The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  Back at the hotel I called London; first a retired actor I knew and then a theatrical agency. No luck from either. There was a subsidiary of Belson Tile and Marble in Fleet Street. I called its director and told him to find out what he could about an actress named Isabel Crawford. I’d call him back next week. His eyes bulged out to see his actual boss talking to him. “Certainly, Mr. Belson,” he said. “We shall put our shoulders to the wheel.”

  ***

  When I’d done what I could about finding Isabel, I called the Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, George Kavanaugh. I’d known him when he was a coal broker. We talked about Baynes, who was up for election in November. “Is he unbeatable?” I asked, after we’d finished the amenities.

  “Maybe,” George said. “He won strongly last time.”

  “Who’s running against him?”

  “Mattie Hinkle. Liberal democrat.”

  “What chance?”

  “A Chinaman’s.”

  “Watch your language, George,” I said. “I’m no person to talk to about Orientals that way.”

  “Some of my best friends are Chinese,” George said.

  “I believe it. What’s Hinkle’s program? What’s she promising?”

  George scratched his head. “Shit, Ben, I don’t know. Reform, I suppose. She should try to get him from the Left.” Suddenly he looked at me hard. “Didn’t you escape from the Marines or something, Ben? In Florida?”

  “It was two private cops, George, and it was Washington. You said from the Left?”

  “Unemployment might work.” He paused and grinned. “God, Ben, you always were a live one. Betty says you ought to be in movies.”

  “I don’t have the time, George. How can I get in touch with this Mattie Hinkle?”

  “Try Miyagawa and Sumo in Louisville.”

  “Okay, George,” I said. “Thanks for the information. And don’t tell anyone I called you.”

  “Mum’s the word, Benny. Where are you calling from anyway?”

  “I’m staying at a hotel,” I said. “In Los Angeles.”

  ***

  Miyagawa and Sumo was an ad agency. I told them I was Aaron Fine, borrowing the name of my friend and accountant. I said I represented an organization backing liberal causes. The man on the phone was a clerk in the agency and clearly bored by all this. “We have impressive sums at our disposal, for key candidates,” I said levelly.

  “Oh?” He looked more interested. “May I ask the name of your organization?”

  “Something in the order of fifty million dollars,” I said.

  He stared at me and set down his coffee cup. “That figure is hard to believe.”

  “Do I look crazy?”

  “No, sir…”

  “Look,” I said, “I’d like to talk to either Miyagawa or Sumo.”

  “They’re both in conference,” he said, for the second time. This time he seemed less sure.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m going to hang up and have my bank send a million for the campaign to show good faith. Then I’ll call back and I want to speak to both of them.” I hung up.

  I called the People’s Bank and told them to phone a million to Louisville. A certified check would pop out of a slot in the agency’s phone in a half minute. I called back and, sure enough, I was talking to two polite Japanese. By that time I’d invented an organization. “I represent the Friends of the Poor. We have been taking an interest in the campaign of Mattie Hinkle.”

  They both nodded sagely and the smaller of them spoke. “Ms. Hinkle thanks you for sharing.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “What Friends of the Poor is concerned with right now is Ms. Hinkle’s stand on safe uranium.”

  “Safe uranium?” the smaller one said. I took him to be Sumo.

  “The uranium aboard the spaceship in Washington. The uranium Senator Baynes won’t release for use in power plants.”

  “You say it’s safe uranium?”

  “I can explain later. The main issue now, for Friends of the Poor, is Ms. Hinkle’s stand on that uranium.”

  They hemmed and hawed for a bit and then admitted Ms. Hinkle had no opinion on the Isabel’s uranium. They would be glad for me to enlighten them both on the issue.

  “I’ll call you back,” I said, and hung up.

  The next morning Pear Blossom called to say the endolin was off the Isabel and in the Chinese Embassy in Washington. I asked about Baynes.

