The Scarlet Ruse

THE SCARLET RUSE

John D. MacDonald

THE SCARLET RUSE John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #14 - 1973

I have learned that the countless paths that one traverses in one’s life are all equal. Oppressors and oppressed meet at the end, and the only thing that prevails is that life was altogether too short for both.

- Don Juan as quoted by Castaneda

Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer!

- Dwight D. Eisenhower [at a Cabinet meeting]

Chapter One

After seven years of bickering and fussing, the Fort Lauderdamndale city fathers, on a hot Tuesday in late August, killed off a life style and turned me into a vagrant.

“Permanent habitation aboard all watercraft within the city limits is prohibited.”

And that ordinance included everything and everybody from the Alabama Tiger aboard his plush ‘Bama Gal, running the world’s longest floating houseparty, all the way down to the shackiest little old pontoon cottage snugged into the backwater mangroves.

It included Meyer, the hairy economist, living comfortably aboard his dumpy little cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes, low in the water with the weight of financial tomes and journals in five languages and chess texts and problems in seven.

It included me and my stately and substantial old barge-type houseboat, The Busted Flush. The edict caught me off balance. I had not thought I was so thoroughly imbedded in any particular environment that being detached would be traumatic. Travis McGee is not hooked by things or by places, I told myself.

But, by God, there had been a lot of golden days, a lot of laughter and happy girls. Moonrise and hard rains. Swift fish and wide beaches. Some gentle tears and some damned good luck.

Maybe that is what made the gut hollow, an old superstition about luck. Long long long ago I stepped on a round stone in darkness and fell heavily at the instant that automatic weapons’ fire yellow-stitched the night where I had been standing six feet four inches tall and frangible. I had two souvenirs from that fall-an elbow abrasion and the round stone. I still had the half-pound stone after the elbow healed. I kept it in the side pocket of the twill pants. Then they leapfrogged two battalions of us forward by night to take pressure off some of our people who’d dug in on the wrong hill.

Our airplane driver didn’t care for the attention he was getting and kept his air speed on the high side as he dumped our group. I came to the end of the static line with one hell of a snap, and there was such a sharp pain in my ankle I thought I’d earned another Heart. I pulled the shrouds around, landed on shale, favoring the right leg, rolled and unbuckled, unslung the piece, and listened to night silence before I felt my ankle. No ripped leather or wetness. Pain lessening. Then I missed the round rock. When the chute popped, the rock had popped the pocket stitches, and it had gone down the pant leg, rapping the ankle bone on the way out, hurting right through the oiled leather of the jump boots. And I felt at that moment a terrible anxiety. “My rock is lost. My luck is lost. Some bastard is sighting in on me right now.”

Later I realized that I had made some bad moves during those next five days before they pulled us all back.

This was the same feeling. I’d clambered up onto the sundeck of the Flush so many mornings at first light and had looked out at my world from the vantage point of Slip F-18 and known who I was. True, the great panorama of the sky had been dwindled over the years by the highrise invasions. But it was my place. I’d taken the Flush out a hundred times and brought her back and tucked her, creaking and sighing, against the piers, home safe. Safe among her people and mine.

I guess there weren’t enough of us, all told. The City Commissioners authorized a survey and found out there were sixteen hundred people living on boats within the city limits. That isn’t much of a voting block in a place the size of Lauderdale. And boat people are not likely to act in unison anyway.

We’d all been pretending it would be voted down, but they made it unanimous.

So all day Wednesday, little groups formed, reformed, moved around, broke up, joined up again, aboard the watercraft at Bahia Mar.

Meyer lectured an embittered audience aboard the ‘Bama Gal, standing on the cockpit deck amid a decorative litter of young ladies, quaffing Dos Equis, spilling a dapple of suds onto his black chest pelt.

“They say we have added to the population density. Let us examine that charge. Ten years ago perhaps a thousand of us lived aboard cruisers and houseboats. Now there are six hundred additional. During those ten years, ladies and gentlemen, how many so-called living units have appeared in this area? Highrise, town houses, tract houses, mobile homes? They were constructed and trucked in and slapped together and inhabited without thought or heed to the necessary water supply, sewage disposal, schools, roads, police and fire protection. All services are now marginal.”

“Fiffy thousand more shore people, maybe, huh?” said Geraldine, mistress of the old Broomstick.

“They say we have created sewage disposal problems,” Meyer intoned. “Doubtless a few of the live-aboard people are dumb and dirty, emptying slop buckets into the tide. But for the majority of us, we have holding tanks, we use shoreside facilities, we want clean water because we live on the water. Thousands upon thousands of transient cruisers and yachts and houseboats stop at the area marinas every year. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of marine hardware, paying a high ticket for docking privileges and bringing ashore a lot of out-of-town spending money. And we all know, we have all seen, that it is the transient watercraft which cause a sewage disposal problem. They do not live here. They take the easiest way out. They do not give a damn. But will the City Commissioners pass a law saying transients cannot stay aboard transient boats? Never! Those transients are keeping this corner of Florida green, my friends.”

He was applauded. Yay! We would march on City Hall. They would see the error of their ways.

But Johnny Dow put the whole thing in perspective. He cleared his throat and spat downwind, turned away from the rail and said, “Ad valorem, goddamnit!”

“Speak American,” said one of the Tiger’s playgirls.

“They hate us. Them politicals. You know what they make their money on. They come from the law and real estate and selling lots and houses. Ad valorem. We not putting dime one in their pockets. They drivin‘ past seeing folks live pretty free, not needing them one damn bit, and they get scalded. We’re supposed to have property lines and bushes and chinch bugs and home improvement loans. Jealous. They all nailed down with a lot of crap they don’t like and can’t get loose of. So here we are. Easy target. Chouse us the hell out of town forever and they don’t have to see us or think about us. Figure us for some kind of parasite. Scroom, ever’ damn ass-tight one of them. Can’t win this one, Meyer. We’re too dense, and we make sewage. Easy target. Neaten up the city. Sweep out the trash. Ad valorem.” He spat again, with good elevation and good distance, and stumped across the deck and down the little gangway and off into the blinding brightness of noontime.

Meyer nodded approvingly. “Scroom,” he murmured. The end of an era.

We walked together back to the Flush and went aboard. We sat in the lounge, frowning and sighing.

Meyer said, “I saw Irv. He said something can be worked out.”

“Something can always be worked out. Sure. If a man wants to live aboard a boat, something can be worked out. If he can pay the ticket. A man could buy a condominium apartment right over there in that big hunk of ugly and make it his legal and mailing address and stay there one night a month and aboard all the other nights. Can something be worked out for all the people who get hit by the new law?”

“Hardly.”

“Then it isn’t going to be the same, old friend. And do we want any part of it, even if I could afford the ticket?”

“You short again?”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“You in the confetti business? You make little green paper airplanes?”

“I have had six months of my retirement in this installment, fella.”

He beamed. “You know, you look rested. Good shape too. Better and better shape this last month, right?”

“Getting ready to go to work, which I seem to remember telling you.”

“You did! You did! I remember. That was when I asked you if you would help an old and dear friend and you said no thanks.”

“Meyer, damnit, I-”

“I respect your decision. I don’t know what will happen to Fedderman. It’s just too bad.”

I stared at him with fond exasperation. A week ago he had tried to explain Hirsh Fedderman’s unusual problem to me, and I had told him that it was an area I knew absolutely nothing about.

Meyer said, “We have thirty days of grace before we have to move away, boat and baggage. I just thought it would be a good thing to occupy your mind. And I told Hirsh I knew somebody who maybe could help out.”

“You got a little ahead of yourself, didn’t you?”

He sighed. “So I have to make amends. I’ll see what I can do by myself.”

“Stop trying to manipulate me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Take a deep breath and say it. If it’s what you want, take a deep breath and say it.”

“What should I say?”

“Take a wild guess.”

“Well… Travis, would you please come with me to Miami and listen to my old friend Hirsh Fedderman and decide if you want to take on a salvage job?”

“Because you ask me so nicely, yes.”

“But then why was it no before?”

“Because I had something else shaping up.”

“And it fell through?”

“Yesterday. So today I need Fedderman, maybe.”

“He is a nervous ruin. He’s waiting for the roof to fall in on him. If it would be okay, how about this afternoon? I can phone him?”

Chapter Two

Fedderman asked us not to arrive until quarter after five, when both the female clerks in his tiny shop would be gone for the day. I put Miss Agnes, my Rolls-Royce pickup, in a parking lot two blocks from his store. He was in mainland Miami, a dozen blocks from Biscayne and about three doors from the corner of Southwest Eleventh Street.

There was a dusty display window, with a steel grill padlocked across it. Gold leaf, peeling, on plate glass, said ornately “FEDDERMAN STAMP AND COIN COMPANY.” Below that was printed “RARITIES.”

Meyer tried the door, and it was locked. He knocked and peered into the shadowy interior and said, “He’s coming.”

I heard the sound of a bolt and a chain, and then a bell dingled when he opened the door and smiled out and up at us. He was a crickety little man, quick of movement, quick to smile, bald rimmed with white, a tan, seamed face, crisp white shirt, salmon-pink slacks.

Meyer introduced us. Fedderman smiled and bobbed and shook hands with both hands. He locked the door and led us back past dim display cases to the small office in the rear. There was bright fluorescence in the office and in the narrow stock room beyond the office. Fedderman sat behind his desk. He smiled and sighed. “Why should I feel better?” he asked. “I don’t know if anybody can do anything. The whole thing is impossible, believe me. It couldn’t happen. It happened. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t sit still or stand still since I found out. Mr. McGee, whatever happens, I am glad Meyer brought you to hear this crazy story. Here is-”

I interrupted him. “Mr. Fedderman, I try to recover items of value which have been lost and which cannot be recovered by any other means. If I decide to help you, I will risk my time and expenses. If I make a recovery of all or part of what you have lost, we take my expenses off the top and split the remainder down the middle.”

He nodded, looking thoughtful. “Maybe it wouldn’t fit perfect, because what is lost isn’t mine. I understand. Let me tell you.”

“Go slow because I don’t know a thing about stamps and coins.”

He smiled. “So I’ll give you a shock treatment.” He took a desk-top projector with built-in viewing screen from a shelf and put it on his desk and plugged it in. He opened a desk drawer and took out a metal box of transparencies and fitted it into the projector. He turned off the light and projected the first slide onto the twelve-by-fifteen-inch ground-glass viewing area.

A block of four stamps filled the screen. They were deep blue. They showed an old-timey portrait of George Washington. The denomination was ninety cents.

“This was printed in 1875,” Fedderman said. “It is perhaps the finest block of four known, and one of the very few blocks known. Superb condition, crisp deep color, full original gum. It catalogs at over twelve thousand dollars, but it will bring thousands more at auction.”

Click. The next was a pair of stamps, one above the other. A four-cent stamp. Blue. It pictured three old ships under sail, over the legend “Reel of Columbus.”

“The only known vertical pair of the famous error of blue. Only one sheet was printed in blue instead of ultramarine. In ultramarine this pair would be worth… twenty-five dollars. This pair catalogs at nine thousand three hundred and will bring fifteen at auction. The top stamp has one pulled perf and a slight gum disturbance. The bottom stamp has never been hinged, and it is superb. Quite flawless.”

Click. Click. Click. A couple of crude bears holding up an emblem, with “Saint Louis” printed across the top of the stamps and “Post Office” printed across the bottom. A block of six brownish, crude-looking five-cent stamps showing Ben Franklin. There were no rows of little holes for tearing them apart. A twenty-four-cent stamp printed in red and blue, showing an old airplane, a biplane, flying upside down. And about a dozen others, while Fedderman talked very large numbers.

He finished the slide show and turned the bright overhead lights back on. He creaked back in his swivel chair.

“Crash course, Mr. McGee. I’ve showed you nineteen items. I’ve bought them for a client over the past fifteen years. Right now there is another twenty thousand to spend. I am looking for the right piece. Another classic. Another famous piece.”

“Why does he want them?” I asked.

Fedderman’s smile was small and sad. “What has he put into these pieces over fifteen years? A hundred and eighty-five thousand. Plus my fee. What do I charge for my time, my advice, all my knowledge and experience and contacts? Ten percent. So let’s say he has two hundred and three thousand, five hundred dollars in these funny little pieces of paper? I could make two phone calls, maybe only one, and get him three hundred and fifty thousand. Or if I spent a year liquidating, feeding them into the right auctions, negotiating the auction house percentage, he could come out with a half million.”

Meyer said, “As the purchasing power of currencies of the world erodes, Travis, all the unique and the limited-quantity items in the world go up. Waterfront land. Rare books and paintings. Heirloom silver. Rare postage stamps.”

“Classic postage stamps,” Fedderman said, “have certain advantages over that other stuff. Portability. One small envelope with a stiffener to prevent bending, with glassine interleafs for the mint copies, you can walk around with a half million dollars. These classics, you can sell them in the capital cities of the world, cash money, no questions. Well, some questions for these items because all the old timers like me, we know the history, which collections they’ve been in over the years-Hines, West, Brookman, Well. We know when they changed hands and for how much. For each item here there is a certificate from the Philatelic Foundation saying it is genuine. The disadvantage is they are fragile. They’ve got to be perfect. A little crease, a little wrinkle, it would break your heart how much comes off the price. These, they never get touched with a naked finger. Stamp tongs if they ever have to be touched. They are in a safety deposit box.”

Meyer encouraged Hirsh to tell me how he operated. It was intriguing and simple. He and any new client would take out a lock box set up to require both signatures and the presence of both parties before it could be opened. He used the First Atlantic Bank and Trust Company, four blocks from his store. When he made an acquisition, he and the client would go to the bank and put it in the box. The reason was obvious-as soon as Fedderman explained it to me. He made a formal legal agreement with each client. If at any time the client wanted to get out from under, Hirsh Fedderman would pay him a sum equal to the total investment plus five percent per year on the principal amount invested. Or, if the client desired, he could take over the investment collection himself, at which point the agreement became void.

“It’s just to make them feel safe is all,” Fedderman said. “They don’t know me. They don’t know if the stamps are real or forgeries. I started it this way a long time ago. I’ve never closed one out the way it says there in the agreement. But some have been closed out, sure. There was one closed out six years ago. About fifty thousand he had in it. I got together with the executor, and we auctioned the whole thing through Robert Siegel Auction Galleries, and a very happy widow got a hundred and forty thousand.”

“They can get big money that easily?” I asked.

Fedderman looked at me with kindly contempt. “Mr. McGee, any year maybe twenty-five millions, maybe fifty millions go through the auction houses all over the world. Maybe more. Who knows? Compared to the stock exchanges, very small potatoes. But if the merchandise was available, the stamp auctions would be twice as big. Three times. That is because shrewd men know what has happened to classic merchandise during forty years of inflation. They’ll buy all they can find. You put money in a Swiss bank, next year it’s worth five percent less. The same money in a rarity, it has to be five percent more because the money is worth less, and the demand adds more percent. So in true rarities these days, the increment, it’s fifteen to twenty percent per year.”

“How many clients do you have right now?”

“Only six. This one and five more. Average. Sometimes ten, sometimes three.”

“How much do you invest in a given year?”

He shrugged. “Last year, over five hundred thousand.”

“Where do you find the rare stamps to invest in?”

“All over the country there are dealers who know I’m in the market for the very best in U.S., British, and British Colonials. Those are what I know best. Say a dealer gets a chance to bid on an estate. It’s got some classics which make it too rich for him. He phones me and he says, ‘Hirsh, I’ve got here in a collection all the 1869 pictorials in singles used and unused, with and without grills, with double grills, triple grills. I’ve got special cancellations on singles and pairs, and I’ve got some blocks of four. Some are fine, some superb, average very fine.’ So maybe it’s Comeskey in Utica, New York, maybe Tippet over in Sarasota, I fly there and figure what I can use and maybe I add enough to the pot so he can bid in the whole collection, and I take the ‘69s, and he takes the rest. Or I get tipped about things coming up at auction and move in and make a buy before they print up the catalog. Or there is a collector tired of some good part of his collection, and he knows me. Or a dealer needs some ready cash on stuff he’s had tucked away for years, watching the price go up. I deal fair. I never take advantage. Three years ago a collector wanted to sell me his early Bermuda. He had some fakes of the early Postmasters’ Stamps from Hamilton and St. George. At eighteen and twenty thousand each and looking like some dumb kid printed them in a cellar, no wonder there’s fakes-lots of them-around. He threw in fifteen or so fakes he’d picked up over the years. I sat right here and went over them. One bothered me. It was Stanley Gibbons catalog number 03, center-dated 1850. The W. B. Perot signature was way off. Too far away from the original. Know what I mean? The rest of it was so damned perfect. Would a counterfeiter be so stupid? Not with several thousand dollars at stake. Okay, so maybe Perot was sick or out of town or had a busted hand that day. It took six months, but I got an authentication out of the Royal Philatelic Society, and I sent the collector my check for nine thousand, which was the best offer I could get for the stamp at that time. I put the stamp in a client investment account. You wouldn’t believe the kind of word of mouth advertising I got out of that.”

The whole thing seemed unreal to me. He claimed to have made fifty thousand last year as a buying agent for the investment accounts. But here he was in a narrow little sidestreet store.

“Your problem, Mr. McGee, I can see it on your face. You think all this stamp stuff is like bubble gum wrappers, like maybe baseball cards, trade three of your players for one of mine. It doesn’t seem like grownups, right? Let me show you how grownup it can get, okay?”

He opened an old cast-iron safe, took out a little file drawer, took out some glassine envelopes. With small, flat-bladed tongs he took out two stamps and put them in front of me.

“Here, look at these two through this magnifying glass. These are both the five-dollar Columbian Exposition of 1893, unused. Printed in black. Profile of Columbus. Catalog seven hundred. For stamps like these, the retail should be a thousand each. Quality. Perfect centering. No tears or folds or bends. No short perforations. No perforations missing. Nice clean imprint, sharp and bright, no fading. A fresh, crisp look. Right? Now I turn them over. Keep looking. See? Full original gum on each. Nobody ever stuck a hinge on either one and stuck it in an album. Perfect? You are looking at two thousand dollars retail? Wrong! This one is a thousand dollars. This other one is schlock. I’ll show you.”

He got out a pistol-grip light on a cord, turned it on, and turned off the overheads. We were in almost complete darkness. “Black light,” he said. “Look at the stamp there.” Two irregular oval areas glowed. One was the size of a lima bean, the other the size of a grain of rice.

Fedderman turned the lights on again. “Let me tell you what is maybe the history of this piece of junk here. Back in 1893 maybe some uncle goes to the Exposition and he brings back a fine gift, all the stamps, and maybe a souvenir album. So a kid licks this one like putting it on an envelope and sticks it in the album, along with the others. This one maybe had one straight edge, where it was at the edge of the sheet when it was printed. Okay, maybe it spends thirty, forty years in that album. Finally somebody tries to soak it off. Hard to do after the glue has set. They don’t get it all off. Some of the stamp comes off on the album paper. That leaves a place called a thin. A nice centered stamp like this with no gum and two thins and a straight edge, nothing else wrong, it goes for maybe a hundred and fifty, hundred and a quarter retail, perhaps ninety bucks wholesale. Okay, last year or the year before, somebody buys this dog along with some others of the same kind of high value dogs. They take them to Germany. Right now, working somewhere in West Germany, there is a pure genius. He makes up some kind of stuff to fill the thins. He gets the gum from low-denomination Columbians. He puts it on perfect, no slop-over between the perfs. And he re-perfs the straight edge perfect as an angel. I’m telling you, back around World War One, Sam Singer was the stamp doctor in this country. Then there was a fellow in Paris named Zareski who was pretty good, especially faking cancellations. But this German is the best yet. Very dangerous. And I’m showing you why I’m worth the ten percent I get for doing the investing.”

