Assignment - Quayle Question

by Edward S. Aarons

“No.”

  “Martin was stubborn. I must remind you.”

  “You are a monster.”

  “Of course.”

  “There are a number of highly influential media networks that consciously or unconsciously mold public opinion one way or the other. They can topple governments. They can work up public anger for war. I am not talking about the large, obvious syndicates and corporate entities such as the London and New York newspapers, the major TV and radio networks. Big as they are, powerful as they are, there are many more small, rural-type networks that in readership and listening and viewing audiences far outnumber and outweigh the impact of the larger groups. My father, Rufus Quayle, saw this at an early age. He went into weeklies, small-town radio stations, independent corporations with perhaps no more than four or five branches. He created a network of his own. He is a wonderful man.”

  “Wonderful?”

  “He is sincerely patriotic. He is sincerely dedicated to the advance of all human welfare everywhere in the world.” “You speak of Rufus Quayle in the present tense.”

  “Why not?”

  “You do not think he might be dead?”

  “He cannot be dead.”

  “Why not?”

  “I simply would know it. Or feel it.”

  “That is not a rational response.”

  “I am sorry. I am still only a human being. And a woman. I grieve for Martin.”

  “But Martin divorced you because he claimed you were too rational, too devoid of a woman’s normal emotions.” “You seem to know so much.”

  “Not as much as you—at least, about Q.P.I. About the problem that Martin wanted you to solve, and which you say you guessed and perhaps solved for yourself—tell me about I. Shumata.”

  “I told you, I don’t—”

  “Please be more responsive, Deborah.”

  “Am I on trial here?”

  “In a way.”

  “For my life?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “I think you’re going to kill me, anyway. You’ll never let me go away from here.”

  “I might. If you help me.”

  “Why should I help you? I think you are disgusting. You sicken me. You make me angry and sick to my stomach. You revolt me, you great, fat, smiling freak of a creature, you nauseating caricature of a man—”

  “You cannot offend me with such childish words. Or pretend to such rage. I see through you, Deborah. You are cold inside. Intellectual. You weigh and measure everything. You analyze all things within your peculiar capacity. As you have analyzed the movement initiated by I. Shumata.”

  “To hell with Shumata.”

  “Your impatience sounds insincere.”

  “And you sound so—so—”

  “Evil.”

  “Yes.”

  “I. Shumata Corporation, Deborah.”

  “Well, under cover of swallowing up, through a wide series of violent events that were directed at corporate executives the world over, I. Shumata has undertaken control of various conglomerates that have one major issue in common. Each entity controls , a media outlet, or series of outlets, like Q.P.I. The network is almost complete. Almost world-wide. The great link that is missing is Q.P.I.”

  “Ah. Very good. Very, very good.”

  “I’m glad you are pleased.”

  “We shall get along very well, if you continue this way, Deborah. Now let us have some details.”

  ****************************************

  She was not imprisoned in the chair as she had been during the first term of questioning. She was not bound or blindfolded. The room was the same room in which she had first been interrogated. The same arched, high, roughly plastered ceiling. The same great window that looked out high over the endless desert. She did not look at the big iron hooks embedded in the black beams across the ceiling. She did not look at the hook from which Martin Pentecost’s body had been hung, for her shock and edification.

  The man who questioned her was seated on a massive thronelike chair of Spanish design that added a small confirmation to her guess as to the location of this place. He was enormous, with a small bald head and massive belly and thick chest. She could not guess what race or nationality he had sprung from. It was somehow difficult to meet his eyes, and she could not tell their color. He wore a robe of some sort, a saffron-colored tentlike outfit of the hue usually adopted by Buddhist monks and priests. Which fitted, she thought, with the sound of temple gongs she kept hearing in this place that had once been dedicated as a monastery for Catholic priests and monks. Baja California, she thought, somewhere in the interior mountains, away from the coast. It was an area that was still one of the wildest and most remote on the continent.

  The small dancing man she had noted before, the one with Oriental manners, was missing in attendance. Two other men stood by passively, behind and below the questioner. It was as if they were symbols chosen to emphasize the ugliness of their master. One was small, slightly hunchbacked, with short bowed legs and a thick thatch of corn-yellow hair that hung low to his shoulders, disheveled and greasy-looking. His face was like a gnarled knot of oak, out of which pale blue eyes leered at her. His companion-guard was monstrous, too, a bearded man with massive shoulders and long, muscular arms, who eyed her in a way she did not like, as if weighing her like a professional butcher in a slaughterhouse. She wondered which of them had killed Martin. Probably both. Inwardly, she shuddered.

  She thought her inquisitor might be Eurasian. His swarthy skin was not Indian or Hindu or Latin, but a mixture of all, with the merest trace of the epicanthic fold at the corners of his eyes that gave him his Eastern appearance. She looked away from the trio and down at the worn, intricately tiled floor. This room might have been a chapel once dedicated to God. A place for worship and divine prayers. It had been turned into a charnel house for her, dedicated to inhuman brutality. . . .

