Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (15 page)

 
          
This
was the scene Sara came upon when she entered the Veterans’ Bar & Grill on
Fremont Avenue: Louis B. Urbiton leading a lot of elderly dipsoes in some sort
of vile calisthenics, Bob Sangster demonstrating quick-draw from a make-believe
shoulder holster to a couple of unemployed sheet- metal workers, and Harry
Razza chatting blithely with the bartender, ignoring the fist the man was
slowly raising.

 
          
Sara
called out, “Hello!” but nobody heard her, and nothing happened. She called out
the Aussies’ names, to absolutely no effect. Finally, seeing no alternative,
she took a deep breath and screamed, “FIRE!”

 
          
Nothing.
So she did it again: “FIRE!”

 
          
And
a lot more times: “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”

 
          
Gradually
the word penetrated, sweeping silence before it like the black death across
Europe
. The last of the kangaroos ceased to hop
and to honk, Bob Sangster looked over at the doorway with his hand like
Napoleon’s inside his jacket, and Harry Razza stopped his story just short of
its punchline, to turn and gaze at the red-faced Sara with pleased admiration.

 
          
Sara
stopped shouting. She took a moment to catch her breath. A layabout near her
said, “Lady, don’t you know you shouldn’t yell ‘fire’ in a public place?”

 
          
“Oh,
yeah?” Sara told him. “You try yelling ‘water’ and see what you get.” Pointing
one by one at the Aussies, she said, “Those are mine.”

 
          
“Oh,
dear, it’s teacher,” said Louis.

 
          
“Come
along, you guys,” Sara said. “Where’s my photographer?”

 
          
Louis
gave himself a visible search, without result. “Photographer?”

 
          
A
retiree urged Sara, “Have him show you his kangaroo.”

 
          
“I
don’t want his kangaroo,” Sara said, “I want my photographer.”

 
          
Head
on table, the bag lady had still been asleep off to one side, the only person
in the room not caught up in the hullabaloo of the Aussies’ descent, but now
she raised her head, blearily gazed around, and said, “Photoga—? Photoga—?”

 
          
“Come
on,” Sara said to her team, “I need that photographer.”

 
          
“Sara,
darling,” Harry Razza said, while the widows sniffed and looked put out, “I
swear we have none of us set eyes on even a single photographer.”

 
          
“Did
you say
photographer?”
the bag lady
cried, at last getting the name right. “I’m a, I can be a, I’ve been a—” She
struggled to rise from her chair, her feet kicking at the various shopping bags
around her.

           
“No, no,” Sara told her. “Our
photographer from
Indianapolis
.”

 
          
Shakily
rising, showing herself to be garbed in a modey mish-mash of unacceptable clothing,
in- advertendy knocking over the half-full (half-empty) beer glass on the table
in front of her, pointing more or less at her own self with a stubby and
uncertain finger, “That’s me!” the bag lady cried. “I came, I just drove down
from, I’m the—”

 
          
Sara
stared.
“You’re
my photographer?”

 
          
The
bag lady nodded hugely in happy agreement. The shopping bags around her feet
were full of lenses, reflecters, work lights, folding tripods, film rolls,
black cloths, light meters and actual cameras. Two more cameras dangled like
lynch victims on the bag lady’s person. Waving precariously, work-booted feet
moving and moving among the bags of equipment, the bag lady cried, “From
Indiana—Indi—From Indian—Yeah!” And backwards she toppled, thumping into a
seated position on her chair, smile magnificent, arms outspread.

 
          
Sara
looked at them. The Aussies. The bag lady. “My team,” she said.

 
          
Midaftemoon,
in the bustling editorial offices of the
Weekly
Galaxy.
Jack Ingersoll paced his squaricle, assembling his list for
tomorrow morning’s conference with
Massa
. Pausing, he squinted one-eyed across the
heaving writhing squaricles toward the battery of reporters, gnawing away at
their phones. He said, “Glue on Postage Stamps Can Give You Migraine, Doctors
Fear.”

 
          
“Is
that one sentence or two?” Mary Kate replied, but she typed, she typed.

