The Branch Page 8
“Do you really mean that?”
Moore nodded.
A look of exaltation spread slowly across her chalk-white face, and her dark eyes widened with an unfathomable expression that almost scared him.
“Mr. Moore, you’ve got yourself a deal,” said Moira Rallings.
Chapter 7
Neptune’s Palace was crowded, as usual. Big-time gamblers and top-dollar prostitutes rubbed shoulders (and other things) with Chicago’s leading social gadflies, most of whom were looking for one last thrill on the way to senility or a first thrill on the road to adulthood.
Painted transvestites, leather-clad exhibitionists of both sexes, the newly wealthy who now disdained their prior association with the proletariat, all spread money through the ranks of the Palace staff to secure prominent tables at which they could preen and be seen.
Ben Pryor and Abe Bernstein sat in a small, unobtrusive booth at the back of the huge room, sipping a pair of Water Witches and watching the unpaid clowns outdraw the professional ones. There were half a dozen empty glasses on the table in front of Pryor, and his ashtray was filled to overflowing with half-smoked cigarettes.
“So what do you think?” Pryor was saying.
“About this place?” replied Bernstein with a smile. “Give me a chance to make up my mind, Ben. I’ve only been here for five minutes. But off the record, I suspect my wife would kill me if she knew I was enjoying myself at Neptune’s Palace while she was baby-sitting for two of our grandchildren.” He paused for a moment. “And while we’re on the subject of this place, exactly why am I here?”
“It’s easier to talk in comfortable surroundings.”
“You call this comfortable?” repeated Bernstein. “Unusual and exciting, maybe, but …”
“Well, I’m comfortable, anyway,” said Pryor defensively. He dumped his ashtray into an empty glass and lit another cigarette.
“As long as you’re paying the bill,” said Bernstein with a shrug. He forced himself to stop staring at the patrons and turned to Pryor. “I don’t imagine you invited me here to talk about this Jeremiah person that Moira used to live with, so what’s on your mind?”
Pryor chuckled. “I’m sick to death of Jeremiah. He’s just a goddamned beggar with delusions of grandeur.” He suddenly became intent. “Tell me about Moira.”
“About Moira? What’s to tell?”
“You had her under the psycho-probe,” persisted Pryor. “What makes her tick? I’ve met a lot of strange people in my life, Abe, but she’s as weird as they come!”
“We probed her for information, nothing more,” replied Bernstein.
“She did tell me about her—what would you call it?—her collection, if that’s what you’re interested in.” He took another sip of his drink. “Did Solomon really empty a four-room office suite so she could move it in?”
“It makes her feel at home,” said Pryor, signaling a nude prepubescent boy in a turban to bring him another drink. “I wonder why Moore agreed to it, though. It’s not like him to go around doing people favors.”
“Who knows?” shrugged Bernstein. “I’m sure he had his reasons.”
“I just wish I knew what they were,” muttered Pryor.
“What difference does it make?”
“You’ve got to know your enemy before you can take him on.”
Bernstein frowned. “Enemy?” he repeated. “What kind of talk is that?”
Pryor downed his drink and stared directly into Bernstein’s eyes. “I’m going to take the organization away from him some day.” Bernstein opened his mouth to protest, and Pryor held out his hand. “Don’t act so surprised, Abe. Moore knows it and you know it, so let’s just lay our cards on the table.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” said Bernstein.
“Of course you don’t,” said Pryor with a smile. “You’re Moore’s man, Abe.”
“Funny,” replied Bernstein, startled. “That’s the way I always felt about you.”
Pryor shook his head. “Uh-uh. The organization is your only client, and you’re as high up the ladder as you planned to go. You’re fat, overpaid, and underworked—meaning no offense. You belong to a temple and a country club, you’ve put your kids through college, you own a big house out in Lake Forest. You’ve got what you want out of life, Abe. But I’m in a different position: Moore’s got what I want.”
