Savant

he needed was time to put his case together.

First things first: If Rose had an ear on his phone or in his office, he could have it uncovered, but if she did— and he knew that she did—it had to be with Metzger's tacit approval. If the producer was as close to the woman as it appeared, Trask would accomplish little by exposing her spying and thievery. Perhaps Metzger hadn't encouraged it, or even known about it, but he would probably protect her. She was a tough cookie. Like so many in broadcasting, she had limited talent but a terrible driving ambition. She probably saw the bug or wiretap business as industrial intelligence—just good business one-upmanship. There was also the possibility that Babaloo and Barb were a secret coalition, and the plan was to undermine Trask for whatever reason. It really didn't matter. What he had to do was now create a false agenda, which they would then find.

By memoranda and scraps of notes, by phone calls made out of his office at KCM, by a select batch of tapes left on his desk, he would create this fictitious slate of projects to be discovered and—for all he knew— purloined.

The odd thing was that when he'd got a slant on the violence theme, so many hitherto boring subjects began to fall into logical order. Slant was everything. When he saw how these other topics could be interwoven he seemed to get new perspectives on a wealth of tried-and-true topics from organ donors to organic farming. They all fell into place for him. It was tough to find shows he didn't want to research, all of a sudden. These new slants brought a hot light to these well-trod issues, making them interesting and provocative again. A topic as yawn-inducing as tabloid news had now become name fixations. He could imagine a clinically analyzed piece on our penchant for celebrity trivia that worked on a different level than the superficial one. We loved to hear, see both film and video, and read gossip about the Donald or the Kennedy family. But the why of it was linked to root causes more substantial than what might first appear to be the case: he could see ways this report might be part of an overall look at the human condition that would be tremendously thoughtful and thought-provoking—if not meaningfully revealing. Everything always came back around to the same basics such as sex, politics, and religious beliefs or personal philosophies—or the lack thereof—but it was the way in which those basics were probed that could make a talk show thrilling or lackluster. Trask knew that he'd touched a rich nerve near the pulse of mankind's existence, and he had that same scent in his nose that archaeologists must get on a hot dig. He smelled secrets and buried treasure.

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9

The telephone in Elaine Roach's apartment had the bell position muted to its lowest point, but still she jumped when it rang.

'Hello,' she said.

'Miss Roach, this is Tommy Norville.'

'Oh, yes, sir!' Her voice brightened. One of the boss's infrequent phone calls.

'Well, how did the first auction night go?' he asked, with just a hint of sibilant simper and pseudo-world- weary petulance in his voice.

'Very well. Sir—I'm glad you called and I certainly hope you won't be angry with me but I—uh—had to take the phone off the hook at two-thirty A.M. I just couldn't stay awake any longer. I hope it's all right?' He could hear the nervousness and fear in her scratchy voice.

'Of course, it's all right. You mean you were still getting calls as late as that?'

'Oh, yes, sir. I think they must have tried to phone me all night, for when I put the phone back on this morning at seven-thirty, it rang instantly. A man in California said he'd been dialing and getting a busy signal all night long.'

'Hmm. Amazing!' he said through fat pursed lips.

'Of course, I didn't tell any of the ones who phoned this morning that I took the telephone off the hook last night.'

'Well,' the effeminate-sounding man told her, 'you certainly didn't get much sleep.' He wanted to ask about the auction response but he decided he'd go gently. 'Perhaps tonight you could retire earlier, Miss Roach. And then, of course, you'll have a couple of weeks to recuperate before the next round of telephone calls.'

'Yes, sir. Oh, by the way, you might want to know that we had many calls on one of the items, Mr. Norville. Number forty-one? The cased dueling pistols that belonged to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?'

'Oh?' He kept the interest out of his tone. 'Did they fetch a decent price?'

'Oh, yes, sir! The highest bid was from a man in New York who bid $24,500 for them.'

'Pardon?' He had to make a noise that sounded like a loud cough, and he covered up the mouthpiece of the phone while he laughed. He loved making fools of the monkey people.

'A man in New York bid twenty-four thousand five hundred for them. And we had about two dozen bids on that item. Next to number forty-one item number three was the most popular, it appears—' Then she began to give him an accounting of the telephone auction. He let her ramble on for a while.

'That sounds excellent, Miss Roach. And you emphasized we would need cashier's checks or money orders, did you not?'

'Yes, sir. And I told them we had to be in receipt of payment within ten days as per the stipulation in our printed terms. Everyone said they would comply. Several persons wanted to know when their items would be sent out, and I reminded them that you will notify all winners within one week, and that it will take about two weeks to process the winning remittances, so with packing time one could safely say approximately six weeks from the time their remittance is sent.' She was maddeningly pedantic and precise in spelling out everything she'd enunciated or done in the last twenty-four hours, but that was exactly what he'd wanted. Nothing would reassure a mail-order customer more than a nice, long phone conversation with somebody as obviously straight as Elaine Roach.

He realized that it was doubtful anyone would be writing him a certified check for $24,500, not for a sight- unseen item from an auction with whom they'd had no prior business, but if her figures were any indication, he knew that his war treasury would soon be healthy again.

Daniel Bunkowski had no interest in profit for money's sake, but he had a need for operational funds, and the response to his first mail-order auction had been satisfactory. As soon as he'd notified all the winning bidders of their good fortune, he'd be ready to resume the so-far-fruitless search for his foster mother of years past, Mrs. Nadine Garbella, for whom payback was long overdue.

Kansas City, Kansas, 1958

Little Danny Boy waits, hurting, fearful, trembling from the anticipation of what terror awaits him as much as from the cold. He huddles in the closet with Gem, the little dog who is his only companion. The closet is cold, pitch black, foul with the stench of urine. This is where the Snake Man often makes him stay. He and the dog huddle together for warmth and companionship. His small, plump fingers curl in the mongrel's matted hair and he strokes the dog gently, whispering to it reassuringly with his mind.

The most recent welts have begun to scab up now, and he hopes he will not be whipped. Pain is only part of it, he realizes in some undeveloped pocket of his mind. There is the sense of dread that chills him. It is easily as difficult to bear as the physical abuse and pain, although his child's thoughts do not consciously make such distinctions.

For a time he called it the Dog Boy, but once the Snake Man called him that, and now he calls it Jim, which—later—he will misspell. Typical of his strange mental capacity, he will retain the spelling of a word—the one that means 'precious stone or jewel.' Because the two words sound much the same to his ears, he spells the proper noun G-E-M. Later he will learn that the word means 'something that is prized for its great beauty.' It will be an appropriate name for this dog, which he regards as a beautiful animal. He prizes it above all else, this young child who doesn't know an antonym from a homonym, his gem of a dog, and now he hears the threatening voice of the hated Snake Man and he and the pup both tremble at the sound.

To whom will he appeal? He has pleaded with Mrs. Garbella a thousand times and her answer is to give him more of the same, or—if she is too tired to lash out at him—laughter, which can sting almost as much as a switch, when it is the court of final resort. He and Gem will appeal to a higher authority, to the place inside his head where the others live. To the place where he and the dog can escape.