Odd Hours

THIRTY-NINE

OVER WHITE SLACKS AND AN EXQUISITE BEADED sweater, she wore a gray coat of supple leather with fox fur at the collar, along the front panels, and at the cuffs.

Setting the satchel on the floor, I said, “No doctor is going to believe you’ve been suffering from a bad shellfish reaction.”

No older than twenty-five, she was beautiful not in the way that women in Joey’s copy of Maxim might have seemed beautiful to him, but as women in a Neiman Marcus catalog might be regarded as beautiful: sensuous but not common, elegant, a generous mouth, fine facial bones, large limpid blue eyes, and not a hard edge to her.

Taking one hand from the wheel, she patted a pocket of her coat. “I’ve got a little bottle of nasty brew to drink before we dock. It fakes some of the classic symptoms.”

Because the Coast Guard had been told that we had put to sea to retrieve a yacht passenger suffering a serious allergic reaction to shellfish, they might follow through with the local hospital to see if in fact such a patient had been admitted.

The dialed-down ping of the radar drew my eyes to the screen. A few pips were revealed at the outermost azimuth rings. The only nearer pip, moving away, must be Junie’s Moonbeam.

“Who’re you?” she asked.

“Harry,” I replied.

“The Harry. I didn’t know there was one.”

“My mother would like to hear it put that way. She thinks I’m the only Harry there is or ever was.”

“It must be nice to have a mother who’s not a bitch.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Valonia.”

“I’ve never heard that one before.”

“It’s from the Latin for acorn. I guess my mother thought I would grow into a great hulking tree. Where’s Utgard?”

From the bridge, she had no view of the afterdeck.

I said, “He’s finishing with…things.”

She smiled. “I’m not a fragile flower.”

I shrugged. “Well.”

“He told me that he would be winnowing the crew.”

“Winnowing. Is that what he called it?”

“You don’t approve of his word choice?”

“I approve that I’m not one of the winnowed.”

“I suppose it matters more to you.”

“Why should it?”

“You knew them, they’re your mates,” Valonia said. “I didn’t know them.”

“You didn’t miss much.”

She liked the ruthlessness. She regarded me with greater interest than before.

“What role do you play in the cast, Harry?”

“I’m a Guildenstern, I guess.”

She frowned. “A Jew?”

“It’s a reference to Shakespeare.”

The frown sweetened into a delicious pout. “You don’t seem like a boy who would live in dusty old books.”

“You don’t seem like a girl who would blow up cities.”

“Because you don’t know me well.”

“Is there a chance I might get to?”

“Right now, I’d say fifty-fifty.”

“I’ll take those odds.”

Because I could not sense whether she was suspicious of me to any extent, I had not ventured closer to Valonia. The more relaxed she became with me, the easier I would be able to subdue her without breaking any pretty thing. She would be a trove of information for the authorities.

Leaning against the doorjamb, I said, “What’s your last name, Valonia?”

“Fontenelle. Remember it.”

“That’s no problem.”

“I’ll be famous one day.”

“I’ve no doubt you will be.”

“What’s your last name, Harry?”

“Lime.”

“Tart,” she said.

“Actually, I’m pretty much monogamous.”

Her laugh was nicer than I had expected, girlish yet robust, and genuine.

I didn’t want to like her laugh. I dreaded hearing in it this trace of merriment that suggested a once-innocent child.

Now I could see that she was even younger than I first thought, no older than twenty or twenty-one.

Valonia’s long hair had been tucked under the fox-fur collar. With one hand behind her neck, she pulled it free. She shook her head, and a wealth of spun gold cascaded around her face.

“Are you ready for the world to change, Harry?”

“I guess I better be.”

“It’s all so old and tired.”

“Not all of it,” I said, openly admiring her.

She liked to be admired.

“They’re going to love him so much,” she said.

“Who?”

“The people.”

“Oh, yeah. Them.”

“They’ll love the way he’ll take charge. Bring order. His compassion and his strength.”

“And his magnificent dental work.”

She laughed, but then chastised me. “The senator’s a great man, Harry. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think so.”

Cautious about being seduced to respond outside the character that I had created-or, rather, borrowed from a Graham Greene novel-I said, “For me, it’s mostly about the money.”

