Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (2 page)

 
          
There
was such a strange feeling here, even apart from the dead man in the Buick. Not
a feeling of exclusivity, exactly, but of . . . apartness. Alien. As though
that building over there, seeming to hunch turtlelike in its wasteland setting
as though it found the two-story-tall sign on its head painful, it was as
though that building were actually a spaceship, from some universe far away.
And she about to enter.

 
          
A
spaceship, and a turde, all at once. “Block that metaphor,” Sara told herself,
and laughed, and got out of the car.

 
          
Because
Jack was in good odor at the moment— his team had done some excellent arthritis
stories recendy—he had a squaricle with a window, out which he now stared,
contemplating the idea of flinging himself through the immovable plate glass.

 
          
Down
below, in the Visitors’ parking lot, a pretty girl got out of a maroon
Chevette. Her short-sleeved blouse was dark blue, her linen skirt was wheat,
her hair was dark blonde, long and straight. So were her legs, long and straight.
In sunglasses she looked, as all women do, like Jacqueline Kennedy. She moved
toward the building, and Jack liked her walk. They have ball bearings in their
hips, he thought. He turned to Mary Kate, whose white rat face under the yellow
Gabor wig looked alert, competent, ready. If he would speak words, she would
type them.

 
          
He
looked again out the window, having no words to speak. The girl was almost
beyond his line of sight. “Does sex,” he said, “cure gallstones?”

 
          
“Well,
I’ve
never had any,” Mary Kate said.

 
          
Jack
turned to look at her.

 
          
“Gallstones,”
Mary Kate explained.

 
          
Sara
pulled open a tinted glass door and entered a small bare room like a
check-cashing operation in a bad neighborhood, except that this place was icy
cold. In the opposite wall was a wide glass window with a receptionist behind
it. Both side walls were hung with framed
Weekly
Galaxy
front pages in bright primary colors: annual predictions, drug
deaths of television stars, invasions from outer space.

 
          
Sara
crossed to the interior window and looked through at the receptionist, a
rawboned hillbilly woman with black hair teased into a feathery explosion. When
this person spoke, her amplified voice came from a speaker grille several feet
away to the right: “Help ya?”

 
          
It
was disconcerting to talk with someone whose voice came from eight feet off to
one side. “I’m Sara Joslyn, I’ve just been hired here.”

 
          
The
receptionist had her own clipboard, which she consulted. “Yes, here you are,”
said the disembodied voice, while the receptionist’s lips moved. “Take this
badge,” it went on, as a metal drawer below the window slid open, “and take the
elevator to the third floor. Ask for Mr. Harsch.” The badge was a red and blue
rectangle with many words on it, the most prominent being
visitor.

 
          
Sara took it and said, “Thank you,” as a strident buzzing sound came
apparently from the receptionist; that is, from the same grid that had been
producing her voice. Startled, Sara looked around, noticed the door beyond that
grid, and headed toward it. Pushing the door open as the buzzing stopped, she
found herself wondering: Who would
visit
this place?

 
          
Jack
watched Mary Kate type. He watched her stop typing. He said, “How many is
that?”

           
“Twenty-eight.”

           
A skinny pessimistic young reporter
named Don Grove entered through the door space into Jack’s squaricle, saying,
“I don’t suppose you want a two-headed calf.”

 
          
Jack
considered him. “With photos?”

          
“Possibly.”

           
“Where is this thing?”

 
          
“
Brazil
,” Don said.

 
          
“Oh,
yeah? Then I want the photos signed by a priest.”

 
          
“If
any,” Don said, and exited.

 
          
Jack
stared at the window, at the ceiling, at his own clenched left fist, at Mary
Kate: “The
Galaxy
clones a rat!”

 
          
“Ugh!”
she said. “A rat?”

 
          
“What
time is it?”

 
          
She
looked at her watch—a massive intricate timepiece that could tell you
everything from the time anywhere on the globe to the fifteen proofs of the
existence of God—and said, “
Nine fifty- eight
and eleven seconds.”

 
          
“Screw
it. A man!”

 
          
Typing,
Mary Kate said, “The
Galaxy
clones a
human being.”

 
          
“There
are
alligators in
New York City
sewers!”

           
“Oh, bushwah.”

 
          
“Type,
type.”

 
          
She
typed, she typed, though with a superior look on her face. All about them,
movement had begun. Editors and assistants and researchers and secretaries
erupted from their squaricles, striding or skipping or jogging along the
hall-lanes, converging toward the elevators. Mary Kate still typed, as Jack
yanked the paper from her machine, grabbed up his pads and pencils, and joined
the nervous flow.

 
          
Sara
emerged from the elevator and looked about. It was a huge open room, almost the
entire area of the third floor, without partitions. Desks and tables and people
and square support pillars made an undifferentiated jumble in front of her
eyes, all the way across to the far windows.