 
          
Jack
nodded, unheeding. Jogging Causes Nymphomania, he said.

 
          
Boy
Cartwright, the limey bastard, the rotten Englishman, Massa’s pet editor, the
only person in the known universe with a comer squaricle—walls
and
windows on two sides!—Jack’s least
favorite living creature, came and stood in the door space of the squaricle and
smiled. Jack hated it when Boy Cartwright smiled, when that doughy baby- fat
face spread its puffy pink Ups. Jack would much prefer to see Boy Cartwright’s
unhealthy face twisted with agony, or that soft and sluglike body cowering in
abject terror. The reason Jack watched
Wages
of Fear
every time it came on television was so he could pretend it was Boy
Cartwright being dragged down into that oozing lake of oil and squashed beneath
the wheels of the straining truck.

 
          
But
here was Boy at the door space to Jack’s squaricle, his usual shit-eating smile
smeared across his white diseased-pumpkin face. “Listen, Boy,” Jack said,
“don’t you have a belfry to haunt?”

 
          
“Ahsk
me,” Boy suggested, “what’s the good word.”

 
          
“Will
you then go away?”

 
          
“Oh,
absolutely,” Boy promised.

           
“All right,” Jack said. “What’s the
good word, Boy?”

 
          
“Felicia,”
Boy pronounced, with loving care on every syllable. Then he smiled even more
horribly than before and, true to his word, went away.

 
          
Felicia!
He
knew!
The bastard
knew!
Jack’s face twisted with agony as
he turned to Mary Kate, who was glaring poison-tipped knives at Boy’s back.
“How?” Jack demanded.
“Who?”

 
          
Because
it had to be a mole within his own team, a viper in his bosom. His scoop was a
scoop no longer. Jack Ingersoll and his team were no longer the only ones who
knew that John Michael Mercer had thrown over Fluffy MacDougall for someone
named Felicia.

 
          
“Who?”

           
Could it have been Sara? Could she
have been that low, to take such a vile vengeance for his not having brought
her into his confidence Saturday night? No; he couldn’t believe it of her. She
was quick and sharp enough, but not naturally mean, a flaw in her character
that would keep her from rising very far at the
Galaxy
, a fact he was in no hurry for her to discover. So it wasn’t
her; if it had been, something would have shown on her face this morning when
he gave her the reward of a trip to
America
, some soupgon of guilt, wisp of regret,
passing shadow of conscience. So not Sara.

 
          
And
not the Down Under Trio either; the Aussies despised Boy, if that were
possible, even more than Jack did. As for Ida Gavin, even now skying LAward to
grind her heel in Keely Jones’s face, she had become who she was today as a
result of Boy’s loathsomeness, so not her either. So, in that case, who?
Who?

 
          
Mary
Kate? Impossible. He and Mary Kate were Siamese twins, they were joined at the
hip, they had the world’s first incestuous platonic relationship.

 
          
Who?
Who?
Pessimistic Don Grove,
constantly coming forward with two-headed calves and honeymoons on Alpha
Centauri? Phyllis Perkinson, the slumming Jaycee-ette? Chauncey Chapperell,
certified lunatic, preppy Trekkie and Space Ranger, who was just this morning
back from a three-week assignment to find a race of chess-playing gorillas in
the Amazon delta? (They hadn’t been there; too bad.)

 
          
So
that was the team. Eight reporters, one secretary, one editor. The only people
in this building, the only ones, who knew the significance of the name Felicia.

 
          
Well,
wait. There
was
one other
possibility; slim, but possible. The waiter.

 
          
Pedro.
Pedro just might already have been among those waiters, garagemen, airline
clerks and others in the service trades who are part of the vast intricate
frivolous network of spies and informants connected with one or another editor
at the
Galaxy.
If that particular
restaurant were a fairly frequent haunt of John Michael Mercer’s, and if some
member of Boy’s team had already suborned Pedro, naturally the fellow wouldn’t
have mentioned the fact to Jack; particularly not when Jack had folding money
visible in his fist. And Pedro, Jack remembered, had still been hanging around
the vicinity when Sara had said that name “Felicia” and told Jack what it
signified.

