"Yes," Alys said.
He shrugged. It had become obvious.
"Tell you what," Alys said briskly. "Would you like to see how a police general lives? His home? His billion-dollar castle?"
"You"d let me in there?" he said, incredulous. "If he found out--" He paused. Where is this woman leading me? he asked himself. Into terrible danger; everything in him sensed it, became at once wary and alert. He felt his own cunning course through him, infusing every part of his somatic being. His body knew that here, more than at any other time, he had to be careful. "You have legal access to his home?" he said, calming himself; he made his voice natural, devoid of any unusual tension.
"h.e.l.l," Alys said, "I live with him. We"re twins; we"re very close. Incestuously close."
Jason said, "I don"t want to walk into a setup hammered out between you and General Buckman."
"A setup between Felix and me?" She laughed sharply. "Felix and I couldn"t collaborate in painting Easter eggs. Come on; let"s shoot over to the house. Between us we have a good deal of interesting objects. Medieval wooden chess sets, old bone-china cups from England. Some beautiful early U.S. stamps printed by the National Banknote Company. Do stamps interest you?"
"No," he said.
"Guns?"
He hesitated. "To some extent." He remembered his own gun; this was the second time in twenty-four hours that he had had reason to remember it.
Eying him, Alys said, "You know, for a small man you"re not bad-looking. And you"re older than I like . . . but not much so. You"re a six, aren"t you?"
He nodded.
"Well?" Alys said. "Do you want to see a police general"s castle?"
Jason said, "Okay." They would find him wherever he went, whenever they wanted him. With or without a microtrans pinned on his cuff.
Turning on the engine of her quibble, Alys Buckman spun the wheel, pressed down on the pedal; the quibble shot up at a ninety-degree angle to the street. A police engine, he realized. Twice the horsepower of domestic models.
"There is one thing," Alys said as she steered through traffic, "that I want you to get clear in your mind." She glanced over at him to be sure he was listening. "Don"t make any s.e.xual advances toward me. If you do I"ll kill you." She tapped her belt and he saw, tucked within it, a police-model weapon tube; it glinted blue and black in the morning sun.
"Noticed and attended to," he said, and felt uneasy. He already did not like the leather and iron costume she wore; fetishistic qualities were profoundly involved, and he had never cared for them. And now this ultimatum. Where was her head s.e.xually? With other lesbians? Was that it?
In answer to his unspoken question, Alys said calmly, "All my libido, my s.e.xuality, is tied up with Felix."
"Your _brother?_" He felt cold, frightened incredulity. "How?"
"We"ve lived an incestuous relationship for five years," Alys said, adroitly maneuvering her quibble in the heavy morning Los Angeles traffic. "We have a child, three years old. He"s kept by a housekeeper and nurse down in Key West, Florida. Barney is his name."
"And you"re telling me this?" he said, amazed beyond belief. "Someone you don"t even know?"
"Oh, I know you very well, Jason Taverner," Alys said; she lifted the quibble up into a higher lane, increased velocity. The traffic, now, had thinned; they were leaving greater L.A. "I"ve been a fan of yours, of your Tuesday night TV show, for years. And I have records of yours, and once I heard you sing live at the Orchid Room at the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco." She smiled briefly at him. "Felix and I, we"re both collectors . . . and one of the things I collect is Jason Taverner records." Her darting, frenetic smile increased. "Over the years I"ve collected all nine."
Jason said huskily, his voice shaking, "Ten. I"ve put out ten LPs. The last few with light-show projection tracks."
"Then I missed one," Alys said, agreeably. "Here. Turn around and look in the back seat."
Twisting about, he saw in the rear seat his earliest alb.u.m: _Taverner and the Blue, Blue Blues_. "Yes," he said, seizing it and bringing it forward onto his lap.
"There"s another one there," Alys said. "My favorite out of all of them."
He saw, then, a dog-eared copy of _There"ll Be a Good Time with Taverner Tonight_. "Yes," he said. "That"s the best one I ever did."
"You see?" Alys said. The quibble dipped now, spiraling down in a helical pattern toward a cl.u.s.ter of large estates, tree- and gra.s.s-surrounded, below. "Here"s the house."
19
Its blades vertical now, the quibble sank to an asphalt spot in the center of the great lawn of the house. Jason barely noticed the house: three story, Spanish style with black iron railings on the balconies, red-tile roof, adobe or stucco walls; he could not tell. A large house, with beautiful oak trees surrounding it; the house had been built into the landscape without destroying it. The house blended and seemed a part of the trees and gra.s.s, an extension into the realm of the manmade.
Alys shut off the quibble, kicked open a balky door. "Leave the records in the car and come along," she said to him as she slid from the quibble and upright, onto the lawn.
Reluctantly, he placed the record alb.u.ms back on the seat and followed her, hurrying to catch up with her; the girl"s long black-sheathed legs carried her rapidly toward the huge front gate of the house.
