Narabedla Ltd (6 page)

T
hings did start to get really crazy about then. I got pretty crazy myself. I found myself doing things that I was very sure Marlene would have defined as
meshuggeneh,
and I wouldn’t have had any right to disagree.

We took the elevator down to the lobby of the hotel, way at the bottom of the casino’s hill. I found a pay phone, collected a stack of those dumb little French telephone tokens, and began calling every luxe hotel in the area. To each one I said the same thing in my best Berlioz French—I mean the opera composer, not the guy who runs the language school:
“Bon jour. Je voudrais parler avec M. Henri Davidson-Jones.”
Eight times I tried it, working my way through Monaco, Menton, and Beaulieu, and when I started on Nice I hit pay dirt. “
Moment, m’sieur, s’il vous plaît,”
said the operator at the Negresco, and a moment later I heard a male voice saying:

“This is Mr. Passerine, Mr. Davidson-Jones’s secretary. Who is calling, please?”

I didn’t have an answer for that question, unfortunately. I am very good at planning, up to a point. I had figured out a way to find out where Davidson-Jones was staying; it had worked; I just hadn’t thought far enough ahead to have decided what to do when I found him.

So I improvised.

I said, “Mr. Passerine, please hold for Mr. Rmfmf in Chicago.” And I put my hand over the mouthpiece for a moment.

Then I gently hung up.

“Why’d you hang up? He’s there, isn’t he?” Irene demanded.

“Right. He’s there. Now you tell me what we do about it.”

“We go and confront him!”

“You tried that in New York. He wouldn’t see you.”

“We’ll sit in the lobby until he comes out.”

“They’ll throw us out, Irene. That’s a classy hotel.”

“They can’t throw us off the sidewalk in front of it, can they?”

“I wouldn’t bet.” Then I said firmly, “Anyway, I want to think this over before I do something foolish.”

And she said, “Oh,
shit.”

She turned her back on me and walked away. I didn’t follow. I didn’t know what to say if I did. I just watched her as she walked into the lobby casino and began feeding coins into the one-franc slots.

I tried to think of what I ought to do next. No good ideas turned up, except that my feet were beginning to hurt; Monaco is an up-and-down place, and I’d jogged over from the bus stop. On cobblestones. I decided to sit down while I thought; so I walked over to the bar and got myself a Campari-soda, not because I had changed my mind about trendy European aperitifs, but because it seemed like the right thing for that place; and 1 sulked.

That’s candor. “Sulked” isn’t the word I would prefer to use. It just happened to be the right one.

I got into a debate with myself, for the lack of Irene Madigan to take the other side. I told myself that I owed her nothing—anyway, nothing but common courtesy, and I’d certainly given her more of that than she had given to me.

It occurred to me that she was really on the edge over what had happened to somebody she loved. I should have been more understanding, I thought.

I also thought that I probably seemed, well, excessively cautious to her. Not to say chicken. That was understandable. Actually I
was
more prudent than she, if only because the person I was principally concerned about was only a client, not a blood relative. Irene should have understood that, shouldn’t she?

She hadn’t, though.

That bothered me, in a part of my mind where I was pretty tender already. I guess you could call it the area of personality I thought of as “manliness.” The old girlfriend who had wept at dinner at II Gattopardo ran into me a year or two later. She didn’t cry this time, she only looked me up and down and chatted for a while and then made up her mind: “Why do you have to be so macho, Nolly?” she asked. “Hang-gliding? Muscle-building? Why don’t you just relax and quit trying to be Rambo?” We didn’t part real friendly that time, either. She’d been through both Esalen and est by then and was, of course, absolutely sure of her diagnosis of me: Acting ballsy to cover up the fact that I wasn’t.

So it meant something to me that Irene Madigan might be thinking of me as a coward. I wanted her to understand where I was coming from. But when I went looking for her among the slots to explain all that to her, she wasn’t there.

“There’s something funny, all right,” I told the telephone, which told the satellite, which told Marlene back in New York, “but I don’t know what I can do about it. I don’t know where Irene went.”

“No names!” Marlene scolded, half a second tardily.

“All right, but I don’t know where she went.”

“She just split on you?”

I said fairly, “Well, I sort of walked away on her, too. We had a little disagreement. But I thought I knew where she was.”

Silence transported via satellite for a second; then, briskly, “So, tell me, Nolly, what are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

That produced more of that expensive silence. After about seventy-five cents’ worth I said, “I think I might as well catch the sleeper to Madrid. I was hoping to see some of the Spanish opera people tomorrow or the next day.”

“Oh.” No inflection. Just an “oh.”

“Maybe,” I said, “when I get back to New York, I’ll talk to the police, I think.”

“All right, Nolly,” said Marlene, and I couldn’t tell whether the tone was disapproving or just attenuated by distance.

So I hung up.

Then I had a drink.

Then I had dinner; and all the time I was thinking about it, and right between the
avocat vinaigrette
and the baby lamb chops I got on the house phone to seek a truce.

No luck. Even bad luck; Irene Madigan had checked out.

As far as I could see, that closed out the account.

It didn’t
feel
closed out, though. And then I remembered the Narabedla Ltd. xeroxes Irene Madigan had given me. I fished them out of my pocket and glanced at them.

Then I began to read in earnest. It was a shame to give those perfect little lamb chops only a part of my attention, but it was really fascinating. The more I looked at Narabedla’s holdings and operations the more awed I got.

Nor was it just the money-spinning power that was impressive. What Narabedla did with the money was curious, too. Quite a lot of it they gave away.

Political contributions—well, sure. Big companies keep the government as crooked as they can with gifts. Narabedla seemed to be paying off more than half the Congress—310 separate contributions to congressional campaign funds, all for the legal maximum of three thousand dollars each.

That was a million dollars right there.

