PART FOUR
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XXI
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PART FIVE
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Copyright
PART ONE
I
Christopher Barocco was in the barber shop of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It was a long, old-fashioned room with something raffish about it, and it was where he always had his hair cut. Having his hair cut was an act that gave him deep pleasure.
The barber combed out the long hair at each side of his head and busily snipped away at the shorter hair underneath. Christopher always kept his eyes shut during this part of the operation, for he knew that it made him look absurd. When the barber had finished the groundwork he swept the two wings of hair back along the sides until they met at the rear, and then fussed with the details of the meeting. It was thick, metallic hair that formed a duckbill, a style that Christopher affected even now that he had risen from the ranks of those who wore it. With some pleasure Christopher opened his eyes and looked at the back of his head in the mirror.
“Just get in from Reno?” asked the barber.
“No. June Lake. I bought some land.” To himself Christopher thought that that sounded rather fine. And because they knew he was rich but not altogether respectable, and therefore glamorous, no doubt it sounded fine to the manicurist, the shoeshine boy, the barber and the manager who showed him out the door as well. What they said behind his back was their own affair. Christopher had carefully trained himself not to listen.
Christopher Barocco was a man who derived a good deal of pleasure from himself, and since San Francisco was hostile territory to him, there he felt the pleasure all the more. He subscribed to the theory that you can wear anything you like anywhere, so long as the clothes look expensive enough, and he knew the theory to be correct. Going to restaurants only racketeers and kept women could afford; having his own compartment in that section of the icebox which contained food that never appeared on the menu; dining alone so long as the head-waiter knew him; buying himself expensive jewellery; and having his shoes shined by white people, preferably Sicilians, deeply gratified him. He was inordinately fond of showing off: it was a way of proving who he was.
But there were few places where he really felt at ease, and the city was small. He was happiest among those people who had no roots and who were like himself, only not so good at it. From the Palace he walked across Market Street, the dividing line of decency in that city, and went into the Tenderloin, a district of tenements, cheap hotels, bookie establishments, and a few really good restaurants. He paid no attention to the people he passed. He did not speak to cheap touts and gamblers any more. He only mixed with the big-time operators who had concessions in the larger hotels and some influence with the police. But he did like to be seen among the small fry, because he knew that they alone admired and were in awe of him.
So he had a long, comfortable, self-indulgent lunch in a copper-lined and neon-lit grill room. He enjoyed the way he was slightly set off from everybody there by an aura of success. He liked the way some of them pretended to know him. He watched it all, the way he watched everything. At the same time, clearly he was not satisfied. He had something on his mind. He was bored by what he was good at. He wanted to do something else, and he wanted to do it in a hurry. If he had been six feet tall, matters might have stood differently; but he was five feet nine, and therefore he wanted to stand on tiptoe and touch the stars. He was a very handsome guy.
After lunch he walked up the hill, past Union Square, and towards Nob Hill itself. That was where Nora Blake saw him, for she was just starting down, walking carefully, because though she was smart and did not look her age, she knew her bones were brittle. She had not seen him for a long time and she watched him plod up towards her with considerable interest. She thought he looked common. To her everyone she had not known personally for at least thirty years looked common. She did not see why he had to wear his hair that way, or why his coats had to be so padded. It was a trace in him of the cheap but amusing dago on the make she had once thought him to be. Certainly she did not, even now, consider him as impregnable as he thought himself. She had her reasons for knowing better.
Because it was clear he had not seen her, she put out her hand and stopped him, just to see what would happen, when he drew abreast of her.
“Oh hello,” he said. “I didn’t see you.”
“I thought not.” She always made a point of being her drawling best when she saw him. But he did not seem either to be impressed or to notice.
“I was thinking,” he explained. He looked at her with more concentration, his forehead wrinkled with hidden amusement. “You don’t know a good architect, do you?”
“A what?”
“An architect. I want one.”
“But why ask me?” she asked. She sounded genuinely surprised. No doubt it was part of his insolence to ask her a favour.
“Oh, I don’t know. Why not?” He put a hand up to his sleek head and looked complacent.
If dogs danced, she thought, they would walk like you. But she also thought it over. It was not often she saw him these days and she liked to keep an eye on him for what seemed to her the best of reasons. She had, after all, a stable of her own favourites who had, occasionally, to be fed.
“I might,” she said. “You know, I just might.”
He gave her a look of boyish but slightly dangerous impudence, a wary, deliberate amusement that always made her mad, and she went on down the hill, wondering why he was so sure that she could not take him in.
A very simple meeting, for the chief adventure of our lives does not always begin when we expect it; and love has various disguises we may not even know. Beyond the next corner, as the unknown guests at a party, perhaps now, perhaps never, may be that other person who will accept the loneliness of our lives, and in accepting, end it. A man thinks of such matters seldom. Christopher had probably never thought of the matter at all, for no one can ever know the ordinary angel who will lead us out of the garden of ourselves. He comes by chance.
So Curt Bolton met Christopher Barocco at a party given by Nora Blake. He had had his own hair cut that day, but more miserably, in a shop around the corner, and as a special thing. Not only was he an aspiring architect. He was an aspiring architect badly in need of a job.
