Джон Макдональд - The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything

So what are the ethics? Go along with it? Tell Betsy when I get a clue? Do I owe her anything? Maybe. It depends on how accurate she was. A little free ride shouldn’t corrode the soul.

But how much corrosion is implicit in Charla Maria Markopoulo O’Rourke? Suddenly he realized he could readily check it out, indirectly at least. If Charla and Joseph were as influential as they seemed to be, and as powerful as Betsy implied, the Miami papers would have something about them in the morgue.

“Darling!” Charla said, sliding into the booth to sit facing him, reaching across to take his hand in hers. “Wherever have you been?” She wore a blue and white cotton print cut alarmingly low, and a totally frivolous hat. He felt the heat of her hands through white gloves. She stared at him so earnestly, so glowingly, so heatedly, he almost turned around to see who she could be looking at directly behind him. It was a dark corner of the grill, a paneled booth, a lamp with an orange shade. The impact of her made her seem larger than life, a face seen by courtesy of Eastman color when you sit too close to the screen. The nose was snubbed, the cheeks broad, the gray-green eyes slightly Asiatic, the hair milky, heavy, the shade of old ivory, mouth broad, lips heavy and slightly parted and delicately moist, disclosing the small, white, even teeth.

“Just — uh — errands,” he said.

She released his hands, pouted at him. “I’ve been forlorn. I’ve missed you terribly. I even wondered if you’d been waylaid by my poor little confused niece.”

“Uh... no.”

“That’s good, dear. She may try to tell you some of her mad nonsense. I should warn you in advance, I guess. I feel disloyal telling you these things about her because, after all, she is the daughter of one of my half-sisters. I guess we should have realized we’d have a problem with her when she was expelled from that nice school in Switzerland. But she did seem so sweet, at fifteen. We did our best by her, Kirby, but she has — a very weak grasp on reality. Possibly we should have institutionalized her. But — family, you know — one keeps trying. Actually, that’s why I had her come here this time. More bad reports. But it might not do any good. She seems totally rebellious.”

“Bad reports?”

“We try to keep track of her, discreetly. Darling Kirby, I don’t want to bore you with family problems. But she is really terribly — unstable. She acts out her own fantasies.”

“Oh?”

“She has accused me and Joseph of truly horrible behavior, and I haven’t known whether to laugh or cry. Unscrupulous men have taken advantage of the way she seems compelled to act out the dreams in her strange mind.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She seems very erratic this time. She may approach you, Kirby. And she may try to make you a key figure in one of her fantasies. And when she does, she will probably throw herself at you.”

“Throw herself at me?”

“It will just be another little drama she is constantly writing for herself in her mind. If it should happen, I can’t tell you what to do. You seem like a most decent person, Kirby. If you refuse to play the male lead opposite her paranoid heroine, she’ll probably find someone who will. She’s reasonably attractive. Maybe it would be best if you — humored her. You would be gentle, wouldn’t you?”

“B-But—”

“Thank you so much, dear. Just indulge her. Say what she wants to hear. I’ll be trying to find another opening for her. I have some good friends in the entertainment world. Don’t you think it is better for her to be free than to be shut away somewhere?”

“I guess so.”

“One doctor suggested that it is a sublimation of something she does not want to face. By accusing me of vicious, horrible, incredible things she seems to ease her own feelings of guilt. To her I am some sort of dream figure living amidst monstrous conspiracies. Joseph and I joke about it sometimes, but it is a heartbreaking kind of humor. We’re really not complicated. Perhaps we like to live too well, but we can afford it — even though we are always being cheated somehow. And maybe you will be taking that worry off our minds, dear.”

“I haven’t really—”

“They gave you an impossible room and I made them change it. Tomorrow you and I are going shopping. I know exactly the sort of clothing you should be wearing. And that haircut is really tiresome if I may say so. It’s as if you are trying to sneak through life without being noticed, Kirby. And you have so much possibility. When I’m through with you, you’ll walk through the world as if you own it and women will turn to stare at you and their eyes will go wide and their little hands will get moist and they’ll make sly little plots to meet you.”

“I don’t think I exactly want that kind of—”

“You’ll relish it, believe me. Come on now, dear. Joseph will be waiting for us in the suite. We’ll have some drinks there, and the limousine will pick us up at seven-thirty and take us to a perfectly fabulous restaurant.”

By ten-thirty that evening, Kirby Winter found himself taking particular pains to enunciate clearly. And sometimes, if he closed one eye, he could keep Joseph in better focus.

“Nice of you to invite me on a cruise,” he said. “But I don’t want to feel—”

“Obligated?” Joseph cried. “Nonsense! It is our pleasure!”

Kirby carefully turned his head and said, “Where’d she go?”

“To freshen her make-up perhaps.”

“I don’t dance often, Joe. I didn’t mean to come down on her foot like that.”

“She forgave you.”

“But I keep remembering that scream.”

“She is just unusually sensitive to pain, Kirby. Her nerves are closer to the surface than most. But since she is equivalently sensitized to pleasure, I imagine it is a characteristic she would not willingly give up.”

“ ’Mazing woman,” Kirby said solemnly. “ ’Mazing.”

“I was just thinking, my boy, if you should feel you might be leading a parasitic life on the Glorianna , if it would offend your instincts, there is one project you might take on. And a worthwhile one I would say.”

“Like what?”

“You were close to Omar Krepps. A fantastic man, fantastic career. But the world knows little about him. He saw to that. I think it would be a rather nice gesture of devotion and respect, dear boy, if you busied yourself with a biography of him. Later we could get some professional to put it in proper shape for publication. Just think of all his quiet charities which will never be recorded unless you do it. And there might be a kind of poetic justice in it. It might make you a bit of money.”

“Interesting,” Kirby said.

“I imagine that for a project like that, you could gather up his personal papers, documents and records.”

“And bring them aboard, huh?”

“You’d be working aboard, would you not?”

“The mystery of Omar Krepps.”

“Might make rather a nice title, that.”

“Sometimes you sound English.”

“I did have some schooling in England.”

“You know, I bet you’d like to help me sort out those cases of personal records.”

“Is there that much!”

“Hell, yes.”

“I’d be happy to help, of course, if you need me.”

Kirby felt shrewd as a fox. “All in storage under my name at the Hotel Birdline. Cases of crud. Diaries.”

“I had no idea you had all that. You didn’t mention it the other night.”

“Forgot it.”

“When the Glorianna gets in, we can have it all brought aboard.”

“Oh sure.”

“Aren’t you acting a little strange, Kirby?”

“Me? Strange?” As he grinned the room tilted and then came slowly back. He felt reckless. “Joseph, old buddy, we’re all strange, each in our own little way. You, me, Charla and Betsy.”