Recoil

1

The door closed behind her with a shuddering steel crash. The corrections officer at the desk looked up once, dropped his eyes to the stack of forms and did not look at her again. “Name?”

“You know my name.”

“We get a lot of visitors.”

She said, “Anna Pastor. Mrs. Frank Pastor.”

He filled in a space at the top of a form, writing with a ball-point. “You’re here to see...?”

“My husband.” She took one step forward and placed the visitor’s pass on the desk. She kept her hand on it.

It took forty minutes; then she sat in a hard chair at the long table. It ran wall to wall: The mesh partition filled the space from tabletop to ceiling. She had learned how to ignore the flyspecked green walls and the men who stood just inside the doors with their pot bellies cinched up by black pistol belts.

Frank came in and faced her through the mesh in his drab uniform. She smiled at him. He drew out the chair and sat down.

“They all send regards.”

“How are the girls?”

“Sandy has a cold. I’m keeping her in bed today. Ezio told me he heard a rumor about your parole.”

When he smiled it made her think of the early days. He was still thin but he’d gone bald on top and that had aged him. She said, “We’ll have to get you a hairpiece.”

“What rumor?”

“Two months at most. Maybe six weeks.”

“Well now.” He smiled again; he began to relax.

“It’s only a rumor, Frank.”

“Sure.”

She said the rest with a nod: The parole board had been reached, the petition would be affirmed; the fix was in.

“Eight years,” he said.

“Don’t think about it, Frank.”

“Nothing else to think about. Nothing else to do except think about it.” He looked around from guard to guard; his voice dropped. “There was a piece in the Post last week. Page five.”

“I saw it. I gave it to Ezio.”

“You ask Ezio for me, ask him to find those four gentlemen.”

“We’ll see if we can’t give them to you at the front gate. As a coming-out present. Gift-wrapped.”

It inspired his quiet laughter.

2

She put the soup pot on the front burner, heard the doorbell and glanced at the monitor screen above the refrigerator. It was Ezio’s face, a pattern of gray dots; he stared gravely into the camera.

She pressed the door-release button and saw him walk out of the picture; then she heard the front door.

“I’m in the kitchen.”

His wide body filled the doorway. “How’s Frank?”

“I haven’t seen him smile like that in years. He even laughed.”

“Yeah.” The cigar had gone out. Ezio snapped his gold lighter. He didn’t look at her; he rarely did. She was still the outsider: He did not let her forget she was the second Mrs. Pastor.

She put the lid on the pot. “Sandy’s got a cold, I’m making her some lentil soup. Want some?”

“No. I’m on my way to a meeting. Just checking in.”

“He saw the article in the Post. He wants the four of them found.” She searched his face. “Any progress?”

He was looking at the monitor screen; his answer was reluctant. “You could say so. We’re getting close to their files.”

“How close?”

“We’ll know Thursday, one way or the other.”

“Better find them, Ezio.”

“I know. Say hello to the girls for me.” He put his hat on and left.

She took the lid off. It was bubbling. She opened the cabinet and took down a soup bowl. On the monitor screen she saw Ezio walk away toward the elevator.

The youth had crow’s-wing hair and a pointed face. He called himself C. K. Gillespie but Ezio called him Charlie because he didn’t like the arrogance of people who used initials in place of a name. He thought of Charlie as a flyweight kid, although Charlie was ten years older than he looked, had a busy law practice in Washington and had done satisfactory work for the Pastor organization.

Charlie came into the office at ten minutes to four. Ezio was reading the Wall Street Journal. “You’re twenty minutes late.”

“We were in the holding pattern. This place swept for bugs?”

“Once a week. And the jammer’s always running. You ought to apologize a little for being late.”

“I never apologize for something that isn’t my fault.”

“It’s just good manners, you know.”

Charlie sat down. He was slim in the sharkskin suit. It looked vaguely Sy Devore, Ezio thought — something West Coast about it. He couldn’t wear clothes like that; from the age of six he’d been built like a beer truck. He had decided he looked best in winter tweed and summer seersucker, and those were all he ever wore.

“And you ought to wait for somebody to ask you to sit down before you sit. It’s presumptuous.”

“Ezio, I like you a lot but I don’t need courtesy lessons from you. I match my manners to the company I’m in.”

“Don’t patronize me, Charlie, I’m not one of your Texas hillbilly clients.”

“No.” Charlie smiled a little and that made Ezio wonder how the kid actually did picture him. As a gorilla with an education, probably. Charlie still had a lot of things to learn and one of them was about jumping to oversimplified conclusions.

Ezio said, “Mr. Pastor’s anxious for news from Washington.”

“I met Mrs. Janowicz this morning.”

“And?”

“The security’s pretty tight there.”

“We already knew that, Charlie.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t call me that.”

“When you’re in this chair you can call yourself anything you want. Right now I’m in this chair and you’re in that one, Charlie. Now tell me about that secretary — what’s her name again?

“Janowicz. Mary Janowicz.”

“Polack?”

“Irish. She’s married to a Polack.”

“Polish-American, Charlie. An important attorney like you shouldn’t stoop to ethnic slurs. Only thugs and bigots use words like that.”

Charlie smiled again: He didn’t rise to it. But Ezio liked to bait him because someday he was going to find out whether the kid had balls.

“She’s got a girl friend she loves once or twice a week. She wouldn’t want it broadcast. The people she works for are stuffy about that kind of thing.”

Ezio made a face. “So am I, as a matter of fact.”

“We’ve got three hundred feet of infrared film. She’s a little fat but you could possibly get six bucks a ticket in a Times Square porn house. She got the idea all right. Then also of course we offered her money to cooperate. Enough money to make her start thinking about the possibilities.”

“How did you get onto her?”

“We put an investigative staff on everybody working out of Corcoran’s headquarters. She turned out to be the apple. All it takes is time and patience.”

“They’ve got their own security checks. If you could turn her up why haven’t they tumbled to it too?”

“It only started a few months ago. She’s been married three years. The honeymoon wore off and she got seduced by this lesbian after a bridge game. That’s how we cottoned onto it — Mrs. Janowicz always stayed behind for an hour or so after the other women left.”

“So why hasn’t the federal security found out?”

“They probably will, next time they run a spot check on the people out of that office. That’s why we’ve got to get it done fast.”

“What’s the hang-up?”

“Access. She doesn’t work in the file section. She’s the secretary to the GS-8 who runs the assignment section.”

“What does that mean?”

“He prepares the new identities. New job, name, location, all the details. He’s got to get the birth certificate, driver’s license, credit cards, all the ID documents. All that stuff has to be legitimate, so it takes time. They’ve got this one official who does it full time. His name’s Fordham, if it matters. Janowicz is his secretary.”

“How the hell can they provide a new legitimate birth certificate for a man who’s full grown?”

“The same way you get one for a phony passport or license. Graveyard registrations. They take, say, a forty-year-old guy that they need papers for. They go back forty years in a newspaper file somewhere, they find a death notice for an infant. Then they check back to the birth notice for that same infant. They go to the hall of records and they buy a notorized official copy of the birth certificate. That’s how they pick the new names for the witnesses — the name originally belonged to some baby that died young. So it’s a real birth certificate.”

“Charlie, you were going to tell me about the delay.”

“Fordham deals only with the new people that come in. Looking after the ones who’ve already been relocated, that’s another department. Bureaucracy, you know, everybody’s a specialist. Witnesses they’ve already relocated go into a standby status after the marshals pull their surveillance off them. It’s an active file because they do regular spotchecks to make sure the people are still secure. But it’s a different department.”

“Then what good does this woman do us?”

“She’s got access but it’s spotty. When they finish work on a new identity for some family they give the file to Janowicz. She takes it to the filing section and puts it in the appropriate file drawer. The drawers are organized by cross-reference. Both under the new phony name and under the old real name. That’s because sometimes they have to call these people back to testify and they need to be able to find them themselves. So all we need is a peek in those files. We’re looking for John Doe, say, so we just look up John Doe, and it says, ‘See William Smith, four-six-two Chingadera Avenue, Podunk, Nebraska.’ Janowicz goes into those files once or twice a week to enter a new file. She’s given a temporary onetime clearance each time. It’d be easier for us if they had it in a computer, but they don’t.” Charlie cleared his throat, crossed his legs and resumed:

“When she does it she’s in plain sight of the security guard. She can find a name and address for us all right. But she’d attract suspicion if she opened more than one drawer per trip, and sometimes weeks go by between trips to any particular drawer — maybe even months. They’ve had this operation seven years now and there are only eleven hundred individuals and families in those files. Figure it out — even if they’re doing more business now, entering another new case every few days, there’s still a couple of dozen file drawers in there and the odds of hitting the right one are kind of puny. We give her a name, we might get the answer overnight and then again we might have to wait a month or six weeks before she gets into that drawer.”

Ezio watched Charlie screw a long cigarette into a silver holder. He didn’t prompt Charlie. When the cigarette was burning Charlie spoke again:

“We’ve got to wait for her to get a new file that fits alphabetically into the same drawer that’s got one of the four files we want. Am I boring you?”

“When I get bored I’ll yawn.”

“For instance we want her to find the file on Walter Benson, right? But she’s got to wait for them to get a new file on somebody whose name starts with B. You follow?”

Charlie’s smile hardened like a trap abruptly sprung. “I’ve got Benson for you. She came through with it last night. He’s calling himself William Smithers, he’s working as an assistant manager in Maddox’s Department Store in Norman, Oklahoma, and he lives at one-eighteen Bickham Place in Norman.”

Ezio wrote it down. He made a point of showing no emotion. “All right. Now go back and get the other three.”

1

Fred Mathieson locked the office safe and went out through the reception office. He heard movement across the room — Phil Adler, leaning through the doorway of his office. “Didn’t realize you were still here, Fred.”

“Heading home.”

“Got a minute?”

“Jan will roast me if I’m late.”

“Only take two minutes. Time me.” Adler, red-faced and forty pounds overweight, backed out of sight.

By the time Mathieson strolled into the office Adler had sat down behind the desk, as if to assume command.

“Good thing you caught that sequel-and-remake clause in the Blackman contracts.” The air whistling through his nose commanded Mathieson’s perverse attention.

“That’s what I get my ten percent for.”

“The lawyers missed it. You caught it. I always told you you should’ve been a lawyer.”

“That’s right, I should have been a lawyer. Your two minutes are ticking, Phil. We’ve got dinner guests.”

“I just wanted to ask you one question.”

“Ask.”

“Well it’s kind of hard. I’ve been rehearsing how to do this but there just isn’t a simple way.”

Mathieson tried not to look uneasy.

Adler said, “To put it bluntly, what would you say if I offered to buy you out?”

“That’s out of left field.” It was; but he was relieved.

