Travis McGee 08 - One Fearful Yellow Eye - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора John D. MacDonald (ч. 3)

Drinks made, she went off and came back in no more than a minute with a plain white envelope. In red ink on the front of it she had written, “A Merry Christmas to Travis McGee.” In green ink she had drawn a small Christmas tree the way children, draw them, in jagged outline.

She sat with brandy snifter in hand, my gift to her on her lap, and said, “You first. It wasn’t going to be a gift. Maybe it isn’t a gift, really.”

I thumbed my gift open. Pale blue bank check. Certified. Eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.

“What the hell, Heidi!”

‘Why don’t you just say thanks?“

“But you’re under no oblig…”

“Hush. You explained it all to me. Half is better than nothing at all. You made the deal with Gloria, but you didn’t go through with it. And Roger certainly wouldn’t let go of twenty cents of his when he finally gets it And out of family pride I just couldn’t have you going around thinking of this as the Geis disaster. Please don’t get all stuffy and noble and turn it down.”

“Okay. So I accept it. Thank you very much. But only on condition that I lay a very good morsel of it on our little venture, yours and mine.”

She went pale and her mouth trembled and she said, “But we aren’t really going to…”

“Open your present, girl.”

Her hands shook as she loosened the ribbons and the metallic paper. She stared down into the box. After she had unwrapped, in turn, the sun lotion, the giant beach towel, the big black sunglasses, the little beach coat, she had begun a dangerously hysterical giggling. And when she undid the last item, a bright bawdy little bikini that could probably have been packed into a shot glass without too much of it protruding, she stared at me and said, “But I couldn’t ever wear… ever wear… anything… anything like…”

So hysteria was suddenly tears. Hands to the face. Gifts spilling. The wrenching hopeless hoohaw of vocalized anguish. Went to the lady. Brushed gifts out of the way. Picked her up by the elbows, sat in her chair, lowered her back down onto the lap, hiked her long legs over the chair arm, wedged resistant head into side of my neck, held tight. Said, “There there. There there now.”

No gossamer she. Respectable girl-weight, bearing down on cushiony-warm bottom, all misty, humid, solid, sweet that bundle of tears, sob-time, fright. All unresponsive flesh, like those storewindow dummies now fashioned of some kind of yielding plastic which you can bend slowly into a new position which they will maintain. No answers in the flesh. No questions. Dull plastic acceptance.

So as she slowly quieted there on that Christmas night, I graded my own final examinations in my own version of a severe Calvinistic morality. Maybe we all mete out to ourselves our little rewards and punishments according to our very private and unique systems of guilt and self-esteem. I had the fatuous awareness of having earned this lovely and inhibited bundle thrice over, by not slipping up on Gloria’s blind side in a parody of comforting the widow that evening after I had first arrived and when in the ember-light we were both aware of all the small ways of saying yes, and by not accepting the full measure of Maurie Ragna’s total hospitality and by not counter-topping the intensity and diligence of little Mrs. Shottlehauster as had been inadvertently observed, an act which came complete with rationalization.

So when you skip the cream pie and pass up the chocolate shake and deny yourself the home fried, you begin to think that, by God, you have a right to the- Cherries Jubilee.

Tears ended, she rested apprehensive upon me with all the nervous tensions of a jump-club recruit as the airplane makes its circling climb, and I knew that this was the wrong time and the wrong place and a certain guarantee of failure. So I set her on her feet, kissed the salttasty cheek, looked into evasive eyes, and said, “Sleep well. Get up and pack.”

“But…”

“Pack!”

The tenth day of February. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Beach cottage. St. Croix. Sun coming through yellow draperies into the bedroom. Rental Sunbeam outside the door. Little sailboat pulled up onto the private beach. Excellent hotel a ten-minute walk away.

I awoke from the nap which was getting to be an almost insidious habit with us. Eyes half shut, I did some sleepy arithmetic and discovered it was our forty-sixth day of residence.

In the subdued golden afternoon light, Heidi came into my range of vision, elegantly nude, smoothly beach-browned swim-browned, sailing browned, topdown browned except for the narrow bikini areas which, when she had decided they were a sickly white, she had toasted to gold on the little walled patio off the living room. She started to walk past the full-length mirror set into the closet door, caught sight of herself apparently, stopped, and inspected herself solemnly, carefully, from head to toe. She faced it head on, and then without moving her feet, turned to present left profile and then right profile to the mirror. The tension made long firm flowing lovely lines, a complexity of curves from earlobe to delicate ankle.

There is an elegance of total unity, and an elegance in the smallest physical details of a truly great pussycat, a truly fantastic bird. Fine-grained texture of the skin everywhere. Little fold of the upper lid, curves and pads of the fingers, jeweler’s precision of eyelash and brow. It is an elegance that makes for mystery somehow, so that finally the most complete intimacy merely hints at intimacies beyond, at promises unreachable.

She faced herself squarely again, brushed pale hair back with both hands. Sun and salt and wind had bleached it and coarsened the texture of it. She frowned at herself, underlip protruding. She patted her tummy and sucked it in. She squared her shoulders and, still frowning, cupped a hand under each breast, lifting it slightly. She took a step back, dropped her hands, tilted her head slightly, and then nodded at herself and gave herself such a broad, delighted, fatuous grin I nearly laughed aloud.

“Great merchandise,” I said.

She whirled and stared aghast at me, mouth open. “Peeping tom!” she said. “Lousy peeping thomas!” Then came at me in a swift hippy hoyden run and pounced. After taking a certain amount of cruel punishment I managed to pin her wrists. She lay panting and grinning at me. The grin faded. I knew it was safe to release her. She nestled close and said, “It’s what you kept saying, you know. About liking myself inside and out. Because if you can’t there’s nothing you can be proud of to give anybody, or share. It always used to make me feel crawly in a funny way to look at myself like that. Now I say Hey look! He likes it. It gets him all worked up. So it must be pretty good. And I own it. But, my God, Trav darling, I gave you a wretched time. Bless you. You are an infinitely patient man.”

I held her quietly and thought once more of that descriptive cliche of comparing women to sports cars and violins and such, responsive to the hands of the master. What she reminded me of was the old yellow Packard phaeton with the Canada goose on the radiator and the wire wheels which I had bought for sixteen dollars, a single-shot.22, and a block of Lindbergh airmail stamps during the year before I was going to be old enough to get a permit to drive. My father raised such hell about having that piece of junk in the yard, I spent all my time at first giving it the coats of paint, rubbing them down, fixing the rotten canvas, mending the torn leather seats, haunting the graveyards to find replacement parts.

I had thought that with the service manual on that year and model, I could get it started without much trouble. I finally got it to the point where everything was in order. Valve springs, fuel pump, coil, distributor, spark plugs, carburetor, jets, clutch plate, air filter. I’d sit in tense anticipation behind the big wheel, turn the key, step on the starter, fiddle with the choke, and it would go wheery-yurry, wheery-yurry, wheery-yurry, wheeryyurry. Not a cylinder would fire. And finally it would go yurry, yurry, yurry… yug.

Then I would walk up the hill behind the house and sit alone and stare desolately out over the valley and suck my barked knuckles and quietly despise the whole concept of the internal combustion engine. Then I would take the battery out again, put it in the red tin wagon of my younger days, and wheel it three blocks to the gas station for a slow charge, and endure stoically the gibes and taunts of the cretins at the gas station.

Then one day when I least expected it, she fired and turned over. For maybe eleven magical seconds she popped, banged, shuddered, and gasped before she stalled out. The next day it was almost twenty seconds. I was able to stop hating her because it seemed to me that that yellow Packard had a personality and that it had astonished her as much as me, and she was saying, in effect, “So that’s what you’ve been after.” When I had begun to despair of ever keeping her running, or ever getting her out of the back yard on her own power, I found that the firing order was wired up wrong, and after fixing that, I found that a lubricant with graphite in it had hardened on the bakelite outside of the distributor cap and some of the impulses were shorting down the outside of the cap.

