There was a band on a raised platform at the far end of the room. The place in between was dotted with people dancing and glittering.
James Bond, of course, could have walked into that situation and owned it. I was not James Bond. I was, all of a sudden, little Matty Cobb from Manhattan, sneaking in with the grown-ups. It was as if the class system was serving notice that I hadn’t escaped it as easily as I thought.
Then I remembered Carol Burnett’s trick for not being nervous at auditions—picture the person auditioning you on the toilet.
I didn’t go so far as to picture a hundred rich people sitting on commodes (each of which would undoubtedly flush in a different way), but I did get a laugh out of it, and that broke the spell.
“Thank you,” I whispered to Roxanne.
“What for?” she whispered back.
“For not living in this world,” I said. “For not making me live in it.”
“What do you think I was running away from?”
“More than this,” I said.
“Sure, but this was a big part of it. Be ready to make nice.”
I said, “Huh?” and looked around; it took me a second or two to realize what she was talking about.
There hadn’t been a trumpet fanfare or a stentorian announcement of who we were when we entered (not that I would have put it past whoever was organizing the party), but through some arcane ballroom telegraph, our Presence Was Known, and Lady Arking was bearing down on us with hostessy good wishes.
“How do you do,” she said to both of us. “I am truly glad you could come. The ambassador will be so delighted when he gets here.”
“I’m glad we haven’t upstaged him.”
“No, he’s been delayed by the fog. It’s quite inconvenient.”
I reflected that her ladyship, slowly but surely, was regaining her imperious style, despite the fact that the Aliou mess remained as messy as ever. She was dressed in her trademark bright red, this time in an evening gown of shimmering satin, like Roxanne’s purple number. But where the shimmering fabric on Rox suggested a gift wrap concealing something wonderful, on Lady Arking it looked like armor.
Off in the distance, Phoebe, in some fluffy orange thing, gave me a playful wave. I ignored it.
“I’ll introduce you to him as soon as he arrives,” Lady Arking said, and smiled a combined blessing and dismissal.
I left Rox to mingle, and went to see if I could find us something nonalcoholic to drink, by no means a sure thing at any English gathering. I was making good progress across the dance floor, since the fog had held down the crowd, when I ran into Bernard Levering.
In my current mood, it was nice to see a familiar face. I greeted him like a brother. “Bernard!” I said.
“Cobb, you bastard,” he sneered. “I ought to smash your bloody face.”
19
“Here’s a little project our Blue Peter viewers might like to try at home.”
Janet Ellis
Blue Peter, BBC
I LOOKED AT HIM.
“You,” I said, “are the last thing I need. What’s eating you, anyway?”
“As if you didn’t know.”
“God, I hate that. Look. You tell me what you think the problem is. If you think I already know it, add hypocrisy to the list of complaints.”
Bernard looked puzzled.
“How drunk are you?” I asked.
“Hah!” he said. “I am totally drunk. I am blind pissed drunk. I find it hard to believe I am able to stand up and articulate.”
“If that’s the case,” I said, “how do you propose to smash my bloody face in?”
He mulled that one over.
“It might present a bit of difficulty,” he allowed, “but I mean to have a bloody good try!”
I managed to catch his fist before he got it up too high, and convince him to relax it without doing anything drastic—i.e., hitting him, hurting him, or knocking him off his drunken balance. Anybody seeing us probably thought we were exchanging a club handshake.
My restraint seemed to infuriate him all the more.
“Bastard,” he hissed. “I ought to—”
I tightened my grip on his wrist a little. He winced. “You ought to control yourself. Listen, Bernard, I don’t know Lady Arking as well as you do, but somehow I doubt she’d appreciate a brawl during this occasion.”
“Stuff her. And stuff you, too.”
“Unlikely, in either case. Suppose we find a seat, and you can tell me what I did, okay? If we stand here holding hands like this, people are going to get ideas. We might even wind up with our own sitcom on Channel Four.”
Bernard liked that one. It made it possible for me to lead him away.
“One thing about you, Cobb. You’ve got a great sense of humor. You’re a bastard, but you’ve got a great sense of humor.”
“I sure do,” I said ruefully, and that was so funny, he had to be off laughing again.
Actually, I did better than find a seat. I found his wife. And my fiancée at the same time. They were seated at a table picking out some hors d’oeuvres from a silver tray proffered by a uniformed waiter. The waiter was good. His face and body language said that it was his greatest pleasure on earth to stand there until the next ice age, if necessary, waiting for the ladies to make up their minds.
I got Bernard to the table, and he joined the fun, though I admit he made up his mind a lot faster than the women did. It was good that he eat something, anyway. It would slow down the absorption of any alcohol remaining in his stomach, assuming his bloodstream could hold any more.
He ate very fastidiously. While he did so, I said hello to the ladies. Sandy kissed me on the cheek, and we picked a few snacks ourselves, and the waiter stifled a scream of relief as he was finally allowed to straighten his back.
I had always liked Sandy. She was a looker in the big-featured, big-boned way of the pre-anorexia Carly Simon. A definite New York type, with the no b.s. attitude and the quick wit that went with her looks.
