Condominium Read online

  Noble Winney could only guess what his own fate would be if one of their agents became aware of the depth and scope of his research and the damning detail of his scrapbook files.

  He went through the New York Times and the rest of his incoming mail, clipping articles and using his Hilighter pens to color-code them in the margins, using combinations of colors: red for international, yellow for monetary, green for confirmation of prior facts on file, blue for new facts. He wrote the sources and dates in the margin and put the clips into the bin ready for filing.

  As he clipped various stories, Winney kept looking for one which would help prove a point to Henry Churchbridge in 6-G. He had been bringing Henry along slowly and carefully, logical step by logical step. Henry was like most of mankind, strangely content to think the world a place of random happenings, completely unconscious of the monstrous conspiracy which ruled the world. Henry had a good mind, a good education and wonderful access to the workings of American diplomacy all over the world, and so it was astonishing to Winney that Churchbridge should be so reluctant to accept the proofs.

  When Henry had begun to express astonishment and concern, and to read the photocopies of old clippings with mounting consternation, Noble Winney had become too confident of his pupil, and he had taken too big a step for Henry to accept and thus had nearly lost him.

  He had explained to Henry how it was possible to decode portions of the Old Testament to understand the prophecies. In Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39, instead of Israel, read Heartland of America wherever it says Israel. These chapters, he showed Henry, describe an attack on America by the Chinese and the Russians, called Gog and Magog, by means of paratroopers and airborne infantry coming over the North Pole and across Canada to land within the rough rectangle between Pittsburgh, Chicago, Omaha and Fargo. In fact, in chapter 39, Hamonah refers to Omaha. He had showed Henry how the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy is actually a concise and complete history of the United States, with verses 1 through 14 covering the period from 1607 to 1837. Starting with verse 15, by careful analysis one could see how, during the period from 1837 to 1861, the House of Rothschild had plotted and fomented the War between the States.

  Suddenly he had seen the look on Henry Churchbridge’s face, amusement and skepticism, and he stopped at once and changed the subject. But Henry had lost interest in the simpler aspects of the Conspiracy and was apparently quite anxious to get away from Noble Winney.

  Why did they always resist the true knowledge? It took a long, careful, painful time to make each convert, and some escaped before they could be converted, preferring to live in a fog of ignorance, unaware of the world around them.

  He found an item which would appeal to Henry. A coordinated national campaign by homosexual rights groups had been launched to limit or prevent the showing on ABC Television of a segment of Marcus Welby, M.D., dealing with the molestation of a fourteen-year-old boy by a male teacher. The executive director of the National Gay Task Force had said that the television play would reinforce old myths and play upon the apprehensions of parents at a time when homosexual-rights legislation was pending in the Congress and about twenty major cities. He reported that the campaign had induced three ABC stations to reject it for broadcast, and that they had persuaded four regular advertisers to withdraw for that episode. These were Bayer Aspirin, Listerine, Gallo Wine and Ralston Purina.

  Henry had seemed receptive to the proposition that the manners and morals and ethics of society could not possibly go downhill as fast as was happening without some hidden force at work. Now Henry could see from this clipping how the perverts were beginning to control network television, not only the programs but the advertisers as well. Henry could not help but be impressed.

  He clipped it, coded it and ran off copies on the A. B. Dick 625 Copier, taking pleasure from the way the carrier slid slowly across and then hastened back, dropping the duplicate in the tray, smelling pungently of toner.

  He vowed to take it very slowly with Henry, to bring him along step by step until at last he was clear-eyed: conscious of the reasons for the porn manuals in the best bookstores, for the weakening of all religions, for the collapse of marriage, for the corruption of children through the hidden messages in the textbooks provided by corrupt and venal state governments.

