Narabedla Ltd (29 page)

“But how—” I began. And then stopped, appalled, because I was beginning to sound as though I would cooperate.

“All you have to do,” said Davidson-Jones gently, “is pick up this phone. Call her. Tell her to call off her dogs. Tell her you’re all right, but you’ve got something going and you’ll be out of touch for a while.”

I snapped angrily, “Can’t Purry do my voice too?”

He said patiently, “We want to make sure she
believes
you, Nolly. You’re the only one who can do that. Convince her. Make sure the next thing she does is call the FBI and tell them it was all a mistake; or do I tell the people in New York to pick her up?”

“But there’s still that tombstone.”

“Oh, yes,” he sighed. “There are a lot of loose ends to straighten out. We’ll take care of that part. You do yours.” He looked at me searchingly for a moment, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. I recognized it: it was my office in New York, complete with area code.

What wonderful technology they had, I thought bitterly as it began to ring.

“You’re on,” said Davidson-Jones, handing the phone to me.

“Stennis Associates,” our receptionist said in my ear.

I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath. “Hello, Sally. This is the boss calling—yes, I’m all right, just real busy. Let me talk to Marlene, please.”

W
hen it was over I sat for a minute, trying not to shake. I didn’t pride myself on what I’d done. Marlene had actually been crying on the phone.

I lied to her, copiously and imaginatively, just as Henry Davidson-Jones wished. I told her a long line of hogwash about how I’d been feeling as though I had a nervous breakdown coming on. I just needed to get away for a while, I said. My crazy ideas about Henry Davidson-Jones were just part of being overstrained and mixed up, I said. Everything would positively be
all right,
I said, and I promised I’d keep in touch every now and then. And I filled it all in with chitchat about whether Henry Stanley’s New Jersey state forms had been filed, and how Terry Morgenstern’s CDs needed to be rolled over—the kind of day-to-day stuff that only I would know about, so she would be sure this person on the phone was no impostor.

Toward the end of the conversation she stopped crying and began to get mad. That didn’t make it any better, and I was glad when it was over.

Of course, I
had
to do that. For
her
sake.

But I couldn’t make myself believe that. Not at that moment, not at all that day, and not for a good many of the days that followed.

Shipperton escorted me back to his office. We didn’t speak. When we got there he poured me a drink and I took it.

“So now,” he said tentatively, “can we figure there aren’t going to be any more threats and arguments out of you?”

I didn’t answer that. I didn’t have to. When I had picked up that telephone to talk to Marlene Abramson I knew what I was doing. I was making a major decision, and the decision was to stay on Narabedla.

“Would he really have killed her?” I asked.

He shrugged uneasily. “I don’t think so. He never has. But it would have been bad for her, one way or another.” He peered at me. “Are you all right?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“I don’t know. You look—you look kind of funny.” 

“How should I look?” But I knew the answer to that. My conscience made it clear to me. It told me I should look like a man who had just got done ratting out on Marlene and on Irene Madigan … on aU of my friends, on my clients, on my country—and most of all on my planet and the whole human race that inhabited it.

He poured me another drink. “You know what that tombstone was?” he said, making conversation. “It was his son. Right, he was married once; only his wife and his kid got drowned on a boat. They never found the wife’s body.” 

“So he just took his son’s identity?”

“Later on he did. Well, he kind of has to, now and then, doesn’t he? I mean, he stays too young to have only one identity. The way you will, here.”

“Are you giving me another sales talk?”

“Well, we really do need to get you to sign a contract, you know.”

“All right.”

He stared at me. “Really? Well, hell, Nolly! That’s fine. Just a minute, I’ve got blanks here in my desk, and you can sign—”

He broke off in the middle of the sentence, peering at my face. “What’s the matter now?” he demanded.

I finished my drink and put the glass down. My mind was made up. I said gently, “Sam, have you ever negotiated a contract with a CPA before? No? I thought not. Well, I hope you’ve still got your coffeepot. It’s likely to be a long night.”

N
arabedla was beginning to look better to me.

All it took, really, was a change of attitude on my part. I stopped thinking of Narabedla as a place where I wished I wasn’t and accepted it as the place where I was. I’d done that before. It had been the same at Camp Fire Place Lodge. After those first few miserable, homesick days I found out that I was, after all, a camper, too. In my second week I won a Shark Feather for swimming clear across the bay unaided; I placed second in marksmanship in the competition with the .22 rifles; before the end of the season I was fourth man on the relay team and in the front row of the sing-alongs around the evening campfire, and when Labor Day arrived I didn’t want to go home.

Calling Marlene had been the irrevocable step. Signing the contract had only confirmed it. I was a Narabedlan now.

On my morning run the next day I detoured by way of the little street called Rodeo Drive to inspect one of the perquisites therefrom: Rodeo Drive looked like any suburban condo development, stucco-walled townhouses with lawns and flowering trees around them under the pleasant (if make-believe) morning sky. I had no trouble finding the house that would be mine. It had daffodils in beds under the windows and marigolds in tubs by the patio in back. Shipperton hadn’t yet given me a key, but, peering through the window, careful not to step on the flowers, I saw that there was furniture in it.