“Okay, Matt,” she said, “what have you done to him?”
“Oh, don’t you start. He came up to me and said he ought to smash my bloody face in.”
“Omigod,” Sandy said. “He didn’t try to do it, did he?”
I told her the attempt had been nipped in the bud with no harm done to anybody’s person or reputation.
“The trouble is,” I went on, “that I can’t get him to tell me why he thinks he ought to be mad at me.”
“Really, Matt, we’ve always been friends, but can you honestly blame him?”
“Cut it out! I don’t know what I can blame and not blame. All I know is that an old friend of mine is very drunk, and he offered to rearrange my face at the risk of job and possible arrest.”
“Arrest?” Roxanne asked. “Matt, he didn’t even hit you.”
“I said at the risk of. I say nothing of the risk of my knocking his block off, but I have been in a bad mood lately and I almost swung first and asked questions later. You hear me, Bernard?”
Almost certainly, Bernard did not. He had his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. He was staring straight ahead with a fixed grin on his kisser, and little buzzing snores escaped from the corners of his mouth.
His wife appraised him.
“This is good. This is the final stage. If everybody leaves him alone, he’ll sleep just like that for forty-five minutes. When he wakes up, his forearms will be numb, and he’ll have a killer headache, but he’ll be sober. Trust my Bernard to figure out a way to have the morning after on the same night.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be back in forty-five minutes to ask him what his problem is. Want to dance, Rox?”
This was a crock, and she knew it. I do not dance. Still, she said sure, and rose to come with me.
Rox was in the middle of telling Sandy what a pleasure it had been to meet her when Sandy said, “Matt. Roxanne. Wait, please.”
We sat.
Sandy looked hard at me.
“You really didn’t know what’s going on?”
I made a frustrated noise in my throat. “What is it, something in the air in this country? How many times do I have to say something before anybody believes I’m really saying it?”
Sandy put her hand on mine, just for a second.
“Matt, I’m sorry. And when Sleeping Beauty over there wakes up, he’ll be sorry, too. The thing is, if you don’t know what’s going on, I really don’t know what’s going on. What the hell is she up to?”
I thought I caught the drift. “By ‘she,’ I assume you mean Phoebe?”
Sandy was more baffled than ever. “Phoebe? What could that washed-out little shrimp have to do with anything?”
“Yeah,” I said. If she only knew. “I guess I was just being silly.”
“It’s not Phoebe. It’s the Queen Bee. The Boss. Lady Arking.”
“What is she doing? That concerns me, I mean.”
“Matt, she’s organizing this big purge at TVStrato. She’s ordered Bernard to get together confidential dossiers on all the employees. She says there are terrible security leaks in the organization, and she’s going to get rid of them if she has to fire the lot.”
“When was this?”
“This afternoon.”
“Ah,” I said. Apparently, I’d been wrong about Lady Arking beginning to put the whole unfortunate business behind her. What she’d actually done was put it all in front of her, so she could fight it the better. No wonder she’d picked a dress that sat on her like iron.
It occurred to me that she would have been most happy tonight armed with a Winchester repeater (to pick off renegades from horseback), and dressed in an Annie Oakley outfit of buckskin skirt and blouse, both complete with fringe.
“So she’s in heavy paranoia mode. I got the impression when I talked to Bernard that fateful day that she frequently is.”
“Not as badly as this,” Sandy said. “And when Bernard objected to spying on his fellow employees that way, she threatened to get rid of him, as well.”
“She couldn’t do it,” I said. “She couldn’t run the place without him.”
Sandy tightened her lips.
“She thinks she can. Especially since she told Bernard in so many words that you were being brought in to run the screening. And, she implied, anything else you wanted to run. The bitch.”
“She said that, huh?”
“See?” Sandy said. “Now you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you, I believe you. It’s her ladyship I don’t believe. Tell her, Rox.”
“Well, she did offer him a job—to set up a Special Projects department for TVStrato—”
Sandy said, “Yeees?” She sounded like the Great Gildersleeve.
“—But Matt turned her down. Cold. Said he’d only look into aspects of it that were outside the business, and he was only doing that much because we’d become unintentionally involved in the case.”
I noticed Rox’s use of the word “we” and appreciated it. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with it.
“Okay,” Sandy said. “I’m just talking hypothetically here, all right? I mean I know you live together, but you’re not Siamese twins. Maybe Matt has made a deal with the old lady and hasn’t gotten around to telling you yet?”
“Why would he do that?” Roxanne demanded. “Not only are we engaged to be married ...”
Sandy’s face lit up in a wide, unfeigned grin.
“You are? She practically squeaked it. “Mazel tov!”
I love New Yorkers.
Sandy asked when the happy day was; Rox said we were still working on it, which was a pretty tactful way of putting it.
“And even if we weren’t involved with each other, I’m the principal stockholder in the Network; Matt’s a vice-president. I’m not active in running the Network, but if a VP leaves to take another job somewhere, Tom Falzet tells me, if only to be polite. How long could Matt keep it from me? What good would it be doing him if he did?”
Sandy shrugged sheepishly “It was only a hypothesis. A hypothesis? I was never any good at that. Are you trying to tell me, Rox, that if he did that he would lose you?”
