by Mavis Cheek
The chap in the office next to his looked relieved at the obvious untruth. He closed his door. Duty done. And ceased to notice that Square Jaw looked pale as a corpse.
*
Gretchen O'Dowd was not given to dreaming, but there was no doubt that a great, red mouth, with numerous pearly-white teeth, hung above her like that cat in Wonderland. It might well be a cat, for it had a fine mane of pale hair and a neat little nose. The only discordant thing (and one expected them in dreams) was that the nose was wearing dark mirrors above it, and these reflected her back to herself. The self it reflected showed mistily through slitted eyes. She opened them wider; the dream incorporated a pair of shoulders and looked, suddenly, very real.
'Hi,' it said, with an American accent. 'I'm Rohanne Bulbecker. Who are you?'
Gretchen screamed. Appropriate in the circumstances. The cause of the scream waited until it was finished, and then smiled again, reaching out a most sinister gauntleted hand.
'I'm not going to hurt you,' said Rohanne Bulbecker, in the soft tone of one who very well might. She sat down beside Gretchen, and the mirrors on her eyes reflected a round pinky-brown face a-twitch with fright. 'Do you, by any chance, know the whereabouts of Janice Gentle?' she asked softly.
The round pinky-brown face shook itself. 'N-n-no,' said Gretchen, hoping this was the right answer.
'Shit,' said Rohanne, and the slap of her leathered hand on her leathered knee made Gretchen wince and jump.
'S-s-sorry,' she said, and meant it.
'Oh, never mind,' said Rohanne Bulbecker.
She removed her sunglasses and peered at Gretchen. Her peering ended at the moustache. 'Sorry to butt in on your siesta,' she said, 'but the door was open.' She said this with a smile that neither touched her nose nor reached her eyes. She looked, Gretchen thought, murderous. Gretchen gulped. And people had the cheek to comment that she looked weird.
'You don't have any idea where Sylvia's secretary went to?'
Gretchen shook her head.
'And you really don't have any idea where Janice Gentle is?' Gretchen twitched negatively. 'Do you know where she lives?' 'N-n-no,' said Gretchen.
'Who are you, then? What are you doing here?'
'This is my ex-employer's office.' Gretchen attempted to sit up a little. She felt at a great disadvantage lying down beneath the gaze of this strange aggressor.
'Sylvia Perth?' The woman drew closer.
Gretchen swallowed but could not speak. She nodded.
'What are you?' asked Rohanne, desperate to discover if this person could help her search in any way. 'Chauffeur? Janitor?'
Gretchen decided to continue on the path of invisibility.
'Friend?' went on Rohanne desperately. 'Relative?'
No point her pretending. An answer was definitely required.
'Personal assistant?'
Gretchen settled for that, and nodded.
'Oh,' said Rohanne, much relieved, 'then you must know where she is.'
Gretchen, whose mind was as far removed from Janice Gentle as Rohanne Bulbecker's was absorbed by her, wrongly connected the pronoun to her deceased employer and thought of Sylvia.
Rohanne stared at the recumbent creature before her, willing her to know, her eyes aglow with the light of compulsion.
Gretchen went rigid, while her brain went spongy. She could not speak.
'Come on,' said Rohanne, applying wheedling tactics, 'you do know where she is, don't you?' She leaned forward and gave her a devastating smile.
Gretchen winced as all those shining teeth came out again.
'In a manner of speaking, yes,' she said, warily, thinking of Sylvia Perth, edging herself, finally, into a sitting position.
'For Chrissake!' snapped Rohanne, fixed on Janice Gentle, 'where?'
Gretchen jumped. All attempts to put it in the same poetic mode as Mr Mole went out of her head. 'Well,' she said, 'she's dead.'
'Oh my God!' said Rohanne Bulbecker, and she put her face in her sinisterly clad hands. 'Oh my God.'
Gretchen began easing herself off the day bed with a view to leaping across the room and out of the door.
'That's it, then,' said Rohanne, despairing, resigned.
Gretchen almost had both feet on the floor.
Rohanne looked up. 'When did she die?'
