The Talisman

Interlude

Sloat in This World (I)

“I know I work too hard,” Morgan Sloat told his son Richard that evening. They were speaking on the telephone, Richard standing at the communal telephone in the downstairs corridor of his dormitory, his father sitting at his desk on the top floor of one of Sawyer & Sloat’s first and sweetest real-estate deals in Beverly Hills. “But I tell you kid, there are a lot of times when you have to do something yourself to get it done right. Especially when my late partner’s family is involved. It’s just a short trip, I hope. Probably I’ll get everything nailed down out there in goddam New Hampshire in less than a week. I’ll give you another call when it’s all over. Maybe we’ll go railroading in California, just like the old days. There’ll be justice yet. Trust your old man.”

The deal for the building had been particularly sweet because of Sloat’s willingness to do things himself. After he and Sawyer had negotiated the purchase of a short-term lease, then (after a gunfire of lawsuits) a long-term lease, they had fixed their rental rates at so much per square foot, done the necessary alterations, and advertised for new tenants. The only holdover tenant was the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, dribbling in rent at about a third of what the space was worth. Sloat had tried reasonable discussions with the Chinese, but when they saw that he was trying to talk them into paying more rent, they suddenly lost the ability to speak or understand English. Sloat’s attempts at negotiation limped along for a few days, and then he happened to see one of the kitchen help carrying a bucket of grease out through the back door of the kitchen. Feeling better already, Sloat followed the man into a dark, narrow cul-de-sac and watched him tip the grease into a garbage can. He needed no more than that. A day later, a chain-link fence separated the cul-de-sac from the restaurant; yet another day later, a Health Department inspector served the Chinese with a complaint and a summons. Now the kitchen help had to take all their refuse, grease included, out through the dining area and down a chain-link dog run Sloat had constructed alongside the restaurant. Business fell off: the customers caught odd, unpleasant odors from the nearby garbage. The owners rediscovered the English language, and volunteered to double their monthly payment. Sloat responded with a grateful-sounding speech that said nothing. And that night, having primed himself with three large martinis, Sloat drove from his house to the restaurant and took a baseball bat from the trunk of his car and smashed in the long window which had once given a pleasant view of the street but now looked out at a corridor of fencing which ended in a huddle of metal bins.

He had done those things . . . but he hadn’t exactly been Sloat when he did them.

The next morning the Chinese requested another meeting and this time offered to quadruple their payment. “Now you’re talking like men,” Sloat told the stony-faced Chinese. “And I’ll tell you what! Just to prove we’re all on the same team, we’ll pay half the cost of replacing your window.”

Within nine months of Sawyer & Sloat’s taking possession of the building, all the rents had increased significantly and the initial cost and profit projections had begun to look wildly pessimistic. By now this building was one of Sawyer & Sloat’s more modest ventures, but Morgan Sloat was as proud of it as of the massive new structures they had put up downtown. Just walking past the place where he’d put up the fence as he came in to work in the morning reminded him—daily—of how much he had contributed to Sawyer & Sloat, how reasonable were his claims!

This sense of the justice of his ultimate desires kindled within him as he spoke to Richard—after all, it was for Richard that he wanted to take over Phil Sawyer’s share of the company. Richard was, in a sense, his immortality. His son would be able to go to the best business schools and then pick up a law degree before he came into the company; and thus fully armed, Richard Sloat would carry all the complex and delicate machinery of Sawyer & Sloat into the next century. The boy’s ridiculous ambition to become a chemist could not long survive his father’s determination to murder it—Richard was smart enough to see that what his father did was a hell of a lot more interesting, not to mention vastly more remunerative, than working with a test tube over a Bunsen burner. That “research chemist” stuff would fade away pretty quickly, once the boy had a glimpse of the real world. And if Richard was concerned about being fair to Jack Sawyer, he could be made to understand that fifty thousand a year and a guaranteed college education was not only fair but magnanimous. Princely. Who could say that Jack wanted any part of the business, anyhow, or that he would possess any talent for it?

Besides, accidents happened. Who could even say that Jack Sawyer would live to see twenty?

“Well, it’s really a matter of getting all the papers, all the ownership stuff, finally straight,” Sloat told his son. “Lily’s been hiding out from me for too long. Her brain is strictly cottage cheese by now, take my word for it. She probably has less than a year to live. So if I don’t hump myself off to see her now that I have her pinned down, she could stall long enough to put everything into probate—or into a trust fund, and I don’t think your friend’s momma would let me administer it. Hey, I don’t want to bore you with my troubles. I just wanted to tell you that I won’t be home for a few days, in case you call. Send me a letter or something. And remember about the train, okay? We gotta do that again.”

