The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 20

SOMEWHERE behind me, a woman’s voice rose sharp. A man’s voice answered it and drowned it out. I turned and looked around the bright, deserted pool. The two were standing close together at the wavering margin of the light, so close they might have been a single dark and featureless body. They were at the far end of the gallery, maybe forty yards away from me, but their voices came quite clearly across the water.

“No!” she repeated. “You’re crazy. I did not.”

I crossed to the gallery and walked toward them, keeping in its shadow.

“I’m not the one who is crazy,” the man was saying. “We know who’s crazy, sweetheart.”

“Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.”

I knew the woman’s voice. It belonged to Isobel Graff. I couldn’t place the man’s. He was saying: “You bitch. You dirty bitch. Why did you do it? What did he do to you?”

“I didn’t. Leave me alone, you filth.” She called him other names which reflected on his ancestry and her vocabulary.

He answered her in a low, blurred voice I didn’t catch. There were Lower East Side marbles in his mouth. I was close enough to recognize him now. Carl Stern.

He let out a feline sound, a mewling growl, and slapped her face, twice, very hard. She reached for his face with hooked fingers. He caught her by the wrists. Her mink coat slid from her shoulders and lay on the concrete like a large blue animal without a head. I started to run on my toes.

Stern flung her away from him. She thudded against the door of a cabaña and sat down in front of it. He stood over her, dapper and broad in his dark raincoat. The greenish light from the pool lent his head a cruel bronze patina.

“Why did you kill him?”

She opened her mouth and closed it and opened it, but no sound came. Her upturned face was like a cratered moon. He leaned over her in silent fury, so intent on her that he didn’t know I was there until I hit him.

I hit him with my shoulder, pinned his arms, palmed his flanks for a gun. He was clean, in that respect. He bucked and snorted like a horse, trying to shake me off. He was almost as strong as a horse. His muscles cracked in my grip. He kicked at my shins and stamped my toes and tried to bite my arm.

I released him and, when he turned, chopped at the side of his jaw with my right fist. I didn’t like men who bit. He spun and went down with his back to me. His hand dove up under his trouser-leg. He rose and turned in a single movement. His eyes were black nailheads on which his face hung haggard. A white line surrounded his mouth and marked the edges of his black nostrils, which glared at me like secondary eyes. Protruding from the fist he held at the center of his body was the four-inch blade of the knife he carried on his leg.

“Put it away, Stem.”

“I’ll carve your guts.” His voice was high and rasping, like the sound of metal being machined.

I didn’t wait for him to move. I threw a sneak right hand which crashed into his face and rocked him hard. His jaw turned to meet the left hook that completed the combination and finished Stern. He swayed on his feet for a few seconds, then collapsed on himself. The knife clattered and flashed on the concrete. I picked it up and closed it.

Footsteps came trotting along the gallery. It was Clarence Bassett, breathing rapidly under his boiled shirt. “What on earth?”

“Cat fight. Nothing serious.”

He helped Mrs. Graff to her feet. She leaned on the wall and straightened her twisted stockings. He picked up her coat, brushing it carefully with his hands, as though the mink and the woman were equally important.

Carl Stern got up groggily. He gave me a dull-eyed look of hatred. “Who are you?”

“The name is Archer.”

“You’re the eye, uh?”

“I’m the eye who doesn’t think that women should be hit.”

“Chivalrous, eh? You’re going to hate yourself for this, Archer.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I think so. I got a lot of friends. I got connections. You’re through in L.A., you know that? All finished.”

“Put it in writing, will you? I’ve been wanting to get out of the smog.”

“Speaking of connections,” Bassett said quietly to Stern, “you’re not a member of this club.”

“I’m a guest of a member. And you’re going to get crucified, too.”

“Oh, my, yes. What fun. Whose guest would you happen to be?”

“Simon Graff’s. I want to see him. Where is he?”

