Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  In fact, if They had found out about his research over the years and what it proved, They might well have planted something in the apartment or near it which would send out some kind of microwave radiation to give him this sensation of hopelessness and defeat. It was clear They had tried a ruse with that engineer’s report. They would know he had too much material now to move it off the key if he let himself be frightened into leaving. Leaving would have been an open invitation for Them to come in and destroy the most damning parts of it, or all of it.

  He had a sudden suspicion, and he hurried out to look at the storm track they had printed in the paper. In the somewhat meager light of the battery lantern, Sarah sat with the earphones on, her fist against her lips, her eyes closed, and tears wet on her cheeks. Scared to death, he thought, and walked past her to pick up the paper. He put the flashlight beam on it and then took it into his workroom and spread it out. He got a felt marker and traced the long line right from the west coast of Africa right up into the Gulf and then north, then northeast, and now east. Right at him! Right from the west coast of Africa, direct and deadly, aimed right at Noble Winney and all his collected evidence.

  Sarah startled him by clutching at him, trying to be taken into his arms. He was very cross. She wasn’t even supposed to come into the workroom. She knew better than this. And he did not like hugging people. It was awkward and made him feel ridiculous.

  “I’m busy!” he yelled at her. “I’m very busy! Can’t you see that?”

  As she slowly shuffled out he opened his master index and began looking for the references under Climate comma Control Thereof.

  The hurricane party on the eleventh floor of the Azure Breeze, on the beach opposite Golden Sands, was not very successful, Marcia Leffingwell decided. It surprised her to discover that she was giving anything less than a perfect party. No party can be great, she thought, if the hostess is bored and irritated. And I am bored with the interminable roaring and whistling of that damned wind, bored with my guests, bored with drinking, bored with having to holler a lot of chitchat at the top of my lungs and not being able to understand a tenth of what they shout back at me. I am irritated with watching drinks get slopped onto my lovely new rug in my lovely new apartment, and I am irritated at watching these idiots stomp the snacks into the pretty shag, and I am irritated by the harsh light of those stupid lanterns, and by the stink they make, and I am terribly tired of being pinched and goosed by Johnny Rogers. I am ready to scream and I might as well, because nobody will hear me at all.

  She glanced over at her husband, Deke, the poor dear, and saw that he looked almost as bored and distressed as she felt. As she moved toward the fake fireplace intending to put her drink on the mantel, she noticed a small ripe olive on the faun-colored shag. It was almost the last straw. We shouldn’t have tried to give a party under these conditions, she thought. The way you handle a hurricane party is go to somebody else’s. We could have gone over to that much smaller party at that tacky little Golden Sands on the bay side. Jack and Grace Cleveland begged us to come over there. The party was in the apartment of somebody we don’t know, though. Some guinea name. At least if we’d gone there, people would be stomping their fucking olives into somebody else’s fucking shag rug.

  She picked it up between thumb and middle finger and put it on the mantel. It promptly rolled to the left and kept rolling and fell off the end of the mantel, and bounced under a love seat. Oh, great, she thought as she knelt and found it. Oh, dandy. My new fireplace is crooked too. When she stood up to look for an ashtray to put the olive in, she felt strangely dizzy. She had to take a quick step to catch her balance. She noticed everybody else. Even in all that constant horrid screaming and roaring which had been going on practically forever, she had the odd impression there was some kind of silence in the room. Nobody was laughing. Or moving. Or looking at anybody else. They had their heads a little bit tilted as though they were listening for some sound buried in the wind.

  They were all in a picture where the camera was held at a small careless angle. A woman staggered back against the wall. The model car, an MG, with wheels that turned and a workable steering wheel, the model car that was a lighter if you pushed the button that snapped the trunk lid up, the little car rolled off the glass-topped table. A man ran for the door, knocking a woman down. They had all broken out of that trance of listening. They staggered for balance. Their mouths and eyes were round and they made hooing sounds heard but faintly in the thunder of wind. They tried to claw and crawl and struggle away from the dreadful window wall, away from the terrors outside. But the furniture toppled and slid, and the people tumbled and rolled to the base of the window wall, there entangled with one another in utter darkness, and with the furniture and hot parts of lanterns, and the breaking glasses, grabbing at the shag, trying to climb the terrible slope, their faces wet chalk.

