Slide

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF GERALD A. BROWNE

11 Harrowhouse

“Vivid, sophisticated, action-filled.”
—Los Angeles Times

“As imaginative, well-plotted, and well-written a thriller as you'll ever find … A remarkable book.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Green Ice

“A cliff-hanger … Sparkling … Entertaining suspense!” —
Cosmopolitan

19 Purchase Street

“A kind of console of our contemporary nightmares at which the author fingers every sinister key … Superb.” —
The New York Times

Stone 588

“No ordinary thriller this, but a story as scintillating as the octahedron crystal on which it focuses.… A tingle for the spine on every page.” —
Publishers Weekly

“Entertaining suspense … Heart-stopping … Browne details both the glitter and grime of the diamond market, high society and the underworld … A gem of a thriller.” —
Orlando Sentinel

Hot Siberian

“Beautifully written … Will keep you entranced.” —
The New York Times Book Review

West 47th

“Immensely entertaining.” —
The Washington Post Book World

Slide

Gerald A. Browne

To Dr. Ruth Ochroch
,

Dr. Marvin Belsky

and my dear daughter Cindy

Forecast

He had a blue sweatband around his right wrist.

As though that would do any good.

The grip of his racquet was slimy, the way leather gets when wet. No matter how tightly he gripped, the racquet gave, turned some each time it met the ball. He couldn't get off a good, solid slam. It infuriated him, added to the feelings that had brought him there.

Man of forty-one with a thirty-two-inch waist. Wearing white sharkskin tennis shorts and a white cotton knit shirt, his lucky favorite. Thirty-five-dollar Tretorn shoes, the best, the kind that cushioned the arch, softly snugged the heel and made his reflexes feel improved. The shoes would be ruined after this; they'd probably dry stiff.

His shirt and shorts were so wet the outline of his jock strap showed, and his nipples. The hair on his head was thick black, dripping. Half of it was a weave job. Every once in a while he snapped his head to shake off the water, as animals do. The water was in his eyes, making them bloodshot. He clenched his eyes and tried to blink away the sting.

And there was the way he had to breathe. He could gasp with his mouth hardly open or breathe entirely through his nose, which was inadequate. If he panted normally with his mouth open, water got into his windpipe. That happened several times, causing him to double over and become red in the face with coughing.

Still, he did not quit, hadn't yet gotten enough of it out of him.

He hit a forehand, one of his strongest of the day. Some spin on it. The ball struck the dark green just above the horizontal white painted line that signified the height of an actual net. The ball ricocheted fast off to his left, his backhand. Leaping for it, he sacrificed form, made a wild stab and missed. It bounced by and across the slick blacktop, splashed through a couple of depressed patches where water had gathered and came to an abrupt stop. On a regular, fair day a new ball such as that would have easily gone all the way to and off the mesh fence.

The man swore aloud and went over to get another new ball. That morning he'd bought ten containers of the best Wilsons. By now he had used eighteen balls, nearly two-thirds his supply. He found that a fresh ball was good for about twenty hits, sometimes as few as ten. On its bounces and in flight a ball became soaked, got heavier and heavier, requiring that he put more and more muscle behind each stroke. Too soon a ball became impossible, like hitting an overripe orange.

Now, almost ritualistically, he snapped open the top of a container and peeled it. The dry hiss he heard was incongruous. He paused a moment to consider where he was.

In back of Beverly Hills High on a part of the school's wide, paved recreation area. Alone there.

And why.

Because he hadn't played in two weeks, not a swing. Two whole weeks of smashing was backed up inside him. Well, at least some of the wet on him now was his sweat.

He shielded the container with his body while he took out a new, dry ball. He put the container down among the others, covered it, and was again ready to serve to himself, as though this were any regular, nice day at the bangboard.

Also then, out in the Valley in the house the divorce had awarded her, was the woman who hoped she wouldn't overload again. What puzzled her was why it happened some times and not others, under the very same conditions, when she had everything going. Anyway, today she was prepared with eight extra fuses.

The room had been a marvelous idea, she thought. An example of how creatively her mind worked. No matter that she'd spent ten times more than she should have. It was a hell of a lot better than fading.

God, how fast a tan faded unless you kept at it.

After only four days of this bad spell she had stood before her full-length mirror and believed she'd already lost a lot of color, was several degrees closer to pasty. Before long she'd look sick.

She cringed at the thought, visualized herself — and fuck you very much you two-faced piece of reflecting glass — a thirty-four, really thirty-eight, -year-old woman, two-time loser, the white of dough, veins showing. Not very Acapulco or Palm Springs. Not a chance.

Maybe this bad spell wouldn't last much longer. She could always fake it for a while with makeup. She recalled those times she'd tried that tan-without-sun crap. She'd turned out looking more jaundiced than ideal bronze as advertised. Besides, anyone worth anything, people who counted, knew their tans. They could tell a phony at first sight.

What to do?

What to do came to her after one and a half sleepless nights.

