Double Hannenframmis

He came in alone on the executive jet, Gus and Kelly up front. First time he had ever been the lone passenger. Wyatt Ross all alone, amid the leathery black luxury of the lounge chairs. Strange not to have the members of the strike force along. Geri Housner, incomparable executive secretary. Stanley Silverstaff, knowing ratios and leverage and cash flow. Stannard on legal. Haines on systems analysis, product mix, production potential. Nucleus of the team, other experts added as needed.

Tried to read over the transcript of the last hearing, looking for hidden tricks in the questioning, looking for inconsistencies in his own answers. Slowed his skilled speed-reading down to minimum, down to subvocal level, but comprehension still fractional. Put it back into the dispatch case. Concentration will be impossible until this thing is settled, solved, brushed under a high-cost rug.

Pressure change in the ears. Change in pitch of jet engines and wind whistle. Lazy voice on the intercom, "Coming in, Mr. Ross."

Tighten the belt and look down at the tilting earth, at the gaudy jumble of the toy hotels of the resort city. Bright-blue water in morning sun. Improbable green of the golf courses and the endless tan and rust and solitude of the desert all around.

At rest on the apron for private aircraft, rotors whining down into silence, heat striking through the metal carapace. Gus came back and undogged the door, cranked the steps down, carried the suitcase and dispatch case out to the wire gate. Wyatt Ross waved a taxi over, told Gus to tell Kelly to count on take-off at nine tomorrow morning.

Ross went blank at the driver's question, felt a panic out of all proportion to the seriousness of the small lapse of memory. Felt he could as readily forget the name of the city he was in, wife's name, names of the two small sons. Took out the black notebook. Hotel Contessa Royale, please.

Rocks and ferns, pools and fountains, upward swoop of driveway to stop in the shade of architectural redwood, and there was handed over to doorman, bell captain, bellhop, desk clerk.

"W. R. Ross. Dallas. Yes, sir, that will be nine-eleven. I hope you will enjoy your stay with us. Yes, there is one message. Here you are, sir. Desk! Take Mr. Ross to nine-eleven, please."

Large room, tufted yellow rug, sliding glass opening onto a small sun terrace. Hushed, chilly, aseptically clean. Dressing room. Ice maker. Bidet. Color television. Many mirrors.

He kept seeing himself in the mirrors, seeing movement and turning with a start and seeing Wyatt Ross. Just like the pictures that had appeared over the past six years in Business Week, Forbes, Time, Newsweek. With the adjectives. Vital. Daring. Imaginative. Fast-moving. Aggressive.

And just like the newspaper photographs recently. Wyatt Ross subpoenaed in Senate hearing on stock manipulation. Securities and Exchange Commission launches investigation of misuse of insider information. Justice Department blocks acquisition of Kallen Equipment by Wyro International Services, Inc. Board of governors of the New York Stock Exchange suspends trading in Wyro. Attorneys for Kallen Equipment claim that Wyatt Ross, chief executive officer of Wyro, made fortune in dummy margin accounts in three brokerage houses.

He opened the sealed envelope he had been given at the desk. Feminine handwriting. Hotel stationery. "Mr. Ross: I will expect you at 11 this morning in 938. Do not phone my room, please. Miss McGann."

Twenty minutes. He unpacked too quickly. Once again, he tried to read the transcript of the last hearing. Just words, without meaning. He prowled, not looking into any of the mirrors. At two minutes before 11, he put the five-inch reel of tape into a side pocket of his suitcoat and walked down the corridor to Miss McGann's room.

She opened the door a few inches and looked out at him, then pulled it wide to let him in. A tall woman, younger than he had expected. Strong-bodied, big-bosomed blonde, with a pretty and impassive face, cool blue eyes, careless hair, brief green skirt with a big brass buckle, yellow sleeveless blouse, yellow sandals.

"Mr. Russo asked me to check and be sure you have a good reason to be here," she said.

