Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

She looked like crying for a moment—I mean, not as though she were going to do it, but as though she’d done too much of it lately. “I was her closest living relative,” she said. “So I told them they could use her organs for anybody who needed them. I called up Henry Davidson-Jones’s office in New York to tell them about it. They didn’t send anybody to the funeral, but they did send the biggest damned wreath of flowers you ever saw—I think. There wasn’t any name on it, but the florist said it came from New York.”

  She finished eating her shrimp. Then she said, “I wonder whose body it was I had cremated.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  The sun was shining bright off the Mediterranean, a tour bus was off-loading summery men and women with cameras, at the table next to us four young German boys were arguing over whether Mutti would be angry if they all had another sweet. It was not an ambience for this kind of discussion.

  I nearly choked on the last of my omelette. “But you said—you said you saw her in the morgue!”

  “I thought I did. I saw a young woman who looked as much like Tricia as Tricia would, with her head all mashed and her nose pushed up under her left eye, and all the exposed flesh I could see all bruises and gashes. I did make an official identification for the police. She was driving Tricia’s car and wearing Tricia’s clothes and carrying Tricia’s pocketbook. That was six months ago, Nolly. I really did think it was Tricia. Wouldn’t you?”

  I was almost as exasperated as upset. “Come on, don’t ask rhetorical questions. You changed your mind, right? Why?”

  She said, “I was putting away all her papers. And some papers I saved about her. I couldn’t even look at them for months. But I saved everything, and then I decided to bundle it all up and do something with it—maybe bum it; maybe send the whole batch off to some other relative, if I could think of one. And I found myself reading the actual police record of the accident. They gave it to me for the insurance. ”

  “Was there a lot of insurance?”

  “There wasn’t any at all, but the police didn’t know that. They were just being nice. The truck broadsided her at a quarter after five. They had the time exactly, confirmed by witnesses. They didn’t call me right away—it took a long time to track me down; they had to check back through my California addresses and everything, because Tricia still had the old address in her pocketbook. But it was a quarter after five when it happened, all right. And when Tricia called me on the phone it was a little after six. I was watching the NBC network news.”

  I didn’t say anything right away. I wanted to make sure I was understanding what she was telling me. To help out, I invoked Marlene’s cure-all and ordered coffee from the very English waitress. “American coffee,” I specified, pointing to where it said that in the menu.

  It wasn’t really going to be American coffee, of course, because all French people think that Americans really would put chicory in their coffee if they only knew how, but I was grateful for the distraction so I could think. Irene Madigan left me alone to do it. When the coffee was served, and poured, and tasted, and we had both made a face, I said tentatively, “I suppose you’re absolutely sure about the time.”

  “I thought you’d ask me about that,” she said. “I would, too, if I were you. But, yes, I’m sure. The reason I’m sure …” She hesitated, then shrugged. “The reason I’m sure is that I had just started my period. I was flowing heavily, and I’d waited for the commercial to go to the bathroom, and Tricia’s call caught me on the way to change my Tampax.”

  “So there’s no doubt,” I summed up. “She called you around six.”

  “Right.”

  “That was three-quarters of an hour after she was supposed to have been in the crash.”

  “Yes.”

  “So,” I sighed, reluctantly, “it wasn’t Tricia who was in the crash. You cremated somebody else.”

  “You’ve got it,” Irene Madigan said, and began to cry. Sitting at a restaurant table with a crying woman is not my favorite thing. I avoid it when I can—usually successfully; the last time I’d been in that position was when one of my old girlfriends asked me straight out why I didn’t try to make love to her anymore, and I straight out told her what the mumps had done to me. Which was a mistake. Actually, I should have been the one crying. But the reason doesn’t matter. People look at you. They make up their own scenarios to account for why she’s crying. “He beats her.”

