"What do you mean if. What you going for?"
"I gotta talk to Dixon. He doesn"t talk on the phone."
"You got his bread," Hawk said. "I guess you don"t have to do what you don"t want."
"You and Kathie can lurk around down at the stadium. If you can find a scalper you might buy tickets and go in. I figure that"s where Paul"s likely to show."
"What I want with Kathie?"
"Maybe Zachary will show instead of Paul. Maybe , somebody else she might know. Besides, I don"t like leaving her alone."
"That ain"t what you said this morning."
"You know what I mean."
Hawk grinned. "What you want with Dixon?"
"I need his clout. I need tickets to the stadium. I need his weight if we run what you might call afoul of the law. And I owe him to say what I"m doing. This matters to him. He"s got nothing else that matters."
"You and Ann Landers, babe. Everybody"s trouble."
"My strength is as the strength of ten," I said, "because my heart is pure."
"What you want me to do with Paul or Zachary or whatever, case I should encounter their a.s.s?"
"You should make a citizen"s arrest."
"And if they resist, seeing as I ain"t hardly a citizen of this country?"
"You"ll do what you do best, Hawk."
"A man like to be recognized for his work, bawse. Thank you kindly."
"You keep the car," I said. "I"ll get a cab to the airport."
I left my gun in the house. I wasn"t taking any luggage and I didn"t want to thrash around at customs. It was just after two in the afternoon when we swung in over Winthrop and headed in to the runway at Logan Airport, home.
I took a cab straight from the airport to Weston and at three-twenty I was ringing on Hugh Dixon"s doorbell again the same way I had a month before. The same Oriental man answered the door and said, "Mr. Spenser, this way." Not bad, he"d seen me only once, a month before. Of course I suppose he was expecting me.
Dixon was on his patio, looking at the hills. The cat was there, asleep. It was like when you come back from the war and the front lawn looks just as it did and people are cooking supper and you realize they"ve been doing it all along, while you"ve been gone.
Dixon looked at me and said nothing. "I"ve got your people, Mr. Dixon," I said.
"I know. Five for sure, I a.s.sume your word is good on the others. Carroll is looking into it. You want money for the first five. Carroll will pay you."
"We"ll settle up later," I said. "I want to stay on this a little longer."
"At my expense?"
"No."
"Then why are you here?"
"I need some help."
"Carroll tells me you"ve employed some help. A black man."
"I need different help than that."
"What do you want to do? Why do you want to stay on? What help do you need?"
"I got your people for you, but while I was getting them I found out that they were only the leaves of the crabgra.s.s. I know who the root is. I want to dig him up."
"Did he have a part in the killing?"
"Not yours, no, sir."
"Then why should I care about him?"
"Because he has had a part in a lot of other killings and because he"ll probably kill somebody else"s family and somebody else"s after that."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to get me tickets to the Olympic games. The track and field events at the stadium. And if I get into a bind I want to be able to say I work for you."
"Tell me what"s going on. Leave nothing out."
"Okay, there"s a man named Paul, I don"t know his last name, and possibly a man named Zachary. They run a terrorist organization called Liberty. I think they are in Montreal. I think they are going to do something rash at the Olympic games."
"Start at the beginning."
I did. Dixon looked at me steadily, without movement, without interruption, as I told him everything I had done in London and Copenhagen and Amsterdam and Montreal.
When I was through, Dixon pushed a b.u.t.ton in the arm of his wheelchair and in a minute the Oriental man appeared. Dixon said, "Lin, bring me five thousand dollars." The Oriental man nodded and went out.
Dixon said to me, "I"ll pay for this."
"There"s no need for that," I said. "I"ll pick up this one. "
"No," Dixon shook his head. "I have a great deal of money and no other purpose. I"ll pay for this. If the police present problems I"ll do what I can to remove them. I"ll have no trouble with Olympic tickets, I a.s.sume. Give your Montreal address to Lin before you leave. I"ll have the tickets delivered there."
"I"ll need three for every day."
"Yes."
Lin returned with fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. "Give them to Spenser," Dixon said.
Lin handed them to me. I put them in my wallet. Dixon said, "When this is through, come back here and tell me about it in person. If you die, have the black man do it."
"I will, sir."
"I hope you don"t die," Dixon said.
"Me too,." I said. "Goodbye."
