by Howard Fast
“Al Brody—by golly, it must be ten years. How are you?”
“Alive.”
“Well, that’s positive at least. I hope you’re calling to tell me that you’ve decided to make us one of your clients, on the cuff, of course. That would get this peace movement off the ground.”
“Warren, any time you say. On the cuff.”
“Great. And don’t think I won’t take you up on that. But that’s not why you called.”
“No. As a matter of fact, I’m calling in reference to Andrew Capestone. You’ve been reading about him in the papers.”
“I have. And isn’t that splendid! He’s a good man—a damn good man, brilliant, incisive, creative. He really took the Institute to his heart—and then the divorce came, and it just about destroyed him. As sordid and miserable a mess as I ever heard of. And then he dropped out of sight. I wrote to him, and the letters came back, no forwarding address. Left the law firm he was with, left his friends—just disappeared. And now I read that he’s undertaken this mission to Rhodesia. It’s so typical of him, so right for him. If there were one white man in the world the blacks could trust, it’s Andrew Capestone. Well, he’s back on the right track. What can I do for Capestone?”
“Just some information for me, Warren. I can’t ask Capestone, so I called you.”
“Anything.”
“You knew his wife?”
“Indeed I did. I am not fond of her, but I knew her.”
“Did she marry again after they were divorced?”
“She certainly did. She’s a woman who gets what she wants. But I imagine you know her.”
“Why should I know her?”
“Well, she married a man called Ronald Bellman—he’s the new senator from your state—and I presume you have enough clout to move in their circle.”
I sat there, holding the telephone, silent, my mouth open, staring at Millie.
“Al—are you there?”
“Yes, Warren.”
“Anything else I can do for you?”
“No—no, that’s it.”
“Well, I won’t ask you to keep in touch, because you can be damn certain I’ll be in touch with you. Peace.”
“Peace,” I replied, and replaced the phone in its cradle and sat and stared at Millie.
“Cat got your tongue?”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know. It’s like walking on tar. Did you ever dream that you were walking on wet tar?”
“Will you please tell me what he said?”
“Yes, yes, of course, Millie. He said that Capestone’s ex-wife is presently married to Senator Bellman.”
“No.” Millie was grinning.
“What in hell are you grinning at?”
“I have an instinct for neatness, Al. Haven’t you noticed how neat and pleasant my apartment is? Haven’t you noticed my closets? I line the shelves and edge them with frill. That’s a certain kind of mind, a place for everything and everything in its place. I do jigsaw puzzles. Do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“A pity. You should. So Capestone’s wife married Senator Bellman. It begins to make a little sense, doesn’t it?”
“No, it does not.”
3
On our way up the coast, still south of Santa Barbara, Millie mentioned that it didn’t take too much persuading after all.
“I don’t really care, I suppose.”
“How’s that?”
“I jumped off a roof. Take an impotent fat man of forty-seven years, half Irish, half Jewish, whose wife despises him and who touts for a living—well, what is there between now and the coronary? At least I broke the pattern, and for five days I have been alive. You wouldn’t understand that.”
“Maybe I would. Do you like being alive?”
“I’m not sure I like it. It makes me too nervous. I find my hand shaking. I don’t drink enough for my hand to shake. It never shook before. And I am afraid. There’s something ignominious about being afraid.”
“There’s also something ignominious about the way you were before.”
“I’ll buy that. If I can stay alive without being this nervous, well, it might work.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday, so the office will be closed, and maybe we can find a beach somewhere and practice being alive without being afraid.”
“It’s a nice thought. When we get to Montecito, remember to call the office.”
I sat at a table on the terrace of the restaurant at Montecito, which was a sort of imitation of a Mexican restaurant, with a menu of would-be Mexican dishes, while Millie went to a booth to call the office. She was gone for quite a while, long enough for me to order the Mexican plate for both of us and long enough for the waiter to bring it. There was a soggy mess of beans and enchiladas and stringy red cheese—possibly a new low in “Mexican” cooking. When Millie returned, she looked at it, tasted it and said:
“Well, it does kill the appetite.”
“Do I eat half of it?”
“It’s a pretty restaurant, isn’t it? It’s funny, you remember the way a place looks rather than how the food tastes.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Al, don’t you remember? You sent me up here two years ago to interview Judith Anderson. She has the most beautiful cottage in the world back in the hills a little. She’s a lovely lady. Could you imagine living in a place like this?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t have to eat in the restaurant, I’m a good cook.”
“You’re also my partner. I don’t need a cook. What did Anne say at the office?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me.”
“Why?”
“It’s that business about being alive and being nervous.”
“What happened?”
“Well, it’s like this. When Anne went into your office to put the mail on your desk, there was this urn.”
“What urn?”
“Well, Anne’s mother was cremated, so she recognized it as a funeral urn. The label said, ‘From Andrew Smith to Andrew Capestone.’ Anne doesn’t flap easily, so she unscrewed the top, and it was full of ashes.”
“That bastard!” I started to get up.
