Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 Read online

  Two

  Sara emerged from the elevator and looked about. It was a huge open room, almost the entire area of the third floor, without partitions. Desks and tables and people and square support pillars made an undifferentiated jumble in front of her eyes, all the way across to the far windows.

  A man was bearing down on her from the right, his expression grim, his hands full of papers and pencils. She said, “I’m looking for—”

  “Look out!” Unslowing, he shoved past her, knocking her back into the closing elevator door, heedlessly hurrying on.

  Astonished, she stared after him. A bank of four elevators stood here, of which Sara had come up in the second from the right. In front of the last elevator to the left was placed a long conference table, one of its narrow ends pushed flat against the elevator door. Chairs lined both long sides of this table, with a second line of chairs ranked behind the first. Hurrying people converged now from everywhere in the room, taking seats at the table. The rude man was among them, spreading his papers and pencils at a place halfway down this side.

  Sara moved out away from the elevators, deeper into the room, to get a better view of that odd scene, and as she did so—the last arrivals were just flinging themselves into their chairs—the elevator door slid silendy open, and what was inside was not a normal elevator but an actual and complete office. Sara stared.

  It was a large space for an elevator, but rather small for an office. Its paneled walls were decorated with framed photos. A trophy case stood at the rear, a black leather sofa to one side, cabinetry on the other containing a TV screen, video machine and stereo equipment. In the center of the room/elevator bulked a large walnut desk and behind it two men, one seated and the other standing.

  As Sara continued to move sideways, staring at this apparition, a humming sound was heard and the walnut desk slid forward to clunk against the end of the table. The seated man was conveyed along with his desk, while the standing man stepped forward, maintaining his position just behind the seated man’s right elbow.

  “Good morning,” growled the seated man in a raspy voice, glaring at everybody around the conference table. He was burly, about fifty, with puffy cheeks and bristly black hair and a low knobby forehead.

  “Good morning, sir,” or “Good morning, Mr. DeMassi,” raggedly responded the people at the table. So that, Sara thought, was the boss himself, Bruno DeMassi, editor and publisher and owner of the Weekly Galaxy. She didn’t know what she’d expected, exactly, but something rather more Perry White and less Don Corleone.

  “So,” growled DeMassi. “We ready to go to work?”

  “Yes, sir,” his subjects responded.

  “Pass ’em up,” DeMassi ordered, and, as sheets of paper were passed toward him from hand to hand, he picked up a twelve-ounce bottle of Hein- eken and downed a slug.

  “Hey!” cried an outraged voice just behind Sara. She turned to see that she had almost backed into a desk at which a woman sat making grease pencil remarks on the backs of photographs. This woman, glaring indignandy at Sara and pointing her grease pencil at the floor, said, “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see the wall?”

  Wall? Sara looked down. The floor was covered with neutral gray industrial carpeting, but now she noticed that there was also a two-inchwide black line of tape running along atop the carpet. Following it with her eyes, Sara saw that it ran straight for several feet, then made a sharp right turn. Beyond it was another similar line. In fact, everywhere she looked there were more black lines.

  Possibly a hundred people were present in this vast space, in addition to the couple of dozen involved in the odd scene in the elevator, and Sara, looking around, now realized that those who were in motion moved in somewhat unnatural ways, with abrupt right-angled turns and unnecessary maneuvers that could only be explained by these black lines on the floor. The people moved around the giant room as though on tracks, as in some complex medieval mechanical toy.

  “Will you get out of my squaricle!” the woman demanded.

  “Sorry.” Sara stepped back across the black line.

  “Visitor, eh?” the woman said, reading the badge Sara had affixed to her shoulder bag strap.

  Becoming less annoyed, and pointing elsewhere with the grease pencil, she said, “If you want to talk to me, come through the door space.”

  “I just want to—”

  “If you want to talk to me,” the woman repeated, getting indignant all over again, “come through the door space ”

  “Sorry.”

