Lucifer's Weekend (Digger) (4 page)

Lucius Belton might own the town and almost everyone in it, but if this had been a Caribbean island, right now there would be rebels massing in the hills to overthrow him. Digger had an idea for a movie.
The Revenge of the Smog People
. Film it in Belton. Pay off all the townspeople with bottles of air flown in from the outside.

Digger rapped once, hard, on the big heavy oak door with the brass knocker, which sounded like Big Ben, and after a moment the door slid open easily and quietly. A small girl stood in the doorway. She was blond and her eyes were a brilliant green. Her long hair was done up in two braids that hung down over her shoulders. Her T-shirt read "Save the Whales" and her jeans had raised piping around the pockets and down the outside seams. She was barefoot and held one hand behind her back.

"Hello," she said.

"Hi," Digger said. "Is the lady of the house in?"

"Oh, dear. You’re not selling anything, are you?"

"No. Why?" Digger asked.

"Because my mother is busy. Only certain things are important enough to interrupt her for. Salesmen aren’t one of them. I’m empowered to deal with salesmen."

Digger remembered from the newspaper obituary on Gillette that Ardath Gillette was eight years old. Did eight-year-olds talk like this nowadays? Maybe this wasn’t Ardath, but a midget maid?

"Are you Ardath Gillette?" Digger asked.

"Yes. Who are you?"

"My name is Julian Burroughs."

"That’s very interesting," the girl said.

"Why?"

"Because Julian is probably a Catholic name. But Burroughs is usually Anglo-Saxon and not Catholic. What are you? So you have two names that suggest two different things? What are you?"

"I’ll give you a clue. I’m half Jewish."

"Oh, my, you are a very complicated man." Digger noticed that she still had her right hand on the doorknob and her left hand behind her back.

"Actually, I’m very simple," Digger said. "To know me is to see right through me. The incredible transparent man, that’s me. What kind of a name is Ardath?"

"That’s interesting too. When my parents gave me that name, they thought it was Welsh because they once had a Welsh friend named Ardath. But I looked it up and my name is from the Hebrew. It means flowering fields. Isn’t that interesting?"

"Inordinately," Digger said.

"We’re both very complex individuals," Ardath said.

"Too bad," Digger said. "I like simple women."

"I don’t believe that for a moment. Your eyes laugh, and men whose eyes laugh like life to be complicated. My father had eyes that laugh."

"Ardath," said Digger, "I think I’m falling in love with you. We’d better get on with our business before I stick you in my pocket and run off with you."’

The girl seemed, for a moment, to consider Digger’s offer.

"It would never work," she said solemnly.

"The age difference?" Digger said.

"I don’t really think age matters much," she said. "No. You have the look of a possessive man and I don’t think I could let you stand in the way of my career."

"What career is that?" Digger asked.

"How would I know? I’m only eight. You just said, get on with our business. What is ’our business’?"

"I’m with the Brokers Surety Life Insurance Company," Digger said.

"Oh. The insurance company. She won’t take it, you know."

"Take what?"

"The extra five hundred thousand dollars," Ardath said. "That’s a lot of zeros, isn’t it? There’s five before the decimal point and two after. Seven zeros. That is a terribly large amount of money."

"After the decimal point, you can have as many zeros as you want," Digger said. "You can make it an infinite number if you want."

Ardath Gillette thought about that for a moment. She said, "If the decimal is just a decimal, you can. But if it stands for the line of separation between dollars and cents, you can only have two zeros after it. Unless you want to get fractional."

"And who wants to get fractional?" Digger said. "I never thought of it in just that way."

"Most people don’t. Then again most people don’t think about anything. I suppose you insist on talking to my mother."

Digger nodded. "I guess so. I’ve come all this way; I might as well go through with it."

"Well, come on in," Ardath said. "I’ll take you to her. She’s playing with her trains."

Digger was sure he hadn’t heard her right. Ardath stepped behind the big door and pulled it open wide for Digger to step through, then closed it behind him. He noticed that the left hand which she had kept behind her body while running him through her screening process was holding a paperback book.

