The Paper Dragon (48 page)

Ebie Driscoll brushed the same strand of hair away from her cheek. There it is again, Norman thought, and I knew she would do it even before she did it the first time we met, felt I had seen her do it a thousand times before that. Or the way she tilts her head, look, just before she's going to say something, look, telegraphing her words, here it comes, she is about to speak, "May I have the salt, please?" Ebie asked. Norman handed her the salt and pepper shakers together, and intuitively knew she would say exactly what she said next, "No, just the salt, please." He frowned and turned his attention back to Driscoll, convinced that he was possessed of extrasensory powers and determined to put them to better use, like perhaps opening his own numbers bank in Harlem and taking bets only on numbers he knew would lose, not a bad thought.

"I think Jonah's approach was the proper one," he said. "Tracing the creative process."

"Mmmm," Driscoll said.

"That's really his forte, you know, hitting on the right approach. That's not as easy as it may sound. A lot of lawyers commit themselves to the wrong strategy from the beginning. Jonah's never done that to my recollection, and he's certainly had some difficult cases over the years."

"Has he?"

"Oh, sure," Norman said. "I didn't join the firm until after the San Quentin case, of course, but even since…"

"What San Quentin case?"

"The one with the guard. Didn't you follow it?"

"No."

"It was in all the papers."

"I must have missed it somehow."

"Well," Norman said, plunging on despite a detected note of sarcasm in Driscoll's voice, "a prisoner there was serving a life term — an ax murderer no less, you can imagine the kind of sympathy he aroused — and one of the guards kept bothering him, so he picked up a fork in the dining room one day and stuck it in the guard's throat."

"He killed him?" Ebie asked.

"Yes."

"Illlfffff," she said, and pulled a face, and the expression and the grimace were both familiar, he knew them from somewhere, but where? How come I pay you thirty dollars an hour, Dr. Maloney, and all you can tell me is that I must adjust as a Negro in a hostile society? Why can't you explain all these inscrutable things that keep happening to me?

"It was a mess," Norman said, "horrible case, but Jonah took it on. He's had a lot of tough ones. Listen, this one isn't such a cream puff, either." On impulse, he turned to Ebie and said, "Have you ever been up to Harlem, Mrs. Driscoll?"

"Never," she replied.

"Well," he said, and cocked his head to one side, and thought She's never been to Harlem, Dr. Maloney, so it isn't even possible we met in Small's Paradise or any of those other quaint places. "You ought to take her up to Harlem sometime, Jimmy," he said, and smiled.

"Invite us," Ebie said.

"I will."

"Do."

"If you mean it, I
will
invite you."

"I mean it," Ebie said.

"Ebie always means what she says, isn't that true?" Driscoll said.

His wife did not answer. She busied herself with her plate instead, cutting another piece of steak, and then meticulously and carefully placed her knife at the rear of the plate, as if this simple act required all her concentration.

"She's straightforward and honest," Driscoll said, staring at her with a cold, pained smile on his face. "It would hurt Ebie to lie, wouldn't it, Ebie?"

"Shut up, Dris," she said flatly, without looking at him, and the table went silent. Norman saw the anger that flared in Driscoll's eyes, and suddenly wondered whether he had misinterpreted the Harlem invitation. Here we are at the crux again, Dr. Maloney, here we are getting right down to the heart of the old matter, which is: Can a Negro Boy from Harlem Find Happiness with a White Woman in a Small Mining Town? And the answer is No, not if Whitey thinks you are eventually going to corral
all
of his women, leaving him nary a soul to set his table or warm his bed. Understand, Jimmy, understand Mr. Driscoll, sun, that I did not intend my invitation for your wife alone, I intended it to include yourself, suh. "Well, let us examine that," Dr. Maloney will say, "especially in the light of your feeling that you and this woman have been intimate. Tell me again about this small scar on her thigh, crescent-shaped, did you say?"

Casually, and without looking at either Driscoll or his wife, Norman said, "In any case, Jonah's approach is the right one, and it's plain to both of us that you're holding your own with Brackman."

