“I really value your advice. It’s hard to take, but it’s good, I know.”
They both got up and moved toward the door, smiling. He shook his head. “It’s going to give Nance a migraine.”
They both reached at the same instant for the doorknob. Their hands touched, and he took hold of her thin wrist, and then reached and captured the other wrist. Her pale gray glance was apprehensive, swift-moving, somehow ironic. With a quick lift of her head she threw her heavy hair back.
“Look,” she said. “I’m not much for this kind of thing.”
“Or me.”
“I didn’t think so. Greg, honey, it really isn’t an area where I have any confidence at all. Okay? Unhand me, sir?”
He let go of her. They gave each other clumsy smiles. He said, “I don’t know what the hell I had in mind. That was dumb. I’m not … one of those.”
“I know. I know. It happens. I give a lot of people the wrong impression. I’m kind of a fake.”
Their eyes met again. She looked away, uneasily, and then met his direct gaze again. He looked into pale gray, into the shiny black pupils. It was a specific physical impact, an electrical tingle of awareness. She said, hardly moving her lips, “I’m … really not any good at anything like this.”
“I think because of the way you said you like me …”
“You are so damned unbelievably young, Greg. You were born way too late for me. I mean even if I wasn’t so jumpy about … getting involved.”
“I wasn’t asking for anything to happen. I don’t really want …”
“I know. Look. Turn around and go out the door. Okay, dear Greg? Just do that.”
He took a deep breath and let it out, and turned and went. As he went blindly through her office and out to his car, he could not remember what she looked like. He could not remember what Loretta Rosen, Realtor, looked like though he had known her for several years. He could remember only what the new Loretta looked like. Before his eyes, she had changed into loveliness. Defects had now become the hallmarks of her authenticity.
He sat in his car and tried to yank his mind back out of fantasy, back to the realities of the waiting admiral, and the reality of taking a frightful bath on the three apartments. But nothing seemed as real or as important as her gray uneasy eyes.
On the way back to the office he had to drive past Golden Sands again. It looked, from Beach Drive, bigger than it was. It glowed orange and gold in the hot afternoon sunlight. In the occupied apartments the draperies were pulled across the tinted glass doors and tinted picture windows. From desperate habit he picked out the windows and balconies of apartments 2-D, 2-E and 2-F. Once again he heard himself telling Nancy what a great deal it would be. He slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel and groaned. Nancy would have to be told. He began to rehearse how best to tell her. But Loretta Rosen sat in the back of his mind, listening to the rehearsal, smiling and nodding when he devised a particularly apt phrase.
Loretta Rosen sat at her desk, alone, going through her list of prospects. But her attention kept wandering.
She leaned back, dug at her scalp, lighted a fresh cigarette, put the old cigarette out, scratched her thigh and thought with exasperation, Not again, goddam it: I don’t need all that hassle.
All that sneaking around, full of crazy excitement, all that glowing, that breathless talking. Having someone to think about all day, and getting horny thinking about him. Little phone codes and signals, and all the frantic desperate screwing, at odd times in odd places. Somebody said the trouble with adultery was you have to do it mostly in the daytime when everybody looks dreadful. It had been … how long?… a year and a half since the last one broke up. Cole Kimber. Funny-coincidence department. Cole built Golden Sands for Marty Liss, had been building it when the affair began and was still building it when it ended. Mostly in that construction trailer of his, or out in the Gulf in his cabin cruiser, or way out in that crummy shack he called his hunting lodge.
No, woman. Not another one. Cole was the very last one forever, the last one this side of the grave. Not that there had been exactly a whole regiment or anything during the twenty-four years of divorce from rotten Rosen.
Not Greg. Not for me. Too young. Absolutely great shoulders and long dark lashes and a voice that makes me feel tingly. Be honest. You picked him out six months ago, dear, and you have been putting on all your little acts and games, and he finally lunged and you struck him good and sunk the hook. That’s not quite honest either. It wasn’t that definite, dear. It has just been a case of like. And people always show their best side to those they like, right?
