Night of Fire and Snow

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Night of Fire and Snow Page 12

by Alfred Coppel


  “Tom,” Miguel said. “Let’s get whatever it is off your chest. You’ll feel better and so will I.”

  Tom nodded, looking at the ground. “You’re right as hell.” He drained the last of his beer and squeezed the can between his big hands. “You got any money?” he asked in a low voice. “Sure, some. You need it?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what for?”

  “No, why should I? If you want to tell me, you will.”

  “How much?”

  “About four bucks with me. Maybe another ten back in my room. And about a hundred and sixty in my checking account.”

  “Anybody owe you?” Plainly, this was a difficult conversation for Tom.

  “Julie owes me six. And Guth Guthrie hit me for three. Accounts receivable, nine bucks.”

  “Jesus,” Tom said.

  “Not enough?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “Then let’s figure a way to raise more. I take it you can’t go to your folks for it.”

  “Listen. I’ve got to tell you.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, the plain fact is that your old Uncle Tom has gone out and gotten himself a dose of clap.”

  “What?” The climax was so sudden and so unexpected that it was all Miguel could do to keep from laughing. But almost immediately he realized how degraded Tom must feel and it wasn’t funny at all.

  “Well,” Tom said, red-faced, “you see why I can’t ask the folks. Ollie would skin me alive.”

  Miguel nodded. Oliver Eubanks had certain standards and a young man “keeping himself clean” was one of them. You could rot your guts out with homemade gin—that was just good sport. But to copulate without a condom was un-American.

  “I’ve scraped together two hundred bucks. I need three more for the treatments.”

  “Five hundred,” Miguel gave a low whistle. “Somebody’s got you over a barrel. What kind of doctor did you see?”

  “The only kind I could. If this got around down at school, can you imagine what would happen to my football scholarship?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Miguel admitted.

  “Hes legit,” Tom said. “He wants to use those new sulfas on me. They’ll knock it in two or three weeks. But it’ll take five hundred bucks.”

  “We might get a loan on my car,” Miguel suggested. “Maybe we could get the whole amount.”

  “We’re minors, remember? A loan company would pitch us out on our ears.”

  “I suppose so,” Miguel agreed. “Besides, the damn crock is registered in my father’s name.”

  “So that’s out.”

  “Well, you take a hundred bucks from me. That’ll only leave two hundred more to dig up. We ought to be able to raise it.”

  “Jesus, Mike, thanks. But what will you do for dough the rest of the quarter? How will you get along on sixty-odd dollars?”

  “Study more,” Miguel said. “And drink less.” He took a battered pack of Chesterfields out and lit two. “Here, beat a weed and let’s use our heads. What about putting the bite on Alberg?” Billy was at the University of California and Miguel saw him seldom, but he felt certain that Billy would have the money.

  “Christ, I don’t want to ask him,” Tom said.

  “No, I guess it wouldn’t be such a hot idea.”

  “He wouldn’t lend it, anyway. You know Alberg.”

  Miguel nodded.

  “So we’re right back where we started,” Tom said hopelessly. “Oh, that God damn miserable bitch. I could kill her.”

  “Was she a pro?”

  “Charity ass. One of the girls at school. Jesus God, to look at her—I mean, how’s a guy to know? Oh, Christ, I don’t want to talk about it. Is there anybody you can borrow from at the dorm?”

  “I don’t think there’s two hundred bucks of loose money in the whole freshman class.”

  Tom made an effort to recover his normal cockiness as he said, “Down at SC, we hear Stanford is the rich kids’ school.”

  “You know, that’s funny. We hear the same thing about Southern Cal. How else could they afford those pretty uniforms for their band?” Miguel said, “Hold it, I know.”

  “You know what?”

  “Where we can get two hundred dollars.”

  “Where, for chrissake?”

  “Becky.”

  “Becky?”

  “Sure, Becky. She’ll lend it to me.”

  “Oh, no, Spick. I couldn’t let you do that.”

