Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  The phone flashed. Mary Kate answered, spoke softly. Nodding, Binx said, “Psychosomatic Illness Is All in Your Mind, Scientists Say. I tried that one once; Massa didn’t get it.”

  “You’re lucky. Okay if I take?”

  Binx tossed the ball into the air, then had to scramble to catch it. “Blessings on you both,” he said, and sat on the comer of the desk again.

  Hanging up the phone, Mary Kate told Jack, “Mr. Harsch wants Sara when she comes in.”

  “Here she comes,” Jack said, watching Sara approach through the maze.

  “Fired?” Binx asked. “Her first week?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Harsch only fires on Tuesdays, so your last two days you don’t get paid for.”

  “Maybe,” Binx said, squeezing the pink ball with both hands, “maybe that’s the answer. Maybe if I never come in on Tuesdays—”

  In the last few days, Sara’s opinion of Jack Ingersoll had softened, but she still remained wary. When Phyllis had explained at length the kind of pressure Jack and the other editors operated under, it did make his initial bad temper more understandable—“As I understand it”—though it had still been damned unfair of him to take it out on somebody arriving here for her very first day of work. Jack himself perhaps agreed with that, since he’d been much more friendly ever since; or maybe it was simply her success in getting the gallstones quote that first morning, which she now understood—“As I understand it”—had been a real coup. Not matched since, unfortunately.

  Still, here was another day, another chance. Coming to Jack’s squaricle, seeing Binx Rad- well there with his perpetual look of terror, she told herself she’d be much worse off if she’d been assigned to Binx’s team. He had, in the rough phraseology of Jack Minter, her former editor on the Courier-Observer, loser sweat all over him.

  A few squaricles away, a nuclear family, Mother and Dad and Sis and Junior, loitered aimlessly, dressed in homemade spacesuits, all shiny aluminum foil, with their helmets under their arms. Looking at those people, Sara almost missed the door space to Jack’s squaricle, but recalled herself just in time, made an awkward little hop to one side, and entered without breaching local etiquette. “Good morning,” she said generally. “More John Michael Mercer?”

  “Not yet,” Jack told her. “The Lord Harsch wants you in his office, up on four.”

  “Then I’d better go,” Sara said, wondering what this could be about. Harsch hadn’t spoken to her since the first morning’s pep talk. Gesturing at the astronaut family, she said, “What’s with Lost in Space?”

  “No idea,” Jack said.

  Binx said, “Something of Boy’s, I think.”

  “That limey bastard,” Jack said, his chronic bad temper suddenly resurfacing. With a gloomy glower at Sara, he said, “I’m not holding you here, you know.”

  It isn’t personal, Sara told herself, but wanted to kick him in the balls anyway. “See you later,” she said sweetly.

  They watched her follow the black lines toward the elevators. “Nice,” Binx suggested.

  “Very nice,” Jack agreed.

  Binx tossed the pink ball from hand to hand, dropped it, caught it on the bounce. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t tell her I’m married, okay?”

  “I’m listening,” Mary Kate said.

  “Don’t,” Binx told her.

  Ida Gavin came striding into the squaricle. “Keely Jones,” she said.

  “I remember her,” Jack admitted. “Three- timing her husband and her manager with the ex- con swimming pool salesman.”

  Binx looked up, clutching the ball. “Ex-con swimming pool salesman?”

  “This one’s mine,” Jack warned him. “All mine. And we have Mr. X—”

  “The swimming pool salesman,” Binx guessed.

  “—on tape.”

  “We are now,” Ida said, “running the Mr. X tape on a loudspeaker truck in front of Keely’s house in Bel Air.”

  “Nice,” Jack said.

  “I’ll keep you up-to-date,” Ida said, and departed.

  Binx sighed. He put the ball in the crook of his elbow, bent the arm to squeeze the ball, grimaced with pain, put the ball back in his right hand, considered it like Puck considering the globe.

  “Invite her to our barbecue, why don’t you?” he said.

  Jack stared at him. “Ida?”

  Binx looked at Jack more in sorrow than in anger. “Sara,” he said.

  “She’ll notice you’re married.”