No trick at all now, she thought, to move in for the kill. Greg has a set of keys. I have a set. Lorrie Higbee has a set on her key board. Call Greg up and tell him you’d like to check over the furnishings in 2-D, to be able to answer some questions from a potential buyer. Put on your pretties and meet him there. He’s ready now. Too easy. Like that heavy old gal in the B.C. comic strip who is forever clubbing that poor snake. Snake has no chance. Snake is sexual symbolism. Greg hard, like warm pink marble, blue curl of the great vein …
With great effort she stilled her visceral trembling. Erectile tissues softened. She firmed her mouth and lifted her chin and thought about money. That always brought it under control. Love affairs always cost money, one way or another. And the worst loss had been the commission on the Carstock Ranch. She would never never never forget that. Eighty thousand commission. All hers. And who got it? That goddam sneak bastard Marvin McGraw, that’s who. Sneaked in and closed the deal when she was out on the Leona III with Cole Kimber, at anchor, napping and drowsing and banging the hot lazy October afternoon away.
Never again. And the time to stop it is before it starts. Once it starts you lose track of your priorities. The office goes to hell. Your people get sloppy. The bandits steal your clients and your properties, while you walk around in a silly buttery haze, alive from the waist down, simpering and sniggering. So the hell with it, Gregory. Find somewhere else to put that damned thing. The lady has had her last ride on snap-the-hip, had her final cotton candy day at the fair, won her last tin mandolin.
She looked up a number and dialed it on her unlisted line. Mrs. Neale answered on the second ring.
“Florence? This is Loretta.”
“Who? Oh, yes, of course. For a minute I just—”
“I couldn’t blame you for forgetting me entirely, dear. But you remember, I did promise that when I found something really exceptional, you’d be the first one I’d call.”
“Yes, but—”
“This is a very dear little apartment in Golden Sands. You know. On the beach, on the bay side, across from Azure Breeze. Of course there’s guaranteed access to the beach. Tennis courts, pool, resident manager. Everything, really. It is beautifully furnished. The owner is in serious financial trouble, and I think he’s going to unload it at a fantastic bargain price. If he does, I’ll have an exclusive. Meanwhile, if you wouldn’t mind taking a chance on wasting your time, I could sneak you in to take a look at it.”
“Well, I’m not really in the market, Loretta. Not the way I was when we talked before.”
“You’ve decided on something else?”
“Well, practically. The bank says I have to get rid of this huge place. It is eating me up, you know? I wish Charles hadn’t given those trust people so much authority over me. I’d rather stay right here than have to pack up all the stuff we accumulated in our lifetimes. Anyway, I think I would be happier in a house than in one of those little boxy things way up in the air, and I’ve almost decided on a sweet little house over on Domingo Terrace.”
“Florence, whether I sell you anything or not, I couldn’t let you move into that neighborhood.”
“What’s wrong? Why?”
“It’s changing. I watch things like that. It’s my business. You might be perfectly safe for a year. But after that? After that you better buy a gun and a big savage dog.”
“You’re k
idding!”
“Florence, believe me, I think that the day when women alone like you and me could live alone in little houses in the city is almost over forever. We have to have the protection of high rise.”
“I’m not really all that nervous about—”
“Will you let me show you the apartment at least? Actually I’d like any excuse to get out of this darn office for a little while.”
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
“Well, okay. Shall I meet …?”
“Sit tight, dear, and I’ll come get you.”
Loretta Rosen went into her small washroom off her private office and fixed her hair and her mouth. She turned from side to side, craning to see as much as possible of her slim figure in the small mirror. Not too bad, she thought, for a forty-six-year-old hag. And that’s another good reason against getting into anything with Greg McKay. It always makes me gain weight. And each time it is a little more hell taking it back off.
She took her purse and went out through the outer office, and smiled radiantly at her people and told them she would not be back.
6
VIC YORK HAD laughing eyes and a merry face. His brows were ridged with old scar tissue. One ear was a welted button. He was almost completely bald. He was a light-heavy from the waist up, a welter from the waist down. He’d had his last professional fight fourteen years ago. His waist was the same size as when he had been a perennial contender. He worked out every day of his life. His neck looked a little bigger than his head.
