He cocked an eye at her. 'I know Rosamond Brice. Or did. She doesn't look old enough to be your mother. And, what's more, she doesn't act like a mother. She's been in more beds than I've been in automobiles. And when she comes to town the local distilleries put on an extra shift.'
Lee went to the bar and poured herself a drink from the first bottle that came to hand. She took down a quick snort and made a face. Absinthe. She poured some water into it and returned to her chair.
She said defiantly, 'My mother and father weren't married, but for a time they evidently had a somewhat hectic love affair. For some reason, she agreed to have a baby. By the time I came, the affair was waning. Mother couldn't bother with me; I interfered with her good times. But father wanted me and raised me. We loved each other very much. After he died, I became friends with Rosamond although we're worlds apart as a rule. When I told her I was to work for the World Club, she told me that they'd probably bug my rooms and gave me a muffler so that we could talk without being overheard. She knew about mufflers because she always uses one. She's afraid of jealous wives, sweethearts, or whoever, listening in on her calls to lovers.'
He looked at her for a long disbelieving moment.
She came to her feet and said, 'Oh, hell; come on. I suppose this was inevitable.'
'Come on where?' he said.
'To the bedroom. I'm going to rape you a little.'
Chapter Nineteen: Roy Cos
Roy dreaded getting up, but that feeling of dread was now a daily occurrence. He couldn't bring himself to face the Coming day. How long had it been now—a couple of weeks? More than that. At least he was giving the bastards a run for their money. One of the newsmen had told them that Oliver Brett-James, in Nassau, had been fired by the outfit issuing the Deathwish Policy Roy had signed up for. Evidently, the cosmo-corp's executives blamed the Englishman for not spotting potential trouble in the offbeat Roy Cos and his manager. Long before this, they had begun losing money on the deal. Not only were the premiums eating them up, but the so-called Deathwish Wobbly was spending his million pseudo-dollars per day at an unprecedented rate. How many people did he have on his payroll now? Over twenty, Roy supposed, counting the stenographers down in the offices on the floor below—a payroll of more than two hundred thousand pseudo-dollars a day! If he wasn't feeling so damned depressed, he might have laughed. Imagine Roy Cos spending over a million a week on his staff.
Mary Ann, on the pillow next to him, said, doing her best to keep the anxiety from her voice, 'Something wrong, darling?'
He looked over at her. Mousy of face, Mary Ann Elwyn might be, but a mouse of very special attractions. It was the first time in his life that he'd had a deep involvement that went beyond mere sex.
'No, not really,' he told her.
She looked at her wrist chronometer. 'You're supposed to hear that Tri-Di singer this morning for the United Church broadcast.'
'Yeah,' he said, staring up at the ceiling. 'What was his name again?'
'Stevie Summers. He's the current big thing in nostalgia folk song revivals.'
Roy sighed and said, 'How's Forry getting along with the hotel manager?'
She laughed shortly. 'He's reversed the flow of crap, you might say. The first few days, guests were moving out wholesale when it was learned that the Deathwish Wobbly was staying here. Evidently, they expected the whole New Tropical Hotel to be bombed flat or something. But that didn't last. Thrill seekers zeroed in wholesale. One of Ron's friends who works in the lobby says the manager is turning down bribes that run up to a thousand pseudo-dollars for reservations. Same old story—thousands of silly dizzards would give then-right arms to be on hand when the Graf's men get to you. I mean if,' she added contritely. 'Sorry.'
He ran a weary hand back through his shaggy, faded brown hair. 'Nothing to be sorry about,' he told her. He dug around for something else to postpone getting out of bed. 'How'd that girl check out?'
'The one who got in with the reporters yesterday? She's evidently what she said she was, a celebrity hound. She wanted to see you in person, wanted to try to get your autograph. The guards shook her down just like everybody else and she had nothing remotely resembling a weapon, so they let her through. Supposedly, she was a reporter.'
'If she could get past all of our security, so could somebody else,' he said bitterly.
'We'd better go and check out this Stevie Summers, darling.'
'All right.' He swung his legs out over the side of the bed. Ignoring his bedroom slippers, he went over to the chair where he had thrown his clothes the night before and began to dress. Mary Ann got up too and went to the closet. The prole clothes she brought forth were as similar to his own as possible.
She looked over at him. Roy Cos had lost the extra ten pounds or so of weight and now looked drawn rather than pasty of face. The sunbaths on the roof, which Forry Brown had insisted upon, had wiped away the pallor. It came to her that Roy must have been quite good-looking as a young man. Twenty-five years of inadequate diet and exercise hadn't done him any good, nor had the long hours of sitting around small, drab rooms arguing political economy, night after night.
Forty Brown and Ferd Feldmeyer were in the living room with three of the guards who bore short, stocky Gyrojet automatic carbines. Dick Samuelson, in particular, carried his with a practiced ease. It had turned out, when the weapons were first procured, that Dick had spent a hitch in the Sky-borne Commandos, and he'd taken over the duty of instructing his less knowledgeable Wobbly colleagues in their use.
Also present was a rather vague-looking young man, somewhere in his early twenties. He bore a guitar and was looking both impatient and bored. His fans might have swooned over him, Roy decided, but he looked like nothing more than a gangly kid.
Forry, dressed identically to Roy, and looking somewhat ludicrous in prole attire, squinted through tobacco smoke at his employer. He said, 'This is Stevie Summers. I promised him five thousand to sing one song as a preliminary to you roasting the Prophet.'
'It ain't the money,' the singer said. 'I hate that sapsucker.'
Roy nodded, went over to his desk, and took up a little red pamphlet, thumbed through it to the page he sought, found it, and handed it to the boy.
'This is a book of old IWW songs,' he said. 'This is the one I wanted you to sing. It was written by one of the early Wobblies, Joe Hill, who was executed in Utah for a crime he didn't commit because he was a radical. You sing it to the tune for the old hymn,
'Gotcha,' the boy said. He looked over the lyrics for a moment, then began to strum and sing. To Roy's surprise, the singer's voice, though soft, grasped with appeal.
'That's the idea,' Roy said. 'He's lined up with the other side. We want to make that clear.' He looked at the folk singer. 'That old radical song is kind of primitive as propaganda goes but it won't put you on anybody's shitlist, will it? The Prophet throws a lot of weight. With me, it doesn't make any difference. He'll have to stand in line if he wants to take a crack at me.'
