“Ersequake?” Alec wore the expression of metaphysical amusement that came from sucking a nicotine lozenge. “Just now?”
“Yes. You feel it?”
“No … I was busy.” He beckoned Louis into his sanctum, where two cigarettes of different lengths were burning in a heaping ashtray. His shortwave was set up by the window, and along the wall were piled packing cartons. It was beginning to appear that these rooms were the only place he had to live.
“Two things,” he said. “Sit please. First thing, I thought again—is maybe not so bad to do those collections. If they won’t pay immediately, say we settle for half if they pay right away. It must be right away.” He selected the shorter of the burning cigarettes, killed it, and drew on the longer one, still rotating the lozenge in his mouth. “Other thing: honest answer. Do employees respect a boss who smokes?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“They appear weak. Smokers.”
“Are you talking about me or about Libby?”
Alec did a foreign thing with his upper lip, curling it like a vampire about to bite, behind a veil of smoke. “Libby.”
“I’m sure she respects you. Why wouldn’t she?”
Alec nodded very slowly, lip still drawn, eyes on an odd corner of the room. “Do those collections,” he said.
Louis returned to his cubicle and reopened the files, but his first call was to the Harvard University switchboard. After one ring he was speaking to Howard Chun, who with an unpromising grunt went to try to find Renée Seitchek. When her voice came over the line she sounded neither surprised nor pleased.
“I felt the earthquake,” Louis said.
“Uh-huh. So did we.”
“Where was it? How big?”
“Outside Peabody, smaller than Sunday’s. This we get from the radio, incidentally.”
“The reason I’m calling is to see if you want to go to a party my sister is giving on the twenty-eighth. Not that this is an idea I personally endorse, but supposedly it’s an earthquake-oriented party. A costume party. Will it be fun, I have no idea. But that’s what I’m calling for.”
He bent his head and listened extra-closely to what came out of the receiver.
“The twenty-eighth.”
“Yes.”
“Well—OK. But I’m not going to wear any costume.”
He released his breath, which he’d been holding. “Let me suggest that you wear some token costume. Like maybe a Band-Aid. Not that I personally—”
“All right. I’ll wear a token costume. Where’s this party going to be?”
He arranged to pick her up in his car. It turned out that she lived in Somerville herself. She gave him her home telephone number and said it was better not to call her at work. He hung up with a bad taste in his mouth, feeling unwanted.
A week of uneasiness ensued. After a couple of lucky collections Louis had begun to run into stonewalling receptionists, dilatory assistants, and a few outright ogres. He was also having trouble finding funds for postage. Once he’d exhausted the little caches of one- and two- and five-cent stamps from various abandoned desks, he had to draw on petty cash, which was kept in the owner’s wallet.
More and more often Alec could be found watching the little Zenith in his office. At dinnertime, alone or not, he provided running oral glosses on TV news and advertising; otherwise he liked to watch Westerns and war films.
“TV noose and noosepapers,” he told Louis, “are the enemy. For eight years we had a U.S. President with subnormal intelligence. Every day he does horrible harm to language, the future, the truth. Every single sinking person in the country knows this, except not the networks and noosepapers. Is suspicious, no? Or is maybe Stupid People now also minority group we don’t say bad things about? Let’s go all the way, let’s have a retarded President. And noose conference, and President is bellowing and drooling, and his advisers say, he has interesting new program, and CBS says, the President drooled tonight, and we have five analysts here to talk about his interesting new program and also perhaps about is he drooling less than last time? And New York Times prints a transcript of noose conference, is all drool drool bellow bellow, also one coherent sentence, and on page one they print the one coherent sentence! I guess they don’t want to offend retarded people by saying is bad to have a retarded President.
“Still, OK, fine, is their prerogative. But isn’t it the responsibility also of every sinking person in the country to say to networks and noosepapers: You are my enemy now. You betrayed me. You are not really on my side. You are on side of money and I see through you now and is the end. No more! You are out! I’ll find a good magazine and radio station, sank you!
“But it’s a horrible venal world. Sinking people—artists and intellectuals, the good reporters—must write for Times and talk to CBS, otherwise their enemies will. And so with blackmail the big noose media buy writers and intellectuals. Personally the media don’t give a fuck, Louis, they don’t give a fuck about truth. They’re just businesses that must always be making money, never stop making money and never offend any group.
“Now Mr. Pro-Life wants to buy my station because not enough people listen. Am I angry? Yes I am angry. But not politically angry. I wall not say,? disagree with these people’s politics.’ Because all politics is the same. Left, right, is the same! Exactly the same! But noosepapers must have readers and networks must have viewers, and without politics everyone could see this emperor of culture has no clothes on, so everything is politics! The far right gets nowhere if the media talk about what is beautiful and what is true and what is just, instead of what is politically feasible. The far right is not beautiful and not true and not just. Is their very good fortune only to be looked at politically …”
Though he was paid for only eight hours, Louis seldom left Waltham before six in the evening. He was surprised, one night at the end of the week, to find Libby Quinn sitting on the sofa in the TV room, breathing Alec’s smoke. Usually at this hour Libby was home with her daughters.
“Louis,” Alec said in greeting. “We have special programming tonight. A portrait of the man who—”
“Sh, sh, sh, sh, sh,” Libby said.
“I was just going to tell Louis—”
Louis ignored him. He was transfixed by the television. It drew him closer. He turned it up loud.
“We’re talking about a building,” the image of DR. RENEE SEITCHEK said, “that was condemned three years ago by the Chelsea city manager and that’s sitting on completely unconsolidated landfill. It’s hard to imagine a building more prone to damage in an earthquake, and to me it’s just insanity to allow 250 church members to be living in it, even if every one of them signed a waiver.”
“So you believe there could be further earthquakes,” an unseen male interviewer said.
“You can’t rule it out. Not after what happened in Peabody on Friday.”
“Dr. Axelrod at?G? told me he thinks the odds of a damaging earthquake in central Boston in the next twelve months are still less than one in a thousand.”
“They could be one in a million, there still shouldn’t be people living in that building.”
“I take it you’re not in agreement with Reverend Stites on the issue of abortion.”
As DR. RENEE SEITCHEK struggled to reply to this irrelevant question, the camera zoomed in on her until the tiny freckles around her eyelids could be seen. In her right ear she wore three small silver hoops in separate holes. Out-of-focus leaves and sunshine played in the window behind her.
“I