Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  “That’s muslin,” Robinson said comfortably. “We got it for a dollar and a quarter a yard and my daughter dyed it with Tintex.”

  Danny nodded. “All right, but you don’t want all black. Get some bright red in there, and what the fuck is that?” He was scowling at a stand with a huge Chinese vase on it, draped in what looked like a white bedsheet.

  “Dennis found the vase. It’s got a big crack in it, is why we got the sheet around it. It’s for like love offerings. We been getting fifteen, twenty dollars a—a week. “

  Danny looked at him suspiciously, then looked around the room. “I got some stuff for you. Joel! Go get the stuff out of the trunk. Over there,” he decided, pointing at a space on the rear partition next to the overlapping section of drapery that hid the door to the rear room. “I want you to hang one of these posters Joel’s bringing in. It’s actually from a movie, shows Los Angeles falling down, and I want you to keep a big candle burning in front of it all the time. No, wait. A little candle, and I want you to have a lot of little candles that people can buy and light up. And I’ve got a whole bunch of posters, so you can sell them to anybody wants to buy one. Five dollars apiece. Maybe ten. And we’ve got some books about disasters, and I want you to sell them, too. I got the prices all covered up with stickers, and we’ll sell them at a special price. You got a lot of people coming in?”

  “It’s a little slow, Danny. No parking space, you know.” Danny knew; that was why the store was such a bitch to rent. But he said:

  “How many?”

  “Well, we had about fifteen last night. Not all at once, of course.”

  “Christ!”

  “Well, but we’re going to do it a different way now. Dennis and I worked it out that we’re going to get some of the people in regular clothes, they’re going to follow the group here from wherever they’re on the street, and they’ll get converted and come up and get some of the black stuff for their faces—”

  “Hey, that’s okay,” Danny said, pleased for the first time. “Only use different ones each night.” He sat down on a low, black-draped bench with a table at one end, off someone’s pile of discards for the trashman in Beverly Hills. “I expect it to go slow at first,” he conceded. “I’m worried about the people getting ripped off, though.”

  Robinson said, “I tell you what we could do, Danny. We could sort of double up the people with the cans, so they could watch each other.”

  “Yeah,” Danny said, brightening. “That’s a good idea. And don’t use the old buddy system, either, because the other thing they can do is watch each other to see if anybody’s dumping money out of the cans before they turn them in.” He got up, cheered. “It’s gonna work out fine, Robinson,” he said. “The way I see it, we got to build slow, say another two weeks to get the image across. There’s not going to be much action right at first. Then we pick up the tempo. I’ll get you some name people to come in here every night. We’ll give away prizes. Maybe a group to play a little. Yeah,” he said, getting up to leave,

  “you’re doing a piss-poor job, all right, but that’s about all I thought you’d do right now. Hey, Joel! Get the hell out of the beer and drive me home!”

  Before you got to Danny’s house there was a sharp dip in the road, with a sign that said:

  RUNAWAY VEHICLES

  Emergency Deceleration Strip

  600 Feet Right

  Danny was fond of that sign. He owed his house to it. Once, in a moment of weakness, he had showed the house to a retired printing broker from Montclair, New Jersey, and it was all “go” until the client saw the sign. “I don’t like the looks of that,” he declared, and Danny had risen to the cue.

  “First big snow,” he gagged, “and you’ll wind up in Brentwood.” And then, when the client didn’t call back, he realized that a printing broker from Montclair might not know snow was a joke in Beverly Hills. It worked out just great; Danny had turned down two million dollars for what he’d offered the printing broker for six hundred thousand. But after that he never joked about snow.

  But the house became His Place.

  Before that fact became clear to him, Danny had lived in eighteen or nineteen houses in half a dozen years, one fixer-upper after another. Each one might have been the right one. Some he thought really were, especially at first; the split-level in Malibu, the old ranch house in Pacific Palisades. When he bought them he meant to live in them. Forever? Perhaps not forever, but indefinitely. And so he neglected some simple little tricks his accountant taught him later on, and when it became clear to him that none of them was actually the place for Danny Deere he had tax problems. The capital gains were there for any auditor to find, with only the most marginal off-the-books profit to show for his work and time.

