"You get a lot of bills," he said, "for a girl living in a oneroom schmalch. You buy your clothes--or what else?--at Metter"s? Interesting."
"I--take an odd size."
He said, "And Sax and Crombie shoes."
"In my work--" she began, but he cut her off with a convulsive swipe of his hand.
"Don"t give me that," he grated.
"Look in my closet. You won"t see much there. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that what I do have is good. I"d rather have a little amount of something good . . ." Her words trailed off. "You know," she said vaguely, "than a lot of junk."
Jason said, "You have another apartment."
It registered; her eyes flickered as she looked into herself for an answer. That, for him, const.i.tuted plenty.
"Let"s go there," he said. He had seen enough of this cramped little room.
"I can"t take you there," Kathy said, "because I share it with two other girls and the way we"ve divided up the use, this time is--"
"Evidently you weren"t trying to impress me." It amused him. But also it irritated him; he felt downgraded, nebulously.
"I would have taken you there if today were my day," Kathy said. "That"s why I have to keep this little place going; I"ve got to have _someplace_ to go when it"s not my day. My day, my next one, is Friday. From noon on." Her tone had become earnest. As if she wished very much to convince him. Probably, he mused, it was true. But the whole thing irked him. Her and her whole life. He felt, now, as if he had been snared by something dragging him down into depths he had never known about before, even in the early, bad days. And he did not like it.
He yearned all at once to be out of here. The animal at bay was himself.
"Don"t look at me like that," Kathy said, sipping her screwdriver.
To himself, but aloud, he said, "You have b.u.mped the door of life open with your big, dense head. And now it can"t be closed."
"What"s that from?" Kathy asked.
"From my life."
"But it"s like poetry."
"If you watched my show," he said, "you"d know I come up with sparklers like that every so often."
Appraising him calmly, Kathy said, "I"m going to look in the TV log and see if you"re listed. " She set down her screwdriver, fished among discarded newspapers piled at the base of the wicker table.
"I wasn"t even born," he said. "I checked on that."
"And your show isn"t listed," Kathy said, folding the newsprint page back and studying the log.
"That"s right," he said. "So now you have all the answers about me." He tapped his vest pocket of forged ID cards. "Including these. With their microtransmitters, if that much is true."
"Give them back to me," Kathy said, "and I"ll erad the microtransmitters. It"ll only take a second." She held out her hand.
He returned them to her.
"Don"t you care if I take them off?" Kathy inquired.
Candidly, he answered, "No, I really don"t. I"ve lost the ability to tell what"s good or bad, true or not true, anymore. If you want to take the dots off, do it. If it pleases you."
A moment later she returned the cards, smiling her sixteenyear-old hazy smile.
Observing her youth, her automatic radiance, he said," "I feel as old as yonder elm."
"From _Finnegans Wake_," Kathy said happily. "When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks."
"You"ve read _Finnegans Wake?_" he asked, surprised.
"I saw the film. Four times. I like Hazeltine; I think he"s the best director alive."
"I had him on my show," Jason said. "Do you want to know what he"s like in real life?"
"No," Kathy said.
"Maybe you ought to know."
"No," she repeated, shaking her head; her voice had risen. "And don"t try to tell me--okay? I"ll believe what I want to believe, and you believe what you believe. All right?"
"Sure," he said. He felt sympathetic. The truth, he had often reflected, was overrated as a virtue. In most cases a sympathetic lie did better and more mercifully. Especially between men and women; in fact, whenever a woman was involved.
This, of course, was not, properly speaking, a woman, but a girl. And therefore, he decided the kind lie was even more of a necessity.
"He"s a scholar and an artist," he said.
"Really?" She regarded him hopefully.
"Yes."
At that she sighed in relief.
"Then you believe," he said, pouncing, "that I have met Michael Hazeltine, the finest living film director, as you said yourself. So you do believe that I am a six--" He broke off; that had not been what he intended to say.
""A six," " Kathy echoed, her brow furrowing, as if she were trying to remember. "I read about them in Time. Aren"t they all dead now? Didn"t the government have them all rounded up and shot, after that one, their leader--what was his name?--Teagarden; yes, that"s his name. Willard Teagarden. He tried to--how do you say it?--pull off a coup against the federal flats? He tried to get them disbanded as an illegal parimutuel--"
"Paramilitary," Jason said.
"You don"t give a d.a.m.n about what I"m saying."
Sincerely, he said, "I sure do." He waited. The girl did not continue. "Christ," he spat out. "Finish what you were saying!"
"I think," Kathy said at last, "that the sevens made the coup not come off."
He thought. Sevens. Never in his life had he heard of sevens. Nothing could have shocked him more. Good, he thought, that I let out that lapsus linguae. I have genuinely learned something, now. At last. In this maze of confusion and the half real.
A small section of wall creaked meagerly open and a cat, black and white and very young, entered the room. At once Kathy gathered him up, her face shining.
"Dinman"s philosophy," Jason said. "The mandatory cat." He was familiar with the viewpoint; he had in fact introduced Dinman to the TV audience on one of his fall specials.
"No, I just love him," Kathy said, eyes bright as she carried the cat over to him for his inspection.
"But you do believe," he said, as he patted the cat"s little head, "that owning an animal increases a person"s empathic--"
"Screw that," Kathy said, clutching the cat to her throat as if she were a five-year-old with its first animal. Its school project: the communal guinea pig. "This is Domenico," she said.
