Watch Your Back (2 page)

Now, riding the elevator, feeling the vibration against his leg, he thought, this is a bad time for this, but on the other hand, in the hall in front of Gogol’s Sables would be even worse, so he pulled the phone from his pocket, opened it, and murmured into it, “Yes?”

Around him, all the other people put that face on that pretends they’re not listening, the way they always do, while they leaned in a little closer just the same.

“You doing anything?”

“Naturally I’m doing something,” Kelp said, having recognized the voice as belonging to his sometime associate, John Dortmunder. “I’m usually doing something.”

“Oh.” Voice now reeking with suspicion, Dortmunder said, “On your own?”

Meaning, of course, was Kelp freezing him out of something good. “Sure, single–o,” he said, while around him the other people began to clear their throats and rub their noses and move their feet around on the floor to express their dissatisfaction with the interest level of the phone call so far. “It happens.”

Two people coughed so loudly, Kelp had trouble hearing Dortmunder’s response: “So call me when you get a little time off.”

“Hour, maybe maybe.”

“I’ll be home,” Dortmunder said, he being someone who, Kelp knew, very often did nothing at all.

“Done,” Kelp said, and hung up as the elevator stopped at 11. He got off, and the elevator continued on up, full of sneezing, nose–blowing and elbow scratching, and fifty–five minutes later Kelp walked into his own little apartment in the west Thirties, carrying a big shopping bag from Wal–Mart, full but not too heavy, with a polyester sweater in lime green on top. He went through into the bedroom, and his close personal friend Anne Marie Carpinaw looked up from the computer, where she was lately in frequent hyperspace correspondence with history freaks who wanted trivia answers about her daddy, who had for a long time been a congressperson from the greatish state of Kansas.

“Shopping?” she asked, fingers still on the keys. “At Wal–Mart?
You?
”

“Not exactly,” he told her, as he put the shopping bag on the bed. “I was more hunting for the pot.” Tossing the sweater into the wastebasket, he reached into the bag and brought out a short silver sable coat of a style that’s never out of fashion. “I think this one’s your size.”

She leaped up from the computer. “Sable in August! How appropriate.”

“I got three of them,” he told her, admiring the way she snuggled into the coat. Taking two similar trophies from the bag, he said, “One for you and two for the rent.”

“Well, this is the best of them,” she said, smiling as her hand smoothed the fur down her front.

“John wants me to call, I’ll do it in the living room.”

“These people,” she said, with a dismissive wave of the hand at the computer. “They want to know where Daddy stood on the Cold War. As though Daddy ever stood on anything. He was a politician, for God’s sake.”

“Tell them,” Kelp suggested, “your daddy felt the Cold War was an unfortunate necessity and he prayed every night that it would come out okay.”

He left her standing there in the sable but with a sudden fraught expression on her face, as though wondering if she’d wound up with her father after all, and in the living room he sat on the sofa, looked at the television set, and called John.

Who answered on the fifth ring, sounding out of breath. “Ern?”

“You hadda run from the kitchen.”

“It turns out, snacking’s a good thing. Many small meals all day long, easier on the system.”

“Still, you hadda run from the kitchen.”

“You aren’t going to,” Dortmunder said, “talk to me about extra telephones.”

“I am not,” Kelp agreed. “I gave up on you long ago. Besides, you’re the one wanted to talk, so you get to pick the subject.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said. “Arnie Albright.”

Kelp waited, then said, “That’s the subject?”

“It is.”

“He’s down south, for the intervention.”

“He’s back, he called me, he says it worked.”

“I’ll want a second opinion.”

“You can have one,” Dortmunder offered. “Your very own opinion. He wants to see us, he says he’s got a great proposition for us.”

“Us?” Kelp watched Anne Marie walk through the room toward the kitchen, smiling. She still wore the coat. Into the phone, he said, “Arnie didn’t call
me,
John, he called you.”

“But he knows we’re a team.”

“Arnie Albright didn’t call me,” Kelp said, “so I don’t need to go over there.”

“He says it’s a really great offer.”

“Fine,” Kelp said. “You go over, if it turns out it really is a really great offer,
then
you call me. You can even come here and describe it to me.”

“Andy,” Dortmunder said, “I’m gonna level with you.”

“Don’t strain yourself.”

“I just can’t do it alone,” Dortmunder admitted. “I’m afraid to know what Arnie is after Club Med. Either we go together, or I’m not going.”

Kelp was beginning to feel trapped. “Look, John,” he said, and Anne Marie walked through the room again, from the kitchen toward the bedroom, still smiling and still wearing the sable coat. She stopped midway and opened the coat, and she didn’t have anything on underneath it. “Uuuuu,” Kelp said.

“So you’ll meet me there,” Dortmunder said.

It was unfair; life was too full of distractions. How could a person figure a way to weasel out of a thing? Anne Marie walked on to the bedroom, the coat twitching behind her legs, and Kelp said, “Only not right now. Later on today, say four o’clock.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Dortmunder said. “Out front.”

“I can hardly wait,” Kelp said, and hung up.

“You say that every day.”

“Well, of course I say it every day,” Preston said, flicking sand off his belly. “That’s the point, isn’t it? The unchanging sameness, the lack of surprise, the loss of suspense, the eternal undifferentiated pleasantness of it all, of
course
I have to respond in the character of the setting, with the same hackneyed phrase every single pointless, drifting, inane day. The wonder of it is that
you
don’t say it every day.”

