The Right Jack

17

BY the time Sigrid had walked up to West Twenty-third Street and back down again, her headache was gone and color had returned to her thin cheeks. She even slipped her arm out of the sling and went to look over the shoulder of the artist who sat on the rotting pier at the foot of her street. The artist looked up, gave her a friendly smile, and kept sketching. A horn tooted along West Street. Sigrid paid no attention until it tooted again and someone called, "Lieutenant? Lieutenant Harald!"

She turned and saw Alan Knight loping across the traffic lanes to join her. His driver, the same bewildered yeoman, pulled gratefully alongside the empty curb and cut the engine.

"I've been all the way down to Battery Park looking for you," Knight called as he neared her. "Your friend said you were walking along the water but he didn't know what direction.".

"Up," Sigrid gestured.

"Down's right nice, too," he drawled, matching her long strides. "They've got a real pretty park there."

Sigrid observed the crisp crease in the trouser legs of his dark blue uniform. "Are you on duty today or has something come up?"

"Both. I had a report waiting on my desk first thing this morning." There was an embarrassed look on his face.

"And?"

"You know those pictures Vassily Ivanovich showed us of his sons yesterday? Remember that nice boy who pulled a few strings so his sweet old papa could enjoy a vacation in America?"

Sigrid nodded.

"KGB," Knight said bitterly.

"Well, he did tell us his son was something in the Party," Sigrid recalled.

"Go on and say it."

"Say what?"

"I told you so."

"I never said Ivanovich was connected with the KGB."

"No, but you said he might not be asi nnocuous as he looks."

"Yes," Sigrid admitted.

"You were right. We've just learned that Ivanovich was the Russian equivalent of an EOD during the war."

"What's that?"

"Explosive Ordnance Demolition."

"Someone who dismantles bombs?" Lieutenant Knight nodded. "Among other things."

"Then he'd know how to put one together."

"I don't see how we missed it. Or how Commander Dixon ever got a security clearance with what amounts to a Russian godfather in her background."

"Maybe she didn't know," Sigrid suggested reasonably as she paused to let three joggers pass. "Her father died over twenty-five years ago and if the two men hadn't corresponded since forty-eight or forty-nine-well, she was just a child then. She didn't try to keep him secret when he contacted her last spring, did she?"

"No." Lieutenant Knight glanced at her with disappointment. "I thought you'd be excited to hear that Vassilym ight be our bomber."

"I'm interested," Sigrid agreed, resuming her pace, "but it may not pertain. John Sutton seems the more logical target to me."

"The professor? Why?"

"It's beginning to look as if he recognized a Red Snow survivor."

"A who?"

Belatedly Sigrid recalled that Knight had not joined them at headquarters yesterday until after the discussion about the radical group that blew themselves up in the summer of 1970, so she summarized for him the facts and speculations they had about Fred Hamilton and Red Snow and how John Sutton had been so deeply involved in the war protest movement out at McClellan State that he could probably have recognized anyone from those days.

"Like Ted Flythe?" Knight suggested shrewdly.

"Mrs. Sutton didn't think so when I raised the possibility last night."

"How's she handling it?" Alan Knight's handsome face was immediately sympathetic.

"She's handling it," Sigrid said bluntly. Her voice remained cool and matter-of-fact, betraying no hint of how grief-wrenched she'd felt watching Val Sutton and her small son last night. She carefully confined her narrative to the pertinent facts. "And even though she doesn't think he's Hamilton, we'll get his fingerprints from FBI files and compare them with Flythe's."

A pair of sailboats slipped by them, headed downriver. Their pristine white sails ballooned in the steady breeze. A clatter of rotors passed overhead, and Knight shaded his eyes to follow the helicopter's flight until it dropped down out of sight at the heliport many blocks north.

"In a way, I hope you're wrong," he said, tugging at the brim of his hat. "I hope it turns out to be Ivanovich."

"For Commander Dixon's sake?" asked Sigrid, recalling how determined Val Sutton had been that her husband be the intended victim.

"Yeah," He walked along beside her in silence, then stopped to face her, his chiseled features bleak. "They hadt o take her arm off."

"When?"

"Last night. They tried to graft in new blood veins, but it didn't work."

Sigrid listened mutely, then strode on without comment. She had not met Commander T. J. Dixon, had not even seen a photograph, unless one counted the snapshot Vassily Ivanovich carried of her as a baby. Yet everyone commented on her prettiness; a feminine woman who enjoyed her beauty and used it to keep at least four men interested. How could she adapt to such a monstrous loss? Would she accept it philosophically, or would she withdraw into isolation, feeling mutilated and hideously disfigured?

Lieutenant Knight trailed along beside her and her silence began to fuel his youthful indignation. The naval officer possessed the Southern charm that remains a birthright of all young adults-male and female-reared by mothers to whom manners are almost more important than morals and who install both in their children with equal vigor. He was by nature friendly and easygoing and willing to meet anyonem ore than halfway, but he couldn't see that Lieutenant Harald had budged an inch beyond the first five minutes of their introduction yesterday.

