"What sort of man is Cave?" I wanted very much to hear Paul's reaction to him: this was the practical man, the unobsessed.
He was candid; he did not know. "How can you figure a guy like that out? At times he seems a little feeble-minded, this is between us by the way, and other times when he's talking to people, giving with the message, there's nothing like him."
"What about his early life?"
"Nobody knows very much. I've had a detective agency prepare a dossier on him. Does that surprise you? Well, I'm going far out on a limb for him and so are our rich friends. We had to be sure we weren't buying an ax-murderer or a bigamist or something."
"Would that have made any difference to the message?"
"No, I don't think so but it sure would have made it impossible for us to sell him on a big scale."
"And what did they find?"
"Not much. I'll let you read it. Take it home with you. Confidential of course and, as an officer of the company, I must ask you not to use any of it without clearing first with me."
I agreed and his secretary was sent for. The dossier was a thin bound manuscript.
"It's a carbon but I want it back. You won't find anything very striking but you ought to read it for the background. Never been married, no girl friends that anybody remembers… no boy friends either (what a headache that problem is in Hollywood, for a firm like ours). No police record. No tickets for double parking, even. A beautiful, beautiful record on which to build."
"Perhaps a little negative."
"That's what we like. As for the guy's character, his I.Q., your guess is as good as mine, probably better. When I'm with him alone, we talk about the campaign and he's very relaxed, very sensible, businesslike: doesn't preach or carry on. He seems to understand all the problems of our end. He's cooperative."
"Can you look him straight in the eye?"
Paul laughed. "Gives you the creeps, doesn't it? No, I guess I don't look at him very much. I'm glad you mentioned that because I've a hunch he's a hypnotist of some kind though there's no record of his ever having studied it. I think I'll get a psychologist to take a look at him."
"Do you think he'll like that?"
"Oh, he'll never know unless he's a mind reader. Somebody to sort of observe him at work. I've already had him checked out physically."
"You're very thorough."
"Have to be. He's got a duodenal ulcer and there's a danger of high blood pressure when he's older; otherwise he's in fine shape."
"What do you want me to do first?"
He became serious. "A pamphlet. You might make a high-brow magazine article out of it for the Readers' Digest or something first. We'll want a clear, simple statement of the Cavite philosophy."
"Why don't you get him to write it?"
"I've tried. He says he can't write anything. In fact he even hates to have his sermons taken down by a recorder. God knows why. But, in a way, it's all to the good because it means we can get all the talent we like to do the writing for us and that way, sooner or later, we can appeal to just about everybody."
"Whom am I supposed to appeal to in this first pamphlet?"
"The ordinary person, but make it as foolproof as you can; leave plenty of doors open so you can get out fast in case we switch the party line along the way."
I laughed. "You're extraordinarily cynical."
"Just practical. I had to learn everything the hard way. I was kicked around by some mighty expert kickers in my day."
I checked his flow of reminiscence. "Tell me about Cave and Iris." This was the secondary mystery which had occupied my mind for several days. But Paul did not know or, if he did, would not say.
"I think they're just good friends, like we say in these parts. Except that I doubt if anything is going on… they don't seem the type and she's so completely gone on what he has to say…"
A long-legged girl secretary in discreet black entered the room unbidden and whispered something to the publicist. Paul started as though she had given him an electric shock from the thick carpeting. He spoke quickly: "Get Furlow. Tell him to stand bail. Also get a writ. I'll be right down there."
She ran from the room. He pushed the bar away from him and it rolled aimlessly across the floor, its bottles and glasses chattering. Paul looked at me distractedly. "He's in jail. Cave's in jail."
Five
1
Last night the noise of my heart's beating kept me awake until nearly dawn. Then, as the gray warm light of the morning patterned the floor, I fell asleep and dreamed uneasily of disaster, my dreams disturbed by the noise of jackals, by that jackal-headed god who hovers over me as these last days unfold confusedly before my eyes: it will end in heat and terror, alone beside a muddy river, all time as one and that soon gone. I awakened, breathless and cold, with a terror of the dying still ahead.
After coffee and pills, those assorted pellets which seem to restore me for moments at a time to a false serenity, I put aside the nightmare world of the previous restless hours and idly examined the pages which I had written with an eye to rereading them straight through, to relive again for a time the old drama which is already, as I write, separating itself from my memory and becoming real only in the prose: I think now of these events as I have told them and not as they occur to me in memory. For the memory now is of pages and not of scenes or of actual human beings still existing in that baleful, tenebrous region of the imagination where fancy and fact together confuse even the most confident of narrators. I have, thus far at least, exorcised demons, and to have lost certain memories to my narrative relieves my system, like a cancer cut whole from a failing organism.
The boy brought me my morning coffee and the local newspaper whose Arabic text pleases my eye though the sense, when I do translate it, is less than strange. I asked the boy if Mr Butler was awake and he said he had gone out already: these last few days I have kept to my room even for the evening meal, delaying the inevitable revelation as long as possible.
After the boy left and while I drank coffee and looked out upon the river and the western hills, I was conscious of a sense of well-being which I have not often experienced in recent years. Perhaps the work of evoking the past has, in a sense, enhanced the present for me. I thought of the work done as life preserved, as part of me which will remain. Then, idly, I riffled the pages of John Cave's Testament for the first time since I had discovered my name had been expunged.
The opening was the familiar one which I had composed so many years before in Cave's name. The time of divination: a straightforward account of the apparent wonders which had preceded the mission. No credence was given the supernatural but a good case was made (borrowed a little from the mental therapists) for the race's need of phenomena as a symptom of unease and boredom and anticipation. I flicked through the pages. An entire new part had been added which I did not recognize: still written as though by Cave but, obviously, it could not have been composed until at least a decade after his death.
I read the new section carefully. Whoever had written it had been strongly under the influence of the pragmatic philosophers, though the style was somewhat inspirationaclass="underline" a combination of a guide to popularity crossed with the Koran. A whole system of ideal behavior was sketched broadly for the devout, so broadly as to be fairly useless though the commentary and the interpretive analysis of such lines as: "Property really belongs to the world though individuals may have temporary liens on certain sections," must be already prodigious. I was well into the metaphysics of the Cavites when there was a knock on my door. It was Butler, looking red and uncomfortable from the heat, a spotted red bandana tied, for some inscrutable reason, about his head in place of a hat. "Hope you don't mind my barging in like this but I finished a visit with the mayor earlier than I thought." He crumpled, on invitation, into a chair opposite me. He sighed gloomily. "This is going to be tough, tougher than I ever imagined back home."