The Horses of the Night (33 page)

Anna was there, her shoes in her hand. She had been dangling her feet in the carp pond, and now she drew herself close to me. “You're a lucky man,” she said. “Renman likes you. I've been listening to him on the phone. No one will ever say no to you again.”

Her arm was around me, and she was wearing a scent I could not identify as one of DeVere's.

“What I want to know is,” she was saying, “how will I be able to help?”

From time to time one of the fish would splash, or perhaps it was the sound of something falling into the water. Once I had the definite impression an animal was lapping the water, splashing with its tongue. That was entirely impossible, I told myself, because we were in a courtyard, the buildings of the villa forming an enclave around us.

Renman reappeared with his hands in the pockets of his robe.

It was still night—dawn was hours away. The water made its music. “You know the story of the goldfish,” said Renman. “You put a goldfish in a pool this big, and it's supposed to be able to grow and grow. And get big. As big as these.”

The fish floated unwavering, splashed with color, like creatures which had been wounded.

“But I don't know.” He was silent. “I don't know if it's true,” he said. He stirred himself. “I've told Anna what to do. You'll need all the help I can give you. You are not a well man, Stratton.”

I wanted to laugh. He was the one who looked shrunken, drained, reserving for himself a residue of peacefulness.

“As a young woman your mother came here once or twice a year. She had a great deal of contempt for all of us parvenus. She'd drive out from San Marcos and stay a weekend during the season, in February. We deserved her contempt. This was just after the war, and all kinds of useless people had a lot of money. But I remember riding with friends to look at the palms in one of the canyons here. It was quite a ride. Rocky. Dead scorpions, or maybe just their exoskeletons. Dry. Unbelievable how dry it can be.”

He laughed wistfully. “I was a would-be cowboy, with silver-chased chaps. What a young dandy I was. A silly kid. Born in New Jersey, taught the alphabet in a public school, and there I was in the saddle next to Gary Cooper. Of course, I paid his salary, but still—he had that look. And we came upon your mother in a dry creek of that rough canyon, all boulders and dead things—lizard skin, dried-up rattle-snake rattles. And she was speaking sweetly to the canyon air.”

I blinked.

“I mean she was talking,” he said. “To nobody. To herself? Maybe. Talking like someone holding conversation with an invisible being.”

I chose my words. “I find that hard to believe.”

He considered this. “My father made his money selling shipping pallets. And then cardboard containers. And then he owned railway cars, and refrigerated trucks, and he seemed to own people. People who could get things done. He did harm to get where he was. He was a feared man.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Go home, Stratton. Give your mother my regards, if and when you see her. I'm going to help you.”

“Who killed DeVere?” I asked.

“An old evil,” he said.

He turned to Anna, who was several steps away drinking from a glass filled with ice and what looked like chartreuse.

“Anna, you look like an angel,” he said. “Take Stratton away before he asks too many questions.”

51

People tell the same stories, over and over again, and it is both a pleasure and a minor source of impatience to realize that one is about to hear once again an anecdote, a dream, a scene from an old movie, which one had heard many times before. One of my father's favorite stories was dusted off over port at least three times during my childhood. It was a bit of musical history, a story from the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, that had caught my father's imagination as a boy, and encouraged him to study the piano.

The carriage ride was long, and the old rutted road dusty. The feeling of travel seeped into the bones, the rocking, the clop of the iron shoes. At last Bach reached the court of Frederick the Great, and climbed down from the carriage. Attendants hurried him at once, dusty and hungry as he was, into the imperial presence. Frederick the Great proposed a difficult musical problem, a theme almost impossible to play, something that would make a musician's hands, in my father's phrase, “spider up and down the keyboard.” He asked Bach to improvise a sketch based on this challenge, and then sat back with his eyes half closed.

Bach played. What was travel, and its weariness and disorientation, compared with a chance to make music? Bach performed, in the candlelight, before the hushed court of the emperor.

The story changed at that point into a sketch of my father's studies, a sunlit summer in Salzburg, hours of conversation with cellists, conductors, and the eventual tale of my father's dislike for playing scales. “I realized I couldn't sit still that long and play the same thing over and over. I was an audience member, a delighted consumer, not an artist at all.” The point of the story dwindled into a simple thesis: My father was not Bach.

But while most people are somewhat aware that they are repeating an old story, my father's telling grew smoother, and at the same time more detailed, and he never seemed to recognize in his audience—usually simply my brother and myself—the very slight reluctance to hear this fragment of musical history again.

We left Palm Springs, flying northwest into a headwind that buffeted the small jet. In the pocket beside my seat was a blue folder. In the folder were several Sony micro floppy disks. On the foldout desk before me was a Toshiba laptop.

I looked over at Anna and she seemed to sense my gaze. “We'll be developing you tomorrow.”

When I did not respond, she continued, “A video, still photos. Stratton Fields: the legend.”

“You'll put my signature on bars of soap.”

She took a moment, and added, “It's what you dreamed of, isn't it?”

As the jet bobbed and ducked in its flight, I reviewed files that at first made little sense to me. The files were labeled enigmatically, in the way of such computerized data, but it took me only a few minutes to begin to scroll through columns of numbers, paragraphs of explanation, drafts of letters and memos. These were Renman's own records, copied, apparently, for my edification.

The files included movie projects DeVere and Renman had discussed. They described loans to foreign governments in exchange for suppressing labor unrest that might have an effect on the cotton harvest. Memos involved highways through rain forests to “access raw material.” U.N. guidelines on worker exposure to insecticides were being indefinitely delayed. A Renman-controlled company owned coffee plantations in Brazil and needed to keep the costs within limits.

