The Gorgon Festival (18 page)

On the evidence of the telephone number, Ward knew that Freddie was not a free-lance conductor on an underground railway. Perhaps a division superintendent would answer his call, but Ruth Gordon had switched him onto this side track, for only Ruth Gordon would have charged $449 for two weeks’ room, board, and expenses.

Naked in the hallway, he dialed the number Freddie had given and heard a tinkle of falling icicles in the answering “Hello.”

“Miss Frost! Freddie give me your private number.”

“Of course, Al. He tells me you’re in a little trouble with the law. Never fear. The Electric Daisy Chain provides for its key personnel. Have you pencil and paper?”

“Yes’m,” Ward lied, thinking it strange she didn’t know such articles were contraband around the apartment. But then her voice was as patronizing as ever. Miss Frost truly thought of him as a black, which meant she was merely a strand in the net of conspiracy.

“Hop on your bike and take the Santa Monica Freeway west to the very end. Keep on 101, past Malibu Village, and turn right at Vertigo Canyon Drive. Don’t turn left. There’s an ocean out there. Follow Vertigo to Rattlesnake Junction, then make a sharp left on Canyon Diablo. Follow Diablo until you reach Paseo de la Muerte and follow it north until it dead-ends on Fiend’s Crest Road. Follow Fiend’s Crest left until you reach a barrier, with reflectors. Don’t drive through it. There’s a three-hundred-foot drop beyond into Lost Indian Canyon. To the right you’ll see a private gravel road skirting the face of a cliff. Follow the road over Dead Prospector’s Saddleback as it winds around a pasture atop the plateau, curving toward Satan’s Summit. Atop the crag you’ll see a ranch house that’s headquarters for the Adorable U Beauty Ranch. The porch light will be on. Go right up to the front door, knock, and don’t gape at whoever answers… Got that?”

“Yes’m.”

“And, Al, I do wish to thank you for that lovely dedication. Your song was so… sensual.”

Her bells were twanging deeper notes, but Ward had no time for romance.

“Who do I ask for, ma’am, when I get there?”

“Miss Diana… Miss Diana Aphrodite.”

He thanked her and hung up.

Despite the energy Ward put into dressing for the road, a pall was hanging over his mind which lingered as he dashed to the garage to get his checkbook from the spare tire. Miss Frost’s directions had been a verbal chamber of horrors over-draped with the black anapest, Malibu; “Mal,” Latin for evil, “ibu,” Javanese for “place of spirits.” Malibu, the place of evil spirits.

Extrapolating from his last two bank statements, Ward wrote out a check for $121,287.44, Freddie’s half of all he had earned while under Freddie’s care, and laid the check on the kitchen sink. Then he headed for the garage and his motorcycle.

Heading west at 11:15 on a Saturday night before the bars let out, Ward had the Santa Monica Freeway to himself.

At eighty miles an hour, slowing for 101, he took only twenty minutes to reach the Vertigo Canyon turn-off and headed north into the Santa Monica Mountains. At Rattlesnake Junction, Canyon Diablo demanded careful driving to negotiate its curves, but it was just a warm-up for Paseo de la Muerte. The latter road twisted through a narrow canyon, uphill all the way, with only a streak of stars above to remind Ward that a universe existed. He was genuinely relieved to break out onto Fiend’s Crest into the full light of the stars and a half moon low in the west.

Turning west on a road without habitations, he drove carefully along rock-imbedded asphalt. Yellow eyes of wild things glared from scrub lining the road, and once a deer bounded across ahead of him. Finally he reached the barrier. Off to the right he found the gravel-paved shelf that wound above Lost Indian Canyon. To negotiate the abyss in the dark, he pushed the motorcycle the quarter-mile to Dead Prospector’s Saddleback before remounting to putt-putt slowly down across the meadow.

Off to the west, outlined by the gibbous moon, he saw a ranch house atop a rocky knoll. Huge, dark, and forbidding, the building loomed above Satan’s Summit, and the road made a wide half-circle below, the bight of its U traversing a stand of eucalyptus, as if the road were wary of the house. Breaking from the trees to approach from the north, Ward saw a faint light marking the entrance. It was well that Miss Frost had not requested that he enter by the rear door. Built in the form of a T, the two-storied structure’s rear wing extended so far south the journey to its back door would have challenged a goat in daylight.