“I know. I’ve been thinking about it but I didn’t know how to put it to you without it sounding like an insult. God knows it’s not an insult. You’ve been a terrific partner. The absolute best.”

“Then why do you want to buy me out?”

Adler leaned back. He was trying to look relaxed but his hands gripped the chair arms and he might have been waiting for the dentist’s drill. “Five years ago you and I figured we could multiply our clout by joining forces. We did a pretty fine job of...”

“Spare me the history, Phil, your two minutes are up.”

“I have an ego problem, I guess. I’d rather be Adler Enterprises than Mathieson and Adler. I’m getting more into the production end of the business — I’ve got an associate producer credit on the Colburn movie, did you know that? And I just feel I’d prefer to have a free hand.”

If it had been anyone else he would have laughed. But Adler had no sense of humor, no picture of himself other than the surface image he’d buffed and polished; laughter would hurt him, so Mathieson didn’t laugh. What he said was, “What would happen to the clients?”

“Your clients, you mean. Nothing would happen to mine.”

“My clients, then. Do you keep them, is that the idea? Or do I take them away with me and set up my own independent agency again?”

“That’s however you’d prefer to do it, Fred. I certainly don’t want to steal your clients away from you. But if you’d like to sell your end of it completely, I’d be willing to pay a substantial hunk for your string of clients. Provided each of them was willing to be represented by me instead of you, of course.”

“What’s a substantial hunk?”

“You pick a figure and we’ll dicker.”

Mathieson said, “You wouldn’t have maybe sent out a feeler or two in the direction of my principal clients?”

“I might have. But I made it clear it was hypothetical.”

“I see. Something like, ‘If Fred should retire, or die, or anything, how would you boys feel about being represented by good old Phil Adler?’ Something like that, Phil?”

“Don’t get mad at me, damn it. Don’t try to put a sinister cast on it. I’m not doing anything underhanded.”

“I’m a little slow today but I still don’t understand why you want to dissolve the partnership. We’re making damn good money. We’re having fun — at least I am. What’s wrong with it?”

“I want to be on my own. I don’t want to have to consult anybody about decisions. Call it power hunger, call it vanity. I can’t explain it, really. I just want my own business again. Look, Fred, you’re late, you’d better get on home to Jan and your guests. But just think about it, all right? Will you do that?”

“Yes, I’ll think about it.” He left the office uncertain whether to be angry or only sad.

2

The traffic on Sunset Boulevard had thinned out and he made good time up over the top of the canyon and down the turns to his house on Beverly Glen. He recognized the Gilfillans’ Chrysler wagon parked in the oval driveway: They lived only five hundred yards away but they had become true Californians. He navigated the Porsche into the garage beside Jan’s convertible and went inside.

Roger and Amy Gilfillan were down in the Pit looking at television news. They rattled their highball glasses at him. Jan came out of the kitchen, cross with him but she put on her company smile. It changed the patterns of her freckles. They kissed with dry lips.

“It’s late, you’re sore and I’m contrite.”

“All right.” She glanced at the clock. “You may as well go and pacify our lonely guests. I’ll have it on the table in fifteen minutes.”

He went down into the room. An aspiring television star had built the house in the era of the Conversation Pit and this one looked like an indoor Olympic pool that had been emptied for the winter. It dwarfed even Roger Gilfillan, who had made a career out of being big enough to stand up to Duke Wayne in Republic prairie operas before he’d won a Supporting Actor Oscar as a genial drunken Texas millionaire in a soapy MGM titillation. Forty-six and still bemused, he seldom made anything but mindless action movies but he stood well up in the box-office top ten.

Amy was tiny and blonde and cherubic. “You look like you just got trampled in a thousand-cow stampede. Come and set and let Roger mix your drink.”

Mathieson settled into black leather cushions. Roger was uncoiling his grasshopper legs. “Bourbon?”

“God no. See if you can find Bloody Mary mix in there.”

“Rough lunch?” Roger pawed through the bar refrigerator.

“You could say that. Like a combat mission.”

Roger had a high whinnying laugh. “We ought to take Amy and Jan on patrol some time, let them find out how their warriors earn combat pay. Who was it?”

“McQueen’s people. Business manager and two lawyers.” Mathieson stretched his legs out and bent his head back until something cracked in his neck.

Roger said, “Everybody trying to get you drunk enough to come down to their price. Who’s the writer?”

“Bill Block.”

Roger clawed at ice cubes and Mathieson grinned at him: Block had written Roger’s Oscar part. Roger said, “Could I do it?”

“You and McQueen could do it together if somebody wanted to come up with enough to pay for both of you. It’s a two-star script. But you’d have to talk to McQueen’s people.”

“They bought the script?”

“They bought it. It’s a bank caper story, set in Oregon. Outdoor pursuit. The bank robber and the state trooper. Nice characters.”

“Block always gives his actors something to do — which makes the bastard unique in this business.” Roger stirred with his index finger. “I’ll call them in the morning before they’ve had time to hire Barbra Streisand for the part instead of me. Here y’go.”

Mathieson took the drink out of Roger’s gnarled hand. “How’s Billy doing?”

“Back on his feet. Busted ankle never slowed no Gilfillan down. He’ll make the track team in September — that’s all he cares about. Kid ever grows up and gets married, his wife’ll be a decathlon widow.” Roger sat down. Amy sprawled sideways on the cushions, cheek propped on her palm; Roger tickled her foot and she kicked him absentmindedly. She was looking at the TV screen — the anchorman talking, behind him a black-and-white still photo of Sam Stedman looking grave. The sound was off; Roger said, “Turn that up, honey, let’s hear about it.”

She reached for the control but the screen went to a commercial. Roger said, “Shit.”

Amy sat up. “Probably a hoax anyway. Old Sam, he’d do anything to get on the front page.” She pronounced it innythang without affectation.

Mathieson tasted the drink. “I don’t think Stedman’s that kind of a phony.”

“That pious el creepo?” Amy lifted an eyebrow.

Roger said, “Sugar baby, look at it this way. Twenty years Sam Stedman’s stayed on top of the box office because he’s the only one of us who won’t play the bad guy. Number-one public image, your God-fearing Bible-belt hero. Can you see him risk the image by settin’ up a phony stunt to have his boy kidnapped?”

Mathieson shook his head. “I talked to his agent yesterday. The man’s going through genuine anguish. It’s no publicity stunt.”

After the commercial the weatherman came on. Amy switched the set off. “What about that announcement he made there last night? About hiring Diego Vasquez to find the boy?”

Roger said, “I could’ve done all right without Sam’s pious preamble but I kind of admired the rest of it. Man, he’s right, you can’t just lay down and let these fuckin’ terrorists walk on you.”

“He’s taking too much of a risk,” Mathieson said. “I wouldn’t have done it if it were our kid. I might have hired an investigator like Vasquez but I certainly wouldn’t have called a press conference to tell the world what I was doing.”

Roger said, “If you think about it, it makes sense. He’s threatening to spend every last penny he’s got to find those bastards. He’s siccin’ Vasquez on them in public to emphasize the message — if they don’t turn Sam Junior loose unharmed, they ain’t no way on earth for them to get away alive. That’s the message, clear enough.”

Mathieson said, “Is Diego Vasquez all that terrifying? What makes him more of a threat than the FBI and the police?”

“The FBI and the police need courtroom evidence and they ain’t too likely just to shoot the bastards on sight.”

“And Vasquez will?”

“He’s done it before,” Roger said. “You remember that case two years ago, that Denver millionaire that hired Vasquez to find out who pushed poison heroin on his daughter after she died from shooting up pure uncut?”

“I think so...”

Amy said, “You couldn’t hardly forget it. Diego Vasquez seems to make damn sure he’s on the front page every time he wipes somebody out.”

Roger went to the refrigerator. “I got time for another one, don’t I? No, he got all the way to the top that time. Not just the street pusher but the one the cops don’t never reach — the one that was financing it. Some real estate honcho up there.”

Amy made a baby-faced smile. “Just like in the movies. Self-defense. Vasquez left that old boy in Denver dead on the living-room carpet with three forty-five Colt bullets inside of him.”

“They dug a couple of thirty-eight slugs out of the ceiling plaster,” Roger said. “And there was this thirty-eight automatic in the dead fella’s hand. Fired twice. Everybody knows Vasquez just planted it that way after he killed that old boy. See, they never could have convicted the fella in court. That’s the way Vasquez earns those five-figure fees.”

Mathieson said, “Whatever happened to the days when there was a difference between the good guys and the bad guys? That’s what tastes sour to me — how could a religious man like Sam Stedman hire a cold-blooded killer?”

“Didn’t you ever see none of them Westerns where the sanctimonious town dads hire the gunslinger to clean up the town for them? Same fuckin’ thing, ain’t it?”

“Oh, hell, Roger.”

“You’re an old-fashioned moralist, Fred.”

Jan emerged from the dining room. “It’s on the table. Move it or lose it.”

3

The Gilfillans left at midnight and there was the customary flurry of clearing up because Jan couldn’t stand to face messes in the morning and the cleaning lady wasn’t due again until Monday. Mathieson cleared the table while Jan loaded the dishwasher and then it was half past twelve and they slouched into the Pit for their nightcaps.

“Cointreau?”

“Yes, fine.”

He poured himself a Remy Martin and carried the drinks to the couch. “I’m already a little squiffed. Ought to go on the wagon.” He stood sipping the cognac. “You know I really should sign up with a health club. The old pot’s growing. I need to get rid of fifteen pounds of this flab and get some decent exercise.”

“You don’t look so bad for an old-timer.” She gave him a distracted glance.

“Well you get past forty, you need to start looking after yourself. I see myself five years from now gone to pot and gone to seed. I get nightmares about turning into a slob like Phil Adler.”

“You won’t. You’ll always be long and lean. You’re like Roger — lanky bones.”

He slapped his paunch dubiously. Then he said, “He wants to buy me out.”

“Roger does?”

“Phil Adler.”

She carried her drink around the room, shifting little things, testing for dust with a fingertip. Mathieson sat down.

“He sprang it on me this afternoon. He wants to dissolve the partnership.”

“Whatever for?”

“I think he’s restless. He’s been bitten by the big-shot bug. A lot of agents have become producers. Phil always hates to be left out.”

She sat down across the room, the drink in both hands. “Are you going to sell out to him?”

“He only sprang it on me tonight. That’s why I was late. I haven’t had time to think about it.”

“What was your first reaction?”

“You can’t always go by that.”

“Sometimes you can.”

“We did that once. You remember what happened.”

Her fingers crept under the neckline of her dress to pluck at something awry. “In the long run it worked out. You enjoy what you’re doing now — more than you did when you were practicing law.”