Lin showed me out. I asked if he could call me a cab. He said he could. He did. I sat on a bench in the stone-paved foyer while I waited for it to come. When it came, Lin let me out. I got in the cab and said to the driver, "Take me to Smithfield."
"That"s a pretty good ride, man," the cabby said. "It"s gonna cost some jack."
"I got some jack."
"Okay. We wheeled down the winding drive and out onto the road and headed toward Route 128. Smithfield was about a half-hour drive. The dashboard clock in the cab worked. It was quarter to five. She should be coming home from summer school soon, if she was still in summer school. Oh, Susanna, oh don"t you cry for me, I come from Montreal with... The cabbie said, "What"d you say, man?"
"I was singing softly to myself," I said.
"Oh, I thought you was talking to me. You want to sing to yourself, go ahead."
23.
It was out of the way but I had the cabbie take me to Route 1. I stopped at Karl"s Sausage Kitchen for some German delicatessen and then at Donovan"s Package Store for four bottles of Dom Perignon. It almost took care of Dixon"s expense money. The cabbie drove me down from Route 1 to the center of town, through the hot green tunnel of July trees. Lawns were being watered, dogs were being called, bikes were being ridden, cookouts were being done, pools were being splashed, drinks were being had, tennis was being played. Suburbia writ large. There was some kind of barbecue underway on the common around the meeting house. The smoke from the barbecue wagons hung over the folding tables in a light good-smelling haze. There were dogs there and children and a balloon man. I did not hear him whistle far and wee. If he had, it wouldn"t have been for me. There were white lilacs in Susan"s front yard, and the shingles on the little Cape were weathered into a nice silvery gray. I paid the cabbie and gave him a large tip. And he left me standing with my champagne and my homemade cold cuts on Susan"s green lawn in the slow evening. Her little blue Nova was not in the driveway. The guy next door was hosing his gra.s.s, letting the water stream out of the pistol spray nozzle in a long easy loop, coiling languidly back and forth across the lawn. A sprinkler would have been much more efficient but nowhere near as much fun. I liked a man who fought off technology. He nodded at me as I went up to Susan"s door. She never locked the house. I went in the front door. The house was quiet and empty. I put the champagne and the stuff from Karl"s in the refrigerator. I went to the bedroom and turned on the air conditioner. It was ten past six by the clock on the kitchen stove. I found some Utica Club cream ale in the refrigerator and opened a can while I unpacked my delicatessen in the kitchen. There was veal loaf and pepper loaf and beer wurst, and Karl"s liverwurst, which you could slice or spread and which made my blood flow a little faster when I thought of it. I had bought two cartons of German potato salad and some pickles and a loaf of Westphalian rye and a jar of Dusseldorf mustard. I got out Susan"s kitchen china and set the table in the kitchen. She had blue-figured kitchen china and it always made me feel like folks to eat off it. I sliced the liverwurst and put the a.s.sorted cold cuts on a platter in alternating patterns. I put the rye bread in a bread basket and the pickles in a cut-gla.s.s dish and the potato salad in a large blue-patterned bowl that was probably intended for soup. Then I went in the dining room where she kept the company china and stuff and got two champagne gla.s.ses I had bought her for her birthday, and put them in the freezer to chill. They had cost $24.50 each. The store had felt that monogramming His and Hers on them would be "kitsch," I think they said. So they were plain. But they were our gla.s.ses and they were for drinking champagne out of on special occasions. Or at least I thought they were. I was always afraid I"d come in some day and find her sprouting an avocado pit in one. Moving about in her familiar kitchen, in her house where it seemed I could smell her perfume faintly, I felt even more strongly the sense of change and strangeness. The cookouts, the watered lawns, the weekday suburban evening coming on had that effect, and the house where she lived and read and did the dishes, where she bathed and slept and watched the Today show, were so real that what I"d been doing seemed unreal. I"d killed two men in a hotel in London earlier this summer. It was hard to remember. The bullet wound had healed. The men were in the ground. And here, this endured, and the man next door, watering his lawn in translucent graceful curves, didn"t know anything at all about it. I opened another can of beer and went into the bathroom and took a shower. I had to move two pairs of her panty hose that were drying on the rod that held the shower curtain. She used Ivory soap. She had some kind of fancy shampoo that came in a jar like cold cream and had a flower smell to it. I used it. Ferdinand the Bull. There were some Puma jogging shoes, blue nylon with a white stripe, that I used sometimes when I was there for a weekend, and a pair of my white duck pants that Suze had washed and ironed and hung in a part of one of her bedroom closets that we"d come to call mine. The part, not the closet. I wore the Pumas without socks, you can do that if your ankles are good, and slipped into the ducks. I was combing my hair in her bedroom mirror when I heard the crunch of tires in her driveway. I peeked out the window. It was her. She"d come in the back door. I hopped on the bed and lay on my left side, facing the door, head propped on my left elbow, one knee drawn seductively up. My left leg fully extended, toes pointing. The bedroom door was ajar. My heart was thumping. Christ, is that corny, I thought. Heart pounding, mouth dry, breath a little short. I took one look at you, that"s all I meant to do. I heard the back door open. The silence. Then the door closed. I felt the apprehension in my solar plexus. I heard her walk through the kitchen to the living room. Then straight to the bedroom door. The air conditioning hummed. Then she was there. In tennis dress, still carrying a racket, her black hair off her face with a wide white band. Her lipstick very bright and her legs tan. The hum of the air conditioner seemed a little louder. Her face was a little flushed from tennis and a faint small gloss of sweat was on her forehead. It was the longest we had been apart since we"d met. I said, "Home from the hills is the hunter."