The boy promised to write, to work hard, to not worry about his father or Lily Cavanaugh or Jack.

And sometime when this obedient son was, say, in his senior year at Stanford or Yale, Sloat would introduce him to the Territories. Richard would be six or seven years younger than he had been himself when Phil Sawyer, cheerfully crack-brained on grass in their first little North Hollywood office, had first puzzled, then infuriated (because Sloat had been certain Phil was laughing at him), then intrigued his partner (for surely Phil was too stoned to have invented all this science-fiction crapola about another world). And when Richard saw the Territories, that would be it—if he had not already done it by himself, they’d change his mind for him. Even a small peek into the Territories shook your confidence in the omniscience of scientists.

Sloat ran the palm of his hand over the shiny top of his head, then luxuriantly fingered his moustache. The sound of his son’s voice had obscurely, irrelevantly comforted him: as long as there was Richard politely coming along behind him, all was well and all was well and all manner of things was well. It was night already in Springfield, Illinois, and in Nelson House, Thayer School, Richard Sloat was padding down a green corridor back to his desk, perhaps thinking of the good times they’d had, and would have again, aboard Morgan’s toy train line in coastal California. He’d be asleep by the time his father’s jet punished the resistant air far above and some hundred miles farther north; but Morgan Sloat would push aside the panel over his first-class window and peer down, hoping for moonlight and a parting of the clouds.

He wanted to go home immediately—home was only thirty minutes away from the office—so that he could change clothes and get something to eat, maybe snort a little coke, before he had to get to the airport. But instead he had to pound out along the freeway to the Marina: an appointment with a client who had freaked out and was on the verge of being dumped from a picture, then a meeting with a crowd of spoilers who claimed that a Sawyer & Sloat project just up from Marina del Rey was polluting the beach—things that could not be postponed. Though Sloat promised himself that as soon as he had taken care of Lily Cavanaugh and her boy he was going to begin dropping clients from his list—he had much bigger fish to fry now. Now there were whole worlds to broker, and his piece of the action would be no mere ten percent. Looking back on it, Sloat wasn’t sure how he had tolerated Phil Sawyer for as long as he had. His partner had never played to win, not seriously; he had been encumbered by sentimental notions of loyalty and honor, corrupted by the stuff you told kids to get them halfway civilized before you finally tore the blindfold off their eyes. Mundane as it might be in light of the stakes he now played for, he could not forget that the Sawyers owed him, all right—indigestion flowered in his chest like a heart attack at the thought of how much, and before he reached his car in the still-sunny lot beside the building, he shoved his hand into his jacket pocket and fished out a crumpled package of Di-Gel.

Phil Sawyer had underestimated him, and that still rankled. Because Phil had thought of him as a sort of trained rattlesnake to be let out of his cage only under controlled circumstances, so had others. The lot attendant, a hillbilly in a broken cowboy hat, eyed him as he marched around his little car, looking for dents and dings. The Di-Gel melted most of the fiery ball in his chest. Sloat felt his collar growing clammy with sweat. The attendant knew better than to try to buddy up: Sloat had verbally peeled the man’s hide weeks ago, after discovering a tiny wrinkle in the BMW’s door. In the midst of his rant, he had seen violence begin to darken in the hillbilly’s green eyes, and a sudden upsurge of joy had made him waddle in toward the man, still cutting off skin, almost hoping that the attendant would take a poke at him. Abruptly, the hillbilly had lost his momentum; feebly, indeed apologetically suggested that maybe that-there l’il nuthin of a ding came from somewhere else? Parking service at a restaurant, maybe? The way those bozos treat cars, y’know, and the light ain’t so good that time a night, why . . .

“Shut your stinking mouth,” Sloat had said. “That little nothing, as you call it, is going to cost me about twice what you make in a week. I should fire you right now, cowpoke, and the only reason I’m not going to is that there’s about a two percent chance you might be right; when I came out of Chasen’s last night maybe I didn’t look under the door handle, maybe I DID and maybe I DIDN’T, but if you ever talk to me again, if you ever say any more than ’Hello, Mr. Sloat’ or ’Goodbye, Mr. Sloat,’ I’ll get you fired so fast you’ll think you were beheaded.” So the hillbilly watched him inspect his car, knowing that if Sloat found any imperfections in the car’s finish he would bring down the axe, afraid even to come close enough to utter the ritual goodbye. Sometimes from the window that overlooked the parking lot Sloat had seen the attendant furiously wiping some flaw, bird dropping or splash of mud, off the BMW’s hood. And that’s management, buddy.

When he pulled out of the lot he checked the rear-view mirror and saw on the hillbilly’s face an expression very like the last one Phil Sawyer had worn in the final seconds of his life, out in the middle of nowhere in Utah. He smiled all the way to the freeway on-ramp.