  “I’ll be going for sympathy,” Binx said, and dropped the pink ball. He watched it roll away across a black line into somebody else’s squaricle. “What do you suppose Harsch wants with her?” he asked. “Give a demonstration, do you think, on sexual technique with college professors?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Harsch gave up sex years ago, when he found something he really liked.” Binx waited, watching his ball at rest under the comer of someone else’s desk. The silence grew. Mary Kate stopped typing. Binx sighed and accepted the inevitable. “All right,” he said. “What did Harsch find that he really liked?”

  “Roasting babies,” Jack said.

  Jacob Harsch’s top-floor office was a large low- ceilinged room in hushed grays, with no sharp edges. Broad gray-tinted windows softened the southern view of the desert, making it into an idealized portrait of itself. Bookcases were filled with large somber tomes grouped by subject: war, pestilence, slavery, Elvis Presley. The furniture was low, bulky, dark, expensive. At a long and heavy-legged library table to one side Harsch himself stood with the Galaxy's art director, Fred Mooney, a nervous paunchy balding man with a scraggly moustache. Together, they studied a number of pictures scattered on the table, Harsch’s bony long fingers and Mooney’s blunt fidgety fingers pushing the pictures this way and that, revealing some, covering others. “All of these women,” Mooney said irritably, “have their mouths open.”

  “That’s all right, Fred,” Harsch said softly. “That’s considered all right.”

  “Okay, okay, fine.” Restlessly, Mooney’s fingers pushed and shoved. “Now, these funeral pictures,” he said. “These funeral pictures just don’t show me a thing. It’s so dark, there’s no life, there’s nothing.”

  “This was a great American, Fred,” Harsch said, his gray fingernail tapping the famous chin. “Top box office for three decades. Massa wants a picture on the cover.”

  Dubious but scared, Mooney blinked and squinted at the pictures. “Well, I’ll do what I can,” he said. “We can lighten them, draw in some detail.”

  “A little cleavage here,” Harsch said, the fingernail tap-tapping. “Widows are considered sexy.”

  “Uh huh, uh huh.” Fleeing that topic, petulantly irritated, Mooney picked up another picture. “Now, this thing,” he said. “This is the space battle story, you know? That clairvoyant in Dallas told us about it. Two spaceships had a dogfight the other side of the moon, what was it, last October, she sees space debris coining around into sight either late August or early September.” “I recall the story,” Harsch agreed.

  “Now, look at this thing,” Mooney said.

  Harsch took the picture, which was done in the black-and-white photo realist style of the Galaxy. “Yes?” The cold fingernail tapped. “Here’s the two ships, different styles because they’re different civilizations. Here’s the moon. We won’t see the earth, the moon hides it. So?”

  “Well,” Mooney said, taking the picture back, gazing at it with deep discontent, “this is very murky, like almost out of focus. The question is, is this a drawing, or is it a photo?”

  Harsch lifted his gaze and looked into Mooney’s fidgety eyes. “I mean,” Mooney explained, “I got to know for myself, for if we retouch or whatever, but also, what if Massa asks me?”

  “Fred, how long have you worked here?” Harsch asked, not unkindly.

  “Nine years,” Mooney said in terror, and the intercom on Harsch’s desk buzzed.

  “One moment,” Harsch said, and crossed to his low massive desk and
pushed the button, saying, “Yes?”

  “Sara Joslyn, Mr. Harsch.”

  “Ah, yes. Send her in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Turning, crossing back to Fred Mooney, Harsch said, “I think it’s a drawing.”

  “Okay,” Mooney said, nodding jerkily, holding the picture without looking at it. The door opened, and Mooney threw a glance of abject fear in that direction, as though it might be the Spanish Inquisition coming in.

  Sara entered Mr. Harsch’s austerely opulent office, and found him talking with a rumpled moustached scared-looking man holding some sort of picture. Mr. Harsch was saying to him, “But you could double-check. Call Accounting, see did any photographer put in for two light-years’ expenses.”

  The rumpled man blinked, as though he’d been slapped. “Well,” he said. “Okay. Okay, it’s a drawing.” He threw a quick glance at Sara, apparently realizing his interview with Mr. Harsch was over, and started gathering up other pictures from the library table behind him. “And we’ll do what we can about that other,” he said.

