The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 17

THERE WAS NO GUARD on duty when I got to the Channel Club. The gate was open, though, and the party was still going on. Music and light spilled from one wing of the building. Several dozen cars stood in the parking-lot. I left mine between a black Porsche and a lavender Cadillac convertible with wine-colored leather upholstery and gold trim; and went in under the inverted red Christmas tree. It seemed to be symbolic of something, but I couldn’t figure out what.

I knocked on Bassett’s office door and got no answer. The pool was a slab of green brilliance, lit from below by underwater floodlights and spotlit from above. People were gathered at the far end under the aluminum-painted diving tower. I went down a shallow flight of steps and along the tiled edge toward the people.

Most of them were Hollywood fillies, sleek and self-conscious in strapless evening gowns or bathing suits not intended for the water. Among the men, I recognized Simon Graff and Sammy Swift and the Negro lifeguard I had talked to in the morning. Their faces were turned up toward a girl who stood absolutely still on the ten-meter platform.

She ran and took off into the light-crossed air. Her body bowed and turned in a smooth flip-and-a-half, changed from a bird to a fish as it entered the water. The spectators applauded. One of them, an agile youth in a dinner jacket and his middle forties, took a flashbulb picture as she came dripping up the ladder. She shook the water out of her short black hair contemptuously, and retired to a corner to dry herself. I followed her.

“Nice dive.”

“You think so?” She turned up her taut brown face and I saw that she wasn’t a girl and hadn’t been for years. “I wouldn’t give myself a score of three. My timing was way off. I can do it with a twist when I’m in shape. But thank you anyway.”

She toweled one long brown leg, and then the other, with a kind of impersonal affection, like somebody grooming a racehorse.

“You dive competitively?”

“I did at one time. Why?”

“I was just wondering what makes a woman do it. That tower’s high.”

“A person has to be good at something, and I’m not pretty.” Her smile was thin and agonized. “Dr. Frey – he’s a psychiatrist friend of mine – says the tower is a phallic symbol. Anyway, you know what the swimmers say – a diver is a swimmer with her brains knocked out.”

“I thought a diver was a swimmer with guts.”

“That’s what the divers say. Do you know many divers?”

“No, but I’d like to. Would Hester Campbell be a friend cf yours?”

Her face became inert. “I know Hester,” she said cautiously. “I wouldn’t call her a friend.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story, and I’m cold.” She turned brusquely and trotted away toward the dressing-room. Her hips didn’t bounce.

“Quiet, everyone,” a loud voice said. “You are about to witness the wonder of the century, brought to you at fabulous expense.”

It came from a gray-haired man on the five-meter platform of the tower. His legs were scrawny, his chest pendulous, his belly a brown leather ball distending his shorts. I looked again and saw it was Simon Graff.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Graff shaded his eyes with a hand and looked around facetiously. “Are there any ladies present? Any gentlemen?”

The women tittered. The men guffawed. Sammy Swift, who was standing near me, looked more than ever like a ghost who had seen a goblin.

“Watch it, boys and girls,” Graff shouted in a high, unnatural voice. “The Great Graffissimo, in his unique and death-defying leap.”

He took a flat-footed little run and launched himself with arms at his sides in what boys used to call a dead-soldier dive. His people waited until he came to the surface and then began to applaud, clapping and whistling.

Sammy Swift noticed my silence and moved toward me. He didn’t recognize me until I called him by name. I could have set fire to his breath.

“Lew Archer, by damn. What are you doing in this galère?”

“Slumming.”

“Yah, I bet. Speaking of slumming, did you get to see Lance Leonard?”

“No. My friend got sick and we gave up on the interview.”

“Too bad, the boy’s had quite a career. He’d make a story.”

“Fill me in.”

“Uh-uh.” He wagged his head. “You tell your friend to take it up with publicity. There’s an official version and an unofficial version, I hear.”

“What do you hear in detail?”

“I didn’t know you did leg work for newspapers, Lew. What’s the pitch, you trying to get something on Leonard?”

His fogged eyes had cleared and narrowed. He wasn’t as drunk as I’d thought, and the subject was touchy. I backed away from it: “Just trying to give a friend a lift.”

“You looking for Leonard now? I haven’t seen him here tonight.”

Graff raised his voice again: “Achtung, everyone. Time for lifesaving practice.” His eyes were empty and his mouth was slack. He stepped toward the twittering line of girls and pointed at one who was wearing a silver gown. His forefinger dented her shoulder. “You! What is your name?”

“Martha Matthews.” She smiled in an agony of delight. The lightning was striking her.

“You’re a cute little girl, Martha.”

“Thank you.” She towered over him. “Thank you very much, Mr. Graff.”

“Would you like me to save your life, Martha?”

“I’d simply adore it.”

“Go ahead, then. Jump in.”

“But what about my dress?”

“You can take it off, Martha.”

Her smile became slightly dazed. “I can?”

“I just said so.”

She pulled the dress off over her head and handed it to one of the other girls. Graff pushed her backward into the pool. The agile photographer took a shot of the action. Graff went in after her and towed her to the ladder, his veined hand clutching her flesh. She smiled and smiled. The lifeguard watched them with no expression at all on his black face.

I felt like slugging somebody. There wasn’t anybody big enough around. I walked away, and Sammy Swift tagged along. At the shallow end of the pool, we leaned against a raised planter lush with begonia, and lit cigarettes. Sammy’s face was thin and pale in the half-light.

