Doctor Cobb's Game: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

SUPPLEMENT ON HEARSAY AND FACT

Hearsay: That Michael Cobb, working through Norman Scholes and C. A. Kugel, established espionage links with intelligence agencies of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. That, after ensnaring Richard Derwent in an affair with Cecile Banner, he extracted secret information from the minister of war and put it at the disposal of Kugel and Scholes.

Fact: Extensive investigation by MI-5 has established to my complete satisfaction that neither Mr. Scholes nor Mr. Kugel were ever engaged in intelligence operations for any government. Mr. Kugel’s interests were no doubt shady in the financial aspect and of questionable morality, but they were aimed at personal gain.

LORD MELAMINE’S REPORT

Lord Melamine is right about one thing, at least. I was never a spy.

I was never, literally, a spy, though many bright people must have been convinced I was. Even my radical son at Princeton is convinced that I’m a tool of the CIA, if nothing worse. His need to believe is one reason we don’t write to each other any more. I might clear myself in his eyes by making sure he gets a copy of Melamine’s Report. But then, I suppose, my sharp-eyed son would note that His Lordship never does get around to saying just what I am in all his 315 carefully indexed pages, nor just how far I got my hand in on things like the Derwent affair. My son is damn clever about picking up points like that. Since he’s clever, he’d appreciate how clever His Lordship was in choosing what to put in and what to leave out of the report. He’d shrug it off, telling himself that the British Establishment picked the right man when they chose Melamine for the nasty job of cleaning up after the Derwent mess. "It’s no better than the Warren Report in this country, my son would say. If you’d swallow one, you’d swallow the other. They’re both full of holes." And you won’t catch my bright son swallowing anything that’s full of holes.

So, let it go. My father had a son. I mocked my father. I had a son. Let him mock me. If he needs to believe I’m in the game for under-the-table money from the CIA, then God bless him.

As for me, I don’t mock anybody any more. And I don’t mean to start this out by sly digs at Lord Melamine. He did his duty in writing the report. As far as I know it doesn’t contain a single untruth. It was his duty to put together a White Paper that would restore world confidence in British justice and security measures. He brought a great legal mind to bear on his task. He investigated the murkiest storm of rumors, press reports, and public testimony that ever swept the British Isles. He came up with answers that put a lid on the embarrassing and demoralizing mess. And now Britain can get on with the job.

The Report is written in pretty stodgy language. It seems ponderous. But, damn it, really it’s as nimble as an elephant toe-dancing on a high wire. If you’re going to respect it—as I do—then you’ve got to respect that nimbleness, too. That great apparatus of British dignity, the British Establishment, spinning on one toe high in the air over a pit full of crocodiles.…

I’m not a spy. I’m one of the top researchers for the Gath Corporation. We don’t advertise for business, but it’s my impression that everyone who reads the news magazines must know that General Gath (the Guadalcanal hero, USMC, Retired) founded and directed a private research corporation—one like the Rand Corporation or Herman Kahn’s operation. Like them, we’ve got most of our contracts from the U.S. government, but very few of our jobs have been for the Pentagon. None with the CIA. We prepare reports—not for public consumption like Lord Melamine’s—but for use by government bureaus or senatorial committees. Our specialties have been economics and the demography of undeveloped countries. One of the reasons I was in and out of England so often when the Derwent affair was coming to a head is that we had moved over to studying the relation between fiscal base and the arms-procurement programs in Africa and South America. The web of finance and also the arms trade obviously still have plenty of lines running to London from all those places that used to be the Empire. As a profitable sideline to the subsidized reports we prepare, the corporation helped develop Syncrotex, which is a system for the spontaneous manipulation of a huge quantity of information in superficially unrelated categories. It involves computers. What doesn’t these days? It also involves preparing mathematical coding for demographic factors ranging from linguistics to how often and where the natives shit.

If you’ve got a comfortable mental picture of how Syncrotex works—like an electronic chess game we tell some of our clients—leave it alone and be thankful. The chances are very big that both you and I would get uncomfortably confused if I tried to explain it further. The general developed it and I only work for him.

But if your picture of me as a researcher is of a man in a white laboratory coat, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a pocketful of neatly sharpened pencils, I’ll correct that impression as I go along. My usefulness to the corporation never depended on being a keypuncher to a computer. I’m the nose man. I sniff along behind the natives—kings, presidents, businessmen, peasants, dictators—to see where they drop the stuff, and the white-coat technicians do the processing thereafter.

The corporation doesn’t retail its product or advertise it with commercials on TV, but over the years when we were trying harder so we’d become number one, General Gath had to sell the whole concept of research to Washington strong boys with mentalities like that of Engine Charlie Wilson in the Eisenhower Cabinet. Gath was a great salesman, too.

His speech went like this: Life on our planet exists within a constant and incessant network of signals. We might as well say that life and meaning—the meaning encoded in signals—are synonymous. No signal, no life. Bees dance out messages to each other about the exact location and amount of honey they have found. Vegetables signal by their color when their seeds are ripe and ready for distribution through the digestive tracts of birds. The scent of the female otter signals readiness. Men … men also share that endless web of signals closely identified with life and the life force.…

After I’d listened to it a few times I said, General, it’s that bit about the female otter that really zaps the bureaucratic mind. They lie down for you when they hear that.

"Well, Nawman. Well, Nawman, he would say testily. I’m trying to spell it out in language any cat and dog can read."

I mocked like that just because I respected so much what the general was trying to get over in his simplified spiel. He couldn’t very well do his job by quoting Goethe to them. His reading of Goethe was just for himself, and whatever he got out of it the rest of us had to have secondhand.

