The Scarlet Ruse (13 page)

My mind felt like glue, and I wondered if I was duplicating Sergeant Goodbread's habitual expression. "But Hirsh wouldn't want business as usual, would he?"

"Of course he wouldn't, silly man! But there's always the mail, and the things I haven't finished, and I want to see what Jane was doing that somebody else will have to finish. I won't open the place up. I'll print a sign and put it on the door. If there's anything Hirsh has to decide, I'll take it to his place and ask him. I hope there is. It will be the best thing in the world for him to start making decisions."

"Say hello to him for me."

"Get some more sleep, darling. I'd give odds you're going to need it."

She gave me a pat and went off to the door, springing along on those Olympic legs. She undid the chain and left, the latch clacking shut. I remembered how (only the day before yesterday) the webbed, interwoven muscles of her thighs had bulged when the full strain of the slalom cutback clenched her whole body. Visible at such times but never discernible to any loving touch, not on the shoulders or back, the arms, or legs. Firm, yes. But so sweetly sheathed by the resilient softness of the woman-padding of the little layer of subcutaneous fat. Grasp her more strongly, and the firm underlayer of muscle was then tangible, sliding and clenching and relaxing. And the tone and control of the athlete muscles was apparent whenever she moved, whenever she bent, flexed, twisted, lifted, and apparent in the tirelessness of her repetition of any stressing motion.

I bobbed across the surface of sleep, sinking and pulling myself away from it, and at last stood up and creaked a hundred muscles in gargantuan stretching, padded in and adjusted the four shower nozzles to soft thick spray for all the soaping and rinsing, and then to hard fine stinging spray for the cold that finally woke me up all the way. I brushed with the new brush, shaved with the new tools, put on my supermarket socks and shorts and slacks and shirt, my shoes from a previous life where I had lived aboard a houseboat somewhere, and went down to find a place in the hotel to have breakfast. The basement coffee shop had the windowless fluorescence of a bus station at midnight, so I went back up and was led across fifty feet of carpeting to a window table and handed a menu as big as a windshield-twice as big when opened. Three copywriters had swooned while trying to describe the taste of eggs scrambled with roe.

When I lowered the menu, Willy Nucci was sitting across from me. It gave me a start, so visible, he said, "I could wear a bell, like a leper."

"I should have been able to hear your shirt."

"This was a gift, handwoven in Guatemala."

"By parrots?"

"You are very funny today. You are killing me." The man came up and bowed and took my order. A large fresh orange juice. Blueberry waffle. Double on the Canadian bacon. Maybe some cinnamon toast. Pot of coffee. Willy ordered coffee. After the captain left, Willy said, "From what Alfred said, I guess you got to regain your strength."

"I thought he was wished on you. I didn't know he reported to you."

He glanced around nervously. "Why should I ever say he was wished on me? He's a good night man. When he isn't sure, he checks with me. I was making a joke."

"You were? Ho,ho,ho. What did he check with you?"

"If you were throwing my name around or you were okay and he should drop it right there. Drop it there, I told him."

"What if I was just using your name in vain?"

"He wouldn't have broke up any romancing, just had some hackie tail her to wherever when she came out, then depending if it was town or beach, a couple of friendlies would have picked her up for soliciting, and then it would have been put to her as either a hundred bucks and ninety days as a freelance, or case dismissed if she wanted to join up and pay her dues and learn the rules."

"How about a perfectly legitimate girlfriend?" Willy almost smiled. "Unless a girl has very heavy connections, what difference does it make, after all? And if she's got the connections, she'll start naming them the minute she's picked up, and then it's a judgment call on the part of the friendlies."

"So he described her to you?"

"Long black hair, blue eyes, and tits that came up to his ears. She got a little pissed-off at how he acted and wouldn't give him a name, so he tried the description on me because he said he thought he'd seen her someplace."

"Where?"

"He couldn't put his mind to it. I told him to forget it, all and any part of it. He said she was built for heavy duty, for a man and a half. But a little too old to be a bonus item for anybody who turns her over to the union."

My juice came. I tasted it. I pushed it over to Willy to taste. He made a face and said, "Yeck. Know what does that?"

"What does that, Willy?"

"The oil in orange rind is practically the same molecular structure as castor oil. So whatever clown ground this fresh, ground right past the juice and pith into the rind. Be right back."

And that is why it is a good hotel. Willy knows everything. He checks every incoming purchase. He reaches up and runs his fingers along ledges. Fifty times a year he picks a room at random and sleeps in it and makes sure that every little thing he finds wrong is fixed.

He came back with fresh juice in a taller glass. He watched me taste it, relaxed when I pronounced it delicious. He said, "Who can knock the woman who did it wrong? A little round Cuban woman, she does the work of three people out there. God grant I shouldn't lose her and the union shouldn't slow her down."

"Before you sell the place."

"Sell! Why should I sell? Are you dealing off a short deck?"

"Sorry, Mr. Nucci."

"Here's your breakfast, McGee. Enjoy."

Sprenger Investment Associates was five blocks west of Collins on Lincoln Road, on the second floor in the middle of the block on the wide pedestrian mall. The big glass door hissed when I pushed it open. It was a combination reception room and bullpen, with a deep blue rug and gauze green draperies, big formica desks in kindergarten colors. A broad tape machine in a decorator housing was against the wall at the left, demonstrating its inhuman typing skill. A table contained stacks of literature about municipal bonds. One floor man was on the phone, another talking to an elderly couple, a third reading The Wall Street Journal. They were young men, expensively dressed and coiffed. Over on the right a computer printout station was making a subdued roar as the interleaf printout sheets came folding down into the bin. A girl who seemed to be fifty percent thighs stood at a waist-high counter deftly separating and binding a previous printout. Another girl was having a donut and coffee. The third girl stared at me from the reception desk, making her decision not to get up and come around the desk with welcome smile after she had given me a quick inventory, from shoes to sun-parched hair.

