6
It was only a month since he'd found Baker. But such a month. What was Ben Meister's expression? The mother
lode. Yes. Well, we'll know in the morning, won't we. In the
morning, Mr. Baker, you may take one giant step. May I, Doctor? Yes, you may, Baker. And once we both find out
what you're made of, we'll try one giant leap.
Sonnenberg grinned and shivered. The very prospect was
making him giddy. Composure, Marcus, he chided himself. Calm yourself. If Mrs. Kreskie sees you excited, she'll be at
your door with a bowl of chicken soup, folding down your
bed.
Marcus Sonnenberg listened at the door of his bedroom
on the second floor. He heard the sound of a television pro
gram coming from Baker's room. There were no other noises. Then, satisfied that Mrs. Kreskie had stopped
dawdling over the silver service and had either taken herself
to bed or gone prowling in the night, he bolted his door from
the inside and limped to the larger of two bookcases. There,
from a hollowed volume of
The Oxford Book of English
Verse,
he chose one of the four entubed Monte Cristo cigars
he kept hidden there. He had long since come to terms with
the destruction of the book for such a purpose. Shelley,
Oscar Wilde, and certainly Kipling would understand com
pletely. John Milton and Alexander Pope, however, and Mrs.
Kreskie, who was easily their peer at fussbudgetry, would
doubtless visit great scorn upon him for pursuing this secret vice at all, let alone compounding the act with literary van
dalism. Odors in the odes, so to speak.
Sonnenberg dragged his stiffened leg to a window that
overlooked the darkened twelfth fairway of the Westchester
Country
Club. Sniffing the cigar at its length and testing its
moisture content with gentle pressure from his fingertips,
the bearded man eased himself into a bentwood rocker posi
tioned there. He lit his prize slowly with a wooden match
and readied himself for an hour of peaceful contemplation.
As the smoke drifted through the open window, his eyes fell upon the small parabolic microphone that sat on a col
lapsed tripod near the sill. Sonnenberg enjoyed, during idle
moments, listening to the chitchat of passing golfers. It was often amusing and sometimes instructive. Sonnenberg liked
to know his neighbors.
All asleep now, though, he thought. And no one on the
golf course except land turtles laying eggs and raccoons eat
ing them. His random thoughts began to focus, for no reason
that he knew, on a small but odd event of a fortnight earlier. He'd been listening at his window, headphones over his ears,
and peering through a cloud of good Havana toward the two
some on the twelfth tee. A loud thunk caused him to blink.
The sound came through his feet. A simultaneous “Oh,
shit!” came through the headphone from a hundred and sev
enty yards away and another voice said, “The hell with it,
Dunny. Take another one.”
Dunny's tee shot, probably attempted with an ill-advised
driver, had cleared Sonnenberg's high stockade fence and caromed off the house itself. The doctor silently congratu
lated himself for opting against aluminum siding, even
though the economics were sound enough when compared to
the triennial five thousand dollars he paid to Puzo and his two
Sicilians. But there were other considerations. One could lit
erally envelop an aluminum-clad home with unseen listening
devices. And, as Dunny's errant shot had demonstrated, to
protect any investment in siding would have required the ed
ucation of the entire membership of that silly club as to the
physical laws that apply to successfully negotiating a short
par four with a dogleg to the right. A three iron at most would
likely have stayed in bounds. It would have left the
ball in po
sition
for a reasonable second shot. And a law requiring the
use of a three iron would spare him these seasonal mortar at
tacks on the roof and walls of his house.
A g
olf cart purred to a stop outside the stockade fence.
Only its surrey top was visible to Sonnenberg. He depressed the platter-shaped microphone and sat back to listen.
The erring golfer had just read aloud a sign on Sonnen
berg's fence that said,
beware, attack cat on premises,
and
had discovered a small pail of balls that hung from a peg be
neath it.
“The sign's just a nice way of saying keep out,” said the
other man. “If you come through here tomorrow, your ball will be in the bucket.”
”I suppose he's had trouble with people climbing the fence,” the one called Dunny wondered. Sonnenberg re
called that he was a tall man, over sixty, with a boardroom
look about him even dressed in Izods.
“Nope,” his partner told him. “No one ever does. Even if
you got to the top without breaking your neck, there's a jun
gle of high rhododendrons on the other side. On top of that,
the whole house is electronically rigged like nothing you
ever saw. It has electric eyes, pressure plates, silent alarms,
klaxons, and hidden cameras. He's even got recorded
screams and gunshots that'll scare the hell out of you if you happen to break the wrong beam.”
“What is he, a nut?”
“If he is, he's a pleasant enough nut,” Dunny's partner an
swered. Sonnenberg knew this one now. Blair Palmer.
Across the street and two houses up. A broker specializing
in arbitrage. Two daughters and one son. The son had had a
minor homosexual encounter in New York the year before
and almost went insane when his erstwhile companion
learned his address and began calling him at home demand
ing “loans.” Sonnenberg had played the tapes for Mrs.
Kreskie, who quietly put a lasting stop to that.
“That's old Doc Sonnenberg,” Blair Palmer continued.
“He invents all that stuff. Lives there alone except for a mute
housekeeper and some technicians that come and go.”
“How well do you know him?” Dunny asked.
Sonnenberg arched one eyebrow. An odd question for a golfer newly burdened with a two-stroke penalty and facing
an even more vexing shot to the green.