That wasn’t a real problem. Shipperton had promised I could choose my own, and the contract I had finally beaten out with him provided for advances on earnings enough to buy anything that needed buying. It would be pleasant to pick out my own, I reflected as I jogged back to Riverside Drive, but I wondered what they would do with the old stuff.

Store it somewhere? Throw it away? What did they do on Narabedla with the things people discarded? For that matter, what did they do with the people when no Dr. Boddadukti could fix them up anymore?

I added those things to the long list of questions I hadn’t yet had answered. I would get all the answers sooner or later, I promised myself. After all, I had plenty of time. I was going to be on Narabedla for quite a while.

Maybe, like Norah and some of the others, for hundreds of years.

Showered, breakfasted, and dressed, I headed for the rehearsal hall.

None of the opera singers was there yet, but Tricia and Conjur Kowalski were dancing on the stage, while Binnda happily beat time from the conductor’s box. The surprise was that the music they were dancing to was World War II-era swing, and the person playing it was Norah Platt, wonderfully reconstituted out of the assemblage of cold cuts I’d seen floating in Dr. Boddadukti’s tub. She seemed none the worse for it. She glanced up as I came in, winked cheerfully, and went on hammering out a jivey “Twelfth Street Rag.” Ephard Joyce was sourly hanging over the piano, and he, too, favored me with a cursory nod. I didn’t want to interrupt. I sat down and watched the jitterbuggers.

They were worth watching. Both Conjur and Tricia were in costume, Conjur in a zoot suit with the jacket cut down to his knees and a gold watch chain flying around his ankles, Tricia in a jitterbug skirt with tiny, tight white panties that showed every time Conjur flung her over his shoulders or between his peg-topped legs. I could see that she was sweating. I could almost smell her, the sweet, healthy smell of a pretty young woman expending a lot of calories and enjoying it. Norah, spry and smiling after her operation, was grooving right along with them on the piano, sounding almost like the old Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey days.

And the interesting part was that while I was sitting there, watching them take the A-train and swing along in the mood, I felt something. It was right in the crotch of my sleek new pants, where I hadn’t felt much stirring for a long time. It was not really anything big, just a tingle, but it tingled in a way that suggested at least a hope that one of these days I might very well be back in the kind of action I had thought as lost as singing in the opera.

I didn’t even hear Binnda call for a break. I came to, out of my rosy glow, to find Binnda looking at me curiously. “Dear boy, are you all right?”

I sat up. “Oh, I’m fine,” I said, looking around. Tricia and Conjur were mopping sweat off their faces and arms at the side of the stage, and Binnda was standing over me. “I thought you’d be rehearsing the troupe.”

“Oh, we’ve given the troupe the day off, my dear boy. More or less on your account, you know; Dr. Boddadukti wasn’t sure how your throat would feel just at first.”

I said, with sincere pleasure, “It feels fine.”

“Really?” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps I should ask Ugolino to spend some time with you this afternoon— just to make sure, you see? And then if he says it’s all right…”

“He will,” I said positively. “I’ll be ready to rehearse again tomorrow.”

“No, no, my dear Nolly! We won’t be rehearsing
tomorrow’.”
he cried, sounding shocked. “Didn’t you know? Tomorrow they’re going to launch the Andromeda probe and we’ll all be glued to our skries!”

“Really? Nobody told me. I didn’t know it was such a big deal.”

“My dear boy! It is going to what your The Earth people call M-31, the Great Nebula in Andromeda! Ever so far away. We’ve never done anything this big before!” He clucked at me reprovingly. Then he said, “But you’ll see it all tomorrow. Meanwhile, go off and amuse yourself a bit, while I see if dear Ugolino can see you today.”

That was easy enough to do. I strolled over to Norah, preening myself. “Stennis,” Joyce growled, acknowledging my presence. I shook his hand, and kissed Norah’s as I told her how happy I was to see her, well,
alive
again.

“But of course, Nolly, dear,” she said in a reproving tone. “I told you it would be all right, didn’t I? And I understand you’ve signed quite a nice contract.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s just a matter of bargaining, you know. It’s like an income-tax audit. You push the agent just as far as you can. You stop right before the point where it would be easier for him to go to court than settle; that’s what I did with Shipperton. And I’ve got a new house, too.”

“What’s an income tax?” asked Joyce, but Norah was frowning.

“As far as I know,” she said thoughtfully, “there’s only one house vacant just now. On Rodeo Drive, is it?”

“That’s the one. And listen,” I said, struck by an idea, “I think I’ll have a housewarming party as soon as I get it fixed up. Will you come? Both of you, I mean?” I added, because, after all, the man was standing right there.

Joyce picked up his cue eagerly. “Yes, of course. Be delighted.” He glanced around, and, lowering his voice, added, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something. Do you remember the thing you said the other night—about how I could do really well if I went back now? Did you mean it?”

I blinked at him. “Oh, that,” I said, remembering. “Yes, I suppose so. I mean, well, definitely you would. If you showed up in New York you’d make the headlines, you know? Someone who actually knew John Wilkes Booth? Not to mention someone who’s been here on Narabedla! Believe me, you’d have TV news people all around you. And, of course, if you decided you wanted to play Hamlet or anything like that, you’d have to fight the producers off, because there’d be a guaranteed box office from people who’d want to see what you looked like.”