If anything, she was becoming steadily more distant.

He remembered his young yeoman clerk this morning. Her tender blue eyes had pooled with tears when she relayed the hospital report, repeating how dreadful it was and how sorry she felt for Commander Dixon until he'd finally seized on the information about Ivanovich to clear out of the office for a few hours.

So it certainly wasn't that he wanted Lieutenant Harald to burst into tears, he told himself. But not to say a word? To keep walking like T. J. Dixon's arm was nothing more than a piece of meat to be thrown in the river?

He'd worked with some hard-nosed senior women officers in his five years with the Navy, but he'd found that if he was friendly and properly respectful of their rank, they soon climbed down and opened up, while this one-

Oblivious to his growing resentment.

Sigrid moved through the sunlit morning almost blindly as she thought how devastated the commander would be when she recovered enough to realize that she'd lost her arm by a fluke, a bad coincidence of time and place. She thought of how bothersome her own arm was, yet it was only wounded and would soon heal.

She turned to Lieutenant'tKnight abruptly. "How much of her arm did they amputate?"

"How much does it take, Lieutenant?"

His hostility took her by surprise.

"I guess police officers get like doctors after a while," he said.

"What-?"

"Cold. Detached. Objective" His soft Southern drawl heaped scorn on the words. "Doctors can tell you about watching a baby die like I'd tell you about the Mets losing to St. Louis. They say it's 'cause they can't let themselves feel; that they'd burn out if they grieved over every patient. After a while, they don't have to worry. They've got no feelings left." His bitterness was scalding. "Is that what happened to you,

Lieutenant Sigrid Harald of the new York Police Department?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said icily, without stopping.

"Is that how you quit being a woman with a woman's softness and a woman's tender heart?"

Goaded now, Sigrid turned on him, her gray eyes blazing. "I'm a professional investigator, Lieutenant. It's my job to stay detached and objective. Will grieving replace Dixon 's arm or bring Val Sutton's husband back to life? Will crying keep whoever did this obscene thing from doing it again? I don't think so, Lieutenant. And what's more if I had a sick child, I'd rather have a doctor cold enough to keep fighting against death than one too choked up to work, so you can take your tender little chauvinistic heart and go to hell!"

She jerked away from him, striding across the dilapidated pier, to the very edge, where she stood staring down into the murky water that lapped against the rotting pilings. She wished the water was cleaner, the day warmer, and that she could just dive in and swim toward thes un until all the churning inside her was washed away.

Her arm throbbed viciously and she slipped it back into the sling and pressed it with her free hand to ease the pounding.

Knight had followed her and he sat down on one of the nearby pilings. "I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I spoke out of line."

Sigrid shrugged and continued staring down into the river, grateful for once that her hair was loose and that the wind kept blowing it across her face and hid what she never willingly allowed anyone to see.

On the next pier over, an oriental man walked out almost to the end carrying a large bundle of red material. He was accompanied by a small girl in pigtails, who frolicked about him like a puppy. They were obviously father and daughter and he called warnings as she ran too near the edge, while her laughter bubbled out in lilting joy.

While Sigrid and Knight watched, the man placed his red bundle on the pier and began working on it. Curious gullsw heeled overhead.

Knight. glanced over at Sigrid. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I keep forgetting that all women don't show-"

"All women don't do anything," Sigrid said between clenched teeth. "No more than all men."

"Hey, I'm no chauvinist," he protested. "I like women. Really."

Still unsettled and now annoyed at herself that she'd lost her temper, Sigrid brushed aside his protest. "Forget it. It's not important."

On the next pier, the long mass of red cloth grew a ferocious golden dragon's face and became first a limp red wind sock and then a swelling sinuous dragon with streamers that caught the wind as it clawed its way into the sky. The child clapped her hands gleefully as it dipped and soared against the blueness like a wild untamed beast straining against its leash. At one point, it toyed with disaster and skimmed the surface of the water, then a twitch of the line sent it climbing again.

It was innocent and graceful and without realizing it, Sigrid began to relax.

"I'm not really a chauvinist pig,"Alan Knight said coaxingly. "Thick-headed at times maybe, but not sexist."

"No?" Sigrid gave him a jaundiced look, for he suddenly reminded her of some of her Lattimore cousins when they meant to wheedle her into trying something she didn't particularly want to do. Whenever the charm switched on, she'd learned to tread warily.

Sensing a slight softening in her manner, Knight smiled persuasively and held up three fingers, with his thumb and pinkie touching. "Scout's honor. I truly do like women."

Sigrid brushed her hair back behind her ears and looked down into his deep brown eyes.

"That must make your wife very happy," she said sardonically.