Suddenly he slumped, sighed. “Sure. Hirsh Fedderman is so damned smart. When you think nobody can take you, somebody takes you.”

“Tell Travis what happened,” Meyer said.

It took Fedderman a few moments to pull himself together. “Eighteen months ago, a little longer ago, I guess, this man phones up, his name is Frank Sprenger, he wants to have a talk with me about investing in stamps. He says he heard about me from so and so. I knew the name. Excuse me, I don’t like to give out names. It’s a confidential relationship. So I drove over to the Beach, and he’s got a condominium apartment, like a penthouse, in the Seascape. It’s in the afternoon. There is a party going on, girls and laughing and loud music and so forth. Sprenger comes and takes me into a bedroom down a hall and shuts the door. He is big and broad, and he has a great tan. He has a great haircut. He smells like pine trees. He is not going to tell me what he does for a living. It is entertainment, maybe. Like with girls or horses or importing grass. Why should I care who I deal with? The protections are there. I do a clean business and pay my taxes. I give my sales talk. He listens good. He asks the right questions. I show him a sample of the agreement and a sample receipt like I sign to show the total investment and a sample inventory list like he can have if he wants. He says he will let me know. He finally lets me know it is yes. We meet at the bank and set up the box, and I sign the agreement, and we get it notarized. He says he can’t say how much or how often, but it will usually be cash and is that okay? I tell him okay. He gives me forty thousand in cash in a big brown manila envelope right there, and I put it in my business account. Who wants to walk these streets with money like that? He had the two fellows who came with him waiting in the car. I’m alone. The items I showed you, that’s not Sprenger’s account. Sprenger said he didn’t want anything well known, any special item that dealers would know on sight. I said it would make a little more volume. He said okay, but keep the volume down.”

“Did his request mean anything to you?” I asked Fedderman.

“What do you mean?”

“He planned to turn over cash in unpredictable amounts for merchandise which couldn’t be traced. Did you make any guesses about him from that?”

“Guesses? A man can do a lot of guessing. Why should I care? I can prove the money turned over to me from my copy of the receipt and from my deposit record. I can show where it went, show my percentage for my own taxes. Suppose it isn’t his money. Suppose he’s getting ready to run. Any time he wants, he can meet me at the bank, give me back my signed agreement, take the merchandise home.”

“What did you invest in?”

“Superb unused blocks of four without plate numbers. High values. Columbians, Trans-Mississippi, Zeppelins. Some larger multiples, like a beautiful block of nine of the two-dollar Trans-Miss, mint, sixty-five hundred it cost me. Same kind of purchases of Canadian Jubilee in the high-dollar values. Also some older stuff when they were perfect singles, used or unused, like a nice mint copy each of Canada numbers one, two, five, seven, nine, and thirteen. Twelve thousand, five hundred right there. Value.” He leaned toward me. “It is the most valuable stuff, Mr. McGee, on a size and weight basis, the world has ever known. Some years ago Ray Weil and his brother, Roger, bought a Hawaiian stamp at auction for forty thousand. Very thin paper. Some newspaper guy in New Orleans, I think it was, figured out that it came to one and a half billion dollars a pound.”

“I’m impressed.”

“It doesn’t come with bubble gum.”

“I said I’m impressed, Mr. Fedderman.”

“Call me Hirsh, please.”

“Hirsh, I want to know what happened. How did you get taken? Or did you get taken?”

“You know those early Canadas? The way I came onto them, there was this old guy up in Jacksonville, he-”

“Hirsh!”

“Okay, I’m sorry. They were switched.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what I said! Sprenger did a lot of business with me. A lot! I had to really hustle to find the right stuff. I know the figure by heart. Call it nineteen months. Three hundred and ninety-five thousand. My ten percent on top of that. Four hundred and thirty-four thousand five hundred, that’s what he has in it. Cash every six to eight weeks. Right now I’ve got about nineteen hundred and fifty dollars of his money to spend. It can’t come out perfectly even, right?”

“It was switched, you say?”

“Let me show you something,” he said. He got up and trotted out of the office into the store and came back in a few minutes and closed the door again. He put a slim, handsome album in front of me. It was in a black fiber dust case. The album was of padded blue imitation leather. The pages had transparent slots for stamps, and Mylar interleafing.

“This is a brand made abroad. Lighthouse. Same color and size as Sprenger’s. I provide it, after making the first investment. Right here on the front bottom corner, in gold, his book says Frank A. Sprenger. I get it done at the luggage place in the next block. This size fits nice in a middle-size safety deposit box. Here is the procedure. I buy something for Sprenger’s account. Mary Alice keeps the records on the investment accounts. Mary Alice McDermit. Missus, but separated. She’s been with me almost five years. Very sharp girl. Okay, I turn the item over to her, and she fixes up a Hawid or a Showguard mount or mounts and posts the price from the invoice in the ledger, on the page for Sprenger’s account. She puts the item in the safe, and then when Sprenger can meet me at the bank, Mary Alice comes along too, and we take the box into one of the bigger rooms where there is room for three to sit down at a table. I show Sprenger what I bought for him and answer questions if he has any, and Mary Alice puts the item or items in the album just like this one as we sit there. Then it goes back in the box, and we get an attendant, and it gets locked into the hole in the wall and we leave.”

“He comes alone?”

“He comes alone into the bank. Yes. There is usually somebody else in his car.”

“The stamps were switched?”

“Listen. Almost two weeks ago, the seventh. Thursday. He was able to make it at eleven in the morning. I walked over with Mary Alice. I had some Zepps and some early colonials. Barbados and Bermuda. Solid investment stuff. Thirty-three thousand worth. Too much to keep here. Okay, it was like always. We went in. I showed him what I had. No questions. Mary Alice put them in the stock book. She wondered if she should put the Barbados on an earlier page with other Barbados. She looked back at that page. She had to turn some pages to find what she wanted. I got a look at the pages. Meyer, like I told you, I thought my heart was going to stop. I’ve got eyes like an eagle. Fifty years I’ve been looking at stamps. Across a room a diamond dealer can tell a good stone. Right? I’d bought prime merchandise for Sprenger. And I am looking at junk. It is not so obvious Mary Alice could tell. Sprenger couldn’t tell in a year. What am I looking at? Bad centering. Some toning and staining. Some pulled perfs. Instead of very fine to superb, I am looking at good space fillers, if that. I felt for a minute like the room was spinning. What saved me, I didn’t have any breath to say anything. Then my mind is racing, and I get hold of myself. When Mary Alice has put the new buys in, I take the stock book and leaf through it, saying something about Sprenger will never be sorry he made the investment. It is worse than I thought. Blocks reassembled from singles. Repairs. Scratches. Little stains. Not counting what Mary Alice had just put in, I had bought three hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars worth of standard classics. Mostly superb condition. Total catalog would run maybe three hundred and twenty-five. I was looking at stuff that was one fifth and one sixth and one tenth catalog anywhere. Sixty-five thousand at the best. Somehow I got the strength to walk out of there on my own legs. You think I’ve had a night’s sleep since then?”

Meyer said, “Hirsh got in touch with me.”

“It had been too long since I saw you last,” Fedderman said. “What is the matter with the world? Old friends don’t see each other. What I wanted, Meyer, was to borrow your mind. Such a logical mind! I get excited, and I can’t think two and two.”

“I listened to the story,” Meyer said, “and it made me wonder if Frank Sprenger might be the kind of barracuda who’d steal his own property and make Hirsh pay him for the loss. The deposit box is in a busy bank. Hirsh here is not an unusual type. His signature isn’t complex or ornate. Sprenger would know the way Hirsh usually greeted the different vault attendants. Sprenger had an inventory list of everything in the investment collection. I asked Hirsh if defective duplicates would be hard to find. He said some of them would take awhile, mostly no. So it began to seem plausible that Sprenger had somebody accumulate the same items, and then they went to the bank together and switched, took the good ones out of the stock book, and put the defective ones in. Somebody successfully passed as Hirsh Fedderman.”

“You like that assumption?” I asked Meyer.

“I don’t like it any better than you do. It is a very touchy thing. Hirsh goes there often. Somebody gets uneasy and steps on the silent alarm, and Frank Sprenger is in a special kind of trouble. Anyway, it didn’t happen.”

“Vault records?” I asked.

Fedderman beamed at me approvingly. “I keep a careful record of every time I go to the vault. I made a list. I went to see my friend Mr. Dobson and gave him the list and asked him to find out if I’d been there more times than on the list, because maybe I had forgotten to write down a visit, and that’s why my inventory was sort of messed up. There was no extra visit at all.”

“And your next guess?” I asked Meyer.

“Hirsh’s practice is to turn the items over to Mary Alice McDermit. She keeps the records, puts the items in mounts. I suggested the switch took place in this shop, item by item, before they even got to the bank. Hirsh went up in blue smoke.”

“Not her. Believe me! Anyway, I always personally showed the new items to Sprenger. I couldn’t help seeing if they had turned to some kind of junk. Could she make the switch right there in front of both of us? No! A stock book like this one has double-sided pages. It holds a lot. Here is the inventory list. To add up to that much without buying well-known pieces, there are almost seven hundred items. No. That’s ridiculous. Even if she wanted to do it, there’s no way.”

“Next guess?” I asked Meyer.

“The next thing was try to talk you into taking a look. You said no. Today you said yes.”

I frowned at Fedderman. “What happens if Sprenger decides to ask you for cash money, according to your agreement?”

“Don’t even say it out loud! I have to find four hundred and fifty thousand. Where? I can sell out my investments. I can empty the bank account. I can borrow. I can liquidate inventory. Maybe I can make it. Then I can get some salvage from that junk, pay back the loan. Maybe I end up naked like the day I was born.”

“What if he wanted to cancel and the stamps hadn’t been switched?”

“No problem. You have no idea how hungry the auction houses are for prime merchandise. I could borrow, interest free, seventy-five percent of anticipated auction prices. That would be close to four hundred. I would come out ahead on the whole deal. The older an investment account is, the better off I am if the client wants out. If a client wanted out, I would have to advise him he’d be better off selling the items on the open market. I’d handle that for him without commission. It’s part of the agreement. I’d get him the best price around.”

“When did you look through that stock book previously, Hirsh? Can you pinpoint a date when everything was in order?”

“I tried. Four times this year I met Sprenger there. February, May, July, September. It was in February, or it was November last year, I looked through the book. Everything looked good. I think it was February, but I can’t be sure.”

“So… it couldn’t happen, but it did.”

“I… I just don’t know what I…” His voice got shaky. His face started to break up, and he brought it under control, but for a moment I could see just how he had looked when he had been a boy.

“I’ll think about it and let you know,” I told him. It wasn’t what I had opened my mouth to say. Meyer knew that. Meyer looked startled and pleased.

Chapter Three

Meyer and I strolled through the golden sunshine of evening, and through the residual stink of the rush-hour traffic, now considerably thinned out. We walked a half-dozen blocks to a small, dark bar in an old hotel. Elderly local businessmen drank solemnly, standing along the bar, playing poker dice for the drinks. At first glance they looked like an important group, like the power structure. But as eyes adjusted to the dimness after the hot brightness outside, the ruddiness became broken veins, collars were frayed and dingy, suits cut in outmoded style, the cigar smoke cheap, the drinks especially priced for the cocktail hour.

They talked about the market and the elections. Maybe once upon a time it had been meaningful. They had probably met here when they had worked in the area, when the area had been important, when the hotel had been shining new. So now they came in from their retirement at this time of day, dressing for the part, to nurse a couple of sixty-cent drinks and find out who had died and who was dying.

We carried our drinks over to a table under a tile mural of an improbable orange tree.

“So Fedderman got in a bind, a bad one, and he took Sprenger’s money and bought junk and pocketed the difference,” I said. “All along he knows there is going to be a day of reckoning, and because Frank Sprenger sounds hard case, it could be a very dirty day. If, by getting help, he can give himself the look of being a victim, he could save his skin.”

Meyer smiled. “I went down that road. It doesn’t go anywhere. Not because he is an honest man, which I think he is, but because he is a bright man. He buys for old customers, not under any special agreement. They take his word on authenticity. He could slip junk into those collections, and there would be no recourse against him. He is bright enough to know that you don’t fool around with the Frank Sprengers of this world. Maybe you shouldn’t deal with them at all. He rationalizes by saying that what he does is honest. He likes action. Sprenger is a lot of action. Fedderman likes having big pieces of money to invest. He likes phoning London and talking to his friends at Stanley Gibbons.”

“How do you know him?”

“Ten years ago I invented an economic indicator I called the Hedge Index. Activity in works of art, antiques, gold, silver, coins, rare stamps. I felt it could be done on a sampling basis. Fedderman was one of the people who agreed to help. He was absolutely candid. No tricks, no lies, no exaggerations. When I had the bugs ironed out, I ran the index for two years and then published a partial report. There was a direct correlation between rate of inflation and hedge activity, with the hedge activity being a lead indicator of major rises in the announced cost of living by about ninety days. It’s been picked up by the big boys and refined. I wanted the kind of built-in warning they used to have in France. When the peasants started buying gold and hiding it, you knew the storms were coming.”

“Are they coming, O Great Seer?”

“What do you think we are standing out in the middle of with neither spoon nor paddle? Anyway, I’ve dropped in on Hirsh when I’ve been in the neighborhood ever since I gave up running the index. I said something to him once about having a friend in the salvage business. It was in connection with a customer whose valuable collection had been stolen. That’s why he phoned me when this came up.”

“If he’s such a specialist and so bright, why isn’t he rich?”

“He’s seventy-two years old. His wife died of cancer twenty years ago. He gives a lot of money for cancer research. Both his sons emigrated to Israel and married there. He has seven, I think, grandchildren. He visits once a year. He gives to Jewish Relief, Bonds for Israel. He’s set up an educational insurance policy for each grandchild. He’s big in the temple. Special work and special gifts. He runs the store because he likes it. He’s used to it. His work is his hobby. He’s very proud of his reputation for fair dealing. He’s proud of having so many good friends scattered around the country. He overpays his help. He lives in an apartment hotel, so called. He knows everybody within four blocks of his store in any direction. Why isn’t he rich? I think maybe he’s as rich as he wants to be.”

“Maybe he ought to sell the business and retire and leave for Israel next week.”

“That’s the last thing Hirsh would ever do.”

“If he could do it, he would have already done it.”

“Right.”

A huge old man came lumbering over to our table. “Don’t tell me,” he said. He bent over and peered into my face. “Don’t tell me. You were six years witha Steelers. Then you got traded to the Eagles. This your second year witha Dolphins, right? Like fourteen years in pro ball. You lost the speed, and you’re not as big as the ones coming up, but you got the cutes, boy. You got the smarts. You got those great patterns and those great fakes. In a minute I’ll come up with your name. You’ll see. Who’s this with you?”

“One of the trainers.”

“Trainer, eh? Good! Worse thing you can do is consort with a known gambler, right? They’ll throw your ass out of the league.”

When he reached for a nearby chair, I stood up quickly and said, “Nice to meet a knowledgeable fan, sir. See you around.”

“Any minute now I’ll remember your name, fella.”

“Want some help?”

“No. I don’t need any help. I know you good.”

The sun was gone when we went out into the muggy evening. Meyer sighed as we started toward the parking place and said, “You look like a hero, and I look like a known gambler.”

“Nature plays fair. You’re the one with the good head.”

“The good head says you are going to try to get a line on Sprenger first.”

In September the Amalgamated Lepers of Eurasia could negotiate special convention rates at any one of fifteen brassy hostelries along Collins Avenue. Bellhops even smile when tipped.

I found a handy spot for old Miss Agnes and told Meyer to be patient. I could work it better alone, and it might mean several hotel lounges before I could put anything together. I tried the Fountainbleu first, that epic piece of decor a Saturday Evening Post journalist once described as looking like “an enormous dental plate.”

When my eyes were used to the gloom, I spotted a bar waitress who used to be at the Eden Roc. Kay. Nice eyes, big smile, fat legs.

“Hey, where you been hiding, McGee?”

“What are you doing working here?”

“Oh, I run into kind of a personal problem the other place. It was better I should try another place. It’s okay here.”

“How are the twins?”

“In the second grade! Would you believe?”

“I bet they’re beautiful.”

“They are, if I say so myself, but they’re hellers. Look, I got to go take care of my station.”

“Come back when you get a chance. I want to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

When she came back to the bar and touched me on the shoulder, I turned on the stool and said, “I was trying to get a reading on somebody. I was looking for somebody like Brownie.”

She leaned warmth against the side of my thigh and said, “I know. But they say he’s dead.”

“How long?”

“A year, maybe. He just stopped showing, and when somebody checked his place, there was nothing there. So nobody got a postcard even, and they say he was dropped in the ocean, and somebody cleaned his place out so it would look like he left. Maybe he had too many readings on people. You know.”

“Is Willy still over at the Contessa?”

“Sure. He knows all, that guy. But he won’t say.”

“Maybe he owes me one.”

“If he does, he won’t remember. You know how he is.”

“I’ll give it a try.”

“You come back, hear? I’m off at nine tonight.”

“Wish I could, Kay. I really do. But this one is priority.”

The desk tried to brush me off. I told the cold-eyed old man to check with Mr. Nucci before he made it final. He went over and murmured into the phone, studying me as he talked. He hung up and came over and told me that if I would go to the Winner’s Circle Bar, Mr. Nucci would join me there in a few minutes.

It was more like twenty minutes before he slipped onto the stool beside mine. He wore a brown denim suit with lots of pockets and ropes and zippers, and a yellow velvet shirt, open to the umbilicus. His face was bland-brown, hairless as his brown smooth chest. Sleepy eyes, languid manner, a thin little mouth, like a newborn shark.

Willy Nucci started as a bus boy and now owns more points in the Contessa than anyone else. This is an unlikely Horatio Alger story along the oceanfront. He managed it by making various pressure groups believe he was fronting for other, just as deadly, pressure groups. He did it by expert intelligence work, brass, guile, persistence, and hard work. Nearly everyone thinks he is a front for New Jersey money, money that comes down to be dry-cleaned and flown back or flown abroad. I am one of the very few people who know Willy is clean and that he owns the biggest piece of the hotel. Maybe the IRS knows.

The motif of the bar is horse. Everything except saddle horns on the bar stools. In season it is a good place for the winners to spend and the losers to cry.

“I kept you waiting,” Willie said in a flat voice. Statement of fact. I nodded. Silence is the best gambit with Willy Nucci, because it is one of his useful weapons. He makes people edgy by saying nothing. It’s always handy to use the other man’s tricks, because he never knows if he is being mocked.

I outwaited him, and finally he said, “It’s your dime, McGee.”

“Look at the edge of my glass.”

He leaned toward it, tilting his head, and saw the little pale pink smear of stale lipstick. He called the barman over and chewed him in a small terrible voice. The man swayed and looked sweaty. He brought me a new drink, delivering it with a flourish and a look of splendid hatred.

“What else is bothering you?” Willy asked.

“I have a name, an address, a description, and I want a fill-in.”

“I don’t know many people anymore. The Beach keeps changing.”

“You have to know, Willy.”

“All I have to do is run this place and turn a dime on it for the owners.”

