The Green Ripper Part 1

The Green Ripper.

John D. MacDonald.

John D. MacDonaldTo Maxwell P. Wilkinson:Representative and Friend.

Fanaticism is described as redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

-George Santayana

One.

MEYER CAME aboard the Busted Flush on a dark, wet, windy Friday afternoon in early December. I had not seen him in nearly two months. He looked worn and tired, and he had faded to an indoor pallor. He shucked his rain jacket and sat heavily in the biggest chair and said he wouldn't mind at all if I offered him maybe a little bourbon, one rock, a dollop of water.

"Where's Gretel?" he asked as I handed him his drink.

"Moved out," I said. He looked so dismayed I quickly added that she had found herself a job, finally, way the h.e.l.l and gone over in the suburb of Tamarac, west of North Lauderdale and west of the Turnpike, out in the area of the shiny new developments and shopping plazas, near University Community Hospital and Timber Run Golf Club. "Couldn't get any farther away and still be in the same metropolitan area. It takes at least forty minutes to drive over there."

"Doing what?"

"The outfit is called, excuse the expression, Bonnie Brae. It is a combination fat farm, tennis club, and real estate development. She works in the office, lives in one of the model houses, gives tennis lessons to the littlies, exercise cla.s.ses for the fatties, and is becoming indispensable. She can tell you all about it. She'll be here about six or six-thirty."

"I was afraid you two had split."

"No chance. I'm not going to let that one get away."

"Splendid judgment."

"It's a phase, Meyer. She did hard time in a bad marriage and says it stunted her. She has to make it on her own, she says, to become a complete person, and when she is, then we can think about what kind of arrangement we're going to have."

"Makes a certain amount of sense."

"Not to me."

"But you're not... being derisive or patronizing?"

"h.e.l.l, no. I am being full of understanding, and all that."

I didn't want to try to tell him what a vacuum she left when she packed and moved out. The houseboat was dismally empty. When I woke up, if I wanted to hear clinking sounds from the galley I had to go make them myself. The winter boats were beginning to come down, filling up the empty berths, spewing out their slender and elegant ladies to walk the area, shopping and smiling, providing what in times past had been like one of those commercial hatcheries where you pay a fee and catch your own trout and take it home to cook. But Grets had made all the pretty ladies look brittle, bloodless, and tasteless, and made the time without her seem leaden and endless.

In another season there were the girls of summer, robust and playful in their sandy ways, and now here were the winter ones, with cool surmise in the tended eye, fragrant and speculative, strolling and shopping, sailing and tanning, then making their night music and night scent, searching for something they could not quite name, but would know once they found it.

"How did the conference go?" I asked.

He shook a weary head. "These are bad days for an economist, my friend. We have gone past the frontiers of theory. There is nothing left but one huge ugly fact."

"Which is?"

"There is a debt of perhaps two trillion dollars out there, owed by governments to governments, by governments to banks, and there is not one chance in h.e.l.l it can ever be paid back. There is not enough productive capacity in the world, plus enough raw materials, to provide maintenance of plant plus enough overage even to keep up with the mounting interest."

"What happens? It gets written off?"

He looked at me with a pitying expression. "All the major world currencies will collapse. Trade will cease. Without trade, without the mechanicalscientific apparatus running, the planet won't support its four billion people, or perhaps even half that. Agribusiness feeds the world. Hydrocarbon utilization heats and houses and clothes the people. There will be fear, hate, anger, death. The new barbarism. There will be plague and poison. And then the new Dark Ages."

"Should I pack?"

"Go ahead. Scoff. What the sane people and sane governments are trying to do is scuffle a little more breathing s.p.a.ce, a little more time, before the collapse."

"How much time have we got?"

"If n.o.body pushes the wrong b.u.t.ton or puts a bomb under the wrong castle, I would give us five more years at worst, twelve at best. What is triggering it is the crisis of reduced expectations. All over the world people are suddenly coming to realize that their children and grandchildren are going to have it worse than they did, that the trend line is down. So they want to blame somebody. They want to hoot and holler in the streets and burn something down."

"Whose side are you on?"

"I'm one of the scufflers. Cut and paste. Fix the world with paper clips and rubber bands."

"Are you trying to depress me, old buddy?"

"On Pearl Harbor Day?"

"So it is."

"And with each pa.s.sing year it is going to seem ever more quaint, the little tin airplanes bombing the sleepy iron giants."

"There you go again."

He yawned and I noticed again how worn he looked. The international conference had been held in Zurich. There had been high hopes-the newspapers said-for a solution to the currency problems, but as it went on and on and on, interest could not be sustained, nor could hope.

"How was the trip back, Meyer?"