Drawing closer, he saw the west façade was cantilevered from the knoll to form a carport with a sub-level apartment, possibly a bunkhouse or chauffeur’s quarters, adjoining a freight elevator and loading platform. One automobile, a white Porsche, was parked in the garage adjoining the stairway to the entrance.

Not only the car was Diana’s, but the entire ranch house, Ward realized, after he had parked and was mounting the stairs. The lower veranda, extending the width of the fifty-yard structure, was lighted by a single entrance light, a forty-watt bulb.

So, inside the house the girl of some of his dreams awaited, and he was not happy. With such resources, Ruth Gordon, alias Diana Aphrodite, had kept him waiting in poverty, hounded by police, while she plotted to halt evolution before human beings had evolved from savagery.

Mindful of Miss Frost’s warning not to gape at who opened the door, Ward pushed the doorbell and waited, bracing when he heard the doorknob turn. Framed in the lighted hallway was a diminutive competitor of Ester, dressed in a black, miniskirted maid’s uniform cut low above a lacy white apron. A heart-shaped doily topped her mass of chestnut curls.

“
Entrez, s’il vous plait
.”

Entering, Ward bent low in his plantation bow and in response she curtsied. Her torso had the shape of a champagne glass, and at the bottom of his bow he sniffed her bouquet. When she straightened from her curtsy, her bowl almost bubbled over, and Ward felt that in another era she would have been from Louis XIV’s private vintage at the Petit Trianon.

“
Vous être senegalese
.” She spoke from astonishment.

If she wanted a Senegalese, his duty and his desire were clear.

“
Oui’m, j’est senegalese
,” he answered in plantation French.

“Was madame expecting…” she started to say, and remembered her manners. “Please, come with me to the library.”

Prancing, Ward followed her behind, catching in his side vision lithographs of Picassos and Modiglianis in plastic frames on plywood walls stained to resemble oak panels. The reception hall’s Woolworth-Sunset Boulevard opulence oppressed him with the parsimony he had once admired as thrift. Even Ruth’s French maid was not an import. In the dip of his bow Ward had detected, subtly blended into the French smell, the tannic tang of Louisiana swamp water.

The maid was less a domestic than a trick to set him prancing. Ruth planned to put him down for his breast obsession, and all she needed for the put-down, to establish her moral superiority, was a prance. But the new Ward was hip.

At the intersection of the corridors, the maid stopped before a white double door marked “Library” in gold letters and knocked. Ward glanced about. East and south, the corridors stretched interminably, but the west hallway was closed near at hand by a temporary partition and a door marked “DO NOT ENTER.”

As they waited, Ward glanced at a bulletin board to the right of the library doors.

MONDAY 3 P.M. LOWER EAST DINING HALL
E-41, former professor of English, will lecture on “Trends in Modern Literature.” Following the lecture, S-37, formerly tragedienne with Fanchon and Marco, will give selected readings from
The Story of O and The Voyeur
.

Those readings should be interesting, Ward thought, but he wondered about the tragedienne. Fanchon and Marco had been a vaudeville circuit, closed these many years. And security must be tight when a vaudeville tragedienne was not called by her name.

Suddenly both doors began to open slowly, inward.

The opening had been done for dramatic effect, and it was effective. Halfway the length of an office the size of a squash court, Diana was revealed, seated behind a desk of silver on a carpet of gold. In front of her desk was a golden chair. All around, the walls were shelved to the ceiling with books bound in white with gold lettering on their spines. Above her down-bent head, a silver chandelier cast reflections in her hair as if the very light were amorous of her curls. On her left, two golden princess telephones were placed. Before her lay a pad containing figures.

Without looking up, Diana—Ward could not think of this glory as Ruth—said, “That will be all, E-24. And you may enter, Al.”

Her voice rustled as softly as wind in willows.

As the maid turned and departed down the east corridor, Ward entered slowly to a cadence counted in his mind. Giving him the busy executive ploy at midnight, Diana kept her head to a list of figures on the pad, but he knew she was peeking at his feet, waiting to see him prance.

Suddenly, she looked up at his dark skin, his Afro, and his brown eyes. “Who are you?”

“Alfred Atascadero, ma’am.”

All the sounds of summer were gone from her voice.

“Would you stand there, one moment?”

She was reaching for a telephone, and he translated her request as “Don’t sit on my golden chair.”

