Narabedla Ltd (48 page)

Almost anything could have happened in the best part of two years, I told myself.

But something certainly had, and none of the possible explanations I could think of were encouraging. I hesitated, then tried her home number.

That was a little better. I didn’t get her, but I got her recorded voice, saying that although she couldn’t come to the phone at that moment I should leave my name and telephone number, and the day and time I was calling.

I hung up. I was beginning to shiver violently in the open phone cubicle, anyway.

So I went down the block to a men’s clothing store and bought a fleece-lined jacket and a hat; I needed more than that, but nothing as desperately. I stopped in the stationery store across from the post office for large envelopes. I picked up some more live fish for the bedbug, made sure the Xerox place was still there … and then dialed Marlene’s home number again.

I got the same recorded announcement from her machine, but this time I was ready. “This,” I said, “is Harrison Cham, Sylvia’s husband.” Sylvia Cham was an old client, which Marlene would remember, and she would not fail to remember that her husband, Harrison, had died five years earlier, because we’d gone together to the funeral. “It is important that I speak to you, but I must be in and out all day. Please call me at this number at three, six, or nine p
.
m
.”
And I gave the number of the phone booth.

At three o’clock I was there. So was a small teenage girl, on tiptoes to reach the phone, having a long conversation in Spanish with, it sounded like, her mother. Three o’clock came and went and she was still on the phone. At five after she finally hung up, gave me a hostile glance, and departed. I took over, pretending I was talking with my finger on the hook.

But by twenty after there was still no ring. I took the statements Irene and I had written to the Xerox place and left them there as I went back to the hotel.

We spent the next hour or so taking Polaroid pictures of us with the bedbug. It didn’t mind. It seemed to enjoy posing, and even climbed up in my lap so that Irene could snap us together a dozen times.

The photos looked pretty convincing to me. I suppose any Hollywood special-effects wizard could have created even better pictures with trick photography, but I couldn’t think of any way of making them better.

At five-thirty I went out again. This time the bedbug insisted on coming along, and Irene decided she didn’t particularly want to be left in the hotel by herself. All three of us picked up the Xerox copies, the bedbug obediently slinking under a table when I commanded, “Sit!” Irene and I stuffed the copies in the addressed envelopes, twelve copies going to twelve different people, and I left her waiting in line at the post office for stamps while the bedbug and I made the six o’clock check on the phone.

It didn’t ring.

There was no particular reason for us to go right back to the hotel, and we were getting used to being out in the cold. Even the bedbug was contentedly doing his job for the Mother, sniffing at the tires of parked cars, rearing up to gaze into windows, pausing to investigate the aromas that came from pretzel vendors and hot-dog salesmen, and out of bars and restaurants. We strolled aimlessly down Third Avenue toward Union Square, and although people stared at the beast we had on a leash, and the hurrying crowds divided to let us through, no one offered any unwelcome questions.

“I guess I don’t really
have
to talk to Marlene,” I said, after a while.

“I suppose not,” Irene agreed.

“But I wish I could! I’m worried about her. She wouldn’t close down the office unless she absolutely had to.”

“Well,” she said practically, “what’s our next step?”

Fortunately I didn’t have to answer that just then. I frowned and shook my head, pointing down at the bedbug.

Which was whining up at us. I looked around. No one was very near. I bent down to listen, and it whimpered, “How does one manage with only four legs, Mr. Stennis? I’m getting tired, and this solid-phase water is very
cold.”

So we took it back to the hotel, and there I had plenty of time to answer Irene’s question.

Or would have had. If I had had an answer. I was glad when it was time to go out again for a last check on the phone. There was no one in the cubicle this time, and not many people on the street at all, and I stood there wondering just what I was going to say to Irene when I got back to the hotel. I went over all the things we had done. We had distributed copies of our accounts in places where even the resources of Narabedla weren’t going to find them. That was our insurance policy; Davidson-Jones would have to reckon with that before doing anything violent to us. The people we had chosen were good people. We could trust them …

But what should we do next?

I was so deep in concentration that the ringing of the phone was only an annoyance at first. Then I almost dropped it when I picked it up.

But then I heard Marlene’s voice saying, “Nolly? It is you, isn’t it? Oh, God, honey, I’m so glad you’re
alive.”

*  *  *

On my way back to the hotel I almost ran, but when I passed the pet store on Lexington Avenue I stopped long enough to buy a few dozen tropical fish.

The bedbug was delighted. He promised to stay in the room while he enjoyed his meal at leisure, and I took Irene down to the hotel restaurant to celebrate. We found a quiet table in a corner, and over a drink I told her about my conversation with Marlene. “She sold the business,” I told her, “to raise money to pay for private detectives. She didn’t give up. She’s been building up a whole dossier on Narabedla and Henry Davidson-Jones.”

“Which will help support our story?” Irene put in. “Which will damn
prove
our story,” I corrected her. “She’s going to get all the papers out of her safe-deposit box tomorrow morning. Then I’m going to go up to see her with a copy of our stuff, and we’ll figure out what to do from there.”

“Sounds good,” Irene said, looking at me thoughtfully over her old-fashioned glass. “You know, Nolly,” she commented, “you’re really some kind of guy.”

I shrugged modestly.

“I mean it,” she said. “You’re a regular Clark Kent. One day you’re a mild-mannered accountant, and then all of a sudden you’re taking on sixty-dozen wizard alien creatures with all sorts of high-tech jazz and rescuing the girl. I never expected k of you.”

I said honestly, “I didn’t really expect it of myself.” 