He made the corporation into a great center for receiving and sending signals. He made it out of some odd fractions—me on the one extreme and the computer technicians on the other. I have my function in the whole operation and so do the electronic memory banks in the handsome new building among the pines on the slope below the mansion at Falcon Wing.

From where I sit now in a library room of the mansion I can see the glass, aluminum, and pink concrete corner of the new building. It’s right here, but I doubt if I’ve been inside it more than half a dozen times since General Gath had it built in ’65 so the whole mansion could be used by the Think Tank. (Does that journalistic label—Think Tank—start to form another mental picture for you, citizen? You’ve read about some of the technicians and scholars the general hired for his tank. So maybe you see us who belong in it as blobs of brain floating like dumplings among other brains in a vat stirred by General Gath himself? Please …! I’ll get around to clearing up that picture, too.)

Falcon Wing is in upstate New York. When I come back from England, Madagascar, Chile, or wherever the hell else, I land at the local airport and drive up the mountain in one of the corporation cars always ready for our use there at the airport. I park it in the gravel lot under that corner of the mansion where the general had his office and living quarters. It’s the gravel crunching under my feet as I step from the car and the keen, thin, piney smell of mountain air that gives me the queer notion I’m home. (Queerer than hell for a man who never felt at home anywhere on the planet and has admitted that to himself since he was a freshman in college.)

I come back and even accidental tiny things hit my eye as unchanged. The custodian’s children and their cowardly Airedale are up on a slope of the forest pretending I’m Kennedy and they’re Oswald. I can see the dog and a couple of toy gun barrels welcoming me. Of course the kids don’t recognize me, except as one of the corporation’s guests, though I’ve been based here since 1954 and have come and gone at irregular intervals for more than fifteen years.

Tim does, though. He’s the half-witted Irishman who thinks he’s the guard at the front door and acts as if he knew all your foul motives for wanting to get past him. All these years he’s wanted to pull his gun on somebody, and grown sour from missing this privilege. Tim’s another one the general took an unexplained fancy to and kept on in spite of nearly everyone’s distaste. He’s like me in that respect.

Any Communists trying to penetrate?

He gives me the sourest of smiles and says only, Morning, Mr. Scholes. Just because no one else likes us doesn’t mean that we like each other.

I pause a moment to grin at him and say, I’m surprised you stayed on. He knows what I mean. General Gath has been dead several months. I mean that the new management’s new broom should have swept out the trash by now and made the corporation into the model of efficiency it is supposed to be. Tim is not quick-witted enough to say, Same to you Scholes.

He hitches his gun belt and says, Loyalty’s a strong thing, Mr. Scholes. He may be right in spite of himself.

In the main lobby I meet none other than Frank Niles. He’s hurrying and the smoke from his pipe whisking back past his distinguished gray curls makes him look like a river steamboat rushing cotton up to St. Looey. Niles always hurries. The smartest, coldest economist to graduate from Harvard in two whole decades, always darting as if he was afraid his pay might be docked if he came to a Think Tank meeting twelve seconds late. Now the general’s heirs have made him acting director. He better touch all the bases in jig time if he wants the appointment made permanent.

Mrs. Klein told me you’d undoubtedly be here for lunch, says Frank. He waves the Manila folder in his hand, puffs up a head of smoke for the last dash upriver to the cotton warehouse, hoists his scholarly shoulders. I have to be in Washington by five. All this to explain that I will miss his company in the big dining room. Lantz and Bob Grenfell are here this week. He frowns an apology for offering me such company instead of his own.

Don’t give it a thought, Frank. I’m going to my room for a nap anyway. I’ll see Lantz and Bob at Martini time.

Of course Mrs. Klein, the housekeeper (if not housemother) for the Falcon Wing crew, will have my room ready. Crisp cool sheets on the bed, the curtains drawn back for the magnificent view of the mountains, my mail on the bedside table, cut flowers in a big silver vase on the floor beside the floor-to-ceiling window. Mrs. Klein always gives us what General Gath wanted his top staff to have. He wanted us, always, to travel first-class. He wanted us to feel that Falcon Wing was home, that we should come there when we needed to, whether he needed us then or not.

He was a great joker. He knew there was no place like home any more. Only luxury inns on an endless journey.

And here I am in one of the small private rooms off the Falcon Wing library. I have the coded metal boxes from the library vault that for eighteen months have held the Michael Cobb papers, drawings, and tapes that I smuggled out of England and brought here because the general and I thought we must make something of them.

Make …? Well, of course we were not going to make a story that would serve the old hash of newspaper scandal-mongering over to a sensation-hungry public. We weren’t going to have fun sniping at Lord Melamine for the discreet omissions in his official report.

I guess we hoped to use the surviving remnants of the true record to help us see how power really works in the modern world. To see into the heart of what the professionals call history.

"Powah, General Gath said once, letting go with the Southern accent that only showed when he was really dead serious. Nothing is worth a man’s concern on this earth but to understand powah."

What he knew of Derwent and Michael Cobb came to him in odd fragments, as it had to me, too. So our talks were intermittent and irregular. Another time he said, What the whole world has seen is a series of events that shook terribly one of the major powers of this earth. Only a fool supposes that they fell into place by accident. When a sensible man sees an effect like that, he assumes that it was caused by an equivalent force.

Weird and eerie—unthinkable—as it would appear for us to say it flatly, we guessed that the power sufficient to shake a mighty government and add its nudge to the power alignments of the globe had come from or through one strange man of genius, Michael Cobb.

