“That’s what I just said.” Sandy’s tone was exaggeratedly patient. Turning to Don, he said in a mock-whisper, “Don’t ever tell Marina she looks pale. Anything but pale.”
“Got it,” said Don. He proffered’a greasy white bag to Marina. “Want a fry?”
“No thanks. Spoil my big dinner with Sondergard.”
Sandy crumpled his napkin. “God. I forgot that was tonight. You’ll have to talk to him, Don. I ate onions.” He checked his watch. “When’s he supposed to be here?”
“I told him about the news thing, and he said he’d stop by afterward to pick me up.”
“Time enough to gargle.”
As Sandy, straightening his tie, disappeared into the bathroom adjoining his office, Marina wondered again at how easily he seemed to have accepted Bobo’s capricious insistence that she be given the Loopy Doop case. It was she, after all, who’d been on the news, her picture— wearing the lab coat, staring through a microscope at nothing— that had been in the paper. When People magazine called, they’d asked for Marina Robinson. So had the wire services. It was the kind of attention Sandy loved, but he’d made no effort to do anything but coach from the sidelines. His attitude had given Marina some uneasy moments of wondering whether there was some reason he didn’t want to be more closely involved himself.
On the other hand, it was opera season, the busiest time of his year, when he spent most evenings squiring this or that society grande dame or ingenue around to performances and parties. Despite the pictures that ran in the papers of Sandy with various women, both the women and anyone else who cared to know knew that Sandy’s serious love for the past few years had been Don. Don hated opera, and refused to attend.
The phone buzzed, and Don sat up. “Your line, Marina.” He answered, and raised his eyebrows at her as he punched the “hold” button. “It’s Patrick.”
“I’ll go take it on my phone.”
“But of course.”
Marina stepped out of Sandy’s office onto the open metal catwalk that surrounded it. Sandy’s office was raised above the floor of the pier on metal supports and was accessible by a fire-escape staircase. As Marina descended to the main floor and walked past the glass-fronted office cubicles on the way to her own, she felt a headache forming behind her eyes. She and Patrick had agreed not to communicate. It had been his choice.
The red blink of the phone button was the only light in her dim office. She sat down at her desk, picked up the receiver, and punched the button. “Patrick?”
“Hi.” Music in the background, of course. A piece she couldn’t quite recognize. He hesitated, then said, “I wanted to be sure you were all right.”
“All right?”
“I’ve seen the stories in the papers. I just saw you on TV. There has to be a lot of pressure.”
Just like Patrick. “I’m fine.”
She heard him draw a long breath. “I was worried that this might be too much like— it might be too much.”
“Too much like Palika Road?”
“That’s what I meant, I guess.”
Why couldn’t he stay out of it? “Palika Road wasn’t exactly an amusement-park ride.”
Several bars of the music came through clearly, but she still didn’t recognize it. Then he said, “I can’t believe you didn’t understand what I meant, so I guess you’re being deliberately snotty.”
Her cheeks were hot. “Listen. Catastrophes are my living. I can’t afford to run screaming into the night when one happens.” She swallowed. “You know that.”
“Actually, I do know that. It was a feeble excuse to call you.”
Neither of them spoke. Then she said, “How are things?”
“Not bad. At the store we’re in the middle of the Christmas madness, selling lots of ‘Jingle Bells’ and the Messiah. The Sidewalk Symphony is making beautiful music except in the horn section. Lucy has dropped out.”
“Not again.”
“Yeah. She’s doing some kind of bodywork, and her bodywork guy told her playing the horn was getting her spine out of alignment.”
“That’s Lucy, all right.”
“It’s really bad in the Vivaldi. Tanner’s just not up to it. And speaking of bad news, it looks like the IRS or the FBI or somebody has finally caught up with me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Guys calling the store to verify that I work there. And Mrs. Dobson told me she’d gotten a call to check that my address is really my address.”
“They said they were from the IRS?”
