Jacko (35 page)

—The female, she said, marginally warming to her topic, the female kangaroo can carry two separate children at once, not twins, each one in a separate womb.

—Only place in the world, confirmed Jacko. Only animal.

Sunny began fiddling with the clasp of a new-looking brown handbag. She addressed Delia, the nurse.

—Do you think there's time … you know … for a call to Joyce and the children?

—Of course there is, said Delia, sitting forward. We can use my AT&T card.

—Excuse me, said Sunny, managing to stand up after some thought.

Jacko and I watched them go towards the little alcoves where the credit card booths were located, along with desks for those who wanted to do serious business here.

I asked Jacko, Is Vixen Six paying for all this?

—Not bloody likely. As far as they're concerned, they've paid their $60,000. Some of the buggers don't think they got much value for it either.

—And where is the money?

—In a trust fund. She's the only one who can draw on it eh. I wondered if Bob Sondquist would want the power to draw cheques, too. But to give the old bugger his due, he didn't.

—So, is she paying for herself and the nurse?

—God, it'd cut a hole out of the only money she has. I tell you mate, I'd better get a windfall in the near future. I've paid for three bloody Connoisseur-class round-trip tickets to Australia in the past week.

And as for a wife, so for a stranger: an expensive trip to the antipodes.

—Just over $15,000 all up eh. AMEX will bleed from the bloody ears!

I watched Delia, standing, swipe her card and make the connection and pass the phone to seated Sunny. I watched Sunny frame her words into the mouthpiece with care and hesitation, yet chancing a smile, and at one stage what looked like a stutter of laughter, speaking to Joyce and/or the children. And then tears at the end, before she hung up. I noticed then that Jacko was watching too.

—You know, I found out she tried to send half the rights money to Joyce Kremmerling. You can imagine what a defence lawyer would have made of that eh! Now it doesn't matter. It's her money. She won't need much out at Burren Waters either.

I said, There's an English company, a very well-known one, Chandler-Silver, who have an option on a book of mine. The offer expires in two weeks time, at which time they have to put up rights money for the book or let it drift. It's my agent's opinion they'll buy the rights. It's not like selling a film to Universal, but it's respectable amounts. If they cough up, I'd be honoured to make a contribution. Four, five thousand dollars say.

He could see I meant it. He leaned forward and punched me sharply on the upper arm.

—You old poofter! Keep it. I might have something coming through too. But thanks. Can you come to dinner with me and some people after this?

After the call, Delia steered Sunny to the women's toilet. I had an image of Sunny being dosed with her last pre-flight medication. They were gone a long time, and Jacko became anxious and began darting up to check the departure screen. The flight was announced as being at the boarding stage; and then ten minutes passed, and passengers were urged to proceed immediately to gate so-and-so. At last Delia and Sunny presented themselves, frankly smiling.

—Shall we go? Delia asked Jacko.

Her casual competence would not go unnoticed in the Territory, where the only competence that was respected was casual. They might never let her get away. Yet she still thought it was just a trip.

We walked them to the gate. Sunny moved as carefully as an eighty-three-year-old with suspect hips. It seemed to me that the inertia of her black body-box delayed her even here on America's threshold. In two days she would be receiving space therapy at Burren Waters, where no door was locked. What a startling and apposite idea it had been of Jacko's to fly her away.

We saw the two young women amble down the passageway to the plane. They walked together with the easy, slow familiarity of two aged sisters who occupied the one house. Once or twice, emphatically in Delia's case, absently in Sunny's, they paused to wave.

18

Outside in the growing night, Jacko flexed his $15,000-lighter shoulders as if he were soothing a back injury. I looked around for the Mercedes and its fierce little driver, but an enormous white limousine – aerialed and winged – came to us. Jacko opened the door before the driver could get around to do it, and waved me in. I found myself in a dark, plush interior. Jacko entered quickly. The driver arrived in time to close the door on him, then darted back to his position at the wheel and instructed us in all the vehicle's many appurtenances – the fax, the telephone, the bar, the television. We were collecting Mr Greenspan, he said, from the East River Heliport in forty minutes time. We should just make it.