Ardath walked off crisply, obviously expecting Digger to follow. They walked down a long hallway to the left. Digger heard what sounded like a train whistle and he guessed that he had heard Ardath correctly after all.

Ardath slid open large double doors at the end of the hallway and Digger heard the slightly constipated
whoop-whoop
of an electric train. He reached under his jacket and pushed the button turning on his tape recorder. Without evidence, no one would believe this—least of all, Walter Brackler. Somehow, Digger doubted that Brackler’s last emissary had reported that Louise Gillette played with toy trains. Brackler was the kind of person who, had he been king, would kill the bearer of bad news.

Digger followed Ardath into the room. Obviously designed as a library, it was as large as his room at Gus LaGrande’s Inn, and the walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves packed full with books, magazines, paperbacks, newspapers. While the room had once been a library, almost every available inch of floor space was taken up now by an electric train layout. Track ran all around the floor. Portions of other track rose from the floor on steel supports until they were six feet high. Digger looked around and saw a section of track against one wall, as close to the ceiling as it could be and still allow the trains to fit in the narrow opening.

But there was something odd about the train layout, and Digger looked at it hard to figure out what it was. Then he realized what it was. Train layouts generally included a lot of bucolic towns, pastoral scenes, plastic cows grazing on Astroturf grass, ceramic farmers leaning on styrofoam plows and watching the trains passing by. Not this train set. There were no farms or pastoral scenes. There were elevated platforms with garbage overflowing trash baskets, with little two-inch-high people in business suits standing cheek by jowl with people in cutoff jeans who wore bandannas around their heads. He saw a train steaming by at waist level right in front of him. There was no traditional toy engine pulling a string of cars. Instead, the train was led by one car identical to the string of cars that followed it, little oval windows making them look like something used to transport prisoners. And on the outside of each car every available square inch of space was covered with brightly colored graffiti. Digger recognized RICO 177. He saw REMO LIVES before the train whisked past him and into a tunnel constructed through the base of a building. In the window of the last car, he saw the letters AA.

Mrs. Gillette’s train set was a replica of the New York City subway system, complete to graffiti, people packed into cars, and yes… Digger looked down at one of the platforms. Behind a turnstile was a replica of a city subway token booth and a two-inch-high armed robber was splashing gasoline on it. In his free hand he held a lighted match. Inside the booth, the woman token clerk was screaming silently, her face distorted in terror. Past the turnstiles, in a darkened corner of the miniature subway platform, Digger saw a man being mugged by four denim-jacketed toughs. Another ceramic figure urinated against a wall.

Digger looked around for the architect of all this madness.

To the left, he saw the back of a figure, hunched over a control board, shoulders scroonched up in a parody of a mad scientist chortling over some particularly evil arrangement of test tubes. The figure wore a red-and-white vertical-striped silk shirt. A railroader’s blue-and-white cap sat atop its head, and from under the cap stray tendrils of dark hair twisted down onto the neck.

Digger glanced at Ardath, who was staring at him coolly.

"Mrs. Gillette?" he called out, but the sound of his voice was drowned out by the cacophony of trains whooping around the room, huffing out their asthmatic whistles.

Ardath gave him a look of great pity, then walked to a section of track that almost reached her shoulders and flicked a switch. The sounds of the trains diminished and died as everything rolled to a stop.

Digger saw the person at the control panel pressing buttons furiously, presumably wondering what act of God had halted the entire New York City subway system.

"Mother," Ardath called out, her voice echoing in the high-ceilinged room.

The train engineer turned. Digger would not have been surprised to see a twisted Phantom-of-the-Opera leer on a lipless face, with eyes sunken deep into sockets and a Singer sewing machine scar stitched neatly down one cheek.

What he got instead was a beautiful brunette woman. Digger remembered that she would be in her mid-to late-thirties, but this woman could have been only twenty-one. Her lightly tanned skin was smooth and wrinkle-free. Her eyes were, like Ardath’s, a brilliant green and there was a quizzical look in them, as if she detected humor where no one else could see it. Her lips were lightly glossed with a beige-colored lipstick. Long natural lashes made her large eyes seem even larger, and they appeared somehow luminous, as if a tiny pair of spotlights were shining on them from somewhere in the room.

