“Nothing,” he sighed in reply to her unspoken quesAnd, before he could qualify the bald statement, the comweb buzzed. Ariadne appeared in the screen, the familiar background of her home showing behind her fair head.
“Jim, what on earth are you doing in your office on a Saturday afternoon? I’ve been calling you at home for the past two hours!”
“Sweeping up a mess with my bare hands,” Reedeth muttered. “That’s what I’m doing.” He summed up what had happened, and concluded, “Just to top everything else, Miss Clay can’t get back into her apt, I underHer only key was left behind at Mikki Baxenand the fee you sent off for her performance here went direct to Dan Kazer’s account, as her mackero, but since he’s dead his account has been blocked pending distribution of his estate. So I gather she doesn’t even have the money to pay a locksmith to let her into her own home.”
“That’s no problem,” Lyla said with a trace of scorn. “Harry could let me in. He did it before.”
Reedeth looked at her blankly.
“Someone I thought was a friend of Dan’s moved into our apt while I was shut up here yesterday. Harry opened the door and let me in without a key.”
“Don’t you have a Punch lock on the door?” Reedeth said, mystified.
“Yes, of course we do.”
From the screen Ariadne looked out with bewilderto match Reedeth’s. “Nonsense,” she said firmly. “You can’t get past a Punch lock without the key-not unless you smash the door down. Jim, I think you’d betreconsider what you’re doing. There are some-ah-suspect claims being made, don’t you think?”
“I’m telling you,” Lyla said, and set her mouth in a mutinous line.
Reedeth was framing a reply, when another signal began to flash on the desketary, and he brightened. “Excuse me,” he said to Ariadne, and switched to ancircuit. When his image reappeared on her screen, he wore an expression of dismay.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“Flamen got here.”
“But I thought that was what you were waiting for-why should it make you look so sour?”
Reedeth sighed. “No reason, I guess. It’s just that he’s brought Conroy with him.”
“Conroy? Xavier Conroy? But I thought he was in Canada!”
“Flamen had him flown to New York for the weekI get the impression he wants a second opinion about his wife, and you certainly couldn’t pick anyone more opposed to Mogshack, could you?”
“No more than Mogshack’s opposed to him. Watch yourself, Jim! You realize what’ll happen if Mogshack finds out you’ve-” She hesitated, searching for a word.
“That I’ve been’trading with the enemy’?” Reedeth supplied with a bitter smile. “If he takes what’s actually sheer coincidence as a personal insult, I’ll have had proof of what the automatics told us about him, and I won’t wait to be fired. I’ll resign. I wouldn’t much care to go on working for a lunatic.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Ariadne said. “Jim, if you’re happy with the company you have right now, you’re welcome to them-but I tell you this! The way you’re going, you’re likely to wind up viewing the Ginsberg from the inside of a retreat yourself!”
She broke the connection with an ill-tempered snort, and Reedeth was left with his mouth half open to utter an abortive counterblast.
What a crazy predicament, to have got hung up on Ariadne of all the available women in the world!
But events were crowding in on him too rapidly to allow time for anger. Already Flamen and Conroy were on the pediflow towards his office. He started to rise with the intention of going to greet them, but canceled the movement and felt his features deform into a scowl.
Ariadne had been perfectly right. He was going to be in trouble if Mogshack learned about all this-not just Conroy’s intrusion, but Madison’s commitment into the guardianship of someone who promptly disregarded his obligations. He hated the idea of confronting his visitors: Flamen because right now he was furious with the man for landing him and Madison both in a mess; Conroy because.
Well, making an honest if silent confession: because at the back of his mind he felt vulnerable to Conroy’s contempt, and in their brief exchange over the comweb, half an hour ago, there had been the long shadow of the scathing irony with which Conroy had treated juinanities in his students’ arguments, back in the days when Reedeth was working under him.