Lookout Cartridge (36 page)

Claire, Gilda, Monty, my mother, and June. Still no call from Aut. June could be operating for the man in glasses and she might not know it was really for Phil Aut. I had not told Sub of the stabbing and Jim. It had been Jim.

Sub asked if I wanted coffee or tea.

Sub mentioned an old movie on TV. Tris and Ruby said they wanted to watch it. Sub said it came on too late and they were going to bed. There was more talk about what was happening when. Sub told them to go to their rooms and give me a chance to make my phone calls.

Sub had begun automatically to do the dishes. He lowered his voice and said, That burglar wanted something.

I said I was sorry. I said I might be in trouble, I had to find my own way through it but in any case we’d gone beyond the stage at which certain interests would imagine they could oppose me by rifling Sub’s apartment. Sub said he had repacked my case—but had the burglar gotten anything? and
what
interests?

I said some pages Jenny had typed, I had copies. I promised it wouldn’t happen again (and thought this sounded more like making a promise to myself).

But—I didn’t say the words—
the address book
. The address book. On top of the pages but not on top of the pages, for I had consulted it to call my charter man. But I had not consulted it because halfway to Sub’s desk I’d remembered the number and didn’t need the book.

They had the book. And the Highgate burglar had a copy of the diary.

But why smash the TV screen? said Sub, and held up a long dripping serrated knife.

Ruby punched me at the base of my spine and asked for a story. I told her to get undressed for her bath. Sub said she wasn’t taking a bath tonight. She left the kitchen and was replaced by Tris.

I said, It must have been an accident.

Sub said, You should have seen the screen.

Tris said, You should have seen the aerial.

Sub said, The aerial is beside the point. The tubes in back weren’t touched. It’s just that from the beginning we never really knew when the set would go and when it would work.

Tris left the kitchen and Sub said Rose had been thoughtful enough to say they absolutely must get a new doorman here, it was dangerous for the children.

Ruby was in the kitchen with nothing on.

Why couldn’t Mommy get an apartment in this building?

We don’t have closed-circuit television surveillance.

We have television.

Sub took a breath and said slowly, Sometimes so many lines of communication seem available, if I just made the right adjustment in myself I’d be clairvoyant.

Ruby wanted to know what that was.

I remembered my address book and its erratic script or capitals, in all my hands, in the hands of others, in pen and pencil.

I said I’d finish the dishes but I had an errand and would be right back.

Sub asked if I’d forgotten my phone calls—my mother had told him he ought to get married again and had been surprised to hear he and Rose weren’t divorced yet. She’d left four years ago. Time is a fast mover. The address book was an old one.

Sub asked if I was staying. Ruby and Tris asked for a story. I said, when I came back, they said Now. I said I’d tell them Beauty and the Beast when I came back. They said they’d heard it. Tris seemed now in spite of his age to be with Ruby, the two currents joined even though bedtime was also a divider because of their different ages. At an angle through the hall and her half-open white door with
DADDY IS STUPIED
marked on it in a slanted column thrice, I saw half of Ruby bent over something. She had forgotten me.

The children were glad to see me and so was Sub. Then Tris said, Did you and Daddy ever blow anything up?

Balloons, said Sub.

Fourth of July firecrackers, I said. In England they’re called thunderclaps and because they don’t have Fourth of July in England they explode them on Guy Fawkes Day.

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, said Sub.

Dad’s suing the TV people, said Tris.

I was, said Sub.

It was like a still shot with sound, I an alien element, moving too softly toward the front door.

Everyone stayed still while I moved. This was better than the other way around.

We’d never got round to some insert shots I’d had in mind of Lorna lying still: first, the mole on her left shoulder blade; second, up upon her shoulder the pearly scar my eyes and nose and tongue had crossed; third, the two clear mounds of pale cool buttock untouched by mole or spot though able to hold the nip of some passing teeth for upwards of three weeks, though by then you would need eyes peeled by lust or love that for their moments of search took other motions or the smell of flesh for granted and so saw only this month-old mark of blue. But what made thirty tripod seconds of Lorna’s still behind a movie—no quivering hand, no tremor on the skin or current through the faint dark down that grows at the end of her spine, nor later in projecting the developed film any faulting flicker to blink the moving frames. What, apart from sound on the film or in the projector, stamped a shot like that a movie rather than one of Millan’s slides? When I asked Lorna she said the movie shot would seem more alive no matter how still. This comment made the film more real and gave me a confidence I hadn’t known I needed or made me wonder if I had secretly dismissed our film.

