The Resort (16 page)

“What about Clete?”

“I’ll figure out a way to duck him.”

She was the diagnostician, he was the fixer. She trusted him to find a solution.

The moment they were both dressed and ready, the phone rang. It was a new voice, not the young woman he had spoken to yesterday.

“Clete will be around in a minute,” she said.

Henry looked
up.
They were being watched
on
closed-circuit television,
of
course. Right
up
against the wall underneath the camera would surely be out
of
its range. He motioned Margaret over to him.
“Courage,” he
said,
giving
it the
French pronuncia
tion.

In a moment, as promised, they could hear the locks being opened. The door swung ajar, but Clete did not step across the threshold.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” Margaret replied, a reflex she immediately regretted.

Henry’d be damned if he’d say good morning to the man.

“Sleep well?” Clete asked.

This time neither replied.

“No rule around here that you’ve got to talk,” Clete said. “I’m heading for breakfast. You can follow me if you want to.”

And off he went, nonchalantly, leaving them staring through the open doorway.

“Of course, we’ll eat. We’re not out to punish ourselves,” Henry said lightly.

They followed Clete by perhaps twenty feet, enjoying the illusion of freedom.

Henry decided that he would look more closely at the faces of the other guests, peer for some clue of strength, determination, willingness to communicate with the newcomers. A thought occurred to him. Had the strong ones escaped already? If so, why hadn’t the outside world been alerted to the goings-on in Cliffhaven? Or had something else happened to those who resisted or tried to escape and only the passive ones were left?

*

When the orange juice was served, Henry thought it was pointless to continue the silence game.

“Clete, how about taking us for a drive around the countryside this morning?”

“Very funny,” Clete said.

“Shouldn’t somebody notify Hertz? We were supposed to return the car in Los Angeles tomorrow.”

“Look, Mr. Brown,” Clete said, “you don’t need to worry about Hertz.”

“Don’t they come looking?”

“Sometimes you’re too much, Mr. Brown. Try the French toast, it’s really good. You, too, Dr. Brown, I recommend it. Hertz,” he said, continuing through half a mouthful of French toast, “just collects the insurance. You don’t think they care, do you? It’s a cost of doing business in California.”

As Henry slowly cut the French toast on his plate into bite-size pieces, the first shimmering nuance of an idea lured him into thought.

“You’re not eating,” Clete said. “Anything wrong?”

Henry loooked up. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said, his voice trailing off.

“I meant with the food,” Clete said.

“I’m afraid my stomach’s a bit upset,” Henry said, rising.

Margaret was puzzled. Henry always announced every complaint to her.

“Am I allowed?” Henry asked.

Clete pointed, nodding. “It’s just this side of the ladies’.”

“I think I know the way,” Henry said.

The first door, in the modern style, showed a male figure. There was a second door less than ten feet down the hall.

The door felt as if it were controlled by a heavy spring. Inside the men’s room he looked up. The door closer was vacuum-operated. Maybe. The urinals were on the right, the cubicles with their swinging half-doors on the left. So far, so good.

He went over to the double-hung window at the rear. To the right front he could see the white-stoned walkway to the dining room. His view to the left was obstructed by large bushes leading off to the woods. From outside, as they had come toward the dining room, he had noticed the window, and having noticed the approximate location of the bathrooms the night before, he assumed the window to be one of the bathrooms. The window of the second bathroom next to it was invisible from the walkway.

Henry went into one of the cubicles and listened against the wall.

Just then he heard the door open. Someone coming into the men’s room. Clete? Quickly, he flushed the toilet to announce his location. He dropped his pants and sat down.

Whoever it was entered the next cubicle. It was soon apparent that the occupant of the next booth had a purpose more ordinary than Henry’s.

Henry leaned his head back against the cold tile wall, listening. Nothing.

The man in the next booth eventually left. He couldn’t stay here much longer. Suddenly, through the wall he heard the sound he was waiting for, a toilet flushing just on the other side of the wall. Of course, that was the way twin bathrooms were usually arranged, the main facilities back to back, emptying into a single soil pipe between them. Okay.

He checked his appearance in front of the mirror, then went out, his eyes glancing over at the door to the other bathroom. It might work. Anything was worth trying.

He rejoined Clete and Margaret with apologies.

“Feeling all right?” Clete asked.

Henry nodded. They finished the meal in silence.

*

As they were wending their way out of the dining room, Henry saw a new couple being led in by one of the orange-and-blue-uniformed young men with a sardonic expression just like Clete’s. They were young, the woman no more than twenty-six or -seven, the man under thirty. He had red hair. Neither of them looked a bit Jewish, Henry thought. Their eyes looked like those of trapped animals.

As soon as Clete led Henry and Margaret out of the dining room, he said, “Those are the Krinskys. Nice couple. They’ve been here before.”

No wonder the look in their eyes, thought Henry.

“And they came back?” Margaret asked.

Clete chuckled. “Not exactly. Krinsky figured his way out of here. We didn’t catch up with them till near Santa Barbara.”

Maybe, thought Henry. And maybe the Krinskys were a setup for them, to prove the uselessness of escape attempts.

*

Clete led them in a direction they hadn’t been before, an area north of the dining room, on a dirt path leading away from the built-up area.

“Mind a walk?” he asked.

Ten minutes later, circling east, they came to an outcrop of rock. Clete motioned them to come look.

Perhaps thirty feet below them and stretching into the distance, Henry and Margaret could see land under cultivation. Several dozen people were working, stopping, nipping off the tops of the weedy-looking plants, inching forward, repeating the process, watched by orange-and-blue-uniformed staff members.

