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Chapter 8:
Jason
Taverner did not, at the moment, wish to return to Kathy. Nor, he decided,
did he want to try Heather Hart once again. He tapped his coat pocket; he
still had his money, and, because of the police pass, he could feel free
to travel anywhere. A pol-pass was a passport to the entire planet; until
they APB-ed on him he could travel as far as he wanted, including
unimproved areas such as specific, acceptable jungle-infested islands in
the South Pacific. There they might not find him for months, not with what
his money would buy in an open-area spot such as that.
I've got
three things going for me, he realized. I've got money, good looks, and
personality. Four things: I also have forty-two years of experience as a
six.
An
apartment.
But, he
thought, if I rent an apartment, the rotive manager will be required by
law to take my fingerprints; they'll be routinely mailed to Pol-Dat
Central ... and when the police have discovered that my ID cards are
fakes, they'll find they have a direct line to me. So there goes that.
What I need,
he said to himself, is to find someone who already has an apartment. In
their name, with their prints.
And that
means another girl.
Where do I
find such a one? he asked himself, and had the answer already on his
tongue: at a first-rate cocktail lounge. The kind many women go to, with a
three-man combo playing fob jazzy, preferably blacks. Well dressed.
Am I well
enough dressed, though? he wondered, and took a good look at his silk suit
under the steady white-and-red light of a huge AAMCO sign. Not his best
but nearly so ... but wrinkled. Well, in the gloom of a cocktail lounge it
wouldn't show.
He hailed a
cab, and presently found himself quibbling toward the more acceptable part
of the city to which he was accustomed - accustomed, at least, during the
most recent years of his life, his career when he had reached the very
top.
A club, he
thought, where I've appeared. A club I really know. Know the maitre d',
the hatcheck girl, the flower girl ... unless they, like me, are somehow
now changed.
But as yet
it appeared that nothing but himself had changed. His
circumstances. Not theirs.
The Blue Fox
Room of the Hayette Hotel in Reno. He had played there a number of times;
he knew the layout and the staff backward and forward.
To the cab
he said, "Reno."
Beautifully,
the cab peeled off in a great swooping right hand motion; he felt himself
going with it, and enjoyed it. The cab picked up speed: they had entered a
virtually unused air corridor, and the upper velocity limit was perhaps as
high as twelve hundred m.p.h.
"I'd like to
use the phone," Jason said.
The left
wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque
loop.
He knew the
number of the Blue Fox Room by heart; he dialed it, waited, heard a click
and then a mature male voice saying, "Blue Fox Room, where Freddy
Hydrocephalic is appearing in two shows nightly, at eight and at twelve;
only thirty dollars' cover charge and girls provided while you watch. May
I help you?"
"Is this
good old Jumpy Mike?" Jason said. "Good old Jumpy Mike himself?"
"Yes, this
certainly is." The formality of the voice ebbed. "Who am I speaking to,
may I ask?" A warm chuckle.
Taking a
deep breath, Jason said, "This is Jason Taverner."
"I'm sorry,
Mr. Taverner." Jumpy Mike sounded puzzled. "Right now at the moment I
can't quite -"
"It's been a
long time," Jason interrupted. "Can you give me a table toward the front
of the room -"
"The Blue
Fox Room is completely sold out, Mr. Taverner," Jumpy Mike rumbled in his
fat way. "I'm very sorry. "
"No table at
all?" Jason said. "At any price?"
"Sorry, Mr.
Taverner, none." The voice faded in the direction of remoteness. "Try us
in two weeks." Good old Jumpy Mike hung up.
Silence.
Jesus shit
Christ, Jason said to himself. "God," he said aloud. "God damn it." His
teeth ground against one another, sending sheets of pain through his
trigeminal nerve.
"New
instructions, big fellow?" the cab asked tonelessly.