“Willy?”

He gave me a quick, sidelong glance. Silence. A barely audible sigh.

“Willy, there is a young lady with a lot of energy on the paper in Lauderdale, and she keeps after me, saying she wants human interest stories about playtown, USA. She digs pretty good. She knows how to use courthouse records.”

He got up slowly, looking tired. “Come on, damn you.”

We went out past the guard and the empty pool and up the stairs to the roof of the cabana row of the Contessa Hotel. These are the days of exotic bugs, induction mikes, shotgun mikes. People like Willy Nucci talk in the open, at night, near surf roar or traffic roar. Or they rent cars and turn the radio volume high and drive around and talk. They never say anything useful over the phone, and they put in writing the bare minimum information required by the various laws and regulatory agencies.

We crossed the recreation roof to the ocean side and stood side by side, leaning on the railing. Freighters were working south, inside the stream. The sleepy ocean whacked listlessly at the little bit of remaining beach, with a little green-white glow of phosphorescence where it tumbled.

In my Frank McGee voice instead of my Travis McGee voice, I said, “When Willy Nucci quietly acquired his first small percentage of the Contessa Hotel, it was laboring under the crushing burden of a sixth and a seventh mortgage. Today, hiding behind a bewildering maze of legal stratagems, Mr. Nucci is not only the principal owner, but he has managed to pay off most of the indebtedness-”

He responded, his voice rising with exasperation. “Look. Okay. I wanted to tell somebody. I wanted to brag. We had a lot of time and nothing to do, and neither one of us figured we had a chance of getting out of there once it was daylight and they could use those goddamn rifles.”

“Wouldn’t you like other people to know?”

He calmed down. “Sure I would. But it would cost me. I get nibbled pretty good. The unions, the assessments, the graft, the public servants on the take, the gifts you make like insurance premiums. But there’s restraint. They have the idea that if the bite gets too big, some very important muscle is going to come down here and straighten some people out. If they knew it was just Willy Nucci, owner and operator, there would be a big grin, and they’d smack their lips and move in very tight and close. I don’t have much margin to play with. I’ve got sixteen years invested. The books look good right now. Last season was good, and this one will be better. You might as well know this too. I’m going to try to move it this season. I can come out well. And cut out of here. How come I always run off at the mouth to you, McGee?”

“I win friends and influence people.”

He frowned at his private piece of ocean. “You could have used what you know, but you haven’t. Except you use it to leverage me.”

“Not often.”

“I make this the third time. In three years. Maybe this time I can’t help you.”

“The man is big and broad and suntanned. Officially or unofficially, he’s in a penthouse at the Seascape. He moves around with some fetch-and-carry people. Frank Sprenger.”

Silence. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked up at murky stars.

“Willy?”

“I don’t know how much you know about the way things are. For all I know you think that soft, romantic crock of shit, The Godfather, was for real.”

“I thought it was real, like a John Wayne western.”

“There’s hope for you. All the action is divided up. There are independents, and when they get big enough, they are absorbed or smashed. There are three neutral areas. Places where anybody can go who is part of the national action and not get pressured. Sanctuaries. Miami, Vegas and Honolulu. There are hits sometimes, but outsiders, amateurs. Discipline situations. ‘Do not crap in your own nest’ is the motto. There’s enough for everybody in the sanctuaries. That’s how come you have maybe nine different groups from elsewhere, owning lots of pieces of property and pieces of action along the Beach here. Like there are twelve groups operating side by side in Vegas. Other areas are strictly territorial. That’s how come all the trouble in New York lately. Now suppose every one of the nine organizations operating here sent down their own bag men and bankers and enforcers? It would get too hairy. People would start pushing. People would push back. It would stop being a safe place for the topside people to come and relax, and it would hurt trade. So there’s been a working arrangement for maybe thirty years. The local group has their own operations, like a franchise area, but you can see how it wouldn’t be fair to cut the out-of-town groups out of the picture entirely because a certain substantial piece of business comes through their owning certain situations here.”

“Example?”

“Okay, say that Minneapolis has substantial points in a couple of hotels and owns a steak house franchise and a taxi company. The local group will be scoring from every part of the operations. Hookers and games and drugs at the hotels on top of linen service, union dues, kickbacks, dozens of angles. And they will work the steak houses and the taxi company pretty good too. So it works almost like a money-room skim. The extra costs of doing business get built into the books as legitimate expenses, and then out of the unrecorded cash flow, an equal amount gets bundled up and couriered to Minneapolis. The profit is minimized, which cuts taxes, and the rebate is under the table, ready for more investment.”

“And somebody has to be the bookkeeper and enforcer, somebody everybody agrees on, to see that the skim is honest?”

“For the last six years, Frank Sprenger. Phoenix. Before that it was Bunny Colder, for years and years. He died of a stroke. I heard that some kinky girlfriend got him smashed and then ran a sharpened piano wire into his brain through the corner of his eye, but nobody ran an autopsy to check it out.”

“What is Sprenger like?”

“I’ll tell you what he’s like. He’s like exactly the right man for the job. He doesn’t use anything, not even booze or tobacco or coffee. He’s a body freak. Not muscle building. Conditioning. He lives like a good heavyweight six weeks away from a title shot. Except for women. He takes care of more than his share. He spends a lot of time crosschecking the action. He’s found some people clipping off a little as the money went by them, and they are not seen around anymore. I hear the local group has stopped trying to con him, because it isn’t safe or healthy.”

“What’s his cover?”

“Investment consultant. He has a second-floor office on Lincoln Road. He’s in the yellow pages. He pays his taxes. I think maybe he has some legitimate clients. He’s a careful man.”

I waited until I thought of the right kind of hypothetical question. “Willy, I want you to listen to some stuff I am going to make up and tell me if it could happen. Let’s say that in the past year and a half Frank Sprenger has been buying important paintings. He has been using an expert and paying a fee for his judgment. Four hundred thousand worth of art. It’s been going into a storage warehouse.

“Possible?”

“Sure,” Willy said. “Especially if it’s on a cash basis.”

“Say it is.”

“Money makes more problems every day. You hear how they want banks to report everything over five thousand? Now they are beginning to crack the Swiss and get the numbers. The islands used to be good, but what’s going to happen to the Bahamas, the Caymans, Jamaica the next couple of years? It’s very hard to set up a corporation and feed cash into it in such a way you can get past an audit. You put cash in a jar in your back yard, it isn’t working for you. It’s shrinking all the time it’s buried. Dry-cleaning money gets more expensive all the time. One way they are using lately is you buy yourself a broker, one who’ll fake back records for the sake of the commission and a little present. Then you set up a buy five years ago for something that has gone up like eight hundred percent. Then you have the sale records faked too and pay capital gains, and what you have left is legitimate and you can invest it legitimate. You have to be your own fence, for God’s sake. So why not paintings? I like it. He would be handling it for one of the out-of-town groups or individuals. He handles investment money right here. The local group has legal talent he can use. Raw land has been good. Pieces of home-building outfits have been good. In-and-out marinas have been good.”

“How much would he be supervising in a year? I mean, how much would the total skim be, the amount he’d be watching?”

“McGee, this has to be absolutely horseback. I could be off, way way off.”

“Take a guess.”

“Well… working it backward and saying that the total take for the Florida group in this area is seventy-five million with fifteen million expenses, and maybe twenty-five percent of the net is reimbursed on account of special ownership… Sprenger keeps an eye on maybe fifteen million.”

“And invests that much?”

“Oh, hell no! The groups mostly have got their own way of handling a cash rebate. It goes back by messenger. Frank might have to find a home down here for one mil, or one and a half, or even two.”

“Okay. Now here is the final suppose. Suppose that right now all those paintings in that bonded warehouse are fake.”

He snapped his head around, eyes wide open for the first time that evening. “You have some weird sense of fun there, McGee.”

“Think out loud.”

“Well… Sprenger wouldn’t know it. He wouldn’t get into that kind of a con. Unless, of course, he had orders to spoil somebody’s day. But I don’t think they’d use him for that. He’s too good doing what he does. Okay. Sprenger doesn’t know. Then he’s dead.”

“Literally?”

“Literally. Because there are only two choices when the news gets out. Sprenger is either getting cute or getting stupid. And they can’t take a chance either way. The only reverse leverage he has is what he knows. So he has to be taken dead before he can get a chance to use it. It’s a standard risk. A man like Sprenger makes as much money as the president of Eastman Kodak. He accepts the occupational risk. If he goofs, he gets more than fired. And if he goofs and has any small chance of covering himself before the news gets out, he would gut his brother, peddle his sister and feed his father and his godfather to alligators, a hunk at a time, to earn that small chance.”

“Why are you so sure Sprenger will do what he’s told to do?”

“Where have you been? They never let anybody close to the money unless they’ve got a good lock on him. Sprenger will always be some kind of errand boy. Somewhere there is something in writing or on tape or on film that some prosecutor can’t ignore. Like with the talent they own. Nobody goes looking for a new manager if the one you already have owns your ass.”

In silence he looked down at the eroded beach. He said dolefully, “They want to pump umpty-seven billion yards of sand in front of all the hotels, a big beach like in 1919 they had. Bond issues, big assessments, more taxes, just so all the clowns can go parading by on public beach land for maybe two years before a hurricane takes it all back out to sea. And after next season this old crock hotel will need a quarter mil of maintenance and redecorating. With luck I’m out by April.”

“Willy?”

“Uh?”

“You’ve got me wondering. You have to get a rebate from Sprenger.”

“I should sidestep it and give up the edge?”

“But how?”

“Maybe there is a little spin-off group of like investors in St. Louis, and maybe they have sixteen points. So a hundred percent of the skim goes there, and they take twenty-two percent instead of sixteen, in return for running it in and out of some accounts before it ends up in something which could be called maybe Acme Management Associates or Scranton Development Corporation.”

“Which could be you?”

“Not entirely, but mostly. There’s no other way I can go and still make out. You can’t fight the establishment.”

“Funny thing to call it.”

“Why? It’s the way things are. They put a night bell captain on. I don’t have to pay him a dime. What’s your pleasure? Hash-candy from Calcutta? A Greek virgin? Table-stakes poker? Cuban cigars? A quick abortion? Mexican gold? An albino dwarf? If you can afford the ticket, you’ve got it. I can’t get rid of him. The cops probably know he’s dealing. But if they charge him, if the case is airtight, it still goes all the way to jury, and after the jury is picked, it takes two phone calls. Or three. Cash money if you vote to acquit, Pancho. And if Alfred gets convicted, you’ll come home from work some day and find something that’ll give you a weak stomach the rest of your life. Who stands up to that? Nobody. The klutz with no connections cops a plea, and they process him into the slammer. Alfred, my special employee, will never do a day of time unless he gets smartass and they want to settle him down. Nobody really gives a goddamn anymore, McGee. Everybody wants to keep his own ass safe from harm.” He paused and made a sound which was like a suppressed gag. Maybe it was laughter. I’d never heard Willy Nucci laugh before, so I couldn’t tell. “Even me,” he said. “Especially me.”

Chapter Four

I felt guilty about leaving Meyer alone for so long. I had no way of knowing Willy was going to make ZsaZsa sound like a mute. I always feel guilty when I keep Meyer waiting. And there is never any need for it. He never paces up and down, checking the time. He has those places to go, inside his head. He looks as if he was sitting and dozing, fingers laced across his middle. Actually he has walked back into his head, where there are libraries, concert halls, work rooms, experimental laboratories, game rooms. He can listen to a fine string quartet, solve chess problems, write an essay on Chilean inflation under Allende, or compose haiku. He had a fine time back in there. If you could put his head in a jar of nutrient and keep him alive forever, he would wear forever that gentle, contented little smile.

He came reluctantly back to the lesser reality of here and now and, as I drove north up A-l-A, he told me he had a confrontation with urchins. They had a needle-sharp icepick and thought a protection price of five dollars per tire was a good place to start the bargaining.

“We had a nice conversation,” Meyer said.

“You had a nice conversation.”

“I told them that theirs was a profession mentioned in the first writings of mankind over thirty centuries ago. Roving bands of barbarians would demand that a village pay tribute, or they would sack it.”

“They listened to the lecture?”

“A discussion, not a lecture. Questions and answers. There is a parallel, of course, in Vietnam, where the Viet Cong would spare villages in return for food, shelter, and information. And I told them about the Barbary pirates extracting tribute from our merchant vessels. Then they went away finally. After they were gone, I remembered we hadn’t decided on any dollar figure. I guess they forgot.”

“Three of them.”

“Age twelve, thirteen, and fourteen.”

“Meyer, did it ever occur to you that one of those half-size hoodlums could have shoved an icepick into you?”

I could sense he was genuinely startled and upset. “Into me? But why?”

Why indeed? Conversely, why not? I don’t know exactly what it is about Meyer. Sometimes, for fun, when we have been at someone’s home, I have seen him do his St. Francis bit, when there has been a bird feeder visible from a window. Meyer goes and stands a few feet from the feeder. The birds come back. They look him over. They talk about him. And in a few minutes they start landing on him. Once when we took a runover dog to a veterinarian, the man told Meyer he had good hands. Meyer could hold the dog still. It snapped at the doctor. I have been on the beach with Meyer and five hundred people and had a frantic girl run directly to Meyer to tell him she was hallucinating and please help me, please. It is a rare attribute, but not all that rare. Lots of people have it in varying degrees. Maybe it is an echo of the remote past when we all lived in the peaceable kingdom. We should find out what it is, how to increase the aptitude, how to teach it to others. It is symptomatic of our times that no one is studying this wild card, nobody thinks it important. In an icepick world, any kind of immunity is crucially important. Any avenue of loving kindness needs some directional signs.

I went up A-l-A looking for a place I had not been to in a long time. Meyer had never been there. It was near Hallandale. I know I made the right turn. I cruised a few blocks. Everything looked strange. I put my old electric blue pickup truck next to a gas island where electronic pumps squatted like skeptical Martians. After extravagant admiration, and several questions about Miss Agnes, the attendant let me ask my question.

“Huh? Oh sure. Hell, it’s been maybe two years. That old house was right down there where that big red and white chicken is flapping its wings. Chicky-Land. Let me see. It was Rosa and… and…”

“Vito.”

“Right! I took the old lady there plenty of times on special occasions. They could handle maybe twenty-four people, tops. Reservations only. You never knew what you’d get for dinner, but by God it was always delicious and always more than you could eat. They treated you like guests in their home.”

“What happened?”

He frowned as he cleaned the high windshield. “Something about the zoning and all. They started giving them fits. Rewire the place, then redo the plumbing, then put in some kind of sprinkler system. Then change the kitchen over somehow. They say somebody wanted that land. Every time something had to be done, they’d have to close until it was all okay and approved. Then Rosa had some kind of breakdown, and Vito went down to a meeting and broke the nose on one of the commissioners. They jailed him, but some of his old customers with clout got him out and got it all quieted down. They went away someplace. I heard one of the commissioners was in the group that bought up that whole two blocks for the shopping plaza and Chicky-Land.”

“If you wanted to find a meal that good right now, where would you go?” I asked him.

He took my money and made change as he thought it over. Finally he said, “Damn if we just don’t eat that good anymore anywhere. Funny, sort of. Big, rich country like this. Everything starting to taste like stale sawdust. Maybe it’s just me.”

“We are all living in chicky land,” I told him.

Back in the car, heading home, I told Meyer about the little sculpture garden Vito and Rosa Grimaldi had fixed up. White cement statues of swooning maidens and oddly proportioned animals. With a dozen complicated floodlights which all kept changing color, focused on the statuary and the three small fountains and the plantings. “So incredibly vulgar, it was somehow very touching.”

“As vulgar as that big red and white electric chicken?”

Meyer is often unanswerable, an annoying habit.

We ate in one of the less offensive steak houses, at a table made from an imitation, wooden hatch cover. They are sawing down forests, strapping thick green planks together with rusty iron, beating hell out of them with chains and crowbars, dipping them in a dark muddy stain, then covering the whole thing with indestructible transparent polymer about a quarter inch thick. Instant artifact.

We talked our way up, over, across and around the Sprenger situation, after I had given him the Willy Nucci perspective.

It was agreed that Sprenger had the contacts to get an accurate reading on Hirsh Fedderman before opening negotiations. So it was possible that he could have set Hirsh up, that by devising a way of switching the rarities, he had invented a way of doubling his money. The stuff had a ready market. And Hirsh would pay instead of run. But it did not seem to be Sprenger’s style, even without knowing the man. If he wanted to play tricks and games, wouldn’t he rather play them in his own jungle?

We decided that if we could figure out how the switch had been made-and that might involve walking Hirsh and Miss Mary Alice through a typical bank visit complete with philatelic props-it might be possible to work backward from the method to the conniver.

Which would mean letting Mary Alice McDermit know for the first time that important stuff was missing.

“I’d say she’s about twenty-seven,” Meyer told me. “One of those big, slow, sweet, gentle girls. You know the type? Dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes, expression always on the edge of a smile. A beautiful disposition. Five years with Hirsh. I think I heard him say the other woman had been there fifteen years. She would be close to forty. Jane Lawson. A service widow. Teenage kids, I think. Small woman, quick and cranky and very smart. I don’t think Mary Alice has any children. I’m sure of it. She is separated from her husband. This is the way I read that store and the relationship. They are dependent on Hirsh and on the job. He pays them more than they could get elsewhere. So between them they make it up to him by making that little store pay off. It’s kind of a family, the three of them. They take care of each other.”

We both agreed that any frontal approach to Frank Sprenger had an unhealthy flavor. Nucci had marked him high for hard, high for smart. He was in a slot where he had to be suspicious of any approach from any direction.

Meyer came up with one faintly promising thought.

“Even though those aren’t famous rarities he bought for Sprenger, not things any dealer would recognize on sight, maybe there is some kind of way of identifying them. I don’t know enough about it. But did you notice that Philatelic Foundation certificate he showed us? There was a photograph glued to it, and an embossing seal used. If just one of those things can be traced…”

“There were numbers in the margin of those blocks of four and six he showed us.”

“We need to know more about it, Travis.”

“Do we?”

He leaned forward and peered at me very intently. “Hmmm. A kind of disapproval? That’s what’s bothered me most. Why should Travis McGee give a faint damn what happens to an elderly party who isn’t too careful whom he deals with and inevitably gets stung? The desirable quality of shining innocence isn’t there this time. And is it a total disaster? He has a place to go, people to look after him. You could get involved, but it would be going through motions.”

“Sometimes it isn’t any more than that.”

“Are you saying no?”

“Not quite yet.”

“But you might?”

“It is a distinct possibility.”

He looked tired. He sighed. He pushed a piece of gristle around his plate and finally hid it under his potato skin. I caught the eye of the redcoat who had served us. He had saved up all his cordiality for the critical moment of check and tip. The service had been indifferent, the orders not quite correct. What do you do? If you are cross, tired, and immature, you take it out on the waiter. The world is not enhanced to any measurable degree by one, or by one million, confrontations with venal, lazy waiters. And it impedes the processes of digestion. So you compute the tip and leave in good order and try to remember never to return.

But it had been one more smear on an already dingy day. All day I had been trying not to think of the eviction notice. But it was in the back of my mind. Willy Nucci had depressed me more than I had been willing to admit. He wanted to get out, and he was not at all sure he could. So, out of accumulations of anxiety, he had talked and talked and talked. The old men in the old bar had depressed me. And children with icepicks are not amusing. And I wished I’d gone to eat at Grimaldis’ when Vito and Rosa were in trouble. I might have been able to help. It was easy to see that I had a new remorse. It was one of the night thoughts of the future. If I had only… I have a long list of those.