Then came the day when I tried and thought it had not caught and then became aware of the deep hum of vibration I could feel through my fingertips on the steering wheel. Foot on gas pedal, I ran her up through the rpm’s to such a roar of even, fullthroated power it awed me. From then on, perfectly tuned, she would start at the slightest touch on the starter. I drove her when I passed my test. She and I went humming through many nights on the small back roads, taking the curves and grades in a perfect harmony…

But now in all that golden light the holding had become nothing that could be called quiet, and in the strong and languid grace of sensuality totally aroused she turned and arched in presentation of self, her eyes huge in that listening look that measures the great slow clock of the body, and in the first taking of the gift her eyes closed, her mouth opened askew with tongue curled back, and she made a long soft vocalized exhalation, the haaaaaaah of small triumph, of search and finding. Then with a growly little she-lion chuckle, she shifted and settled and braced herself for the journey.

That night we drank, we ate, we danced one dance at the hotel, and came walking back along the beach, hand-holding, shoes in the spare hand, walking in the wet where the tide had run out.

We sat on the fiberglass deck of the canted sailboat and looked at the stars. “What can scare you,” she said, “when you squeak through, when you know how narrow the escape was, is all the crazy accidents and coincidences that got you to where you are. You let me out of a dark room. I’d have stayed in there thinking it was just as dark every where. Son of a gun! If you hadn’t found Gloria long ago and put her back together, if she hadn’t gotten a job at that place where Daddy was staying… It can drive you out of your mind. There were so many choices and you don’t know why, really, they went one way instead of another way. Even take something like Daddy not marrying Gretchen. It could have gone either way. Oh, how all the tongues would have flapped! But that wouldn’t have bothered him. He was too busy to care what people thought.”

I got up restlessly and walked about ten feet, sat on my heels, scooped up sand, and drifted it through my fingers.

Is something the matter?“

“I don’t know.”

“Travis, for a week at least you’ve been going off somewhere. I have to repeat things I say. May I say something?”

“Why not?”

“If you’re getting broody about this girl, don’t waste yourself. I love you and I always will, in a special and private and personal way that is sort of… off to one side of what the rest of my life is. going to be. One day this ends and I go back and I tear my painting all the way down to bedrock, and then I put it together again with some life and juice and fire in it, and I am going to look up and there is going to be some great guy there who wants the kind of life I want, and we are going to breed up some fat babies, and laugh a lot, and get old and say it was all great right up to the end.”

“I wasn’t worried about you turning into an albatross, kid. I’m worried about all the little things that didn’t fit right. That Gorba thing is over and it isn’t over. I got some answers. I got some salvage. I missed part of it. When you said that your father might have married Gretchen, I got a little resonance off that. Maybe she would have made him a good little wife. She got along with you and your brother. And she had her mama there to keep things to rights. Anna Ottlo had her widower employer in a great bind. But she worked out an alternate choice, the Kemmer boy. Why?”

“Well, wouldn’t you say it was just that sort of… humility of the Old-World German? Respect for the learned doctor?”

“But she was in the New World where things are not the same. And you always want a better deal for your kids than you got.”

“She was very harsh with Gretchen.”

“And damned indifferent to her own grandchildren. It doesn’t fit that… kind of hearty; hausfrau cook-up-a-storm image. Flour on the elbows, goodies in the oven, house clean as a whistle.”

“Maybe she knew Daddy would never stand still for it.”

“That’s not my image of him. I think he had quite a load of guilt out of pronging that girl-child while your mother was dying, and the pregnancy meant more guilt, and marriage would have cleared it all off the books.”

“Does it really make any difference?”

“With no life of her own really, except through your father, who was a damned busy man, and probably used the house the way other men use a residential club, you’d think Anna would want to be closer to her own daughter and the grandbabies.”

“Oh, I think she had something else going for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I hadn’t thought of it in a long time. Roger was home from school on vacation. He went to some kind of a party and then he went to a place where people parked and smooched. When he left he turned his lights on too soon. That’s bad form. Lo and behold, they shone into a car and right on Anna. He didn’t see the man. The next day he tried to kid her about it. She took such a clout at him it scared him. He barely got his face out of the way. She had a grater in her hand and he told me it would have taken the hide and meat off right down to the bone. He said it scared her too. She cried and said it was because she was so insulted. She was a decent woman. She did not do things like that or go to such places. He told me he was positive it was Anna. But he didn’t try to argue,the point or kid her about it, not after that first time. She was very upset. We agreed that she’d probably been out there. It seemed pretty hilarious that she should have a boyfriend. I’m just telling this to show that… she could have had other emotional outlets. I know we weren’t one. She kept us warm, clean, and fed, and that was it.”

“She was apparently very fond of Gloria. But she didn’t tell Gloria that Gretchen and Gorba had made it legal, and she didn’t tell her that better relations had been established and that she was visiting the family almost every Sunday.”

“She was never one for talking about herself. I remember when we were studying World War II and the rise of National Socialism I tried to get her to tell me about Germany when Hitler took over before the war started and she just wouldn’t talk about it. She said it was too sad and terrible. She said that she and Gretchen had been in a camp, for a while and it was better to forget such things. Her husband and all her other relatives were dead and she wanted to forget it, not talk about it.”

So I dropped it, admired the stars. We stacked our clothes on the sailboat and went skinnydipping, and then went into the dark cottage and rinsed off the salt in a shared shower, and scrambled into the hasty bed.

As I was bobbling along in that dark current toward sleep Heidi walked her fingers along my chest and said, “Mister? You awake?”

“Oh, come on!”

“Don’t leap to conclusions, friend. You haven’t got the strength. I just remembered something. When we were helping get the house shaped up for Gloria to come back from the hospital, I was talking to Susan about the young kids, about relatives and so on. I asked about Freddy’s grandmother Kemmer in Florida arid if she’d let her know that her ex-daughter-in-law had died. And Susan said that Karl Kemmer’s mother had died back in nineteen sixty or sixty-one. So I said I was positive that was who Anna had gone to visit in Florida, her old friend. Susan said it must have been some other Kemmer. I was going to ask Gloria about it if she seemed up to that kind of talk, and then I forgot it completely until now.”

So I was awake. Awake a long time. She drifted off. She purred into my throat. Her arm twitched and she muttered something. When I made the decision, I fell asleep. I told her in the morning over second coffee. Her face fell, but she tried to whip up a gallant smile.“

“No, dear girl. Just because we check out of here doesn’t mean you’re going to get away just yet. I’ve got a shamefully neglected houseboat sitting up there in Fort Lauderdale, neglected mostly on account of you. You’re going to earn your keep. You’re going to learn how to chip and scrape and sand and paint, and when the Busted Flush looks brand-new, you can go back to Illinois.”

The smile became real. “I work cheap. Board and bed.”

“So okay. Start packing.”

“You know, you keep saying that.”

THIRTEEN

COMMUNICATION WAS far simpler back on the main land.

I phoned Glory from the lounge of the Flush on Sunday a little before noon. She sounded a little more like herself, but uncertain, subdued.

“But where are you, Trav?”

“Back aboard the Flush. Taking my ease. There’s a tall exhausted blonde puttering around in the background scouring the copper pots and muttering about mildew on the cabin curtains.”

“We’ve all enjoyed her crazy… postcards. Darn it, I have to keep reaching for words.”

“Otherwise?”

“Not so bad. Some bad little spots. Like the other day I was looking in the bathroom mirror and my face just started to sort of melt and slide off. It’s like… parts of nightmares happen in the daytime. Heidi sounds happy as a clam.”

“I beat her when she gets out of line. I’ll let you say hello in a minute. Look, what I called about, where did Anna go?”

“That’s a strange thing, Travis. I just don’t know. I had an address she left, care of Mrs. Hans Kemmer in Winter Haven, and I wrote there and it came back address unknown, and then Susan said that Mrs. Kemmer died years ago. It’s weird, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

“I have a nightmare about her, over and over. She keeps clapping her hands in front of my face and telling me I’m burning up, that my skin is getting so hot I’m going to set fire to anything I get near.”

“Maybe it was the fever you ran. How’s your group there?”

“Great. Really great!”

