Each little group of strangers establishes its own set of balances and unspoken agreements. Tentative relationships are made and broken until the ones are found which are durable enough to last the evening, at least. From long habit, Meyer and I could talk on one level while maintaining an elliptical kind of communication on a level inaccessible to the other three. Bruce and Becky were doing the same thing, wherein innocent expressions had subterranean values.
Bruce bustled about, happily hostessing, making drinks, lighting the patio lanterns, summoning a solemn little Mexican woman to present the trays of hors d'oeuvres, with Bruce anxiously awaiting our verdicts on each delicacy.
Becky was all animation, in constant movement, making wry and bawdy judgments, with hoots of harsh laughter. In her evident maturity, she was still totally girl, that special kind of girl who does not have any self-conscious awareness of herself, but can fling herself about, leggy and lithe, laugh with an open throat, comb her casual hair back with splayed fingers, scratch herself, kick off her sandals, stand ugly, lick crumbs from her fingertips. She was teeming and burning with endless and remarkable energies, with taut slender vibrating health. One could not imagine her ever being bored. Her drink was a pale Spanish sherry, in an old-fashioned glass with a single cube of ice, and she seemed able to make one last indefinitely.
David Saunders was a familiar type, muscular, burly yet feline. He moved with languid grace. He sat immobile, thighs bulging the khaki slacks, apparently in total disinterest and indifference to anyone and anything about him. It was that special arrogance which relieves the possessor of any responsibility to communicate with anyone or please anyone. He could have been in a bus station, waiting for an overdue bus. But he did not become inconspicuous or invisible. There was a surly presence, an assurance, that made people try to please him, to bring him into the conversation. His drink, to Bundy's apparent dismay, was bourbon and Coke, and he knocked them back with stolid, metronomic efficiency.
I decided that I could risk, for the sake of possible returns, casting a large doubt on our insurance story, and Bruce's statement of having done stage design in New York and set design in California gave me the opening. So at a handy opening, using that-reminds-me, I brought up a Famous Female Name in the Industry.
"That wretched bitch!" Bruce said. "The most self-important little slut in the world, believe me. I did one totally commercial job for her. One of those period piece things, where they wrapped her little ass in crinoline, and had her bang her way through half the Confederate Army. I went a little camp with the decor, not to cut the picture, but to make a little gentle fun that only the cognoscenti would catch. So she raised stinking hell about my color patterns being wrong for her. She wants to act, direct, produce, write the script, and design the sets, and she doesn't know one thing about her own trade. The only acting she does that seems authentic is when they have her horizontal. She is one of the reasons, dears, why I tucked away all their abundant bread into very good little securities, and when I had enough to live nicely on for the rest of my years, I told them all what they could kiss." He paused and looked at me with a suspicious glint. "But don't tell me she was buying her insurance in Florida."
"It was something else, Bruce. She partied on a sun deck with a mixed bare-ass group, and somebody with a good telephoto lens tried to get rich quick."
He nodded. "I remember a rumor that she was in that kind of trouble, but nothing happened."
"I got lucky."
"But why would you get involved in something like that, Travis?"
"Because she came around and asked me."
"Why would she come to you?"
"Because I solved another kind of problem for someone she knew."
"Then you aren't really in the insurance business?"
I smiled upon him. "Hell, I don't know. I guess that lady would be willing to say it was a kind of insurance."
"But what are yod trying to do here? Who are you... trying to insure, Mr. McGee?"
"I think that if I had gone around telling people what I was trying to do for the actress, it wouldn't have worked out as well as it did."
Meyer broke in and said, "We just go around helping people, Bruce. I think it's some kind of guilt syndrome. Trouble with those windmills, you stick a lance into one in a good wind, and it will purely toss the hell out of you."
Bundy, after a few moments of narrow-eyed consideration, dropped it. And soon he began moving in on David Saunders' blind side. But first there was a little exchange between Bruce and Becky that went over David's sullen head.
Bruce said, "Becky, darling, Larry told me last week that you. practically gave him that marvelous ceremonial mask from Juchatengo."
I saw her eyes go blank and her mouth purse, and though she recovered in a sparkling instant, I felt reasonably convinced that there was no mask, perhaps not even anyone named Larry.
"He seemed to want it."
"It upset him a little. I mean he knew how terribly acquisitive you had felt about it when you first got it, and he didn't want to take advantage of your friendship."
"How silly!" she said. "I was cleaning out my little gallery and I remembered that he seemed to admire it, so I took it over and asked him if he'd like it. My word, had I wanted to keep it, would I have taken it to him?"
"I guess he wanted to be certain it was not just an impulse you'd regret later."
"When you see him, tell him not to worry his little head. Actually, you know, I was very fair with him. I told him when I took it over there that it was really not as first class as I had thought at first. It's very primitive, of course, and quite authentic, but it's just one of those things you tire of seeing every day I suppose because it hasn't much subtlety."
