The Green Ripper Part 6

I said, "Who knows? Something else happens that fits in with this, who do we tell?"

Jake said to Max, "If we don't know what's going on, we don't know if they are involved more than they think they are. An ident.i.ty mixup. Or something observed they shouldn't have seen."

After a moment of thought, Max nodded and wrote a number down and tore it out of his pad. "Memorize this number. Use a phone you can control for a couple of hours. It may take that long for a call-back. Here is what you say. That line will always answer, day and night. The person will say h.e.l.lo. You say, 'Was somebody at this number trying to reach Travis McGee?' They'll say they don't know, but they can check around and find out. Then you say, 'If anyone was, I can be reached at such and such a number.' Then wait. Clear?"

"Perfectly." I said.

Max stood a little taller and said, "You shouldn't have gone out to see Broffski and Slater. The cover story was halfway okay, but frail. What you shouldn't do, either of you or both of you, is push at this thing any more, from any direction. We've satisfied ourselves you can both keep your mouth shut about what you learned here. Finding out the kind of security clearance you had once upon a time, Meyer, helped in that decision. So lay low. Keep down. Keep quiet. In return for that, I promise I'll find some way to let you know when we've tidied up. No, don't leave just yet. I have to make a call."

He made it from a phone in a dispatch case. He grunted and listened, grunted and listened, then said thanks and hung up and slapped the case shut. "No sign of your being followed here. There's no directional bug on your pickup truck, and your home phones on those two boats are not tapped."

"She died a week ago today." I said. "She didn't want to die. She was pushed over the edge. She was pushed off the earth. And you want me to keep down and keep quiet."

Max looked at me with a pitying expression. "If you wanted to thrash around, what could you do? Where could you start? Suppose you knew for sure that the DGI did it."

"What's the DGI?"

"The Cuban secret service. It has been directed and controlled by the KGB for nine years at least. What next? Who do you ask? Who do you go see? And who would know anything anyway? Is whoever killed her still alive? Maybe not. Intelligence operations are compartmentalized. There is only one contact between cells, and few people in any cell. I don't care what you do. Just don't go to the police to complain about an unsolved murder, and don't write your congressman about internal security."

"We can leave now?" Meyer asked.

Max nodded. Jake took a look at the corridor. We left. The day was the same kind of day. But the world was a different kind of world.

Eight.

WE WERE back aboard the Busted Flush by four o'clock. My brain seemed to be droning along in neutral. I could not kick it into gear.

Meyer selected a beer. I roamed back and forth with a beaker of Boodles on ice. "I don't want it to be de-personalized," I said. "I want it to be a single person with a single motive. I don't want it to be organizational, a committee decision. You can't get your hands around the throat of a committee. You can't beat the face of an organization against a brick wall."

"Listen to me, Travis. Stop pacing and listen. If she was killed because she discovered something, by pure accident, she should not have known, then it is accidental death. The world is full of secret plans and understandings. A sniper in Lebanon misses and the slug smashes the head of a child a half mile farther away. What can the child's father do? What does he see? Where does he file his complaint?"

"Somebody aimed at her, Meyer, and didn't miss."

"And your chance of ever finding that somebody is exactly zero."

"Then I'll find who gave the orders."

"Again zero."

"How can you possibly know that?"

"Travis, please sit down. I can't talk to you when you keep walking around behind me. There. That's better. And if you can listen a little, it will be better yet. I live in two worlds, yours and the real world."

"Come on!"

"Just listen. In your world the evil is small scale. It is one on one. It is creature preying on creature. All right, so it can be terrifying. I am not trying to say it is like games in a sandbox under the apple tree. A person can get killed doing what you do, and I think it is a worthwhile way for you to live. In these past few years it has made you a bit morose, but that is only because any kind of repet.i.tion leads to a certain staleness of the soul. Too many beds, and too much dying. Greed and love begin to wear the same masks. Gretei gave me high hopes for you. You were emerging from the dolor of repet.i.tion. Now you look as if you had been hit on the head with a mallet. In your world, your heart is broken. I want to reach you before you start any kind of move that will break your heart on a larger scale than you can now conceive of. All right?"

"Keep talking."