I bore into Aut’s office building, the location of whose address I had again checked on the address-locater in my wallet, a crisp brown paper bag containing a container of coffee. The night man already on duty was leaning his chair against the empty newspaper and candy stand and stared straight ahead as if dreaming, and if so, not of dynamite.

It was not inevitable one of Claire’s keys would fit, but it did, and the glass door with Outer Film on it opened and my feet were on carpet.

Best turn on the lights, two banks of fluorescents momentarily blinking in the dark. Half a dozen big gray-green desks, some hooded typewriters, a World War II
Uncle Sam Wants You
poster, and nothing to do with films but a few cans on two desks and against a wall the hexagonal carrying cases.

Voices came, and as they passed my door the Outer Film phone nearest the door on what must be the receptionist’s desk started ringing and the steps stopped after a moment. But there was no reason to think the voices that happened now to stop weren’t waiting at the lift, and since it would not be unthinkable for lights to have been left on or for someone trying to finish up to wish not to get stuck on the phone, I let it go. I identified Claire’s desk by the glossy photos on the wall of Big Ben and Stonehenge. In her desk, not to mention stationery, pens, pencils, and the personals some nine-to-fivers feel more intimate with than anything in their bathroom cabinets at home, were two scripts, a modern Greek textbook, folders with invoices and letters, and in the center drawer notes, a notice from the dog hospital, and under a scattering of more letters, one from Dagger that felt in my hand like a look into the future meant for me. It was dated May 24 and it was typed on both sides and too long to recall in every detail. I could not decide whether to take it or not. I could have it copied but Claire would know. Steps echoed toward me, I thought from the elevator—someone who just might know it was unusual for lights to be on at this hour in an office, if in fact it
was
unusual, but might not know who worked for Aut and who didn’t. The letter was warm and confusing. What a guy! Dagger devoted the opening long paragraph apropos of nothing to a story about his Uncle Stan who had lived in Yonkers and when he heard his voice on one of the old prewar wire recorders had grown a beard and left his wife and gone to live in New Jersey and signed up in radio school and cultivated his voice and later got into eastern mysticism. Then Dagger wrote about the film. The ball-game footage was fast and funny, he’d dropped to 8 fps once so the film would show Umpire Ismay rolling a cigarette like a madman, and there were three moments, two of them not strictly in the game, that Outer Film would want to use, namely certain (shall we say, he said)
arresting faces
. Don’t worry, Aut will never hear about our initiative from me.

The steps stopped, a phone began to ring, the same phone, I couldn’t tell from the steps or the watery shadow in the glass door if I had two observers or one. This empty office was surrounded by me, or by the trick I sought in its aisles and files, its desks, demented desks every one messy but the receptionist’s, which was too clean on top not to be tidy inside even to some pattern of emptiness. Each desk had a bit of something. No desk had all. Not even Aut’s. Where was Aut’s? Claire I was sure had not been straight with Aut. Tessa had given confidence to Lorna who had given confidence to me. In a dim and unplaced room of recollection I believed I had given confidence to Tessa.

In one long shot of three people, Dagger went on in the second paragraph of his letter, he knew of course two but had to dig a bit to place the other Indian. No doubt, he said, I will run into him Friday. It’s been fun using the Beaulieu, blows better to 35 but it’s just a nicer little machine to hold than a Bolex though hell to load and with a few French shortcuts, but we might have to switch to a Bolex if I have to give back the Beaulieu. Advance some more bread, I’ll rent an Angenieux zoom. We are getting good now. We had a little practice this morning, but nothing to write home about. So far it’s been just the ball game Sunday, May 16, but we’ll be running both burners from this weekend on.

The steps started again but proceeded slowly. The second was like two people with a shared limp. The steps stopped down the hall. I thought I picked up a whisper. But I couldn’t have at that distance and through walls. The steps went off and then I didn’t hear them. I thought a door latched.

When the phone started again I noticed that when the steps had continued it had stopped ringing.

I was not sure. I closed the drawer, keeping the letter. I slipped to the wall and doused the light. I found my way back to Claire’s desk. I struck a match so I must have laid Dagger’s letter down. I wanted to check the deep drawer right bottom again in case the DiGorro film-file was in another folder. My match burned my fingers. I hadn’t found anything. I straightened up to strike another, I would try the last four or five folders, the names on them had meant nothing to me.

Steps, the same, came along again and stopped. It was two men very clearly. Would Phil Aut have come in, or called the watchman? The watchman had been unarmed.

