Condominium (46 page)

“Our acquaintanceship. He wouldn’t let me back away without any explanation. He had to keep worrying at it. Why should a retired diplomat be afraid of the truth? Because one retires, that does not mean one should turn one’s brain off forever. I should be thinking of how much I could contribute to his study groups and work sessions, not how I could avoid them.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Yes indeed. Oh, boy. He wore such an earnest face. As you talk to him, his mouth makes little motions, trying to help you along. And he nods and nods as you talk. Somehow like an old nun. Like an old Mother Superior. Yes, that’s what it is. A kind of ecclesiastical fervor. The true believer. Nothing can shake his faith. I realized that just as I was about to hit him with logic. Logic would have been as effective as throwing marshmallows at a tank. So I said that I had studied his materials and I had given his discoveries and insights a great deal of thought. I said I had decided that when I had been in the Department, I had been asked to assume a certain amount of risk. I had to live up to my oath, and besides I was paid
to do a job. But now, in my retirement, I did not feel that I wished to assume the risks he was asking me to assume.”

“Oh, boy.”

“I said that as his influence spread, inevitably word of his activities would reach the ear of somebody who would feel it necessary to do something about him and his associates. I said it would be done cleverly and painlessly, of course. It would look like heart attacks and strokes and so on, so as not to create any publicity. Or any martyrs. I said that, from my experience, I thought it too great a risk to take, as I would prefer to live out my years in peace.”

“You
bastard
, Enrique! You utter horrid
bastard
. You’ve terrified the poor hulk.”

“Terrified him? My goodness, no! He couldn’t have been more delighted. I have reinforced his paranoia. I have verified his most foul suspicions. I have given him a credible object for his fears. I launched that idiot into euphoria. He held my hand in his large damp cold hands and shook it slowly for a long time as he kept telling me that he understood, that he would not press me further, that I had already given enough of my life to my country and on and on. He would respect my wishes and I would hear nothing more from him on these matters, ever.”

She pounced upon a shell, examined it, found it flawed and threw it into the sea. She turned to look up at him. “It makes me wonder just how many times you have manipulated me?”

“Physically? Let me make an estimate …”

“No! You are an old sex fiend.”

“Retired with honors,” he said. “I do not believe I have ever successfully conned you into anything since the day I conned you into marrying me.”

“In frightful Spanish.”

“The best of Berlitz.”

“Now I am going to con you, Henry
Iglesia-puente
. Next month I will get the next payment from that estate of my dear dead sister’s father-in-law, and with it I wish to be taken to Guadalajara and to Melbourne and to Anchorage—in any order you choose.”

“I swear upon the great gray stomach of C. Noble Winney that I shall arrange the trip and we shall go.”

“And first you will finish your paper? Swear on the stomach.”

“It doesn’t go all that well. It doesn’t march.”

“What I’ve read marches dandy. Swear on the stomach.”

“I do so swear.”

“We’re past our marker, dear. More than a mile. We can turn around.”

After David Dow, the treasurer of the Condominium Association, left the manager’s office at Golden Sands, Julian Higbee said angrily to Lorrie, “It doesn’t
mean
anything! An absolute minimum we can get along on? Work for the Association? Forget it, baby. I don’t want Gulfway Management sore at me for any reason.”

“Mr. Dow is only working up—what did he call it?—a bare-bones budget. He was asking what
if
we’d work for them, what would we have to make. That’s all. They haven’t asked us yet.”

“You didn’t have to answer any of those questions about what we make.”

“What do we make anyway? Thursday is the fifteenth. You think a check will come? Mr. Sullivan, the girl said, is no longer with Gulfway. Mr. Gellroy is in charge. Mr. Gellroy is busy. Three calls and he won’t call back. Mr. Frank West is no longer at Investment Equities. The man in charge is a Mr. Milremo. And he doesn’t
call back either. I don’t even know if we’ve got jobs and I can’t find out, and you don’t want me to even answer questions.” She stared at him. “Jesus Christ, Julian, the thing about you is you are so thick-headed, stubborn, damned dumb, sometimes I …” She shrugged hopelessly and started toward the office door to unlock it and take off the C
LOSED
sign.

Julian caught her by the shoulders and pulled her back and turned her around. “Honey, it’s a big organization and they pay us good money, and if things go bad here, they’ll put us someplace else, some other condo, maybe over on the East Coast. We don’t want to rock any boats, right?”