  “Massa wants,” Harsch said, in his soft cold voice.

  “Okay. Sure.” Pictures clutched in his arms, the man shot another scared look at Sara and hurried from the room.

  This was to be the first time Harsch would talk to Sara since her arrival on Monday, and she’d spent the time in the elevator trying to guess what the subject would be. Congratulations on the gallstone quote? A special assignment? A transfer to a different editor? (She wasn’t sure exactly how she felt about that last possibility.) She wasn’t at all prepared for Harsch’s first statement. His coldeyed attention swiveling to her, he said, “I understand, Miss Joslyn, you’ve lost a piece of Galaxy property.”

  Bewildered, Sara said, “I have?”

  “The sticker you were—”

  So relieved that it wasn’t anything serious, Sara unconsciously interrupted, saying, “Oh, that! I completely forgot—”

  “Miss Joslyn,” the cold voice said, bearing down, “the Galaxy is a fearless hard-hitting newspaper.”

  Thrown off balance, Sara could think of nothing to say but “Yes?”

  “That means,” Harsch told her, “the Galaxy has enemies. That’s why we have security here.”

  “Oh,” Sara said, nodding, “I see what you—”

  “A Galaxy sticker is now out in the world, Miss Joslyn,” Harsch said. “Out of our control.”

  Unable to believe Harsch expected her to treat this situation like a tragedy out of Shakespeare, Sara said, “But it’s just a—”

  “I want you to understand this, Miss Joslyn,” Harsch said, overriding her. “We don’t take security lightly here. Nor theft of Galaxy property.”

  Shocked, offended, Sara raised up, saying, “Mr. Harsch, I—”

  “That’s what our attorneys would name it,” he said, “if we felt we had to call them in on this.” Then, while Sara watched him in mingled alarm and disbelief, Harsch turned away, looking out his tinted windows at the soft gray desert. “You’re new here,” he said, looking at the desert, “so I’m taking that into account.” Glancing back at Sara, he offered a wintry smile, saying, “Everyone gets one free error.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said, her mind racing. Had all of this just been meant to scare her, to play some sort of petty power game on her?

  “However,” Harsch went on, giving her his full attention again, “we will need that sticker back.”

  She didn’t understand. “But it’s gone,” she said.

  “You’re a reporter, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, with as much force as she could muster.

  “Your assignment, Miss Joslyn,” he said, bearing down again, “is to drive your stickerless car off this property and return no later than tomorrow with the sticker affixed.”

  Call the rental place; not impossible. Absurd, but not impossible. “All right,” she said, feeling mutinous but realizing mutiny would be just as absurd as this pettiness over a windshield sticker. Captain Queeg and the strawberries, she thought.

  Turning away again, moving toward his desk, speaking more quietly and thoughtfully, Harsch said, “This is a bad mark for Jack Ingersoll, and—”

  “What?” Sara stared. “Why for him?”

  Harsch looked back at her, shrugging as though it should be obvious. “You’re on his team. If you don’t return, it’s a worse mark. And if you fail to come back tomorrow, Miss Joslyn, fail to come back.”

  Tomorrow’s Saturday, she suddenly realized, and assumed he’d forgotten. “There won’t be anyone here tomorrow,” she said. “It’s Saturday.”

  “The guard will be at the gate. He’ll be expecting you.”

  So that’s my punishment, Sara thought. I get to drive all the way out here on my day off. “All right,” she said. “Is that all, Mr. Harsch?”

  “For the moment,” Harsch told her, as a section of wall to her left suddenly receded an inch, with a heavy mechanical clack, and slid away rightward behind the next section of wall, revealing Bruno DeMassi, seated at his desk in his elevator/offlce. He looks ridiculous in there, Sara thought, but then realized that he also looked faindy frightening, the mechanized spider in his web. Everything at the Galaxy, it seemed, combined those same qualities of the scary and the absurd.

  “Busy, Jock?” DeMassi asked, with a quick glance toward—but not exacdy at—Sara.

  “No, sir,” Harsch told him, his manner somehow just as cold as ever but no longer threatening. “Miss Joslyn is just starting out on assignment.”

  “Good, good,” DeMassi said. “Golf this afternoon?”

