A Deadly Shade of Gold Page 5

  She pushed herself away. "You think you can make it that easy?"

  "Not really"

  "Don't try then," she said, and ran into the bath room and slammed the door. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself some more coffee. I went back to the magazine article I was reading. A southern pusgut who fancied himself a liberal was patting the coons on their burry heads by asking them to live up to the responsibilities of conditional oquality, the implication being that his white brethren were so doing. I would have liked to have sent that jolly racist crawling across bad terrain with a couple of skilled Negro infantrymen giving him covering fire. I decided that I wouldn't want to marry his daughter, and threw the magazine aside just as Nora came into the kitchen, taking small steps. I got the orange juice from the refrigerator and handed it to her.

  She sat at the table and took several small sips and said, "I'm pretty flippy today Trav. Don't listen too hard to anything I say."

  "Shaj took off at quarter to nine. She said the shop is under control."

  "Bless her. And you too, my friend."

  She had not put on makeup. Her face had a new dry papery texture, as though it would crackle to the touch.

  I told her about Branks. I gave her the same detailed report I'd given Shaj.

  "Can you handle it?" I asked.

  "I guess so. You mean, on the level that he was nothing more than a friend who'd been away. Yes. I can manage. But why?"

  "Maybe I don't want him to know that we have a very intense personal interest in finding out who...."

  "Who killed him. Don't hunt for easier words. Use the brutal ones. Let them sting. Why shouldn't he know we have that personal interest, Trav?"

  "Because we don't want him interfering with any looking we may want to do. If it is personal. If it is intense, we want a part of it, don't we?"

  She put the empty juice glass down.

  "Do you know something about it?"

  "I think so."

  "Did you tell that man?"

  "No.

  I cannot describe the look on her face then, a hunting look, a merciless look, a look of dreadful anticipation. It reminded me that the worst thing the Indians could do to their enemy prisoners was turn them over to the women. "I want to keep it very very personal," she whispered.

  "Then don't give Branks the slightest clue. He's a sharp man."

  "If I thought there was no point to it, if it was just some murderous animal trying to rob cabins...."

  "More than that."

  She locked icy fingers on my wrist. "Then what? The thing he had to take care of. What?"

  "Later, Nora. It will keep."

  I saw her accept that promise. I had polarized her, with one of the most ancient and ugly emotions. It was irresponsible of me, perhaps. I plead a shining motive. Without direction she had nothing but pain, loss, grief. I gave her a bullet to bite on while they amputated her heart. It is a temporizing world, fading into uncertain shades of grey, so full of complexities all worth and value are questioned, hag-ridden by the apologistics of Freud, festering with so many billions of us that every dab of excellence has to be spread so thin it becomes a faint coat of grease, indistinguishable from the Eva-Last plastics. In this toboggan ride into total, perfectly adjusted mediocrity, the great conundrum is what is worth living for and what is worth dying for. I choose not to live for the insurance program, for creative selling, for suburban adjustments, for the little warm cage of kiddy-kisses, serial television, silky wife-nights, zoning squabbles.

  But what is the alternative? I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism-all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the very concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them.

  All that remains for the McGee is an ironic Knighthood, a spavined steed, second class armor, a dubious lance, a bent broadsword, and the chance, now and again, to lift into a galumphing charge against capital E Evil, his brave battle oaths marred by an occasional hysterical giggle. He has to carry a very long banner because on it has been embroidered, by maidens galore, The Only Thing in the World Worth a Damn is the Strange, Touching, Pathetic, Awesome Nobility of the Individual Human Spirit. The end of the banner trails on the ground way the hell behind his horse, and people keep stepping on it.

  So in polarinzing the lady, I had at least given hera simplification she could live with and, if the need should arise, die for. But when I looked into the depths of her dark eyes, there was something there which made me wish I hadn't pushed that particular button. I had created something which perhaps I could not control.

  Branks phoned at eleven-fifteen and came by at quarter to twelve.

  She had dressed by then. Her heart said black, but she dressed in pink, a pleated skirt, an angora sweater, a mouth red for polite smiling.

  Just a friend, she said. And it seemed like a kick to go visit him at such a crazy hour. But it was the sort of thing he would do. And Beanie had phoned her because she knew Nora used to run around with the guy sometimes. And McGee was an old friend too. It was just for kicks. Welcome home. You know. But, God, who ever thought we'd walk in on anything like that! Oh, yes, I went all to pieces completely. I never saw anything so horrible in my whole life, never. Maybe I should have stayed there, but I couldn't, really.

  Branks thanked her and thanked me again. He said that Beanie had said Taggart was alone when she had seen him, eating at the counter. The owner of the cabins, who ran the gas station also, had seen Taggart drive out about seven and when he had closed at nine, Taggart had not returned.

  "We'll find him," Branks said with absolute confidence. "You'll see it in the paper one of these days." As he drove out, Nora's casual smile crumpled. She clung to me, asking if she had done all right. She got a case of hiccups. I patted her and said she had done fine. Just fine, honey. Slowly, with a labored effort, she pulled herself together, a nerve at a time. It was a valiant thing to watch.