I summoned Heidi onto the line. She took the phone and, talking, slid onto the long yellow couch and ended up in a teenage posture, on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, sheaf of pale hair obscuring the phone, upright calves slowly scissoring. She wore white work pants with old paint stains thereon. The soles of her bare feet were dusty. One of the two snaps were undone on the back of her bandana halter. She and Glory compared climates, and she told Glory that St. Croix was the absolute of all time. I sat and watched her and pondered the disappearance of Anna Ottlo: When I paid attention again, Heidi was talking to Susan. I looked at her slender brown back between halter and waistband, at the almost invisible sunwhitened fuzz along that graceful curve that deepened and then lifted to the bisected heartiness of the splendid bottom. I felt the inner wrench, the sideways slide, the feeling there was not quite enough air in the whole lounge to fill the lungs of McGee. I moved over and wedged beside her and she slid over to make room. I ran a. slow thumb down the crease of the strong back across the little knots of the vertebrae. Her breath caught and broke in the middle of a word and picked up again and when I rested my hand quietly upon her I felt that inner humming that had begun, like the inaudible idling of the great engine of the yellow car of long long back.

Keep this one, I thought. It’ll keep well. It has one hell of a shelf life:

At the final good-bye, I popped the single snap with my thumbnail and the two halves of the halter slid away. She faked collapse, face down. “Nothing but work, work, work,” she grumbled. “Jeez!” Then rolled around grinning to reach out with both arms, and the phone bumped onto the rug and was tugged toward the desk by the coiled accordion phone wire.

Monday morning I phoned Dr. Hayes Wyatt and he phoned back in a half-hour and I found out he had not heard Glory’s dream about Anna Ottlo. He said she was coming along nicely and if she could keep on coming back at the present rate, she should be quite herself by June. The dream interested him. I asked some questions.

“Yes, Mr. McGee, under any of the psychedelics the subject is extraordinarily suggestible. If she could be made to believe that her body heat was such that her clothes and the things around her were beginning to smolder, she might very well run out onto that winter beach, shedding her clothes.”

“What about the hand clapping?”

“Yes. Acceptable technique to capture and hold the attention long enough for the suggestion to be made and accepted.”

I looked down at my brown hand at the two pale little puncture marks, still visible, the scars from the bite of the terrified thing in the howl of wind on that beach. I explained the curious thing we had learned about Anna. I asked him if he could find out if Gloria could remember anything that could have happened the morning of that day or the evening of the day before which might have given Anna some cause. He said he would try, but if Gloria began to get agitated he would have, to wait for another time.

When the call came through at four o’clock, Heidi was over on the beach with a hairy friend of mine named Meyer. The wind had died and the Florida day had warmed up, but not enough for swimming. When Meyer had first seen her he had shaken his head slowly from side to side. He had clucked. He had sighed. He had said, “Now if Vogue only used a centerfold girl.” He pointed a thumb at me, his eyes still on hers. “That one. He shouldn’t have such luck. He shouldn’t have such good taste. He brings you around and all of a sudden I am a bitter old man.”

In resignation he had put his hand out, and she had laughed, moved in, kissed him a good hearty smack and said, “I hate shaking hands with bitter old men, Meyer. ”

“I swoon,” he had said. He offered his arm. “Come with me to a saloon. I need sustenance. Let this aging beach boy here stew in his own jealous venom.” And off they had gone, laughing, the best of friends. Instant Meyer.

Dr. Hayes Wyatt called back and apologized about being tied up and not getting to me sooner. “But I don’t have much. It’s all pretty shadowy in her memory: Seems she got up very early that morning. Much earlier than usual. And she found Mrs. Ottlo in Fort’s study, sitting at his desk, just putting a handwritten letter and some kind of legal document into an envelope. As she was holding it, running her tongue along the flap, the envelope was toward the doorway, a pre-printed business address, quite gaudy. All she can remember is something like Mark Bay or Macko Bay, and a palm tree, and a row of airmail stamps. When she saw Gloria, she started violently and slapped the envelope face down onto the desk. She seemed agitated. ”That’s all. I’m sorry“

“Not much to go on.”

In the middle of the night something came sliding into my mind and slid right out again before I could grab hold of it. At breakfast I caught a glimpse of an edge of it in the back of my mind and caught it before it could get away and pulled it into sight.

Your retirement paradise! A planned community for the senior citizen. Live the golden years in the golden way. And it wasn’t Mark or Macko, but she had been close. Marco Bay and Marco Bay Isles, between the mysterious Everglades and the glorious Gulf. Marco Bay Development Corporation.

“What’s with you?” Heidi demanded. “Something wrong with the eggs, dammit?”

“They are beautiful eggs and you are a beautiful girl and I think I can lay a hand on Anna Ottlo. We’re going for a nice long ride.”

“But we were going to go fishing with Meyer, honey.”

So we stopped and told Meyer it was off. I said we were going over to Marco Bay, between the mysterious Everglades and the glorious Gulf, to see if, perchance, a good cook I had met in Chicago had settled herself there to live the golden years in the golden way.

We took a cab over to the garage. Heidi was enchanted with my old stately transportation, name of Miss Agnes, one of the really big old Rolls-Royces. She had suffered a curious trauma, perhaps during the Great Depression, when somebody had converted her into a pickup truck and painted her bright blue.

In the bright clear cool morning we struck west across the Tamiami Trail, sitting high above the squatty and more frangible products of later years, Miss Agnes going along with stately rumble and faint wind-hiss, floating up to her mild and amiable eighty miles an hour when I had clear pieces of road.

And so at eleven-thirty I parked in a broad lot next to the sales office of the Marco Bay Development Corporation. I left Heidi by the truck and went into the office. It looked like functional slices of three kinds of jet aircraft fastened together with aluminum windows. The salesmen weren’t in. A Miss Edgerly was. She was all wrists, eyebrows, and big rabbity teeth, and determined to be helpful if it killed both of us.

“Gee now. From Chicago in late December.” She went trotting from file to file. She was about eleven inches across the shoulders and forty inches across her secretarial butt, making the pink blouse and madras shorts less than totally attractive.

“With a thick German accent? Gee now. Well, heck, I can check it by date but that’s about the last way left.” She riffled through more files, pulled out a sheet. “Gee now, actually the only sale from the Chicago area was Mr. and Mrs. Hennigan, and that was just on account of our handling the resale of the Torbadill house at the end of Citrus Lane. Poor Mrs. Torbadill had… well, catering to an older group we often have to handle the resale of some very excellent properties.”

I knew why she looked distressed. It’s the old sun-city syndrome. Instead of fun in the sun in the golden years the oldsters find they’ve locked themselves into a closed society with a mortality rate any combat infantry battalion would find impressive. You have to make friends fast because they aren’t going to be around long. Spooks in the sunshine. Change the club rosters once a week. For Sale signs sprout as fast as the pretty tropical flowers and trees.

“I guess that’s it,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry. Over here are some pictures at the Welcome Party. Everybody who moves into Marco Bay has a Welcome Party at the Golf and Tennis Club. I think this is… yes, this is Mrs. Hennigan.” And with the eraser end of her yellow pencil she tapped the fleshy smiling face of Anna Ottlo. “But of course she just doesn’t fit the sort of person you are describing.” She leaned close, squinting to read the typed legend taped to the bottom edge of the glossy color print. “Perry and Wilma Hennigan are retireds from Chicago, all right.”

“I suppose there’s the off chance they might know where the other lady is, if they know her at all. Long as I’m here I might as well ask. How do I get to…”

“Well, hey, come look here at our wonderful map that’s just been brought up to date!”

It was so big I hadn’t seen it. Vivid green plaster for the grass. Blue mirror glass for water, in the bay, the canals, the community pools, the private pools. Some kind of gray flexible strip for the roads, complete to yellow center line.

I followed the pencil eraser. “Right down Mainway all the way to Grapetree Circle, and then three quarters of the way around it and down Osprey Lane to the end where it runs into Citrus Lane, and then take your right and go to the end.” She bounced the eraser off the roof of an L-shaped house on a point of land that jutted into the bay. Most of the houses sat shoulder to shoulder. The one she indicated, and a very few others, had a lot of lateral privacy. “You can’t miss it!” she cried, spinning toward me, beaming, and smelling of peppermint.

“Looks pretty elaborate.”

“Oh, it is! It’s one of our Adventure in Living series, the biggest one. Tropic Supreme. It’s thirtyone thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, plus the lot, but including closing costs and title insurance, and the poor Torbadills added the Kingway Pool, a second Florida room, and marvelous, absolutely marvelous plantings. They picked one of the choicest pieces of land, and they bought these three additional lots for privacy. They furnished it beautifully too. Why I would say they had, at least, at the very least, sixty thousand in it. It’s really the nicest home in the entire development. And just when they had it exactly the way they wanted it, poor Mrs. Torbadill… well, that’s another story, isn’t it?”