“No. But what else?”
“Your taxes are OK, aren’t they?”
“Except for my secret Swiss accounts, I am simply a record-and-tape-store manager and sometime orchestra conductor whose meager taxes are paid up to date.”
“Once they crack your American account they’ll realize they’re wasting their time.”
He chuckled. “No doubt.”
The music had stopped. “I’d better go,” she said.
“I love you, Marina.”
She took a deep breath. “See you.” She hung up.
She sat in her darkening cubicle, drumming her fingers on her desk. She could just make out, on the opposite wall, the photograph that looked like a lunar landscape but was really an electron-microscope view of corroded steel.
Patrick knew what was important to him. He might wear frayed sweaters and cords most of the time, but when his orchestra had a performance he showed up in a tux, and insisted that his musicians dress formally too. His Berkeley apartment, in the flatlands off College Avenue, had almost no furniture, but was equipped with an elaborate stereo system and tape deck on which to play his huge collection of recorded music. He decided what was important to him, and he committed himself to it. It shouldn’t have surprised her, then, that he had wanted to commit himself to her.
Which was the last thing she wanted. When he talked about living together, maybe getting married sometime, she felt numb. Worn out with it, pushed to the wall, she had compared her feelings to an alloy of metals: “Say this particular alloy is made to hold ten pounds of weight, OK? Its nature is to hold ten pounds. Put eleven pounds on it, and it breaks. It isn’t made to hold eleven pounds.”
“So what we’ve had together is ten pounds, and what I want is eleven pounds.”
“Something like that.”
“No matter how much I want it to, it won’t hold eleven pounds.”
“It can’t hold eleven pounds, Patrick. It can’t do it. It isn’t made to do it. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it.”
Patrick was an optimist. He thought things could change. She was— not a pessimist, but a realist. Eric Sondergard was probably here by now. She’d take a minute to brush her hair and then she’d go.
6
“Dessert?” Sondergard looked inquiringly at her as the waiter hovered.
She shook her head. “Just coffee.”
“Two coffees.” As the waiter moved off Sondergard drank the last of his wine and said, “Delicious.”
Somewhat to Marina’s surprise it had been delicious, and not all that unpleasant. She hadn’t been sure what to expect when Sondergard invited her to dinner to discuss Loopy Doop, but had imagined the best she could hope for was an indifferent meal in a dim, half-empty hotel restaurant. Instead, Sondergard had brought her to one of San Francisco’s best fish places, where the lights were bright, the bar loud, smoky, and crowded with people drinking liquor instead of white wine, the booths dark wood and taller than head-height, the waiters middle-aged, and the menus printed every day. Sondergard had surprised her.
He had surprised her, too, by his cordial, even friendly, manner. She had expected at least coldness, if not outright hostility, but ever since she had walked into Sandy’s office to find him chatting with Don while Sandy took a phone call, Sondergard had been extremely nice. There were deep lines from his nose to his mouth, and
light blue circles under his eyes, but these were the only evidence of strain. He had listened seriously while she explained, over dinner, the shape the investigation would take, and had asked questions that probed but didn’t bully. He had even volunteered a few remarks about his wife and two teenaged children and had asked Marina why she’d wanted to be an engineer. As dinners with clients went it merited a pretty good rating. When the coffee came, she leaned back, feeling her performance to be over, and started to relax.
Sondergard stirred his coffee, gazing into his cup. “I have to confess something to you.”
Marina was instantly wary. She hated it when people said things like that. “Confess?”
He raised his eyes to hers and she felt a slight jolt of attraction. Watch out. “I’m afraid of what you might find,” he said. “Scared to death.”
She was speechless. He wasn’t going to tell her how everything had been done by the book and he had nothing to hide? Didn’t he know how the game was played? When she thought she could sound casual she said, “What are you talking about?”
He leaned forward. “You met my boss.”
“You mean Bobo—Mr. Bolton?”
