Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (32 page)

 
          
“He
asks if he can have a word with you, Mum.”

 
          
“Put
the villain on.”

 
          
“Boy
Cartwright here, Lady Beatrice,” said the villain, and the instant she heard
that glutinous voice, that style of Uriah Heep after assertiveness training,
Lady Beatrice placed the fellow precisely and unerringly in his proper pew in
the great English pecking order. A tradesman’s son from somewhere like
Bradford, a redbrick university dropout, the sort of fellow who in Manchester
or Liverpool sells used cars to Pakis. “If I could have a bit of a chat, Lady
B,” this mongrel said, “I’d be most appreciative.”

 
          
You’ve
had your bit of a chat, my lad, Lady Beatrice thought, and said, “Put Jakes
on.”

 
          
“I
beg your pardon?”

 
          
“That
large strapping fellow there with you. Jakes. Put him on.”

 
          
“Oh,
of course, of course. See you in half a tick, then,” the creature said, and
Lady Beatrice heard him, away from the phone, say snottily to Jakes, “Your
mistress has instructions for you.”

 
          
“Mum?”

 
          
“That
wide leather belt you usually wear, Jakes,” Lady Beatrice said. “Are you
wearing it today?”

 
          
“Yes,
Mum.”

 
          
“Then
use it, man!”

 
          
Lady
Beatrice hung up, and smiled out at the happy couple still strolling around the
lawn, saying little private things to one another. To the right, the gravel
road curved down and away. Almost out of sight through the ornamental trees was
the gatehouse. All at once, from down there, came the sound as of someone
crying out, “Woop!” And then again: “Woop! Woop! Woop!” The couple down below
seemed not to hear it, and rapidly the
woops
receded into silence, and all was well.

 
          
Jack
couldn’t sleep. Usually, no matter what happened in the course of a day, no
matter how much warthog dung was dumped on his head, it all sloughed away by
beddy-byes, and he slept like an innocent babe; which just goes to show. But
tonight, in the dark, with Sara’s dear head on his breast and the sound of her
slow respiration soothing to his ears, tonight for some reason he just couldn’t
seem to lose consciousness.

 
          
When
in doubt, make a list. What’s bugging the old brain, then, that it won’t let go
of Saturday?

 
          
Well,
let’s see. Outside this room, out there beyond the repaired glass doors and new
curtains, a
Massachusetts
state trooper patrolled, or was alleged to patrol; with a second
wandering the halls of the inn. No one could figure out why those shots had
been fired into this room last night, so there was a general effort to keep
more shots from being fired tonight. Had someone been trying to kill Sara, and
if so, why? Had they been trying to kill someone else, and got their targets
mixed? Had it just been a random shooting, without sense or meaning?

 
          
Hmm.
Whatever the cause of the shooting, the
fact
of the shooting was item number one on Jack’s list, and he studied it, turned
it over and over, poked at it with his brain as his tongue might poke at an
aching tooth. Is that why I can’t sleep? Because somebody emptied a gun through
that window into this bed last night?

 
          
No.
Doesn’t feel right. Not my problem, to begin with, plus we have police
protection, plus the shooting didn’t accomplish anything. So, no.

 
          
Boy
Cartwright, then; item number two on the list. I am now in a subservient
position to Boy Cartwright, my assignment to get an interview with John Michael
Mercer having been superseded by Boy’s assignment to get the wedding pictures.
Is
that
why I can’t sleep?

 
          
Certainly
not. The worst day of his life, Boy Cartwright couldn’t keep me awake for a
second if I wanted to sleep. So, no.

 
          
The
wedding itself, then, the whole problem of John Michael Mercer and his marriage
and Martha’s Vineyard and the very wild card of Lady Beatrice Romneysholme.
Yes?

 
          
No.
The job does not keep us awake. No.

 
          
In
her sleep, Sara murmured slightly, sighed, shifted position, her palm warm on
Jack’s chest, her hair pleasantly tickling his chin.