  Now I’m doing it, Sara thought, as she followed the black line around to the right to where it stopped, only to start again thirty-two inches later, leaving—as the woman had said—a door space. Sara stepped through. “I just got here,” she apologized.

  “I could tell,” the woman said.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Harsch.”

  The woman pointed with her grease pencil again, this time toward the elevator/office. “That’s him over there,” she said, “standing behind Massa.” Apparently it was all right to look through the nonwalls, even though you weren’t supposed to walk through them. Looking, Sara for the first time studied the man in the elevator/office with Bruno DeMassi. Tall, thin, sixtyish, nearly bald with a low fringe of thin dead gray hair, a gaunt face with a hawk nose and ice-gray eyes, Jacob Harsch looked about as warm and appealing and human as Torquemada.

  Sara looked at him, head bowed, hunched forward slightly like a vulture, as he and DeMassi read the papers that had been handed forward, and she felt a little chill. “He looks busy,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t interrupt.”

  Massa read aloud, “ ‘How to Give a Party.’ ” He looked up, glaring along the table at Binx Radwell. “Binx? What the fuck is this?”

  Binx Radwell was a thirty-two-year-old blond man covered with a layer of baby fat and panic. A sheen of perspiration always lay on him, and his constant smile begged for salvation while acknowledging there was none. Teeth sparkling, eyebrows waggling up and down, he said, “That’s it, Mr. DeMassi. How to give a party, right there in your own home. That survey of the readership, sir, you remember, they’re a lot of very insecure people, socially inse—”

  “Course they’re insecure,” Massa said, “they don’t know their ass from a fire hydrant. What’s this party?”

  Binx jigged on his chair. “Well,” he said, “we explain how to be a host, a hostess, how you—” Massa frowned. “You mean a party?” Waving his hands over his head, he said, “With hats?”

  “Well, not necessarily hats,” Binx said. “We can do it without the hats. The point is, the people are coming into your house, now what the hell do you do?”

  DeMassi, chewing this idea, found it without savor. His red pencil drew a line through “How to Give a Party.” Only Massa was permitted to own and to use a red pencil at the Galaxy. That way, all orders written in red were known to be genuine. A staffer found with a red pencil on the property would be assumed to be a counterfeiter, and would be fired at once. Drawing a second line and then a third through the rejected offering, Massa said, “People don’t go to parties.”

  Binx nodded, smiling spastically.

  To delay the meeting with Mr. Harsch as long as possible, Sara continued to roam the giant room, being careful not to cross any more black lines. Away to the right, some distance from the elevators, she came upon an area where the black lines dwindled away and where there were instead eight very long tables, one behind the other. Ten or eleven people were seated at each table, all facing toward the main part of the room and looking mostly like the banks of volunteers manning the phones at a telethon. Foot-high wooden dividers spaced along the tables gave each of these people his or her own little area, and on these rather small patches of space were typewriters, telephones, cassette recorders, steno pads, cups filled with pens and pencils, ashtrays, reference books, here and there phone books, here and there a framed family photo or an African violet or a small comic statue.

  These, it was clear, w
ere the Galaxy’s reporters. About a third of them banged away at typewriters or jotted things in memo pads, but the majority were on the phone, making call after call. Moving unobtrusively among them, Sara listened to what the reporters were saying.

  “What did the interior of the spaceship look like?”

  “I’m calling from the Barbara Walters show. Of course this is the Barbara Walters show; would the Barbara Walters show he to you?”

  “And when you served the meal, you did observe that they were holding hands, is that right? Or, okay, their hands were on the table, near one another, and they were looking at one another in a very passionate way. Would you describe it as a very passionate look?”

  “Professor, would you be amazed if I told you I had a three-foot-tall Saturnian in my office right this minute?”

  “Doctor, as a recognized authority on arthritis, could you comment on—I’m from the Weekly Galaxy, and—Doctor? Doctor?”

  “Something I can do for you, honey?”

  “Oh!” Sara said. “No, I’m just waiting to talk to Mr. Harsch.” And she drifted away toward the conference at the elevators again.