"Make it Las
Vegas," Jason grated. I'll try the Nellie Melba Room of the Drake's Arms,
he decided. Not too long ago he had had good luck there, at a time when
Heather Hart had been fulfilling an engagement in Sweden. A reasonable
number of reasonably high class chicks hung out there, gambling, drinking,
listening to the entertainment, getting it on. It was worth a try, if the
Blue Fox Room - and the others like it - were closed to him. After all,
what could he lose?
***
Half an hour
later the cab deposited him on the roof field of the Drake's Arms.
Shivering in the chill night air, Jason made his way to the royal descent
carpet; a moment later he had stepped from it into the
warmth-color-light-movement of the Nellie Melba Room.
The time:
seven-thirty. The first show would begin soon. He glanced at the notice;
Freddy Hydrocephalic was appearing here, too, but doing a lesser tape at
lower prices. Maybe he'll remember me, Jason thought. Probably not. And
then, as he thought more deeply on it, he thought, no chance at all.
If Heather
Hart didn't remember him no one would.
He seated
himself at the crowded bar - on the only stool left - and, when the
bartender at last noticed him, ordered scotch and honey, mulled. A pat of
butter floated in it.
"That'll be
three dollars," the bartender said.
"Put it on
my -" Jason began and then gave up. He brought out a five.
And then he
noticed her.
Seated
several seats down. She had been his mistress years ago; he had not seen
her in a hell of a while. But she still has a good figure, he observed,
even though she's gotten a lot older. Ruth Rae. Of all people.
One thing
about Ruth Rae: she was smart enough not to let her skin become too
tanned. Nothing aged a woman's skin faster than tanning, and few somen
seemed to know it. For a woman Ruth's age - he guessed she was now
thirty-eight or-nine - tanning would have turned her skin into wrinkled
leather.
And, too,
she dressed well. She showed off her excellent figure. If only time had
avoided its constant series of appointments with her face anyhow, Ruth
still had beautiful black hair, all coiled in an upsweep at the back of
her head. Featherplastic eyelashes, brilliant purple streaks across her
cheek, as if she had been seared by psychedelic tiger claws.
Dressed in a
colorful sari, barefoot - as usual she had kicked off her high-heeled
shoes somewhere - and not wearing her glasses, she did not strike him as
bad-looking. Ruth Rae, he mused. Sews her own clothes. Bifocals which she
never wears when anyone's around ... excluding me. Does she still read the
Book-of-the-Month selection? Does she still get off reading those endless
dull novels about sexual misdeeds in weird, small, but apparently normal
Midwestern towns?
That was one
factor about Ruth Rae: her obsession with sex. One year that he recalled
she had laid sixty men, not including him: he had entered and left
earlier, when the stats were not so high.
And she had
always liked his music. Ruth Rae liked sexy vocalists, pop ballads
and sweet - sickeningly sweet strings. In her New York
apartment at one time she had set up a huge quad system and more or less
lived inside it, eating dietetic sandwiches and drinking fake frosty slime
drinks made out of nothing. Listening forty-eight hours at a stretch to
disc after disc by the Purple People Strings, which he abominated.
Because her
general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one
of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take
apart.
What else
did he remember about her? Tablespoons of oily yellow fluid every morning:
vitamin E. Strangely enough it did not seem to be a shuck in her case; her
erotic stamina increased with each spoonful. Lust virtually leaked out of
her.
And as he
recalled she hated animals. This made him think about Kathy and her cat
Domenico. Ruth and Kathy would never groove, he said to himself. But that
doesn't matter; they'll never meet.
Sliding from
his stool he carried his drink down the bar until he stood before Ruth
Rae. He did not expect her to know him, but, at one time, she had found
him unable to avoid ... why wouldn't that be true now? No one was a better
judge of sexual opportunity than Ruth.
"Hi," he
said.
Foggily -
because she did not have on her glasses - Ruth Rae lifted her head,
scrutinized him. "Hi," she rasped in her bourbon-bounded voice. "Who are
you?"
Jason said,
"We met a few years ago in New York. I was doing a walk-on in an episode
of The Phantom Baller ... as I recall it, you had charge of
costumes."