  “Why not?” Miguel plucked at a long blade of grass and put it between his teeth. “You let me worry about it, Uncle.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Like this,” Miguel said, smiling dryly at his friend. “I tell her the truth.” As Tom protested he raised his hand. “Almost, that is. I don’t mention you, though. I tell her it’s for me.”

  And he had done that. He often wondered if he had really been acting for Tom or had he been satisfying a deeper, more personal need. Some desire to outrage his father, or a need to stun Becky. And was that the moment, he asked himself, that Becky, shocked and revolted to be sure, had looked at a boy and seen a man?

  EIGHT

  A pall of smog lay over Manhattan Island, a gray-blue haze compounded of industrial smoke, dust, and the exhaust fumes of a hundred thousand automobiles. It lay like a blanket over the city, a blanket pierced here and there by the taller buildings. Miguel could see the spires of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, their eastern faces illuminated by the filtered light New Yorkers thought of as sunshine. From three thousand feet, the jumbled, congested mass of New York looked deceptively orderly. This is my country, Miguel thought, but he had no sense of having returned home. He had always imagined that he liked New York, but suddenly he realized that what he longed to see were the sere browns and summer greens of the Coast Range and the placid gray waters of San Francisco Bay.

  The Constellation banked over the East River and the sun’s reflection flashed on the glassy slab of the UN, raced over the dirty water flowing sluggishly under the Queensboro Bridge and vanished in the tangle of piers and wharves of the Long Island shore.

  The cabin was filled with murmuring as the Frankfurt tourists pressed their faces to the plexiglass windows for their first close look at the capital of the world. The cabin speaker came to life for the first time and the captain’s voice said he hoped they had all enjoyed the trip and would fly with the airline again. Miguel was reminded of the bus drivers’ spiels you heard on the sightseeing tours around San Francisco, Chinatown, Coit Tower, the Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf and then back to Union Square and we hope you had a real ball with us taking in the sights.

  The stewardess was smiling cordially now as she untagged overcoats and returned them to their owners. Miguel thought of Lieutenant Artigue sipping his whisky in some Irish pub, and of J. C. probably getting ready to take his wife Denise to the evening cinema—the Royale near the Place d’ltalie where the American films were never shown.

  He sat watching the ground come up to meet them as the airliner descended. The pattern of order seen from the air disintegrated as altitude diminished. He could see traffic, the tangle of streets and alleys, freeways, automobiles scarab-like from above. He watched people walking on buckled sidewalks, breakfasting on terraces. He saw the red brick faces of outlying tenements, the dirty glass fronts of neighborhood stores, children playing in empty, weed-choked lots. Everything was in motion. Even this early in the morning the ground below was swarming with the ant-hill pulse of life. He thought of the restless, moon-driven motion of the empty sea. In retrospect, it seemed peaceful and calmly beautiful.

  The airplane leveled and glided toward the airport. Flaps sprouted from the wings. He felt the landing gear bump into place and lock. The approach light standards, white and orange, swept under the fuselage and then the white painted numerals on the concrete runway. There was a momentary sinking quiet and then the wheels squealed as they touched the ground.

  The end of sanctuary.<
br />
  The Customs inspection was short, but to Miguel, unbelievably tedious. When at last he was able to turn his luggage over to a skycap, he felt as though his eyes had been blasted with sand. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so tired.

  He followed the porter out into the concourse, looking for Nora in the crowd. A flashbulb popped near the entryway and he turned toward the flash. He didn’t see her immediately, but he knew she must be there, in the center of a group of people. And then the crowd parted a bit and he caught sight of her, slim and lovely and unmistakably Nora.

  She was wearing a plain gray suit and carrying a shoulder-strap bag with a brass regimental crest of some sort on it. Her hair was cropped off in a beautifully casual style that suited the high angularity of her face perfectly. She wore a pair of dark harlequin glasses—her one concession to motion picture custom. Other than that she might have been any one of a hundred smartly dressed women you’d meet walking on Fifth Avenue. Only if she were, you would stop and look after her, because there was that sudden, almost breathtaking impact that was strictly visceral.

