Death of a Citizen

CHAPTER 6

FRAN Darrel kissed me goodnight at the door. Amos kissed Beth. It's an old Spanish custom which Beth detests. Just about the time she outgrew the unpleasant chore of kissing her New England aunts and grandmothers, and could get a little selective in her osculation, she married me and moved to New Mexico, where, she discovered to her horror, it was her social duty to take on all corners.

Amos, to do him justice, was one of the less objectionable male kissers of our acquaintance, satisfied with a token peck on the cheek. I think he made that much of a concession to local custom only because Fran had told him that he might hurt the feelings of some of her friends if he didn't. In a11 social matters Amos took his cue from Fran, since it didn't mean a thing to him, anyway.

Afterwards, he stood there with his vague, bored look while the women went through their goodbye chatter; and I stood there, and found myself suddenly wishing he'd get the hell back inside and out of the light. A guy of his scientific importance ought to have more sense than to hang around in a lighted doorway below a ridge full of desert cedars that could conceal a regiment of expert riflemen. It was a melodramatic idea, but Tina and Loris had started my mind working in that direction. Not that Mac's people were any threat to Amos, but their presence meant trouble, and once there's trouble around, anybody's apt to find a piece of it coming his way.

"It was sweet of you to come," Fran was saying. "I do wish you wouldn't rush off. Mart, you have a nice trip, hear?"

"The same to you," Beth said.

"Oh, we'll see you again before we leave."

"Well, if you don't, I hope you have a wonderful tune. I'm green with envy," Beth said. "Good night."

Then the Darrels were turning away and entering the house together, and nothing whatever had happened to either of them, and we were walking towards Beth's big maroon station wagon where it stood gleaming with approximately four thousand dollars worth of gleam in the darkness.

I asked, "Where are they going?"

"Why, they're going to Washington next week," Beth said. "I thought you knew." -

I said, "Hell, Amos was in Washington only two months back."

"I know, but something important has come up at the lab, apparently, and he's got to make a special report. He's taking Fran along, and they're going to visit her family in Virginia and then have some fun in New York before they come back here." -

Beth's voice was wistful. To her, real civilization still ended somewhere well east of the Mississippi. She always had a wonderful time in New York, although the place always gives me claustrophobia. I like towns you can get out of in a hurry.

"Well, we'll try to make New York some time this winter, if things go well," I said. "Meanwhile we'd better settle on a place to eat tonight. If we take our time, maybe Mrs. Garcia will have the kids in bed when we get home."

We had dinner at La Placita, which is a joint on the narrow, winding, dusty street sometimes known as Artists' Row by people who don't know much about art. There were checked tablecloths and live music. Afterwards we got back into Beth's shining twenty-foot chariot. If Beth had married a New York broker and settled in a conventional suburb in her native Connecticut, I'm sure she'd have become an enthusiastic Volkswagen booster. It would have been her protest against the conformity around her. In Santa Fe, where they never heard of the word conformity, and with a screwball author for a husband, she needed the Buick to keep her sense of proportion. It was a symbol of security. She glanced at me quickly as I drove past our street without turning in.

"Give them a little more time to go to sleep," I said. "Don't you ever put gas in this bus?"

"There's plenty," she said, leaning against me sleepily. "Where are we going?"

I shrugged. I didn't know. I just knew I didn't want to go home. I could still see Tina's black-gloved hand gracefully giving me the old stand-by signal. If I went home, I'd be expected to make myself available, somehow-take a walk around the house to find the cat, have a midnight burst of inspiration and dash out to the studio to get it down on paper. I was supposed to place myself alone so they could reach me, and I didn't want to be alone. I didn't want to be reached.

I took us through the city through the sparse evening traffic and sent the chrome plated beast snarling up the long grade out of town on the road to Taos, sixty miles north. There should have been a release of sorts in turning loose all that horsepower, but all it did was remind me of the big black Mercedes I'd stolen outside Loewenstadt-it was the assignment after I'd kissed Tina goodbye and lost track of her-with a six-cylinder bomb under the hood, a four-speed transmission as smooth as silk, and a suspension as taut and sure as a stalking tiger. When I'd glanced at the speedometer-on a dirt road, yet-the needle was flickering past a hundred and eighty kilometers per hour, which translates to a hundred mph and some change. And I'd thought I was kind of babying the heap along. -

It almost scared me to death, but for the rest of that job I was known as Hot Rod, and all driving chores that came up were left to me without argument, although I could get an argument from that bunch of prima donnas on just about any other subject… Well, I never saw any of them again, and some of them hated my guts and ~ wasn't very fond of theirs, but we moved our sniper into position and made our touch on schedule, so I guess it was a pretty good team while it lasted. Mac didn't believe in letting them last very long. One or two assignments, and then he'd break up the group and shift the men around or send them out to lone-wolf it for a while. Men-even our kind of men-had a perverse habit of getting friendly if they worked together too long; and you couldn't risk jeopardizing an operation because, despite standing orders, some sentimental jerk refused to leave behind another jerk who'd been fool enough to stop a bullet or break a leg.

I remembered solving that little problem the hard way, the one time it came up in a group of mine. After all, nobody's going to hang around in enemy territory to watch over a dead body, no matter how much he liked the guy alive. I'd had to watch my back for the rest of the trip, of course, but I always did that, anyway.

"Matt," Beth said quietly, "Matt, what's the matter?"

I shook my head, and spun the wheel to put us onto the unpaved lane that feeds into the highway at the top of the hill. The big station wagon was no Mercedes. The rear end broke loose as we hit the gravel, and I almost lost the heap completely-power brakes, power steering, and all. For a moment I had Buick all over the road. It gave me something to fight, and I straightened it out savagely; the rear wheels sprayed gravel as they dug in. I took us up on the ridge, with those soft baby-carriage springs hitting bottom on the bumps, and swung in among the pinons and stopped.

Beth gave a little sigh, and reached up to pat her hair back into place.

"Sorry," I said. "Lousy driving. Too many Martinis, I guess. I don't think I hurt the car."

Below us were the lights of Santa Fe, and beyond was the whole dark sweep of the Rio Grande valley; and across the valley were the twinkling lights of Los Alamos, in case you were interested, which, unlike Amos Darrel, I was not. They no longer make so many loud disturbing noises over there, but I'd liked the place better when it was just a pinon forest and a private school for boys. Whatever it was Amos had turned up in his lab, and was rushing to Washington to make his report on, I had a hunch it was something I could have lived quite happily without.

Looking the other way, you could see the shadowy Sangre de Cristo peaks against the dark sky. They'd

already had a sprinkle of snow up there this fall; it showed up ghostly in the night.

Beth said softly, "Darling, can't you tell me?"

It had been a mistake to come up here. There was nothing I could tell her; and she didn't belong to the catch-as-catch-can school of marital relations. In my wife's book, there was a time and a place for everything, even love. And the place wasn't the front seat of a car parked a few feet off a busy highway.

I couldn't talk to her, and I wasn't in a mood for anything as mild and frustrating as necking, so there wasn't a damn thing to do but back out of there and head for home.