Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (13 page)

 
          
He
looked alert. “Name? What name?”

 
          
“That
girl—is
her
name really Fluffy?—she
told me who Mercer’s throwing her over for. Somebody named Felicia.”

 
          
“Felicia!”
Pleased, excited, he pressed his hand palm-down on the memo pad pages, fingers
spread, as though to keep the pages from flying away, or being stolen. “A new
name, somebody new,” he said, looking over her head, thinking out loud. “We’ll
have to find out who she is.” Focusing on her again, he grinned broadly and
said, “Great work, Champ! And I do remember your name; you’re Sara the Champ.”

 
          
“We
do the best we can,” she said, and smiled back, to show she really wasn’t mad
anymore.

 
          
She
hated him.

 
          
When
Sara arrived at work Monday morning, and reported to Jack’s squaricle for her
next assignment, he greeted her with a harried impersonal smile, as though
nothing at all had happened over the weekend. And, in one way of looking at it,
nothing had.

 
          
There
was just under an hour left before the morning editorial conference with Massa,
when Jack would have to produce today’s thirty story ideas, so that’s why he
was pacing the squaricle like a trapped rat, and why Mary Kate was seated so
alertly at the typewriter. Clippings on both their desks, Sara now knew,
represented potentially useful items from obscure journals around the world;
creatures bom with extra heads or other duplicated body parts came mosdy from
Brazil, she’d noticed, while encounters with oversexed but not unfriendly
aliens took place most frequendy in Scandinavia.

 
          
However,
to reach that magic number of thirty, Jack would have to go beyond clippings,
beyond all the bits and pieces of star bio brought him by his eight reporters,
and
invent.
“The earth,” he said, and
Mary Kate poised her narrow fingers over the keyboard. “The earth,” he
repeated, pacing and pacing, staring at the gray industrial carpet, “came from
another solar system. It was a, a, a, a meteor or a comet or—It was a
rogue planet!”
He straightened, as
though thick leather thongs that had held him bent like an ape—rather like a
Lon Chaney Sr. impersonation—had at last been removed. Beaming with joy, he
intoned, “Desperate Aliens Search for Rogue Planet Earth! Collision of Solar
Systems Set Our Planet Adrift!” Mary Kate typed, her fmgers snapping at the
keys like tiny predators. Jack, feeling obvious relief for just this instant,
smiled on Sara and said, “Good morning. You are here for your assignment.”

 
          
“You
want me to find Felicia?”

           
“No no,” he said. “We have serfs
dragging those ponds. You found Felicia’s
name
,
you flinched
magnificently
as you will
see when you see the photo, and you are to be rewarded.”

 
          
“I
am?” Sara asked, mistrusting him deeply. “How?”

 
          
“You
are going to
America
. In a town called—” He snapped his fingers several times impatiently at
the back of Mary Kate’s head. “Called, called—” Mary Kate gave Sara a jaundiced
look. Finished with her typing for the moment, she picked up a slender
paper-clipped stack and read, “Whitcomb.”

           
“Just so. In the town called
Whitcomb, in the great but not overly exciting state of
Indiana
, are twin boys, name of Jim and Joe Geezer.
Can that be right?”

           
Mary Kate extended to him the
paper-clipped stack and he consulted it.
“Geester.
Still doesn’t sound right. Anyway, day after tomorrow those boys are
celebrating their one hundredth birthday together, in their nursing home out
there in . . . Whitcomb, and the
Weekly
Galaxy
is going to throw them a party.”

 
          
“That’s
very nice,” Sara said neutrally.

 
          
“Isn’t
it,” Jack agreed. “And your reward, for Felicia and the flinch, is that you
shall be the one in charge. You will have the Down Under Trio to—”

 
          
Sara
stared. The Down Under Trio? How could
that
be a reward? Those were the three Australian reporters on Jack’s team—Bob
Sangster, with the big nose; Harry Razza, the lounge lizard Lothario; and Louis
B. Urbiton, the oldest and drunkest reporter on the staff—and Sara had never
seen any of them do anything but make trouble for themselves and others. “The
Australians?” she asked. “All of them?”

 
          
“They
are your team,” Jack insisted. “They obey clear orders very well, and they’ll
be a terrific help if there’s a problem. Also, they deserve a reward too, for a
body in the box they got last month. Plus we’ll—”

 
          
There
was that phrase again:
body in the box.
What
could it possibly mean? Jack had been given a Jeep Laredo for his part in
getting one, and now the three Australians were to be sent to this birthday
party as
their
reward for the same or
a similar thing. Sara would have asked Jack for an explanation, but he was
sailing unstoppably on, saying: “Plus we’ll send you a photographer from
Indianapolis
or somewhere. You go out and set up the
party, see what you can do for notable names. Maybe the governor of
Indiana
would like a task.” “What else does he have
to do,” Mary Kate commented.

           
“Exactly. The Down Unders are super
with press reps, put them to work on it. And we want a birthday cake the size
of a Rose Bowl float.” His hands spread wide, designing and indicating what he
wanted on the cake: “Happy Birthday, Joe and Jim Thing, All America and the
Weekly Galaxy
Salute You on Your First
Century. Get the words
‘Weekly Galaxy
’
on the cake.”

 
          
“Of
course,” Sara said. “How much can I spend?”

 
          
“What
it costs,” Jack told her.

 
          
Mary
Kate said, “You never ask, ‘How much can I spend?’ Not around here.”

