The Seersucker Whipsaw (9 page)

It was a long speech and during it Shartelle had hooked his thumbs into his vest, cocked his head slightly to one side, and studied a corner where the ceiling met the walls. He nodded emphatically whenever Coit came to a period. I found it a disconcerting response.

“You see, gentlemen,” Coit went on, “you have the opportunity to bring to the Albertian voters the chance to decide the future of their country. You can present them with a clear-cut, well-delineated picture of the issues involved. If you succeed, you will have performed a tremendous public service.”

Shartelle kept his thumbs in his vest. His chair was tilted back now, and his eyes were still on the far high corner of the room. “Your remarks are most kind, Mr. Coit, and I'm glad you've elevated our job of rounding up the necessary votes to such an exalted mission. It makes me proud, but I hope not too proud, because pride's a sin as you well know. So just in case we don't make the issues as clear-cut as you'd like them, I'd like to share the credit—or the blame—with the boys who are going to be handling Chief Akomolo's opposition … Dr. Kologo and Sir Alakada.”

Shartelle kept on staring at the corner so perhaps he didn't see the hair cracks in Coit's composure. Or perhaps he did, because he gave it another exploratory tap.

“There are other outside forces involved in this, you know. One of them is the biggest agency in the world—in the political sense anyhow. It's worked the Far East, Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East….” He paused. “South America.”

I watched Coit. The composure was flaking a bit. His mouth was slightly open. His hands were worrying a ballpoint pen.

“It's quite an agency to go up against,” Shartelle said, still tilted back in his chair, still studying the top of the room. “You're familiar with—” He paused again, this time to light a cigarette. Coit almost squirmed. “You're familiar with … Renesslaer?” When Shartelle spoke the name he brought the chair down on its front legs and the metal caps banged nicely on the gray linoleum floor. Coit jumped. Not much, but it was a jump. It was hard to tell whether it was because of the noise of the Renesslaer name. He stared at Shartelle.

“Renesslaer?”

“Right. That's the agency I was talking about. They're big all over the world, you know, and they're going to handle old Alhaji Sir Alakada etcetera up north.”

“I've heard of them,” Coit said. His tone was stiff. He didn't seem to care anymore whether we liked him or not. “Are you sure of this?”

“Oh, quite sure,” Shartelle said. “I've been told the deal's all signed and sealed. The boys from Renesslaer ought to be drifting through here any day now and then you'll have to give them that nice little talk of yours about their chance to delineate the issues. They like stuff like that.”

Coit said nothing. His hands were now pressed palm up against the bottom of his desk drawer. You could see the muscles bulge in his neck. They were as visible as the bitter dislike in his eyes. He knew then that Shartelle knew. Worse, he knew that Shartelle had been playing with him. Cubebing him, Shartelle called it for some reason I could never understand and was too proud to ask about.

Shartelle got up and stuck out his hand. “Mr. Coit, it has been a pure pleasure to have had this little talk with you. I just hope that we'll measure up to your expectations.”

“We're certainly going to try,” I said nicely and shook his hand.

But he was a pro. Unless you had been watching carefully, you wouldn't have noticed the hair cracks. They were all gone now. He smiled at us, walked over to the door, and held it open. “Gentlemen, I hope we can meet again soon. You have been most informative. I'll watch your progress—and that of the Renesslaer firm—with much interest, I assure you.” We started out and Coit said: “By the way—is there—or have you heard of, any agency handling Dr. Kologo in the east?”

Shartelle stopped and looked at Coit's eyes. Their faces were not more than eight inches apart. “Why, no, Mr. Coit, I haven't. Have you?”

“No, I haven't either.”

“If you hear of anything like that, would you let us know?” Shartelle asked.

“Of course,” Coit said.

Shartelle looked at him some more and nodded his head slightly. “Of course.”

We walked out into the hall and found our way to the front of the Consulate. We walked out of the pleasant seventy-two degrees into the ninty-nine degrees that was the Barkandu afternoon. Both of us hastily put on sunglasses. Shartelle smoked another cigarette while we waited for William to bring the car up.

“You ticked him off,” I said.

“Some. He's a cool customer.”

“He is that.”

“We'll warm him up,” Shartelle said. “Come Labor Day he'll sizzle.”

Chapter

7

On the way back to the hotel, the car got caught in a midafternoon traffic snarl and we were forced to inch along Bailey's Boulevard at four miles an hour. There was no breeze and we sweltered in the thick, palpable heat that made me want to gasp. As a concession to it, Shartelle unbuttoned his vest, took off his slouch hat and fanned himself.

“Fans,” he said.

“What?”

“Fans. Remember the funeral parlor ones, the kind that contained advertising?”

“Like the one that the Great Commoner used during the Scopes trial?”

“Like that. We're gonna get us some, Pete. You want to make a note of it?”

I took out a notebook and wrote down “fans.”

“How many?” I asked.

“A couple of million,” he said. “Better make it three.”

I wrote down “3,000,000” after fans. “Think they'll cinch it for us, huh?”

“We can't lose,” Shartelle said. “Not with three million fans.”

“To be crass, don't you think we'd better have a little commercial on them? Maybe a jingle?”

“You're the word man, boy. Just set yourself to composing.”

“I'll give it the afternoon.”

“Mastah want me drive?” William asked, skillfully missing a goat by an inch.

“When?” I asked.

“Now, Mastah.”

“No.”

“I go for brother's house,” he announced.

“You have a brother here in Barkandu?” Shartelle said.

“Many brothers, Mastah,” William said and smiled his big-toothed smile. “They give me chop. Go small-small time.”

