Goodbye California. Alistair MacLean

accepted the facts at their face value. If the bandits are the kind of people that I think they are then they’re not to be judged on ordinary standards. They’re mavericks. They’re power-mad, megalomaniacs if you like, people who will stop at nothing, people who will go all the way in ruthlessness, especially when thwarted or shoved into a corner.’

      Jablonsky digested this for some time then said: ‘Then you ought to look worried.’

      ‘That would help a lot.’ The door bell rang. Ryder rose and went to the lobby. Sergeant Parker, a bachelor who looked on Ryder’s house as a second home, had already let himself in. He, like Jablonsky, was carrying a briefcase: unlike Jablonsky, he looked cheerful.

      ‘Evening. Shouldn’t be associating with a fired cop, but in the sacred name of friendship –’

      ‘I resigned.’

      ‘Comes to the same thing. Leaves the way clear for me to assume the mantle of the most detested and feared cop in town. Look on the bright side. After thirty years of terrifying the local populace you deserve a break.’ He followed Ryder into the living-room. ‘Ah! Dr Jablonsky. I didn’t expect to find you here.’

      ‘I didn’t expect to be here.’

      ‘Lift up your spirits, Doc. Consorting with disgraced cops is not a statutory crime.’ He looked accusingly at Ryder. ‘Speaking of lifting – or lifting up spirits – this man’s glass is almost empty. London gin for me.’ A year on an exchange visit to Scotland Yard had left Parker with the profound conviction that American gin hadn’t advanced since prohibition days and was still made in bath-tubs.

      ‘Thanks to remind me.’ Ryder looked at Jablonsky. ‘He’s only consumed about a couple of hundred crates of the stuff here in the past fourteen years. Give or take a crate.’

      Parker smiled, delved into his briefcase and came up with Ryder’s photograph. ‘Sorry to be so late with this. Had to go back and report to our fat friend. Seemed to be recovering from some sort of heart attack. Less interested in my report than in discussing you freely and at some length. Poor man was very upset so I congratulated him on his character analysis. This picture has some importance?’

      ‘I hope so. What makes you think so?’

      ‘You asked for it. And it seems Susan was going to take it with her then changed her mind. Seems she took it with her into the room where they were all locked up. Told the guard she felt sick. Guard checked the wash-room – for windows and telephone, I should imagine – then let her in. She came out in a few minutes looking, so I’m told, deathly pale.’

      ‘Morning Dawn,’ Ryder said.

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘Face-powder she uses.’

      ‘Ah! Then – peace to the libbers – she exercised a woman’s privilege of changing her mind and changed her mind about taking the picture with her.’

      ‘Have you opened it up?’

      ‘I’m a virtuous honest cop and I wouldn’t dream –’

      ‘Stop dreaming.’

      Parker eased off the six spring-loaded clips at the back, removed the rectangle of white cardboard and peered with interest at the back of Ryder’s photograph. ‘A clue, by heavens, a clue! I see the word “Morro”. The rest, I’m afraid, is in shorthand.’

      ‘Figures. She’d be in a hurry.’ Ryder crossed to the phone, dialled then hung up in about thirty seconds. ‘Damn! She’s not there.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘My shorthand translator, Marjory. She and Ted have gone to eat, drink, dance, to a show or whatever. I’ve no idea what they do in the evenings or where the young hang out these days. Jeff will know. We’ll just have to wait till he returns.’

      ‘Where is your fellow ex-cop?’

      ‘Up on Cypress Bluff throwing some of Chief Donahure’s most treasured possessions into the Pacific’

      ‘Not Chief Donahure himself? Pity. I’m listening.’

CHAPTER THREE

      America, like England, has much more than its fair share of those people in the world who choose not to conform to the status quo. They are the individualists who pursue their own paths, their own beliefs, their own foibles and what are commonly regarded as their own irrational peculiarities with a splendid disregard, leavened only with a modicum of kindly pity and sorrow and benign resignation, for those unfortunates who are not as they, the hordes of faceless conformists amongst whom they are forced to move and have their being. Some few of those individualists, confined principally to those who pursue the more esoteric forms of religions of their own inventions, try sporadically to lead the more gullible of the unenlightened along the road that leads to ultimate revelation: but basically, however, they regard the unfortunate conformists as being sadly beyond redemption and are resigned to leaving them to wallow in the troughs of their ignorance while they follow the meandering highways and byways of their own chosen life-style, oblivious of the paralleling motorways that carry the vast majority of blinkered mankind. They are commonly known as eccentrics.

      America, as said, has its fair share of such eccentrics – and more. But California, as both the inhabitants of that State and the rest of the Union would agree, has vastly more than its fair share of American eccentrics: they are extremely thick upon the ground. They differ from your true English eccentric, who is almost invariably a loner. Californian eccentrics tend to polarize, and could equally well be categorized as cultists, whose beliefs range from the beatific to the cataclysmic, from the unassailable – because incapable of disproof – pontifications of the self-appointed gurus to the courageous resignation of those who have the day, hour and minute of the world’s end or those who crouch on the summit of a high peak in the Sierras awaiting the next flood which will surely lap their ankles – but no higher – before sunset. In a less free, less open, less inhibited and less tolerant society than California’s they would be tidied away in those institutions reserved for imbalanced mavericks of the human race: the Golden State does not exactly cherish them but does regard them with an affectionate if occasionally exasperated amusement.

      But they cannot be regarded as the true eccentrics. In England, or on the eastern seaboard of the States, one can be poor and avoid all contact with like-minded deviants and still be recognized as an outstanding example of what the rest of mankind is glad it isn’t. In the group-minded togetherness of California such solitary peaks of eccentric achievement are almost impossible to reach, although there have been one or two notable examples, outstandingly the self-proclaimed Emperor of San Francisco and Defender of Mexico. Emperor Norton the First became so famous and cherished a figure that even the burial ceremony of his dog attracted such a vast concourse of tough and hard-headed nineteenth-century Franciscans that the entire business life of the city, saloons and bordellos apart, ground to a complete halt. But it was rare indeed for a penniless eccentric to scale the topmost heights.

      To hope to be a successful eccentric in California one has to be a millionaire: being a billionaire brings with it a cast-iron guarantee. Von Streicher had been one of the latter, one of the favoured few. Unlike the bloodless and desiccated calculating machines of the oil, manufacturing and marketing billionaires of today, Von Streicher had been one of the giants of the era of steamships, railways and steel. Both his vast fortune and his reputation as an eccentric had been made and consolidated by the early twentieth century, and his status in both fields was unassailable. But every status requires its symbol: a symbol for your billionaire cannot be intangible: it has to be seen, and the bigger the better: and all self-respecting eccentrics with the proper monetary qualifications invariably settled on the same symbol: a home that would properly reflect the uniqueness of the owner. Kubla Khan had built his own Xanadu and, as he had been incomparably wealthier than any run-of-the-mill billionaire, what was good enough for him was good enough for them.

      Von Streicher’s choice