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  Castor frowned, tilted his head. “Just possibly …”

  “And you’ve been so busy you really haven’t had time to see how much of the stuff your people do is really necessary. People tend to do the things they like to do at the expense of more important things which should be done.”

  “I can’t really give the degree of supervision …”

  “I know that. Why don’t you just let me come around Monday and nose around your operation here and look at your records, and maybe I can come up with some recommendations to make things a little easier for you and give a little better service to the patients.”

  “I can’t budget anything at all for that.”

  Garver smiled upon him. “Just as a favor. And all I want from you, Mr. Castor, is your assurance that Mrs. Garver will be tended to with … just a little more diligence?”

  “Well, I …”

  Gus found the man’s soft plump hand and shook it strongly, and said, “It’s a deal, then!”

  As Garver walked to the parking area he was trying to remember the name of the man who had come up with the idea that every man is sooner or later elevated to that job which he is not competent to handle. Castor was the perfect example. Probably trained in nursing home and rest home administration. A competent and admirable second banana, but a disaster when put in charge. A hostile man, generating hostility in his staff, failure prone, riding the nursing home downhill to disaster. A nitpicker, pausing to pick his nit in the middle of the whirlwind. That was the kind you had to be able to identify and hold back, hold them in that ultimate slot they could manage.

  Other men, and he remembered Sam Harrison once more, could never be content with second place.

  Speak for yourself, Gus, he thought, as he unlocked his car. Another one like Sam Harrison. Perfectly willing to tell Mr. Castor how to run his nursing home. Tell the mayor how to run the city. Correct the management defects of God’s administration of the universe.

  Garver is an old goat, he decided. Or an old horse out to pasture, rather, aching for the weight of the rock sled.

  It will get better attention for Carolyn, but that is a rationalization. You itch to run something, administer something, manage something, because you did it all your life and you are better at it right now than in your so-called peak years. Retirement is a strange irony. A curious waste of training and talent.

  And that, perhaps, accounts for some of the irritability of these old retired men. They are patronized, ridiculed and shoved around by self-important clerks, by men they would never have hired back in the real world.

  But this is the real world, isn’t it?

  Never, said a loud voice in the back of his skull.

  He got into his gray Toyota wagon and drove slowly back out onto Fiddler Key, through the late bright afternoon of July. Between the gulf-side condominiums and apartment houses he could squint into the sunlight and see the sun-brown throngs on the broad white beach, with kites and lotion, towels and Frisbees, with kids and koolers, blisters and beer, tubular chairs and sunglasses. Small waves lifted from the glassy flat, humping as they neared the beach, then curling and slapping at the broken shells and the swift-legged shore birds.

  The tall buildings made oblongs of shade across Beach Drive. Traffic was heavy and slow. The several years of heavy construction of the high-rise buildings had broken the road up. The shoulders were crumbled, and the holes had been patched with asphalt over and over again. It was becoming increasingly difficult to turn left from one of the parking areas onto Beach Drive, or to turn left off Beach Drive into an apartment entrance. Bikers with their high red flags pedaled past the clogged traffic as a car waited a chance to turn, blocking all those behind it.

  Backwards, he thought. Full speed ahead backwards. Things used to be delivered: milk, butter, eggs. Milkman made a hundred and fifty stops. Now a hundred and fifty cars have to chug to the convenience stores. Trouble with the engineering mind is an infatuation with simple logic. And you, Guthrie Harmon Garver, are just another old fart, yearning for the past, deploring the present.

  He wished he could find a time warp, so handy for the writers of science fiction. A permeable membrane, a momentary resistance, then penetration into one of the places of his past. Toyota transformed to one of those noisy durable old trucks on the mountain roads of Peru, the Garver body transformed to the elastic, tireless toughness of those years. He would be driving to that grass strip where A1 would use all of it before yanking the little airplane over the treetops, and then it would be all downhill to the coast, catch Pan Am’s tin goose, and be home forty hours and a lot of stops later, to the soft perfumed haven of Carolyn’s happy arms.