“I mean Mr. Bolton. Do you have an idea of what I’m bucking?”
“I don’t quite—”
“Let me explain. There are a hundred and fifty Fun Worlds in the country. I’m supposed to be in charge of them. Only I’m not, because nominally he is. Mr. Bolton is a wonderful old gentleman, and he started the company and God knows he should have a say, but— do you see what I’m getting at?”
“I think so.”
“Hell, Marina— I hope I can call you Marina?— I spend half my time trying to uncover what he’s done and fix it. He countermands my orders, wants to make sure cronies of his from way back stay on the payroll, goes over requisitions and decides five thousand of something will do instead of ten. I try to catch everything, but some of it’s bound to slip by. And then—” He opened his long-fingered hands, palms upward.
“You mean he might’ve done something that led to the Loopy Doop collapse?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“But what?”
“I have no idea.”
Marina stared at the few golden crumbs of sourdough crust littering the tablecloth.
“Listen.” Sondergard’s voice was husky. “I wouldn’t let the old man take the blame. If the company’s at fault, put it on me. That’s how it should be. But still— I’m not anxious to go down the tubes for somebody else’s mistake. Do you understand?”
His face was slightly flushed now, making his pale eyes and the shadows beneath them bluer. Marina nodded. “Sure.”
“I don’t know why I’m bringing it up, except to ask you to keep me closely informed. I know you’ll be reporting to him, but I’d like you to stay in touch with me, too.”
“I will.”
Trying to digest what he’d said, Marina gazed at him. Instead of thinking about his remarks, though, she thought how good he looked. Spare and elegant, like Loopy Doop. No indication of need in his demeanor, nor of sloppy over-generosity. Exactly enough of everything.
Nothing could be easier, really, than for him to stop at her place and stay with her a while before going back to his wife and kids on the Peninsula. It might be pleasant, and it would be so much less draining and irritating than dealing with somebody like Patrick. She wondered briefly what Sondergard would say if she suggested it, then realized that he’d certainly say yes. Regretting that it wasn’t going to happen, she sipped her coffee and found that it had gotten cold.
7
STRESS
Parts break for one reason only: stress. That’s an easy diagnosis and in the end an uninformative one, because there are many different kinds of stress. In metals, for example, a torn surface means overload. Wavy marks mean fatigue. Grains indicate corrosion. The way to identify the kind of stress a material has been under is to study the break closely.
Why Breakdown?
Marina curbed the wheels and got out of her car into a pool of brightness from the street light. The narrow, winding street in the Berkeley hills was deserted. A light burned on the front porch of Clara’s big brown-shingled house. Marina stood for a moment, breathing the cold, foggy, eucalyptus-scented air, trying to clear her head before she crossed and rang the bell.
Her head wouldn’t clear. When she blinked, she saw green numbers jumping on the insides of her eyelids— the numbers she’d been staring at on her computer terminal before she left the office. She tried not to blink, but her eyes burned and she blinked anyway.
The call from the boy’s uncle hadn’t helped— a stammering, embarrassing monologue about how she had to find the guilty party because when she did, the uncle would— well, he wouldn’t say exactly what he was going to do, but— she wanted to scream at him to leave her alone, stop wasting her time. Not that she was doing much except wasting it herself.
Or Bobo was wasting it for her. He insisted on daily reports in person, and in order to be nearby he had taken a suite at the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill instead of staying at home in Hillsborough. Every afternoon he had tea served for her in his little glass-walled, bubble-like solarium, and as she talked Marina had the sensation that she was floating over San Francisco, seeing the high rises of downtown, the hills, the bridges, the bay, from a detached, hermetically sealed height.
Bobo looked ravaged— his eyes red, his face doughy. Sometimes he seemed to be listening to what she said, but more often he was distracted. Occasionally he told her anecdotes about his early days with the circus, and Marina, thinking of the work waiting for her back at the office, bit down hard on the inside of her cheek as she nodded at him.
