Small World (15 page)

Victorian sensibilities that Nick Weiler thought of as his museum. He most certainly didn’t belong with Dolly. Not casting possessive glances at her.

Mr. Tinker is writing a book about miniatures,’ Dolly elaborated.

'If we can assist you in any way . . . ’Nick offered. Roger didn’t seem enthused at the thought of professional assistance, if the sour grimace on his face meant anything.

Nick, reflecting that Dolly had some odd pals, turned his attention to her. ‘Are you sure you don’t want my people to do the packing for you?'

She took him by the arm. ‘Oh, no, darling. We want to get right at it. Lead on.’

Nick didn’t stay with them any longer than it took to turn them over to the collections manager, and a pair of packers. Wednesday was the day the Dalton closed its doors to the public and did its housekeeping. He had legitimate excuses of work to be supervised. Dolly, like some high school tease, clung to him and smothered him with
dears
and
darlings.
Roger Tinker’s fierce foo dog glare was childishly irritating. It was a relief to leave them to their own devices.

After examining the packing materials, Dolly sent the museum packers on their way, saying she would call them if she needed help. The packers were happy to go. It wasn’t as if Dolly were known to be fun to work for. She wanted her dollhouse to herself, and now she had it.

The disassembling and packing consumed hours. Dolly didn’t seem to notice either the passage of time or Roger. She went on wrapping all the tiny objects from the Doll’s White House and placing them, patiently and lovingly, into frames of foam. Roger did the heavy looking on.

It was Roger’s first examination of the dollhouse. He told himself it wasn’t the creeps whispering on his shoulder like a big nasty black bird, that it was not just an overgrown dollhouse. The perfection of detail was uncanny; it called out for tiny people to populate its precious rooms.

After a while it was too much, and he wandered away to stare at the remainder of the exhibit. But the spooks wouldn’t go away. Something kept pecking at his brain, a kind of mental itch that
would
be scratched.

Sisterless, and raised in a firm straightjacket concept of masculinity, he had not been exposed to dolihouses as a boy. His childhood was past before the craze for little boys’ dolls, disguised as ‘action figures,’ and all the attendant paraphernalia of appropriately scaled space ships, motorcycles, automobiles, and secret headquarters, arrived. He had read about it, but here, in the Dalton, he saw the physical evidence: the toys of generations of children had been metamorphosed into an adult hobby, and for some adults, more than a hobby, into an obsession.

The why was just beyond his grasp, solid and tangible, but smooth, hard, and inaccessible, like a polished stone, a piece of fused glass. Why was the reduction of every aspect of human life so fascinating?

Working the subject over in his mind, he drifted to the second-story gallery where a new exhibit was being assembled. The place was ass-deep in technical staff and electrical equipment. The staffers, mostly electricians, were a swarm of buttercup-gold uniformed bees, fitted out with belts of tools.

Roger figured out that they were setting up a whole series of projection screens, each of which required sound systems and a video disc unit. It was interesting to watch, so he stayed for quite a long time, trying to stay out of the way, and itching to give a hand.

He was able to see bits and pieces of the video recordings as the equipment was tested and discovered the whole zoo had to do with showing processes, preindustrial processes. One three-minute slice was of an old man making barrel staves. Another detailed the making of maple syrup and sugar. The tapes were as interesting as the equipment.

With each screen, antique tools were being arranged in realistic settings. A girl from the graphics department told Roger that visitors would be encouraged to handle the old tools. Roger privately thought someone would kite the whole display, piece by piece, and that Nick Weiler must be as pussy-wrecked over Dolly’s daughter-in-law as Dolly said he was, to approve that idea.

Once the idea of thievery was in his head, Roger remembered he’d wanted to find a little something for Dolly and started to look around in a casual fashion. His survey was interrupted by the sound of a voice he’d heard once before and he looked up just in time to see Nick Weiler’s unwelcome face across the gallery. He made his way out and found himself, after a few minutes on a back staircase, in the third-story gallery.

