Night-World (2 page)

Peggy offered her an official smile of welcome, second class, and pressed the buzzer releasing the lock on the unmarked door at the far right side of the room. Karen turned the knob and entered the corridor beyond.

Now she was in another world. Suther Land, she called it, in the private geography of her mind. The long corridor down which she passed was like a highway in a strange and secret kingdom.

Behind the big oak-paneled double door was the throne room of the ruler, Carter Sutherland III. One of the strange things was that the room didn’t contain a desk: in the realms of business, the mark of supremacy is an office without such a demeaning device of drudgery. All a modern ruler needs is a gracious and ostentatious setting for his bar, his intercom and his dictating machine. A dictator—that was Sutherland’s true function. Of course rulers seldom spend much time in throne rooms, and one of the secrets was that the biggest office in the Sutherland Advertising Agency, Inc., was usually unoccupied. Karen had seen the man only twice during the four years she’d worked here, and not at all since he’d suffered a stroke on his yacht six months ago. Since then, the agency business had increased almost twenty percent, but that could have been mere coincidence.

Karen moved down the hall past the oak-paneled single doors of the next-largest offices. There were five of these, for the five account executives. Account executives had desks, but in deference to their rank, the desk tops were bare of everything except a telephone. The clutter of paperwork accumulated on the smaller desks of their personal secretaries. And like their superior, the account executives were seldom to be found in the office, although their secretaries could always reach them and intercept calls from their wives.

Farther along the corridor were the domains of the Art Director, the Media Director, the Copy Chief. Linked by a commonly shared meeting room, their quarters were smaller, but very definitely occupied. The individual doors were constantly opening and closing with the comings and goings of printers, engravers, sales reps, messengers and lesser staff personnel carrying memos in and out. Sometimes the meetings—and the profanity—spilled over into the hall, but Karen was used to sidestepping the huddles that threatened to block her progress.

Now she turned the corner into the angled corridor beyond and walked along a row of doorless cubicles lining either side—a series of one-windowed cells barely large enough to contain a filing cabinet, two chairs, and a small desk or drawing board for the individual occupants. Hardly impressive, but then artists and copywriters weren’t expected to impress anyone; they merely did the creative work which kept the agency in business.

At the far end of the second corridor, Karen stepped into her own niche, put her purse in the desk drawer, pushed the telephone to one side, and sat down to study the approved and initialed rough layout for a full-page black-and-white scheduled to run in the fashion magazines listed in the accompanying memo and work-data sheet. She glanced at the notes and suggestions, then studied the rough, trying to visualize the finished artwork.

In the foreground, arms folded defiantly across his bare chest, a scowling young man with shaggy hair tumbling across his forehead, the slitted stare of his heavy-lidded eyes suggesting the acid-head. Striped trousers, very tight in the crotch, just suggesting.

Behind him, the girl—all angularity and elbows, hands on hips and legs outthrust. Long straight hair strand-strung on either side of exaggeratedly high cheekbones and sullen slash of mouth. The young witch, suffering from malnutrition or stardom in an Andy Warhol film.

Midway between the two, a chopper or bike. Not a motorcycle—only the pigs ride motorcycles;
we
ride hogs.

Karen made a mental note of the distinction: pigs are bad, hogs are good. If she referred to the machine at all in the copy block, she must remember that. On the other hand, the ad was for the striped pants, and she’d better concentrate on the merchandise. She began to run through phrases, discarding as she went. Dig, bag, with it, doing your thing—last year’s vocabulary, but a dead language today. And the Now Generation was presently known as the Beautiful People. Their clothes would be heavy, or funky. Gear. Karen reached for pad and pencil and jotted down a tentative headline
—Geared for Action.

No sense bothering with an actual description of the trousers; no one buys striped pants, they buy a
look.
And the look was—what?
In deep. Thrust. Put it all together
—and today’s lexicon of popular phrases sounded like a description of the activities in a whorehouse.

On the other hand, who was she to pass judgment?
This
was a whorehouse, Karen reminded herself, a whorehouse pandering to the appetites of youth. And what she was doing was whoring. Next year the phrases would change—but she would still be a whore. Unless she got out of here and took up an honest profession, like prostitution. Meanwhile she needed the money, Bruce needed the money, and she’d better write the copy.