“We don’t talk about that, remember?”

She uttered a short bark of unamused laughter. “I suppose Frank Pastor has microphones all over this house.”

“It’s better to stay in the habit of never talking about it.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel foolish? Melodramatic?”

“I like it here. I don’t want us to take stupid risks.”

His eyes followed the lines of her body as she stood up and walked aimlessly around the room. She was tennis-slim and her fine long hair was sunbleached. She seemed unaware that she was in a chronic state of irritation. “Ronny’s coming home Friday. I hope you haven’t forgotten.”

“I haven’t but I’ve got a lunch on with a client from Seattle. It’s the only day he’s here — I tried to change it but I couldn’t. Can you meet the plane?”

“We both ought to be there.”

“I’ll see how early I can get away.”

“It lands at half past two.”

“I’ll try.”

“Please do.” She took his glass and carried both empties out to the kitchen. When she reappeared she looked drowsy — the drinks were catching up. “Well take me to bed, then.”

It took him by surprise but he walked her to the bedroom with his hand on the small of her back; he felt through the thin fabric the warmth of her skin. They undressed in silence, peeled back the covers neatly and got into bed. He reached up for the light switch; they made love in darkness and she did not kiss him.

4

By the time he reached the airport Jan had already collected Ronny. Mathieson saw them coming along the concourse together, the boy maintaining a stiff distance from his mother: Ronny was eleven and painfully determined that no one mistake him for a momma’s boy. He seemed to have grown at least another two inches since June.

Ronny held out his hand gravely and Mathieson shook it. “How you doin’, son?”

“Fine, Dad. How’re you?” Very grown up.

They walked toward the baggage-claim turntable. “You look damn near bowlegged, boy. Didn’t they ever get you off a horse in the past ten weeks?”

“Oh sure. We had all kinds of activities. Man, you wouldn’t believe it, that’s a bad place.”

Jan said, “When ‘bad’ comes to mean the spectacularly good, I wonder what that tells us about ourselves?”

“Oh, Mom, sheesh.”

The boy stood straight up and flashed his white California smile and Mathieson was proud of him. Ronny rattled on about his adventures while they waited for, and collected, his duffel bag. They walked out into the thick heat of the parking lot. The boy got in the narrow bench that passed for a back seat in the Porsche and Mathieson gave him a critical look. “You’re growing too long to scrunch up back there.”

Ronny was alarmed. “You wouldn’t sell it!”

“No. But I might have to hang a U-Haul trailer on behind for those mile-long legs of yours.” Mathieson flipped the bucket seat up for Jan; but she was looking back toward the terminal and she’d gone bolt still.

He peered back that way. A man was standing on the curb by a taxi, looking at them. Then the man stooped to enter the taxi.

Jan said, “Isn’t that...?”

“Bradleigh.”

“But I thought...”

“If he wants to see us he knows where to find us.”

Ronny leaned forward. “Who’s that?”

“Just an old acquaintance.” But sensations of alarm rubbed against Mathieson. He fitted the key into the ignition. Jan’s eyes had gone wide. He gave her hand a quick squeeze.

5

When they walked into the house the phone was ringing. He put down Ronny’s duffel bag and went to the receiver.

“Hello, Fred?”

“Yes.” He recognized the voice. Jan was in the doorway watching him and he contrived an indifferent shrug to reassure her.

“You were right, that was me at the airport. I’m glad you didn’t try to approach me. I’m in a phone booth right now — I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Go ahead, talk.”

“Not on the phone. You remember where we had that drink together the first time we came to Los Angeles?”

“Wasn’t that at the—”

“Not on the phone. But you remember the place. Is it still there?”

“Far as I know.” Mathieson watched Ronny lug the duffel bag toward the back of the house. Jan was locking the front door. It was something she almost never did in the daytime.

“Meet me there in half an hour.”

“Look, it’s an awkward time. My son just got home from summer camp and we...”

“It’s important, Fred. Important, shit, it’s vital. Make sure you’re alone before you show up there. You get me?”

“I— Should I bring Jan and the boy along?”

“Does he know?”

“No.”

“Then don’t bring him. I won’t have time to explain things to him. You’ll have to do that yourself, later on.”

“Why? There’s no reason why he ever has to...”

“There is now.”

Mathieson gripped the phone hard. “Why?”

“Have you got neighbor friends Jan and Ronny could go visit for a few hours?”

“The Gilfillans. They’ve got a kid Ronny’s age...”

“Send your wife and the boy over there.”

“But they just came home and...”

“I don’t want them home alone right now. You get me? Hang up and get a move on.”

Click.

She was still by the door; now she came toward him, anxiety on her face.

“Glenn Bradleigh. He wants me to meet him.”

“What is it?”

“He wouldn’t explain on the phone. Those guys are all paranoids.”

“Something must have happened.”

He said, “Maybe it’s a routine drill of some kind.”

“You don’t need to tell me reassuring lies, you know.”

“I don’t see what else it could be. But he wants me to send you both over to Roger and Amy’s until I get back.”

“He’ll be so disappointed — he’s bursting with things to tell you about camp.”

“He can tell me when I come back. I won’t be long.”

Ronny came through from the back of the house with a clumsily gift-wrapped package. “For both of you.”

Mathieson began to rip at the Scotch tape. Jan had the boy’s face between her hands: “Oh Ronny, how sweet.” Ronny shied away and regained his composure at a wary distance. He eagerly watched the opening of the package.

They were belts, Indian style, beaded with multicolored patterns.

“I made them in shopcraft.”

“My God,” Mathieson said, “that’s fantastic!” He wrapped the belt around his middle and laughed. “It’s a foot too long. Trying to tell your fat old dad something?”

“We can cut it down. See, I wasn’t sure so I figured I’d better make it too big, so I didn’t punch holes for the buckle yet either...”

Jan’s was a perfect fit and she wore it over her skirt and beamed at her son.

“We’d better go,” Mathieson said.

“Go? Hey, we just got home and I was going to...”

Jan said quickly, “Your father has an appointment, Ronny, and I know Billy Gilfillan’s dying to hear about your summer. Why don’t you and I go over to Roger and Amy’s until Dad comes home?”

“We’ll have a celebration dinner tonight, how’s that sound?”

They’d said the right thing: The boy had adventures to mesmerize Billy Gilfillan; the prospect was enough to make him forget his disappointment.

Mathieson watched them stride down the curving pitch of the street, Ronny breaking into a run and racing on ahead. Mathieson locked up and got into the Porsche. He answered Jan’s wave.

Downhill into Sherman Oaks and Culver City he had his eye on the rearview mirrors constantly; he saw no sign he was being followed but he put it up onto the freeway and went through a series of maneuvers designed to disclose pursuit. Eight years ago Bradleigh had taught him things he’d never expected to have to put to use but this was the sort of thing you didn’t forget once you’d learned it. He went down an off-ramp and around under the cloverleaf and got right back up on the freeway. He went past Universal City, got off at Vine and got back on, northbound. He left the freeway in Burbank and drove completely around the same block twice. No car followed him. When he was positive about it he went up Hollywood Way and parked the Porsche on the concrete lot behind Berk’s Bar.

His hands were sweating when he went inside.

6

It had no windows. The light was poor and each booth had a squat candle burning inside a red glass cup.

Mathieson searched the shadows but did not find Bradleigh. He slid into a corner booth at the rear and the barmaid took his order for a Bloody Mary. Mathieson wiped his palms on a napkin.

Bradleigh appeared and stood just inside the door acclimating his eyes to the darkness. When he began to search the room he found Mathieson. He came over, put his palms on the table and slid in across from Mathieson. “You didn’t pick up any company, I hope.”

“No. What’s this all...?”

The barmaid’s approach silenced them. She set the Bloody Mary on the table and took out her order pad. “Yes, sir?”

“Just a ginger ale,” Bradleigh said.

Mathieson studied him. Bradleigh had put on ten pounds or so but it only made his ruddy face squarer. His brown hair was still in a 1950ish brush crew cut and he was still wearing a conservative suit with a white shirt and plain brown tie; it might have been a uniform. His gray eyes picked up a little reflected candlelight and seemed frosty, as if he’d been affronted by something.

The barmaid went away and Bradleigh took an envelope from his pocket. “You’d better take a look.”

It wasn’t sealed. Mathieson reached inside — a folded newspaper clipping. STORE MANAGER SHOT BY SNIPER. He glanced down the paragraphs. One William Smithers had been gardening in his yard in Norman, Oklahoma, when a rifle bullet had struck him in the back. Apparently it had been fired from a passing car. Smithers had been taken to a hospital and was on the critical list: The bullet had broken a rib and done some internal damage.

He handed it back to Bradleigh. “So?”

“This was a last-minute squib in this morning’s Oklahoma City paper. The later editions probably ran photographs of him. Smithers is Walter Benson.”

It hit him like a fist. “Oh boy. Oh boy.”

“It could be a coincidence.”

“You don’t think it was, though.”

“If I did I wouldn’t be here.”

“Is he going to pull through?”

“Nobody knows. We’ve transferred him to another hospital under wraps. We’re guarding the place like the mint.”

Mathieson tried to compose himself. “What does it mean?”

“Obviously we think the mob found him.”

“I thought Frank Pastor was still in prison.”

“He is, but he’s up for parole in a matter of days. And his organization’s not in prison. Ezio Martin’s still running things.”

“And if they found Benson they may find the rest of us.”

“Fred, they may already have found you.”

He reached for the Bloody Mary. It had too much Tabasco and pepper in it; his throat burned afterward.

Bradleigh said, “I sent people out this morning to cover Draper and John Fusco. Maybe Benson was a fluke, maybe they haven’t got a line on the rest of you but we can’t take the chance. Not until we know more. I came here myself because if they do have information on all four of you then you’d be the prime target. You were the one who put Pastor away — the others were corroboration but we could have done it without any of them. You were the key witness.”

“That’s a comforting reminder.”

“I know.”

“How did they find Benson?”

“God knows. We’re investigating everything. Including ourselves.”

“Yourselves?”

“It’s always been our nightmare. The chance of a leak in our office. We don’t think it happened. We don’t see how it could. But we’ve got to check it out. Until we prove there was no leak we’ve got to assume all four of you may have been blown.”

“Terrific. That’s terrific.”

“Look, the way it probably happened, some guy happens to be passing through Norman, Oklahoma. He just happens to spot Benson in the street. Maybe just some uninvolved guy who gets back to New York and goes out to dinner and says, ‘Say, you’ll never guess who I saw on the street out in of-all-the-Godforsaken-places Norman, Oklahoma. It was old Walter Benson, you remember how he disappeared right after that sensational Pastor trial where he testified?’ And somebody over at the next table with big ears passes the word back to somebody in Ezio Martin’s crowd and they figure there’s probably nothing to it but it can’t hurt to send somebody out to Oklahoma just to check it out.”

