End of the Tiger (25 page)

“I’m pleased you think I can handle the job, sir.”
We all know very damn well I can handle it, don’t we?

“Done and done,” Mallory said with satisfaction, moving in quickly for the handshake. “I can speak for Ed, too, when I say we’re both very pleased at the way we’ve been able to work this thing out.”

“Now it’s decided, Ben,” Ed Bartlett said, “there’s no point in dragging our feet. Suppose you get cleaned up here by the end of the week and report out there Monday.”

“For a quick look,” Mallory said hastily, “then fly on back and take care of personal matters and then take your time driving your family out there. See something of the country. I’m sure that will be all right with Gil.”

The three men were standing. They smiled at one another. They were all members of the National family, and when these little family problems came up, you made a practice of handling them in a warm, human, cooperative way.

Ben Weldon spent a week in Denver. Gil Walker was delighted that Ben was taking over the district. Gil talked a great deal about the benefits of being a district manager, of being the top dog in the area. He was proud of his staff of sixty-two. The staff seemed competent, pleasant, and as wary of Ben as he expected them to be.

Gil steered Ben to a good real-estate agent who found a house that seemed nearly perfect, at less than he had expected to pay. He told Ginny all about it over the phone. She sounded ecstatic at the description, and told him to nail it down fast—the same advice given him by the agent.

He made the deposit. He was taking an evening flight back, leaving at ten o’clock, Friday night. He had checked out of the hotel. After dinner alone he had time to kill, and so he drove the rental car out to the house where they would live.

It was a very cold night, and the stars were vivid. He parked in the driveway and walked slowly around to the back of the house and sat on the low wall that enclosed the open patio. He smoked the cigarettes that he could afford, and he wore a new sports jacket, new flannel slacks, a new topcoat. He looked at the long slant of the land he would own, and he wondered if he had done it all as well as he could do it. He knew it was a question that could not be resolved, one that he would ask himself, probably, for the rest of his life.

On the evening of the day he had accepted the new job, he had gone home with two bottles of champagne. He beamed at his Ginny and presented her with the champagne. She stared at him in blank confusion. He took the champagne out of her hands and kissed her with splendid emphasis and resounding duration.

When he released her, gasping, she said, “What is this all
about
?”

“It is because you are a woman of rare perception and intelligence. And if I have your solemn promise never to gloat, I’ll tell you it is because you were entirely right, and I was dead wrong, darling.”

“About the job?”

“What else, pray? I just got bumped ten thousand, baby.”

“Ben! I don’t know what to say! How incredibly wonderful!”

“And we’re going to live one mile in the air, woman. You are standing in the presence of the brand-new district manager, Southwest District, headquarters in Denver.” Even as he beamed at her proudly, he was watching her closely. It was the critical moment.

He saw the doubts go out of her eyes. “Then champagne is exactly the right thing, isn’t it?” she said.

“Please chill it immediately. And jump when I give an order. I expect more respect around here from now on.”

“Lord and master,” she said, smiling, and came into his arms again.

He held the flame of his lighter to read his watch. Another ten minutes and it would be time to start to the airport. You did what you felt you had to do, and when it was done, you lived with it.

They could be content here, secure and happy. Things might become as good as they had once been, before insecurity began to corrode their contentment.

But he knew, and he would always know, that he had once climbed to a high and lonely place, that with the climbing irons and the ropes he had reached the last sheer drop before the summit. He had swung there in the frosty gale until finally, too numbed to make the final effort, he had climbed back down the way he had come, back down to a niche where he could be warm and safe and out of the wind.

He knew he would read and hear about the ones who made it all the way to the high peaks. The lower slopes of the mountains were warm and easy, and the trails were marked. The high places were dangerous. He knew how close he had come, and he could read about the others who had made it. Their powers and their decisions would affect him. And all his life he would wonder just how it felt to be up there.

He stood up and snapped his cigarette into the night and walked back to the car. As he got behind the wheel he found himself wondering if it was a happy ending. He smiled with derision at himself as that ancient phrase came into his mind. Happy endings were reserved for stories for children. An adult concerned himself with feasible endings. And this one was feasible, as an ending or as a beginning. You had to put your own puzzle together, and nobody would ever come along to tell you how well or how poorly you had done.

He woke up quite alone in his half acre of bed, in the sealed, soundproofed, shadowy expanse of bedroom, measuring the bulge of pain behind his eyes, tasting the sourness of his tongue. Soon, willing himself to make the effort, he hitched to the side of the bed, swung his legs out, and sat up quite slowly, making a face, scrubbing at his thinning harshness of black hair. He wormed his bare toes into the fur of the big white rug beside the bed and saw himself indistinctly in a distant mirror, the round doll-man in the bright pajamas. He reached to the big button board set into the headboard and punched the one for the draperies. The electric motor whined into life and opened the heavy draperies that covered the big window wall, letting in the flood of mid-May sunshine.

He pantomimed an extreme agony, covering his eyes with a heavy forearm, holding the other hand out in defense, and saying in one of his Balkan accents, “No, Andreyev, not the torture of the lights, comrade, I beg you.” He peered over his forearm, blinking. “I did it! I did it! I sabotaged the hushpuppy production, you all.”

He sighed and pushed the button for the tape. After a few scratchy sounds the music came on with a depth and fidelity too impressive for the song. It started up in the middle of a ricky-tick version of the Bahamian ballad Yellow Bird, a girl singing the lyrics in a gassy mock-sensual way.