"When I attend conferences on international monetary affairs, when I go give my little speeches, or go earn a little fee for consultation, I hear of many things. They alarm me. I cannot tell you how much they alarm me. In Iran a little band of schoolteachers dribble gasoline around the circ.u.mference of a movie house and light it, incinerating four hundred and thirty people, most of them children. In Guyana nine hundred Americans kill themselves, for reasons as yet unexplained. There are over four billion people in the world, and each day more and more of them are dying in b.l.o.o.d.y and sickening ways. The pot is beginning to simmer. The little bubbles appear around the edges. Intrigue, interconnected, is multiplying geometrically, helped along by the computer society. Orbiting eyes in the sky scan us all. Poisons abound. The sick birds fall out of the air. Signs and portents, Travis. And here we are in happyland, in a resort town, with the bright sunshine, bright boats, humid young ladies. This is all stage setting. Carnival. Scenario. The real world is out there in a slow dreadful process of change. There is a final agony of millions out there, and one and a quarter million new souls arriving every week. We try to think about it less than we used to. None of it makes any sense, really. But then whatever it is that is out there, it moves into this world in the shape of a tiny sphere of platinum and iridium and deadly poison. Now we have to think about it, but it cannot be personalized. It is all a thing, a great plated toad-lizard thing with a rotten breath, squatting back inside the mouth of the cave, infinitely patient."

"So keep on having fun?"

"That's not very responsive."

"Sorry."

"Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible."

"Except joining the Church of the Apocrypha."

"Have you lost your mind?"

"Brother t.i.tus will forgive my sins."

"It's an idiotic idea."

"I have to go out to California anyway, with... the ashes."

"When are we leaving?"

I smiled at him and shook my head. "Not this time, Meyer. Part of this trip is trying to get away from myself somehow. I have no delight in what and who I am. Not anymore. Not here."

Meyer sat and looked at me for a long moment, the small bright blue eyes intent, the face impa.s.sive. "You take yourself wherever you go, Travis."

"A popular truism."

He finished the beer and put it aside. "I'll go get the urn."

"You don't have to bother right now. I can come and get it when I'm ready to leave."

"I might not be there. I'll get it now."

He was back in ten minutes with a cardboard carton, a vise-grip wrench he had borrowed a year ago, and fifteen dollars he claimed he owed me and insisted I take.

And then he was gone. It had not occurred to me that I would hurt Meyer, but there seemed to be no point in going over and apologizing to him. Through me, he had acquired a taste for the salvage business. Now there was nothing left to save but myself. And he couldn't help me there.

I fixed myself another heavy drink and, carrying it along, I went through all the interior s.p.a.ces of the Busted Flush. I remembered all the lovely women. I looked at the huge shower stall, the sybaritic tub, the great broad bed in the master stateroom. I looked at the speakers and turntables, the tape decks and tape racks. Everything had a sweet, sad look. Like a playpen with scattered toys after the child has died.

When the drink was gone, I went down to my hidey-hole in the forward hull and removed all my reserve and took it up to the lounge. Ninetythree hundred-dollar bills. Life savings. Wisely invested, it might bring me almost eighty dollars a month. I sat and planned what I would wear and what I would carry, and mentally distributed my fortune in inconspicuous places.

Then I looked directly at the cardboard carton for the first time. Firmly taped and tied. Ten inches square, twelve inches tall. All the remains of the physical Gretel. It hefted at about the weight of a sizable cantaloupe.

I sat at the little pull-down writing desk again, and I wrote a letter to Meyer: I will take this up to the office and give it to Linda and tell her to hold it a few days and then give it to you. By then I will have added the keys to this boat, and to the Munequita and to the car. I will have emptied out the perishables and turned off the compressors and arranged for disconnect on the phone. I am enclosing five hundred in cash-I better make that eight hundred-to take care of expenses around here. I will have put the phone on temporary disconnect and arranged for my mail to come to you. Today is December 18th. If I am going to be able to make it back here, I will get word to you somehow on or before June 18th. If you don't hear by then, everything here belongs to you. Frank Payne has a will on file to that effect, witnessed and all. I don't really know what is making me act the way I am acting. You would know more about that than I, probably. I have this very strong feeling that I am never coming back here, that this part of my life is ending, or that all of my life is ending. I have been bad company a lot of the time the past few years, going sour somehow. Gretel was the cure for that. I came back to life, but not for long. And this is what the stock market guys call a lower low. I just feel futile and ridiculous. You are the best friend I have ever had. Take care of yourself. Make a point of it. If I don't come back, what you should do is move aboard the Flush, peddle your crock boat and the Munequita and the Rolls, and throw a party they will never never forget around here.

I put it in a heavy brown envelope and left it unsealed. It was dark. I took a walk around my weather decks. The night smelled like diesel fuel. A nearby drunk was singing "Jingle Bells," never getting past the sleigh, starting again and again and again. The boulevard hummed and rustled with cars, and there was no sound at all from the sea. A woman laughed, a jet went over, and I went back inside. Somebody working his way into his slip made a small wake, and the Flush shifted, sighed, and settled back into stillness.

On the following Sat.u.r.day morning I found the same man at the Petaluma cemetery, the one Gretel and I had dealt with when we had flown out with John Tuckerman's ashes. He was cultivating and reseeding two parallel curving scars in the soft green turf. He was a broad muscular old man with a bald head and thick black eyebrows. He wore sneakers and crisp khakis. He dropped the tool, dusted his hands, and tilted his head to one side as he looked up at me.

