Condominium (7 page)

“Let’s drop this right now. Right now, Elda, and I mean it.”

They were soon back at Golden Sands. The Gobbins had one of the twenty-four protected parking places under the building. George put the Chrysler into his slot with geometric precision. He took their folding cart out of the trunk and loaded the three bags of groceries into it, along with his purchases. They rode up to the third floor in silence. He placed the bags on the countertop in the kitchen and took the cart back down and put it into the trunk before checking the doors to be sure the car was locked.

Mr. Ames startled him by saying, close behind him, “Won’t do a damned bit of good, George.”

“Oh. Hi, Brooks. What won’t do any good?”

“Locking it. A thief could open up that car in six seconds. Everybody should realize we’ve got no security here at all. We’re alone here, George. If I was a hoodlum I could hit you on the head, take your wallet, roll you under your car and walk away and be miles from here before anybody could find you.”

Brooks Ames was short and round and stood so very erect he seemed to lean backward. He had thick white hair, a heavy white mustache, a veined red face, bulging blue eyes and a high loud voice. He had owned a small printing company before his retirement.

“Or Peggy Brasser could come steaming in and run me down before I could hide behind a column.”

“Don’t make jokes about it, George. In the prospectus it clearly states that there is to be an armed security guard on patrol at all times. I’m demanding that we take legal action. People like you just don’t understand the danger. The courts let people off with a slap on the wrist: Be a good boy. The police have stopped giving a damn. What’s the use arresting people if nobody goes to jail? You got eyes in your head, George. Use them. Go up to Beach Village and look at the scum hanging around. Sick, dangerous persons. They always get money from somewhere. Now times are hard and getting harder. You think they’re going to give up booze and hard drugs and gasoline when all they have to do is come swaggering in here and take our money? What’s to stop them? The law? Don’t make me laugh.”

“Maybe it isn’t as bad as you think.”

Brooks Ames stepped close and clamped his thick red hand around George’s arm just above the elbow. The painful force of the clasp surprised and disconcerted him. Brooks lowered his voice to a stage whisper. There was peppermint on his breath.

“You better wake up, George. I happen to know they’ve been casing this place. Everybody else is living in a fool’s paradise. I’ve seen them on the stairways, loitering and watching. I found one getting off the elevator on four, on my floor.”

“One what?”

“Oh, I confront them every time. I want them to know somebody is onto them. But they’ve all been briefed. They always have a cover story. It always sounds plausible. But they are sly. I can always tell them by the look in their eyes.”

“What are they after?”

“Are you really all that innocent? Listen. A week ago I went into the office. It was unlocked. Julian wasn’t there and Lorrie
wasn’t there. The key cabinet was closed but … get
this …
the key to the key cabinet was in the lock!”

“I don’t know what—”

“Don’t interrupt. Do you know what is inside that service room over there? You ought to be interested in these things. I’ll tell you. Every single phone line comes down to a big unlocked circuit box in that room and then goes out of here in an underground cable. Suppose somebody hasn’t got a key to the service room? What could be easier than just giving it a nudge with a corner of a front bumper. In seconds you are out of the car and in there with tin snips cutting that cable. Then you go from apartment to apartment, using the keys you’ve had made from the keys you took from the key cabinet and replaced. You’ve got chain cutters. Unlock a door, cut the safety chain, hit you and Elda over the head with a hunk of pipe and clean out everything you have of any value. Pack the stuff in your own suitcases and take them down to the waiting truck.”

“That’s a pretty wild notion, Brooks.”

“You bet it is, and I can prove it.”

“
Prove
it?”

“You bet I can. There’s a place in New York City called Olympic Towers. It is a place with absolute total security. You never have to leave the building. Everything is right there for you. And do you know what they are selling nine-room condominium duplexes for, George? Six … hundred … and … fifty … thousand … dollars … per! And a monthly fee that would stagger you. What do you think of that?”

“What does it prove?”