The phone rang. Karen uncradled it.

“Sweetheart?”

She recognized the voice, and the approach, of the Copy Chief.

“Yes, Mr. Haskane.”

“Girnbach just called. They want to see copy when they look at the rough this afternoon.”

“I’m working on it now. Give me another twenty minutes.”

“Beautiful! My place or yours?”

“I’ll bring it over as soon as I’m finished.”

“Don’t bother to knock. There’ll be cold champagne and a warm mattress waiting.”

Karen let the Copy Chief hang up without giving him an answer. Poor Haskane—she understood his hang-up only too well. A pudgy, balding little man, caught in the middle of the generation gap. A potbelly with no stomach for pot.

And it must be doubly hard for Haskane to be working with constant reminders of what he was missing, surrounded by ads for hot pants and never glimpsing or grasping the reality. He’d be jealous of the agency’s account execs with their location trips for magazine ad spreads, their expense accounts for a week in Cannes to photograph a nude model holding a light bulb which, like the girl, was AC-DC. Haskane supplied the word, they enjoyed the deed. No wonder he was aggressive on the phone.

Karen wondered what would happen if she ever took him up on one of those verbal passes. The poor bastard would probably drop dead on the way to a motel. Then again, he might surprise her.

Worse still, she might surprise herself. After all, it had been a long time since she’d gone the cold champagne and warm mattress route, and how could she be so sure of her own response? Wasn’t she subject to the same pressures as the man she presumed to pity? Selling sex and never buying; always a bridesmaid and never a bride. She’d been a bride once—Mrs. Karen Raymond. Now she was a wife. A wife in name only, isn’t that how they say it?

To hell with them. And to hell with Ed Haskane and his roll in the hay. She was as square as he, probably; not old, not ugly, but just as hung-up in the outmoded mores of her own background.

Karen shook her head and dismissed the subject. Turning to the desk, she fed paper and carbon into the machine. For the next twenty minutes she concentrated on the picture of the scowling, half-naked young man and his unkempt companion, dutifully ignoring the impulse to caption the ad
Me Tarzan—You Ape.

The electric portable hummed and she murmured, and at last the page was covered with breathless prose celebrating the ineffable glories of a pair of striped pants, complete with crotch-phrases, very tightly written.

Karen ripped the copy out, deposited one carbon in her desk drawer, then clipped the other carbon and the original to the top of the rough layout. She rose and started for the door, and it was then that the phone rang again.

She moved back to her desk, picked up the receiver, listened.

“Mrs. Karen Raymond?”

“Mrs. Raymond speaking,” she said.

“One moment, please.”

And then the other voice came on, and she listened again and said yes, and yes again, and thank you very much. Her voice didn’t tremble.

But when she put the phone down, she almost missed the cradle because her hand was shaking so.

Walking down the hall to Haskane’s office was like walking under water, and when she reached down to turn the doorknob, her hand was still shaking.

But she got the door open, got into Haskane’s office, got through the meaningless mumble of conversation about the ad.

Haskane’s voice was faint and his moon-faced features were wavery and distorted like those of a puffy-faced fish swimming behind the glass of an aquarium. Karen gathered that he liked the copy and would have it retyped for presentation to the client late this afternoon. And would she like to stick around and sit in on the meeting, just in case there were any suggestions for changes?

Karen was drowning, she was going down for the third time, but she came up at the last moment, gasping for breath.

Haskane frowned up at her. “What’s the matter?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather skip the meeting. I want to leave early today.”

“Headache?”

“Yes.” Karen gulped air.

“Okay. I don’t think there’ll be any problems. You run along.”

“Thanks.” Karen flashed him a grateful look, then turned away.

Too bad she couldn’t tell the truth.

It was just that she didn’t want to see the look on his face if she said, “Sorry, but I’ve got to run out to Topanga Canyon. I’ve just had word that my husband may be released from the asylum.”

CHAPTER 3

A
ccording to the late Edgar Cayce, the area known as Southern California may soon sink beneath the sea.

