Pigs Get Fat (Trace 4) Read Online Free Page B

Love, Bob and Chico and Ted and Emmie.”

4
     
    It was going to be a fun day at the convention. That was for sure. Trace met Chico and her mother emerging from the hotel’s coffee shop, and Chico went back inside with him to have another breakfast. She gave him a complete rundown on the convention schedule.
    First there was going to be a lecture on Japanese industry and its place in a changing world. In Japanese. And then there was going to be a lecture on Japanese film and its place in a changing world. Then they were going to show a film, Seven Brides for Seven Samurai , in Japanese.
    Then they were going to a lunchtime lecture on Japan’s cuisine and its place in a changing world, in an effort to find out what they had eaten for lunch.
    “That’s easy,” Trace said. “Say octopus if they ask questions.”
    Trace ordered a half-piece of toast and coffee. Chico ordered something called the Fisherman’s Breakfast, which included pancakes, eggs, and fried oysters, among other things.
    “I thought you just ate,” Trace said.
    “I did. But I had the Cable Car Special Breakfast and I was wondering what was in this one,” she said. Her mouth full of Trace’s toast, she said, “I think the way you close your mind to other cultures is the mark of a small person.”
    “You mean all this Japanese culture around here?” he asked, and she nodded. “Well, that’s how little you know,” he said. “I happen to like other cultures very much. Greek, French, English, I am very big on all those cultures.”
    “You wish,” she said.
    “Are you really going to all these lectures?”
    “Mama-san says we go, we go. You don’t have to,” Chico said.
    “And what do I do?”
    “Wander the streets,” she said. “Borrow one of my mother’s cameras. She’s still got the six you gave her. Take pictures of the local flora and fauna and fagola.”
    “I just may buckle on my tape recorder and go do some work,” he said.
    “I’m sure you may,” she said. She returned a quarter-slice of toast to his plate and bent down over her own breakfast.
    Back in his room, Trace taped the small tape recorder to his right side. A long wire plugged into the microphone jack and he threaded the wire under his shirt and through a buttonhole and attached it to the tie clip shaped like a golden frog. The gold mesh that covered the frog’s mouth was the cover for a very strong microphone.
    Trace checked that the machine was working, put an extra tape into his jacket pocket, and left the hotel.
    It was cool and cloudy—good weather for San Francisco—so Trace decided to walk to Michael Mabley’s office.
    Walking along, Trace decided that it wasn’t that he disliked California. The fact was that he didn’t understand it. The state was certainly physically beautiful. Everything God had managed to cram into the world had a counterpart in California, from desert to mountain, from prairies to forest.
    But the state had no discernible soul. It reminded Trace of a Christmas package. The box was beautiful and decorated with gold and silver; and inside, there was a layer of beautiful wrapping paper, and then another layer of wrapping paper more beautiful than the first. But no matter how long you dug or how deeply you rooted around inside the box, you never found anything more than beautiful wrapping paper. No soul.
    New York had its nasty busy-ness and Chicago had its feel of muscled corruption. Even New Hampshire looked nice, but underneath was the knowledge that everybody in the state would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes.
    But California had no feel, and neither did Californians. There was a quintessential New Yorker and Alabaman and Texan, but no quintessential Californian.
    Unless it was a movie producer. They were perhaps the only indigenous California creatures that could not be transplanted elsewhere and feel right at home.
    What an epitaph for a state: “It gave us the movie producer.”
    He amended that fifteen minutes