  “I’d be pleased, sir.” The expression around Harsch’s mouth might even have been called a smile.

  Sara, moving toward the door, said, “I’ll get right to work on it, Mr. Harsch.”

  “You,” DeMassi said, waving a hand at her. “Miss Whatever.”

  “Joslyn,” Sara said.

  “Come on,” DeMassi told her, gesturing for Sara to board the elevator, “I’ll give you a lift.”

  Surprised but willing, Sara said, “Why, thank you,” and crossed to enter the elevator.

  Meantime, DeMassi had apparently heard the echo of what he’d said and was delighted by it. Grinning hugely at Harsch, he said, “Did you hear that? This is a lift! In England, that’s what they call an elevator, they call it a lift! Did you hear what I said? I’ll give you a lift!”

  “Funny,” Harsch agreed.

  “Talk to you later,” DeMassi said, and, with Sara aboard, pushed a button on his desk.

  From within, Sara watched two wall sections close over the space, shutting out the grim figure of Jacob Harsch. The inner wall section, paneled wood with a pair of framed old hunting prints on it, snicked into place, and the elevator simply became a windowless doorless room furnished as an office. I’d go crazy in here in thirty minutes, Sara thought, as she felt the elevator start down.

  “Sit down,” DeMassi told her, pointing at the green leather sofa on the side wall. As she did so, he opened the refrigerator built into his desk, took out a bottle of beer, and waggled it at her. “Beer?”

  “No, thank you.”

  DeMassi grunted, shut the refrigerator door, opened the bottle. “Good for your figure,” he said. “We got a story coming up on that.”

  “I worked on it,” Sara told him.

  That brightened him right up. “Yeah? Then you know. Great story. You know why this is my office?”

  “No, sir,” Sara admitted.

  “Watch. This is your floor.”

  Sara felt the elevator stop. DeMassi pushed the button on his desk and the paneled wall receded with its hunting prints, revealing the conference table and, beyond it, the editorial land of the black lines. DeMassi leaned forward, glowering suspiciously, glaring left and right at his domain out there. Then he relaxed a bit, looked at Sara, winked, and said, “They never know where I am, never know when I’ll see ’em! Keeps ’em working, keeps ’em on their toes.”

&nbs
p; “I guess it would,” Sara agreed. “Well, thanks a lot.” Exiting the elevator, edging past the conference table, she said, “I better get to work. The boss is watching.”

  “You bet!” DeMassi shouted, laughing, and pushed the button again. As the elevator shut, he was drinking deeply from the beer bottle.

  Jack was on the phone, helpless with rage. “Whadaya mean,” he demanded, “incest isn’t interesting? Incest has always been interesting. So what if they’re giraffes?”

  The tinny voice in his ear said, “No.”

  Jack slammed down the phone, as Sara Joslyn entered the squaricle. Not noticing her troubled expression, thinking about his own troubles, he glared at her and yelled, “Evaluators!”

  She looked at him without comprehension. “Yes?”

  “They hate me,” Jack told her, “just out of the evil in their hearts.”

  “Amen, brother,” Mary Kate said, not pausing in her typing.

  “Evaluators?” Sara echoed. “What’s that?”

  Brimming over with sarcasm, punching and chopping the air in front of his stomach, Jack said, “What a happy carefree existence you do lead, Missy Sara. A life without evaluators!”

  “So far,” Sara said.

  “You know what our bottom line is here?” Jack demanded. “What gets into the paper! And you know who carries the ball on that, every goddamn down? The editors. Me”

  “I know that.”

  “You know that.” Jack glared at the telephone as though it had just laughed at him. “Let me tell you what I do.”

  “Oh, good,” Mary Kate said, typing and typing. “Now he’s gonna tell her what he do.”

  “You be quiet,” Jack told her, “or I’ll tell everybody your secret. Underneath that wig, you’re Pee-Wee Herman.”

  “Take it out on everybody, why don’t you,” Mary Kate suggested.

  Turning back to Sara, Jack said, “I make up the story, or I find it in some local newspaper from East Nowhere, I sell it to Massa, that’s the first hurdle. Then I give it to you, you check it, make it work, write it up, you give it back to me, you’re done, happy as a pig at the Galaxy. Am I done?”