“It’s a nice trait in a man. Is your drink empty, too?” That was easily enough taken care of. When the waiter brought us the second round she frowned. “The funny thing is,” she said, “I always thought I didn’t really like jocks. You know? The kind of guy that figures he can take care of anything just by throwing some weight around? Do you suppose …”

She hesitated, fiddling with the orange slice in her new drink. Then she looked up at me with a peculiar expression, a little bit amused, a little bit embarrassed. “Tricia told me about your, uh, operation,” she said. “Do you suppose that’s why you’re doing all this?”

Well, if I’d thought at all (I hadn’t, actually) I would have been damn sure Tricia would not have missed the chance to gossip a little with her cousin. I didn’t like that thought, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I said shortly, “How would I know if it was?” Then I said, more carefully, “I can tell you what lit my fuse this time. What got me going, Irene, was you. When I found out they had kidnapped you I wanted to—well, hell, I was willing to do anything I had to do to get you out.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling at me.

“Don’t mention it. Uh, what else did Tricia tell you?” 

“Oh, well,” she said vaguely. “Different things.”

I was flustered. “I guess she told you that she and I—” 

“Really, Nolly,” she said, “what difference would that make? It’s not important, is it?”

“Um,” I said. “Uh. Well, Irene, you see, I didn’t think there was any way that, for instance, you and I would ever see each other again—”

“Of course not.”

“And we really didn’t know each other very well, did we? You and I, I mean.”

“Hardly at all.”

“The only thing is,” I said, “I felt kind of tacky about it, all the same.”

“No reason you should have,” she said firmly. “Don’t you think we might order now? I’m starved.”

And we ordered. And we ate. And we had a brandy with our coffee to finish it off. And when we were all done and the check was paid and we were lingering over the last brandy I said, “Well, we’ve got a busy day tomorrow. Do you want the room with the bedbug or the room by yourself tonight?”

And she said, “He’s probably going to keep the TV going all night again, isn’t he? So why don’t we just let him have one of the suites all to himself?”

W
hen the city of New York decides to take a recess from winter it can change overnight. I came up out of the IRT at Seventy-second Street into bright sunshine. It was only a short walk to Marlene’s block.

Marlene’s apartment was one of those rent-controlled wonders that New Yorkers are willing to kill for, four big rooms in a well-kept building with an elevator for less than three hundred dollars a month.

It was a quiet block. There were still knee-high mounds of snow along the curbs where the plows had given up. Just behind one of them there was a parked ambulance. Its driver had the window rolled down to take advantage of the unexpected sun; he was wearing shades, a black man reading a copy of
Penthouse.
He looked vaguely familiar. An old woman was walking a dog—a real one; I saw it lift its leg to one of the city’s always imperiled shade trees. An elderly man was peering out at the sunshine from the steps of Marlene’s apartment house, trying to decide if it was warm enough to allow his old bones a walk to the 7-Eleven on the corner.

He looked familiar too. With good reason. As I climbed the steps he caught my arm. “Aren’t you Stennis?”

As soon as he spoke I knew who he was. Marlene had brought him around to the office now and then. He wasn’t a boyfriend, or even a date; he was just a guy she went to the movies with now and then. “Nice to see you, Mr. Keppler,” I told him. “Is Marlene in now, do you know?” 

“In?” He scowled at me. “Of course she isn’t in,” he went on in a disagreeable tone. “What do you think? Where’ve you been? She told me before she went to the hospital the first time you were someplace out of town. But didn’t you know
anything?”

I pulled my arm free, staring at him.
“What
hospital?”

“St. Luke’s. Where she’s dying from cancer,” he said bitterly. “So now it’s too late you can finally take the time to come see her, eh?”

I couldn’t speak for a moment. I stood staring at him.

“I didn’t know! Tell me!” I said finally, abjectly begging. He did, with an old man’s attention to the details of terminal illness. According to Mr. Keppler, Marlene got sick the first time over a year ago. She’d had to close down the office, because she was facing at least six months of radiation and chemotherapy. Then she’d been back in her apartment for a while, but she’d regressed. He had gone to the hospital to see her the day before.

She had, he said, no more than a month to live.

I cannot say how I felt then. I don’t know the words to describe it. It wasn’t that I wanted to cry; it was a shock too complete and unexpected for that.

“But,” I said stupidly, “I just talked to her yesterday.” 

“You called her at the hospital? That’s good,” said Mr. Keppler grudgingly. “You were lucky, because it’s a real miracle she could talk. When I went to see her last night she was in a coma.”

I let him go, my hand on the door to the building.

I watched him walk down the steps, leaning heavily on his cane, making his way past the ambulance at the curb, where the driver was looking sidewise at me from behind his glasses.

It would have been a natural question to ask who it was I had spoken to on the phone yesterday. I didn’t have to ask it. I already knew the answer. I remembered it from Henry Davidson-Jones’s office, when I had heard Marlene’s voice on a tape and it had not been Marlene speaking then, either.

The sun was still out, but the winter wind was chilling my bones. Everything had suddenly become very different.

I turned around and walked quickly to the curb, not looking at anyone. When I got to the street I turned left, walking along the parked cars. When I got to the ambulance I stopped short.

I reached in the open window and grabbed the wrist of the black man in the sunglasses.

“Nice to see you again since that time in Nice,” I said conversationally.

His reflexes were fast. He tried to pull his hand free, but I had it solidly. “Got a gun in your pocket?” I asked. “Or is it whoever’s upstairs in Marlene’s apartment that’s got the gun?”

 “Get your hands off me,” he snarled, trying a sudden lunge. I put my elbow in his throat to stop that.

“You don’t need a gun,” I told him. “Just relax. If you want to take me to Henry Davidson-Jones you don’t need anything at all, because that’s where I want to go. Right now.”