What you do not do, ever, is lead the Light Brigade straight into hell’s mouth.
Fine. But my woman had called for help, and the rules were suddenly obsolete. We had been too long apart. She was afraid, and alone. If she was in trouble I had to be with her to get her out. If she was only having nightmares, it was my job to hold her hand.
When she calmed down she said, “I shouldn’t have called you. I guess I’m not as good as I thought I was.”
“Easy.”
“I think I’m all right now. I wanted to call you back and tell you not to come. It doesn’t make any sense. I missed you, and I kept getting more nervous all the time and there was nobody handy to lean on. I’m sorry, darling.”
I told her that it was all right. She took the last cigarette from her pack. I gave her a light. She sat close beside me on the couch and smoked.
I said, “You said you thought he knows.”
“It was probably my nerves.”
“What happened?”
“Partly his attitude. He seems very different. He’s a gruff, impulsive man, John, but he’s always been even-tempered with me. He blows off steam now and then. Everybody does. But lately he snaps all the time. And the way he looks at me. I catch him looking at me when he doesn’t know I can see him. As though he’s trying to figure something out, as though he suspects something.”
“You’re piling up molehills.”
“Enough of them could make a mountain, couldn’t they?” She knocked ashes from her cigarette, put it to her lips, drew on it. “He needles me about you.”
“How?”
“He refers to you as my boyfriend. In a sarcastic way, but with an undertone that gives me the feeling—I don’t know, I guess this must be way off-base—”
“Go on.”
“As though it’s a joke but he means it anyway. Do you know what I mean?”
“He’s kidding on the square.”
She nodded gratefully. “As though he has things figured out with almost all of the pieces in place. And he’s going along with it, waiting to see what happens, and ready to tear us apart at the end. I’m so scared of him. He would kill me. Just like that.”
Her hands were shaking. I took her cigarette and put it out for her. I told her she was adding it up and coming out all wrong.
“Well, what does it mean?”
“It first of all doesn’t mean what you think. It’s too far out of character. Even if he decided to stick around for the ending once he tipped to the con, he wouldn’t play it this way. He’d be poking around everywhere trying to fit all the pieces together. He’d be on the phone with me trying to trap me up. He thinks he’s very good at that. He would push it.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“Besides, I know how sold he is. I’ve been playing him slow for a reason, baby. Slower than Doug would like, all to make sure that nothing will shake him loose. Don’t you know why he’s acting the way he is?”
“Why?”
“Because he has to have it all. Everything. He can’t stand to give a thing away. Not money and not people either. He used you as bait to get me into this thing. Now it bothers him. He can’t get rid of the feeling that maybe you gave me a little too much. You belong to him, see? It’s all right for him to use you as a teaser, but he doesn’t like the idea that maybe you got carried away with yourself and crawled into the rack with me.”
She was nodding slowly.
“He needed you to get me into it on his side, but he’s conveniently forgotten that by now. I think he’s forgotten that I’m supposed to be cut in for five percent of his action. He never put it on paper, naturally, and I’m damn sure he’d edge out of it if I ever asked for the dough. He’s not exactly the last of the big spenders. He sweetened things a while back with a half a thou for my expenses. Anyone with class would have doubled that figure, minimum. But he’s cheap. He picks up dinner checks and he doesn’t turn off the lights to save electricity, but he’s still a stingy son of a bitch.”
“Well, that’s the truth.”
I went on like that, giving her every reason on earth why there was nothing to be afraid of. They weren’t all of them logical, but the more I could throw at her the cooler she would be for the rest of the distance. I must have sounded a lot more sure of myself than I actually was. A score is never a sure thing until the cash is in hand and the mooch a thousand miles away. There’s never been one yet that didn’t have a chance of going to hell on crutches.
But I talked, and she listened, and it seemed to sink in. She asked me if Doug knew I’d come down. I said I hadn’t had a chance to tell him, and wouldn’t have bothered anyway. She agreed that I shouldn’t, and that she’d been foolish to call me and I’d been less than wise to come running.
“But I’m glad you did,” she said. “How long can you stay?”
“I’ve got return reservations in two and a half hours.”
“So soon?”
“Uh-huh.”
She sighed. “I wish you could stay longer. I know you can’t. We don’t even have time to—” She colored.
“We might have time,” I said.
“I . . . I don’t know. I’m not really in the mood, I don’t think.”
“It’s a bad time for it.”
“And a bad place. But God knows I need you, my darling—”
An invisible violinist played pizzicato on my vertebrae. I turned from her. “In Colorado,” I said.
“Mmmmm. At Barnstable Lodge.”
We’d taken to calling it that. “We should find a better name for it,” I said.
“It’s a fine name. Do you want coffee? I’ll make some.”
She went into the little kitchen to cook water. A fine domestic lady. I did not feel bad about the plane ride. It was nothing, just a little static, and worth a scare to see her, to be with her.
She called in: “I think I left my cigarettes on the table, John. Bring me one?”
I poked around in the pack. It was empty. I asked her if one of mine would do.