“We won’t bother Mr. Graff just now. And may I make a suggestion? It’s getting latish, more for some than for others. Don’t you think you’d better leave?”

“I don’t take orders from servants.”

“Don’t you indeed?” Bassett’s smile was a toothy mask which left his eyes sad. He turned to me.

I said: “You want to be hit again, Stern? It would be a pleasure.”

Stern glared at me for a long moment, red lights dancing on his shallow eyes. The lights went out. He said: “All right. I’ll leave. Give me back my knife.”

“If you promise to cut your throat with it.”

He tried to go into another fury, but lacked the energy. He looked sick. I tossed him the closed knife. He caught it and put it in the pocket of his coat, turned and walked away toward the entrance. He stumbled several times. Bassett marched behind him, at a distance, like a watchful policeman.

Mrs. Graff was fumbling with a key at the door of the cabaña. Her hands were shaking, out of control. I turned the key for her and switched on the light. It was indirect, and shone from four sides on a bellying brown fishnet ceiling. The room was done in primitive Pacific style, with split-bamboo screens at the windows, grass matting on the floor, rattan armchairs and chaise longues. Even the bar in one corner was rattan. Beside it, at the rear of the room, two louvered doors opened into the dressing-rooms. The walls were hung with taps cloths and Douanier Rousseau reproductions, bamboo-framed.

The only discordant note was a Matisse travel poster lithographed in brilliant colors and advertising Nice. Mrs. Graff paused in front of it, and said to no one in particular: “We have a villa near Nice. Father gave it to us as a wedding present. Simon was all for it in those days. All for me, and all for one.” She laughed, for no good reason. “He won’t even take me to Europe with him any more. “He says I always make trouble for him when we go away together, any more. It isn’t true, I’m as quiet as a quilt. He flies away on his trans-polar flights and leaves me here to rot in the heat and cold.”

She clasped her head with both hands, tightly, for a long moment. Her hair stuck up between her fingers like black, tidy feathers. The silent pain she was fighting to control was louder than a scream.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Graff?”

I touched her blue mink back. She sidestepped away from my touch, whirled the coat off, and flung it on a studio bed. Her back and shoulders were dazzling, and her breast overflowed the front of her strapless dress like whipped cream. She held her body with a kind of awkward pride mixed with shame, like a young girl suddenly conscious of her flesh.

“Do you like my dress? It isn’t new. I haven’t been to a party for years and years and years. Simon doesn’t take me any more.”

“Nasty old Simon,” I said. “Are you all right, Mrs. Graff?”

She answered me with a bright actress’s smile which didn’t go with the stiffness of the upper part of her face, the despair in her eyes: “I’m wonderful. Wonderful.”

She did a brief dance-step to prove it, snapping her fingers at the end of rigid arms. Bruises were coming out on her white forearms, the size and color of Concord grapes. Her dancing was mechanical. She stumbled and lost a gold slipper. Instead of putting it on again, she kicked off the other slipper. She sat on one of the bar stools, wriggling her stockinged feet, clasping and rubbing them together. They looked like blind, flesh-colored animals making furtive love under the hem of her skirt: “Incidentally,” she said, “and accidentally, I haven’t thanked you. I thank you.”

“What for?”

“For saving me from a fate worse than life. That wretched little drug-peddler might have killed me. He’s terribly strong, isn’t he?” She added resentfully: “They’re not supposed to be strong.”

“Who aren’t? Drug-peddlers?”

“Pansies. All pansies are supposed to be weak. Like all bullies are cowards, and all Greeks run restaurants. That isn’t a good example, though. My father was a Greek, at least he was a Cypriot, and, by God, he ran a restaurant in Newark, New Jersey. Great oaks from little acorns grow. Miracles of modern science. From a greasy spoon in Newark to wealth and decadence in one easy generation. It’s the new accelerated pace, with automation.”

