The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything (13 page)

"I did," he said. "I did indeed."

"Any man
using
me," she said intently, "he gets a kick turns him soprano. I'm eager, but I'm no gawddamn free lunch counter for any bassar prowling for kicks, hear?"

"I'm not."

"Don't ever get to be. Hey! That's the news starting." They went inside and sat on a couch. After the national news, Kirby was the first item on the local news.

"State, Federal and local authorities have joined in the hunt for mystery man Kirby Winter and his accomplice, Wilma Farnham. Last night Arturo Vara, room service waiter at a Miami Beach hotel, swore out an assault warrant against Winter. As the police reconstruct it, Winter, hemmed in by reporters in the corridor outside his hotel room yesterday, broke into an adjoining room, placed a call for room service, then, when Vara arrived, slugged him, donned his uniform and made his way through the reporters to the elevators and escaped from the hotel. He has not yet been apprehended."

Bonny Lee turned and stared at Kirby and raised one eyebrow in question. He nodded, guiltily.

"Dr. Roger Farnham, Associate Professor at Florida Eastern, elder brother of Wilma Farnham, disclosed that after a brief unfruitful interview with the press yesterday, Miss Farnham left the apartment where she lived alone, taking a few personal possessions, and has not been seen since. Police have established that Miss Farnham and Winter held clandestine meetings at a Miami hotel during his infrequent returns to this area from various foreign countries.

"The question which is on everyone's lips is what could have happened to the missing twenty-seven million dollars turned over to O. K. Devices by Krepps Enterprises at the direct order of Omar Krepps, international financier, who died suddenly last week. It is believed that Winter and the Farnham woman carefully planned the huge embezzlement over a period of time, including the destruction of the files and records and, according to police theory, including plans to leave the country, plans they may have consummated last night.

"In addition to the assault charge, Winter and the Farnham woman face embezzlement charges lodged by Krepps Enterprises. At midnight last night K.E. posted a reward of ten thousand dollars for any information leading to the apprehension of either or both of the fugitives. They are also bringing civil suit against both Winter and the Farnham woman. Both the tax and immigration authorities are anxious to serve summonses on both Winter and the woman.

"Winter is described as being six feet, one-half inch tall, weight about one-ninety, sandy hair, dark blue eyes, age thirty-two, small crescent scar on left cheekbone, clean-shaven, polite, soft-spoken, highly intelligent, disarming."

Bonny Lee went over and turned off the radio. She came back to him, shaking her head. "You now a celebrity, man." She touched his cheek. "Where'd you get the scar?"

"A little girl hit me with a rock when I was about six years old." He grasped her hand, touched the scar he had seen. "How about this one?"

"I swang back-handed at a little old buck-tooth boy pinched me when I was about eleven."

"You need ten thousand dollars?"

"Hope to God I never do need it so bad, sugar. Can you think of anything at all they
don't
want you for?"

"Armed robbery."

"Keep trying. Maybe you'll get lucky. Sugar, I better get you onto that boat before anybody tracks you right to here."

"Or before I get too scared to walk out the door."

He put on the hat and the glasses and checked his pockets. He went and got the gold watch off the shelf near the phone. Thanks for everything, Uncle Omar, he thought.

"How far to that Marina?"

"Ten minutes, about."

Before they went out, he kissed her. They held each other tightly for a few moments. She looked up at him. "Fun?"

"More than I can say."

"I could get a little weepy over you, Kirby. Let's go."

The Sunbeam roadster was, he guessed, about three years old, dinged, dirty and beginning to rust out. But the engine roared immediately, and she yanked it around a corner like a toy on the end of a string. He clapped his hat back on just in time. It was almost nine o'clock. She drove with her brown hands high on the wheel, chin up, eyes slitted, cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She shifted up and shifted down, and danced in and out of the lines of morning traffic with what at first seemed like terrifying abandon, but he soon recognized as such skill that he felt entirely safe in the noisy little yellow car.