“Not really. I’ve got a fresh pack in my purse. I think it’s in there somewhere. On the television, I think.”
It was. I took it to her, opened the catch, fumbled inside for her cigarettes. She was at the stove spooning instant coffee into a pair of Melmac cups. All at once her eyes went very wide and her mouth shaped a small O. About that time my hand settled on something hard and cold. Some people could have guessed; I had to haul it out and look at it to know what it was.
It looked like a howitzer.
“Why?”
“I . . . oh, I don’t even know. I’ve been dreaming about him, John. He’d kill me if he knew, I know he’d kill me, and I can’t even think about it without turning cold inside. I thought it would be good to . . . to have something. In case something happened. I don’t know.”
“Where did you get it?”
“It’s his.”
“How come you’ve got it?”
“I took it. He kept it in his desk for years. Then it got switched to one of the filing cabinets. He’ll never miss it. I don’t think he’s looked at it once in the past eight months.”
“Ever shoot it?”
She shook her head.
“Ever handle any gun?”
“No.”
“Then you probably couldn’t do anything with it if you had to. Nine people out of ten can’t hit the side of a garage at twenty feet with a handgun. The only time you might ever shoot this would be if you panicked. You would probably miss and be in deeper than ever. Or else you would kill somebody and get tagged with it.
“But chances are you’d never fire the gun at all. You’d just carry it, and you’d get unlucky and he’d just happen to look in your purse the way I just did. Or someone else would look in your purse, anyone. Or you’d drop the bag and the gun would go off. Or any of a thousand other damn fool things that wouldn’t happen if you didn’t do a harebrained thing and carry a gun along.”
She stood wordless, and
about to cry. The teakettle had been whistling throughout the tail end of my speech. I turned the burner off and the whistle died.
I said, “I didn’t mean to fly at you like that. Guns make me as nervous as a virgin bride on opening night. They scare the hell out of me. I won’t even work with anybody who carries one. All they buy you is trouble. A bank robber needs one, a killer needs one, all the thickheaded heavies need them. Nobody with a brain has to have a gun on his hip. Not even you.”
“I feel—” I reached for her arm. She drew away. “I feel like an idiot,” she said.
“Forget it. I’m just glad I found this thing.”
“I almost wish you hadn’t. You must think—”
“I think I’ll be glad when this is over. And when you don’t have to worry about anything more terrifying than what pattern glassware to buy for our little cabin in the pines. Is this loaded, by the way?”
“I think so.”
I sat down on a kitchen chair, holding the gun gingerly. Guns do bother me. I hunted now and then when I was a kid, but nothing beyond birds and small game. I’ve never used a handgun. I do not like them at all. This one was a Smith and Wesson, .38-caliber, three-inch barrel, a safety on the grip. I shook my head at the last and thought she would never know to depress the grip safety before firing. The gun was all risk and no reward. I fumbled it open. It was loaded all the way, with a slug waiting there right smack under the hammer, which proved that Wally Gunderman didn’t know a hell of a lot more about guns than she did.
I pulled its teeth, set the shells upright on the table top. I put the gun back together again and held it out toward her. She drew away and shook her head.
“I don’t even want to touch it,” she said.
“Should I leave it here? I could take it with me and dump it somewhere, but it would be better if you put it back in his files. If you’d rather not—”
“I don’t mind. I just . . . put it on the counter, John. I don’t want to touch it now. I’ll take it with me when I go to work.”
“I’ll get rid of the shells for you.”
“How?”
“I’ll put them down a sewer. No problem.”
“I’m nothing but problems tonight, aren’t I?”
“I’m not complaining.”
“Dragging you all the way here for nothing, and then this—”
“I’m glad I came. And glad I found out about the gun. It’s worth the trip just keeping you from toting it around. You don’t have to be scared of him, baby. He won’t know a thing until you’re a million miles away. He may never find out, he may drop dead long before he’d figure out that he’s been had.”
“It’s this waiting—”
“You won’t have to wait much longer.”
We weren’t any of us going to wait much longer. I had been laboring on details like Michelangelo on that Roman ceiling. I was so busy getting everything utterly perfect that I’d lost sight of a fairly important fact. Every extra day was just that much more hell for Evvie. I was hard at work on my masterpiece, and she was the one getting all that paint in her eyes. A bad mistake.
Not that day but the next I told Doug we were ready. And the following afternoon he called Gunderman and said yes to the deal, a firm yes, an all-the-way yes. An hour later I called Wally. Everything was set, he told me. In five days time he and Mr. Douglas Rance would put it all on paper. The deal was already being set up.
“I’ll come in the night before,” he told me. “You and I, John, we have some celebrating to do. You can show me that town and I’ll teach you how to put a coat of paint on it.”
I told him that sounded like a good idea.
So the days crawled by and the nights dawdled but passed, and he came to Toronto like Caesar to Rome. He wanted to hit every bar. We very nearly made it. He drank steadily and steadfastly refused to get bombed enough so that we could call it a day. I drank less than he did but not little enough to stay especially sober.