—Is Greenspan's helicopter going to land on the roof of this thing? Jacko asked.

—Well it can, sir, in remote locations. But such a landing is not authorized for urban conditions.

—Bloody shame, said Jacko.

He flicked on the television and left the bar untouched. It was evening news time. They were still debating the Sunny Sondquist case: male rights advocates were making a martyr of Kremmerling; and feminist authors still correctly said Sunny was the archetypically punished woman and that her behaviour was utterly coherent.

—But none of the bastards know she's out of here, breathed Jacko with gratification.

The prosecution of the two San Bernardino deputy sheriffs had struck technical and forensic problems, a commentator said, and might not proceed.

Any man hounded like this, argued a male rights champion, would consider taking his life the way Kremmerling had, as a statement of bravery and dissent.

Sunny could well have perished here in New York, either of her critics or of her advocates.

—It gives a person great bloody satisfaction, Jacko told me. He switched the television off. He said, You by all means hit the bar. I've got to stay clear-headed tonight. Maybe you can tell Lucy about all this.

—About you, and about paying for the women?

—No, for Christ's sake, don't tell her that. No, about tonight's meeting. It serves as a sincere token of mending my ways. I'm offering myself to Hubert Greenspan.

Even I knew that name. Flicking channels you heard it regularly. He produced, it seemed to my lay ear and eye, all the game shows.

—You're going into games.

—Damn right. I'll keep on the doorknocks in the meantime for a basic living. But Greenspan wants to try out a new idea with me. Something like Groucho Marx: light, whimsical, wisecracking but real money involved. Durkin might come over with me. We're toying with the idea of incorporating the doorknock thing, going into people's houses by one means or another and asking them a question. A real question though: What's the capital of Hungary? Who's the president of Austria? And they could have say, three minutes to hunt through any material they have to hand – newspapers, books, encyclopaedias. Harmless fun. Harmless, totally bloody harmless.

He cuffed the upholstery behind his head.

—You were right, he said. Now I'm missing her something bloody bitter.

We were at the heliport some time before Greenspan's helicopter landed. We waited in the little lounge, looking out at the river and squinting up at the busy, blurred lights of all the city's other helicopters, this night's only stars. At last one great, dark, clattering machine loomed, threw an intense beam onto the helipad, and then descended.

I saw a spritely little man in a white suit and an Astrakhan coat jump down in the manner of an elderly person who wants to show you how athletic he is. He then helped down a blonde woman, and then a dark-haired woman who seemed more tentative, not as accustomed as the blonde to walking out from beneath the murderous blades of the thing.

Wizened and fashionable, Hubert Greenspan, who was believed to be in his mid-seventies, introduced both women. A friend of his, he said, indicating the blonde woman. And her college room-mate.

This was, as he had warned Jacko, an informal meeting. Both the women's names flew away under the noise of helicopters, and I would not quite master them all evening.

Jacko said that on the basis of the informality of the night, he'd taken the liberty of bringing his best friend and adviser: me.

We all got into the limo together. The blonde asked me, Are you a lawyer, sir?

She had a faint Southern accent, Virginia or Maryland perhaps.

—No, I said. Nothing as grand.

I felt a palpable diminution of respect, as if it was only as a lawyer that I could achieve validity at her table.

I took one of the jump seats by the television set, and the Greenspan house-guest took another, and Jacko and the blonde woman, who can't have been much older than twenty-five years, served as bookends to Greenspan.

—Well, said Greenspan, lifting his rubicund little chin. We'll all remember this night, Jacko. We'll boast at cocktail parties that we were here. We couldn't have a better response to our initial survey.

—And it's all pure fun, said Jacko.

—My son, said Greenspan, you can at last give up being television's door-to-door salesman.

Jacko didn't mind what another man might well have considered a mild slur. He beamed not at Greenspan, but first at the blonde woman, and then at her companion. The companion seemed older than Greenspan's woman friend, seemed to be one of those ageless women who exercise, perhaps have prostheses, and work at energetic jobs.

Despite himself, Jacko was beginning to twinkle in the company of the healthy old gnome and his two handsome sidekicks.