"It's probably more Larry's sort of thing than yours."
"Very probably. I sensed that, I suppose." Transfer accomplished, in good faith. And so Bundy engaged Meyer in amateur archeological talk, saying, fmally, "I just cannot imagine how those priest types could bring the Indian peasants into this terribly inhospitable and certainly waterless countryside and establish a whole culture without losing untold thousands of them."
And that hooked Saunders into his first conversation of the evening. "From what we know now, the system was to send out a large party of specialists, carrying water supplies, just before the rainy season. If they couldn't find reliable wells or springs, they would dig giant cisterns deep in the earth, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, like gigantic bottles made of stone and waterproofed with clay. Then around the top of the bottle, they'd make a hard surface, round, fifty or sixty feet across, and sloping toward the mouth of the bottle. The rains would fill the bottle and they'd put a big clay stopper in place to prevent evaporation. Next they would bring in the Indian families with grain and fowl and tools and tell them where to build the village and where to plant the grain."
Bruce cried that the information fascinated him. How clever those ancient people were! And how clever the ones who were now so carefully reconstructing all that lost marvelous history!
And he kept him going a little while until it was time for dinner. I said we had to leave just to see how much he would protest. And he did, with an earnest vehemence, because it was obvious that if there were just the three of them, he couldn't focus on David.
So we, with show of reluctance, accepted the warm invitation.
Five
THE FOOD was excellent. Candles flared and flickered in the night breeze. He served a good and heady Greek wine.
A round table. Superb silverware, table linen, glassware, pottery. Muted music from a good tape system somewhere in the house. Bundy had Lady Rebecca at his right, David at his left with me at Becky's right, and Meyer between me and David.
Rebecca had begun to make an elegant presentation of herself to me, managing in her casual careless way of handling herself, to artfully establish all the sensory awarenesses-of vision, of scent, of apparently inadvertent touch. But more importantly, she knew well that most important ingredient of
all charm, all seduction, the art of so listening and responding that she made me feel as if I were the most exciting and rewarding and important man she had met in untold years, that if I had not come along, her life would have continued in its drab and dreary pattern. It requires not only the ability to listen so carefully no word, no nuance, is missed, but also the ability to sense when a contrary opinion will further the growing sense of closeness. I knew what she was doing and knew some of the devices she was using, but that awareness did not prevent my growing feeling that this was, indeed, one hell of a lot of extraordinary woman and nice to be with and worth arranging any further closeness possible.
Bruce Bundy, in another way and on another level, was targeting in on David Saunders. And it was interesting to see how much more masculine Bruce had become, in voice, gesture and opinion. And both Bruce and Becky were using Meyer as that necessary little dilution factor to mask their acquisitive intensity, directing questions and comment to him in much the same way the stage magician makes a great show of letting you look up his sleeves and into his top hat.
Their eyes gleamed in the candlelight, and their faces were smooth and youthful and animated, and their voices were clever, articulate, and amusing. The pretty predators, using their tested skills for the newest stalk.
David Saunders seemed to make, at table, a slightly porcine prey. He would dip his head almost to the plate, shovel in a heaping forkful, chew heavily with rolling bulge of muscle at the jaw corners, and then slosh it down with a gulp of wine, the throat bulging and shifting with the bulky swallow.
So, half in self-defense, half in the interest of moving ahead with the mission, I found a hole in the conversation and ran it off at a new angle. "I'd like to meet and talk to Eva Vitrier. Can you arrange it, Bruce? Becky?"
An instant of wary stillness, such as might happen to the smaller scavengers when they hear the carnivore coming back through the jungle toward the kill.
"Oh, it would have to be Bruce. He seems to get along quite smashingly with the creature. And by the way, dear, her first name rhymes with favor rather than with fever. Shockingly rich, that one. And she doesn't, as we say, mingle."
Bundy said, "I really don't see very much of her. She comes and goes without much warning-I should say with no warning. She's not a very social animal. Even were she here, Travis, it would be quite a feat to arrange an introduction. But I understand she left right after identifying that ghastly body. I could hardly blame her for wanting a change of scene."
"Where would she have gone?"
"She's never given me any other address," he said.
"But," said Becky, "it's rumored she has several of her little fortresses scattered about the world. The woman has this secrecy thing. Absolutely barmy."
"But she had those two girls at her place as house guests," I said. "Seems like a sort of friendly sociable act."
"On the same order, one might say," said Becky, "as that touching friendliness and sociability in a dinner invitation from the Borgias."
"Wear the big ring," said Meyer, in nostalgic tribute to Lenny Bruce. It drew blank looks.
I took a sneak shot at Bundy. "Didn't you say you had to protect yourself from something Rocko dreamed up?"
He pressed his gray-brown bangs with the palm of his hand. A ring fashioned of gold mesh gleamed in the candlelight.
"Why do you strain so hard to be clever, McGee?" he asked.
"Answer a question with a question," I said, "and you buy time to sort things out."
