A Man of Affairs

by John D. MacDonald

  “I understand my sainted sister has arrived at a decision. About Warren. And she’s elected you.”

  “Do you object?”

  “No, I don’t object. Hell, you know Warren. I can get along with him when nobody else can. And I don’t want to sound disloyal to Louise, but … Oh, the hell with it.” He picked up the spear gun.

  “Wait a minute. I want to know what you think.”

  He sighed and put the gun aside again. “First I have to explain about me. I spent a lot of years learning not to give a damn. Our father was a technically honest and emotionally dishonest man. He was that funny kind of hypocrite who can’t admit for one split second that he ever did a wrong thing, ever made any kind of a mistake. And that made him an overbearing, emotionally crippling son of a bitch. It was like trying to live with a righteous avalanche. There just wasn’t room in the house for anybody else’s emotions or ideas. I reacted by not giving a damn. I guess by the time I was fifteen, the habit was set. Maybe it made me a good fighter pilot. Anyway, if I didn’t give a damn, there wasn’t any way he could hurt me. Without the money, I’d probably be a bum. But I inherited money and I married money. So I can play and I like to play, and so does Puss and it’s a nice pleasant grasshopper life and I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it. Now take Louise. She went the other way. She decided to suffer. You can feed on your own suffering, you know. And it becomes just as necessary after a while as the air you breathe. She’s lived with a tragic picture of herself for a long time. And when she got married, which surprised me that she would, she married another peck of trouble. Warren makes her miserable. But that’s just exactly what she has to have. If Warren tried in every way to make her happy, it still wouldn’t work, because then she’d have to invent reasons for suffering. In a funny kind of way, it’s a good marriage. I’m not trying to make her out as some kind of a monster. Our father was the monster. But it’s something you should understand about her. And, if you understand it, maybe you can help her get over it. Maybe you could do it. I wish you all kinds of luck, and I know I’ve talked too damn much.”

  “I think I see what you mean.”

  “Don’t let it put you off.”

  I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and looked toward the house. Louise came down across the lawn. “Tommy, they want us to come sign those proxies now.”

  “Okay,” he said and stood up.

  “You’re sure you understand this is the best thing to do, like Sam says?” she asked him.

  “Sign, schmine,” he said. “A signature you want, a signature you get. I don’t bother my furry little head with the details, sis. All I want to do is get the spear gun fixed.”

  “Tommy, do you have to be so … trivial about everything?”

  “I’m a trivial-type guy.”

  I stood and watched them go up across the graded lawn toward the main house, side by side. I had a feeling that something was slipping away from me. I wanted to go roaring after them and say, “It’s all a big mistake, kids. Honest Sam Glidden is giving you and your children, if any, and your children’s children a classic financial raping. And I get a big payoff. But maybe the only payoff will be in money because all of a sudden little sister doesn’t look quite so good to me. So don’t sign.”

  But of course I stood there and watched them out of sight, thinking of how strongly they resembled each other on the surface and how different they were down underneath where it counted.

  Then I went back to my room to get more cigarettes. Bridget and Elda Garry and Guy Brainerd were having a conference on the veranda over a typed manuscript. Bridget winked at me without changing the bright-little-girl-in-school expression she was wearing. I liked the roundness of her face and the way her nose was slightly up-tilted. They were in shadow, but her hair looked as though a shaft of the sunlight had found its way down through the veranda roof.

  When I came out of my room I met Warren Dodge just coming out of his. His face was improving slightly. The swelling had gone down and his eye was open, though not far, but he wore interesting shades of saffron, blue and purple.

  “Welcome to the club,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You look like hell. I never expected you to tie one on. I thought all you business wheels kept your guard up night and day. So you wouldn’t spill any trade secrets. Maybe, for Chrissake, you’re human. Anyhow, you’ve got one daisy of a right hand on you. Like being slapped with a cinder block. It was the first time in my life, compadre, that I didn’t get back on my feet when I could have. I didn’t happen to see any particularly bright future in it.”

  We walked along together. I said, “I don’t know what was holding me up.”

  “Neither do I. I tagged you good. Let’s find John and get a drink made. How does a rum sour sound?”