  He drove past Golden Sands and went on to the mall, where he would buy the groceries and supplies written on the list in his shirt pocket. And he wondered, for the hundredth time, if it would be possible to bring Carrie back to the apartment, possible for him to give her the nursing care she required. And if he should do it, even if he could. As the doctor had said, she was a healthy woman. That servitude, once begun, would last through whatever years he had left. And then what would become of her?

  17

  ON A SUNDAY MORNING Martin Liss sat with Lew Traff, Benjie Wannover, Cole Kimber and Drusilla Bryne in the small conference room off Lew Traff’s office on the top floor of the Athens Bank and Trust Company building. Because it was Sunday the computer had cut the air conditioning back to eighty. The men were in short sleeves. Drusilla wore a pale blue tennis dress. All the overhead fluorescence was on, shining down through the plastic honeycomb. The tabletop was stacked with piles of papers. It was a little after eleven. They had been going since eight.

  Marty said, “Okay. I am not going to thank you for breaking your asses getting this all set up this last two months because in the first place it is going to make you a lot of money and in the second place I have been going at it as hard as any one of you. But what I do not care to see at this point in time is any kind of goof that is going to wreck the timing, so let’s hit the high spots one more time. Benjie?”

  “Okay, I set up the books on the Letra Corporation. Hoo, boy, some strange books! We got in—I mean Letra got in—a $13,550,000 loan from Equity Mortgage Management Shares at ten percent. Equity prepaid interest back to EMMS, $1,355,000. The $550,000 less $55,000 interest, equaling $495,000, went into the Tropic Towers Division of Letra. It got dispersed as follows: $100,000 to Jerry Stalbo for his interest, $119,300 to West Federated Savings and Loan to pay up the back interest, $22,000 legal fees, title and so on. That leaves Letra with title to Tropic Towers, with $253,700 cash working capital in the Tropic Towers Division, and owing $550,000 on a ten percent note to EMMS, interest paid for eleven months in advance, and owing West Federated one point two million at eight percent, and we negotiated a one-year moratorium on principal and interest payments on that one when we took up the back interest. I haven’t done the feasibility on it, but when we multiply out the seventy-two unsold apartments by $24,300 we get the $1,750,000 owed. That’s $6,250 below the average price he’s had on them. And—”

  “Work out the feasibility with the idea I want to be out of that project in the next twenty minutes, if possible. Get to the big one.”

  “Right. After paying one year interest in advance, the Harbour Pointe Division of Letra had $11,700,000 left. Out of that Letra bought from Marliss Corporation all the plans, documents, permissions, plus a very small allowance for overhead for $131,000. From you personally, Marty, Letra bought the option on the Silverthorn tract for $1,028,000 then closed on the tract for the additional $1,252,000, for total land acquisition price of $2,280,000, for the land, almost $163,000 an acre.”

  Marty glanced at Lew in question, and Lew Traff said, “Yes, we’ve got the arm’s-length offers for the land on file, from important people you don’t know personally and never met. The price is in line—or used to be—for land on the water zoned for high rise. But that price cuts into the expected profits according to the old feasibili
ty studies Benjie and Cole worked out.”

  “So does that interest rate,” Benjie said darkly. “Anyway, after I advanced half a million to Cole here, of which he had to advance two hundred thousand to Marine Projects on the dredging—”

  “I didn’t advance it. I escrowed it,” Cole said.

  “Whatever. Anyway, I had enough left to buy eight and a half million in certificates of deposit from Fred Hildebert downstairs. I staggered them according to Cole’s estimates of when he’d need advances against construction, on percentage of completion. We’ll make back about four hundred thousand dollars in interest on those CDs this first year. The second year will be the zinger, when we have to pay one point three million in interest to Sherman Grome and make back only about two hundred thousand on the remaining CDs. And so, down the road, we better be selling apartments like wild cakes or we are in deep trouble.”

  “Will Fred take the mortgages on the apartments?”

  “Yes, and apply the proceeds directly to the EMMS loan, with the usual discounts. That is, if we sell any apartments.”

  “You’re very funny today,” Marty said, mopping the front and naked half of his skull. “Now you can be funny, Cole. Where do you stand?”