  That was no good, so Danny spent a week with his accountant and at the end of that time he understood what he had to do.

  From then on his life style became more lavish and more mercurial. He didn’t buy single old houses to fix up. He bought two at a time. He specialized in properties that had been farms, or family compounds, or whatever eccentric or practical thing would produce two livable structures on a single piece of land. When he found one such he bought it. He moved into the better of the two structures while the other was being rehabbed; then into the second while the first was done; then separated the two by ivy, a trellis, a wall, a hedge—whatever. And he sold two properties for more each than the two together had cost.

  The prices went steadily up. There were only 156,361 square miles of land in California, far the bulk of it desert, mountain, buried by freeway or out in the boonies, and for the pitiful few million desirable acres there were ten million people anxious to own a piece of it. Danny’s prices went up faster than his competition’s, because he was smarter. Every client he showed a house to taught him what clients looked for. A swimming pool. The stranger the shape the better, and, really, it cost very little more to pump concrete into the shape of the state of California, or of Texas, than to make it square. Tennis courts. Even for the people who were obviously decades past the playing of tennis. Privacy. There never was any, really, for most of them, but if you planted enough hedges and put up enough slat fences you could produce the illusion. It all paid off. An acre and a half he bought in January for eighty or ninety thousand dollars, plus the fifty or sixty thousand in real money that he paid for cement and paint and plaster and plantings, plus the wages of the people who put them in, sold in two sections in October for a hundred and fifty thousand each. The big problem became what to do with all his money, but the course in accountancy helped with that, and Danny was growing rich. Of course, he lived free for all that time, in one fixer-upper or another, but that was only the least part of the profits.

  And he fell in love—not with a woman (he gave that up after his third wife), but a house.

  It was more than a house, it was an avocado plantation, and there were thirty acres of it.

  Growing avocados had not been a very good idea, because they didn’t grow well in California outside of one little belt far south of Los Angeles. But they didn’t grow badly, either. Marginal. That was the word for the avocado farm. It was also, unfortunately, the word for the house that was on it, because it was falling apart. The whole thing had belonged to some movie star of a day even before Danny’s own. She had been a smart enough movie star to buy land when she had the money. And when she stopped having the money she began selling the land as she needed to replenish the bank accounts, and this last parcel was all that remained free of the developers. It had been her home, although she hadn’t lived in it for twenty years. No one had, and the place was a disaster.

  But to Danny ;t was a beautiful ruin, a Coliseum among ruins, the wreckage of a Chartres. Its architecture was silent-movie-star hacienda. It was peeling pink stucco and crumbling wide, tall arches over a veranda of grass uncut between the flagstones. It looked like hell. But it was built for the ages, and under the rot it was sound. It had two swimming pools, not one—an oval jobbe
r just outside the house, with a diving board on the sleeping porch outside the master bedroom for mornings when it was just too much trouble to walk downstairs for a dip, and a deep rubbly one in a fern grotto fifty yards away. Neither had water in them, only tree branches, dried mud and broken bottles. Neither would hold water as they stood. One was cracked, and the other seemed to have been bulldozed open, perhaps to avoid breeding mosquitos.

  When Danny first saw it he was alone. The movie star’s lawyers had given him the key and instructions to sell, and he had taken the first look by himself. He spent an hour outside, visualizing what the place must have looked like, what it could look like again, before he went in the house; and then he knew it was his own.