  “Fine, if it’ll stay down.”

  We found John and he brought ice and made us a drink at the playroom bar.

  “Who was it in your room Thursday afternoon, pal?” he asked.

  “No comment.”

  “I vote for Murphy. Process of elimination. That’s a very choice bit, Glidden. When the Crowns took off, it screwed up a campaign I was working on. I would have hit pay dirt today. Not the kid. Tessy. So with that dream broken, I think I’ll switch my sights to Murphy. Any objection?”

  I was unprepared for anger that was like a half-blinding sheet of flame. “Stay the hell away from her!”

  He grinned at me. “I wasn’t sure it was her. So I ran a little check. Thanks for the information. John, this one was a little too sweet.”

  I left him there. I went to the pool. I swam ten lengths of the pool before my anger was entirely gone. When I climbed out I discovered I had forgotten to take the cigarettes and matches out of the waistband of my swim trunks. After I got a fresh pack from my room, I saw that Tommy was out beyond the end of the dock in fins, face mask and snorkel. Louise and Puss were sitting on the dock watching him. He did a surface dive and disappeared.

  He seemed to be gone for a long time. He came up just as I reached the dock. He swam over and clung to the stern of one of the skiffs, breathing hard.

  “Pretty good hole out there,” he said. “Lot of stuff in it.”

  “Please be careful, honey,” Puss said. She seemed very subdued.

  A few minutes later Warren came down to watch, and so did Cam Duncan and Amparo Blakely. The five of us sat in a row on the edge of the dock.

  After a few more tries, Tommy swam over to the dock and looked up at us and said, “I’m getting pooped. Anybody want to try? How about you, Sam?”

  “I’ve never done it.”

  “Nothing to it. I can adjust the fins and mask to fit you. And it’s damn beautiful down there. Clearest water I ever saw.”

  I gave him a hand and helped him up.

  “There’s about six big ’cuda hanging around, but they won’t bother you. They’re just curious.”

  I stared at him and said, “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not kidding. Hell, I’ve been in with them before, off the Florida Keys.”

  I thought of the head of the yellowtail and I said, “Tommy, I wouldn’t go down there with those things for ten thousand dollars.”

  “Chicken!” Warren said harshly.

  EIGHT

  Violence gives no warning, usually. But sometimes there is a curious forewarning. The world changes in a strange way. It can happen at an automobile race, or a bullfight, or at an air show—anywhere where death is an acknowledged participant.

  One moment everything will be going well, the cars roaring nimbly into the turns, the torero fixing the bull for the kill, the airplane circling high, ready to release the parachutist.

  And then the world will change. Colors will seem more vivid, outlines and shapes more precise, and there will be an odd feeling of hush. And soon, then, you know it will happen. The careening car will slam the wall to send the rag doll driver flopping high, pinned for one endless moment against the blue of
the sky. The bull will swerve and when the horns come up they will thud deep into blood and tissue and bone, and the torero, carried high and jolting ludicrously, will ride his life out on the white horns and the hump of throwing muscle. The tiny figure will come endlessly down through the holiday sky from the circling plane, the tangled white of the chute as straight as the tail of a comet, and it will strike the baked August earth and rebound horridly to the height of a tall man. And the crowd noise is always the same, a grating concerted shriek that dies into a long gasping sigh.

  “Chicken!” he said, and I looked along the dock at his bloated face with its look of contempt and hatred. And I felt the familiar hush that precedes violence.

  “Don’t be childish,” I said as casually as I could. “I just don’t have any warm and kindly feelings toward barracuda. Frankly, they scare hell out of me.”

  He stood up. “Chicken bastard,” he said. “Give me the stuff, Tommy.”

  Puss’s short laugh had a brittle sound. Louise said, “Honey, Tommy’s very good at it and you’ve only done it three or four …”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “She could be right,” Cam Duncan said.

  Warren was fixing the mask strap and Tommy, on his knees, was adjusting the heel straps of the fins. “You will shut up too,” Warren said harshly. There seemed to be a driving urgency about him. I knew it was related to everyone having seen him refuse to get up the night we fought.

