Narabedla Ltd Read Online Free PDF Page A

because he had lied to me about Woody Calderon. Calderon hadn’t turned him down, I was sure of it. Woody might not have accepted (but if not, where did he get the thousand dollars?), but he surely would not have refused.
    And wondering because something about Davidson-Jones’s office was sticking uncomfortably in my mind. I couldn’t quite swallow it down, and I couldn’t quite diagnose what it was. Perhaps it was, I thought, something about his starry ceiling. Certainly that was a quaint and unusual thing for the chief executive officer of Narabedla Ltd. to have in his private office.
    I went back to my own place discouraged and dubious.
    It’s funny that it didn’t ever occur to me to spell “Narabedla” backwards.

 
CHAPTER

5
     
     
    W ell, time passed.
    You know how it is. You let things slide. You come to a block of some kind. Then you don’t forget the things, exactly—God knows I didn’t forget either Woody or Henry Davidson-Jones—but you put them aside for the moment, because it’s really hard to see how to take the next step, even if they’re important. Other things come up. The old ones sort of slide into that stack of things that you damn well know you have to get around to, real soon now.
    Only you don’t.
    I didn’t get around to doing anything more about Woody’s death because I ran out of ideas, and besides it was vacation time.
    Once we get the sixty-day deferments out of the way on June 15th, then it’s pretty light work until the sluggards with the four-month deferments come due in August. There aren’t many of them, either, because if you need four months you probably need six, which is the most the I.R.S. will give you without much misery befalling, and so June and July are our best getaway times.
    I got away.
    Marlene and I each take a couple of weeks then, and my turn came first. I had airline tickets to Milan, with a return from London-Heathrow, and a Eurailpass to get me around betweentimes. That’s the best way to do it, I’ve found. Europe isn’t all that big, and you can get almost anywhere from almost anywhere else by rail overnight, and with the pass you don’t have to make reservations. You get on the train. You go.
    My “vacation” is also business, of course. I mean it really is. I’ve defended it successfully in two audits, one of them really bloodthirsty. I have an arrangement with most of my artists’ representatives to split a commission now and then, and so I turn up bookings for some of the artists as I travel. I had dinner with some of the people at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, went down to Rome for a day, then on to Naples to the Teatro San Carlo, then back to Milan just in time to buy a ticket to La Scala when I saw that it was Trovatore that night. One of my sopranos was to sing in that production later in the year. I don’t often pay for an opera ticket, but as I had made up my mind at the last minute I didn’t bother to get comped. In the intermission I wandered around the sparsely filled theater, looking at the busts of Verdi and Leoncavallo, with nothing more on my mind than whether to head for Paris or Vienna the next morning.
    The thing was, I was feeling pretty good. I promised myself that I would get up early enough the next morning to run a mile or so before the Milanese were abroad to gape at me. I didn’t even feel the usual heartburn when the baritone got a solo curtain call; I had made up my mind I was past all that, as well as other things I once had enjoyed a whole lot, and the renunciation was bittersweet but no longer painful.
    When I got back to my room in the Albergo Termini I checked the time and called my office. It was nearly six in New York, but Marlene was still there.
    “How’s business?” I started as usual; and as usual Marlene said:
    “You shouldn’t ask. Jack Pershing came in today with the return and a check for the balance due.”
    “That was due on the fifteenth!”
    “What a memory,” she said admiringly.