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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF GERALD A. BROWNE

  11 Harrowhouse

  “Vivid, sophisticated, action-filled.” —Los Angeles Times

  “As imaginative, well-plotted, and well-written a thriller as you’ll ever find … A remarkable book.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  Green Ice

  “A cliff-hanger … Sparkling … Entertaining suspense!” —Cosmopolitan

  19 Purchase Street

  “A kind of console of our contemporary nightmares at which the author fingers every sinister key … Superb.” —The New York Times

  Stone 588

  “No ordinary thriller this, but a story as scintillating as the octahedron crystal on which it focuses.… A tingle for the spine on every page.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Entertaining suspense … Heart-stopping … Browne details both the glitter and grime of the diamond market, high society and the underworld … A gem of a thriller.” —Orlando Sentinel

  Hot Siberian

  “Beautifully written … Will keep you entranced.” —The New York Times Book Review

  West 47th

  “Immensely entertaining.” —The Washington Post Book World

  Slide

  Gerald A. Browne

  To Dr. Ruth Ochroch,

  Dr. Marvin Belsky

  and my dear daughter Cindy

  Forecast

  He had a blue sweatband around his right wrist.

  As though that would do any good.

  The grip of his racquet was slimy, the way leather gets when wet. No matter how tightly he gripped, the racquet gave, turned some each time it met the ball. He couldn’t get off a good, solid slam. It infuriated him, added to the feelings that had brought him there.

  Man of forty-one with a thirty-two-inch waist. Wearing white sharkskin tennis shorts and a white cotton knit shirt, his lucky favorite. Thirty-five-dollar Tretorn shoes, the best, the kind that cushioned the arch, softly snugged the heel and made his reflexes feel improved. The shoes would be ruined after this; they’d probably dry stiff.

  His shirt and shorts were so wet the outline of his jock strap showed, and his nipples. The hair on his head was thick black, dripping. Half of it was a weave job. Every once in a while he snapped his head to shake off the water, as animals do. The water was in his eyes, making them bloodshot. He clenched his eyes and tried to blink away the sting.

  And there was the way he had to breathe. He could gasp with his mouth hardly open or breathe entirely through his nose, which was inadequate. If he panted normally with his mouth open, water got into his windpipe. That happened several times, causing him to double over and become red in the face with coughing.

  Still, he did not quit, hadn’t yet gotten enough of it out of him.

  He hit a forehand, one of his strongest of the day. Some spin on it. The ball struck the dark green just above the horizontal white painted line that signified the height of an actual net. The ball ricocheted fast off to his left, his backhand. Leaping for it, he sacrificed form, made a wild stab and missed. It bounced by and across the slick blacktop, splashed through a couple of depressed patches where water had gathered and came to an abrupt stop. On a regular, fair day a new ball such as that would have easily gone all the way to and off the mesh fence.

  The man swore aloud and went over to get another new ball. That morning he’d bought ten containers of the best Wilsons. By now he had used eighteen balls, nearly two-thirds his supply. He found that a fresh ball was good for about twenty hits, sometimes as few as ten. On its bounces and in flight a ball became soaked, got heavier and heavier, requiring that he put more and more muscle behind each stroke. Too soon a ball became impossible, like hitting an overripe orange.

  Now, almost ritualistically, he snapped open the top of a container and peeled it. The dry hiss he heard was incongruous. He paused a moment to consider where he was.

  In back of Beverly Hills High on a part of the school’s wide, paved recreation area. Alone there.

  And why.

  Because he hadn’t played in two weeks, not a swing. Two whole weeks of smashing was backed up inside him. Well, at least some of the wet on him now was his sweat.

  He shielded the container with his body while he took out a new, dry ball. He put the container down among the others, covered it, and was again ready to serve to himself, as though this were any regular, nice day at the bangboard.

  Also then, out in the Valley in the house the divorce had awarded her, was the woman who hoped she wouldn’t overload again. What puzzled her was why it happened some times and not others, under the very same conditions, when she had everything going. Anyway, today she was prepared with eight extra fuses.

  The room had been a marvelous idea, she thought. An example of how creatively her mind worked. No matter that she’d spent ten times more than she should have. It was a hell of a lot better than fading.

  God, how fast a tan faded unless you kept at it.

  After only four days of this bad spell she had stood before her full-length mirror and believed she’d already lost a lot of color, was several degrees closer to pasty. Before long she’d look sick.

  She cringed at the thought, visualized herself — and fuck you very much you two-faced piece of reflecting glass — a thirty-four, really thirty-eight, -year-old woman, two-time loser, the white of dough, veins showing. Not very Acapulco or Palm Springs. Not a chance.

  Maybe this bad spell wouldn’t last much longer. She could always fake it for a while with makeup. She recalled those times she’d tried that tan-without-sun crap. She’d turned out looking more jaundiced than ideal bronze as advertised. Besides, anyone worth anything, people who counted, knew their tans. They could tell a phony at first sight.

  What to do?

  What to do came to her after one and a half sleepless nights.