"We even have pieces of broken gla.s.s bottles embedded in the top of the walls. To repel bandits . . . in this day and age. The house once belonged to the great Ernie Till, the Western actor." She pressed a b.u.t.ton mounted on the front gate before the house and there appeared a brown-uniformed private pol, who scrutinized her, nodded, released the power surge that slid the gate aside.
To Alys, Jason said, "What do you know? You know I"m--"
"You"re fabulous," Alys said matter-of-factly. "I"ve known it for years."
"But you"ve been where I was. Where I always am. Not here."
Taking his arm, Alys guided him down an adobe-and-slate corridor and then down a flight of five brick steps, into a sunken living room, an ancient place in this day, but beautiful.
He did not, however, give a d.a.m.n; he wanted to talk to her, to find out what and how she knew. And what it signified.
"Do you remember this place?" Alys said.
"No," he said.
"You should. You"ve been here before."
"I haven"t," he said, guardedly; she had thoroughly trapped his credulity by producing the two records. _I"ve got to have them_, he said to himself. To show to-- yes, he thought; to whom? To General Buckman? And if I do show him, what will it get me?
"A cap of mescaline?" Alys said, going to a drug case, a large hand-oiled walnut cabinet at the end of the leather and bra.s.s bar on the far side of the living room.
"A little," he said. But then his response surprised him; he blinked. "I want to keep my head clear," he amended.
She brought him a tiny enameled drug tray on which rested a crystal tumbler of water and a white capsule. "Very good stuff. Harvey"s Yellow Number One, imported from Switzerland in bulk, capsuled on Bond Street." She added, "And not strong at all. Color stuff."
"Thanks." He accepted the gla.s.s and the white capsule; he drank the mescaline down, placed the gla.s.s back on the tray. "Aren"t you having any?" he asked her, feeling--belatedly--wary.
"I"m already s.p.a.ced," Alys said genially, smiling her gold baroque tooth smile. "Can"t you tell? I guess not; you"ve never seen me any other way."
"Did you know I"d be brought to the L.A. Police Academy?" he asked. You must have, he thought, _because you had the two records of mine with you_. Had you not known, the chances of your having them alone are zero out of a billion, virtually.
"I monitored some of their transmissions," Alys said; turning, she roamed restlessly off, tapping on the small enameled tray with one long fingernail. "I happened to pick up the official traffic between Vegas and Felix. I like to listen to him now and then during the time he"s on duty. Not always, but"--she pointed toward a room beyond an open corridor at the near side--"I want to look at something; I"ll show it to you, if it"s as good as Felix said."
He followed, the buzz of questions in his mind dinning at him as he walked. If she can get across, he thought, go back and forth, as she seems to have done-- "He said the center drawer of his maple desk," Alys said reflectively as she stood in the center of the house"s library; leather-bound books rose up in cases mounted to the high ceiling of the chamber. Several desks, a gla.s.s case of tiny cups, various early chess sets, two ancient Tarot card decks . . . Alys wandered over to a New England desk, opened a drawer, peered within. "Ah," she said, and brought out a gla.s.sine envelope.
"Alys--" Jason began, but she cut him off with a brusque snap of her fingers.
"Be quiet while I look at this." From the surface of the desk she took a large magnifying gla.s.s; she scrutinized the envelope. "A stamp," she explained, then, glancing up. "I"ll take it out so you can look at it." Finding a pair of philatelic tongs she carefully drew the stamp from its envelope and set it down on the felt pad at the front edge of the desk.
Obediently, Jason peeped through the magnifying lens at the stamp. It seemed to him a stamp like any other stamp, except that unlike modern stamps it had been printed in only one color.
"Look at the engraving on the animals," Alys said. "The herd of steer. It"s absolutely perfect; every line is exact. This stamp has never been--" She stopped his hand as he started to touch the stamp. "Oh no," she said. "Don"t ever touch a stamp with your fingers; always use tongs."
"Is it valuable?" he asked.
"Not really. But they"re almost never sold. I"ll explain it to you someday. This is a present to me from Felix, because he loves me. Because, he says, I"m good in bed."
"It"s a nice stamp," Jason said, disconcerted. He handed the magnifying gla.s.s back to her.
"Felix told me the truth; it"s a good copy. Perfectly centered, light cancellation that doesn"t mar the center picture, and--" Deftly, with the tongs, she flipped the stamp over on its back, allowed it to lie on the felt pad face down. All at once her expression changed; her face glowed hotly and she said, "That motherf.u.c.ker."
"What"s the matter?" he said.
"A thin spot." She touched a corner of the stamp"s back side with the tongs. "Well, you can"t tell from the front. But that"s Felix. h.e.l.l, it"s probably counterfeit anyhow. Except that Felix always somehow manages not to buy counterfeits. Okay, Felix; that"s one for you." Thoughtfully, she said, "I wonder if he"s got another one in his own collection. I could switch them." Going to a wall safe, she twiddled for a time with the dials, opened the safe at last, and brought out a huge and heavy alb.u.m, which she lugged to the desk. "Felix," she said, "does not know I know the combination to that safe. So don"t tell him." She cautiously turned heavy-gauge pages, came to one on which four stamps rested. "No onedollar black," she said. "But he may have hidden it elsewhere. He may even have it down at the academy." Closing the alb.u.m, she restored it to the wall safe.
