Closing Time (7 page)

"Drop me off at that building," said Yossarian. "It's where I live now."

"There?" When he nodded, she added, "Move."

"I just did. What's wrong? On the top of my magic mountain we have a couple of health clubs, and one of them is a temple of love. At the bottom there are nine movie houses, two X-rated and one gay, and we have stockbrokers, law firms, and advertising agencies in between. All kinds of doctors. There's a bank with a cash machine and that great supermarket too. I have suggested a nursing home. Once we have a nursing home, I can live there a lifetime and practically never set foot outside."

"For God sakes, John, don't always joke. Go to a good neighborhood."

"Where will I find one? Montana?" He laughed again. "Frances, this
is
a good neighborhood. Do you think I'd set foot in a bad one?"

All at once, Frances looked tired and dispirited. "John, you used to know everything," she reflected, dropping the affectation of cultured speech. "What can be done?"

"Nothing," he obliged her helpfully in reply.

For things were good, he reminded her: as measured by official standards, they had not often been better. This time only the poor were very poor, and the need for new prison cells was more urgent than the needs of the homeless. The problems were hopeless: there were too many people who needed food, and there was too much food to be able to feed them profitably. What was wanted was more shortages, he added, with just a small smile. He did not volunteer that by now he was one more in the solid middle class who was not keen to have his taxes raised to ameliorate the miseries of those who paid none. He preferred more prisons.

Yossarian was sixty-eight and somewhat vain, for he looked younger than many men of sixty-seven, and better than all women of his approximate generation. His second wife was still divorcing him. He did not think there would be a third.

All his children had come from his first.

His daughter, Gillian, the judge, was divorcing her husband, who, despite a much better income, was not achieving as much and was unlikely ever to amount to anything more than a reliable husband, father, family man, and provider.

His son Julian, the braggart and oldest of the lot, was a minor major hotshot on Wall Street still with insufficient earnings to move regally into Manhattan. He and his wife now occupied separate quarters of their obsolescent suburban mansion while their respective lawyers made ready to sue and countersue for divorce and attempted, impossibly, to arrive at a division of property and children that would supply entire satisfaction to both. The wife was a good-looking and disagreeable woman of fashionable tastes from a family that spent money recklessly, as loud as Julian and as despotic in certitude, and their boy and girl were bullying too and odiously unsociable.

Yossarian sensed trouble brewing in the marriage of his other son, Adrian, a chemist without a graduate degree who worked for a cosmetics manufacturer in New Jersey and was spending much of his adult working life seeking a formula for dying hair gray; his wife had taken to enrolling in adult education courses.

He fretted most about Michael, who could not seem to make himself want to amount to anything special and was blind to the dangers lurking in that lack of goal. Michael had once joked to Yossarian that he was going to save money for his divorce before starting to save for his marriage, and Yossarian resisted wisecracking back that his joke was not a joke. Michael did not regret that he never had tried hard to succeed as an artist. That role too did not appeal to him.

Women, especially women who had been married one time before, liked Michael and lived with him because he was peaceful, understanding, and undemanding, and then soon tired of living with him, because he was peaceful, understanding, and undemanding. He resolutely refused to quarrel and fell silent and sad in conflict. Yossarian had a respectful suspicion about Michael that in his taciturn way, with women as with work, he knew what he was doing. But not with money.

For money, Michael did freelance artwork for agencies and magazines or for art studios with contract assignments, or, with clear conscience, accepted what he needed from Yossarian, disbelieving a day must dawn when he would no longer find these freelance assignments at hand and that Yossarian might not always choose to safeguard him from eventual financial tragedy.

All in all, Yossarian decided, it was a typically modern, poorly adjusted, new-age family in which no one but the mother truly liked all the others or saw good reason to; and each, he suspected, was, like himself, at least secretly and intermittently sad and regretful.

His family life was perfect, he liked to lament. Like Thomas Mann's Gustav Aschenbach, he had none.

