Nick called Yvette in New York from the Cleveland airport at 12:55 A.M. The answering service said she still hadn’t called in for her messages. He was getting cross-eyed with fury over her perversity. Why was it that only the women one loved behaved like this and never the women one was indifferent to?
The Cleveland flight got Nick to New York at six twenty in the morning. He checked into an airport motel and left a call for half past ten. At eleven thirty he was riding the high-speed elevator in the National Magazine building to get some kind of a reasonable explanation from Harry Greenwood as to why the magazine had sent him to a man in Cleveland who, according to the unimpeachable source of Frank Mayo, did not exist as far as the Syndicate was concerned. Nick wanted to have Greenwood’s undoubtedly plausible explanation in hand when he made his report to his father about the Mentor meeting.
His name was sent along to Greenwood’s office from the editorial reception desk. After about seven minutes he was told Mr. Greenwood would be unable to see him. Was there someone else who could help him?
“Perhaps his secretary doesn’t know I had a meeting with Mr. Greenwood here two nights ago. I am Thomas Kegan’s son.” The receptionist repeated Nick’s message to Mr. Greenwood’s secretary. There was a short wait, then the receptionist said Mr. Thirkield was to go to the thirty-eighth floor, please.
A young woman was waiting for him at the elevator bank. “Mr. Thirkield?” He followed her to the uptown side of the building at the eastern end. She led him into an anteroom just as a portly man with heavy eyeglasses and an imperturbable look came through from the far room. “This is Mr. Thirkield,” the young woman said.
“What’s this about a meeting we had?” the man asked.
“I’m here to see Harry Greenwood.”
“I’m Greenwood.”
“Like hell you are,” Nick said pleasantly, managing to smile.
“Hey, Charlotte,” the portly man yelled. The young woman reappeared. “Who am I?” he asked.
“You are Mr. Harry Greenwood.”
Greenwood said to Nick, “And you’re Tim Kegan’s brother?”
Nick nodded with bewilderment.
“Sit down,” Greenwood said. “No. You better come inside and tell me what this is all about.”
Greenwood’s office walls were lined with cork to which production schedules, assignment sheets and oddly shaped pieces of paper were pinned.
“Do you have a writer named Chantal Lamers?” Nick asked.
“On our staff?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“No?”
“You’d better tell me what happened.”
Nick told him how he had met Miss Lamers, who said she worked for the magazine. She had given him her direct-to-desk telephone. The magazine did have direct-to-desk phones? Greenwood nodded. Nick had called Miss Lamers to arrange a meeting. In an office two floors below, off a corridor behind the reception desk, she had introduced him to a man she called Harry Greenwood, who said he was the editor of the National Magazine. He gave a careful description of Lamers and the false Greenwood.
“I can’t say until I clear it with my father. But you have been very helpful. Thank you very much.”
***
Nick told the cab to take him to Chantal’s address on East Thirty-first Street.
The doorman was a ratty, if beautifully uniformed, short man who did not look strong enough to protect the tenants from the neighborhood children. He barred the way. He said no one named Chantal Lamers lived in the building. Nick asked him how long he had worked there. The doorman said three and a half years. Nick gave him three one-dollar bills and described Chantal carefully. The doorman shrugged and said they just didn’t have any good-looking tenants of any name anywhere in the building. “I don’t say this as criticism, buddy,” the doorman said, trying to earn the three bucks, “but we have never had a pretty woman live in this building. There could be a jinx on this building.”
Nick went to the Walpole Hotel. He felt dazed. Two people who were as convincing in their ways as any two people he had ever met had melted away as if they had never existed. Yet he knew Chantal Lamers existed, because he could still smell her and feel her all too solid flesh, which was incapable of thawing and resolving itself into a dew. Why had she done it? Where was the point of doing what she had done? Whatever her reason, when could it have been planned?—because everything that had happened between them had been accidental. Her car had been wrecked. Her forehead had been cut. The garageman at the crossroads that bore the improbable name of Jane Garnet’s Corners, on the Muskogee road, had volunteered the information about the two stoned men who had driven her off the road. She hadn’t called him in New York, he had called her. He had wandered completely out of her life; then, because he had told her what he thought he needed, she had taken him to the National Magazine Offices and had produced the magazine’s confidential files bearing the cabalistic marks of the magazine’s staff. Then, absolutely authentically, she had fallen in love with him.
How, or why, or because of what absurdity should she have pretended to do a thing like that? No one saw anything wrong with simple lust anymore. Subterfuges were silly when two adults wanted to couple for pleasure. Why had any of it happened? It had no shape. It made no sense. What had made any sense since he left Brunei? Keifetz was dead. Nick still could not overtake that terrible fact. Keifetz was dead. One-third of the people in the world who gave a damn about him had been a big breakfast for a shark. Nick knew it was his fault. Keifetz was his friend. If Keifetz had been less of his friend he could be alive. Miles, Tate, Kullers, Sis Ryan and Coney were all dead, as if they had all been playing cards together and he had thrown a live grenade in among them. They had one thing in common and it caused their death: they all knew Nicholas Thirkield. But why was he still alive, eluding such expert killers, who had put away twenty-three people, including Tim? Where was the missing piece? What was its shape? How had it suddenly happened, after almost fifteen years, that he was wandering around in a steam room, causing the deaths of all the indistinct shapes he happened to bump into? He was on some kind of a bummer through American mythology, a demi-god. Look at the folks: Dawson, the world’s richest and most spectacular recluse; Ellamae Irving, a suicidal movie queen; Mayo, a grand vizier of the underworld. It was all so vulgar, with illusion and falsehood used to construct dwellings of steam, buildings on wheels which had rolled him up streets, down corridors. Turk Fletcher had faded into Captain Heller who became Z. K. Dawson who resolved into Chantal Lamers who blended into a dead kitten and an English hit man until all of them fused into Casper Junior who was William Casper or was it Casper Williams. Everyone disappeared almost as soon as he began to talk to them.
Someone, somewhere was trying to teach him futility. This came to him with the clarity of a night ball game—shadowless and static. He had to try to keep in mind that, so far, only one pattern seemed to exist: a pattern of confusion and exhaustion intended to teach him that all striving was fruitless, that when he understood the futility, he would find peace and safety for the people he loved. If that were so, he had to find Yvette and keep her with him. He felt smothered by the terrible fear that these people in the shadows around him were capable of doing to Yvette what they had done to Keifetz and twenty-two others. But if he was on this bummer through a fun house of the American myths, surely Pa’s money could save them—Yvette and himself—surely Pa’s money was the magic cloak that could cover them and let them survive any darkness?
***
He left the elevator at the tower floor, opened the door of the apartment and walked into the foyer.
Keifetz was asleep in a large chair that had been placed to face the door. There was a large manila envelope in his lap. Nick stared at him. Nausea hit him. The door slammed behind him. Keifetz awoke suddenly, came to his feet reflexively in one leap, recognized Nick as he focused and said, “Jesus, I thought you’d never get here, baby.”