Odds On: A Novel Page 14

  “CIA?” Jencks said, very loud.

  “Shhh.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Now Jencks looked around. “I hope I didn’t get you into any trouble.”

  “I think I can handle anything that comes along,” Brady said, breathing deeply. “I had quite a rough posting in Shanghai, a few years back.”

  “Pretty exciting.”

  “Damned tooting. Lots of snatch too, baby.” He slammed Jencks’ back and roared.

  “This is terrific,” Jencks said. “Both in the same business. How long are you here for?”

  “Just a couple of days. I leave Saturday morning.”

  “Listen,” Jencks said. “You can tell me. Are you here on vacation, or is it … business?”

  Brady looked reluctant. “I’d rather not say.”

  “Sure, sure. I understand. I don’t want to compromise you.”

  “Speaking of compromises,” Brady said, “will you look at that.”

  Jenny had just walked into the room, looking very cool and tanned in a white evening dress.

  “All mine, I’m afraid,” Jencks said getting up unsteadily from the bar.

  Brady clutched his sleeve. “You shitting me?”

  “Nope. I’m going to dinner.”

  “Je-sus Christ,” Brady said. “Would I like that. What’s her name?”

  Jencks winked. “I’d rather not say.”

  He went over to Jenny, took her hand, and walked out of the room with her.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “I’m not.” He straightened, and smiled. The sappy look was gone from his face, the slouching, tentative walk replaced by a firm, direct step. “Just a minute,” he said. “I forgot to pay the bar bill.”

  He left her and returned to the table. Brady was looking at the bill, one hand in his pocket. He seemed very unhappy.

  “Thought I was going to stick you with that?” Jencks said. He took the bill and signed it. “Not a chance. Listen, I need something from you.”

  “Anything,” Brady said, smiling expansively.

  “You got a room facing the ocean?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’re leaving Saturday, could I take it? My room isn’t so good.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll speak to the desk about it.”

  “Don’t bother,” Jencks said, “I’ll do it.” He rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign. “I doubt that speaking alone will do the job.”

  “Haw,” Brady said, and punched Jencks in the arm. “You old devil.” He laughed, and Jencks went out to Jenny, and took her to dinner.

  Jencks sat alone in his room, thinking. He did not know what to make of Brady or their conversation. In all, he thought that it had gone rather well; he had stopped at the desk after dinner and asked if he could have Mr. Brady’s room when he checked out; Brady was indeed scheduled to leave on Saturday. It all seemed to be on the up-and-up. Of course, the business about the CIA was garbage, but that didn’t matter. Men in bars always lied, whether their motives were sinister or merely ego-boosting.

  The telephone rang. “Room 205,” he said.

  “Can’t make it tonight.” Bryan’s voice.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Jencks said. It was necessary to conduct a normal conversation, since the switchboard might be listening in, but he managed to convey his strong disapproval. “Where are you now?”

  “Gerona.”

  “Having a nice time?”

  “Very nice.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “A bird. I can’t get out of it without looking funny.”

  So he was busy with the receptionist. Well, that was excusable. “Can I see you tomorrow?”

  “I’ll stop by at noon.”

  Spending the night with her. “Fine.”

  “I can tell you what I’ve got. Ten offs, and half a dozen Q’s. Okay?”

  “Have a nice time,” Jencks said.

  He sat back in his chair and sipped the dry vermouth which had been delivered to his room a few minutes before. His thoughts wandered from Bryan and the receptionist to Jenny. She was beginning to get under his skin. He recalled their conversation at dinner; at one point, he had asked, “Is your hair naturally that color, or is it dyed?”

  “Natural,” Jenny had replied. “Why?”

  “Curious.”

  “There are more interesting ways,” she had said, “of finding out than asking.”

  “Really? You’ll have to explain.”

  On the surface, he had come off well, as usual. But she had somehow cut deeply into his growing desire. She was a bitch, all right, but such an attractive one. It was irritating.

