Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“A long time ago, in translation. I don’t remember the story.”

“Then you wouldn’t see what I’m talking about. Salammbô is a tragedy, its theme is dissolution. So Sime Graff tells me to tack a happy ending onto it. And I write it that way. Jesus,” he said in a tone of surprise, “this is the way I’ve written it. What makes me do it to myself and Flaubert? I used to worship Flaubert.”

“Money?” I said.

“Yeah. Money. Money.” He repeated the word several times, with varying inflections. He seemed to be finding new shades of meaning in it, subtle drunken personal meanings which brought the tears into his voice. But he was too chancy and brittle to hold the emotion. He slapped himself across the eyes, and giggled. “Well, no use crying over spilled blood. How about a drink, Lew? How about a drink of Danziger Goldwasser, in fact?”

“In a minute. Do you know a girl called Hester Campbell?”

“I’ve seen her around.”

“Lately?”

“No, not lately.”

“What’s her relation to Graff, do you know?”

“No, I wouldn’t know,” he answered sharply. The subject disturbed him, and he took refuge in clowning: “Nobody tells me anything, I’m just an intellectual errand boy around here. An ineffectual intellectual errand boy. Song.” He began to sing in a muffled tenor to an improvised tune: “He’s so reprehensible yet so indispensable he makes things comprehensible he’s my joy. That intellectual – ineffectual – but oh so sexual – intellectual errand boy. Whom nothing can alloy... Dig that elegant ‘whom’.”

“I dug it.”

“It’s the hallmark of genius, boy. Did I ever tell you I was a genius? I had an I.Q. of 183 when I was in high school in Galena, Illinois.” His forehead crinkled. “What ever happened to me? What happen? I used to like people, by damn, I used to have talent. I didn’t know what it was worth. I came out here for the kicks, going along with the gag – seven fifty a week for playing word games. Then it turns out that it isn’t a gag. It’s for keeps, it’s your life, the only one you’ve got. And Sime Graff has got you by the short hairs and you’re not inner-directed any more. You’re not yourself.”

“Who are you, Sam?”

“That’s my problem.” He laughed, and almost choked. “I had a vision of myself last week, I could see it as plain as a picture. Dirty word, picture, but let it pass. I was a rabbit running across a desert. Rear view.” He laughed and coughed again. “A goddam white-tailed bunny rabbit going lickety-split across the great American desert.”

“Who was chasing you?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a lopsided grin. “I was afraid to look.”

GRAFF, came strutting toward us along the poolside, trailed by his twittering harem and their eunuchs. I wasn’t ready to talk to him, and turned my back until he’d passed. Sammy was yawning with hostility.

“I really need a drink,” he said. “My eyes are focusing. How’s about joining me in the bar?”

“Later, maybe.”

“See you. Don’t quote me on anything.”

I promised that I wouldn’t, and Sammy went away toward the lights and the music. At the moment the pool was deserted except for the Negro lifeguard, who was moving around under the diving tower. He trotted in my direction with a double armful of soiled towels, took them into a lighted room at the end of the row of cabañas .

I went over and tapped on the open door. The lifeguard turned from a canvas bin where he had dumped the towels. He had on gray sweat-clothes with CHANNEL CLUB stenciled across the chest.

“Can I get you something, sir?”

“No, thanks. How are the tropical fish?”

He gave me a quick grin of recognition. “No tropical-fish trouble tonight. People trouble is all. There’s always people trouble. Why they want to go swimming on a night like this! I guess it’s the drinking they do. The way they pour it down is a revelation.”

“Speaking of pouring it down, your boss is pretty good at it.”

“Mr. Bassett? Yeah, he’s been drinking like a fish lately, ever since his mother died. A tropical fish. Mr. Bassett was very devoted to his mother.” The black face was smooth and bland, but the eyes were sardonic. “He told me she was the only woman he ever loved.”

“Good for him. Do you know where Bassett is now?”

“Circulating.” He stirred the air with his finger. “He circulates around at all the parties. You want me to find him for you?”

“Not just now, thanks. You know Tony Torres?”

“Know him well. We worked together for years.”

“And his daughter?”

“Some,” he said guardedly. “She worked here, too.”

“Would Tony still be around? He isn’t on the gate.”

“No, he goes off at night, party or no party. His fill-in didn’t show up tonight. Maybe Mr. Bassett forgot to call him.”

“Where does Tony live, do you know?”

“I ought to. He lives under your feet, practically. He’s got a place next to the boiler room, he moved in there last year. He used to get so cold at night, he told me.”

“Show me, will you?”

He didn’t move, except to look at his wristwatch. “It’s half past one. You wouldn’t want to wake him up in the middle of the night.”

“Yes,” I said. “I would.”

He shrugged and took me along a corridor filled with a soapy shower-room odor, down a flight of concrete steps into hothouse air, through a drying-room where bathing suits hung like sloughed snakeskins on wooden racks, between the two great boilers which heated the pool and the buildings. Behind them, a room-within-a-room had been built out of two-by-fours and plywood.

“Tony lives here because he wants to,” the lifeguard said rather defensively. “He won’t live in his house on the beach any more, he rents it out. I wish you wouldn’t wake him up. Tony’s an old man, he needs his rest.”

But Tony was already awake. His bare feet slithered on the floor. Light came on, blazing through all the cracks in the plywood walls and framing the door. Tony opened it and blinked at us, a big-bellied little old man in long underwear with a religious locket hanging around his neck.

“Sorry to get you out of bed. I’d like to talk to you.”

“What about? What’s the trouble?” He scratched at his tousled, graying hair.

“No trouble.” Just two murders in his family, one of which I wasn’t supposed to know about. “May I come in?”

“Sure thing. Matter ’fact, I been thinking I’d like to talk to you.”

He pushed the door wide and stepped back with a gesture that was almost courtly. “You comin’ in, Joe?”

“I got to get back upstairs,” the lifeguard said.

I thanked him and went in. The room was hot and small, lit by a naked bulb on an extension cord. I’d never seen a monk’s cell, but the room could probably have served as one. A blistered oak-veneer bureau, an iron cot, a kitchen chair, a doorless cardboard wardrobe containing a blue serge suit, a horsehide windbreaker, and a clean uniform. Faded blue flannelette sheets covered the cot, and an old brass-fitted suitcase protruded from underneath it. Two pictures shared the wall above the head of the bed. One was a hand-tinted studio photograph of a pretty dark-eyed girl in a white dress that looked like a high-school graduation dress. The other was a Virgin in four colors, holding a blazing heart in her extended hand.

Tony indicated the kitchen chair for me, and sat on the bed himself. Scratching his head again, he looked down at the floor, his eyes impassive as anthracite. The big knuckles of his right hand were jammed and swollen.

“Yeah, I been thinkin’,” he repeated, “All day and half of the night. You’re a detective, Mr. Bassett says.”