Lookout Cartridge (79 page)

CUT
to
CLOSE SHOTS
, mosdy reaction shots where
THE FACE IS NOT THE SPEAKER’S
:

Chad
(mouth open as if singing, while the speaker who is not Chad says): Don’t listen to him, he had the gun in my cab Sunday night in London pointing at my head—the gun isn’t in Callanish.

Nash
(looking over his shoulder, but at whom? while the speaker who is not Nash shakes his head and snaps his hand with its finger stuck out like a conductor’s): Had
I
known what was going on I wouldn’t have merely disparaged your half-baked ideas, I’d have had the film destroyed. And that is what, Gene, you should have done. Power unfocused in process, Graf told me last weekend. Balls, I say! Sow confusion.

Gene
(blue eyes into the camera, while the speaker who is not Gene says):
I
never called it a cover. What cover? Sherman called it a cover, not me. Cartwright lost his job with Whitehead. You didn’t know Whitehead, but I know Whitehead. Cartwright needed money. You should see the bills stuffed in the desk in his living room. I say we hit him
and
the girl.

Jan
(slowly shaking her head while the speaker who is not Jan says): I have it on good authority through June that Callanish was not in the film. Or is it in the diary? But the film was liquidated, and so, I gather, was the diary (
CUT
to
CLOSE SHOT
of
Gene
). So what we need is your head, Cartwright, that is to say, how serious you are about (a) blowing the whistle and/or (
b
) using the original plan as Mike alleges but which seems to me strange indeed if you are working with Jack Flint.

Incremona
(the decathlon star tilting as if to spring through Chad’s verbiage—but in the direction of no one, while the speaker who is not Len says): My brother didn’t find Krish. So how do you know he’s dead? And would you mind telling us (
CUT
to
CLOSE SHOT
of
Jan
) what you’ve done with a red jaguar.

John
(who is about to remain silent but—this time the face in the close shot—speaks): Don’t speak, Nash. Suck on a ring, but do not—

Nash
(automatically bringing ring hand up to mouth, then dropping it while a familiar voice that conjures up its own narrow, tan, virile face speaks in answer to John): Don’t you tell anyone shut up. Nash can speak. Speak Nash.

Frenchman
(looking at his watch while speaker not the Frenchman blurts): All I say is your sister June speaks on authority too damn much. I never heard of any windbreakers. So don’t talk to me about windbreakers.

Incremona
(rocking on his own private axis as we hear the Frenchman): Za Catwight gell.

Incremona
(forestalling a
CUT
, by speaking): We got her.

Cartwright
(halting on the side of the room opposite John-of-Coventry and between Mike and Jan as she suddenly says): You are heartless.

But what Len said is close to the bone. Bills in pigeon holes. For a piano. For the builder. Doctors. Magazine renewals. Bills on the floor in riffled sequences, in swirls, little white frames with names and numbers, strewn by Incremona. He’s unmarried. Jenny wants a proper shower. Lorna likes a bath; the scum gurgles down the drain, never a problem though in the winter of ’63 the outside pipes clotted, but I always paid the bills and they were there in the desk for Incremona to go through two weeks ago because Lorna saves them like the yearly New York Metropolitan Museum of Art calendar richly colored oriental medieval Moslem what have you, that my mother sends us that as Lorna looks back through our code of names, phone numbers, times, can tell her what we did. But you who have me know what Incremona doesn’t, that it looks like not one lost income but two or three, the charters, the boatyard, add to that the perqs through Dag, cheap booze, a blender, and for Will for Christmas though we sing our carols live a Sony 110 cassette recorder (like a policeman’s walkie-talkie in lieu of his traditional whistle), toss in a brandied plum pudding you can’t even buy at that Knightsbridge landmark Harrod’s where according to Queenie Stone the Queen and Philip have a charge—and American smokes though those I give or sell away. Yes, Mike, I could kill—kill Len for going in my house. Forget the diary he burgled.

Not a marvelous country house; a city house. Not a revolutionary life; a plain life. Where suitcases are packed and unpacked (never mind if Tessa says to Lorna Let him pack his own bloody case). Where the soap opera of our marriage has serialized itself in cartridges I’ve packed away in a hole in my study wall behind a picture. And where a park is near, and if we wish I and my wife may let the grass grow under our feet and the garden walls decay and title to the turtle grow as communal and friendly as the weatherman’s crystal-clear forecast of bright intervals for a hungover Sunday. Our children grow up.