"One of the men on my board lives here. Sam Wattenberg. He isn't well. He doesn't travel. He has a large stock interest in Wyro and he's very upset. I'm seeing him at his home at five this evening."

"May I have the tape, please?"

He handed it to her. She went over to the couch. She had cleared the long coffee table and set up electronic equipment on it. Two reel-to-reel recorders. A small amplifier. A piece of laboratory equipment that looked like an unfinished television receiver. Two small speakers on the floor.

As she threaded the tape onto one of the decks, he said, "It's just a lot of standard husband-and-wife talk. Russo said to just turn on that machine and make sure she talked."

Miss McGann made no reply. She started the tape, adjusted the amplifier controls, then leaned back on the couch, arms folded, eyes half closed. And the breakfast-table voices of Wyatt and Mary Lou Ross, husband and wife, came into the room with a special clarity, a startling presence. The small routines of domesticity. The man had fixed the dishwasher, but it still wasn't working right. Denny's new tooth looked as if it was coming in sideways. Maria wants three days off to go visit her sick sister down in Brownsville. She wants to borrow the bus fare.

And then a part that made him edgy and uncomfortable.

"Darling, you look so tired. And you seem so kind of remote. I suppose it's all this trouble with the Government. They're sort of persecuting you, aren't they?"

"That's a good word, honey."

"Is it ... real bad trouble?"

"Pretty bad."

"They're saying such ugly things about you in the newspapers. It hurts me when they say things like that. I know you're not like that."

"Thanks."

"Wyatt, darling?"

"What is it?"

"It's all a lot of misunderstandings, isn't it? I mean, you haven't ever done anything ... sneaky and underhanded, have you? I shouldn't even ask you that. I know you better than that."

"I'm absolutely clean, honey. Believe me."

"I do. Then this is just something ... we have to go through and they'll find out they're wrong about you. I think I would just die if you ever did anything crooked. I love you and I know you couldn't. I shouldn't spoil your breakfast by even talking about it. I'm sorry."

"You have a right to ask, honey. You have a right to be reassured."

"Well, I wish it was over, darn it."

Wyatt's face felt hot. The conversation turned to trivialities, to invitations they couldn't accept, to when the dog should have his shots, to what to send her mother for her birthday this year.

The tape ended. Miss McGann said, "That sounds like a nifty little wife, Mr. Ross."

"She is a nifty little wife, indeed."

"North Carolina?"

"Until she was about fifteen, and then her family moved to Atlanta."

"Nifty little wife isn't going to take this very well, is she?"

"I'm paying Russo a very large piece of money to get me out from under. The deal does not include my listening to your personal appraisals, Miss McGann."

"Correction, deary. I'm not on your conglomerate payroll. I am a specialist, and I am damned good, and I get paid very, very well. You got too confident and you got too cute and you got caught. You can lose your ass, fellow. Russo knows it, you know it and I know it. I think your Mary Lou is better than you deserve and I think you will be doing her a favor by dropping her off the back of your sleigh, fellow. I say what I want when I want to and take crap from no man alive. Now tell me you're not used to being talked to like this. And I will tell you to relax and enjoy it. Now let me get to work."

She ran the tape back and found a place she wanted. A simple sentence. "Maria gets so all gloomy and dramatic when there's any kind of family trouble, especially financial problems."

"Why that one?" Wyatt asked.

"Why not?" she said.

"Look, Miss McGann. Truce. I'm in trouble. I'm humble. I need your help. My name is Wyatt."

She studied him, head tilted, then smiled for the first time. "Sure. Call me Ruth. That sentence has the sounds in it that are going to give me the most trouble. She turns financial, for example, into a four-syllable word. 'Fye-nance-you-wull.'"

She recorded the sentence from tape to tape ten times, leaving blank tape between each repeat. She then played the new tape, watching the ever-changing graph pattern on the screen of the unfamiliar piece of equipment.

With a microphone, she then repeated the sentence, recording it onto the new tape in the blank spots she had left, working the piano-key controls of the recorder deftly while she watched the sound pattern, the voice profile, on the screen.