  He jumped off the dock, spat into the mask, rinsed it out and adjusted it. Tommy leaned down and handed him the spear gun. “Don’t be stupid enough to try for a ’cuda, boy,” Tommy said.

  “I’m not crazy,” Warren said. He swam out from the dock, swam to where Tommy had been diving.

  “Wait a minute!” Tommy called. “If you spear something, don’t …” But Warren was gone. Tommy looked nervous and uncertain. He said, in a flat voice, “I was going to tell him that if he speared anything, not to haul it in. The ’cuda might try to hit it when he’s taking it off the spear. But he’s not likely to get anything. And maybe he knows enough not to do that anyway.”

  I hadn’t seen the others get up, but we were all standing. With the angle of the sun and the wind riffles on the water, we could not see below the surface. And the world was very still.

  He broke through the surface, head craned back, cords in his throat standing out. And he broke the silence with a monstrous bray of pain and outrage and terror. And the water around him was a red stain.

  Tommy hit the water first in a flat racing dive. I saw Puss poise herself to dive in and I pulled her back and dived from where she had been standing. I heard Warren yell again, and this time it seemed to me there was less body to the yell. Tommy reached him before I did and had started to tow him toward shore, pulling him along by one wrist, kicking strongly. The red spread thickly in the water For a few seconds I could not figure how to help without getting in the way. Then I swam behind Warren, ending each stroke with a firm push against him. When we reached shallow enough water, I picked him up and carried him to the low sea wall and laid him on the grass. Tommy ripped the mask off. Warren was whining weakly, his eyes squeezed shut, rolling his head from side to side.

  “Hit him twice,” Tommy said.

  “Tourniquets, quick!” Amparo Blakely said in a voice of command. Puss was vomiting into the grass a dozen feet away. Cam jumped down into a skiff and he had a pocket knife out and was cutting lengths of nylon mooring line. I ran to the dock house, vaguely aware that people were pouring out of the house and hurrying down across the lawn. I snatched an unrigged glass boat rod and snapped it across my thigh, and snapped it again, and ran back with two pieces.

  “The arm first,” Amparo said. He had been hit on the under side of the right upper arm, close to the armpit. Half the biceps muscle was gone. Amparo was groping for the artery with her fingers, but the blood continued to pulse strongly with each beat of his heart. He had lost consciousness. Cam slipped the nylon loop over the inert and ruined arm and I inserted the piece of glass rod. I twisted it quickly as Amparo tried to work the loop into proper position. But it was slippery work, and the great bite had been taken so close to the armpit that there was very little room.

  The jetting pulse of blood slowed and seemed to stop. Amparo sat back on her heels, her face gray, her bloodied hands resting carelessly on the thighs of her ruined skirt.

  “Does that stop it?” I asked. She shook her head and I saw that I had misunderstood. I looked at his face. I released the improvised tourniquet and stood up. The other wound had stopped bleeding too. It was on the outside of his right thigh, slightly toward the back, and up near the buttock. It was badly shredded, and wide enough and deep enough to hold a grapefruit.

  Warren did not look big any more. He looked grayish and quite shrunken and very old. The green swim fins were the final touch of ludicrous horror. Nobody had to ask if he was dead. It was far too obvious that his life had run quickly into the roots of the green lawn.

  I saw Skylark standing beyond all the others, eyes wide and white, and I could see his lips soundlessly forming the word barracuda over and over. Mike Dean looked as if he had bitten into something very sour. Tommy was slowly pounding his fist into his palm and there was no expression on his face. Bowman wore a strange expression. He stood with his head tilted a little, and he looked puzzled, as though he heard some distant sound he couldn’t identify. I wondered if he was acquiring his first true awareness of his own mortality. Bonny Carson stood spreadlegged, three fingers in her mouth, looking like a soiled, elderly, frightened child. Guy Brainerd’s face expressed sincere and dignified disapproval of the entire incident. Elda Garry stood beside him, hugging his arm, her face against his shoulder. Bridget stood with her eyes shut, swaying. And I saw her lower herself to the grass in a gingerly way in a half faint.