  When Sarah called him to lunch he took her a few of the more interesting photocopies to read, while he perused the most recent copy of the American National News-Herald. He was a soft, hulking, pallid man with gray hair, gray eyes and thin lips which were oddly, vividly red. His afflictions were severe dandruff, hemorrhoids, and abdominal walls of such fragility that after two hernia operations on each side he was able to avoid pain only by wearing a truss. He had worked as a civil servant, as an auditor for the State of Indiana, and during the final fourteen years before his retirement, his researches had become so engrossing and so time-consuming that his hours on the job seemed both unreal and pointless. Since retirement he was able to give his research program the full seventy to eighty hours a week that such intricate work required, if it were to be done well.

  Sarah Winney finished one of the clippings he had given her and slapped it down and said, “Well! We certainly know Congress is corrupt. That’s for sure.”

  “Eh? Oh, yes. That’s right.”

  “You know what I think? I think it’s the Jews in Washington. The president is too innocent about the Jews.”

  “Yes, dear,” Noble Winney said.

  “Is that a good book?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Am I bothering you, talking?”

  He stood up and wiped his mouth. “Well. Back to work.”

  “You ought to take longer for lunch, darling.”

  “Too much work, and too little time.”

  “You’ll make yourself sick if you keep it up.”

  “Don’t you worry about me, Sarah.”

  7

  THE HIGH SUN blazed down through the screening into the pool and patio area at the rear of the Fiddler Key bay-front home of Justin D. Denniver, appliance dealer (Don’t Miss the Deal at Denniver’s) and one of the five county commissioners of Palm County. A thick high hedge of punk trees made the backyard area completely private, screening the yard and pool area from the houses on either side. From the pool and patio area one could see the bay shore, some mangrove islands, the misty mainland and, nearby, Commissioner Denniver’s L-shaped dock and Commissioner Denniver’s nineteen-foot Mako, tarped and snugged close to the blocks of the twin davits mounted on the dock.

  In the silence of the early afternoon, a silence broken only by the thup-thup-thup of the lawn sprinkler system, the tiny drone of the pool filtration system and the distant bliss of a mockingbird three houses away, Lew Traff, Martin Liss’s lawyer and minor partner in several ventures, was engaged in lengthy and dogged copulation with Molly Denniver, the plump, pretty, giggly, fortyish wife of the Commissioner, upon a faded blue sun pad beside a pool as still as lime Jell-O.

  Mounted there upon her, he kept his eyes closed against the blinding glare of sun on white stone, glass and aluminum. Close at hand were the sounds of their effort, the moist lisping sounds of locked sweaty bodies, muffled thud of her hips against the sun pad, the whuffling, whinnying sound of her fevered breathing. Lew Traff felt like that man condemned for all eternity to roll a big boulder up a mountain. When they had made love the first time today, he had been too quick for her. She had not let enough time pass before manipulating him back to a sufficient stiffness to permit penetration. Now he felt engorged, swollen, irritated. His back ached. He wondered if he was going to get a bad sunburn on his white buttocks. There was little sense of pleasure in the frictive motion. From time to time she would grasp him convulsively, squeak, and snap like a bait shrimp. He felt glad somebody was having some fun. Not only was she having fun, she was also in the shade. His shade.

  From far off, from way back, he felt his own reluctant climax approaching. It was quick, meager, constricted and painful. He was gla
d to collapse upon her, his labors finished. She held him tightly, purring her gratitude, then wormed out from under him and rolled into the pool, splashing water onto him. He followed her in, relishing the feel of the water on his overheated body. They swam a couple of lengths and then he stood, winded, in water up to his waist, and looked down and saw that he had been congested for so long, very little diminution had occurred, giving him a fallacious look of readiness. Were she to misunderstand, he did not think he could endure any more of it. He climbed out and hurried to the borrowed swim trunks and pulled them on, tucking himself into unobtrusiveness.

  She got out of the pool and tugged herself into her yellow and white swim suit. They toweled and sat in big deck chairs under the shade of the roofed portion of the patio, each with a cigarette and a can of cold beer.

  “I wasn’t ever going to let it happen again, Lew.”