The barmaid brought Bradleigh his ginger ale. He tasted it.

When the girl was gone Mathieson said, “It’s been eight years. Nearly nine. Why should Pastor’s mob give a damn any more? Benson wasn’t doing them any harm in Oklahoma.”

“You still don’t know those people, do you?”

“Nor want to.”

“They shot Benson for reasons that make perfect sense to them.”

Mathieson said, “What reasons? What reason justifies trying to murder somebody who’s doing you no harm?”

“For one thing it’s an object lesson. They want the world to know they’ll catch up with their enemies no matter how far they run or how long they hide. It’s a deterrent.”

Mathieson scowled at him. Bradleigh went right on:

“Then there’s the matter of revenge. Those people are very primitive that way. Revenge is a religion with them. They carry it along from generation to generation. Vendetta. It amounts to their law.”

“What a grisly waste.”

“They’re weaned on it.” Bradleigh lit a filter tip.

“You’re saying we’ll never be safe.”

“Who’s safe? You could get hit by a truck. The chances are they stumbled on Benson by a fluke. The chances are you’re in no danger at all.”

Mathieson said, “You fly out here on the first plane and you alarm the hell out of my wife and me. And we’re in no danger at all. I see.”

“Look, Fred, it’s my job. I’m not trying to be an alarmist. I’m just preparing for a contingency. A remote possibility.”

Mathieson burned his throat on another swallow. At the bar a fat TV character actor whom Mathieson knew by sight but couldn’t name returned from the jukebox to a glass of something that looked like a potted plant. The jukebox bleated heartbrokenly.

Mathieson tried to compose his ragged emotions. “What do you think we should do?”

“Disappear. Take your family on vacation for a while. Don’t leave a forwarding address. We’ll send agents along for protection. And I’d like to set up surveillance on your house — see if anybody snoops around.”

“What if they do? You can’t arrest them for snooping around.”

“But we’ll know, won’t we. If nobody snoops around then we can assume your cover’s intact. If they do show up we’ll be warned. We might have to do another identity switch.”

“No.”

“Fred...”

“I couldn’t put Jan through it again.” The marriage was barely intact as it was. “And Ronny. I’d have to tell him what we were doing and why.”

“He’s old enough to understand it.”

“He’d have to keep the secret for the rest of his life — or at least for the rest of mine. He’s too young for a responsibility like that.”

“You may not have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” he said with empty stubbornness.

“Like for instance?”

“Shouldn’t we wait and see what happens?”

“I want you to be prepared, Fred. It’s my job to protect you but I also kind of like you, you know. Most of the people we service are losers. Opportunists like Benson. Most of them are in the mob themselves. We nail them for something, then we offer them immunity if they’ll finger the higher-ups. Once in a while a guy like Benson accepts our offer and we go to work for him. But we don’t get too many good honest citizens who choose to testify because they see it as a moral duty. You were a breath of fresh air from the moment I met you. I don’t want anything to happen to you. We’ll send some good men to look after you. They’ll be there if you need them, you know, but they won’t get in your way. Where’d you like to go?”

Mathieson drummed his fingers on the table. “Hell. We’ve never been to Hawaii.”

“Sounds perfect, if you can swing the tab.”

“We’ve got high-priced clients nowadays. In fact we’re doing so well my partner wants to buy me out.”

“Does he. Well I hope it doesn’t come to that but you may have to accept his offer.”

“The hell. I just decided not to. This morning.”

“Did you tell your partner?”

“Not yet.”

“Then don’t. Tell him you want to get away for a couple of weeks to think it over.”

“It’s rough to get away right now, Glenn. I’m right in the middle of contract negotiations...”

“Nothing’s as urgent as survival.”

“Maybe. But I think you may be—”

The bartender yelled across the room: “Hey, everybody listen here!”

He was turning up the volume of the radio behind the bar. It was a news announcer’s voice:

“... promises to hold a news conference at nine tomorrow morning, Los Angeles time, at which time he expects to have been reunited with his son, Sam Stedman Junior. The star’s sixteen-year-old son, who was kidnapped last Saturday, is being taken by helicopter from his place of rescue in Baja California to a hospital in Hermosillo, Mexico. Mr. Stedman stressed that his son appears to be unharmed, according to his reports from private investigator Diego Vasquez, who rescued the youth this afternoon. But he said his son had been drugged with sedatives by the kidnappers to prevent his escaping. The flight to Hermosillo hospital is purely precautionary, Mr. Stedman said, and his son will be flown home to Los Angeles tonight in a private chartered plane which Mr. Stedman, a licensed pilot, will fly himself. On his way to Los Angeles airport, Mr. Stedman spoke briefly with this reporter.”

There was no mistaking the deep heartland twang of Sam Stedman’s voice. “Through the grace of God and the mercy of Jesus Christ my son has been set free. I’m clasping my hands in a prayer of profound thanks to Almighty God.”

“Mr. Stedman, is it true that your son was rescued by an armed assault on the kidnappers’ camp by Mr. Vasquez?”

“Yes, sir, it was Diego Vasquez’s show, pure and simple. My son and I owe a great deal to that fine man — more than we can ever repay. I pray to God to bestow His blessing on Mr. Vasquez and his fine family.”

“We’ve heard reports that three or four of the kidnappers may have been shot during the rescue operation. Can you confirm that, sir?”

“No, I can’t. I think we’d just better wait and find out the truth from the people who are actually down there. You have to excuse me now. Bless you.”

The bartender turned the radio down and beamed at everyone in the room. “Well now how about that, folks?”

The fat actor lurched to the door. He looked around owlishly. “Hallelujah,” he muttered, and went.

Conversations picked up again. The waitress plugged the jukebox back in. Bradleigh seemed annoyed: “Vasquez. I’m sick of hearing Vasquez, Vasquez, Vasquez. You’d think he was Emiliano Zapata. Fucking gunslinger. He’s found a way to commit legal murder and the press loves the son of a bitch. In a sane society he’d be locked up in a rubber room.”

Bradleigh lit another cigarette and inhaled ferociously. “They say he gets the job done. Well the bastard that tried to murder Benson in Oklahoma — he almost got the job done too. Where’s the difference? Come on, let’s get out of here.” He signaled for the check.

Mathieson said, “Where can I reach you?”

“Right behind you. I’ll tag along in my car and hang around until we’ve got you packed and on the plane.”

7

Going up toward the top of the canyon drive he heard sirens somewhere nearby. There were always sirens in the valley; the sound carried up the gorges.

He saw the blue Plymouth in the rearview mirror, Bradleigh’s left hand propping up the frame of the open window.

By habit he had the car radio tuned to KGEB, the all-news station; a fraction of his attention absorbed the Stedman-Vasquez story and the hour’s catalog of disasters while he stopped and waited for a Datsun to back out of a driveway. He was starting to move again when his ear picked up the name Mathieson; he shot his hand to the radio knob to turn it up.

“... explosion evidently was caused by a powerful bomb that was thrown from a passing car. The bomb was hurled into the house through a front window, shattering the glass and exploding violently inside the living room. Jim Schott reported from the scene of the explosion a few minutes ago that police and rescue workers still are not certain whether the Mathieson residence was occupied at the time of the blast. Firemen and police are sifting the wreckage...”

He was jammed up behind the lackadaisical Datsun with traffic flicking past in the opposite lane; he held the horn down and hooted the Datsun right off the road and went up to the crest ramming the gearshift around, swinging the Porsche fast through the bends, squealing. In the mirror Bradleigh’s Plymouth was lodged behind the Datsun, dwindling.

At the top he squirted recklessly across the stop-sign intersection; down the turns on the north slope he rode the brake, teetering around the sharp curves, hunched forward over the wheel.

He heard the grind of a siren starting up. One last bend and then he swerved through it, nearly banging nose to windshield as he tried to see ahead.

Maddeningly his view was blocked by a great red fire truck that was beginning to pull away. He slewed toward the curb behind it.

A cop ran forward, gesturing at him angrily. The lawn was aswarm with men in uniform. Three patrol cruisers were drawn up at haphazard angles, askew on the road. He saw the Gilfillans and Jan, standing in a rigid little knot like mannequins: Jan was pale, she had both fists clenched at her sides, she wasn’t looking at the man in the business suit who was talking to her with a notebook in his hand.

“Get back in that car and move along out of here, buddy.”

He was searching for Ronny; he still had his hand on the car door and he felt the Porsche begin to roll — he hadn’t pulled the brake. He dived back into the seat, stabbing for the pedal. That was when something made a loud sharp crack over his shoulder.

He hadn’t heard that sound in twenty-three years but his instincts knew it: the crack of a high-velocity bullet passing near — a tiny sonic boom.

He threw himself flat across the seats and heard the distant cough of the rifle, delayed by range. He jackknifed his legs inside the car and the brass of fear coated his tongue with sudden bitterness. The next shot clanged against metal and sighed away whistling: again the distant bark of the rifle.

The Porsche was rolling slowly. The third bullet starred the windshield and then his ears thudded with the shockingly close-by boom of a handgun shot. Another explosion, and he realized it was the cop shooting back.

The car whacked the curb. It threw him against the dash and wedged him down toward the floor; his knee cracked the shift knob and sharp pain shot up his leg. The curb chocked the wheel and the car didn’t move again; he heard the cop empty his revolver methodically. Other guns opened up and the racket was intense, like a battlefield. Someone kept yelling — he couldn’t make out the words. Heedlessly he lifted himself off the floor and searched the lawn. The plainclothesman must have knocked Jan down; the man was down on one knee, hiding her behind his own bulk, sighting his revolver up across the street at the high canyon slope beyond. Roger had his arm across Amy’s shoulders and was running her toward cover, the hedge on the property line. Then he saw Ronny and Billy, both of them diving into the ruins of the house.

Bradleigh’s blue Plymouth came lurching downhill. The cop just outside the Porsche was belly-flat with his revolver extended in both hands toward the slope.

He heard the distant cough and sputter of a kicked-over motorcycle engine and he spun his eyes toward the far slope. The cycle roared and abruptly appeared in flitting bursts, ramming through the trees on the ridge line above the houses. It drew police gunfire from the lawn but the motorcyclist dropped off the skyline, disappearing beyond the crest.

Bradleigh was running forward, bellowing: “Get that mother!” A cruiser plunged away, siren unwinding from a growl. Cops swarmed past Mathieson and slammed into their cars.

Mathieson backed out of the Porsche, dimly aware that his body was doing the necessary things: pulling the hand brake, ducking to clear the opening with his head, turning to face Bradleigh. “Jesus Christ, Glenn—”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m not hit. But they—”

Bradleigh’s relief took the form of a surge of anger: “Get back in there and get the fuck away from here.”

