The Santaroga Barrier Page 4

Piaget looked from her to Dasein. “Letters? What letters?”

  “Gil wrote and I never got the letters!”

  “Oh.” Piaget nodded. “Well, you know how they are at the post office sometimes—valley girl, fellow from outside.”

  “Ohhh! I could scratch their eyes out!”

  “Easy, girl.” Piaget smiled at Dasein.

  Jenny whirled back into Dasein’s arms, surprised him with another kiss. He broke away slightly breathless.

  “There,” she said. “That’s for being here. Those old biddies at the post office can’t dump that in the trash basket.”

  “What old biddies?” Dasein asked. He felt he had missed part of the conversation. The warmth of Jenny’s kisses, her open assumption nothing had changed between them, left him feeling defenseless, wary. A year had passed, after all. He’d managed to stay away from here for a year—leaning on his wounded masculine ego, true, fearful he’d find Jenny married … lost to him forever. But what had she leaned on? She could’ve come to Berkeley, if only for a visit.

  And I could’ve come here.

  Jenny grinned.

  “Why’re you grinning?” he demanded. “And you haven’t explained this about the post office and the …”

  “I’m grinning because I’m so happy,” she said. “I’m grinning because I see the wheels going around in your head. Why didn’t one of us go see the other before now? Well, you’re here as I knew you would be. I just knew you would be.” She hugged him impulsively, said: “About the post office …”

  “I think Gilbert’s breakfast is getting cold,” Piaget said. “You don’t mind if I call you Gilbert?”

  “He doesn’t mind,” Jenny said. Her voice was bantering, but there was a sudden stiffness in her body. She pushed away from Dasein.

  Piaget lifted a cover from one of the plates on the cart, said: “Jaspers omelette, I see. Real Jaspers.”

  Jenny spoke defensively with a curious lack of vitality: “I made it myself in Johnson’s kitchen.”

  “I see,” Piaget said. “Yes … well, perhaps that’s best.” He indicated the plate. “Have at it, Gilbert.”

  The thought of food made Dasein’s stomach knot with hunger. He wanted to sit down and bolt the omelette … but something made him hesitate. He couldn’t evade the nagging sense of danger.

  “What’s this Jaspers business?” he asked.

  “Oh, that,” Jenny said, pulling the cart over to the chair by the desk. “That just means something made with a product from the Co-op. This is our cheddar in the omelette. Sit down and eat.”

  “You’ll like it,” Piaget said. He crossed the room, put a hand on Dasein’s shoulder, eased him into the chair. “Just let me have a quick look at you.” He pinched Dasein’s left ear lobe, studied it, looked at his eyes. “You’re looking pretty fit. How’s the head?”

  “It’s better now. It was pretty fierce when I woke up.”

  “Okay. Eat your breakfast. Take it easy for a day or two. Let me know if you feel nauseated again or have any general symptoms of lethargy. I suggest you eat liver for dinner and I’ll have Jenny bring you some more iron pills. You weren’t in there long enough to cause you any permanent trouble.”

  “When I think of that Mr. Johnson’s carelessness, I want to take one of his cleavers to him,” Jenny said.

  “We are bloodthirsty today, aren’t we,” Piaget said.

  Dasein picked up his fork, sampled the omelette. Jenny watched him, waiting. The omelette was delicious—moist and with a faint bite of cheese. He swallowed, smiled at her.

  Jenny grinned back. “You know,” she said, “that’s the first food I ever cooked for you.”

  “Don’t rush him off his feet, girl,” Piaget said. He patted her head, said: “I’ll leave you two for now. Why don’t you bring your young man along home for dinner? I’ll have Sarah make what he needs.” He glanced at Dasein. “That all right with you?”

  Dasein swallowed another bite of the omelette. The cheese left a tangy aftertaste that reminded him of the unpasteurized beer Burdeaux had served. “I’d be honored, sir,” he said.

  “Honored, yet,” Piaget said. “We’ll expect you around seven.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s almost eight-thirty, Jenny. Aren’t you working today?”

  “I called George and told him I’d be late.”

  “He didn’t object?”

  “He knows … I have a friend … visiting.” She blushed.