Curt Bolton was a big, rabbity blond from the Middle West who knew he had the effete manner that for some reason women like Nora always seem to find congenial.
The room was in an uproar, and so crowded with people that it was almost impossible to move. The air was heavy with blue smoke, and so stagnant that the smell-of cigarettes hung in layers in the air, shifting sluggishly, unnoticed in the babble. It was not at all what Curt Bolton expected. Usually he was asked only to Nora’s smaller parties. He stood in the foyer, under an archway which was really a canopy of pink and white muslin stiffened with plaster-of-Paris, and decided he could not face so many people without a drink. He grabbed a drink from a tray, and then went in search of Nora. At first he could not fight his way through to her, for she always sat at the far end of the room. Fortunately he knew very few of these people, so he was able to shoulder his way through them without being stopped.
“Curt, dear ….”
He whirled and saw her through a break in the crowd. She was sitting by the fire, nursing a bottle of brandy. He made his way to her, as she peered up at him from her chair. He had heard she spent four months a year at a health farm near Santa Barbara. Even so, he didn’t see how she did it. She was a shellacked matron in her bored sixties, to look at her, but she was older than that, much older.
“What’s everybody waiting for?” he asked, for there was an atmosphere of waiting in the air that he could not understand. Nora, he knew, had asked him for some-reason, and he would
have felt more comfortable if he had known what it was.
She gave a nervous cackle. “For Barocco, of course.” She made a rueful face. “If he comes, he’s a good catch for you. There’s nothing you won’t be able to get. And I imagine your ideas are quite expensive.”
He looked at her suspiciously. He had been the victim of Nora’s little games before. “What does he do?” he asked.
Nora was obviously pleased with herself. She was fond of intrigues. “I prefer not to think what he does. As to what he is, he calls himself a public relations counsellor. The only one in the country, I imagine, who carries a gun.”
Curt was not really listening. He looked at her for a moment and then moved off, aware that she would say nothing more. She did not like to speak to any one person for very long at a time. The crowd was too much for him, and if Nora wished him to meet Barocco, she would contrive the meeting soon enough. She was very good at contriving things. He fought his way to the relative peace of the bar, a small airtight bandbox on which Nora’s decorator had expended his most exhausting efforts. It was apparently deserted, so he sat down on a stool to think things over. As he did so, a man popped up from behind the bar itself.
“Did you know this was where the old crow hides her brandy?” he asked.
Curt was startled. The man looked at him blandly. He was not an impressive looking person. He was a short, chunky Italian of about forty-three, with a brisk, cursory manner and a hard twinkle in black eyes. He looked pleased with himself.
“I could use some of that,” said Curt, pointing to the bottle.
“Of course.” The man set up two glasses. His voice was cautious, husky, and low pitched. Curt felt attracted to him. It may have been the alcohol, but a feeling of meeting someone he had known for a long time swept over him. “What are you doing here?” asked the man.
“Nora asked me.”
“She must have had a purpose. She always has a purpose.” The man sounded amused.
“I’m an architect. I need commissions. Nora can introduce me to people.”
“Out of the goodness of her heart?” The man sounded as though he knew her.
Curt twisted uncomfortably. “If you like. She’s a little old for anything else.”
The man laughed at this. “You don’t know Nora,” he said.
“Do you?”
“As well as I want to.”
Curt thought that over. The liquor had gone to his stomach and had made him irritable. He always felt ill at ease with Nora’s friends, and what was more, Nora knew it. “Who is this bastard Barocco?” he asked.
The man finished his glass and beamed jauntily. “I am,” he said, flipped up the flap of the bar, and left the room.
Curt sat looking at his drink blankly, and then leaned over the bar and poured himself another. The drunker he got, he thought, the better off he would be. He had miffed his chance.
“Well, you had quite a chat.”
It was Nora, standing beside him. On her platform shoes she walked like a tethered goat. She came and stood behind the bar. She was clearly annoyed and did not want to show it. She drummed her fingers on the bar. “He’s not so frightening,” she said suddenly, having made some mental connection of her own. “Besides, I’ve seen his mother. See a man’s mother, and you know all. She’s the one who has the brains.”
“I liked him.” Curt wondered what she was up to. Her reveries were not as aimless as they seemed.
Nora stiffened. “Oh yes, he has charm. But it’s all a bit too perfect to be natural. Wait and see.” Her voice was acid, and she looked at him speculatively. “I have to get back. Sulk in here if you want to, but be sure to see me before you go.”
She left, and he sat there thinking. Nora had been tired of him for a long time. It wasn’t like her to be helpful. After a while he got up and followed her into the living-room. He realized she was trying to shove him into some plan of her own concoction and he resented it. He did not enjoy being a pawn.
“Well,” she said exultantly, “he asked for your name.” There was a coffee urn on the table beside her now, for it was her custom to sober up for dinner.
“I’m flattered,” he said.
Nora gave him a shrewd glance. “I’d watch my step if I were you. He’ll eat you alive, if he can get what he wants out of you.”
