around and ran out of the room, hurried back with hypodermic and small bottle of clear fluid. She drew a careful amount into the barrel, bared his shrunken arm, popped the shot into the upper arm, outside, near the shoulder.

After she wiped the spot with alcohol and cotton, she leaned close to him and said quietly, slowly, distinctly, “Hang on, tiger. It will start to work soon. Hang in there.”

Sam said in a half whisper, “I think we better be going.…”

She snapped her head around and glared at him in an emotion not quite anger. “Stay! It’s all right. Stay!”

Sam looked at Gus. Gus shrugged and nodded and sipped his drink. Slowly the tensions went out of the old man, and his color returned. But there was little expression on his face. His eyes looked dull, almost vacuous.

“Come on, dear,” she said, and helped her old husband to his feet.

“Can I hel—”

“Please!” she said. “Just
sit
there!”

The old man leaned his tall weight on her strength. In a little while a door clicked shut behind him.

“That was some hell of a pain that hit him,” Gus said.

“Heart or cancer?”

“Cancer, I think. Somewhere in the gut.”

“He’s one sharp old party,” Sam said. “Nothing at all wrong with his head. Good with him, isn’t she?”

Gus said, “A long time ago I was with the Seabees and we were building a strip on a Pacific island. The marines were supposed to have cleared it a long time before we got there, but they missed one, and he took a long-range shot from the bushes and hit a fat old sergeant right in the belly, from the side. Hit him under the short ribs on the right side and it came out just in front of the hip bone on the left side. When we finally raised somebody on the radio, they said the quickest way to get him to the hospital would be if they sent a Norseman from Tinian to pick him up, and could it land, and we said if we worked like hell it could land the next morning. We put gauze pads on the wounds and taped them in place, and we made him comfortable in the shade, under netting, and we loaded him with morphine. Every few hours he would wake up and he would look just like Mr. Messenger looked, and then he would start yelling, and we’d stick another couple of ampules in him and he’d drowse off again. We got the airstrip finished and the airplane came in and took him away.”

“Did he recover?”

“God, I don’t know. It was a big war. You never got to keep track of anybody unless you were real close. I remembered it because he would break out in sweat the same way, and turn that color, and look way off into the distance just like Mr. Messenger did.”

A couple of minutes later Gus made a harsh brief laughing sound, without mirth.

“What’s funny?”

“You started me wondering what happened to that sergeant. Hell, he was at least fifteen years older than I was, and that was
1944. So even if he recovered, he’s probably dead now anyway. God help me, I don’t want to turn into one of these old farts like Brooks Ames, always telling hero stories about the goddam war. That war was a lot of wars ago. To some it was the biggest thing in their life, so they talk about it, the way others talk about the big deals they pulled, and some talk about their fraternity days. And … I talk about things I built.”

Barbara came back so quietly she startled Sam Harrison. She had changed to patchwork jeans and a cotton work shirt. She sat in Lee Messenger’s chair and said, “I’m sorry I got snippy. He wouldn’t want you to hurry off just because he felt unwell. And he doesn’t like anyone to help him except me. When he has one of these, it makes me nervous and I get … short.”

“No need to apologize. How is he now?”

“Out. He keeps on responding well to Demerol. They told us he’d acquire a tolerance. Mr. Garver, I was listening to the discussion, and I was wondering if you don’t have … a moral obligation to send the report to those other three condominiums in that vulnerable area on Mr. Harrison’s map.”

“Planned on doing so. One to each association. We’ll need forty-five for Golden Sands. I doubt if they’ll pay much attention.”

She looked at Sam, and he wondered if he had ever seen another gaze so direct, searching and thoughtful. “I think it is wicked that there should be … a conspiracy against getting this information published.”

“Conspiracy is too strong a word. People have not gotten together and decided to suppress. It just isn’t in the best interests of the business community to make people unhappy about living out here, about buying and selling land out here, about paying off
their mortgages on their houses and apartments out here. And you have to remember that ever since the first house went up on Fiddler Key, I’ll bet people have been crying doom. It’s an old story along this coast. And too many years since they had a big one come roaring in. Every season the Miami bureau cries wolf and the storm goes elsewhere. If I could take a person out onto the beach and point out toward the horizon and show him a wave fifty feet high out there, moving toward the beach, he would believe it and run like hell.”