He hummed skillful harmony and stood up and became a mortally wounded fellow bent on reaching the bathroom before expiring. He burlesqued it, using all the ingrained art of that big fat spry useful body, faking the smack of forehead against doorframe, the dazed rebound.

The big bathroom opened into another room with matching tile, containing his exercise equipment, rubbing table, barber chair, and steam box. His spacious shower stall had six shower heads and a back wall mirror. After soap and heat, he danced and gasped for a time in the
chill spray of ice water. He knotted a large coral towel around his belly and went back to the bedroom. He went directly to the button board to ring for Robbie but stopped just before his finger touched the button. Just one more time, he thought. He had been aware of the magazine over on his desk from the instant he was completely awake. The special messenger had brought it out to the house the previous evening. Today five or six million copies were going into the hands of the public.

He brought the magazine back to the bed and sat and read that part again.

He slapped the magazine shut and scaled it across the room, pages rattling. He went after it and picked it up and put it back on the desk. He wandered to the window wall and looked down at the pool. There were a few swimmers, and all the others were stretched out, flesh oiled, in the sun. No sound of them came into the room, no splash or shout or girl laugh, though he could see their mouths. Like a film with the sound gone bad. An
idea moved through the back of his mind, a skit where the sound came and went, the silent parts always giving the audience an incorrect and bawdy idea of what was going on. Could they fake running a film backward? Ask Jorgie about that. Maybe do the rubber cane bit in reverse pantomime.

Robbie appeared less than a minute after King punched his bell. He came in briskly enough, and the smile was there, but King sensed something tentative about the man. The narrow jockey-face looked closed and defensive. So maybe it had been a rougher night than he remembered.

“There are some strange pussycats in the pool,” King said.

“Oh, Franklin sent those two out. What they are, they’re for the stewardess part. What he said, either one is okay with him, so you pick. They got the knives for each other, naturally.”

“Chrissake, Robbie, that isn’t until August.”

“I know. He says let’s get set as far as we can as soon as we can, on everything that doesn’t start nibbling the budget. What’s the matter with you maybe hustling Kerner on the script some, Franklin says.”

“Tell him to goose Kerner, and what’s the matter with you? I fire you last night?”

“Two or three times, King. Look, we’ve got in maybe forty calls, what they say mostly is that Jessup is a rat fink after all the time he spent with you, then doing that fright thing. They say you want he should have a broken leg, okay. I called Barney like you said, and he said nothing actionable.”

King Noonan stared at him. “Like I said?”

“Last night you said call Barney.”

“Chrissake, baby, I must have been sauced. Look, do I ever give a damn what’s written about me? No. Jessup is in the business of selling magazines. Right? I’m in the business of selling King Noonan.”

“Well, it was rough. You know that. It was rough.”

“Everything is rough wherever you look, Robbie. Let’s join hands and start the dancing around here. This is the way we open. I want Mitch to come pound me some to get my heart started, ten minutes of that, and then Hymie
come give me a shave and a trim. While that is going on I can be going over the Chicago material with Mert and Willy. That’s tomorrow night out there, and it isn’t smoothed out yet. Breakfast here in … thirty-five minutes, mucho eggs scrambled, and a herd of those little sausages like yesterday. Have Mary Ann up here to go over those series ideas while I eat, and Maddy to take notes. But the first priority, you find Joseph and send him up here with an ice-cold pitcher of orange juice belted real good with vodka.”

Robbie moved toward the door. “Fennison is here with that deal about the French television …”

“Baby,
after
Mary Ann.
Then
we schedule and run like a train.”

He was stretched out on the rubdown table with big Mitch chopping at his shoulder muscles when Joseph scurried in and poured a tall glass of juice. Hymie was waiting by the barber chair, stropping his razor. Mert and Willy came in with pink copies of the Chicago material. The juice had reminded him of something. He had Mitch quit and he sat on the table and said, “This juice, I remember I was eighteen, nineteen, working this club in Camden, New Jersey. A little palace for cockroaches and the material strictly blue, the bar whisky two bits a shot, the broads cruising like vultures, you know the type place. So on a Saturday we all hear the place is closing, it’s the last night. Midnight we roust the customers we’ve got, maybe three, and word is around, so the bartenders, the broads, the entertainment from the other joints along the street, they come in through the back, and what we have is these odds and ends of bottles. Aquavit, Curaçao, crap like that, so we make a hell of a big punch bowl, and it tastes so bad we squeeze a hell of a lot of oranges in.” He was into the rhythm of it then, the clown face mobile, words flowing into the apt gestures, timing professionally precise, voice flexible. He told the little audience of four how one of the girls, anxious to use up all the bottled goods, had, when they mixed the second batch, dumped in the entire contents of the bartender’s little bottle of chloral hydrate, thinking it some kind of bitters. He bounced off the table and imitated the way they went down—the glaze, the sag, the
little blind stagger. He had the audience howling and weeping with laughter. “Three years before I could stare an orange in the face,” he said and got into the barber chair. Hymie tilted him back and wrapped his face in the steaming towel.

He put on his dragon robe for breakfast. Mary Ann Mize was waiting for him at the bedroom table, sipping hot coffee. Maddy was over at the desk, her steno book and pencils ready. He ignored Mary Ann and went over to Maddy and kissed her, then hooked a finger in the top of her blouse, pulled it away from her body, stared severely down, and shouted, “You men down there! Back to work! We need more barrage balloons to save London.” Maddy flushed and giggled.