She tossed off the rest of the brandy, frowned, shrugged, and let me walk her home. She hung onto my forearm with both hands and contrived to bump a hip into me every now and again.
'what if I want to fire Michael and he won't let himself be fired by me?"
I was supposed to volunteer assistance. 'Then you'll have to let the executor ilre him, I guess."
'~e's worked for Harvey for twenty-three years."
We stopped at the gangplank. She said, "Would you like to come aboard and look around?"
'Dot really."
"You're not very gracious, are you?"
"Not very."
The Green Ripper
'Novell... if you feel terribly lonely and want someone to talk to who... faces the same }rind of sorrow, I'll be nearby. Okay?"
"Okay, Anna. Sure. Uptight."
I walked slowly home to The Busted Ftush. There was a sour smell in the night air, like a broken drain. Anna was a very tidy little biscuit, with her old dark eyes set in that child's face. She exuded a tantalizing Savor of corruption, of secret, unspeakable experience. There had been times in my life when I would have been happy to help her pass the time until old Harv died and then talked her into letting me help her take the Madana home, by way of a lot of nice islands.
But I had seen the crocodile tears bulging in her dark eyes when she had said, "Any day now." And I had seen the greed behind the tears, the impulse to break into laughter. Everything old Harv had is now mine, fella. All, all mine. During those past two years she had probably been dreadfully afraid that he would live forever.
When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it malces you take a closer look at your own.
We are all at the mercy of the scriptwriters, directors, and actors in cinema and television. Man is a herd creature, social and imitative. We learn the outward manifestations of inner stress, patterning reaction to what we have learned. And because the visible ways we react are so often borrowed, we wonder about the truth of what is happening underneath. Do I really feel pain, grief, shock, loss?
It is as if we look inside and take a tentative rap at some bell that hangs in there. I had the horrid feeling that maybe my pain was tempered by some sick measure of relief, that I had escaped the trap of a permanent twoness.
Take a rap at that bell, dreading a possible fiat, cracked, dissonant sound of self-pity, of a grubby selfishness.
But it rang true. It rang for her, for my lost girl. The loving and the losing were still larger than life. Than my life. The sound of the bell was almost unbearable. I was like a rat in a cage, subjected to su- personic experimentation. They run back and forth and roll at last onto their backs, chewing their paws bloody. I wanted to swim straight out into the sea. Or go visit Anna and help her into bed. Each was a form of drowning.
64
5 - On Monday morning I awoke glum, got up glum' dressed glum. The sky was a bright pewter, a radiance that cast no shadow but made people squint and walk hunched over, as if searching for something. It would be windless and silent one moment, then a hard blast would come slamming past, picking up dust devils and scraps of paper before sub" siding into stillness. At sea on a day like this I would have been laying a course to the nearest shelter and checking the fuel level to see how fast I dared go to get there. It is the kind of weather Mat makes people cross.
Meyer was cross when he arrived at eleven for reheated coffee.
"How are you?" he asked, peering at me.
"Peachy."
"I'm sorry. It is the standard question one asks. How did you get rid of little Anna?"
'walked her back to her personal ship. What made you jump to the conclusion I got rid of her?"
"Not such a big jump. Why shouldn't you get rid of her? There'd be no reason to keep her around."
"Who brought her and dumped her on me?"
"Lilt MacNair. And it wasn't her fault She just couldn't get the Farmer woman to leave."
"Farmer?"
"Anna Farmer.',
"Don't look so exasperated, Meyer. I never caught her last name. Is she worth talking about, even? And does it matter a damn one way or another what I do or don't do with my days or with my nights?"
"Aha!" he said. "Tragic jigger of a man."
"Meyer, I know what you are trying to do, and I forgive you. But don't keep it up. Understand?"
He stared and finally nodded. "All right. I was out of line. A transparent, clumsy attempt to cheer the troops. What I came over for, aside from dispensing hollow cheer, was to complain about the bureaucracy. And to give you a conundrum to occupy your mind."
"A riddle?"
"Somewhat. I was on the phone at a reasonable morning hour, calling old friends in Washington.
The Green Ripper
There are a lot of offices up there. And strange titles. Deputy Director to the Assistant Director in charge of the Policy Committee on Administration. The phone directory is gigantic. I gave them the in- formation and set them to scurrying about. I gave the same mission to three quite different people in three quite different departments, and then waited for the results. The last call came in fifteen minutes ago. That phone number they gave you is not an operating number. There is not now and never has been, at least in living memory, any Select Commit- tee on Special Resources. The central register of all civil servants has no Robert A. Toomey, but it does have two Richard E. Klines. One is twenty-five and works for the Department of the Interior in Alaska. The other is sixty-one and based in Guam. Interesting?"
My head was too full of fragments, like a kaleidoscope, making its bright patterns of nonsense. I had decided that when they had visited me, my reaction had been paranoid.
'I don't know what to think, Meyer. Don't they have departments sort of hidden away, without public records and so forth?"
"So why give you a bad phone number?"
"Maybe you would like to try to make sense out of it."
"Too many parts missing," he said. He got up and roamed around the lounge, sighing audibly, pausing to look out the port, then resuming his circuit. "High-level inquiry," he said.
"What?"
"Excuse me. I'm talking to myself."
He roamed and muttered and finally sat down. He gave me a bright false smile. "It's all too melodramatic. There is but one way I can make the parts fit together, and it offends me."
"See if it offends me."
"It will more than offend, Travis. All right. Postulate X. X is an unknown force, group, movement, with unknown objectives. X is powerful and has high-priority objectives. Secrecy is imperative. Brother Titus represents the syndicate in Brussels, and he came down here from another part of the country to take a look at the land and make contact with Mr. Ladwigg. The odds against anyone seeing him and recognizing him are astronomical. But that is one way in which life is consistently quirky. It keeps serving up unlikely coincidences. Gretel told us her story about Brother Titus on December seventh. And she said she had seen him last week,' if I remember correctly. Not 'this week,' last week.' The last week in November. Brother Titus went back to X and reported being recognized. For some reason, this created a great danger to the high-priority objective. They had a wee} in which to plan and move. Their representatives were in the area by mid-week, perhaps, or earlier. On Saturday morning Ladwigg fell off his bike and died. Gretel was