The room, including floor and ceiling, was covered with mirrorlike silver Con-Tact paper. The windows were also covered over. Unless you'd known the room before you wouldn't know windows were there. To do the entire job had required fifteen rolls of Con-Tact. Regular kitchen foil would have been cheaper but more difficult to work with. Attached close up to the ceiling at a point where it could be aimed down at a typical angle was a two-thousand watt reflector floodlight. On the floor in opposite corners were a pair of General Electric portable heaters, the kind with built-in fans. Overhead, fixed to the middle of the ceiling was a sunlamp. The largest, most powerful ultraviolet sunlamp made for home use. Identical lamps were situated midway up each wall, so altogether there were five of those.

Centered on the floor was a plump, full-length lounging cushion of yellow sailcloth. Spread on that was an oversize blue towel with not a wrinkle, waiting. Electric cords dangled down, joining extensions that snaked around to consolidate into a single control switch located within reach of the cushion.

Now the woman was just outside the room. The door was closed. She snapped a switch that turned on the floodlamp in there, and the heater fans and a stereo tape that played surf and other seaside sounds.

She was nude. Except for a pair of purple wedgie espadrilles. A woven straw bag held things she might normally carry, including a recent issue of
Town & Country
intentionally folded cover out. She was ready, but she allowed a warm-up period, proving her patience by using the time to polish her dark glasses, the ones with special protective lenses. She didn't put them on.

She went in. She lay on the cushion, went down upon it with a self-conscious grace, as though she were being observed. She got settled, took two deep breaths and thought how nice and bright and warm it was. If she opened her eyes she'd be looking right up at the sun. Her eyelids were a blood-red background for the aerobatics of tiny squiggles.

It was hot.

There was a breeze, but not enough to prevent her perspiring.

Such a lovely day for the beach. Glad she'd come. She lay absolutely still, baking, browning in God's great oven.

Within a half hour she could hardly get her breath. A familiar penalty. She sat up and removed a vitamin-E lotion from her bag. She applied it to her skin, concentrating, doing it leisurely with a gentle self-respect. Until she had touched and covered every part of her. She lay back again and put on the sunglasses.

Her right hand moved, slowly. She hardly realized it was moving. It reached the switch. She hoped she didn't fumble. Once she had fumbled and it had taken almost an hour for her imagination to recover. This time couldn't have been better. Her contact with the switch was brief as possible, while the rest of her senses refused to acknowledge it at all — the hard, intrusive reality of it.

What did give her a problem, however, was the ultraviolet. Its odor. Such an exceptional smell that nothing she conjured up could appropriately excuse it. She was most successful when she dabbed Arpege below her nostrils and told herself that that, combined with the rather unpleasant, sterile vaporous quality of ultraviolet, was the original odor of air, before contamination. Pure as could be, she was being blessed with it. But really getting used to it would take some time.

Four hundred twenty-one suicides since it began.

The tally was not made public, nor was the fact that four out of five of the suicides occurred in the southern part of the state — that is, from Bakersfield on down.

Four hundred twenty-one was nearly ten times the state average and, although an accurate count, it was considered incomplete. Many people in Southern California were old and living alone. No doubt a number of those had taken their lives but had not yet been discovered. Four hundred twenty-one figured out to about thirty a day. But that wasn't how it went. During the first few days there were fewer cases. Then each day brought an increase. The official projection for tomorrow was another one hundred ninety-five.

Five hundred ten murders to now.

Four hundred seventy took place in the Southern California area. Some were everyday murders with motives. More were incredibly senseless.

In San Bernardino a businessman on a morning bus used a ten-pound rock from his garden to crush in the head of the female stranger seated in front of him. In Anaheim a likeable young nurse hypodermically injected cyanide into a dozen Sunkist oranges. Holding open the bag of oranges for whomever she happened to meet, she said, “Help yourself.”

There were eight cases of mutual murder — people shooting one another point blank simultaneously upon a predetermined signal. One such pact involved three finely strung young men who fired as point blank as possible, each taking the muzzle of another's revolver into his mouth.

Business was suffering.

Nonfilter cigarette sales increased sharply, however.

So did booze, especially cheap wine.

Home haircoloring was up.

Many reducing salons and body-building gyms as much as quadrupled enrollments.

Legal person-from-person separations were up.

Rape was down, having dropped after an initial flourish.

The crime rate in general was above average. One category had an increase even greater than murder. It was arson. The rate for arson was up to seventy-five a day. There were some major fires at industrial plants, warehouses and oil storage facilities, but most of the cases involved private homes and small-business buildings. Police and Fire Department investigators were puzzled because all the fires, even some of the larger ones, were so obviously arson, lacking the finesse or clever subterfuge of the professional or the mentally disturbed arsonist. It was often as primary as a match being put to a crumple of newspapers with a sprinkle of backyard barbecue starter to help it catch.

In most cases the firebugs were caught. Only a few had ever been previously booked for arson. When interrogated, many of the offenders were confused, disbelieving their own behavior. Psychiatric probing revealed no common pathology. Of course, the psychiatrists agreed: the acts of arson were protests, combustions of tantrums, similar to the resentment expressed when children play with fire on a confining rainy day.