“Not that well. He throws a party for the neighbors once a year and that's about it.” Palmer glanced back toward the tee and the waiting golfers, who were becoming restive.
“Listen,” he urged Dunny, “you better take a drop right here
and then try to lay up short with a seven iron.”
Sonnenberg listened to the soft wock of the shot being
made and watched the ball soar to Blair Palmer's ap
plause. It faded past a tall elm and bounded confidently
toward the twelfth green. Sonnenberg's other eyebrow
went up. Very deftly done for a man whose previous shot was mishit so heroically. He listened to the fading voices
of the two men as the cart pressed a path into the Karastan fairway and wished he'd had a better look at the one called Dunny. The thought nipped at Sonnenberg for the
next two weeks.
Probably nothing to it, Sonnenberg decided now. He
reached absently toward the dials of a small black console
that sat on a Parsons table to his left. Still, Sonnenberg
wished that he'd thought to tune in to the Palmer house that
same evening to see what might be said about Blair Palmer's
golf partner. Probably nothing, though. For the second time
in as many weeks, Sonnenberg dismissed the man called Dunny from his conscious thought.
He rested one finger on the console's power switch. What
to do? Do I spend another evening listening to Baker's tapes
or do I visit the neighbors for a change. There's not much
more to be learned about Baker. Not without stirring the
soup, and we'll try that tomorrow. For now, how about lis
tening in to the Dickersons first. They're entertaining, I un
derstand, if the word applies in their case. Allison Dickerson
could discourse with equal ignorance on the subjects of
Szechuan cookery, post-impressionist art, the care of
African violets, and the devotion of her husband, of which
he had not a whit. Allison Dickerson. Sounds like
Higgledy-Piggledy. I must write a piece of doggerel some
day about Allison Dickerson. Perhaps I just did. függiedy-
Piggledy Allison Dickerson, egregiously boring and
tiresome twit. Higgledy-Piggledy, Allison Dickerson, who
reads
Reader's Digest
for wisdom and wit. What else
rhymes? Grit
?
. Warm spit
?
. Split? Now there's a notion. What
if I could draw from Allison Dickerson what there is in
Baker? What is the counterpoint to a boring woman? An ag
gressively boring woman? A violently boring woman? A woman who'll tear your head off if you wince at the taste of
her Peking duck? Steady, Marcus. And sorry, Jared Baker.
I'm just a bit flighty this evening. I hoped you'd understand
this electronic eavesdropping. A harmless entertainment.
One that sometimes has a salutary effect, however, as in the
case of young David Palmer. Above all, I simply like to
know what's being said of me from house to house. I like to
know that I've succeeded in being reclusive without seem
ing more than a touch eccentric or unduly mysterious. An in
ventor of electronic exotica is expected to follow a different buzzer, as it were.
Sonnenberg flipped on the switch.
Even if rarely seen, Sonnenberg was a popular neighbor.
Somehow, he always managed to know of anniversaries and graduations and other happy events in the lives of the people
nearby. A bottle of Mouton Rothschild, for which he was known to have a passion, would appear at their doorsteps
with a gracious note that began: ”I seem to recall . . .” At
Christmastime, each of the local policemen had come to ex
pect a boxed gallon of Chivas Regal and their superiors re
ceived some portion of a case of wine. Sonnenberg hoped
sincerely that this division did not smack of condescension. There was only so much of the better vintages to be found,
and experience, in any case, had shown him that the Scotch
would be perceived as the greater gift by the men in uni
form. This he accepted reluctantly, convinced that this par
ticular blend of Scotch was genetically undistinguished,
pretentious to the point of fraud, and dreadfully overpriced.
One neighbor, who was in advertising, had once remarked
that if there were neither a Christmas nor a Harlem, there
would be no Chivas Regal. The insight delighted Sonnen
berg and impressed him with his neighbor's wit. He made a
mental note to listen in on more of that man's conversations. But be that as it may, the effect of his holiday remembrances
was that his house was regularly patrolled and checked, par
ticularly during his frequent absences.
This too pleased the neighbors. All forms of protection
that embraced the Sonnenberg home also embraced their
own. Most, in fact, boasted possession of one or more of his security devices, often experimental, and installed by one of
the technicians who often stayed at Sonnenberg's house for
weeks, sometimes months, on end. There was never a charge
for the service, save the unwitting cost in the coin of privacy
as each became a channel on Sonnenberg's console.
Once a year, the neighbors and a handful of local busi
ness people would receive a glitteringly formal invitation to
cocktails at the Sonnenberg home. It was the party Blair Palmer had mentioned to his friend Dunny. The invitation always came during the holiday season, a time when good will was pandemic and when the baser forms of curiosity
were at their lowest ebb. A gift box containing a delicate tree
ornament from Tiffany's would invariably accompany the
invitation. Some of the neighbors had collected nine of
them.
Sonnenberg was a superb and elegant host. He would ap
pear at the door, leaning on his cane with one hand, holding
a champagne glass aloft in the other, and he would greet
each of his guests, enthusiastically pronouncing each of
their names and bowing slightly in the European manner. If
a guest brought a small gift, as did most, he would profess a
childlike delight at being remembered. Such a wonderful
season, he would say. Such wonderful friends and neigh
bors. Such a wonderful country.