  She felt the slowness of it. Feet crushed her back against the glass. Realization came more than once. It kept exploding in her brain over and over, erased each time by her disbelief, as the tall building, its seaward supports exposed, undermined and crumbling, leaned past that point of equilibrium and crashed, unheard, into the black and white turbulence of the huge hurricane waves and was there slowly broken apart and dispersed over the floor of the Gulf and the sugary beach.

  Mr. Harlin Barker hurried from Connie’s two-bed hospital room down to the nurses’ station in the middle of that third-floor wing. There was only one person there, a woman in a blue uniform, writing on five-by-eight file cards under the light of a very dim bulb.

  “Come quick!” he shouted. “My wife. Mrs. Barker. Quick!”

  “You need a nurse?”

  “She’s bad, I think.”

  “I’m not a nurse. I keep these here records, mister.”

  “Call a nurse, please.”

  “Nobody can call anybody, mister. Nothing works. All the wires got wet. We got a hundred leaks in the crummy building.”

  “Where are the nurses? Where are the doctors?”

  “A nurse went by going that way a little while ago.”

  He hurried down the hall in the direction she had pointed. He looked in a room and saw a flashlight moving about. “Nurse,” he yelled. “Nurse!”

  A broad-bodied elderly nurse came out and glowered at him and tried to walk by him. He grabbed her arm. She wrested away. He grabbed her again and she hit him across the bridge of the nose with her flashlight. She put her mouth near his ear and yelled, “Get back in bed!”

  “I’m not a patient!”

  “Then go home! No visiting hours!”

  “My wife is dying!”

  “What?”

  “Dying! Dying!” She suffered being led at a half trot all the way back to Connie Mae’s bedside. She shone the light on Connie Mae’s face. She took her pulse.

  “Fibrillating!” she yelled at Harlin Barker.

  “She did that before.”

  “Cardiac section. She should be in the cardiac section.”

  “Put her there. Okay? Put her there!”

  “No use. Nothing works over there. No electric.”

  “Do something!”

  “Who’s the doctor?”

  “Keebler.”

  “Keeler? Don’t know him.”

  “Keebler! Keebler!”

  “Go to Emergency.”

  “What?”

  “Go get any doctor from Emergency downstairs.”

  “Help her!”

  To his consternation the hefty nurse raised her fist high and thumped it down onto Connie’s frail chest. She took her pulse, and raised her fist to do it again, as Harlin Barker fled. It took him a long time to find the Emergency area in the darkened confusing corridors of the hospital. Patients grabbed at him, thinking him a doctor. Nurses tried to intercept him.

  When he found the emergency room he was astonished and relieved to find Nurse Roberta Fish at a desk sipping a plastic cup of coffee.

  He leaned toward her ear and yelled, “My wife is fi
brillating!”

  “Whoa, Mr. Barker. Slow.”

  “She got out of Intensive Care, Cardiac Section, on the ninth and they said she had to get out of the hospital in six days. Dr. Keebler got them to let her stay. She’s had three heart attacks already and this is the fourth.…”

  She motioned to him to stay put, and in moments she was back with a doctor in a stained smock, rubbing his eyes and carrying a medicine case. Harlin told her the room number, and then he followed them. They made very good time. It was difficult for Mr. Barker to keep up with them. He was smiling and weeping as he ran along behind them. Everything was under control. As he rounded the last corner, he hit a wet patch, his feet flew up. He landed on his hip. The pain was excruciating. He tried to get up and tried to call out, but the blackness came welling up from behind his eyes.