  “Like that, eh? Well, don’t get into any trouble.” Piaget turned, lumbered from the room with a head-down purposeful stride.

  Jenny turned a shy, questioning smile on Dasein. “Don’t mind Uncle Larry,” she said. “He darts around like that—one subject then another. He’s a very real, wonderful person.”

  “Where do you work?” Dasein asked.

  “At the Co-op.”

  “The cheese factory?”

  “Yes. I’m … I’m on the inspection line.”

  Dasein swallowed, reminded himself he was here to do a market study. He was a spy. And what would Jenny say when she discovered that? But Jenny posed a new puzzle. She had a superior talent for clinical psychology—even according to Dr. Selador whose standards were high. Yet … she worked in the cheese factory.

  “Isn’t there any work … in your line here?” he asked.

  “It’s a good job,” she said. She sat down on the edge of the desk, swung her legs “Finish your breakfast. I didn’t make that coffee. It’s out of the hotel urn. Don’t drink it if it’s too strong. There’s orange juice in the metal pitcher. I remembered you take your coffee black and didn’t bring any …”

  “Whoa!” he said.

  “I’m talking too much I know it,” she said. She hugged herself. “Oh, Gil, I’m so happy you’re here. Finish your breakfast and you can take me across to the Co-op. Maybe I can take you on the guided tour. It’s a fascinating place. There are lots of dark corners back in the storage cave.”

  Dasein drained his coffee, shook his head. “Jenny, you are incorrigible.”

  “Gil, you’re going to love it here. I know you are,” she said.

  Dasein wiped his lips on his napkin. She was still in love with him. He could see that in every look. And he … he felt the same way about her. It was still love me love my valley, though. Her words betrayed it. Dasein sighed. He could see the blank wall of an unresolvable difference looming ahead of them. If her love could stand the discovery of his true role here, could it also stand breaking away from the valley? Would she come away with him?

  “Gil, are you all right?” she asked.

  He pushed his chair back, got up. “Yes. I’m …”

  The telephone rang.

  Jenny reached behind her on the desk, brought the receiver to her ear. “Dr. Dasein’s room.” She grinned at Dasein. The grin turned to a scowl. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Pem Johnson, is it? Well, I’ll tell you a thing or two, Mr. Johnson! I think you’re a criminal the way you almost killed Dr. Dasein! If you’d … No! Don’t you try to make excuses! Open gas jets in the rooms! I think Dr. Dasein ought to sue you for every cent you have!”

  A tinny, rasping noise came from the phone. Dasein recognized only a few words. The grin returned to Jenny’s face. “It’s Jenny Sorge, that’s who it is,” she said. “Don’t you … well, I’ll tell you if you’ll be quiet for a minute! I’m here bringing Dr. Dasein what the doctor ordered for him—a good breakfast. He doesn’t dare eat anything you’d have prepared for him. It’d probably have poison in it!”

  Dasein crossed to a trunk stand where his suitcase had been left, opened it. He spoke over his shoulder. “Jenny, what’s he want, for heaven’s sake?”

  She waved him to silence.

  Dasein rummaged in the suitcase looking for his briefcase. He tried to remember what had been done with it in the confusion of the previous night, looked around the room. No sign of it. Someone had gone to the other room for his things. Maybe whoever it was had missed the briefcase. Dasein thought of the case’s content
s, wet his lips with his tongue. Every step of his program to unravel the mystery of the Santaroga Barrier was outlined there. In the wrong hands, that information could cause him trouble, throw up new barriers.

  “I’ll tell him,” Jenny said.

  “Wait a minute,” Dasein said. “I want to talk to him.” He took the phone from her. “Johnson?”

  “What do you want?” There was that twangy belligerency, but Dasein couldn’t blame him after the treatment he’d received from Jenny.

  “My briefcase,” Dasein said. “It was in the other room. Would you send up someone with a key and …”

  “Your damned briefcase isn’t in that room, mister! I cleaned the place out and I ought to know.”

  “Then where is it?” Dasein asked.

  “If it’s that case you were so touchy about last night, I saw Captain Marden leave with something that looked like it last night after all the commotion you caused.”

  “I caused?” Outrage filled Dasein’s voice. “See here, Johnson! You stop twisting the facts!”

