Billion-Dollar Brain (14 page)

‘It’s OK with me.’

‘Good.’ The word carried a certain amount of menace. Midwinter leaned forward and the harsh cross-lighting emphasized his age. His flesh was soft; a badly-fitting mask that around the eyes showed a moist pink edge. The yellow skin freckled brown shone like the well-fingered ivories of a bar-room piano.

His white-gloved hands played possum on the desktop until one of them walked across to the
baton, picked it up and hit the desktop a sharp blow.

‘They told me you were belligerent,’ said Midwinter. ‘I said I didn’t mind ’cause I’m a little belligerent myself.’

‘Looks like neither of us is going to grow out of it.’

‘In your case, I’m not so sure.’ He tapped the baton on the desk and dropped it with a loud clatter. ‘When you see the set-up we have—not only here but throughout the world—you will join us all right.’ The soft white animal-like hand picked up the baton again.

‘You are a probationer. This is a symbol of the faith we have in you.’ He picked up one of those brown shiny golf-balls that I had seen at Pike’s and rolled it across the desk to me. I picked it up and looked at it. ‘Inside that sphere is a sample of American soil—the soil of freedom. I hope you will treasure that piece of soil, remain true to it; a symbol of the simple faith of a free people rooted in a free soil.’ He tapped the desk as though it was all there in a diagram that I should have already looked at.

‘When you come back from training, then we will have tested you, then we will be trusting you.’

‘Suppose you decide that you won’t be trusting me?’

‘Then you won’t be coming back,’ Midwinter wheezed.

‘Then perhaps it’s me that should be mistrusting you,’ I said.

‘No, no, no,’ said Midwinter in a fatherly voice. ‘I like you. You will find that I am the one person you can always trust. Come to me, confide in me. I am the one person you can trust around here. Always trust a financier because he is investing the stuff that counts. If you pay money to an artist how can you tell if he’s going to be famous a couple of years from now? You submit yourself to a doctor; well, who knows how many guys he’s slaughtered? It’s strictly between him and the AMA. An architect: maybe he had a smart assistant last year; you may end up with the dumbest heap of concrete you ever saw. But a financier: when he lays it on the line it’s going to be portraits of presidents cashable in solid US any place on the globe. So don’t ever say a financier doesn’t measure up; he’s the only one who does.’ One of the soft white animals had gone to sleep and the other went across the desk to sniff at it. ‘Get me?’ said Midwinter.

‘Got you,’ I said. Midwinter nodded and wheezed a wheezy laugh.

‘Let me tell you something, son,’ he said. ‘Making a lot of money is no fun. When you get rich you find that the rich are soft and stupid and want to talk about parties for their daughters. Your old friends—your real friends—don’t want to see you any more. Poor people don’t want a
millionaire among them reminding them of some way in which they failed to make it. So it’s lonely being a rich old man. Lonely.’ The animal with an emerald on its leg tugged at Midwinter’s sleevelace and picked up the baton again and staggered about with it.

I said, ‘Poor old rich men are something of a cliché, aren’t they?’

Midwinter said, ‘I got nothing against clichés, son. It’s the quickest method of communication yet invented, but I get you. You think I’m a lonely old man looking for a tomb in a history book. I love. It’s as easy as that. I love, I love my country. Get me?’ The animal with the baton smacked the sleeping animal in time to Midwinter’s staccato pronouncements. From the next room I heard a riff of a clarinet and toot of a trombone. ‘Get me?’ Midwinter said again.

‘Yes.’ I said quietly.

‘No,’ said Midwinter. His voice was loud but without animosity. He leaned across the desk and looked at his hands and the baton and at me, and then he winked. When he spoke again it was a low persuasive tone. ‘You don’t understand the kind of love I have for this great country we live in. Love’s not built that way—my way—any more. These days love is marriage and its compensation is alimony or success. Love these days is bravery under fire and the compensation is medals and fame. Love is public duty or a political donation and the compensation is a pension or maybe an
embassy. Love is some dame you left back in St Louis or a fast haul in the back seat of an automobile.’ One of the white animals tapped his waistcoat. ‘My love is nothing like that. My love is this great company of brave young men who are proud to make their country strong. I love my country and my token is to make the thing I love strong. Get me, boy? Get me?’ He was agitated.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said very loud. The baton waved in the air.