"The mescaline," Jason said, "is beginning to affect me." His legs ached: for him that was always a sign that mescaline was beginning to act in his system. "I"ll sit down," he said, and managed to locate a leather-covered easy chair before his legs gave way. Or _seemed_ to give way; actually they never did: it was a drug-instigated illusion. But all the same it felt real.
"Would you like to see a collection of chaste and ornate snuff boxes?" Alys inquired. "Felix has a terribly fine collection. All antiques, in gold, silver, alloys, with cameo engravings, hunting scenes--no?" She seated herself opposite him, crossed her long, black-sheathed legs; her high-heeled shoe dangled as she swung it back and forth. "One time Felix bought an old snuff box at an auction, paid a lot for it, brought it home. He cleaned the old snuff out of it and found a springoperated level mounted at the bottom of the box, or what seemed to be the bottom. The lever operated when you screwed down a tiny screw. It took him all day to find a tool small enough to rotate the screw. But at least he got it." She laughed.
"What happened?" Jason said.
"The bottom of the box--a false bottom with a tin plate concealed in it. He got the plate out." She laughed again, her gold tooth ornamentation sparkling. "It turned out to be a two-hundred-year-old dirty picture. Of a chick copulating with a Shetland pony. Tinted, too, in eight colors. Worth, oh, say, five thousand dollars--not much, but it genuinely delighted us. The dealer, of course, didn"t know it was there."
"I see," Jason said.
"You don"t have any interest in snuff boxes," Alys said, still smiling.
"I"d like--to see it," he said. And then he said. "Alys, you know about me; you know who I am. _Why doesn"t anybody else know?_"
"Because they"ve never been there."
"_Where?_"
Alys ma.s.saged her temples, twisted her tongue, stared blankly ahead, as if lost in thought. As if barely hearing him. "You know," she said, sounding bored and a little irritable. "Christ, man, you lived there forty-two years. What can I tell you about that place that you don"t already know?" She glanced up, then, her heavy lips curling mischievously; she grinned at him.
"How did I get here?" he said.
"You--" She hesitated. "I"m not sure I should tell you."
Loudly, he said, "_Why not?_"
"Let it come in time." She made a damping motion with her hand. "In time, in time. Look, man; you"ve already been hit by a lot; you almost got shipped to a labor camp, and you know what kind, today. Thanks to that a.s.shole McNulty and my dear brother. My brother the police general." Her face had become ugly with revulsion, but then she smiled her provocative smile once again. Her lazy, gold-toothed, inviting smile.
Jason said, "I want to know where I am."
"You"re in my study in my house. You"re perfectly safe; we got all the insects off you. And no one"s going to break in here. Do you know what?" She sprang from her chair, bounding to her feet like a superlithe animal; involuntarily he drew back. "Have you ever made it by phone?" she demanded, bright-eyed and eager.
"Made what?"
"The grid," Alys said. "Don"t you know about the phone grid?"
"No," he admitted. But he had heard of it.
"Your--everybody"s--s.e.xual aspects are linked electronically, and amplified, to as much as you can endure. It"s addictive, because it"s electronically enhanced. People, some of them, get so deep into it they can"t pull out; their whole lives revolve around the weekly--or, h.e.l.l, even daily!--setting up of the network of phone lines. It"s regular picturephones, which you activate by credit card, so it"s free at the time you do it; the sponsors bill you once a month and if you don"t pay they cut your phone out of the grid."
"How many people," he asked, "are involved in this?"
"Thousands."
"At one time?"
Alys nodded. "Most of them have been doing it two, three years. And they"ve deteriorated physically--and mentally-- from it. Because the part of the brain where the o.r.g.a.s.m is experienced is gradually burned out. But don"t put down the people; some of the finest and most sensitive minds on earth are involved. For them it"s a sacred, holy communion. Except you can spot a gridder when you see one; they look debauched, old, fat, listless-- the latter always between the phone-line orgies, of course."
"And you do this?" She did not look debauched, old, fat, or listless to him.
"Now and then. But I never get hooked; I cut myself out of the grid just in time. Do you want to try it?"
"No," he said.
"Okay," Alys said reasonably, undaunted. "What would you like to do? We have a good collection of Rilke and Brecht in interlinear translation discs. The other day Felix came home with a quad-and-light set of all seven Sibelius symphonies; it"s very good. For dinner Emma is preparing frog"s legs . . . Felix loves both frog"s legs and escargot. He eats out in good French and Basque restaurants most of the time but tonight--"
"I want to know," Jason interrupted, "where I am."
"Can"t you simply be happy?"
He rose to his feet--with difficulty--and confronted her. Silently.