When Lorrie Higbee looked up, there was Vic York standing there beaming at her with extravagant approval. It startled her. He wore a beige knit sport shirt with a little alligator on the pocket, and tight fawn slacks. She could smell his male cologne from ten feet away.
“Hey, Gorgeous,” he said. “Long time.”
“What do you want around here, Vic?”
He had the fighter’s voice box, a high-pitched raspy whisper. “That’s no kind of friendly greeting to give your old buddy, Lorrie. Your old man around?”
“What do you want with him?”
“Hey, he got Mr. Sullivan pretty sore at him. You know that? Mr. Sullivan said to me, he said, Vic, you go over there and tell Julian he should show some respect. So here I am.”
She bit her lip. Julian hadn’t listened to her advice. So here was Vic York. There was no way in the world to appeal to Vic. She remembered the terms from the anatomy course in nursing school. Civilized man has highly developed frontal lobes. In these lobes is the fine edge of coordination, along with mercy, restraint, imagination, self-control. The frontal lobes are snugged up against a sharp edge of the sphenoid bone, known as the sphenoidal ridge. And every time during his long career that Vic had been hit in the head, the ridge had damaged nerve tissue in the frontal lobes. Nerve cells are not replaced once they die.
She got up and took the file she was using over to a filing cabinet. She heard the grunt and looked over her shoulder in time to see Vic vault lightly over the dividing railing. He came up behind her when she opened the file drawer. She tried to ignore him. He put his arms around her and ran his hands up to cup her breasts. He pulled her against him.
“Lorrie, why you wanta all the time wear these T-shirts way too big for you. You got a nice body, huh? You got great little boobs and you hide them so nobody can see. Why?”
“Shall I phone Sully and ask him if he sent you over here to grope me?”
He let go and backed quickly away. “Now, that isn’t friendly. That isn’t friendly at all. You shouldn’t say that.”
“Why should I be friendly if you come over here to hurt Julian? Everybody knows that’s what you do for Mr. Sullivan.”
“Lorrie, Lorrie, that’s dumb. I got to learn him a little is all. Which you rather have, sugar? He gets bounced a little by the old pro, or he gets his ass fired out of here? How are you two going to get anything this good, times like we’re having? What you draw for unemployment isn’t all that great, sweetie. Listen, I like Julian. And I like you. We’re all traveling on the same team. You know he called Sully a name and hung up on him, and you knew right off it was going to be some kind of trouble.”
“I told him,” she said quietly. “Jesus, I told him, all right. How … how much do you have to hurt him?”
“No hospital, kid. Nothing like that. It isn’t that big a deal. Just sort of refresh his memory of the way things have got to be, is all. So he’ll have some respect.”
He was smiling, speaking softly, moving toward her again. She sensed he wanted to touch her again, no more than that, and she thought that maybe if she let him, it might be easier for Julian somehow, but she could not bring herself to let Vic fondle her again. His touch had made her feel ill, in almost the same way Julian’s touch was making her feel ill more often lately, ever since sneaking into 2-D that time and holding the water glass against the wall, her ear pressed to the base of it, listening to Julian and Mrs. Fish in the Fish apartment, all that snorting and thrashing and groaning.
She managed, without being too obvious about it, to put the desk between herself and Vic York, and sensed that he had given up his automatic pursuit of her.
“Where is Julian, anyway?” he asked.
“He’s somewhere on the property, Vic. If you wait here, he’ll come in sooner or later. Are you in a hurry?”
“Me? I got all the time there is. What I think I’ll do, I’ll go walking around the place, and if I don’t find him I’ll come back here again and talk to you some more.”
“You do that, Vic.”