Wyatt Ross felt disappointment. The imitation seemed way off, unconvincing. Ruth McGann opened a small jar and took out a wad of pink, puttylike material, broke off two pieces, thumbed them into her cheeks outside her back molars.

"Changes the amount of space inside the mouth," she explained. "Changes the resonance. I can alter the pitch."

She practiced for a little while, then put the duplicate tape on the first machine and a fresh tape on the second. She spoke at the same time, saying the same words, and both voice patterns appeared on the screen, becoming ever more similar.

Then she turned the equipment off and said, "Wyatt, darling, what in the world are you doing in this hotel room with this female person?"

The uncanny accuracy of it made him jump. It was Mary Lou's voice coming out of the stranger's mouth. She laughed at his startled look and it was Mary Lou's laugh.

"Now I got it, I better stay with it (continued on page 156)double honnenframmis(continued from page 124) right along, because if I go back to being me, I'll, like, lose the taste of it, dear."

"It's a very weird sensation."

"Honey, we better go over the little scripts. Here's your copies. Soon as we get to sounding natural, then we can put them on the tape."

Russo had worked out the dialog. Ruth McGann became very irritated with Wyatt when he could not get away from the sound of somebody reading something. Once he had the sense of it, she made him put it aside and ad-lib it. Finally, by changing her own lines, she was able to help him sound natural.

They taped the first exchange and then listened to it on playback.

"You got time for more coffee, darling?" she asked.

"I guess so. Sure."

"Wyatt?"

"What is it?"

"I think there was a Kallen girl in school with me in Atlanta. Could that be the same family?"

"Where did you get that name from, Mary Lou?"

"Well, I couldn't hardly help seeing it. All those papers about the Kallen Equipment Company all over your desk in the study. I don't let Maria go in there, but somebody has to do a little bit of dusting and cleaning. I saw the name and I wondered about that girl."

"I don't know. The company is in Michigan."

"That's who you went up there to see last week?"

Listening to the tape, he could appreciate Russo's cleverness. It back-dated the conversation by almost six months.

"Yes, but it's strictly confidential, honey."

"Oh! Are you going to buy that little old company? My goodness, if you keep on buying things, doesn't it get hard to keep track of everything?"

"Not with the team I've got working for me."

"But why do you want that little company?"

"Because it's there, honey."

"Oh, come on!"

"Well, for instance, they've got about sixteen million dollars' worth of raw land, at fair resale value, and it's carried on their books at what it cost them way, way back. Eight hundred thousand dollars."

"Wow! Do they know that?"

"They sure do, honey. That's why we might have to give them one share of Wyro for every share of Kallen outstanding, which is a difference of better than twice what their shares are worth on the big board."

"Now you've lost me, sweetheart. More coffee?"

"I better run. If you get a chance, find out about the suit the cleaner lost."

Ruth McGann switched it off. "You're a little wooden, but it's good enough. Let's get these others done."

There was one where she pried into the profitability of Wyro until he told her that their next quarterly earnings statement was going to be about half of what had been estimated, and another where he told her he had decided to break off negotiations to acquire Henderson Homes.

After Ruth had listened intently to the playback, she turned off the equipment and sighed, plucked the two wads of pink-plastic substance from her mouth, got up and went into the bathroom. When she came back, she said in her normal voice, "That should do it."

"But what happens next? How can Russo explain the reason the tapes were made in the first place?"

"There's a lot of options. He won't come into it at all. Somebody will show up with the tapes. In the interest of fair play and all that. Mr. Russo makes everything logical. Don't worry about it. It will all fit together. I could make a guess, but it won't mean much."

"Go ahead."

"Some woman hired an investigator to get the goods on your Mary Lou and her husband. So the investigator bugged the house; and, because it isn't exactly legal, he sends the tapes in with an anonymous letter of explanation, sends them to your attorneys."

"That won't be enough."