“The Hennigans must be pretty well-heeled too.”

“It was a fantastic bargain, actually. Forty-nine five for everything, even including the boat poor Mr. Torbadill bought and only used twice.”

“It still adds up to big monthly bite though.”

“I heard they paid a considerable part of it in cash.”

“You’ve been very helpful, Miss Edgerly.”

“That’s what we’re here for. To be of service.” When I went back out to the lot, Heidi was stand ing leaning against Miss Agnes, hands in her skirt pockets, ankles crossed. When someone has become very dear it is rare that you get a chance to see them anew, as though for the first time. I saw her before she saw me approaching. She stood there in her relaxed and slender elegance, chin up, expression cool, looking perfectly capable of buying the entire project and moving everybody out and building herself a castle.

I told her the whole bit. “Darling,” she said, “are you quite certain it was Anna?”

“Positive.”

“But how absolutely weird!”

“So we find out what goes on.”

I drove the route pointed out to me. A pickup truck means a service call, even if the basic vehicle happened to cost three thousand pounds back in the days when a pound was worth five dollars. So the glances were casual. The separate generations belong together. No matter how lush the flower beds; how spirited the bridge games, the shuffleboard competitions, the golf rivalries-nor how diligently the Hobby Center turns out pottery waterbirds, bedspreads and shell ashtrays, this kind of isolation still makes a geriatric ghetto where, in the silence, too many people listen to their own heartbeats.

I had noticed a small community bayfront park at the intersection of Osprey Lane and Citrus Lane, so I pulled in there and turned Agnes off and reached across Heidi into the back of the shallow shelf under the glove compartment and took out the little canvas zipper case, extracted the Bodyguard, and worked it into my right-hand pants pocket.

“To see Anna Ottlo?” she said incredulously. “Hear dem bells. In the back of my head. Better safe than sorry. A stitch in time. A penny saved. Hell, dear, I’m cowardly.”

“But clean.”

“You wait here. Think pretty thoughts. Paint a painting in your head.”

Circular drive. Double carport. Dark blue Buick station wagon in one stall. Power mower and golf cart in the other. Drops from the sprinkler pattering off elephant ear leaves. Birds yammering. Blue bay beyond. Sizable cinderblock house, awning windows, Bahama gray with white trim, glaring white roof.

When I pressed the button the chimes came loud and clear through the screening of the, door. They were not as ornate as the Shottlehauster set. When I heard a female voice call, “Coming,” I moved a little to one side, turned my back toward the door. “Yes?” she said. “Yes? What is it?” I heard the spring creak on the screen door and I turned and caught it and faced her.

“Hello there, Anna!”

She had been somewhat thinner in the Welcome Party picture, and since _ then she had lost a great deal more weight. Her white hair had been dyed a peculiarly unpleasant shade of building-brick red, and cut into a style that would have looked cute on a young girl, the bangs curving down to eyebrow level. She wore dangling gilt earrings, a yellow blouse, purple pants, and zoris. It was a grotesque outfit for a woman in her middle fifties. The meaty face had lost no weight, and the pottery-blue eyes were the same.

“Anna, what happened to the vaudeville accent?” She frowned and shook her head. “Young man, you apparently think I am someone else.”

“I think you’re trying to be someone else.”

She turned and shouted into the sunny vistas of the house. “Perry! Sweetheart! Come here, dear. There’s a man here saying the strangest things. Hurry, sweetheart!”

“Cleverness isn’t enough,” I said. “It takes luck too.”

“You must be insane, young man.” I realized how perfect a place she had picked. Guaranteed respectability. Immediate group identification. She was wearing the uniform of the day. Again she turned and shouted over her shoulder, “Will you please come out here at once, Perry, and help me with this…”

It covered any small sound he might have made when he came up behind me. Something flickered in front of my eyes and then as I gasped with surprise, the standard reaction, something was yanked to a fatal tightness around my throat. I spun to grapple with whoever had sneaked up behind me, and I saw a plump bald man hop nimbly backward. But the pressure on my throat did not lessen. I could not take a breath. My ears began to roar. I tried to get my fingertips under whatever it was, but it was sunk too deeply into the flesh. I reached to the nape of my neck and felt some kind of a clip device and felt of the free end that dangled down my back. I fumbled with the metallic-feeling clip. The screen door had shut. She stood watching me through the screen. He stood with the same expression-interest and mild concern. Vision began to darken. I thought of the gun and I willed my hand to go down and take it out of the pocket and put one through the screening and one into the plump belly. But my hand was more interested in trying to dig enough meat out of my throat to get to the tightness and pull it free. Roaring had turned to a siren sound. I felt a jolt and a faraway pain in my knees. The world went from dark gray to black and I pitched from my kneeling position, face forward over the edge of the world, spinning down and down and down.

Brightness shone through my eyelids. My chin was on my chest. I tried to swallow the gravel packed into my throat but I couldn’t budge it. I opened my eyes and tried to sit higher in the chair and saw at once why I could not. It was a tubular aluminum lawn chair, the kind with a double bar for the armrests. My forearms were fastened with wide white surgical tape from wrist to elbow to the chair arms, wrapped around arm and armrest, tight and overlapping, so that my hands had darkened and puffed. My legs were straight out, heels resting on terrazzo, pants cuffs hiked up by the same kind of tape which had also been used to fast en my ankles together.

I lifted my head. I was on the sort of jalousied porch locally called a Florida room. Anna sat ten feet away and a little off to my left. Behind her was a picture window from ceiling to floor and ten feet wide, framing the swimming pool beyond. There was a row of little white seahorses on the glass to keep the unwary from trying to walk through it. I could see a dense hedge of punk trees, tailored grass, concrete pool apron, redwood picnic furniture, a stone barbecue, a wall of pierced concrete block painted white. A blow-up duck, big enough to ride, floated high on the pool water, being drifted in random turning patterns by the light breeze.

On the table beside Anna was my undersized.38 special. She was using yellow needles and knitting something out of bright blue yarn.

She gave me a merry little glance and said, “You’re very heavy, Mr. McGee. It took both of us to drag you.”

I started to speak, but it was a rusty whisper. I cleared my throat and managed a guttural rasp. “Was the code word sweetheart?”

“Hoping we’d never have to use it. You certainly had good luck. But when you add stupidity, what good is the luck?”

“Where is sweetheart?”

“Taking a little stroll. He wants to know how you got here and if you brought anyone along.”

“Nobody important. Some state cops.”

“I hardly think so.”

“Not a trace of accent. You’re very good.”

“Thousands and thousands of hours, Mr. McGee, in my room, listening to your damned dreary radio programs, practicing into a tape recorder, playing it over and over and over, correcting it each time. Discipline. Endless self-discipline. Endless patience. And now, you see, we are quite safe. You are an annoyance only.”

“You dosed Gloria, didn’t you?”

“I knew where it was and what it was, and knew it would not change the taste of her morning orange juice. It was interesting, but it was just a little bit careless. I indulged myself. When she asked me what I was mailing to Marco Bay, I should have made quite sure, don’t you think? Perry is very annoyed. The silly sentimental little bitch was quite amusing, gasping and panting and slapping at her clothes to put out imaginary fires.”

“Anna, wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to live the lush life by marrying your daughter off to the Doctor?”

The needles stopped clicking and she stared at me. “My daughter! If I’d ever had children, my dear man, I can assure you they would have had considerably more intelligence than Gretchen. But then again, had she been brighter, perhaps she couldn’t have been persuaded to believe I was her mother. I had her on my hands only seven years, thank God. A tiresome child. Oh, you asked about the marriage. If the man in that untidy situation had been very rich and very obscure, it might have been an acceptable solution. But Fortner Geis was somewhat of a celebrity, and it would have been a treat for your dirty-minded newspapers, and I could not risk their prying into my personal history, of course.”

“What are you wanted for?”

She saw me start and look beyond her. She turned and saw the bald man bringing Heidi around the house. He had her hand in his and she walked quite rigidly, with a twist of pain on her lips.

“Heavens!” said Anna Ottlo. “What a small world it is after all.”