  Kimber grinned and laced big fingers behind his neck. “What I have to do is cut back to an average cost of fifty-one thousand an apartment, that cost to cover everything: pools, roads, drainage, yacht basin, tennis and so on. I’ve taken out two million in costs without changing it enough so we have to go back for new permits. I cut back on the specs everywhere I could. It isn’t first class anymore, Marty. I don’t think they’ll move at the price structure you’ve got to have. So I am now playing hard ball with my old buddies. Every week I lay the bills onto Benjie and he draws my check and the check is good and it includes my cost plus percent, or I pull my crews that same day and walk. If I was dealing with the Marliss Corporation it might be a little different. But, in these times, not a lot different.” He shrugged, popped a match with his thumbnail and relighted his skinny cigar. He was rangy, leathery, sun-baked and virile, like a rodeo performer in a cigarette ad. “No hard feelings?” he said.

  “No, no,” Marty said impatiently. “Who blames you? Now, once again, Lew, what I want from you is a rundown on all the permissions and I want your assurance nobody can put a stick in the wheels.”

  “Don’t get the idea there isn’t going to be some screaming. There is. Lots of it. But everything was properly done. I’ll go to court on any of it, and I’ll successfully fight any injunction to shut us down. I went over it all last night with Denniver. The big thing on our side is that construction is falling off so bad, nobody really wants to kill this kind of big new project.”

  “The ecology freaks?” Kimber asked.

  “They’ll be the loudest,” Traff said. “When does Herb move in?”

  “He’ll hit there with all his big yellow machines next Saturday morning. Saturday because the government is all closed down for the weekend. Mike’s outfit, Marine Projects, should have the dredge, barges and draglines in place about the same time.”

  Marty nodded and closed his eyes and pursed his lips. Everything seemed to be all right, but it didn’t feel quite right. There was less excitement than he had anticipated. A lot of the risk had gone out of it. And a lot of the fun. He had his personal million in capital gains. By hard scrambling he had managed to short three blocks of EMMS shares, eight thousand, five thousand and three thousand. Sixteen thousand shares. He had dumped three hundred and twenty thousand into his margin account to finance that short position. His brokers hadn’t been able to find any more to borrow. It had faded to eighteen dollars on the big board, giving him a thirty-thousand paper profit so far. He was dimly amused to be playing Sherman Grome with that strange man’s money.

  “Marty?” Benjie asked.

  “Yes?”

  “I got to start repricing this whole thing with Cole here and his purchasing guy, and I ought to start today.”

  “Meeting adjourned.”

  Marty walked slowly back to his office with Drusilla. He had her bring her book into his office. “It’s getting hotter,” he said.

  She pulled her dress away from her body. “Horrible.”

  “Look, I won’t keep you. What you should do, I want you to write that up as if it was a meeting of the officers of Letra. Lewis Traff, C.E.O., presiding. Put in the reports and make up the motions and all that shit, and then have Lew sign it and you sign it and put it in the minutes book, okay?”

  “Surely.”

  “Do I have to tell you what to put in and what to leave out?”

  “I wouldn’t think so, love. I’ll run you a copy just in case.”

  “What have you got planned for today?”

  “Well … a light lunch and then I’ve got a tennis lesson.”

  “You shouldn’t try to play tennis in heat like this, Dru. I’m not kidding. People fall over dead.”

  She slapped herself on the haunch. “I do love the heat. It melts this off ever so much faster. What are you going to do?”

  “Float around in my pool. Then she’s got people coming in for drinks and we go out to the club for dinner.”