She cut through to the waterfront, turned north and went three blocks, and when she began to downshift he saw the big Marina sign and all the pleasure craft at the wide docks. Suddenly she gunned it and went on by, and he saw the prowl cars at the curb and saw the uniformed men on the dock. She turned the next corner, braked, and tucked the little car into a parking slot.

"That door there is shut and locked," she said. "I don't know what the hell to do!"

"Just sit tight and let Bonny Lee find out for sure. What's the boat?"

"The
Glorianna
."

She found a newspaper under the seat and handed it to him. "Hide behind this, sugar. Be right on back."

She was gone for a full fifteen unbearable minutes. Then she piled into the car and drove away from there. She headed west, found a shopping center, parked amid the other cars.

"It took me a time, Kirby, to single me out a cute cop and get him a-coming over to me to show off how big he is. That
Glorianna
, she took off twenty minutes ago and those cops got there ten minutes too late. Now as near as I can tell, what happened is they found out a lot of your stuff was moved out of some cruddy hotel, and it took time to track it down, and they found it got took to that Marina and put aboard the
Glorianna
. So they figure you're on it and they got you nailed good, because they got the Coast Guard looking already and they'll pick it up any time. It's a big old son of a gun the man there said. You know, they got the idea that twenty-seven million got put aboard, and they're all standing around so sweaty they can't hardly stand it. It wouldn't hurt me a bit to know what did get moved onto it, sugar."

"Personal junk. Total cash value, maybe two hundred tops. There's even a pair of ice skates."

Her eyes looked startled. "Shees marie.
Ice
skates!"

"I've got no place to turn, Bonny Lee."

"I should truly like to hear from the beginning. Should we go back to Bernie's?"

"I'd rather not go back there."

"All we need is a place to talk, for now. And the last place they'd look I'd say is a public beach. Okay?"

"Okay, Bonny Lee."

The noise of the little car eliminated any chance of conversation. She drove over to the beach and headed north. By ten o'clock they were on a cement bench in a small open pavilion, looking out across a wide beach toward the curl and thud of the blue Atlantic waves. Though it was a Tuesday morning in April, there were hundreds of people on the beach. He was beginning to feel depressed and helpless.

"You load it all onto me, sugar, and then you get a new opinion."

He told her. He droned a leaden parade of facts, without color or hope. And in the telling of them, he disheartened himself even more. He took it from the first legal conference after the funeral right up to the morning phone call from Joseph.

He stared woodenly at her. "Think I should go try to explain?"

"Who the hell would believe you? Gawddammit, Kirby, they'd start looking for the needle marks in your arm."

"Do you believe it?"

"I'm this girl loves you. Remember? I do. But it is sure God an effort. Not loving you. That's right easy. Believing all this stuff comes hard. Charla. What the hell kind of name is that? Sugar, after those three broads, you sure got a change when I hopped into bed."

"What should I do?"

"You ever get a cake with a hacksaw in it?"

"I was afraid you'd say something like that."

"If both them girls were on that boat, the Coast Guard got them by now for sure. And that Charla and Joseph are maybe jammed up as bad as you."

"I doubt it."

He took Uncle Omar's gold watch out of his pocket. He fiddled with it, absently. He wound it, pulled the stem out, set it to correspond with his wrist watch. It had an hour hand, a minute hand and a sweep second hand. It had a fourth hand motionless at twelve o'clock, silver instead of the gold of the other hands. He wondered what it was for. He pushed the stem in again, and suddenly discovered that by pushing it in and turning it, he could turn the silver hand back to a new position.

In the instant he did so, the world turned silent and his vision clouded. His first thought was that he was having a heart attack. There was such an utter silence he could hear the murmurous sound of his own blood in his ears. Any speculation as to what might have happened was drowned in a total, primitive, unreasoned terror. To known hazards, the human animal can react with fear bleached with reason. The unknown drops him back into the cave nights, into the sabered terror, awash in adrenaline, the sphincter precarious, muscles knotted for the sideways leap, the head-down whimpering run.