After Meyer had gone to his home afloat, I made myself a hefty nightcap and turned the lights off and went up to the sundeck in a ratty old blue robe and sat at the topside controls, bare feet braced on the dew-damp mahogany. It was a soft night. Car lights, boat lights, dock lights, star light. Sound of traffic and sound of the sea. Smell of salt and smell of hydrocarbons. The Flush wind-swayed under me and nudged against a fender.

“Hey, McGee? McGee?” she called from the dock.

I got up and went aft and looked down at Jenny Thurston under the dock lights, in basque shirt, baggy shorts, baseball cap, and ragged boat shoes.

“Hey, is it really true?” she asked.

“Come on aboard. Want a drink?”

“I got most of this here can of beer, thanks.”

She came up topside and took the other pilot chair, beside me, and swiveled it around to face me in the night. “I got back around five, and they showed me in the paper, and all of them were bitching about it. I looked for you to check it out.”

“It’s true enough, Jen.”

“Well, goddamn them! Nobody is going to move me ashore, McGee. I was born on a boat. We’ll have to find a place where they’re not trying to iron everybody out flat. Maybe down in the Keys?”

“Maybe.”

“But it won’t be the same as here. Never.”

Jenny lives aboard a roomy old Chris and paints aboard her. Jenny paints three paintings. One is of a beach with a long cresting wave, sandpipers, and overhanging palms. One is of gulls in the wind, teetering over the abandoned, stove-in hulk of an old dory on a rocky beach. The last is of six old pilings at low tide, with weed and barnacles on the exposed part, with four brown pelicans perched on individual pilings, and two more sailing in to land on the empty ones. She paints them in varying sizes and frames them in different styles, in order to have a useful range of prices. They all sell. They hang in untold hundreds of northern living rooms, all signed in the bottom right corner. Jennifer Thurston.

She is chunky, forthright, salty, and loyal to her friends. She paints as many paintings as she needs, in order to get along. She has pretty eyes and good legs. From time to time, sturdy young men move in with her, aboard the West Bank. The average tour of duty has been about three months. The old timers have learned to estimate the probable date of departure very accurately. They detect in the young man a certain listlessness, a sallowness, a general air of stupor.

So we sat in the night and talked about old times and people long gone. Sam Taggert. Nora Gardino. A girl named Skeeter. Puss Killian. Remember when… Hey, what about the time… Were you around when…

It was all nostalgia, sweet and sad, and it was good therapy. Sometimes you need that special kind of laughter.

I went down the ladderway with her and walked aft to the gangplank. I bent and kissed her and felt her mouth sweeten and flower under the pressure when she grabbed hold to make it last longer. She sighed as I straightened, and she said, “Sometimes I wisht I didn’t have my rule about sleeping with my friends.”

“A lot of the trouble in my life has come from not following your rule, Jen.”

“It’s always better when you don’t have to give a damn.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“Let’s try to see if we can find a place most of the old hands can tie up permanent. You know. Enough room and everything.”

I watched her walk away. She slapped her old boat shoes down with stumpy authority. Her hair had smelled fresh and sweet. I needed a lady to be happy with. Not that lady, though. It had been a long time between amiable ladies. Chauvinist pig yearning for new playtoy, new love object? Not so as you would hardly know it. Reverse of Jenny’s dictum: It’s always better when you give a damn. But how do you tell a genuine damn from one you muster up to justify tupping the wench? Well, you can tell. That’s all. You can. And so can she. Unless, of course, she is just a female chauvinist pig yearning after you as a playtoy, a sex object, and drumming up her little rationalizations.

I dreamed about a lady I saw on one of those stamps. Antigua. 1863. Lady in profile in rosy mauve, with an elegant neck, a discreet crown on her pretty head. She turned with a half smile, looking out of the stamp at me, then shook her head, frowned, and said, “Oh, golly. You again, huh?”

Chapter Five

The First Atlantic Bank and Trust Company occupied the first two floors of its own office building on a noisy corner. The four of us walked from Fedderman’s shop to the bank. Meyer walked ahead with Hirsh. I followed with Mary Alice McDermit. Anyone would probably mention that she was tall enough for me. In hardly any heels at all, she came close to six feet. It was a stifling Thursday morning. September can be a seething bitch in Miami. She wore some kind of sunback dress with about five inches of skirt. Maybe six inches. Her glossy black hair bounced to her free stride. Her fair skin had taken a tan the color of weak butterscotch. Her face had good bones, but it was slightly plump, and something about her expression and the way she dressed made me think of a very large twelve-year-old girl.

“I can’t believe it,” she kept saying. “I just can’t believe it.”

“Hirsh believes it. He got a good look two weeks ago today. The good stuff is gone, except what you put in that day.”

“We knew something was awfully wrong. The way he’s been acting. Jane and I talked about it. We tried to find out from him. I just can’t believe it.”

It felt good to walk with a girl who matched my stride, nice brown knees alternating. Any kind of a close look and that twelve-year-old impression was gone all of a sudden.

She said, “It wasn’t any of your really great stuff. You know. Like one-of-a-kind or tied to historical covers or anything. But it was all really first-class, high-catalog material, the kind you can depend on to hold value.”

“You like futzing around with postage stamps?”

She gave me a blank, frowning look. “What do you futz around with, huh? Hitting an innocent little white ball with a long stick? Soldering wires together and playing four-track stereo? Slamming some dumb little car around corners, upshifting and downshifting? Are you a gun futz or a muscle futz?”

“I think I know where you’re going with that.”

“Where I’m going is that there’s no list to tell you where you rate on some kind of scale of permanent values and find out how unimportant you are. But I can tell you what nobody ought to be doing.”

“What’s that?”

“Nobody ought to be sneering at anybody else’s way of life.”

“Mrs. McDermit?”

“Mmm?”

“Could we set our personal clock back and start over again?”

Her smile was bright, vivid, personal, merry. “Why, you dummy? We’re getting along pretty remarkable.”

“We are? Good.”

“I like people. I really do. Here’s the bank.”

The safety deposit vault was in the back left corner. There were three people on duty there. Hirsh Fedderman signed the slip and put down the number of his own personal box. They let us all in, and had the three of us wait in the corridor off to the side which led to the private booths and little rooms. Hirsh joined us, with his box under his arm. The attendant led us back to one of the little rooms. There was a table, three chairs. The attendant said he would bring another chair. I told him thanks, not to bother.

The table was butted against the wall. It was narrower than a card table and about half again as long. They moved the chairs to where they had been in an identical little room on September seventh. As I stood with my back against the closed door, Hirsh and Mary Alice sat at the right, Mary Alice nearest me, facing Meyer across the table-Meyer, of course, representing Sprenger.

I said, “Try to make as exact a reconstruction as you can. I’ll stop you if I have any questions.”

Hirsh said, “I put the box right here, against the wall, nearest me, and I opened it like this and took the stock book out. Okay. Here is the stock book I brought, so…”

“Put it in the box and close the box and then take it out as you did before and do with it exactly what you did the other time.”

Hirsh took it out and put it in front of Mary Alice and said, “Other clients, I hand them the book. They want to take a look at their money. Not Sprenger. I tried at first. He wouldn’t take it. He’d just shrug.”

Mary Alice said, “That was when I was taking the new purchases out of my purse, like this. And the inventory sheet. I gave the inventory sheet to Mr. Sprenger, and I put the new stamps, in their mounts, right here, where they would be handy for Mr. Fedderman.”

“I took a copy of the list out of my pocket,” Hirsh said. “I put it here in front of me, like this. Then I read off the items and found each one and showed it to Sprenger and then pushed it toward Mary Alice.”

“By then,” she said, “I’d taken the book out of the slip case and opened it up, and as Hirsh pushed them toward me, I would pick them up and slip them into the book like this, into these transparent strips. I used these tongs because you have to have something to lift the edge of the strip. The stamps were in mounts like this, so it was just because it’s easier for me, not to protect the stamps, I used stamp tongs.”

“Is that the same inventory list?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she said. “And I fixed up the right number of mounts and the right size. But these stamps I just put in are junk from the new issue service.”

“Go ahead just the way you did with him,” I said.

Hirsh tried to smile. “I’d try to give a little spiel. Clients like it. I couldn’t tell if Sprenger did or not. We never got loosened up with each other. He’d grunt. He always seemed bored, like I was taking too long. Okay. I’ll say the sort of thing I said to Sprenger. It won’t be exact, but it will be close.”

I watched intently. I had them do a repeat of Mary Alice looking back through the book to see if there was room on a prior page to put the new Barbados stamps with the previous Barbados stamps. I had Hirsh take the book and leaf through it and give it back to Mary Alice. She put it in the fiber slip case and handed it to Hirsh. He opened the box and put the stock book in and closed the lid.

“Then I picked up the box and started to stand up, but he said he had some money. I thought he had it with him so I sat down, but he said he would be in touch and get it to me soon. I haven’t seen it yet. We left the room. When I came out of the vault, he was gone. Mary Alice was waiting for me. We walked back to the store. Like always, I would have been kind of depressed. He never said, ‘Very nice. Very pretty.’ Nothing. You like people to take an interest. But I was too scared to be depressed. I was terrified. My head was spinning. I almost told this girl.”

“You should have told me, Hirsh. Really.”

“I should worry your pretty head with total disaster?”

She looked at me. “Did you see anything?”

“Nothing at all. Did you always do it that way?”

“Always,” she said. “With him and the other clients too. Just like that. Except it’s more fun with the others.”

Meyer said, “Do either of you remember a distraction? Did anybody yell fire, drop anything, fall off a chair?”

They remembered nothing like that. They had been buoyed by a fragile hope. It seeped away. Hirsh went from looking sixty-two to looking ninety-two. Meyer was somber. The girl bit her thumb knuckle and blinked rapidly. So we all got out of there. We went back to the shop. Jane Lawson looked at us with anxious query when we all walked in. Hirsh and Mary Alice shook their heads no. Jane looked bitterly depressed. An old man with hair like Brillo sat erect on a stool, using gold tongs with great deftness as, one by one, he examined stamps and replaced them in the stock book in front of him. “Fedderman,” he said, “everything here is perfectly ordinary, quite tiresome, exceedingly unremarkable.”

“Colonel, if I had looked through them, I would have known that, right?”

“Yes, but-”

“And then if I told you I had not looked through them, I would be lying. Right? Believe me, that book is exactly the way I found it, in one of the cartons. If it’s tiresome, I’m sorry.”

“Huh!” said the Colonel.

“What?” asked Fedderman.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Wait. You put this one back crooked. Let me help you. What do you know? Look, Mary Alice. A nice double surcharge on Canada C3. Doesn’t that go pretty good?”

“Like about seventy dollars in Scott, Mr. Fedderman.‘’

“See, Colonel? In the middle of all this junk, a nice little error. Let me see. Original gum. Never hinged. Nice centering. To you, Colonel, only forty dollars.”

“Forty!”

“I know,” said Mary Alice. “That surprises me too, sir. It ought to be fifty-five at least.”

“Well… put it aside, dear girl,” said the colonel.

They meshed smoothly and well, did Fedderman and Mary Alice. She went behind the counter. Meyer and I went back to Fedderman’s office with him and closed the door.

“Now what?” Fedderman asked out of the depths of his despair.

“One thing I know,” Meyer said. “The impossible doesn’t ever happen. Only possible things happen.”

“To me the impossible happens,” said Fedderman.

“If it isn’t you and it isn’t Sprenger,” Meyer said, “then it has to be Mary Alice.”

“Impossible!”

“So we are comparing two impossible things, and it being Mary Alice is not quite as impossible as what happened.”

“Maybe I follow you,” Hirsh said. “My head hurts. I hurt all over. I’m coming down. I should be in bed with a pill.”

“Did she bring that same purse,” I asked Fedderman.

“Purse?”

“The one she had today is like a picnic basket made of straw painted white. Did she have the same purse the last time?”

“Yes. No. How should I know? There are five clients. What difference does it make?”

“I wish I knew if it made any difference. That junk you saw in the Sprenger collection. Could it have come out of your stock here in the store?”

“What I saw? Some of it, maybe. Very little. I didn’t have long enough to study it, you understand. A dealer has a good memory for defective pieces. No, I’d say probably none of it from my stock, or I would have recognized one piece anyway. Besides, it was higher catalog value than what I stock here.”

I remembered Meyer’s interesting thought. “Hirsh,” I asked, “suppose whoever switched the goods has sold the Sprenger items to the trade. Could you identify them?”

He thought, nodded, and gave me a show-and-tell answer. Once again the projection viewer came out. He put a slide box in place and in the darkened office clicked through a half-dozen slides and stopped at a block of four blue stamps imprinted “Graf Zeppelin” across the top. They were a two-dollar-and-sixty-cent denomination.

“This is one I picked up for Sprenger. It was in a Mozian auction catalog last year. It is absolutely superb, and I had to go to fourteen hundred for it. I take an Ektachrome-X transparency of everything I put in an investment account. I use a medical Nikon, and I keep it right here on this mount. Built-in flash. Now you see where the perforations cross in the middle of the block, those little holes? They make a certain pattern. Distinctive. Maybe unique? Not quite. Now look out at the corners. See this top left corner? That paper between the perforations, right on the comer, is so long, it looks as if maybe there was a pulled perforation on the stamp that was up here, in the original sheet. Okay, add that corner to the pattern in the middle, and it is unique. Any dealer could look at this slide, go through a couple dozen blocks and pick this one out with no trouble. Individual stamps would be a lot harder, especially perforated. Imperforate, usually they are cut so the margins are something you can recognize. Of course, postally used stuff, old stuff, the cancellation is unique.”

As he put his toys away, I said, “Could you get prints made from the slides of the most valuable items and circulate them to your friends in the trade?”

“A waste of time and money. These days, believe me, there are more stamp collections being ripped off than ever in history. Information comes in all the time. Watch for this, watch for that. Hoodlums come in here to the store, and they tell me their uncle left them some stamps in an album, do I want to take a look, maybe buy them? I say I’ve got all the stock I want. They’ll find people who’ll buy. But not me. I don’t need the grief. After fifty years in the business, I should be a fence? Am I going to look at the stamps the hoodlum brings in and call a cop? Who needs a gasoline bomb through the front door?”

“Then there’s no way?” Meyer asked.

Fedderman sighed. “If all that stuff goes back into circulation, a lot of those pieces have to find their way into the auction houses. Every catalog, there are pictures of the best pieces. Like if there are two thousand lots listed in the catalog, there could be a hundred photographs of the best items. One day last week I sat in here, I went through a couple dozen catalogs to try to spot any item from the Sprenger account. H. R. Harmer, Harmer, Rooke and Company, Schiff, Herst, Mozian, Siegel, Apfelbaum. Nothing.”

“Oh,” said Meyer, his disappointment obvious.

“I think I am going home to bed, the way I feel,” Fedderman said. “What are you fellows going to do now?”

I said, “I am going to get Mary Alice to help me.”

“How do you mean?” Hirsh asked.

“If she knows more than she’s told us, the only thing she can do is play along with me.”

“But that kind of person,” Hirsh said, “she would help if you ask. It wouldn’t prove anything.”

“Suppose I get to the point where I ask something or do something which would make her back away fast if she was innocent, and she doesn’t back away?”

He stared at me, uneasy and upset. “She is a good person. She isn’t used to anything rough.”

“Rough?” I asked him.

“No offense,” he said.

Meyer said, “You look terrible, Hirsh. Travis will drive you home.”

“It’s not even as far as the bank, but the other way. So I can’t walk it?”

“I’ll walk with you,” Meyer said.

“Why should you bother?

“Why shouldn’t I?”

On the way out through the store, by prearrangement, Hirsh told his two ladies that Mr. Travis McGee was going to do what he could to help out in this terrible situation, and he would appreciate it if they would answer questions and show him things and so on. Meyer told me he would go his own way, do a little research maybe, take a bus probably, and see me at Bahia Mar.

Chapter Six

Jane Lawson went off on her lunch break about fifteen minutes after Meyer and Hirsh left. A man came in to buy a beginner’s stamp-collecting outfit for his son’s birthday. I imitated a browser, leafing through big glassine pages on a countertop easel, looking at incredibly florid stamps from improbable countries, like Ajman, Zambia, and Bangladesh.

I liked the way Mary Alice handled the customer. She was plugging an outfit which, with stamps, album, manual, hinges, and so on, came to $24.95. The man finally said he couldn’t go over fifteen dollars. She told him there was a $14.95 kit, but she could assemble something better for him. She took items from stock, added them up, and told him it came to $14.50. Then she threw in another packet of stamps as a birthday present from Mr. Fedderman. She did not patronize the man. She made it seem like a better deal than the more expensive spread.

The narrow store seemed jammed full of merchandise in a bewildering confusion. But as I got used to it, I could see there was a logical order to the storage and display, and see that everything was bright and clean.

After the man left, she moved over to where I stood at the counter and said, “It’s sort of a policy in the trade, you know, to encourage kids to collect. But look at what some of these countries are doing. This stuff is just a bunch of… gummed labels. And they grind it out in such millions, they’ll never be worth more than what they’re worth this minute. I’ve told Hirsh I wish they’d all get together and boycott the countries that take advantage.” She turned a page. “Look here. This is a new issue for Grenada; it’s an island near Trinidad that used to be part of the British Empire. They’ve got a contract with some company that grinds out stamps and sends a few of them to Grenada for postal use and sends the rest directly to dealers like us and splits the profit with the government in Grenada. It’s just a racket. Gee, I guess we’re no better. Our government encourages collectors. Every stamp that isn’t used means no postal service is required, so it’s practically all profit. People buy all the commemoratives as they come out, in whole sheets and tuck them away like an investment. Some investment! You go to sell them, somebody will take them off your hands like for seven percent discount off face value. That’s because they print hundreds of millions of every one.” She hesitated. “I guess you don’t want to know about stuff like that.”

“Why not? If I was looking into a theft of paintings, I’d want to know something about art.”

“What are you? Some kind of investigator? I know you are Meyer’s friend. He’s such a dear, sweet man. We all love him.”

Before I could answer, a man came in and was greeted by name. She went back to the safe and brought out five little brown envelopes. The man sat on a stool, took out his own magnifying glass and, one by one, inspected the gold coins. Big coins. Mary Alice waited patiently. Finally he said, “Okay, dear. These three. Tell Hirsh this one is a slider, and I don’t like the strike on this one. That makes six hundred and twenty, doesn’t it?”

She used scratch paper and said, “Six forty-four eighty with tax, Mr. Sulzer.”

He produced six hundreds and one fifty. She made out a receipt and gave him his change. He said, “When are you going to change your mind about some nice Sunday?”

“If I do, I’ll let you know, okay?”

“How is he doing locating a 1930?”

“Gee, I don’t know. He was complaining about finding one that wasn’t the quality you want. I really don’t know much about coins, like I keep telling you. If he finds one, I’m sure he’ll phone.”

Sulzer left. She made a face at me. “He collects double eagles. St. Gaudens, not the Liberty Heads.”

“What’s a slider?”

“He won’t buy anything except B.U. or better. That means Brilliant Uncirculated. The only things better are choice, gem, and proof. This one here, he thinks it could just as well have been called A.U., or Almost Uncirculated. So if a coin is sort of in the middle, where you could maybe honestly call it one or the other, it’s what a dealer calls a slider. I don’t feel a thing for coins. I mean they’re valuable, and they keep going up and all, but I don’t want to own them. Let me get these back in the safe with the money.”