“You’re not thinking, Gobbin. Are any nine rooms in a tall building worth that much money? Hell no! What are they buying,
anyway? Security! People with that much money to spend are smarter about predicting things than you and I are. That’s why they have that much money. Why are they willing to spend it on total security? Because they know that the streets are going to be full of ravening mobs of hoodlums, smashing and stealing and killing, and they are going to be safe, while we go under.”

Brooks gave George’s arm an extra-powerful squeeze. He moved even closer and in that strange hoarse whisper said, “Are you willing to serve?”

For a few moments George Gobbin lost contact with reality. He stood amid concrete cubes and walls, amid metal machines in a shadowed place separated from the bright sun outside by a jungle of plantings. A short strong person stood at the wrong distance for his bifocals, too close for the distance lens, too far for the reading lens, blurred red face and blurred blue eyes, huffing warm peppermint smells at him, hurting his arm, making an incomprehensible request.

He wrenched his arm free and yelled, in fear and anger, “Serve what?” He massaged his numbed fingers.

Brooks Ames stepped warily back and said, “What’s wrong with you, George?”

“Nobody is after us.”

“You
yelled
at me.”

“Serve what? How?”

“I ran it up the flagpole with Pete McGinnity, and he said he had no objection if I could get the gun permits. The way I see it, suppose we sign up twelve men. Four times twelve is forty-eight. Four hours of armed patrol duty once every two days. That wouldn’t hurt anybody, would it?”

“Wander around here with a gun for four hours?”

“The patrol station would be right outside Higbee’s office where you can watch the elevators. Actually, what we ought to have is closed circuit television so you can watch the stairways and outside walkways too.”

“Brooks, I am not going to watch anything.”

“That’s your option, of course. Nobody can force you to do your civic duty.”

“Are you going to be wandering around with a gun?”

“When I am, you can sleep sounder at night, neighbor.”

“I don’t think it will work exactly that way.”

“I’m disappointed in you, George.”

“I just don’t happen to think the corridors of Golden Sands are going to be awash in blood any minute now.”

Brooks Ames smiled sadly. “Go ahead. Make your jokes. Your innocence is really very very touching.” He walked briskly away, whacking his metal-shod heels against the concrete, the sound bouncing off the hard walls and metal cars.

George rode back up to 3-C. As he got off the elevator two children about six or seven years old raced into it, shrieking, and pressed all the buttons from 7 to G.

“Hey!” George said. “Don’t do that, kids! You’re not supposed to push all …”

The door was closing. The browner of the two children, wearing only red swim pants, blond hair hiding most of its face, said with a painful clarity, “Fuck off, gramps!” The door closed and the indicator showed it was heading upward.

George went thoughtfully into his apartment.

“Where
were
you? What kept you?”

“Brooks Ames. He wants me to volunteer to be an armed guard. I think he’s lost his wits.”

“Audrey says he worries all the time about thieves coming in here. He wakes up in the night, she says, and paces around, worrying and hearing noises.”

“Some children hopped on the elevator and pushed all the buttons.”

“I thought I heard children screaming. Who are they visiting?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Did you check for the mail?”

“It won’t be there yet.”

“Why can’t you just say you forgot to check?”

“I didn’t check because it is too early to check.”

“Instead of going three steps out of your way and looking in the box?”

When he made no reply, she went back into the kitchen, holding her shoulders high and rigid. He sat on the couch and opened the package with the reel in it and took out the little instruction pamphlet and began reading it. At the Fisherama he’d had the clerk fill the spool on the reel with eight-pound monofilament, and fill the extra spool with twelve-pound. He reviewed how to remove the spool and replace it and then did so, admiring the oily click with which the spool settled into position on the reel.

Elda leaned and spoke through the pass-through. “If you had any consideration at all, you’d go find out about the mail without my having to beg you.”

“The children are using the elevators.”

“Is that supposed to be humorous? You know it was nine months for Judy over a week ago.”

“And you know she had the first two with about as much trouble as your average brown rabbit, and if there was any trouble, Hal could certainly phone.”

“Maybe he phoned when we were marketing.”

“If so, he’ll try again.”