  And then I looked at Louise. She stood not far away, leaning forward from the waist, stood in a strangely tense way. From her expression she seemed not so much to be looking at him as inward at herself in a hypnoidal trance. And on her face was a revealing and sickening expression of exaltation. It was as though, of all the girls in her class, she had been selected to play Joan of Arc.

  “For God’s sake, cover him up!” Bundy squealed, breaking the spell that was over all of us. Cam went quickly and quietly to the dock house and came back with a paint-stained tarp and spread it over the body. Louise flung herself onto the tarp, sobbing in a lost and hysterical way, and everybody, it seemed, tried to ask questions at once.

  “How did it happen?”

  But only Warren knew how it had happened.

  Tommy, later on, after he had dived and retrieved the spear gun and found that it had been fired, and found a fragment of fish flesh adhering to the barb that hadn’t been there before, made a logical reconstruction of what had probably happened.

  “He nailed a fish. God knows what it was. Then he should have come up and got out of the water and hauled the spear line up and hoped no barracuda would nail the struggling fish. But he wanted to show off. So he pulled the spear toward him. The blood in the water and the flapping fish got the barracuda all heated up, and they flashed in. I’d guess that one nailed the fish and the next one hit him in the leg. Then when he threw his arms up to head for the surface, another one hit at the white underside of his arm, because it may have looked something like a fish. It’s a damn sorry way to die and the only good thing you can say about it is it didn’t last very long.”

  As with all emergencies, it had to be handled by the conference method. Mike, Bowman, Amparo, Cam and Guy went into conference, and in a half hour they had all the answers. Bowman had contacted Nassau and had gotten in touch with the proper officials. A man who could issue the necessary certification of accidental death would fly up from Nassau to West End to inspect the body and talk to the witnesses. He had also made contact with the mainland, and Mike’s plane would be at West End. The body would be flown to West Palm Beach and turned over at once to a funeral dire
ctor who would arrange for proper shipment north.

  These decisions were given to us in a meeting of all hands aboard, with Fletcher Bowman acting as spokesman, and Mike Dean not present.

  “Cam will accompany you people,” Bowman said, “and you can be certain he’ll see that everything is handled as quietly as possible.”

  “What do you mean, quietly?” Bridget asked.

  “It isn’t something we want to beat any drums about, is it? Death by barracuda is extremely rare. Maybe, Guy, you can enlighten … your employee.”

  Guy smiled at Bridget, a wise and tolerant smile. “Murphy, dear, I explained to Mike that this isn’t the sort of publicity that helps anyone concerned, or helps the area. We certainly don’t want any tabloid headlines saying ‘Guest of Mike Dean Eaten by Barracuda.’ I’m sorry, Mrs. Dodge. Perhaps that example was distasteful to you. I’m certain that it can be handled in such a way that it will be reported in the press that Mr. Dodge drowned. Knowing Cam as I do, I can safely say that he’ll be able to convince all officials concerned of the wisdom of the decision.”

  “But that isn’t what happened!” Louise said in a small voice. She looked, and sounded, both hurt and disappointed.

  Guy Brainerd’s answer showed he had more perception than I had given him credit for. “It doesn’t have to be a deep dark secret, Mrs. Dodge. After a few days have passed, so the information would no longer be considered newsworthy, I’m sure you can tell your intimate friends, in confidence of course, just what did happen to your husband.”

  She sat back with a frail brave smile.

  I was grimly amused at how quickly the first name rule was beginning to break up. Maybe a sudden and nasty death had made us all aware that we were strangers to one another.

  “When do we go?” Tommy asked.

  “Right after lunch. I believe you’ll have time to pack before lunch. You and your wife and Mrs. Dodge and Cam.”

  “Aren’t I a part of that group?” I asked.

  Cam answered for Bowman. “I suggested that it would be easier and probably go more smoothly if it’s just the members of the family, Sam. Then, when I release the news to the press in West Palm Beach this afternoon, I have a more legitimate reason to handle all press interviews myself. While I’m at the West End Airport this afternoon, I’ll make reservations with Mackay Airlines for you and Guy and Miss Hallowell and Miss Garry to West Palm tomorrow, and while I’m in West Palm today I’ll see what I can do about reservations north by commercial airline for you.”