“She was writing an autobiography, A Life Alone, which title tells you a lot about her. Poor thing. Her friends said the book was ‘generally confused’ but parts of it showed some of your genius.”
“I always said that Livy and I were too highstrung to have children.”
“Well, she wasn’t suffering from lack of money. She inherited some trust funds from her mother, about $800,000, I believe. Money from the sale of your books. When she died, she was worth one and a half million dollars. Yet, she was unhappy and lonely.
“Oh, yes. Her body was taken to Elmira, New York.. .for burial in a family plot near the famed grandfather whose name she bore.”
“I can’t be blamed for her character,” Sam had said. “Clara and Ossip can take credit for that.”
The informant shrugged and said, “You and your wife formed the characters of your children, Clara included.”
“Yes, but my character was formed by my parents. And theirs by theirs,” Sam had said. “Do we go back to Adam and Eve to fix the responsibility? No, because God formed their temperaments when he created them. There is but one being who bears the ultimate responsibility.”
“I’m a free-wilier myself,” the man had said.
“Listen,” Sam had said. “When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian sea, the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing in my kilt at this instant, talking to you. That’s from my What Is Man? slightly paraphrased. What do you think of that?”
“It’s bullshit.”
“You say that because you have been determined to do so. you could not have said anything else.”
“You’re a sorry case, Mr. Clemens, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I do. But you can’t help saying that. Listen, what was your profession?”
The man looked surprised. “What’s that got to do with it? I was a realtor. I was also on the school board for many years.”
“Let me quote myself again,” Sam had said. “In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”
Sam chuckled now at the memory of the man’s expression.
He sat up. Gwen slept on. He turned on the nightlight and saw that she was smiling slightly. She looked innocent, childlike, yet the full lips and the full curves of the breast, almost entirely exposed, excited him. He reached out to awake her but changed his mind. Instead, he put on his kilt and a cloth for a cape and his visored high-peaked fish-leather cap. He picked up a cigar and left the room closing the door softly. The corridor was warm and bright. At the far end, the door was locked; two armed guards stood by it. Two also stood at the near end by the elevator doors. He lit a cigar and walked toward the elevator. He chatted for a minute with the guards and then entered the cage.
He punched the P button. The doors slid shut, but not before he saw a guard starting to phone to the pilothouse that La Bosso (The Boss) was coming up. The cage rose from the D or hangar deck, where the officers’ quarters were, through the two narrow round rooms below the pilothouse, and then to the top chamber. There was a brief wait while the third-watch exec checked out the cage with closed-circuit TV. Then the doors slid open, and Sam entered the pilothouse or control room.
“It’s all right boys,” he said. “Just me, enjoying insomnia.”
There were three others there. The night pilot, smoking a big cigar, eyeing the dials lackadaisically. He was Akande Erin, a massive Dahomeyan who had spent thirty years operating a jungle riverboat. The most outrageous liar Sam had ever known, and he had met the world’s best. Third-mate Calvin Cregar, a Scot who had put in forty years on an Australian coastal steamer. Ensign Diego Santiago of the marines, a seventeenth-century Venezuelan.
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