'Very recently,' said Gretchen O'Dowd, trying to sound casual and as if her body were not in a very peculiar position: both feet were safely on the floor, one buttock had slid to freedom, and her arms were poised in a prepare-to-eject position. With one bound she would be free.
Rohanne was thinking how odd it was that both agent and writer should have died at the same time. Perhaps Janice Gentle felt she could not go on without her protectress.
'Suicide, was it?' she asked wanly.
Gretchen arrested the last fractional movement which would release her.
'Heart,' she said.
'Good grief!' said Rohanne incredulously, for she knew that Sylvia had also died in that way. 'Both of them? At the same time?'
Now Gretchen knew for sure that this person was deranged. Despite all the interesting achievements in modern surgery, people still went around with only one of those organs. You might have a kidney too few - that was possible - but you certainly never, ever had a heart too many.
'She only had one,' she said defiantly.
'One what?'
'Heart.'
Now Rohanne knew for sure that this person was cra2y. Which was sort of comforting. If she was crazy (and she looked that way), she might not really know anything.
'Not two,' added Gretchen.
'You mean . . .' Rohanne said carefully, kindly even, for light was beginning to dawn — here was someone in deep distress; you could see it from her posture - 'if she had had two hearts then one could have malfunctioned, but the other would have kept her alive. Like an aeroplane and its engines?'
By now Gretchen's muddlement had temporarily overcome her fear.
'What I mean,' she said, 'is that Sylvia had one heart and she died from it. Recently.'
'Yes,' said Rohanne soothingly, 'and Janice Gentle did, too?' 'Did she?' said Gretchen politely. It was Rohanne's turn to scream.
*
'"Man's life is well compared to a feast,"' said Janice, making her way to the top of her road. ' "Then with an earthen voider, made of clay, Comes Death, and takes the table clean away."'
Who wrote that? she wondered. One of those feckless Elizabethans she supposed. Such crude metaphor. Apt, though. Death had certainly taken away her table, metaphorically speaking.
Bacon, was it? Or the Earl of Essex?
The combination of the word 'feast' and the word 'bacon' worked in her head and thence downward to her stomach. She fancied a bacon sandwich, whichever poet wrote it. She almost
turned round and went home again. A bacon sandwich suddenly became most pressing. And being out here on the road to Dog Street felt, quite suddenly, rather foolish.
A voice behind her called, 'Morning. Don't often see you about this time of day. Well, I must say it is hot, very, very hot, too hot in my opinion. What say you?'
She moved away and crossed the road hurriedly. Anything was better than walking back past that. She must take her courage and go on. Yesterday she rang Sylvia's number and, on hearing that lively voice, began talking - no, chatting - to it. That settled it. Janice was well aware that in some respects she was outside the rules of society, but she was not what her mother would have called mental. Courage it would take, but to Dog Street she must go. After all, how much worse for the pilgrims of yore? One road, thick with footpads and danger, and only the promise of sporadic inns along the way. Walking through the London of today could hardly be comparable with that ... After all, even Madame Eglentyne, that fastidious Prioress, had travelled in the unavoidable discomfort of the age, despite her corals, furs and finery.
And here was Janice on a sunny morning, setting off in the full and comforting certainty that she would arrive, whole a
nd unmolested, at her destination. She could hardly turn back, given those easy odds, now could she? She shook her head and set off* resolute once more. Look upon this as your own little pilgrimage, Janice, she told herself, and none the less comforting for all that.
*
Rohanne Bulbecker stood on a street corner and whistled for a cab. One stopped. Her stocky and rather unwilling companion entered it glumly. Rohanne slammed the door. 'Dog Street,' she said, 'Dog Street and step on it. . .'
Chapter Twelve
M
ORGAN Pfeiffer stared at the photograph of his late wife and smiled at it confidently. He had just dialled London again and Rohanne Bulbecker was no longer in her hotel, which meant she must be out on the trail. He intended to keep up the pressure. There was nothing like pressure to bring results. Besides, Stoat was nearly expiring with damped-down energy. Much more of it and he'd have a coronary, and he was far too good a man to lose. Where are you now, Ms Bulbecker? he asked the ether. Where are you now?