"Weren't you here way last spring? With the Tuckerman girl?"

"With Gretel Howard. Her married name."

"What you got there?"

"Well... she died. Gretel died. This is her ashes."

He mopped his face and turned slightly away and looked upward into a tree. He sighed. "Sorry to hear it. Even if it was a sad time for her, bringing her brother's ashes here, it wasn't hard to see you and she were real close, real happy with each other."

"Yes, we were."

"Too bad. Nice size on that girl. Great smile. What did she die from? Automobile? That is what takes most of the young ones."

"Some kind of flu with a high fever and kidney failure."

"I tell people it's the bugs striking back. Those laboratories go after the bugs with powerful new poisons and it stands to reason that the ones that live through it, they get twice as tough and nasty as they ever were before. Of course, John and Gretel's folks, they died premature, but it wasn't sickness. I suppose you want her in the family plot. Dumb-a.s.s question. You wouldn't be here if you didn't."

"Can we go right ahead with it?"

"Don't you remember how it was before? There's got to be the permit, and they've got to have vital statistics for the records, and there's the fee."

"The office is closed."

"I know. They used to stay open Sat.u.r.day morning, but not lately."

"I've got a copy of the death certificate here, and I've got her birth certificate, marriage certificate, and final decree of divorce. Here, you can have them."

He took them and then tried to give them back to me, saying, "I don't have anything to do with the office part."

"And if the permit hasn't gone up since last time, here's the fifty dollars."

He hesitated and finally took it. "I guess we could do it now and I could give them this stuff Monday. But don't you want any words said? She said the words for her brother."

"As I will for her."

The Tuckerman plot was in that part of the cemetery where the stones were flush with the ground-which, as he had mentioned when I had seen him before, made mowing a lot easier. While he went to get the post-hole digger from his shed, I opened the carton. The urn was shinier than I had expected it to be, and more ornate. It looked like a large gold goblet with a lid.

She had owned a small worn book of the collected poems of Emily d.i.c.kinson. She had read two of them over her brother's grave. She had marked the ones she liked best. There were three short ones I wanted to read.

I could just make out the place where the old man had dug the hole before, for John Tuckerman's urn. He chose a new spot and asked me if it was all right. I approved of it and asked him if I could dig.

"Leave the dirt close and neat," he said.

He watched me as I chunked the tool down, lifting the bite of earth in the blades, setting it aside each time, close and neat. Once it was down over a foot, it began to get me in the small of the back. It is an awkward posture, an awkward way to lift.

When it was deep enough, he stopped me. I lifted the urn out of the box and, kneeling, lowered it to the bottom of the hole. I stood up then and read the first two poems, the longer ones. My voice had a harsh and meaningless sound in the stillness, like somebody sawing a board. I said the words I saw on the page without comprehending their meaning. Then I read the one she had read to her dead brother, called "Parting."

"My life closed twice before its close It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me "So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of h.e.l.l."

I bent and dropped the faded blue book down the hole, and then, kneeling, using both hands, I cupped up the dirt and filled the hole and tamped it down, replaced the circle of turf I had cut with the digger, and with the edge of my hand brushed away the loose dirt into the gra.s.s roots.

"No marker for her either?" he asked.

"I don't think so. Neither of them had children to come and look for the place." The oblong of marble, level with the earth, reading TUCKERMAN, was enough.

"Those words were like the ones she read that time. Is that some kind of one of these new religions?"

"Sort of."

"I thought so. There's a lot of them these days. I guess having one is better than having none, but it makes you wonder." He looked down toward the office and the road. "Where'd you park?"

"I walked out from the bus station."

"Where are you going? Back to Florida?"

"I haven't decided."

"This town isn't as bad as some. If you need work, maybe I can think of somebody you could go ask. You look sort of down on your luck, mister."

"Thanks. If I come back this way I'll look you up."

When I looked back from the road he was still watching me. I waved. He waved and turned away, back to his work fixing the scars where somebody had torn up the turf doing funny stunts in an automobile. I dug my duffel bag out of the bushes where I had hidden it and shouldered it with the wide strap over my left shoulder, the bag. b.u.mping against my right hip. My poncho was strapped to the duffel bag. I wore work shoes, dark-green twill trousers, a faded old khaki shirt, a brown felt hat, a gray cardigan sweater. I had sandy stubble on my jaws and neck. Before leaving Florida, I'd had my hair clipped down to a Marine basic cut, which could have been a prison cut. I carried in my shirt pocket, for the right occasion, a pair of gla.s.ses with gold-colored rims, hardly any correction in the lenses, and one bow fixed with black electrician's tape. I wanted to attract a second look from the average cop, but without stirring enough curiosity for him to want to check me out. But if he did check me out, I had some credentials. I had an expired Florida driver's license with my picture on it, and I had a fragile tattered copy of army discharge papers, and a social security card sandwiched in plastic. They were wrapped in a plastic pouch and were in the compartment in the end of the duffel bag. They all said I was Thomas J. McGraw, address General Delivery, Osprey Florida, occupation commercial fisherman.