  He hurried across the concourse toward her, thinking that she was like a beacon in that crowd. Then she was running to meet him and he was catching her in his arms and it was as though he had never been away from her.

  Her green eyes were more flecked with gold than he remembered and her body felt thinner, with a taut hardness that thrust against him demandingly. “Oh, God, Mike,” she said breathlessly. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Nora,” he said, and kissed her again, trying to respond to her. Flashbulbs exploded. He became aware of the people watching them. Her, really. He wished with all his heart that they could be alone for this time of meeting. It was important. Perhaps the most important single moment in his life. But it was impossible, of course, and he remembered he had promised himself to try to understand what it meant to be loved by Nora Ames.

  She became aware of his withdrawal. She could always read me like a book, Miguel thought. Always, from the first.

  “Don’t be angry with me, darling,” she whispered to him. “I couldn’t come alone.”

  “I know, Nora,” he said.

  “Come on and meet them?” she asked. She had a capacity for self-demotion that was at once aggravating and endearing, he knew. Now she was apologizing to him for being who she was and what she was and he could not be so ungenerous as to refuse the gesture. It isn’t necessary, Nora, he thought wearily. It isn’t necessary at all.

  The others closed in around them. A thickset man who must be Ziegler, a brush-haired young husky with an angelic baby’s face, and four men with cameras.

  The thickset man smiled blankly. Miguel noticed that there seemed to be no real animation in his face at all. The features arranged themselves into the pattern of a smile, but there was no warmth. “I’m Victor Ziegler,” he said, extending a meaty hand. His flesh was cold and white to the touch, like the belly of a fish.

  “And this is Tony Ayula, darling,” Nora said, leading Miguel over to the muscular young man in a charcoal gray suit and pink button-down shirt. “Tony is Artfilm’s New York public relations man.”

  Ayula smiled at him as though they had just discovered they were fraternity brothers. “A pleasure, Mike. We hear good things about you.”

  Miguel suppressed the urge to say “Like what?” and merely nodded.

  More flashbulbs erupted as Miguel shook hands with Ayula. By this time, a considerable crowd had gathered, staring curiously. Miguel had the notion that this was exactly what Ayula had had in mind when he brought the photographers along. It wouldn’t be long before someone recognized Nora and then the mob scene would be on.

  “Can we pull out of here?” Miguel asked. “I’d like to clean up a bit and get some coffee.”

  “Poor darling,” Nora said. “Was it an awful trip? We were so worried about the weather. And then when you couldn’t get anything but a tourist flight—”

  Miguel was about to correct “get” with “afford” but he thought better of it and simply said, “It wasn’t too bad.”

  “Vic,” Nora said. “Are we all set? Can we go now, do you think?” Miguel decided that this was certainly something new, this business of Nora asking someone to make decisions for her. Still, she was Ziegler’s protégée now, and in Hollywood the word Producer was equated with God.

  “Just hold it a while, Victor. Just a bit,” Ayula said, and turned to his photographers who were now regarding the crowd with professional apathy.

  Ziegler looked at Miguel distantly and nodded. All he needs, Miguel thought, is the cigar and a five-carat diamond to look like those cartoons that used to appear in Der Stürmer. The gabardine suit, the long-collared silk shirt and the handpainted tie were unmistakably Hollywood. The face was florid, etched with deep lines around the mouth and eyes. And the nose was thick and curved. There might be no life in Ziegler, but there was no pretense, either. Miguel could like that. He couldn’t imagine Ziegler hiding his Jewishness under an Ivy League suit and a plastic surgery job on his nose as though it were something shameful.

  “We’re staying at the Plaza, Mike,” Nora said. She squeezed his hand and added in a low voice, “All of us.”

  He knew what she meant and something stirred inside him. Eight months without Nora was a long time.

  Someone in the crowd murmured, “That’s Nora Ames.” Miguel drew a breath and walked over to Ayula. He took him aside.

  “What’s on your mind, fellah?” Ayula said.

  Miguel indicated the photographers. “Those your people or the newspapers’?”