The ways we measure power may be insufficient, the general said. And if some eccentric or fool or deviant or saint showed us how to think in new categories, we might read undecipherable messages the world is constantly beaming at us. Someone may be trying to get through to us.…

We knew nothing of Michael’s Russian friends when General Gath said this. The general was always most fascinated by a search when he didn’t know what he would find. Say this for him though: He was a sad, brave, frightened old man, and what he always listened hardest for was something that might change the heartbreaking world he had lived in so long. He had built Falcon Wing in the hope of learning what no one he had met could tell him.

In my hands is a drawing Michael made of Cecile Banner. He was an artist as well as a physician. He made, literally, thousands of drawings and an enormous number of paintings besides attending to a great many patients—many of them wealthy and therefore demanding not only of his time but of his personal concern and sympathy. Besides that, all the newspaper-reading world knew that his night life, social life, sex life had been lived on an epic scale. Playboy and cocksman. When I first began to catch up with him in London, all these activities had seemed to me at least a sign of an outsized restlessness. Totally untypical of modern Englishmen as I knew them.

In the drawing Cecile is leaning on the back of a chair. The drawing is sepia crayon on a pale blue paper. The long diagonal of her naked torso and right leg is supported by her rigid right arm continuing the line of the chairback. Her conical breasts look fragile as birds’ eggs. Her pubic hair looks like a robber’s mask comically and frighteningly misplaced between her gorgeous young legs. Her eyes are white flashes. She looks as if she is getting ready to utter a witch’s incantation—but of course the real Cecile never spoke out with anything but cute Mod banalities. Someone—it would have been Cecile of course—had written in crayon across the bottom of the drawing DANGEROUS CURV**. This had been half rubbed out and overwritten—by Michael of course. DANGEROUS CUNT.

Did he know from the beginning how dangerous?

Outside the library window the custodian’s children have come down from the shadows of the forest slope and are playing on the grass in the sun. The little girl has blonde hair bleached from her summer’s play. It is as pale as Tammy Chandler’s—Cecile’s whorish friend and C. A. Kugel’s girl. I hear her giggling as she mimics something she heard on a TV commercial. That ain’ frahd chicken. That’s Shake ’n’ Bake. Mama made it and I hehpped. The American Child.

This is one world. But there is no connection between these kids in the American sun and the dangerous teen-age London girls who crushed a member of the British cabinet and killed Michael Cobb.

But, damn it, there are connections. We live in a constant and incessant web of signals.

But, damn it, you can’t read from one to another of these unrelated things in anything like a straight line. No, but the beauty of Syncrotex is it shows how to read in a nonlinear manner. It reads diagonally and vertically as well as horizontally. Put it on the Syncrotex.

I put aside the drawings and photographs of Cecile and start a tape on the tape recorder. It’s a conversation I had with Michael’s clergyman-uncle while Michael was being tried at the Old Bailey.

The old man’s sad and tranquil voice:

Michael was a prodigy, you know.

It’s very uncomfortable to hear someone say that and mean it. Hearing it again on the tape makes me twitch as I did when I heard it first. A child should be a child. It must be unlucky, at least, to claim anything more for him.

He said, "One time the boy came to me and announced with all gravity—‘I am a giant.’

"‘Giants are strong,’ I said.

"Michael thought this over for a time. ‘Anyway I am a giant,’ he insisted.

"‘But you have not a giant’s strength.’

"‘Ah,’ said he, ‘that is a problem.’

"I suppose it was two days later when he approached me again and demanded, straight to the point, ‘How do I get my strength?’

"He was a giant, too, indeed. I felt Michael and I should keep that a secret between us, though, since he was such a small one."

I flick the switch and the Reverend Cobb’s voice dies in a fading squeak of the machine. Of course I see a slight connection between the English boy imagining nearly fifty years ago that he was a fairy-tale giant and the custodian’s boy who imagined he was an American assassin when he saw me drive into the parking lot. All children would be dangerous if they had the power to be. But Michael was almost fifty before he found the giant’s strength, and then it came to him in the form of a 105-pound female, his brainchild, his invention, his whim … Cecile Banner.

But for all those years of apparent normalcy, this Michael Cobb must have lived with the deep conviction that he was a mutant, an aberration in the species. A new kind of human being set down among the rest of us, or a unique holdover from an earlier time. Elsewhere on these tapes he makes it clear enough that he knew the truth of his life as if he dreamed it instead of experiencing it as most of us do. The astonishing things he made happen—with his giant’s powers—were hardly brought about by omnipotence. I guess they followed naturally from his special vision of things and the way he recognized himself.

As for that … he saw himself as psychologically hermaphroditic. He knew that in the oldest of all folk legends magicians are usually spoken of as having a dual sex. From his reading of them he built the fancy that he was in some way their legitimate descendant. And, since he was a physically normal male, he toyed with the idea that Cecile was the sundered female half of his divided nature.

He taught her … dear God, he taught her all that his intuition and observation knew about that part of womanhood. There is another tape among this weird collection of mine in which he specifies some of the instructions he gave her for handling a man. (Presumably that man was Richard Derwent, minister of war in Her Majesty’s government.) These are ticked off, whimsically or solemnly, like institutional rules for conduct, like the duties of a girl scout:

1. Touch his body with your hands—inside his coat, inside his shirt, slipping down inside his belt, opening his fly. Put your tongue on his hands, his neck. Fall back to touch his cock discreetly when he is walking behind you. When he is naked, trail your fingertips and the back of your nails over his chest and abdomen and the inside of his legs.