“Where are you going, Al?”
“To call that son of a bitch at Loving Care and give him a piece of my mind.”
“I made the call. I spoke to him.”
“And?”
“And he informed me that the crematory is still too hot to remove Mr. Smith’s ashes. They have an old-fashioned crematory and it burns for twenty hours before the ashes are complete.”
“Then what’s all this about the urn?” I sat down now.
“The same game, Al. We should be used to it by now. They want us to know that they’re always a step ahead of us, that we’re pulling no wool over their eyes.”
“Then who was in the urn?”
“Not who—what. Wood ashes, I suppose, from some fireplace. I told Anne to throw it away, that it was a practical joke. By the way, a Mr. Richards called. He said he was expecting you.”
“Richards?”
“Something about the Bureau of Narcotics.”
“Richards—oh, yes. He came in to see me, about the fact that Andrew Smith was an addict at one time. I mean Capestone. But he knew him as Smith, from the hospital records.”
“What do you mean ‘from the hospital records’?”
I was eating the Mexican food now, in large bites.
“Al,” she asked, “why are you eating that horrible mess?”
“Because I am nervous.”
“I don’t like this new aliveness of yours if you’re going to become as fat as a house. I prefer you with no appetite.”
“Then I am depressed. It’s better to be nervous than depressed.”
“Did you ask them at the hospital who came to look at the records?”
“I never thought of it.”
“Al, listen to me.” She sig
naled the waiter and asked him to take away the Mexican plates and to bring us fruit and cheese and coffee instead. “Now listen,” she said. “We are in something, deep in it. It’s very big and at this point it’s complicated. Capestone was in it. His ex-wife was in it. Maybe the senator is in it. Leone was in it. But I suspect that it’s only complicated from our point of view, because we don’t know the part we play.”
“Whatever it is, it’s a damned important part.”
“Precisely.”
The waiter came with cheese and fruit and coffee.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked her. “I didn’t want cheese and fruit.”
“It’s better for you than that slop, and fewer calories.”
“You’re running my life, do you know that?”
“I am not.”
“Oh, you are—make no mistake about it. You worked for me six years and you didn’t run my life.”
“More’s the pity.”
“You keep saying ‘more’s the pity.’ What the hell does that mean?”
“I’m glad you’re getting angry, because it’s a good counterirritant to nerves.”
“I’m not getting angry. But let me tell you this, Millie. I am not leaving a woman who was utterly indifferent to my life to take on one who tells me what to eat and what to do and what to think.”
“You are not taking me on, Al. Not yet. But even if you were, what is so awful about my helping you?”
“I don’t need help.”
“No?”
I munched cheese and stared at her. “OK, what were you going to say?”
“Nothing, Al. Nothing at all.”
“You damn well were. You had that look in your eyes.”
“What look?”
“The look you have when you decide to explain the obvious to me.”
“Do I? Oh, Al, I’m so sorry. I do, don’t I? I’m such a fool. Only you’re wrong. I think you’re the wisest and most decent man in this business. I always felt that way. But I do get hooked on the obvious, don’t I?”
“Well—at times.”
“You’re right. You are absolutely right. I get to be a complete bore, don’t I? I was only going to say that the criminal mind is not brilliant and not clever.”
“Come on. Some of the richest and most successful men in America are crooks.”
“Oh, I agree with that, but this does not mean they’re clever—unless you speak of childlike precocity, the kind that a seven-year-old chess wizard shows. The criminal mind is infantile; it operates within an orbit of infantile omnipotence. And we can outthink them. That’s the important thing, not the guns and the brass knuckles, but understanding the way their minds work and thinking a little better than they do.”
“How do you know all this?” I demanded.
“I took a course in criminal psychology at college. It was a snap course, but very stimulating.”
“All right—how do we outthink them?”
“We begin by deciding not to let them know that we are moving in the dark.”
“And how do we do that when we don’t know who they are?”
“Al, I have a strange feeling that we’ll know very soon.”
4
We were on the last lap of our drive to Big Sur when out of the corner of my eye I saw Millie’s head turn gently to look behind her.
“He’s still there,” I said.
“Oh! You know?”
“He’s been with us since we left Los Angeles. Black Buick. I’ve been watching him in the mirror.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I don’t feel I mind it as much as I might. I’m used to him. I thought of trying to run away—this Caddy will float at a hundred miles an hour—but I’m not sure I want to.”
She nodded. “I’m with you on that.”
It was late afternoon when we reached Big Sur, and at the gas station where I filled my tank, I watched the black Buick sitting half a mile back alongside the road. I asked the attendant how to get to the Hunting and Fishing Club.
“Turn right at Coyote Drive—that’s a mile or two up—and then just keep going up into the mountains until you reach it. It can’t be more than three or four miles.”
It was a beautiful drive. Coyote was a dirt road, hardly wide enough for two cars to pass each other, and we turned and twisted until presently the land fell away and we could look down onto the golden Pacific, the sun dropping into it like a ball of red fire, the air clean and sweet and cool.