“Even if that’s so,” said Bernstein, “what makes you think he’ll give it to you?”
“He won’t. That’s why I’m going to have to take it away from him.”
“That’s dangerous talk,” said Bernstein uncomfortably.
“Nonsense. It’s business talk. I’ve put nine years of my life into this organization, Abe. I’ve worked more eighty-hour weeks than you can count and had three marriages fold out from under me.” He paused. “I didn’t do it so I could take orders from Moore for the rest of my life.”
“If I’m Solomon’s man, why are you telling me all this?”
Pryor smiled. “Like I said, I’m not telling you anything he doesn’t know. And don’t look so damned suspicious: I don’t plan to preside over a pile of rubble, so I’ll do the best job I can until I get rid of him.”
The nude boy returned with his drink. “And in the meantime, I’ve put a couple of things together on the side.”
“Such as?”
“Who the hell do you think owns Neptune Palace?”
“Does Solomon know?” asked Bernstein.
“Of course.”
“Then it would seem that you’re doing all right on your own,” noted Bernstein, waving a hand at the crowded room.
“Moore goes for the common man’s dollar; as another guy named Abe once pointed out, there are so many of them. I wanted to show him we could go after the rich man’s money, too. It spends just as well.”
“And you’ve obviously become successful,” noted Bernstein, taking another sip of his drink.
“Only because Moore isn’t interested,” said Pryor. “Otherwise, he’d buy Naomi off in a minute.”
“Who’s Naomi?”
“Naomi Riordan. Her professional name is Poseidon’s Daughter.”
“I’ve heard about her,” said Bernstein, displaying some interest. “She’s something of a sensation, according to the people I’ve talked to.”
“You can decide for yourself,” said Pryor. “Her act’s due to start very soon now.”
In less than a minute the house lights dimmed, and a huge aquarium tank, housing hundreds of exotic fish and a pair of large jeweled sea castles, rose up out of the center of the floor.
“Watch,” said Pryor.
Music from an unseen harp soon permeated the room. Then a spotlight hit the aquarium, the door to one of the castles opened, and Poseidon’s Daughter made her entrance, wearing only a pale-blue mermaid’s tail, which she soon removed. She began swimming around the tank, her movements taking on the fluid grace of some long-lost Lorelei of the sea, her muscles rippling exotically beneath her unblemished skin.
Her long, flaming red hair trailed out behind her, undulating sensuously through the water as her body arched and banked and circled in intricate interlaced patterns. Soon the fish, attracted by her hair, fell into a synchronous choreopattern, and suddenly the girl, the hair, the fish, and even the air bubbles had formed an hypnotically whirling, swirling unity that transcended Grace and achieved Art.
And then, before the stunned audience could rise in thunderous applause, Poseidon’s Daughter had disappeared beneath the second sand castle and all that remained of the performance was a small school of fish. Oblivious to the screaming, cheering spectators, they clustered just above the sand in a far corner of the aquarium and pursued their fruitless quest for algae.
“What did you think of her?” asked Pryor, when the applause had subsided and the tank had sunk back into the floor.
“Absolutely fantastic!” enthused Bernstein. “I’ve never seen anything like it!” He turned to Pryor. “Could I possibly meet h
er? I’d like to tell her how much I admired her performance.”
“Perhaps some other time,” replied Pryor ruefully. “We had a little disagreement last night.”
“Oh?”
He nodded. “Yeah. We’ve been living together ever since I hired her, and I lost track of the time and didn’t get home until sunrise.”
“What could keep you away from something like that?”
“As a matter of fact, I was with M,” said Pryor with no trace of embarrassment.
“I never thought of you as a man of poor taste before,” said Bernstein. “But if you prefer that bloodless lunatic to—”
“It was strictly business,” interrupted Pryor.
“If it was strictly business,” replied Bernstein firmly, “Solomon would have been there first.”