"From the kitchen setup," she said, "it would appear that you"d bagged a German delicatessen." Then she put her tennis racket on the bedside table and jumped on top of me. She put both arms around my neck and kissed me on the mouth and held it. When she stopped I said, "Nice girls don"t kiss with their mouths open." She said, "Did you have an operation in Denmark? You"re wearing perfume." I said, "No. I used your shampoo." She said, "Oh, thank heavens," and pressed her mouth on me again. I slid my hand down her back and under the tennis dress. I"d had small experience with tennis dresses and wasn"t doing well with this one. She lifted her face from mine. "I"m all sweaty," she said. "Even if you weren"t," I said, "you would be soon."
"No," she said, "I"ve got to take a bath first."
"Jesus Christ," I said. "I can"t help it," she said. "I have to." Her voice was a little hoa.r.s.e. "Well, for crissake why not a shower. A bath, for G.o.d sake. I may commit a public disgrace on your stereo by the time you run a bath."
"A shower will ruin my hair."
"Do you know the ruination I face?"
"I"ll be quick," she said. "I haven"t seen you in a long time either." She got up from the bed and ran the water in the bathtub off the bedroom. Then she came back in and pulled the shades and undressed. I watched her. The tennis dress had pants underneath. "Ah ha," I said. "That"s why my progress was slower than I"m used to."
"Poor thing," she said, "you"ve seduced a low-cla.s.s clientele. With a better upbringing you"d have learned years ago how to cope with a tennis dress." She was wearing a white bra and white bikini underpants. She looked at me with that look she had, nine parts innocence and one part evil, and said, "All the guys at the club know."
"If they only knew what to do after they"d gotten the dress off," I said. "How come you wear pants under pants?"
"Only a cheap hussy would play tennis without underwear." She took off the bra. "Or kiss with her mouth open," I said. "Oh no," she said as she wiggled out of the underpants, "everyone at the club does that." I"d seen her naked now enough times to stop counting. But I never lost interest. She wasn"t fragile. She was strong-looking. Her stomach was flat and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s didn"t sag. She was beautiful and she always looked a little uncomfortable naked, as if someone might burst in and say, "Ah hah!"
"Take your bath, Suze," I said. "Tomorrow I may go beat up the club." She went into the bathroom and I could hear her splashing around in the water. "If you"re playing with a rubber ducky in there I"m going to drown you."
"Patience," she yelled. "I"m soaking in an herbal bubble bath that will drive you wild."
"I"m wild enough," I said. I took off my white ducks and my Pumas. She came out of the bathroom with a towel tucked under her chin. It hung to her knees. With her right hand she removed it, the way you open a curtain, and said, "Tada."
"Not bad," I said. "I like a person who stays in shape." She dropped the towel and got on the bed with me. I opened my arms and she got inside. I hugged her. "I"m glad you"re back in one piece," she said, her mouth very close to mine. "Me too," I said, "and speaking of one piece..."
"Now," she said, "I"m not sweaty." I kissed her. She pressed harder against me and I could hear her breath go in deep once through her nose and come out slowly in a long sigh. She ran her hand over my hip and down along my backside. It stopped when she felt the scar of the bullet wound. With her lips lightly against mine she said, "What"s this?"