She looked around the alien room. “He might as well have stayed in Cyprus, for God’s sake. What good did it do me? I ended up in a therapy room making pottery and weaving rugs like a God-damn cottage industry. Except that I pay them. I always do the paying.”

Her contact seemed to be better, which encouraged me to say: “Do you always do the talking, too?”

“Am I talking too much?” She gave me her brilliant, disorganized smile again, as if her mouth could hardly contain her teeth. “Am I making any sense, for God’s sake?”

“From time to time you are, for God’s sake.”

Her smile became slightly less intense and more real. “I’m sorry, I get on a talking jag sometimes and the words come out wrong and they don’t mean what I want them to. Like in James Joyce, only to me it just happens. Did you know his daughter was schizzy?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “So sometimes I’m a wit and sometimes I’m a nit-wit, so they tell me.” She extended her bruise-mottled arm: “Sit down and have a drink and tell me who you are.”

“Archer,” she repeated thoughtfully, but she wasn’t interested in me. Memory flared and smoked inside of her like a fire in changing winds: “I’m nobody in particular, either. I used to think I was. My father was Peter Heliopoulos, at least that’s what he called himself, his real name was longer than that and much more complicated. And I was much more complicated, too. I was the crown princess, my father called me Princess. So now–” her voice jangled harshly off-key “–so now a cheap Hollywood drug-peddler can push me around and get away with it. In my father’s day they would have flayed him alive. So what does my husband do? He goes into business with him. They’re palsy-walsies, cerebral palsy- walsies.”

“Do you mean Carl Stern, Mrs. Graff?”

“Who else?”

“What kind of business are they in?”

“Whatever people do in Las Vegas, gambling and belling around. I never go there myself, never go anywhere.”

“How do you know he’s a drug-peddler?”

“I bought drugs from him myself when I ran out of doctors – yellow jackets and demerol and the little kind with the red stripe. I’m off drugs now, however. Back on liquor again. It’s one thing Dr. Frey did for me.” Her eyes focused on my face, and she said impatiently: “You haven’t made yourself a drink. Go ahead and make yourself a drink, and make one for me, too.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea, Isobel?”

“Don’t talk to me as though I were a child. I’m not drunk. I can hold my liquor.” The bright smile gashed her. face. “The only trouble with me is that I am somewhat crazy. But not at the moment. I was upset there for a moment, but you’re very soothing and smoothing, aren’t you? Kind of kind of kind.” She was mimicking herself.

“Any more,” I said.

“Any more. But you won’t make fun of me, will you? I get so mad sometimes – angry-mad, I mean – when people mock my dignity. I may be going into a wind-up, I don’t know, but I haven’t taken off yet. On my trans-polar flight,” she added wryly, “into the wild black yonder.”

“Good for you.”

She nodded in self-congratulation. “That was one of the wit ones, wasn’t it? It isn’t really true, though. When it happens, it isn’t like flying or any sort of arrival or departure. The feel of things changes, that’s all, and I can’t tell the difference between me and other things. Like when Father died and I saw him in the coffin and had my first breakdown. I thought I was in the coffin. I felt dead, my flesh was cold. There was embalming fluid in my veins, and I could smell myself. At the same time I was lying dead in the coffin and sitting in the pew in the Orthodox Church, mourning for my own death. And when they buried him, the earth – I could hear the earth dropping on the coffin and then it smothered me and I was the earth.”

She took hold of my hand and held it, trembling. “Don’t let me talk so much. It does me harm. I almost went, just then.”

“Where did you go?” I said.

“Into my dressing-room.” She dropped her hand and gestured toward one of the louvered doors. “For a second I was in there, watching us through the door and listening to myself. Please pour me a drink. It does me good, honestly. Scotch on the rocks.”

