There are three airfields on the island, only one of them normally open to commercial aircraft, and the visitors who arrive there also sometimes amuse the local cabbies by asking to be taken to “a nice hotel, not too expensive, but on the water.” Everything on Martha’s Vineyard is too expensive, but then again, everything is on the water. And everything is booked solid until Labor Day.
Just after four o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, August the fourth—not very long after Sara Joslyn, fifteen hundred miles away in Florida, put Jack Ingersoll’s mind at rest in re those hundred-year-old twins—a small charter plane from Boston landed at the main airport on the Vineyard, and its three passengers not only wanted rooms for themselves starting today, they also wanted rooms for twenty-four people starting tomorrow. In addition, for purposes other than accommodation, they wanted a house. They also wanted a number of rental cars and telephones and other things. And they wanted everything now.
Most people would have gotten nowhere with such a quixotic quest, but most people are not Ida Gavin. She was accompanied, as the advance guard of the Galaxy invasion, by Harry Razza and by a Boston stringer of the Weekly Galaxy called Sherman Sheridan. Ida left the plane moving fast, and when she returned to the airport at one o’clock the next afternoon, to meet the larger charter plane containing Jack and Sara and the entire Ingersoll team, plus several photographers and a lot of equipment, it was with only the faintest edge to her voice—residue of combats won—that she greeted Jack with the words “All set.”
All set. Through bribes, bluff, blandishments and browbeating, Ida had managed to secure nine rooms in the motels along Main Street and West Chop Road in Vineyard Haven, the town where the ferry comes in. Three more rooms—these very expensive, and exceedingly tough to get hold of—had been obtained in inns down around Edgar- town, the posh heart of the island. The house they also needed for their nefarious purposes had been found and rented, and was even now being adapted for their use, over in Oak Bluff, the other side of Vineyard Haven Harbor. (Oak Bluff is—I’ll have to say this quiedy, and away from the children, because of course such things don’t exist anymore —the black neighborhood on the island. Rich black, but black.)
To be put into all these rooms, assembled with such grim determination, a motley crew indeed had now descended on the Vineyard. There was, to begin with, Jack Ingersoll and his team: the eager Sara Joslyn, the arid Ida Gavin, the pessimistic Don Grove, the irrepressible Down Under Trio and even the team’s resident spaceman, Chauncey Chapperell, who this time had been called back from Port Radium on Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories, where he had been sent in pursuit of the North American cousin of the Himalayan yeti. (A tall, cadaverous, wild-haired, huge-eyed creature who appeared to have been put together with low-quality rubber bands, Chauncey Chapperell might readily have been mistaken for a yeti himself, if he would wear a fur coat and if anyone knew the sound of the yeti’s mating cry.)
Supplementing this core group were eighteen more Galaxians of various sorts. There were nine photographers, two of them full-time employees of the paper from Florida, the other seven sometime contract workers from New England, all nine of such a level of disreputability and disorganization as to make Sara’s bag lady photographer of Indianapolis look like Meryl Streep playing Greer Garson. Also from Florida were four secretaries from the secretary pool, known for their efficiency and silence and loyalty and low self-esteem and miserable sex lives, while also from New England were five more stringers, or local pieceworkers for the Galaxy and other publications, these last all similar to Sherman Sheridan, the stringer who’d flown in with Ida and Harry Razza yesterday. That is, all were hairy, sloppy, distracted, and probably infested with bugs; all were themselves failed scientists or philosophers or mathematicians, whose occasional work for the Galaxy consisted of speaking about Galaxy-type scientific concerns —extraterrestrials, cancer cures, unlikely pregnancies—with members of that vast unworldly technocracy of professors and scientists and engineers in the greater Boston/Cambridge area; and not a one of them knew the slightest thing about American popular culture of the second half of the twentieth century. They could describe the theory behind the invention of television—if television hadn’t already been invented, they could probably invent it—but none of them ever actually watched anything on it. To them, “John Michael Mercer” and “Breakpoint’ were words in some foreign language they had no desire to learn. So they stood about, scratching and blinking, and waited to obey orders they already knew they would not comprehend.