Alan frowned. Preston suspected, not for the first time, that Alan had not been paying strict attention. “Say what every day?”

“ ‘You say that every day.’ ”

Alan scrunched his monkey face into a walnut, a walnut wearing a Red Sox hat and sunglasses. “I say
what
every day?”

“Oh, Lord,” Preston said. Should he try to get back to the beginning of the thread, untangle the snarl? What for? Instead, he said, “You’re not quite the thing as a paid companion, are you?”

“I’m every bit a companion,” Alan insisted. “I’m here at your beck and call, I engage in conversation with you, I fetch and carry, I completely subordinate my own preferences and personality, and I never argue with you.”

“You’re arguing with me now.”

“No, I’m not.”

Another dead end. Preston sighed and looked out over his own supine form on the chaise longue, past his mounded pink belly cresting at the waist of his scarlet swimming trunks, past the tops of his toes, just visible way down there this side of the white wood rail enclosing the porch, past the bit of sand and neat plantings and brick path that paralleled the shoreline, past the shoreline out there and then to the green and foamy sea, speckled with snorkelers, whizzing with windsurfers, caroming with canoes. It was exhausting just to watch all those people exercise. “I hate this place,” he said.

Alan had no doubt heard that before as well. “We could go somewhere else, if you’d like,” he said.

Preston snorted. “Where else? It’s all the same, except most of it is even worse. At least, here there’s no weather.”

Alan waved a hand at the view. “It’s August, Preston,” he said, “the whole northern hemisphere’s like that at the moment. No snow, not even much rain. You could go anywhere you like.”

“You know perfectly well,” Preston told him, beginning to become really annoyed, “the only place I’d like to go is the one place I certainly
cannot
go, and that is home. New York. My apartment. My clubs, my city, my theaters, my restaurants, my board of directors’ meetings, my five–hundred–dollar hookers speaking French.
That’s
where I cannot go, as you full well know. And you also know why, because that’s something else I talk about often, because it preys on my mind.”

“Your wives, you mean.”

“To have ex–wives is the normal state of affairs,” Preston explained. “It’s merely the end product of lust. But ex–wives are not supposed to band together, pool their resources, set themselves to strip their former benefactor to his skivvies, and then set fire to the skivvies.”

“You probably jeered at them,” Alan suggested.

Preston spread his hands. “Well, of
course
I jeered at them. Ex–wives are
meant
to be jeered at. Tiny little grasping brains, greedy little pigs.”

“Driving them together.”

“Well, they weren’t
supposed
to be together, they were supposed to hate each other too much. If those four women had remained solitary soreheads, as they were supposed to do, I wouldn’t be on the run the way I am, hounded to the ends of the earth by the baying of the world’s most rapacious divorce attorneys.”

“Club Med isn’t exactly the end of the earth,” Alan informed him.

“It’s one of them,” Preston said. “It isn’t your
hub,
your
beating heart,
your
nerve center,
in short, your New York. It isn’t, Alan, New York.”

“I agree,” Alan said.

“Thank you.” Preston brooded, then said, “If I
could
go home again, Alan, I would go there in a shot, as you very well know, and I would have absolutely no further use for a paid companion, and you would no doubt starve to death in a gutter somewhere. And deserve it, too. Is there anything more otiose than a paid companion?”

“Probably not,” Alan said. “Of course, pleasant people get companionship for free.”

“And worth every penny of it. What do you mean, pleasant people? I am pleasant. I smile at the waitstaff, I josh with the other guests.”

“You taunt and tease,” Alan told him. “You like to hurt people’s feelings — mine, if I had any — and use big words they won’t understand and just be so superior it’s amazing you’re not in a toga.”

“Don’t forget the laurel leaves,” Preston said, and laughed, and said, “Do you know who I miss?”

Alan seemed mildly surprised. “You miss somebody?”

“That little Albright fellow,” Preston said. “The crook, whatever he was. The fellow out of the Bowery Boy movies.”

“You miss him,” Alan said, the words as flat as a skipping stone.

“I do,” Preston said, and smiled at the memory. “You talk about teasing people, he was the best subject I ever had in my life. Albright —
there’s
a misnomer. And when he got to drinking!”

“You got to drinking yourself,” Alan told him.

“Oh, a bit, here and there,” Preston acknowledged, and waved the idea away. “Just enough to keep him company, so he could tell me things I could make fun of.”

“You told him a few things yourself,” Alan said.

“I did?” Preston tried to remember something he might have told the little Albright fellow. “What on earth could I possibly have told Arnie Albright?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alan said. “Personal details, when you were in your cups together. He’s probably forgotten it all. But you know, I almost had the feeling sometimes that he came around so often mostly because he was trying to pump you.”

“Pump? Me? Don’t be foolish. Arnie Albright was about as crafty as that scuba instructor you inveigled me into going to.”

“If you’d gone back,” Alan said, “he might have drowned you.”

“One of the reasons I didn’t. But Arnie Albright. To pump
me.
He came back, day after day —”

“Because he had nowhere else to go, like you.”

“Paid companions do not interrupt,” Preston said. “He came back because, in his pitiful little brain, he had dreams of someday one–upping me. It was wonderful to watch him, tongue–tied, nose turning bright red, trying to find a
snappy retort.
”

“No, he didn’t have a lot of those,” Alan agreed.

“I should think not.” With another laugh, Preston said, “Wherever he is right now, back up there in the city, I wonder if he thinks sometimes of me.”