“Oh, shut up. Maybe they’ve gone broke like everybody else.”

“You need cheering up,” he said, and pulled her close and began caressing her. In a little while he realized she was standing slack and unresponsive. He held her away and looked at her. “What’s
with
you?”

She shook her hair away from her face and said, “You want to rape somebody, go find somebody that’ll put up a fight.”

“Who said anything about rape?”

“Who said it was ever anything else with you?”

He pushed her away, made a mindless, wordless, howling sound of rage and frustration and went storming out.

Because he happened to have on him a key to 5-E, the unit owned by Pastorelli and ready for furnished rental, and empty now for four months, he went there and turned the color set to a game show and stretched out on the couch.

It took anger a long time to fade. The worst mistake he had ever made, he realized, was setting up Bobbie Fish. How was he to have known in advance that Bobbie would become Lorrie’s best friend? They’d gotten very close. Lorrie had always wished she’d finished
her nurse training. She liked to talk to Bobbie about nursing. And Bobbie acted as if Lorrie had saved her life, getting her off the sauce.

The trouble was that with Bobbie hanging around the office and hanging around their apartment all the time, it was a constant reminder to Lorrie of his infidelity. Actually she didn’t seem as sore about the cheating as she was about how he had taken advantage of Roberta. She bought that crap about his forcing Roberta into it, and she was willing to believe that all the times Bobbie phoned trying to locate him, it was because she had been drinking.

They had wept together and hugged and had somehow become best friends—a big dark-haired woman and a little one. He had tried to explain to Lorrie that Bobbie hadn’t really been forced, that she had only tried to make herself believe she had been forced in order to save her own face, that she had been so ready she had come in about a minute and a half after he got in, but Lorrie didn’t want to hear one word of criticism of her new best friend.

It made him feel strange the way they would both look at him when he walked in and interrupted one of their long conversations. They would stop talking and giggling and both stare at him. Identical looks, cold and full of hate. No, not hate. Contempt. As if he had messed on the rug. They closed him out. Each one of them was down on him for what she thought he had done to the other one. Disliking him was part of their friendship. There was no possible way now for him to get a piece of ass from either one of them, and it was beginning to make him very jumpy. He wouldn’t have gotten into that situation with Lynn Simmins if it hadn’t been for Lorrie and Bobbie freezing him out.

What did they expect him to do, anyway? Go up to the Sand Dollar Bar and buy it from one of Tom Shawn’s hookers? But that Darleen Moseby would certainly be worth the price from the look
of her. Very choice. The only one he knew of at Golden Sands who ever got any of that was the Reverend Doctor Harmon Starf. Once a month Mary Starf had to fly up to Chicago for a meeting of the family corporation which was supposed to own lots and lots of coal and pipe lines, and one of the two nights she was gone, the Moseby girl would make a house call.

Thinking of money made the bottom fall out of his stomach, and made him feel sick and dizzy. There was a good chance no check would come on the fifteenth. And that increased the chance of Lorrie’s finding out sooner, instead of later, that the joint savings account was about three thousand smaller than she thought.

He wished he could die, or disappear. Rub the magic lamp and disappear. Maybe the thing to do was clean out the account and go. Twenty-five hundred left. Go out to Oregon. Pick a new name. Make a new life. If Lorrie didn’t stop going dead every time he touched her, it would serve the bitch right. What did she expect a man to do? Go without? Forever?

Maybe by now she was feeling sorry for the way she had acted when he had tried to show some affection. He went over to the phone and dialed the office number. No answer. The office phone extension rang in their apartment, so she wasn’t in either place. He sighed. She had probably made another trip up to Nurse Roberta’s place to tell her all her terrible problems and have another little session of tears and hugging.

He drifted off to sleep and wakened with a start an hour later, with a bad taste in his mouth. He creaked big shoulders as he stretched, and then he tried the office number again.

With equal measure of apprehension and indignation, he hurried down to the office. As he got there, he saw Lorrie unlocking the office door. Roberta Fish stood close behind her. They were laughing. When Lorrie turned as she pushed the door open, he saw
that merry, rosy, dancing look on her face, a look he had not seen in several years. He knew exactly what it meant, and in his moment of realization, he knew that he had really known about it for some time, somewhere in the back of his head, hidden, inadmissible.

