Everything but the Squeal

15

“Don't you listen?” she snapped, long-distance from Kansas City. She sounded like Aurora's imitation of an adult talking to a child. “I said that you weren't to do anything.” I'd awakened late, but even in Kansas it was only noon, so it was safe for me to call: the Pork King couldn't be home.

“You paid the ransom,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“It means that I mailed the money. Please, Mr. Grist, just send me a bill and forget about it.”

“Mailed it?” I asked. I was pretty sure that she was speaking English, but to me it didn't make any more cognitive sense than running water. “Mailed it where?”

“To an address he gave me. In Los Angeles. Now, please, leave us alone.”

“Hold it, hold it,” I said. “Park and idle for a minute. He gave you an address?”

“Yes.”

“In Los Angeles.”

“I believe I just said so.”

“Mrs. Sorrell,” I said. I was developing a headache. “Kidnappers don't give out their addresses.”

“This one did,” she said in the tone of a threatened child. “Ask Aurora.”

“I don't want to ask Aurora. Aurora's a kid and Aimee's her sister. What do you mean, he gave you an address? Was it a he?” I asked, backtracking.

“You heard him on the tape. And when I say he gave me an address, I mean a number and a street and a zip code, all the things that usually make up an address.”

“What is it?”

“I'm not going to tell you that,” she said. “Just send me a bill.”

“How long are you supposed to wait?”

“Four days. Aimee will be home in four days.”

“She won't,” I said, without thinking.

“Oh, yes she will. And listen, you, don't do anything. This is my daughter's life you're fooling around with.” She hung up. When I called back there was no answer. I noodled around with the phone for a few minutes, dialing numbers at random and hanging up when they started to ring. I didn't like any of it, and I needed to do something meaningless while my subconscious sorted it out and came up with something for me to do.

So I didn't have a client anymore. So bill the client. I made out a bill for a few days' work, addressed it, remembered to add the receipts from the Sleep-Eze, and slogged down the unpaved muddy driveway to the mailbox. I raised the red flag to get the attention of my brain-damaged mailman. Then I stuck the letter halfway out and closed the mailbox on it to get a little more of his attention. After twenty years of sizzling his neurons with anything he could buy cheap, his attention needed a lot of getting.

So, there. I'd done something.

The house, as usual, was a mess. I sort of cleaned it, wondering how Eleanor was, all those watery miles away in China. Then I went outside and sort of weeded my root garden. The radishes looked good; you can't discourage a radish. The onions were up, and the potatoes were probably rotting after the cold snap and the rain. I dug one out, and it looked fine. Little, but fine. It wasn't something you could put back, so I went inside and washed and sliced it. Then I fried it in butter for a few minutes and wrapped it into the center of a nice breakfast omelet. Then I threw the omelet away. I hate breakfast.

So now what was I supposed to do? I made some more coffee that I didn't want and sat around, counting my toes through my shoes. When I got to ten for the second time, I remembered that I was scheduled to see Mrs. Brussels at ten, or tennish, or something. I called to cancel.

“We've been trying and trying to reach you at the motel,” Birdie said waspishly. “They said you weren't there.”

“And we're not,” I said. “We're at the Free Clinic. Jewel has the flu.”

“Oh, my God,” Birdie gasped, “and she was in here only yesterday.”

“She's okay,” I said.

“Who cares about her?” Birdie said. “She was probably absolutely redolent with germs. That's why the flu spreads, you know, because you're most contagious before the symptoms appear. I hope it's not one that dogs can get.”

“In fact,” I said spitefully, “it is. It's called the Bowser flu. It's decimated the canine population of Hong Kong.”

“Oh, heavens. Poor Woofers. I'll have to wear a surgical mask when I get home. That will upset her. She loves to see me smile.”

“Whatever you do, don't smile. This virus coats the surface of the teeth. A smile could be lethal. You'll know she's got it if her tail starts to droop.”

“My baby,” he said. “I'll tell Mrs. B. that you won't be in.” He hung up.

The moment I hung up, Jessica called. I told her nothing was doing. She sounded disappointed, but she mastered it. Youth is resilient. I'm not sure what's supposed to be so great about being resilient.

There was a time in my life when I enjoyed having nothing to do. There was also a time in my life when I smoked two packs a day and my idea of exercise was reading a digital watch. It was the only thing I did that took two hands. In those days, I'd weighed more than two hundred pounds. Eleanor had changed all that. She'd gotten my beer consumption under control, helped me to cut out the cigarettes, and gotten me running. My first quarter of a mile had been sheer agony, wheezing and limping behind her while she encouraged me in a bright and completely stress-less voice. “Positive reinforcement,” she called it. It was only the view of the back of her gym shorts that kept me going. Six months later I weighed one-eighty and was doing six or seven miles at a time. I had actual muscles. I bought new clothes. Women smiled at me on the street.

Unfortunately, with health came energy. I could no longer sit still. So here I was with a day, or four, on my hands. An hour in, and both my feet were tapping.

Jessica called again. “Maybe we could make something happen,” she said brightly.