Then, suddenly, we were at the lodge—with no sign of the black Buick behind us. It was a fine, rambling building of redwood logs, gabled, with a slate roof. There was parking space on either side of the entrance for about two dozen cars, but only four cars and a pickup truck were parked there now.
I glanced at Millie, and she said, “Drive in, Al, and park over there next to the pickup truck. Play it very cool. Darling, I love you, really—very much. Cool, remember.”
I parked next to the pickup truck. Dusk was gathering, and lights were going on in the windows of the lodge.
“Front door?” I said to Millie.
“Of course.”
We got out of the car and walked to the entrance. It was the kind of lodge they built in California in the twenties, and it had been kept up, the logs glistening with fresh varnish, the brasswork on the door spanking bright. As we moved toward the door, the outside lamps went on, and the door was opened by a servant in green livery, who smiled and held the door aside for us to enter. We walked into a magnificent foyer-living room, a great eight-foot-wide fireplace facing us, a box so large it dwarfed the three enormous logs burning in it. The overstuffed chairs and couches in the room were old-fashioned, but proper for the place, and a huge Oriental rug covered the floor in front of the fire.
“We have been expecting you, Mr. Brody, and you, Miss Cooper,” the man in the green livery said. “Won’t you make yourselves comfortable? The washrooms are over there”—he pointed—“if you care to refresh yourselves. I’ll take your orders for drinks now. Dinner will be at seven.” He waited, his hands clasped, his brass buttons shining.
“Well,” said Millie, “this is very nice indeed. I’ll have a tall Scotch and soda.”
“The same, but a double,” I said.
He moved silently away, and Millie said, “Well, partner, I think we ought to refresh ourselves, as the man said. Don’t you?”
I nodded, having absolutely nothing to say, and entered the room marked with a silhouette of a man, while Millie went into the other. Like the living room, the washroom was of another time, the toilets framed in marble, the sinks cut out of solid marble, gold-plated fixtures, chain boxes above the toilets, but everything clean, shining, the pile of towels soft and inviting. Here, as in the big living room, there was an air of propriety, of calm, moneyed assurance, as if the people who kept up the place were totally and unshakably content with their post-Victorian splendor, untouched by the fripperies of our times. The same held true of the log walls of the living room, hung with elk heads and moose heads, with Remingtons and Bierstadts.
I went back into the large room and selected a couch facing the fire on an angle, sank into the soft luxury of it and stretched out my legs gratefully. Somehow my nervousness had been reduced to a minimum. I found myself thinking that whatever came up, Millie would handle it properly and competently. I was provoked at myself for the thought—and then Millie appeared, looking as bright and fresh in her white sweater blouse and plaid skirt as if she had just stepped out of her morning bath, and dressed precisely as one would dress for an evening at a hunting lodge at Big Sur.
I rose, forgetting the whole thing for a moment and smiling with delight at her appearance and at her fine good looks.
“Sit down, Al,” she said, dropping onto the couch alongside me. “Isn’t this something, this grand old couch and this great fire? Where would you find the like of it today? They don’t make them like this anymore, do they, not fur
niture, not rugs, not fireplaces, not buildings. Everything now is shoddy and fake, plastic junk—we live in a world of things that fall apart before you can cart them to the dump. But this is real.”
“I don’t feel very real,” I said. “Nothing that has been happening to us is very real. For thirty seconds or so, when I saw you come out of the washroom, I forgot about it. Now I am remembering again. God, you looked so beautiful when you walked across the room.”
“Did it go away, or am I still a bit attractive?”
“Not attractive—beautiful. You’re a very beautiful and fascinating woman. But God damn it, Millie, I can’t be romantic now—not if this were the Casbah itself. They were expecting us—do you realize that? Every move that we made, they were on us.”
“Al, we knew they were following us.”
“Then what happens now?”
“We wait and see.”
“You realize we’re apparently the only ones here.”
“There were other cars outside, Al.”
“Then where are they?”
“Al, take it easy. You said you were going to play it cool. You promised me.”
The man in the green livery returned with the drinks and placed them on the coffee table in front of the couch. “Your single, Miss Cooper, and your double, Mr. Brody. Is there anything else I can get you? The waiter will bring you some hors d’oeuvres. If you enjoy cheese, we have some sharp Canadian cheddar that’s very excellent.”
“Well skip the cheese,” Millie said. “Mr. Brody has had his cheese today.” And then she lifted her drink and turned to me. “Cheers.”
“It’s probably poisoned.”
“Don’t be silly, Al. They didn’t bring us here to poison us. They could have done that in L.A.”
“I suppose they could. Well—cheers.”
It was excellent Scotch, and a moment later a waiter—black coat and tie this time—entered with a silver tray, a bowl of beluga caviar, thin toast, chopped onion, chopped egg. He put it down and departed, and Millie spread caviar on toast for me, sprinkled it with egg and onion and said, “Be my guest, Al.”