I was a little startled to see that most of the names I recognized were likely to be liberal Democrats instead of the what’s-good-for-business-is-good-for-America types that usually got that kind of corporate dough. I was even more surprised to see what some of the other donations had gone for.

Narabedla was angeling a large number of scientific and educational institutions. A hundred and fifty thousand to one university, eighty-five thousand to another, nearly a quarter of a million to a foundation—all to finance research on AIDS. There were twenty-five or thirty grants for medical research on a dozen other ailments, ranging from salmonellosis to flu. Fifteen thousand to the World Esperanto Association. Forty thousand to an astronomical observatory, “to undertake an analytical catalogue of pulsars and related objects.” Another twenty-five thousand to the same place that was marked, “Supplementary grant for the study of anomalous novae.” Sixty-five thousand to one university and eighty thousand to another for grants “for basic study of particle physics and Einstein-Rosen interactions.” A big one, nearly half a million, to CalTech: “Survey of earthquake precursors in the Palmdale Bulge.”

It wasn’t all science and politics. The list went on for three pages—a few thousand here, a lot more thousand there, to a long list of do-good organizations—peace groups, civil rights groups, groups of all kinds from the NAACP to the Unitarian-Universalist Church of America; and I’m not even beginning to talk about the music conservatories and chamber-music quartets and struggling opera companies.

He was quite a good and responsible citizen, Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones. The total made my eyes pop. His Narabedla donations had totaled more than eleven million dollars in the latest known year. There was certainly, I told myself, no reason to think that anybody like that would do anything as pathologically felonious as kidnap people.

With that in mind, after dinner I had them call a taxi to take me to Nice-Ville; and all the way to the station my thoughts were fully occupied with the task of changing my mind.

It wasn’t hard to do. I got it done by the time we arrived at Nice-Ville; philanthropist or not, there were just too many questions about the man. So I checked my bags at the station and took a taxi back to the Promenade des Anglais along the beach, and the Hotel Negresco.

In the days when I was a budding opera star I got a number of chances to live high on the hog. I took as many of them as I could afford. I sang in Nice, once, and stayed at the Negresco. Once. I valued the experience greatly, especially when I saw the bill. Which, fortunately, was picked up by the people at the opera festival, because if I had had to pay for it myself I would have been working that week for nothing.

It was not likely they would remember me at the Negresco, although beyond doubt there was a card file somewhere in the hotel’s guest files with my name on it and the fact that I liked my bacon very crisp. But I remembered them very well. I played no games. I headed for a house phone, got the never-sleeping Mr. Passerine, and said, “This is Knollwood Stennis. I want to see Mr. Davidson-Jones, please.”

“Mr. Stennis,” he said placidly, “it’s nearly midnight. I certainly can’t disturb Mr. Davidson-Jones at this time.”

“Yes, you can,” I said. Then I took a deep breath. “I want him to tell me what happened to Irene Madigan. Not to mention her cousin, Tricia, and Woody Calderon.”

Smooth Mr. Passerine didn’t turn a hair. “Whatever your reason is, Mr. Stennis,” he said politely—reasonably politely—“there is no way I’m going to bother Mr. Davidson-Jones now. If it is important, you can telephone in the morning. After ten.”

And he hung up on me.

And I had run out of programming.

The troublesome part of all that was that well-mannered Mr. Passerine had all reason on his side. No titan of finance wants to be bothered at midnight by somebody who wants to accuse him of implausible felonies, does he?

I looked at my watch.

I still had time to grab a cab from the stand outside and get back to the station in time for my train to Madrid—even if one stretched imagination as far as it could go and supposed it would be on time.

I might even have a few minutes to spare. Time enough, perhaps, for a few discreet private-eye-type questions here and there. It was at least worth trying, so I summoned up all my discretion.

It wasn’t enough. I was not nearly discreet enough for the Negresco, which houses Arab oil zillionaires and German newspaper publishers, not to mention royalty. When I asked the reception clerk if she had happened to notice a good-looking, redheaded young woman with Cote d’Azur eyes who might have been asking for Mr. Davidson-Jones, I didn’t see her move a muscle to call anyone. She simply said, actually with a quite friendly smile, “I am sorry, sir, but we are not permitted to discuss our guests.” And then, when I looked behind me, there was the doorman in his monkey suit with a large, polite porter standing attentively beside him.

I left with as good grace as I could manage.

There was a taxi with a Senegalese-looking driver at the stand across the street. I waved him over.

Then I hesitated.

Even the best hotel may have somebody, somewhere, who will take a tip. If I could just find out from some such person which suite Davidson-Jones was in, I could pound on the door until he let me in. Or until someone threw me out, whichever came first, but how bad could that be?

So why not try it? What was the worst that could happen? I might miss my train, of course, but that would be only an annoyance, not a tragedy. No one was expecting me at any particular time in Madrid. I would very possibly get thrown out of the hotel. I might even get punched out, by either the porter or the doorman in the organ-grinder hat. But the Negresco would probably prefer to avoid violence, and besides, in a pinch I could ask them to look up that old card-file to show that, once anyhow, I had been on their protected-species list myself.

What the hell, I said to myself courageously.

So I pulled two hundred-franc notes and my business card out of my wallet and handed them to the Senegalese, patiently standing by the open door of his cab. In my very best French I said, “I must go inside the hotel for ten minutes. If I am not back by then, go to the police.”

It turned out I was in error, on at least two counts.

The man I thought was Senegalese said in unaccented Harlem: “Shit, man, you just don’
learn.”
And what he hit me with I never found out.

And that is how I came to travel to the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.

When Irene Madigan said you could hide anything at all on a yacht the size of Henry Davidson-Jones’s she was absolutely right. She just didn’t go far enough. She hadn’t imagined what the limits of “anything” might include.