  When he woke up he felt strangely groggy. He was in a small cubicle with walls of white canvas. The storm roar was still going on. Nurse Fish came in and leaned over him and smiled with her eyes and leaned close and told him to go to sleep. He asked about Connie. She patted his cheek and told him to go to sleep. He motioned her close and shouted weakly, “She’s dead? Dead?”

  Nurse Fish nodded and left, after patting him again. He exhaled all the air out of his lungs and tried to keep himself from ever inhaling again. But pretty soon he did, with self-disgust for his weakness, and soon he slept.

  41

  PROFESSOR ROGER JEFFREY and his wife, Maurine, had made themselves at home in the tenth-floor apartment of Professor Alden Maitland, in the Bay Terrace Condominium, a large complex on the bay shore of Fiddler Key a half mile from the north bridge.

  Alden and Peggy Maitland had made the apartment as safe and as snug as possible in preparation for the storm. Their apartment overlooked the bay and the city beyond. Even with all the windows closed, a condition they could not endure for long, and even though they had no window facing west, the only place where it was possible to carry on any kind of conversation was the windowless storage and utility room, half of which Alden had converted into a darkroom.

  “Couldn’t go forward after the bridge jammed. Couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t go backward. And poor old Maurine wouldn’t have lasted long trying to walk back to Golden Sands in that wind, would she now? She gets no exercise at all. Stay there and we’d have drowned like rats. Damn good thing I remembered you good people lived right here, what? Even so, it was all poor old Maurine could do to make it, even with me bundling her along like a sack of old potatoes. Had her in one arm and my machine in the other. We’ll be forever grateful to you two, won’t we, dear? We’ll go on very short rations because the little we had, we had to leave in the automobile. A borrowed car. Too bad. Water coming up fast. Of course, it would have had the same fate if we left it at Golden Sands. Belongs to a chap named Mensenkott. To his wife, actually. She’s a loonie. They put her away. Mensenkott is one of those network types. Very macho and very dull. Now if I could spread newspaper out in your living room, dears, I have to take my trusty Panasonic Touring Deluxe apart. I am afraid she got some salty water in her innards, and she is too exquisite a machine to let rust out.”

  A long time later Peggy Maitland maneuvered her husband back into the darkroom, knowing that with the door closed, no word they shouted at each other could be heard outside the room.

  “We hardly know these terrible people!”

  “I know, dear.”

  “She’s no problem. She keeps her nose in that book. She doesn’t know or care where she is. But he is so goddam … jolly! Did you see him glom onto those sandwiches? Short rations! Did you see him down our beer?”

  “What were we supposed to do when we opened the door to them? Close it in their faces?”

  “The stink of that stuff he uses on that bicycle makes me feel sick to my stomach.”

  “He’ll be finished soon.”

  “Soon? He’s got a lot of little bearings and things rolling around on the floor loose. I don’t think he’ll ever get it back together.”

  “Peggy, honey, Roger Jeffrey and I were in the same line of work. We were in different schools together. We were on one national committee together. Okay? They called on us when we moved in. We never returned the call or invited them back.”

  “Invite them out! They are eating our food, drinking our drink, and breathing up all our air.”

  “I give you permission to go right ahead and do it yourself.”

  She hugged him. “Okay. I can’t. Neither can you. We’ll have to just live through it.”

  “Cheer up. The building might blow away.”

  “Please don’t make that sort of joke, not when it sounds like it does. It’s getting worse. You know that? It isn’t possible, but it is getting worse. I swear it.”

  “We’ll be okay.”

  “We should have gotten off.”

  “And left your mother here?”

  “I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

  “It isn’t your fault she’s with us and she’s bedridden, Peg. And it isn’t your fault I made fifteen phone calls without finding one damned hospital or nursing home that would take her in. We can’t take her to a motel or a shelter. What are we supposed to do, for God’s sake? Put her to sleep like an elderly hamster?”

  “I better go look at her again. All the noise is scaring her. And me. But not those damned Jeffreys of yours.”

  “Of mine?”

  “There isn’t enough air to breathe anywhere, is there?”