The flame pricked my finger. I had taken it not even for granted, I had forgotten it. The steps had gone away again. To soothe and cure the burn, I didn’t know how long I’d stood there with Claire’s bottom right drawer out. I struck a match and as my head turned down to the folders my eye stopped on Dagger’s P.S. and I read, and my recollection is that it said, Don’t worry about Aut, I will definitely be able to handle the group in Wales, having experienced my Uncle Stan from Yonkers and New Jersey who once said, Don’t talk to
me
about the Stones and transcendental meditation!

The penny dropped—noiselessly—two pennies—a pound—an inflation of pounds blown up and dropped on the moon. But how can a paper pound drop into a slot. My brain was going soft. But so were the things that had been occupying its slots.

In shape or not, I was on the treadmill and couldn’t get off but it was moving the way I wanted it to and I was adding my movement to it. Dagger’s letter was May 24. So he’d already known about a group in Wales; but we didn’t find them in their field (by accident) till Friday, May 28.

The phone was ringing on the receptionist’s desk. I was receiving signals and the Cartwright-DiGorro enterprise looked like passing into receivership. Whole printed circuits sailed softly through the new soft-warped slots of my head. Micro-circs. Faster than a speeding bullet, slower than an old movie. Sub believed in messages; people who knew the precision of his professional mind and the inspired practicality with which he keeps his home going do not know about his messages—pain in the dentist chair (a message understood, hence liquidated); coincidence a section drawn from the map of one’s force field; if he had considered his word
clairvoyant
, no telling what he’d make of it. Or of Jim and the aerial stabbing now so far back, yet not six working days from this present Monday night, 8:45, October 18, 1971.

But Wales was not Dagger’s idea, it was mine. For Wales was passion and sorcery, heroes and deceptive mountains and music and boozing and hidden communes up behind a misty hill and lambs bleating in the gorges. There was the story of the hound-dog Gelert left by his master the warrior Llywelyn in a tent to watch over his infant son. When Llywelyn returned that night he found the tent collapsed and his dog calmly sitting beside it, his head and coat all matted with blood. Llywelyn in a frenzy of vengeance ran Gelert through with his spear, but hearing then a cry he pulled back the canvas and found not only his child safe in the cradle but a huge wolf ripped open and hideously dead. Gelert breathed his last licking Llywelyn’s hand and Llywelyn gave him a hero’s burial in a tomb visible to this day, a great slab on its side and two upright stones, and the valley where the meadow lies is called Bethgelert. Dudley Allott would tell you of American place names in Wales; he made no more of Gelert, Ontario, than of Tessa’s animal legends, he wasn’t much on mystic tumuli or Arthur’s knights, but Dudley knew where the stone castles had been that marked the lines of the River Wye and the River Usk and he was moderately interesting on a name like Gelliswick, which is Celtic
gelli
(hazel grove) and Norse
wick
(haven). And he knew who holed up at Harlech and what prince of Gwynedd held a mountain against strangers from the east by means of the canniest practical skill.
How Green Was My Valley
came from my parents’ book club and I read it from cover to cover the weekend of Pearl Harbor and got 70 on my geography test Monday. There was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas whom my immediate predecessor with Lorna took us to hear read at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association before we left for England and who in ’52 or ’53 along the college circuit seemed like the Voice of America until he was consumed by an America in himself. Lorna read him, I could not; but I could listen. And there was a young Welsh conductor for whom Lorna had sung in a chorus who went to Cleveland and New York seeking his fortune, and Cincinnati and Florida, and who got sick of podium politics and came back to London though his wife stayed. Catherwood’s friend Stephens records a theory that ascribes to the Welsh the first and original peopling of America. Ned Noble and my sister and I saw the movie of
How Green Was My Valley
and when the lights went up Ned taunted me that there were tears in my eyes, and Ned would have had a fat eye or a bloody nose if we hadn’t by some magical incoherence shunted off into whether it was anthracite or bituminous coal the miners were mining in the picture and my sister sided with me because she was still clutching my bandanna handkerchief that she had borrowed dry. Tessa and Dudley spent some weekends in a converted schoolhouse in Wales that had been bought by a friend who Dudley said had had the DT’s at one time, but he wasn’t American. The Welsh “Bells of Rhymney” Pete Seeger made into an American socialist anthem and we heard him sing it in Royal Festival Hall with the changeless Dietrich his friend sitting in the same row with us and Tessa, which was some months before the Allotts went to America in ’64. Wales, then, had been in my mind.