Riviera Blues. Jack Batten

bird. I drank some more vodka and pondered the wisdom of pushing ahead. I could be sitting at the damn machine all night and never come within hailing distance of Operation Freeload. Or I could go home and think about rounding up someone who would handle the computer detail for me.

      I positioned the arrow opposite “gravity” and clicked the mouse.

      Everything on the screen bounced and vibrated. Words and symbols and boxes trembled as if an earthquake had struck.

      Then — zip — nothing. The screen went blank, nothing except a sea of off-white.

      Was this a silent metaphor? Was there a hidden message in the damn blank screen? Was the computer telling me to sign up for a course at George Brown College? Study up your Disk Drive 101 and come back in a year, fella.

      “Well, thank you very much,” I said to the NeXT.

      Talking out loud to an inanimate object. Bad omen. Maybe a sign I should bid adieu to the NeXT. But not to the disk. I pushed the Power button, and the machine went into another round of hums and drones. As they dwindled toward silence, the light on the screen faded to black and the slot on the annex box beside the main computer burped out the disk. Good old Operation Freeload, whatever it was.

      I stuck the disk in my pocket, made one more small vodka, and organized myself to head home. The hell with technology.

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      At home, I phoned Pamela.

      “This is the Cartwright residence.”

      It wasn’t the housekeeper who answered, not unless her voice had dropped an octave since the afternoon. It was a man on the line, sounding as pear-toned and snooty as Arthur Treacher used to in the movies. I gambled it wasn’t Archie being funny, or even being serious, and asked for Mrs. Cartwright.

      “May I say who is calling, sir?”

      “The credit manager at Creed’s.”

      “One moment, please.”

      Pamela took less than one moment to get to the phone.

      “Is this a joke?” she said into the receiver.

      “It’s Crang.”

      “Close enough.”

      “Was that a real butler who answered?”

      “Real part-time butler. He comes in when we have a dinner party. Which is what’s going on right now. Why are you calling? And speak fast.”

      “Jamie’s got a NeXT in his den.”

      “A birthday present from me.”

      “What’s he do with it?”

      “Plugs into the Pentagon for all I know,” Pamela said. Behind her, I could hear the subdued buzz of the party.

      “There are little square disks that go with it. With the NeXT.”

      “Optical disks. Get the terminology right, Crang. Those, if you want to know, hold words and pictures and sound. A person could store a whole novel on one disk, a James Michener, though God knows why anyone would want to.”

      “Gee,” I said, “you’re practically an expert.”

      “I couldn’t help picking up something, the way Jamie rabbits on about that bloody NeXT.”

      “Did he ever rabbit on about an optical disk labelled Operation Freeload?”

      “Should he have?”

      “I was hoping.”

      “He didn’t, and, listen, couldn’t this wait? The dinner party’s really for Archie’s sake, business friends of his. It isn’t polite for the hostess to ignore them. Or good for Archie’s business either.”

      “Michel Rolland, heard of him?”

      “Who’s he, the director of Operation Freeload?”

      “He was in Jamie’s apartment when I went over. He’s from Monaco. A guy in his late thirties, looks prosperous, obviously tough, a cagey sort of cookie.”

      “Hold on.”

      She must have put a hand over the receiver. At my end, I got muffled half-words. One of the half-words was “hole.” I had an inkling the other half was “ass.”

      Pamela came back on the line, unmuffled.

      “Archie’s getting antsy,” she said.

      “Did I half-hear you describe me as an asshole?”

      “You half-heard me describe the credit manager at Creed’s as an asshole who’s bothering the wrong Mrs. Cartwright at an hour when sensible credit managers should be in the bosom of their families.”

      “I got more on Jamie,” I said. “We should meet again. Not for tea.”

      “Whatever you’ve been doing in the last few hours, Crang, you’d better not have blown my problem into major proportions. This isn’t a criminal case, you know.”

      “Those are just about the same words Swotty used at lunch.”

      “Well, Daddy is usually right.”

      “A meeting?”

      Pamela didn’t hesitate. “Saturday at five-thirty,” she said. “The Courtyard.”

      She hung up.

      I spent another five minutes on the phone talking to a young criminal lawyer I know, one of the new computer-friendly breed. He said he’d be free to look at the optical disk and its contents Sunday morning. I thanked him, and thought about hiding the disk until Sunday.

      If the disk was important enough to conceal in Jamie’s apartment, it merited the same treatment in mine. I moseyed around the living room and out to the kitchen checking for a hiding place that qualified as cunning. In the end, after fifteen minutes of moseying, I settled on the white globe around the overhead light in my bedroom. I stood on a chair from the kitchen, unscrewed the globe, took out the light bulb, dropped in the disk, and re-screwed the globe. Maybe not out-and-out cunning, but fairly crafty.

      I phoned Annie and got her answering machine. Annie was busy with movies. She had to see six or seven before we left for France and put reviews of them on tape for Metro Morning to use in her absence. I made a sandwich out of three-grain bread and some turkey slices that were just beginning to harden at the edges. A rerun of L.A. Law was on TV. I watched it, ate the sandwich, and helped it along with a Wyborowa and soda. When L.A. Law ended, I tried to decide whether I identified more with Jimmy Smits or Corbin Bernsen. Tough call. I was still working on the decision when I fell asleep.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      On Friday morning, I called Trumball Fraser. He said sure, he was free for lunch. Did I know Coaster’s? Little place over by the St. Lawrence Market? Trum said he was a regular there. I didn’t know Coaster’s, but I knew Trum. When he said he was a regular, it meant Coaster’s must be an out-of-the-way spot where Trum could have long lunches and longer drinks without other Cayuga & Granark employees crowding his noon hour. I said I’d meet him at twelve-thirty.

      Trum Fraser was a lawyer about my age. Professionally, he had two strikes against him, his father and his older brother. They were both civil litigation lawyers whose names looked incomplete unless the adjective “distinguished” was inserted up front. Distinguished counsel Justin and Roger Fraser. They argued before the Supreme Court of Canada about every other week and had their cases written up in the Dominion Law Reports. Trum got the short end of the stick in the family when it came to the law. He had most of the brains but not much of the ambition. He took the path of least resistance: a job as an in-house lawyer at Cayuga & Granark. He read contracts, wrote memos on changes in laws that affected trust companies, nothing terrifically demanding in the legal line. If litigation loomed, a lawsuit against C&G, Trum briefed counsel outside