  “She’s pregnant and he won’t marry her.” Or maybe, in this particular setting, “He lost all their money in the casino and he doesn’t even have the decency to kill himself.” It makes no difference if you’re innocent of all charges. It doesn’t even matter if, actually, you’ve been more of a louse than anyone looking on could possibly guess, and once or twice in the old days I was close enough to that. Whatever. They look at you. And you know damn well that if the crying woman should say exactly the right thing, one of the men in the restaurant would come over and punch your face out.

  This time I was certifiably as innocent as anyone could get. I looked back at the furtive glances and the hostile stares—girls in bikinis, men in shorts, an elderly couple, she in a sort of lavender miniskirt, he with an ice-cream suit and the worst toupee I’ve ever seen, fingering his cane dangerously as he glared at me. I tried to project innocence to them all, and wished I could think of a way to stop Irene Madigan crying.

  Fortunately, she stopped herself.

  “Sorry,” she sniffled, reaching for a dry Kleenex. I patted her hand. She smiled damply back at me, and a lot of the voltage began to go out of the stares. “The thing is,” she said, wiping her nose, “I’m so damn helpless. Who would believe me?”

  “I would. I do.”

  “And who’s going to believe you, Nolly?” She returned the hand-pat to show she didn’t mean to hurt my feelings. “If you had anything convincing to say you would have been talking to the cops long ago, right?”

  “Well, but the two of us together …”

  She looked levelly at me, waiting for me to figure out the end of the sentence for myself. I did. I shrugged.

  She said simply, “Forget that.” She rummaged in her handbag again. I thought it was for another Kleenex, but what came out was a couple of sheets of Xerox paper, stapled together and folded several times. She pulled one set of pages off and handed them to me. “Take a look at this, Nolly. I practically had to sleep with a guy from the Wall Street Journal to get it.”

  I unfolded and glanced at the heading: “Estimated Balance Sheet for Narabedla Ltd. Unofficial.”

  It was unofficial, all right. It was the Journal staff’s best guesses about some very well kept financial secrets. Vic had told me they didn’t have to file very many reports. They certainly didn’t volunteer any. Almost every line was marked “Estimated” or “Provisional” or “Projected from Earlier Data.”

  But what it added up to was—remarkable.

  I knew the huge empire called Narabedla Ltd. was huge. I hadn’t known about the shipbuilding firm in Taiwan, or the Japanese computer company. I had no idea Narabedla held such large interests in a hundred American firms. None of your standard blue chips. Better than the blue chips. The list included most of the biggest money-spinners in the high-tech industries. Gene-splitting. Computers. Industrial chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Avionics. If a company was going somewhere fast in a growing market, Narabedla owned a piece of it. A big piece. This summary changed my idea of what “big” meant. By these figures, Ford, ITT, any of the companies of Big Oil—Narabedla was right up there with them, and could maybe have bought and sold some of them.

  Irene asked, “Did you read the part about the lawyers?” I had. I hadn’t missed its significance. Not one but four of the hottest, winningest firms in the country were on retainer to Narabedla. Which meant to Henry Davidson-Jones. Which meant …

  I sighed and put the paper in my pocket. “Legal-wise,” I said, “they could kill us.”

  She set her chin. “All the same, the son of a bitch kidnap
ped my cousin.”

  I said reasonably, “We don’t know that for sure. We certainly don’t have a clue about any motive.”

  “Sex, Nolly!” She pointed to the yacht across the bay. “Sure, that sounds crazy. A man like Henry Davidson-Jones wouldn’t have to kidnap good-looking women and lock them up in a harem. God, his big problem ought to be fighting them off! But if he did do that, what better place could there be to do it in than a yacht like that? You could hide half an army. Forty or fifty screaming harem girls would be nothing.”

  “Irene,” I said soothingly, “that wouldn’t account for cellists and baritones.”

  “So maybe he’s gay, too. Or maybe he likes music when he makes love.” She scowled at-me. “I don’t know why, I just know that, and if you’ve got a better theory, tell me what it is.”