The man opened a jalousied door and pushed Heidi in and followed her. Heidi massaged the hand he had been holding and she stared at me and then at Anna and then back at me. “Tray, what are they… He walked me and said such terrible things to me. Anna, my God, what are you trying to…”

“I asked her name and she told -me,” Perry said. He stood beaming. His bald head was sunburned and peeling. He wore a sport shirt of pillow ticking, dark blue walking shorts, white canvas boat shoes. He wore his stomach high. It looked solid. He had meaty and muscular forearms, and spindly, hairy, pipestem legs. He had little brown eyes, a broad flattened nose, and a heavy sensuous mouth. “She made it too easy. I see you’re breathing again, sonny,” he said, turning toward me and giving me a quick little wink.

Anna shook her head. “How perfectly delicious, Perry. Dear Heidi. The arrogant bitch of all time. Why make her bed when old Anna could do it? Drop the clothes where you take them off. Never carry a plate to the kitchen. The cool, golden, superior princess.”

“Anna! You don’t have any accent at all.”

“What a marvel! What a miracle! Stupid housekeeper. What a treat to have you here, Miss Heidi.” Heidi lifted her chin. “Stop this nonsense at once and take that tape off Mr. McGee.”

Anna faked vast astonishment. “Is that an order?”

“I think I made it quite clear.”

“Perry, if you could teach this child to sing us a little song, I think her manners would be better.”

“My pleasure,” Perry said, with a little bow. He moved over in front of Heidi, his pudgy back toward me. He hooked one arm around her and yanked her close and busied the other hand between them. I could see the elbow turning and working.

Heidi gave a harsh gasp of shock and outrage, then her eyes and mouth opened wide and she flapped her arms weakly at the plump shoulders of the man and gave a squalling sound of pain and fright.

He let her go. She staggered, going so pale her tan looked gray-green. Her face was shiny with sweat: She took two weak steps to an aluminum and plastic chaise and half fell onto it and bowed her head all the way to her knees, flax hair aspill.

“A pretty little song, dear,” Anna said. “Now mind your mouth.” She ‘spoke to Perry in a fast guttural rattle of German. He answered and seemed to ask her a question. She thought, shrugged, gave a longer speech and he nodded, gave a short answer, gestured toward Heidi. Anna responded and he went beaming to her and picked up one hand and hauled her to her feet.

He put an arm around her and led her into the house proper. She gave me a gray, lost, hopeless look as he led her by me. In a cooing little voice he said, “Tender little dearie. Dainty little dearie.”

“Hardly little,” Anna said. “She’s a half-head taller than he is. You couldn’t have made him happier.”

“Look. She got a case of the hots and I made the mistake of letting her come back to Florida with me. She doesn’t know anything about anything. She’s a clumsy lay, and she’s a bore.”

“Perry won’t be bored.”

I heard a sharp thin high scream from somewhere inside the house. Anna looked irritated and yelled some kind of an order in German. He answered in a placating tone.

“Now he’ll go get your truck and bring it around,” she said. “All he was supposed to do was secure her in there. They have a charming little practice here in Marco Bay Mr. McGee. We all have these little round signs on sharp sticks that we can stick in the ground out at the end of the driveway to show we are taking naps. They. say Hush, Friend on them. Nobody ever violates the rule. Perry stuck ours in when he went to get Miss Heidi.”

“Did both of you work on Saul Gorba?”

“Just Perry. Saul was a fool. Very smart and very sly, but careless and impulsive. Hard to control. He couldn’t see why it was best he should marry Gretchen. We did not wish to alarm him by telling him that if the Doctor became stubborn it would be necessary to arrange certain accidents so that in the end Susan would be the only heir. Perry is very skilled at such things. But the Doctor decided not to be stubborn. I knew how much money there would be. I knew how long he thought he might live. I knew his warm feeling for Mrs. Stanyard, and knew when she visited her husband. I knew many useful things. Perry found that farm for them, a place good for our purposes. We needed Saul Gorba for certain risky things, like taking Braniy for the ride, like breaking into Mrs. Stanyard’s apartment to do the thing with the cat. And he was very good at documents. Perry and Wilma Hennigan are very welldocumented people. Saul had a great greed for money. It was amusing to discuss it with him in. German. Stupid Gretchen had lost almost all of her German. Saul taught me how to wire the noisemaker to Gloria’s little automobile. And, of course, when the gift of candy was in the house, I opened it carefully and fixed a special treat for Miss Heidi.”

“Why did Dr. Geis set up Mrs: Stanyard for Susan to go to if she needed help?”

“There was a certain threat made against the girl, a nastiness to be done to her. This was over the telephone, you understand. That is how negotiations were handled. A whisper over a pay telephone, by Saul, of course. We told him what to say. We frequently… encouraged the Doctor in that way.” She bit her lip. “I could not say. Perhaps Saul was a little too convincing when he spoke of the girl. At any rate, I saw the letter before it was mailed to Mrs. Stanyard. I told Saul about it, and the fool told Susan he knew where she’d. go for help, after he had beaten…”

Perry came out onto the sun porch from the main part of the. house. They carried on a lengthy conversation. I got the impression she made a suggestion he did not like, and he made a series of alternate suggestions. She turned every one down, firmly. He pouted like a fat child. She gave him a lit tle lecture, a teasing tone in her voice. He shrugged, smiled, brightened up and went back into the house.

Anna said, “Poor disappointed man. He has all the rest of the day and into the night for both of you, and I have told him that under no circumstances must you he marked, either of you.” She got up and came over and bent to peer at my throat. She rubbed it briskly with the flat of her hand and went back to her chair saying, “That will not be noticeable.” She sat down and picked up her knitting: “We have decided to hold your faces down in a basin of salt water from the bay so that the lungs will be proof of death by drowning. And tonight late we shall undress you both on a quiet beach we found that is twenty miles from here, and put your clothing on the seat of that truck of yours and push you into the sea and drive back in our car together. A blanket on the beach and perhaps some beer, that will add conviction.”

I heard Heidi’s voice whimpering and pleading. Anna smiled. “I told him it is a test of his ingenuity. Many things can be managed. At least he has time, not the way it was with Gretchen when Saul called up in panic to say she had guessed what he had been up to and was threatening to take the children and leave. He had only one hour with her.” A sudden harsh hoarse cry of anguish from Heidi sickened me. It sounded effortful enough to tear her throat.

“His little bird sings well for him. You understand, of course, about people like Perry. I like a bit of it, for amusement. But to him it is necessary. A sexual orientation, I suppose. First there must be the gross humiliations, the unthinkable violations of the precious citadel of self, with pain as the spice and fright as the sauce. But he will have to do with what variations he can invent on that theme, because he cannot have what he likes best, to create those moments of ultimate hopeless horror when his companion experiences damage she knows cannot be undone, cannot be mended, and then begins to wonder how long he or she will be forced to sustain the burden of consciousness and of life itself.”

Out of the silence Heidi began to make an explosive sound, a kind of squealing grunting sound repeated over and over in abrupt jolting rhythm, then dying slowly away.

Anna listened with tilted head, half-smile. “Ah, he is a rascal, that one!”

My heart was breaking for Heidi. All the silky luxuries of her, and the sense of fun, and all her quick sure hungers.

“Listen, Anna. Make him stop. Please. I’ll make a deal. I got to the farm before the police did. I found what Perry couldn’t find. Maybe the figure is proof enough. A hundred and seventy-eight thousand, six hundred and fifty. I kept it. I’ll make a deal. If she has to die, okay, but no more of him. Make it easy for her and I’ll tell you where it is and how you can get it in absolute safety”

She put the knitting aside, next to the revolver on the table beside her chair. “Poor Saul thought he would keep that money. He could not know he was only holding it for us until it was time to leave. Then he lost his silly head over that juicy little wench and after beating her in a temper, let her sneak away. So when he found out she was gone, he went to a pay phone and called me late that Monday afternoon and I told him to get the children out of the house, to leave them with friends.”

“God! God! God!” Heidi cried, her voice rusted almost shut.

“Stop him,” I yelled.

“Where was the money Mr. McGee?”

“Hidden in dings he put into the fenders and body and covered over with plastic and painted. Stop him. Please!”