2. Use of voice. Each time you are coming, sing out loud and clear, "I’m coming for you. After fucking, count and describe orgasms. Phone and say, I’m hot, I’m hot. Come over and let me suck your cock. Come play with my cunt. You needn’t fuck me. Come be with me." Tell him you are playing with yourself. Call him and tell him you are naked in bed with a pillow between your legs, playing with yourself. Ask him to come and be with you while you do it. Ask him to tell you when he is going to fuck his wife at home. Tell him you will play with yourself at the precise time he is doing this. He is to phone you beforehand, as a signal, and afterward to ask if you have really done it. Ask him to describe. Talk about everything you are doing. Oh, your finger is strong in my cunt. Make it loose enough for two. Now three. Three. Gently make it loose. Make it open all the way so it will take your four fingers. Gently.

3. On occasion be more aggressive with your body than his. Hoist up your skirt and take your pants off. Let the cunt move and play in the room, touching objects of various texture. Let it play on his trouser leg, his sleeve, his shoe, the arm of a chair, the fold of a drape. Let your hands play around and in your cunt.… Kneel and play with yourself in front of him, partly dressed.

4. Sometimes after he has come, suck his cock very quietly, letting it lie warm and still in your mouth.…

That’s rough stuff to listen to in a library in the middle of a day. There’s a lot more like it in the tapes. It’s the education of a totally modern English geisha. It goes all the way, with very little attention paid to the education of the brain.

Put this on the Syncrotex next:

A rose. A dark red rose that’s been pressed between the pages of a book. The kind of sentimental souvenir a Victorian schoolgirl would treasure. But it was Michael’s souvenir. He pressed it in a book and kept it.

Another quick change: Add on a small bale of newspaper clippings in English, German, and French. All of them about the Derwent case or Michael’s trial.

The easy journalistic answers have all been given to nonexplain his case. The American newsmen who flocked around his trial at Old Bailey tended to simplify his complex relationships with girls by whispering that he had a miniature prick—too small to satisfy the girls himself.

I’ll tell you. It looked like the average prick. You’d consider it typical if you’d spent as much time in American locker rooms as I have. Measuring pricks, if that’s your hang-up, just doesn’t reveal character very precisely.

Some of the inside dopesters in London purported to know for a fact that Michael had sold Cecile to C. A. Kugel in the first place for a huge sum of money—in gold—that is still lying in a safe-deposit box in Zurich.

Anyone want to go on a treasure hunt?

Here is another tape. Cecile’s voice recorded from a radio interview a few days after Michael’s death.

Her darling voice says: Michael had no weaknesses. Never thinking about the past. Always pushing forward. Always cheerful, eager, smiling. With him it was an everything-for-the-minute sort of life. What’s swinging this minute? What’s the new thing in London? It’s after midnight, but where do we go now? He was so alive. You know?

It’s a whore’s voice, sentimentalizing over her pimp. And yet she hadn’t been a whore. For a golden, dangerous little while she was his magic eyes and ears and female intuition. His magician’s wand to make old Britain roar again with a lion’s passion.

All that changed back to drab reality when he died. Then he became a pimp, she became a whore. The law said so. His death made the law speak true. Dead men tell no tales.

So I have to. With or without the help of Syncrotex, without General Gath to talk with, that’s what I’ve come back to Falcon Wing to do.

CHAPTER TWO

It is alleged that Michael Cobb was a double agent through whom foreign powers obtained information about British military capabilities and intentions. It was further alleged that his notoriously numerous liaisons with women were exploited to obtain atomic secrets from Britain and her allies.

LORD MELAMINE’S REPORT

General Gath was once quoted in a New Yorker profile as saying, "The Think Tank at Falcon Wing consists of any given number of intellectuals and Norman Scholes. The piece went on to say snippily that many of the staffers were academic misfits" because of personality quirks that didn’t match their intellect.

I wasn’t even that. My only academic qualification was that I had once writen a master’s dissertation on Pareto: The Irrational in Political Power Shifts: 1912–1939. It was barely accepted by the political science department at Columbia. One bastard member of my examining committee chuckled, Not only is your subject irrational, Mr. Scholes. So is much of your reasoning from historic fact. That prof was the pundit who predicted that peace would come in 1942 after Hitler had liquidated Russia. I’ve snagged a few things that straighter thinkers have muffed.

One of our secretaries told me that once when Frank Niles gave the general a cost analysis showing beyond doubt why I should be fired, the Old Man smiled and agreed. Then he shook his head. No, Frank, he said. I send Scholes out to make bodily contact. If he doesn’t come back from Brazil with a believable story, at least he’s been in contact with the real stuff of life. We scrape it off his pelt and send it to the laboratory for expert analysis.

His salary and expenses will run over eighty thousand this year, Frank reminded him.

Yes. You’re right. We can’t afford him. But Scholes penetrates.

I penetrate.… It was my knack for homing in from odd corners straight to the political storm centers that put me on the track of my old-time friend Michael Cobb while most of my colleagues were still convinced that Britain’s next major crisis would be monetary.

There was one precise, literal, stunning moment when Hound Dog Scholes of the Gath Corporation sniffed a trail he’d given up almost twenty years before.

Hound Dog was—I was—sitting in my room at the Dorchester. Tammy Chandler was lying with her back arched over my knees because someone who wanted a favor had paid her to be with me. We were not on the bed, because I have found that if you let expensive call girls into bed with you they expect to stay the night. I had a tennis date in the morning.

We were on the striped nylon cushions of the Regency couch facing the fireplace. We had taken down the top of her dress and let the bra straps go so we could both admire her breasts. They deserved admiration. The truth is that Tammy had been queen of a dairy show in her hometown before she came to London and the jokers had picked the right girl. She pushed them together to squeeze my hand between them. When she released them they sprang apart like bouncing tennis balls. The shadows and gleams of firelight on them were very fine.

I do enjoy a Yank, she said. You’re very appreciative. She twitched her shoulders to make the tits jump at my hands and laughed in pure delight.