  I didn’t have a better theory, of course. I only had a whole lot of doubt and confusion. I said, “It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of.”

  And that was true. But I hadn’t then been to the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Things did start to get really crazy about then. I got pretty crazy myself. I found myself doing things that I was very sure Marlene would have defined as meshuggeneh, and I wouldn’t have had any right to disagree.

  We took the elevator down to the lobby of the hotel, way at the bottom of the casino’s hill. I found a pay phone, collected a stack of those dumb little French telephone tokens, and began calling every luxe hotel in the area. To each one I said the same thing in my best Berlioz French—I mean the opera composer, not the guy who runs the language school: “Bon jour. Je voudrais parler avec M. Henri Davidson-Jones.” Eight times I tried it, working my way through Monaco, Menton, and Beaulieu, and when I started on Nice I hit pay dirt. “Moment, m’sieur, s’il vous plaît,” said the operator at the Negresco, and a moment later I heard a male voice saying:

  “This is Mr. Passerine, Mr. Davidson-Jones’s secretary. Who is calling, please?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that question, unfortunately. I am very good at planning, up to a point. I had figured out a way to find out where Davidson-Jones was staying; it had worked; I just hadn’t thought far enough ahead to have decided what to do when I found him.

  So I improvised.

  I said, “Mr. Passerine, please hold for Mr. Rmfmf in Chicago.” And I put my hand over the mouthpiece for a moment.

  Then I gently hung up.

  “Why’d you hang up? He’s there, isn’t he?” Irene demanded.

  “Right. He’s there. Now you tell me what we do about it.”

  “We go and confront him!”

  “You tried that in New York. He wouldn’t see you.”

  “We’ll sit in the lobby until he comes out.”

  “They’ll throw us out, Irene. That’s a classy hotel.”

  “They can’t throw us off the sidewalk in front of it, can they?”

  “I wouldn’t bet.” Then I said firmly, “Anyway, I want to think this over before I do something foolish.”

  And she said, “Oh, shit.”

  She turned her back on me and walked away. I didn’t follow. I didn’t know what to say if I did. I just watched her as she walked into the lobby casino and began feeding coins into the one-franc slots.

  I tried to think of what I ought to do next. No good ideas turned up, except that my feet were beginning to hurt; Monaco is an up-and-down place, and I’d jogged over from the bus stop. On cobblestones. I decided to sit down while I thought; so I walked over to the bar and got myself a Campari-soda, not because I had changed my mind about trendy European aperitifs, but because it seemed like the right thing for that place; and 1 sulked.

  That’s candor. “Sulked” isn’t the word I would prefer to use. It just happened to be the right one.

  I got into a debate with myself, for the lack of Irene Madigan to take the other side. I told myself that I owed her nothing—anyway, nothing but common courtesy, and I’d certainly given her more of that than she had given to me.

  It occurred to me that she was really on the edge over what had happened to somebody she loved. I should have been more understanding, I thought.

  I also thought that I probably seemed, well, excessively cautious to her. Not to say chicken. That was understandable. Actually I was more prudent than she, if only because the person I was principally concerned about was only a client, not a blood relative. Irene should have understood that, shouldn’t she?

  She hadn’t, though.

  That bothered me, in a part of my mind where I was pretty tender already. I guess you could call it the area of personality I thought of as “manliness.” The old girlfriend who had wept at dinner at II Gattopardo ran into me a year or two later. She didn’t cry this time, she only looked me up and down and chatted for a while and then made up her mind: “Why do you have to be so macho, Nolly?” she asked. “Hang-gliding? Muscle-building? Why don’t you just relax and quit trying to be Rambo?” We didn’t part real friendly that time, either. She’d been through both Esalen and est by then and was, of course, absolutely sure of her diagnosis of me: Acting ballsy to cover up the fact that I wasn’t.

  So it meant something to me that Irene Madigan might be thinking of me as a coward. I wanted her to understand where I was coming from. But when I went looking for her among the slots to explain all that to her, she wasn’t there.