"I was too sound asleep to notice."

"Did you all just sit around and read papers to each other?"

"There was some of that. Yes. But most of it was workshop, computer a.n.a.lysis. Feed all the known, unchangeable factors into the program, and then add the ones that can be changed, predicating interdependence, making the variations according to a pattern, and a.n.a.lyzing the shape of the world that emerges, each one a computer model. Very bright young specialists a.s.sisted. We came out all too close to the doom antic.i.p.ated by the Club of Rome, no matter how we switched the data around. It comes down to this, Travis-there are too many mouths to feed. One million three hundred thousand more every week! And of all the people who have ever been alive on Earth, more than half are living right now. We are gnawing the planet bare, and technology can't keep pace with need."

I had never seen him more serious, or more depressed. I fixed him a fresh drink when Gretel arrived. I met her, and after the welcome kiss, she looked over my shoulder and gave a whoop of surprise and pleasure at seeing Meyer. She thrust me aside and ran into his delighted bear hug. Then she held him off at arm's length and tilted her head to give him her brown-eyed measuring stare.

"You look awful!" she said. "You look like you just got out of jail."

"Fairly good guess. And you look fantastic, Gretel."

"It goes with the job. I got sort of sloppy living on this barge, eating too much and drinking too much. Today I jogged with four sets of fatties. I must have done seven miles. I've got the greatest new job."

"Travis was telling me about it."

"You'll have to come out and let me show you around." Quite suddenly the enthusiasm had faded out of her voice. I couldn't imagine why. She gave me a quick look and looked away, and went to the galley to fix herself one of her vegetable juice c.o.c.ktails.

I followed her and said, "Is something wrong out there?"

"No. Of course not."

"Hey Grets. This here is me. Asking."

"I hear you asking. I think I might fall right the wagon right now. I'm down to where I can spare a few pounds. Straight Boodles and rocks, okay?"

"When you come down off it, you come down a way."

She leaned against a storage locker as I fixed her drink. I looked at her, a great lithe woman who, on tiptoe, could almost look me in the eye. Thick brown sun-streaked hair, dark brown eyes, firm jaw, broad mouth, high-bridged imperious nose. A woman of pa.s.sion, intensity, good humor, mocking grace, and a very irritating and compelling need for total-or almost total-independence. During all the lazy weeks aboard the Busted Flush when, after the death of her brother in Timber Bay, I had brought her all the way around the peninsula to Fort Lauderdale, we had arrived at last at a relationship she had decided did not threaten her freedom. She was a hearty and sensuous woman, and for a long time she was suspicious and reluctant in lovemaking, apparently feeling that my increasing knowledge of her body's resources, its needs and rhythms and special stimuli, was somehow an exercise in ownership. But after she decided to accept completely, she became herself-forthright, evocative, and deliciously bawdy when the mood was upon her.

After she took a sip of her drink I put fingertips under her chin, tilted it up, kissed her gently on the lips, and then said, "Whatever it is, I would like to know. Okay? Like management trying to slip up on your blind side?"

She grinned. "That I can handle, McGee. What makes you think there's a blind side?"

"If there isn't, what are you doing here?"

She frowned into her drink. "I think I'll tell both of you. I think I could use more than one opinion."

We went back in and she sat next to Meyer on the yellow davenport. "What it is," she said, "I think something other than what is supposed to be going on out there, is going on out there."

"Bonnie Brae is a front for something else?" I asked.

"Not really that," she said. "I mean, it's pretty big and elaborate. Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski borrowed a fantastic amount of money to buy the land. It's twelve hundred and eighty acres. There was a big stone-and-cypress house on it, and outbuildings. It was called the Cattrell place and was empty for years while the estate was being settled. They put a half-million dollars into renovating the house and some of the other buildings. And they put in roads and a sewage-treatment plant, water supply, and all that. And they fixed the old airstrip near the barns. They are digging lakes, and building and selling houses, and selling building sites. We can accommodate twentyfour fatties in the main house at one time, feed them from the diet kitchen, and keep them busy. They pay twelve hundred a week, and there's a waiting list. And there's a waiting list for membership in the tennis club too. I mean, without knowing all the financial details, I'd say it's going very well. Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski have both built houses for themselves in the best part of the development, where the lots have to be two acres each, and Mr. Morse Slater, the manager, has a new house near theirs. There are twenty-five or thirty new houses occupied, and room for an awful lot more, of course. There are some staff quarters in the back of the main house, because it is sort of like a small hotel, or hospital. There is a nice flavor. I mean it's a good place to work. We have some laughs. People get along." Her voice trailed off and she sipped and frowned.