“You know Simon Graff pretty well,” I stated.

His light eyes flickered. “You got to know him well to feel the way I do about him. I been making a worm’s-eye study of the Man for just about five years. What I don’t know about him isn’t worth knowing. What I do know about him isn’t worth knowing, either. It’s interesting, though. You know why he pulls this lifesaving stunt, for instance? He does it every party, just like clockwork, but I bet I’m the only one around who’s got it figured out. I bet Sime doesn’t even know, himself.”

“Tell me.”

Sammy assumed an air of wisdom. He said in the jargon of the parlor analyst: “Sime’s got a compulsion neurosis, he has to do it. He’s fixated on this girl that got herself killed last year.”

“What girl would that be?” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.

“The girl they found on the beach with the bullets in her. It happened just below here.” He gestured toward the ocean, which lay invisible beyond the margin of the light. “Sime was stuck on her.”

“Interesting if true.”

“Hell, you can take my word for it. I was with Sime that morning when he got the news. He’s got a ticker in his office – he always wants to be the first to know – and when he saw her name on the tape he turned as white as a sheet, to coin a simile. Shut himself up in his private bathroom and didn’t come out for an hour. When he finally did come out, he passed it off as a hangover. Hangover is the word. He hasn’t been the same since the girl died. What was her name?” He tried to snap his fingers, unsuccessfully. “Gabrielle something.”

“I seem to remember something about the case. Wasn’t she a little young for him?”

“Hell, he’s at the age when they really go for the young ones. Not that Sime’s so old. It’s only the last year his hair turned gray, and it was the girl’s death that did it to him.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Sure, I’m sure. I saw them together a couple of times that spring, and I got X-ray eyes, boy, it’s one thing being a writer does for you.”

“Where did you see them?”

“This is your own idea, no doubt.”

“Yeah, but it makes sense,” he said with some fanaticism. “I been watching him for years, like you watch the flies on the wall, and I know him. I can read him like a book.”

“Who wrote the book? Freud?”

Sammy didn’t seem to hear me. His gaze had roved to the far end of the pool, where Graff was posing for more pictures with some of the girls. I wondered why picture people never got tired of having their pictures taken. Sammy said: “Call me Oedipus if you want to. I really hate that bastard.”

“What did he do to you?”

“It’s what he does to Flaubert. I’m writing the Carthage script, version number six, and Sime Graff keeps breathing down my neck.” His voice changed; he mimicked Graff’s accent: “Mâtho’s our juvenile lead, we can’t let him die on us. We got to keep him alive for the girl, that’s basic. I got it. I got it. She nurses him back to health after he gets chopped up, how about that? We lose nothing by the gimmick, and we gain heart, the quality of heart. Salammbô rehabilitates him, see? The boy was kind of a revolutionary type before, but he is saved from himself by the influence of a good woman. He cleans up on the barbarians for her. The girl watches from the fifty-yard line. They clinch. They marry.” Sammy resumed his own voice: “You ever read Salammbô?”

“A long time ago, in translation. I don’t remember the story.”

“Then you wouldn’t see what I’m talking about. Salammbô is a tragedy, its theme is dissolution. So Sime Graff tells me to tack a happy ending onto it. And I write it that way. Jesus,” he said in a tone of surprise, “this is the way I’ve written it. What makes me do it to myself and Flaubert? I used to worship Flaubert.”

“Money?” I said.

“Yeah. Money. Money.” He repeated the word several times, with varying inflections. He seemed to be finding new shades of meaning in it, subtle drunken personal meanings which brought the tears into his voice. But he was too chancy and brittle to hold the emotion. He slapped himself across the eyes, and giggled. “Well, no use crying over spilled blood. How about a drink, Lew? How about a drink of Danziger Goldwasser, in fact?”

“In a minute. Do you know a girl called Hester Campbell?”

“I’ve seen her around.”

“Lately?”

“No, not lately.”

“What’s her relation to Graff, do you know?”

“No, I wouldn’t know,” he answered sharply. The subject disturbed him, and he took refuge in clowning: “Nobody tells me anything, I’m just an intellectual errand boy around here. An ineffectual intellectual errand boy. Song.” He began to sing in a muffled tenor to an improvised tune: “He’s so reprehensible yet so indispensable he makes things comprehensible he’s my joy. That intellectual – ineffectual – but oh so sexual – intellectual errand boy. Whom nothing can alloy... Dig that elegant ‘whom’.”

“I dug it.”

“It’s the hallmark of genius, boy. Did I ever tell you I was a genius? I had an I.Q. of 183 when I was in high school in Galena, Illinois.” His forehead crinkled. “What ever happened to me? What happen? I used to like people, by damn, I used to have talent. I didn’t know what it was worth. I came out here for the kicks, going along with the gag – seven fifty a week for playing word games. Then it turns out that it isn’t a gag. It’s for keeps, it’s your life, the only one you’ve got. And Sime Graff has got you by the short hairs and you’re not inner-directed any more. You’re not yourself.”

“Who are you, Sam?”

“That’s my problem.” He laughed, and almost choked. “I had a vision of myself last week, I could see it as plain as a picture. Dirty word, picture, but let it pass. I was a rabbit running across a desert. Rear view.” He laughed and coughed again. “A goddam white-tailed bunny rabbit going lickety-split across the great American desert.”

“Who was chasing you?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a lopsided grin. “I was afraid to look.”