The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything (5 page)

Kirby suddenly realized Hess was talking about Miss Farnham, Wilma Farnham, the only other staff member of Uncle Omar's secret give-away program, the one-woman clipping service, keeper of the files, translator of foreign news items, totally devoted to Uncle Omar's hidden program. She had been on the job six years, working out of a small office in a building far from the main offices of Krepps Enterprises. His field reports went to that office. The money was arranged through that office. Uncle Omar had assigned rough priorities to the projects she dug up. Then the two of them, Kirby and Miss Farnham, had worked out the schedules. When he was in town they often had evening conferences over work in progress and future missions in his room at the Birdline. She always pushed hard for the health things, the bush hospitals, the village ambulance services, the child nutrition programs. She was consistently dubious about the struggling little entrepreneurs, and always made Kirby feel she thought him too gullible for the job. She had worshipped Uncle Omar. He felt guilty, realizing this was the first time since returning he had wondered what would become of her now. But there stood Hoover Hess, leering at him.

Feeling that he was betraying and degrading Miss Farnham, he gave Hess a broad, knowing, conspiratorial wink.

"Out of them glasses," Hess said, "and out of them old-lady clothes, with her hair mussed and a drink in her, I bet she's a pistol, Kirb."

"How much do I owe you this time?"

"You're past checkout, but I won't charge you for today. You come in dawn Friday. Make it three nights, plus two phone calls. Comes to eighteen eighty-four. No credit card?"

"I had to turn them in."

"So who needs cards with so much cash coming? You can just sign if you want."

"I'll pay cash, Hoover. Thanks."

When he had his change, he walked to the lobby booth. No point in trying the office to get Wilma Farnham. It was listed under O.K. Devices. O. K. for Omar Krepps. He looked up Miss Farnham's private number. After the phone rang eight times he gave up and took a cab back out to the beach and checked into the Hotel Elise. The desk clerks were extraordinarily cordial. Room 840 was ready for Mr. Winter. It was approximately six times the size of his room at the Birdline, with chaises, tables, gentle music, six shower controls, a sun deck, an ocean view, vases of cut flowers, bowls of fruit, his dry-cleaned suit hanging in the closet, the other laundry on a low chest of drawers. When he was alone, he went out onto the sun deck. He could not see the deck where he had walked out to be confronted by Charla supine, but he estimated it was perhaps forty feet to his right, screened by an architectural concession to privacy. He looked down. Little brown people were stretched out on the bright sun cots near the cabanas, looking like doll bodies awaiting the attentions of the costumer. He went back into the room and over to the biggest bowl of fruit. When he looked at it, it made him think of Charla. He selected a pear, and it turned out to be such a superior pear, he had to eat it over the bathroom sink, a deep oval of stainless steel set into a long countertop covered with cherry-colored tile. He looked at the rounded shape of the sink and thought of Charla. He bit into the pear and thought of Charla. He glared into his own mirrored eyes and thought of Charla. Finally he had to dry his sweaty face on a hand towel and go stand in front of the nearest air-conditioning vent.

He went down into the ornate maze of bars and shops and dining rooms in the bowels of the hotel and found a grill room that would serve him a steak sandwich and coffee. It was after four. He tried to sort things out logically. He wasn't very good at it. Miss Farnham had always seemed skeptical of his attempts at orderly analysis. Uncle Omar had never seemed to mind when he reached conclusions he could not justify through any exercise of logic.

Betsy Alden presented too many possibilities. He did not even want to think about her. Thinking about her was like having a dull headache. She could be a neurotic having hallucinations. She could be absolutely accurate. Or she could be at any point between those two extremes.

I am not, he thought, so remarkable, so enchanting, so superior, that Joseph and Charla lay all this on because they can't help themselves. All over the world, whenever they found out I might come up with funds, I've been hustled, but never so good, never so completely. So they do want something. And it isn't the way you hustle a potential employee. As far as I know, I haven't got anything they want. But they think I have it or will have it. There is something somebody wants. It did well by Uncle Omar. Well enough, so that all the outposts have been ransacked, but according to Mr. Wintermore, there would have been nothing in any one of them, not even at the island.

I told them I have nothing. I'm still being hustled. I was too drunk to lie, so they must think I have something I don't know I have, or will get something later that I don't know about. The letter. As good a guess as any. Or maybe, as Betsy suggested, the personal papers.

