Area of Suspicion Read Online Free PDF Page B

with our people. Mandatory changes came in by the bale. Each change would effect all future production. We won the war. So the system must be okay. But there are a lot of executives underground who would be walking around today if it hadn’t been for the load it placed on them. My father was one of them.
    The plane slowed as the wheels came down. The runway lights streamed by and we were down and the plane slowed quickly. We taxied to the terminal. The rain was coming down. Women trotted toward the entrance with newspapers over their heads. The unaccustomed collar had rubbed my throat raw. The feeling of excitement and anticipation that I had felt on the way up from Florida did not die now that I,was home. It became more intense. In a strange way it had been easier to believe Ken dead while I was in Florida. Thoughts of him kept slipping into my mind through unguarded doorways. Transition by aircraft is unreasonably abrupt. The scene changes too fast. Yet there was no overlapping. Florida was gone as though it had never happened. It was like walking out of a movie into the dark rainy streets of Arland in April, pausing for that wrench of readjustment and then turning in the right direction and letting the sunlight of the movie fade out of your mind.
    At last I got my suitcase and I shared a cab into the heart of town, to the Gardland Hotel. The streets were wet tunnels, lined with neon. I could sense how the town was. Hopped up. Every night is Saturday night. The heavy industry cities get that way when plants put on the extra shifts. It was like the forties. I knew how it would be. The factory girls in slacks, the bars lined three deep, the juke jangle, blue spots on the girl doing the trick with the parrots, green floodlights on the tank where the girl was doing the underwater strip. The high-priced call girls with their hatboxes and miniature dogs. The too-young tramps with tight skirts and mouths painted square. That’s when the town jumps and the big cars get sold on time, and you can hear in the night the bingle-bang of ten thousand cash registers.
    But I had seen Arland when the streets were dreary with broken shoes, hacking coughs, and panhandlers. I had seen the empty houses. I had seen sharp winter winds blowing the drifters by the closed joints. The heavy metal towns are feast or famine.
    Now it was feast, and in the rain-bright night the town was licking its chops, clapping grease-bitten hands and saying, “Let’s have us a time!”
    The lobby of the Gardland Hotel looked like a movie set for a society mob scene. Everybody seemed to be hurrying in purposeless circles, and they all wore earnest, worried faces. People sat on stacks of luggage looking doleful. I stood near one of the lines at the reservation desk and heardthe clerk saying, “Sorry, we don’t have a thing, sir. Next, please? No reservation, sir? Sorry we don’t have a thing.”
    I went to the assistant manager’s desk. In a moment he came hurrying back, looking like a distracted penguin. “Yes, sir?”
    “Is Mr. Gardland in his office?”
    “If you’re after accommodations, sir, I can assure you that it will be useless to—”
    “Would you mind phoning his office and giving my name?”
    “Not at all, but—”
    “Tell him Gevan Dean wants to see him for a moment.”
    “Dean?” His eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time. He murmured into the phone. He hung up and said, “The door is beyond the cashier’s windows, the last door at the end of—”
    I told him I knew where it was. Joe Gardland came out of his office and halfway down the short hallway. His face lighted up. He is a small, plump, balding man, younger than he looks, with shrewd eyes. If they weren’t shrewd eyes, the Gardland would long since have been absorbed into one of the big chains. Purchase or stock transfer would have made Joe permanently, independently wealthy, but he preferred being the king of his own domain.
    He pumped my hand. “My God, Gevvy! My God!