  “Well, I guess we got carried away, honey.”

  “Promise it won’t ever happen again.”

  “I promise.”

  This was her charade. He humored her, knowing the dependence of everyone on his own rationalization. He would call Molly next time or she would call him, and it would be about some legal or business matter, and she would say, “Hey, whyn’t you come over for a swim, hey?” This afternoon, or tomorrow morning, or tomorrow afternoon.

  So he would go over to 88 Bayview Terrace and park in the drive and go into the long low blue cinder-block house with the white tile roof, and go into the guest room and put on the borrowed trunks and pad out onto the patio and have a little swim. There would be some giggly little games of splash and tickle and chase, until finally he would peel her out of her suit in the shallow end, slip out of his trunks, hoist her out onto the sun pad and have at her. There was something to be said for her rationalization. In case of interruption, it was a lot quicker and easier to slip into swim togs and start swimming than to get entirely dressed and go out a side door. Also it gave her the chance to say to herself that it had not really been intentional. It had just sort of snuck up on them, in spite of promising each other it would never happen again.

  She had dark red curls, round green eyes and a fatty little mouth. Though she looked chubby, she was solid meat and hard heavy bone. She enjoyed golf, tennis, waterskiing, swimming, jogging, bicycling and lovemaking. She combined superb health, excellent reflexes and a tireless enthusiasm for all energetic pursuits. Lew Traff was thirty-four, lean, swarthy, languid, hairy and sardonic.

  Molly chugged her beer, beamed upon him and said, “It was pretty fabulous, huh? You like to have ruined me, lover.”

  “It was really great.”

  “But we’ve got to give it up, right? It just isn’t fair to Jus. He ever finds out, he’d kill us both, and you better believe it.”

  “How would he find out, Molly? One of the two of us would have to tell him, and it won’t be me.”

  “Golly, it wouldn’t be me either. Anyway, it’s never going to happen again, so we shouldn’t worry. From now on it’s just a memory we share between us, a very sweet memory.”

  He drew an icy line across the lower part of his chest with the bottom edge of his beer can and stared gloomily at his toes, his knobby ankles and his scrawny shins.

  “You bring it?” she asked.

  “Eh? Sure I brought it.”

  “Look, I didn’t have any lunch or anything, and I got a tennis lesson at the club at two thirty, and …”

  “And get off the dime. Sure, honey.”

  Lew Traff got up and sauntered wearily to the guest room. After he had dressed in his pale gray slacks and light green shirt-jacket, he went into the bathroom and hung the wet trunks over the shower rail. He looked at himself in the mirror with customary distaste and combed his black hair over the places where it was thinning badly. The whites of his eyes looked yellow. His tongue was caked with white. He sighed and went back into the bedroom and put his dispatch case on the bed, clicked it open and took the Denniver envelope out of the file flap on the case lid.

  With envelope in hand he went in search of her. She was in the master bedroom, all dressed in her little white tennis outfit, sitting at the dressing table, leaning toward the mirror, painting bigger lips onto her small fat mouth.

  Looking at him in the mirror she said, “I got time I could make us fried egg sandwiches, okay?”

  “Sure. Great.”

  He put the envelope on the dressing table and backed away. She finished her mouth, inspected it, then picked up the envelope and ran her stubby thumb under the flap and ripped it open. She riffled the stack of bills and looked at him.

  “Something wrong? One hundred hundreds equals ten big ones.”

  “Well … Jus and I were talking about it last night. Like he says, he’s dedicating a part of his life to public service and all. But what Marty Liss wants to do is a lot bigger than before, you know? And it isn’t like there wasn’t expense coming out of it. Well, we thought it ought to be more.”

  “How much more?”

  “Justin thought maybe double?”

