Bentley croaked out a hoarse cry and fell over backward, tearing fronds off the trunk of the tree fern and scrabbling in the muddy flowerbed on his hands and knees as the rain pummeled his back and shoulders. He crawled along the side of the house, blinking the water out of his eyes. A hibiscus limb snatched off his hat, and he groped for it blindly, clutching it in his hand now and reeling forward, suddenly free of the shrubbery and staggering through the rain toward his car. He tore the car door open, slid in behind the wheel, and started the engine, glancing backward as he accelerated up the rainswept street, half expecting Argyle’s corpse-pale face to peer out through the lighted window.
For it had been Argyle himself who had come out of the shadowed hallway and into the room, carrying two glasses of orange juice and dressed in red pajamas identical to the pair worn by the dead man on the floor.
28
THE NEWSPAPER LAY in the bushes that morning, hidden from view, just like he’d asked. It was early. The paperboy must have set the alarm for three A.M.! Not bad for a dead bird in a jar, he thought. He smiled uneasily. Of course it was just coincidence….
But what if it wasn’t? He stood on the sidewalk and thought about it, looking down the empty street toward the church. First the tomatoes, now the newspaper. The bluebird of happiness was apparently granting his wishes. The idea was lunatic, and he chuckled now, thinking about it. A man runs across a magical charm, Aladdin’s lamp, and he gives its genie full rein, casting spells and calling down wishes. Does the man conquer kingdoms, attain vast power, amass a fortune? No, he makes the genie work out on newspapers and tomato vines, uses it to control the ant problem in the kitchen.
So give it back to Argyle, he told himself suddenly, and his smile faded. This idea had slipped into his mind as if out of nowhere: essentially he had stolen it, hadn’t he? And normally he didn’t steal things. And he didn’t lie, either. And now he was up to his ears in both these crimes.
But hell, there wasn’t anything normal about this. Here he was confronted by liars and cheats, with Argyle’s baloney and the giant grinning postal inspector with eyes like a sand hog. Whose rules was he supposed to play by? What if a man found a grocery sack full of money in the bushes, and he knew, say, that it was dirty money, drug money—a lot of wrinkled fifties and hundreds, utterly untraceable. What would he do with it? Advertise? “Attn, scum, found yr money in a shrub….” How could that be the right thing to do, in any way you could explain in under an hour? And anyway, this wasn’t a bag full of money, it was just a dead bird pickled by some Third-World trinket company with an arcane sense of humor.
Unless of course it wasn’t.
The door to the motor home swung open and Henry looked out, fumbling with his eyeglasses and dressed in a pair of pajamas and floppy-looking slippers. He spotted Walt out on the sidewalk and gave him the high sign.
“Paper?” Walt asked him. He stepped toward him across the wet lawn, pulling off the plastic wrapper and handing it over. There, he thought, abruptly relieved of his burden. It’s out of my hands now. Like giving the sack of dirty money to the church, it expiates the living daylights out of the sin.
Henry looked at the paper, then tried to hand it back. He was too much of a gentleman to take it. “Go ahead,” he whispered, clearly not wanting to wake up Jinx. “You first. I can work a crossword or something.”
“No, heck,” Walt said. “I’ve got work to do anyway.”
“Well, here. Take the sports or something. What do you read first? Financial page?”
“Not a thing,” Walt lied. “I’m just going to stuff boxes with it. You might as well take a look at it first.”
“If you’re sure …”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Thanks,” Henry said. He nodded and then shut the door, and Walt found himself standing in a fresh drizzle, his newspaper gone. Well, this took care of it. He could quit agonizing over the damned bluebird. Apparently the creature didn’t work after all; he hadn’t gotten his wish, had he?
He headed for the garage and cranked up the space heater, then climbed up the ladder and had a look in the rafters. Spotting the tin box, he reached in among the fishing tackle and pulled it out, opening the lid and sniffing the ginlike aroma that wafted out of it. The bird itself wasn’t nearly as deteriorated as he remembered it. Its feathers were almost glossy now, a bright, clear blue, and its eyes were open and alert. Well, not alert, for heaven’s sake. There was no use getting nutty about it.