A house at London’s highest point (Y’don’t say, murmurs my father, affable once standing on our Highgate stoop)—near park and pub and bus, outdoor summer concerts, history, tennis courts, near a good school for my son with Mr. Ogg and the digressions he spontaneously maps.

I lost my temper and asked Len if he found the five-pound note in the far-left pigeon-hole, and Len too quickly said that when he knew where he was going to pick up twenty grand cash, no sweat. Len rocked back, and John grumbling about a chair got out the door to the other room that I probably had not seen.

My answers came out of nowhere. These people did not quite know, but I was one with them, and like a pedestrian accosted in the New York subway I wasn’t sure whom I could protect by giving them what they wanted.

I said, I keep the red jaguar with my weapons, but what if you do find out if I’m going to blow the whistle or revive the film which I don’t even know myself?

Cut it out, came a voice from Corsica, Mike’s, cut it out—
you
know Chad didn’t mean the film.

But Incremona (a face from Corsica as stiff as its eyes are bright) speaks (and rocks, as if to give the words a secret beat): Who said the film was destroyed?

Depend upon it, I said, and heard our spools clanking down Claire’s chute.

But Jan, now kneeling, hands clasped, said: Oh yes, oh yes, more than I knew when I first said the word, oh Christ yes!
heartless
—he doesn’t even ask where she is.

Heartless! I said. I fell to my knees. What about these people around you? I bet you don’t know who Nash was
with
, that day—

The words go on while Jan and I retort.

The words go on down fifteen floors to Claire’s furnace, then back up like a loop, and they’re not quite the right words, for here captive in a room and speaking of cruelty, I’d meant to say
Len
and said instead my very words to Jenny Tuesday.

Which day? said Jan.

That summer Sunday, the fiasco, Nash, Len, Reid, my daughter—

Nash?

Incremona
, the one who bashed him up—And what’s it matter? The film’s gone, your idea’s safe.

Oh I used it like a weapon, said Jan.

Len stood aside as the door opened. You were a long time finding a chair, he said, and John brought in a straight chair and puffed himself down.

And it wasn’t original, said Jan.

And I—I had found out that what threatened to be revived was not the film.

So: if Flint but not film (and if Len flaunted Whitehead before me)—

What fiasco? said Len. He had come toward me from his post by that door and was standing above Mike.

The jaguar, I said, and stopped. At Graf’s, said Gene.

You were there Teeyoosday, said Chad, you phoned June.

Balls, said John. Get him back to London, put him under house arrest. Simplest thing.

At Graf’s, said Incremona, and turned his back to me and faced the door he’d knelt by. Chad at the other door seemed to have forgotten me.

It was Dagger DiGorro, said Jan.

House arrest? said Nash, house arrest? Where do you get house arrest? He blew Bill and Ronnie at South Ken. How many copies of the diary are there? He’s got connections, connections.

Shut up, said John.

Like the telephone, said Len, looking at John.

Krish got it from Cosmo, said Nash, Cosmo got it from DiGorro’s wife: DiGorro didn’t know what his own partner might do.

Shut up, said John and Len looking at each other.

Len’s fist clenched and unclenched again, the same knuckles that as my breath like a brain swashed here and there in some equal time had gripped Gilda’s cash register; and I said Stupid (the English way,
steeyoomd
), why
should
Nash shut up?—does him good to talk—like autographing Tessa’s daughter’s cast in Golders Hill Park to contact Tessa—like acting independently—so don’t shut him up, he’s getting it out of his system and I know all he’s saying anyhow.

But like a cartridge track without its containing cartridge, Jan was saying that the idea had been that none of us know enough—that was the idea, and it wasn’t original because it came from Dagger and Dagger was good. The thick pale eyebrows frowned, the heart-shaped face finds me dangerous and tries to look through my impurities that bring this group together, and the face can’t understand how I could wait patiently to hear about Jenny what I do suddenly hear from Incremona clenching and clenching the fist, says
Stupid
eh? which he probably did not say after Chad with his English pronunciation called him (I’m now sure) stupid downstairs or upstairs for delivering that blow to my chest (for it must have been Len)—Stupid, eh? We make you disappear, how about that? You and your girl, she’s with Reid and he’s with Sherman and you know where they are just like I know where your little weapons cache is, right, Cartwright?