  A knock on the door, and Miguel entered.

  “What did you find?”

  “His room’s pretty clean. Nothing obnoxious, like a gun. Just a straightforward tourist—who happens to have three passports. American, name of Alan Brady; French, name of Alain Bernet; Italian, name of Marco Bernino.” Miguel shrugged. “Other than that, nothing. Clothes from every capitol of the world, but that’s hardly a crime.”

  He sat down.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’ve been thinking. We want to get him out of the way, right? If I pushed him down some steps, just easy and inconspicuous, we’d have him in the hospital for the next week. Nothing to it. What do you say?”

  “He’s leaving Saturday,” Jencks said.

  “Does he say that?”

  “Yes. But I checked at the desk. It’s true.”

  Miguel lit a cigarette. “Then it’s no sweat.”

  “That’s what I think. We leave him alone.”

  “I still wish I knew why he’s here.”

  “So do I,” Jencks said, “but I can’t worry about it now. Did you bring the list?”

  Miguel produced it, and Jencks ran his eye down the two columns of numbers, one for rooms which could definitely be skipped, and one for possibilities—or Q’s, as Bryan had called them. Each of the three men had prepared such a list.

  “Where’s Bryan?”

  “Busy. I’m getting his information in the morning.”

  Jencks ignored Miguel’s lewd, knowing look, and placed the list alongside his own. He ticked of all the certainties on a master sheet, and noted the question marks. Then he burned the small lists in the ashtray.

  “How many?” Miguel asked.

  Jencks tallied quickly. “Twenty-one to pass over, nine to check again. Bryan says he has ten checks and six questionables, which raises our total—assuming no duplication—to thirty-one and fifteen. That’s not very good.” Jencks rapped the desk top with his pen. “We need more rooms. Unless we come up with at least 60 by Saturday morning, we may have a little trouble. The program calls for a 20% write-off.”

  Miguel nodded, and stepped to the door. “Do my best,” he said. “See you.”

  “Good luck.”

  The meeting was over. Jencks looked at his watch. It had taken two minutes and five seconds. That was better than he had expected, though, of course, Bryan was absent. He glanced down the master sheet, frowning. They really were behind schedule; he had hoped to cross off more than forty rooms at this meeting, and they hadn’t come close. Supposing they only came up with fifty rooms by Saturday? In his mind, he reviewed the computer printout. He looked down the memorized page of numbers.

  Chances of success fell from .87 to .77. That meant that they’d have to choose a number of rooms at random to skip, in order to get the full 20% required to keep the probabilities up. It would be easy enough, but it might cut into the total profit. That prospect was unappealing.

  Bryan Stack came out of the phone booth. She was waiting in the car.

  “Did you get through all right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  He started the car and drove in silence. They had spent a pleasant day in Gerona, the peaceful inland capitol of the Costa Brava, wandering through the hilly, narrow cobbled streets. Gerona had a good cathedral and an excellent Romanesque cloister; like a pair of goggle-eyed tour
ists, they had seen each sight with a kind of innocent wonder. He had enjoyed himself, enjoyed being with her, and had relaxed—though a part of his mind still prodded her, directing the conversation.

  There had been just one bad moment, when they had plunged into the cool, arched interior of the old Moorish baths. Bryan had tossed a coin into the large, mossy fountain and had made a wish. She had teased him, trying to discover what he had hoped for, and that depressed him. He had hoped that this would be the last time, that he would never do anything like this again.

  They had eaten dinner in a small restaurant off the main square, a hectic place which served wonderful paella and produced, after a little coaxing, an excellent bottle of local white wine. Stuffed and happy, they had walked along the river, watching people take in the day’s laundry from their balconies. The sun had set, turning the river molten gold. Then Bryan had made his call. Now they were going back.

  As he drove, he tried to conjure up an image of Jane and failed. That disturbed him. Annette reached over and took his hand, she brushed it lightly with her lips.