"And now something doesn't seem right?" Meyer asked, prompting her.

She smiled and leaned back. "Maybe I was lied to for too many years. Husband Billy was a world-champion-cla.s.s liar. Brother John wasn't exactly clumsy at it."

"What's my rating?" I asked.

"All the returns aren't in. What I'm saying, maybe I get suspicious when there's no real need."

"We've got the whole evening, my dear," Meyer said. "If we're all patient, you'll probably get to the point sooner or later."

"I guess I'm dragging my feet because it sounds so weird I hate to mention it. Last week I had a batch of fatties down by the barns in the middle of the morning, making them do exercises, when a pretty little blue airplane landed on our strip. When I went back to the office, I asked Mr. Slater who had come in and he said that it was somebody to see Mr. Ladwigg, he didn't know what about. I asked because sometimes a buyer flies in, and when they buy something, it means more paperwork for me. Now we come to the coincidence part. I woke up real early the next morning. It was brisk and clear. The model house I'm living in is about a half mile from the office. A couple of days before, I lost a pin I like very much while leading a group jogging. So I put on a heavy sweater and went out to retrace our route, thinking maybe I could find it in the gra.s.s. I was over by the airstrip, searching near a patch of palmetto, when I heard a motor. For a moment I thought it was a plane, and then I stepped out almost into the path of Herman Ladwigg's Toyota, going cross-country. It's like a Land Rover, tall and open, with winches and things, and huge tires. It's white with red trim. Mr. Ladwigg was driving, and it startled him as much as it did me, I guess. I dodged back, and I was on the pa.s.senger side of it as it went by. So the face of the.man riding with Mr. Ladwigg was not more than a yard away from me. I saw him very very clearly. And I knew in that split second I had seen him before. He looked right at me, and I saw the flicker of his recognition. He knew me too. But I couldn't remember where or when. All I could remember was that it had been an unpleasant experience."

"You can describe him?"

"Oh, sure. Big, but not fat. Big-boned. About forty, maybe a little less. Kind of a round face, with all his features sort of small and centered in the middle of all that face. Wispy blond hair cut quite short. No visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Lots and lots of pits and craters in his cheeks, from terrible acne when he was young. Little mouth, little pale eyes, girlish little nose. He was wearing a khaki jacket over a white turtleneck. He was holding on to the side of the pa.s.senger door because of the rough ride. His hands are very big and... well, brutal-looking."

Meyer said, "It doesn't sound as if there could be two like that. But it's possible, of course. Maybe his change of expression was not recognition, but surprise at seeing somebody pop up like that."

"No. He knew me. Because I remembered two nights ago, in the middle of the night, where I'd seen him. As soon as I remembered, I knew it was the same man. Five years ago Billy's sister, my kid sister-in-law, Mitsy, disappeared. The family was frantic. She'd been in school up near San Francisco. She had just taken her things and gone away. Billy got time off from work and went up to San Francisco and nosed around and found out she had been hanging around with some kids who were connected with a religion called... d.a.m.n! It will come to me."

"The Unification Church, the Moonies?" Meyer asked. She shook her head. "Hare Krishna? Scientology? Children of G.o.d? The Jesus People? The Church of Armageddon?"

She stopped him and said, "That's close, that last one. It's like Apocalypse. Wait a minute. Apocrypha! The Church of the Apocrypha."

"Very interesting!" Meyer said.

"What's an apocrypha?" I asked.

"It's plural," he said. "Fourteen books or chapters which are sort of an appendix to the Old Testament and are not acceptable to the establishment. Seldom printed. They are b.l.o.o.d.y, merciless, and, some say, divinely inspired. Authorship unsubstantiated. I suspect that a religion based upon them would be... severe indeed."

"A postcard finally came from Mitsy" Gretel said. "It was mailed from Ukiah, California. It was to her mother, father, her two brothers, and me. All it said was, 'Remember that I will always love you, but I will never see you again in this life.' You can imagine how that hit us all. Mitsy was such a... such a merry little gal. Pretty and bouncy and popular. Your standard cheerleader type. No steady boyfriend. She wanted to be a social worker and work with handicapped children.

"Anyway, her father hired an investigator, and he located an encampment of the Church of the Apocrypha about twenty miles southwest of Ukiah, off in the woods. He had tried to get in to find out if Mitsy was there, but he couldn't learn a thing. Just about that time, her father-my father-in-law-had a stroke, a severe one. His right side was totally paralyzed, and he couldn't speak or understand what anyone said. He died of pneumonia about four months later. Billy's younger brother was working in Iran. So when we could, Billy and I drove up to the encampment, using the map the investigator had marked.

