The Barbarous Coast Read online

  She ran and took off into the light-crossed air. Her body bowed and turned in a smooth flip-and-a-half, changed from a bird to a fish as it entered the water. The spectators applauded. One of them, an agile youth in a dinner jacket and his middle forties, took a flashbulb picture as she came dripping up the ladder. She shook the water out of her short black hair contemptuously, and retired to a corner to dry herself. I followed her.

  “Nice dive.”

  “You think so?” She turned up her taut brown face and I saw that she wasn’t a girl and hadn’t been for years. “I wouldn’t give myself a score of three. My timing was way off. I can do it with a twist when I’m in shape. But thank you anyway.”

  She toweled one long brown leg, and then the other, with a kind of impersonal affection, like somebody grooming a racehorse.

  “You dive competitively?”

  “I did at one time. Why?”

  “I was just wondering what makes a woman do it. That tower’s high.”

  “A person has to be good at something, and I’m not pretty.” Her smile was thin and agonized. “Dr. Frey—he’s a psychiatrist friend of mine—says the tower is a phallic symbol. Anyway, you know what the swimmers say—a diver is a swimmer with her brains knocked out.”

  “I thought a diver was a swimmer with guts.”

  “That’s what the divers say. Do you know many divers?”

  “No, but I’d like to. Would Hester Campbell be a friend of yours?”

  Her face became inert. “I know Hester,” she said cautiously. “I wouldn’t call her a friend.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a long story, and I’m cold.” She turned brusquely and trotted away toward the dressing-room. Her hips didn’t bounce.

  “Quiet, everyone,” a loud voice said. “You are about to witness the wonder of the century, brought to you at fabulous expense.”

  It came from a gray-haired man on the five-meter platform of the tower. His legs were scrawny, his chest pendulous, his belly a brown leather ball distending his shorts. I looked again and saw it was Simon Graff.

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” Graff shaded his eyes with a hand and looked around facetiously. “Are there any ladies present? Any gentlemen?”

  The women tittered. The men guffawed. Sammy Swift, who was standing near me, looked more than ever like a ghost who had seen a goblin.

  “Watch it, boys and girls,” Graff shouted in a high, unnatural voice. “The Great Graffissimo, in his unique and death-defying leap.”

  He took a flat-footed little run and launched himself with his arms at his sides in what boys used to call a dead-soldier dive. His people waited until he came to the surface and then began to applaud, clapping and whistling.

  Sammy Swift noticed my silence and moved toward me. He didn’t recognize me until I called him by name. I could have set fire to his breath.

  “Lew Archer, by damn. What are you doing in this galère?”

  “Slumming.”

  “Yah, I bet. Speaking of slumming, did you get to see Lance Leonard?”

  “No. My friend got sick and we gave up on the interview.”

  “Too bad, the boy’s had quite a career. He’d make a story.”

  “Fill me in.”

  “Uh-uh.” He wagged his head. “You tell your friend to take it up with Publicity. There’s an official version and an unofficial version, I hear.”

  “What do you hear in detail?”

  “I didn’t know you did leg work for newspapers, Lew. What’s the pitch, you trying to get something on Leonard?”

  His fogged eyes had cleared and narrowed. He wasn’t as drunk as I’d thought, and the subject was touchy. I backed away from it:

  “Just trying to give a friend a lift.”

  “You looking for Leonard now? I haven’t seen him here tonight.”

  Graff raised his voice again:

  “Achtung, everyone. Time for lifesaving practice.” His eyes were empty and his mouth was slack. He stepped toward the twittering line of girls and pointed at one who was wearing a silver gown. His forefinger dented her shoulder. “You! What is your name?”

  “Martha Matthews.” She smiled in an agony of delight. The lightning was striking her.

  “You’re a cute little girl, Martha.”

  “Thank you.” She towered over him. “Thank you very much, Mr. Graff.”

  “Would you like me to save your life, Martha?”

  “I’d simply adore it.”

  “Go ahead, then. Jump in.”

  “But what about my dress?”

  “You can take it off, Martha.”