“That’s my house.”

“The hell. It’s the insurance company’s now. You damn fool.”

He stared at the ruins. Half the house was gone: just debris. The back walls were intact and part of the roof sagged inward; the rest was junk.

Roger had his arms around Ronny’s shoulders. Mathieson couldn’t see Jan in the wheeling crowd. Bradleigh thrust him into the car. “Shove over, damn you.” Then Bradleigh was at the wheel, finding the gears, making a tight U-turn, squalling away.

“My kid — my wife...” He twisted around, watching Jan step forward on the lawn with one hand lifted.

Bradleigh batted him across the back of the head, “Get down. Quit making a target out of yourself.”

“What?” But he slid down in the seat, knees against the dash.

“You fell for it like a rube buying the Brooklyn Bridge. Why do you think they posted the sniper up there? The bastard was there to pick you off when you showed up to rubberneck the wreckage. You dumb bastard. God knows why you’re alive.”

1

Roger’s station wagon slid to a stop on the gravel and Jan came out into Mathieson’s arms; Ronny dived out of the car. There was a confusion of embraces: He couldn’t stop touching them, he had to keep reassuring himself that they were alive.

They were inside the Gilfillans’ house but he didn’t remember getting there. Bradleigh was on the phone. Two ambulance doctors were filling syringes. Ronny sat subdued on the couch with his hands in his lap, holding Jan’s hand. Billy and Roger stood around like funeral mourners, uncertain what to do with their hands. Cops flowed in and out of the house endlessly. A plainclothes sergeant with a notebook and pencil was talking to Roger.

Mathieson refused sedation and the white-uniformed doctor moved away. Mathieson sat on Roger’s cowhide ottoman right back in the corner of the room with his shoulders wedged against the intersecting walls. Words flew past and he tried to catch them.

The nurse with Amy glanced at him. He felt her stare and dragged his eyes around. The nurse was young and pretty and had one of those meaningless professional smiles that clicked on whenever anyone looked at her. She was pretending to listen to Amy’s drugged babblings: Amy was flat on the divan, struggling to communicate something.

A cop lifted back an end of the drape to look outside. Mathieson saw past his arm through the window. He had no reckoning of time: It was after dark but the Gilfillans’ lawn glared with a blaze of television lights. He saw a TV-remote panel truck and a reporter on the lawn talking into a camera.

The cop dropped the drape back in place and turned toward Mathieson. “Anything I can get you, sir?”

“No.”

Bradleigh cupped the phone in his palm and spoke to the cop: “Get him a drink. Straight booze and an ice cube.”

“Yes, sir.” The cop moved briskly. Mathieson watched everything; it all swayed around him and never seemed to touch him — he felt weightless.

Uniformed cops shifted in the room like organisms under a microscope.

There was a drink in his hand and someone was forcing his arm up toward his mouth. “Come on, drink it.” Bradleigh.

He took a swallow. He couldn’t taste it. “Glenn — what’s the matter with me?”

“Shock. Go on, drink up. You want a coat or a blanket or anything?”

“No.”

“Chug-a-lug. Come on, attaboy.”

The nurse put a blanket over Amy Gilfillan. Mathieson had never seen Amy so pale — like a death mask. She was muttering, scowling with a little-girl frown of concentration.

Bradleigh was back on the phone. “The hell with that. I want both of them tucked away out of circulation, right now this minute. Arrest them if you have to; I don’t care what they want. Pass it on, all right?... Right. Switch me over to the DAC, will you?... Dan, me again. Did you ask the police to cover L.A. International? All right, let’s try to cover the rest of the area airports too — everything from Burbank and Santa Barbara to San Diego. And get teams out to the New York airports... What?... Hell, because we know who set this up and they’re from New York... Maybe not but we’ve got to cover it.... No. No positive make on it. Couple people saw a dark sedan going like hell — one makes it green, the other blue. You know how those are. No make on the motorcycle but what the hell, how many people can tell one motorcycle from another?... No, the car was probably boosted an hour before the hit anyway. We’ll find it abandoned five miles from here. They must have switched cars four times on the way in and out, these guys aren’t tyros. See if you can run a make on Vietnam combat veterans in the New York mobs. They used plastique, they must have learned how somewhere... Frank Pastor what? Jesus H. Christ, doesn’t that just figure... All right, you’ve got the number here.”

The alcohol was getting to Mathieson. Jan was sitting on the edge of the ottoman holding his hands. “Darling?”

She looked up at Bradleigh. “He’s coming out of it.”

“I’m freezing to death. Look at me — goose bumps.”

“Get him a blanket.” Bradleigh sent the cop away. “You with us now, Fred?”

“I think so. Funny, it’s like Inchŏn. Artillery flashes — it’s lit up here and there but I can’t make the picture stand still. Give me another shot of that stuff.”

The cop brought a blanket and Bradleigh swapped the empty glass for it. “Refill.”

His teeth were chattering. He clutched the blanket around him like a Sioux. “Been a long time since I got shot at. But I wouldn’t have thought I’d have gone all to pieces like this.”

“You want a cigarette?” Bradleigh shook out his pack.

“I quit six years ago.”

“That was six years ago.”

“I’d only burn holes in this blanket.”

The cop gave him the refilled glass and he drank it straight down. It burned. Bourbon, he realized.

Bradleigh took the empty glass. “That’s probably enough. You don’t want to get schnockered.”

“All right, I’m mostly here. Tell me what the hell happened.”

Jan looked up at Bradleigh and caught his nod. She said, “We were all here in Roger and Amy’s house. We heard the blast. Then a lot of sirens, and somebody phoned Roger and told him our house had exploded. We all went up there.”

Bradleigh said, “A few people heard the car going away fast but only a couple of people saw it. There haven’t been any descriptions we could use. One of your neighbors had phoned the police and they got up there fast, if it matters. The way we’ve reconstructed it, the car came down from the top of the canyon, at least two men in it — a driver and the guy who threw the bomb. Are you all right?”

“I’m just peachy. For God’s sake.”

“Look, at least nobody got hurt.”

“Go on, then.”

“I don’t know what else to tell you. Frank Pastor was awarded parole today. He’ll be out in a day or two. How does that grab you, Goddamnit?”

Jan burst into abrupt laughter. Mathieson reached out and she sagged against him, burying her face against his chest, the laughter going into sobs.

“You’re alive,” Bradleigh said in his stern monotone.

“Are we supposed to be grateful about that?”

“You will be when you’ve had time to think about it.”

“What about right now? How are we supposed to feel right now?”

“They don’t make rules about it.”

“I just want this to be a bad dream.”

2

By midnight Amy Gilfillan was in bed, drugged to sleep, and the house had emptied out but there were still cops outside standing guard. The TV trucks and lights were gone. Ronny dozed on the couch; most of the lights were off; Roger had taken Billy back to put him to bed; Jan sat half drunk on the ottoman.

Mathieson went to the bar. Anger made his hands shake and Bradleigh shouldered him aside. “I’ll do it. What are you having?”

“Might as well stick with bourbon. Rocks.”

He waited without patience and finally took the glass from Bradleigh; he turned. “What now?”

“We’ll have to get you out of here. They’ll try again.” Bradleigh closed the refrigerator door. He was drinking orange juice. “It was my job to prevent this.”

“Don’t get maudlin, Glenn. You’re not responsible. You didn’t sling any bombs.”

The phone rang and Bradleigh took it; Mathieson couldn’t hear what he said but afterward Bradleigh came across the room and stood beside him. “Looks like they’ve slipped the net. If we were going to collar them locally we’d have had them by now. Either we’ll get a tip from a CI or we’ll have to go at it from another angle.”

“CI?”

“Sorry. Confidential informant. We’ve made some progress toward finding the leak in the office — narrowed it down to three or four people. As soon as we pin it on one of them we’ll go to work. We’ll find out who bought the information, I promise you.”

“We know who bought it.”

“Not to get a prosecution we don’t. We’ve got to have evidence.”

“When does Pastor go out in the street?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

Silence dragged along for a while. Jan had fallen asleep sitting up, one shoulder tipped against the wall, the hair falling across her eyes. Mathieson looked down at Ronny’s sleeping face.

Some time later he said, “I feel like a goldfish here. Suppose they throw a bomb into this house? We ought to clear out.”

“We may as well.” Bradleigh looked embarrassed; he was a poor dissembler.

“What’s the matter, Glenn?”

“Guess I’ve been playing dirty pool with you. Chalk it up to an excess of zeal. We should have moved you out of here six hours ago.”

“Hell, I know that. You’ve kept us here because you wanted them to make another try.”

“Believe me this place is covered inside out and upside down. They’d never get near you.” He put his glass down. “But you’re right, we’d better move out. Let’s start waking them up.”

1

Frank’s daughters carried their strident rivalry onto the screened porch and Anna Pastor slumped with the fatigue of dealing with them. She retreated from the parlor, out onto the flagstones.

Beyond the statuary the lawn was neatly cut, two acres of grass sloping down to the beach. She could see Frank on the dock with Ezio: In silhouette against the silver water of the Sound they looked like cutouts of Mutt and Jeff. Ezio used his body expressively whenever he spoke; his arms rode up and down incessantly, his head rocked back and forth, he pivoted and stamped and took up defiant poses. Frank stood motionless, perhaps asking and answering, but there was no sign of it at this distance. Frank had outgrown the mannerisms of the streets long ago and prison had put a kind of rigidity into him.

This morning when he’d come outside the walls he’d stood on the curb with his head thrown back and his eyes half closed, presenting his face to the sun as if to draw strength from it. It had been ten minutes before he’d got into the car and then he’d just sat beside her holding her hand, letting Ezio’s rapid-fire talk roll off him.

They’d driven straight out to the Island and he’d gone upstairs with her and without a word made love to her without even bothering to draw the curtains; then he’d put on his whites and told her he needed to be alone because he hadn’t been alone in eight years and he’d taken the outboard onto the Sound.

He’d been gone until an hour ago; at midafternoon he’d tied the boat up to the dock and Ezio had gone down there to meet him and they were still talking.

In the meantime there’d been twenty phone calls and for a time the place had crawled with men but Ezio had sent nearly all of them away, some on errands and some simply away. Only two were left, somewhere around the place — George Ramiro down at his post in the gatehouse and C. K. Gillespie who had been on the phone in the dining room when she’d gone past a moment ago.

Every summer for eight years she’d brought the girls out here; every summer it had got harder as they’d got older. She had never lived out here with Frank: They had been married the year before he went to prison and they’d taken a honeymoon in Italy that summer and spent the rest of it in the Brooklyn house while Frank’s lawyers tried to delay the sentencing.

