Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“Thanks, Doctor. If it works on me, it’ll work for anybody. I can get blistered looking at a colored photograph of a sunset.”

Aigan hurried along on his short legs, his sandals slapping the terrazzo, catching up with Burt Lesser and Leroy. She turned and watched the three of them. Doc was an affable little man. Burt was a neighbor. Leroy Shannard had been Van’s attorney, and he had been very understanding and helpful when he had handled Van’s estate. Van had designed Doc’s home. All three men had been at Van’s funeral.

“Miss?” a voice was saying. “Miss?”

She turned and saw a man standing in front of her desk. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“All I want is to rent a box like to put something important in, Miss.”

“You’ll want to talk to Mrs. Harper,” she said. “The lady with the white hair behind that counter over there to your right, sir.”

As she watched Mrs. Harper greet the man and give him an application form, she thought, All I want is to rent a box like to hide in for a while. I don’t want to think about the kind of a world where men like Aigan and Shannard and Lesser could know something about what is happening to Dial Sinnat, and approve of it.

When it was time to go to lunch and Jimmy had not yet appeared, she waited five minutes into her short time allowed and then went back across the street, hoping he would show up before she had to return to work.

“I remember you, Mr. Wing,” Ernest Willihan said. “You interviewed me a long time ago when you were still in school, a reporter for a school paper. You reported the interview accurately and still managed to make me sound like an idiot. I predicted a newspaper career for you at that time. What brings you to St. Pete?”

Willihan was a brown and totally bald man in his forties. The tilt of his eyes and the baldness gave him a slight Oriental flavor. They talked in a small untidy office with a single large window overlooking a long concrete wharf owned by Stormer and Willihan — Marine Research and Development. Willihan’s smile was inverted and his eyes were bright with amusement.

“Maybe I ought to do a feature on this setup, Mr. Willihan. What happens to public-school science teachers.”

“You could get some of your material from your boss down there, Ben Killian. We’ve done some work for him. Tank tests on experimental hull designs. His little boat works there has done some fascinating things. It isn’t commercial, of course. If you are interested in us, we wear two hats. We’re an independent testing outfit for small boats, motors and boating devices. That’s the bread and butter. Also, we are developing a few ideas of our own. That’s feast or famine.”

“What kind of ideas?”

“Right now we’re fiddling with a sonar rig for small boats which can be set to give a warning buzz when the bottom shoals to within X feet of what you need to float the boat, thirty to forty feet off your bow. When the bugs are out of it, we hope to license it to somebody who can knock the unit price down below five hundred bucks.”

“Sounds better than teaching.”

“There’s more money. There’s no politics. But I miss the kids. I tell myself someday I’ll go back into it. You hit me on a good day, Mr. Wing. Want a guided tour?”

“I’d like that, but I’ll have to take a rain check on it. I came to ask you about something else. We’re about to have a bay fill hassle down in Palm County.”

“What do they want to fill now?”

“Grassy Bay again.”

Willihan shook his head sadly. “Every place seems to have to make the same mistake, just as if it had never been made before. The fast buck. It’s an illusion, Wing. Can’t they come and see and understand what’s happened to St. Petersburg Beach and Clearwater? Or what’s happening to Bradenton and Sarasota? This whole coast used to be a shallow-water paradise. Spoiling it is so idiotic. A friend of mine made a very neat analogy about it. Once upon a time there was a mountain peak with a wonderful view, so that people came from all over to stand on top of the mountain and look out. The village at the foot of the mountain charged a dollar a head to all tourists. But so few of them could stand on top of the mountain at the same time, they leveled the top of the mountain to provide more room and increase the take. This seemed to work, so they kept enlarging the area on top of the mountain. Finally they had a place up there that would accommodate ten thousand people, but by then the mountain was only forty feet high, and suddenly everybody stopped coming to see the view. This convinced them people were tired of views, so in the name of Progress and a Tourist Economy, they turned the flattened mountain into a carnival area, and every night you could see the lights and hear the music for miles around. They still attracted customers, but it was the kind of people who like carnivals instead of the kind of people who like beauty.”

“There’s more people who like carnivals,” Jimmy said.

“A fact the beauty-lovers find it hard to stomach.”

“Anyhow, because of the pending battle, we want to be ready to run profiles of the key figures. I ran into some problems on one of them. She’s always in the middle of our conservation battles. Some people told me you might be able to give me the background that she won’t give. Doris Rowell.”

Willihan frowned at the wall over Jimmy’s head. He picked up a slide rule and began to toy with it. “As a newspaperman, Mr. Wing, I’d think you’d have come up against the fact that when people refuse to talk about themselves, there’s generally a reason.”

“As a newspaperman, Mr. Willihan, I resent historical blanks. I can’t leave them alone. It’s a compulsion.”

“You better leave this one alone.”

“I won’t, of course. I’ll keep digging. If you won’t talk about her, it will just take a little more time and effort. And if it’s anything discreditable, I might learn it from... a less sympathetic source than I think you are.”

“If she’s of value to the conservationists down there, Wing, and if you’re opposed to the fill, you’d just hurt your own cause by printing something which happened a long time ago.”

“It’s going to be a rough fight down there. If somebody else comes up with whatever it is you won’t tell me, I ought to be in a position to make it look better than they want it to look. She’s on the committee opposing the fill. Everybody on that committee is going to be under fire.”

Willihan swiveled his chair and looked out at the wharf. “It happened a long time ago and it seemed a lot more important then than it does now. I guess it would still seem important to a lot of people, though. She committed the ultimate academic sin, Wing, and was caught in the act and was thrown out of a world where she probably belonged. I might as well tell you about it. If you’ve traced it to me, you could discover the rest of it. It happened in 1939. I was a senior at Minnesota Polytech. She was on the faculty. She was married to Doctor Harris Rowell, but she used her maiden name for professional purposes. Dr. Doris Hegasohn. She’s Swedish. She’d done her undergraduate work at Stockholm, and gotten her master’s and doctor’s at Polytech. She and Rowell were both instructors on fellowships when they married. She was a damned interesting-looking woman, very dynamic and impatient and intellectually merciless. Rowell was a very frail, rather unearthly man, a brilliant scholar. Doris was a competent translator. By 1939 Rowell had been an invalid for four or five years. She was teaching classes, doing research, writing papers and taking care of her husband. Maybe it was too much of a strain. Maybe she was too ambitious. She was making a name for herself and fighting for a full professorship, which would have eased some of the financial strain on them. Rowell needed special treatment beyond what they could afford. That year a man from Budapest was a guest lecturer. One of his associates was engaged in the same area of research as Doris was. The papers he had published were not available in English. Hungarian was one of the languages in which she was reasonably competent as a translator of scientific documents. Once the guest lecturer got on the trail of what had happened, a special committee was appointed to investigate. They found out she had taken a really enormous amount of the Hungarian’s findings and published them as her own. They backtracked and found a long cribbed section in her doctoral thesis. By the time they were ready for a confrontation, Rowell was dying. There was a flurry in the newspapers. They rescinded her two graduate degrees, fired her out of the profession. It is the final crime in learned circles, stealing a man’s work and publishing it as your own. She made no attempt to defend herself. She immediately became a pariah. No one in university circles would care to have anything to do with the woman. Rowell died. There was insurance, and, I believe, a small income from her people. She ‘retired’ to Palm County. I saw her on the street and recognized her. It would have been strange if she had gone anywhere in the country and not have been recognized by one of us who were there at the time. It was one hell of a scandal, Wing. When I saw her she was becoming very fat, but I knew her.”