  Massa had finished with Binx Radwell. Binx mopped his brow and his neck and the tender inside of his elbows, as his spastic smile semaphored distress calls—I’m sinking! Help me! I’m drowning!—to people who had troubles of their own.

  Massa was now considering Jack Ingersoll’s list, and his red pencil had been working, working. Jack’s manner, when things went poorly, was to become more and more still, more and more unmoving and closed in upon himself; at the moment, he could have been a granite statue, unblinking eyes fixed on Massa’s furrowed forehead.

  Which cleared, abruptly, like a spring day. “ ‘Does Sex Cure Gallstones?’ “ Massa read aloud, and looked up with a happy smile. “That’d be good news, wouldn’t it?”

  “Amen to that, sir,” Harsch said, in his bloodless voice, as the assembled editors feebly chuckled.

  Massa swigged beer, then pointed the bottle at Jack. “Can you give me a positive yes?”

  “I’ll do my best, sir,” Jack said.

  “Don’t do your best, boy. Do my best.” His head lowered once more, and he read, “ ‘The Galaxy Clones a Human Being.’ ” Awed, he looked down the table at Jack. “We do? We could do that?”

  “I’d need help from the science staff, of course,” Jack said. “It might—”

  “Which human being?” Massa asked. “Man or woman?”

  “Well, I was thinking of a man originally—”

  “Where’s the cheesecake?”

  “We could do a woman, of course,” Jack conceded. “But remember, sir, it’s going to be a baby for—”

  “A what?” Massa glowered. “You mean we don’t start with a person?”

  “No, sir,” Jack said, with every appearance of calm. “Clones have to be bom like anybody—”

  “You mean we got a baby around here for twenty years?”

  “Well, we don’t have to—”

  Binx, who at odd moments tried to help other people, even though no one ever tried to help him, said, “It might be a mascot, sir.”

  “Oh, no,” Massa said, with a negative wag of the beer bottle. “We had that goat that time, and it didn’t work out. A baby isn’t gonna be better than a goat.”

  Jack gave Binx a quick expressionless look as Massa redlined the clone. Binx smiled like a poison victim.

  Massa read, “ There Are Alligators in New York City.’ ”

  “Sewers!” Jack cried.

  Potentially offended, Massa glared down the table. “What?”

  “New York City sewers,” Jack explained. “That’s where the alligators are.”

  “Bushwah,” muttered an editor to Jack’s right.

  Massa waved Jack’s paper. “Not what it says here.”

  “My secretary must have—”

  “Sewers.” Massa wrote it in, using a black pen, then picked up the red again, held it poised, read aloud: “ There Are Alligators in New York City Sewers.’ ” An infinitesimal pause, and the decision: “No.” The red pencil drew the lines. “That’s anti-Florida,” Massa said. “Also, there’s nobody in New York.” It was well known that Massa had stayed completely away from the Greater New York Area for the last seventeen years mostly because three of his cousins in the garbage and jukebox industry would put several bullets in his head if he ever did go back. Before the move to Florida, the Galaxy had been published out of New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  “Can I help you, young lady?”

  Everybody looked up at the cold sound of Harsch’s voice, to see him looking at an attractive but apparently nervous young woman dawdling near the table and fiddling with her shoulder bag. She was, Jack noted, the girl he had seen from the window, and she looked better close up.

  Though nervous. “Oh,” she said, tripping over herself by trying to back up without appearing to back up. “Mr. Harsch? I’m a new employee, I’m Sara—”

  “All right,” Harsch said. “Fine.” To Massa he said, “What have we got left?”

  “Just Boy Cartwright,” Massa said, rifing papers. “He’s no trouble, you go on.”

  Across the table from Jack, Boy Cartwright, a despicable Englishman of about forty, face puffy from years of alcohol and starch, smiled the smug smile of a winner. Boy was no trouble. Boy was a good Boy.

  Massa squinted toward the new girl. He said, “She’ll talk to scientists, right?”