  “He did not involve himself,” Pear Blossom told me coolly. She was a shade more civil, now that I was Chinese myself, but she still could project a lot of dislike.

  “Baynes didn’t try to interfere?”

  “He was out of town. My colleagues went through the Department of State.”

  “Pear Blossom,” I said, “can I come out this afternoon for my three hundred million?”

  “Two hundred ninety million dollars,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Can I get it today?”

  Pear Blossom looked petulant about it. I could see how it hurt her actuarial soul to part with that kind of money. She’d been boggled when Mourning Dove agreed to my terms, even though she must understand the drug market well enough to appreciate the impact endolin would make. “Mr. Belson,” she said, “Lao-tzu is paying you over sixty thousand dollars an ounce for endolin. I feel we should attempt to market before…”

  “Come on, Pear Blossom,” I said. “You know I get the money when your embassy gets the endolin. Our embassy. There are forty-five thousand milligrams in a pound. You’ll recover half your investment in six months. You have an exclusive on imports. You’ve got a bargain.”

  She shrugged wearily. It was the first human gesture I’d seen her make and my heart warmed to her. “Come on, Pear Blossom, honey. It’s going to double the business for you. You’ll be a company hero. Don’t weaken.”

  And suddenly I was astonished to see her, there on my big viddiscreen, smiling at me. “Okay, Mr. Belson. I’ll have your check ready.” What nice teeth she had!

  ***

  Pear Blossom had thawed enough to be downright agreeable. She congratulated me in Chinese and gave a demure bow as I took the little plastic check. The weather was getting cool and she wore a tight lavender sweater and Synlon jeans. “Pear Blossom,” I said, “how’d you like to join me for breakfast?” We were sitting in her big antiseptic office. Behind her desk was a huge photograph of the Chinese Olympic Soccer Team.

  “That would be pleasant,” she said, almost bowling me over. I really hadn’t expected it. “There’s a cafeteria on the second floor.”

  It was about ten-thirty in the morning and we had the room to ourselves. I had figs and a pot of green tea; Pear Blossom had coffee and a danish. After we’d finished I looked for a few moments at the array of photos of bright pill bottles on the walls and then smiled at her. “You really look good in that sweater,” I said.

  Insensitive as Pear Blossom might seem, she appeared to be alert to the vibrations in my words. “Oh?” she said, coolly.

  What the hell? I thought. “You’re really a very dandy looking young lady,” I said. “It’s a nice fall day outside. Why don’t you let me take you for a spin in my taxi?” Pear Blossom was probably in her late twenties; it occurred to me I hadn’t touched the firm skin of a really young woman in a coon’s age. Her jet-black Chinese hair shone in the fluorescent lights and her skin was flawlessly white.

  Unfortunately, at my question her eyes had turned to something resembling Belson obsidian. “Mr. Belson,” she said, in the voice you use for lunatics, “what do you have in mind?”

  I almost backed off, but I felt I’d be damned if I would. “Sex,” I said.

  She put her little white hands firmly on the table and leaned toward me, speaking very distinctly. “You old man,” she said in the crispest English I’d ever heard. “You crazy, arrogant old man. I don’t want your body touching mine.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, grabbing what composure I could from what was flying out every window i
n the big room. I could see myself in her eyes: a clumsy old Caucasian wanting to soil her body with lecherous hands.

  “I’m going back to my office, Mr. Belson,” she said, as distant as Fomalhaut. She got up and walked off, paying my check as she left the cafeteria.

  I guess humility is good for you, if it can be kept to short bursts. It took me about three minutes to recover and remember how I really wasn’t a dirty old man and that my body was in terrific shape. Besides, I was rich, and gentle, and good with children. I was helpful to the downtrodden. I made excellent fettuccine. Ruth liked me. Anna probably loved me. Isabel ditto, if she still remembered me. I’d cured Myra.

  I took the check out of my shirt pocket and read the figures again. I began to feel better.