The little boy would live, a quadriplegic. The newspapers had printed a school picture showing a kid with floppy hair, a gap-toothed smile. She kept drawing a blank on his name, but it might be Tommy, or Ronnie. Agit. There was no reason to think about Agit More, the Indian boy, and only somebody like Patrick, who understood nothing, would imagine there was. The uncle had been drinking, she thought. “Sweetest kid,” he had said, “sister’s little boy,” and if he found out whose fault— When she closed her eyes this time she saw, instead of green numbers, smoke and flames.
Forget it. Forget it. Go talk to Clara. She started across the street toward the porch light.
Clara was sometimes Marina’s therapist. The relationship had continued off and on since Marina had returned from India. When Marina felt she loathed and resented Clara to the point that she couldn’t bear to look at her wizened little face, her ever-so-exquisite clothes, couldn’t stand her superior, patronizing attitude any longer, she would stop seeing her for months or years. Eventually, Marina would call Clara and Clara would take her back with what seemed to Marina perfect indifference.
Now Clara had almost given up her practice. Marina’s sessions with her these days were more in the nature of visits. Each time Marina saw Clara, Clara looked more feeble. Marina resented that more than anything else— more than Clara’s pushing and pushing her to talk about Halapur, and insisting that she say Catherine’s name. When Marina saw Clara’s hand quiver as she picked up a teacup, heard the fatigue in her low voice, she felt furious.
A few moments after she rang the bell, the door opened a crack, and Mrs. Daughtry, Clara’s nurse, peered out. Marina saw the glint of a security chain that hadn’t been there before. “It is you,” Mrs. Daughtry said, and unhooked the chain and stood back to let her in. As Marina walked down the polished hallway she heard the chain tinkle as Mrs. Daughtry slid it back into place.
Clara sat in front of the fire, tiny and gray, wearing a quilted jacket of printed yellow silk, an afghan tucked around her knees. The firelight was reflected in the beveled glass fronts of the bookcases, and flickered on the teapot and cups on the end table. When Clara poured, Marina saw the tremor and wondered if it was worse.
“I saw you on the news,” Clara said.
“It’s a big case. The biggest
I’ve ever had.” As always when she was with Clara, Marina felt herself starting to talk fast, rushing to get everything said. Usually, Clara’s attention was obviously focused on Marina. Tonight, though, Marina thought Clara’s mind was on something else.
When Marina finished talking about Loopy Doop, Clara leaned her head against the back of her chair and closed her eyes. Disconcerted, Marina said nothing. After a few moments, Clara said, “I had a shock. It has left me feeling— very bad. Someone broke into my house.”
The idea of an intruder here, among the books, the lemon-scented wood, the ceramic vases, was unsettling. “Was anything stolen?”
“Nothing at all. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to know anyone had been here. I was asleep upstairs, and Mrs. Daughtry had gone out for the afternoon.”
“What happened? Did you hear somebody?”
“I heard nothing. I only realized someone had been here because, as you know, I lead an extremely orderly life. I recognize it as an obsession, of course.” Clara smiled self-deprecatingly. “You probably remember that on the desk in my office there is a crystal paperweight on an ebony stand. The stand is really a box, where I keep the keys to my desk and my filing cabinet. When I came down later in the afternoon, I saw immediately that the paperweight and stand had been moved. They weren’t moved far, you understand. But moved.”
“But couldn’t Mrs.—”
“She never goes into my office, and besides, she says not. She was away, in any case, and had it been disturbed earlier I would have noticed. Once I did notice, I saw other things as well. Some disarrangement of the materials in my desk drawers. Scratches where someone forced the lock to get into the room through the sliding glass doors.”
“Did you call the police?”
“I called the police, and I called the locksmith. The police came, they looked, but there is nothing they can do. Nothing was stolen, after all. The Berkeley police have worse crimes to think about.
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 67