I moved around behind the bar and got ice cubes out of the small beige refrigerator and opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker and made a couple of drinks, medium strength. I felt more comfortable on the wrong side of the bar. The woman disturbed me basically, the way you can be disturbed by starvation in a child, or a wounded bird, or a distempered cat running in yellow circles. She seemed to be teetering on the verge of a psychotic episode. Also, she seemed to know it. I was afraid to say anything that might push her over the edge.

She raised her glass. The steady tremor in her hand made the brown liquor slosh around among the ice cubes. As if to demonstrate her self-control, she barely sipped at it. I sipped at mine, leaned on my elbow across the formica counter in the attitude of a bartender with a willing ear.

“What was the trouble, Isobel?”

“Trouble? You mean with Carl Stern?”

“Yes. He got pretty rough.”

“He hurt me,” she said, without self-pity. A taste of whisky had changed her mood, as a touch of acid will change the color of blue litmus paper. “Interesting medical facts. I bruise very easily.” She exhibited her arms. “I bet my entire body is covered with bruises.”

“Why would Stern do it to you?”

“People like him are sadists, at least a lot of them are.”

“You know a lot of them?”

“I’ve known my share. I attract them, apparently, I don’t know why. Or maybe I do know why. Women like me, we don’t expect too much. I don’t expect anything.”

“Lance Leonard one of them?”

“How should I know? I guess so. I hardly knew – I hardly knew the little mackerel.”

“He used to be a lifeguard here.”

“I don’t mess with lifeguards,” she said harshly. “What is this? I thought we were going to be friends, I thought we were going to have fun. I never have any fun.”

“Any more.”

She didn’t think it was funny. “They lock me up and punish me, it isn’t fair,” she said. “I did one terrible thing in my life, and now they blame me for everything that happens. Stern’s a filthy liar. I never touched his lover-boy, I didn’t even know that he was dead. Why would I shoot him? I have enough on my conscious – on my conscience.”

“Such as?”

She peered at my face. Hers was as stiff as a board. “Such as, you’re trying to pump me, aren’t you, such as? Trying to dig things out of me?”

“Yes, I am. What terrible thing did you do?”

Something peculiar happened to her face. One of her eyes became narrow and sly, one became hard and wide. On the sly side, her upper lip lifted and her white teeth gleamed under it. She said: “I’m a naughty, naughty, naughty girl. I watched them doing it. I stood behind the door and watched them doing it. Miracles of modern science. And I was in the room and behind the door.”

“What did you do?”

“I killed my mother.”

“How?”

“By wishing,” she said slyly. “I wished my mother to death. Does that take care of your questions, Mr. Questionnaire? Are you a psychiatrist? Did Simon hire you?”

“The answer is no and no.”

“I killed my father, too. I broke his heart. Shall I tell you my other crimes? It’s quite a decalogue. Envy and malice and pride and lust and rage. I’d sit at home and plan his death, by hanging, burning, shooting, drowning, poison. I’d sit at home and imagine him with them, all the young girls with their bodies and waving white legs. I sat at home and tried to have men friends. It never seemed to work out. They were exhausted by the heat and cold or else I frightened them. One of them told me I frightened him, the lousy little nance. They’d drink up my liquor and never come back.” She sipped from her glass. “Go ahead,” she said. “Drink up your liquor.”

“Drink up yours, Isobel. I’ll take you home. Where do you live?”

“Quite near here, on the beach. But I’m not going home. You won’t make me go home, will you? I haven’t been to a party for so long. Why don’t we go and dance? I am very ugly to look at, but I am a good dancer,”

“You are very beautiful, but I am a lousy dancer.”

“I’m ugly,” she said. “You mustn’t mock me. I know how ugly I am. I was born ugly through and through, and nobody ever loved me.”

The door opened behind her, swinging wide. Simon Graff appeared in the opening. His face was stony.

“Isobel! What kind of Walpurgisnacht is this? What are you doing here?”

Her reaction was slow, almost measured. She turned and rose from the stool. Her body was tense and insolent. The drink was shaking in her hand.

