Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

“A pleasure to see you, Miss Aloe. And you, too, sir, needless to say.”

“Not at all,” I said. “My pleasure.”

He looked at me a little startled. I am inclined to gag it up and talk too much when I am uneasy or unsure of myself, which means that I am almost always gagging it up and talking too much.

“This is Mr. Britton Rainstar, Albert (Albehr),” Manuela Aloe said. “I hope you’ll be seeing him often.”

“My own hope. Will you have a drink at the bar while your table is being readied?”

She said we would, and we did. In fact, we had a couple, since the night employees were just arriving at this early hour, and there was some delay in preparing our table.

“Very nice,” I said, taking an icy sip of martini. “A very nice place, Miss Aloe. Or is it Mrs.?”

She said it was Miss — she had taken her own name after her husband died — and I could call her Manny if I liked. “But yes—” she glanced around casually — “it is nice, isn’t it? Not that it shouldn’t be, considering.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Or should I say ah-ha? I’m afraid I’m going to have to rush right off to Geneva, Manny.”

“Wha-aat?”

“Just as soon as I pay for these drinks. Unless you insist on going dutch on them.”

“Silly!” She wriggled deliciously. “You’re with me, and everything’s complimentary.”

“But you said considering,” I pointed out. “A word hinting at the dread unknown, in my case at least. To wit, money.”

“Oh, well,” she shrugged, dismissing the subject. “Money isn’t everything.”

With an operation as large and multifaceted as PXA, one with so many employees and interests, it was impossible to maintain supervision and surveillance in every place it might be required. It would have been impossible, even if PXA’s activities were all utterly legitimate instead of borderline, with personnel who figuratively cried out to be spied upon. Pat Aloe had handed the problem to his niece Manny, a graduate student in psychology. After months of consultation with behaviorists and recording experts, she had come up with the bugging system used throughout the PXA complex.

It was activated by tones and was uncannily accurate in deciding when a person’s voice tone was not what it should be. Thus Bradley, the man who had called me this morning, had been revealed as a “switcher,” one who diverted business to competitors. So all of his calls were completely recorded, instead of sporadically spotchecked.

“I see,” I nodded to Manny, as we dawdled over coffee and liqueurs, “about as clearly as I see through mud. Everything is completely opaque to me.”

“Oh, now, why do you say that?” she said. “I’d seen that portrait when I was a little girl, and I’d never gotten it out of my mind. So when I found out that the last of the Rainstars was right here in town...!”

“Recalling part of the conversation,” I said, “you must have felt that the last of the Rainstars needed his mouth washed out with soap.”

She laughed and said nope, cursing out Bradley had been a plus. “That was just about the clincher for you with Pat. Someone of impeccable background and breeding, who could still get tough if he had to.”

“Manny,” I said, “exactly what is this all about, anyway? Why PXA’s interest in me?”

“Well...”

“Before you answer, maybe I’d better set you straight on something. I’ve never been mixed up in anything shady, and PXA seems to be mixed up in nothing else but. Oh, I know you’re not doing anything illegal, nothing you can go to prison for. But still, well—”

“PXA is right out in the open,” Manny said firmly. “Anyone that wants to try can take a crack at us. We don’t rewrite any laws, and we don’t ask any to be written for us. We don’t own any big politicians. I’d say that for every dollar we make with our so-called shady operations, there’s a thousand being stolen by some highly respectable cartel.”

“Well,” I nodded uncomfortably, “there’s no disputing that, of course. But I don’t feel that one wrong justifies another, if you’ll pardon an unpardonable cliche.”

“Pardoned.” She grinned at me openly. “We don’t try to justify it. No justifications, no apologies.”

“And this bugging business.” I shook my head. “It seems like something right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s sneaky and Big Brotherish, and it scares the hell out of me.”

Manny shrugged, remarking that it was probably everything I said. But bugging wasn’t an invention of PXA, and it didn’t and wouldn’t affect me. “We’re on your side, Britt. We’re against the people who’ve been against your people.”

“My people?” I said, and I grimaced a little wryly. “I doubt that any of us can be bracketed so neatly anymore. We may be more of one race than we are another, but I suspect we’re all a little of everything. White, yellow, black, and red.”

“Oh, well—” she glanced at her wristwatch. “You’re saying that there are no minorities?”

I said that I wasn’t sure what I was saying, or, rather, what the point to it was. “But I don’t believe that a man who’s being pushed around has a right to push anyone but the person pushing him... if you can untangle that. His license to push is particular, not general. If he starts lashing out at everyone and anyone, he’s asking for it, and he ought to get it.”

It was all very high-sounding and noble, and it also had the virtue, fortunately or otherwise, of being what I believed. What I had been bred to believe. And now I was sorry I had said it For I seemed to be hopelessly out of step with the only world I had, and again I was about to be left alone and afraid in that world, which I had had no hand in making. This lovely child, Manny, the one person to be kind to me or show interest in me for so very long, was getting ready to leave.

She was looking at me, brows raised quizzically. She was patting her mouth with her napkin, then crumpling it to the table. She was glancing at herself in the mirror in the purse. Then snapping the purse shut and starting to rise.

And then, praise be, glory to the Great Mixed Blood Father, she sat back down.

“All right,” she said crisply. “Let’s say that PXA is interested in using the Rainstar name. Let’s say that It would be pretty stupid of us to dirty up that name, now, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, yes, I suppose it would,” I said. “And look. I’m sorry if I said anything to offend you. I always kid around and talk a lot whenever I’m—”

“Forget it. How old are you?”

“Thirty-six.”

“You’re forty. Or so you stated on your loan application. What do you do for a living, if you can call it that?”

I said why ask me something she already knew? “That information’s also on the application. Along with practically everything else about me, except the number and location of my dimples.”

“You mean you have some I can’t see?” She smiled, her voice friendlier, almost tender. “But what I meant to ask was, what do you write for this Hemisphere Foundation?”

“Studies. In-depth monographs on this region from various aspects: ecological, etiological, ethological, ethnological. That sort of thing. Sometimes one of them is published in Hemisphere’s Quarterly Reports. But they usually go in the file-and-forget department.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said thoughtfully, musingly. “Very interesting. I think something could be worked out there. Something satisfactory to both of us.”

“If you could tell me just what you have in mind...”

“Well, I’ll have to clear it with Pat, of course, but... Thirty-five thousand a year?”