“I’ll call Jean tomorrow night,” Di Parma said. “She’ll meet us at the airport. Listen, Harry, why don’t you come out to the house then? You haven’t seen the new house.”
Vollyer had no particular desire to see the new house, but he smiled and said, “Sure, Livio, all right.”
There was no getting around it, he really did like Di Parma.
Three
From the window of her room at the Joshua Hotel, Jana Hennessey stood looking down the length of Cuenca Seco’s dusty main street to the spanning arch of the huge wooden banner marking the town’s westward entrance. Even though the black lettering on the front of the sign was not visible from there, she had taken her yellow Triumph TR-6 beneath it late the previous afternoon — after better than fifty miles of desert driving — and she remembered clearly what it said:
As far as Jana was concerned, the wording was misrepre-sentational. The Wonderland it spoke of was little more than a dead sea sustaining grotesque cacti with spines like razor-edged daggers, a haven for vultures and scorpions and fat brown venom-filled snakes, an arid and polychromatic graveyard strewn with the very bones of time. And the Gateway — well, the Gateway was an anachronism in a world of steel-and-glass, of hurtling chrome-toothed machines, of great, rushing, ant-busy throngs of people; it was an elaborate set for an Old West movie, with too many false-fronted buildings and sun-bonneted women and Stetsoned men moving ponderously beneath a demoniacal sun, with dust-caked metal extras miscast in the roles of horses and carriages; it was make-believe that had magically become a reality, and been given an aura of antiquity that was somehow a little frightening.
Jana expelled a long, soft breath. The trouble with me is, she thought, I’m a big-city girl. I can’t appreciate native Americana because I’ve never seen any of it face-to-face; I’ve never really been out of New York City until now. How much of the grass roots can you see in Brooklyn or Long Island or downtown Manhattan? It’s not so easy to adjust to a different way of life, it’s not so easy to surround yourself with nature instead of with people, with life-in-the-raw instead of life-insulated-by-luxury; it’s not so easy to break away, to change, to forget.
To forget...
Abruptly, Jana turned from the window — tall and lithe in her mid-twenties, figure reminiscent of a lingerie model’s, sable hair worn long and straight, with stray wisps falling over her shoulders, almost to the gentle swell of her breasts. A pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses gave her narrow face a quality of introspective intelligence that was enhanced by the prominence of delicately boned cheeks, by the firm set of a small, naturally pink mouth. Her eyes, behind the lens of the glasses, were an intense brown that contained, like an alien presence, a small dull glow of pain.
The room was small and hot, in spite of a portable air-conditioning unit mounted in the frame of the window; but since the Joshua Hotel was the only lodging in town — and since this was considered one of its finer accommodations — she had not had much choice in the matter. It contained a brass-framed double bed, two nightstands, a small private bathroom, and a child-sized writing desk; the walls were of a varnished blond wood, decorated with desert lithographs. The white bedspread depicted a stoic, war-painted Indian astride a pinto horse, a feathered lance in one hand.
Jana crossed the room, stood behind the desk, and studied the typewritten sheets laid out beside the portable Royal, the first two pages of the outline she had begun earlier that morning. Then she looked at the half-filled third page rolled into the platen of the machine, at the x-ed out lines there. She turned again and went to the bed and sat down, staring at the telephone on the nightstand nearest the door.
She had put off calling Harold Klein for a week now, and she knew that that had been a mistake. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him because of the book, the fact that she hadn’t even started it; and, more important, because he represented an integral part of the life in New York from which she had so completely severed herself. Time to think, uninterrupted, had been what she desperately needed during the two thousand five hundred miles she had driven this past week — time to sort things out in her mind so that she would be able to work again. And Harold would not have understood, would still not understand. Oh, he knew about Don Harper, of course — the bare facts of the affair — but that was all he knew. He was a fine agent, a good friend, but she had just never been able to talk to him on a personal level — and the things which had been on her mind of late were such that she would have found it almost impossible to discuss them with a priest, much less a man of Harold’s uncomplicated nature.
But that did not alter the fact that her failure to call him had been a mistake. He was undoubtedly worried, and with good cause; he had done a lot for her, after all, had been responsible for a large percentage of her current success. He had a stake in her future — was a prospectively important part of her future — and to continue to shun him would be, ultimately, to shun whatever prospects for renewed normalcy lay ahead of her.
She had been thinking about rectifying her mistake all morning, and now she knew that she would not be able to get back to her outline until she had done so. She picked up the phone and asked the desk clerk to dial Klein’s personal office number in New York, nervously tapping short, manicured nails on the glass top of the table as she waited. What would she tell him? How would she—?
A soft click. “Harold Klein,” his voice said distantly, metallically.
She drew a quiet, tremulous breath. “Hello, Harold, this is Jana.”
Momentary silence — and then Klein said with deceptive calm, “Well, hello, Jana. How nice of you to call.”
“Harold, I—”
“For God’s sake,” Klein interrupted, anger replacing the subtle sarcasm, “where have you been the past week? You just disappeared, without a word, without a trace. We’ve been so damned worried we were about ready to call in the police.”
“I’ve been... traveling,” she told him vaguely.
“Traveling where?”
“Cross country.”
“Well, where are you now?”
She explained, briefly.
“What are you doing there?”
“Getting ready to write Desert Adventure.”
“You mean you haven’t even started it yet?”
“No,” she said.
“You’re a week past deadline now,” Klein said with exasperation. “I’ve gotten at least one phone call a day from Ross Phalen—”
“Ross Phalen is a pain in the ass,” Jana said bluntly.
“That may be true, but his word is law at Nabob Press. Do you want to lose them, Jana? They’re paying a hell of a lot more money than I can get you from any of the other juvenile publishers.”
“I know that, Harold, and I’m sorry. But I’ve had some... problems the past month. I tried to work and I couldn’t, and so I decided to come out here and see if the location would stimulate me.”
“Problems? What sort of problems?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
Klein exhaled audibly. “Don Harper, I suppose. Well, all right. How long will it take you to finish the book? I’ve got to have something to tell Phalen when he calls again.”
“About a week,” Jana said.
“And the illustrations?”
“Another week.”
“Is that definite?”
“I think so, yes.”
Klein sighed a second time. “When you get back to New York, girl, you and I are going to have a nice long talk about the facts of life. You’ve got to understand that running off unannounced this way—”