“What am I doing? I’m telling my secrets. I’m telling all my dirty little secrets to my dear friend.”

“You fool. Come home with me.”

He took several steps toward her. She threw her glass at his head. It missed him and dented the wall beside the door. Some of the liquid spattered his face.

“Crazy woman,” he said. “You come home now with me. I will call Dr. Frey.”

“I don’t have to go with you. You’re not my father.” She turned to me, the look of lopsided cunning still on her face. “Do I have to go with him?”

“I don’t know. Is he your legal guardian?”

Graff answered: “Yes, I am. You will keep out of this.” He said to her: “There is nothing but grief for you, for all of us, if you try to break loose from me. You would be really lost.” There was a new quality in his voice, a largeness and a darkness and an emptiness.

“I’m lost now. How lost can a woman get?”

“You will find out, Isobel. Unless you come with me and do as I say.”

“Svengali,” I said. “Very old-hat.”

“Keep out of this, I warn you.” I felt his glance like an icicle parting my hair. “This woman is my wife.”

“Lucky her.”

“Who are you?”

I told him.

“What are you doing in this club, at this party?”

“Watching the animals.”

“I expect a specific answer.”

“Try using a different tone, and you might get one.” I came around the end of the bar and stood beside Isobel Graff. “You’ve been spoiled by all those yes-men in your life. I happen to be a no-man.”

He looked at me in genuine shock. Maybe he hadn’t been contradicted for years. Then he remembered to be angry, and turned on his wife: “Did he come here with you?”

“No.” She sounded intimidated. “I thought he was one of your guests.”

“What is he doing in this cabaña?”

“I offered him a drink. He helped me. A man hit me.” Her voice was monotonous, threaded by a whine of complaint.

“What man hit you?”

“Your friend Carl Stern,” I said. “He slapped her around and pushed her down. Bassett and I threw him out.”

“You threw him out?” Graff’s alarm turned to anger, which he directed against his wife again: “You permitted this, Isobel?”

She hung her head and assumed an awkward, ugly posture, standing on one leg like a schoolgirl.

“Didn’t you hear me, Graff? Or don’t you object to thugs pushing your wife around?”

“I will look after my wife in my own way. She is mentally disturbed, sometimes she requires to be firmly handled. You are not needed. Get out.”

“I’ll finish my drink first, thank you.” I added conversationally: “What did you do with George Wall?”

“George Wall? I know no George Wall.”

“Your strong-arm boys do – Frost and Marfeld and Lashman.”

The names piqued his interest. “Who is this George Wall?”

“Hester’s husband.”

“I am not acquainted with any Hester.”

His wife gave him a swift, dark look, but said nothing. I fixed him with my steeliest glance and tried to stare him down. It didn’t work. His eyes were like holes in a wall; you looked through them into a great, dim, empty place.

“You’re a liar, Graff.”

His face turned purple and white. He went to the door and called Bassett in a loud, trembling voice. When Bassett appeared, Graff said: “I want this man thrown out. I don’t permit party-crashers–”

“Mr. Archer is not exactly a party-crasher,” Bassett said coolly.

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“I think of him as a friend, yes. A friend of brief standing, shall we say. Mr. Archer is a detective, a private detective I hired for personal reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“A crackpot threatened me last night. I hired Mr. Archer to investigate the matter.”

“Instruct him, then, to leave my friends alone. Carl Stern is an associate of mine. I want him treated with respect.”

Bassett’s eyes gleamed wetly, but he stood up to Graff. “I am manager of this club. As long as I am, I’ll set the standards for the behavior of the guests. No matter whose friends they are.”

Isobel Graff laughed tinnily. She had sat down on her coat, and was plucking at the fur.

Graff clenched his fists at his sides and began to shake. “Get out of here, both of you.”

“Come along, Archer. We’ll give Mr. Graff a chance to recover his manners.”

Bassett was white and scared, but he carried it off. I didn’t know he had it in him.