Gazing into the fog, Valonia blew out a poof of breath through puckered lips. “The old, tired world-just gone.”

“Do that again,” I requested.

Staring at me, she puckered and blew.

I said, “Maybe, after all, it’s not entirely about the money.”

Her blue eyes dazzled. “The perpetual arguing, the tiresome debate that never settles anything. No one will miss that.”

“No one,” I agreed, but was overcome by sorrow that she could be so young yet hate so much.

“He’ll shut them up, Harry.”

“It’s time somebody did.”

“And in the end, they’ll like it.”

She inhaled as if trying to clear nasal congestion.

“The endless quarreling,” she said, “when we know the issues were really settled long ago.”

“Ages ago,” I agreed.

She tried to clear her nose again. “The people are going to be so grateful for the New Civility.”

I could hear the uppercase N and C in the way that she said it.

“Do you believe, Harry?”

“Deeply. Plus there’s the money.”

“It’s so wonderful to believe.”

“You come so alive when you say the word.”

“Believe,” she said with childlike yearning. “Believe.”

She inhaled noisily, and again.

“Damn these allergies,” she complained, and reached into a coat pocket for a handkerchief.

From under my sweatshirt, from the small of my back, I drew the gun that held two more rounds.

Her compact pistol, a lady’s gun but deadly, hung up on the lining of her coat pocket as she tried to draw it.

“Valonia, don’t.”

The snagged lining tore.

“Please,” I said.

The gun came free, and in her passion to defend the faith, she fired wildly.

In every direction from the bullet hole, the laminated window beside my head instantly webbed to the limits of its frame.

I shot her once, not just to wound, because it never could have been that way.

Golden hair swirled, shimmered, as she spasmed from the impact. She dropped the little gun, and dropped herself, collapsing toward a needed rest, faceup on the stained and soiled deck, an orchid in the mud.

Snaring her pistol, I knelt beside her.

Her eyes were open, but not yet vacant. She stared at something, perhaps a memory, and then at me.

She said, “I’ll never get to see…”

I took one of her hands in both of mine, and I was not assaulted by the vision of a red tide. That future had been thwarted.

“I’ll never get to see…the new world,” she finished.

“No,” I said. “I spared you that.”

Her limp hand tightened on mine.

She closed her eyes. And at once opened them in alarm.

“Don’t let go,” she pleaded, her voice younger now, without sophistication or artifice.

I promised her, “I won’t.”

The strength in her grip increased, became fierce, and then she had no strength at all.

Although she was gone, I still held her hand and prayed silently that she would not add to her suffering by lingering here in spirit.

I wondered who had turned her free mind from the light into the dark, where and how and when. I wanted to find him, her, every one of them-and kill them all.

In the closet where I had discovered a satchel in which to stow the bomb triggers, on a shelf above the hanging rain gear, I had seen what I needed now. I went down to the foredeck, selected two wool blankets, and returned to the bridge with them.

After shaking open one of the blankets, I refolded it lengthwise to make a soft and simple catafalque on which to place her.

I lifted her in the cradle of my arms and moved her onto the woolen cushion. She proved to be lighter than I expected. She was petite but had projected herself larger in life.

Before her eyes locked open, I closed her lids with my thumbs and held them for a moment. I placed her right hand atop her left, on her breast.

I shook out the second blanket, folded it much like the first, and covered Valonia Fontenelle, who after all would never be famous. Or infamous.

Questing fog crept across the threshold, seduced by the warmth of the bridge. I stepped outside and closed the door.

I threw Birdie Hopkins’s handgun into the sea.

At the railing on the open portion of the bridge deck, I stood for a while, staring down at what the fog allowed me to see of the rolling ocean.

Within half an hour, I had killed three men and a woman-but I had not murdered anyone. I combed the fine hairs of philosophy, assuring myself that I had found the part between moral and immoral.

With no one at the helm, the action of tides and currents had begun to turn the tugboat in the lazy vortex that nature preferred.

On the blue lake of abiding hope, the sun had been warm and every soft breeze a caress, and the future had waited to be dreamed.

Below me now, the ocean was not blue, and I could not see any hope in it, but the ocean did abide.