That look was gone in an instant, and Lorrie said something in a quiet tone to Bobbie. They both looked at him in that way they had. Bobbie kissed Lorrie lightly on the cheek and patted her shoulder and then turned and swept by Julian on her way to the elevators. Julian came to within a fractional part of an impulse to club the nape of her neck with his big clenched fist, with all the strength he could muster. He knew the blow would have killed her. It shook him to have come so close. He leaned against the corridor wall, weak and sweaty, hands trembling, and in a little while he felt well enough to face Lorrie. He could hear her typewriter.

He went into the office. She looked at him blandly enough and he said, “I know what’s been going on.”

“So?”

“Aren’t you going to even deny it, Lor?”

“I happen to be sort of happy. In spite of you. I’m even kind of grateful to you. In a weird sort of way.”

“What’s going to happen to us? What’s going to happen to
me
?”

“Julian, for God’s sake, go fix a faucet washer. Go clean the pool. Go haul trash. There is absolutely nothing you can do about us, ever.”

Ella was a life force of immeasurable strength. Her vitality was fueled by the heat of the summer sea beneath her. She sucked up the warm moist air from near the surface, whirled it high into towering clouds. Rain squalls radiated in all directions, billions of tons of rain, falling with a smashing awesome weight. From the clouds
she spewed forth, tornadoes dipped down, spinning, ripping, smashing. She moved, advanced, threatened. She was a personage, reaching her deadly maturity, destined to die many many days in the future, much farther west, much farther above the equator.

By Monday evening at six o’clock Ella’s approximated center was at 15 degrees north, 55 degrees west, approximately three hundred miles due east of Martinique. But so vast was the basic cloud-shape in its distinctive oval pattern, the leading edge of the main body of cloud was already blotting out Antigua and Guadeloupe. The aircraft had flown in and out of it. The instruments had been read, the data fed into the National Hurricane Center computers. Ella was a major hurricane, well-organized, of large size, with sustained winds of almost one hundred miles an hour, with an increase possible. One gust of a hundred and fifteen had already been measured at Saint Johns, Antigua, coming right after ten inches of rain had fallen in five hours.

After the NOAA researchers aboard a 41-C four-engine turboprop had measured, within the eye and adjacent to it, water droplets, ice crystals, pressure gradients, wind speed and direction at various altitudes, with the stationary camera taking pictures of the changing values on the instrument panel, the track of the hurricane was plotted on the on-board computer and the results radioed to Miami for use in preparing the next advisory.

Classified as a five on the Saffir-Simpson scale, Ella was confirmed as a major hurricane, one of the same size and intensity which in 1944 took a toll of seven hundred and ninety men, one hundred and forty-six aircraft and three ships of the U.S. Third Fleet in the Pacific. Ella was as dangerous as the one in 1789 in India which left twenty survivors out of a coastal population of twenty thousand where she came ashore, as impressive as the 1881 hurricane which killed three hundred thousand people in China
and the one that drowned three hundred thousand more in Bangladesh in 1970. Ella was sister to Beulah, Celia, Carla, Hilda, Camille and Betsy, who had all come slamming into the upper Gulf Coast in the 1960s.

The hurricane’s anatomy was powerful and complex. Heavy rain clouds rushed inward to be caught at the perimeter of the eye and there whirled upward in spiral pattern. As the clouds rose they became cooler, and as the water condensed as rain, it created and released heat. This heat made the air mass rise more rapidly, just as in a fire storm. This rapid elevation reduced the pressure and thus increased the size and scope and velocity of the input of the moisture-heavy cloud masses.

Ella’s energy was the reverse of the energy of the sun. The sun had heated the tropic seas along the Intertropical Convergence Zone. It had expended great energy in the form of heat to turn the water of the sea into vapor. One part of volatile fuel such as gasoline will turn twenty parts of water into vapor by boiling it. Ella was now condensing twenty billion tons of water a day out of the cloud pattern. And so the energy released each day was equal to a billion tons of fuel. Air descending inside the eye—which was thirty-five miles wide and forty thousand feet deep—was cooler and dry. At the top of the cloud wall the air, after having shed all its contained moisture, was pumped away in anticyclonic pattern. Ella fed on an apparently endless supply of warm moist air from the vastness of the Atlantic, sending belts of heavy rain ever farther out in front of her, and to either side of her path.