Her bare legs were sprawled up over my knees, holding it up so I could get at it easily when I graduated from her breasts. Just half-naked—and that was all I called for, because if you strip them down they demand too much energy.

Most of the time her eyes were closed as I played. That was good, too. You don’t want too much face on a casual lay. She was just lending her presence, filling her shining skin, and letting me enjoy her like a dessert after the good dinner the Averill Holdings people had treated me to at Pruniers. Poulet à la crème aux raisins, Château Yquem in plentiful supply, framboises glacées—and then young Tammy, succulent as the cream and berries to finish up with. How could that help but put me in a charitable mood?

The Averill Holdings people wanted the favor. You can see what kind. The value of the spin-off from the corporation’s research was potentially very big. We back up our actuarial analyses and public-opinion polls and interviews with politicians by some pretty sophisticated analyses of trade potentials and natural resources that will affect the economy at large as well as U.S. foreign aid. Tips on coming elections in South America could have made or broken many moderate investors. Old Mr. Averill and his vice-president Rice were pretty anxious about their harbor development in Peru, Peruvian unions, and the best bets in the coming election.

Mr. Averill wasn’t so obtuse as to expect me to deliver any tips on the spot. You’ll be going home soon now? To Falcon Wing, what? Jolly picturesque name for a business location. Ah, when you see Bill Gath then, you must tell him I said the winter we were in Singapore—’27 I believe; yes, ’27—is like yesterday to me. Ask him if he still remembers the Royal George in Calcutta. An excellent club. London hardly has a better one.… Friendly memos to General Gath from another old Asia hand.

Mr. Rice and Mr. Averill were too old to trip out with me in search of swinging London. But their young Mr. Hobridge—he was there too, wolfing expense-account food as if he’d been living for weeks on Wimpies—took me away. He took me straight to Tammy. She just happened, mind you, to be sitting at a table in Murray’s with a very dear friend of Hobridge’s. The young men had so much to talk about that naturally Tammy and I could pay attention to the reason we’d been brought together. I won her heart—or her consent or whatever was needed beyond the fifty pounds they paid her—by the simple Yank expedient of saying, Let’s go.

So here I was in my hotel, doing my homework as a Gath representative while my fingers played between her legs. Sure it was homework. I was reading Tammy like an index of how desperate Averill Holdings had got about the solvency of their Peruvian harbor project.

They might never get the value of their investment back. But to me she was well worth their fifty pounds. She had a bodily coloration worth remembering, besides that white-blonde puff of hair. When we first skinned off her bra I thought she had made up her nipples with fluorescent lipstick. The color was natural, though—this proved by their taste—and the pinkest, most luminous clitoris I had ever seen or imagined, shining at me from the pale hair like a coral bean.

I appreciated her laziness, too. She shucked open my fly with professional verve when we first sat on the couch, whistled and cooed at my erection, and then let it go. No anxious-to-please nibbling. She was nicely sure of herself.

She had a way of permitting a pure autoeroticism, with the lonely curse of it taken off by her good-natured presence. Technically speaking I have never in my life masturbated. I was very tough with myself as a youngster. That may account for the cruelty of my face. But though I led myself past the age for masturbating, I suppose I’ve contrived some substitutes for it. It certainly wasn’t for her sweet sake that I made her come with my well-manicured finger. I was picking a little goody for myself and carrying it very far away into a very private world.

She made a little clucking sound with the back of her tongue. Her fingers clenched my shirt front and her head burrowed into my chest. The insides of her legs closed on my hand. It was very beautiful to feel the subsiding convulsions in her abdomen.

She was through, and for my part I could have let her go then. But I didn’t want to cheat Averill Holdings. They’d paid for a little more.

Lazy as she, I dumped her off my knees on her back on the couch. Mmmmph, I said and knelt between her legs. Let my belt go. My trousers dropped. I put her disinterested little hands on an erection she could have chinned herself on. She had come good for me and that was fine for my ego.

All at once those outrageous blue eyes of hers were wide and flickering like the muzzle blast of a gun firing from ambush. It’s funny you should mention Michael Cobb, she said.

I hadn’t mentioned him. But, I remembered, young Mr. Hobridge and his friend had brought his name up in their gabble while we were still at the table in Murray’s, flipping it out the way they might have mentioned an actor or other celebrity one might expect to see in that nightclub. And I had said I knew him once. Had meant sometime to look him up in London.

It’s fab, it’s out of this world you should know him, you being the kind of person you are, and all, Tammy said. All at once she had a face. It was judging me with a woman’s shrewdness and finding me lacking—cold. Until that minute she had been as impersonal to me as a doll in a well-stocked toy department.

Nothing strange about it, I said.

She nodded and held me suspended above her open body a minute with a stiffened arm. It’s funny because he’s my uncle. He never mentioned he knew you.

That was it. Suddenly my mind was feeding all the wrong signals, like a computer with a short-circuit, jumbling one message impulse with another.

Niece.

No one said it, but the word, the idea, hooked up with the wrong things. Something uncanny began to clutter my thoughts—the least of which was certainty that my erection was softening. That panic accelerated the other. I came down on her hard enough to bruise my pelvic bones against hers. My lips smashed hers.

I was in—barely. My balls slapped encouragingly against her velvet buttocks. She was trying to talk against the pressure of my mouth. The rhythm of her belly and thighs against mine was nastily out of time. She was giggling.

I kept trying—that desperate feeling of trying to set fingers and toes in a mudbank deluged with flood water. Bad-dream images from childhood spilling all over inside the skull. I was lunging hard and losing ground.