So what are the ethics? Go along with it? Tell Betsy when I get a clue? Do I owe her anything? Maybe. It depends on how accurate she was. A little free ride shouldn't corrode the soul.

But how much corrosion is implicit in Charla Maria Markopoulo O'Rourke? Suddenly he realized he could readily check it out, indirectly at least. If Charla and Joseph were as influential as they seemed to be, and as powerful as Betsy implied, the Miami papers would have something about them in the morgue.

"Darling!" Charla said, sliding into the booth to sit facing him, reaching across to take his hand in hers. "Wherever have you been?" She wore a blue and white cotton print cut alarmingly low, and a totally frivolous hat. He felt the heat of her hands through white gloves. She stared at him so earnestly, so glowingly, so heatedly, he almost turned around to see who she could be looking at directly behind him. It was a dark corner of the grill, a paneled booth, a lamp with an orange shade. The impact of her made her seem larger than life, a face seen by courtesy of Eastman color when you sit too close to the screen. The nose was snubbed, the cheeks broad, the gray-green eyes slightly Asiatic, the hair milky, heavy, the shade of old ivory, mouth broad, lips heavy and slightly parted and delicately moist, disclosing the small, white, even teeth.

"Just—uh—errands," he said.

She released his hands, pouted at him. "I've been forlorn. I've missed you terribly. I even wondered if you'd been waylaid by my poor little confused niece."

"Uh—no."

"That's good, dear. She may try to tell you some of her mad nonsense. I should warn you in advance, I guess. I feel disloyal telling you these things about her because, after all, she is the daughter of one of my half-sisters. I guess we should have realized we'd have a problem with her when she was expelled from that nice school in Switzerland. But she did seem so sweet, at fifteen. We did our best by her, Kirby, but she has—a very weak grasp on reality. Possibly we should have institutionalized her. But, family—you know—one keeps trying. Actually, that's why I had her come here this time. More bad reports. But it might not do any good. She seems totally rebellious."

"Bad reports?"

"We try to keep track of her, discreetly. Darling Kirby, I don't want to bore you with family problems. But she is really terribly—unstable. She acts out her own fantasies."

"Oh?"

"She has accused me and Joseph of truly horrible behavior, and I haven't known whether to laugh or cry. Unscrupulous men have taken advantage of the way she seems compelled to act out the dreams in her strange mind."

"I beg your pardon?"

"She seems very erratic this time. She may approach you, Kirby. And she may try to make you a key figure in one of her fantasies. And when she does, she will probably throw herself at you."

"Throw herself at me?"

"It will just be another little drama she is constantly writing for herself in her mind. If it should happen, I can't tell you what to do. You seem like a most decent person, Kirby. If you refuse to play the male lead opposite her paranoid heroine, she'll probably find someone who will. She's reasonably attractive. Maybe it would be best if you—humored her. You would be gentle, wouldn't you?"

"B-But—"

"Thank you so much, dear. Just indulge her. Say what she wants to hear. I'll be trying to find another opening for her. I have some good friends in the entertainment world. Don't you think it is better for her to be free than to be shut away somewhere?"

"I guess so."

"One doctor suggested that it is a sublimation of something she does not want to face. By accusing me of vicious, horrible, incredible things she seems to ease her own feelings of guilt. To her I am some sort of dream figure living amidst monstrous conspiracies. Joseph and I joke about it sometimes, but it is, a heartbreaking kind of humor. We're really not complicated. Perhaps we like to live too well, but we can afford it—even though we are always being cheated somehow. And maybe you will be taking that worry off our minds, dear."

"I haven't really—"

"They gave you an impossible room and I made them change it. Tomorrow you and I are going shopping. I know exactly the sort of clothing you should be wearing. And that haircut is really tiresome if I may say so. It's as if you are trying to sneak through life without being noticed, Kirby. And you have so much possibility. When I'm through with you, you'll walk through the world as if you own it and women will turn to stare at you and their eyes will go wide and their little hands will get moist and they'll make sly little plots to meet you."

"I don't think I exactly want that kind of—"

"You'll
relish
it, believe me. Come on now, dear. Joseph will be waiting for us in the suite. We'll have some drinks there, and the limousine will pick us up at seven-thirty and take us to a perfectly fabulous restaurant."