"There were little winding roads, and finally we came to the private, no-trespa.s.sing signs he had told us about, and the wire gate across the road. A young boy came out of a lean-to. He wore a dirty white smock and he was trying to grow a beard. We said we wanted to visit Miriam Howard, Mitsy Howard. He nodded and walked away up the curving road beyond the wire gate, and out of sight. We waited and waited and waited. Billy got very angry. I had to keep talking him out of going over the gate. It was over an hour before that man came down the road. That same man. He was five years younger, of course. He wore a white tunic with a Chinese collar, and white trousers tucked into shiny black boots. He came right to the high fence and looked us over very carefully. He completely ignored the angry questions Billy was shouting at him.

"Finally he spoke to us. There was so little movement of his lips it was as if he were a ventriloquist. He had a soft little voice. 'I am Brother t.i.tus. I am an elder of the Church of the Apocrypha. You are inquiring about someone we now know as Sister Aquila. She has asked me to tell you that she is quite happy here and she does not wish to see you or anyone from her previous life.'

"Billy demanded to see her. He swore at t.i.tus. It had no effect. He said it wasn't possible, not now, not ever. She was happy in her new life, he said. Billy said he was going to see his sister Mitsy, and if it took a court order for a conservatorship, he would get it. He'd gotten that information from the investigator.

"Brother t.i.tus thought for a little while and told us to wait. In twenty minutes a little crowd of them, about nine or ten, came down to the gate. We didn't see Brother t.i.tus again. The people ranged in age from, I would guess, sixteen to twenty-five. Three or four girls, and the rest boys. At first we thought they had come without Mitsy, and then we recognized her. It was a shock. She had become such a worn, skinny, subdued little thing. She wore a dirty white smock and she had some kind of serious rash on her face and throat and arms. They looked badly chapped. The smock was too big for her. All of them had exactly the same look, It's hard to describe. Sort of bland and smug and gla.s.sy.

"They stood very close to her as she stood at the gate. She said, 'h.e.l.lo, Billy. h.e.l.lo, Gretel. I don't know how you found me, but I'm sorry you did.' Billy said, 'What have they done to you, Mitsy?' She said, 'My name is Sister Aquila now. They have made me very happy. I am full of peace and happiness and the love of G.o.d. Please don't ever try to find me again. Tell Mama and Papa I'm happy here, happier than I've ever been before.' Billy said, 'You better come home. Pop has had a very bad stroke. Things are in terrible shape. We all need you.' She didn't turn a hair. She looked at him with that contented half smile and said, 'All of that is in my previous life. It has nothing to do with me now. My life is here. Go away, please. G.o.d bless you.' They all turned and went up the hill together, so close together they made each other stumble from time to time. They all had exactly that same look. It took the heart right out of Billy."

"Did you make another try?" Meyer asked. "Billy did. He went up there several weeks later, but they told him she was gone. They said she had been 'called' to another place in the service of the Lord. If it wasn't for the stroke, maybe the family would have taken some kind of action through the courts, but money was scarce, and G.o.d knows Billy and I couldn't finance a court order and deprogramming her and all that. The brother came back from Iran about six months before Billy ran out on me. Carl, his name is. He couldn't understand why we couldn't get her away from those people. He wasn't here. He couldn't know how it was. He lives in Houston now, at least he did the last I heard, and their mother lives with him and his wife..."

"So you saw Brother t.i.tus here, last week?" I said.

"Definitely. He was so... so out of context, it took a while to remember where I'd seen him before. But I am positive. Trav, there's another thing that seems odd. After they went by me, they headed for the airstrip, and a little later the blue plane took off. I saw it take off and head west. When Mr. Ladwigg drove back home, he drove on the road. Why did he take Brother t.i.tus on such a roundabout way? Was it because t.i.tus didn't want to be seen by anybody?"

"Maybe he was showing him some land. Maybe the Church wants to set up an encampment here," I said.

"Where there isn't any available? That piece was sold months ago."

"To whom?" Meyer asked.

"To some kind of foreign syndicate, headquartered in Brussels. I was told they plan to put up a hotel-club where members can come for holidays in the States. They took twenty undeveloped acres over on our western boundary near the airstrip."

"For foreign members of the Church of the Apocrypha?" Meyer asked with a sweet smile.

"Oh, no!" Gretel looked horrified. "Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski and Mr. Slater would have fits. It can't be that, really. Could it, Travis? Could that creep..."

"Not at the price they're probably getting out there."

"Two hundred and twenty-five thousand. It was a special price because of no roads or water supply or sewer."

"Maybe Brother t.i.tus left the Church," I suggested. "Maybe he's into real estate. That has the status of a religion in south Florida."