"Bullet wound."
"I gather you weren"t attacking," she said. "I am now," I said.
24.
"In the a.s.s?" Susan said. "I like to think of it as a hamstring wound," I said. "I"ll bet you do," she said. "Was it bad?"
"Undignified but not serious," I said. We were eating deli and drinking champagne in her kitchen. I had my white ducks back on and my Pumas. She had on a bathrobe. Outside it was dark now. Nonurban night sounds drifted in through the open back door. Night insects pinged against the screen. "Tell me. All of it. From the beginning." I put two slices of veal loaf on some rye bread, added a small application of Dusseldorf mustard, put another slice of bread on top and bit. I chewed and swallowed. "Two shots in the a.s.s and I was off on the greatest adventure of my career," I said. I took a bite of half sour pickle. It clashed a little with the champagne, but life is flawed. "Be serious," Susan said. "I want to hear about it. Have you had a bad time? You look tired."
"I am tired," I said. "I"ve just been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g my brains out."
"Oh really?"
"Oh really," I said. "How come you were doing all that sighing and moaning?"
"Boredom," she said. "Those weren"t sighs and moans. Those were yawns."
"Nice talk to a wounded man."
"Well," she said, "I am glad the bullet didn"t go all the way through." I poured some champagne in her gla.s.s and mine. I put the bottle down, raised the gla.s.s and said, "Here"s looking at you, kid." She smiled. The smile made me want to say Oh boy, but I"m too worldly to say it out loud. "Begin at the beginning," she said. "You got on the plane after you left me and... ?"
"And I landed in London about eight hours later. I didn"t like leaving you."
"I know," she said. "And a guy named Flanders that works for Hugh Dixon met me at the airport..." and I told her all, the people that tried to kill me, the people I killed, all of it. "No wonder you look tired," she said when I finished. We were on the last bottle of champagne and most of the food was gone. She was easy to tell things to. She understood quickly, she supplied missing pieces without asking questions, and she was interested. She wanted to hear. "What do you think about Kathie?" I said. "She needs a master. She needs structure. When you destroyed her structure, and her master turned her out, she latched on to you. When she wanted to solidify the relationship by complete submission, which for her must be s.e.xual, you turned her out. I would guess she"ll be Hawk"s as long as he"ll have her. How"s that for instant psychoa.n.a.lysis. Just add a bottle of champagne and serve off the top of the head."
"I"d say you were right, though."
"If you report accurately, and it"s something you"re good at," Susan said, "certainly she"s a rigid and repressed personality. The way her room was, the colorless clothing and the flashy underwear, the tight-lipped commitment to a kind of n.a.z.i absolutism."
"Yeah, she"s all of that. She"s some kind of m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t. Maybe that"s not quite the right term. But when she was tied up and gagged on the bed she liked it. Or at least it aroused her to be tied like that and have us there. She went crazy when Hawk searched her while she was tied."
"I"m not sure m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t is the right word. But obviously she finds some connection between s.e.x and helplessness and helplessness and humiliation and humiliation and pleasure. Most of us have conflicting tendencies toward aggression and pa.s.sivity. If we have healthy childhoods and get through adolescence okay we tend to work them out. If we don"t, then we confuse them and tend to be like Kathie, who hasn"t worked out her pa.s.sivity impulses." Susan smiled. "Or you, who are quite aggressive."
"But gallant," I said. "How do you think Hawk will deal with her?" Susan said. "Hawk has no feelings," I said. "But he has rules. If she fits one of his rules, he"ll treat her very well. If she doesn"t, he"ll treat her any way the mood strikes him."
"Do you really think he has no feelings?"
"I have never seen any. He"s as good as anyone I ever saw at what he does. But he never seems happy or sad or frightened or elated. He never, in the twenty-some years I"ve known him, here and there, has shown any sign of love or compa.s.sion. He"s never been nervous. He"s never been mad."
"Is he as good as you?" Susan was resting her chin on her folded hands and looking at me. "He might be," I said. "He might be better."
"He didn"t kill you last year on Cape Cod when he was supposed to. He must have felt something then."
"I think he likes me, the way he likes wine, the way he doesn"t like gin. He preferred me to the guy he was working for. He sees me as a version of himself. And, somewhere in there, killing me on the say-so of a guy like Powers was in violation of one of the rules. I don"t know. I wouldn"t have killed him either."