  The room, including floor and ceiling, was covered with mirrorlike silver Con-Tact paper. The windows were also covered over. Unless you’d known the room before you wouldn’t know windows were there. To do the entire job had required fifteen rolls of Con-Tact. Regular kitchen foil would have been cheaper but more difficult to work with. Attached close up to the ceiling at a point where it could be aimed down at a typical angle was a two-thousand watt reflector floodlight. On the floor in opposite corners were a pair of General Electric portable heaters, the kind with built-in fans. Overhead, fixed to the middle of the ceiling was a sunlamp. The largest, most powerful ultraviolet sunlamp made for home use. Identical lamps were situated midway up each wall, so altogether there were five of those.

  Centered on the floor was a plump, full-length lounging cushion of yellow sailcloth. Spread on that was an oversize blue towel with not a wrinkle, waiting. Electric cords dangled down, joining extensions that snaked around to consolidate into a single control switch located within reach of the cushion.

  Now the woman was just outside the room. The door was closed. She snapped a switch that turned on the floodlamp in there, and the heater fans and a stereo tape that played surf and other seaside sounds.

  She was nude. Except for a pair of purple wedgie espadrilles. A woven straw bag held things she might normally carry, including a recent issue of Town & Country intentionally folded cover out. She was ready, but she allowed a warm-up period, proving her patience by using the time to polish her dark glasses, the ones with special protective lenses. She didn’t put them on.

  She went in. She lay on the cushion, went down upon it with a self-conscious grace, as though she were being observed. She got settled, took two deep breaths and thought how nice and bright and warm it was. If she opened her eyes she’d be looking right up at the sun. Her eyelids were a blood-red background for the aerobatics of tiny squiggles.

  It was hot.

  There was a breeze, but
not enough to prevent her perspiring.

  Such a lovely day for the beach. Glad she’d come. She lay absolutely still, baking, browning in God’s great oven.

  Within a half hour she could hardly get her breath. A familiar penalty. She sat up and removed a vitamin-E lotion from her bag. She applied it to her skin, concentrating, doing it leisurely with a gentle self-respect. Until she had touched and covered every part of her. She lay back again and put on the sunglasses.

  Her right hand moved, slowly. She hardly realized it was moving. It reached the switch. She hoped she didn’t fumble. Once she had fumbled and it had taken almost an hour for her imagination to recover. This time couldn’t have been better. Her contact with the switch was brief as possible, while the rest of her senses refused to acknowledge it at all — the hard, intrusive reality of it.

  What did give her a problem, however, was the ultraviolet. Its odor. Such an exceptional smell that nothing she conjured up could appropriately excuse it. She was most successful when she dabbed Arpege below her nostrils and told herself that that, combined with the rather unpleasant, sterile vaporous quality of ultraviolet, was the original odor of air, before contamination. Pure as could be, she was being blessed with it. But really getting used to it would take some time.

  Four hundred twenty-one suicides since it began.

  The tally was not made public, nor was the fact that four out of five of the suicides occurred in the southern part of the state — that is, from Bakersfield on down.

  Four hundred twenty-one was nearly ten times the state average and, although an accurate count, it was considered incomplete. Many people in Southern California were old and living alone. No doubt a number of those had taken their lives but had not yet been discovered. Four hundred twenty-one figured out to about thirty a day. But that wasn’t how it went. During the first few days there were fewer cases. Then each day brought an increase. The official projection for tomorrow was another one hundred ninety-five.

  Five hundred ten murders to now.

  Four hundred seventy took place in the Southern California area. Some were everyday murders with motives. More were incredibly senseless.

  In San Bernardino a businessman on a morning bus used a ten-pound rock from his garden to crush in the head of the female stranger seated in front of him. In Anaheim a likeable young nurse hypodermically injected cyanide into a dozen Sunkist oranges. Holding open the bag of oranges for whomever she happened to meet, she said, “Help yourself.”

  There were eight cases of mutual murder — people shooting one another point blank simultaneously upon a predetermined signal. One such pact involved three finely strung young men who fired as point blank as possible, each taking the muzzle of another’s revolver into his mouth.

  Business was suffering.

  Nonfilter cigarette sales increased sharply, however.

  So did booze, especially cheap wine.

  Home haircoloring was up.

  Many reducing salons and body-building gyms as much as quadrupled enrollments.

  Legal person-from-person separations were up.

  Rape was down, having dropped after an initial flourish.

  The crime rate in general was above average. One category had an increase even greater than murder. It was arson. The rate for arson was up to seventy-five a day. There were some major fires at industrial plants, warehouses and oil storage facilities, but most of the cases involved private homes and small-business buildings. Police and Fire Department investigators were puzzled because all the fires, even some of the larger ones, were so obviously arson, lacking the finesse or clever subterfuge of the professional or the mentally disturbed arsonist. It was often as primary as a match being put to a crumple of newspapers with a sprinkle of backyard barbecue starter to help it catch.

  In most cases the firebugs were caught. Only a few had ever been previously booked for arson. When interrogated, many of the offenders were confused, disbelieving their own behavior. Psychiatric probing revealed no common pathology. Of course, the psychiatrists agreed: the acts of arson were protests, combustions of tantrums, similar to the resentment expressed when children play with fire on a confining rainy day.