  “Ours,” Ayula said. “That way we can go over the stills and make sure we only release the best ones. We handle it this way whenever we can.”

  “Well, that’s great. But I wouldn’t use any pictures with me in them.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why, fellah, we couldn’t tie this stuff up. The story is all laid out and set to go to the papers. What a girl like Nora does is news.”

  “Use all you want of Nora. Just leave me out of it.”

  Ayula smirked at him, his cherubic face radiating superiority. “Mike, boy, you can use the publicity too, you know. I happen to know what your last book sold.”

  Miguel decided he disliked Tony Ayula very much. “Look, mister,” he said, “I don’t know if Nora ever bothered to tell you, but I have a wife and daughter out in San Francisco.” Ayula paled. He couldn’t have looked more shocked, Miguel thought, if I had suddenly urinated on his feet.

  “We have been separated for some time,” he told Ayula. “But people at home don’t always play The Game Hollywood style. My wife might take a dim view of seeing my face plastered all over the newspaper.”

  “Nora didn’t tell me,” Ayula said.

  “No harm done. Just tell your boys to leave me out of the pictures. Tell them I’m a member of an African tribe and I’m afraid of having my soul caught by the camera.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It’s the best I can do. I’m tired.”

  “But Mike—for chrissake. The whole story is set up to include you. That’s the tie-up. The gimmick.”

  “Gimmick?”

  “Sure. Artfilm’s buying you and it makes you worth more to them if we can capitalize on a romance angle.”

  Miguel winced inwardly at Ayula’s thrust. It was as though an invisible shell between him and the rest of the real, pushing, swarming world had suddenly cracked. He became conscious of the clatter of machines, the echoing babble of voices, the hoarse shouting of the public address system, the roar of motors. The terminal was a madhouse of movement and crowding, shoving humanity. He heard Nora’s name repeated again and again as people pressed nearer. Someone shouted, “How about an autograph, Miss Ames?”

  Ayula was still talking, but Miguel could scarcely hear him over the excited noises issuing from the moving mass of featureless faces surrounding them.

  “What did you say?” he
shouted.

  Someone elbowed Miguel aside in his anxiety to get close to Nora. Miguel glanced over at her. She was surrounded by people, being jostled by them, touched by them, as she signed autographs. And all with a set, posed smile on her face that seemed to hit every person in that throng right in the solar plexus. He didn’t like to look at her.

  “What did you say?” he shouted to Ayula again.

  The childish face was flushed. “I said for chrissake why didn’t somebody tell me about the frigging wife and kiddie!”

  Ziegler stepped suddenly between Miguel and Ayula. Miguel was stunned to see that he was looking at him with a sadly pitying expression on his coarse face. “Don’t do that, Mike,” he said in a barely audible voice.

  Miguel looked down at his own hands and saw that they were knotted into fists. He realized with a shock that he had been within an ace of hitting Tony Ayula. It shook him badly.

  Ayula, apparently, had not noticed. He was shouting at Ziegler, trying to make himself heard. Ziegler was shaking his head. For the first time he was showing some animation. Miguel strained to hear what they were saying.

  “We can’t stand any bad publicity. Kill the story, Tony.”

  “But Victor, for chrissake, we were all set to go.”

  “Never mind that. Kill it. It isn’t that important.”

  Ayula yelled, “Maybe we can figure some other angle on Rinehart.”

  “Forget it. Why do you keep making me repeat myself?”

  “I hate to waste the trip out here. I think—”

  “Tony, you think and it costs money. We don’t want trouble.”

  “Trouble, for chrissake, Victor! We come all the way out here—”

  “Tony, you better start breaking this up. Now.”

  Ziegler took Miguel by the arm and led him out of the crowd. Miguel held back. He said, “What about Nora?”

  “Nora’s fine,” Ziegler said. “Having the time of her life. Tony will take care of her.”

  Miguel looked back, but he could not see her. A lassitude swept over him. The crowd seemed to suck the life out of him. He let himself be led out to a black fishtail Cadillac limousine parked at the curb. The driver jumped out and opened the back door.

 

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