“I was following orders. I’ll be there at ten, Mr. Wintermore.”
He hung up and looked around the room and wondered if he would ever find reason to check into the Hotel Birdline again. It was centrally located, but sometimes the nights were made hideous by people hammering on the wrong doors and cawing in the hallways and striking one another with the damp sounds of expert impact until the sirens came. But it was cheap and reasonably clean and he could always get a room in or out of season, and the management stored, free of charge, that small store of personal possessions he did not take along with him on his world-wide errands of mercy, support and investment.
Now he carried his suitcases down to the desk, experiencing stomach pains which reminded him he’d forgotten lunch. Hoover Hess, the owner, was working the desk. He was a loose, asthmatic, scurfy man with the habitual expression of someone having his leg removed without anesthetic. His smile was a special agony. He had gone as high as a seventh mortgage and been down as low as a second. He averaged out at about four.
He smiled. “Hey, Kirb, this thing with your uncle. I’m sorry as hell. It happens like that sometimes. Bam! You’re gone before you got time to fall down. How old was he?”
“Just turned seventy, Hoover.”
“Well, I guess now you’re set, hey?”
“Not exactly. I want to check out. I’ll be over at the Elise on the Beach.”
“Like I said, set. Taking a suite? Why not? Live it up, Kirb. Order up some broads. Order up some tailors. Drink that stuff from the good years.”
“Well, I’ll be sort of a guest over there, Hoover.”
“Sure. Until the legal thing clears and they give you the bundle. I understand. And I’m sorry to lose a good customer. What I want you should do, Kirb, when you get the bundle, we’ll sit down some place and let me show you the books on this thing. What I figure, consolidate the mortgages. It would be just the right kind investment for you.”
“I really won’t have anything to invest, Hoover.”
“I know how it goes. You got to have an answer. Every clown in the world comes around with hot deals, but you know me a long time, right? You don’t have to give Hoover Hess any brushoff. I know you good too, Kirb. You play it just right. Nice and smooth and quiet. No fuss from any broad you bring here, right?”
“But I didn’t—”
Hoover Hess waved a pale freckled hand. “Sure. Be cute. That’s the way you play it. The one I see those times, she was a lady. The glasses is always good, the flat heels, the outfit like a school teacher. Some guy hasn’t been around, he gets fooled, right? But you been around, you watch her walk, and you know it’s class stuff, chin up, swinging that little round can only one sweet little inch side to side walking through here to the crummy elevator.”
Kirby suddenly realized Hess was talking about Miss Farnham, Wilma Farnham, the only other staff member of Uncle Omar’s secret give-away program, the one-woman clipping service, keeper of the files, translator of foreign news items, totally devoted to Uncle Omar’s hidden program. She had been on the job six years, working out of a small office in a building far from the main offices of Krepps Enterprises. His field reports went to that office. The money was arranged through that office. Uncle Omar had assigned rough priorities to the projects she dug up. Then the two of them, Kirby and Miss Farnham, had worked out the schedules. When he was in town they often had evening conferences over work in progress and future missions in his room at the Birdline. She always pushed hard for the health things, the bush hospitals, the village ambulance services, the child nutrition programs. She was consistently dubious about the struggling little entrepreneurs, and always made Kirby feel she thought him too gullible for the job. She had worshipped Uncle Omar. He felt guilty, realizing this was the first time since returning he had wondered what would become of her now. But there stood Hoover Hess, leering at him.
Feeling that he was betraying and degrading Miss Farnham, he gave Hess a broad, knowing, conspiratorial wink.
“Out of them glasses,” Hess said, “and out of them old-lady clothes, with her hair mussed and a drink in her, I bet she’s a pistol, Kirb.”
“How much do I owe you this time?”
“You’re past checkout, but I won’t charge you for today. You come in dawn Friday. Make it three nights, plus two phone calls. Comes to eighteen eighty-four. No credit card?”
“I had to turn them in.”
“So who needs cards with so much cash coming? You can just sign if you want.”
“I’ll pay cash, Hoover. Thanks.”
When he had his change, he walked to the lobby booth. No point in trying the office to get Wilma Farnham. It was listed under O.K. Devices. O. K. for Omar Krepps. He looked up Miss Farnham’s private number. After the phone rang eight times he gave up and took a cab back out to the Beach and checked into the Hotel Elise. The desk clerks were extraordinarily cordial. Room 840 was ready for Mr. Winter. It was approximately six times the size of his room at the Birdline, with chaises, tables, gentle music, six shower controls, a sun deck, an ocean view, vases of cut flowers, bowls of fruit, his dry-cleaned suit hanging in the closet, the other laundry on a low chest of drawers. When he was alone, he went out onto the sun deck. He could not see the deck where he had walked out to be confronted by Charla supine, but he estimated it was perhaps forty feet to his right, screened by an architectural concession to privacy. He looked down. Little brown people were stretched out on the bright sun cots near the cabanas, looking like doll bodies awaiting the attentions of the costumer. He went back into the room and over to the biggest bowl of fruit. When he looked at it, it made him think of Charla. He selected a pear, and it turned out to be such a superior pear, he had to eat it over the bathroom sink, a deep oval of stainless steel set into a long countertop covered with cherry-colored tile. He looked at the rounded shape of the sink and thought of Charla. He bit into the pear and thought of Charla. He glared into his own mirrored eyes and thought of Charla. Finally he had to dry his sweaty face on a hand towel and go stand in front of the nearest air-conditioning vent.
He went down into the ornate maze of bars and shops and dining rooms in the bowels of the hotel and found a grill room that would serve him a steak sandwich and coffee. It was after four. He tried to sort things out logically. He wasn’t very good at it. Miss Farnham had always seemed skeptical of his attempts at orderly analysis. Uncle Omar had never seemed to mind when he reached conclusions he could not justify through any exercise of logic.
Betsy Alden presented too many possibilities. He did not even want to think about her. Thinking about her was like having a dull headache. She could be a neurotic having hallucinations. She could be absolutely accurate. Or she could be at any point between those two extremes.
I am not, he thought, so remarkable, so enchanting, so superior, that Joseph and Charla lay all this on because they can’t help themselves. All over the world, whenever they found out I might come up with funds, I’ve been hustled, but never so good, never so completely. So they do want something. And it isn’t the way you hustle a potential employee. As far as I know, I haven’t got anything they want. But they think I have it or will have it. There is something somebody wants. It did well by Uncle Omar. Well enough, so that all the outposts have been ransacked, but according to Mr. Wintermore, there would have been nothing in any one of them, not even at the island.