  “Are you happy?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He wanted to let it go at this, to take her back and send her to bed alone. It was enough; he had found out enough; he had intruded enough into her life. It was not necessary to go further—except that, perhaps, she expected it He sighed.

  “Something the matter?” She curled up in the seat and put her head on his shoulder.

  “No, just tired.”

  “I feel very safe with you,” she said, kissing his shoulder. “You must think I’m very foolish.”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  They drove on, through the sleepy little town of Cassa de la Selva. The road was deserted.

  “Are you going to try and interest me in a nightcap,” she asked.

  “I was just about to suggest it,” he lied.

  “Thank you. I accept.”

  Hell. He tried again to think of Jane, and again he failed. He decided he wanted a cigarette, and at that moment Annette sat up, lit one with the dashboard lighter, and placed it between his lips. Her fingers were cool. She stroked his cheek.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “Just lucky, I guess.” She curled up against him. In a few minutes she was peacefully asleep.

  FRIDAY, JUNE TWENTIETH

  ONE DAY TO GO. Steven Jencks awoke in a philosophical mood. He was still slightly depressed by the fact that their work had fallen behind schedule, but somehow everything looked better in the morning.

  He allowed his mind to wander over the scheme, and its basis, the marvelous mathematic concept of probability, of chance.

  To the layman, chance meant risk, uncertainty, weakness. Jencks had a more sophisticated understanding, the kind of understanding a physicist has when he talks about diffraction through a double slit. It was, basically, an awareness that chance governs—not in an individual case, but in many cases. He could accept that paradox and all it implied. You could not predict what would happen in a single instance, a single throw of the dice, a single pitch in the seventh inning, a single toss of the coin. But you could predict three out of five, four out of ten, seven out of sixteen, and to that extent chance governed everyone, all the time.

  Just as surely as two equals two.

  He got out of bed, and went into the bathroom to shave. For some reason, quotations came into his head.

  Henri Poincaré: “Chance is only the measure of our ignorance.”

  Laplace: “Probability is relative, in part to our ignorance, in part to our knowledge.”

  And one quotation which occurred to him, for no particular reason, and amused him as he ran the razor over his chin. C.S. Pierce: “To be logical men should not be selfish.”

  Well, he was embarked upon a venture of chance, and it was a most logical and selfish venture. He was not afraid; he welcomed this opportunity to test his mind against the vagaries and uncertainties of life among three hundred souls temporarily inhabiting the Hotel Reina. In fact, it was the element of chance, of carefully calculated—no, computed—risk, which made the project so interesting.

  Jencks was not a man given to broad generalizations, but he fervently believed that mathematics was the foremost source of power in the modern world. Its potentialities, for both good and evil, far outstripped atomic energy. Because mathematics was a source of discovery, a tool of inquiry. It was mathematics, after all, which made atomic energy possible in the first place. One little white-haired German refugee working with chalk and a blackboard. He shook his head, half-amused, half-wonderingly. It was really quite incredible.

  And in his own modest way, Steven Jencks was making a contribution to knowledge. He was using mathematics, and using the computer, to carry out the first genuinely scientific crime in the history of mankind.

  He had to admit he was eager to begin.

  Annette opened her eyes slowly and stared across the room. She saw her dress and stockings placed carefully across a chair, her shoes on the floor. She looked outside; the sun was shining, but she could not see the ground—this room was on a higher floor than her own. She had a brief moment of panic until she remembered where she was.

  “Hello,” Bryan said. He was sitting up in bed, smoking.

  “Hi,” she said, stretching. The movement exposed one breast above the edge of the sheet, but she did not hurry to cover it. She had spent the night lying naked next to him; she was not afraid and not falsely modest.

  She thought back over the evening before and discovered that she could remember nothing after the drive in the car.

  “Listen,” she said, “this may sound ridiculous, but I don’t remember what happened.”

  “Not surprised,” Bryan said. “You were dead to the world. I just brought you back and popped you into bed.”

