Nor did he have a burning ambition to be another mimic on TV. “Wasn’t that wonderful, folks? Let’s give Frank Ashford a big hand!” As he himself had once said, borrowing Winston Churchill’s voice for the task, “I do not consider that fit employment for an adult.”
Unfortunately, he had as yet no idea what he wanted to do instead. Dealing in used comic books had been profitable enough, but his interest in it had paled when he’d attained his eighteenth summer — the people he was dealing with in that racket tended to be bores with tightly repressed sexual problems, and this, too, neither he nor Mr. Churchill considered fit employment for an adult.
From eighteen to twenty he’d occupied his time, and mind and talents with failing the Army induction physical. They kept calling him back every three months and he kept injecting himself with things to make him fail. But this was a seasonal occupation at best, and not high pay, and he was just as pleased when the Army finally threw in the towel and gave him a permanent deferment.
His Army career behind him, Frank struck off into greener pastures, and spent the next year and a half winning contests. He appeared on quiz programs, submitted entries to puzzle contests advertised in newspapers, sent his phone number to radio games and postcards to any company intending to have a drawing for anything.
But that, too, got boring after a while. Besides, a lot of the payoffs were year’s supplies of this and that, and before long Frank’s father’s garage was full of soap, pudding, razor blades, detergent, and socks; Frank’s father’s car was exposed to rain and sun by the curb; and Frank’s father was suggesting maybe it was time for the baby bird to emulate its big brothers and sisters and fly away from the nest. Also, the contest people get to know the professional winners after a while, and put their names on a list. Pretty soon Frank was being turned down for television quiz shows and his phone number wasn’t being called any more and his postcard was no longer being drawn.
Now Frank was twenty-five, and for over three years he’d been drifting. His father was growing more insistent about the baby bird, even his mother was beginning to make nature noises, and Frank himself was beginning to think a place of his own might be nice. But where was the money to come from? How was Frank, without boredom, to support himself?
Until Kelly had come along, things had looked really grim. Frank had gone up to Walden Pond and lived in a shallow hole in the ground there for a while, but that had turned out badly, with a terrible head cold and nosy state troopers and a session with a state psychiatrist and all the rest of it, and his prospecting for gold in Death Valley had been even worse. Nobody replied to his application to become a pilot for PanAm, and though the CIA did respond to his application to them, it was only to ask his draft status, so that time he didn’t respond.
But then, in the nick of time, along came Kelly. When Frank had first known Kelly a decade before, Kelly had been an EC nut, a collector of all the EC horror comics and science fiction comics. He’d even take a war comic, if it was EC, and he’d take science fiction comics even if they weren’t EC. Ten dollars, twelve dollars, he hadn’t cared what he had to pay for the early EC stuff, and for a while Frank had looked upon him as an unending source of income, but he hadn’t expected Kelly ever to supply his income in any other way.
It had taken him a while yesterday to realize that down beneath Kelly’s lunatic exterior there beat a brain of pure gold. If Kelly’s scheme worked, and Frank was convinced it would, it was the answer to all his problems.
A mountain in Manitoba, that’s what he’d buy, with a lake to land his seaplane on. And a town house in New York, facing Gramercy Park. With the comfort and time that two hundred eighty-five thousand dollars could give him, he could at last in a leisurely fashion make up his mind about what he intended finally to do with his life.
But right now there was the Rolls to consider. One drives on the left in Jamaica, and Frank found his Vespa had a tendency to veer rightward, like an aging West Point alumnus. This was bad enough on The Queen’s Drive, the blacktop road leading down into town from the airport, but once in the middle of town on Fort Street, surrounded by Cortinas and Morris Minors, it became downright dangerous. Frank hunched over his handdlebars and dogged the Rolls’ tail.
The Rolls trundled through town and out Barnett Street-past the police station, which Frank was too troubled by traffic to notice — and completely out the other side of the city. Monstrous trucks and buses kept threatening to skin the knuckles on his right hand, and he was developing a squint in his right eye.
Finally, five miles from town, the Rolls turned leftward into a driveway that arched uphill past two stone columns and a lot of jungle flora up to a large white house with balconies. The house could barely be seen from the road, but all of Montego Bay could surely be seen from the house.
Frank overshot the driveway, stopped the Vespa beside a tree, leaned against the tree as he switched on his tape recorder, and said à la Jack Webb into the microphone, “Four-seventeen. Suspect car entered driveway of private residence at—”
“And this,” Bullworth Spence announced as they entered the front hall of the house, “is Sir Albert Fitzroy!”
It was the first time Sassi had ever seen anyone introduced as though he were a natural wonder, but in this case the method was maybe appropriate. Sir Albert Fitzroy didn’t look like a person so much as a three-dimensional painting of a person, standing there in the hallway with a broad smile on his face and his hand out in greeting. On seeing him, one felt like saying, “How lifelike!”
But he wasn’t lifelike, not really, the way movies in Technicolor aren’t really lifelike. His jacket was too perfect a blue, his trousers too totally wrinkle-free, his shoes far too silkily polished. The expansion band of his watch seemed to glisten with a life all its own, as did the small plain gold ring on his left pinkie. His hands and face were scrubbed to a pink and healthy glow never seen outside Norman Rockwell paintings, and his hair, black on top and gray at the temples, thick and glossy, was swept back from a broad forehead in an effect impossible to attain in real life. The smile was not too much and not too little, the jaw was firm, the cheekbones high, the face ruggedly handsome and admitting to perhaps forty-five, the eyes sincere and pleased and welcoming and way too honest to believed.
Not really expecting this apparition to reply, or even to move, Sassi put on her coming-to-the-business-meeting smile and said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Sir Albert.”
“I have been looking forward to knowing you, Sassi. May I call you Sassi?”
The voice was perfect, just like everything else. A resonant baritone, rich and trustworthy. But it, too, was just too perfect. Sir Albert’s voice reminded Sassi of those recordings made by celebrities who can’t really sing, and in the final published record one can sense the ghostly presence of the technicians, all of the taping and retaping, splicing and resplicing, the filters and the mixing, the echo chambers and the adjusting of the treble and bass control, so that what comes out sounds as though it never was entirely human.
Sassi was so bemused by this voice, and by the fact that Sir Albert could move his head and his hand, like the Walt Disney robot of Abraham Lincoln, that it took her a second to realize she’d been asked a question. Could he call her Sassi. She said, “Of course, Sir Albert. I wish you would.”