With half-smile and half-frown she said, “But I’d have to give him a reason. Saul died after just a few hours. Perry was furious. He searched as long as he dared and then came back. It would be nice to have that money, but not really essential. I think you must have given it to Mr. Andrus anyway. If I called Perry and told him such nonsense he would just say that when he finishes with her and gets to you, you will tell him everything you know anyway, so what is the point? I wouldn’t think of spoiling his pleasure.”

Then came a cry from Heidi more horrid than anything which had gone before. It was a wild straining, climbing, gargling croak that stopped with a sickening abruptness.

Anna pushed herself to her feet, scowling. “Now I don’t think he could get that much effect unless he has…”

The blackest anger and total despair can give you what you need for superhuman effort, if you can focus it and direct it. I yanked my feet back, lunged up, and stood in precarious balance, hunched in the aluminum embrace of the chair. And I went at her, hoppity-hop, grunting, fighting for balance. I had the vague idea of charging into her, knocking her down, and getting my teeth into her fat neck.

With a look of alarm she turned to reach for the pistol. I had lost my balance on the last hop and as I started to fall forward, I gave a final thrust and felt my head ram the softness of her belly, heard the air grunt out of her. I fell onto my side, the aluminum clattering onto the terrazzo, and saw her stagger back, turn half around to catch her balance, trip as one foot came out of a zori, take two little running steps, head down, and then dive.

Her brick-red head hit the window wall section perhaps two feet from the bottom. It punched a huge shard of glass out onto the grass, and ran diagonal cracks all the way up to the top corners. Small pieces sprinkled down onto the terrazzo. She lay face down with her throat across the sill where the plate glass had been puttied in. The top section was suspended. It shimmied. It creaked. Pieces of dry putty fell, then suddenly the great plate of glass worked loose and fell like a great blade, straight down.

She humped her purple hips high and smacked them down. The final grind and bump. The falling glass had made an enormous sound. The brick-red hair did not go well with the spreading puddle of bright red blood.

I hitched myself with frantic effort toward the small table by her chair. I hooked my feet around a table leg and yanked it over. I could hear him coming. The gun spun to a stop five feet away. More lumpy hitching spasmodic effort, like a legless bug.

“Fredrika! Fredrika!” he called in a voice of anguish and loss. He was behind me. I could not see him. I got my fingers on the gun. I could barely feel it. My hands were numb. I fumbled at it and my right hand would not pick it up.

Something yanked my chair back. He bent and picked up the gun. He was bare to the waist, oiled with sweat, his chest hairless, his breasts fatty as a woman’s. His mouth worked and he sobbed and he aimed the snub barrel at the center of my face. He was bending over me. There was a strange sudden sound, a damp, smacky little chunking sound. He straightened up and stood very still as if listening to something a long way off. The Airweight slid out of his hand and clanked on the floor. Then he puddled down slowly, with a tired sigh, and stretched out on his back, his head lolling toward me, eyes half-open, only the whites showing, and with a small, very neat, very very round hole punched through the bone of brow an inch above the left eyebrow, and on the curve of forehead into temple. A single blood-drop ran an inch away from the hole and stopped at the end of its pink snailtrail. Belly gas rumbled and then made a little snore sound as it carne out through the flaccid throat.

I had a view of the lawn beyond the broken glass from a vantage point about as high as a rabbit’s eye, and I saw two men come across from the direction of the punk-tree hedge. It was an arty director’s angle at combat technique. They came toward the house, running swiftly, widely separated, constantly varying both direction and speed, weapons held in a familiar readiness. The ultimate and grotesque contrast was in the way they were dressed-neat dark trousers, dress shoes, white shirts, neckties.

“It’s okay!” I shouted. “It’s safe.”

They dived and disappeared. “What is your name?” one of them called. Veddy British.

“McGee. Travis McGee. They’re both dead.” They appeared suddenly, much closer, standing upright, stepping through the great hole where the glass had been, avoiding the blood. Trim-bodied men in their early thirties. Tough and watchful faces, an air of special communication between them. As they quickly checked the bodies of the man and the woman, I said, “The girl needs help. She’s somewhere in the house.”

One gave the other an order in a language I did not understand and then went into the house. The order-taker set his weapon aside and righted the chair with me in it with an effortlessness that shocked me. He took out a pocket knife, inserted the blade near- the aluminum arm, and with one keen stroke sliced the tape open from elbow to wrist. He put the knife down…paused, shrugged, gave me a gold-toothed grin, and said, “No Englitch,” and ripped the tape loose in a single yank that took the hair and felt as if it had taken the skin too.

As he was slicing the other arm free, the other one came out of the house onto the porch and said, “D’you know the lassie quite well, McGee?”

“Yes. How is she?”

“Bit hard to tell. Better see if you can settle her down.”

I winced as the other arm was ripped loose. I massaged my hands and a painful prickling began to penetrate through the numbness. The goldtoothed one squatted to slice my ankles free.

The one standing gave the dead man a casual kick and said, “I suspect the old sod merely scuffed her up a bit. The Captain here had to take the clean shot before he blew your face off with this silly little weapon. Too bad. We wanted a chat with Wilhelm.”

“Captain?”

“On leave. From the Israeli Army. Spot of sightseeing here and there.” He helped me to my feet. I wobbled and then steadied. “Tend the lady while we look about,” he said. “She’s in the bathroom.”

Heidi lay naked on her side in the corner beyond the shower stall, on a floor of yellow and white octagonal tiles. Her knees were pulled up to her chin, fists hugged between her breasts, smudged eyes closed, hair matted with drying sweat. There were two doors into the bathroom. Her clothing was on a hanger on the hook on the closed door, arranged with a deadly Germanic neatness. Damp towels were strewn about. The man’s pillow-ticking shirt was on another hanger.

I squatted beside her, touched her shoulder, and said, “Honey?”

She gave a convulsive start and scrabbled her way into the corner and kept scrabbling as though to push her way through the wall. With wide bluegray eyes focused on me but not seeing me, she said, “Please not any more, please, oh God, please no.” It was a sugary sweet little gamin croak, a humble little voice for begging, and it sounded like the husk of a long-ago movie star whose name I could- not remember.

“You’re all right now, honey. It’s me. It’s Trav.” She looked very dubious. Very skeptical. Her teeth chattered. Incongruously I remembered the fate of the Packard phaeton after my dear old buddy Buzzy borrowed it and didn’t make a curve. He took me out the next morning and showed me. He had missed a tree and a telephone pole by narrow margins, had gone down a forty-degree slope and torn a swath through scrub alder and then hit the almost dry creek bed. It had gone a hundred feet along the creek bed. The water-smooth boulders were the size of peck baskets and bushel baskets. The sturdy old car had rearranged a few dozen of them. Everything that could possibly be shaken loose had flown off the car, including both sides of the foldback hood. Axles, drive shaft, frame, engine block, and all four wheels broken.

“It’s like a miracle all I got was just this one little bump on the head,” said Buzzy.

We salvaged the parts worth salvaging. It squatted there among the stones and during the spring torrents from the snow melting up in the hills, it disappeared completely.

She let me take her by the wrists, and she did not resist very much as I pulled her to her feet. She leaned against me and in her tiny croak said, “He kept… He made me… He put…”

“Easy, honey. It’s all okay.”

“It hurt so,” she said. “It hurt so bad.”

It was like dressing a child who is just learning about buttons and sleeves. She would help a little and then forget. I took her into a bedroom. She walked like a convalescent taking the first trip down the hospital corridor without the wheelchair. I sat her on the edge of a neatly made bed, lifted her feet up onto the spread. She lay back and looked at me out of child-eyes and I said, “Rest a little while, honey. Then we’ll go.”

‘ “All right.”

I found them in the living room, the Captain watching while the Englishman went through each drawer, looking at each piece of paper.

He looked up and said, “How is she?”

“Shaky. I made her lie down and get a little rest. Suppose you start with the beach that night in December. Who hit me and what with?”

“My dear chap, we don’t have to start with anything and go anywhere.”

I stood over him and said, “I have been goddam near choked to death. I have been tricked by two old folks, and I have listened to that girl screaming when I could not do a damned thing about it. With pure courage and brute strength and great skill I managed to kill a fifty-six-year-old woman in purple pants. Now stop the secret-agent act, buddy, and give me the score.”