When she came back I said, “What about some nice Sunday?”

“Oh, he’s got a sailboat. And a lot of ideas.”

“And you’ve already got somebody you’d rather go sailing with?”

“Yes, but not the way you mean that. You didn’t tell me what kind of investigator you are, Mr. McGee.”

“Travis or Trav, Mary Alice. I’m not any kind. I just try to find things people lose. On a percentage basis. Salvage consultant.”

“I hope you find the stamps.”

“You’ll probably be able to tell me where they are.”

She bit her lip and tilted her head. “Now that’s kind of a rotten thing to say.”

“How so?”

“I wouldn’t do anything like that!”

“Like what?”

“Steal anything.”

“You, dear? I mean you are a bright woman, and you probably saw something or heard something or know something which doesn’t seem important at all, but is really very important. When you and I find out what it is you know, then it will tell us where the stamps are.”

She frowned at me. “I don’t like cute.”

“What?”

“You said that the way you said it so I would take it wrong. You wanted me to. You wanted to see me react. Okay, I’m reacting. I don’t like that kind of cute. Don’t play little games with me. If I’m waiting for you to play games all the time, I won’t be thinking of how to help, will I?”

“Good point.”

“You did it on purpose?”

“Certainly. Can I take you to lunch?”

“She’ll be back in ten minutes. Sure.”

“Seems quiet around here. Don’t you get bored?”

“Bored! I’m about ten thousand jobs behind right now. I’ve got a whole mess of new issues to mount. Our mailing is going to be late this month. It goes to six hundred people. I’ve got three appraisals I’m working on, for estates. I took two of them home to my place, because they aren’t all that important moneywise. But the other is back in the safe, and it’s pretty nice. It’s nicer than Hirsh said it was going to be.”

“And if you wanted to, you could pull a nice item out of it and replace it with something cheaper, and nobody would know?”

She turned away from me and began straightening albums on one of the shelves behind her.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I’m waiting until I can say something.”

I waited. She turned back. “Here is the only way I can say it. Excuse my French, I don’t give a goddamn what you would do or wouldn’t do. Or what anybody else in the world does or doesn’t do. If I steal, somebody knows. Me! That’s why I can’t, won’t and don’t. And I am going to have lunch alone, thanks.”

“I guess you should. I guess nobody is really worthy of breaking bread with you, dear. We ordinary mortals are unable to tell at first sight just how totally honest and decent and virtuous you really are. At first glance, you look like a sizable and pretty lady, and I have the vague feeling that many pretty ladies have done unpretty things over the last few thousand years. By all means, lunch alone and think clean and honest thoughts, dear.”

She went white and then red with anger. She slapped her palm on the plate glass counter top. “But I am getting so goddamn tired of you accusing me of things!”

I yelled too but just a little louder. “So move the scenario elsewhere, you silly bitch! Move it to Chicago. Mr. X, the expert, buys for Mr. Y, the investor. Miss Z keeps the records and handles the merchandise. X, Y, and Z go to the bank a dozen times. The merchandise is stolen and replaced by cheap goods. Who do we blame, dear? X, Y, or Z. You were there! Who? Who? Who?”

She blinked and blinked, and the tears welled and spilled and trickled. She made an aimless gesture, and I took her hands and held them. She looked down and said, “I guess I just… I don’t…”

The door opened, and the pressure on the mat bonged the overhead bell. Jane Lawson peered at us.

“What’s going on? Are you crying, Mary Alice?”

“We were just going to lunch,” I told Jane.

“Let go and I’ll get my purse,” Mary Alice said.

After we’d ordered a drink, Mary Alice went to the women’s room to repair the tear damage. She came smiling back and sat and sipped and said, “You’re kind of wearing, you know? Or maybe it’s the whole rotten day. I feel ragged around all my edges.”

“It doesn’t show.”

“On me it never does. I could be dying, and people would tell me how great I look. I always wanted to be one of those mysterious little girls with the hollow cheeks and the sad eyes. I wanted to have a kind of accent. You know. Like Hungarian.”

“And all the sad-eyed little Hungarian girls want-”

“I know. I know. You’ve got a funny look on your face, Trav.”

“I just found out I don’t have to wonder about one thing that didn’t fit too well. I don’t have to accuse you again.”

“Thanks for practically nothing.”

I reached across and touched the bridge of her nose and pulled my hand back. “The answer is right there.”

She looked puzzled, took out a mirror, and turned her head toward the light. “Oh. The little groove place, huh? From the glasses. But why would… Oh, I think I see. If I inventoried all those things and cut the mounts to size and put them in the book, wouldn’t I see they weren’t the same when I looked back through the book that day? The answer is, I don’t wear my glasses in the bank. The close work is all done. The answer is vanity. Okay. No matter what kind of frames I get, I look like a big goggly owl.”

“How about contacts?”

“I can’t adjust to the hard ones. You can’t get bifocals in soft lenses. I wear them to see close, and then I’d have to take them out to see across the room or drive my car or cross the street. Or wear glasses for distance when I was wearing them.”

“Oh.”

“Jane says the only thing faster than light is me whipping my glasses off when a customer comes in. I know it’s silly. I think my husband made me sort of supersensitive about them.”

“How?”

“I shouldn’t mention him because I don’t like answering questions about him, and so I hardly ever do.”

“No questions.”

“Thanks. We better order, maybe?”

We ordered. After the food came, I said, “I know you didn’t find out until this morning, but you must have some idea of how it was done.”

“I can’t believe it really happened. I keep thinking Hirsh has to be wrong. He’s really old. Don’t old people get weird ideas sometimes?”

“That would be a pretty complicated fantasy.”

“But for me it’s easier to believe.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look, it’s the detail, the volume. If I had no interruptions and everything right there, it would take a long time to take the good items out and put the bad items in. There are thirty-six double-sided pages in that stock book. Seventy-two pages and about ten to go. Okay, that means about ten items per page. I’m pretty quick with my hands. They’re kind of big but quick. So I have to take an item out of the horizontal strip and put it aside and then select the item that goes there and put it where it should be. Ten seconds to switch one? Fair guess? So six hundred single stamps, pairs, blocks and plate blocks all in mounts would take six thousand seconds, or one hundred minutes, or an hour and forty minutes. And if I could get very whippy and do it in five seconds, it would still take ten minutes less than an hour. Just exactly how am I going to do that sitting practically touching two men at a little table under a bright light? The goodies have to be right there in that book! Or the bank is crooked. Take your choice.”

“Would you be able to remember the arrangement, the way you put the items in the book?”

“Sure.”

“And you could see well enough to-”

“I’m not that blind. I found the Barbados page, and it was too full to take the ones we’d brought that day, even if I’d moved the items closer together. And I like to arrange the stamps on the pages. You know. Spaced to look nice. It doesn’t matter to Sprenger. He wouldn’t care if we put them in a cigar box, I guess. But they are nice, and they represent a lot of money, and it is sort of… a response to the quality and the money to arrange them nicely.”

“Do you think if you had your glasses on that day in the bank, you would have seen something was wrong?”

“From what Hirsh said this morning I should hope so! Bad centering. Stains and toning and fading. But not in every case.”

“Why not?”

“Well… take Barbados for example. Scott 53, the four-penny rose is worth about fifty dollars unused, for a real good one. But Scott 53b in the same condition is worth fifteen hundred dollars anyway. Know what the silly difference is? Well, 53 is perf fourteen on all sides, and 53b is perf twelve and a half on the sides.”

“What do those numbers mean?”

“Like fourteen. Those little holes so you can tear the stamps apart, it means there are fourteen holes in a space two centimeters long. You use a gauge to measure, something with the different gauges all printed on it. So you couldn’t look in the stock book and tell with the naked eye if you had the ordinary 1875 four-penny rose or the special one. The special one is worth so much more because there were so few of them printed.”

“And you certainly have one fantastic memory, Mary Alice.”

She laughed. “I’m showing off. My memory isn’t so great. I remember that one because I found one. Hirsh bought a collection of Colonials. It was so neat and orderly and well-labeled and mounted that we sort of took for granted the collector had really studied them. Well, it was just sort of luck. I took an ordinary one we had in stock and put it beside the one in the collection because I wanted to see which one was really best, for a customer. And the perforations didn’t look right. I used the one stamp to measure the other. After the customer left, I used a gauge. Then, on my own, I sent it off to the Philatelic Foundation in New York, with a fee in advance, and in six weeks it came back with the certification it was S3b. So I put it on Hirsh’s desk as a surprise. He put it in Sprenger’s investment collection, and he gave me a hundred-dollar bonus. It’s really fun to find something like that, you know? Like mining for gold, I guess.”

Though I had no empathy for her excitement, I liked the expression on her face, the look of enthusiasm. To each his own. I wondered why some man hadn’t made a lot of extra effort to keep hold of this girl. The special, bonus size. A lifelong supply of goodies. But she had warned me nicely about asking questions.

I decided abruptly that I was going to take the lady at her own valuation. It is a process of logic, I guess. If she had the art, the style, the exquisite ability to project a total plausibility regardless of what stress I’d put on her, then she would not have spent five years in a funny little stamp store in Miami. Pretense requires vast expenditures of energy. That much guile would have sought better stalking-places.

Besides, I liked the neat little creases at the corners of her mouth. I liked that tricky blue shade of her iris. I liked the genuine big-girl hunger with which she stashed away the medium-adequate meal. I liked the way the black hair had a coarse, healthy gloss and the way she tossed and swung it back out of her way.

“Okay,” I said, “you are no longer on the suspect list.”

“Are you sure you want to do me such a big favor?”

“I know how impressed you must be.”

“Are you suspicious of practically everybody?”

“Practically.”

“That must be a hell of a way to go through life, fellow.”

“It’s only when I’m working. The rest of the time I’m an amiable, trusting, innocent slob.”

“Isn’t it steady work?”

“It could be, but I don’t let it. When I get a few bucks ahead, I retire. Retirement is more fun at my age than it would be later.”

“You’ve got a point. Also, you don’t look married. Which makes it easier, huh?”

“Just one thing about you raises a question.”

“Such as?”

“You have a sedentary job, Mary Alice, and from what you said, I guess you work at home too. But I know good conditioning when I see it. You walk around on springs.”

She grinned, clenched her fist, and made a muscle. At her invitation I reached over and prodded it with a thumb. “Very substantial,” I said.

“I have to live with it, Trav, or give up. I’m big, and I’ve got good coordination. I ran with a pack of boys from the time I could run. I played all their games and all the girl-games too. I can win canes and boxes of taffy at those weight-guessing places. What would you guess me at? Don’t try to flatter me.”

“Hmmm. Between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty?”

“One fifty-six this morning, stripped, on my very good scales. I’ve got big heavy bones, and I grew a lot of muscle tissue at all the games. So I’m in training always, because if I let things go, they really go. The muscles turn to lard, and everything starts to sag and wobble around, very nasty. I do the Canadian thing. And I make all my points-men’s points, by the way-every week of my life. I’ve done it so long, I love it.”

“I dog it. I get soft enough so that it bothers me, and then I have to go to work on it.”

“You look in real good shape, you know?”

“I’ve been working on it.”

We looked at each other. The blue eyes seemed to get bigger, just big enough to let me in. I had the feeling I was reaching down into that blueness, to where something had gone click, startling both of us. I heard her breath catch, and then she took a deep deep breath, looking away as she did so, breaking the unexpected contact. I signaled the waiter, making a writing motion in the palm of my hand. He nodded and came toward the table, sorting through his checks.

We walked back side by side and about twenty inches apart.

“Thank you for a very nice lunch, Travis.”

“You are most welcome, Mary Alice.”

“Like Hirsh said, I want to help you any way I can.”

“You’ve been a lot of help.”

“Have I?”

“That estimate of the time it would take to change the items in the stock book was useful. It helps me see the whole picture.”

“I’m glad.”

“Perhaps when we get back to the store, you can let me inspect one of those books.”

“Of course.”

“My car is over there in that lot. Would you like to look at it?”

She stopped and frowned at me. “Why should I want to look at your car?”

“Maybe because it is older than you are.”

“It is?”

“It’s a pickup truck.”

“Really?”

“Do you want to look at it?”

“Why not?”

As we neared it, I pointed it out. “Yecht,” she said, “what a frightful shade of blue.” And then she said, “But it’s a home-made pickup truck!” And then she said, “My God, it’s a Rolls-Royce.” Then she braced herself against it and laughed. No silvery little tinkly giggle. Haw ho haw hah haw. Oh God. Oh ho haw! A bray. A contralto bugling.

“If you think this is funny, you should see my house boat, where I live.”

“Whu-whu-whu-what’s funny about that?”

“I can’t explain it. I have to show you.”

“Yuh-yuh-you do that. Oh dear.” She found her kleenex and wiped her eyes and blew her nose. We headed for the office.

“Is it really that funny?”

“No. I hurt your feelings or something?”

“No.”

“It… it was relief, kind of. When you said look at your car I thought, Oh God, another of those. You know. You’d have some kind of nasty little thing about two feet high and ten feet wide and twenty feet long, with fifty dials and a speedometer that goes up to two hundred. And I’d have to admire the ugly damn childish thing or even ride in it if you insisted. Then you’d show me your key that fits every Playboy Club in America and overseas, and then you’d try to do the old magic trick.”

“What old magic trick.”

“You know. All of a sudden you turn into a motel.”

“And you laughed because none of that is going to happen?”

“And because that Miss Agnes is a very dear automobile,” she said, pushing open the door to the shop.

Chapter Seven

On Friday morning I cleaned up after my breakfast, took a couple of overdue loads to the laundromat and sat and peaceably watched some women get their loads whiter than mine. I was not torn with jealousy. I wished them well. On the way back a fat man on a rackety little trail bike nearly ran me down, then yelled out his estimate of my ancestry and lineage. I smiled and nodded and wished him well. I remembered vaguely that the city fathers had put the roust on me. Move off your boat or leave town. I wished them well too. Nourish yourself well at that public trough, boys. Gobble any goodies which happen to float by.

Meyer was sitting on the dock, legs swinging, waiting for me. He came aboard. He stood behind me as I stowed the laundry.

“How did you make out?” he asked.

“Beautiful”

“What?”

“This is the best time of year. Right?”

“I stayed and talked to Hirsh for a while. By the time I got around to calling the shop, you were gone.”

“We left early. Mary Alice and me.”

Turn around, Travis.“

“What?”

“Turn around a minute and look at me.”

“Sure.”

He stared and nodded. “I see.”

“What do you see?”

“That you’re going to try to help Hirsh Fedderman.”

“What? Oh, sure. That’s right. As right as…”

“Rain?”

“Whatever you say, old buddy.”

When my chores were done, we had a talk. I pulled my wandering attention in from somewhere out beyond left field and tried to settle down to the task at hand. I remembered what Mary Alice had said about how long the switch would take and how incredible it seemed to her, how she wondered if any switch had really taken place at all. I tried her approach on Meyer.

“I have to believe Hirsh,” Meyer said. “If he saw it, he saw it. His mind is very quick and keen.”

“She really knows all that stuff.”

“What?”

“All that stamp stuff.”

“I would think it would be more remarkable if, after five years, she didn’t know all about it.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Good God!”

“I wanted to give her a ride in Miss Agnes. It was a slow afternoon. Jane told us to take off. I followed Mary Alice to her place, in her old yellow Toyota. We had a drink in Homestead and dinner in Naples.”

“Naples?!”

“I know. We were just drifting along, talking about this and that, and Naples seemed like the closest place. So we came back across Alligator Alley and came here, and I showed her the Flush. It knocked her out, like Agnes did. I like the way she laughs.”

“You like the way she laughs.”

“That’s what I said. So then I drove her home and by then it was too late to even stop in for a nightcap.”

“How late is too late?”

“Quarter past five.”

“No wonder your face looks blurred.”

“Meyer, the whole twelve hours seemed like twenty or thirty minutes. We just hit the edges of all the things there are to talk about.”

“Are you going to be able to think about Hirsh Fedderman’s problem?”

“Whose what?”

He went away, shaking his head, making big arm gestures at the empty space ahead of him. If he had come back, I would have told him that I had almost decided that there was no problem at all, that Fedderman had been mistaken. If there is no way at all for something to have happened, the best initial assumption is that it didn’t happen.

On that Friday I arrived at the store at closing time and drove Jane Lawson back to her place, a so-called garden apartment in a huge development of yesteryear, about a half-hour bus ride from Fedderman’s store.

She sat erect on the edge of the seat and said, “Our gal was pretty punchy all day, Trav.”

“I haven’t been exactly alert.”

“Now turn left again and here we are. I hate that miserable bus, but it would be a worse bus ride for Linda.” She had already told me that Linda was the elder of her two, a scholarship freshman at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. Judy was a junior in high school. Sixteen and eighteen. I had noticed she talked about Linda quite a lot and had very little to say about Judy.

She tried the door and then got out her keys and said, “Excuse the way the place will probably look. Working mother and two teen gals. I’ve tried. But they have a tendency to hang their clothes up in mid-air.”

The living room was small and oven-hot. She hurried over to a great big window unit and turned it on high-high, and then raised her voice to carry over the thunder of compressor and fan. “The house rule is the last one out turns the beast off. It eats electricity. But it will chill this place fast, and then I can turn it down to where we can hear ourselves think. Isn’t it terrible? Fix you a drink?”

“If there’s a beer?”

“There could be. Let me look.”

She came smiling back with a cold bottle of beer and a tall glass and excused herself to change out of her working clothes. There was too much furniture in the room. The fireplace was fake. There was a double frame on the mantel, and in one side of it was an incongruously young man with a nice grin, Air Force uniform, lieutenant bars, pilot wings. In the other half was a picture of the same lieutenant in civilian clothes, sports jacket and slacks. He was holding a baby and looking down into its invisible face while a Jane Lawson, eighteen years younger, stood by him, no higher than his shoulder, smiling up at him.

There was an alcove off the living room with some high-fidelity equipment, with racks of tapes in bright dog-eared boxes, with tilted stacks of records. The room was getting cool very quickly. I went over and checked the controls on the beast and cut it from high cool to cool, from max fan to medium. It shuddered and smoothed to about the sound of a good chain saw on idle. I was back looking at the pictures when she came out in an overblouse and faded blue shorts and sandals. She was a slight and pretty woman, with the residual marks of old tensions in her face, with a firmness to her mouth and corners of her jaw.

“That’s Jerry,” she said. “It seems incredible. He was stopped right there in time, just thirteen months after this picture. In another year Linda will be as old as I was when I met Jerry.”

“Combat?”

“No. He was trade school. He wore the ring. They used to have more flameouts in fighter jets back then. He was on a night exercise, just two of them. That particular model, the way it worked, there was an interlock so that if you didn’t jettison the canopy first, you couldn’t eject, you couldn’t make the charge go off to blow the seat out. It was supposed to be a safety thing, so a green pilot couldn’t get nervous and blow himself through the canopy. But his canopy release jammed and all the way down he told his wingman exactly what he was doing to try to free it. No messages for anybody. Just technical information. A real pro.”

“They must have to take a special course in cool.”

“If I sound bitter, it’s because they were already turning out a better canopy release thing and making the change in the field as the kits came in.”