  She had swiveled around on the bench. He walked a slow thoughtful circle and then sat on the foot of the kingsize bed and looked at her and shook his head sadly. “You disappoint me, honey. You really do.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “You are the brains, baby. Justin D. Denniver can’t use a urinal without an instruction book. You are supposed to be smarter than this kind of shit you pull on us. I won’t go into arguments, like telling you this time we don’t need any zoning exceptions so there won’t be any public hearing, or telling you that interest charges and construction costs are so high, maybe Marty shouldn’t be taking the risk at all, or reminding you that the building industry in Palm County is so flat on its ass, out of the five commissioners we could probably get three in favor without any help from Justin at all. What you’re trying to pull isn’t worth argumentation. What you should know, and what you know already, is there are wheels within wheels within wheels. Harbour Pointe is twelve million to fifteen million, and the visible part of it is the Marliss Corporation. You two are taking. And you know what Marty wants in return, right? That minor work permit for the so-called scouring of the channel, and an extension of the time limit on the permit on the land clearing.”

  “I know that. But Justin said …”

  “Down, girl.” He sighed, smiled, shook his head sadly. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Her mouth tightened. “What the hell kind of—”

  “Shush, honey. Just listen. Marty and Benjie and Cole Kimber and me, we are not syndicate-type people. Take Azure Breeze, for example. A big project like that, it has to be a miracle of timing, not only getting all the permissions and certifications and so on, but getting it up on time. Big delays mean big losses. What happened there was bathroom fixtures. The crews were all ready to put them in, and the main supplier is struck, and also there is a trucking strike. Marty had found out that if he could steer the maintenance and service and supply contracts to local subsidiaries of a Miami corporation, they could solve problems for him, they said. He got in touch, and all the bathroom stuff came right through, because of some kind of arrangement with the unions. It’s a permanent relationship on all the projects now. It’s all clean legal business, you understand, but the money behind it could have come out of Mafia links.”

  She looked uncertain. “Just what are you trying to tell me?”

  “Marty gets excited and does things on impulse. All the costs have been cranked into the formula on this Harbour Pointe project. I can’t guarantee that if I go back to him for another ten, he won’t complain that he’s being held up for more money by a local county honcho, and then there would be the danger somebody might overreact.”

  She moistened her lips. “Like how?”

  “There was that situation over in Hallandale, where a subcontractor was stalling a big project for more money, and persons unknown went in one night and rapped him and his wife on the skul
l, put them in the trunk of their Chrysler, drove it out into the boonies and lit it like a big gasoline lantern.”

  She swallowed with obvious effort, tried to smile and said, “Come on, Lew, really!”

  “Maybe he won’t get excited. Maybe he will think it’s worthwhile to pay you, but he certainly will find somebody else in the future, to do little favors. Nobody likes a gun in their ribs.”

  “Well … maybe you better forget I said it.”

  “The east coast people who take care of little problems for Marty do so as a way of cementing goodwill. From what I’ve observed, they seem to react badly to situations where people want to change an existing agreement.”

  “All right, Lew,” she said angrily. “Just forget it. It was a rotten idea anyway. I won’t push that way again. Justin thought it was worth a try, that’s all. He needs money. He says business is terrible.”

  “As a friend of both you nice people, I felt I had to speak up, just as long as there was any outside chance anything might …”

  “You scared hell out of me, just as you wanted to do. Don’t worry about Jus. I’ll quiet him down.”

  She got up and went to the long wardrobe and racked one of the sliding doors back, revealing a rainbow array of Justin Denniver’s sports jackets and slacks. She pushed them apart, sliding the clothes along the bar, revealing the little barrel safe cemented into the cinder-block wall behind the clothes at waist level. She bent over to see the combination as she turned the dial. She kept her legs straight. Her little tennis skirt hiked up in the back, revealing the white panties and the full round buttocks. He smiled, knowing that if she’d been alone she would most probably have squatted or knelt to work the combination. And he was reassured by a stirring tingle in his groin. He was glad to know that he might come back to life some day. She chunked the safe closed and spun the dial, backed out and stood up and rearranged the hangers.