  "F-Find out about services for him, Trav. All that."

  "Courtesy of the county."

  "No!"

  "Honey, just what difference does it make to Sam now?"

  She lit a cigarette, her hand shaking. "I've been tucking money away, for the time when he'd come back. He came back. What do I do with the money? It doesn't mean anything."

  "What do you want to do? Buy a plot? And bronze handles. Hire a hall? For two mourners?"

  "I just... want it to be nice."

  "All right. We'll do what we can, in a quiet way, Iike a hundred dollar way. On top of the county procedure, so that if Branks should ever wonder or ask, we took up a collection. Flowers, and a lengthy reading at the graveside, and a small marker."

  I stalled her on the other until after the small ceremony. Six of us there, under the beards of Spanish moss blowing wildly in a crisp wind on a day of cloudless blue. Shaj, Nora and me, a pastor and two shovelers. The wind tore the old words out of his mouth and flung them away, inaudible.

  The single floral offering bothered me, a huge spray of white roses, virginal, as a huge bride might carry. Death is the huge bride, and the night of honeyinoon is eternity. The stone would be placed later, one just big enough for his name, date of birth, date of death.

  We took her home, bleached with grief, moving like an arthritic. She was pounds lighter than on the night we had gone to see him. Shaj hastened back to the shop. I set out a gigantic slug of brandy for Nora Gardino. Then I told her everything I knew.

  Her numbness turned slowly to anger. "That is all you know? What does that mean? What can we do about that, for God's sake?"

  "He wanted me to help him, and then because of you he changed his mind and decided to make a deal with them."

  "But you've let me think it was... someb
ody we could find right here, right now!"

  "There's something to go on."

  "But how far?"

  "I don't know how far. I don't know until I try. If you don't like it, give up right now, Nora. I've gotten into things with less leverage than I have on this one."

  "I'll never give up!"

  "Do you want it all handed to you, wrapped and tied and labeled?"

  "I didn't say that. You made me believe...."

  "That it would be easy? That doesn't sound like you."

  "But.... "

  "Nora, do you want to play or don't you? It can be long and expensive, and it can all come to nothing, or it could get somebody killed. I have a hunch two will work out better than one on this thing, less conspicuous. I'll pick up my end of the tab. But one thing clear, right now. You take orders. And if we make a recovery, of what Sam said was his, if we are convinced by then that it was his, then we split it down the middle."

  "That's what you're in this for?"

  "Certainly. That's why I said no thanks, when Sam invited me in."

  "I'm sorry, Trav."

  "I can tell you one thing. From what we know right now, if we handle ourselves well, if you follow orders, we can get close."

  Her right hand turned into a claw. "I would like that."

  "Close is all I can promise. Remember this, Nora. Sam was tough and quick and smart. You saw what he got out of it."

  "Don't. But... where is the starting point?"

  "Finding out just what it was that he thought was his. That's my job. While I'm doing that, you get Shaj set up so she can run the store on her own."

  Professor Warner B. Gifford was a fat, sloppy, untidy young man. He was not the tenant the architects had in mind when they had designed that particular building for Florida Southwestern. The building, I guess, was for dynamic scholastic living, for Communications courses, whatever they are, for machines to grade multiple choice questions, for that curious union of Madison Avenue, the N.A.M., foundation monies and the education of the preadjusted young which successfully emasculates all the factors thereof. It was a building to house the men who could turn out fabulous technicians with that contempt for every other field of human knowledge which only the truly ignorant can achieve. It was a place to train ants to invent insecticides.

  But Warner B. Gifford was unaware of that. They had given him a weatherproof cube to work in, and he had managed to make it look and smell like the back room of a London hock shop. He goggled vacantly through thick lenses in frames mended with Band-Aids. He committed all the small offenses he had no best friends to tell him about. He worked at a rickety little table amid piles of paper and unidentifiable junk, rank, scurfy, soiled and absolutely unconcerned with everything in the world except the expertise of taking one tiny fragment of the remote past and fitting it into another little fragment, and thereby filling that tiny gap in the continuity of the history of the human animal. If, in his total career, he could infect two or three other individuals with that same compulsion, I had the feeling he would be worth a round dozen of the tailored golfers who gave brilliant lectures which could have been printed intact in the Reader's Digest, and probably were.

  It had taken two hours to thread my way through the labyrinth of exotic specialties and find my way to him.

  "A what?" he said. "A what?"

  I found myself raising my voice, enunciating clearly, as though he were deaf. I described the little golden figurine with greatest care, and he looked pained at my layman's language. He grunted up off his straight chair and went over to a corner full of books and got down on all fours, giving the impression of a large sad dog digging a hole. He brought a big book back, sat down, riffled the pages, turned it to face me and laid a dirty finger against a photographic plate. "Like this, possibly?"

  "Very much like that, Professor."