Ms Bulbecker was sitting with a clamped smile upon her face opposite Gretchen O'Dowd, who wore an expression ghastly enough to be a death mask. Sdll, Rohanne continued smiling. At this stage there was nothing further she could do.
*
The Boss Masculine, having seen his wife after her operation, and having been told by her in detail how the catheter felt and what the nurses had said about her bowels and the sagginess of her belly muscles, made a very aggressive business call that afternoon. Even the Little Blonde Secretary Bird was surprised at the vehemence of his voice as it rasped through the closed door.
'I don't want fucking excuses,' he shouted, 'I want action.'
Really it was what he had wanted to shout to his wife.
The Little Blonde Secretary jumped. Normally the Boss Masculine was even-tempered to the point of dullness, and sort of spoke in a low voice through gritted teeth if he was angered. There was something quite exciting about that explosion, more like the sort of men she read about, men with power, men of ruthlessness, men who needed to be tamed . .. Surreptitiously she put away the magazine she had been reading - apparently there were creams you could rub in to stop stretch marks, and with a good nursing brassiere your bust need not suffer any ill effects at all, thank heavens. She turned to her machine and finished the page of figures. Soon it would be lunchtime and she wanted to go to British Home Stores; they were doing some lovely styles in maternity wear nowadays.
The Boss Masculine, recovering from the unsatisfactory dispensation of his rage, dropped his coffee cup down his chest and lap and, giving full deep-voiced vent to his further enragement, yelled, 'Damn everything to hell!' A cry whose shocking resonance caused his secretary to feel quite fluttery as she flew to his aid. She mopped the upper half while he dealt with the bit below the belt. Automatically she brushed his shoulders free of dandruff, too. Might as well make him really presentable. Her small hands with their perfect pink nails were deft and dainty in their movements. It was a long time since he had been touched intimately. He thanked her and, as she left the office, he noticed that she had a neat little bum and nice legs. A tingling began in his groin. He turned the photograph of his wife towards him, stared at it, frowned as Crippen might have frowned, and returned it to a less prominent angle.
*
Morgan Pfeiffer had made his money in candy bars. Stoat, whom he had brought with him from the realms of gold to the realms of literature, had been his marketing giant in the launching of Brite the Booster Bite, a candy bar that was marketed as full of vitamins, energy and natural goodness - and great for your sex life. Morgan Pfeiffer had been a little sceptical about the emphasis on sex, but Stoat had proved abundantly right: everything you sold was about sex - and if it wasn't, it could be made to be. In marketing there was very little else. Stoat told him a healthy, energetic, pure body made you one of the beautiful people. And the beautiful people never had any problem getting and enjoying sex. It was only the schmucks, the ones who smoked and drank and didn't eat Brite the Booster Bite who had attraction problems. And as the first six months' sales figures came through all those years ago, proving the argument indisputable, so now, in the same way, Stoat was sure to be right. Janice Gentle with sex, so he assured Morgan Pfeiffer, made great marketing sense. Stoat had called the deceased Mrs Pfeiffer a Very Great Lady for daring to think of it; he did not say that he had suggested it to her in the first place.
Morgan Pfeiffer looked through the blue haze of smoke at the photograph on his desk and sighed. Mrs Pfeiffer, deceased, smiled piggily back at him, eyes sunk into ruddy marshmallow cheeks, chins delineated by the Bermuda sun, curvaceous arms of deep rich brown achingly seductive with their potential strength, and those breasts, magnificent things, scarcely held by the scarlet boob-tube, like pneumatic roundels of chocolate blancmange. A full-blown woman. Ah, he thought, where was there such another?
How he missed her. Dammit, that woman had an appetite. If he took out one more glitz-dunked sparrow and watched her push a radicchio stalk around, he thought he'd go pop. Mrs Pfeiffer might have been a woman of whom it was said that the elevator did not go all the way up, but you knew you had something when you got hold of her. And that made her a very desirable person indeed. Nowadays he was permanently seeking distractions to compensate for the loss of such tantalization. There was nothing more lonely in the world than a powder-pink, heart-shaped, double king bed. He picked up the photograph. He'd bet she was giving old St Peter a good time up there; got him off the fish by now for sure. He sat down and shook his head.