 
          
A
man was bearing down on her from the right, his expression grim, his hands full
of papers and pencils. She said, “I’m looking for—”

 
          
“Look
out!”
Unslowing, he shoved past her,
knocking her back into the closing elevator door, heedlessly hurrying on.

 
          
Astonished,
she stared after him. A bank of four elevators stood here, of which Sara had
come up in the second from the right. In front of the last elevator to the left
was placed a long conference table, one of its narrow ends pushed flat against
the elevator door. Chairs lined both long sides of this table, with a second
line of chairs ranked behind the first. Hurrying people converged now from
everywhere in the room, taking seats at the table. The rude man was among them,
spreading his papers and pencils at a place halfway down this side.

 
          
Sara
moved out away from the elevators, deeper into the room, to get a better view
of that odd scene, and as she did so—the last arrivals were just flinging
themselves into their chairs—the elevator door slid silendy open, and what was
inside was not a normal elevator but an actual and complete office. Sara
stared.

 
          
It
was a large space for an elevator, but rather small for an office. Its paneled
walls were decorated with framed photos. A trophy case stood at the rear, a
black leather sofa to one side, cabinetry on the other containing a TV screen,
video machine and stereo equipment. In the center of the room/elevator bulked a
large walnut desk and behind it two men, one seated and the other standing.

 
          
As
Sara continued to move sideways, staring at this apparition, a humming sound
was heard and the walnut desk slid forward to
clunk
against the end of the table. The seated man was conveyed
along with his desk, while the standing man stepped forward, maintaining his
position just behind the seated man’s right elbow.

 
          
“Good
morning,” growled the seated man in a raspy voice, glaring at everybody around
the conference table. He was burly, about fifty, with puffy cheeks and bristly
black hair and a low knobby forehead.

 
          
“Good
morning, sir,” or “Good morning, Mr. DeMassi,” raggedly responded the people at
the table. So that, Sara thought, was the boss himself, Bruno DeMassi, editor
and publisher and owner of the
Weekly
Galaxy
. She didn’t know what she’d expected, exactly, but something rather
more Perry White and less Don Corleone.

 
          
“So,”
growled DeMassi. “We ready to go to work?”

 
          
“Yes,
sir,” his subjects responded.

 
          
“Pass
’em up,” DeMassi ordered, and, as sheets of paper were passed toward him from
hand to hand, he picked up a twelve-ounce bottle of Hein- eken and downed a
slug.

 
          
“Hey!”
cried an outraged voice just behind Sara. She turned to see that she had almost
backed into a desk at which a woman sat making grease pencil remarks on the
backs of photographs. This woman, glaring indignandy at Sara and pointing her
grease pencil at the floor, said, “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see
the
wall?”

 
          
Wall?
Sara looked down. The floor was covered with neutral gray industrial carpeting,
but now she noticed that there was also a two-inchwide black line of tape
running along atop the carpet. Following it with her eyes, Sara saw that it ran
straight for several feet, then made a sharp right turn. Beyond it was another
similar line. In fact, everywhere she looked there were more black lines.

 
          
Possibly
a hundred people were present in this vast space, in addition to the couple of
dozen involved in the odd scene in the elevator, and Sara, looking around, now
realized that those who were in motion moved in somewhat unnatural ways, with
abrupt right-angled turns and unnecessary maneuvers that could only be
explained by these black lines on the floor. The people moved around the giant
room as though on tracks, as in some complex medieval mechanical toy.

 
          
“Will
you get
out
of my squaricle!” the
woman demanded.

 
          
“Sorry.”
Sara stepped back across the black line.

 
          
“Visitor,
eh?” the woman said, reading the badge Sara had affixed to her shoulder bag
strap.

 
          
Becoming
less annoyed, and pointing elsewhere with the grease pencil, she said, “If you
want to talk to me, come through the door space.”

 
          
“I
just want to—”

 
          
“If
you want to
talk
to me,” the woman
repeated, getting indignant all over again, “come through the
door space ”

 
          
“Sorry.”

 
          
Now
I’m
doing it, Sara thought, as she
followed the black line around to the right to where it stopped, only to start
again thirty-two inches later, leaving—as the woman had said—a door space. Sara
stepped through. “I just got here,” she apologized.

 
          
“I
could tell,” the woman said.

 
          
“I’m
looking for Mr. Harsch.”

 
          
The
woman pointed with her grease pencil again, this time toward the
elevator/office. “That’s him over there,” she said, “standing behind
Massa
.” Apparently it was all right to
look
through the nonwalls, even though
you weren’t supposed to walk through them. Looking, Sara for the first time
studied the man in the elevator/office with Bruno DeMassi. Tall, thin,
sixtyish, nearly bald with a low fringe of thin dead gray hair, a gaunt face
with a hawk nose and ice-gray eyes, Jacob Harsch looked about as warm and appealing
and human as Torquemada.