 
          
Sara.

 
          
Yes.

 
          
Jack
pondered that idea, found it surprising, found it discouraging, but reluctantly
admitted he also found it plausible. The reason he couldn’t sleep was because
he was worried about Sara.

 
          
Not
Sara being shot at. His worry was much sillier than that, much more ridiculous,
too absurd even to look at straight ahead; which is why he’d been unable to
think about it and deal with it and ignore it and go to sleep.

 
          
He
was afraid Sara was getting too good at her job.

 
          
It
had probably been happening from the very beginning, or at least from the time
of the hundred- year-old twins, but it hadn’t been out front and obvious until
here in Martha’s Vineyard, until Sara’s reaction to frustration had been to get
steadily tougher and tougher, stronger and stronger, more and more ruthless and
determined. When Jack had seen her with Ida today, had seen how well the two
women meshed, had seen how Sara was
becoming
Ida, something terrible had happened inside his brain, something awful,
something he had thought himself safe from, something he had believed could
never again get its clutches into him:

 
          
Ambiguity.

 
          
If
Sara’s getting better at her job, if she’s becoming ever more useful, there’s
only the one reaction possible, isn’t there? Pleasure. Satisfaction at the
development of another powerful member of the team. So whence, damnit, this
ambiguity, these doubts, this brooding inability to sleep?

 
          
With
what trouble and difficulty Jack had rid himself of extraneous emotion several
years ago he could barely stand to remember. A thoroughgoing romantic in
college and beyond, slopping over with empathy and fellow-feeling, as naive as
a CIA man at a rug sale, he had been hardened,
annealed,
by circumstances too harrowing to store in the memory
banks, and since that time he had been safe.

 
          
It
had been a conscious decision he had made, four years ago, to retire from the
human race, to care about nothing, to become as self-sufficient as Uncas. He
had chosen deliberately an environment where emotional attachments of every
kind, from the greatest to the smallest, were literally impossible. It was not
conceivable to
care for
one’s fellow
workers at the
Galaxy,
for instance.
One amusedly pitied a Binx Radwell about as meaningfully as if he were a puppy
with a thorn in its paw; one used an Ida Gavin and then washed one’s hands; one
rather relished a Boy Cartwright as so thoroughly
representing
the environment.

 
          
Equally,
one could not become emotionally involved with the job. Not
this
job. Nor could one care about the
pip-squeak transitory celebrities on whom they all lived their parasitic
existence. Even the state of
Florida
helped; anyone who managed to sing the
glorious rocks and rills of
that
sunny buttcan needed psychiatric care.

 
          
Too
thoroughly a bumt-out case even to relish the romantic self-image of
being
a bumt-out case, Jack Ingersoll
had retired to
Florida
and the
Weekly Galaxy
and the
likes of Ida Gavin and Boy Cartwright to lick his wounds and care never again
about anything at all. Not even possessions; his

 
          
Spartan
life not only gave him more money to put into blue-ribbon investments, the
better to prepare for that inevitable day of involuntary retirement, it also
kept him from falling—like puppy Binx— in love with
things
. He who has nothing has nothing to lose. And he who has
nothing to lose has already won.

 
          
Unlike
Sara. I don’t want to care about her, he thought. I want to be pleased that
she’s getting better and better at the job. I want to be happy that I have a
second mad dog on my team, nearly as good as Ida, and potentially even better.
I want to be amused by the knowledge that she lied to me
in bed
about the hundred-year-old twins, and that I’ll never be
able to prove it. I cannot save myself because I do not want to save myself,
and therefore I cannot save Sara, so I should merely find contentment in her
transformation.

 
          
And
what do I mean by
save,
anyway?
That’s pretty goddamn melodramatic, isn’t it? Sorry, buddy, I didn’t notice the
halo when you came in.