"It didn't feel that way," Driscoll said. He addressed the words to Norman, but he was still staring at his wife.

"Don't let him scare you," Norman said. "All you have to remember is that McIntyre isn't an idiot. He'll see this as clearly as the rest of us do."

"Mmm," Driscoll said.

"I'll tell you how
I
know you didn't steal that play."

"How?"

"The patterns."

"Meaning?"

"The play and the book have entirely different patterns," Norman said, completely aware that neither of them were the least bit interested in what he was saying, but convinced he had to say
something
, anything, to avert a homicide right here at the table, and then perversely deciding he would ask Mrs. Driscoll whether she still had that cute little crescent-shaped scar on her thigh, and then deciding against it. I know, Dr. Maloney, I'm chicken, I'm afraid of the white man. Has it ever occurred to you, Dr. Maloney, that
you
are a white man and that I am paying you for the privilege of informing you about how a Negro feels about white men like yourself? I know, I know, I'm paying you because I'm afraid of you too, man, you can't win. He sighed and said, "The patterns are obvious to anyone who's read both works carefully."

"Have
you
read them carefully, Mr. Sheppard?" Ebie asked.

"I read them both twice."

"And they're both about war, aren't they?" she asked, and looked up at her husband.

"Yes," Norman said, "but that's only the superficial pattern. I'm talking about something else. Look, there's a pattern to a bullfight, too. It never changes, it's always the same, it's timeless. But the
bulls
are different, and the
men
are different, and what happens each time is different from what happened the time before, even though the sequence of events may be identical. Or take a trial, for that matter, take any court case. Nothing changes there, does it? All rise, and the judge comes in, and the clerk tells us who the plaintiff is and who's defending, and the witnesses come up, and are sworn in and examined and cross-examined, all prescribed and tight, all according to strict rules and regulations — a pattern conceived and executed by men. It's my personal theory that
all
the civilized structures men create
have
to be patterened because life itself is so formless."

"I don't agree with that," Driscoll said.

"You don't think life is formless? Coincidental? Even inconclusive?"

"It's certainly not inconclusive. It ends."

"Who says an
end
is a
conclusion
?"

"Webster."

"What the hell did
he
know? All he did ws give us a formal pattern for our language, which is exactly what I'm talking about. We
have
to have these patterns. Life would be unendurable otherwise. Look, the logical conclusion for life
is
death, isn't it — formless, mysterious, inexplicable? But do we accept it? No. We invent another pattern, an
afterlife
, a complex of heaven and hell, thereby extending life, and creating a concept we can hope to understand. We set up rules and regulations for everything, the same way
you
did when you were writing your novel, the same way Constantine did when he was writing his play. A pattern. A logical structure. You even went a step further by laying out a timetable for yourself, target dates and word goals, superimposing a
second
pattern upon the pattern already established for your novel. You had to know that at least the task would be conclusive."

"What do you mean?"

"The pattern you'd established for your book was inconclusive, Jimmy. You know that. The novel simply ends."

"It's conclusive, all right," Ebie said. "Perhaps you didn't understand it."

"I think I understood it."

"Perhaps not," she said. "In many respects, you see,
The Paper Dragon
is a mystery."

"What do you mean?"

"Just that it's a mystery," she said, and shrugged, and glanced at her husband.

"
Any
good novel is a mystery," Norman said.

"I don't mean a mystery
story
," Ebie answered.

"What
do
you mean?" Driscoll asked sharply.

"A book with a key."

"Like a diary?" Norman asked, and smiled.

"Yes," Ebie answered unsmilingly. "Like a diary."

"I wish
my
diary could earn as much money for me," Norman said.

"I think my wife is trying to say that all fiction is personalized fantasy. In that respect…"

"No, that's
not
what I'm trying to say."

"But that's it precisely," Norman said, leaning forward. "That's why the two works are so very different, because one is exclusively
Constantine's
fantasy, and the other is exclusively
yours
. The patterns are as different as your fingerprints."