He thought suddenly of the demons hightailing it out of Pandora’s box, and he replaced the jar and shut the lid again, shoving it back in among the salmon eggs and the fishing lures, then stuffed the tackle box back into the rafters. Maybe later he would find an even safer place for it.
He climbed down and poured a cup of coffee, then sorted through the half dozen mail-order catalogues that had arrived in yesterday’s junk mail—the competition. Walt was on every address list in the country by now. It fascinated him to think of it: his name and address reproducing itself like a slow virus along with thousands and millions of other addresses—long lists of them sold back and forth as if they were eggs in a basket instead of words and numbers. Somewhere, right now, enterprising people were pulling down a staggering fortune buying and selling names. The concept was almost mystical, sublunar capitalism in the information age.
Two months ago he himself had paid good money for three lists of a thousand addresses each—seven cents per address—which was about all the catalogue production and mailing he could afford to do right now. There was forty pages of offset printing along with darkroom work, collating, stapling, addressing, and bulk-rate postage, which added up to more than two thousand dollars per catalogue, and the cold truth was that within three weeks of the catalogue’s coming out, orders dwindled nearly to nothing, and it was time to put out another one that was in some clear way different from the last, and him wondering all the time whether he ought to hustle another thousand addresses in order to expand things generally. But he had no real idea how much was too much—how many catalogues, how much inventory. It wasn’t like planting corn; in the business of catalogue sales, the relationship between sowing and reaping was in no way clear. Probably Dr. Hefernin could sell him a pamphlet on the subject.
He found the current Archie McPhee catalogue, one of his favorites, and the American Science and Surplus catalogue, which was offering overstock Water Weenies right there on the first page along with dental burs, radiation gloves, and something called a “Toilet Seat Alarm,” the purpose of which wasn’t made clear. There were sixty-five pages crammed with this kind of stuff, half of it electronic. Walt envied the hell out of that kind of inventory. His little collection of rubber skeletons and palm-tree hats was pitiful in comparison. Now that the tin shed was up, though, he could expand a little bit, make fewer trips out to the wholesale warehouses in Bellflower.
One of the catalogues was new to him—something called The Captain Grose Collection. It was expensively done, full color, offering “antiquities and religious relics and reproductions of all natures, direct from the East.”
Walt sipped his coffee, fingering through the catalogue with idle interest at first, then with growing disbelief. It offered hundreds of sacred and sanctified relics: fragments of the true cross, vials of tears from a dozen different sources including the Savior himself, links of the chain that bound St. Peter, droplets of blood from an inventory of martyrs two pages long, wine from the marriage at Cana, toenail parings from the apostles, Tubalcain’s fire fender, the brass-shod broomstick of the Witch of Endor, one of the seven golden lampstands, a tooth from Balaam’s ass, the preserved ears and snout of one of the Gadarene swine, a chip of the stone that the builder refused….
He burst into laughter and shut the catalogue. This had to be a joke, an impossibly elaborate, lowball prank. But who on earth … ? He looked at the cover again, trying to estimate how much it had cost to print—the slick, full-color cover, the high-quality paper. It was put out by someth
ing called “Millennialist Products, Ltd.” He checked the address—Santa Ana! It was a local company. Immediately he thought of Dr. Hefernin, but this wasn’t in his line. In fact, this had a family resemblance to the stuff in Argyle’s misdelivered box. Maybe it wasn’t a prank after all.
Suddenly suspicious, he opened the catalogue again. A number of the items had no price—apparently you had to call an 800 number to inquire. The priced items were classified as “reproductions” that were “strict copies” of originals in the Captain Grose Collection, with which these replicas were “kept in close association.”
About halfway through the catalog the listings changed, and instead of sacred relics and reproductions there was a list, much shorter, of “profane” relics, “offered strictly in the spirit of scientific inquiry.”
This clearly was the stuff in Argyle’s box: the “dead mans grease,” the twigs from the “tree of living flesh,” figures of saints carved out of their own finger bones and preserved in oil, vials of blood….
