Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

That would make him about sixty, I thought. And twenty years ago he would have been forty to Isobel’s twenty, say.

“How did you feel about her?” I said. “Avuncular?”

“I loved her. She and my mother were only two women I ever loved. And I’d have married her, too, if her father hadn’t stood in the way. Peter Heliopoulos disapproved of me.”

“So he married her off to Simon Graff.”

“To Simon Graff, yah.” He shuddered with the passion of a weak and timid man who seldom lets his feelings show. “To a climber and a pusher and a whoremonger and a cheat. I knew Simon Graff when he was an immigrant nobody, a nothing in this town. Assistant director on quickie Westerns with one decent suit to his name. I liked him, he pretended to like me. I lent him money, I got him a guest membership in the Club, I introduced him to people. I introduced him to Heliopoulos, by heaven. Within two years he was producing for Helio, and married to Isobel. Everything he has, everything he’s done, has come out of that marriage. And he hasn’t the common decency to treat her decently!”

He stood up and made a wide swashbucking gesture which carried him sideways all the way to the wall. Dropping the glass, he spread the fingers of both hands against the wall to steady himself. The wall leaned toward him, anyway. His forehead struck the plaster. He jackknifed at the hips and sat down with a thud on the carpeted floor.

He looked up at me, chuckling foolishly. One of his boiled blue eyes was straight, and one had turned outward. It gave him the appearance of mild, ridiculous lunacy.

“There’s a seavy hea running,” he said. “We’ll hatten down the batches.”

I took him by the arms and set him on his feet and walked him to his chair. He collapsed in it, hands and jaw hanging down. His divided glance came together on the bottle. He reached for it. Five or six ounces of whisky swished around in the bottom. I was afraid that another drink might knock him out, or maybe even kill him. I lifted the bottle out of his hands, corked it, and put it away. The key of the portable bar was in the lock. I turned it and put it in my pocket.

“By what warrant do you sequester the grog?” Working his mouth elaborately around the words, Bassett looked like a camel chewing. “This is illegal – false seizure. I demand a writ of habeas corpus .”

He leaned forward and reached for my glass. I snatched it away. “You’ve had enough, Clarence.”

“Make those decisions myself. Man of decision. Man of distinction. Bottle-a-day man, by God. Drink you under table.”

“I don’t doubt it. Getting back to Simon Graff, you don’t like him much?”

“Hate him,” he said. “Lez be frank. He stole away only woman I ever loved. ’Cept Mother. Stole my maître dee , too. Best maître dee in Southland, Stefan. They offered him double shallery, spirited him away to Las Vegas.”

“Who did?”

“Graff and Stern. Wanted him for their slo-called club.”

“Speaking of Graff and Stern, why would Graff be fronting for a mobster?”

“Sixty-four-dollar question, I don’t know the ansher. Wouldn’t tell you if did know. You don’t like me.”

“Buck up, Clarence. I like you fine.”

“Liar. Cruel and inhuman.” Two tears detached themselves from the corners of his eyes and crawled down his grooved cheeks like little silver slugs. “Won’t give me a drink. Trying to make me talk, withholding my grog. ’Snot fair, ’snot humane.”

“Sorry. No more grog tonight. You don’t want to kill yourself.”

“Why not? All alone in the world. Nobody loves me.” He wept suddenly and copiously, so that his whole face was wet. Transparent liquid streamed from his nose and mouth. Great sobs shook him like waves breaking in his body.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. I started out.

“Don’t leave me,” he said between sobs. “Don’t leave me alone.”

He came around the desk, buckled at the knees as if he’d struck an invisible wire, and lay full-length on the carpet, blind and deaf and dumb. I turned his head sideways so that he wouldn’t smother and went outside.

THE AIR was turning chilly. Laughter and other party sounds still overflowed the bar, but the music in the court ceased. A car toiled up the drive to the highway, and then another. The party was breaking up.

There was light in the lifeguard’s room at the end of the row of cabañas . I looked in. The young Negro was sitting inside, reading a book. He closed it when he saw me, and stood up. The name of the book was Elements of Sociology .

“You’re a late reader.”

“Better late than never.”

“What do you do with Bassett when he passes out?”

“Is he passed out again?”

“On the floor of his office. Does he have a bed around?”

“Yeah, in the back room.” He made a resigned face. “Guess I better put him in it, eh?”

“Need any help?”

“No, thanks, I can handle him myself, I had plenty of practice.” He smiled at me, less automatically than before. “You a friend of Mr. Bassett’s?”

“Not exactly.”

“He give you some kind of a job?”

“You could say that.”

“Working around the Club here?”

“Partly.”

He was too polite to ask what my duties were. “Tell you what, I’ll pour Mr. Bassett in bed; you stick around, I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

“I could use a cup of coffee. The name is Lew Archer, by the way.”

“Joseph Tobias.” His grip was the kind that bends horseshoes. “Kind of an unusual name, isn’t it? You can wait here, if you like.”

He trotted away. The storeroom was jammed with folded beach umbrellas, piled deckchairs, deflated plastic floats and beach balls. I set up one of the deckchairs for myself and stretched out on it. Tiredness hit me like pentothal. Almost immediately, I went to sleep.

When I woke up, Tobias was standing beside me. He had opened a black iron switchbox on the wall. He pulled a series of switches, and the glimmering night beyond the open door turned charcoal gray. He turned and saw that I was awake.

“Didn’t like to wake you up. You look tired.”

“Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Nope. For some reason I never do. Only time in my life I got tired was in Korea. There I got bone-tired, pushing a jeep through that deep mud they have. You want your coffee now?”

“Lead me to it.”

He led me to a brightly lighted white-walled room with SNACK BAR over the door. Behind the counter, water was bubbling in a glass coffee-maker. An electric clock on the wall was taking spasmodic little bites of time. It was a quarter to four.

I sat on one of the padded stools at the counter. Tobias vaulted over the counter and landed facing me with a deadpan expression.

“Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster,” he said surprisingly. When Cuchulain was weary and exhausted from fighting battles, he’d go down by the riverside and exercise. That was his way of resting. I turned the fire on under the grill in case we wanted eggs. I could use a couple of eggs or three, personally.”

“Me, too.”

“Three?”

“Three.”

“How’s about some tomato juice to start out with? It clarifies the palate.”

“Fine.”

He opened a large can and poured two glasses of tomato juice. I picked up my glass and looked at it. The juice was thick and dark red in the fluorescent light. I put the glass down again.

“Something the matter with the juice?”

“It looks all right to me,” I said unconvincingly.

He was appalled by this flaw in his hospitality. “What is it – dirt in the juice?” He leaned across the counter, his forehead wrinkled with solicitude. “I just opened the can, so if there’s something in it, it must be the cannery. Some of these big corporations think that they can get away with murder, especially now that we have a businessmen’s administration. I’ll open another can.”