He was still under surveillance. He could not tell by how many. By the end of the week there was even an Orthodox Jew pacing back and forth outside his building on the other side of the avenue, and a call on his answering machine from the nurse Melissa MacIntosh, whom he had all but forgotten, with the information that she'd been rotated to the evening shift for a while, in case he'd been planning to take her to dinner-and to Paris and Florence too for lingerie, she reminded with a caustic snicker-and with the incredible news that the Belgian patient was still alive but in pain and that his temperature was down almost to normal.

Yossarian would have bet his life that the Belgian would already be dead.

Of all those tailing him, he could account for only a few-the ones retained by the lawyer for his estranged wife and those retained by the estranged, impulsive husband of a woman he'd lain with half-drunkenly once not long before, a mother of adolescents, and thought halfheartedly he might wish to lie with some more, if ever he was graced with the urge to lie with a woman again, who had detectives shadow every man she knew in his craze to obtain evidence of fornication to balance the evidence of fornication she had earlier obtained against him.

The idea of the others festered, and after another few spells of aggravated embitterment, Yossarian took the bull by the horns and telephoned the office.

"Anything new?" he began, to Milo's son.

"Not as far as I know."

"Are you telling me the truth?"

"To the best of my ability."

"You're not holding anything back?"

"Not as far as I can tell."

"Would you tell me if you were?"

"I would tell you if I could."

"When your father calls in today, M2," he said to Milo Minder-binder II, "tell him I need the name of a good private detective. It's for something personal."

"He's already phoned," said Milo junior. "He recommends a man named Jerry Gaffney at the Gaffney Agency. Under no circumstances mention that my father suggested him."

"He told you that already?" Yossarian was enchanted. "How did he know I was going to ask?"

"That's impossible for me to say."

"How are you feeling, M2?"

"It's hard to be sure."

"I mean in general. Have you been back to the bus terminal to look at those TV monitors?"

"I need to clock them some more. I want to go again."

"I can arrange that again."

"Will Michael come with me?"

"If you pay him for the day. Are things all right?"

"Wouldn't I want to tell you if they were?"

"But would you tell me?"

"That would depend."

"On what?"

"If I could tell you the truth."

"Would you tell me the truth?"

"Do I know what it is?"

"Could you tell me a lie?"

"Only if I knew the truth."

"You're being honest with me."

"My father wants that."

"Mr. Minderbinder mentioned you were going to call," said the sanguine, soft-spoken voice belonging to the man named Jerry Gaffney when Yossarian telephoned him.

"That's funny," said Yossarian. "Which one?"

"Mr. Minderbinder senior."

"That's very funny then," said Yossarian in a harder manner. "Because Minderbinder senior insisted I not mention his name to you when I phoned."

"It was a test to see if you could keep things secret."

"You gave me no chance to pass it."

"I trust my clients, and I want all of them to know they can always trust Jerry Gaffney. Without trust, what else is there? I put everything out front. I'll give you proof of that now. You should know that this telephone line is tapped."

Yossarian caught his breath. "How the hell did you find that out?"

"It's my telephone line and I want it tapped," Mr. Gaffney explained reasonably. "There, see? You can count on Jerry Gaffney. It's only me who's recording it."

"Is
my
line tapped?" Yossarian thought he should ask. "I make many business calls."

"Let me look it up. Yes, your business is tapping it. Your apartment may be bugged too."

"Mr. Gaffney, how do you know all this?"

"Call me Jerry, Mr. Yossarian."

"How do you know all this, Mr. Gaffney?"

"Because I'm the one who tapped it and I'm one of the parties who may have bugged it, Mr. Yossarian. Let me give you a tip. All walls may have ears. Talk only in the presence of running water if you want to talk privately. Have sex only in the bathroom or kitchen if you want to make love or under the air conditioner with the fan setting turned up to- That's it!" he cheered, after Yossarian had walked into the kitchen with his portable phone and turned on both faucets full pressure to talk secretly. "We're picking up nothing. I can barely hear you."

"I'm not saying anything."

"Learn to read lips."

"Mr. Gaffney-"

"Call me Jerry."