"Not without some trimmings. Maybe a fake phone tap, Mary Lou talking to an unidentified boyfriend." She switched to Mary Lou's voice. "Sweetheart, I'm doing the best I can, I really am. I mean, I've never paid much attention to all this business stuff in the past. I've been asking him everything you told me to ask him, lover, and I've been telling you everything he says: but when can we stop all this? When will you have enough money, so we can go away, my dearest? I think of you every living minute of the day and night, honest. I love you so."

He found that he was standing. And roaring. "No, damn it! I won't stand for that!"

"Deary, you were very shifty the way you worked those accounts. Nobody can tie you directly to them, Mr. Russo says. But he says you were stupid with the timing, because you made your moves in the market on the basis of information known to you alone. He says you were greedy-stupid, getting in at the bottom and out at the top. And you pulled the cash out in such a way that it can't be traced back to you."

"I had to do something! Too many things started to go wrong at the same time."

"We all have our little rationalizations, sugar. You made your moves and you siphoned off the cash; and if you hadn't, you couldn't afford Russo to get you into the clear. But you didn't declare it and you haven't planned on paying taxes on it. And unless you can throw them some alternative, you get your pick of Leavenworth or Atlanta or some other garden spot."

"But I was doing it for--"

Wise and crooked smile, too old for her mouth and face. "For the wife and kiddies? Come on! Any way you deal the hand, you've lost your Mary Lou. Best to set it up to look as if somebody was using her. Otherwise, she could get clipped for tax evasion. After they play the tapes and question her, and after you testify that those are conversations you had with your wife, you think she'll forgive and forget?"

"No."

"If there has to be more trimmings, Mr. Russo will provide them. A motel witness. Look at it this way. In the clear, you can afford to give her big alimony. If they nail you, she might have to work waitress to support those kids."

He sat on the couch, elbows on his knees, forehead resting on the heels of his hands, shoulders hunched high. Did not know he was weeping silently until he felt the tickle of the tears. Ruth McGann was pulling out the interconnecting jacks, putting the equipment into fitted cases.

On one inhalation, he made a loud and inadvertent snorting sound. She sat beside him and said softly, "Hey. Hey, now."

"I can't ... can't...." Voice gritty and strangled.

Strong grasp pulled the nearest hand away. Warm hand against his far cheek, turning his face toward her.

"Poor sad sorry bastard," she whispered, her face soft. Hand still on his cheek, she ran the ball of her thumb across the wetness under his eye. "Is it for real?" she asked.

"That's ... the worst part, Ruth. I don't know ... how much I mean it ... or if I mean it at all."

"I know. So later on, you can tell yourself that when it happened, you cried."

"How do you know so much?"

"When I was fifteen, I was the voice of seventeen or eighteen rotten little animals in cheap commercials, deary. It kept me from ever having anything of my own to say." She leaned close and put her mouth on his, her lips soft, clever, unendingly sweet.

After he had his arms around her, tilting her back, she pushed him away. She mocked herself with her smile. "Ok, so I have this Earth Mother kick. The sky fell on your head and you are pretty rotten. Go yank those draperies across, honey."

Then after they were in the bed, her exhalations explosive at each readying caress, her body lifting and wanting, she stopped him as he moved to enter her, her face sweaty in the half-light, seen through the tumble of her hair.

Breathing like a runner, she said, "The worst part. Sure. Not knowing how much I mean this. Or. Or if I mean ... if I mean it at all, deary. Or. Or ever can."

"Shut up. Shut up."

"I don't like. Don't like either one of us, love. Is that why I'm so ready? Is that how? How I know I'm going to make it?"

"Shut up."

"All right. Come on, then, chief executive officer of everything."

• • •

Four months and four days later, he awoke from a Sunday-afternoon nap in the beach-front cabana at the new hotel in Puerto Rico. The dream had sweated him, soured his mouth. In the dream, he stood small before a judicial bench so high that he could not see the face of the sentencing judge. Hollow, solemn, echoing voice. "Wyatt Rutherford Ross, this court finds you guilty of hannenframmis in the first, second and third degrees."

Terror. "Your Honor! Your Honor! I don't understand the charge."