  ***

  I hadn’t bought Chinese securities for years, had never held a seat on the Peking exchange, and knew next to nothing about how to beat Chinese income taxes. But I didn’t want to put my money in anything American, for fear of Baynes’s tying it up. I’d have to get a Chinese lawyer, a Chinese broker and a Chinese accountant, for openers, and I didn’t want to spend the time right then doing research. I’d done a thorough study of gold about five years before, and there is nothing more comfortably international. What I did was take a quick look at current prices, sigh a little, and buy two hundred fifty million worth of Chinese gold. That meant a new number would be placed on a list in Zurich. The simplicity of gold always scares me. Thirteen thousand four hundred a troy ounce. All it’s really good for is filling teeth.

  The other forty-eight million went into three bank accounts: one Chinese, one Japanese, and one—for sentiment—Scottish. Using the Chinese account and my Chinese name, I bought a five hundred thousand, paid-up American Express card, for traveling.

  Back at the hotel that afternoon my passport card was already in the phone slot, with a scowling hologram of my face on one side and the crimson symbols for the People’s Republic on the other, together with the usual date and place-of-birth information and warnings against travel in Russia, Cuba or Brazil. I slipped the card into my billfold, called Miyagawa and Sumo, and told them I wanted to speak to Mattie.

  They put her on immediately. She came on the screen as a stocky, no-nonsense type in her mid-fifties, with glasses and closely cut hair. There was a matronly toughness to her, but her voice was soft. “My agency finds no record of a Friends of the Poor,” she said, straight-out. “How do you account for that, Mr. Fine?”

  I’d figured that might happen, since Miyagawa and Sumo had time to check it out.

  “Look, Ms. Hinkle,” I said, “I’ll be straight with you. I’m not Aaron Fine, I’m Ben Belson. I want you to beat L’Ouverture Baynes so I can get my spaceship back.”

  She peered at me through her glasses for a moment, impassively, and then said, “That’s pretty blatant, Mr. Belson.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “Illegal in every way.”

  “I understand you’re not even an American citizen.”

  “That’s right, too,” I said. “They took it away from me.” I decided the best defense was no defense at all. She’d have to make up her own mind, if she wanted me to buy her the election.

  She pursed her lips and thought about it a moment. “Mr. Miyagawa said you spoke of several millions.”

  “Fifty. I can let you have it in gold. Five million at a time. I’ll give you a number of an account in Zurich; you have it transferred where you want it.”

  “People get long prison terms for less,” she said.

  “That’s the truth,” I said.

  “How can I know you aren’t setting me up for just that? How can I know this phone call isn’t being recorded?”

  I was lighting a cigar as she said these things. I took a big puff and then set it in a hotel ashtray. “Well,” I said, “you can never be sure. Anyway, I don’t think my phone is tapped. To answer your first question, why would I want to set you up for anything? So Baynes could beat you? You know as well as I do he’s already got you beat.”

  She pursed her lips again, in a schoolteacherly way. “I have other enemies,” she said.

  “I don’t doubt it. You’ll just have to assess the risks. You know who your enemies are; you’ll have to figure out why I would be working for them.”

  She nodded. “May I call you back?”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry. I’m keeping my whereabouts a secret. I’ll call back at noon tomorrow. Shall I go ahead and set up that Swiss account?”

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Just call. I’m addressing a D.A.C. meeting at noon, so make it at eleven.”

  “What’s D.A.C.?” I said.

  “The Daughters of the American Confederacy,” Mattie Hinkle said.

  ***

  I sat there and fidgeted for a minute. Then I decided to go ahead with it despite Mattie. I punched my Bank Dispatch code into the phone and had Shanghai send a twenty-million credit to Geneva under the rubric FRIENDS OF THE POOR FOR MATTIE HINKLE and a notification to Miyagawa and Sumo.

  If I didn’t hear anything for a week I’d send the rest of it.

