Peter Abrahams - The Fan

“Their mood. Expression on their faces.”

“On the way out of the can, you mean?”

“Sure. On the way out of the can.”

“That’s a funny thing.”

“Funny?”

“Now that you mention it. Primo was the loser, right? But he went out smiling.”

“And?”

“Rayburn looked grim.”

Jewel thought about that. Leon finished his champagne.

“Trip over?” he said.

Jewel checked her watch. Game time. Unable to think of anything else, she started to hand him the money. He almost had his fingers on it when she paused. “Did anyone actually see what happened in there?”

“I told you. They were in the can.”

“Alone?”

“Alone?”

Jewel withdrew the money. “Or was anyone else in there?”

Leon sat back. “Come to think of it.”

“Who?”

“A guy.”

“You know him?”

Leon licked his lips. “This feels like a detour.”

“Detour?”

“On our trip.”

“Jesus Christ. Do you know him or not?” She could see in his eyes that he did.

Leon raised thumb and index finger to his mouth, zipped it shut. Jewel wanted to smack him. She took out another twenty instead.

He shook his head. “This is one of those side trips that’s worth the whole voyage,” he said.

She showed him another twenty.

“How about one more?” he said.

“Fuck off,” she told him.

He grinned. “Gil,” he said.

“That’s it? Gil? That’s worth the trip?”

“He’s sort of a regular.”

“What’s his last name if he’s sort of a regular?”

“Don’t go in for a lot of last names here.”

“Where do I find him, then? What does he do? Where does he work? Et cetera.”

“He works for that knife company.”

“What knife company?”

“Or he used to.”

“What knife company?”

Leon stared down his empty champagne flute for a moment or two, then brightened. “It’s on the Survivor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll show you.”

They returned to Cleats. Leon ducked behind the bar, came up with a knife. It had a red-and-white-checked handle, and a blade that ended in a long, jagged point because the underside of the tip was broken off. He handed it to her.

Jewel put on her reading glasses. “R. G. Renard?” she said.

“Right. It’s all coming back to me now.”

“What is?”

“Renard is the company. But it’s his last name too.”

Jewel handed over the money.

“How about a bonus?” Leon said.

“You’ll get a turkey at Christmas,” Jewel told him.

Jewel, driving late to the ballpark, called R. G. Renard and asked for Gil.

“No longer with us,” said a woman with some sort of attitude, Jewel didn’t know what or why.

“Can you tell me how to reach him?”

“No.”

Jewel waited for elaboration. None came. “It’s important,” she said.

Silence. Jewel heard a phone buzz at the R. G. Renard office, then another. She had maybe five seconds, and nothing to go on but the woman’s seeming antipathy toward Gil Renard. “He owes me money,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“A lot?”

“You could say that.”

Half a minute later, Jewel had Gil Renard’s address and phone number. She dialed it, listened to a few rings, and then, “I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

She checked the time-2:17-switched on the radio: “top of the third, one out, nobody-” The ballpark was ten or fifteen minutes away, Gil Renard’s address in the northern suburbs at least half an hour farther than that, maybe more. She knew she should go to the ballpark-how could she interview Rayburn in the evening without having watched him play in the afternoon? — but she drove north instead.

The radio was tuned to the game, but Jewel wasn’t really listening. Questions for Bobby Rayburn, half formed, unsatisfactory, rose and fell in her mind. She was parking in front of the worn three-decker in a working-class district off the ring road before she realized he wasn’t playing.

Jewel mounted the steps to the open porch. There were five buzzers. She pressed number four, Renard. She waited ten or fifteen seconds and pressed it again, listening this time for a buzzing sound inside and hearing none. She tried it again, and once more. Then, on the chance that the buzzer wasn’t working, she knocked, first lightly, then harder.

No response.

Jewel stepped back from the door, looked around. A few plastic garbage bags stood in one corner of the porch, next to a cardboard box marked IWO JIMA: THE SURVIVOR, NEW FROM R. G. RENARD FINE KNIVES. She looked in the box. There was nothing inside but an empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold and five or six yellow neckties. She picked one out, saw nothing wrong with it.

Jewel walked around the house. There was an alley at the back with a squat apartment building on the other side, its bricks sooty from the pollution of decades. Parked outside the back door of the three-decker was a rusted-out pickup with Maine plates. Jewel went a little closer. A big bearded man sat in the passenger seat, head against the window, eyes closed.

“Excuse me,” Jewel said.

He didn’t respond. Was there any point in waking him, any chance he lived in the building, or knew someone who did? Jewel tapped on the glass.

Still no reaction. “Excuse me,” she said again, a little louder, and tapped a little louder too. The sounds she made had no effect on the bearded man, but they did mask a crunch in the gravel behind her. Jewel was just starting to turn when something hard and heavy struck the back of her head. The blow rang changes through her senses, making her taste bile, feel sick, see nothing but cloud, black and quivering around the edges.

Jewel got up on her hands and knees in time to see the pickup round a corner at the end of the alley and disappear.

Bobby Rayburn put one arm around his wife and gave her a squeeze. Val turned to him, gazed up into his eyes, and smiled her brightest smile.

“Very nice,” said the photographer from the New York Times Magazine, changing lenses. He had a faint accent, the r in very more liquid than an English r and slightly rolling.

“All done?” said Val.

“Your part is,” the photographer replied. “Thanks so much.”

Val slipped out of Bobby’s grasp, her smile fading fast. Bobby walked down toward the pool. Wald was sitting at the edge, talking on the phone, his suit pants rolled up, his bare feet, pale and hairy, dangling in the water.

“This is pissing me off,” Bobby said.

“Almost done,” the photographer called. “Perhaps one or two more with the piscine just a little in the background?”

“Pissing me off big time,” Bobby said.

Wald lowered the phone. “No one knows where the hell she is.”

“I’m splitting.”

“Ten more minutes, Bobby.”

“Why should I?”

“It’s important.”

“To them, maybe. Not to me.”

Wald took off his sunglasses. “I’m going to tell you something crucial right now, big guy.”

“Crucial?”

“The world-our world, Bobby-sits on four pillars. The owners, the agents, the players, the media. It’s just like this house. If one of the pillars is shaky the whole thing comes crashing down.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Simply this: you’ve got to learn how to use the media.”

“Mr. Wald, is it?” said the photographer. “If you would be kind enough to clear the shot?”

Wald got out of the way. The photographer took a few more pictures. “Perhaps with the chemise removed? On the diving board?”

“What’s he talking about?”

“I think he wants you to take your shirt off,” Wald said.