So I told her about the radio tape years ago, made in Lauderdale, and broadcast only once before NASA came galloping in, all sweaty, and confiscated it. The interviewer had asked one of those good and tough-minded and free-thinking men of the early days of space orbiting how he felt as the rocket was taking off. Maybe it was because he had heard that question too many times. He answered it with a question. ‘How would you feel, taking off, sitting up there on top of fifty thousand parts, knowing that every one had been let to the lowest bidder?’“

“Grissom?” she asked. I nodded. “I thought so. It sounds like Gus. I knew those guys. I came close to marrying one. The girls were little. They liked him. I was half in love and telling myself the girls needed a father. So maybe the new father was going to end up frozen hard as marble, circling us all forever, haunting us all forever. I dilly-dallied and I dithered and shilly-shallied and all those words. And the tram left the station before I could make up my mind whether to buy a ticket. Maybe it’s best. Who knows? Well, my troubles aren’t what you came to talk about.”

“This problem could give you trouble you don’t need. If the investment items are gone, Hirsh is going to have to make it good with Sprenger. With a man like Sprenger, I don’t think there’d be a choice, even if Hirsh did want to look for an out. It might clean him out. It might take the store and the stock to do it.”

She was sitting in the corner of the couch. She pulled her legs up under her and made a face. “That would really be rotten. For him, I mean. He’s been so good to me. I can’t believe I’ve been there fifteen years. I answered a blind ad, and when I found out what it was, I didn’t want it at all. He liked my letter. He begged me to try it. He offered me too much money. I couldn’t even type. I thought somebody was going to take advantage of this crazy little man, so it might as well be me. I didn’t find out until later he’d interviewed at least thirty-five girls before me without finding anybody he wanted. He was looking for a nut who’d go to a business school nights and learn to type just because it would make things easier for him. Trav, don’t talk about the troubles I could have. I’ll manage. With the pay and the pension and being able to use the PX at Homestead, I’ve stuck rainy-day money away. Jerry’s folks have helped some, and they’d help more if I had to let them. The thing is to help Hirsh so he doesn’t have to sell everything.”

“That’s what Mary Alice says too, but she can’t really believe the good stuff isn’t still in that book in the safety deposit box.”

“Hirsh doesn’t imagine things like that. Know what I keep thinking?”

“What?”

“Don’t tell Hirsh. If one investment account could be cleaned out like that, so could the others, couldn’t they? He hasn’t had a chance to look at any one of the other five during the past two weeks.”

“You certainly know how to relax a person, Jane.”

“You thought of that already, huh?”

“They’re all handled alike, pretty much, aren’t they?”

“Yes and no. The oldest account is Mr. Riker Benedict, and that was started about the same time I came to work. In fact, it was the first account Hirsh set up that way, mostly because Mr. Benedict couldn’t really believe that the things Hirsh wanted to buy for him would keep going up in value year after year. He’s bought nineteen classic pieces in fifteen years, famous items. And he’s looking for another one now. The collection is worth so much more than Mr. Benedict put into it, there’s really no point in keeping on with it in the same way. But it’s a ceremony, adding a new piece. The two of them will spend half a morning in the bank going over the great rarities, one by one, whether they are adding a new one or not. With the other accounts I would say that sometimes they go over the things previously purchased and sometimes they don’t. The Sprenger account is the one where he never looks at the old purchases or the new ones either. He just sits there like so much dead meat. He nods, shrugs, grunts, and that’s that.”

“What would happen to those accounts if anything happened to Mr. Fedderman?”

“That’s all worked out in the agreement. It’s clear that he had no ownership interest in anything in the investment accounts, and his lawyer has a power of attorney in the event of Mr. Fedderman’s death, and I think it’s on file at the bank with a signature card. In the agreement the lawyer and the investor meet at the bank along with an appraiser certified by the APS, and the investment account is appraised, and if the current estimated resale value is higher than the breaking point in the agreement, the account is then accepted by the investor, and the agreement is surrendered. If the resale is less, the difference between it and the guaranteed price becomes a claim against the estate. But there would be no question of a claim of any kind on five of them. And on the stuff Hirsh has bought for Sprenger, I think Hirsh would come out a little bit ahead, actually, the way the market is going. You see, he hasn’t really been taking any risk at all. This was just an easy way of easing the fears of people with risk capital. Sort of satisfaction-or-your-money-cheerfully-refunded. You can do that when the product is really tops.”

“Unless the product mysteriously disappears.”

“It’s made him sick. It really has. Physically sick.”

“I keep wondering how come Mary Alice keeps all the records and does all the work on the investment accounts?”

“Because I’ve been there longer? I used to do it, and then when Moosejaw retired and Mary Alice came on, I taught her the routines.”

“Moosejaw?”

“Excuse me. Miss Moojah, a maiden lady with a very strong personality. A creature of legend. She didn’t believe in the alarm system. There are eight buttons in handy, inconspicuous places. She kept a toy baseball bat under the cash register. Twice when she was alone, a would-be robber aimed a gun at her. Twice she picked up her bat and let him have it. One needed two lumps before he went down, and one collapsed on the first one. Then she’d push the button. It made Hirsh so mad he couldn’t speak. He just made gobbling sounds. He was so afraid the next one would kill her. Anyway, I’m glad to have Mary Alice do the scut work. I’m sort of more into decision-making.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the routine things, of course, that Hirsh hasn’t time or patience for. When to reorder and how much. Albums and packets and mounts and so on. But the part I like best is watching the market and studying it and advising Hirsh. It’s a lot of work, but he says I have a real talent for it. I study the changes in the catalog prices as they come out, Scott, Minkus, Stanley Gibbons, Sanabria. Also, I get the list of prices realized from all the leading auction houses and find out what the lots are bringing in New York and on the West Coast and in London. It isn’t all up, you know. I saw some little early warnings three years ago on Italian issues. They’d moved up or been pushed up too fast. So we had some pretty good things in counter stock, and some real good things in the investment accounts, and Hirsh moved everything out quickly. He lets me run a little risk account, like speculation in inventory. I saw that early Canada was looking active, so I put the money in those issues, and they’ve really moved. They were always good, but sort of stodgy. Now they’re glamour. I think that-Do you really care about all this?”

“Would Mary Alice rather be making decisions?”

She pursed her lips. “N-No, I don’t really think so. I’m more the cerebral type, and she’s the manual type. That’s oversimplifying. She loves to cut mounts and fix up pages. She loves to appraise estate stuff, item by item, and bring out the watermarks and count the perforations and check the color charts. She’d rather not have me handling any of the really good things. She got furious at me last year. When there is envelope paper stuck to the back of a stamp, you put it in a little wet box called a Stamp Lift, and after a while you can peel that paper right off the stamp. The old gum softens in the dampness. It was a pretty good Columbian, a four-dollar denomination with a light cancel. I took it out too soon, and I peeled part of the stamp right off. That’s like making confetti out of a couple of hundred-dollar bills. She got so mad she wouldn’t talk to me for hours.”

“But usually she’s easy to get along with?”

“A personal or official question, sir?”

I wondered if my ears looked as red as they felt. “It has to be personal, doesn’t it?”

“Who should blame you? That is a pretty vivid hunk of lady. And you seem to have that old familiar look.”

“Fox in the henhouse?”

She laughed. “More like a pro linebacker trying to line up on the wrong side. But on the personal side, I can’t tell you much. She’s fun to work with. The three of us make a good little team. I don’t see her after work. Maybe there have been a lot of men trying to get close to that. If it works out the way it works out with the customers and the guys who work near the store, then they don’t get anywhere either.”

“How am I doing?”

“Who knows? It’s early. I shouldn’t give advice. I would go very very slow.”

“What’s her trouble?”

“I don’t really know. I don’t know a thing about her marriage. She won’t talk about it at all. And as far as I can tell, she has absolutely no sex life at all, and that is a lot of big healthy girl with a lot of little motors running. From a couple of casual remarks I’d say that she certainly was turned on to it at one time. The only thing I can think of is that it was such a rotten, hideous marriage that it somehow turned her all the way off. And she keeps herself quieted down with all that exercise. The impression I get, the minute the man makes the first grab, she’s off and running, and he never gets another chance. You spent a lot of hours with her. What did you really find out about her?”

I went back over it in my mind. “Not a hell of a lot. No family apparently. And she lived in Philadelphia when she was a kid.”

“And also in Scranton. I’ve asked her direct questions. She says, ‘Jane, someday when we have a lot of time, I’m going to tell you all about it.’ But we haven’t had enough time yet.”

The door opened onto the shallow hallway, and a young girl came in. She was slender, taller than her mother, with brown hair darker than Jane’s dark blond. Her hair was long and lifeless, half-hiding a sallow and strangely expressionless little face. She wore missionary barrel work pants, too heavy for September in Florida, a soiled body shirt. Her feet were bare. Her hands were as grimy as her feet. She carried a notebook and two schoolbooks in the crook of her arm.

She gave us one swift, opaque glance and headed past us toward the rear of the apartment.

“Judy!” her mother said. She stopped and turned slowly.

“You want something?”

“This is Mr. McGee. My daughter, Judy.”

“Hello, Judy.”

She gave me a briefer taste of that original look. She swept it across me. I was absolutely without meaning to her. She was something in a forest, aware only of other creatures like herself. I was a tree, and she did not give a damn what brand of tree. She half-nodded and made a small sound and turned back on her way. I sat down again.

“Judy?” her mother said.

She stopped in the doorway. “Now what?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“So talk.”

“Not this minute. I’m talking to Mr. McGee. I just don’t want to come looking for you and find you’ve gone out again.”

“They’re waiting on me.”

“Go tell them to be patient then.”

“Screw that. I don’t want you hassling me. I told you that already.”

“Go to your room and wait right there!”

“Is that an order?”

“What does it sound like?”

“Shove it, you silly old bitch. Phone the probation officer and tell him I’ve gone out. Okay?”

Jane Lawson started up when the girl left and then sat back down again. She put her fists on her bare knees and bent forward at the waist and rested her cheeks on her fists. In a little while she straightened, blinking, and gave me a frail smile. “Sorry.”

“There’s a lot of it going around.”

“Judy… is at a difficult age. It’s very difficult for young people these days.”

“Don’t you want to go talk to her?”

She gave me a grateful and appreciative look. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Very difficult for young people these days. Or any days. In what golden epoch was being a teenager a constant joy? There has always been a generation gap. It is called twenty years. Too much talk about unresponsive government, napalm, irrelevant education. Maybe the real point is that young lives have no accepted focal point. The tribe gives them no responsibilities, no earned privileges, no ceremonial place. In the family unit they do not fit into a gap between generations, because the generations are diffused.

Maybe that is why they are scurrying pell-mell back to improvised tribal conditions, to communes. The schools have tried, in loco parentis, to fill a vacuum, condition the young on a fun-reward system. It has been a rotten try. The same vacuum spawns the rigid social order of the Jesus freaks, another try at structure and meaning. The communes themselves are devices of the privileged, because if everybody went into communes, the communes would become impossible.

So the kids float. They ram around, amble around, talk and dream, and rediscover all the more simplistic philosophical paradoxes. And the ones in the majority who make it (as apparently Miss Linda Lawson was making it) find some bottom within themselves. A place to stand. A meaning derived from fractionated nonsense. They are not a brighter generation than ever before. They have been exposed to more input, so much they have been unable to appraise and assimilate it, but are able to turn it into immediate output, impressively glib, and commercially sincere.

And the few that can’t make it, like the younger daughter, exude the ripe odor of the unwashed as opposed to the animal tang of healthy sweat. Their tangled and musty locks make the shining tresses of the others repugnant to all those Neanderthal spooks who would hate and resent youngness no matter how it might be packaged. The lost ones, like Judy, get so far into the uppers and the downers and the mind benders, hardly ever knowing what they are taking, seeking only something in the blood that will bring the big rush, and warp the world-that if told it would make a nice high, they would stuff a dead toad into their ear. The lost ones trade the clap germs back and forth until they cultivate strains as resistant to penicillin as were the Oriental brands of yore.

It is relaxing to climb down off the egomanic pedestal of guilt and blame and shame and responsibility and say, ‘Who told me I have to understand the causes?’ There are bad kids. There are bad trees in an orchard, bad apples on any tree, sick worms in any decaying apple. A world of perfection would be absurd. Even Doris Day couldn’t sustain that kind of concept. Who needs it? We need the flawed ones, the lost ones, as a form of emotional and social triangulation, to tell us if we’ve gained an inch since Hammurabi. Rough rough rough on the people who love them, but by some useful design in the human fabric, the rejects manage to kill most of that love by the time they are grown. Think of it, dear Jane Lawson, as a trick of nature whereby some great smirking cowbird came long ago and laid its egg in your nest.

She came back in and said, “Thanks anyway.”

“Something wrong?”

“She’d gone out the back way. I… had to check up on one of my sneaky spy tricks. That green rubber band around her books. I put a hair from my head under it the day before yesterday. It’s still there. If she’s not going to school, they’re going to pick her up. They’ll put her in a state school for girls.”

“Probation for what?”

“I’d rather not say. She’s in my custody, but I can’t control her.” The tears threatened to come again. “My lawyer said if we could find a place that would take her, we could jump the gun and go to the judge and get a transfer of custody. A private place. But either they won’t take her, or the cost is so fantastic… He’s still looking.” She hit her knee with her fist “What am I supposed to do? Chain her to the wall in her room? Beat her senseless?”

What do you say? My best guess would do Jane Lawson no good whatsoever. My best guess was that the girl was on the edge of leaving for good. And in some city as yet unknown, she would be studied with great care by experts. And if they were to decide it was merchandise worth salvage, she might indeed be beaten into total submission, cleaned up, dressed up, trained, and marketed for a few years. The merchandising experts cruise the bus terminals, and they watch the downtown streets for young girls carrying suitcases or packs. Impersonal appraisal. No uggos, no fatties, no gimps, no rich kids, nothing too too young.

“You didn’t come here to get involved in a family problem,” she said. She sighed. “Maybe in time she’ll straighten out.”

“Sure,” I said. We smiled at each other. It was that special social smile people use when they don’t believe anything they are saying.

Chapter Eight

When I phoned Mary Alice early on Saturday morning, she said that I’d caught her just before she went out the door. She said she was going to stop and see how Hirsh was and then do some shopping, and then she was going to her health club and work out, like she did every Saturday. What did I have in mind? Nothing special and nothing in particular. I had noticed the ocean was flat calm, and the weather people said the wind out of the west would hold all day, and I’d had a runabout tuned, and it was running well. So, running down outside, I could make it in very good time, and I knew a place that put up a good lunch, and I thought maybe we could run down the bay to a place I knew where we could have our own private patch of Atlantic beach for a swim and picnic. What she could do would be set the time when I could pick her up, say at the Royal Biscayne Yacht Club. She could leave her car there. I could drop her off there from the Muсequita later, or if she wanted, she could come back up to Lauderdale with me, and I’d get her back to Miami somehow.

She thought about it and decided that maybe the health club could be canceled out with no problems. That left the necessary shopping and seeing Hirsh and how about noon at that yacht club, okay? I told her twelve-thirty would be better for me, and she said fine.

I phoned the lunch order and told them when I would pick it up. I was unsnapping the big tarp cover off the Muсequita when somebody called my name. Two men stood on the dock, silhouetted against the glare of blue sky, looking down at me. I said I was indeed he. I freed the rest of the snaps, folded, and stowed the tarp, climbed up onto the side deck of the Flush and went aft, wanting a better look at them before deciding whether or not to ask them aboard.

“Permission to come aboard?” one of them said.

“Please do.” They came onto the shallow aft deck. Solid handshakes. One was Davis and one was Harris. No first names volunteered. I have spent a lot of years making quick guesses, and at times my health has depended on accuracy as well as speed.

Both in their thirties, both of a size, six feet or a hair under, both somewhere shy of two hundred pounds, both softening in the middle and around the jaws, but not too much. The dark one had a Joe Namath hairdo and a villain’s moustache. The other was red-brown and crinkly, with a swoop of sideburns.

The first impression was that they were used to working together. Men who do not know each other well express an awareness of each other in body movements and expressions. Familiar partners act more as if each were alone.

I couldn’t put any geography together. The voices were Everywhere voices, like the men who do local news on television. Moustache was tanned, and Sideburns was permanently burned several shades of red, several degrees of peeling. Big hands. Old nicks on the knuckles. A very intent expression in the eyes, at odds with casual stance. I could read it very close to cop, but a few things canceled that out. The teeth were the persuasive, gleaming white you get from expensive show biz caps. Twenty-dollar haircuts. A drift of male cologne, leather and pine and fresh paper money. Summer weight knits, both slacks and shirts, and shoes so funny looking they had to be very in. Moustache had a fat gold seal ring on his pinky with a green stone in it.

In the back of my head all the troops hopped up out of the sack, grabbed weapons, and piled into the vehicles. They raced out to the edge of camp and set up a perimeter defense and then lay and waited, weapons off safety, loaded clips in place, grenades handy.

“Can we talk, Mr. McGee?”

“No reason why not,” I said. I sat on the rail, one leg swinging free, the other foot braced, the knee locked.

Moustache was Davis. Memory trigger: Jeff Davis, dark hair, moustache. Harris: Harris tweed, tweedledee and dum. I didn’t believe either name. I made no suggestions about where to sit. There was no awkward social hesitation. Davis folded himself into the deck chair, and Harris sat on the curve of railing six feet from me.

“We’re representing somebody,” Harris said. “He doesn’t want his name brought into the deal yet.”

“What deal?”

“There’s a situation he wants you to look into,” Davis said. “He thinks he’s been had. He thinks he got tricked into the short end of a deal.”

“You’re confusing me, gentlemen.”

“What’s to confuse?” Harris asked, faking bewilderment. “He may want you to take a shot at salvaging the deal for him, getting back what he got conned out of. Isn’t that what you do?”

“Do what?”

“Salvage work!”

“I don’t do anything. I’m retired. Oh, sometimes I do a favor for a friend. I think the man you represent needs a licensed investigator.”

“No, Mr. McGee,” said Harris. “He needs you. He was very firm on that particular point. The way this thing is shaping up, he maybe might need you at a moment’s notice. So he would be very grateful to you if you would just sit tight and wait to hear.” He reached into his pants and took some bills folded once out of his side pocket. He pulled the bills out of a gold clip which said “After Tax” in block letters. He crackled and snapped five one hundreds, one five hundred free of the pack, reclipped the rest and put it away, folded the bills and took a long reach and shoved them into my shirt pocket. “Just to show he isn’t kidding around.”

“I couldn’t help anybody I don’t know.”

“If he needs your help, you’ll get to know him.”

I pulled the money out and held it toward Harris. He pulled back. I tossed them into Davis’ lap and said, “Sorry.”

“You busy or something?” Harris asked with just a shade too much casual innocence.

“I’m doing a favor for a friend of a friend. Trying to, at least.”

“What I think you should do is drop that one,” Davis said.

“Should I?”

“The man we’re talking about,” he continued, “he heard about you someplace or other, and he got a good impression. He’s not used to asking people for help, and they say they’re busy or some damn thing.”

“We all have these little disappointments in life.”

“Is that smartass?” Harris asked.

“I didn’t mean it that way. Think of it this way, gentlemen. If we all got exactly what we wanted all the time, wouldn’t life get very dull?”

“This man gets what he wants,” Davis said.

“Not this time.”

“Suppose he wants to give you a choice, McGee,” Harris said. “Suppose he keeps the deal open, and when you get out of the hospital and you can move around again pretty good, he sends somebody to ask you again.”

