The Gold Coast

35

Sandy Chapman is in the middle of an ordinary business day, snorting Polymorpheus and listening to The Underachievers with his friend and client John Sturmond, watching the hang-gliding championships at Victoria Falls on John’s wall video and talking about the commercial possibilities of a small-scale aural hallucinogen. Suddenly John’s ally Vikki Gale bursts in, all upset. “We’ve been ripped off!”

Turns out that she and John fronted nearly a liter of the Buzz to a retailer of theirs named Adam, who has now disappeared from the face of OC. No chance of finding him, or collecting the bill, which means they are out some ten thousand dollars. Gone like a dollar bill dropped in the street, and with no lost and found. And no police to call. It’s gone. The price you pay for bad character judgment.

Vikki is collapsed on the couch crying, John is up striding around, shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I knew I shouldn’t have trusted that guy!”

Heavy gloom ensues. Sandy sighs, roots around in his Adidas bag and pulls out a large eyedropper of California Mello. “Here,” he says. “There’s only one solution to a situation like this, and that’s to get as stoned as you can.”

So they start lidding. “Think of it as an event,” Sandy drones. “An experience. I mean, how often does it happen? It’s great, in a way. Teaches you some about the realms of experience and emotion.”

“For sure,” Vikki says.

“I’m with you there,” says John.

“Besides, I fronted you, and okayed the front to this thief Adam, so I’ll halve the loss with you. We’ll just have to sell more and make it back.”

“For sure.”

“That’s really tubular of you, man. Absolutely untold.”

They lid some Funny Bone. Now the whole thing strikes them funny, but they’re too mellow to laugh.

“It’s a high-risk industry.” Giggles.

“Investment portfolio just walked off on us.” Chuckles.

“We’ve been completely fucked.”

But beneath all that, under the attempt to take the bummer in style, Sandy is thinking furiously. He had expected to be paid several thousand by John and Vikki, which apparently they thought they were going to get from the absent Adam. So much for that.

But he needs that several thousand to buy the supplies for the next shipment from Charles, who works C.O.D. only. Without the several thousand, he is into a serious cash-flow problem, especially given the giant bills from the medical center in Miami. He starts doing some serious accounting in his head, where all the books are anyway, at the same time holding down his part of the conversation with John and Vikki.

Somewhere in that conversation John says something that Sandy finds particularly interesting, and after he’s done with his calculations—which remain disheartening—he tries to track back to it.

“What did you say a second ago?”

“Huh?” John says. “What?”

“I say, say what? What did you say? Say it again?”

“Oh man, you’re asking a lot! What were we talking about?”

“Um, dangerous work, something about chancy occupations like ours, and you said something about aerospace plants?”

“Oh yeah! That’s right. This guy I know, Larry, he’s working for a friend in San Diego who does industrial espionage. He slips into offices as a repairman or janitor and rips off paperwork and disks. Now that’s already chancy enough, but he tells me that it’s escalated into sabotage recently.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve read about some of that I guess,” Sandy says. This is connecting up with something he heard… when was that? “Do you know the friend?”

“Larry didn’t mention the name. But they’re hiring out to people that want the work done, apparently, and Larry is freaked. Even though the pay is good he’s not too comfortable with the way things are trending.”

“He’s doing the actual sabotage himself?”

“Some of it. And then he’s got people working for him too. Like your friend Bastanchury.”

“Arthur’s one?”

Dispassionately Sandy considers it. Up until this point he hadn’t placed the earlier conversation he remembers having on this topic, but now with the mention of Arthur the party on Torrey Pines Cliffs comes back to him, the opium conference with Bob Tompkins. What was it Bob had been saying? Whew. There is this problem with drug taking at Sandy’s level: functioning in the present is possible, just barely, with the most intense concentration; but the past… the past tends to disappear. A lot of tracks branch back up into the hippocampus there, and he doesn’t seem to have much of a program for navigating them.

Well, he couldn’t give a word-for-word transcript, but finally he does recall the gist of it. Something about Raymond taking revenge against the military, which is a funny idea on the face of it, although it’s developing disturbing aspects. Instinctively he is curious. He wants to know what is going on. Partly this is because it is going on in his territory, the black economy of OC, and it’s important for him to know as much as he can about the territory. Then partly it’s because he has the feeling that the whole affair might have something to do with his friends, through Arthur. Jim hangs out with Arthur a lot these days, and probably he doesn’t know what Arthur’s gotten himself into.…

For the moment, however, he’s distracted by the memory of Raymond and Bob Tompkins. That was the night that Bob’s friend Manfred made the proposal concerning the aphrodisiac coming in from Hawaii, that’s right. A little smuggling for twenty thousand and a lot of aphrodisiac, which no doubt there would be a good demand for. Of course it goes against Sandy’s usual operating principle, but in a situation like this one… necessity makes its own principles. Now when was that conference? Just a week or so ago, wasn’t it? So there might still be time.…

Vikki starts crying again. She was the one who first met this disappearing Adam, and introduced him to John and Sandy, and so she feels responsible. “Let’s lid some more,” John suggests morosely.

Without a word, Sandy shifts back into support mode, pulls another eyedropper from his bag. Impassively he watches his friends blink Mello into their tears. We use drugs as a weapon, he thinks suddenly; a weapon to kill pain, to kill boredom. The thought shocks him a little, and he forgets it.

After cheering them up again he makes his way out. He types in the program for his next appointment, and sits in the driver’s seat watching the cars tracking around him. Ten thousand dollars. John and Vikki won’t be able to repay him for months and months, if ever, so essentially the loss is entirely his. Ach. Thieves, frauds, con men, do they ever think how their victims feel? He redoes the accounting, confirms the results; he is in a bad cash crunch.

Bleakly he picks up the car’s phone, calls Bob Tompkins. “Bob? Sandy here… I’m calling about your friend Manfred…”

So he agrees to do it. Bob says he has a few days before the transfer is to take place. The boat is all ready, in a slip in Newport harbor. Fine.

Once or twice during the next couple days Sandy remembers to ask casually about the industrial sabotage thing. It turns out that there are a whole lot of rumors about sabotage attacks on defense contractors—that they’re being made by members of the black economy’s extended family. But the rumors tend to contradict each other. No one but John Sturmond has heard Arthur’s name connected with it. Eveline Evans believes that the security chief at Parnell is behind it all, and that it’s all a manifestation of an intercorporations war. But Eveline is a big fan of intercorporate espionage videos, so Sandy is suspicious. This is a problem; filtering through rumors to real information is not an easy task. But Sandy keeps at it, when he remembers.

One night around 2:00 A.M. he’s talking with Oscar Baldarramma, a friend and a big distributor of the lab equipment and tissue cultures Sandy needs for his work. They’re out on Sandy’s balcony, near the end of the nightly party. And Oscar says, “I hear that Aerojet is going to get hit tonight by those saboteurs.”

“Is that right? How do you know?”

“Ah, Raymond himself was up here last night, and he let it slip.”

“Not very good security.”

“No, but Raymond likes to show off.”

“Yeah, that’s what Bob says. Is that all Raymond’s doing this stuff for, though?”

“ ’Course not. He’s doing it for money, just like he does everything. There’s lots of people happy to pay to see some of these companies suffer a setback or two.”

“Yeah.” And Sandy is thinking of Arthur, who left the party a couple hours before, after turning down an eyedropper of the Buzz, which surprised Sandy. And, for that matter, what happened to Jim?