Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  “I’m sorry I interrupted your story,” she said, mocking his impersonal tone.

  Again there was the fleeting hope of a smile, but he denied it with his voice. “There isn’t much more to tell. Apparently the property wasn’t worth much—it had been on the market for years and years with no one interested—so I thought I might as well hang on to it. In the beginning, I had the devil’s own time even finding it. No road comes in except a goat’s trail down through the notch that Cora and Abe use a couple times a year.”

  “No one else lives here?”

  “Only Cora and Abe—and they sort of belong, like the trout and the deer.”

  “And Cash McCall?”

  Still there was no smile. “I don’t know whether I belong or not. But I built a cabin a couple of years ago. Want to see it?”

  “Of course.”

  He guided her, not back up the path by which they came, but along a ledge of rock on the cliffside. He walked behind her, his arm extended as a guard when the path was narrow. Once she slipped and, instantly, his hand was on the bulge of her hip, solidly sustaining. She moved quickly ahead, escaping the touch of his fingers, charging the shortness of her breath against the fear of falling.

  “There’s an easier way to come,” he apologized. “But this is the way I wanted you to see it first.”

  “You should have warned me this was going to be a mountain-climbing expedition. I’d have worn different shoes.”

  “I didn’t know it would be today.”

  Today? Involuntarily, she glanced back at him.

  “Watch it!” he warned.

  Her eyes went ahead again, seeing a downstep and then, only two strides away, the path ended against a dead-end wall of rock.

  “To your right,” Cash directed.

  Turning, she saw a totally incongruous door, varnished and shining in the sun, that and nothing else, no visible structure, only the door against the sheer wall of natural rock, the only mark that the hand of man had left on the whole enormous landscape.

  Cash stepped around her, opening the door. Ahead, there was a short tunnel through naked rock and then, framed in the opening, a sight that was even more of a visual shock than the falls had been at first seeing. It was a room that seemed less an actuality than something suddenly flashed on a motion picture screen, the imagined interior of a Park Avenue penthouse. She reached out to touch the end of a long upholstered divan, almost surprised to find that her fingertips confirmed its reality. But it was when she turned to the left, drawn by the light, that the full quality of the room burst upon her. The outer wall was largely glass, exposing the full panorama of the falls, not as if seen through the end opening of a cave but as if she were standing on a projected suspension in space, the same feeling of detachment from the earth that she had experienced in the cockpit of the plane. The room seemed unwalled and without limit but, as she watched, there was a dark side movement across the sky and the falls were gone, the room suddenly materializing as a close containment … the cabin of the plane … her childhood studio …

  An exclamation of wonder rose in her throat but it was silenced by an awareness of inadequacy. Cash’s hand moved, a sorcerer’s wand, and the curtain slipped soundlessly back across the window. They were out in space again and she moved forward, experiencing the sensation of walking in air, heightened as she came to the glass and looked almost straight down into the pool at the base of the falls, its emerald depths glimpsed through the swirling mists as, looking upward, she might have seen patches of cobalt sky between the clouds. Again, as had happened before, she was struck by the almost incredible placidity of the stream that flowed from the tortured turbulence of falling water.

  “Impressed?” Cash asked behind her.

  “Oh, I am. It’s the most—”

  Words failed her and she turned back to face the room, experiencing a slow restoration of the sense of reality that had been lost as she had stepped through the door. Then, incongruity had made everything seem the creation of a Hollywood set designer, but now it was no longer the eye-tricking product of a scenic artist. This was something solidly built by masons and carpenters, undeniably real.

  “How did you ever manage to build it?” she asked, vaguely visualizing the problems that must have been involved in nesting this mountain house against the high sheer face of the cliff.

  “The only difficult part was trying to convince the workmen that I really wanted it. There wasn’t any way to explain why I did—” He smiled self-consciously. “There still isn’t.”

