THE MAN WHO JAPED

CHAPTER 18

Late that night he sat with Janet in the darkness, listening to the noises filtering through the walls from other apartments. The murmur of voices, faint music, rattle of dishes and pans, and indiscriminate globs of sound that could be anything. "Want to go for a walk?" he asked. "No." Janet stirred a little beside him. "Want to go to bed?"

"No. Just sit."

Presently Allen said: "I ran into Mrs. Birmingham on my way to the bathroom. They brought the reports in a convoy of Getabouts. Six men guarding it. Now she's got it all hidden somewhere, probably in an old stocking."

"You're going into the block meeting?"

"I'll be there, and I'm going to fight with everything I've got."

"Will it do any good?" He reflected. "No."

"Then," Janet said, "we're washed up."

"We'll lose our lease, if that's what you mean. But that's all Mrs. Birmingham can do. Her authority ends when we leave here."

"You've resigned yourself to that," Janet said.

"I might as well." He searched for his cigarettes, then gave up. "Haven't you?"

"Your family worked decades for this lease. All those years your mother was with the Sutton Agency before it merged. And your father in T-M's art department."

"Pooled status," he said. "You don't have to remind me. But I'm still Director of Telemedia. Maybe I can wangle a lease out of Sue Frost. Technically I'm entitled to one. We should be living in Myron Mavis' apartment, within walking distance of my work."

"Would she give you a lease now? After this business today?"

He tried to imagine Sue Frost and the expression on her face. The sound of her voice. The rest of the day he had hung around his office at T-M expecting her to call, but she hadn't. No word had arrived from above; the powers had remained mum.

"She'll be disappointed," he said. "Sue had the kind of hopes for me only a mother could invent."

Up the ladder generation by generation. The schemings of old women, the secret ambitions and activity of parents boosting their children one more notch. Exhaustion, sweat, the grave.

"We can assume Blake-Moffet briefed her," he said. "I guess it's time to tell you what happened last night at her apartment."

He told Janet, and she had nothing to say. There wasn't enough light in the apartment to see her face, and he wondered if she had passed out with wretchedness. Or if some primordial storm were going to burst over him. But, when he finally nudged her, she simply said: "I was afraid it was something like that."

"Why the h--l why?"

"I just had a feeling. Maybe I'm clairvoyant." He had told her about Doctor Malparto's Psionic-testing. "And it was the same girl?"

"The girl who got me to the Health Resort; the girl who helped kidnap me; the girl who leaned her bosom in my face and said I was the father of her child. A very pretty black-haired girl with a big lovely house. But I did come back. Nobody seems to care about that part."

"I care," Janet said. "Do you think she was in on the frame-up?"

"The idea entered my mind. But she wasn't. There was nothing to be gained, except by Blake-Moffet. And the Resort isn't part of Blake-Moffet. Gretchen was just witless and irresponsible and full of feminine vigor. Young love, they call it. And the idealism of her calling. Her brother's the same way: idealism, for the benefi [sic] , of the patient."

"It's so sort of crazy," Janet protested. "All she did was walk into your office, and all you did was kiss her when she left. And you're completely ruined."

"The word is ‘vile enterprise,' " Allen said. "It'll be showing up Wednesday, about nine a.m. I wonder what Mr. Wales can do in my defense. It should pose quite a challenge to him."

But the block meeting wasn't really important. The unknown was Sue Frost, and her reaction might not be in for days. After all, she had to confer with Ida Pease Hoyt: the reaction needed the stamp of absolute finality.

"Didn't you say something about bringing home a quart of ice cream?" Janet asked wanly.

"Seems sort of silly," Allen said. "Everything considered."