"Named after Domenico Scarlatti?" he asked.
"No, after Domenico"s Market, down the Street; we pa.s.sed it on our way here. When I"m at the Minor Apartment--this room--I shop there. Is Domenico Scarlatti a musician? I think I"ve heard of him."
Jason said, "Abraham Lincoln"s high school English teacher."
"Oh." She nodded absently, now rocking the cat back and forth.
"I"m kidding you," he said, "and it"s mean. I"m sorry."
Kathy gazed up at him earnestly as she clutched her small cat. "I never know the difference," she murmured.
"That"s why it"s mean," Jason said.
"Why?" she asked. "If I don"t even know. I mean, that means I"m just dumb. Doesn"t it?"
"You"re not dumb," Jason said. "Just inexperienced." He calculated, roughly, their age difference. "I"ve lived over twice as long as you," he pointed out. "And I"ve been in the position, in the last ten years, to rub elbows with some of the most famous people on earth. And--"
"And," Kathy said, "you"re a six."
She had not forgotten his slip. Of course not. He could tell her a million things, and all would be forgotten ten minutes later, except the one real slip. Well, such was the way of the world. He had become used to it in his time; that was part of being his age and not hers.
"What does Domenico mean to you?" Jason said, changing the subject. Crudely, he realized, but he went ahead. "What do you get from him that you don"t get from human beings?"
She frowned, looked thoughtful. "He"s always busy. He always has some project going. Like following a bug. He"s very good with flies; he"s learned how to eat them without their flying away." She smiled engagingly. "And I don"t have to ask myself about him, Should I turn him in to Mr. McNulty? Mr. McNulty is my pol contact. I give him the a.n.a.log receivers for the microtransmitters, the dots I showed you--"
"And he pays you."
She nodded.
"And yet you live like this."
"I--" she struggled to answer--"I don"t get many customers."
"Nonsense. You"re good; I watched you work. You"re experienced."
"A talent."
"But a trained talent."
"Okay; it all goes into the apartment uptown. My Major Apartment." She gritted her teeth, not enjoying being badgered.
"No." He didn"t believe it.
Kathy said, after a pause, "My husband"s alive. He"s in a forced-labor camp in Alaska. I"m trying to buy his way out by giving information to Mr. McNulty. In another year"-- she shrugged, her expression moody now, introverted--"he says Jack can come out. And come back here."
So you send other people into the camps, he thought, to get your husband out. It sounds like a typical police deal. It"s probably the truth.
"It"s a terrific deal for the police," he said. "They lose one man and get--how many would you say you"ve bugged for them? Scores? Hundreds?"
Pondering, she said at last, "Maybe a hundred and fifty."
"It"s evil," he said.
"Is it?" She glanced at him nervously, clutching Domenico to her flat chest. Then, by degrees, she became angry; it showed on her face and in the way she crushed the cat against her rib cage. "The h.e.l.l it is," she said fiercely, shaking her head no. "I love Jack and he loves me. He writes to me all the time."
Cruelly, he said, "Forged. By some pol employee."
Tears spilled from her eyes in an amazing quant.i.ty; they dimmed her gaze. "You think so? Sometimes I think they are, too. Do you want to look at them? Could you tell?"
"They"re probably not forged. It"s cheaper and simpler to keep him alive and let him write his own letters." He hoped that would make her feel better, and evidently it did; the tears stopped coming.
"I hadn"t thought of that," she said, nodding, but still not smiling; she gazed off into the distance, reflexively still rocking the small black and white cat.
"If your husband"s alive," he said, cautiously this time, "do you believe it to be all right for you to go to bed with other men, such as me?"
"Oh, sure. Jack never objected to that. Even before they got him. And I"m sure he doesn"t object now. As a matter of fact, he wrote me about that. Let"s see; it was maybe six months ago. I think I could find the letter; I have them all on microfilm. Over in the shop."
"Why?"
Kathy said, "I sometimes lens-screen them for customers. So that later on they"ll understand why I do what I did."
At this point he frankly did not know what emotion he felt toward her, nor what he ought to feel. She had become, by degrees, over the years, involved in a situation from which she could not now extricate herself. And he saw no way out for her now; it had gone on too long. The formula had become fixed. The seeds of evil had been allowed to grow.
"There"s no turning back for you," he said, knowing it, knowing that she knew it. "Listen," he said to her in a gentle voice. He put his hand on her shoulder, but as before she at once shrank away. "Tell them you want him out right now, and you"re not turning in any more people."
"Would they release him, then, if I said that?"
"Try it." Certainly it wouldn"t do any harm. But--he could imagine Mr. McNulty and how he looked to the girl. She could never confront him; the McNultys of the world did not get confronted by anyone. Except when something went strangely wrong.
"Do you know what you are?" Kathy said. "You"re a very good person. Do you understand that?"
He shrugged. Like most truths it was a matter of opinion. Perhaps he was. In this situation, anyhow. Not so in others. But Kathy didn"t know about that.
"Sit down," he said, "pet your cat, drink your screwdriver. Don"t think about anything; just be. Can you do that? Empty your mind for a little while? Try it." He brought her a chair; she dutifully seated herself on it.
"I do it all the time," she said emptily, dully.
Jason said, "But not negatively. Do it positively."
"How? What do you mean?"