"May I help you?" she said in a voice which indicated she thought it was most unlikely that she could. It was cold in the room. She was pretty. There were goosepimples on her upper arms.

"Mr. Sprenger said he would see me whenever I got here."

"Are you sure he said that?"

"Why don't we try him on it, little chum?"

"I couldn't interrupt him, really."

"The name is McGee."

I saw at once that she had been instructed. But she had not been prepared for somebody who looked as if he had come to fix the wiring. Her eyes went round. "Oh, of course! I remember now. Mr. McGee." Her smile became very wide. Unreal, but wide.

"That's a dead tooth," I said. "Just beyond the canine on the upper left. A pretty girl should get that fixed."

Her smile shrunk enough to hide the gray tooth. She wanted to be offended but couldn't risk it. "I keep trying to get an appointment." She trotted back and through a door made of blond wood, her hair and her little rump bouncing.

She came out and very close behind her there was a tall frail old man, erect and handsomely dressed. Frank Sprenger, looking just as I expected him to look, had a big brown hand on the old man's arm just above the elbow. He took him over to one of the young men and got him seated and told the young man to brief Mr. Sumner on the new issues on the recommended list, nothing less than Standard and Poor double A. He came back and nodded to me and stood aside and let me go first. He was big and he was broad and he was brown. He had black, straight, coarse hair that looked as lifeless as hair on a museum Indian. His face was a chunk of bone with the skin taut over it. He had simian brows under an inch and a half of forehead. The skin folds around his eyes had a reverse slant from that of the Japanese, and imbedded in there were little bright intense blueberry eyes. He was dressed in a way that made him conspicuous in Miami in September- beautifully tailored banker's gray in summer weight weave, a white shirt custom made for what looked to me like a twenty-two neck and forty-inch sleeves, a blue silk tie, a gold stickpin, gold cufflinks.

His office was just as anachronistic. It was like a small library-study in an English manor house, and it looked out upon what seemed to be a ground-floor garden, surrounded by a stone wall. But as I sat in the leather chair he offered me, I saw that though the plantings were real, the turf was Astro, and the stone facing on the wall was by Armstrong.

His voice was a bit high for the size of him, and he projected it with very little lip movement and no animation on his face at all. It is characteristic of people who have either been in prison or who live in such a manner that their total environment becomes a prison of sorts, a place where communication can be a deadly risk.

"Thanks for seeing me," I said.

"Think nothing of it. You found a problem I didn't know I had. I appreciate it."

My chair was very carefully placed. Before him on the desk was one of those brass and mahogany gadgets which are supposed to tell you the time, temperature, humidity, and state of the world, as well as play music for you, FM, AM, or taped. I could not see the dials. His glance kept straying to it, and I realized I was probably being scanned. The world of electronic bugging has gotten so esoteric that the best defense is a receiver of great precision and limited range which constantly scans all frequencies on which a concealed mike could be broadcasting, and translates anything it picks up into a visual signal.

A quick run up and down the scale would not be enough, because the casual visitor might be set up to activate his sending equipment once things got interesting. Also there are some bugs, slightly more bulky, which can be activated and deactivated by an outside incoming signal. The best defense, of course, is to never say anything of use to anybody. The second best defense is the offensive technique of transmitting an overwhelming blast of white noise, a smothering hiss, on all frequencies, whenever you say anything you'd rather not hear played back some day.

I said, "A friend told me about a brand new development, a new way to bug a room, Sprenger."

He showed no surprise, only a mild interest. "Yes?"

"Everything is a sounding board. Every word we are saying moves the glass in that big window there. There is a transparent substance somebody can put on the outside of that glass that will reflect a certain kind of laser beam. The beam transmitter has to be in a very solid mount. It reflects back to a receptor, very sensitive, which translates the minute differences in the angle of the beam into fluctuating electrical impulses which can be translated into sound. They can do it from a half-mile away, and there isn't any device you can use which will detect it."

"Pick up the voices, the words?"

"A speaker is a diaphragm that moves back and forth like the head of a drum and changes electrical impulses into sound."

He got up and went over to his window, tested the yield in the center of it with big spatulate fingers.

"Could be," he said. "But nobody can see into this window from anywhere because of the wall. So they couldn't hit the window with one of those." He came back and sat at his desk.

"You live in this room? Or don't the other rooms you live in have windows?"

He rubbed his bumpy nose, closed his blueberry eyes for a few seconds, then said, "I'll check it out. You are doing me some good, maybe. You checked me out?"

"Enough for my purposes. I didn't know about this operation."

"It isn't a cover. It's a legitimate outlet for municipal bonds. Home base is in Memphis. We do three hundred million a year in face value right out of this office. We service the municipal bond portfolios of over forty smaller banks."

"But you're not regulated like regular brokers."

His deep tan turned to red tan, and his voice got louder, and he used more lip movement. "We have an association of municipal bond dealers pledged to clean our own house and eliminate the bad practices of the past and drive the shysters out of-What the hell are you laughing at?"

"I couldn't help it."

"What's so funny?"

"You're wired into every kind of hustling there is. Protection, franchises, smuggling, drugs, gambling, broads, unions, extortion, and you get all huffy about your clean bond business."

He thought about it. He tried a small smile which lasted almost a microsecond. "Maybe it's funny. It started as a cover. We bought somebody out. I got interested and built it up. Some of the skim goes away and comes right back into good bonds. I ask them, if the money comes back clean and it is supposed to go into legitimate investment, which would you rather have-a shopping center giving you a taxable ten percent return or bonds giving you five and a half tax free that you don't have to wake up in the night and wonder about?"