Walt dialed the number on the back of the catalogue. It was impossibly early, not even seven. Obviously no one would be there, although possibly they’d have a voice-mail ordering system….
A man answered. “Dilworth Catalogue Sales. Twenty-four-hour service.”
Walt was bowled over. Dilworth! Argyle after all! Nothing in the catalogue had … “Hello,” he said, scrambling to find something more to say, to keep the man on the line.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m calling about the catalogue,” Walt said. “The relics catalogue.”
“Mastercard, Visa, or American Express? There’s a fourteen-dollar minimum. Any order over thirty dollars receives the ‘Get Out of Hell Free’ card at absolutely no cost whatsoever.” The man’s voice was perfunctory, as if he had reeled this nonsense off a hundred times that morning already. “Are you interested in the card? I’ll mark the appropriate box on the order form.”
Walt laughed out loud. “I’ll take ten,” he said.
“No can do,” the man said to him. “One per customer. Nobody needs more than one anyway, do they?”
“Of course not,” Walt said. The man was serious! “Just a little joke. Not very funny.”
“Mastercard, Visa, or American Fxpress?”
“Visa,” Walt said hurriedly. Apparently the man wasn’t in a joking mood. He thought about hanging up but he held on instead, thumbing through the catalogue, looking through the reproductions for something cheap. Hell, he could write it off. It was business. And it was only thirty bucks, after all, give or take. No way he was going to miss out on the free card. He reeled off his Visa number and expiration date.
“Delivery address?”
He gave the man his address.
“I need the description, catalogue number, quantity, and price, in that order,” the man said.
“All right. Let’s see. Send me the ‘Ever-burning Brimstone,’ number S-883, quantity one, $8.95, and the ‘Reproduction Golden Lampstand,’ Q-452, quantity one, $26.50. Now what is that exactly?—the lampstand?”
“Revelations 1, verse 12.”
“Ah,” Walt said. “From Revelations. Somehow I remember that those were candlesticks, but what you’ve got is lampstands?”
“The catalogue number you gave me is lampstands. That’s Revised Standard Version. King James is candlesticks. Now, if you want the candlesticks instead of the lampstand, we offer those too, but they’re a little more pricey, although they do come with good candles—aromatic.”
“No,” Walt said. “That sounds nice, but I think I prefer the lampstand. I just can’t … Surely it must be one or the other?”
“It’s our policy to please the customer.”
Walt nearly hung up again. This was blatantly fraudulent. Fraud with its mask torn off. A moment ago the whole thing was funny; now he felt like a credulous fool. “Look,” Walt said, “what’s the deal here? Seriously.”
After a moment the man said, “What do you think the deal is?”
“To tell you the truth,” Walt said, “I think I’m getting hosed.”
“Well, then that’s the truth. You’re getting hosed.”
“That’s it?”
“Let’s put it this way—sometimes you get what you think you pay for. It’s like that here. All I can tell you is that we’ve had a lot of satisfied customers. You might be one of them, or you might be one of the other. The choice is yours. The choice is always yours.”
There was something about this speech that took the wind out of Walt’s sails. Whatever else was true about Dilworth Catalogue Sales, this man clearly believed in it on some fundamental level. He was a salesman, not a shyster.
“Shall I enter this?” the man asked.
“Yeah,” Walt said. “I guess so. What’s the total?”
“That’s $35.45 plus tax plus two dollars shipping … that’s $40.10.”
“Great,” Walt said. “Don’t forget the card.”
“It’s already on the order form—no extra charge.”
Walt hung up. He had just paid forty dollars for junk. It was a damned good thing that Ivy was going to work for Argyle. Lord knows how they’d get the bills paid otherwise.
He razored open a box and pulled out the contents, plastic bags full of dollhouse furniture—not the usual plastic trash, but high-toned wooden furniture, mouse-size. There were even little rolled-up rag rugs. He sold the heck out of these to dollhouse fanatics, usually adults crazy for little bitty things.