"What about the 105th?" Ebie asked, and the table went silent again.

"Patterns are created by humans," Norman said at last. "The 105th is a human coincidence, pure and simple."

Ebie's eyes met her husband's, but she said nothing.

Sidney Brackman ate quickly and alone, and then went out into the street to rehearse his plan, deciding again to go ahead with it, and then deciding almost immediately that he was behaving foolishly again and in a manner that could only incur Chickie's wrath. She had said it last night, of course, and she'd been absolutely right, was he going to distrust her even after they were married? What kind of foundation was that, how could two people live and grow together if they did not trust each other?

He supposed there was a Jerome Courtlandt, and he supposed the agency really was planning a trip for him, but it seemed very coincidental to him, well, what the hell, life was full of coincidences, still it seemed very coincidental to him that Jerome Courtlandt in his tan Cadillac just happened to be on the way to the agency at closing time, just happened to pick up the two girls and, according to Chickie's testimony, drop them off at a restaurant. Well, why not? It had been a bitter night, thank God the temperature was a little milder today, it looked like rain, and how was Courtlandt to know what time the agency closed? Still, it was rather late to be heading there, well no, not if he thought the agency was open. And she had, after all,
told
Sidney about this Courtlandt fellow, she wouldn't have mentioned his name if there were anything funny about it, would she? Of course not. So why had he conceived his ridiculous plan, and why was he intent now on putting it into action? He either believed the girl or he didn't, trusted her or didn't. And why would she jeopardize their very good relationship, that could only get better once he won the case, once he came into his share of what the Court awarded Arthur, once they were married, he would have to call.

No, don't, he thought. Don't ask for trouble. Leave well enough alone. You're going to marry this girl, leave well enough alone.

He found a telephone booth in the drugstore on the next corner. He lingered outside the booth while a woman chattered interminably with someone she kept calling "
Boon
dy," and then went to the Manhattan directory only after the woman had vacated the booth. He hesitated before opening the book, turned to the C's and hesitated again, closed the book and walked directly out of the drugstore and into the street, it still looked like rain.

I'm doing the best thing, he thought. Why would I want to check up on her, for God's sake, she told me what it was all about, didn't she, she even told me the mans' name, Jerome Courtlandt, would she have given me his name if there'd been anything to hide? He spotted a bar in the middle of Murray Street, quickly turned right, and went into it. There were a lot of colored girls scattered at the tables, eating lunch and drinking beer, girls who worked in the various municipal offices in the area, he supposed — what would New York City do without its colored civil service employees, sink into the ocean, that's what. The juke box was playing a lovely melody, he could not place it, one of the new things. He had stopped remembering the tunes or words to songs when he was eighteen, and had always considered it a loss. The phone booth was at the end of the bar. A lighted sign above it advertised Miller's High Life. By the light of the sign, he searched the Manhattan directory and found a listing for Courtlandt, Jerome, on East 36th Street, well, he exists, he thought, and closed the book. He stood undecided for a moment. The bartender was watching him. He opened the book again, found the listing again, memorized the number, and went into the booth to dial it.

He dialed the first two numbers, and then hung up.

His dime clattered into the return chute.

He retrieved the coin, put it into his pocket, sat in the booth a moment longer, rose, opened the door, closed the door again, sat, took the dime from his pocket, lifted the receiver from its cradle, inserted the dime into the coin slot, heard the dial tone humming against his ear, and quickly dialed the number. He could hear the phone on the other end ringing once, twice, three times.

"Hello?" a man's voice said.

"May I speak to Mr. Courtlandt, please?" Sidney asked.

"This is he."

"Mr. Courtlandt, this is Mr. Simmons of Trans World Airlines."

"Yes?"

"About your European trip," Sidney said. His heart was pounding. He was certain his lie had already been detected, certain Courtlandt would instantly call his bluff.

"Yes?" Courlandt said. There was a pause. "Trans
World
Airlines, did you say?"