  The master bath was as big as the bedroom. It had no fixtures on the marble tub—perhaps they had been gold and long since pulled out and sold? But the bath had a long clerestory window, and sitting on the pot you could look out at the tops of the avocado trees and a distant smudge that might have been the Pacific. It had a “rumpus room”—the lawyers’ letter actually called it that—in the basement. The billiard table smelled discouragingly of mildew, but the cabinetry was sound. It had a private projection room, of course, and a wine cellar, of course, and a wing for the servants, of course; and it also had a gatehouse, and a rusted but solid wall around the central core of the property, topped with ornamental steel daggers. You could not see the house from the road. Two hours of driving around the area convinced Danny of that; the house could not be seen at all, from anywhere, unless you got past the gatehouse. And that you would not do without getting past the Mexicans who lived there.

  There were supposed to be four resident aliens in the family, a momma and a poppa and two kids old enough to help out in the avocado grove. When Danny walked in on them the first time without warning, the new padrone inspecting his tenants, there were three battered vehicles in the gravel space behind the gatehouse, and beds in every room.

  The census was right: two adults, exclaiming with pleasure at the sight of him; a boy and a girl, sitting on either end of the home-built seesaw in the yard, not moving the whole time he was there. He was not surprised at the discrepancy between vehicles and human beings. They had opened the gate for him, and that left plenty of time for a dozen others to make themselves invisible in the avocado grove. Danny sat down on the steps of the gatehouse and regarded them seriously. “Ese,” he said, “you hear me? If I buy, I will keep you on, perhaps. If I keep you on, I will never enter your house—unless it is to throw you out for not doing the work you are paid to do. Or because you make too much noise, or become in trouble with the law. Perhaps you will have some, ah, friends visiting you. If so, there may be odd jobs for them sometimes, to be paid in cash, so there is no nuisance with the authorities.”

  Manuel looked at Elisaveta and then back at Danny, and said prayerfully, “We hope very much you will buy the ranch, señor.”

  And so he had. Not easily. Thirty prime acres came to a lot more money than he could put his hands on at that stage of his life. It took every penny he had, even the bearer bonds in the safe deposit boxes, even the petty cash out of the office till. It was fifteen years back, but even at 1967 prices thirty acres of Los Angeles real estate—however dilapidated, however much on the wrong side of Sunset Boulevard, however anything—meant serious money. He put up the down payment, with the rest on a suicide note. If he didn’t make the payments on schedule he lost it all. And then he scurried, selling hard. Six acres to this one, five and a half to this other; the eleven-acre strip along the boulevard to his worst enemy, who happened to think that shopping centers were the big new place to put your money. They all knew he was wriggling on the hook. They priced their offers accordingly. But he knew what he had to have, and he knew what the land was worth. He did not sleep for ninety-six hours, but at the end of that time he had sold twenty-five acres for what the entire parcel had cost him. He didn’t make a profit in cash on that deal. His profit was the house.

  Danny had ways of making that profit really handsome. He found contractors, good ones, who had their own reasons for preferring to get paid in cash, off the books. For six years every house he fixed up paid a tithe to Rancho Deere. For plastering and painting, for landscape gardening and carpentry, out of every dollar’s worth he spent, a nickel or a dime went into his own home. It helped with the taxes on the other houses, no small item, because the profits were getting serious. When you came right down to it, Danny realized with some embarrassment, he could have made a hell of a lot of money even if he’d been strictly honest. Everybody else was. California real estate was generating more millionaires than oil. It didn’t even take capital. There were people he knew who had run up a couple thousand dollars on the tables in Vegas and parlayed it into millions; all you had to do was buy, hold for a little while and sell, because the prices were always insanely leaping up. And they didn’t have the problem he had, of what to do with the profits he didn’t want to display.

  On the other hand, they probably hadn’t found as intelligent a way of dealing with them as he had.

  Nobody pushed the button that raised the gate as Joel turned into the little drive. He turned to frown at Danny, shrugged and blew the horn. “I guess they’re out,” he said, opening the door.

  “You guess they’re out. You got a brain I can’t believe,” Danny snarled. “Come on, get a move on.”

  Joel ducked his head and hurried to unlock the gate. He jumped back in, pulled the car past it, and then ran back to lower and lock it again while Danny scowled at the house. There should always be someone there; what the hell did they think he kept them around for? But the house was silent. Joel trotted back in and eased the limousine around the gentle curve that led to the house itself.