 
          
So
it could be Pedro. It could be. Unlikely,
extremely
unlikely, but not impossible.

 
          
And
to have to accept the alternative, that some member of his own team had been
suborned by the despicable Boy, was not to be borne. So, until events proved
otherwise, Jack would assume that Pedro was the source of the leak. And he
would watch his ass.

 
          
At
which point in the progress of his gloomy thinking, one of the absolutely trustworthy
mem* bers of Jack’s team, pessimistic Don Grove—could it be him? could
it?—entered the squaricle to say, “I don’t suppose you could use a hole opened
in the earth and swallowed a garage. There was a car in it.”

 
          
Back
to work. Jack said, “Anybody in the car?”

           
“That depends,” Don said carefully.

           
“Verifiable, Don.”

 
          
“I’ll
see what I can do.”

 
          
Don
Grove started from the squaricle and Jack called after him, “Unless it’s in
California
.”

 
          
Don
Grove frowned, looking back. “What’s wrong with
California
?”

 
          
“Happens
there every day.”

 
          
Sighing,
Don Grove went away, and Phyllis Perkinson—could it be her? could it?—entered
in his place, saying, “Unless it’s Felicia Farr, I just don’t know.”

           
“Is
it Felicia Farr?”

           
“No.”

           
“So you don’t know, is what you’re
saying.” Phyllis’s high clean forehead furrowed in distress. She said, “I’m
sorry, Jack, I know this is important.”

           
“About on a par with the Dead Sea
Scrolls, I would say.”

           
“The problem is, he’s fired all our
spies.” Phyllis shook her patrician head in dismay at the baseness of
humankind. “Why does Mercer have to have such a bad attitude?”

 
          
“Some
people are just no fun at all,” Jack agreed, as the phone in the squaricle
flashed and Mary Kate answered. Jack said to Phyllis, “Strive on, girl. We must
find Felicia.” Rolling his eyes to indicate all the other editors in all the
other squaricles, he said, “We must find Felicia
first!”

           
 
“Oh, I know, I know,” Phyllis said. “I’ll
keep searching.”

 
          
“Sara
of the twins,” Mary Kate announced.

           
“Go thou and find Felicia,” Jack
told Phyllis, who nodded and left as Jack picked up his phone and said, “How’s
Warwick
?”

 
          
“Whitcomb,”
Mary Kate corrected, but Jack was listening, nodding, smiling, saying, “Oh,
yeah, that’s the photographer, don’t worry about how she looks, she’s really
terrific, she’ll give you great shots, very human.”

 
          
“Oh,
that
one,” Mary Kate said.

           
“Are the Aussies a help?” Jack asked
the phone.

           
“Don’t let them drink too much.”
Then he looked at Mary Kate, and said, “She’s laughing.”

           
“Well, she’s a cheerful girl,” Mary
Kate said.

           
“What?” Jack asked the phone, and
listened, and looked sad. “No governor?” Then he looked cheerful again.
“Three
mayors! Very nice. And the
birthday cake as big as the Ritz?”

           
“Tell her to bring me back a slice,”
Mary Kate said.

 
          
“It’s
not on your diet,” Jack told Mary Kate, and then said to the phone, “Nothing, I
was just chatting with Mary Kate. Twenty feet? That’s not a really
big
cake, honeybunch. Tell the
photographer to do a real severe angle and a wide-angle lens and whatever—well,
she knows. Tell her it’s supposed to look as big as that aircraft carrier, you
know the one. Well,
she'll
know the
one.”

 
          
“The
one with the planes on it,” Mary Kate said.

 
          
“Have
fun there, darling,” Jack said, and held the smile until he hung up, when the
smile was immediately replaced by a deep black scowl.
“Could
it be her?” he demanded.
“Could
it be her?”

 
          
“Of
course it could,” Mary Kate said. “It could be anybody. It could be you.”

 
          
Jack
stared at her.
“Me!"

           
“I trust nobody,” Mary Kate told
him. “And I recommend you be the same.”