Once all these stray molecules had deplaned and were standing around amid their discreditable luggage, Jack gestured at them and said to Ida, “You’ve looked the area over. Will they have any trouble blending in?”
Ida considered the question. “K-Mart,” she decided, “meets J. Press.”
Four p.m. Jack and Sara, having reassured themselves that their rooms at the inn in Edgartown were adjoining, with a connecting door, drove over to Oak Bluffs to look at the house Ida had found. Jack’s rental car was a maroon Chevette, the same model and color as the car Sara had driven that very first day in Florida, when she’d gone out to the Galaxy to find work, so new and naive she’d thought the people there would give a damn about a murdered man beside the road. That seemed so long ago! She’d learned so much, she’d done so much, she’d even managed the hundred-year-old twin con under the very eyes of Jack and the fact checkers and Mr. Harsch and everybody. This maroon Chevette on Martha’s Vine-
yard was a symbol. It said to her: “You’ve come a long way, baby. By golly, you’re good”
Driving across the island, remembering, Sara said, “Do you know what Henry Reed said to me?”
“Huh? Who?”
“The man who does John Michael Mercer’s hiring.”
“Oh, him. He said no, didn’t he?”
“When I told him I was new, he said, ‘You’ll be something when you get your growth.’ ”
Jack laughed, and looked at her, and then looked thoughtful, and then grinned. “He was right,” he said.
Sara returned the grin. She felt he was proud of her. “I am good,” she said.
In front of the address in Oak Bluffs were parked three phone company trucks, a rental furniture company van, a Land Rover, a few more rented cars and a chrome-quilted small truck blazoned with the name cadet catering. Phone company linemen, none as pretty as Betsy Harrigan, worked on the roof. Two burly bruisers carried a long table into the house. Jack parked among all the other vehicles, and paused to sing, “Just before the battle, Mother.” Then they got out of the car.
The house itself was a small two-story gray-shingled place with white trim, in a very New England fishing village style; appropriate enough. Oak Bluffs having originally been a fishing village, and the whole island still being in New England. The house was among the less desirable properties roundabout, however, being a good seventy feet from the ocean and less than a mile from the public state beach.
The little house had a narrow porch, with gray floor and white railing. Jack and Sara followed the bruisers with the table across this, Jack held open the charming old front door with beveled- glass lights, and they entered the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera.
The original living room furniture, down to the carpet, had been removed, toted upstairs and stored in the bedrooms up there. The rented furniture replacing it, and still in the process of being delivered, consisted mostly of long plain tables and innumerable folding chairs, plus a few tall metal filing cabinets and a number of large clunky wooden wastebaskets. More of these items had been rented than could fit into the house, but that was all right; they shoehomed everything in anyway.
And among the furniture moved the people. To one side, at the moment, Ida was nailing a large map of Martha’s Vineyard to the wall with huge common nails. Beyond her, two men wearing silver warm-up jackets that made them look like the Cadet Catering truck outside—and that even said cadet catering on t
he back—were dealing out onto one of the long tables plates and trays of sandwiches and doughnuts and other inedibles. At the other tables, reporters and stringers and photographers and secretaries sat and ate or typed or drank coffee out of cardboard cups or played with their photographic equipment or talked to one another or (in Chauncy Chapperell’s case) slept snorily, sprawled forward with one cheek pressed to the table. Three phone company installers crawled around on the floor as though looking for any number of lost contact lenses. The furniture rental bruisers opened table legs that kept bumping into people who were either too intimidated or too disassociated to complain. And Bob Sangster, thoughtfully scratching his big nose, sidestepped his way through it all to say to Sara, “There’s a priest for you next door, in what was once the dining room.”
“A priest? You mean a minister?”
“How would I know?” Bob asked. “I’m just a simple Aussie.”
“Don’t you have ministers in Australia?”