  This was the fourteenth day.

  The satellite weather map — a sheet of acetate flapped over a dark silhouette of North America — presented its view of conditions. A barometric high-pressure system existed from the Aleutian Islands diagonally across a corner of Oregon and over to the Rockies. Another similar high extended from the Gulf up through Texas and Arizona. The two highs met and mixed, creating what professional weather people called an occluded front. A jam-up. Occluded fronts were not so rare, actually. They could be expected to cause some precipitation.

  However, this combined high-pressure front was different. It didn’t seem to have any top to it. It went up into the atmosphere as far as Earth weather can. Warmer air; moving in from the Pacific, hit against this wall. The warm air rose, tried to climb over, couldn’t, and retreated, overlapping itself like a massive ocean breaker. The low-pressure area that formed had nowhere to go. It appeared on the satellite map as an opaque, cloudlike mass particularly concentrated over Southern California.

  Ordinarily, Los Angeles and thereabouts got more cloudy days and more rainfall during the spring months. Nearly every morning the sky was gray, thick with haze, appearing as though it would surely rain. Then the sun would burn it clear away by noon. When rain came, it came in comparatively brief, benevolent showers that distributed in all only about two inches over the season.

  But not this year, this May.

  The area was now receiving its fourteenth consecutive day of rain — over three hundred hours of continuous drizzle.

  The municipal drainage systems were not built for so much water. Gutters overflowed. In places the pressure, choked in the underground drains, blew off heavy steel street covers as though they were corks. Brackish geysers spewed up a hundred feet. Numerous intersections were so flooded they had to be closed and traffic rerouted.

  Such inconveniences were relatively well tolerated. More so the first week. Men wearing chest-high waterproof fishing outfits carried women across deep streets.

  Chivalrous antics.

  A kiss or he’d drop her.

  Their picture in the next day’s newspaper.

  Fat women rode piggyback. It seemed that everyone was walking around barefoot, shoes in hand. And it was a lark to see men strip down right then and there to their undershorts so they could wade across, and women with their skirts held way up, often higher than necessary. After a few days some people went to and from work in bathing suits, toting their clothing in plastic bags.

  Motorists went about at only slightly reduced speeds, sending up rooster-tail sprays in their wakes.

  Throughout the day, every once in a while, nearly everyone glanced skyward. They held the faith that the sun would not forsake them, that it would come breaking brightly through at any moment, rewarding them for all the worship they had previously paid it.

  Some said the Air Force was to blame. Because the Air Force had been conducting rain-making maneuvers above the Mojave and Death Valley. The United States had been the first to wage weather warfare, had chemically produced downpours to impede enemy troop and supply movements along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Bombarding the sky with canisters of silver iodide. Well, this time the Air Force had given the atmosphere an overdose.

  From Edwards Air Force Base and the China Lake Naval Weapons Center came official word denying any recent weather-warfare maneuvers or testing. That wasn’t the truth, but the Pentagon thought it best to say that. Otherwise it would be in violation of the proposal made by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in June of 1975 to outlaw techniques for changing the weather for military purposes.

  Then there was the old plaint: the problem was caused by messing around with nuclear weapons. Setting off all those bombs over the years had upset the weather. There had been many climatic fluctuations in recent years. Record-breaking colds
in some northern regions, less rain than ever in India, where it was so badly needed, a drought in the Soviet Union that gave the Russians such a hunger scare they had manipulated the famous United States-Canada wheat deal. For six years in a row there had been droughts in Central Africa. International relief agencies hadn’t been able to keep up with the starvation. More proof? Andrew Ransen, head of the climate project at the National Center for Atmosphere Research at Boulder, Colorado, stated publicly that it was his expert opinion that a benevolent climate could no longer be taken for granted. Climatologists agreed that over the next ten or so years the world could expect more frequent and drastic climatic changes — droughts, floods, temperature extremes. They didn’t go so far as to blame any one thing, such as nuclear testing, but some hinted at it. Anyway, people said, certain people knew the score. London, for example, was not getting nearly as much rain as it once had. New York City was having milder winters and not much summer. Florida was generally colder but didn’t want the fact publicized. Blast the world off position just a fraction and there could be igloos in Haiti.

  One television network thought enough of it to schedule an hour-long science special called “Weather,” co-sponsored by a coffee company and a tire maker, who were guaranteed an audience rating of no less than twenty-five.

  Several prominent meteorologists appeared on the program as featured guests. In the most elementary and hopefully entertaining ways they explained about lows and highs, how winds move counterclockwise toward the centers of low-pressure systems. They acted amused and a bit embarrassed when they admitted they didn’t know why. All pressure systems normally moved eastward, they said.

  What about that front currently dampening Southern Californian spirits?

  Lightly, the meteorologists gave the front the name “High Boy” and said he was indeed a strange one, extraordinarily stubborn; he refused to move along and let the weather get back to being unpredictable.

  For a closing the network’s prime-time anchorman gave the weather report and forecast. He performed it with evident futility and with the camera in close, playing up to the resentful reaction his words would surely cause.