“Your orders.”
“Quite!”
“Do I look like a con artist? Do I look like a salesman? Do I look like a pest? Dear girl, aren’t you supposed to exercise some instinct and judgment about people?”
“Sir, one might possibly say… pest, should this go on too much longer. Oh! My word! Are you a pilot? Is it about that… currency matter?”
“I am not a pilot. But some currency might enter into it. I just remembered something. Somebody said at one point that to get to Santo with a certain suggestion, they had to clear through Mary Smith. Is that a person or some kind of a code name for something?”
“Mary Smith would be a person, sir.”
“A special personal private secretary, maybe?”
“Praps just private secretry, sir, might be suitable.”
“Now, please don’t tell me I need an appointment with her.”
She studied me for a moment, tilted her head, looked slightly quizzical and inwardly-and possibly bitterly-amused. The appraisal was like unto that given a side of beef when the US Grade stamp is not easy to read.
“You could give me your name, sir?”
“McGee. T. McGee.”
“This is teddibly irregular. Just a chawnce, y’know.”
“Tell her I do card tricks, have never been completely domesticated, and show signs of having been struck sharply in the face in years gone by.”
“At least you are amusing,” she said.
“Quite!” said I.
“Please have a seat. I’ll find out what she says, Mr. McGee.”
I sat cautiously in a chair that looked like the slope-end of a blue bathtub resting on a white pedestal, and found it more comfortable than it looked. Windowless rooms always give me the feeling of having been tricked. Now they’ve got you, boy, and they’re going to come through all the doors at once. I opened a mint copy of Fortune and a grizzled fellow looked out at me with alert and friendly squint of eye, advertising my chummy neighborhood power company. I think I could remember having seen him on somebody’s television set shilling an adenoidal housewife into squealing in ecstasy about suds.
The limey maiden murmured into the oversized mouthpiece of one of those privacy telephones. In a little while she hung up and said with a certain air of accomplishment and mild surprise, “She will be out in a few moments, sir.”
A flush door, bone-white, off to the left of the receptionist opened, and little Miss Mary Smith came through and toward me without a glance at the receptionist. I put Fortune aside and stood up. She marched to within four feet of me and stopped and looked up into my face. At least it was not a name they handed around the office. She was the one I had seen with Tush Bannon in the bar lounge atop the International Hotel. The dark and rich brownauburn hair fell in a straight gloss. I had misread, across the room the last time, the expression on her face. It was not petulance, not discontent. It was a total and almost lifeless indifference, a completely negative response. In a special way it was a challenge. It said, “Prove I should relate to you, buddy.” Her eyes were the improbable emerald of expensive contact lenses, made more improbable by just enough eye makeup to make them look bigger than they were. And they were generous to start with. Her skin texture was a new grainless DuPont plastic. The small mouth did not really pout. It was just that both upper and under lip were so heavy it was the only choice it had. They were artfully covered with pink frost. White blouse, navy skirt that nunnery flavor of offices and hospital wards.
She looked up at me, motionless as department store wax, with two millimeters of query in one eyebrow.
“The eyebrow,” I said, “is the exact same shade of those wooly bear caterpillars I remember from my childhood. You’d look for them in the fall to see if they were heading north or south. It was supposed to predict what kind of a winter we’d have.”
“So you’ve verified Elizabeth’s claim you’re mildly amusing. This is a busy office.”
“And I just happened to come bumbling in off the street to bother all you busy; dedicated people.”
She took a step back, a quarter turn. “Then, if that’s all.”
“I want to see Santo. What do I have to say to you? A magic word?”
“Try good-bye.”
“My God, you are a silly, pretentious little bitch!”
“That doesn’t work either, Mr. McGee. The only thing that does work is to state your business. If Mr. Santo did not employ people of some judgment to screen out the clowns, his time would be taken up with clowns… and eccentrics, and clumsy con men. Do you want him to finance a flying saucer?” She rested a finger against her, small chin and tilted her head. “No, you have that deepwater look. A bit salty? This is probably more of that treasure-map nonsense. Spanish galleons, Mr. McGee? And you have some genuine gold coins minted in the New World? I would say we average eight or ten of you people a month. So either you tell me or you don’t tell anyone here at any time. Is that quite clear?”
“All right. I will tell you. I will tell you enough so that you will open the door for me to see Santo.”
“May we call him Mr. Santo?”
“But I am not going to talk standing here like the last guests at a cocktail party. I want to sit at a desk or a table and you can sit on the other side of it and listen to as much as I care to tell you.”
“Or as much as I care to listen to.” She turned to the receptionist and said, “I shall be in Conference D, Elizabeth.”
“Thank you, miss Smith,” said the humble limey. I pushed the glass door open for little Miss Mary Smith and followed her down the corridor. Her walk was engaging, as it seemed to involve a conscious effort to inhibit any swing and flourish of her solid little rear end, and was successful to but a limited degree.
Conference D was a ten by twelve cubicle. But the end wall opposite the door was all window, looking out across Biscayne Bay to the improbable architectural confectionary of Miami Beach, with a. sunlit glitter and shimmer of traffic across the Julia Tuttle Causeway a little to the north, and the residential islands off the Venetian Causeway about the same distance south. It was a gray room with gray armchairs, six of them, around a Chinese red conference table. On one wall was a shallow gray case, glassfronted, wherein a very diversified collection of white nylon gears and cogs and rods and bushings of various sizes had been arranged against a Chinese red background in simulation of some of the art forms of Louise Nevelson.
I could be reasonably certain that as we had walked down the corridor, Elizabeth had, as common practice, turned on whatever bug system was used in Conference D. After all, Elizabeth could look through the glass doors and see which door we had entered.
I had learned the right terms from Meyer. She sat across from me, radiating skepticism.
“I am a speculator, Mary Smith. I’m not a trader. My specialty is in the maximized capital gains area. There is enough income from certain other sources so that the Fed hasn’t, and won’t, class me as a professional and cut it all back to straight income. Is this over your head.”
“Hardly! In fact, you’ve almost run out of time, Mr. McGee.”
“I do not want to sell Santo a hot item. I do not want him in any syndicate operation. I do not want any piece of his action, or even any knowledge of the details just so long as he does move in on it. This is not nickel and dime. It’s a listed security. Now, usu ally I operate in a sort of informal syndicate deal. Every man for himself, but we make the same move at the same time. But we’ve done so well we’ve got some security leaks. I dug this one out and it’s too damned good to get the edge taken off of it by too many leaks. I could probably establish a position in it and then arrange a show of interest on the part of one of the aggressive funds. But they work out in the open, and the blocks they buy are too big.”
I looked at her questioningly. “You haven’t lost me. And your time hasn’t run out,” she said.