“But won’t your report
prove
that it will happen?”

“It’s hard reading. It will prove that it might happen—prove it to other engineers. But I read the other day that thirty percent of all high school graduates are unable to read and comprehend a traffic citation, or fill out a job questionnaire, or write a business letter. So don’t be too hopeful.”

“Do you have secretarial help?” she asked.

“I thought I’d try an agency.”

“Lee suggested I offer my services. I’m a lot better than anybody you could find through an agency. I’ve got supplies and equipment right here. Would you dictate this?”

“Well … I thought I’d write it out longhand.”

“When you get ten or so pages done, why don’t you bring them here, and we’ll talk about spacing and style and so on, okay?”

“If you really want to do this …”

“Lee used to keep me very very busy, but lately he’s been closing out a lot of the projects he was interested in, and having too much free time makes me restless.”

Garver said, “You’ll move out of here, won’t you?”

“He hasn’t said, of course. Hasn’t had a chance, but I would think we’d move out. I hate to leave here. We’ve had a kind of
unexpected privacy here. Because nobody really expects a man like him to live in a place like this, they think it is just a similarity of names. Excuse me, Mr. Garver. I don’t mean to …”

Gus smiled. “You’re not hurting my feelings.”

“We wanted everything simplified. And we wanted it to last, but … I don’t know. He’ll decide what’s best for us.”

The drinks were gone. They excused themselves, and left after telling Barbara Messenger they hoped her husband would be feeling better soon.

They went down to Gus Garver’s apartment. Ever since Carolyn’s injury and stroke, he had been putting odds and ends into cartons and storing them. Plates on wire hangers. Figurines. Bud vases. Ceramic children and animals. They made him nervous. They had always made him nervous. He did not like the flavor of fragility they imparted to his environment. He was a neat man. He liked clean surfaces, tidy and logical arrangements. He had lived tidily and comfortably and well in many parts of the world, doing for himself, taking a bachelor pleasure in achieving an ultimate simplification of the required chores involved in eating, sleeping and bathing.

Now the apartment was acquiring that look of field-office austerity to which he had become accustomed over the years. It was still her place. He thought of it as her place, even while he was making it his.

Gus opened two beers and brought them into the living room. “What was that bit about the unexpected privacy?” Sam Harrison asked.

Gus grinned at him, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I will tell you some magic names, friend. H. L. Hunt. Getty. Howard Hughes. L. D. Messenger …”

Sam stared at him, mouth agape. “
That
one? Him?”

“It finally came to me and I checked it out. Yes. Him, himself.”

“What the
hell
is he doing
here?
”

“Achieving unexpected privacy. He’s got a couple of private unlisted lines going in there. She’s a top executive secretary and a good nurse. Because she doesn’t have to run a big house, she can spend more time with him. They have a housekeeper cook, Mrs. Schmidt. And that apartment, you have to admit, is not exactly some kind of slum area. How much room can a person use at one time? Like how many meals can you eat a day, and how many pair of pants can you wear? When they want a car, they call a limo. When they want an airplane ride, they call a limo and a charter jet. But they stay in, mostly. What it is … what they want … is a nice quiet way for him to die, loved and tended.”

“So you brought me in to check out what is bothering you, and between the two of us we’ve fucked it up. Nice.”

“They can move with a lot less pain and suffering than most of the others in the building. So don’t worry about them. What you should worry about is finding somebody from an agency to type your report, Sam.”

Sam put his empty beer can on the empty coffee table and studied Gus Garver. “That obvious?”

“Obvious? Just because your neck swole up like a hop frog, and your eyes bugged out, and the cords in your neck stuck out, and you breathed all wheezy, and just because she turned nine different colors and her eyes got shiny and she breathed through her mouth, and both of you gave off enough electricity to dim the lights, I wouldn’t call it obvious.”