Not all the projects smacked of what some journalists would have called exploitative strategies. Schools were being rebuilt in Armenia, to replace those lost in a major earthquake. Tuberculosis was being studied in China, the funds coming entirely from Renman's sports profits. A vitamin supplement was being provided to infants in Africa, and mothers were to be encouraged to nurse their children. But there were opposition leaders to be persuaded, unions to be infiltrated, governments to be rewarded for their willingness to be “partners in progress.” The theme of Renman's files dwindled to: We give, we take away.

There was a file labeled
FIELDS
. I had unlimited access to ready money. It would all come out of medical research funds.

But the files contained lies, too. Some of Renman's interests had been losing money, according to one report. One consultant recommended “thoughtful cutbacks.” Renman had deliberately given me access to information that showed his empire faltering, failing around the edges. I was angry. I knew that he was trying to disguise his power.

It was dawn.

From DeVere headquarters there was a view of the East Bay hills. Headlights still glittered on the Bay Bridge. The big building was silent around us, DeVere's desk a slab that reflected the light of the rising sun.

“I don't know how you managed it,” said Anna Wick, handing me a cup of coffee. When I didn't respond, she continued, “Renman's getting old. He's losing it.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“You don't know him.”

“The man can do everything he wants to do.”

She gazed with me out at the view of the bay. “Not everything,” she said.

She surprised me by leading me to an elevator secreted behind a panel in the wall. We rose one floor, and stepped out into a suite with a broad bed, oak furnishings, and another view of the predawn Bay Bridge.

“We'll get it redecorated. All these earth colors make me feel dirty.” She waited, as though for my reaction.

The furniture was all mission-style, some of it authentic early Californian. The worm holes and minor blemishes gave a feeling of gnarled authenticity. DeVere had not felt entirely happy in this tall, air-conditioned building, I realized. He had wanted something more real, more enduring.

“Renman's giving me what I wanted,” I said. “He had to.”

She considered my words. “He makes mistakes. He's making one with you.”

I did not enjoy her tone. I asked, “What kind of person was DeVere?”

She sat on the edge of the bed. “DeVere lived here for awhile. Here in this room. You might say he didn't really ‘live' anywhere, though. This was his address, but you couldn't say it was his home. He was always meeting with someone, or on the phone. Even when he was here his mind was somewhere else. He was looking at videos, or spreadsheets.”

“He sounds a lot like you.”

“Men have often found me brittle. Too interested in work. Too amused at the wrong things, too interested in what I can get out of life.”

“Too interested in money.”

“Power. You deceived an old man. That's what Renman is—soft and tired. He decided to be generous to you. You tricked him. I don't know how—but you did. Congratulations.”

I switched on the sound system, dialed through a jazz station and various spurts of static. When I found some Elizabethan music, nearly comical in its jaunty rhythms and bleating instruments, I drew close to her.

“We're not like Renman,” she said. “And Ty was never happy with any of this. He wanted to escape his past, and ended up wishing he was a farmer. I've decided that Ty didn't have an empire so much as a sort of minor cattle drive.”

I let her talk.

“You're crazy,” she went on. “But it may work. And if you're going all the way, I want to go with you.”

The room resounded to the sound of recorder and tambour. I smiled.

She unbuttoned her blouse, and eased off her shoes. At my touch she closed her eyes. At the touch of her lips I felt something inside me go cold.

Not right.

This wasn't right.

“We'll have time,” I said huskily.

She kissed me, and did not seem to sense the reserve in me, the feeling I had that there was something wrong. Or if she did, she thought she understood. What was lust compared with power?

“Yes,” she said with a smile. “I believe we will.”

The rest of the day was a series of conference calls, faxed messages, employees hurrying in. Photographers clicked away at me as I studied designs. The big desk was covered with blueprints, contact prints, folders.

Anna fumbled now and then for a vial of pills, and she smiled apologetically when she knew that I saw her swallowing three at once. “I'm not like you,” she said.

DeVere had been in the midst of a deal to have his trademark signature on a pack of cigarettes. DeVere had insisted on top-quality Virginia tobacco, the cigarette company had wanted air-blown Maryland and “other well-regarded tobaccos” along with flavorings and “enhancers.” DeVere was moving heavily into the field of handwashed silks. There were sketches of women in flowing blouses, and samples of imported silk, swatches of the stuff, some of it raw, with that wonderful creamy scent.

Renman was building two new stadiums. He was building a hospital in Denver “exclusively for the study of cancers of the internal organs.” He was buying a da Vinci cartoon. He was buying a chemical company that was momentarily weakened because of a lawsuit. He was denying any knowledge in the disappearance of a Teamsters Union official who had vanished years ago but kept showing up in tabloids as a subject of controversy.

I flipped through folders, printouts, fired off questions to Anna and a string of assistants. I took pleasure in every minute. There would be a Stratton Fields edition luxury car out of Detroit, and there would be a Stratton Fields sportscar out of Italy. I decided that it was perfectly all right to raid the medical research funds for some of my projects. We could always repay the money in the future.

I did not let myself be deceived at the hints that Renman was losing control over his empire, that the rust that eats at all empires was slowly weakening his.

My brother must have found out where I was. He called three times, but I didn't have time to talk to him.

The sketches I made were some of the best work I had ever done. The reading I did was stored in my memory. The presence of power refreshed me. I was more intelligent now. I was more energetic. I found myself thinking—knowing—that I could make no mistake.

But in the midst of conversation with Anna Wick regarding the new DeVere scent I stopped. The cologne was being test-marketed in Tucson and Omaha, and Anna had been explaining to me that these cities were ideal for such experimentation.

She passed me, running a finger over one of my eyebrows possessively.

Her touch awakened a memory.

What was I doing?

Anna leaned forward with a frown, blinking to clear what I had begun to realize were contact lenses. “Are you all right?”

I said that I was fine. “But maybe this isn't a very interesting subject. Perfume for men is a little dull.”