Beneath the brim of his hat, his handsome face became unexpectedly flushed. "Uh-Well, you see, I'm not exactly married."

She shot a telling glance at the gold band on his left hand.

"I've never been married," said Knight.

"Then why-?"

"The ring? I bought it in a pawnshop and started wearing it in college."

"Why?"

"Well, look at me."

Bewildered, she looked him over completely and saw nothing to alter yesterday's original impression. Lieutenant Alan Knight was a remarkably attractive specimen of American malehood.

She said as much.

"Yeah, now, he said without vanity. "Up until my sophomore year in college, I was an Alfred E. Neuman lookalike: my ears stuck out like jug handles, my front teeth made Bugs Bunny's look good, I was as tall as I am right now, but weighed a hundred and ten sopping wet, and I had cowlicks fore and aft-goofiest looking face outside a comic strip."

Sigrid lowered herself to the dock and leaned back against the next piling with her left knee drawn up and her right leg dangling over the edge.

"What happened your sophomore year?"

"I worked on my uncle's tobacco farm, ate my aunt's cooking all summer, and put on twenty-five pounds. It seemed to make everything fit together. Then before

I went back to college, my sisters hauled me down to their beauty shop and they found a way to cut my hair so it didn't look like a haystack in a hurricane. All of a sudden, I looked pretty much like I do now."

"And that was bad?"

"Scared the living bejesus out of me," he replied earnestly. "I told you I like women and I do. I grew up in a household with six sisters, a terrific mom, and more aunts than I can count, but I never had a sweetheart. Girls at school used to tell me all their problems 'cause they knew I'd understand. They never wanted to go out with me, though. As far as they were concerned, I was just good old dumb-looking Alan. They kept telling me I was almost like a brother to them, only no girl wanted to date her brother."

Across the way, the pigtailed child had her hand on the thick cord that bound the majestic dragon to the earth, and they could hear her lilting tones as she cajoled her father to let her fly it solo.

Alan Knight leaned down to scoop up a handful of loose gravel scattered alongt he pier and began plinking it into the water.

"When I got back to college that fall, I didn't know what hit me. I sort of liked it, having girls like me-who wouldn't? But I also didn't know how to handle it. Most guys, the guys that girls go after, have time to get used to how to act. From kindergarten, most of them; and certainly by junior high; and there I was, all the way in college, for God's sake."

Sigrid smiled.

"Yeah," he said self-mockingly. "Funny as hell, right? And the worst thing about it was that after a while I missed having girl friends. I don't mean lovers, but friends who are girls. Sorry, I guess I should say women."

"I'm not hung up on semantics," Sigrid said mildly.

"No? Anyhow, every time I'd try to be friends with a female, she'd either slap me down or expect us to go to bed together. It got to be such a hassle that I bought the ring and told everybody it was a secret marriage and that she'd promised her parents to finish school out west somewhere first. That took a lot ofp ressure off right away."

"I shouldn't have thought a ring had that much power anymore."

"You'd be surprised."

"What happens when you're attracted to someone?" she asked curiously.

"I take it off. Or I tell her my wife and I are separated at the moment."

"So you have your cake and eat it, too."

"At least I'm not trying to pretend the cake doesn't exist," he said; then added boldly, "Why are you?"

"In case you hadn't noticed," she answered flatly, "I'm not a college sophomore. I did all the growing up and filling out I'm ever going to do and, unlike you, I didn't turn into a swan."

"But women are different," he said, "there's so much you can do to help the swanning along."

"Oh Lord, don't start on the hair-makeup-sexy clothes bit."

She pulled both knees up sharply and rested her strong chin on them.

"Why not? What are you afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid of anything, andf rankly. Lieutenant, I can't see that it's any of your business."

"The guy you're living with-Is he the one trying to get you to nibble some of the cake?"

"Oh for God's sake," Sigrid groaned and swung herself up to leave.

"That's what my sisters always used to say when I got uncomfortably near the truth," he called, stridng after her.

"I'm surprised they didn't smother you in your crib," she muttered as he caught up with her.

"They tried. Mother wouldn't let them." He smiled at her persuasively.

"She did not smile back.

"Look, I'm sorry if I've insulted you. You're right. It's none of my business if you don't like cake. Truce?"

Her suspicious gray eyes probed his. The mischief that had lurked there a few minutes ago was gone now and he seemed serious again.

"I think it might be better if you worked with someone else in the department," she said doubtfully.

"I don't. Besides, your partner's still out and your captain mentioned you weres hort-handed. Why don't we head on up to the Maintenon," he suggested craftily, "and get Flythe's fingerprints?"

Sigrid glanced at her watch. Roman usually served Sunday's main meal in the middle of the day. If she stretched it out a little, she could probably miss his anised veal completely.

"First we'll drop in on Molly Baldwin," she told him.

Behind them, the crimson dragon with the golden face stalked sea gulls far out over the water.