Ordinarily, Karen dismissed the prophecy as she dismissed the dangers of smog and seismic disaster, but now she wasn’t so sure. Whipping along the Hollywood Freeway she wondered if perhaps the prediction hadn’t already come true, because she was moving underwater again. On her right, the high hills wavered; on her left, the Capitol tower shimmered; and the road ahead of her was a black-topped blur.

Only the speed of the car itself reassured her that she was still enveloped by the element of air, and her breathing quickened as she tried to clear her head. Common sense told her to pull over to the shoulder of the freeway, or at least seek the nearest off-ramp, but there wasn’t time. Not if Bruce might be released.

If Bruce might be released
—

Karen sensed the approaching division in the road ahead and swerved into the right-hand lane which led her into the Ventura Freeway. The midafternoon traffic was just beginning to build up, and she fought to focus her attention on the road. Her vision sharpened, but there was still a blurring of the inner eye, a constant awareness of the inner depths. She felt as if her life was passing in review.

Life? What life was there to remember? There had been a little girl once, a little girl who went to Disneyland with Dad and Mom. But Dad and Mom were in their graves, and the little girl was suddenly a tall, leggy blonde on the UCLA campus, majoring in journalism. Karen tried to visualize the campus, and the waves rose quickly, obscuring it from the mind’s eye.

Then Bruce appeared, moving towards her slowly, and they walked hand in hand, moving together slowly under the bursting pressure of the water, little bubbles of laughter rising from their lips until those lips were joined briefly—so very briefly . . . Then she was alone again, working at the agency, and that’s when she’d tried to ride out the storm, don’t make waves, and—

For God’s sake, stop!
Karen told herself.
Quit playing with words. You’re not writing ad copy now, and you’re not drowning in anything except self-pity.

Karen blinked into accelerated awareness, and moved into the righthand lane leading north on the San Diego Freeway. No more word games now. She knew what she was doing, knew where she was going.

As she eyed the upcoming ramp, a plane snarled overhead, swooping down in a plunging path just above the freeway. Karen lost sight of it as she took the ramp and descended to make a left turn under the freeway on the street below.

Moving at half her former speed, she was suddenly conscious of the hot, acrid air of the San Fernando Valley; she’d come out of her imaginary underwater kingdom into an actual desert. Once, not too long ago, the Valley had been a sandy wasteland. Then a million hardy pioneers invaded it, planting their sickly shrubbery and their crackerbox houses. But all the supermarkets, the bowling alleys, the auto-repair shops, drive-in movies, drive-in hamburger stands, drive-in mortuaries, couldn’t disguise the fact that it was still a desert. And the sand still blew across the parking lots of the shopping centers where the sons of the hardy pioneers purchased striped trousers like the ones Karen immortalized in her copy.

Karen drove west against the sun, turned north at the stoplight and proceeded past the expanse of the airport on her right, where the swooping plane now lumbered to a landing. She turned in at the third gate and pulled up near a cluster of small one-engine aircraft grouped around a tin-roofed hangar, inert metal bees before their hollow hive.

Adjoining the hangar was a clapboard rectangular outbuilding, its side displaying paint-flaked lettering—
Raymond’s Charter Service.
Above the open doorway was a smaller sign labeled
Office.
Standing in the doorway, squinting into the sun as she watched Karen approach, was Rita Raymond.

Seeing her, Karen told herself for the hundredth time,
she looks like Bruce.
And for the hundredth time she caught herself hesitating momentarily as she drew near. Because she knew that, despite the striking resemblance in features, Rita wasn’t like Bruce at all.

The tall, dark-haired woman with the deeply tanned face and somber brown eyes was dressed in boots, levis, and a faded short-sleeved shirt, but the ensemble couldn’t disguise the fullness of her hips and the ripe roll of her breasts; the eyes and nose and mouth might be Bruce’s, but the body was very much her own. As far as Karen knew, Rita’s body was indeed extremely personal property, for she’d never seen Bruce’s older sister with an escort. If indeed she had a sex life, it was as well hidden as her sexual attributes were well displayed. Yet she was capable of deep affection—she loved planes, loved the mechanical tinkering she lavished upon them, loved flying, loved her brother—