Greenspan remarked, You seemed uncertain about your contractual situation last time we talked. I can buy out anyone as long as I know what the situation is.

This was not meant as a boast, but as paternal information.

—I don't think you'll have to, Jacko told him. A crowd called Silverarts have an option on my services. They pay me fifteen hundred dollars a month option fee.

The old man laughed indulgently, and almost with the sort of thrill which goes with the observance of microscopic life.

—This is strictly a game show option with Silverarts, said Jacko. Something they had in mind for me. But there are windows of opportunity written into the agreement, and I'm in one of them now. If we can arrange things by the fifteenth of next month, it won't cost you anything.

Jacko beamed across at Greenspan's blonde companion, whose name – I had by now learned – was Tracey.

We went to Elio's, a turbulent, fashionable Italian restaurant in the East Seventies. Jacko began to gulp the white wine. Obviously it wasn't his drinking I was to commend to Lucy, but then, I wasn't in a position to commend my own.

Anyhow, the presence of the two women and the promise of an innocently procured fortune had revived Jacko. In his shining, amicable demeanour, I could see too clearly Lucy's argument borne out yet again: that marriage was to him a casual act of kindness; that he shone his countenance equally on all creatures, a wife, a liberated slave, a psychiatric nurse, a game show producer, and in particular – as it was turning out – a game show producer's golden companion named Tracey.

We all ordered, mainly pasta. Both the women, with ambitions to be beautiful forever, asked for the angel hair without the sauce.

—I work in production for Hubert, I heard Tracey say to Jacko. You'll be working with me.

The antipasto had barely been eaten, and we were deep into a second bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and – after the chastening of the past two weeks – all Jacko's demons were again at large. The older, darker of Greenspan's companions began asking Jacko about his career as America's doorknocker.

He told them his favourite stories. When Gorbachev had been in town, visiting the UN and having talks with Bush – this had been two summers ago? – Jacko had found a Texan comedian who did Gorbachev impersonations, complete with the Soviet leader's South America-shaped birthmark. The man was uncanny. Jacko had envisaged taking him to the Soviet Union and walking him through Red Square dressed in an Elvis Presley costume – just to see the reaction of the Russians, he said.

He had never fulfilled that ambition, but he'd used the man for another purpose: to test the New York real estate tycoon, Gordon Renmark. The State Department had asked Renmark if he would be available for a meeting with Gorbachev, and the New York tabloids ran away with the story from that point. If anyone could infect Gorbachev with the glories of the free market, it would be Gordon Renmark, who carried the virus in a particularly rampant form. The meeting had, in any case, been cancelled, but Jacko employed the Texan Gorbachev to turn up at Renmark Towers on Fifth Avenue for the meeting anyhow. Jacko also employed some plausible looking members of Actors Equity who resembled State Department men, and they presented themselves at the reception desk of the Towers. Mr Gorbachev, they said, had time for a quick exchange with Mr Renmark in the lobby. The schedule did not allow for elevator-time up and down. Could Mr Renmark descend to the lobby immediately?

Beyond the glass stood Dannie and Clayton and Jacko, filming it all. Renmark, appearing in a phalanx of aides, embraced the false Gorbachev. They sat on a leather lounge chair by the security desk and began to discuss the destiny of the two great powers. The comedian, however, was incapable of playing it straight, and began to insert a few of his Gorbachev punch lines. Doubt crossed Mr Renmark's face.

By this stage of Jacko's tale, the woman called Tracey was engrossed, laughing in delight. It was chiefly for her and not for Greenspan that Jacko was displaying what he considered his triumphs.

This, one of Jacko's most favoured stories, perhaps more precious to him than the story of the Wall, concludes with Renmark looking up, seeing Jacko and the others beyond the glass, trying to make up lost ground and to be quick-witted, to be whimsical in return with the
faux
Muscovite, and, above all, trying not to be enraged. The Gorbachev meeting broke off with a mixture of bitter joking and dudgeon, and Renmark's security men emerged from the building and ordered Jacko, Clayton and Dannie to lose themselves.