“Look, mister,” a kindly missing-persons sergeant explained. “People are one thing. Belly Ravers are something else. Are these people on the tax rolls? Do they have punch-card codes? Do they have employment-contract identification tattoos? No. No, they don’t. So what can we do? We can find missing persons, sure, but this gal ain’t a person. She’s a Belly Raver.” The sergeant shrugged philosophically. “Maybe she just took a notion to wander off. Maybe she’s got her toes turned up in a vacant lot. Maybe not. We just wouldn’t know, see?”
But he kindly took Charles Mundin’s name, just in case.
However Mundin bought a gun and started his own inquiries in Belly Rave. Lots of people had seen Norma and her ancient Cadillac the day of the disappearance. But not afterward.
And that was that
It took a week, during which Mundin found himself making regular trips to the Lavin Ryan home loaded down with groceries. He also found that Ryan was tapping him for cash to feed his habit.
Don Lavin was sinking into a kind of catatonia without his sister. Ryan, sometimes coldly confident with a bellyful of yen pox, other times devoured by the weeping shakes, begged Mundin to try something, anything. Mundin tried a doctor.
The doctor made one visit—during which Don Lavin, sparked by some flickering pride, rallied wonderfully and conversed good-humoredly with the doctor. The doctor left, with an indignant glare at Mundin, and Don lapsed back into
his twilight gloom. “All right, Ryan,” Mundin said bitterly, “now what?” —^
Ryan shook the last pill out of the tin, swallowed it, and told Mundin now what.
And Mundin found himself calling on William Choate IV.
Poor Willie’s office was a little smaller than a landing field. He sprinted the length of it to embrace good old Charles.
“Gosh,” he burbled, “I’m so glad you could come and see me! They just put me in here, after old Sterling died. It used to be his office, see? So when he died, they put——”
“I see,” Mundin said gently. “They put you in here.”
“Yep. Say, Charles, how about some lunch?”
“Maybe. Willie, I need a little help.”
Willie said reproachfully, “Now, Charles, it isn’t about a job, is it? Gee, that’d be an awful spot to put me in.”
Well, Mundin thought, they had succeeded in beating one thing into his head, though not two. “No,” he said. “I just want a little advice. I’d like to know when and where the annual stockholder’s meeting of G.M.L. Homes comes off.”
Willie said happily, “/ don’t know. Don’t they have to publish it somewhere? In a newspaper?”
“Yes, they have to publish it in a newspaper, Willie. The trick is to find out what newspaper. There are maybe fifty thousand of them in the country, and the law just says that it has to be published in one—not necessarily English language.”
Willie looked sorrowful. “I only speak English, Charles,” he said.
“Yes, Willie. Why don’t you ask your Periodical Search Department?”
Willie nodded vigorously. “Oh, sure, Charles. Anything to oblige. Anything at all!” Willie uncertainly asked his squawk box whether they had anything like a Periodical Research Department, and the squawk box said yes, sir, and connected him. Half an hour later, deep in the intricacies of the preliminary pre-hearing of the Group E Debenture Holder’s Protective Committee, the squawk box coughed and announced that the G.M.L. Homes meeting was advertised in the Lompoc, California, Picayune-Intelligencer. Time, day after tomorrow. Place, Room 2003, Administration Building, Morristown, Lone Island.
“Whew!” said Willie dubiously. “They won’t get many people to come there, will they?”
The next morning Mundin was waiting at a two-dollar ticket window of the New York Stock Exchange when the opening bell rang.
He examined the crumpled instructions from Ryan nervously, as sweating and tense as any of the passionate throng of devotees pressing around him, but for other reasons. •
Ryan’s instructions were complete and precise, except for one thing: They didn’t tell how to get the two thousand dollars to put them into effect. Mundin swore under his breath, shrugged, and swiftly punched Number 145. Anaconda Copper. He inserted his token, threw the lever and tore off his ticket At 19,999 other windows in the gigantic hall, 19,999 other investors were doing the same. And outside, on the polychrome street, ten thousand late-comers milled and murmured, waiting for their turn inside.