The two men came up across the garden. Frank took her in his arms. He held her close and tight, not moving; she slid her fingers up his spine and rubbed the back of his neck. She felt a shudder run through him. “Jesus Maria,” he whispered, “sometimes I thought it’d never be.” Then he turned past her and patted her rump. In the house a phone was ringing; Ezio hurried inside. Gillespie had come outside and was politely looking away, down toward the water. Frank moved to the marble table and pressed the buzzer under its lip; after a moment Gregory Cestone appeared at the French doors in black trousers and white shirt and black bow tie. “Yes, Mr. Pastor?”

“Let’s have some drinks out here.”

“Right away, sir.” Cestone neither nodded nor smiled. He had been in some kind of fire years ago; there were legends about it and none of them coincided; whatever the incident, Cestone’s face had been burned. Plastic surgeons had reassembled it but the facial muscles were gone and it was an immobile mask. It had taken her years to get used to it.

Cestone turned back inside and Ezio brushed past him, coming out. Frank caught Ezio’s eye and Ezio shook his head. “There’s nothing. They’ve all gone to ground.”

“That’s not good enough, Ezio.”

“We’ll get them, Frank. It’ll take a little time.”

“This time it’s taken eight years. How long do you figure on the next one?”

“It won’t be any eight years, I can promise you that.”

“Can you?” Frank never raised his voice but she edged away from him; when he spoke in that tone she felt uneasily as if she were in a cage with something untamed. Yet she had never seen him lift his hand to anyone. It was what had attracted her to him in the beginning; the sensation of raw savagery absolutely controlled by the power of his will.

Cestone pushed the wheeled drink cart outside through the doors. Gillespie came from the parapet and they gathered around the cart while Cestone made the drinks. She thought how handsome Frank looked in his nautical whites and cap.

But then he took the cap off and rubbed his pale scalp. “Those four gentlemen made me into a bald-headed old man, Ezio. They took eight of my best years. That’s something a man can’t ever get back.”

“I know that, Frank.”

“No. You don’t. You’ve never been inside. Eight years with those stinking black animals. If I hadn’t been who I am, I’d have got raped in there twice a day. Two thousand black junkie fags locked inside those walls. That’s what I lived with those eight years.”

“You look damn good, though.”

“I kept fit. I made a point of it. You go too soft in there, it doesn’t matter who you are or who your friends are. You have to keep command. Nobody respects a flabby leader.”

“Well you’ve never been flabby, Frank, that’s for sure.”

Gillespie said, “Personally I never trust a fat man.”

It made Ezio look at him angrily. Ezio wasn’t fat — he was thick but it was all solid — but she hadn’t missed the insinuation in Gillespie’s remark and she was surprised he had the nerve to utter it.

It hadn’t escaped Frank but he decided to ignore it; he had other things on his mind. He gestured toward his wife with his drink; she smiled; Frank took a healthy swallow and turned toward Ezio. “What’s in motion?”

“Hell, Frank, we’re looking for them. What else can I tell you until we start hearing back? The word only went out a few hours ago. We’ve got photographs going out to every city and town where we’ve got contacts. Some of the cops here and there, the organizations, you know how it goes. It’s the biggest manhunt we’ve ever started. We’ll find them.”

“Particularly Merle. Edward Merle.”

“Particularly him, Frank.”

“I want all four of them. But the other three are just window dressing compared to him.”

“We know that.”

Frank turned his head. He was eyeing C. K. Gillespie. The younger man met his glance. She saw the flicker of a smile at the corner of Gillespie’s thin mouth.

Frank said, “What about you? What are you doing about it?”

“Well I have an idea, Mr. Pastor.”

“You do? Let’s hear it.”

“Sir, I wouldn’t want you to take this the wrong way. Right now it’s just kind of a wild idea I’m trying out. I’d just as soon not go into the whole thing before I find out whether it pans out.”

Ezio said, “Mr. Pastor doesn’t like smartass young lawyers, Charlie.”

Gillespie spread his neat small hands openly. “Look at it this way, Ezio. If the idea works we’ll all benefit from it. But if it’s a dud, then I just raise Mr. Pastor’s false hopes and I make a fool out of myself by bragging about it at this point. All I can say is I’m working on something and I think it’s got a pretty good chance of producing results.”

“You coy little—”

“Let it go,” Frank said. “C.K. may have a point. In the meantime you get on the phone to Los Angeles and build some fires under those people.”

2

They walked together along the shore; she held Frank’s hand. With the toes of her canvas shoes she kicked at seashells. Out on the Sound little sailboats wheeled like butterflies. Frank said, “You’ve done a job with the kids. I mean a fabulous job, Anna.”

“Forty lashes a day keeps them in line.”

“I’m serious about this. I married you — let’s face it, I married you because you had good brains and good looks and a body that just won’t quit. I wasn’t looking for a mother for my kids; I wasn’t even thinking that straight in those days. Nobody around me wanted this marriage. They all hated it. They put you through hell, I guess. And then those four gentlemen sending me away for eight years. But you’re still here and you’re the one that got me out of there, you more than anybody else—”

“Now that was Ezio, Frank; he’s the one who reached the board.”

“Just between us and the seashells, little Anna, I get a feeling Ezio wouldn’t have minded having a free hand to go on running the organization by himself for a while longer. You were the one who kept sticking the prod to him. What I’m saying, you turned out to be a lot more wife than I figured I was bargaining for and I’m not forgetting it.”

But then it went both ways and he knew that. All she’d had before she’d met him was her wits and her looks. She was a coal-dust brat from a rancid miner’s shack thirty miles from Hazleton, Pennsylvania. She’d won a high-school beauty contest and quit school to go to New York and be a high-priced model, and she’d ended up getting two TV commercials because the director liked sleeping with young brunettes, and that was the extent of her life — that and a fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village that she shared with another girl and a hundred cockroaches and the occasional influx of freaked-out junkies with Beatle haircuts; and the promise of maybe eight or ten good years as a hooker before her looks got battered away and she disappeared from the world.

She didn’t remind him; he became annoyed whenever she brought up her past. What she said was, “I love you, Frank.”

3

For an hour she and Nora played badminton against Sandy: Sandy was the athlete and won more games than she lost to the two of them. They were going inside to clean up when Gillespie drove down the driveway from the road. Anna saw George Ramiro go back into the gatehouse after closing the big gates. There was electric wire along the top of the wall all the way around the three landward sides of the six-acre estate.

The girls raced inside; Anna waited at the door while Gillespie parked the rented Cadillac and came up the slate walk with his briefcase, his sharkskin suit and his gentle friendly smile. “Been getting your exercise, I see.”

“The girls keep me hopping.”

“They’re a great pair of kids,” he said. “I’ve got some good news for Frank.”

“In that case let’s not keep him waiting.” She led him through the parlor and knocked on the door of the office. When she heard Frank’s voice she opened it and stepped back and Gillespie went past her into the office.

Ezio and Frank were at the table leaning over a litter of blueprints. Gillespie stopped two paces inside the room. “That idea paid off.”

Over the back of Gillespie’s shoulder she watched Frank’s face. One eyebrow went up inquisitively. Ezio glanced at her disapprovingly but she stayed where she was.

Gillespie said, “I think it’ll lead us to Edward Merle.”

Ezio said, “Shouldn’t this be private, Frank?”

“Anna has a right to hear this. Come on in.”

She stepped into the room and pushed the door shut behind her.

Gillespie was opening his briefcase on the arm of a chair. The room had been built for a nineteenth-century millionaire; it was all deep rich woodwork — glass-enclosed bookcases, wainscoting, Dutch doors onto the garden, an Italian Renaissance chandelier. It was huge for a study; Frank was not a large man but he dominated it, and very few men had that quality.

Gillespie drew a single sheet of paper from the briefcase. “Name, vital statistics, fingerprints. Photograph in here as well.”

“On Edward Merle?”

“No, sir,” Gillespie said. “They’ll probably be changing his name again, giving him a new identity, relocating him, all that. It would take quite a while to get that information. I think this is faster.”

Ezio said, “Then spill it.”

“The government knows the four witnesses are targets. They’ve put all four of them under wraps.”

Ezio’s voice became sharp. “We know that, Charlie.”

Gillespie smiled. “Sure. The government assigns caseworkers to look after these witnesses, shepherd them along, get them resettled. You know how it is. Now I managed to get this information from our contact in the Witness Security office because I asked for it. She wouldn’t have volunteered it — I don’t imagine it would have occurred to her.”

Ezio spoke through his teeth: “You don’t imagine what would have occurred to her, Charlie?”

Gillespie put the sheet of paper on the desk and put the photograph on top of it. “The name and picture of the agent who’s assigned to take care of Merle. His name’s Glenn Bradleigh. We find Bradleigh, we’ve found Merle. And I don’t think Bradleigh is trying to hide. Why should he? He ought to be easy enough for your people to find. Start them looking in the Los Angeles area.” Gillespie picked up the photograph and looked at the face. “You find this man, he’ll lead you to Edward Merle.”

She looked at Frank. He was walking forward, a hard shine on his eyes. He took the photograph gently out of Gillespie’s hand. “I like a man who uses his head.”

“Yes, sir. I’m glad it worked out. I wasn’t sure she’d be able to get us the name but she came through.”

“You’re all right, C.K.” Frank turned to Ezio and put the photograph in his hand. “Find him.”

1

Explaining it to Ronny was the worst part. Ronny sat on the motel bed watching both of them. Mathieson said, “I know it sounds kind of comic book. But it happens all the time. Glenn Bradleigh has more than a thousand families just like us on his roster.”

Ronny only watched him; it unnerved him. Jan was hugging herself and Mathieson went to the air-conditioner under the window. “You could hang meat in here.” He switched it off. Jan gave him a brief distracted smile.

The boy’s puzzled eyes searched him: Ronny wanted to understand but it was a lot to absorb. “What was this thing you testified to?”

“Bribery. Frank Pastor was involved in a real estate lawsuit. It wasn’t a criminal trial, it was a civil suit, but if he lost it he might be liable for fraud charges. And there was a lot of money involved in the case — hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“He wanted to buy the judge, to make sure he’d win the case.”

“Which side were you on? Whose lawyer were you?”

“Nobody’s. I wasn’t involved in the case.”

“You just said you used to be a lawyer, though.”

“I was trying another case in another courtroom in the same building. I went into the men’s room to wash some of the subway dirt off my hands and I happened to walk in just when Frank Pastor was slipping an envelope to the judge in the back of the men’s room. They didn’t realize I’d seen the envelope change hands.”

“How come?”

“They were around behind the row of stalls. I happened to see it in one of the mirrors over the washstands. It was an accident — a total coincidence. Things happen like that all the time but they’re always hard to believe when you try to explain them later.”