I stared at him and then at his partner. “Now come on! What’s your script anyway? Kick my spine loose and drive away in your 1928 LaSalle? You two looked and acted and talked like you know the names and numbers of all the players. All of a sudden, Harris, you open up with this hospital shit, and you sound like somebody got you from Central Casting.”

Davis in the deck chair gave me the smile of a lazy hyena. “Every once in a while he does that,” he said. “Remember that old movie, The French Connection? Want to know how many times this crazy turd went to see it?”

“Oh, come on, Dave,” Harris said petulantly.

“The thing is,” Davis said, “he gets hung up on some kind of image thing, and he likes to use it when he talks to civilians, because if they’ve been to all the same movies, they almost wet their pants when Harry comes on hard.”

“You should learn to read people,” I told Harry Harris.

Harry shrugged. “So it worked. That was one of the questions, right? To find out if McGee was-”

Davis cut him off. He evened the edges of the six pieces of money as he spoke and folded them once lengthwise. “Suppose you happened to be nibbling around the edge of something where this man we’re talking about has an interest, and so he gets a reading on you, and he gets some kind of idea of what you do. So let’s imagine that having you in the picture makes him back up and take another look at that particular deal. So not knowing how you fit, he thinks the easy way is to give you a retainer so you would come in on his side of it if things are getting fancy, if somebody has been stupid enough to play games with him, even though that somebody came highly recommended.”

“How would this man think I’d fit?”

“What he said was you might even be trying to work out a way to give him the short end of that deal.”

“I’m only interested in getting back something someone has lost. When there’s no other way to get it back.”

“The man could have thought you were trying some kind of Robin Hood bit. Or he might think you could be conned.”

“Can we start using his name?” I asked.

“It’s better we don’t,” Harris said. “Dave and me, we might not even know his name. Lots of things go through channels.”

Davis said, “I can tell you one thing. The man would feel better about this trip we took if you would take this round one.” He held the money out. “Kind of like a sign you’re not trying to slip it to him. You don’t have to back off from anything you have going on. It would make him keep on wondering about you if you don’t take it.”

I took a step and took the bills and put a haunch back onto the railing. They both looked relieved. The jargon changes constantly due to the telephone taps. Ten bills made a round one. Five round ones to a victor. When we first heard that, Meyer deduced that it came from V for Victor, V being the Roman five. Two victors make a spot. X marks the spot maybe? Ten spots make a big round one. Ten big round ones make a mil, and thus we are back into English.

I was not certain about my own judgment in taking it. It set up a dependency relationship. If you take the money of a man like Sprenger and then work against him, they can find you behind a shed in Tampa in the trunk of a stolen car, shotgunned and six days dead in the bake-oven heat, a silver coin in the rotting mouth.

We shook hands again. Away they went. Dave Davis. Harry Harris. I saw them stop and admire a big new Rybovitch fishing machine, looking like a pair of mod Indiana businessmen hunting for a charter. Dave Davis and Harry Harris?

I went below, went up to the bow and down through the service hatch into the bow bilge. I opened the false hull and stepped back from the slosh of seawater that spilled down and started the automatic bilge pump. I reached in and got my waterproof box, opened it, and put nine bills in with the dwindling reserve fund. It fattened it a little, but not enough.

I was beginning to run late. On the way over to pick up the picnic lunch, I wondered just what micro-percentage of the thousand dollars I had taken came from the pocket money and lunch money of Judy Lawson’s high school class. I wondered what kind of little death they were peddling in the girls’ rooms this week.

I buttoned up the Flush, tight and secure. I wanted to talk over the visit with Meyer and get his opinion, but there just wasn’t time. All the required gear was in the Muсequita. She burbled her way past the moored fortune in transient and local cruisers and motor sailers and elegant houseboats. A few friends hallooed. Teak baked in the sun, and brightwork shimmered, and toilet-paper danced in my wake in the bourbon-colored water of the boat basin. I went down past the gas docks, under the bridge, nudging the throttles up as I went through a little tide chop in the pass. I turned her south short of the sea buoy and angled out. The port engine coughed out at three thousand rpm, kept dropping below two thousand, building up to three, and coughing out again. I called Davey some unhappy names. He swore he had them both running perfectly. I pulled them both down to idle, waited a few minutes, and then popped them up to full throttle. Little doll came surging up onto her plane and scooted, with rpm moving up into the red.

I backed them off to thirty-eight hundred rpm, listened, made my apologies to Davey Hoople, master marine mechanic, age nineteen. A half millimeter nudge on the starboard throttle put them into final perfect sync. I was out far enough to make my straight shot to the Miami ship channel, so I held it on the heading and threw it into automatic pilot. I watched the needle as it searched. I had it about a degree too much west, so I took it out and tried again and hit it perfectly. I took a brew out of the cooler and stood on the pilot seat and sat on the backrest part, sea wind in my face, the horizon misty-pale and glassy, the Muсequita doing her thirty-eight knots without effort, the wake straight as a line on a chart.

I kept trying to sort out my guesses as to how and why Sprenger had sent a couple of members of the first team, but some bottomless blue eyes kept getting in the way. Fine day, fine boat, fine beer, and it had been a long long time since blue eyes. So I wrapped up the whole problem and shoved it into a cubicle over in a side corner of my mind and slapped the little door shut. A man should have his weekends, no matter what he does.

I tried to spot a yellow Toyota in the parking area as I came easing down the line of private markers into the protected basin of the Royal Biscayne Yacht dub. The small-boat area was off to the left beyond the rows of yachts and was built of those floating slabs of aluminum and floatation material which move up and down with the tide, simplifying access and mooring. A young Cuban, uniformed in the club colors, came running out, waving me off. “No, no, no!” he yelled. “Ess private! Ess cloob.”

“Soy socio, hombre.”

He looked startled and uncertain. He looked back over his shoulder for help. “Eh? Nuevo possible, seсor?”

“No. De muchos aсos.”

“Pero-”

“Momentito. Ayudame, por favor. Tengo mi tarjeta de sodo.”

He hesitated, then took the bow line and made it fast. I swung it in and cut the engines and jumped out with the stern line. After I made it fast I went back aboard and opened the shallow drawer under the chart bin and found my card. I handed it to him.

He frowned and then smiled. “Ah. Especial. Bienvenido, Meester McGee.”

I read his name on the pocket. “Thank you, Julio.” I dropped the card back in the drawer. I told him I was looking for a tall, dark-haired lady who was to meet me at twelve-thirty. It was now twelve-forty-five. No, he had not seen such. Would I please come to the small house of the dockmaster and sign the boat register? It would be my pleasure. He hoped he had not offended me. I said that it pleased me to see such care and diligence.

A few years back the cloob had a very ugly problem, and a member had asked me to help them deal with it. I posed as a guest and with a little good management and a lot of good luck, solved it without confrontations or publicity. The Board of Governors wanted to give me some special token of appreciation. They knew I had as much chance of slipping through their Membership Committee as a hog of entering heaven. So at the next meeting they amended the bylaws to permit one special membership, without initiation fees or dues, to be awarded by the board. I was nominated, seconded, and voted in, and then they voted to rescind the amendment to the bylaws. I seldom use it and knew it was childish to use that way of impressing, or trying to impress, Mary Alice McDermit.

I walked up the steps from the dock area to the edge of the lawns that slant down toward the water and the seawalls. A walkway and avenue of coconut palms led up to the main buildings of the club. The old Moorish portion has two new wings attached, wings as stark and modern as anything by I. M. Pei. So all of it together looks like a wedding cake for the Arabian bride of a suitor from Stonehenge. I could walk up there to the lofty paneled wealth of the men’s bar and order one of the finest Planter’s Punches known to man and sign for it. The bill would come in due course, on thirty-pound parchment with an engraved logo. I could stand and drink my drink, looking out through high windows at a dancing pool full of wives and children and daughters and grandchildren.

At least half the tennis courts were being used by hot-weather maniacs, out there going… pung… ponk… pung… ponk, yelling insincerities at each other and screaming of love.

The yellow Toyota came past floral plantings and parked in landscaped palm shade. Julio appeared beside me and said, “Ess your she?” When she got out and stood erect, dwindling her auto with a lot of female stature, I said, “Yes. Ess.” And Julio went bounding toward the parking area to help with her gear. A very obliging young man. Very earnest. Very dedicated and doubtless very ambitious. He was bounding proof of the fact that the Cuban colony in Miami has the most upwardly mobile young people and the lowest crime rate of any ethnic colony in the U.S. east of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

My she wore a big floppy fabric hat in a big white and yellow check. She wore a yellow top and a short white skirt so slit that her stride revealed the matching yellow shorts. She wore huge glasses with lavender lenses. She had a big yellow Ratsey bag and a big white shoulder bag. Julio took the beach bag from her and went on a dead run to stow it aboard the Muсequita.

“I’m so sorry I’m late, Trav. Traffic and bad planning. But, my God, this is some place to wait, if you have to wait. Wow! I got stopped at the gates, and I had to sign a guest thing and write in the name of the member I was meeting. I was positive you’d just picked this as a handy place. But he looked on a list. You are a member, huh? This is really some kind of incredible. There must be an army of guys just to keep the flowers looking so great.”

Maybe it was better than a pretense of total cool, all this happy, awed enthusiasm. But I found myself wishing her approval wasn’t quite as total and quite as genuine.

My twenty-two-foot runabout gave her some more pleasant astonishment. “I thought you had some kind of outboard thing. Hey, this is more like they race to the Bahamas.”

“Same hull design they used a few years ago, but they had a lot more muscle than the pair of one-twenty-fives this one is wearing.”

She hopped aboard, very lithe and springy for the size of her. She stooped and looked forward, under the bow deck. “Say, you’ve got mattress things and a toilet! It’s all so neat!”

Julio nearly fell in while freeing my lines, because he couldn’t take his eyes off Mary Alice. He radiated a worshipful approval. She had about seven inches and thirty-five pounds on him, and he was doubtless imagining walking her through his neighborhood on Sunday morning, dressed in their best, as if Snow White had finally made up her mind and decided on one of the dwarfs.

As I chugged, dead slow, past the yachts looking like ponderous caprisoned elephants in gleaming outdoor stalls, Mary Alice moved close to me and hooked her left hand over my near shoulder and made a laughing sound of delight. Her hip bumped me. I had the feeling that exact place where she put her hand would turn into a raised, radiant welt showing the precise shape of fingers and palm.

“You know what?” she said.

“What?”

“I shouldn’t even tell you. I figured that this time of year, what happened was the owner hired you to stay aboard The Busted Flush. I mean, a lot of guys want a woman to believe things. You never really said it was yours. I mean, from the dock it looks kind of lumpy and funny. But that great kitchen and that huge living room and that tub and the shower big enough for four people, practically, and that crazy bed in the main bedroom, like one I saw in a magazine, you know, why should I believe it, Trav?”

“But now you do.”

“You just don’t look as if you belong to great clubs and own great boats is all. Or act like you do.”

“What do I act like, Mary Alice?”

“I don’t know. After I moved into the place I’m in now, a guy came around to hook up my phone. He got a thing about me, and when he has service calls in the neighborhood and he sees my car, he stops to find out if my phone is working. As if I wouldn’t report it if it wasn’t. He’s almost as big as you are. A little younger. I mean, if he tried to make me think he owned The Busted Flush…”

“I won her in a poker game.”

She hit me in the ribs with her elbow. “Oh sure. I bet you did. You’re funny, you know. I can’t tell what’s a joke and what isn’t. We can go fast now? How fast will this go anyway?”

“It’s tuned right now, and the bottom is clean, and I put a new pair of wheels on her, so she should do very close to fifty, but I don’t like to hold her there more than a few minutes because I don’t like to buy new engines every year. Wait until we get past Dinner Key and I’ll show you.”

When I got past an area of prams and sailfish and little cats, I pushed it to full, with both mills yelling in full-throated unison. She stood tall above the top of the windshield, the wind snapping her black hair. She was laughing, but I couldn’t hear her, and she had me just above the elbow in an impressive grasp. The reading was a full forty-four knots, which is a respectable fifty and a bit. I pulled it back down to cruising speed.

She roamed the walk-around and found the slalom ski stowed up under the gunwale overhang, zipcorded to bronze eyebolts. She wanted to know if we had far enough to go so she could ski. I said yes, if she didn’t keep falling off, and she said she was the kind of freak who does all the physical things well after a few tries, and she’d had more than a few tries at the skiing. She went under the foredeck and pulled the privacy curtain, taking her beach bag with her, and in a little while she came out in a plain, businesslike, off-white tank suit, her hair pulled tightly back and fixed there with a silver clamp. I had gotten the tow line out and clipped it to the ring bolt in the transom and held it clear of the slowly turning wheels.

She grinned, threw the ski over the side, and dived after it. When she had the ski and had worked her feet into the slots, I pulled the bar past her at dead slow, and she grabbed it and turned to the right angle and nodded. I pushed both throttles, and she popped up out of the water and the Muсequita jumped up onto the step in perfect unison. After she made a few swings, I knew she was not going to have any trouble. She gave me the pumping sign for more speed and then the circle of thumb and finger when it was where she wanted it. It translated to thirty-two miles an hour.

She was not tricky. There were no embellishments. All she did was get into the swooping rhythm of cutting back and forth across the almost-flat wake, far out there in the expanse of Biscayne Bay, far from land, far from any other water craft. She edged the slalom ski as deeply as the men do, laying herself back at a steep angle, almost flat against the water, throwing a broad, thin, curved curtain of water at least ten feet into the air at the maximum point of strain. At that point before she came around and then came hurtling back across, ski flat, to go out onto the other wing, the strain would sag her mouth, wipe her face clean of expression, and pull all the musculature and tendons and tissues of her body so taut she looked like a blackboard drawing in medical school.

She took it each time to the edge of what she could endure. It was hypnotic and so determined that it had a slightly unpleasant undertaste, like watching a circus girl high under the canvas, going over and over and over, dislocating her shoulders with each spin, while the drums roll and the people count.

I put it into autopilot so I could watch her. From time to time I glanced forward to make certain no other boat was angling toward us. I knew she would have to tire soon. I tried to calculate her speed. She was going perhaps twenty-five feet outside the wake on one side and then the other. Call it fifty feet. I timed her from her portside turn back to her portside turn. Ten seconds. For a hundred feet. Miles per hour equals roughly two thirds of the feet per second. Ten feet per second. Add seven miles an hour then to the boat speed. Very close to forty miles an hour. At that speed, if she fell, the first bounce would feel like hitting concrete. Water is not compressible.

I heard a thick, flapping sound over the boat noise and looked up and saw a Coast Guard chopper angling across at about a thousand feet.

I saw us for a moment the way the fellow up there saw us. Gleaming boat. Deeply browned fellow in blue swim trunks running it at speed, watching the graceful girl swinging back and forth, girl in a white suit, with a light, very golden tan.

For all he could tell, the girl was eighteen, and the man was twenty, and somebody’s father had bought the boat.

Suddenly I felt bleak, oddly depressed. It took a moment for me to realize that one of Meyer’s recent lectures on international standards of living was all too well remembered.

“… so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts. Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross-country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody’s share in this country. Know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world?

“You come up against a bleak fact, Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we’re used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge-not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We’ve hogged it all. Technology won’t come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with Muсequitas.

“It was okay, Travis, when the world couldn’t see us consuming and consuming. Or hear us. Or taste some of our wares. But communication by cinema, satellite, radio, television tape, these have been like a light coming on slowly, being turned up like on a rheostat control in a dark cellar where all of mankind used to live. Now it is blinding bright, cruelly bright. And they can all look over into our corner and see us gorging ourselves and playing with our bright pretty toys. And so they want theirs now. Just like ours, God help them. And what is the only thing we can say? ‘Sorry. You’re a little too late. We used it all up, all except what we need to keep our toys in repair and running and to replace them when they wear out. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.’ What comes after that? Barbarism, an interregnum, a new dark ages, and another start a thousand years from now with a few million people on the planet? Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don’t dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and the shame and the despair. Nobody in the world will ever live as well, materially, as we once did. And now, as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might manage it. But no one else.”

Good old Meyer. He can put a fly into any kind of ointment, a mouse in every birthday cake, a cloud over every picnic. Not out of spite. Not out of contrition or messianic zeal. But out of a happy, single-minded pursuit of truth. He is not to blame that the truth seems to have the smell of decay and an acrid taste these days. He points out that forty thousand particles per cubic centimeter of air over Miami is now called a clear day. He is not complaining about particulate matter. He is merely bemused by the change in standards.

Now, as I watched the tireless lady zoom back and forth, he had made me feel like one of those regal jokers of olden times who could order up enough humming bird tongues for a banquet. What’s your message, Meyer? Enjoy?

She slid back to a straight track behind the stern. She smiled and rolled her shoulders. She cocked her head and then tried some signals on me. First she held her left hand up, finger and thumb an inch apart. Then she pulled her hand across her throat, in the cut-power signal. Then as I started to turn toward the controls, she shook her head violently and held her hand out, palm toward me. I waited, puzzled, and she pointed toward the water off to the port side of the boat, and then she bent her knees and swung her fanny out to the right. So I had the message. I decided I’d better leave it on pilot but be close enough to take it out in a hurry.

She moved out to the side and gave me her signal and swung wider for speed. I pulled the throttles halfway back, and she tossed the line clear, into the wake, and came angling in too fast toward the port side, amidships. I moved quickly to grab her, but she yelled me off, turned parallel to the direction of the boat, slowing and just as the speeds were identical, she gave a little twisting hop which hoisted her rear onto the flat gunwale and would have been perfect except she was overbalanced. The slalom ski went up, and she fell over backward into the cockpit. I wasn’t close enough to break her fall, and I heard the thump her head made against the deck and felt it through the soles of my bare feet. She scrambled up and went to the stern and brought the tow line in, and then I cut the power all the way back. In the semisilence I said, “You are totally mad. Miss the edge and you’d get swept right into the port wheel.”

“That’s how come I jumped too far.”

“Did you ever try that before?”

“Onto docks. It’s trickier because you have to get it just right, ending up at the dock just when you stop and start to sink. So this is easier. You can kind of adjust because it’s like the dock is moving too.”

“And that makes it easier?”

“You’re cross because it scared you, Trav. Well, I’m a little scared too. I always get scared after I try things.”

“You thumped your head pretty good.”

“All this hair worked like a cushion. It’s my elbow that hurts.”

She showed me. She had knocked a flap of skin loose. I got out the kit and disinfected it and put a bandaid patch on it. She stretched and then squatted on her heels and bounced a few times and came up slowly. “You know, that’s really a workout,” she said. “I wish I could do that every day. I’d get hard as rocks. It would really firm me up.”

“I didn’t notice anything very loose.”

“Then you weren’t looking.”

“I’m pretty sure I was looking.”

She gave me a quick sidelong glance, not at all flirtatious. It backed me off from whatever was about to come into my mind. She said, “Pretty soon I am going to start eating those life jackets.”

I looked ahead and picked out the familiar island shapes. I established my location and knew the water I could trust. I said, “You’ll be eating in fifteen minutes, and you can start drinking right now, if you’re up to it. Look in the ice chest over there. I laid aboard some of those cocktails in cans. Take your pick. Give me a vodka martini, please.”

She picked a marguerita, pulled the tabs off the cans, and handed me mine, then clinked cans. I was glad to note I did not have to tell her why we don’t throw the shiny tabs overboard.

“I feel great,” she said over the engine noise. “Everything is pulled loose, sort of. All stretched. I want to have two drinks, eat myself blind, go to sleep in the sun, and then have a swim, and then ski all the way home.”