           
Sara looked at him, head bowed,
hunched forward slightly like a vulture, as he and DeMassi read the papers that
had been handed forward, and she felt a little chill. “He looks busy,” she
said. “Maybe I shouldn’t interrupt.”

 
          
Massa
read aloud, “ ‘How to Give a Party.’ ” He
looked up, glaring along the table at Binx Radwell. “Binx? What the fuck is
this?”

 
          
Binx
Radwell was a thirty-two-year-old blond man covered with a layer of baby fat
and panic. A sheen of perspiration always lay on him, and his constant smile
begged for salvation while acknowledging there was none. Teeth sparkling,
eyebrows waggling up and down, he said, “That’s it, Mr. DeMassi. How to give a
party, right there in your own home. That survey of the readership, sir, you
remember, they’re a lot of very insecure people, socially inse—”

 
          
“Course
they’re insecure,”
Massa
said, “they don’t know their ass from a fire hydrant. What’s this
party?”

 
          
Binx
jigged on his chair. “Well,” he said, “we explain how to be a host, a hostess,
how you—”
Massa
frowned. “You mean a
party?”
Waving his hands over his head, he said, “With
hats?”

           
“Well, not
necessarily hats,” Binx said. “We can do it without the hats. The point is, the
people are coming into your house, now what the hell do you do?”

           
DeMassi, chewing this idea, found it
without savor. His red pencil drew a line through “How to Give a Party.” Only
Massa
was permitted to own and to use a red
pencil at the
Galaxy.
That way, all
orders written in red were known to be genuine. A staffer found with a red
pencil on the property would be assumed to be a counterfeiter, and would be
fired at once. Drawing a second line and then a third through the rejected
offering,
Massa
said, “People don’t go to parties.”

 
          
Binx
nodded, smiling spastically.

 
          
To
delay the meeting with Mr. Harsch as long as possible, Sara continued to roam
the giant room, being careful not to cross any more black lines. Away to the
right, some distance from the elevators, she came upon an area where the black
lines dwindled away and where there were instead eight very long tables, one
behind the other. Ten or eleven people were seated at each table, all facing
toward the main part of the room and looking mostly like the banks of
volunteers manning the phones at a telethon. Foot-high wooden dividers spaced
along the tables gave each of these people his or her own little area, and on
these rather small patches of space were typewriters, telephones, cassette
recorders, steno pads, cups filled with pens and pencils, ashtrays, reference
books, here and there phone books, here and there a framed family photo or an
African violet or a small comic statue.

 
          
These,
it was clear, were the
Galaxy’s
reporters. About a third of them banged away at typewriters or jotted things in
memo pads, but the majority were on the phone, making call after call. Moving
unobtrusively among them, Sara listened to what the reporters were saying.

 
          
“What
did the interior of the spaceship look like?”

 
          
“I’m
calling from the Barbara Walters show. Of course this is the Barbara Walters
show; would the Barbara Walters show he to you?”

 
          
“And
when you served the meal, you did observe that they were holding hands, is that
right? Or, okay, their hands were on the table, near one another, and they were
looking at one another in a very passionate way. Would you describe it as a
very passionate look?”

 
          
“Professor,
would you be amazed if I told you I had a three-foot-tall Saturnian in my
office right this minute?”

 
          
“Doctor,
as a recognized authority on arthritis, could you comment on—I’m from the
Weekly Galaxy
, and—Doctor? Doctor?”

 
          
“Something
I can do for you, honey?”

 
          
“Oh!”
Sara said. “No, I’m just waiting to talk to Mr. Harsch.” And she drifted away
toward the conference at the elevators again.

 
          
Massa
had finished with Binx Radwell. Binx mopped
his brow and his neck and the tender inside of his elbows, as his spastic smile
semaphored distress calls—I’m sinking! Help me! I’m drowning!—to people who had
troubles of their own.

 
          
Massa
was now considering Jack Ingersoll’s list,
and his red pencil had been working, working. Jack’s manner, when things went
poorly, was to become more and more still, more and more unmoving and closed in
upon himself; at the moment, he could have been a granite statue, unblinking
eyes fixed on
Massa
’s furrowed forehead.

 
          
Which
cleared, abruptly, like a spring day. “ ‘Does Sex Cure Gallstones?’ “
Massa
read aloud, and looked up with a happy
smile. “That’d be good news, wouldn’t it?”

 
          
“Amen
to that, sir,” Harsch said, in his bloodless voice, as the assembled editors
feebly chuckled.

 
          
Massa
swigged beer, then pointed the bottle at
Jack. “Can you give me a positive yes?”