  After the level of the water in the bay had risen to where short steep waves were rolling in across his big terrace and slapping the side of his house, Marty Liss began to pay a lot more attention to Hurricane Ella. As a developer he knew the elevation of his own property. He had arranged an exception to the stipulation as to the height of the floor level above mean high tide. On a broad part of the bay front, on the mainland, he was supposed to be eleven feet above mean high tide. He had obtained permission to build eight feet above mean high tide. Water was about eighteen inches deep in the long living room. Okay, so there was nine and a half feet of water everywhere. It awed him to think of what it must be like out on Fiddler Key and Seagrape Key. Not only would they have the water out there, but it would be rolling in, big waves a lot higher than the water level. Way down under the deep hard roaring of the big wind he thought he could hear the heavier thunder of the surf out there, smashing up the key.

  Those damned doom merchants could have been right, all along. All that weeping and wailing and wringing of hands about how criminally dangerous it was to build out there on those beautiful damned keys. They called it transient land. Hell, a lot of Fiddler Key had the same contour it had back in the thirties. The market factors all the risks in any situation. When you have to pay up to twenty-five hundred a foot for beach-front land zoned high rise, you have to know the risk is very small. If the risk was big, the price would be dirt. Everybody knows that. It made for a wonderful lifestyle out there. Turn the key in the door and go on a nice little cruise, no need to worry. No noisy kids racing around. No dogs crapping in the grass. No cats stinking up the corridors. Little tennis and swimming to keep in shape. Get a small boat and keep it right at your own dock, and ride out there into the Gulf and hook into those great silver kings.

  The waves and wind had broken the French doors into the dining room, and the water came in there. Standing in the living room he could see the current that flowed through the arched doorway from the dining room. This place was going to be a mess when the water went down. Wouldn’t be any plantings left at all. The pumps, air conditioning, intercoms, wiring—everything would be shot.

  He felt almost amused. Everything else is shot. Why not the house too? Martin Liss, the fall guy. Blame him for the hurricane too, while you’re at it. Stick his ass in the slam, and let him rot there. All those red hots need a victim. Here’s Marty. He’ll do fine. Everything he has touched his whole life has ultimately turned to shit. Marriages, kids, home, business. Marty the high roller. Now the d
ice come up craps every time. Snake eyes. Snake-bit.

  Suddenly Francie grabbed his arm from behind and yanked him around to face her. She stood yelling at him, face and posture ugly, slacks, shirt and hair water-pasted flat against her, makeup gone. She was pointing behind her, and making fists, and stomping her foot in the living-room water. He felt very oppressed by her and irritated by her. He could not understand one word she was saying. Whatever she thought he was supposed to do, he had no interest in doing.

  In a languid manner designed to infuriate her, he gave her the finger. Without hesitation, she tried to kick him in the groin, and perhaps would have succeeded had not the water slowed the beginning of the furious attack. He turned just in time and her foot thumped his thigh. There were pictures in the back of his head, of her and the young tennis pro, and they lent additional force to his openhanded blow. The heel of his hand caught her on the angle of the jaw and she dropped face down into the water.

  She made a few vague movements and he thought how very easy it would be to place his foot, in its nonslip boat shoe, on the nape of her neck and keep her down. It gave him a rush of pleasure, an almost sexual feeling, to think about doing it. If he waited, he might not have to do anything.

  At that instant an object came through the heavy glass of the picture window that faced the bay. It bombed through the glass at a flat angle and struck close behind him, as the wind thrust the rest of the glass out of the frame and ran shrieking around the room, blowing paintings off the walls and objects off the tables. He braced himself against the wind and picked Francie out of the water. She came up gagging and coughing, but he could not hear the sounds she was making. Arm around her, he helped her toward the stairs. He looked behind him and saw that the object which had come through the window was a dead great blue heron. It looked too frail to have broken the glass. It looked as if it was made of sticks and string, like a model of a bird. The sticks were crumpled. He remembered something about how you can shoot a candle through a pine board if you have enough velocity.