Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [90]
“What happened to you?” I said.
She told me about being hit by a taxi. She had just mailed a letter to Arpad Leen, confirming all the orders she had given to him on the telephone.
“I’ll get an ambulance,” I said.
“No, no,” she said. “Stay here, stay here.”
“But you need help!” I said.
“I’m past that,” she said.
“You don’t even know what’s wrong with you,” I said.
“I’m dying, Walter,” she said. “That’s enough to know.”
“Where there’s life there’s hope,” I said, and I prepared to run upstairs.
“Don’t you dare leave me alone again!” she said.
“I’m going to save your life!” I said.
“You’ve got to hear what I have to say first!” she said. “I’ve been sitting here thinking, ‘My God—after all I’ve gone through, after all I’ve worked for, there isn’t going to be anybody to hear the last things I have to say.’ You get an ambulance, and there won’t be anybody who understands English on that thing.”
“Can I make you more comfortable?” I said.
“I am comfortable,” she said. There was something to that claim. Her layers and layers of clothing were keeping her warm. Her little head was supported in a corner of the stall and cushioned against the metal by a pillow of rags.
There was meanwhile an occasional grumbling in the living rock around us. Something else was dying upstairs, which was the railroad system of the United States. Half-broken locomotives were dragging completely broken passenger cars in and out of the station.
“I know your secret,” I said.
“Which one?” she said. “There are so many now.”
I expected it to be a moment of high drama when I told her that I knew she was the majority stockholder in RAMJAC. It was a fizzle, of course. She had told me that already, and I had failed to hear.
“Are you going deaf, Walter?” she said.
“I hear you all right, now,” I said.
“On top of everything else,” she said, “am I going to have to yell my last words?”
“No,” I said. “But I don’t want to listen to any more talk about last words. You’re so rich, Mary Kathleen! You can take over a whole hospital, if you want to—and make them make you well again!”
“I hate this life,” she said. “I’ve done everything I can to make it better for everybody, but there probably isn’t that much that anybody can do. I’ve had enough of trying. I want to go to sleep now.”
“But you don’t have to live this way!” I said. “That’s what I came here to tell you. I’ll protect you, Mary Kathleen. We’ll hire people we can trust absolutely. Howard Hughes hired Mormons—because they have such high moral standards. We’ll hire Mormons, too.”
“Oh Lord, Walter,” she said, “you think I haven’t tried Mormons?”
“You have?” I said.
“I was up to my ears in Mormons one time,” she said, and she told me as gruesome a tale as I ever expect to hear.
It happened when she was still living expensively, still trying to find ways to enjoy her great wealth at least a little bit. She was a freak that many people would have liked to photograph or capture or torment in some way—or kill. People would have liked to kill her for her hands or her money, but also for revenge. RAMJAC had stolen or ruined many other businesses and had even had a hand in the toppling of governments in countries that were small and weak.
So she dared not reveal her true identity to anyone but her faithful Mormons, and she had to keep moving all the time. And so it came to pass that she was staying on the top floor of a RAMJAC hotel in Managua, Nicaragua. There were twenty luxury suites on the floor, and she hired them all. The two stairways from the floor below were blocked with brutal masonry, like the archway in the lobby of the Arapahoe. The controls on the elevators were set so that only one could reach the top, and that one was manned by a Mormon.
Not even the manager of the hotel, supposedly, knew who she really was. But everyone in Managua, surely, must have suspected who she really was.
Be that as it may: She rashly resolved to go out into the city alone one day, to taste however briefly what she had not tasted for years—what it was