He did most of the talking. Some of it was about money, some of it was about Evvie. Once he gripped my arm and winked owlishly at me. “Some woman,” he said. “Some wonderful woman.”
I looked around to see who he meant. “Not here,” he said. “I mean Evvie. One in a million.”
“One in a million,” I echoed. We were in complete agreement on that point.
He let go of my arm and dumped his face into one hand. He scratched idly at his earlobe. “If you only knew,” he muttered secretly.
If you only knew, I thought.
And in some other remarkably similar bar he winked conspiratorially at me. I smiled politely and returned the wink, and he threw back his big head and roared.
“Easy,” I said. The waiters were beginning to stare at us. “Easy, old pal.”
“All mine,” he said.
“Easy.”
“Signed and sealed. All mine.”
“All yours, old buddy. But take it easy.”
He grabbed all the checks, overtipped all the waiters, winked at all the girls, and was the goddamned life of every goddamned party. “A celebration,” he said, at least four hundred times. “A celebration.”
I almost told him it was just a shade premature.
Back in my room, I was hanging my jacket over the back of a chair when the phone rang. I answered it, talked for a while. Then I got the rest of my clothes off and fell into bed, and the next thing I knew it was morning and the phone was ringing again.
Fifteen
Maybe I was getting old. When they rang the room in the morning the phone set little devils dancing in my head. I grabbed the phone and said all right, damn it, all right, and put the phone in the cradle and found my way to the john. The demons kept doing the twist inside my skull. I went through the standard wake-up ritual and tossed in a pair of aspirins and a Dexemil. All of this helped me wake up, and this in turn did little more than make me more aware of my headache. Too much Scotch, too little sleep—I was definitely getting too old for the life. The roadhouse in the mountains beckoned.
I put the good white shirt on once again, tied the small knot in the sincere tie, worked my way into the conservative suit. In another couple of hours I could unknot that tie and drop it in a handy wastebasket; in another couple of hours I could wipe the matching sincere look from my face and begin looking like me again. It was about time. The masquerade was beginning to make me ache, the costume was wearing thin on my frame. In another couple of hours—
Outside, the sun was all too bright. I let a couple of cups of coffee pretend to be breakfast and battled the sunlight once again. According to plans, I was supposed to be at the office at ten for the skinning ceremonies. It was time. I stepped to the curb, and a cab glided to me as if by magic. I hopped in and gave the driver the address.
It was funny. In the old days a time like this was always sweetly tense, the precious moment before the kill, the instant frozen in time when the matador stood poised, sword ready, with the great gross bull rushing in to impale himself and die in beauty. On mornings like this my eyes were bright and my head clear, and no quantity of liquor or shortness of sleep could cancel the fresh glory of it all.
It should have been like that now, and it was not. Not at all. Instead the hangover was in full bloom, aided and abetted by little grains of doubt and fear. Something gnawed at me. Something demanded attention. There was the feeling you get when you’ve left a room and you’re dead certain you left a cigarette burning. Or the feeling you’re left with after an alcoholic blackout—memory is gone, and you assume at once that you’ve done something dreadful; there are threads and patches in the back of your mind but not enough to grab onto and pin down, just enough to drive you mad.
“You’re flipping,” I said. “You’re falling apart.”
“What’s that?”
This last from the cabby. I had been talking aloud and not realizing it, a phenomenon which is always less than comforting.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You talking to me?” r />
“Just talking to myself.”
“You always do that?”
“Just after a bad night.”
“Oh,” he said.
She’d be in Olean now, waiting. How long? A week for me to clear up everything in Toronto and get back to Colorado. A week was ample; our accounts had to be cleared, our front money had to be paid back, Gunderman’s check had to be routed through channels. And it would be a week and more before she could pick up and join me. Call it ten days. In ten days we would be together, in Colorado, with all of his pretty money in our kick.
In ten days I could quit talking to myself.
Doug was already at the office, looking fresh and well-tailored. He looked at me and shuddered.
“That bad?”
“You look like hell,” he said.
“Well, he wanted to celebrate. We did most of the town.”
“I thought you’d bring him with you. No?”
“He wanted to meet me here.”
“At ten?”
“At ten.”
“Fine,” he said. “He should be here any minute. Everything’s set, the papers, everything. That printer does choice work.”
“He’s expensive.”
“Well, you get what you pay for, Johnny.”
“That’s if you’re lucky.”
“Sure.” He walked around behind his desk, sat down, clasped his hands behind his neck, yawned, unclasped his hands and dug a cigarette out of his pack. He lit it and blew smoke at the ceiling. I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes past ten.
“Any minute, Johnny.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So smooth. I’m sorry you were stuck with him last night. He had big eyes to celebrate?”
“Bigger eyes than mine.”
“I hope he didn’t drink so much that he forgets to show up. It’s been so damned smooth so far. Like silk. Was he holding it pretty well?”
“Better than I was.”
“You didn’t let anything out?”