  There was a car in front of it.

  There was never a car in front of Danny Deere’s house unless he specifically invited someone, and that not often, and certainly not when he wasn’t home! He began to sputter with anger. Then, as they drew closer, he saw that the car was not empty.

  Four men were sitting in it, all looking directly at him with empty, uncaring eyes.

  “Oh, my Jesus,” Danny said. “Joel, let’s get the hell out of here—”

  But someone had thought of that. Without seeming to look at what he was doing, the driver of the car backed it around in a gentle curve, blocking the driveway. There was no way past it, and the door nearest the limousine opened and one of the men got out.

  Danny rolled up his window and shrank back into the seat. “Joel! See what they want.”

  The man opened the door and leaned in. “What we want, Mr. Deere,” he said, “is to talk to you a little bit. Why don’t we go in your house?”

  Danny stared at him while his mind ticked through possible alternatives. None appeared. “Say,” he said genially, “why don’t we all go in my house?” Cracking wise could be a mistake, he thought.

  How big a mistake he only realized when the limo’s rear door opened and the oldest and ugliest of the men hopped out. He was wearing a pale green outfit that looked like a jogging suit, and made him look like a watermelon. The face was tantalizingly, then frighteningly familiar. Danny knew it well, though he had never seen it except on TV…and had had no intention of coming anywhere near it in the flesh.

  Buster Boyma.

  The mobster stood rocking on the toes of his pale green boots, studying Danny’s home as though he owned it and was thinking of selling. Or owned the world. “Oh, God,” said Danny, but only under his breath. He scurried to the door and held it, quaking.

  Danny had lived close enough to the edge of the law long enough to know what trouble he could be in with the people who had passed the edge. “Sit down, fellows,” he said, as forthcomingly as he could manage, but swallowing hard. “Joel! Get these gentlemen something to drink.”

  Boyma hopped onto the lowest couch and moved the corners of his lips a fraction of an inch—it might almost have been the intention, at least, of a smile. “We don’t want
anything to drink out of those glasses of yours, Deere,” he said, “we only want to talk to you a little bit.”

  Danny swallowed. “Have I got a problem with you?”

  “I don’t think you do, Deere. Although you never can tell.” He glanced at his nearest colleague, who opened a dispatch case. “You can have this back,” he said, as the man handed Danny the collection can that had been taken away from his Hancock Park hustler. It was empty, but the man reached in his pocket and counted out two dollars and forty-five cents in coins and stacked them on the marble coffee table in front of him.

  “There wasn’t much in it,” Boyma said, “but we figure your boy had a bad spot. What do you take in, two or three hundred a day?”

  “About that,” Danny agreed. “I mean, some days. But it’s not really my money—”

  The mobster shook his head. “I’m not looking for a partnership right now,” he explained, “although you never can tell about that either, when somebody gets some action going in my territory. Actually, I’ve got other business interests involved here. What I want to know is, is there any chance this, is on the level?”

  The scales fell from Danny’s eyes. “Oh,” he said. “Oh! I see what you mean. Well, see, here’s the thing. I don’t know anything about science, but I felt that the people of Los Angeles had a right—I mean,” he amended, as the lip-corners moved minutely down, “I mean, I don’t really know. But there’s some scientists that probably do, or will, anyway, because they’re about to start a whole shmaffis to investigate it, and I have a line into them. One of my associates. Young fellow named Dennis Siroca. Joel! Get Dennis’s address for these gentlemen.”

  Boyma shook his head. “No,” he said, “the way we’re going to do it is you’re going to find out and let us know.”

  “Oh,” Danny said, nodding his head. “Right.”

  “And you’re going to do it pretty fast, Deere, because there’s some important interests involved here, isn’t that right? You’re a pretty interesting fellow. We’ve been keeping a sort of eye on you for a long time, and I have a lot of confidence that you’ll get what we want to know. “