“No way. We're on hold for four days.”

“There must be something I can do. I'm going crazy sitting here. Simeon, if we don't do something, this is going to be the longest Easter vacation of my life.”

“Can you vacuum?”

“What's that, a joke?”

“We can clean house,” I said. “They didn't say anything about cleaning house.”

“Heck,” she said before she hung up. “I'd rather do my math.”

I sort of washed the dishes. Then, probably in order to avoid sort of drying them, I realized that there was actually quite a lot I could do, without Aimee's kidnapper knowing anything about it.

I cleared a space on the living-room floor and went through Mr. Kale's files, a sheet of paper at a time, without much hope. My pessimism was rewarded. There were many good reasons why he should never be elected president of the Girls' Club of America, but there wasn't anything that linked him to Aimee. I made a note to turn the files over to Hammond and then dumped them into a box.

Okay, concentrate on Mrs. Brussels. I got the little tape recorder I'd taken with me when I broke into her office and played back the tones of the phone numbers I'd lifted off Birdie's auto-redial telephone. I listened to all of them about ten times but they went by too fast to do anything about, so I scrounged around in a closet until I came up with an old semiprofessional reel-to-reel that an aspiring rock singer had left there after she and I stopped seeing each other and she decided that being a secretary was steadier. I recorded the tones at three and three-quarters inches per second and played them back at seven and a half. They still went by too fast, but at least now there was some tape space between them.

Using a pair of rusty scissors and the roll of Scotch tape I'd bought to silence Mrs. Brussels' alarm, I cut into each of the spaces between the tones and inserted a few inches of blank recording tape. Manual dexterity is not my strong point, but eventually I had a nice long pause after each tone. I had also invented a few profane expressions that I could use later to please and impress my friends. Hauling the contraption over to the phone, I went to work.

The procedure was simple: One, crank the recorder back down to three and three-quarters, then play a tone and stop the recorder. Two, hit a number on the touch-pad of the phone. Three, when it didn't sound right, rewind, play the tone again, and hit the next number. When I found the matching tone on the telephone at last, I wrote down the number on a pad and went on to the next tone on the tape. After three or four hours of mind-numbing boredom, I'd developed perfect pitch for all the tones from one to zero, I had a blister on my index finger, and sixteen phone numbers were scribbled on my pad. Three of them were outside the 213 area code. Hot damn, I thought, I really am a detective.

By then I was on my eighth cup of coffee and more wired than a marionette. I switched to beer to calm down and dialed the first of the numbers.

“Doggies Do,” said a fey voice on the other end of the line.

I coughed a little beer onto the mouthpiece of the phone. “I beg your pardon?”

“Doggies Do,” the voice said, sounding a tad peevish. I'd have been peevish too, if I'd had to say it twice.

I took a wild conjectural leap. “I'm calling about a dog,” I said.

“I certainly hope so. If you're not, I'm wasting my time. What is it you want?”

“Well, I was hoping you'd tell me about your services.”

“Wash, dry, curl, manicure, dip,” he said automatically. “Perms require advance notice.”

“Perms.”

“Permanents, you know? Permanent waves, silly. If your dog needs a permanets, you've got to call forty-eight hours in advance. Got it?”

“Thanks,” I said. “She's a Mexican hairless, but I'll keep it in mind.” I hung up. The next number on the pad was a veterinarian's office. The one after that was a dog hotel, the Bark ’n Wag. Woofers had more appointments than a producer's wife. What I had burgled, apparently, was a Yorkshire terrier's Rolodex.

The fourth number rang forever. The fifth was a disconnect. The sixth was Birdie's colonic therapist. I was not on a hot streak. I worked on the beer for a while and then went back to the phone.

The seventh, just maybe, was something. It rang twice and then a gruff male voice said, “Cap’n’s.”

For lack of anything better, I asked, “Is the captain there?”

There was a long pause, and then the man said, “You've got the wrong number,” and hung up. When I called back, the phone was off the hook. On the whole, I thought, a very odd exchange.

One more disconnect. Then no answer. Then, on number ten, one of the ones with an out-of-state area code, I got a different man, but the same greeting.

“Cap’n’s,” he said.

“Which captain?”

I listened to the cosmic whistle of long distance. “Who is this, anyway?” the man asked.

This time I was ready. “I'm calling for the National Naval Census. We've gotten up to captains.”

“How did you get this number?”

“I told you, I'm calling-”

He disconnected. I tried another out-of-state number. “Cap’n’s,” a new man said. This time I hung up. A small revenge, but mine own.

My, my, my, I thought. I may even have said it out loud. Captains, or, rather, Cap'ns, all over the landscape. Where were all the people who answered the phones when I punched up these numbers? Hammond could have given me addresses, but I figured that calling the cops was out of bounds until Mrs. Sorrell said it was okay. However remote I thought Aimee's chances of getting home standing up might be, I didn't want to do anything to jeopardize them.

What I could do, though, was check the area codes with the operator. One of the Captains was in Arizona, one was in Idaho, and the third was in L.A. It was beginning to sound like the First Interstate Bank.