Philip Sawyer had underestimated Morgan Sloat from the time of their first meeting, when they were freshmen at Yale. It could have been, Sloat reflected, that he had been easy to underestimate—a pudgy eighteen-year-old from Akron, graceless, overweighted with anxieties and ambitions, out of Ohio for the first time in his life. Listening to his classmates talk easily about New York, about “21” and the Stork Club, about seeing Brubeck at Basin Street and Erroll Garner at the Vanguard, he’d sweated to hide his ignorance. “I really like the downtown part,” he’d thrown in, as casually as he could. Palms wet, cramped by curled-in fingers. (Mornings, Sloat often found his palms tattooed with dented bruises left by his fingernails.) “What downtown part, Morgan?” Tom Woodbine had asked him. The others cackled. “You know, Broadway and the Village. Around there.” More cackles, harsher. He had been unattractive and badly dressed; his wardrobe consisted of two suits, both charcoal-gray and both apparently made for a man with a scarecrow’s shoulders. He had begun losing his hair in high school, and pink scalp showed through his short, flattened-down haircuts.

No, no beauty had Sloat been, and that had been part of it. The others made him feel like a clenched fist: those morning bruises were shadowy little photographs of his soul. The others, all interested in the theater like himself and Sawyer, possessed good profiles, flat stomachs, easy careless manners. Sprawled across the lounge chairs of their suite in Davenport while Sloat, in a haze of perspiration, stood that he might not wrinkle his suit pants and thereby get a few more days’ wear out of them, they sometimes resembled a gathering of young gods—cashmere sweaters draped over their shoulders like the golden fleece. They were on their way to becoming actors, playwrights, songwriters. Sloat had seen himself as a director: entangling them all in a net of complications and designs which only he could unwind.

Sawyer and Tom Woodbine, both of whom seemed unimaginably rich to Sloat, were roommates. Woodbine had only a lukewarm interest in theater and hung around their undergraduate drama workshop because Phil did. Another gilded private-school boy, Thomas Woodbine differed from the others because of his absolute seriousness and straightforwardness. He intended to become a lawyer, and already seemed to have the probity and impartiality of a judge. (In fact, most of Woodbine’s acquaintances imagined that he would wind up on the Supreme Court, much to the embarrassment of the boy himself.) Woodbine was without ambition in Sloat’s terms, being interested far more in living rightly than in living well. Of course he had everything, and what he by some accident lacked other people were quick to give him: how could he, so spoiled by nature and friendships, be ambitious? Sloat almost unconsciously detested Woodbine, and could not bring himself to call him “Tommy.”

Sloat directed two plays during his four years at Yale: No Exit, which the student paper called “a furious confusion,” and Volpone. This was described as “churning, cynical, sinister, and almost unbelievably messy.” Sloat was held responsible for most of these qualities. Perhaps he was not a director after all—his vision too intense and crowded. His ambitions did not lessen, they merely shifted. If he was not eventually to be behind the camera, he could be behind the people in front of it. Phil Sawyer had also begun to think this way—Phil had never been certain where his love of theater might take him, and thought he might have a talent for representing actors and writers. “Let’s go to Los Angeles and start an agency,” Phil said to him in their senior year. “It’s nutty as hell and our parents will hate it, but maybe we’ll make it work. So we starve for a couple of years.”

Phil Sawyer, Sloat had learned since their freshman year, was not rich after all. He just looked rich.

“And when we can afford him, we’ll get Tommy to be our lawyer. He’ll be out of law school by then.”

“Sure, okay,” Sloat had said, thinking that he could stop that one when the time came. “What should we call ourselves?”

“Anything you like. Sloat and Sawyer? Or should we stick to the alphabet?”

“Sawyer and Sloat, sure, that’s great, alphabetical order,” Sloat said, seething because he imagined that his partner had euchred him into forever suggesting that he was somehow secondary to Sawyer.

Both sets of parents did hate the idea, as Phil had predicted, but the partners in the infant talent agency drove to Los Angeles in the old DeSoto (Morgan’s, another demonstration of how much Sawyer owed him), set up an office in a North Hollywood building with a happy population of rats and fleas, and started hanging around the clubs, passing out their spandy-new business cards. Nothing—nearly four months of total failure. They had a comic who got too drunk to be funny, a writer who couldn’t write, a stripper who insisted on being paid in cash so that she could stiff her agents. And then late one afternoon, high on marijuana and whiskey, Phil Sawyer had gigglingly told Sloat about the Territories.

“You know what I can do, you ambitious so-and-so? Oh, can I travel, partner. All the way.”

