“What are you going to do?”
“Ad-lib. Maybe I’ll talk to the Director.”
“If you can get to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wasn’t in the country the year they decided to do an audit. When was it?”
“Seventy-five.”
“From what I saw in Langley yesterday, I’d say we’ve got a repeat. They’re afraid, Ben. They’re afraid somebody’s going to take the Director off the count. He’s got bodyguards with him in his office. They’re afraid they’ve blown it so bad that somebody inside the Company is going to decide it’s time for new management.”
“The what?”
“See?” He pointed to the five-foot fire-red neon sign that flashed “PARK IN REAR.” Above it, an unlighted but ornately filigreed script said the something Cafe and Bistro, but Margaret wasn’t sure if she could have read it in daylight.
“Charming.”
Chinese Gordon pulled the car into the shadowy alley and stopped it beside a 1968 Chevrolet painted mainly in gray primer dappled with red rustproofing. As Margaret got out she noticed that the parking lot was vast, stretching in a hundred-yard rectangle along the solid line of plain walls and loading docks, and that at least fifty or sixty cars were sitting at haphazard angles wherever their owners had felt like stopping them. “Looks like a demolition derby.”
“No, just Friday night at the Park in Rear. We’ll be out of here before they all try to get out that alley, so we’ll miss most of the fun.”
“I could pass up all of the fun.”
“If we want to talk to Immelmann tonight, this has got to be it. He only goes to Ma Maison on Thursdays.”
He pulled the door open, and the stale, smoky air of the place rushed out, bringing with it a tenor voice shouting in a southern accent over a driving bass guitar. Margaret shuddered involuntarily and looked around her. It seemed to be one cavernous room dominated by a marble bar that must have been a hundred feet long. She counted seven barmaids scurrying up and down behind it, and four men who stood along the back wall, big men with the hard, scanning eyes of policemen.
All over the room were tables where people sat drinking and yelling against the invincible solidity of the bass guitars. The music had already pummeled her senses so that she didn’t hear it as music anymore. It was like being inside a great chugging engine composed of pounding pistons and some kind of undifferentiated roar. She followed Chinese Gordon through a crowd of tall men holding beer bottles, her face at chest level beside all of these bodies, and far too close, so her view was of plaid shirts and cowboy shirts, pockets with cigarette packs stuffed into them, wet underarms and then a greenish-blue tattoo of something with wings and a sword and some reddish flames. In front of her was only Chinese Gordon’s back, and she felt an urge to cling to him but stifled it and only tried to make herself smaller to thread her way through behind him.
As she passed one man he was shouting along with the music, so she finally had the words blasted into her face along with an odorous, beery mist that seemed to go with the general smell of male sweat: “If that’s all you want, little lady, you already got it.” Perfect, she thought. Immelmann would be right at home. He always called his girlfriends “Little Lady” or “Sunshine” because he couldn’t remember their names.
At the tables there seemed to be a lot of people wearing hats—young women in cowboy hats, a man in a blue Dodger baseball cap, a few that bore trademarks like Caterpillar or Peterbilt. There was even an olive-drab one with sergeant’s stripes stenciled on it in black.
She followed Chinese Gordon to a darker corner, where Immelmann and Kepler sat drinking beer out of bottles and then snapping their heads back to down shots of whiskey. Immelmann stood up when they approached, and he pulled out a chair for Margaret. Kepler nodded and held up a hand to call for the waitress, who seemed to be hovering nearby to watch the hand. She scurried to his side on impossibly high platform shoes that made Margaret wince, leaned over to listen, then strutted away in a parody of efficiency.
Chinese Gordon spoke, and she was surprised when she realized she could hear him. The noise seemed to have subsided imperceptibly. “We came to talk to you about another idea we’ve got.”
Immelmann smiled and waved a big hand in Kepler’s direction. “That’s a coincidence, Chinese. I wanted to talk to you about the same thing. I was just telling Kepler.”
“Don’t listen to him, Chinese,” Kepler said. “The man is a retard. It’s an insult to have to take him seriously, and I do it only out of charity.”
“What’s your idea?” Margaret asked Immelmann.
“Thank you for asking, honey.” There it was, she thought. He was probably too drunk to remember the name. “What we’ve got here is a chance for an investment. You remember I come from farm country.”
Kepler said, “I’d never have guessed.”
Immelmann ignored him. “Well, we’ve got a chance to triple our money—quadruple it in a year or two if we’re willing to invest it now. There’s a chance to buy a whole lot of land in Saskatchewan for very little right now.”
“No doubt,” said Chinese Gordon. “It’s fifty below zero there most of the winter.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Immelmann said. “That’s why we can pick up prime acreage for the asking. Miles and miles of it.”
“What’s the idea? Oil? Minerals?” Chinese Gordon asked.
“Minerals? Shit!” he snorted, his long face breaking into a grin. Then he glanced at Margaret. “Excuse me, honey.”
Kepler said, “God bless you.” To Margaret he said, “Must be something he ate.”
Immelmann leaned forward, talking barely above the buzz of noise around them. “It’s not oil, it’s not minerals, it’s”—he glanced about and pronounced distinctly—“beefalo.”
“Beefalo?” Chinese Gordon asked.
“That’s right. Beefalo are a hybrid animal that has been developed by crossing beef cattle and buffalo. The meat tastes just like beef, but the animals themselves thrive in the roughest climate. I’ve been looking into this, and Saskatchewan is perfect. Way up north where cattle can’t live and land is cheap.”
Chinese Gordon stared at Margaret. She looked down at her hands in her lap.
Kepler leaned forward and said, “Immelmann, you are a grown man. When somebody tells you something tastes just like something else, you ought to know better than to believe him. You’ve been through survival school in the Marines, haven’t you?”
“Sure.”
“They told you snake tasted just like chicken, didn’t they? Well, you know goddamn well it doesn’t. It tastes like snake. Armadillo doesn’t taste like—”
“That’s true,” said Immelmann. “It’s not like that. Everything disgusting is supposed to taste like chicken. If they said beefalo tasted like chicken, I’d know they were lying. It doesn’t. It tastes like beef.”
“That’s what they say about horse, too,” Kepler said. “You ever eat horse?”
Margaret looked up to see the heavily padded bust of the waitress appear between her and Kepler. The conversation was beginning to make her queasy, but maybe the drink would help.
Immelmann was insistent. “Look, at this moment the world is starving for beef.”
The waitress eyed him uneasily. “Would you like to order something to eat?”
Kepler shook his head and handed her a bill.
Chinese Gordon sang, “I see by your outfit that you are a beefalo boy.” Immelmann stared at him, one eyebrow lifted, so he moved on into “I’m an old beefalohand,” which he changed quickly to “Beefalo gals won’t you come out tonight and dance in Saskatoon.”
“You’re not a normal person, Chinese,” Immelmann announced. “I’m offering you a chance to quietly convert