‘Strong,’ said Midwinter, and the animal with the baton smashed the sleeping animal in the belly and there was a terrible noise of splintering wood. One leg kicked convulsively and the sleeping animal died with its feet in the air. ‘I knew you’d get me,’ Midwinter said. ‘I knew,’ and he picked up his poor dead broken hand and removed the white glove. The wooden fingers of his false left hand were bent and damaged and he turned it slowly under the light. My own swollen hand seemed to hurt even more as I watched him.

The door opened after a brief tap and the wench with the cardboard box came in. The dance band began to play ‘Smoke gets in your eyes.’ Midwinter was still looking at the revolting hand. She bent over and kissed Midwinter on the cheek. ‘You promised,’ she said reproachfully. From somewhere across the city came the lonely scream of a police car. ‘They don’t make them strong enough,’ said Midwinter. He had lost the intensity that his love had generated and was in a post-coital triste. She
kissed him again and said, ‘You mustn’t get overexcited.’ She turned to me. ‘He gets over-excited,’ she explained. She rolled back the sleeve to reveal the place where the false hand fitted to the arm. Midwinter waved his baton at me. ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘Go and have a swell time at our fancy-dress party. We’ll talk some more tomorrow. We can fix you a costume if you feel conspicuous in your street clothes.’ He winked again as if it was his way of dismissing visitors.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘Uniforms bring me out in a rash.’ That house was one of the few places where I preferred to be different from the others.

I moved out among the Nell Gwynnes with cast-iron facials and the Redcoats who rode a Jaguar unafraid. The chips were down, the levels were split and the Scotch trickled over the rocks. Harvey was there in a red-coat uniform, smiling and doing his neat little dances and pretending to drop plates and saving them at the last minute, and the girls were saying ‘Ooo’ and slyly studying each other’s hairdos and shoes. I stood watching Harvey, trying to get beyond his moods to the man underneath. His timing was exact: even when he moved in a clumsy way he never knocked anything over. He was the sort of fielder who never runs but is always there when the ball lands. His eyes were clear but his white wig was askew. I felt sure that he was more than a little drunk, but his voice never slurred or changed from that flat resonance
that makes so many Americans sound as though they are speaking over a loud-hailer.

Harvey spotted me on the rim of his audience. ‘You old son of a bitch,’ he said in a relaxed idle way, and he leaned forward and grabbed my arm to be sure I wasn’t an hallucination. ’Bout time you smiled, you miserable old swine. You look drunk,’ he said. He flagged a waiter down and grabbed two drinks from the silver tray. The waiter began to move away. ‘Stay right there,’ Harvey said. ‘Stand there stood, like a real waiter should.’ Harvey insisted that I drink three gigantic martinis before he released the waiter. Harvey watched me down the drinks and he downed three just to keep me company. ‘Now let’s go,’ he said, dragging me towards the door. ‘The only thing worth having at these crazy pantomimes is the booze.’

Harvey grabbed two more drinks for good measure, then did a little dance. The band saw him and picked up the rhythm. It was all that—or more than—Harvey needed. The dancers cleared a path as he did a Gene Kelly, relaxed and skilful right there in the middle of the dance floor. As he drank from the two glasses so he was able to strut wider and leap higher, until with the glasses empty he was spinning and soft-shoe shuffling, and the dancers had stopped dancing and were finger-clicking and hand-clapping and the atmosphere built like a house of cards, thin and precarious but high and beautiful. The enthusiasm spread to the band, the drummer steadied him and the trumpet
urged him to attempt and complete stances beyond his normal skills. The ESP boys would say that it was the telepathic radiations of the audience that enabled Harvey to do that dance. Certainly they were all rooting for him and just as certainly Harvey responded, and he did things that night that would have attracted a talent scout from the Bolshoi. When the band sensed that Harvey was growing tired they moved him towards a finale and spread a musical carpet and drew a musical curtain and the trumpet milked the applause. Harvey stood there grinning and flushed and the waiter stepped forward with another great silver tray with just two drinks on it, and some wag took down a piece of greenery and formed it into a crown and the soldiers drew their swords and provided an arch under which Harvey walked. He went out on to the balcony and the applause was still echoing around the ballroom.

Harvey said, ‘Hey, they like us. You’re not bad,’ which was nonsense because all I had done was follow Harvey’s steps and fake pauses when they became too difficult to follow.