  Happy and still sleepy, she pressed up against his warm body. He ran his fingers through her hair, holding the soft dark strands gently. “Did we …”

  “No,” he said. “You kept mumbling something about it, but you were too tired.”

  He did not sound annoyed, just accepting. She sat up and kissed his cheek, feeling the stubble of beard.

  “Want a cigarette?” She shook her head. “I’ve ordered coffee for eight o’clock. It’ll be here in ten minutes.”

  Suddenly she was wide awake. “My God,” she said, “I have to be at work at eight. It’s Mr. Bonnard’s day off.”

  Bryan remained calm. “Coffee first. Why don’t you go take a shower? It’ll be here when you get out.”

  She got up and walked to the bathroom, feeling no embarrassment although she knew he was watching her. That was unusual; other times, when she began an affair, she had been acutely self-conscious under a man’s eyes. She wondered why Bryan should be different, and realized that it was because he was not embarrassed. He seemed to accept her.

  She came back feeling fresh and clean, a towel around her. She sat down on the bed and he handed her a cup of coffee; she sipped it, feeling it warm her throat, making her feel instantly awake. The towel fell down around her waist. She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. Her breasts brushed against his chest.

  “You’re handsome,” she said.

  “You’re beautiful, and neither of us is saying anything new.”

  She laughed, and watched as he balanced his cigarette, coffee cup and saucer with the deft aplomb which only an Englishman could acquire, the accumulated training of endless tea and sherry parties.

  “I used your toothbrush,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  He smiled. “Will I see you tonight?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I have to work late. Tomorrow?”

  It would be difficult, he thought. “I can’t plan that far ahead.”

  She finished her coffee and stood up. “I really have to get to work now,” she said. She kissed him again. He took her hand firmly.

  “No.”

  “No?”


  “You’re going to be a little late today,” he said, and drew her down against him.

  “I see,” Miguel said, listening with every appearance of attention to the pimple-faced kid. No, it was more than attention. It was an interest and fascination that bordered on adulation. The kid was lapping it up, poor bastard.

  “Yes,” Peter replied. “I’ve always had that ability. Not with all women, of course—but with many of them. I find that the right amount of pressure and cajolery, in the right combination, works wonders. The only problem is finding the combination, though I’ve been lucky there, most of the time. And I find women so interesting, particularly older women. That’s the trouble—the young ones have the bodies, but the older ones know how to use them.”

  “I agree,” Miguel said. He did not allow his eyes to leave Peter’s face. Basking in the luxury of attention, Peter was growing more excited and voluble; his words poured forth in confusion, and Miguel was certain that he was lying fabulously.

  “Now an exception,” Peter said, leaning over confidentially, “an exception happens to be the chambermaids in this hotel. Have you tried them?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. I haven’t gotten around to it. You see, I’ve been busy with other … matters.”

  Peter chuckled, man-to-man. Miguel detested him at that instant, and purposely looked away, across the empty bar. It was empty with good reason; only people with real problems frequented the bars at nine in the morning. He had seen Peter here the day before and today had found it easy to strike up a conversation. The kid wanted desperately to talk, to impress someone. “Who’s the lucky number?” Peter asked, smiling lecherously.

  “That’s her, now,” Miguel said, waving to Cynthia, who was passing by on her way to the pool. She appeared hungover, but with her sultry features, it looked good. He beckoned her over and introduced Peter.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Peter said, nodding slightly at Miguel’s wink. His attention was focused on Cynthia’s bikini, which was not as brief as it might be—though certainly brief enough.

  “So glad,” Cynthia said, extending her hand and half-yawning. Miguel gave her a warning glance. It was the least he could do for her, he felt.

  “I must be running along now,” he said, finishing his drink. Peter’s eyes widened in gratitude as Miguel walked out; poor bastard, Miguel thought. But Miguel had been looking for a way to break up the conversation for the last fifteen minutes, ever since Peter had told him all he wanted to know.