“Your phone has been busy forever,” Jessica complained when I picked it up on the third ring. “Are you working?” She sounded aggrieved and suspicious.

“Looking for a job,” I said.

“You have a job.”

“Jessica,” I said, “this has been a memorable partnership, but for the moment it's over.”

“Treat me like a baby,” she said bitterly. “I thought we were getting to be friends.”

“As soon as there's anything you can help me with, I'll let you know.”

“In other words, don't call me, I'll call you.”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I'll be at Blister's.”

“Great idea,” I said. “You can bench-press his nose.”

“You are totally gross,” she said, hanging up.

I tried the remaining numbers and got nothing. There was something else I wanted to do, but it would have to wait until Hollywood's nocturnal population crawled out from under their paving stones. In the meantime, there were the computer disks.

The disks, unfortunately, seemed to be garbage. Every time I tried to find my way into them, I got a bunch of mathematical symbols that looked like a physicist's guess at the perfect universal symmetry that might or might not have existed a millisecond or so before the Big Bang. They booted up okay, but after one or two keystrokes I found myself looking at all that garbled math.

A computer whiz is something I've never claimed to be. I bought the Korean-made micro that takes up most of my desk in a misguidedly upbeat moment after a client had overpaid me almost to the point of sarcasm. That was a couple of years ago, when everybody who claimed to be an expert on the future was talking about the electronic world: people working at home and shooting messages and data back and forth like a bunch of wash hung on a line that traveled at the speed of light. Well, that hadn't happened. Despite the experts, people still wrote in longhand and talked on the phone. The U.S. postal service was still in business. And me, I'd learned to work a simple word-processing program to the point where I could type in my case notes and print them out, and I'd mastered Flight Simulator. I could now land an imaginary airplane at an imaginary airport. Neither of these accomplishments had prepared me for the mathematically coded chaos of Birdie's disks.

Nevertheless, I went through all ten of them, including the one I'd labeled DOS. DOS is short for disk operating system, and it's what you feed the computer first. Until it's digested DOS, you might as well stick your fingers in the drive and ask for a readout on your prints. In short, without DOS, the computer is just something you have to dust. It can't do anything.

Birdie's DOS diskette was the first clue that something was intentionally wrong. You're supposed to put DOS in and then turn the goddamned machine on. After some beeping and some blinking, the screen gives you an enigmatic symbol that looks like this: A›. Then you can load whatever program you want and tell the computer what to do. If you're lucky and if you know what you're doing, it'll behave.

I'd used my own DOS diskette to look at the disks numbered one through nine, and I'd gotten the mathematical salad. In a flash of inspiration, I shut the computer off and slipped in Birdie's DOS diskette. Maybe it was a different DOS, I reasoned. Maybe it could make sense of numbers one through nine.

But when I turned the computer on and hit Enter twice, as I'd learned to do, the reassuring A› was nowhere in sight. Instead, I got a message that said: disk error or nonsystem

DISK. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ANY KEY.

I'd seen that before, and recently: on the screen of Birdie's computer, when I'd forgotten to put a DOS diskette in before firing up the computer. When I'd worked on Birdie's computer I'd used the DOS I'd bought. And that meant that Birdie's DOS diskette wasn't really DOS. Like the other nine disks, it was written in some kind of computer code.

There was nothing to do but try my own DOS diskette again. As before, I got a few words of English before the screen dissolved into the kind of mathematics that gives high-school kids zits. But this time, I noticed the message at the bottom of the screen. It said: disk full.

Well, that was peculiar, because I'd already done a directory on that disk, and the computer had told me that there was lots of space left. When you do a directory, you just type DIR, and the screen fills up with the names of the files or documents that are taking up space on the disk, and at the bottom is a number that tells you how much space remains. I did it again now. According to the directory, there was enough space left on the disk for a biography of Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy lived to be eighty-two.

But when I went back into the English and tried to type a word or two, I got the disk full message again. What that meant, in plain English, was that I was in over my head. Whatever the hell was on the disk had been hidden somehow, and it would require someone a lot more conversant with the perverse ways of computers to figure out what was going on.

The problem was, I didn't know anyone more conversant with computers than I was. Most of my friends said a cheerful good-bye to technology in the early seventies, about the time they noticed that most airplanes didn't have propellers anymore. They regarded computers as Big Brother's uncle.

I had just discovered a new use for mine-resting my head on the keyboard-when the phone rang. It was, for the ninth or tenth time that day, Jessica.

“Any progress?” she said, making an easy assumption that I'd been lying to her since morning.

It seemed pointless to tell another one. “What I am,” I said, “is stonewalled. Find a new godfather.”

“I like the one I've got,” she said a trifle shyly. “What's the problem?”

“The information revolution.”

“Computers?” she said promptly.

“Exactly.”

“You need help with computers?”

“You've grasped the challenge.”

“What time is it?”

“Around seven.”

“Come over,” she said. “Bring your problem. Have I got a boy for you.”