She came out of the kitchen, marched past him and went out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her. He went into the utility room and got his fish box and spinning rod. By the time he had taken the old reel off and put the new one on and threaded the line through the guides, she was back. In her anger she had forgotten to take a key. The door locked automatically. He decided not to answer the first knock. After the second knocking he waited just long enough so that when he opened the door, she stood there with her fist upraised to start again.

“Couldn’t you hear me?”

“Hear you what? You knocked and I came to the door and opened it.”

“I knocked twice.”

“Then evidently I did not hear the first knocking, or I would have opened the door.”

He went and sat on the couch. She slung the mail at him from ten feet away. The corner of a small catalog stung the corner of his mouth and the rest of the mail fluttered down around him, on the couch and on the rug.

“There is all your terribly important mail,” she said. “It ought to keep you busy the rest of the day.”

He gathered it up. Ads, circulars, solicitations. “I’ll try to make it last. We retireds have to spread things out.”

“Hah! Retired!”

“Didn’t you know?”

“
You
may be.
I’m
not. What the hell has changed for me? Cooking, cleaning, shopping, dusting, laundry, bed-making. Not only you don’t have a job, you don’t even have a yard to take care of anymore. Retirement is one hell of a laugh.”

He faked astonishment as he looked up at her. “My God! I never
realized you’re working your fingers to the bone stacking dishes in the dishwasher and putting the washing in the washing machine. Wow! Here you are waiting on me hand and foot and—”

“You can be one ice-cold sarcastic son of a bitch. You are—”

“Exactly like my mother?” He jumped up from the couch. “I knew it was about time for that.”

“She was a cold person, George. Through and through. And she had that terrible sense of … superiority, of being a little bit better than everyone around her, without any cause in the world that I could ever discover. You are exactly like she was.”

“You know what you have? You have a compulsion to feel abused. Any idiot could run this apartment with one hand during the television commercials. But that would take away the kicks. You have to dawdle and futz around and fool around until you make every ten-minute job take an hour. Then you can blame me for keeping you in harness.”

He saw the familiar tears well into her green eyes and spill and run. “That is
stinking!
That is a cruel stinking thing to say. I’ve worked hard and I’ve sacrificed having a life of my own just to—”

“Come here to this garden spot where you can swim in the pool and walk on the beach and enjoy the sunshine.”

“As if you earned it all for me? Just for me?
Bull
shit, George. If we had to retire on your very own pension, we damned well wouldn’t be retired yet, would we? And if we did hang around and retire on it, we wouldn’t be living here. We live here because they put an interstate past the farm.”

“You would have sold it years ago.”

“And you hung onto it because you’re so shrewd? Ha! It is to laugh, George Genius Gobbin. We did without a lot of things while the kids were growing up so you could hang onto that farm
and go out there and pretend to be the big man bossing those thieving tenants around. You kept it for sentimental reasons, and if Hap hadn’t gotten after you to sell, we’d still be up there, if they hadn’t already fired you.”

“So I’m a weak sentimental failure. Or I’m a cold superior person. And you haven’t decided which.”

“You are cold and indifferent and hateful. And if you’d done your job as well as I did mine, you’d have been running that company instead of just being some kind of clerk.”

“A vice-president, damn it!”

“And you’re proud of that? Gee! I remember you telling me when Vance made every salesman a vice-president so they could get in to see more purchasing agents.”

“You are not happy unless you’re pulling me down. What you are is an emasculator. Maybe I would have done better if you hadn’t been all the time right behind me, destroying my confidence.”

“Destroying! That’s a wicked thing to say. I always tried to make you feel as if—”

“I couldn’t do one damn thing right.”

“Oh, you are so rotten and unfair. So-o-o unfair to me.”

Elda stood there, facing him, her face crumpled with despair, and he knew that his next line was supposed to be an accusation about overacting, and then she would get back to his mother, and then transpose into his talent for spoiling things for everybody. Then he would go storming out in an enormous rage and come back later and they would comfort each other with a sexual solution.