He spoke to his friend, the friend shrugged and said something, and they both laughed.

The Englishman went back to his search. He began speaking, stopping for a few moments when he came to any piece of paper that interested him. “I was eight years old, thereabouts; when our dead friends out there made the list. The names won’t mean anything to you. Fredrika Gronwald. Wilhelm Vogel. He was one of the Munich bully boys. When The Thousand Years began, they became an interrogation team. They sifted the camp list, picked up people who looked useful, worked the last crumb of information out of them, and made confidential reports to Himmler. I can assume they were ambitious, but their methods turned too many stomachs, Gestapo stomachs even, a very considerable accomplishment. Both of them would have given a clinical psychiatrist weeks of good fun. Aberrant types. Opportunity reinforces the aberrations.

“The list grows very short these days, McGee. Those two eased out so cleverly it took a long time to piece it, all together. They fell out of favor in late 1942, and they were sly enough to sense how the war was going. While they still had interrogation privileges they searched the camps-not the death camps-for new identities. She found an Anna ®ttlo, same age and build, some facial resemblance. She’d been in since thirty-seven. Her child, Gretchen, was in another area of the camp and hadn’t seen her mother in the whole five years. From what we can gather, they took the Ottlo woman and extracted a complete personal history from her before finishing her off. Maybe she had remaining relatives who had to be done away with also in order to be safe. Perhaps the test was the reunion with the daughter, not a terribly bright child. When the daughter bought it, Fraulein Gronwald knew the child was her ticket through the interrogation by the other side. We suspect that Vogel did much the same sort of thing. They duplicated the camp identity tattoos, slipped into one of the underground escape routes, and made it all the way to the Land of Liberty.

“Four years ago we got a recognition report on her from Chicago, and it moved her name up to the active list. There was a certain clumsiness a year later which alerted her. We debated bagging her then before she made a run, but the powers that be are far more interested in Vogel. We can’t move swiftly, unfortunately. Limited resources. No phone taps possible. One must have a taste for the hunt. Once they knew, or sensed, they had been spotted, I imagine they thought it essential to extort funds from her employer: Vogel’s work on the Gorba chap was as unmistakable as a signature. Incidentally, you did a respectable job of work tracing them here, McGee. I imagine you have a good amateur instinct for it. We traced it through the shipping arrangements she made for her two crates of personal possessions. An intricate pattern, but not intricate enough. In earlier years she would have had the sense to abandon such things. Ah! This looks promising.”

He showed it to me. It was a receipted statement for almost two hundred dollars for installation of a barrel safe in the utility room.

It had been installed in the floor. The circular cement lid with recessed lift-ring was hidden by a grass rug. The Englishman gave an order when the safe was exposed, and the Captain went out and came back quickly with a tool case. He opened it and took out a little aluminum chassis case with a speaker grill, toggle switch, and volume dial. The single lead was a suction-cup mike. He pressed it against the safe above the dial, turned the rig on, turned the volume high. It made a continuous hissing sound. He turned the safe dial slowly to the left. There was an amplified grating sound and then a sharp clack. He turned the dial to the right until it clacked again, then to the left until the third clack. He tried to open it but it was still sealed. He went the second time to the right. After the fourth clack he tried again and opened the safe. As he turned the amplifier off and pulled the suction mike loose, the Englishman knelt and began reaching down into the safe and taking the contents out, examining each item. He opened a thick manila envelope, thumbed a double sheaf of currency over three inches thick, slipped the red rubber band around the envelope, and flipped it to me, saying, “Your affair, I believe.”

I caught it, hefted it. “But shouldn’t you take some of it, at least?”

He smiled up at me. “My dear chap, there would be a positive wilderness of forms and reports to complete, absolutely weeks of desk work. If you do feel some intense obligation, suggest to your principals they send some over as a contribution to the Irrigation Plan, or some such.”

I made protest but he didn’t hear me. He had found a little tattered pocket notebook. Their heads were close together as they turned the pages slowly. They made excited comment to each other.

He stood up. “Bit of luck. Seems to be some fivenumber groupings that could be what we call the Argentina code. Still a few of them holed up down there. Getting quite old. Sly as old foxes. Constant condition of fright, and bloody well justified. I think you’d best gather up your lady and be off. We have a spot of stage management to do here.” His smile was the coldest I have ever seen. “Rearrange the meat, plausibly”

“But won’t they…”

“Don’t worry your downy head, dear fellow. After all, it’s our game, isn’t it?”

With Heidi in a huddled silence on the seat beside me, I passed their parked car after I turned out of the drive. It was a pale green sedan with New York plates. Gold lettering on the side door said, “Freddy’s Exterminator Service” with an Albany phone number.

I drove eastward through the bright day, in tourist traffic. Herons and egrets fished the canals, as did people with cane poles. I had never thought that an ugliness of so long ago could ever reach into my life. I had thought it was all history-book stuff, and that all that Eichmann hooraw had been an anachronistic after-echo of it.

It gave the same feeling as if I looked over across the saw-grass flats dotted with cypress hammocks and saw one of the great carnivorous lizards rise up onto his steaming haunches, with scaly head big as a Volkswagen, scales gleaming like oiled metal in the sunshine, great tearing fangs of the flesh eater, and the cold yellow savagery of the ancient saurian eye.

I could not have guessed that any fragments of that old evil were still around, and still claiming victims. Gretchen, Gloria, Saul Gorba, Fortner Geis, Susan, and the silent, wretched, violated girl beside me. Know-it-all McGee. I’d been a damned fool prancing in total naive confidence around the edges of disaster, like a blind man dancing on a roof.

“Hungry at all?” I asked her.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shake her head no. I drove on, contemptuous of myself and my comedy automobile and my sybaritic nest of a houseboat, and all my minor skills, and all the too familiar furniture of my life and my brain.

FOURTEEN

THREE DAYS later, after making the necessary phone calls to set it up, I got an early jet to Chicago from Miami International with a firm reservation for a flight back that would get me in at ten that night.

It was three below zero at O’Hare. Janice Stanyard met me and I drove her car out to Lake Pointe. All the kids were in school. Big logs were crackling in the fireplace. Jeanie, Roger Geis’s wife, had come over to be with Glory while Janice went in to get me.

Gloria hugged herself to me, and laughed, and tears spilled at the same time. She looked better than I had been led to hope. John Andrus arrived ten minutes after I got there. I had given him the total of the second piece of salvage over the phone, and he brought along a work sheet of the probable estate-tax bite.

Gloria and John and I closeted ourselves in Fort’s study. I took the money out of the briefcase Meyer had loaned me and put the banded stacks on the desk. Personally counted and banded by McGee. Gloria sat in Fort’s leather chair. She studied the work sheet. “So, in round numbers, John, it makes an additional hundred and twenty thousand for me and sixty each for Roger and Heidi.”

“Approximately. We’re still way short of what’s missing.”

“But there won’t be any more,” I told him.

As I told you on the phone, John, Travis gets sixty thousand of my share. Half.“

“Just a minute, Glory…”

“Minute nothing. You wouldn’t take any of that first part. I know your rules, Trav. I knew them when I yelled for help. And even if I didn’t, it’s worth more than sixty thousand to know that… that damned woman gave it to me, that I didn’t take an overdose. I don’t care how you arrange it, John. Just arrange it.”

I said I would take absolutely nothing. She said she would force me to take it all if I made her any angrier. Impasse. So I reached over and took one slender packet with $10,000 printed on the band and tucked it into the inside pocket of my winter jacket and said, “I must have made a mistake counting it. Pretty stupid, I guess. What I actually recovered is ten thousand less than I told you, John. Count it and see.”

He looked at me in horror. “But you can’t just and put it in your pick up ten thousand dollars pocket, man!”

“I didn’t see him do that. Are you out of your mind, John? Did you pick up any money, Travis?”

“Certainly not! Do you think I’m low enough to steal from a poor little woman who has five kids to educate?”

“But,” he said. “But… oh, the hell with it! I am going to take this to the bank. I am going to put it in the vault. Then I am going to the club and I am going to sit at the bar for a long long time.”

After Andrus left I showed the women the clip from the Naples paper. Tragedy at Senior Center. Wife dies in freak accident during quarrel. Husband slays self, leaves note.