"And sentences you to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment. May God have mercy on the soul you should have had."

"Your Honor! I can't even see you."

He got up and padded into the bathroom and rinsed his mouth. He looked at his sun-browned holiday face in the mirror and said, "I plead guilty to hannenframmis in all the degrees you got, baby."

He went back into the bedroom and found his damp swim trunks and pulled them on. Tuck the dream away. Hide it behind the well-remembered newspaper features. Ross cleared on stock-manipulation charges. Executive's wife implicated in information leak. Surprise tapes played in closed committee session. Mrs. Wyatt Ross denies love affair, says evidence is faked. Surprise witness heard in closed session. Hotel registrations subpoenaed. Wife refuses to reveal identity of mystery man, denies his existence.

SEC clears officers of Wyro International Services. Trading in Wyro resumed. Divorce action filed. Kallen acquisition plans dropped by Wyro, due to drop in price of Wyro common after release of earnings report. Wyatt Ross announces spin-off of three earlier acquisitions, concentration on the most profitable product lines and services, improved future earnings through internal growth instead of acquisition route.

Done. For $500,000 fed cautiously into the channel that ran from New York to Miami to Nassau to Zurich and into the proper account, the number furnished by a small, quiet, dead-faced man named Willy Russo. So he'd moved his own through the same pipeline, what he had left after Russo's bite, into the numbered account he'd set up three years ago, along with orders to keep the money working, make it grow. The Swiss have a talent for it.

All done. And the old strike force had dropped away, one at a time. Stanley Silverstaff first, taking the best of the outstanding offers. Then Stannard, going back into private practice. Then Haines, leaving to go into that think-tank mystique in California at a fifth of what he was worth in industry.

Just as well. That team had been geared to acquisition, to making the careful stalk, the daring pounce. Different ball game now. Chop away at all the costs, direct and overhead. Expand existing markets. Improve the products and services. Need a different type. Dogged, methodical men. No noisy celebrations in the private jet on the way home from victory. In fact, no company jets at all. Dwindling need. Cut the costs.

No need for the hearty devices that create the kind of team spirit that used to be so useful. Stay remote. It is too difficult to fire your friends. Easy to fire uneasy strangers. Set the goals. Promote the men who can meet them, fire those who can't. And keep upping the goals.

Heard the stealthy key in the lock. Door opened. Geri Housner came in. Dark-blue bikini with white ruffles. Canvas beach bag. Last one left. Incomparably loyal and efficient executive secretary. Incomparably elegant lady, slender and cool and unconsciously provocative. Four years of her executive-secretarial services had left him at times in such a rage of desire, it had taken the last fragment of self-control to keep it all on the polite, affable, impersonal basis that guaranteed her continuing efforts.

She was one of the rare ones, so good at any task he gave her that he knew he would never find another as useful. And he was all too aware of the implacable rules of the game. The day you tumbled a good one into bed was the day you started to lose her. The office marriage was a transient arrangement. It might take a year, or two, or possibly three at the most. Then she would leave or you would crowd her out.

"Oh," she said. "You're awake, darling."

"Just about to go beach-walking, looking for you. Have a good swim?"

"Lovely. Absolutely lovely. Have a nice nap?"

"Not so lovely."

She patted her dark hair and came toward him with a look of concern. "What do you mean? What's wrong, Wyatt?"

"A dream. A dumb dream. Woke me up tired."

"Poor darling."

He caught her wrist and tugged, sat on the bed and stood her in front of him, between his knees, hands on her slender tanned waist. He grinned up at her, watched with clinical interest the way her mouth softened and sagged open, the way her head seemed to become too heavy for the slender neck. She had been so constrained, so stiff and awkward and shy for the first week, he had begun to think that her look of sensuality held under control had been ironic illusion. And then, all in a rush, she had come on, found it all, relished it all, living on that edge of readiness that needed only his touch to start the flowering.

"I should take my shower," she said in a small blurred voice.