“No,” she said. “I’m telling you that if he were the kind of person who would do that, he never would have had me in the first place.”
Sandy nodded wisely. “You’d have to be an idiot to give up that kind of fringe benefit.”
There was that word again. Maybe I was trying to tell me something. I sort of tuned out of the conversation and explored the idea. There were some interesting corridors to probe while I was wandering around in the old subconscious. They led from interesting to fascinating, from fascinating to frightening.
This was the way it always was. I was dashing around in my memory and imagination, opening new doors, tracing connections I hadn’t suspected before.
Sandy and Rox went on talking; I remember odd flashes of the conversation.
“... So glad you can finally get Marshmallow Fluff in this country. When you need a Fluffernutter, you just need one....”
“... Used to be so polite, but nobody queues for buses, anymore ...”
“... My God, look, now the other one’s in a trance, too ...”
“... And don’t worry, if I know Matt, he’ll have a few words to say to Lady Arking when he sees her....”
That last bit broke through.
“Lady Arking!” I said.
“Where?” the two women demanded.
“We’ve got to find her!”
Sandy asked Roxanne if I was always like this.
“Mostly, he’s pretty normal. Sometimes he’s worse.” Rox turned to me. “Matt,” she said, “has something happened?” She sounded just like Cloris Leachman asking Lassie if Jeff was okay. “Something that makes it urgent that we find her right away? Because remember, she’ll come looking for us as soon as the ambassador gets here.”
“No, nothing’s happened, except that a hunch just bit me. Yes, if my hunch is right, we’d better do it right away, and stick with her until I can organize something to wind this thing up.
“Sandy, you can help, too. Can you leave Bernard without his falling over and cracking his head?”
“Sure,” she said. “The one thing I regretted about leaving the Network was never having a chance to get in on one of your Special Projects parties.”
“Is that what they called them? Parties?”
“Usually. I think Harris Brophy started it.”
“Figures. Okay, here’s what you do. Circulate. Find the old lady.”
“Shouldn’t be hard,” Sandy said. “She’s taller than I am, and she’s dressed like a fire engine.”
“That’s right. So find her and stick to her like a limpet. Then don’t let her out of your sight until I find her, okay?”
“Sure,” she said again. “Bernard is going to be sorry he missed this.”
She was off. Roxanne had a strange look on her face, half excitement, half wariness.
“Same instructions for me?” she asked.
“One addition. Before you go looking for Lady Arking, find a phone first. Call Bristow and get him out here.”
“In the fog?”
I had forgotten about the fog.
“Yeah,” I said. “In the fog. He’s got sirens, he won’t mind.”
“This is it, huh, Cobb?”
“Could be. I hope so. I’m sick of this mess.”
“I’ve known you for a long time, Cobb, but this is only the second one of these things I’ve been in on the end of. I don’t much like it. I’m scared.”
I gave her a weak grin.
“Me, too,” I said. “Especially about tonight.”
“I don’t suppose you’d want to give me a little hint of what you’re talking about.”
“Sure. What is this house full of?”
“Tradition?”
I shook my head. “It seems Victorian, but it’s quite new, remember?”
“Food?” Rox asked. “Windows? Gu
est Rooms? Servants? Guests?”
“You think of them as guests,” I said. “Somebody thinks of them as potential suspects.”
“Suspects? You mean ... ?”
“We’ll see. Maybe we’ll just have a nice session with Bristow and then go home. In the meantime, let’s find Lady Arking.”
“Right,” she said. “Phone first, find Lady Arking.”
“Then find me.”
“Right.”
Roxanne kept saying “right,” but she went left, at right angles to Sandy who’d headed straight off across the room. That left the far reaches of the ballroom for me. I decided to got to the far end and work my way back toward the middle.
The crowd, which had looked pretty sparse when we’d first come in, became a teeming multitude when I started trying to sift through it. You’d think it would be easy for a fairly tall man to find a tall woman in a bright red dress no matter how dense the crowd, but you would be wrong.
Of course, it’s a lot less easy if the tall woman in the red dress happens not to be there.
That was the conclusion I found myself facing as I swept the floor of the ballroom, looking and looking. I found Sandy twice, and Roxanne once. Sandy had seen Stephen from a distance, she said the second time.
“How about Phoebe?”
“Her, too. She was talking to some guy from Italian television.”
“Okay,” I said. “The next time you see either one of them, say we’re looking for the old lady. Recruit them into the search. It’ll be a good idea if they know of our concern.”
She wiggled joyfully “This is really exciting,” she said.
“Yeah,” I deadpanned, “I’m all aquiver.”
Roxanne had spoken to Bristow.
“He didn’t like it, but he’s coming.”
“Good. Keep looking.” I told her about the Stephen and Phoebe order.
“Matt?” she said. “Bristow asked me if they should bring guns.”
That twisted a short, harsh laugh out of me.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him you hadn’t said anything about it. He said, well, since you seemed to be running things anyway, he wouldn’t do it without orders.”
“Golly,” I said, “what a card.”
Killed in the Fog Page 17