I didn’t answer their questions very well. I didn’t know too much about anything, just that it seemed she was some kind of a war criminal or something and she’d been in hiding for all those years, and Gretchen wasn’t even her daughter. We’d been there when a couple of men appeared to settle old scores.

“But why wouldn’t you let me talk to Heidi on the phone?” Gloria demanded.

“It was all pretty sudden and pretty violent and it shook her up badly. Sensitive, you know. Artistic temperament. She’s started going to a good man. Talk it out. Get steadied down.” I patted my pocket. “When she gets a clean bill, I think I’ll tote her back down to St. Croix on this money.”

“Have you ever considered making an honest woman o my sister-in-law?” Jeanie Geis asked sweetly.

Gloria snorted and said, “If she was honest they wouldn’t have anything in common, dear. And I believe she did try marriage once.”

“Dear Gadge,” Jeanie sighed. “Well, do have fun. I have to run. Give Heidi a hug for me. Keep well, Glory. Jan, dear, I’ll try to remember to phone about Tuesday, but if I forget, you call me. Let’s all see if we can’t settle down into some kind of nice quiet predictable life, shall we? Ciao, everybody.”

We flew over and settled into a two-bedroom cottage on a Thursday, the second day of March. We were a couple of miles closer to Christiansted, the cottage not as attractive or as well furnished, the beach narrower. But the sea was the same, and the flowers and the smell of the air. And I managed to rent the same kind of car and lease the same breed of small sailboat.

The doctor had recommended that I try to create the same scene as closely as possible. It is both unpleasant and difficult to sit across a desk from a grave and bespectacled man and tell him in clinical detail just how one had managed to introduce the repressed lady to enjoyment and untie the knots that had kept her so hung-up. There is a temptation to skip parts of it, and to go into an aw-shucks routine. He solemnly told me the obvious as though it were news, saying that her previous sexual repression with its neurotic basis was what was now preventing her from recovering from the emotional damage of being abused in crude fashion. He said that I should not, under any circumstances, make any direct or indirect sexual advance to her.

And no matter how deliciously lovely she looked on the St. Croix beach or on the sailboat, or how painfully and often I would be spitted by a shaft of pure aching old-timey lust, sharpened by the bursting health of beach and sea, sailing and swimming, and one of my periodic programs of physical conditioning-easy on the sauce and groceries; push-ups, sit-ups, duck walks, sprints on land and in the sea, I was not going to lay a hand on the damosel, not after two gestures of physical affection back aboard the Flush before I knew how deep the fright was. Each response was a convulsive leap. Once she spun into the wall, hands upraised, face sweaty and drained of blood, staring at me but without any knowledge of who I was or where she was. The second time she ran headlong over a chair and finished on her hands and knees, facing me, backing into a corner and trying to keep backing after she got there.

It is difficult to describe properly what our relationship was like during those weeks of March. We used separate bedrooms. Perhaps the best analogy is that we were like the only two passengers on a freighter. Because we were sharing meals and the long voyage, it would have been ridiculous not to go through the polite ceremonies of acquaintanceship. We could share the sea view, relish the weather, play deck games.

She was often listless, lost in her thoughts, looking up from a book to stare for a long time at the far edge of the sea, white teeth pinching into her underlip. At other times she had energy to spare. She was ripe with health, her hide taut and glossy, a blue tint to the whites of her eyes.

And then, one night, as the world was gathering itself to roll on into the fragrance of April, I was slowly awakened by her. I had been asleep on my back. She was beside me, braced to look down into my face, angled so that there was the warm silk of her against the side of my leg. Her face was in the steady silver of the moonlight, unreadable eyes pockets of shadow, the two sheafs of hair hanging to brush the sides of my cheek and neck. Moon made a single catch-light on the curve of underlip. A scalding tear fell onto my upper lip near the corner of my mouth, and with tongue tip I hooked in the small taste of her salt: When she leaned slowly down and lay the soft acceptance of her mouth onto mine, I did not dare touch her. Each time she bent to kiss, I felt the weight and sweetness and warmth of her, bare breasts upon my chest. Slow kisses and slow tears, and I dared hold her, but there was no start, no tension, just a slow and dreamy sensuousness, turning gently for me, with small urging pressures, to lay as I had been and lift in a waiting readiness, fingertips on my shoulders bearing no more weight than the moonlight, and in the slowness of joining her catch of breath was almost inaudible, and the following sigh as soft and fragrant as the night breeze.

In one lifetime how many times can it be like that, be a ceremony that becomes so unrelated to the flesh that I had the feeling I floated disembodied in the night sky, halfway between sea and stars, looking down upon a tiny cutaway cottage, at two figures there in the theater of moonlight caught in a slow unending dance to the doubled heartbeat, a counterpoint in offstage drums. But there is a time to fall out of the sky, and a fall from that height makes long moments of half-light, of knowing and not knowing, of being and dying.

When I felt her beginning to leave me, I caught at her to hold her, but she whispered, “No.” I let my fingertips trail down her arm as she went out of moonlight into the darkness and back to her own bed. That single whispered monosyllable was the only word she had said. I could feel my mouth smiling as I slid toward sleep. Total and unflawed smugness. Patience, understanding, and self-control had done it, boy. She has turned the corner. And now day by day and night by night we would build it all back, into all our old moods and manners of making love, of hearing her little soft chuckling laugh of pleasure as she felt herself beginning to begin.

I slept later than usual and when I came yawning out in swim trunks, with a piece of tissue pasted onto a razor nick, she was just finishing her packing. I asked what the hell. She looked very groomed and brisk and competent. She said she had phoned and made flight reservations. If I’d put on a shirt and slacks we’d have time to drive to the hotel and have breakfast with a comfortable margin to get to the airport for her flight.

I kept saying Why often enough to sound like some kind of rotor that needed greasing. She looked pale. She snapped the catches on her second suitcase and looked around with that GotEverything? look. Then she marched to me and stuck her hand out like a lady ambassador.

“We’d better say good-bye here, Travis.”

I tried to pull her into my arms but she begged and demanded and I gave up. “Then answer the question,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I have to have my own life.”

“Oh, greatl”

“I’ll never forget you. You’ll always be… part of me, part of whatever happens to me.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t scowl so, darling. Please. Remember when you told me in Chicago I was standing outside the gates looking in, wistfully? So you opened the gates. Huge heavy gates with rusty hinges, and you led me in to where all the gardens are. I thank you with all my heart. Darling, if it had stopped there, I could have survived beautifully, and kept my own identity. But don’t you understand? I got thrown out into the darkness again. I nearly lost my mind. And you had it to do all over again, but differently, because I knew the second time what it could be. And, bless you, the gates are open again, just a little way. I squeezed through. I’m standing just inside the gates. But I can’t go see all the gardens with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because then you would own me; every atom of heart and soul and body forever, and life would have no meaning except as it related to you. It would be a total dependency as long as I might live. I do not want that kind of life or that kind of love. But if you want me on those terms, Travis, if you want that responsibility for another human being forever, say so, and I’ll cancel the reservation and unpack. I am fighting like hell for emotional survival, and I’m right on the edge of surrender. I think if I am going to be a whole person, now that I am inside the gates again, I had best go the rest of the way with some man I have yet to meet, but know in my heart I will meet. Shall I phone?” Her stare was intent, direct, searching. Her mouth was trembling.

So I put on shirt and slacks and put her bags in the car.

Meyer keeps telling me that I did exactly the right thing. He keeps telling me that she knew how a dependence that total would have suffocated me. But when he looks at the painting she sent me, his voice loses conviction. A small painting. She sent it air express from Chicago. It is an enchanted picture. At close range it is an abstraction, an arrangement of masses and light and color. But when you get back from it you realize you are looking through the black bars of an ancient iron gate, into a place where there are black limbs of old and twisted trees. The sky is a heavy dreary gray, but there is a shaft of sunlight shining down on a vivid brightness of gardens, a small place you can see beyond the gate and the trees.

I think that when he looks at the painting Meyer has the same suspicion I have, that maybe all along this was the one, and that she got away. I am outside the gates and there is no one to open them.

So then he tries to lift our mood and he makes his jokes, and when I sense that he is trying too hard with the jokes I manage to laugh a little.

Otherwise he’d just stand around looking like Smokey the Bear watching all the forests burn down.

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