“They believed you, though, didn’t they? They must have, if Pastor went to jail.”

“It was my evidence that triggered the investigation, but they had a lot more to go on than just what I happened to see in the men’s room.”

“How come you knew who this guy Pastor was?”

“Everybody in New York knew him by sight in those days. You used to see him all the time on the television news, his picture in the magazines, all that kind of thing. He was a spokesman for some sort of antidefamation league and he was always in the public eye.”

“But if everybody knows these guys are gangsters, how come they’re not all in jail?”

He glanced at Jan. “Sometimes it’s very hard to get proof against them. They’re very clever people.”

“Doesn’t sound to me like this Pastor was so clever. He went to jail, right?”

Mathieson nodded. “I washed my hands and left the men’s room. I suppose they’d seen me by the time I left, or at least heard me, but neither one of them came out of the back of the room. I went right to the phone and called the District Attorney’s office. I had several friends there. I told them about the envelope I’d seen change hands in the men’s room. It could only have been one thing — a bribe. People don’t pass over harmless legitimate messages in secret like that. The District Attorney got a warrant from a criminal-court judge right away and they searched this judge’s chambers about two hours after I’d phoned. They found the envelope in the desk because he was in court all morning and hadn’t had time to get it away from his office.”

“What was in it, anyway? Money?”

“Seventy-five hundred dollars in cash. The envelope had both Pastor’s and the judge’s fingerprints on it.”

“Dumb,” Ronny said.

“Well they didn’t expect anybody to find it, did they.”

“I still think it must’ve been pretty stupid for Pastor to do that in person. He could’ve had anybody deliver the money for him. Some flunky.”

“Normally he would have. But the judge insisted that Pastor pay him off in person. If anything went wrong — and something did — the judge wanted to be able to take Pastor down with him. He didn’t want Pastor double-crossing him afterward. You understand, Ronny?”

“I think so. So they got caught. Did this judge fess up?”

“He might have, but as soon as he was released on bail he was killed. Shot to death on his own doorstep.”

Ronny drew air through his teeth. “Cripes.”

Jan said, “It’s not a TV movie we’re talking about, Ronny. These are real people. It’s real blood and real pain...”

Ronny scowled at Mathieson. “They killed this judge to keep him from talking, right?”

“Yes. That’s why sometimes it’s so hard to get evidence against them — they make people afraid to testify.”

“But they didn’t scare you, did they.”

“They scared me.”

Jan said, “Your father stood up and testified to the truth in open court. A lot of people told him he was crazy.”

At the time, he was thinking, it seemed the right thing to do.

Ronny said, “How come they didn’t arrest Pastor for killing the judge, then?”

“Nobody could prove he’d ordered it done.”

They talked on. It was hard to explain to the boy; he’d grown up on adventure shows that always wrapped the villains up neatly in the fourth quarter-hour.

There was a discreet knock at the door — three raps, an interval, three more. Mathieson admitted Glenn Bradleigh. There were two men with him, lugging suitcases. They set the cases down and left without a word. Mathieson said, “It’s still cold in here. You can leave the door open.”

Bradleigh crossed to the door. “No, we don’t want to talk to the world.” He shut it and locked it.

“Talk about what?”

Bradleigh tossed a large bulky manila envelope on the bed. “Morning, Jan. Ronny. You folks are looking a lot healthier today. Had breakfast?”

“Mr. Caruso brought it on a tray for us.”

“Caruso’s a treasure.” Bradleigh was snapping the latches of the suitcases. “We rescued as much of your clothes as we could from the house. One of the boys ran it through one of the dry cleaners yesterday. Had a lot of plaster dust but I think you’ll find most of them pretty clean now.”

Jan got up and rummaged through the suitcases. She beamed at Bradleigh. “We didn’t expect to see any of these again. Thanks so much...”

Bradleigh looked away. “Don’t thank me. Don’t ever thank me again for anything, all right?”

“Glenn, it wasn’t your fault.”

Bradleigh wouldn’t look at any of them. “We dug quite a bit of other stuff out of the house. Odds and ends, you’ll want to sort through it — we’ve taken it to the FBI office downtown, you can claim the stuff later. Amazing the kind of things we found intact. A balsa-wood model airplane, believe it or not.”

She smiled; a sidewise glance at Ronny. “He put that away in the closet last November. He’d probably forgotten he ever had it.”

“I did not.”

Mathieson was looking at the manila envelope on the bed. “Who are we?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Jason W. Greene.” Bradleigh emptied the envelope’s contents onto the rumpled bed: documents of various shades and sizes. “Best we could do on short notice — we’d been putting these together for another family but they can wait. I’m afraid it’ll make you both out to be older than you are but it’s the closest we could do. The birth certificate on the boy is a flat-out forgery but we’re slipping a copy of it into the Binghamton hall of records if anybody ever checks back that far.”

“Binghamton?”

“Right. Because you spent some summers there, didn’t you?”

“Long time ago. With my uncle and aunt.”

“Then you knew the town a little, at least. We couldn’t give you a background you knew nothing about at all. Jason W. Greene. Margaret Johnson Greene. Don’t forget it.”

“What do I do for a living?”

“Your wife used to be a librarian. You were an investment counselor. All right?”

“That’d be hard to put over on anybody who knows anything about stocks and bonds.”

“You won’t ever have to practice the profession. It’s just part of the background, like last time. You came out here with a phony background as an insurance executive, remember? Letters of reference, testimonials, the works. It’s all in that pile of papers. Read through it, familiarize yourselves with all of it. Memorize what you have to.”

“What’s our program?”

“Like last time. Whatever suits you — whatever you folks think you can handle. We’ll grease wheels to help you get started. After that it’s up to you. If you start a business and it goes bust that’s your own problem. We’ll help with the relocation costs but we can’t bankroll you beyond a few hundred a month for seed money. It’d be against policy and anyway we haven’t got the funds.”

Mathieson pawed through the documents on the bed. “Massachusetts driver’s license. I don’t know the first thing about Massachusetts.”

“Don’t have to. You apply for a new license, you turn in the Mass license. It’s just to get bona fides on your applications. You did all this before, Fred.”

“It’s been eight years. I’d forgotten a lot of this.”

“It’ll come back to you.” Bradleigh lit a cigarette. “Think about it, let me know what you both decide. And incidentally I think you both ought to change your appearance. Jan, try a short haircut. Fred, I’d do a crew cut for a while and get one of those compounds that cover gray. You might think about growing a moustache.”

2

They brought him a typewriter and he sent brief letters to each of his clients. After lunch Caruso, a man whose face Mathieson always had trouble remembering, drove him several miles to a shopping center in Santa Monica. Mathieson changed ten dollars into coins in a bank; he made his calls from an outdoor phone booth while Caruso sat in the car keeping watch.

His first call was to Phil Adler. “Do you still want to buy me out?”

“Well naturally I’ll do whatever you want, Fred, but I’m sure right now you don’t want to have to be thinking about—”

“Is the offer open or not?”

“Well, you know, of course it is.”

“Draw up the papers. I’ll take whatever you think’s fair. A man named Bradleigh will conclude the deal with you, he’s got my power of attorney, he’ll be in touch with you in a few days to clean out my office and take care of the details.”

He finally got off the line and made the rest of his calls — the lawyers, the bank, his good-bye calls. Most of them had seen the news on TV or in the papers; he tried to keep his answers short and fend off their sympathies.

Finally he called the Gilfillans. Amy answered the phone. “Wait, I’ll get the string bean and put him on the extension.”

In a minute they were both on the wire. Roger said, “How’re they hangin’, partner?”

“We’ve got to clear out, I’m afraid.”

“I know. No forwarding addresses, I reckon.”

Amy said, “Billy’s going to miss Ronny.”

“It’s worse on the kids than anybody else.”

“Like some kind of fuckin’ divorce,” Roger said. “Listen, there’s some clown hanging around up at your place. About your size and he’s wearing that red and yellow sport shirt of yours.”

“Must be one of the government people,” Mathieson said.

“I told him it was a dumb thing to do, making himself a target like that. Man said, ‘That’s my job, sir.’ Just like one of them brave heroes in the movies. Stupid fuckin’ idiot.”

Amy said, “Fred, you and Jan and that boy take real good care of yourselves, hear?” Her voice broke; he heard the click when she hung up her extension.

Roger said, “I hope all your trails keep downslope with the wind at your back, old-timer.”

“Maybe one of these days we’ll come back.”

“Yeah.”

“At least I’ll see you in the movies.”

“You do that.”

“Christ this is a pain in the ass.”

“Just look after that good family you got, Fred.”

“So long, Roger.” When he hung up he couldn’t stop the tears.

3

Bradleigh woke him up, banging on the motel room door. Mathieson crawled out of bed, glanced at Ronny on the cot and went to the door. When the three-and-three knock repeated itself he opened up.

“Come next door a minute.” Bradleigh talked in a whisper.

He locked the door and carried the key with him, padding along the galleried porch in his pajamas. It was still dark.

When he entered the room Caruso gave him a tired nod. The bed was made; nobody had slept in there. Bradleigh closed the door and handed Mathieson a styrofoam cup of coffee.

He stumbled to the chair with it. “Thanks. I need it.”

“A little hung?”

“You could say that.” He’d thrown the empty vodka bottle in the wastebasket; it was the last thing he remembered.

“I had a call from Washington. They’ve found the leak. I thought you wouldn’t mind being rousted early for that bit of news.”

“Uh-huh. Time’s it, anyway?”

“Quarter to five.”

“Jesus Christ don’t you guys ever sleep?”

“When we have time to. It’s one of the secretaries in our office. They were blackmailing her — never mind for what. Ever heard the name C. K. Gillespie — a lawyer in Washington?”

“No. Gillespie? No. You mean he was blackmailing her and he was stupid enough to tell her his name?”

“No. She was smart enough to follow him after one of their meetings. She took down his license number.”

“He’s a lawyer? Then it’s a dead end. He’ll plead confidential privilege.”

“He doesn’t know we’re onto him. We’re keeping the woman on ice. We’re going to bug Gillespie every way from Sunday. Phones, office, apartment, car, even his clothes. After a while he’ll realize she’s disappeared — then we’re hoping he’ll panic and start calling people.”

“This wiretapping and bugging. Is it legal?”

“Warrants from the Circuit Court, sure. We want them airtight, we’re not going to fuck around with illegal taps.”

“She’s the one who fingered me to this Gillespie?”

“And Benson and John Fusco and Draper. All four of you. We’ve got the other three under cover, we’re relocating them all. Incidentally it looks like Benson’s going to make it all right. But don’t worry about C. K. Gillespie, he’s a drop in the bucket.” The smell of Bradleigh’s cigarette was slightly nauseating. “We may have a chance at the whole megillah this time, Fred. All we need is a few breaks. If we can get enough on Gillespie we can make a deal with him and maybe bring the whole structure toppling down.”