"Well, officer, it was like this. My old lady died and I sold off our stuff and the trailer, and I thought I'd come out here and poke around and see if I could locate our daughter Kathy. She took off six years ago when she was Tourteen, and we heard from her two years ago, some postcards from San Francisco, and Petaluma and Ukiah. She said she was joining up with some kind of church. Me, I come here by Greyhound bus."

As I walked, I wrote my autobiography, and the story of my marriage, and my wife's death. I made Peg and Kathy into real people. I made Tom McGraw into a real person. As I walked, I went over and over the imaginary events of my life until I could see them. I outlined my own personality. I was not too quick of wit, and I tended to lose jobs through getting drunk and not showing up. When I worked, I was a hard worker. I was a man of great pride. I did not suffer unkind remarks about my character or my station in life. I was a womanizer when I was in my cups. Peg had been a staunch churchwoman. I went with her a couple times a year. I shared most of my political opinions with Archie Bunker. As I walked, I talked to imaginary people, talked as Torn McGraw would talk to them. He was servile when he talked to people in power. He was affable as a dog with his peers. He was nasty to those he considered beneath him. I worked my way into the role.

Long, long ago, I had known an actress. Susan was twenty-four. I was sixteen. She was working in the country hotel where she was staying. She was a lanky lady who cussed, wore pants, and smoked thin little cigars. I found her monstrously exciting. I was worried about myself that year. There had been an episode with a loud chubby girl who, true to locker-room gossip, was willing to put out. But she was so loud that I was less than able. I could almost but not quite count it as the first time. I could lie to others but not to myself, and I had the dread fear Lolly would tell everybody. I was worried about myself.

Though I was a head taller than the actress, she didn't want to be seen with me around town. I would walk out into the country, and she would come along in her borrowed car and we would go up into the hills and park and go walking together. In August, after we had gotten into the habit of making a bed from a blanket and spruce bows, in hidden places, while we were resting from each other, I told her about Lolly and about my fears. She laughed her deep harsh startling laugh and told me that I had less to worry about than anybody she had ever known. It was very comforting.

It was repertory theater, and she had to refresh her memory in a lot of roles. It startled me the way she could turn herself into an entirely different person. We would sit in the shade and I would give her her cues from the playscript, and then we would walk and she would become the character in the play. I had to ask her questions, any questions, and she would respond as that person would have responded. She explained that it was the best way to do it. One had to invent a past that fitted, and memories that fitted. She explained that once you were totally inside a false ident.i.ty, secure in it, you could handle the unexpected on stage in a way consistent with the character.

And I had used that afterward, many times, and now I was using it again. Susan taught me a lot. Once she got me past the initial shyness, she showed me and told me all the ways I could increase her pleasure while delaying mine. It gave me a wonderful feeling of domination and control to be able to turn that strong, tense, mature female person into gasping, grasping, shuddering incoherence. I was in love with her, of course. I could not stand the thought of the summer ending. I told her I loved her, and I was going to come to New York to be close to her.

I will always remember the way she cupped both hands on my face and looked deeply into my eyes. "Travis, you are a very very sweet boy, and you are going to become one h.e.l.l of a man. But if I ever find you outside my apartment door, I am going to have the doorman throw you out on your a.s.s. We can end it right now or next week, whichever you choose. But end it we will, boyo, with no loose ends. No letters, no phone calls, no visits. Ever."

And that's how it was.

So now I walked my way deeper into my Tom McGraw role. Trucks whuffed by with the trailing turbulence tugging at my clothes. Divided highway. Route 101. Looking for the daughter lost. Too many years ago.

This didn't have the bare rolling look of the hills near the sea below San Francisco. There was more water here, rivers and lakes and forest country. I had flown into San Francisco as Travis McGee, taxied to a Holiday Inn near Fisherman's Wharf, and spent a day a.s.sembling a wardrobe to go with the new ident.i.ty I had bought from a reliable source in Miami. The McGee ident.i.ty fitted into a suitcase. I stored it and paid six months in advance. The storage receipt was the only link, and I didn't want it on me. Small things can be hidden in public places. There was a bank of new storage lockers in the bus station. They were not quite flush against the rear wall. I taped it at shoulder height to the back of the lockers, out of sight. If I could stand up, I could get it back. If I wanted it back.