  After only a heartbeat of silence, Johnson said: “I was, wasn’t I? Sorry.”

  Johnson’s abrupt candor disarmed the psychologist in Dasein. In a way, it reminded him of Jenny. Santarogans, he found, displayed a lopsided reality that was both attractive and confusing. When he’d collected his thoughts, all Dasein could say was: “What would Marden be doing with my case?”

  “That’s for him to say and you to find out,” Johnson said with all his old belligerence. There was a sharp click as he broke the connection.

  Dasein shook his head, put the phone back on its hook.

  “Al Marden wants you to have lunch with him at the Blue Ewe,” Jenny said.

  “Hmmm?” He looked up at her, bemused, her words taking a moment to register. “Marden … lunch?”

  “Twelve noon. The Blue Ewe’s on the Avenue of the Giants where it goes through town … on the right just past the first cross street.”

  “Marden? The Highway patrol captain?”

  “Yes. Johnson just passed the message along.” She slipped down off the desk, a flash of knees, a swirl of the red skirt. “Come along. Escort me to work.”

  Dasein picked up his suitcoat, allowed himself to be led from the room.

  That damn’ briefcase with all its forms and notes and letters, he thought. The whole show! But it gave him a perverse feeling of satisfaction to know that everything would be out in the open. I wasn’t cut out to be a cloak and dagger type.

  There was no escaping the realization, though, that revelation of his real purpose here would intensify Santaroga’s conspiracy of silence. And how would Jenny react?

  2

  Dasein’s first impression of the Jasper Cheese Cooperative with the people at work in and around it was that the place was a hive. It loomed whitely behind its fence as Jenny led him from the Inn. He found it an odd companion for the Inn, just across the road, nestled against a steep hill, poking odd squares and rectangles up onto an outcropping. The previous night’s brooding look had been replaced by this appearance of humming efficiency with electric carts buzzing across the yard, their platforms loaded with oblong packages. People walked with a leaning sense of purpose.

  A hive, Dasein thought. There must be a queen inside and these were the workers, guarding, gathering food.

  A uniformed guard, a police dog on a leash beside him, took Dasein’s name as Jenny introduced him. The guard opened a gate in the chain-link fence. His dog grinned wolfishly at Dasein, whined.

  Dasein remembered the baying he’d heard when he’d first looked down into the valley. That had been less than fourteen hours ago, Dasein realized. The time felt stretched out, longer. He asked himself why dogs guarded the Co-op. The question bothered him.

  The yard they crossed was an immaculate concrete surface. Now that he was close to the factory, Dasein saw that it was a complex of structures that had been joined by filling the between areas with odd additions and covered walkways.

  Jenny’s mood changed markedly once they were well inside the grounds. Dasein saw her become more assertive, sure of herself. She introduced Dasein to four persons while crossing the yard—Willa Burdeaux among them. Willa turned out to be a small husky-voiced young woman with a face that was almost ugly in its tiny, concise sharpness. She had her father’s deeps-of-darkness skin, a petite figure.

  “I met your father last night,” Dasein said.

  “Daddy told me,” she said. She turned a knowing look on Jenny, added: “Anything I can do, just tell me, honey.”

  “Maybe later,” Jenny said. “We have to be running.”

  “You’re going to like it here, Gilbert Dasein,” Willa said. She turned away with a wave, hurried across the yard.

  Disturbed by the undertones of the conversation, Dasein allowed himself to be led down a side bay, into a wide door that opened onto an aisle between stacked cartons of Jaspers Cheese. Somewhere beyond the stacks there was a multiplexity of sounds—hissings, stampings, gurgling water, a clank-clank-clank.

  The aisle ended in a short flight of wide steps, up to a loading bay with hand trucks racked along its edge. Jenny led him through a door marked “Office.”

  It was such an ordinary place—clips of order forms racked along a wall, two desks with women seated at them typing, a long counter with a gate at one end, windows opening onto the yard and a view of the Inn, a door labeled “Manager” beyond the women.

  The door opened as Dasein and Jenny stopped at the counter. Out stepped one of the card players from the Inn’s dining room—the balding sandy hair, the deeply cleft chin and wide mouth—George Nis. The heavily lidded blue eyes swept past Dasein to Jenny.