The motor home door slammed shut, and he looked out in time to see Jinx cutting across toward the front porch. The world was waking up.
“Bluebird,” Walt said, glancing toward the rafters just in case it was necessary, “fetch me my golden lampstand this very day, a quarter hour before the sun reacheth the zenith.” He chuckled a little bit, as if to imply that what he’d said was a sort of joke.
29
“AND WHAT ABOUT the testimonials for the Sensible Investor? I don’t want the same crowd we ran through the Startup America meetings last year. They’ll be all right up in San Jose in the spring, but we’d be in bad shape if one of them was recognized as a ringer. We need some new faces. And tone it down, too. This is the nineties. A couple of years ago the public believed any damned thing. Now they don’t want risk.”
Argyle studied himself in the mirror. He hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in weeks now. And he had a splitting headache. His late-night forays into the neighborhood inevitably made his head ache as if he’d been hit with a club. And the voices—the satanic gibbering and muttering in his nightmares, like someone had opened a door onto Hell….
“The testimonial crowd is entirely new,” the man on the other end of the line said tiredly. “New faces, new stories. Don Little over at the temp agency worked that out along with the gimmick. You’d have to look hard to spot any kind of pyramid element. I’m surprised nobody got back to you with the prospectus.”
“I am too,” Argyle said flatly. But then he remembered. In fact someone had gotten back to him—weeks ago. He’d forgotten it, put the paperwork away in a drawer. His mind just wasn’t with it somehow. Business kept getting shunted aside by this damned …
Abruptly he had the uncanny feeling that someone was looking at him, a feeling so profound that he swiveled around in his chair and looked behind him, although it was impossible: the wall was windowless, only three or four feet away. There was a sound in his ears like the rushing of wind and a creaking like a heavy body swinging slowly on a wooden gallows. Sweat ran into his collar as he sat staring, tensed, his head pounding, waiting for something to happen. Slowly he opened the bottom desk drawer. There were four jars in it, from LeRoy’s collection. He untwisted one of the lids, releasing the sigh of breath, the last exhalation of life trapped within.
The sounds faded and disappeared. The presence in the room evaporated. There was nothing behind him but framed diplomas and thank-you trophies from Little League and from kids’ soccer teams.
&n
bsp; “Are you there?”
“Yeah,” he said into the phone. He looked at his list, trying to concentrate. “What about the orphans?”
“They’re gangbusters. We got IRS approval last week. The photo layouts are perfect—Filipino girl about four years old, crying at the edge of this vast dump, scrounging for garbage. She’s got enormous eyes, like a kid in one of those paintings. Big crocodile tears.”
“Where’d you find her?”
“The girl? Pasadena. The photo shoot was at some kind of landfill out in Whittier. We trucked in a lot of crap to set it up right—rags and bottles and rotten fruit, that kind of thing. Big mountain of it. Looks like a typical third-world dump. Anyway, the girl’s got this little busted-up basket with—get this—an old brown banana and a stuffed doggy in it. We took a rock and beat the hell out of the doggy, yanked its eye out, really made it look loved. It’s purely pitiful. Girl’s mother’s a maid for Benson up there. You remember Jim Benson?”
“Benson?” Argyle groped through his mind, trying to remember the name. The words “yanked its eye out” echoed in his head, going around like a nursery-rhyme refrain. “Didn’t Benson threaten to go to the press over the coupon giveaway? I thought he met with a couple of broken legs.”
“That was Benton, with a T. He’s up in Camarillo now, state hospital, completely mental. This is the guy who did that great PR package for ‘Get Rich Yesterday.’”
“How about the maid and the girl? Are they all right?”
“We put them on a plane back to Manila. No chance the mother will ever see the ads.”
“I didn’t mean all right that way. I mean happy. The kid. The little girl.”
“Happy?”
“Yeah. Did you take care of her? I don’t use children, not unless they’re imaginary children.”
“Sure, we took care of her. Absolutely. We gave the mother two one-way tickets and a thousand bucks—a choice between that and deportation.”
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