“There are certain problems I’m better equipped to handle than he is,” said Pryor, not without a touch of pride. “I wanted to find out what she had on Jeremiah.”
“To help Solomon or harm him?”
“To help him. Give me credit for a little intelligence, Abe. Being Number Two with Moore is better than being out on the street with Jeremiah. Anyway, nothing happened.”
“Nothing?” said Bernstein dubiously.
“Nothing that I was personally involved in,” amended Pryor slowly. “She’s a pretty strange woman.”
“How strange?”
Pryor stared at him for a moment, as if debating whether or not to answer the question. Finally he shrugged. “Abe, she’s a goddamned necrophile!”
“I find that a little difficult to believe.”
“So did I, until last night.”
“I find it even harder to envision,” continued Bernstein. “Making love to a dead woman may have its drawbacks, but at least it’s possible, however disgusting the thought. But for a woman to have sex with a male corpse …”
“She’s a taxidermist, remember?”
“Just the same …”
“Damn it, Abe!” snapped Pryor. “I was there! I watched her!”
“And you say she’s weird!” laughed Bernstein contemptuously.
“It’s the way she gets her kicks. She wouldn’t talk to me unless I watched.”
“Well?”
“It was fascinating. And I’ve got to admit it was exciting as all hell. If we could get some films or tapes of her, we’d sell five million copies.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Bernstein. “What does she have on Jeremiah? I put her through the psycho-probe and couldn’t find a damned thing that Solomon hadn’t already gotten from her.”
“Nothing.”
“I take it back,” said Bernstein after a moment’s consideration. “She did tell me one item of importance.”
“Oh?” said Pryor quickly. “What was it?”
“She told me why Solomon runs this organization and you don’t.”
“Yeah?” said Pryor suspiciously. “Why?”
“Because she made a similar offer to him yesterday, and he turned her down flat. He went home to work in an empty apartment, while you left Naomi Riordan to spend the night with her.”
“What does that prove?”
“Ben, whether you did it for kicks or you did it for Solomon, it comes to the same thing. All he wants is power; if you’re interested in anything besides power, whether it’s pleasure or perversion or money, you’re going to stay in second place because you haven’t got the single-minded intensity that he has.”
“I told you why I was there,” said Pryor defensively. “It’s hardly my fault if I enjoyed it.”
Bernstein shook his head. “That’s a lousy answer, Ben. If Solomon knew going there wouldn’t help, then so did you—and if you say otherwise, you’re just lying to yourself.” He stared severely at Pryor. “Solomon lies to a lot of people, but he’s never yet lied to himself. That’s why you’re never going to be able to take this organization away from him.”
“We’ll see about that!” said Pryor hotly.
“So we shall,” agreed Bernstein.
“But in the meantime,” continued Pryor, his attention suddenly captured by a top-heavy blonde who had just walked into the club unescorted, “we’re all teammates. It’s Jeremiah who’s the enemy. We’ll talk more about it tomorrow.”
He signed for the tab, nodded pleasantly to Bernstein, and set off on an arduous and ultimately successful pursuit of the blonde.
And, as Pryor’s thoughts turned once again to sexual conquest, Moore sat alone in his apartment, considering various ways to bring Jeremiah out into the open. A few minutes later one of his agents called to tell him where Pryor would be spending the night. He smiled, shook his head in wonderment, and returned to his planning.
Chapter 8
Moore spent the next four weeks being visible.
With Moira Rallings in constant attendance at his side, he spent the bulk of the first week touring the legion of underworld dives and drug dens that flourished beneath Chicago’s shining exterior, simultaneously shutting down the security—or at least that portion of it that was obvious—around his office building and his apartment.
There was no sign of Jeremiah.