“So be it,” I said. “Won’t you burn?”

She poked at her thigh. “My skin is thick and tough, like some kind of plastic. I don’t burn at all. After I get pink about nine thousand times, then I gradually turn the color I am now, and then nothing else happens, no matter what.”

I read the shallows ahead and slowed down and eased up to them and then along the edge until I found a notch deep enough to get me close to shore. I cut everything and put a couple of hooks over and slung the boarding ladder.

Then we offloaded everything and, in two trips, carried it up over the dune and down to the little cove on the Atlantic side, dispossessing a pale and malevolent crab, when we spread the two giant beach towels in the semi-shade of a pair of wind-torn old casuarinas. We had more of the extravagantly convenient drinks-in-a-can. (Were the emerging nations targeting on this delight in their misty futures?)

I went back and checked the hooks, reset one and trod it into better bottom, and brought back the battered and eroded old battery radio. It brought in the most useful Cuban station, playing, on this Saturday afternoon, a concert of symphonic pieces for Spanish guitar. With very few commercials.

We had a short swim before lunch. The drinks were making the bright day faintly, tantalizingly unreal. I caught her looking stealthily at my ugliest and most impressive souvenir of old trauma, the long deep one down the top of the thigh. I told her it was surgical. A wound had become infected, and they had chopped around in there three times, planning to take the leg off if they had to schedule the fourth. She asked if it was something that happened in some war, and I said that no, it had been a civilian difference of opinion. There were some less impressive marks from one of those wars, and the rest of them were either bad luck or good luck or bad judgment. She swallowed and said she couldn’t stand the thought of being hurt. She simply couldn’t stand it. Oh, not the little bang and bumps and sprains you get from athletics, or even a couple of busted ribs and a broken collarbone, which she got when she fell from the rings in a gym one time. She meant really really hurt, with stitches and drains and operations and needles and all that. She swallowed again. She said she had never even been really sick, not ever.

Having seen her eat and knowing that outdoors improves appetites, I had ordered enough for four. Hunks of sharp cheddar, cucumber salad, giant roast-beef sandwiches on dark bread, corned beef sandwiches, big crisp kosher dills, a big thermos of iced coffee, two big pieces of tart, deep-dish apple pie. It was successful. She kept making little humming sounds and small chuckling sounds. Through the dark curtain of hair I saw the solid jaw muscles bulging and sliding under that golden hide as she chomped away. I warned her about the horseradish but she slathered it on the roast beef anyway, yelped when she got into it, and then finished the sandwich, eyes tearing, snuffing as though with a head cold.

She yawned and lay back on the big towel I had provided her. She put a forearm across her eyes. In the middle of a sentence her voice dwindled and blurred and stopped. I saw the deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing of heavy sleep, lips apart, edge of white teeth showing. Her up-flung arm revealed the faint, sooty shadow of the shaven stubble. Her palm was turned to the sun, fingers curled. Her other hand, almost a fist, rested against the flattened, muscular belly. Tiny round beads of perspiration, the size of the heads of the pins they put in expensive shirts, clung to the pale fuzz of her upper lip.

I looked at the angle of the sun and got my watch out of the side pocket of the canvas bag I had brought from the boat. A straight shot to the Royal Biscayne would take forty minutes. And I wanted to be coming into Lauderdale past the sea buoy no later than eight-fifteen. So, to have some of the day left for more swimming, more skiing, I wouldn’t want to sleep more than about a half-hour. I set the alarm. Meyer had given the watch to me because it amused him. It does not make a sound. At the specified time, a semisharp little metal nub starts popping out of a little hole in the underside of it, stabbing you in the wrist.

Chapter Nine

On Sunday morning after ten o’clock I got around to hosing down the Muсequita with fresh water from the dockside connection at Slip F-18. After I wiped the water-spots off the brightwork, I checked the batteries, oil level in the engines, used a dip stick to check the level in the two tanks against the fuel gauges, greased the linkage in the power lift, and carried the picnic items aboard The Busted Flush. By then the cockpit deck had dried, so I did a better job of making her white rubber fenders fast in the right places before I snapped the big custom cover in place all the way around. As I clambered up onto the Flush, I heard Meyer calling my name. He was coming along the dock at an unaccustomed briskness, and I went ashore and met him with a suggestion he buy me some coffee aboard his boat, mine having run out.

“And what was the big hurry?” I asked him.

As we strolled back toward his dumpy cruiser he said, “There’s something I never thought of before. When you want to deliver surprising news, your first impulse is to do it in a hurry. If it’s good news, the second decision is to slow down, take your time, savor the pleasure of delivering it. But with bad news, you keep hurrying. You want to get it off your hands. Share it.”

“Which means yours is bad?”

“Bad. Sad. It’s nothing I want to hang onto for the pure relish of it. Jane Lawson was killed yesterday.”

I stopped. He kept going for three strides and turned and looked at me and said, “I know. She was more alive than most.”

“Vehicle?”

“No. From what I understand from Hirsh, somebody trashed her house. The police think it was high school kids. The younger daughter runs with a batch of kids who have been feuding with other gangs of girls. They think it was revenge of some kind. The girl’s possessions were pretty much destroyed, and it looks as if perhaps Jane came back while the damage was happening. She would have run into her place and tried to stop them, of course.”

“If it was a gang of girls, yes. I’d buy that.”

“It doesn’t look intentional. It looks as if she could have been grappling with someone, trying to restrain them, and someone else grabbed her from behind by the hair to pull her away and broke her neck.”

“Jesus God!”

“When she went down, they got out of there in a hurry. The other daughter came home and found her late yesterday afternoon. Hirsh woke me up at eleven-thirty last night, phoning me to tell me about it. For a while I could hardly understand him.”

“Do they have a time of death?”

“They say between one-thirty and three, preliminary. The electric clock in the younger daughter’s room stopped at two-fifteen when somebody threw it against the wall.”

“Do they have the younger daughter, Judy, in custody?”

“Maybe. Hirsh said they were still looking for her at ten last night. Apparently neighbors are no help in that place. It’s designed for a kind of privacy, so it is difficult to see people come and go. There are no community areas or activities. People are moving in and moving out frequently. With all the window air conditioners on and the televisions and radios and all the children in that development, nobody hears anything. And if there was some suspicion of something unpleasant going on, the neighborhood reaction would be to turn up the volume on the set and not check the time. Otherwise one might become involved. If you get involved, you can spend untold hours sitting around, waiting to be called into court.”

“Meyer?” I said.

He gave a little start. “Sorry. I got sidetracked. Come along. I do have coffee made. I’ll have to suggest a study of why people become involved and why they don’t.”

“Like the forward pass.”

“You lost me, Travis.”

“When you pass the ball, six possible things can happen, and five of them are bad.”

He was silent until he handed me the mug of black coffee, reaching out over the stern quarter to hand it to me where I sat on the dock. “Five things can go wrong?” he asked.

“One, incomplete. Two, intercepted. Three, caught and fumbled. Four, penalized for offensive pass interference. Five, caught for no gain or for a loss.”

“I forgot about the penalty.”

“Also, they can smear your quarterback just as he unloads and put him out for the rest of the season. That makes six bad things out of seven chances. Why are we doing this, Meyer?”

“So as not to discuss Jane Lawson.”

“Let’s let her wait in the wings while I tell you about Dave Davis and Harry Harris.”

He listened and had no comment until I requested one. And his comment was a pass. He said it needed thought. The alternate assumptions put it into the province of symbolic logic.

I said, “Jack does the family marketing whenever it rains in the afternoon, if it is not one of Jill’s bridge days, provided it is not one of the Tuesdays or Fridays when Jack rides to work with Ben.”

“Scoff, if it amuses you.”

I gave him back his empty mug and stood up. “I have the feeling that nothing is going to be able to give me much amusement for quite a while.”

When I was two steps away, he said, “You had your phone turned off last night?”

“I do believe I did.”

I went back home and sat in the lounge and thought about Jane Lawson for a little while and looked at my watch. Twenty-five minutes before noon. I went to the master stateroom and opened the door. Mary Alice had shifted position since I had crept out. There was a faint breath of coolness in the air conditioning-she did not like it turned high-and she lay face down, diagonally asprawl across the big bed, sheet down to her bare waist, one hand under her cheek, the other fist clenched close under her chin. One tangle of black hair was sheafed across her sleeping eyes, and shining strands hung down over the side of the bed.

I eased myself stealthily onto the bed to sit and look down at her. There was her own mix of scents in the cabin air, a smell of sleep and girl and Mary Alice, a sort of smoky smell, pungently sweet, with an undertaste of tart, like a wine just turning.

I had not believed she would be in my bed. Not after I had defied Jane’s warning about her. When the watch had stabbed me awake on the beach, I had leaned and propped my arms on either side of her and bent to her lips and kissed her awake. Her lips rolled softly open, and then she pushed me away and stared at me, pulled me back down very strongly for about a low four count, then shoved violently and rolled away, rolled up onto knuckles and haunches and stared at me through dark hair. I reached out and caught her arm and said, “What is it with you?”

She tossed her hair back, yanked her arm free. “I don’t want to get into that anymore. I really don’t.”

“Never?”

“Never,” she said and stood up.

I got up too and said, “It’s… an unusual decision.”

“Now you can tell me it’s ruining my health. Anybody can look at me and see I’m a wreck.”

“Mary Alice, it’s your body and your decision to make. I’m not going to argue and pressure you. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.”

“Why should you be sorry?” she said. “I’m… going for a walk, okay?”

She went down the little stretch of beach. She went as far as she could go without swimming, which was about a hundred feet. She picked up a handful of small shells from the tide line and stood plunking them out into the sea, I found a piece of driftwood, a flat board off somebody’s dock or beach steps, and used it as a shovel and dug a hole deep enough to bury our debris above the tide line, with about eighteen inches of sand stomped down on top of it. When I looked at her again, she was sitting on the little slope of beach, arms around her legs, chin on a knee, staring toward Africa. I could tell that it was a time of thought for her, a time of decision. When at last she came back, she was determinedly merry and carefree. I could not read her at all.

There was time for another swim. We swam around to the bay side, and I got two sets of masks, snorkels, and swim fins out of the locker. We swam to a place where boats had anchored, and we found rare and unusual treasure on the bottom. Genesee and Blatz and Pauli Girl. Coors and Utica Club and Hockstein brewed in Rollie, Alabama. Vintage aluminum. Rare brands brought from afar.

Her forced jolliness seemed to become genuine later on. We frolicked and raced and startled some small fish. Then it was time to pack up and run for it, with no time for skiing on the way back to the Royal Biscayne.

Then she stopped me as I was slowing to make the turn between the club channel markers. She wanted me to wait a minute, right there. So I got myself opposite the tide and held it in place with just the port engine turning softly in gear. She stood in balance, her back to me, and then turned and came over and stood close in quarter profile.

“Would they mind my leaving my car there?” I had to lean close and make her repeat it.

“No. They wouldn’t mind. Is it what you want?”

She turned her face further away. “I don’t know what I want. I’m stuck. Right in the middle. Dammit, when I want somebody to hustle me…”

I pulled her chin around and uptilted it, but she would not look at me. Her glance slid down and away, off to the side. I put the starboard engine in gear. I turned the boat until she was headed northeast, toward the channel. I took Mary Alice’s hand and put it on the starboard throttle. I took hold of the port. I put the loop of line over the spoke to lock the wheel.

I said, “Okay. As I push this throttle, the port engine is going to pick up speed, heading for the channel, heading for home. Let’s say that is my intention. But the wheel is locked, so if the starboard throttle stays right where it is, all I am going to do is make one hell of a big circle and end up aiming back into the yacht club.”

She didn’t say anything. Her hand was slack on the throttle. I slowly pushed mine up. We went almost straight and then began to turn more and more easterly. I could see I was going to have some problems with water traffic if I waited too long for her. She took her hand off, and as I was about to accept that as her decision, she hit the throttle with the heel of her hand, banging it all the way forward. She sat in the copilot’s chair. The maneuver gave me a couple of very busy seconds flipping the loop off, yanking the throttle back, turning the wheel.

I said, “When you make up your mind, honey, you-”

“Shut up and drive,” she said.

I went outside, got on my heading, and put it on pilot. She did not want a beer. She did not want a drink. She did not want any conversation, thanks. So I took a beer back and sat on the engine hatch as we roared through the calm sea, tipping and lifting a little in the swell that was just beginning to build. She stood up and leaned her folded arms on the top of the windshield, staring ahead for a long time, standing hipshot with ankles crossed. The light of the dying day was gold and orange. The shore was turning blue-gray, the sea to indigo.

I guessed that in another five minutes I would take it out of pilot and turn toward the sea buoy and the early lights of Lauderdale. She came striding back, losing her balance and catching it, looking angry, and said, “Can you turn everything off and sort of just float out here? Please?”

Done. A sudden silence until ears can find the smaller sounds. Dip and pitch and roll, water slapping the hull, something rolling and thumping in a gear locker, water sloshing the cooler.

She went back and sat on the broad transom which was also the engine hatch, swiveled to hang her legs over the stern. I sat beside her, facing inboard.

“I don’t talk about my husband,” she said.

“People have noticed.”

So she talked about him. She hopped back and forth in time and space, with silences between. I didn’t come in with questions. She had to set her own tempo of revelation. She had gone steady with a boy for several years. She’d caught the eye of an older man, one of the McDermit brothers who had a lot of food-service companies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, catering airlines, operating coffee-break concessions and cafeterias in factories and offices, owning vending machines and warehousing facilities. He had big cars, phones in his cars, a duplex apartment with a staff, an executive jet.

She had played one against the other, in a girlish mischief. Then abruptly Tom, the boyfriend, had died in a one-car accident, lost control at high speed on the interstate. McDermit had been gentle, understanding, comforting. She had married him.

“Then it all turned so rotten,” she said. “They owned race horses, those brothers. I was another thing, like a horse that costs so much to keep, you can do any damn thing you want with it. He liked to hit. He liked to hurt. He couldn’t really make it any other way. He was trying to break me. We had a big fight, and I told him Tom had been a man, and he wasn’t a man. He said he had a specialist put a gadget inside the wheel cap on Tom’s right front wheel, set so that at seventy it would push a weight against a spring thing and blow the lugs off. He said Tom was dead meat. I said he was never going to touch me again, and I was getting a divorce. He said nobody was ever going to touch me again, so I didn’t need a divorce. He said to get out if I wanted to, but if I let anybody have me, he’d have both of us killed.”

She hadn’t really believed him. She’d gone to a lawyer who accepted the divorce action eagerly, then suddenly cooled off. When she insisted on knowing why, he took her into a little conference room and closed the door. He was sweaty. He told her she should go back to her husband. He said the brothers were always involved in legal actions, and sometimes they were indicted, but nothing had ever gone any further than that. He told her he didn’t want her business, she didn’t owe him a dime, please leave.

She tried another town and another name, and McDermit had phoned her at work to say hello. He found her more quickly the second time. So she had come to Miami and gone back to her own name. “His people check on me. Somebody comes around every couple of months. You get used to it. Five years, practically. It isn’t all that rough, getting along without. It isn’t that big a part of life.”

“Why now and why me, Mary Alice?”

She sighed. “I hope you can find your way in off this ocean in the dark.”

“No problem.”

“Look at all the stars! You can see them better out here.”

“Evading the question?”

“No man in his right mind is going to take a chance on getting killed, just to get one specific piece of ass out of all the ass there is floating around. And besides, I’m not all that great in bed. I’m a big healthy girl, but I’m just sort of average sexy, like you’d find anywhere.”

“Question still pending, lady.”

“I’m saying it isn’t now and it isn’t you, because it could have been if I decided, but instead I’ve told you why it shouldn’t happen. It would be stupid of you. And it would be stupid of me to let myself get into it. I’ve had it all pushed down out of sight, and I’m okay. I get along fine.”

“Then let me ask it a different way. Why did you almost decide on now and on me?”

“Not because you are so absolutely irresistible, believe me. If I was inventing a guy to… break my fast with, he would sort of be like Michael Landon, only a foot taller.”

“Like who?”

“If you don’t know, never mind. I think that the way it started, I had the idea that if I ever got the nerve to take the risk, it should be with somebody who’d be awfully damned hard to kill, and then maybe he could keep me alive too. It was just… what is the word when you think of things you aren’t going to do?”

“Conjecture?”

“Right! I conjectured about us. Then I woke up on the beach, and you were asleep, and I looked at you and kind of wanted you. Still conjecture. Then you kissed me, and I was having a dream it fitted into. Then I went down the beach and thought about it, and then I began playing some kind of fool game about it, but you have to come to the end of games, right? Something to get killed over? Who needs it? Come on, dear. You better start aiming me toward home. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“And you don’t play quicky games, do you?”

She snapped her head around. “You better not be asking me to.”

“I’m not.”

“If I wanted to sneak it, I could have had all a girl could need.”

“I know.”

“It would have to be something that starts and keeps going until somebody finally says whoa. Out in the open. People would know just by seeing me look at the guy.”

And now, in the shadows of the curtained master stateroom, I wanted to see that look. I slowly ran the ball of my thumb down the crease of her back, from shoulder-blades to the little knobs in the small of her back. She sighed and moved slowly and made a small murmur of complaint. Then suddenly she stiffened, sprang up and back and away from me, eyes wide and blank in terror, as she grasped the sheet and pulled it up across her breasts.

She expelled the frightened in-suck of breath in a long grateful sigh, hooked her hair back out of the way with curled fingers, gave me a small and uncertain smile and said, “Talk about having a heart attack, darling.”

“Bad dreams?”

“Mmmm. Hold me, huh?”

I stretched out beside her, atop the sheet, and put my arms around her. She put her face in my throat. She chuckled.

“What’s funny?”

“A dirty joke a girl told me where I have lunch. It sort of fits. You know. I’ll mess it up if I try to tell it.”

“Try.”

It was the one about the doctor with the gorgeous girl patient who comes in with a hangnail and has to strip for the complete physical, and it ends with the tag line, “Don’t be silly, Miss Jones. I shouldn’t even be doing this!”

And she didn’t tell it very well.

“Darling?” she said.

“Wha‘?”

“Tell me exactly what you promised and exactly what you are going to do.”

“Hmm. Let’s see. I am going to put extra drums of fuel aboard this here vessel. I am going to equip her and provision her for a voyage of uncertain duration. And at the first hint that your freak husband is after us, whenever you say go, we go, taking the Muсequita in tow. If the weather is good enough, we see if we have enough good luck and good management to get over to the islands. If not, we lay at anchor somewhere down Biscayne Bay or in Florida Bay until we get the right weather.”

“When I say we’re leaving, what do you do?”

“I do not argue. I do not discuss. I do not negotiate. I hang up the phone, start the engines, and wait for you.”

She gave me a very strong hug. “That’s our deal.”

“That’s our deal, M.A.”

“Time is it?”

“Moving up onto noon.”

“What! Good Lord!”

“Something must have relaxed you, honey.”

“Sure didn’t look like anything was going to at first. I was absolutely hopeless. I was just too tense and nervous and scared to be worth a damn. You are a very patient guy.”

“In a self-serving kind of way.”

There was a long silence and small motions finally, body language involved in question and answer, query and response, trick or treat. And off in the side of my mind was a fleeting recap of Meyer’s insight, that we all tend to save good news as long as we can. But sometimes, with a little tickle of guilt, we find a compelling reason to save the bad for a little while too.