"Mother," Ardath repeated, "this is Mr. Julian Burroughs. He’s from the insurance company."

"I see," Mrs. Gillette said. Her face frosted over but was still without wrinkles. She said to Ardath, "Suppose you leave us, dear. I imagine we’ll be talking business."

"Don’t sign anything," Ardath said.

"I won’t, dear. Run along now."

Ardath nodded, but as she turned and walked past Digger, she looked up at him and shrugged, a shrug that contained two million years of hurt and resentment and said, "See, treated like a juvenile again." She closed the sliding doors behind her as she left the train room.

"I’m sorry," Louise Gillette said. "Your name was…"

"Julian Burroughs, Mrs. Gillette. I’m with Brokers Surety Life Insurance."

"I know the name of your company, Mr. Burroughs," she said. "It seems my life is doomed to be one of never-ending correspondence and conference with you people."

"Not we people," Digger said. "I think this whole thing is stupid. I think we ought to give you the five hundred grand, call it quits and let you get on with rebuilding the New York subway system."

"Good. Have you brought a check?"

"No. They wouldn’t trust me with that much money. Actually, they wouldn’t trust me with the price of a pack of cigarettes."

"It’s funny, you don’t look like a corporate vice-president," she said.

"Perish forbid," Digger said. "Actually, I’m kind of an investigator for Br—for that insurance company whose name you know so well."

"And just what is it you’re investigating?" Louise Gillette asked.

"I’ll tell it to you the way it was told to me," Digger said.

"I wish you would."

"Go up there and find out what it takes to convince this crazy broad to take an extra half a million. I was also told that your elevator doesn’t go to the top floor."

She studied him with a measured gaze, then rose from her seat in front of the control panel and walked toward him, stopping only when there was a thin section of track separating them.

"That still doesn’t explain why they sent you. You’re an investigator."

"But I am fabled for my tact and diplomacy," Digger said. "It’s why they keep me around."

"I don’t think you’re going to last long enough to collect your pension," she said. "Tell me why you think wanting to protect my husband’s reputation makes me a crazy broad."

"You misunderstand, Mrs. Gillette. I didn’t say you were a crazy broad. My boss, Walter Brackler, complain to him—I’ll give you his home address and phone number
—he
said you were a crazy broad. I came out here because I needed an excuse to drive to Pennsylvania and see my girl friend."

She was silent for a moment, and Digger said, "Mrs. Gillette, let’s get it straight. I’m sort of a consultant for Old Benevolent and Saintly. I solve problems for them. They asked me to try to solve this problem concerning your insurance payment. I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass whether you take the million or the half million or if you send them money. It’s all the same to me. I came out here for personal reasons. But I’m the company’s last best hope, and yours, too, I suspect. After me, it goes to the legal department and then it’ll be in court for a hundred and fifty years until senility lowers Ardath’s IQ to five hundred and fifty and you finally get your first wrinkle. But just to touch the bases and tell them I tried, I did want to see you and find out exactly what were your reasons for refusing the extra five hundred thousand. It seems like kind of a large commitment to an arbitrary principle."

The woman folded her arms for a moment. "Principles are worth nothing unless they are arbitrary," she said. "If it’s flexible, it’s not a principle, it’s a sometime rule. But if you’re going to be the last of the pests, I don’t mind talking to you. At least you’re honest and you’re not smiling all the time like the last insipid cretin they sent to see me. Can I get you a drink?"

"I thought you’d never ask. I always get thirsty in train stations. Vodka."

"Soda? Tonic? Ice?"

"Ice. Hold the adulterants."

"Okay. And thank you for the compliment about the wrinkles."

She lifted the section of track that had been separating them, much like a bartender getting out from behind the bar. He noticed that all the sections of track were hinged and could be opened the same way. Louise Gillette closed the track behind her and walked to a small walnut side-bar built into the base of the bookshelves. She poured his drink, but instead of handing it to him, she put it atop a railroad car and hit a switch. He watched his drink make a slow run around the room before coming to a stop on the section of track in front of him.