  She lifted her notebook, raised one eyebrow in question.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “You don’t have to do these now. It’ll give you something to start on tomorrow morning. This is to Stalbo, Penthouse A, Tropic Towers. Dear Jerry. Reference our conversation Friday morning, I want to confirm what I told you at that time. I was given an information copy of the termination agreement between your company and Equity Mortgage Management Shares, as signed by you and Mr. Sherman Grome, duly notarized and recorded and so on. I need not remind you that this severed any relationship between you and the Tropic Towers project. I realize we have known each other a long time, but that does not mean that I can provide you with gratis housing at Tropic Towers. If it were up to me, Jerry, certainly I would do you the favor. But I am advised that to avoid clouding the agreement, you must vacate Penthouse A no later than the last day of this month. Naturally, if you wish to buy that condominium penthouse as a private person, that would be fine with me. I notice that on your last sales list it is down at ninety-five five. I also note that it is the display apartment and was furnished by Epic Interiors out of Tampa. A search of the records indicates that they still own the furnishings, and a suitable arrangement will be made with them to either remove the items or purchase them for a mutually agreeable figure. I will expect you to phone me after you receive this letter and tell me if you will vacate as requested, or if you will purchase. If you will purchase, I must have the necessary documents signed and in hand by the last day of this month. Make it cordially yours, I guess. Put it in paragraphs. Dru, I think what happened to that son of a bitch, he tried to be some kind of Hefner.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As soon as it looked like he was in real trouble and would maybe lose his ass, that second wife of his, that Irene with the big boobs, that barracuda about one year older than his oldest kid, she gets a smart lawyer and moves fast and puts a lock on liquid assets before he can dump them into the company to try to save it. He has to move out of the house, so he moves into Tropic Towers. So he turns that penthouse into a permanent house party. Booze all day and food brought in and stereo rock and some of those tough little teenage hookers that hang around the beach. It seems as if a man starts getting bad ideas, they gradually get worse instead of better. Maybe he’s trying not to think about how he can’t sell those apartments and can’t pay the interest on the loans. Finally he gets a dose. What did he expect from those hustlers? He gets it cured with antibiotics. When he tries again, he can’t get it up. Anxiety, I guess. Plus being pretty well burnt out with all the games and fun. When the food and booze stops, all the young boys and girls go elsewhere, but a housewife he has hired to sell apartments moves in with him and puts him on grass to cure the anxiety, and pretty soon he can make out with her, but then he has what he thinks is a he
art attack while he’s in the saddle and that turns him off again and she moves out.”

  “Love, who told you all this?”

  “Who told me? Jerry Stalbo told me when I went up there to see him Friday. He wouldn’t meet me anywhere. He had big draperies drawn across the windows. He looked like hell. He kept crying every once in a while. He looked like a dead man. What he wanted me to do was talk Grome into letting him come back into Tropic Towers for a piece of the action. A piece of nothing. I can’t fool with Jerry. He’s going down the tube so fast you wouldn’t believe it. It is a terrible job of design and construction and planning, but the penthouse looks okay, what I could see of it. Look, honey, you want the penthouse? Same terms as when you were living in Seven-E in Golden Sands.”

  “Is there a pool? I know there is, but is it usable?”

  “It was in use Friday when I was there looking around. And the tennis courts look okay.”

  “As soon as you get that dreary little man out, I’ll move in. Thank you! Were there more letters?”

  “There were, but the hell with it. I got to get out of here. Look at this shirt. Like I’d been under water. Get out of here, kid. And don’t work too hard in the hot sun.”

  18

  IN THE FIRST GRAY LIGHT of an early Saturday morning, George Gobbin drifted in and out of light sleep. Neither he nor Elda liked to sleep in the false chill of air conditioning, even in this torrid month of July, when, as George liked to tell his new neighbors, it was “almost as hot as July in Iowa.”

  By experimentation they had found it best to close off the bedroom, leave the rest of Apartment 3-C air-conditioned, with the thermostat set at 75 degrees, and open the windows which faced toward the jungle behind Golden Sands. A small rubber-bladed soundless fan on the low chest of drawers against the foot of her bed kept the warm moist air moving. The early bird-sounds slid him back into a dream of the Iowa farm. He was small. He was crawling through the tall corn on black earth that muddied his hands and knees. It was cool and shadowed under the corn leaves, below a breeze that rattled their broad green curves. He heard a roaring grinding sound and in a sudden sweat of fear he crawled through the corn to the edge of a slope and looked up a slope to where a stone road crested the hill. With a louder roaring the lead tank of the column came over the ridge, black cross on the turret that turned slowly from side to side, the slender deadly 88 searching, searching.…