"I used the name Rocko in a generic rather than a particular sense. The Rockos of the world are always scheming, aren't they? Just as you were when you first arrived. I merely said that I feel. competent to protect myself against the schemes of... the Rockos and the McGees."
"But you met the girl, didn't you? Bix Bowie?"
"Should I have?"
"Through Rocko or through Eva Vitrier, one or the other. Why not?"
He smiled. "I went through deep analysis ages ago, my dear man, with a very fashionable New York shrink. He had this quaint trick of trying to stir up guilt by asking questions in exactly that manner. One does lie to one's psychiatrist, you know. The truth is so utterly rancid sometimes. One wants to look better. But with all that endless talking, it is terribly difficult to remember what one might have said a dozen afternoons ago. No, I did not meet the lass. Nor do I see any reason why I should be expected to have met her, or have any memory of her if I did. What are you really looking for?"
"All the reasons why the girl drove off the mountain in your car, Bruce."
"I shall never never forgive the little bitch. That was a marvelous little car. Very loyal and dependable."
David Saunders yawned, belched, reached for the wine bottle.
"See?" Becky cried. "We're boring poor David. A lovely meal, Bruce. Do you have any of that marvelous brandy? The kind I like? I can't remember the name. Good! Just a tiny bit, no more than a tablespoon. And can we leave the table? Thank you, darling."
As we got up, Meyer said, "Mr. Bundy I appreciate your hospitality and your kindness, but I think that I am beginning to feel unwell. The altitude and the wine, I think. The best thing for me would be a walk in the fresh air. I can walk down to the plaza and take a cab back up the hill to the hotel. No, Travis. Don't bother. I'll be fine."
Gracefully and shrewdly done, old friend. After he left the brandy was served, and I noticed that Bruce gave David Saunders the opportunity to pour his own, and a snifter that gave him enough scope to be foolhardy. They went off into the house. Bruce wanted to show David some of the artifacts he had collected.
Becky and I went into a far corner of the patio, sat together on a stone bench near a small, persistent fountain.
"You were very naughty Travis, really."
"What did I do?"
"Ah! Such innocence. It was a lovely little party and then you made poor Bruce so awfully uncomfortable and nervous. He was terribly upset by that whole Rockland affair. Actually, it's the last thing he wants to have mentioned."
"And you know all about it?"
"He talks over his problems with me. He asks my advice. He's not a bad sort, you know. Sometimes he is quite foolish and impulsive and he encounters... problems that are typical of the world he lives in. I think that because I never condemn him, we've been able to become friends."
"Such good friends you brought him a little gift."
"A gift?"
"One husky, sunburned young archeologist."
"Of course, ducks! We are frightfully nasty degenerates who go about handing our discards to our chums. And I imagine that quite puts you off, doesn't it?"
"I don't know enough about it. Or about you."
"Me? I am just a wicked old woman with a ravenous appetite for strong young men. They are generally sweet and touching and grateful. But this chap was... out of focus somehow. He fancies himself as some sort of overwhelming stud. But he has that talent for little bits of brutality that betrays him for what he really is. I had begun to suspect him, and then he told me a horrid little story about beating up homosexuals and taking their money when he was at school. Such chaps are usually hiding their own tendencies from themselves. I had decided to cut him loose because he is really dull. He has no sense of fun. But I had described him to Bruce, and Bruce said that were I to bring him around, he could quickly tell me if my suspicion was correct. After ten minutes Bruce knew and let me know. So... it might be rather nice for Bruce after such a fiasco with that Rockland person. Bruce is quite lonely this year. The chap who used to stay with him drowned last year in the surf at Acapulco when they were down visiting friends. It was a terrible shock to Bruce. Do I sound as if I were pleading for forgiveness and understanding? Hardly! After all, I did not exactly bash him upon the head and gift wrap him and put him on the doorstep did I?"
"What did happen with Rockland?"
"My dear, you are very, very nice. But, my word, you are tiresome at times! Here we are, quite alone, both of us with that marvel
ous knowledge that we would be awfully, awfully good in bed together, and all you seem to want from me is a long tiresome story-far too long to tell here. I know you respond to me. We're becoming quite deliciously aware of each other. Shouldn't you be trying to bundle me off into my lonely bed instead of leaving the advances to me? I am quite sick of the young, young men. They are in endless supply, and unlike poor David, they are terribly sweet and earnest and dear. But too sweet. Like endless desserts. They cloy. But one accepts, because the mature ones with any style and presence are usually married. And I have a rule about that. It is too much like theft."
"But what about my wife and five kids?"
"You lie, sir! A woman leaves her mark, her scent, her shape upon what is hers, whether it is her furs, her underthings, or her man. You are not married, and I doubt you ever have been. Though I was once, several centuries ago."
"Here I come again, tiresome as ever. How do I find out about Rockland?"
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 11 - Dress Her in Indigo Page 6