He pulled her across him, onto the bed, and in the lazy light of the late afternoon, peeled her out of the bikini and slowly, indolently, knowingly made love to her. In one slow, sweet, cantering pace, the time when a ubiquitous commercial song about manly cigarettes would sometimes come into his head, instead there came the Ruth--Mary Lou voice, saying, "Maria gets so all gloomy and dramatic when there's any kind of family trouble, especially financial problems. Especially fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull." Timed to thrust and riposte.

Grab at some other nonsense phrase to drive the first one away. Like singing a song to get rid of a song.

"Guilty of hannenframmis," he said.

"What? What, darling?" she asked, speaking up out of motion and lostness.

"Nothing."

"Guilty of something."

"Hush, darling. Come on, now."

He had sensed that she was close, but his idiot phrase had shifted her concentration. She was working but not making it back to where she had been. He knew that he could not wait and did not want to stop, so he rocked to the side and gave her a great ringing stinging slap on her sea-salty, sweat-salty elegant haunch. So she yelped, leaped like a racing mare, clung and came thundering home.

So later, dazed face frowning down at him, propped up on her elbow. "What was it you said about guilty?"

"Guilty of hannenframmis."

"What did they used to call that? Double talk. Yes. Why did you say it then?"

"It came into my mind, I guess."

"Why would it come into your mind?"

"For God's sake, Geri! Nobody knows what makes things come into your mind."

"There's always a reason, they say."

"Ok. I don't know the reason. It was something in the dream I had."

"You dreamed I was guilty of ... whatever that is?"

"I was guilty. I was in court. They gave me three life sentences."

"Darling, I don't want you to be troubled. I don't want you to have bad dreams. I don't want us to think about anything but us. There's only three more days."

"I'm not troubled!"

"You wouldn't be cross to me if you weren't." She got up with quiet dignity and went into the bathroom and closed the door. Soon he heard the shower.

"Fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull." Get over it, baby. Marry well. Take good care of the boys.

He sighed and got up and went into the bathroom and made jokes and scrubbed her narrow lovely back, and she was in a good mood and wearing a pretty dress when they went up to the hotel, had rum drinks, watched the sunset, ate steaks, danced.

They walked on the beach and then went back to the cabana. He had brought a newspaper back from the hotel. While she got ready for bed, he looked at the stock-market reports. Kallen was in the high 40s, up a point and a half for the day on high volume. She came over in sheer shorty nightgown, spicy aroma of perfume, dark eyes shining, kissed him meaningfully, told him to come to bed, kind sir. Right away, ma'am.

The lights were bright in the bathroom. He could smell her soap and lotions and the lingering steamy-sweet odor of her body. He tried to summon desire, but there was none. None at all.

Finished brushing teeth. Examined teeth in mirror. Turned toilet lid down. Sat on it. Had feeling he was looking for something and would not know what it was unless he happened to see it. Or see something that reminded him of what it was he was looking for.

He saw his dark-red robe on the hook on the back of the door. The belt was a thick white cotton rope. He got up and pulled the white rope out of the loops. He turned and looked up over the tub at the brace that held the high window open. A very sturdy brace. Well made.

So two nonsense things could be fitted together into double nonsense. "Fye-nance-you-wull hannenframmis." It did not sound well said aloud, but he discovered he could say it inside his head effectively. Fast or slow. High or low. Loud or soft.

Slipknot. Stand on edge of tub. Wedge knot firmly into narrow end of brace. Give tug. Now keep saying it all inside your head, fellow, because big Ruthie McGann is standing back there somewhere, shouting, trying to get through. And she is yelling something about meaning it or not meaning it and not knowing if anything means anything. Crap like that you can do without. So fye-nance-you-wull-hannenframmis the hell out of her. Throw up a cloud of it. Wet the rope. Makes the knot harder. Good thought. Edge of tub. Erection? Why erection, when the elegant lady doesn't do a thing for it tonight? Keep that old double nonsense coming, fellow. Loud and fast and all inside the head. Yank tight. Take step. And keep it loud and fa--