“Certainly not, they’re all poofters. Yours is a very clean old body, though.”
“My minister,” decided Sara, nodding at Jack. Jack said, “The officiator at the wedding?”
“And solver of the Irish question. See you.” Sara went away to the other room, and Jack crossed through the scumble and flux to a long table bearing a dozen identical black rotary-dial telephones.
He picked one up, and spoke into it: “Watson, come here, I want you.” Then he did it to the second: “Watson, come here, I want you.” Then the third: “Watson, come here, I want you.” Then, with grim patience, a man wanting to know the worst, insisting on knowing the worst, demanding to know the worst, he went on through the rest, telephone by telephone: “Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you.” Then, rather than hang up this last phone, he waggled it at the nearest kneeling installer, saying, shouting over the general hubbub, “Why all this peace and quiet?”
“Just a few more minutes, sir,” the installer said, from the floor. “They’re bringing the lines in from the road now.”
And even as he spoke, there was a tremendous crash, and plaster dust drifted down onto the people and the food and the phones and everything else, and when Jack looked up there was now a metal pipe sticking down through the ceiling, and out of the metal pipe was emerging telephone line. “There it is now,” the installer said.
“So I see.”
“We were told a rush job,” the installer said, finally getting up off his knees. “Otherwise, your lines wouldn’t be so noticeable.”
“Ah.”
Ida, her nailing of the map to the wall completed to her satisfaction, made her way through the mob to Jack and said, “You like the place?”
“It’s so much like home,” Jack told her, “I keep looking for old Shep, the faithful hound.”
“He’s around here somewhere,” Ida said, frowning at the installers all over the floor.
The front door opened and a man with a moustache stuck his head in to shout, “Telly!”
“Kojak?” cried a photographer, reaching for her cameras. “Where?”
“Television, madam,” said the newcomer frostily.
“A passing fad,” Jack told him.
“The rental television that was ordered, sir,” the man explained.
Jack looked around his overcrowded realm. “Oh, really?”
Ida said, “That goes in the next room.”
“Thank God,” Jack said.
“Thank you, madam,” the rental television man said, and disappeared, only to reappear leading a tiny Oriental man carrying a huge television set on his back. Wires trailed from the television set down the Oriental man’s legs and along the floor. The rental man, the Oriental man and the television set moved on into the next room as Sara came out of that room, looking dazed, holding a slender manuscript rolled into a tube in her right hand, and smiling imperfecdy at a roly-poly whitehaired smiling saindy man who looked like Santa Claus disguised in a minister’s suit. “Well, Reverend,” Sara was saying, “it’s a fresh approach.”
“Thank you very much,” the reverend said, with an angelic smile.
“I’ll see it gets prominent placement in the paper,” Sara promised him, gesturing with the tubular manuscript.
“Oh, that would be nice,” the reverend said, and pressed his clean pink pudgy hands together.
“With the same photo of you that we use for the interview.”
“Oh, a photo!” The reverend’s smile had a halo of pleasure around it; but then he became more serious, with an obvious effort, saying, “But that can’t be till after the wedding, you know.”
“No, of course not,” Sara agreed.
“Mr. Mercer wants the whole affair kept absolutely private.”
“Of course.”
“He would be quite upset,” the reverend went on, with an impish little grin, “if he even knew I was here, talking to you.”
“I’m sure he would,” Sara said.
“So I’d best run along,” the reverend said, with a little bobbing bow. “Thank you again.”
“Thank you, Reverend,” Sara said.
Sara saw the reverend out, her own smile holding till she’d shut the door, when it got all wrinkly around the edges. Turning, she waded through the rising tide of rentals and reporters to Jack, and handed him the roll of manuscript. “The Irish question solved,” she announced.
He handed it back, his expression dubious. “Can you give me a summary?”
She looked at the manuscript, which she thought she’d given away. “Well,” she said, “it’s not too coherent ...”
“Good.”