 
          
“Exactly,”
Jack agreed. “When the subject matter is truly trivial, no expense is too
great. Report to Sally Forth, I told her you’re on the way. And check with the
Down Unders, where you’ll meet them in . . . Whitcomb. They’ll travel
separately, you’ll be happy to hear.”

 
          
Sara
blinked, trying to keep up. “Sally Forth?” Wasn’t that a comic strip?

 
          
“Her
name,” Jack said, with a look at his watch, becoming nervous and impatient
again, “is Sally Farber. She’s in charge of travel here, down on one, and
therefore ...”

 
          
“I
get it,” Sara said. “Sally Forth.”

 
          
Sally
Forth (nee Farber) was a matronly lady who never got to go anywhere except the
travel office on the first floor of the
Weekly
Galaxy
building. The outer room of the travel office was a barren oblong,
bisected by a chest-high counter, with Sally Forth on one side and the
customers on the other. When Sara entered and approached this counter, Sally
Forth looked up from the paperback edition of
Marco Polo
she was reading and waited, tense and angry, obviously
expecting the worst.

 
          
“Hello,”
Sara said. The woman said nothing. Sara wanted to ask if she was the right
person, but there was no way to say,
Excuse
me,
are you
Sally Forth?,
so she
identified herself instead: “I’m Sara Joslyn, they sent me down to—”

 
          
“Oh,
yes,” the woman said, slamming down
the paperback with unnecessary force. “They told me you were coming.” Then she
picked up the paperback, glaring as though she suspected Sara of intending to
steal it, and carried it away to her inner room.

 
          
Alone,
Sara looked around, noticing that, where one would expect travel posters on the
walls, these framed poster-sized objects were merely more front pages of past
Weekly Galaxy
s. However, when she
considered them more closely, she realized that one of the stories prominent on
each front page involved some exotic locale:
South Africa
, Rio di Janeiro,
Tahiti
, Mars.

           
Sally Forth slammed back from her
inner office, lugging a white shopping bag with a yellow circular smile face on
the side. Her own face was the rebuttal. Lifting this shopping bag to a lower
shelf on her side of the counter, “It’s a nice life, I
must
say,” she snarled. “Gallivanting around. Spend money like
water. World travelers.”

 
          
“It’s
my first trip,” Sara said, to placate her. She was not to be placated. Taking
items from the shopping bag, slapping them on the counter in front of Sara, she
announced each object in turn: “Airline ticket. American Express card. Air
Travel card. MasterCard card; I hate that one. Visa card. Telephone company
card. Hertz card. Exxon card. Two thousand dollars cash. Extra American Express
card without the
Weekly Galaxy
name
on it. Sign this.”

 
          
Sara
obediendy signed the requisition sheet Sally Forth shoved across the counter at
her, while Sally Forth sneered at her penmanship, saying, “Puss in boots,
that’s what it is. Seven league boots. Up up and away.”

 
          
Yanking
back the signed requisition, she snapped, “And what do I get to do? Stand here
and look at this
counter ”

 
          
Trying
to find something to say, some words of comfort or solace, human contact, Sara
dithered and finally told the woman, “Life’s unfair, I guess.”

           
Sally Forth leveled on her a
murderous but calm gaze. “So that’s the news, is it?” she asked.

 
          
Sara
gathered everything off the counter and fled.

 
          
Her
own name was on all those credit cards. The two thousand dollars, a thick wad
of used bills with a paper band around it, marked in black ink
$2G,
turned out to be a mix of twenties,
fifties and a few hundreds. The airline ticket was for a first-class seat on
flights between
Miami
and
Indianapolis
, changing at
Atlanta
. (Dead people, it was said, on their way to
heaven, change at
Atlanta
. Or was that for people on their way to hell? Those going to heaven
change at
Amsterdam
.)

 
          
Mary
Kate’s paper-clipped stack of information, now in Sara’s possession, informed
her Hertz would have a rental car reserved for her at the airport in
Indianapolis, and a room awaited her at the Holiday Inn on State Highway, just
outside Whitcomb. All she had to do was pick up her typewriter and go.

 
          
Her
typewriter? Yes. When she had, at the barbecue last Saturday, expressed
surprise to Binx that the
Galaxy
"s
reporters were issued manual portable typewriters rather than the word
processors plugged into a mainframe computer that even the poor old
Courier-Observer
had converted to before
it was merged and Sara’d lost that job, Binx had said, “Massa likes his
reporters mobile.” So this was what he’d meant.

 
          
The
Aussies, feverish with expectation, grinning broadly and whacking one another
on the back, assured Sara they would make contact immediately upon arrival at
the Whitcomb Holiday Inn. Phyllis, one of those assigned to the hard slog of
tracking down the unknown Felicia, expressed a heartfelt envy that made Sara
glow with pleasure as she packed her typewriter and filled her shoulder bag
with pens and tapes. Nearby, Ida Gavin was also packing, on her way to
California
to interview the elusive Keely Jones, whose
defiant shotgunning of the
Galaxy
's
soundtruck had been that star’s final misguided resistance of the
Galaxy's
loving embrace.
That
was the true plum among today’s
journeys to
America
, a sunny conversation with a TV star beside a Bel Air swimming pool,
but Sara felt no envy at all. Whitcomb was exciting enough, for a first time
out.

 
          
What
was it like? The first day of school, the first
year
of school. No, more than that; it was like the first time you
ever went to the supermarket on your own, your mother’s shopping list and the
green paper money clutched tight in your moist fist.

 
          
Typewriter
case handle clutched in her moist fist, head already filling with sentences
about hundred-year-old twins, Sara ran for her plane.