  He went into a discourse, pitched in a penetrating monotone, and it took me a long awed time to realize that he was still speaking English.

  I stopped him and said, "I don't understand any of that."

  He looked pained and decided he had to speak to me in Pidgin English. We both needed a course in Communications. With each other.

  "Eight hundred years old. Um? Fired clay. National Museum in Mexico City. Gold is rare. Um? Spaniards cleaned it out, melted it into ingots, shipped it to Spain. Indian cultures moving, changing. Some used gold. Ceremonial. Open veins in mountains. Um? Low melting point. Easily worked. No damn good for tools. Pretty color. Masks, et cetera. Then conflict of cultures. Changed the meaning of gold. Cleaned them out, hunted it down. Torture, et cetera. Gold and silver. Um?"

  "Then there isn't much left?"

  "Museums. Late finds. Overlooked. Uh... less archeological significance than one would think. Have the forms in clay, carvings, bone, et cetera. Duplication. Um?"

  "But a museum would be interested in the thing I described?"

  "Of course. Highly. Not scholarship. Museum traffic. Publicity."

  "What about a collection of twenty-eight little stattuettes like that, some bigger and some smaller, all goId, and from different places? Aztec, Inca, some East Indian."

  He shrugged. "Ancient man made little ceremonial figures. Handy materials. Ivory, bone, wood, stone, clay, gold, silver, iron, lead. Gods, spirits, demons, fetishes, from very crude to very elegant. Merely being of gold, it would not be a museum collection. A museum could assemble perhaps such a showing from other specific collections. Egypt. China. Not very professional."

  "Then such a collection would be a private collection?"

  "Possibly. Pack rats. Something shiny. No scholarship. Um? Acquisition. Most unprofessional. Hampers the work of professionals. Probably very valuable items all over the world, locked away. Valuable keys. Connectives. Take Egypt. Thieves looted tombs, sold to tourists. Same in Mexico. All changed now. But damage done. They should will collections to museums. Let the professionals sort them out."

  "But such a collection would be valuable?"

  "In money? Um? Oh yes."

  "Who would know if such a collection exists, Professor?"

  Again he went searching among the chaotic debris. He dug into a low cupboard. He took out correspondence files, put them back. Finally he extracted a letter from a folder, tore the letterhead from it and put it back. He brought me the letterhead. Borlika Galleries, 511 Madison Avenue, New York.

  "They might know," he said. "Supply collectors. Hunt for things on assignment. Special items. Jades, African sculpture, ancient weapons, bronze artifacts, all periods, all cultures. Purveyors to pack rats. Sometimes they deal with museums, but not when they can get more elsewhere. Buy collections, break them up, sell items to the rich. Hunt all over the world. They might know. Business on an international scale."

  He was bent to his lonely work again before I had reached the door of his office. My car was a quarter mile away, parked at the Administration Building. It was dusk on the big busy sprawl of campus. By now all the young heroes would be showering, savagely hungry, after all the intricate business of learning how best to drop an inflated ball through a hoop and net. The class day was over, and all the jolly business of the evening charged the air with expectancy. Gaggles of soft young girls hurried by making little cawing sounds at each other.

  I marveled at the strange and tenuous link between them and Professor Warner B. Gifford. We are doing something wrong. We haven't found out what it is yet. But somehow we have turned all these big glossy universities into places which the thinking young ones, the mavericks, the ones we need the most, cannot endure. So all the campuses are in the hands of the unaware, the incurably, unconsciously second class kids with second class minds and that ineffably second class goal of reasonable competence, reasonable security, reasonable happiness.

  Perhaps this is the proper end product to people a second class world. All mavericks ever do, anyway, is make the sane, normal, industrious people feel uncomfortable. They ask the wrong questions. Such as-What is the meaning of all this. So weed
them out. They are cultural mistakes. Leave the world to the heroes and the semi-heroes, and their rumpy little soft-eyed girls, racing like lemmings toward the warm sea of the Totally Adjusted Community.

  Miss Agnes seemed glad to take me away from there. We made our stately way through snitty little clots of sports cars and Detroit imitations thereof, and were soon whispering toward home, through a hundred miles of cold February night.

  Six

  GRIEF IS a strange tempest. Nora Gardino, her strong and handsome face becoming mask-like, bobbed about in her own storm tides, supporting herself with whatever came to hand. But she found that her sense of purpose provided the most useful buoyancy. And as I was the instrument through which she expected to achieve a bloody vengeance, she came running to me whenever she felt as if she were drowning. She thought my methods far too indirect. She wanted immediate confrontations. She had no patience with research. She wanted us to go at once to Puerto Altamura and start slamming around. She threatened to go by herself. I explained to her that it worked on television dramas and in muscular movies, but in the far drearier vistas of life itself, a man could pry nothing open unless he had a pry bar. And knowledge is that pry bar. Strangers do not suddenly open up because you confuse them. Confusion leads to a cautious silence. Strangers talk when they know that you have facts. They talk when it is in their interest to try to convince you your facts are wrong.