Дональд Уэстлейк - Castle in the Air

Gabble-gabble-gabble.

Gabble. A different gabble, different in tone, different in language, and different in place. A live gabble, in fact. Baffled, Eustace turned his head and saw Lida’s cousin standing there, looking as stubborn as — and less intelligent than — a mule. “Not you again,” Eustace said.

In Spanish, Manuel repeated his gabble, which was simply, “What have you done with Lida?”

“I don’t have time for this now,” Eustace told him. “I have all these other idiots to contend with.”

“I demand to see Lida,” insisted Manuel.

Eustace chose another walkie-talkie, spoke firmly into it: “Group A, I wish a report, and I wish no nonsense, no foreign tongues, no conclave-of-nations, nothing but a progress report concerning the progress of our present operation! ”

“In München steht ein Hofbräuhaus,” sang the walkie-talkie, with two badly assorted voices, “eins, zwei, gsuffa! ”

Manuel had plodded around in front of Eustace, and was standing just the other side of the table. Ignoring the singing walkie-talkie, he said, “You tell me where Lida is.”

Bewildered, appalled, Eustace was asking the walkie-talkie, “Are you all drunk?”

Manuel pounded the table; all the walkie-talkies hopped. “Tell me where Lida is!”

Eustace glared at him. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“I don’t trust you people. I want Lida. Lida! Lida!”

Eustace picked the familiar name out of the gabble. “Oh, Lida, is it? Your cousin, eh, that’s what you want?”

“Lida,” agreed Manuel, sullen and implacable.

Eustace waved an airy hand — made somewhat less airy by the fact that it was still grasping a walkie-talkie — out over the city: “Lida,” he said, “is out peddling her bicycle around Paris. Go away now.”

“Lida,” said Manuel.

Eustace reared up from his folding chair, shaking the walkie-talkie under Manuel’s chin, yelling at him, “You go away! You’re one idiot too many, one language too many! I don’t have the time or the patience for you! Go away, or I’ll, I’ll—” Eustace gabbled a bit himself, waving both arms. “I’ll throw you off this roof!”

Manuel might not speak any language but Spanish — and a rather bedraggled form of South American Spanish at that — but he could read faces and tones of voice pretty well, and he was smart enough to back away from Eustace and those waving arms, saying as he did so, “You’ll regret this. You’ll be sorry about this!”

“Go!” screamed Eustace. “Go, go, go, go, go!”

Manuel went, muttering in Spanish. Eustace flung down the still-singing-in-German walkie-talkie, grabbed up another one, and yelled into it, “Somebody say something in English!”

And the voice of Bruddy, angry and belligerent, came immediately back, saying, “What do you bloody well expect, Hindustani?”

“Thank God,” Eustace said. “A friendly voice, where are you?”

Bruddy’s voice said, “In the flippin’ truck, you twit. Where are you?”

“Where am I?” Baffled at such a question, Eustace looked around before answering, “I’m on the roof.”

“Good place for a pigeon like you.”

Belatedly, Eustace realized what Bruddy had said earlier, and he cried out, “In the truck? You mean, you’ve done it?”

“Bloody twit,” responded Bruddy.

Before Eustace could continue this suddenly invigorating conversation, one of the other walkie-talkies on the table suddenly said, in Jean LeFraque’s Gallic-accented English, “Hello. This is me. Is that you?”

“Wait, Br... Uhh, Group...” (quick reading of painted letter) “... B. Don’t go way, just wait.” And Eustace dropped that walkie-talkie, picked up another one and said, “Is that you, Group C?”

The walkie-talkie squabbled, in Italian.

“Arrgh!” Eustace flung it down, looked at the others, found the one with the “C” painted on it, picked it up, and cried into it, “Group C? Is that you?”

“I don’t know,” answered Jean. “Am I Group C?”

“Yes, of course you are.”

“I can never remember.”

“You wanted something?” In his desperation, Eustace was squeezing the walkie-talkie with both hands. “Is something wrong? What’s gone wrong?”

“Mission accomplished,” said the happy voice of Jean LeFraque.

For a few seconds, Eustace couldn’t grasp the import of Jean’s message; he was too prepared by now for calamity. “What?” he said. “Isn’t it work... What ? You’ve done it?”

“Absolutely. That’s how you say it? Absolutely?”

“Absolutely!” responded Eustace, a huge smile crossing his face. “Absolute- ment! ”

“What a charming accent you have,” Jean said drily, but Eustace had already dropped that walkie-talkie and was lunging for another, shouting into it, “Br... B. Group B. You’re in the truck?”

“Same as ever,” came Bruddy’s surly voice.

“It’s working!” Eustace cried. He jumped to his feet, grabbing up the walkie-talkies and dancing with them. Gusts of wind flipped and blew his maps, his charts, his diagrams; Eustace in his dancing kicked over his folding chair. Somewhere in the distance a red balloon rose up into the blue Parisian sky. The walkie-talkies sang and snarled and squabbled at one another, and Eustace danced on the roof.

The construction business is booming in Paris, and has been for the last several years. Office buildings, apartment houses are shooting up everywhere, within the city limits and just beyond, steel and concrete and glass creating cell after cell as Paris expands and expands, ever upward.

But in times of boom there are always those who boom a little too enthusiastically, who overextend their capacities, their finances, their resources, and who suddenly find themselves in bankruptcy court, surrounded by no-longer-smiling faces. People are never understanding in such situations, just never understanding.

And when such mishaps occur, unfinished buildings inevitably moulder roofless, wall-less, worker-less, hopeless, awaiting a new owner, a new builder, a new infusion of hope, vision and capital.

Just such a structure was the incomplete apartment house just off the Boulevard Berthier in the 17th Arrondissement, in the northwest corner of the city. Behind a tall rickety wooden fence languished the pale white concrete skeleton of what might someday be a finished building but which at the moment looked most like a cubist version of a museum’s dinosaur skeleton. The white concrete walls, with gaping rectangular holes, jutted up from yellowish mud, giving every evidence of failure and despair. Who would come to such a place, unless forced by circumstance?

Rosa Palermo, that’s who. And Angelo Salvagambelli. And Vito Palone. Angelo having driven orange truck number two through the wooden gate in the wooden fence, followed by Rosa and Vito and the little white Renault, Vito had re-closed the wooden gate and now the Italian mob was considering the results of its depredation. They were, in point of fact, getting down to cases.

Shipping cases. Great huge wooden shipping cases now lay jumbled beside the orange truck, and here came Angelo and Vito staggering out of the back of the truck with yet another. They dropped it off the rear of the truck, hopped down into the mud next to it, and paused to lean against the case and mop their brows with their sleeves.

“Well,” Angelo said, “nearly empty. We’ll put this one over there.”

“No,” said Vito, “I must rest.”

Dubious, Angelo looked around, saying, “I suppose we could open some of these now, and unload the rest later.”

“Opening crates,” Vito told him, “is not the same as resting.”