  Her smile became slightly dazed. “I can?”

  “I just said so.”

  She pulled the dress off over her head and handed it to one of the other girls. Graff pushed her backward into the pool. The agile photographer took a shot of the action. Graff went in after her and towed her to the ladder, his veined hand clutching her flesh. She smiled and smiled. The lifeguard watched them with no expression at all on his black face.

  I felt like slugging somebody. There wasn’t anybody big enough around. I walked away, and Sammy Swift tagged along. At the shallow end of the pool, we leaned against a raised planter lush with begonia, and lit cigarettes. Sammy’s face was thin and pale in the half-light.

  “You know Simon Graff pretty well,” I stated.

  His light eyes flickered. “You got to know him well to feel the way I do about him. I been making a worm’s-eye study of the Man for just about five years. What I don’t know about him isn’t worth knowing. What I do know about him isn’t worth knowing, either. It’s interesting, though. You know why he pulls this lifesaving stunt, for instance? He does it every party, just like clockwork, but I bet I’m the only one around who’s got it figured out. I bet Sime doesn’t even know, himself.”

  “Tell me.”

  Sammy assumed an air of wisdom. He said in the jargon of the parlor analyst:

  “Sime’s got a compulsion neurosis, he has to do it. He’s fixated on this girl that got herself killed last year.”

  “What girl would that be?” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.

  “The girl they found on the beach with the bullets in her. It happened just below here.” He gestured toward the ocean, which lay invisible beyond the margin of the light. “Sime was stuck on her.”

  “Interesting if true.”

  “Hell, you can take my word for it. I was with Sime that morning when he got the news. He’s got a ticker in his office—he always wants to be the first to know—and when he saw her name on the tape he turned as white as a sheet, to coin a simile. Shut himself up in his private bathroom and didn’t come out for an hour. When he finally did come out, he passed it off as a hangover. Hangover is the word. He hasn’t been the same since the girl died. What was her name?” He tried to snap his fingers, unsuccessfully. “Gabrielle something.”

  “I seem to remember something about the case. Wasn’t she a little young for him?”

  “Hell, he’s at the age when they really go for the young ones. Not that Sime’s so old. It’s only the last year his hair turned gray, and it was the girl’s death that did it to him.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. I saw them together a couple of times that spring, and I got X-ray eyes, boy, it’s one thing being a writer does for you.”

  “Where did you see them?”

  “Around, and once in Vegas. They were lying beside the pool of one of the big hotels, smoking the same cigarette.” He looked down at the glowing butt of his own cigarette, and threw it spinning into the water. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling tales out of school, but you won’t quote me, and it’s all in the past, anyway. Except that he keeps going through these crazy lifesaving motions. He’s re-enacting her death, see, trying to save her from it. Only please note that he does it in a heated pool.”

  “This is your own idea, no doubt.”

  “Yeah, but it makes sense,” he
said with some fanaticism. “I been watching him for years, like you watch the flies on the wall, and I know him. I can read him like a book.”

  “Who wrote the book? Freud?”

  Sammy didn’t seem to hear me. His gaze had roved to the far end of the pool, where Graff was posing for more pictures with some of the girls. I wondered why picture people never got tired of having their pictures taken. Sammy said:

  “Call me Œdipus if you want to. I really hate that bastard.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “It’s what he does to Flaubert. I’m writing the Carthage script, version number six, and Sime Graff keeps breathing down my neck.” His voice changed; he mimicked Graff’s accent: “Matho’s our juvenile lead, we can’t let him die on us. We got to keep him alive for the girl, that’s basic. I got it. I got it. She nurses him back to health after he gets chopped up, how about that? We lose nothing by the gimmick, and we gain heart, the quality of heart. Salammbô rehabilitates him, see? The boy was kind of a revolutionary type before, but he is saved from himself by the influence of a good woman. He cleans up on the barbarians for her. The girl watches from the fifty-yard line. They clinch. They marry.” Sammy resumed his own voice: “You ever read Salammbô?”