Of course it was the association of niece and Michael Cobb that had blown the fuse. The fact, bigger and harder than I, was that Michael was the father of my one and only niece—Michaela Scholes. (That poor little bastard child of so many well-intentioned confusions we had shared somewhere else and long ago. The body of grief, buried in St. Louis in 1946. Michaela, age eight, committed once and for all to the earth. Child unknown to her father. Not to be dug up out of the black depths of memory at a moment like this.)

My face should have scared Tammy when I rocked back on my extended arms so she could see it. Or my voice … I’m going to fuck the hell out of you. Oh, my voice was still hard.

Wow! she laughed.

I’m going to!

The sheer determination almost saw me through. Anger is hot. It swelled me into her. I was tensing to shoot away the panic and grief once again, as men can do. Bury the lost child again in the falling walls of an orgasm.

And my despair had become so much fun for Tammy!

Giggling and watching my face she jeered, Bet you can’t come now!

She was so right about that. A turtle has a shell and if you swing a stick at his naked, ugly head, it pulls back into the shell. Norman Scholes spent the better part of his life fashioning an invisible shell to keep every other human being from really touching him. A shell is a shell and at least a cock knows when to withdraw inside it when a battle is lost.

So—what was that all about? I asked. Time to hitch up pants and buckle the belt one notch tighter than it had been before. To light a cigarette and flip the dead match on the hotel carpet. To pour half a tumbler of whiskey and swish it round and round so the red-brown fluid comes periolously close to the brim.

It was just lovely, ducks! How nimbly Tammy swung her legs to the floor and stood upright. She adjusted her brassiere and presented her back so I could fasten the clasps. What could I possibly object to?

I didn’t touch her bra, or, of course, help with the zipper of her lilac drass. She rested one hand on my knee when she bent across me to gather her panties from the floor where I had dropped them. Leaning on me like that, she couldn’t have missed the tremble of my rage. But she had got what she came for and was blithely on her way.

Look, she said, in the sweet voice of business. I shall certainly stay the night if you wish. She was pulling on her tiny garment as she said it. There was a minute pink ribbon attached in front. It bobbed in an ironic salute before she lowered her skirt to hide it. But if you’re tired, love, I’ll just trot along.

I didn’t say a word.

She went to the bathroom and came back very shortly with fresh lipstick on. I told Michael I should try to catch up with him later if I could.

Still no answer from me.

She half-knelt beside me and put her hands coaxingly on my shoulders. Do come along if you like. I’m going to meet him at a club called Annabel’s. It’s jolly decadent there. I’m sure he’d be glad to see you.

Get the hell out.

She cocked her head as if she had just that instant guessed—dimly—that I was in a temper. She shrugged and stood up. Nothing she could do about it if I was.

I shall certainly tell Michael that I met you, she said. On the way to the door she swung her ass pertly. After all, it was a smiling ass, wigwagging cheers for a mission accomplished. Jolly good show.

I might have kicked it. But I had long ago put down the habit of physical violence.

I might have kicked the little whore—the next thing, I might have been trampling a child, breaking her bones on the carpeted floor, popping out eyeballs and kidneys. Neither habit nor grief really dies.

It was touch-and-go for a minute. I was literally holding my arms with my nails to keep them still until I had counted time for her to get in the elevator and I knew she was safe from me.

I let go a breath of burnt-out air. Oh, niece of Michael Cobb—for a bad little while I had you confused with the lovely, dead child we buried in St. Louis—you whore that came out of the night saying, Uncle, don’t you know me?

But it only takes a little time and toughness to straighten out a confusion of the nerves. Uncle? Uncle, indeed. It was a term—not very common any more I guess—that whores use for their pimp.

That couldn’t have been the Michael Cobb who’d lurked so agelessly in my mind all the while I’d refused to look him up again—refused to admit that he might change as I knew I had.

Still, twenty years is a very long time. Anything is possible. Whatever else Tammy had come to do for me, she had delivered that message loud and clear.

I knew it was time to see him again.

CHAPTER THREE

Though Michael Cobb sustained his practice as a physician and had the confidence of his medical colleagues, he had no close friendships among them. Many considered that his real interests lay outside the field of medicine.

LORD MELAMINE’S REPORT

Doctor is seldom to be found here on Thursday afternoons except by appointment, Miss Podmore said. She was Michael’s receptionist, a tall, black-haired woman with even teeth. A long-stemmed English rose. The classic English governess type, letting you know by word and gesture that she knew her place as servant among the very best people.

You might have saved yourself a trip had you rung up in advance, she said. Her manner conveyed that she believed I might be an American friend of Dr. Cobb’s. He had so many friends from everywhere.

On the other hand I might be a bank investigator putting on a Yank accent. Or from the police. Dr. Cobb flung his good income to so many winds, as bachelors are apt to. There had been police inquiries before about some of his lower-class friends. Miss Podmore was obviously ready for any surprise.

Too bad I didn’t have a badge to flash under her nose. That test of her wit and her loyalty to Dr. Cobb might have made her day.

I loitered a little—to pique her curiosity and to get the feel of the place. The vibrations of Miss Podmore. I figured her for a lady who liked her job and knew her boss just well enough to imagine him more heroic and dashing than he was.

What’s this obscene thing? A trophy for the annual snake-hunters’ derby? I asked. There, below his diploma from the College of Osteopathy in Hansville, Missouri, was a small glass case. Inside on the green velvet was a six-inch bronze cross. On the cross a very fat serpent hung crucified. The emblem was obviously very old. Very shocking. Very beautifully modeled.

That, Miss Podmore said, really huffing at my barbarity, "is a gift from an Austrian patient of Doctor Cobb. A grateful patient and a very rich man. It’s fifth century, we believe."

I winked to cool her wrath. "A work of art? How about that?"

Also of supposed magic, she said. She cooled very fast.

That’s what the card says.