Apparently the phone was direct to the Daisy Chain, for she didn’t dial. “Miss Frost, Miss Aphrodite. You’ve sent me the wrong Negro. This one doesn’t speak in iambs, and he has no prance… Cute little shuffle! What do I care about cute little shuffles? No, I can’t use this man… Get that black scatologist on the conference line… Big John, what’s this all about? This man isn’t Alexander Ward… Freddie said! I don’t care what Freddie said. He lied. I paid him three hundred forty dollars for harboring one of his criminal friends. Quit rhyming at me…”

She was fighting to control herself, and Ward underwent a similar struggle at her remark about the $340. Ward could appreciate Freddie bilking a whitey, but his black brother had charged him $449 for the same service.

Listening, he could almost interpolate the remarks at the other end of the line.

“Big John, I try to be broadminded on matters of race, but that black scalawag tempts me. Fire him… I don’t care if he is pining to be resigning, fire him first… And, Miss Frost, send a form letter to every listed subscriber to the Fair Employment Code blackballing that young man with every employer in Southern California… You get it from the local FEPC office. Where else? And, Big John, I want another message on your board, lettered very clearly:

“Miss Frost, I don’t care if every fairy in Hollywood does call your number, I’ve got to find that man within two weeks… I don’t care if the message is obscene, Big John, he’s a breast man and that’s the only lure for the pervert… Suggestions. What am I going to do with the one I’ve got?”

She was being a good executive now, listening to her department heads, jotting notes, and Ward knew his fate was being settled. A prance would reveal him, but she had kept him up tight for over two months, and he wished to return the favor. Besides, he could get a more rounded view of her methodology from the bottom, and there were a few areas of investigation he wished to explore in secret, beginning tonight.

“He can saw a log or wheel a hog,” she was saying, obviously to Big John. “Well, I might use a messenger boy… Dodge a cop or swing a mop. Well, I could use a clean-up man… Good with books, brooms, and ballads?”

Her face glowed at the alliteration of the three “b’s,” and Ward sensed a master psychologist at the other end of the line.

“But I don’t want him in the library… He’s a better man at brewing tea than any man you ever did see? How is he on hot chocolate?… What were you paying him, Miss Frost?… No wonder the Electric Daisy Chain’s Profit Profile was weak for July. Well, I’ll correct that here.”

She hung up and looked up at the waiting Ward.

“You seem to be popular with Miss Frost, Big John, and the police. What do the police want you for?”

“Rape, ma’am.”

“In California? Come now, Al.”

“No’m. In Alabama. They’s old-timey back there. But I was innocent.”

“No matter. Fortunately, the girls at the Adorable U Beauty Ranch are rape-proof. Are you good at running a vacuum cleaner?”

“I do my best, ma’am.”

“We have a few minor cleaning chores. Guests attend their own rooms as part of our fitness course, but many aren’t diligent, and I insist on dust-free rooms and spotless baths. So you must dust all corridors and dining rooms, mop all kitchens, and clean behind each guest. At present I have only 244 occupied rooms, with more opening when the thirty-eights arrive, Wednesday. But the new arrivals will be in the lower west wing, which you must never enter. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma am.”

“You may call me ‘Miss Diana,’ ” she said, reaching into her desk for a key. “ ‘Ma’am’ makes me feel ancient… You’ll be quartered in the garage room, below, next to the elevator shaft. Your hours are from 6:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at one dollar an hour plus room and board.”

“That’s a mite low, Miss Diana.”

“Of course you may refuse my offer.” She laid the key in front of him. “I’m sure the police can find you another position, at much longer hours and much less pay.”

Ward picked up the key.

“Good,” she said, rubbing her hands briskly together. “It’s twenty minutes till your quitting time. Run down to the east-wing kitchen and prepare me a cup of chocolate. Busy, busy, I’ll be working here until two.”

Turning to go, Ward left behind him all idealism and devotion he had known as a youth in Dormitory C, Ethan Allen Prep. He had seen her divested of all beguilement, and Ruth Gordon was a ruthless Gorgon.

So, one adapted, he thought, checking off the room numbers as he passed; E-18, on his right, E-20, E-22. Counting on the confraternity of kitchen help, he paused at E-24 and rapped softly, hoping to get information from scullery gossip.

“
Entrez-vous
,” a voice called.