"The
episode," Ruth Rae rasped, "where the Phantom Baller was set upon by
pirate queers from another time-period." She laughed, smiled up at him.
"What's your name?" she inquired, jiggling her wire-supported exposed
boobs.
"Jason
Taverner," he said.
"Do you
remember my name?"
"Oh yes," he
said. "Ruth Rae."
"It's Ruth
Gomen now," she rasped. "Sit down." She glanced around her, saw no vacant
stools. "Table over there." She stepped supercarefully from her stool and
careened in the direction of a vacant table; he took her arm, guided her
along. Presently, after a moment of difficult navigation, he had her
seated, with himself close beside her.
"You look
every bit as beautiful -" he began, but she cut him off brusquely.
"I'm old,"
she rasped. "I'm thirty-nine."
"That's not
old," Jason said. "I'm forty-two."
"It's all
right for a man. Not for a woman." Blearily she stared into her
half-raised martini. "Do you know what Bob does? Bob Gomen? He raises
dogs. Big, loud, pushy dogs with long hair. It gets into the
refrigerator." She sipped moodily at her martini; then, all at once, her
face glowed with animation; she turned toward him and said, "You don't
look forty-two. You look all right! Do you know what I think? You ought to
be in TV or the movies."
Jason said
cautiously, "I have been in TV. A little."
"Oh, like
the Phantom Baller Show." She nodded. "Well, let's face it; neither
of us made it."
"I'll drink
to that," he said, ironically amused; he sipped at his mulled scotch and
honey. The pat of butter had melted.
"I believe I
do remember you," Ruth Rae said. "Didn't you have some blueprints for a
house out on the Pacific, a thousand miles away from Australia? Was that
you?
"That was
me," he said, lying.
"And you
drove a Rolls-Royce flyship."
"Yes," he
said. That part was true.
Ruth Rae
said, smiling, "Do you know what I'm doing here? Do you have any idea? I'm
trying to get to see, to meet, Freddy Hydrocephalic. I'm in love with
him." She laughed the throaty laugh he remembered from the old days. "I
keep sending him notes reading 'I love you,' and he writes typed notes
back saying 'I don't want to get involved; I have personal problems.'" She
laughed again, and finished her drink.
"Another?"
Jason said, rising.
"No." Ruth
Rae shook her head. "I don't drink anymore. There was a period" - she
paused, her face troubled - "l wonder if anything like that has ever
happened to you. I wouldn't think so, to look at you."
"What
happened?"
Ruth Rae
said, fooling with her empty glass, "I drank all the time. Starting at
nine o'clock in the morning. And you know what it did for me? It made me
look older. I looked fifty. Goddamn booze. Whatever you fear will happen
to you, booze will make it happen. In my opinion booze is the great enemy
of life. Do you agree?"
"I'm not
sure," Jason said. "I think life has worse enemies than booze."
"I guess so.
Like the forced-labor camps. Do you know they tried to send me to one last
year? I really had a terrible time; I had no money - I hadn't met Bob
Gomen yet - and I worked for a savings-and-loan company. One day a deposit
in cash came in ... fifty-dollar-bill stuff, three or four of them." She
introspected for a time. "Anyhow, I took them and put the deposit slip and
envelope into the shredder. But they caught me. Entrapment - a setup."
"Oh," he
said.
"But - see,
I had a thing going with my boss. The pols wanted to drag me off to a
forced- labor camp - one in Georgia - where I'd be gangbanged to death by
rednecks, but he protected me, I still don't know how he did it, but they
let me go. I owe that man a lot, and I never see him anymore. You never
see the ones who really love you and help you; you're always involved with
strangers."
"Do you
consider me a stranger?" Jason asked. He thought to himself, I remember
one more thing about you, Ruth Rae. She always maintained an impressively
expensive apartment. No matter who she happened to be married to: she
always lived well.
Ruth Rae
eyed him questioningly. "No, I consider you a friend."
"Thanks."
Reaching, he took hold of her dry hand and held it a second, letting go at
exactly the right time.
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