 
          
Thus
Jack tried, with sardonic contempt, to whip himself back into shape. And lay in
bed awake, Sara’s head warm on his chest. And failed.

 
          
Gloomy
Sunday. The morning of the Mercer- Nelson wedding dawned bright and sunny, with
a light offshore breeze, temperature in the low sixties, expected to rise to
the low seventies by nuptial hour at
1:00
p.m.
In the Oak Bluffs command center of the
Weekly Galaxy
, crammed with Jack
Ingersoll and his entire team, plus Boy Cartwright and the riffraff and scum of
his group, plus assorted stringers and photographers and secretaries, the gloom
was as palpable as a bad smell.

 
          
There
were also actual bad smells, of course, which everyone was too depressed to
complain about, some rising from Boy Cartwright’s assorted vermin, but most
emanating from the Down Under Trio, recalled at last from the trenches of
Green’s Hotel (where Phyllis Perkinson, representing
Trend
, had been among the happy distractees). It no longer mattered
that the world’s press was here;
Trend
or
Newsweek
would get as short shrift
from Lady Beatrice Romneysholme as the
Weekly
Galaxy.
(It was, in fact, a
New York
Post
team, attempting a landing on Lady Beatrice’s private beach via
rowboat, who had been driven back into the sea with their legs and behinds
riddled with birdshot by ancient but unerring marksmen on the household staff,
thus ending any idea Jack might have had of trying the same stunt.)

 
          
And
now, the final nail had been driven into the coffin of their hopes by the
arrival of Ida with yet another bit of bad news. “I found out who’s taking the
wedding pix,” she told Jack.

 
          
Boy,
nearby, raised his head and looked mildly at her stony profile. “You’ll want to
talk to me, then, dear,” he said.

 
          
Ida
ignored him, continuing to look at Jack, who said, “Would this photographer be
bribable?”

 
          
“I
doubt it,” Ida said. “Lady Beatrice is a rather well-known amateur
photographer, it turns out.”

           
Jack clutched his forehead. “Oh,
don’t do this to me.”

           
“Not to you,” Sara said. “To Boy.”

           
“Thank you, dear,” Boy said.

           
Still talking exclusively to Jack,
Ida said, in a fake la-dee-da voice, “Her flower photos are in all the
best
magazines.”

 
          
“Then
I wouldn’t have seen them,” Jack said. Bob Sangster, fondling his large nose,
which had become quite a bit redder the last few days and possibly larger as
well, smiled sadly and said, “Time for Ida to arrange another fire.”

           
Ida gave him an icy look. “I didn’t
arrange
the first one.”

           
“Just a manner of speaking, love,”
Bob told her, but then retreated to another table, still within earshot.

 
          
Sara,
looking alert, eager to learn, said, “What fire?”

           
“Nothing,” Ida told her. “Doesn’t
matter.”

           
“As a matter of fact,” Jack said,
“that was about the quickest thinking I’ve
ever
seen, and that’s saying something.”

 
          
“It
sure is,” Sara agreed. “Tell me about it.” “What’s happening right now,” Ida
said, “is what we should be thinking about.”

           
“Ida,” Jack said, “what’s happening
right now is failure and defeat. Speaking for myself, I’d much rather think
about a triumph of yesteryear than the rout of today.” To Sara, he said, “It
was a body in the box last year, George Hamler, I think, somebody famous who—”

 
          
Sara,
frowning in bewilderment, said, “Body in the box?”

 
          
“That’s
right, you haven’t been along on one of those, have you? That’s a—”

 
          
“Tell
her about the
fire
, man,” Harry Razza
said. “She’s a bright girl, maybe it’ll give her an idea.”