  “There’s something funny, all right,” I told the telephone, which told the satellite, which told Marlene back in New York, “but I don’t know what I can do about it. I don’t know where Irene went.”

  “No names!” Marlene scolded, half a second tardily.

  “All right, but I don’t know where she went.”

  “She just split on you?”

  I said fairly, “Well, I sort of walked away on her, too. We had a little disagreement. But I thought I knew where she was.”

  Silence transported via satellite for a second; then, briskly, “So, tell me, Nolly, what are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  That produced more of that expensive silence. After about seventy-five cents’ worth I said, “I think I might as well catch the sleeper to Madrid. I was hoping to see some of the Spanish opera people tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Oh.” No inflection. Just an “oh.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “when I get back to New York, I’ll talk to the police, I think.”

  “All right, Nolly,” said Marlene, and I couldn’t tell whether the tone was disapproving or just attenuated by distance.

  So I hung up.

  Then I had a drink.

  Then I had dinner; and all the time I was thinking about it, and right between the avocat vinaigrette and the baby lamb chops I got on the house phone to seek a truce.

  No luck. Even bad luck; Irene Madigan had checked out.

  As far as I could see, that closed out the account.

  It didn’t feel closed out, though. And then I remembered the Narabedla Ltd. xeroxes Irene Madigan had given me. I fished them out of my pocket and glanced at them.

  Then I began to read in earnest. It was a shame to give those perfect little lamb chops only a part of my attention, but it was really fascinating. The more I looked at Narabedla’s holdings and operations the more awed I got.

  Nor was it just the money-spinning power that was impressive. What Narabedla did with the money was curious, too. Quite a lot of it they gave away.

  Political contributions—well, sure. Big companies keep the government as crooked as they can with gifts. Narabedla seemed to be paying off more than half the Congress—310 separate contributions to congressional campaign funds, all for the legal maximum of three thousand dollars each.

  That was a million dollars right there.

  I was a little startled to see that most of the names I recognized were likely to be liberal Democrats instead of the what’s-good-for-business-is-good-for-America types that usua
lly got that kind of corporate dough. I was even more surprised to see what some of the other donations had gone for.

  Narabedla was angeling a large number of scientific and educational institutions. A hundred and fifty thousand to one university, eighty-five thousand to another, nearly a quarter of a million to a foundation—all to finance research on AIDS. There were twenty-five or thirty grants for medical research on a dozen other ailments, ranging from salmonellosis to flu. Fifteen thousand to the World Esperanto Association. Forty thousand to an astronomical observatory, “to undertake an analytical catalogue of pulsars and related objects.” Another twenty-five thousand to the same place that was marked, “Supplementary grant for the study of anomalous novae.” Sixty-five thousand to one university and eighty thousand to another for grants “for basic study of particle physics and Einstein-Rosen interactions.” A big one, nearly half a million, to CalTech: “Survey of earthquake precursors in the Palmdale Bulge.”

  It wasn’t all science and politics. The list went on for three pages—a few thousand here, a lot more thousand there, to a long list of do-good organizations—peace groups, civil rights groups, groups of all kinds from the NAACP to the Unitarian-Universalist Church of America; and I’m not even beginning to talk about the music conservatories and chamber-music quartets and struggling opera companies.

  He was quite a good and responsible citizen, Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones. The total made my eyes pop. His Narabedla donations had totaled more than eleven million dollars in the latest known year. There was certainly, I told myself, no reason to think that anybody like that would do anything as pathologically felonious as kidnap people.

  With that in mind, after dinner I had them call a taxi to take me to Nice-Ville; and all the way to the station my thoughts were fully occupied with the task of changing my mind.

  It wasn’t hard to do. I got it done by the time we arrived at Nice-Ville; philanthropist or not, there were just too many questions about the man. So I checked my bags at the station and took a taxi back to the Promenade des Anglais along the beach, and the Hotel Negresco.