Michael had lettered the card at the base of the bronze:

The crucified serpent (which symbolized both maternity and the union of the feminine and the masculine) had a significance in alchemy which is not clearly understood. The Hebrews paid homage to the serpent on account of its curative power.

Primordial strength (also symbolized by the serpent) had to be crucified or massacred before the ‘Great Work’ could come into being. The alchemists regarded the innocents slaughtered by Herod as ‘metallic germs which it was necessary to dissolve.’

So he’s gone in for alchemy, too, now, I said.

That bit of teasing put Miss Podmore far above me. Very lofty. I understand that in your country there’s prejudice against osteopathy—though you are said to have originated it, goodness knows. I should think a friend of his would know he was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons as well as the College of Osteopathy.

But she wasn’t really down on me. She changed her tone all at once and said, If you’re really only in London for a few days more, I suggest you go now to the Horseferry Arms.

A pub? The pubs are closed by this time.

She nodded. I see you know their hours, she said tartly. Nevertheless he’ll be there through the afternoon. Some friends are there as well, helping him hang an exhibition of his drawings.

In a pub?

Now she really beamed down on me. Of course it was her secret pride to work for an unconventional man. Should an artist only show his work to the snobs in Mayfair? She offered me a piece of candy and nibbled one herself. Of course you’ll find the front door of the Horseferry Arms locked. But you can probably ooze your way in. You seem a crafty sort.

I was glad I hadn’t phoned ahead just to save myself this trip. You couldn’t say I was spying out Michael in advance of meeting him again. There was no reason for that.

But the right way to put it is that I was stalking him, the way a shy boy will stalk and sniff around when he moves to a new town and wants to squint out of the alleys and peep through the hedge by the baseball field before he steps out to introduce himself.

The Horseferry Arms is a three-storied building on the Thames bank among warehouses and garages. There is a small stone church among elms and gravestones across the street. From the side door you can see just one slice of the river, oily and green-brown, as it surges with the passage of tugs and barges.

A plump, good-looking woman of about thirty-five let me in when I explained who I was. I’m Eileen Mayhouse, she said. We’re all over in the other room having a tiddly about the most magical way to hang Michael’s drawings. She took my arm and walked me past the dart board, around the corner of the bar and to the top of the short, broad steps leading down into the big public room. I had the privilege of getting sight of Michael before he saw me.

There he was in shirt sleeves and dark glasses, pointing with a cane to show a couple of aproned men where he wanted them to nail up a panel to which both photos and drawings had been glued. The room was for the most part campily decorated with antique comic strips, Victorian age paintings of chorines in curly gold frames, and huge posters of Garbo and Buster Keaton. Across the shorter side of the room was a bandstand with drums and horn cases, music stands, and a piano, besides two huge long black curving horns that looked like something stolen from the shepherd folk in a Hardy novel. Only the long wall parallel with the river had been cleared to make room for Michael’s work.

That’s Cecile, Eileen Mayhouse said. I supposed she was talking about one of the two women lolling on folding chairs between the big bar down there and the bandstand. They both looked pretty gorgeous in their summer dresses. Both had glasses of pink gin. They were obviously not in attendance to help Michael with the heavy part of the work.

I mean the panel they’re nailing there above the door is Cecile. Pictures of her, Eileen said. It’s really her show. A show of her. Though most of the studies of her are upstairs. Can you imagine? The Governor, though he’s Michael’s old crony and though the show was his idea to begin with, balked at hanging any nude drawings down here where the poor but honest workingman might see them while he comforted himself with his pint. The Governor wants the movie stars and the peerage and others Michael has done of that sort put up down here. The slick things. I told him it was all the more cathousish to put the nudes above stairs. You know. Isn’t it rather like the signs in Soho—‘Young Model, June, 1 flight up’? But he wouldn’t take my point. And I think it’s amused Michael to have it this way.

It’s the magic solution.

Oh, she said, a little put off by the word magic when I batted it back to her. Yes. Quite. Michael, darling. Someone to join us.

He turned then, fifty feet away from me on the dimmer side of the big room, a white-clothed figure saluting me with his cane, waving it like a wand.

’lo, Norman, he said, recognizing me instantly as I recognized—not his face, really, because the features were so camouflaged by dark glasses—I recognized the voice that was so unchangingly his. Not loud. Never loud at any distance. Just solid and sure of its power to reach across distance and, as I thought in an emotional moment, across more vanished time than a human voice has any right to reach.

His friends turned languidly to see who had come in as he tucked the cane under his left arm, rather theatrically, and came to shake hands. He cupped my elbow with his left hand while we shook.

All right. It was not a fraternal gesture. It was a caress. I felt folded in by the arms of an older brother.

Well, I made it at last, I said. You know I’ve been often enough in London for several years. It was only a matter of looking up your number in the phone book.…

There is a right time for everything, he said. Meaning that this was it. He was smiling at how perfectly we’d managed to time a reunion that might have been bitched if we’d hurried it. I wished I could see his eyes. Often in the spring when the weather starts to turn I’ve said to myself, ‘Ah, now, this season Norman will show up and say it’s time to go off to the Ozarks in his patched canoe.’ We’d planned that once. I suppose it was the easiest tag line for him to remember me by. But everything else aside, I was moved by the grace he showed in choosing to mention it now. I’ve been often in America, too, he said. Though never near St. Louis or Hansville. Is your sister well?

Well, I said. She’s living in St. Louis.

Married long ago, of course?

Married long ago … There we stood on the dangerous edge of all I had carried so long to tell him. And he was not going to give me the opening to tell him, any more than he was going to lift those damn glasses and let me see his eyes. Time wasn’t going to permit it. It had been too long. It wasn’t a thing I’d permit myself ever to blurt out unless the perfect moment to say it came again.