 
          
“Right.”
Jack said, “It was a situation just like this. We couldn’t get in, no matter
what we tried, we just couldn’t get that picture, and we
needed
it. We’re all standing around outside, we had a Mayflower
moving van down the street with our headquarters inside that, and all of a
sudden there’s a fire breaks out up in the main house. We barely hear the
sirens and see the smoke when Ida’s right
there
with a fireman’s outfit. I put it on, I take the camera, I’m in with the first
bunch of firemen running in, I get my picture, by then the cops were there—”

 
          
“By
then,” Harry Razza said, “the cops were checking the
firemen,
they were already on to the idea of the stunt.”

 
          
“We
only made it because Ida was so fast,” Jack said. “She heard that siren, she
saw that smoke, she was
there”

 
          
“Then,
when the old lady died,” Harry Razza said, “we couldn’t use the picture after
all. Such is life.”

 
          
Sara,
bewildered, said, “Old lady died? Is that the body in the box?”

 
          
“No,
no,” Harry said, “his
mother
. She
died in the fire.”

 
          
Louis
B. Urbiton raised his hoary and battle- scarred head from a nearby table.
“Mother-inlaw,” he said, and subsided.

 
          
“Right
you are,” Harry told him. “Mother-in-law it was.”

 
          
Don
Grove said, “I don’t suppose lightning’ll strike that house, or anything nice
like that.”

           
“Well,” Sara said slowly, “but what
if there was a shipwreck? Washed ashore.”

           
“No,” Jack said. “Lady Bee is not
your basic humanitarian type.”

 
          
“If
people are
drowning?”
Sara insisted.

 
          
“Lady
Bee,” Jack told her, “would turn the hose on them.”

 
          
“Something
else, then,” Sara said, thinking hard. Jack, watching her think, tried not to
be troubled, tried to be proud of this prodigy. “An airplane crash?” Sara
thought aloud, and shook her head. “Maybe a quarantine? A terrible infectious
disease, nobody allowed off the property until the health department gives
everybody shots?”

           
“Medical science baffled,” Jack
suggested. “But Lady Bee would give the shots herself.”

 
          
“There
has
to be a—” Sara started, but Boy
interrupted, saying mildly, “Is this a light I see before me, flashing off and
on?”

 
          
It
was the light on the phone on Boy’s desk. Everyone in the room watched him pick
it up and speak into it, with calm self-assurance:
“Family Circle
.” Then he sat abruptly to attention, even the dead
suety flesh of his cheeks seeming to stiffen. “Yes, Mr. DeMassi!” he announced,
and
everybody
stiffened.

 
          
“Yes,
Mr. DeMassi.”

 
          
“No,
Mr. DeMassi, I’m afraid not.”

 
          
“Well,
Mr. DeMassi, they do take our money. We have, I’m afraid, enriched several of
Lady Beatrice’s servants. However, having taken our money, they then refuse to
honor our bargain. Instead, they run us off with shotguns and dogs.”

           
“Absolutely, Mr. DeMassi, that is
immoral and unethical behavior, but—”

 
          
“No,
sir, the authorities in this area are absolutely no help at all.”

 
          
“Well,
sir, I’ve just managed to find out who’s going to do the official wedding
album—”

 
          
Ida
looked daggers.

 
          
“—and
I’m afraid there’s no comfort there, either. Lady Beatrice herself is going
to—”

 
          
“I’m
afraid so, sir, yes. Yes, indeed.”

 
          
Boy’s
eyes widened. He sat even straighter than before. The knuckles of the doughy
hand holding the phone receiver to his leprous ear were seen to whiten. “Yes,
sir!” he cried. “Yes, sir, we will! Absolutely, Mr. DeMassi! Thank you, sir!”

 
          
Boy
hung up. Greasy globules of perspiration stood on the fishbelly flesh of his
forehead. He stared about at all the people staring at him. “Well, well,” he
said in a kind of awe.

 
          
“Well?”
demanded Jack. “What did he say?”

           
“He said—” Boy cleared his throat.
A nervous smile flickered spastically across his face. “
Massa
said— Mr. DeMassi said— He said . . .
storm the wedding!”