  “They do like a college girl,” Harsch agreed. Harsch left the elevator to talk to the college girl, and Massa considered Boy’s list. “ The Argentine Navy Caused the Bermuda Triangle,’ ” he read, and lifted his head to show a happy smile. “That’s terrific, Boy. Terrific.”

  Boy purred, eyes half closed in feline pleasure.

  Three

  The strange thing was, Sara had turned the job down back when it was offered. That was a year and a half ago, up in Syracuse, when the recruiters came around in the spring to talk to the journalism graduates. The Galaxy had a terrible reputation, a garish supermarket tabloid full of TV stars and creatures from outer space, but the recruiter had been a sensible, plausible woman, not much older than Sara herself, and she’d been tempted. Here was a chance to move from the cold dark Northeast to sunny Florida, to work in what sounded like a fun environment, to get a fabulous salary.

  Too fabulous, that’s what the problem had been. Thirty-five thousand dollars a year for a trainee? There had to be a catch in it somewhere. Weird scenarios of white slavery had crossed her mind —Florida was, after all, the same direction as South America—which was ridiculous, of course, but there had to be something wrong with it somewhere, or why would they pay so much? Besides, through a friend at school, she’d been offered a low-paying job on a small New England paper. It wasn’t so far from home, it was real journalism on a comfortably small scale, and the editor looked a lot like Ed Asner. And the salary didn’t make her nervous.

  But here she was, after all, a year and a half later, and everything made her nervous, including the ice-eyed Jacob Harsch, approaching now from the elevator, while everybody else returned their careful attention to Mr. DeMassi. A cold smile on his cold face, Harsch made his way among the black lines—even he obeyed, she noticed— and offered a hand that Sara was not surprised to find also cold. He held hers briefly, saying, “Remind me of your name, dear.”

  “Sara Joslyn.”

  “Yes, I remember your resume.” His cold hand on her elbow, he led her away from the editorial meeting, down along the row of elevators. He was very tall, and he bent his head above her shoulder, speaking confidentially in a raspy voice. “You worked for a newspaper in Vermont.”

  “New Hampshire,” she corrected. “It closed. Or it was merged, actually.”

  “We won’t be closing,” Harsch said, merely pointing out the fact, not speaking with any particular satisfaction. “We fulfill a need, and people come to us,” he explained. They had come to a stop past the elevators, in an open spac
e just before a librarylike area of tall bookshelves filled with phone directories and other reference books. “We think of ourselves as a community service organization.”

  “Oh?” Sara said politely.

  “Not only in our hard news,” Harsch told her, “but also in our features. Our audience is the modem woman, in all her complexity.”

  Remembering the gaudy front pages mounted on the entry walls, Sara nodded soberly, saying, “I see.”

  “Not only as a housewife and mother,” Harsch went on, his manner calm and secure, “but as a consumer, a sophisticated audience for today’s entertainment, and as the keeper of the flame of Western civilization. We think we here at the Galaxy know today’s more knowledgeable, more interested, more involved woman pretty well, and our newsstand figures back us up. Our average weekly sale is comfortably above five million copies, which gives us sufficient financial strength to be able to go out and aggressively get the stories we want, the stories we know our reader is interested in.”

  Sara nodded, listening, keeping her thoughts to herself. This was the way the recruiter had talked, a year and a half ago, but the recruiter had spoken more passionately, selling the concept. Harsch didn’t sell; he was more like a priest describing his religion. His assurance was so total that neither miracles nor agnostics could faze him. Sara, listening, wondered if the man could possibly believe what he was saying. We’re all just here for the buck, aren’t we? It didn’t seem a good question to ask.

  And what about her dead man, the man with the bullet in his head out on the highway? Her first story in the new job, and she’d imagined herself running in with the news, flinging herself into a chair in front of a typewriter, banging out the copy while co-workers in the comers of her imagination murmured, “The new kid’s okay, you know?” She already had her lead: “The car radio played a sprightly melody, but the driver couldn’t hear it anymore. He was dead.”