“... but it seems to suggest that all the Protestants in Northern Ireland should be relocated.”
“Where?”
“Mars,” Sara said.
Jack nodded thoughtfully, looking at nothing in particular. “I see,” he said.
“To work in the mines there,” Sara explained.
“Uh huh, uh huh.” Jack nodded some more. “You know,” he said, “Massa might actually like that.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Sara agreed, and all twelve black telephones began wildly ringing. Everybody stopped doing everything to stare. RRIYYYINNG!!! said the phones, in unison. They took a deep breath to say it again, and in that interval the head installer beamed proudly at Jack and said, “All set, sir.”
Jack said, “What’s—”
RRIYYYINNG!!!
Jack said, “What’s this?”
“Your phones,” the installer said. “All—” RRIYYYINNG!!!
People started answering phones just to stop the ringing, picking up the receivers and putting them back down again. “Not bells!” Jack cried. “Li—!” RIIINNG!!
“What?” asked the installer.
“Lights!” Jack shouted at him. “Not be—” RING!
“What?” asked the installer.
“Look on your order sheet!” Jack yelled. (Ring.)
“Lights on the phones! How are we supposed to know which is which? How are we supposed to think around here?”
“Oh,” the installer said, as another installer came over with a clipboard, showed it to the first installer, and pointed at something. The two installers muttered together, looking like men trying to figure out a way to blame somebody else and not succeeding.
“Jack?” asked Sara.
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Yes?”
Sara spread her hands to encompass it all, the phones, the installers, the rented tables, the map nailed to the wall, the caterer’s men and their food, the television rental man and his faithful Oriental companion just now leaving, the reporters and photographers and stringers, the filing cabinets, themselves. “Why?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Why what?”
“We have such nice hot
el rooms,” she said. “Why did Ida have to come on ahead to find a private house? Why do we have all this stuff here? Why are we in this dump in the first place?”
“No hotel switchboard, for one,” Jack told her. “No nosy guests. No other media climbing all over our exclusives.” Holding his closed hand to his cheek to simulate a phone call, he said brightly, “Hi, this is Jack Ingersoll of Newsweek. Sure you can call me back, I’ll give you my number.”
Sara said, “Do we really need that much security? I mean, who really cares, besides us?”
“The world cares, my darling,” Jack assured her. “Everyone else pretends to be more sophisticated than that, to really care about international arms control, but when it comes right down to it, they’ll all be here. The newsmagazines, the gossip magazines, the fan magazines, the networks, cable news, the wire services, the entertainment editors of every newspaper in the United States with a travel budget, everybody ”
“But we’re the only ones who know about the wedding,” Sara said.
“Today,” Jack said. “This is Thursday, the wedding’s Sunday, we probably have a twenty- four-hour jump on the rest of the world. We have first pick of the rental cars and motel rooms and photo labs, and first shot at bribing the bellboys and ministers, but no later than tomorrow the locusts will descend. Believe me.”
Sara couldn’t help grinning. “And John Michael Mercer,” she said, “thinks he’s going to be all alone.”
Two
Security. Secrecy. Privacy. A Breakpoint production assistant made the two first-class Miami-New York American Airline reservations in false names, then phoned American’s security twenty minutes before flight time to reveal who would actually be using those tickets. The limousine service between Kennedy Airport in Queens and Teterboro Airport over in New Jersey was arranged for by an assistant in John Michael Mercer’s accountant’s office in New York, who also reserved the chartered plane from Teterboro to Martha’s Vineyard, paying for it with a credit card with her own name on it. A private car and driver had been ordered to drive down from Boston and across the ferry to the island, an arrangement made by the network’s New York office, so that when John Michael Mercer and Felicia Nelson landed at the Vineyard Friday afternoon the car was waiting for them, driven by a deferential man with a black chauffeur’s cap, a funny accent, and a large nose. “ ’Ere we are, sir,” he said, with a sweeping gesture. “ ’Ere we are, madam. Your chariot awaits.”
Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 Page 20