“And what does he want?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded as if she were lying. “I’ve often wondered.”
“You hate him, don’t you?”
Nora started to speak, and then stopped to consider. “Everybody hates him. A man like that has no friends.”
“I like him.”
“You don’t know him,” snapped Nora, and looked angry. Curt had seldom seen her look so alert. He excused himself, left the apartment, and got into the elevator. He felt discouraged. He paused outside on the curb, wondering what to do. A big black car drew up beside him, and Barocco was inside it. It was as simple as that. He got the job.
*
The job was to build him a house. On the face of it that was a good thing, and one which Curt had been after for years. But when it came to the actual building it was another matter. He had not, for one thing, expected it to be high in the mountains. And for another, Nora would not leave him alone. In return for the job, she seemed to expect him to spy on Christopher, and that, for some reason even he did not know, he was unwilling to do.
In short, Curt was appalled. It was two months later. In the early morning light he stood on the height of the cliff and saw, thirty miles away, at the edge of the higher mountain passes, the first of an endless caravan of trucks breast the grade, the glass of its windshield catching the sun. They were the supply trucks. He stood idly as the caravan moved ponderously down the grade.
The building had begun. In his hand he had one of Nora’s inquisitive letters. He did not trust her; he did not trust Barocco; he did not trust his own feelings; and least of all he trusted this obscure valley in the Sierra Nevada and the madness he knew was in it. He let the letter blow out of his hand. It turned in the air once or twice, like an angry hawk, and blew away. It was the latest of many such letters and he had answered none of them.
Looking up, he heard the drone of a plane and knew instinctively who it was. He had not seen Barocco for a month. He went down the hill, got into a pick-up, and drove to the barren lake at the far end of the valley in order to meet him. Such had been their arrangement. It took him about fifteen minutes to get there.
He arrived in plenty of time. The little plane taxied to the dock, and after what seemed a very long time its door opened and a well-wrapped-up figure clambered down on to the wharf. Curt smiled despite himself and began to wave, though he did not feel like waving. The figure stripped off its goggles and yelled a greeting. Then Christopher strode down the dock to meet him. The man looked vigorous and Curt wondered if that trick of his of seeming over-tired was not just a device for getting rid of people once he was through with them.
The two of them walked into that copse of damp and dripping trees where the car was idling. From there they went up to see the site of the house, which was on a plateau three hundred yards long and a hundred wide, backed by thick trees dusty with age. The plateau ended in a sheet of granite facing the high mountains across the valley.
All Barocco wanted to know was, did Curt have the foundations in yet.
Of course he didn’t have the foundations in yet, and this annoyed them both. But then Barocco liked to work at cross purposes. He liked to keep the people he knew divided against themselves. Curt had already learned that, but it was all he had learned. Barocco had a special insolent animal charm that men resent and women can make no use of.
The annoyance persisted, for Barocco had decided to move in. He planned to share the farmhouse at which Curt was lodging, and if there was one thing that drove Curt wild, it was to be watched. Barocco seemed to know that, too.
They did not speak much the first night Christopher moved in, but after
dinner he insisted that they should go for a walk. They went through the woods, treading on dusty ferns, until they came to a place where the trees opened out. Through the opening Curt could see, on the other side of the valley, the cliff where the house was soon to rise: that sheet of granite had, he noticed now for the first time, a distinct fault running at an angle through it.
Christopher shielded his eyes and looked upward. His expression was almost boyish and his face was deliberately handsome. The face uplifted drew the chin tight, disclosing the toughness of the jaw, but in profile the mouth, which from the front seemed so casual and decisive, now looked petulant. It was the mouth of a small child reaching for its bottle. He stood as though yearning after something, his hands captive in his pockets.
“I wish I could build it myself,” he said. “I wish I could do it all myself.”
*
And that was the rub: not only did he want to do everything himself, but he persisted in trying to do so. He treated Curt like a naughty boy. “Humour me,” he would say. “You can do what you like as long as you humour me. How about it?” And in his face there would be something faintly contemptuous, the look of a man who always got his own way, even when he didn’t necessarily want to.
Yet sometimes it occurred to Curt that Barocco was a lonely man. “What will you do with your house when it’s finished?” he asked.
“Live in it,” said Christopher shortly, and walked rapidly away, to cut the conversation off, and so ended what should have been one of many amiable strolls after dinner. He had been sweating, and the heavy animal smell lingered in the air behind him. It was like the smell of a troubled dog. Whatever else he might be, Barocco was not an easy man. He was certainly a devil to work for. And in addition to this, Curt had problems of his own soon enough. The first of these was the riveting of the fault in the granite shelf.
*
At first the men had refused to go down in the cage suspended over the edge of nothing, so Curt had been forced to go with them. He had swung out into space while the cable ground against the cliff edge and the wire seat scratched sickeningly during its descent. Below him the trees of the valley rose like spires, and it was all he could do to keep from vomiting. He was not good at handling the men, even so. It was curious how quickly he had become subservient to them, and this he did not want Barocco to know.
The Self-Enchanted Page 2