It was proportionately smaller than the second story gallery, and in atmosphere, totally different. Quieter, darker, given over to portraits. Roger drifted around it, studying the faces of ancestral Americans, painted in the early primitive way. He was bemused by the kaleidoscopic quality of the Dalton. It was more like Disneyland than the museums of his school field days, or the ones he had poked around in New York. All those fucking wires! He’d always thought of a museum as being like a big old Roman Catholic church during a funeral. Only the museums had glass coffins instead of wood, and dozens of them, full of dusty, arcane, dull objects instead of bones. Nobody of any active scientific intelligence would be interested in such places or things, any more than they would be interested in the contents of his mother’s head. But apparently museums had changed since Roger quit the hot-lunch line. This one, for sure, was run like a rich kid’s toybox.

Roger found his way back to Dolly by means of an elevator.

‘Nick came back to ask if we would have lunch with him,’ she told Roger briskly, barely looking up from her task.

'Whatever you want.’ Roger had no trouble restraining his enthusiasm for Nick Weiler’s company.

Dolly sat back on her heels and regarded her handiwork with satisfaction.

Never mind then. Give me a hand with this and then go find one of Nick’s munchkins, preferably well muscled, to help us with the

crating.’

She was so cheerful and energetic that Roger shrugged off the shadows of the Dalton and fell to. The Doll’s White House and its furnishings were deposited in the rental van by midaftemoon. Roger’s stomach rumbled noisily. He was looking forward to a well-earned late lunch.

‘What do you think of him?’ Dolly asked Roger as they drove away.

Roger looked back at the portico of the Dalton, where Nick Weiler, good host that he was, stood seeing them off. The late afternoon sun glinted in his blond hair, making spun gold from

straw.

‘Pretty,’ Roger grunted.

Dolly reached over to pat his hand in mock consolation.

'You should have seen him when he was a little boy, living with his mother. Rattling around in a rotten, damp old mansion, like two buttons in a drier, with the old man, his stepfather, squatting in his library, half gaga, and a dozen antique servants trying to keep the place up.’

Roger watched the city as she threaded the van through the crowded streets. He was looking for the FBI building, which hadn’t been built when he was last in the capital. She broke the silence as they approached their hotel.

‘Poor Nick’s always been pretty. It’s a curse,’ she said thoughtfully. She glanced at Roger and smiled. It was a pleased, satisfied smile.

‘You,’she declared.

Roger straightened up to await her verdict.

‘You,’ she said, ‘are smarter than you look.’

Roger grinned. ‘I’m hungry,’ he confided.

Dolly looked severely at his barely noticeable gut. ‘You can afford to skip a meal,’ she scolded.

Roger’s heart sank. It looked like a long haul to dinner.

It was. Dolly refused to lock the goddamn crates in the trunk and leave them in the parking garage. They had to be trucked through the garage, onto the freight elevator, and up to her suite. She supervised the whole operation too so that Roger and the pair of bellmen who had been pressed into service had no opportunities to be slack.

Roger had to go out for a disposable razor. He told Dolly he would be a few minutes, that he might do a little sightseeing around the hotel. It was convenient to the tourist attractions; Roger was able to buy a hotdog from a street vendor and consume it while staring righteously at the Capitol. He wandered by the Library of Congress and bought a T-shirt that said
Wet Paint
in multicolored dripping letters from another vendor. Dolly would be revolted by it, but it made him feel better. A man had to have something he could feel comfortable in, once in awhile.

He was in the shower, struggling to strip the paper off the hotel soap, when the FBI came. If he’d heard the knock on the door, he would have hurried to finish, assuming it was room service, but he didn’t. So he wandered into the middle of things, damp around the ears, with his hair curling wildly from the humidity. He found Dolly sitting on one of the crates and smoking while a pair of FBI agents looked up foolishly from where they squatted over an open crate.