“Okay. You go for brother small-small time,” Shartelle said. You be back at the hotel, six o'clock. Right?”

“Yes, Sah!” William said.

“How's my pidgin coming, William?” Shartelle asked.

“Very good, Sah,” he said and giggled. “Very nice.”

“What are your plans for the afternoon, Sahib?” I asked.

Shartelle looked out of the car window at the harbor. “Some harbor,” he said. “Well, I plan to get ahold of some hickory nuts and stain my face, slip into my burnoose, and flit about the bazaars to pick up the native gossip. Then I got some planning to do,” Shartelle went on, “and I do planning best when I'm in the solitude of my own counsel.”

“What you want to say politely without hurting my feelings is that you don't hold with the DDT theory of brainstorming during which everybody spews out everything and a pearl appears among the hawkings.”

Shartelle looked at me. “You don't honestly do that—you and Pig and all those grown men?” He sounded horrified.

“Honest to God.”

“Does it work?”

“Not for me. But then I'm the type who lurks in the wet forest and throws rocks at those cozily sitting around the camp fire.”

“You'd like to be asked to join, huh?”

“So I could say no.”

“You got problems, boy,” he said.

“I'm going swimming.”

“That's healthful. Let's meet for dinner about seven.”

“In the bar?”

“Good enough.”

At the hotel, Shartelle went up to his room and I found out from the Lebanese desk clerk that the hotel ran a shuttle car to a beach. There was a place to change on the beach, but no shower. I went upstairs and got my trunks, a white duck hat with a floppy brim, the biggest hotel towel I could find, and caught the Morris Minor shuttle. I was the only passenger.

At the beach there was a snack stand that sold Pepsi-Cola and Beck's Bier. I bought a Beck's in its tall green quart size, took it into the shack that served as a dressing room, changed and carried the beer and my clothes out to the beach. It was virtually deserted, except for three or four Albertian children who were running up and down in pursuit of a small brown dog with an enormous tail that waved ecstatically. They never caught the dog but nobody seemed to mind. I put my shoes down on the sand, folded my slacks, shirt and underwear and placed them on top of the shoes as carefully as a suicide who wants to leave something neat to commemorate a messy life. I spread the towel out on the beach, pulled at the brim of my white-duck hat, took a swig of beer, lighted a cigarette, and sat down on the towel and looked at the ocean.

Like the rest of the Dakotans, I felt that anything larger than a two-acre pond held the promise of wild adventure. The ocean was a body of unbearable expectation. I sat looking at the South Atlantic lace itself into combers as the Benguela current rolled up into the Gulf of Guinea. I put the cigarette out, squirmed the beer bottle firmly into the sand, and ran out into the sea. I caught a wave and dived through it. I could feel the undertow, strong and cold, pulling me out towards Fortaleza and Cayenne, eight thousand miles away. I decided I didn't want to go so I swam back, scrambling when my feet touched bottom. Then I tried it again and got the hang of the undertow, playing a game with it to see how long I could last without scrambling to get back. I was a less-than-average swimmer, but that made the game more interesting. If it had been raining, I could have stayed in my room at the hotel and played Russian roulette.

The cigarettes, the martinis, and English food had provoked my chronic malnutrition. Weariness forced me to quit my war against the sea. I stumbled back to the tidy pile of clothes, shook the sand out of the towel, and dried myself off.

The blue jeep drove down as far as it could, until the beach sloped too sharply, and then it stopped. The girl who was driving it got out and walked towards the dressing room shack. She knocked on the door and when there was no response, she went in. She was carrying one of those blue airline bags. The jeep had some white lettering on the top of its hood, but it was too far away for me to read.

I lighted another cigarette and picked up the bottle of Beck's from the sand and swallowed some. It was warm but wet. I watched the dressing shack and in a few minutes the girl came out and walked towards me carrying the airline bag and a large, black and red striped beach towel. She wore a white two-piece bathing suit that was almost a bikini. She moved with an awkward grace that signalled a total lack of self-consciousness.

Her hair was blond, almost white, as if she spent much time in the sun, and she wore it carelessly long. It framed a smooth tan face that would never conceal an emotion. The face was smiling as she walked towards me, swinging the blue bag and carrying the towel. The face was alive—the mouth was wide and full and the smile was dazzling white against the dark tan. She had kind, soft dark-brown eyes that you could learn to trust.

She was all girl. Her breasts formed tan half-moons where they peeked out above the top of her bathing suit. Her stomach sank flatly back from her rib cage and then rounded out nicely to her thighs. Her legs were long and she would stand at least five-seven in heels. It was all there, nicely shaped and molded, in almost perfect proportion, and she seemed totally unaware of it.

When she was twenty feet away she made the smile warmer and said: “Hi, there.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Would you mind watching my things while I go in? The last time I was here a couple of the kids made off with them and I had to drive back in my suit.” She spread the black and red towel on the sand and dropped the bag down on it.

“I'm Anne Kidd,” she said and extended her hand. I took it.

“Peter Upshaw.”

“You American?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn't tell by the way you speak, but then I haven't given you a chance to say anything, have I? But your hat's a dead giveaway. I haven't seen a hat like that since Daytona.”

“It's been in the family a long time.”

She smiled at me. “I'm just going in for a little while. Please don't go away.”

“I'll be here.”

She ran towards the water, and she ran well in the sand. She caught a wave and dived through it and then began to swim with a smooth, effortless Australian crawl. She swam as if she had spent a lot of time in the water. I liked to watch her. She swam for fifteen minutes and then she came running back up the beach, just a little pigeon-toed, but not much, her sunbleached hair hanging wet and straight to her shoulders. She remained lovely.