Double Deuce

CHAPTER 33

Erin and Hawk and I were nibbling at some Irish whiskey in my office. It was dark in the Back Bay. The rain had stopped, but everything was still wet and the streets gleamed blackly when I looked out the window.

“Say the Hobarts did it is saying Major did it,” Hawk said.

“If Tallboy’s right,” I said.

“Tallboy will never testify,” Erin said.

“No need,” Hawk said.

“Spenser said something like that,” Erin said. “I asked him if he might take action of his own. He said he might.”

Hawk smiled. He drank some whiskey. And rolled it a little on his tongue and swallowed. Then he stood and went to the sink in the corner and added a little tap water. He stood while he sampled it, nodded to himself, and came back to his chair.

Erin said, “What would you consider appropriate action?”

“We could kill him,” Hawk said. Erin looked at me.

“You?” she said.

“Somebody is going to,” I said.

“I don’t think you would,” she said, “simply execute him yourself.”

I let that slide. There was nothing there for me. She looked back at Hawk.

“You feel no sympathy for these kids, do you,” she said.

Hawk looked friendly but puzzled.

“Got nothing to do with sympathy,” Hawk said. “Got to do with work. Work I do you kill people sometimes. Major seems as good a person to kill as anybody.”

“When you were twenty,” Erin said, “you probably weren’t so different from Major.”

“Am now,” Hawk said. He drank another swallow of whiskey.

Erin was holding her whiskey glass in both hands. She stared into it quietly for a moment.

“You got out,” she said. “You were no better off than Major, probably, and you got out.”

Hawk looked at her pleasantly.

“Now you are a free man,” Erin said. “Autonomous, sure of yourself, unashamed, unafraid. Nobody’s nigger.”

Hawk listened politely. He seemed interested. “And you’ve paid a terrible price,” she said.

“Worth the cost,” Hawk said.

“I know what you’re like,” she said. “I see young men who, were they stronger, or braver, or smarter, would grow up to be like you. Young men who have put away feelings. Who make a kind of Thoreauvian virtue out of stripping their emotional lives to the necessities.”

“Probably seem a good idea at the time,” Hawk said.

“Of course it does,” Erin said. “It is probably what they must do to live. But what a tragedy, to put aside, in order to live, the things that make it worth anything to live.”

“Worse,” Hawk said, “if you do that and don’t live anyway.”

“Yes,” Erin said.

We all sat for a while nursing the whiskey, listening to the damp traffic sounds from Berkeley Street, where it crosses Boylston. Erin was still staring down into her glass. When she raised her head, I could see that her eyes were moist.

“It’s not just Major that you mourn for,” I said.

She shook her head silently.

“If Hawk talked about things like this, which he doesn’t, he might say that you misread him. That what you see as the absence of emotion is something rather more like calm.”

“Calm?” I nodded.

“I worse than Major,” Hawk said quietly. “And I got better, and I got out, and I got out by myself.”

“And that makes you calm?”

“I know I can trust me,” Hawk said.

“And you’d kill Major?”

“Don’t know if I will, know I could.”

“And you wouldn’t mind,” Erin said. “I can’t understand that.”

Erin’s glance rested on Hawk. She wasn’t staring at her whiskey now.

“I can’t understand that.”

“I know,” Hawk said.

“I don’t want to understand that,” Erin said.

“I know that too,” Hawk said.