McBannerman was already shaking her head.
‘No, I’m sorry, I really can’t do that. It’s a confidentiality issue.’
She appealed to Jodie with her eyes, doctor to lawyer, woman to woman, a you-know-how-it-is sort
of a look. Jodie nodded, sympathetically.
‘Maybe you could just ask your receptionist? You know, see if she saw Dad talking with one of the others out there? That would just be conversational, third-party, no confidentiality issues involved. In my opinion, certainly.’
McBannerman recognized an impasse when she saw one. She buzzed the intercom and asked the receptionist to step inside. The woman was asked the question, and she started nodding busily and answering before it was even finished.
‘Yes, of course, Mr Garber was always talking to that nice elderly couple, you know, the man with the dodgy valve? Upper right ventricle? Can’t drive any more so his wife brings him in every time? In that awful old car? Mr Garber was doing something for them, I’m absolutely sure of it. They were always showing him old photographs and pieces of paper.’
‘The Hobies?’ McBannerman asked her.
‘That’s right, they all got to be thick as thieves together, the three of them, Mr Garber and old Mr and Mrs Hobie.’
SIX
Hook Hobie was alone in his inner office, eighty-eight floors up, listening to the quiet background sounds of the giant building, thinking hard, changing his mind. He was not an inflexible guy. He prided himself on that. He admired the way he could change and adapt and listen and learn. He felt it gave him his edge, made him distinctive.
He had gone to Vietnam more or less completely unaware of his capabilities. More or less completely unaware of everything, because he had been very young. And not just very young, but also straight out of a background that was repressed and conducted in a quiet suburban vacuum that held no scope for anything much in the way of experience.
Vietnam changed him. It could have broken him. It broke plenty of other guys. All around him, there were guys going to pieces. Not just the kids like him, but the older guys too, the long-service professionals who had been in the Army for years. Vietnam fell on people like a weight, and some of them cracked, and some of them didn’t.
He didn’t. He just looked around, and changed and adapted. Listened and learned. Killing was easy. He
was a guy who had never seen anything dead before apart from roadkill, the chipmunks and the rabbits and the occasional stinking skunk on the leafy lanes near his home. First day in-country in ‘Nam he saw eight American corpses. It was a foot patrol neatly triangulated by mortar fire. Eight men, twenty-nine pieces, some of them large. A defining moment. His buddies were going quiet and throwing up and groaning in sheer abject miserable disbelief. He was unmoved.
He started out as a trader. Everybody wanted something. Everybody was moaning about what they didn’t have. It was absurdly easy. All it took was a little listening. Here was a guy who smoked but didn’t drink. There was a guy who loved beer but didn’t smoke. Take the cigarettes from the one guy and exchange them for the other guy’s beer. Broker the deal. Keep a small percentage back for yourself. It was so easy and so obvious he couldn’t believe they weren’t doing it for themselves. He didn’t take it seriously, because he was sure it couldn’t last. It wasn’t going to take long for them all to catch on, and cut him out as middleman.
But they never caught on. It was his first lesson. He could do things other people couldn’t. He could spot things they couldn’t. So he listened harder. What else did they want? Lots of things. Girls, food, penicillin, records, duty at base camp, but not latrine duty. Boots, bug repellent, side arms plated with chromium, dried ears from VC corpses for souvenirs. Marijuana, aspirin, heroin, clean needles, safe duty for the last hundred days of a tour. He listened and learned and searched and skimmed.
Then he made his big breakthrough. It was a
conceptual leap he always looked back on with tremendous pride. It served as a pattern for the other giant strides he made later. It came as a response to a couple of problems he was facing. First problem was the sheer hard work everything was causing him. Finding specific physical things was sometimes tricky. Finding undiseased girls became very difficult, and finding virgins became impossible. Getting hold of a steady supply of drugs was risky. Other things were tedious. Fancy weapons, VC souvenirs, even decent boots all took time to obtain. Fresh new officers on rotation were screwing up his sweetheart deals in the safe non-combat zones.