  “Problems in Bay Nine, Jenny,” Nis said. “You’re needed over there right away.”

  “Oh, darn!” Jenny said.

  “I’ll take care of your friend,” Nis said. “We’ll see if we can’t let you off early for your dinner date.”

  Jenny squeezed Dasein’s hand, said: “Darling, forgive me. Duty and all that.” She blinked a smile at him, whirled and was back out the door, the red skirt swirling.

  The women at their typewriters looked up, seemed to take in Dasein with one look, went back to their work. Nis came to the gate in the counter, opened it.

  “Come on in, Dr. Dasein.” He extended a hand.

  The handshake was firm, casual.

  Dasein followed the man into an oak-paneled office, unable to get his mind off the fact that Nis knew about the dinner date with Jenny. How could the man know? Piaget had extended the invitation only a few minutes before.

  They sat down separated by a wide desk, its top empty of papers. The chairs were padded, comfortable with sloping arms. In large frames behind Nis hung an aerial photograph of the Co-op and what appeared to be a ground plan. Dasein recognized the layout of the yard and front of the building. The back became heavy dark lines that wandered off into the hill like the tributaries of a river. They were labeled with the initial J and numbers—J-5 … J-14 …

  Nis saw the direction of Dasein’s gaze, said: “Those are the storage caverns—constant temperature and humidity.” He coughed discreetly behind a hand, said: “You catch us at an embarrassing moment, Dr. Dasein. I’ve nobody I can release to show you through the plant. Could Jenny bring you back another day?”

  “At your convenience,” Dasein said. He studied Nis, feeling oddly wary, on guard.

  “Please don’t wear any cologne or hair dressing or anything like that when you come,” Nis said. “You’ll notice that our women wear no makeup and we don’t allow female visitors from outside to go into the cave or storage areas. It’s quite easy to contaminate the culture, give an odd flavor to an entire batch.”

  Dasein was suddenly acutely aware of the aftershave lotion he’d used that morning.

  “I’ll be pure and clean,” he said. He looked to the right out the windows, caught suddenly by motion there on the road between the Co-op and the Inn.

  A peculiar high-
wheeled vehicle went lurching past. Dasein counted eight pairs of wheels. They appeared to be at least fifteen feet in diameter, big ballooning doughnuts that hummed on the pavement. The wheels were slung on heavy arms like insect legs.

  In an open cab, high up in front, four leashed hounds seated behind him, rode Al Marden. He appeared to be steering by using two vertical handles.

  “What in the devil is that?” Dasein demanded. He jumped up, crossed to the window to get a better look at the machine as it sped down the road. “Isn’t that Captain Marden driving it?”

  “That’s our game warden’s bush buggy,” Nis said. “Al acts as game warden sometimes when the regular man’s sick or busy on something else. Must’ve been out patroling the south hills. Heard there were some deer hunters from outside messing around there this morning.”

  “You don’t allow outsiders to hunt in the valley, is that it?” Dasein asked.

  “Nobody hunts in the valley,” Nis corrected him. “Too much chance of stray bullets hitting someone. Most of the people around this area know the law, but we occasionally get someone from down south who blunders in. There’re very few places the buggy can’t get to them, though. We set them straight in a hurry.”

  Dasein imagined that giant-wheeled monstrosity lurching over the brush, descending on some hapless hunter who’d blundered into the valley. He found his sympathies with the hunter.

  “I’ve never seen a vehicle like that before,” Dasein said. “Is it something new?”

  “Sam, Sam Scheler, built the bush buggy ten, twelve years ago,” Nis said. “We were getting some poachers from over by Porterville then. They don’t bother us anymore.”

  “I imagine not,” Dasein said.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me,” Nis said. “I do have a great deal of work and we’re short-handed today. Get Jenny to bring you back later in the week … after … well, later in the week.”

  After what? Dasein wondered. He found himself strangely alert. He’d never felt this clearheaded before. He wondered if it could be some odd after effect of the gas.

  “I’ll, ah, let myself out,” he said, rising.

  “The gate guard will be expecting you,” Nis said. He remained seated, his gaze fixed on Dasein with an odd intensity until the door closed between them.