A Man of Affairs (18 page)

As Spider was pushing us off the shallows, Mrs. Thatcher said incredulously, “You were
rowing?”

“Sure,” Bridget said. “You know. A little moonlight row on Saturday night.”

“And you spent the whole night on the island?”

“Well, about half of it. We got here pretty late.”

But by then Spider was ready to roll, and the roar of the motors made all further conversation impossible. I looked at my blonde with the tangled hair and the ruined clothes, and she looked very good indeed. At the Grand Bahama Club dock we thanked the Thatchers and Spider, warm and heartfelt thanks. Bridget and I walked up to the hotel, and through the lobby, trying not to notice the people who stopped in mid-sentence to stare. We went out the far door and acquired an ancient and asthmatic Chevy which took us down to the village and waited for us in the muddy yard of the tiny cable office.

I sent one to Al Dolson. MIKE DEAN DIED HEART ATTACK YESTERDAY. ALTER PROGRAM ACCORDINGLY. BACK SOONEST.

And Bridget sent two. One was to a friend on a New York paper, a managing editor. WILL DICKER ON EXCLUSIVE ON YESTERDAY’S DEATH MIKE DEAN AT BAHAMA HIDEAWAY. FELLED BY CORONARY AMID BIG DEALS.

She handed the second one to me instead of to the man. It was to her folks. PLAN MARRY KING-SIZE CASTAWAY. BELIEVE CAN CIVILIZE IN TIME. DETAILS FOLLOW.

She raised one calm and questioning eyebrow.

I handed the cable blank to the man, and we held hands in the rackety cab all the way back to the hotel.

I had a very lucid idea of what was going to happen, of course. I would go back to Portston and find time to be married, and then put in a few years of hard labor turning Harrison healthy.

I did go back and we did get married on the Fourth of July, and we did find out that it was going to be the very best of marriages. You never know that until you try it a while.

Harrison was in no danger from the remnants of the Dean organization. The empire fell apart completely, and very quickly. Bridget and I had given it the final push, and we were not sorry. I did some checking when I was in New York and found out that Amparo had gone back to nursing, Cam had gone back to his home town and into private practice, Fletcher Bowman was still looking.

Bonny Carson’s musical opened in early December. And closed in early December.

Louise lived alone in the big house, terribly muted and terribly tragic. Tommy and Puss sold their house and moved to Texas.

So it should have gone the way I thought it would go. But the Harrison Corporation was still a crippled animal in the jungle, and we couldn’t move fast enough. I had a year of it before a crew that called themselves Kell-Mar Associates moved in on us. They’d picked up the Harrison holdings from the Dean estate. The operation was headed by a little man named Kellison. He wanted to engineer a merger because our loss picture made us damn attractive, tax-wise, to one of the more profitable firms in the industry. At least it was slightly more wholesome than the raid Mike Dean had planned.

We put up a battle, but maybe by then we were getting a little weary of battles. And Louise and Tommy were bored with trying to sustain old and meaningless loyalties.

So it went through. And they cleared us out. Me and Dolson and Budler and Murchison and the rest.

I had plenty of places I could go. And be placed fast. But I wanted time to unwind, and get the world back in perspective. So I listed myself with an executive placement agency in New York, and after we counted our money, I said I would be available on January first.

And so right now we are taking our long delayed honeymoon in Mexico, and we have a small house with a walled garden and a tiny swimming pool and a beaming maid named Carlotta and a morose and effective gardener named Miguel.

I am on the patio, in the shade. On the table at my right is half of a tall rum drink. Beside the drink is the most recent report from the agency. And this time I like the sound of the job and the size of the salary. And the idea of living in San Francisco. When dusk comes I will have a committee meeting with my Bridget and we will make a decision, maybe.

I needed this time to unwind, and get reacquainted with myself. And my bride. We have often talked about the lurid week on Dubloon Cay. It was not a waste. It gave me a clue to myself. It taught me that under certain conditions I could become a rascal, and readily rationalize my own rascality. Bridget says that will keep me from becoming too fatuously pleased with myself. She says every man should be aware of his own capacities for villainy, so he knows what to look out for.

From where I sit I can look out into the sunny garden, at a picture I admire. I look through a fringe of flowers at a green pool, and beyond it a gray wall heavy with flame vine. And above the wall, a deep blue sky.

Bridget is between the pool and the wall, supine on the faded yellow canvas of a poolside cot, her forearm across her eyes. In the privacy of our walled garden I have no objection to her wearing the startling bikinis she adores. No objection at all. This one is fashioned of red silk bandannas, and the Mexican sun has browned her most beautifully.

It is quiet in our Cuernavaca garden, and I run a loving glance from high instep up straight leg to convex thigh, up to red silk breasts and gentle throat and round firm chin.

She insists that it is beginning to show, but I cannot see it yet. But the timing will be fine. Around the end of March a new Glidden will take its first angry look at a dazzling world.

I look at her and I think of my crazy luck, and it makes my eyes sting. And I have the superstitious fear that something will spoil it. But if something wants to come along and spoil it, it will first have the chore of killing Sam Glidden, inch by inch.

So I go out into the garden on the pretext of seeing if she needs new ice. But actually just to be closer to her.