Narabedla Ltd by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online

tokens, and began calling every luxe hotel in the area. To each one I said the same thing in my best Berlioz French—I mean the opera composer, not the guy who runs the language school: “Bon jour. Je voudrais parler avec M. Henri Davidson-Jones.” Eight times I tried it, working my way through Monaco, Menton, and Beaulieu, and when I started on Nice I hit pay dirt. “ Moment, m’sieur, s’il vous plaît,” said the operator at the Negresco, and a moment later I heard a male voice saying:
    “This is Mr. Passerine, Mr. Davidson-Jones’s secretary. Who is calling, please?”
    I didn’t have an answer for that question, unfortunately. I am very good at planning, up to a point. I had figured out a way to find out where Davidson-Jones was staying; it had worked; I just hadn’t thought far enough ahead to have decided what to do when I found him.
    So I improvised.
    I said, “Mr. Passerine, please hold for Mr. Rmfmf in Chicago.” And I put my hand over the mouthpiece for a moment.
    Then I gently hung up.
    “Why’d you hang up? He’s there, isn’t he?” Irene demanded.
    “Right. He’s there. Now you tell me what we do about it.”
    “We go and confront him!”
    “You tried that in New York. He wouldn’t see you.”
    “We’ll sit in the lobby until he comes out.”
    “They’ll throw us out, Irene. That’s a classy hotel.”
    “They can’t throw us off the sidewalk in front of it, can they?”
    “I wouldn’t bet.” Then I said firmly, “Anyway, I want to think this over before I do something foolish.”
    And she said, “Oh, shit.”
    She turned her back on me and walked away. I didn’t follow. I didn’t know what to say if I did. I just watched her as she walked into the lobby casino and began feeding coins into the one-franc slots.
    I tried to think of what I ought to do next. No good ideas turned up, except that my feet were beginning to hurt; Monaco is an up-and-down place, and I’d jogged over from the bus stop. On cobblestones. I decided to sit down while I thought; so I walked over to the bar and got myself a Campari-soda, not because I had changed my mind about trendy European aperitifs, but because it seemed like the right thing for that place; and 1 sulked.
    That’s candor. “Sulked” isn’t the word I would prefer to use. It just happened to be the right one.
    I got into a debate with myself, for the lack of Irene Madigan to take the other side. I told myself that I owed her nothing—anyway, nothing but common courtesy, and I’d certainly given her more of that than she had given to me.
    It occurred to me that she was really on the edge over what had happened to somebody she loved. I should have been more understanding, I thought.
    I also thought that I probably seemed, well, excessively cautious to her. Not to say chicken. That was understandable. Actually I was more prudent than she, if only because the person I was principally concerned about was only a client, not a blood relative. Irene should have understood that, shouldn’t she?
    She hadn’t, though.
    That bothered me, in a part of my mind where I was pretty tender already. I guess you could call it the area of personality I thought of as “manliness.” The old girlfriend who had wept at dinner at II Gattopardo ran into me a year or two later. She didn’t cry this time, she only looked me up and down and chatted for a while and then made up her mind: “Why do you have to be so macho, Nolly?” she asked. “Hang-gliding? Muscle-building? Why don’t you just relax and quit trying to be Rambo?” We didn’t part real friendly that time, either. She’d been through both Esalen and est by then and was, of course, absolutely sure of her diagnosis of me: Acting ballsy to cover up the fact that I wasn’t.
    So it meant something to me that Irene Madigan might be thinking of me as a coward. I wanted her to understand where I was coming from. But when I went looking for her among the slots to explain all that to her, she