  “But why wouldn’t you want it? It’s so—it’s such a wonderful place—so perfect. When you’re here, you can forget the rest of the world even exists.”

  “Yes, that’s the temptation,” he said soberly, almost as if it were a reluctant admission.

  “Is it important not to forget?” she asked gaily.

  “Isn’t it?”

  She shook her head, still smiling, afraid for an instant that he might be interpreting her silence as a too-personal boldness, relieved when he turned away to let his eyes run back over the room.

  “In some ways, I suppose, it was a hang-over from my kid days,” Cash said. “There was a mountain behind our house—actually only an old claybank back of the brickyards, but still a very fine mountain. I built myself a wonderful cabin up there—two old packing crates with a Calumet Baking Powder sign for a roof—but it was a splendid place, much finer than this.”

  “I know,” she said quickly, caught up in the memory of her own little backyard studio. “When you were there, it could be any place in the world.”

  Cash laughed. “Until there was a lawn to mow or a front porch to sweep.”

  “Or your father came and told you that there was something wrong with you because you weren’t out playing with the other little boys.”

  “You, too?” he asked, amazed.

  She nodded. “Except that mine wasn’t a cabin on a mountain top. No, wait—once it was—after I’d read Shangri-La.”

  “Did you ever try Mount Kilimanjaro?” he asked with the pseudo-seriousness of rigid make-believe. “Wonderful place—you could sit up there and see all the animals in Africa. And very convenient, too. When you got tired of being the great white hunter you could just snap your fingers and change all the safari boys into Sherpas. Then you could spend the rest of the afternoon climbing Mount Everest.”

  “Oh, I was much too busy for any such waste of time as that. You see, I had all my studios. There was one in Paris—that was an attic with candles in wine bottles—and then Greenwich Village, of course. But sometimes I’d get very bored with being such a famous artist and then I’d run away to my lovely villa in the south of France. Or my house in the casbah of Algiers.”

  “Then you must have known an old friend of mine—Pépé le Moko?”

  Cash’s twinkling eyes made the mood impossible to sustain and she broke out in laughter. “At least this has the advantage of being real.”

  “Come along and see the rest of it,” Cash said, gesturing toward a corridor along an extension of the enormous window that opened on the falls, creating the illusion of a passageway through the clouds. The view was so demanding that Lory had taken a half dozen steps before her attention was caught by the opposite wall. She saw then that it was the bare rock of the cliff, niched and shelved to hold a large collection of sculptured figures that she immediately recognized as East Indian. Breaking her stride, she stopped abruptly before a Buddha in a niche so deep that only by standing directly in front could she see the serenely contemplative face in the deep shadows.

  “I was in India for a while,” Cash said, a seemingly simple explanation, but his tone of voice carried the implication that what he had brought back was something beyond these tangible relics.

  Her eyes left the Buddha and she saw then that the deep niche was flanked by terra cotta bas reliefs, so close in color to the stone into which they were inset that they seemed to be modeled from the living rock. “The Prince Gautauma renounce
s the world and flees to the forest,” she whispered, explaining the pageantry of the carved figures as if it were an inscription to be read aloud.

  Cash’s eyes narrowed. “You surprise me.”

  “Why?”

  “That you’d know that.”

  “I used the life of the Buddha for my senior mural project at Prather. One of my instructors had a great passion for Buddhism and Hinduism—well, actually not the religions as much as their arts—but he got all of us terribly interested. He used to go out there almost every summer—India or Burma.”

  “Dr. Borg?”

  “Do you know him?” she asked, surprised.

  Cash nodded. “I helped stake a couple of his expeditions.”

  “You did? What a wonderful thing to do.”

  “Oh I always got much the best of the bargain,” Cash said offhandedly, almost as if embarrassed by her approval. “He always managed to bring me something or other that was worth more than I ever gave him. That’s one of the Borg things up there.”

  Half turning, she looked up to the high niche he had indicated and saw a beautifully wrought stone figurine rising from the shell of a full-blown lotus.