  ****************************************

  “Your ring, Miss Quayle.”

  “What?”

  “On your right hand.”

  “Oh. What about it?”

  “It seems a bit unusual.”

  “My father gave it to me, when I was sixteen.”

  “Can you take it off?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ve never taken it off, and now I can’t.”

  “The ring has great emotional significance to you?”

  “My father gave it to me.”

  “It is a pretty little thing.”

  “Yes. No more than that.”

  “Of not much intrinsic value?”

  “The sapphires are small. The gold is nineteen carats. It’s worth less than a thousand dollars, if you’re interested.”

  “But it’s sentimental value, I assume, is without price?” “To me, yes.”

  “Rufus Quayle would recognize it if he saw it again?” “He once said he was pleased that I always chose to wear it.”

  “Did he normally express such affection?”

  “No.”

  “But he wanted you to wear the ring?” “He gave it to me for that purpose.”

  “Place your hand on the table, Deborah. Spread your fingers a bit. Yes. There. Just so.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing, yet. You still persist in being evasive. Do you know a man named Sam Durell?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know of an agency of the government called K Section?”

  “No. I’ve never heard of either.”

  “Please do not remove your hand from the table.”

  “Why not? What are you going to do to me? I want to know.”

  “There are many things we would both like to know, Deborah. You do not know Sam Durell. Or K Section. But you do know about the I. Shumata zaibatsu. A process of deduction?”

  “I don’t know how I do it. It just comes to me. Like putting two and two together. I was thinking about what Martin might be worried about, and that’s what I came up with. I. Shumata is after my fath
er’s Q.P.I.”

  “And means to have it.”

  “Never.”

  “And will have it.”

  “Not while Rufus Quayle is alive.”

  “He is that stubborn?”

  “More so.”

  “You do not know for certain that he is alive. Or where he is. You know all his places of residence, Deborah. We have had them under surveillance for some months. He has not been seen. Neither has he been heard from. His Q.P.I. goes on of its own momentum, of course, but as a headless, mindless thing without a heart or soul of its own. Why has Quayle vanished?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why has he abandoned all those dedicated people who work for him, who show such devotion to him?”

  “He hasn’t abandoned anyone. He’s done this before.” “Vanished? Ah. When?”

  “Two years ago.” “Indeed?”

  “For two months.”

  “On what occasion?”

  “My father did not always confide in me. I was distressed by it. As I am now, on this occasion.”

  “How did he reappear?”

  “He simply showed up one day, the same as ever.” “Exactly the same?”

  “Yes.”

  “You hesitate?”

  “No.”

  “How was he different?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he look different then, when he reappeared two years ago after that other disappearance?”

  “No.”

  “Or behave differently?”

  “No.”

  “You hesitate again.”

  “You have a keen ear.”

  “He sounded different?”

  “Tired.”

  “Could he have been with a woman?”

  “My father was devoted to my mother’s memory. There were no other women in his life. I am sure of that. I would have known. No, no other women.”

  “Perhaps this time, though?”

  “He’s too old now.”

  “Old men get foolish fancies.”

  “Not Rufus Quayle.”

  “Old men dream of young girls.”

  “Not my father.”

  “You do not know him all that well, Deborah. Nor have you seen him for over two months. Or heard from him. As a matter of fact, you really know very little about his personal life, do you?”

  “I know enough to be sure of that.”

  “Then perhaps he is ill?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Was he ill two years ago?” “I would have noticed.”

  “Was he?”

  “No.”

  “You are being difficult. Suppose you wished to communicate with him? Suppose you had to transmit some important business information to him? Martin Pentecost wanted to do so, did he not? But he could not, and so, despite your personal differences that culminated in a divorce, he came to you. Surely, somewhere in that intricate network that comprises Quayle Publishing Industries, there is a single thread, a thin but unbroken line, between you, his daughter, and Rufus Quayle, this man of mystery.”

  “He always communicated with me.”

  “Always? But sometimes you had traffic for him in the other direction, of course.”

  “He didn’t care. He chose his own time to see me.” “And where would those places be?”

  “The last time was in our Djakarta office.”

  “Were all your meetings face to face?”

  “Yes.”

  “He never used the mail, the telephone, the cable?”

  “He didn’t trust them.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was a business idiosyneracy.”

  “So you last saw him in Djakarta. Was he in good health?”

  “He was as well as ever.”

  “Where would he go if he were ill?”

  “He always had his own physician with him.”

  “But if his illness required surgery, perhaps, and hospitalization?”

  “Rufus Quayle could buy and sell his own hospitals and surgeons. Nothing but the best.”

  “Did he in fact own a private hospital?”

  “No. He was never ill to my knowledge.”

  “Why are you smiling, Deborah?”

  “You’re up a tree, aren’t you?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it has done you no good to kill Martin and kidnap me, since you can’t reach Rufus to terrorize or intimidate him with these facts. What good does it do you to have a hostage, if you don’t know where to send your demands?”

