Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

“I knew dysentery was recurrent. I never heard that about gastro-whoozis. When contracted?”

“You sound like a doctor.”

“Small talk. I don’t care—professionally—what you’ve got. What illness.”

“I picked it up in the Caribbean about four years ago,” said Harry, softly. “Somebody forgot to wash their hands Before Leaving This Rest Room and went and put together our hors d’oeuvres.”

“’Our’?”

“My wife and boy. They died of it. The boy on the island, my wife in Miami. After she heard. Never eat raw fish.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. I mean it,” he added quickly.

“To get back to Joe the Nuts,” said Roseboom.

“Just a minute,” said Harry. There was a pause of ten or fifteen seconds, then Harry braked the car to a near stop and turned sharply to the right, up a dirt road that was really only two ruts through a vacant lot overgrown with brown marsh grass. They breasted a low hill—really a sand dune, Roseboom realized—and saw the ocean. Harry let the car roll ahead a little into softening sand and then stopped it and turned off the motor. “Come on,” said Harry. They got out of the car. Roseboom sank to his ankles in soft, hot sand. “Leave your shoes and socks.” Roseboom sat on the wide running board and pulled them off. He knocked the shoes together, sending a cloud of sand downwind. “Don’t get it on the car,” called Harry.

Roseboom caught up with him, and they trudged together through the sand and grass tufts toward a tall oblong structure half on the beach and half in the low surf. There was a rusty metal ladder set in its landward side. Harry shouldered ahead, heaved himself up, and continued to climb without a word. Roseboom saw him disappear into a low doorway about twenty feet from the ground and then followed him. Roseboom heaved himself into a low-celinged room about thirty feet square and saw Harry on the seaward side, looking out a narrow horizontal window. The walls, Roseboom saw, must have been a foot thick. There were pocks and cracks in them, and bits of rusty reinforcing skeleton were visible here and there. He guessed that the thing must have been fifty feet high altogether. “What’s upstairs?”

“Another room like this. Roof. We could go up there now, but it’s like a frying pan this time of day.” He intercepted Roseboom’s look. “Watchtower left from War Two. There were a lot of tankers getting sunk off this coast. There’d be six or eight guys in here, Coast Guard, all weathers, looking for submarines, smoke, like that.”

Roseboom looked at him with a grin. “Not bugged?”

“Someday the thing’ll fall into the water. Anyway, I don’t think anybody knows the way I come here. At least nobody ever followed me or was here, except some kids who come to roast marshmallows and screw and like that.”

“You come here often.”

“Oh, yeah. I like to watch the sea,” he said simply, looking out the view slit again.

“How did you know your own place was bugged?”

“Well, I did it myself. Early in the game, that was. Then somebody, I don’ know, maybe Christmas Angel, some of the boys, added some little hickeys of their own. You can hear ‘em on the phones. Lights dim out every once in a while. You’d be surprised—no, I guess you wouldn’t—at what goes on in those back rooms some nights.” Roseboom nodded and continued to look straight at Harry, who wiped his rust-stained palms on his spotless white bell-bottomed slacks, looked once around the room, then back out at the ocean.

“You bought into Decline And Fall in nineteen sixty-six,” prompted Roseboom.

“Oh, yeah. I came back here, tried to pick up my practice. You know. I had this big-ass house down the coast, in Lochmere, on the Bay. Hundred’n a quarter thousand. Pool. Heated pool. Vacuum cleaners in the baseboards. Boat dock. Big playroom. You know how I felt when I saw that playroom. Jesus Christ.

“Well, I tried to stick it out there. The place wasn’t quite paid off, I had a good practice, lots of consulting work, my own lab, four bright young kid associates, going to all be partners someday. Whole floor in a new building. Eight chairs, little operating theater, even. Mostly just for show,

“And. I never had much time to indulge myself, really, just in that upper-middle suburbs kind of way. The lawn. The parties. The concerts. Running the pie throw at the church fair. You know. I really didn’t know how to go about it any other way.

“I tried. I had the people from Dunhill’s come down and survey the place, turn the next-to-biggest bathroom into a room-size humidor. Bought three thousand Royal Jamaica Churchills. Ever smoke a Churchill?” Roseboom shook his head. “Here. Buck twenty-five a crack.”

Roseboom did not smoke. He took the big cigar anyway.

“Then I called Frederick Wildman. I don’t mean Frederick Wildman’s goddamn secretary, I mean Frederick. Wildman. He came down. Him. We put together a wine and cordial cellar. He also sold me a couple of barrels of scotch. Glenlivet Waters, it’s called. Apparently they don’t bottle it at all. That’s how Decline And Fall got such a reputation for wines and brandies, by the way. That’s my cellar down in the cellar. If you follow me.

“I drank the scotch,” he added after a pause.

“Then I had a few more alterations made. A sauna. A seven-foot-deep bathtub. That just about killed my wife’s insurance. Turned the Buick in on a Cad with a few refinements. Mostly a bar.

“I got myself a maid after the first couple of big dinner parties I gave to dispel the...what? It wasn’t gloom, exactly... A maid, after a decent period of mourning. Lives-in-gives-out, as the saying goes. That was a little girl. Between her and that fountain of booze, I wouldn’t have lasted long. It was that empty, empty house. And I hadn’t even gotten started on drugs yet.” He was talking quietly, conversationally, but Roseboom saw that he was wringing his hands very slowly and very hard.

“Then one night. I think it was New Year’s, sixty-six, I was driving along Oceanic Avenue, blitzed out of my mind, as usual, when all of a sudden, this fire engine comes blasting by me on the right. Of course I was probably driving on the left anyway. Well, this aroused some atavistic drunk-ass response in me, so I took off chasing it. Now that was a wild ride. I should mention that there were a bunch of others behind me. I kept those red lights in sight up ahead and drove. Spray was coming over the seawall and freezing in the air, and that road was just like glass. Anyway, I stayed alive until I came up on the place that was burning. I spun out turning into the lot—hit the big marble seal by the exit sign—and crumpled the Cad up a little.

“Anyway, I was out there looking over the damage, freezing to death and staggering and falling on my face, half from ice and half from booze, up comes this little guy with tears running down his face, yelling, ‘No insurance! No insurance! No insurance even for fires! You might’s well go away, no money for you here!”

“Well, I told him I wasn’t going to sue, it was my fault, I was drunk, and so on for about a minute. After the third time I said ‘drunk,’ his face lit up, and he grabbed me and hugged me and said ‘Me, too!’ And be damned if he didn’t have half a Pinch bottle under his apron,

“So then, we got in the Cad and watched the fire and butchered the Pinch. What he’d left. The place didn’t burn badly, just a lot of decor and the kitchen wiped out. And there were some fur coats and so on that they were going to be liable for. Just for the record, his name was Tibor Telredy, and the place was called Ungaria, Goulash Our Specialty. Telredy was a Hungarian Freedom Fighter who’d gone into his family pretty deep to set up the place; his mother did the cooking, his father played violin and so on, besides their life savings on the line. He just hadn’t had anything left over for insurance.