Shortly after that, both of them travelling now, Phil Sawyer met a rising young actress at a studio party and within an hour had their first important client. And she had three friends similarly unhappy with their agents. And one of the friends had a boyfriend who had actually written a decent filmscript and needed an agent, and the boyfriend had a boyfriend . . . Before their third year was over, they had a new office, new apartments, a slice of the Hollywood pie. The Territories, in a fashion that Sloat accepted but never understood, had blessed them.

Sawyer dealt with the clients; Sloat with the money, the investments, the business side of the agency. Sawyer spent money—lunches, airplane tickets—Sloat saved it, which was all the justification he needed to skim a little of the cream off the top. And it was Sloat who kept pushing them into new areas, land development, real estate, production deals. By the time Tommy Woodbine arrived in Los Angeles, Sawyer & Sloat was a multimillion-dollar business.

Sloat discovered that he still detested his old classmate; Tommy Woodbine had put on thirty pounds, and looked and acted, in his blue three-piece suits, more than ever like a judge. His cheeks were always slightly flushed (alcoholic? Sloat wondered), his manner still kindly and ponderous. The world had left its marks on him—clever little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the eyes themselves infinitely more guarded than those of the gilded boy at Yale. Sloat understood almost at once, and knew that Phil Sawyer would never see it unless he were told, that Tommy Woodbine lived with an enormous secret: whatever the gilded boy might have been, Tommy was now a homosexual. Probably he’d call himself gay. And that made everything easier—in the end, it even made it easier to get rid of Tommy.

Because queers are always getting killed, aren’t they? And did anybody really want a two-hundred-and-ten-pound pansy responsible for bringing up a teenage boy? You could say that Sloat was just saving Phil Sawyer from the posthumous consequences of a serious lapse of judgment. If Sawyer had made Sloat the executor of his estate and the guardian of his son, there would have been no problems. As it was, the murderers from the Territories—the same two who had bungled the abduction of the boy—had blasted through a stoplight and nearly been arrested before they could return home.

Things all would have been so much simpler, Sloat reflected for perhaps the thousandth time, if Phil Sawyer had never married. If no Lily, no Jack; if no Jack, no problems. Phil may never even have looked at the reports about Lily Cavanaugh’s early life Sloat had compiled: they listed where and how often and with whom, and should have killed that romance as readily as the black van turned Tommy Woodbine into a lump on the road. If Sawyer read those meticulous reports, they left him amazingly unaffected. He wanted to marry Lily Cavanaugh, and he did. As his damned Twinner had married Queen Laura. More underestimation. And repaid in the same fashion, which seemed fitting.

Which meant, Sloat thought with some satisfaction, that after a few details were taken care of, everything would finally be settled. After so many years—when he came back from Arcadia Beach, he should have all of Sawyer & Sloat in his pocket. And in the Territories, all was placed just so: poised on the brink, ready to fall into Morgan’s hands. As soon as the Queen died, her consort’s former deputy would rule the country, introducing all the interesting little changes both he and Sloat desired. And then watch the money roll in. Sloat thought, turning off the freeway into Marina del Rey. Then watch everything roll in!

His client, Asher Dondorf, lived in the bottom half of a new condo in one of the Marina’s narrow, alleylike streets just off the beach. Dondorf was an old character actor who had achieved a surprising level of prominence and visibility in the late seventies through a role on a television series; he’d played the landlord of the young couple—private detectives, and both cute as baby pandas—who were the series’ stars. Dondorf got so much mail from his few appearances in the early episodes that the writers increased his part, making him an unofficial father to the young detectives, letting him solve a murder or two, putting him in danger, etc., etc. His salary doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and when the series was cancelled after six years, he went back into film work. Which was the problem. Dondorf thought he was a star, but the studios and producers still considered him a character actor—popular, but not a serious asset to any project. Dondorf wanted flowers in his dressing room, he wanted his own hairdresser and dialogue coach, he wanted more money, more respect, more love, more everything. Dondorf, in fact, was a putz.

When he pulled his car tight into the parking bay and eased himself out, being careful not to scratch the edge of his door on the brick, Sloat came to a realization: if he learned, or even suspected, sometime in the next few days, that Jack Sawyer had discovered the existence of the Territories, he would kill him. There was such a thing as an unacceptable risk.

Sloat smiled to himself, popping another Di-Gel into his mouth, and rapped on the condo’s door. He knew it already: Asher Dondorf was going to kill himself. He’d do it in the living room in order to create as much mess as possible. A temperamental jerk like his soon-to-be-ex-client would think a really sloppy suicide was revenge on the bank that held his mortgage. When a pale, trembling Dondorf opened the door, the warmth of Sloat’s greeting was quite genuine.