Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“Nice dive.”

“You think so?” She turned up her taut brown face and I saw that she wasn’t a girl and hadn’t been for years. “I wouldn’t give myself a score of three. My timing was way off. I can do it with a twist when I’m in shape. But thank you anyway.”

She toweled one long brown leg, and then the other, with a kind of impersonal affection, like somebody grooming a racehorse.

“You dive competitively?”

“I did at one time. Why?”

“I was just wondering what makes a woman do it. That tower’s high.”

“A person has to be good at something, and I’m not pretty.” Her smile was thin and agonized. “Dr. Frey – he’s a psychiatrist friend of mine – says the tower is a phallic symbol. Anyway, you know what the swimmers say – a diver is a swimmer with her brains knocked out.”

“I thought a diver was a swimmer with guts.”

“That’s what the divers say. Do you know many divers?”

“No, but I’d like to. Would Hester Campbell be a friend cf yours?”

Her face became inert. “I know Hester,” she said cautiously. “I wouldn’t call her a friend.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story, and I’m cold.” She turned brusquely and trotted away toward the dressing-room. Her hips didn’t bounce.

“Quiet, everyone,” a loud voice said. “You are about to witness the wonder of the century, brought to you at fabulous expense.”

It came from a gray-haired man on the five-meter platform of the tower. His legs were scrawny, his chest pendulous, his belly a brown leather ball distending his shorts. I looked again and saw it was Simon Graff.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Graff shaded his eyes with a hand and looked around facetiously. “Are there any ladies present? Any gentlemen?”

The women tittered. The men guffawed. Sammy Swift, who was standing near me, looked more than ever like a ghost who had seen a goblin.

“Watch it, boys and girls,” Graff shouted in a high, unnatural voice. “The Great Graffissimo, in his unique and death-defying leap.”

He took a flat-footed little run and launched himself with arms at his sides in what boys used to call a dead-soldier dive. His people waited until he came to the surface and then began to applaud, clapping and whistling.

Sammy Swift noticed my silence and moved toward me. He didn’t recognize me until I called him by name. I could have set fire to his breath.

“Lew Archer, by damn. What are you doing in this galère ?”

“Slumming.”

“Yah, I bet. Speaking of slumming, did you get to see Lance Leonard?”

“No. My friend got sick and we gave up on the interview.”

“Too bad, the boy’s had quite a career. He’d make a story.”

“Fill me in.”

“Uh-uh.” He wagged his head. “You tell your friend to take it up with publicity. There’s an official version and an unofficial version, I hear.”

“What do you hear in detail?”

“I didn’t know you did leg work for newspapers, Lew. What’s the pitch, you trying to get something on Leonard?”

His fogged eyes had cleared and narrowed. He wasn’t as drunk as I’d thought, and the subject was touchy. I backed away from it: “Just trying to give a friend a lift.”

“You looking for Leonard now? I haven’t seen him here tonight.”

Graff raised his voice again: “ Achtung , everyone. Time for lifesaving practice.” His eyes were empty and his mouth was slack. He stepped toward the twittering line of girls and pointed at one who was wearing a silver gown. His forefinger dented her shoulder. “You! What is your name?”

“Martha Matthews.” She smiled in an agony of delight. The lightning was striking her.

“You’re a cute little girl, Martha.”

“Thank you.” She towered over him. “Thank you very much, Mr. Graff.”

“Would you like me to save your life, Martha?”

“I’d simply adore it.”

“Go ahead, then. Jump in.”

“But what about my dress?”

“You can take it off, Martha.”

Her smile became slightly dazed. “I can?”

“I just said so.”

She pulled the dress off over her head and handed it to one of the other girls. Graff pushed her backward into the pool. The agile photographer took a shot of the action. Graff went in after her and towed her to the ladder, his veined hand clutching her flesh. She smiled and smiled. The lifeguard watched them with no expression at all on his black face.

I felt like slugging somebody. There wasn’t anybody big enough around. I walked away, and Sammy Swift tagged along. At the shallow end of the pool, we leaned against a raised planter lush with begonia, and lit cigarettes. Sammy’s face was thin and pale in the half-light.

“You know Simon Graff pretty well,” I stated.

His light eyes flickered. “You got to know him well to feel the way I do about him. I been making a worm’s-eye study of the Man for just about five years. What I don’t know about him isn’t worth knowing. What I do know about him isn’t worth knowing, either. It’s interesting, though. You know why he pulls this lifesaving stunt, for instance? He does it every party, just like clockwork, but I bet I’m the only one around who’s got it figured out. I bet Sime doesn’t even know, himself.”

“Tell me.”

Sammy assumed an air of wisdom. He said in the jargon of the parlor analyst: “Sime’s got a compulsion neurosis, he has to do it. He’s fixated on this girl that got herself killed last year.”

“What girl would that be?” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.

“The girl they found on the beach with the bullets in her. It happened just below here.” He gestured toward the ocean, which lay invisible beyond the margin of the light. “Sime was stuck on her.”

“Interesting if true.”

“Hell, you can take my word for it. I was with Sime that morning when he got the news. He’s got a ticker in his office – he always wants to be the first to know – and when he saw her name on the tape he turned as white as a sheet, to coin a simile. Shut himself up in his private bathroom and didn’t come out for an hour. When he finally did come out, he passed it off as a hangover. Hangover is the word. He hasn’t been the same since the girl died. What was her name?” He tried to snap his fingers, unsuccessfully. “Gabrielle something.”

“I seem to remember something about the case. Wasn’t she a little young for him?”

“Hell, he’s at the age when they really go for the young ones. Not that Sime’s so old. It’s only the last year his hair turned gray, and it was the girl’s death that did it to him.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Sure, I’m sure. I saw them together a couple of times that spring, and I got X-ray eyes, boy, it’s one thing being a writer does for you.”

“Where did you see them?”

“This is your own idea, no doubt.”

“Yeah, but it makes sense,” he said with some fanaticism. “I been watching him for years, like you watch the flies on the wall, and I know him. I can read him like a book.”

“Who wrote the book? Freud?”

Sammy didn’t seem to hear me. His gaze had roved to the far end of the pool, where Graff was posing for more pictures with some of the girls. I wondered why picture people never got tired of having their pictures taken. Sammy said: “Call me Oedipus if you want to. I really hate that bastard.”

“What did he do to you?”

“It’s what he does to Flaubert. I’m writing the Carthage script, version number six, and Sime Graff keeps breathing down my neck.” His voice changed; he mimicked Graff’s accent: “Mâtho’s our juvenile lead, we can’t let him die on us. We got to keep him alive for the girl, that’s basic. I got it. I got it. She nurses him back to health after he gets chopped up, how about that? We lose nothing by the gimmick, and we gain heart, the quality of heart. Salammbô rehabilitates him, see? The boy was kind of a revolutionary type before, but he is saved from himself by the influence of a good woman. He cleans up on the barbarians for her. The girl watches from the fifty-yard line. They clinch. They marry.” Sammy resumed his own voice: “You ever read Salammbô?”