The following week he began a systematic tour of the local retreats, those incredibly valuable pieces of real estate that extended from the westernmost portions of the Chicago megalopolis halfway to the Mississippi River. He went to the health farms, where the truly sick died in luxury and the hypochondriacs were soon convinced that they were truly sick. He went to the diet farms, where the results of years of boredom and inactivity could be starved and sweated off at a rate of five thousand dollars a pound (or ten thousand dollars a week, which usually came to the same thing). He went to the dryout farms, where the aromas of fruit juice and coffee assailed his nostrils from hundreds of yards away, and where repentant alcoholics and unrepentant but dying alcoholics were never more than a short walk from the church and all-purpose temperance lecture of their choice. He went to the R&R farms for tired businessmen, which were dedicated to letting their patrons win at rigged sporting games all day and score with rigged sporting women all night, and he went to the R&R farms for tired businesswomen, which were, if anything, even more wildly enthusiastic about providing for their patronesses.
He went to the religious camps, the nature camps, and all the multitude of country estates that had been set aside, not to eradicate mankind’s boredom, but merely to channel it in new directions.
Jeremiah remained in hiding.
Next came a series of visits to the sites of the city’s most expensive diversions. He went to the Obsidian Square, the huge, almost legendary casino where everything from the chairs and tables to the very walls was made of shiny black volcanic glass, and which stood, with only a mild attempt at camouflage, at the very center of the old Loop. He went to the Sky Links, the most exclusive nine-hole golf course in the world, located a half-mile above the ground (and covered by an immense net, lest stray shots kill unfortunate passersby on the lower levels). He went to the Little K, the miniature nondenominational Kremlin that could be rented, at great expense, for weddings, funerals, baptisms, festivals of the arts, or just about any other function desired, including an occasional orgy.
Jeremiah was nowhere to be seen.
He went to Veldtland, that extremely costly and exclusive ranch in the northwestern portion of the state, which possessed fifty of the last three hundred lions left on Earth, all roaming at large over a thirty-mile tract. For the modest stipend of two million dollars, a man could shoot one of them; or, for one-tenth of that amount, he could strip himself naked and go armed with only a spear. He even promoted a welterweight championship fight, and used himself as bait by taking over the ring announcer’s duties.
But as the month drew to a close there was still no sign of Jeremiah.
“Maybe those gunshot wounds really did kill him after all,” mused Moore, sprawling on an overstuffed leather chair in his temporary living quarters down the hall from his office.
“Lots of people die every day in this town,” said Moore dubiously.
“You have your sources for hunting down the living,” replied Moira, “and I have mine for finding the dead. If Jeremiah dies, I’ll know of it the same day.”
“Well, alive or dead, I wish to hell he’d become a little more visible,” said Moore. “I’m running out of ideas.” He shrugged. “Getting hungry?”
“Yes.”
Under the watchful eyes of his well-hidden security men, Moore and Moira took a monorail to Randolph Street, then transferred to an escalator that took them to the upper levels.
“Where are we going this time?” asked Moira, who during the past month had grown increasingly used to splendid food splendidly served.
“A little place that specializes in French cuisine,” replied Moore. “Have you ever had Oysters Bienville?”
“I’ve never even heard of them,” said Moira. “What do they taste like?”
“You’ll see,” said Moore with a smile. “We’re only a block away, and—”
Suddenly he froze.
“What is it?” asked Moira. “Is something wrong?”
“That man!” said Moore, pointing toward an elderly man walking toward them on the opposite side of the street. “It’s him!”
“It’s who?”
“Krebbs—the old guy from the Bizarre Bazaar. Come on!”
Moore broke into a run, and instantly three large, well-dressed men emerged from the throng of shoppers to join him. They reached the old man in a matter of seconds. Moore’s quarry made no attempt to evade him, but merely stared blankly ahead with dull, lusterless eyes.
“All right!” snapped Moore, unmindful of the crowd that was gathering around them. “Where is he?”
The old man gazed off into space.
“Where is Jeremiah?” demanded Moore.
The old man smiled vacantly. His face displayed no sign of intelligence or recognition.