  ***

  I slept well that night and dreamed beatifically of money. Not of graphs on production charts or shorts in corn futures or even of bank accounts, but of crisp green beautifully engraved bills and brightly minted coins. For a while during the night I was a baby wrapped in new thousand-dollar bills, as though in swaddling clothes. I gurgled with the joy of contact with all that sweet money while older folk moved slowly by me, their steps taken as if in a sea of molasses, themselves dressed soberly in gray and brown suits, disdaining my infantile garment of cash. I smiled at them all.

  Chapter 14

  Some part of me must have been expecting it all along. When I saw the four Marines the next morning standing in the lobby at the foot of the stairs, it had some of the quality of dèjá vu. Big sons of bitches. I stared at them and froze. When one of them took me by the right arm I came out of it and tried to pull away from him. It didn’t work. I suppose I’d been imagining myself as one of the strongest men in America; this was a rude brush with reality. This youth with the perfect shave was bigger than I in every way. His fingers on my forearm felt like rocks. The other three looked about the same.

  When they took me past the desk to the door the clerk looked away, busying himself with some records. Outside the hotel was a gasoline-powered military jeep. I sat in back with a Marine on each side of me and we drove off down Broad Street while people on the sidewalk stared.

  I got back a bit of my composure in the jeep. “Men,” I said, “where are you taking me?”

  “Air base” was all I could get, from the only one who seemed to know how to talk. He had sergeant stripes. “You’re not supposed to do this,” I said, “I’m a Chinese national.” I might as well have been speaking to the wind.

  They took me about twenty miles to Kissinger Air Force Base, put me on an F-611 jet fighter, and flew me to Washington at four times the speed of sound. Those military sons of bitches; they burn jet fuel as if it were seawater.

  It’s quite an experience to fly like that, let me tell you. The Isabel could zip through her warp at two hundred times the speed of light, and light goes fast enough to circle the earth seven times in a second; but even so, that little white jet felt a hundred times faster. Zoom, Pennsylvania! Zoom, zoom, New Jersey! Zoom, Maryland! Zip, Washington! Good afternoon, Senator.

  I wore one of those white spacesuits for altitude and was handcuffed to my seat, feeling like a nailed-down snowman skimming the stratosphere in this military frisbee. When we slowed for a landing the G forces pressed my body like the hand of death. I sat strapped in a tiny cockpit, feeling like hell, feeling like a childish fool, and unable to say a thing to anybody. I couldn’t even hear my own voice over the roar of those fuel-wasting jets. Damn the military. They could have sent me back on a Pullman and saved everybody a lot of grief. But I grudgingly had to admit what they were doing made Baynes look good, the son of a
bitch. There was class to this operation.

  Four MPs at the Washington Air Base got me out of the white suit and into another jeep. They drove me straight to the Reagan Detention Center, where Baynes was waiting, dressed elegantly in gray tweeds. I checked my watch; less than two hours since they’d picked me up. If only they could handle mail like that. “Hello, L’Ouverture,” I said, rubbing my wrists where a cop had just taken off the cuffs. We were in a steel-walled room without windows, sitting on wooden benches facing one another through plastic; our voices came through speakers. There was no humanity to this; I’d have felt closer talking to him by viddiphone.

  “Ben!” L’Ouverture said, shaking his head in mock dismay. “What a nuisance! What a waste of taxpayers’ money!”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” I said. “How did you find me?”

  Baynes shook his head again. “Ben,” he said, “it was simplicity itself. You left clues everywhere. People recognized you in Philadelphia and called the FBI. The Chinese Embassy filed a report.” He looked at me in a kind of bemusement. “Ben,” he said, “I don’t see how a man so careless could be so rich.”

  I felt myself blushing. Caught in my fool’s paradise again, playing games. Tom Sawyer Wins An Election.

  “Quit rubbing it in,” I said. “What is it you want from me?”

  “I want to know where that uranium came from, Ben.”