Harvey grinned and said, ‘I knew three of those big martinis would do it. I know you only too well.’

The rain had stopped. The balcony was cool and the night was dark as far as Broadway, where a slab of writhing electricity changed the colour of all the window panes on the other side of the street. Harvey produced a couple of cigars and we looked at the glow above the dark city and
smoked, and Harvey said, ‘It’s a millionaire’s toy,’ and I said, ‘Yes, with eight million working parts.’

‘Working parts,’ said Harvey. ‘Yes.’ The street below was empty except for a girl walking along sobbing quietly and a boy behind her trying to explain. ‘They wouldn’t have killed you,’ Harvey said. ‘Rough you up a little, yes; but they would never have killed you. It was Stok that made it dangerous by sending that cavalry patrol to pick them up.’

‘Better a devil you know than a devil you don’t,’ I said.

Below on the street the sobbing girl let the boy comfort her, then behind us there was a click from the balcony door. The serving wench who had been carrying the General’s spare hand in a cardboard box stepped out on to the balcony to join us. ‘Harvey darling,’ she said in that same reproachful tone she had used on General Midwinter.

‘What’s wrong, honey?’ Harvey said. ‘Won’t the General lend you his plane?’

‘You know,’ said the girl. ‘I came out of the study with the General and there you are cutting up, Harvey. Don’t you understand how terrible it makes me feel?’

‘No,’ said Harvey.

‘It makes me feel terrible. Embarrassed, Harvey: that’s how it makes me feel.’

Harvey screwed up his eyes and stared at her. ‘You know something, honey?’ he said. ‘Drinking makes you very beautiful.’

‘I haven’t been drinking, Harvey,’ she said patiently, as if this was a dialogue they had been through many times before.

‘No,’ said Harvey triumphantly. ‘But I have.’

‘If your marriage means nothing to you, Harvey,’ she said, ‘then your self-respect should. I’ll be ready to go home in fifteen minutes.’ Then she swept away, skilfully rustling her long dress for maximum effect.

‘My wife,’ said Harvey in explanation.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘One of these days I’ll wire up her electric toothbrush…’ He stopped. It was a joke, I suppose, but he didn’t grin.

‘She spies on me. Do you know that? My own wife spies on me. To hear her talk you’d think I was the hired help. To hear her talk you’d think that guy Midwinter was the right hand of God.’

‘That’s what you’d think if you hear anyone around here talk about Midwinter.’

‘Right. These punks think he’s MacArthur, George Washington, Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie all rolled into one.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘I didn’t say that. I think he’s a great man. Seriously. A really great man and a powerful man. Midwinter will never be the President of the United States but he will be close to the President. When the forces of conservatism take control of this country then Midwinter will be the power behind the throne…and man I do mean the throne.’
Harvey smiled. ‘But he doesn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t trust anyone.’

‘That’s a common failing among people in our business.’

‘Aw, but this guy taps phones, intercepts mail, checks up on friends and relatives. He even puts agents in to spy on his own staff. That’s pretty crummy, wouldn’t you say?’

‘All I’d say is, why are you so sure that this balcony isn’t bugged?’

‘I’m
not
sure, but I’m too drunk to give a good goddamn is all.’ Harvey suddenly thought of something else. ‘Tell me something, you bastard,’ he said. ‘Why did you change over the eggs in that package?’

‘I told you, Harvey, the package of eggs was stolen from my baggage on the way to London Airport.’

‘Tell me about that again.’

‘I already told you. It was the same man who followed me from the doctor’s surgery. Full face. Black hornrimmed spectacles. Medium height.’

Harvey said, ‘You said projecting ears, bad teeth, long hair, sounded like an Englishman who wanted to be taken for a Yank, bad breath. You gave me a long description.’

‘That’s right, the horn-rimmed spectacles were adapted to make his ears project. He was an American who put flat Cockney vowel-sounds into his American accent to sound like an Englishman assuming an American accent. He used a hair-piece
to cover a bald patch on top of his head. (It didn’t come near the hair line so if he hadn’t kept tapping it no one would have noticed it.) He blacked out a couple of his front teeth with stage cosmetics and made his breath smell with chemical—oldest trick in the business to prevent people looking you in the face close to. He stole the baggage after it had been through customs.’ I paused.