  “It’s Lakshmi, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “You do know your Hinduism, don’t you? Yes, I suppose Borg thought she’d be appropriate—the goddess of wealth, you know.”

  Lory laughed. “He was probably looking out for his own interests, hoping that if Lakshmi was good to you, you’d finance another expedition.”

  Cash’s smile was quick-fading, his voice serious as he said, “Of all the strange things about Hinduism, that’s always struck me as the strangest—that they should have a goddess of wealth and prosperity and accept the fact that it’s perfectly all right to worship her. As far as I know, it’s the only religion that does.”

  “But don’t we do the same thing?” she asked. “Maybe worship is the wrong word, but isn’t that the main interest in life for most Christians—making money?”

  “But we never acknowledge it—at least religiously,” Cash mused. “Our whole Western civilization is based on the profit motive—and yet it’s one of the key tenets of our Christian religion that the pursuit of riches is the root of all evil—that virtue is somehow associated with poverty.”

  “Maybe the Hindus are just more honest about it.”

  “There’ve been times when I’ve thought so,” Cash chuckled wryly. “But of course, they have the advantage of an entirely different philosophic approach—the division of a man’s life into the four stages. It’s only in the second stage that the pursuit of riches is justified but, after all, that covers the full period of a man’s most productive life.”

  “Then he renounces the world,” Lory supplied, glancing toward the bas relief. “That’s the third stage, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, then it’s off to the forest.”

  “Or the mountain top,” Lory added too quickly, regretting what had been a purposeless flippancy when she saw the sudden freezing of Cash’s expression.

  For a moment he seemed one of the sculptured figures that peopled the rock wall, voiceless, withdrawn and remote, as far beyond understanding as the incomprehensible Buddha, as remote from her own life as the temple gods of the Hindus.

  Suddenly, surprisingly, he smiled. “That’s probably my trouble—there’s too much of the Christian in me to ever believe that the world is really escapable—except temporarily—now and then.”

  He led the way to the door at the end of the corridor, opening it to reveal a dining alcove. A second door opened on a small kitchen, gleaming metallically, copper and stainless steel.

  “And, anyway, a hermit’s life is much more appealing if you have all the modern conveniences,” Cash added. But the lightness of his voice seemed oddly forced and he turned quickly, letting the kitchen door swing shut, moving on down the corridor.

  “My bedroom,” he explained, opening another door, giving her only the quickest glimpse of a room almost monastically plain except for a grouping against the white walls of what appeared to be framed pages from old illuminated manuscripts.

  Beyond, he opened another door. “Guest room,” he said crisply. “Want a chance to get off some of the dust?”

  She nodded gratefully, stepped through the door, reaching back to close it, aware then that Cash had already done it. At first glance, the room seemed of matching plainness, starkly bare, but closer examination revealed that the bedspread was an Indian brocade, almost colorless but woven in a design of surpassing intricacy, and then that the headboard of the bed was not wood but old bronze, delicately engraved in a portrayal of the Ramayana legend. Bending close, her eyes were drawn to one of the feminine figures—no more a logical center of interest than any of the others but somehow magnetically demanding—fantastically voluptuous in form and pose, yet with a serenity of facial expression that recalled Dr. Borg’s explanation of the Indian representation of ideal womanhood as the perfect blending of her two natures.

  Quickly, she found the bathroom door and stood for a long moment with the open taps flooding water over her hands and wrists, cold and then hot, waiting through the subsiding of an excitement of which she had become aware only after Cash had closed the door behind her.