He had tried many compensations - even taking a blow-up doll of grand proportions to that pink, flouncy bed, but it lay there, with his arm around it, so mute and cheerless that he had consigned it to the trash can the next morning. He liked the rustle
of candy papers in the bedroom, he liked the smell of Turkish delight on the pillow, he even - hard to believe, but so it was -liked the feel of sugar and biscuit crumbs in his bed, and the sound of a voice, slightly indistinct, mellow with pleasure, talking wanderingly as he squeezed a yielding thigh. Perhaps occasionally he wished she could discuss things other than TV and magazines and stuff like that, but in an imperfect world Belinda Pfeiffer was pretty well irreplaceable.
Irreplaceable. He had found that to his cost when he bought the services of a human replica. And the woman had looked all right. Built like a double-dose Mae West, she had lain on the bed, a pink Michelin woman, pink as the bed, and smiling in the correct porcine manner. But alas, just as he began to get a feeling for the thing, just as the squeezing of her thigh became a heightened experience where reality and Mrs Pfeiffer, deceased, became entwined, the lady of the night had — as requested -begun to talk. And alas, not only was she built like a double-dose Mae West, but she misconstrued the kind of talk required . . . Mae West minus the wit. Dirty, very dirty.
He decided not to try again. No, there was nothing to life nowadays except profit and success. Nothing.
'Lust, greed, murder, betrayal,' mused Morgan Pfeiffer, 'with a moral ending.' He checked the notes that Enrico Stoat had left. 'And six sexual encounters distributed throughout the book. Sensitively handled.'
He would have liked to add, 'And a big heroine,' but good marketing sense prevailed. Ah well. Nothing more to do now than to sit back and wait.
Chapter Thirteen
AT Dog Street Rohanne took Sylvia's keys from Gretchen. Gretchen was sorry about this and felt she had every right to be their keeper, but Rohanne's air of authority made this impossible. Instead, like an anxious, scurrying bull-pup, she followed the carapacial Rohanne into the building and up the narrow stairs. It was impractical to ascend two abreast since the space did not permit it, and Gretchen continued to follow close on Rohanne's heels up to the top flight. Rohanne, feeling the bull-pup pursuit, went at quite a lick, with the result that, by the time they reached the final landing, both women were puffing and groaning and the inner state of Rohanne's leathers was the stuff of which top-shelf publications are made. Unab
le to go up any further since Sylvia Perth's apartment was the last in the building, Rohanne stopped suddenly, and with impromptu rigidity, at the top of the stairs facing a door. Gretchen, who had found keeping her head down as she went helped her breathing, was unprepared for stopping, and, at some speed, head-butted Rohanne in the coccyx.
Experiment for yourselves: on approaching an unknown door that has both a lock and a separate handle for turning, you will grasp the handle and turn it as you apply the key to the hole. You will not expect the door to give way until the key has done its duty, and in most instances your assumption would be correct. But Erica von Hyatt, not having a key of her own and having made her earlier milkmanward sortie, had forgotten to resnag the lock - people who have lived in cardboard boxes and under railway arches tend, on the whole, to be unmindful of locking procedures. With the result that, instead of the cool, calm, dignified and slightly menacing entrance that Rohanne Bulbecker had planned for herself, she went into the deceased Sylvia's apartment nose first, at some speed and in a manner that the English are pleased to call colloquially 'arse over tit'. Followed immediately by Gretchen O'Dowd, who, less graceful than her transatlantic sister, though none the less urgently propelled, went in very fast and then down like a sack of potatoes right on top of her.
There are some who, upon entering a room of unknown possibilities, might feel quite philosophical about doing it on all fours and beneath the body of another. Rohanne Bulbecker was not one of these. The opprobrious messages meant for Gretchen O'Dowd, who lay across her like an iron girder on a Japanese house, were more or less lost in the thick white pile of the carpet into which the Bulbecker nose was firmly pressed. What opprobrium did escape was delivered with great authority. All the more galling, then, that the pinion should remain firmly where she was.