He sprang to his feet, gasping, trembling, and yanked the sunglasses from his eyes. He felt a strange resistance as he jumped up, as though a wind he had not felt or heard pressed against him. All the world was still. With the sunglasses off, the world was a pale, unpleasant red. He had seen the world look like that before, when he had looked through the prism of a single lens reflex camera with a red filter on the taking lens. But through the camera he had seen the normal unending movement of the world. Now he was in a pink desert, or a garden of savage sculpture, or inside a painting by Dali filled with the horror of a timeless motionlessness.

A single wave, the length of the beach, curled and did not fall. The gulls of pink stone hung from invisible wires. He turned and looked down at the girl. The color of her face was unpleasant, and her lips looked black. She was caught in that eternity, hand half-raised in gesture, lips parted, tongue touching the edge of her front teeth. She had the merciless stillness of a body in a casket.

He closed his eyes tightly, opened them again. Nothing had changed. He looked at the gold watch. The gold hand that marked the seconds was motionless. He looked at his wrist watch. It, too, had stopped. He looked at the gold watch carefully, looked at the silver hand and at last was able to detect the tiny movement of it as it crept up toward twelve. He held the watch to his ear and thought he could hear a tiny sound, a faint, sustained musical note. He had set the silver hand back to ten. It was at seven minutes to twelve. It seemed a fair assumption he had been in the red world of silence for three minutes.

He took two experimental strides. Again he felt the odd resistance against his body. And his shoes felt as if they weighed twenty pounds each. It was difficult to lift them, to move them forward through the air and then to push them back down again. They had a strange weight and inertia, as though he walked through glue. And the pressure against his body seemed caused by an equivalent inertia in his clothing. He bent down and picked up a discarded paper cup. It was like lifting a cup made of lead. He felt the weight and resistance of it when lifting it, but when movement stopped, it seemed weightless. All the normal muscle-to-brain signals were distorted. Cautiously he released the cup. It remained suspended in the air, exactly where he had released it. He reached out and pushed it. He could move it through the air, but its motion stopped the instant he stopped exerting pressure against it. In this red world a body in motion did not tend to stay in motion. He grasped the cup and squeezed it. He could crumple it, but it was like crumpling a cup made of heavy lead foil rather than thin cardboard.

He looked at the watch again. Three minutes to twelve. He looked down the beach at the hundreds of motionless people. He looked toward the drive and saw the frozen river of traffic. Far over the city a jet was pasted against the sky. Fifty feet away was a small boy halted in the act of running, horridly balanced on the ball of one bare foot.

Cautiously he pressed the stem of the watch in, thinking he might turn the silver hand back to twelve, trying to believe that if he did so the world would be the same again, knowing he could not endure another three minutes of the red silence.

When he pushed the stem in, the silver hand, like the hand of a stop watch, snapped back to twelve. The noise of the world crashed in around him and the redness was gone instantaneously. The wave struck, the cup fell, the boy ran, the flying things flew.

"Think you could—" Bonny Lee said and stopped, stared at him, stared at the bench, looked at him again, swallowed, and said, "You can sure God move fast, sugar! Wow! You're in better shape than I thought."

He looked at her and laughed. He laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks, and until he began to hear an edge of hysteria in his own voice. She tried to laugh with him and then stopped, staring at him with concern.

"Kirby! Kirby, dammit!"

"I'm in great shape," he said, gasping. "I've never been in better shape!"

"You losing your damn mind, sugar?"

He dialed the gold watch back to the red world. He wanted time to think, time to control the helpless laughter. But laughter was easy to control. It sounded too hollow, too ghastly in the silence. She was again frozen, this time looking directly into his eyes.

He shuddered, shaking himself like a wet dog. He looked at the watch. He had set the silver hand at quarter of twelve. Fifteen minutes, if he wanted all of it. Or just depress the stem and let the world snap back to life. No. That was a distorted version of reality, an invitation to insanity. The world was the same. It was continuing. He had merely stepped out of it. Everything had stopped but the vibrations of light itself. And the dingy red look of the world might mean that light itself had slowed in relation to him. More logically, he had changed his objective relationship to time, so that perhaps one hour of red time would be a fractional part of a second of real time. Of course, that could lead you into conjecture as to which one was "real" time, a philosophical route to the same goal—insanity.