  Finally, assured that she had attained the security of reason, she dried her hands and opened her purse, finding her comb and lipstick. This was the end … it had to be! This day couldn’t be allowed to be a repetition of that day at Eagle Harbor … the transient excitement of his presence and then, afterwards, nothing but those endless nights. To live through that aftermath again would be totally pointless. She had been a child that night in Maine, mad with an unmanageable desire … but now she was a woman, wise enough to know that there could be no happiness in unreasoned hunger for the unattainable. She had seen Cash McCall again … flown in his plane … he’d shown her his mountain hideaway and his collection of East Indian art … all very interesting. But that was that! Now it would end. He would take her back to Suffolk and it would all be over and done with. That would be the end. And this time the end would be the ending.

  She snapped shut her purse and walked quickly across the bedroom and out into the corridor. Cash was nowhere in sight. But a door stood open and she walked to it, stepping out onto the sunlighted terrace. The roar of the falls burst upon her ears again, the instant of first hearing strangely timed to the quickly caught image of Cash’s figure silhouetted against the sky. He was standing on the rock parapet that surrounded the terrace, looking out at the falls, unaware of her presence.

  “It’s a beautiful place,” she said.

  He turned at her first word, leaping lightly down now to face her, his expression questioning.

  “And I’m so glad you brought me,” she added with a curtaining finality.

  There was an instant when he seemed surprised enough to protest. Then, quickly—too quickly—she heard him say, “Yes, I wanted you to see it.”

  Watching, she felt the strange unreasonableness of disappointment as he stepped back to the house and started to close the door, catching her breath through the indecisive moment when his hand seemed held back by some decision yet to be made. But then he closed the door, the click of the latch incredibly loud against the thunder of the falls.

  “There’s no need to make the climb back,” he explained, curtly businesslike. “There’s a car down below. Abe can pick up the truck afterwards.”

  11

  The faceless clock on the glass wall of the Freeholders Bank & Trust Company registered only eleven-twenty as Grant Austen pushed open the front door. It was earlier than he had planned to arrive, but walking the streets had exhausted his patience as well as his strength … and Will Atherson might be leaving early for lunch, this being a Wharf day.

  He looked up to the mezzanine and saw the banker through the transparent wall of his office, sitting alone at his desk, and walked confidently toward the silvery spiral of the staircase.

  Atherson’s secretary met him a
t the top step. “Why, Mr. Austen, this is a surprise! Or was Mr. Atherson expecting you?”

  “Well, nothing definite,” he said. “But I guess he probably figured I’d be down.”

  “I hope he’s free,” she said, uncertainly but still smiling. “Sit down, Mr. Austen, and I’ll tell him that you’re here.”

  He drew his wallet from his inside coat pocket, taking out the check, not bothering to sit down because he was sure that Will Atherson would appear immediately—and he did, taking the pipe out of his mouth long enough to offer a quiet greeting.

  “Don’t want to break in on you if you’re busy,” Austen said, hesitantly hopeful that the banker would offer a disclaimer. But the pipe had gone back. “Had the settlement with McCall this morning, you know—well, it’s a lot of money so I thought I ought to get it down here as soon as I could.”

  Atherson nodded, taking the check, examining it, looking up then with a silent question.

  “Sure, there’s Lory’s check too,” Grant Austen said. “I thought she’d get a kick out of banking it herself. But we can make the arrangements about investing it and all that.”

  Atherson turned to his hovering secretary. “Will you see if Mr. Brown is busy?”

  They were standing outside the bank president’s office and Grant Austen made a guardedly suggestive move toward the door. “I thought we could sort of run over the investment situation, Will. It’s a lot of money and I’d like to get it working for me as soon as I can.”

  “Naturally,” Atherson said. “That’s why I sent for Brown. He’s the head of our Trust Department, you know. Be a lot more help to you than I’d be. Investments are Fred’s specialty. As you know, I stick pretty much to the industrial end.”

  Fred Brown came around the corner, his face remembered only because of its oddly tinted complexion, his skin always looking as if it had been stained by color leaching out of his sandy hair. Atherson offered a cryptic explanation and, with a maneuver too adroit to be circumvented, put Grant Austen in a position where he had no choice except to follow Brown down the hall.