It was true. But only when he said it. I now knew where Jenny was held. Incremona’s door opened a crack and John was called to the phone by a voice that was John-of-the-loft, and as John-of-Coventry went out he was saying God save us from bourgeois adventure.

Incremona pulled shut the door. Who’s Lana?

Nobody knows her, said Mike.

A friend of a friend of a friend of mine, I said automatically (meaning Millan’s Jasper). You drove me to her Sunday night.

It was true, as if by my saying it.

The idea wasn’t all that came from Dagger, said Gene. The jaguar did too.

You knew that? said Jan.

My brother told me.

Paul!
cried Chad like an explosion.

Jack, said Gene.

You been talking to Jack? demanded Incremona.

Don’t get onto
my
loyalty, said Gene. This whole thing started as a test of that, and I passed the test, right Len?

Jack
, mused Len.

Jack of course, I said—old money bags, eh Len? was twenty thousand the figure you mentioned?—and I shook my head and smiled, and Mike said to Gene, Mary Napier is in New York.

But the pain came back through my chest and the name I’d said
Jack
instead of was Dagger, but the
shtip
right through to my back was too bony and bodily to be out of a mere intelligence report about Dagger that seemed to place me again outside some system that in the past fortnight I had on the contrary felt at the crux of.

Again outside, though near.

Will has made a six-year-old movie out of cards each subtly different from the one before so you riffle them and there’s a motion picture—it’s Little Red Hiding Hood. Incremona riffles my doctor bills.

I look at Jan. I shouldn’t have let her think Jenny magic-markered the self-portrait.

I look beyond her to Len who is staring at Gene who (mouth open) is pointing at Mike as if to let follow his finger the memory inside his body of what Mike has reminded him of to do with Mary.

Where are you going? asks Jan.

Like Len now vanishing in fury through that door, waves of improbability pass outward: Lana and the woman John is traveling with are probably one and the same;
sow confusion
, her phrase at Geoff’s was likely taken from John; Mary is here in New York for the heart of Montrose, but Gene recalls her brother the one-time Scottish Nationalist Party activist who urged Paul to retire; Gene knows about Dagger and the jaguar from Jack who used and may own Red Whitehead who was in turn the object of some further attention here that was less improbable than potential or, like liquid crystal Red sold through me, shifting and mysteriously double-duty; and Dagger the donor I can hardly believe—and Dagger the source of Jan’s film I can’t or won’t: In June I send my aged parents a pre-release carbon of the Bonfire in Wales, in June I send Sub the Unplaced Room, in July I send Dudley the Softball Game, in August only now in this receding room I recall dispersing Corsican Montage at his request to the only hard-nosed pro among these likely readers the horny onetime world-traveler Savvy Van Ghent, and to complete this impulse-distribution there’s Lorna closeted in the October night with yet another part of the film record, unsure why I insert our friend Tessa into the Marvelous Country House, but curious only for a moment because then comes the tread in the dark Highgate house which she takes for an intruder, the very thing that the intruder, her dark-haired blue-eyed son Will prowling with his new aluminum racket, takes for her.

I breathe away the pain, the room is in my blood, breathing. Gene squints as if in pain, he doesn’t dream it’s the Montrose heart Mary’s here in New York for. Nash bites on a ring staring at Len’s empty door.

I say to Nash: It was Nell—it was through Nell that Tessa’s daughter knew Reid.

Nash to Gene: Tessa knew Nell!

Gene to me: Savvy knew the husband Dudley.

Nash to me: You were balling Tessa. Nell told Savvy.

Gene to no one: Tessa got him into Mexican stuff, she said.

I’m queasy. The uninterrupted expanse of pale carpet looks new. Headlines say 2500 to 5000 are dead and there’s a follow-up on what seems now recent news I’ve missed—Britain has opted for the Common Market.

There’s talking outside this room from beyond each door, but then also around—like an axis turning into motion.