  “A long time ago, in translation. I don’t remember the story.”

  “Then you wouldn’t see what I’m talking about. Salammbô is a tragedy, its theme is dissolution. So Sime Graff tells me to tack a happy ending onto it. And I write it that way. Jesus,” he said in a tone of surprise, “this is the way I’ve written it. What makes me do it to myself and Flaubert? I used to worship Flaubert.”

  “Money?” I said.

  “Yeah. Money. Money.” He repeated the word several times, with varying inflections. He seemed to be finding new shades of meaning in it, subtle drunken personal meanings which brought the tears into his voice. But he was too chancy and brittle to hold the emotion. He slapped himself across the eyes, and giggled. “Well, no use crying over spilled blood. How about a drink, Lew? How about a drink of Danziger Goldwasser, in fact?”

  “In a minute. Do you know a girl called Hester Campbell?”

  “I’ve seen her around.”

  “Lately?”

  “No, not lately.”

  “What’s her relation to Graff, do you know?”

  “No, I wouldn’t know,” he answered sharply. The subject disturbed him, and he took refuge in clowning: “Nobody tells me anything, I’m just an intellectual errand boy around here. An ineffectual intellectual errand boy. Song.” He began to sing in a muffled tenor to an improvised tune: “He’s so reprehensible yet so indispensable he makes things comprehensible he’s my joy. That intellectual—ineffectual—but oh so sexual—intellectual errand boy. Whom nothing can alloy.… Dig that elegant whom.”

  “I dug it.”

  “It’s the hallmark of genius, boy. Did I ever tell you I was a genius? I had an I.Q. of 183 when I was in high school in Galena, Illinois.” His forehead crinkled. “What ever happened to me? Wha’ happen? I used to like people, by damn, I used to have talent. I didn’t know what it was worth. I came out here for the kicks, going along with the gag—seven fifty a week for playing word games. Then it turns out that it isn’t a gag. It’s for keeps, it’s your life, the only one you’ve got. And Sime Graff has got you by the short hairs and you’re not inner-directed any more. You’re not yourself.”

  “Who are you, Sam?”

  “That’s my problem.” He laughed, and almost choked. “I had a vision of myself last week, I could see it as plain as a picture. Dirty word, picture, but let it pass. I was a rabbit running across a desert. Rear view.” He laughed and coughed again. “A goddam white-tailed bunny rabbit going lickety-split across the great American desert.”

  “Who was chasing you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a lopsided grin. “I was afraid to look.”

  chapter 18

  GRAFF came strutting toward us along the poolside, trailed by his twittering harem and their eunuchs. I wasn’t ready to talk to him, and turned my back until he’d passed. Sammy was yawning with hostility.

  “I really need a drink,” he said. “My eyes are focusing. How’s about joining me in the bar?”

  “Later, maybe.”

  “See you. Don’t quote me on anything.”

  I promised that I wouldn’t, and Sammy went away toward the lights and the music. At the moment the pool was deserted except for the Negro lifeguard, who was moving around under the diving tower. He trotted in my direction with a double armful of soiled towels, took them into a lighted room at the end of the row of cabañas.

  I went over and tapped on the open door. The lifeguard turned from a canvas bin where he had dumped the towels. He had on gray sweat-clothes with CHANNEL CLUB stenciled across the chest.

  “Can I get you something, sir?”

  “No, thanks. How are the tropical fish?”

  He gave me a quick grin of recognition. “No tropical-fish trouble tonight. People trouble is all. There’s always people trouble. Why they want to go swimming on a night like this! I guess it’s the drinking they do. The way they pour it down is a revelation.”

  “Speaking of pouring it down, your boss is pretty good at it.”

  “Mr. Bassett? Yeah, he’s been drinking like a fish lately, ever since his mother died. A tropical fish. Mr. Bassett was very devoted to his mother.” The black face was smooth and bland, but the eyes were sardonic. “He told me she was the only woman he ever loved.”

  “Good for him. Do you know where Bassett is now?”

  “Circulating.” He stirred the air with his finger. “He circulates around at all the parties. You want me to find him for you?”