She introduced him. He sat down on the couch to pull on his socks and shoes and comb his hair while the agents efficiently tossed the crates. Dolly came to sit beside him. Then she discovered she was out of cigarettes.

‘Oh, shit,’ she said appealingly.

‘I’ll get some,’ he volunteered, after patting his pockets and turning up none. He picked up his camera case and made for the door.

He missed her silvery laugh behind him. He would have recognized it. Dolly had used it on him often enough. Put him at ease. Like ice on the sidewalk, oops.

In the hotel room, one of the agents fumbled for his notebook and pen.

'Would you mind answering some questions, ma’am?’

Dolly was amused. Gold star for politeness from Uncle Saint J. Edgar. If they wanted to play out old scripts from the televised mythology of the FBI, she would milk what fun she could out of it. ‘No, of course not.’

'About Mr. Tinker?’

'What do you want to know?’

‘Well, what does he do for a living? Where does he come from?’ 'Oh.’ Dolly shifted around and picked up an ashtray. She twirled it slowly on the tips of her fingers. ‘Mr. Tinker is writing a book about miniatures. I’m helping him. I believe he’s from California, but I know very little about his background.’

The agent nodded helpfully. ‘Do you know his permanent address?’

Dolly smiled. ‘The same as mine.’

Duly noted. ‘Is he in your employ?’

‘Not exactly.’

The agent pursued the question. ‘What is your relationship with Mr. Tinker.’

'We’re friends. He’s a little helpless. I look after him.’ Make them work a little. Challenge is good for the soul.

The agent exchanged a nervous glance with his colleague. He didn’t want to have to ask the question again, more bluntly. It was worse because he couldn’t see any reason why the FBI had to know the answer but he knew his supervisor would ask, and he’d better have the right answer.

'Oh, no,’ Dolly exclaimed. ‘I didn’t mean that. Roger is just as gay as Mardi Gras, darling.’

How did you meet Mr. Tinker?’ Relief. Move on to the next one.

'Oh, somewhere. Some party. I don’t remember, really.’

The agent closed his notebook. ‘Thank you, ma’am. Sorry to bother you.’

Roger passed them in the corridor. He smiled at them genially, and was disappointed to receive nothing for his effort but neatly paired sneers.

‘Good fucking riddance,’ Dolly said, as he came through the door. ‘One more “ma’am” and I’d have screamed.’

Roger presented her with the pack of cigarettes. He slipped 91

the camera case from around his neck and dropped it into the nearest drawer.

‘At least that’s over. What did you tell them?’

She looked uneasy. ‘You won’t like it. I had to fib a lot.’

‘Sure. So what did you tell them? I ought to know in case they try to catch us up with different stories.’

Dolly looked at him from half-closed eyes. She put out the stub of her current cigarette.

‘I had to tell them I picked you up, the way people do. And that you are gay.’

‘What?’ Roger was flummoxed. ‘For Christ’s sake, why?’

‘I didn’t want them to suspect the true nature of our relationship.’

‘Shit.’ She sounded like she was quoting some frigging soap opera. ‘What does that have to do with what they were looking for?’

‘Don’t talk to me like that.’ She turned her back on him.

Roger could think of only one reason why she should tell such a lie. She was ashamed of him. Abruptly, the true nature of their relationship, as she called it, stared up at him, like his own reflection unexpectedly encountered. He had something she wanted, the minimizer, and what the minimizer could do. And she had the money and she had her body.

He saw the set of her spine and knew she could grind him down. What hadn't he already done for her? Tortured himself with her goddamn diet and fitness program, jumped to her every whim. So that she could deny him to a couple of FBI agents whose opinions were of no significance to either of them, or shouldn’t be. He had only himself to blame. His mother would have told him so.

Except for his acute awareness of the state of his wallet, he would walk. After paying for her carton of cigarettes, he had exactly fifty-seven cents in his pocket. Then he decided that was okay, too. He would get along, if he had to wash dishes. He opened the drawer where he’d dumped the device.