Each weekday and Saturday morning at quarter to nine, after his four-minute egg and well-done sausage patty, Mr. C. Noble Winney kissed the soft folds of the right cheek of his wife, Sarah, went out to the rear parking area, got into his pale orange Gremlin, with his empty dispatch case on the seat beside him, and drove down to the main post office in downtown Athens. There he transferred the contents of his rental drawer to the dispatch case and then drove back to his day’s work at Apartment 5-C, Golden Sands Condominium.
Mr. Winney had converted a bedroom into the kind of office which best suited his function. He had fashioned long tables of sawhorses and plywood. He had tall bins for vertical storage of his giant scrapbooks. A glass case held the looseleaf notebooks containing the thousands of pages of his daily workbook. He had a small efficient copier, an A. B. Dick 625. He had pots full of marker pens for his color coding system. He had razor-blade holders, spray adhesives, stacks of new pages for the scrapbooks and brilliant fluorescent lighting.
Sarah knew better than to allow anyone to interrupt her husband’s work for the first two hours after he came back from downtown. That was when his need for total concentration was the greatest. That was when some seemingly innocent item might slip by him were his concentration flawed.
C. Noble Winney subscribed to fourteen daily papers, nine weekly newspapers and magazines, and twenty-one monthly publications. He had plotted this at 5,830 items per year, 303 visits to the box, for an average of 19.24 items per visit. The spastic rhythms of the Postal Service could provide five items or fifty on any given day, in addition to the correspondence.
On this day in May there were seventeen newspapers and five magazines, and no letters at all.
After he shut himself in the office-bedroom he separated the items into proper piles. And then he began reading. Years ago he had taken a speed-reading course, and since then had trained himself to the point where he could read a book as quickly as he could turn the pages.
There were two editions of the New York Times. That was always the most interesting because it was the most clever and devious. For fifteen years C. Noble Winney had been researching the progress of the conspiracy that ruled the world. Once you could comprehend it in all its devilish intricacy, then you could find the proper meaning of the items in the public press. Winney knew beyond any shade or shadow of doubt that the Rothschild-Zionist Axis determined the shape and direction of all history. Fools and du
pes were taken in by the stage-managed drama of the menace of world communism. The Rothschild bloc was intent on maintaining such a balance of power between the democracies and the communist bloc nations that they could fatten themselves on the by-products of this everlasting tension. When you had learned to read between the lines you could not help knowing that the Jew Conspiracy controlled Wall Street, the public press, the television networks, the Congress, Parliament, the Kremlin, the Arab nations, the world’s gold supply, all the universities of the world, the military and the Pope of Rome. It had become obvious to him that the United States of America had, for a time, posted a threat to that carefully maintained balance of power due to its dynamic strengths. But they had taken care of the problem by thrusting the world into depression, which gave them a chance to put President Franklin D. Rosenfeld into the White House. Rosenfeld had enlisted the help of a lot of so-called social scientists in tearing down the fabric of rational society and setting up the machinery for penalizing thrift, honesty and management skills, for rewarding the Africans for breeding faster than the white man by the device of child welfare payments to unmarried mothers, for destroying American education by adopting the anti-disciplinary theories of John Dewey, whose real name was Jon Dewaski, for corrupting the currency and resources of the nation by forcing America off the gold standard, for weakening social and sexual standards and thus taking the country into the era of rapes and riots, degenerate music, drugs, group sex orgies, muggings and murder.
It was all in the newspapers and magazines, all the sick and evil perversions of a once-great nation. Once you knew about it, it was remarkably easy to read the self-satisfied smirks on the faces of Cronkite, Chancellor and Reasoner. Sometimes a man in high office would guess at the dimensions of the conspiracy. And then the word would go out from Rothschild headquarters to destroy him, and destroy they would, even when it was Richard Nixon, the most popular president in American history. On other occasions some of their own creatures, who had been put in office by the power of the Rothschilds, would rebel against their masters, as did the Kennedy brothers. The death of Marilyn Monroe was a warning the brothers did not heed. And so it was very easy and very necessary to make the arrangements at Dallas, in California, at Chappaquiddick. And for a little while apparently George Wallace had seemed dangerous to them. As had Willy Brandt, Allende and Krushchev.
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