  “Ah. But you shall tell us.”

  “I can’t, because I don’t know, myself.”

  “I cannot accept that reply.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Only the truth as you believe it to be. But deep inside that remarkable mind of yours, Deborah, you know otherwise.”

  “I wish I did.”

  “Would you cooperate if that were so?”

  “To help you against Rufus? No.”

  “Name me your father’s residences. I understand he often lived in one or another of his varied domiciles for quite some lengths of time.”

  “He owns the hotel in Hong Kong—the Quayle Empress; he keeps the fiat in London, of course—everybody knows about that. And the villa on the California coast at San Hernandez. The Chicago office complex of Q.P.I.; he has the penthouse apartment there. The compound in the Florida Keys—two houses, the Tower, the whole of Black Pelican Key northeast of Key West. The chalet in Switzerland, above Lugano, and the other one at Montreux. The Q.P.I. Building—another penthouse establishment— in Manhattan, of course. He also has the apartment down on Wall Street, on top of the Geoger-Hall Building.”

  “Why do you pause?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “But you have all these places at your fingertips.”

  “Yes. There’s his yacht, of course. The Expediter. He used to live on that a great deal, down among the Greek islands. The old Quayle family house—the farmhouse— out near Topeka, Kansas. It’s the only evidence of sentimentality he has ever expressed, keeping that.”

  “And?”

  “Sometimes he slept wherever he happened to be.”

  “And the Ca’d’Orizon in New Jersey?”

  “Of course. Everybody knows that place.”

  “You were born there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you put it last?”

  “Subconscious, I suppose. I’ve always hated it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too lonely. Too gloomy. Too monstrous a joke. It goes back to what Rufus calls his ‘Era of Bad Taste.’ ” “When he first—ah—struck it rich?”

  “Before he knew better. Before he became more sophisticated, perhaps.”

  “And your mother died there.”

  “Yes, there’s that, too.”

  ****************************************

  She remembered.

  She had been summoned home from college to watch her mother die. She was just seventeen then, intent on learning all she could about the news media, with plans for a master’s at Columbia’s School of Journalism. Rufus wanted it that way, and she was agreeable. She sometimes felt such a close affinity to her father’s interests that she suspected a nascent jealousy-rivalry for him against her mother. Certainly her mother, in all the years of Rufus Quayle’s astonishing prosperity, never quite lost the Kansas farmgirl background that had captivated Rufus in his youth. Deborah often thought that her mother had become confused by the whirlwind growth of Q.P.I., by the publicity, the world-wide travels, the aura of power that surrounded her genius-husband. Her defense had been to retreat from that power and the spotlight of attention that followed Rufus Quayle wherever he went. As she retreated, Rufus had drawn closer to the daughter she had presented him, to Deborah, herself a child of this new and dizzying world of money and power.

  She remembered.

  She could still smell the cloying odor of antiseptic, medicine
s, of illness and hovering death. Her mother had looked a stranger to her. She had been repelled, and afterwards felt guilty for drawing back from the dying woman, this mother who never understood her or recognized her peculiar talent. But then Rufus had held her and urged her implacably forward, and whispered, “Kiss her. Say goodbye.”

  She remembered.

  In all that splendor of Ca’d’Orizon, they had been isolated, she and her father and the woman who died that night. Rufus Quayle was already a figure to be noted, photographed, written about. The grotesque old building in the Jersey marshes was like a besieged fortress, with chartered boats and the little bridges and roads—the bridges and roads were burned and bulldozed out of existence, afterward—all filled with reporters watching the great Rufus Quayle’s personal bereavement.

  They would have tom her apart with their questions. Rufus told her later of the way to get in and out of that ornate stone house without being seen and noted. . . .

  “Deborah? Miss Quayle? What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You remembered something?”

  “I was thinking of my mother.”

  “Yes. I reminded you that she had died at Ca’d’Orizon. But what else troubled you in that memory?”

  “It was just a bad time for me, that’s all.”

  “What else?”

  She remembered that Rufus had given her the ring, two days after the funeral. He had said, “Send it to me if you ever need help, Debbie. But I doubt that you’ll ever have to give me such a signal.”

  “I’ll always need you, Daddy.”

  “And I’ll always need you, honey. Times are going to change. We don’t know what the future holds for either of us. You’ll never want for anything, of course.”

  “And you, Daddy?”

  “I’ll be just fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  “But won’t you ever need or want anything?”

  “I doubt that, little girl.” He had towered over her, emanating a sense of masculine strength that was almost brutal; but the strength encompassed her and she felt safe

  within his presence. His blue eyes changed, looked dark and far-seeing for a moment. He had stared out over the marshlands from the tower window where they stood together, and for long moments he seemed at a distance from her. Then he said, “Some day I’m going to die here, honey. Every man has to go through that, of course. When it comes, I want it to happen here.”