  “Not just now, thanks. You know Tony Torres?”

  “Know him well. We worked together for years.”

  “And his daughter?”

  “Some,” he said guardedly. “She worked here, too.”

  “Would Tony still be around? He isn’t on the gate.”

  “No, he goes off at night, party or no party. His fill-in didn’t show up tonight. Maybe Mr. Bassett forgot to call him.”

  “Where does Tony live, do you know?”

  “I ought to. He lives under your feet, practically. He’s got a place next to the boiler room, he moved in there last year. He used to get so cold at night, he told me.”

  “Show me, will you?”

  He didn’t move, except to look at his wristwatch. “It’s half past one. You wouldn’t want to wake him up in the middle of the night.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I would.”

  He shrugged and took me along a corridor filled with a soapy shower-room odor, down a flight of concrete steps into hothouse air, through a drying-room where bathing suits hung like sloughed snakeskins on wooden racks, between the two great boilers which heated the pool and the buildings. Behind them, a room-within-a-room had been built out of two-by-fours and plywood.

  “Tony lives here because he wants to,” the lifeguard said rather defensively. “He won’t live in his house on the beach any more, he rents it out. I wish you wouldn’t wake him up. Tony’s an old man, he needs his rest.”

  But Tony was already awake. His bare feet slithered on the floor. Light came on, blazing through all the cracks in the plywood walls and framing the door. Tony opened it and blinked at us, a big-bellied little old man in long underwear with a religious locket hanging around his neck.

  “Sorry to get you out of bed. I’d like to talk to you.”

  “What about? What’s the trouble?” He scratched at his tousled, graying hair.

  “No trouble.” Just two murders in his family, one of which I wasn’t supposed to know about. “May I come in?”

  “Sure thing. Matter ’fact, I been thinking I’d like to talk to you.”

  He pushed the door wide and stepped back with a gesture that was almost courtly. “You comin’ in, Joe?”

  “I got to get back upstairs,” the lifeguard said.

>   I thanked him and went in. The room was hot and small, lit by a naked bulb on an extension cord. I’d never seen a monk’s cell, but the room could probably have served as one. A blistered oak-veneer bureau, an iron cot, a kitchen chair, a doorless cardboard wardrobe containing a blue serge suit, a horsehide windbreaker, and a clean uniform. Faded blue flannelette sheets covered the cot, and an old brass-fitted suitcase protruded from underneath it. Two pictures shared the wall above the head of the bed. One was a hand-tinted studio photograph of a pretty dark-eyed girl in a white dress that looked like a high-school graduation dress. The other was a Virgin in four colors, holding a blazing heart in her extended hand.

  Tony indicated the kitchen chair for me, and sat on the bed himself. Scratching his head again, he looked down at the floor, his eyes impassive as anthracite. The big knuckles of his right hand were jammed and swollen.

  “Yeah, I been thinkin’,” he repeated. “All day and half of the night. You’re a detective, Mr. Bassett says.”

  “A private one.”

  “Yeah, private. That’s for me. These county cops, who can trust ’em? They run around in their fancy automobiles and arrest people for no-taillight or throw-a-beer-can-in-the-highway-ditch. Something real bad happens, they ain’t there.”

  “They’re usually there, Tony.”

  “Maybe. I seen some funny things in my time. Like what happened last year, right in my own family.” His head turned slowly to the left, under intangible but irresistible pressure, until he was looking at the girl in the white dress. “I guess you heard about Gabrielle, my daughter.”

  “Yes. I heard.”

  “Shot on the beach, I found her. March twenty-first, last year. She was gone all night supposed to be with a girl friend. I found her in the morning, eighteen years old, my only daughter.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  His black glance probed my face, gauging the depth of my sympathy. His wide mouth was wrenched by the pain of truth-telling: “I ain’t no bleeding heart. It was my fault, I seen it coming. How could I bring her up myself? A girl without a mother? A pretty young girl?” His gaze rotated in a quarter-circle again, and returned to me. “What could I tell her what to do?”