We've bounced off that wall before. It's very tight over there.'
Max stood up and said, 'We're very grateful for your cooperation, gentlemen.'
'din you contact us again?' I asked.
'doubtful.'
'How would we get in touch with you?'
'Why should you?' There was some amusement in his steady gaze.
I said, 'Who knows? Something else happens that fits in with this, who do we ten?'
Jade said to Marc, 'If we don't know what's going on, we don't know if they are involved more than they think they are. An identity mixup. Or something observed they shouldn't have seen.'
After a moment of thought, Marc nodded and wrote a number down and tore it out of his pad. 'Memorwe this number. Use a phone you can control for a couple of hours. It may take that long for a cat/-back. Here is what you say. That line win always answer, day and night. The person will say hero. You say, 'Was somebody at this number try' ingto reach Travis McGee?' They'll say they don't know, but they can check around and find out. Then you say, 'If anyone was, I can be reached at such and such a number.' then wait. Clear?'
'Perfectly,' I said.
Max stood a little taller and said, 'You shouldn't have gone out to see Broffski and Slater. The cover story was halfway okay, but frail. What you shouldn't do, either of you or both of you, is push at this thing any more, from any direction. We've satisfied ourselves you can both keep your mouth shut about what you learned here. Finding out the kind of security clearance you had once upon a time, Meyer, helped in that decision. So lay low. Keep down. Bleep quiet. In return for that, I promise I'll find some way to let you know when we've tidied up. No, don't leave just yet. I have to make a call.'
He made it from a phone in a dispatch case. He grunted and listened, grunted and listened, then said thanks and hung up and slapped the case shut. No sign of your being followed here. There's no directional bug on your pickup truck, and your home phones on those two boats are not tapped.'
'She died a week ago today,' I said. 'She didn't want to die. She was pushed over the edge. She was pushed off the earth. And you want me to keep down and keep quiet.'
Max looked at me with a pitying expression. '`If
The Green Ripper you wanted to thrash around, what could you do? Where could you start? Suppose you knew for sure that the DGI did it.'
'What's the DGI?'
'The Cuban secret service. It has been directed and controlled by the KGB for nine years at least. What next? Who do you ask? Who do you go see? And who would know anything anyway? Is whoever killed her still alive? Maybe not Intelligence operations are compartmentalized, There is only one contact between cells, and few people in any cell. I don't care what you do. Just don't go to the police to complain about an unsolved murder, and don't write your congressman about internal se- curity.'
'We can leave now?' Meyer asked.
Max nodded. Jake took a look at the corridor. We left. The day was the same kind of day. But the world was a different kind of world.
109
8
We were back aboard The Busted Flush by four o'clock. My brain seemed to be droning along in neutral. I could not kick it into gear.
Meyer selected a beer. I roamed back and forth with a beaker of Boodles on ice. 'I don't want it to be depersonalized,' I said. 'I want it to be a single person with a single motive. I don't want it to be organizational, a committee decision. You can't get your hands around the throat of a committee. You can't beat the face of an organization against a brick wall.'
'Listen to me, Travis. Stop pacing and listen. ~ she was killed because she discovered something, by pure accident, she should not have known, then
The Green Ripper it is accidental death. The world is full of secret plans and understandings. A sniper in Lebanon misses and the slug smashes the head of a child a half mile farther away. What can the child's father dot Who does he see? Where does he file his complaint?'
'Somebody aimed at her, Meyer, and didn't miss.'
'And your chance of ever finding that somebody is exactly zero.'
'Then I'll find who gave the orders.'
'Again zero.'
'How can you possibly know that?'
'Travis, please sit down. I can't talk to you when you keep walking around behind me. There. That's better. And if you can listen a little, it will be better yet. I live in two worlds, yours and the real world.'
'Come onl'
'Just listen. In your world the evil is small scale. It is one on one. It is creature preying on creature. All right, so it can be terrifying. I am not trying to say it is like games in a sandbox under the apple tree. A person can get killed doing what you do, and I think it is a worthwhile way for you to live. In these past few years it has made you a bit morose, but that is only because any kind of repeti- tion leads to a certain staleness of the soul. Too many beds, and too much dying. Greed and love begin to wear the same masks. Gretel gave me high hopes for you. You were emerging from the dolor of repetition. Now you look as if you had been hit on the head with a mallet. In your world, your heart is broken. I want to reach you before you start any kind of move that will break your heart on a larger scale than you can now conceive of. All right?'
'weep talking.'
'When I attend conferences on international monetary affairs, when I go give my little speeches, or go earn a little fee for consultation, I hear of many things. They alarm me. I cannot tell you how much they alarm me. In Iran a little band of schoolteachers dribble gasoline around the circumference of a movie house and light it, incinerating four hundred and thirty people, most of them children. In Guyana nine hundred Americans kill themselves, for reasons as yet unexplained. There are over four billion people in the world, and each day more and more of them are dying in bloody and sickening ways. The pot is beginning to simmer. The little bubbles appear around the edged Intrigue, interconnected, is multiplying geometrically, helped along by the computer society. Orbiting eyes in the sky scan us all. Poisons abound. The sick birds fall out of the air. Signs and portents, Travis. And here we are in happyland, in a resort town, with the bright sunshine, bright boats, humid young ladies. This is all stage setting. Carnival. Scenario. The real world is out there in a slow dreadful process of change. There is a final agony
The Green Ripper of millions out there, and one and a quarter million new souls arriving every week. We try to think about it less than we used to. None of it makes any sense, really. But then whatever it is that is out there, it moves into this world in the shape of a tiny sphere of platinum and iridium and deadly poison. Now we have to thinlr about it, but it cannot be personalized. It is all a thing, a great plated toadlizard thing with a rotten breath, squatting back inside the mouth of the cave, infinitely patient.'
'So keep on having fun?'
'That's not very responsive.'
'Sorry.'
'Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.'
'Except joining the Church of the Apocryphal'
'Have you lost your mind?'
'Brother Titus will forgive my sins.'
'It's an idiotic idea.'
'] have to go out to California anyway, with... the ashes.'
'when are we leaving?'
I smiled at him and shook my head. 'Not this time, Meyer. Part of this trip is trying to get away from myself somehow. I have no delight in what and who I am. Not any more. Not here.'
Meyer sat and looked at me for a long moment, the small bright blue eyes intent, the face impassive. 'You take yourself wherever you go, Travis.'
'A popular truism.'
He finished the beer and put it aside. 'I'll go get the urn.'
'You don't have to bother right now. I can come and get it when I'm ready to leave.'
'I might not be there. I'll get it now.'
He was back in ten minutes with a cardboard carton, a vise-grip wrench he had borrowed a year ago, and fifteen dollars he claimed he owed me and insisted I take.
And then he was gone. It had not occurred to me that I would hurt Meyer, but there seemed to be no point in going over and apologizing to him. Through me, he had acquired a taste for the salvage business. Now there was nothing left to save but myself. And he couldn't help me there.
I fixed myself another heavy drink and, carrying it along, I went through all the interior spaces of The Busted Flush. I remembered all the lovely women. I looked at the huge shower stall, the sybaritic tub, the great broad bed in the master stateroom. I looked at the speakers and turntables, the tape decks and tape racks. Everything had a sweet, sad look. Like a playpen with scattered toys after the child has died.
When the drink was gone, I went down to my hidey-hole in the forward hull and removed all my reserve and took it up to the lounge. Ninety-three hundred-dollar bills. Life savings. Wisely invested, it might bring me almost eighty dollars a month. I sat and planned what I would wear and what I
The Green Ripper would carry, and mentally distributed my