“See how well behaved they are,” Clete said. “You’d never know none of them’ve been farmers before.”

“Who are they?” Margaret asked, suspecting she knew.

“Guests.”

I’ve got to control my reactions, Henry thought. I don’t want anything to spoil our chances for tonight.

“You’ll learn more about our economy here in due course,” Clete said, glancing at his watch. “In the meantime, I’ve got to get you back for indoctrination. I hope you don’t mind walking a bit faster.”

Halfway back Clete took a side road toward an area north of the dining room where twenty or so redwood lounge chairs were arrayed in two rows facing the sun as on a cruise ship. All but two of the chairs were already occupied, and Clete gestured at the two empty ones.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the young man who stood in front of them, his legs apart like a gym instructor, “Mr. Clifford has been kind enough to donate these pamphlets, which we will all now read. Please don’t speak among yourselves. Address any questions to me.”

Henry glanced down at the pamphlet.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
They had to be kidding.

“What is this?” Margaret said.

Henry remembered seeing a copy when he’d been seventeen or eighteen. He’d dipped into it, couldn’t see how anyone could believe such garbage.

Margaret asked again, “What is this?”

A man in front of her, reddish-haired and freckle-faced, turned to Margaret and said, “It’s the menu for the Holocaust.”

Instantly, Clete was headed toward them.

“You were warned not to speak,” Clete said to the red-haired man, who Henry could now see was only a few years older than Clete. “And you, too, Dr. Brown,” Clete said.

The young man stood now, taller than Clete. The woman next to him tugged at his sleeve, trying to get him to sit down. He wrenched his arm away.

“You’ve been here nearly a week,” Clete said to the young man. “You ought to know better.”

“Oh fuck you,” the man said, turning away, just as Clete, with the full force of his arm, slapped the man across the face with the back of his hand.

Henry found himself standing. “Now cut that out!”

Clete turned to Henry. “Mr. Brown, you’re too new to get involved. This man’s been trouble all week.”

“My wife asked a civil question, and he answered.”

The eyes of the other guests darted from their pamphlets to see what was happening. Clete waved a hand, and two of the other staff members came trotting over.

“Okay,” Clete said. “Freckles goes, and Brown goes.”

Henry felt the strong arms grab him from behind. “Take your hands off me,” he said, watching the other staff member Clete had called snapping something on the freckled man’s hands.

Handcuffs?

Henry felt the metal being snapped around his own wrists.

“Cut that out!”

He tried to pull his hands apart. This was ridiculous!

“I told you good behavior was rewarded, Mr. Brown, not insolence,” Clete said. “Okay,” he said to the others. “The lockers for both of them.”

“It was I who spoke,” Margaret said, suddenly realizing that she and Henry might be separated.

“You sit down,” Clete said. She wasn’t a Jew. He’d need special instructions.

“Move,” Clete said, and on cue the two staff members shoved their charges forward.

The freckle-faced man was trying to look back at his wife, who had tried to keep him seated.

Suddenly, the staff member behind Henry shoved him hard. He stumbled forward. His hands, his balancing agents, were not available to him. He nearly fell. He glanced just once at Margaret’s eyes, a rabbit in a field surrounded by hunters.

Then Henry and the freckle-faced man were led away around the back of the main buildings of Cliffhaven, Clete behind the group, until they came to a gray building in the rear. It looked like the kind of thing that houses electrical equipment. Clete used a key to unlock the door, then motioned Henry and the freckle-faced man in. The staff members behind them shoved them forward into the doorway.

I have to keep my head, Henry thought. The objective is to get away. Useless resistance might kill the prospect of escape. He walked into the building.

Inside it was like a long locker room, with full-length lockers along both walls. Henry could hear sounds of breathing from some of the lockers, and from one he could hear the sound of a woman whimpering. The smell was like the worst kind of public urinal.

“What the hell is this?” Henry asked.

“You’ll see.”

“There’re people in those lockers.”

“You bet.”

At the other end of the room, the freckle-faced man was resisting being shoved into one of the lockers by the two staff members.

Clete swung open the door of an empty locker. There was not quite room for a man of Henry’s height to stand upright.

“I’m going to be nice to you,” Clete said, “since this is your first infraction. Turn around.”

He unlocked Henry’s handcuffs. “That’s so you can scratch yourself,” Clete said. He motioned Henry into the locker with his thumb.

The freckle-faced man was shouting to have his handcuffs removed. The staff members handling him turned to Clete.

“No way,” Clete said. “You heard him say fuck you, didn’t you?”

Henry saw the two staff members shove the man into a locker, then slam the door shut. God, it would be awful with one’s hands cuffed.

“You people are crazy,” Henry said.

“If every Jew in America had a taste of these lockers, we’d have a lot less trouble from you people.”

“What trouble?”

“Get in there.”

“How long have some of these people been in here?”

“The longest anybody’s lasted is a few days. Since yours is a first infraction, I’m giving you exactly four hours. That other fellow’s getting eight.”

Henry wondered whether standing in that confined
space would be as bad as whatever Margaret would experience in her head during the four hours of waiting.

I’m not going to do this, he thought.

He looked at Clete.

If I resist, Henry thought, he’ll do something that might kill our chances to escape tonight.

“Come on,” Clete said. “I haven’t got all day.”

He is making me my own jailer, Henry thought, as he stepped in backward so that he would face forward toward the air holes. He wasn’t sure he could really turn around inside.