By ten-thirty that evening, Kirby Winter found himself taking particular pains to enunciate clearly. And sometimes, if he closed one eye, he could keep Joseph in better focus.

"Nice of you to invite me on a cruise," he said. "But I don't want to feel—"

"Obligated?" Joseph cried. "Nonsense! It is our pleasure!"

Kirby carefully turned his head and said, "Where'd she go?"

"To freshen her make-up perhaps."

"I don't dance often, Joe. I didn't mean to come down on her foot like that."

"She forgave you."

"But I keep remembering that scream."

"She is just unusually sensitive to pain, Kirby. Her nerves are closer to the surface than most. But since she is equivalently sensitized to pleasure, I imagine it is a characteristic she would not willingly give up."

"'Mazing woman," Kirby said solemnly. "'Mazing."

"I was just thinking, my boy, if you should feel you might be leading a parasitic life on the
Glorianna
, if it would offend your instincts, there is one project you might take on. And a worthwhile one I would say."

"Like what?"

"You were close to Omar Krepps. A fantastic man, fantastic career. But the world knows little about him. He saw to that. I think it would be a rather nice gesture of devotion and respect, dear boy, if you busied yourself with a biography of him. Later we could get some professional to put it in proper shape for publication. Just think of all his quiet charities which will never be recorded unless you do it. And there might be a kind of poetic justice in it. It might make you a bit of money."

"Interesting," Kirby said.

"I imagine that for a project like that, you could gather up his personal papers, documents and records."

"And bring them aboard, huh?"

"You'd be working aboard, would you not?"

"The mystery of Omar Krepps."

"Might make rather a nice title, that."

'"Sometimes you sound English."

"I did have some schooling in England."

"You know, I bet you'd like to help me sort out those cases of personal records."

"Is there that much!"

"Hell, yes."

"I'd be happy to help, of course, if you need me."

Kirby felt shrewd as a fox. "All in storage under my name at the Hotel Birdline. Cases of crud. Diaries."

"I had no idea you had all that. You didn't mention it the other night."

"Forgot it."

"When the
Glorianna
gets in, we can have it all brought aboard."

"Oh sure."

"Aren't you acting a little strange, Kirby?"

"Me? Strange?" As he grinned the room tilted and then came slowly back. He felt reckless, "Joseph, old buddy, we're all strange, each in our own little way. You, me, Charla and Betsy."

"Betsy?"

He grinned broadly and drained his Irish coffee. "She's maybe the weirdest one of all. She can tell what's going to happen before it even happens. She's a witch, maybe."

Joseph's big, bronzed, glossy face was suddenly like something on a coin. "Just what did she predict, Kirby?"

Suddenly, too late, the alarms rang. The fox became a rabbit and ran under a bush.

"Who predict what, Joseph?"

"Has Betsy been talking to you?"

"Excuse. I think maybe I might be going to be a little bit sick."

He went into the men's room, leaned close to the mirror, and made strange savage faces at himself until somebody else came in . . . .

"Naughty boy," the gentle, chiding, loving voice said, husky-sweet in the night. "Oh, yes indeed, a very naughty boy." Fingers stroked his forehead. He opened his eyes cautiously. He saw a dark edge of building overhead, and half a sky full of stars. A head, bending over him, blocked out some of the stars. The face was in dark shadow, but light came from somewhere behind her, silvering the outline of her head.

"Dear God," he whispered.

"Oh yes, darling boy, you drank much too much. And such a waste, really. Such a waste of all manner of good things."

He moved his head slightly. There was a smooth, rounded, pneumatic warmth under the nape of his neck. As he began to wonder just what it was, a stir of the warm night breeze ran along his body and he felt as if he was entirely naked. He moved one hand cautiously. He was naked. He sat up abruptly in spite of the pain which split his head in two. He got his head up into the light for a moment before Charla took him by the shoulders and yanked him back down so firmly his head bounced once off the resilience of her thigh then settled into its previous position. At least he had gathered some information. He was on a sun deck, on a sun cot, and from the micro-glimpse of the room beyond, he guessed it was his own. Charla sat at the end of the cot, his head on her lap. And at least there was a reassuring layer of fabric over the rubbery convexity of his fleshy pillow.