Let me introduce you around, he said, still holding my elbow and swinging me to the little circle of his friends. To make a bad joke, it’s Norman, here for the Conquest, he said to them. Norman Scholes is a representative of the Gath Corporation, he said gaily. Spy outfit. Another mask for the CIA and the Pentagon. Right, old boy?

The truth is the truth. I never argue, I said. I didn’t mind being identified this way to clever people. It nettled me to note that he probably got his information either from Tammy Chandler or from the Averill Holdings people who’d rented her services for me. There was still all that to be explained—if the right moment ever came for explanations.

He’s here scouting the British Isles with the view of annexing them as the fifty-first American state, he said.

It’s not a joke, I said in my best joking tone.

Only not good form to say it, what? Ursula …

Ursula Drake was the tall, beautiful redhead. It wouldn’t take a man as shrewd as me to spot her as one of Michael’s women. You don’t have to feel the crease to know what’s been between their legs.

The woman who’d brought me in belonged to Peter Mayhouse, the chunky intense man with eyes as blue as Tammy Chandler’s. I told him I’d admired his last play in its New York run. "No one’s seen my last play, Norman. We ran it off once in a Wimbledon church. It’s that sort of thing, you know. Unfit for public consumption."

Whether that was true or not, he was one of the best of the new British playwrights. And what was he doing here on a fine summer afternoon, helping hang some drawings in a neighborhood pub?

That question tickled my nose more as the introductions went on. They were swingers, Michael’s crew. Simon Whetlock worked for the The Mirror and wrote pieces for The Observer. Tracy Bryce was an MP from Liverpool. There was a Japanese astrophysicist on temporary duty at Jodrell Bank. And those three men can’t have been there merely to sniff after Ursula Drake or the other pretty girl, whose name I never did catch.

Only the manager (called the Governor) of the Horseferry Arms seemed to fit. Dr. Cobb’s been a friend of this establishment for years, the governor, Harry Duke, told me. You can see his cartoons and caricatures on every wall. He swung his hairy bare arms toward the rooms through which we’d entered. "So I says to him, ‘Doctor, the time has come. The customers as comes here, some of them see their own likeness where I’ve hung ’em. Every once in a while, no telling when, they see you in here with pad and pencil drawing an ugly map or some lovely young person. They read in The Mirror when you have an exposition of your art in a Mayfair gallery—and they won’t in a hundred years ever get up there to see it. Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘would it not be well and proper to show your God-given talent to them as cares?’ Then Mr. Whetlock will get us a proper spread in his newspaper, too."

I will, Harry, Simon Whetlock promised.

And who of us can ever be hurt by publicity? Harry demanded of everyone.

We’ll headline it ‘What’s Upstairs at the Horseferry Arms,’ Whetlock said, teasing Harry Duke about the nude drawings he wouldn’t permit in the public bar.

No, Harry said. No, Mr. Whetlock, I should think it might be ‘Art in a Workingman’s Pub.’

He was all for dignity, Harry Duke. But he licked his lips and offered to show me the display upstairs if that should be my pleasure.

So I saw Cecile first as I see her now—not flipping her three cute dimensions through Richard Derwent’s bed and into history and notoriety—but flat on the page as Michael drew her. She was the creature of Michael’s imagination. He made her an agent of fate by the skill of his hand, and his skill as a showman.

Miss Banner’s a lovely young person, Harry Duke said as he ogled the nates and navels and eggshell breasts drawn in pencil and crayon on a variety of tinted papers displayed in frames around the walls of that airless room upstairs at the Horseferry. Make sure that Dr. Cobb introduces you sometime.

Of course he had introduced her with the drawings, letting me see about as much of her that day as he chose to reveal of himself—an impression, an image, some significant lines to be fleshed out later.

We had no chance at all to talk alone. Michael had to go by the hospital at four—to open the cast on a baronet’s leg, no less. He made it sound like the work of a sculptor. He made it sound like name-dropping. His performance for me was all as contrived, conventional, and disciplined as the drawings he was putting up for display.

We were to have lunch together before I flew back to America. But what I took back with me was mainly just the image of him there in the pub among his remarkable disciples. I told General Gath that the curtains showman Cobb had parted on that scene had been, again, decisive. Like the first time I laid eyes on him in Hansville, I said, before the war.

You saw an extraordinary man? he asked musingly. Then, with the fine, dry irony he used to both mock and encourage me, he said, When I was a boy in school we used to be told that history was made by extraordinary men. Of course the fashion for that is changed and we believe only in social forces, capital, and technology. We make our profit from analyzing them. But … don’t dismiss the exceptional man.

I told him I had tried that once. I had decisively put Michael out of my mind for twenty-five years. I’ve seen a hell of a lot since then. I’m not the same person. And here I am, feeling I have to start over from the same beginning with that damn Michael Cobb.

You’ve come a long way from Missouri, the general said. We were on his balcony, breathing the air of a summer night. The stars were out over the mountains across from Falcon Wing. The pieces of a riddle were twinkling inside my head, as far apart as those stars. Far enough apart to scare a man, just with the thought of distances.

It’s a damn sad story, I said. "My sister picked up this nice young Englishman in a drugstore when he was lonesome for home. She was drinking a Green River. He remembers that. He told me day before yesterday.…

I met Michael on the tennis court Bill Koonsey and I had scraped out of our back yard, I said. Everything in my lousy life changed from the minute I heard his voice.

CHAPTER FOUR

As a physician Michael Cobb was admired and liked by many of his patients. He treated Lord Collingwood well and became his friend. Lord Collingwood and the Hon. Tracy