"Mr. Gaffney, you tapped my telephone and you bugged my apartment?"

"I
may
have bugged it. I'll have one of my staff investigators check. I keep nothing back. Mr. Yossarian, you have an intercom system with the staff in the lobby. Can you be sure it's not on now? Are there no video cameras watching you?"

"Who would do that?"

"I would, for one, if I were paid. Now that you know I tell the truth, you see we can become close friends. That's the only way to work. I thought you knew that your telephone was tapped and that your apartment might be bugged and your mail, travel, credit cards, and bank accounts monitored."

"Ho-ly shit, I don't know what I know." Yossarian soaked up the disagreeable intelligence with a prolonged groan.

"Look on the bright side, Mr. Yossarian. Always do that. You'll soon be party to another matrimonial action, I believe. You can pretty much take all that for granted if the principals have the wherewithal to pay us."

"You do that too?"

"I do a lot of that too. But this is only the company. Why should you care what M & M E & A hears if you never say anything you wouldn't want the company to hear? You believe that much, don't you?"

"No."

"No? Keep in mind, Mr. Yossarian, that I'm getting all of this down, although I'll be pleased to erase as much of it as you wish. How can you have reservations about M & M E & A when you share in its progress? Doesn't everybody share?"

"I have never gone on record with that, Mr. Gaffney, and I won't do that now. When can we meet to begin?"

"I've already begun, Mr. Yossarian. Grass doesn't grow under Senor Gaffney's feet. I've sent for your government files under the Freedom of Information Act and I'm getting your record from one of the best consumer credit-rating bureaus. I already have your Social Security number. Like it so far?"

"I am not hiring you to investigate me!"

"I want to find out what these people following you know about you before I find out who all of them are. How many did you say you think there are?"

"I didn't. But I count at least six, but two or four of them may be working in pairs. I notice they drive cheap cars."

"Economy cars," Gaffney corrected punctiliously, "to escape being noticed. That's probably how you noticed them." He seemed to Yossarian to be extremely exact. "Six, you say? Six is a good number."

"For what?"

"For business, of course. There is safety in numbers, Mr. Yossarian. For example, if one or two of them decided to assassinate you, there'd already be witnesses. Yes, six is a very good number," Gaffney continued happily. "It would be nicer to get them up to eight or ten. Forget about meeting me yet. I wouldn't want any of them to figure out I'm working for you unless it turns out that they're working for me. I like to have solutions before I find out the problems. Please turn off that water now if you're not having sex. I'm growing hoarse shouting, and I can hardly hear you. You really don't need it when you're talking to me. Your friends call you Yo-Yo? Some call you John?"

"Only my close ones, Mr. Gaffney."

"Mine call me Jerry."

"I must tell you, Mr. Gaffney, that I find talking to you exasperating."

"I hope that will change. If you'll pardon my saying so, it was heartening to hear that report from your nurse."

"What nurse?" snapped Yossarian. "I have no nurse."

"Her name is Miss Melissa MacIntosh, sir," corrected Gaffney, with a cough that was reproving.

"You heard my answering machine too?"

"Your company did. I'm just a retainer. I wouldn't do it if I didn't get paid. The patient is surviving. There's no sign of infection."

"I think it's phenomenal."

"We're happy you're pleased."

And the chaplain was still out of sight: in detention somewhere for examination and interrogation after tracking Yossarian down in his hospital through the Freedom of Information Act and popping back into his life with the problem he could not grapple with.

Yossarian was lying on his back in his hospital bed when the chaplain had found him there the time before, and he waited with a look of outraged hostility as the door to his room inched open after he'd given no response to the timid tapping he'd heard and saw an equine, bland face with a knobby forehead and thinning strands of hay-colored hair discolored with dull silver come leaning in shyly to peer at him. The eyes were pink-lidded, and they flared with brightness the instant they alighted upon him.

"I knew it!" the man bearing that face burst right out with joy. "I wanted to see you again anyway. I knew I would find you! I knew I would recognize you. How good you look! How happy I am to see we're both still alive! I want to cheer!"