“Immunity from prosecution and a new identity if he’ll blow the whistle on Pastor and Ezio Martin and the rest of them. That’s the ‘deal’?”

“Sure.”

“So Gillespie set us up, and he ends up going scot-free.”

“Come on, Fred, be sensible. He’ll lose his law practice, that’s for openers. I told you, forget him. He doesn’t matter; he’s the smallest potato in the sack.” Bradleigh picked up an ashtray; he kept his feet, holding the ashtray left-handed like a guest at a cocktail party. “Given any thought to where you want to go? Discussed it with Jan and Ronny any?”

“Ronny’s all for doing a Swiss Family Robinson somewhere in the South Pacific.”

“That what you want?”

“No. I’d go nuts if I didn’t have people around me who talked the same language.”

“So?”

“We’ve talked. I realize you want the decision fast but we’re talking about the rest of our lives, Glenn. I’ll let you know as soon as I can — we’re not crazy about motel rooms either.” He threw the empty styrofoam cup at the wastebasket, missed, ignored it and leaned back in the chair. “Got any aspirin?”

Caruso went toward the bathroom.

Bradleigh said gently, “Scared, aren’t you.”

“Sure I am. They found us — they can do it again. I don’t really care how they did it, Glenn. I don’t care if you’ve plugged this leak. They can find another one. That’s what gives me nightmares.”

“No more leaks.”

“Suppose my kid had gone home to get his baseball bat or any damn thing. Suppose he’d been in the house when they threw the bomb.”

“It’s no good supposing. He didn’t. Nobody was home. They tried Benson and they tried you and they came up losers on both. Mobsters aren’t supermen, you know. They get power by keeping people afraid, but take away the guns and they’ll never last a day in the real world.”

“They may not be mental giants but they frighten the hell out of me.” Mathieson took the aspirin with the glass of water Caruso gave him. He rubbed his eyes; they’d be bloodshot all day.

Bradleigh said with unusual heat, “It’s a crazy mythology we’ve created about the mob. The cold professionals, the never-miss hit men. All they know is triggers and bombs. More often than not they can’t even handle the simplest job without screwing it up. Look at you. Look at Benson. Benson’s off the critical list, incidentally. About the worst they did to him was inconvenience him.”

“Inconvenience.” Mathieson clenched his eyes against the ache. “I’m sorry — I don’t feel grateful. I don’t even feel relieved. I’ll feel grateful when there’s nobody out there with guns and bombs looking for my wife and my son.”

“I know how you feel.”

Bradleigh’s detachment enraged him. He sat with his eyes closed. He was remembering different people, different times. A cheerful young lawyer and his sparkling young wife and their bubbling three-year-old son. Friendships that were built on laughter and simple enjoyments. They had taken warm pleasure in one another: That had been the center of their world — warmth. He remembered the cramped apartment on Thirteenth Street and the laughter that always filled it — and then a man in a men’s room had handed a white envelope to another man and it had all taken on weight and begun to sink beneath the surface.

He bestirred himself. “Phil Adler’s drawing up dissolution agreements. You’ll have to use that power of attorney for me, wrap things up with him.”

“Sure.”

“Sell the cars, handle the insurance people about the house, you know.” Scrape up the leavings of the life of Fredric Mathieson, 1967–1976 — born by fiat and died of fear, aged eight and one half years.

Bradleigh said, “We’ll make it as though you never existed at all.”

4

They had the pool to themselves: noon in a motel. A few cars were parked in the diagonal slots — the day sleepers who didn’t have air-conditioned cars and drove by night. The pool was in the center of the two-story court, out of sight of the street; outside, Bradleigh’s four operatives were positioned to enfilade the entrances. Caruso was the only visible official presence; he wore a loud Hawaiian shirt with the tails out over his slacks and Mathieson knew there was a revolver under his waistband.

“How about a drink?”

She shook her head. “It’s not even one o’clock.”

“What the hell, we’re on vacation.”

She was watching the boy swim across the pool. “I wouldn’t call it that. For God’s sake stop patronizing me, I’m not made out of bone china.” Finally she looked straight at him. “I’m not going to pieces. You can stop treating me as if I were.”

“OK. I’m sorry.”

“And quit apologizing all the time.”

“I’m sor—” And then they both laughed. But it was uneasy laughter.

Mathieson hitched his aluminum chair six inches closer to Jan’s. “Been thinking about where we go?”

She pulled the sunglasses down off her forehead and adjusted them on the bridge of her nose. Now he could no longer see her eyes; but her face kept turning toward the pool. “My mind’s still blank. I wish I could think.” Her face dipped. “It’s so damned unfair.”

“We’ve got to make up our minds, you know. We can’t stay here. Glenn’s itching to get us out of here.”

“I know... I know.”

Ronny climbed the ladder, perched at the top of the slide, made sure he had an audience and chuted into the water. He went in straight, feet first, holding his nose. When he surfaced at the ladder he said, “I wish they had a diving board.”

“Do your surface dives,” Mathieson told him.

“Yeah but it’s not the same thing.” But the boy went off the ladder step, curving neatly through the blue water.

5

Bradleigh went out first. Mathieson heard his soft talk: “All right?”

“All clear.”

Bradleigh waved them out. Mathieson went ahead of Jan and Ronny. “Feels a little foolish.”

“Let’s just play it by the rules,” Bradleigh told him. They walked through the archway to the back parking lot. Phosphor lamps on high arched stalks of aluminum threw pools of white light around the tarmac. The three cars were drawn up side by side. Caruso was feeding luggage into an open car trunk.

Bradleigh opened doors for them and stood to one side. “You understand the drill?”

“Seems melodramatic to me,” Mathieson said.

“I know. Think of it as a game you’re playing.”

Ronny said, “Funny kind of game if you ask me.”

“It won’t last long,” Bradleigh said. “A couple of days you’ll be up in those Arizona mountains learning how to be an Indian scout.” He gripped Jan’s hand. “You take care of each other now.”

“Glenn, you told us not to thank you but—”

“That’s right.” But Bradleigh smiled a little; Mathieson took his firm brief handshake. “Look after them, Jason. I’ll check in with you in a few days.”

Jason W. Greene. “Take care, Glenn.”

Then they were in the back seat of the Plymouth and Caruso was sliding in behind the wheel. The doors chunked shut, starters meshed, headlights stabbed across the lot. The car on Mathieson’s right pulled away and Caruso drove after it. Mathieson looked around: The third car rolled into place behind them.

They went up along the freeways with the two outrider cars bracketing them front and rear. Caruso kept a steady hundred feet behind the point car. Three in the morning: There was no traffic. Caruso’s small talk dried up quickly. In the back seat Ronny fell asleep between them. Mathieson tried to sleep. He thought of the Gilfillans, the rubble that had been his own house, Phil Adler’s complacent fat smile. He felt buffeted by events and resentful of his own passivity; but an innocent civilian on the battlefield couldn’t make the war stop. You could only run for cover and hate yourself for it.

At El Centro the convoy stopped for gas and breakfast: Caruso made a phone call; after a while they were on the road again.

Ronny became restive; Jan gave him her place by the window but everything was shut tight, the air-conditioner feebly holding back the desert heat. The land was painfully bright, mirages in the road ahead, blinding slivers darting at them from the chrome of passing cars.

They crossed the Colorado River into Arizona and the temperature kept climbing. Twice the convoy left the Interstate and went two-laning along straight country roads, into the cotton and citrus towns, all dusty pickups and slow-moving tractors and endless irrigation hoses. The outrider cars ahead and behind were never out of sight. There was no pursuit but Caruso was obeying instructions.

The detouring and doubling-back ate up hours. At noon they were at a drab oasis somewhere near Buckeye and he tried to revive himself by splashing cold water in his face in the flyspecked lavatory. The overcooked hamburger kept coming back at him through the afternoon.

The procession took a roundabout route through the Phoenix suburbs; as the traffic thickened the outriders moved in closer like mother quail. One of the marshals spelled Caruso at the wheel of the Plymouth; Caruso slept with his head lolling while Mathieson and Jan kept Ronny occupied with Twenty Questions and Botticelli; after a while the boy grew tired of word games and took to counting telephone poles.

East past the Superstition Range, Florence Junction, up the grades through the smelters of Superior, the mines of Miami and Globe, the dark red earth of the Apache reservation. They switchbacked down the limestone cliffs of the Salt River Canyon, crossed the bridge and stopped at the filling station for gas and Nehis.

Going up the north cliff one of the cars overheated and they waited in the scenic overlook until it could cool down enough to empty a Thermos of water into the radiator. Caruso sat on the stone retaining wall and stiffened whenever a tourist car pulled into the parking strip. Ronny ran from point to point, plugged Mathieson’s money into the coin-telescope, read the embossed metal legends about Indian battles and Spanish explorations.

Mathieson took Jan’s hand and they stretched their legs. It was bright and dry but the altitude was enough to take the heat out of the air and there was a mountain breeze.

Above the canyon Caruso took them off the highway and they wound through the back roads of the reservation through Whiteriver and up the twisting bends of the Mogollon Rim into piney woods, with a trout lake on the left, and for the first time Jan gave Mathieson her slow smile. “Almost there.”

They reached Showlow at suppertime. Caruso said, “End of the line, everybody out,” and they trooped into a roadside steak house made of lodgepole logs. A heavyset Apache sat in a chair on the porch and tipped his head back to peer at them under the brim of his curled cowboy hat; he did not smile.

Mathieson pulled out a chair for Jan and then settled at the table. “All right. Tomorrow we start house hunting.”

1

George Ramiro had blue jowls and a belly on him; he was comfortable in his fat.

Ramiro was smoking a Cuban cigar when he came into Ezio’s office. His suit must have cost the better part of a thousand dollars but he made it look baggy. One jacket pocket bulged where he’d wadded his necktie into it; his shirt collar was open to the second button with coiled-wire hair bursting through the vee; his pot had puckered pleats into the shirt where it sagged out of his waistband.

“Mr. Pastor sent me over.”

“Got a job for you, George.” Ezio reached for the file. He opened it and glanced through it mechanically as if to remind himself of its contents, though he had committed it to memory. He pushed the file across the desk, picked a leaf of tobacco off his tongue and sat down.

Ezio said, “How’s Alicia?”

“Fine, fine.” Ramiro was married to Ezio’s half sister. She was not a likable woman; the question and the answer were ritual; no further discussion was required.

“Justice Department agent,” Ramiro said. He turned a page and held up the photograph, squinting at it.

“We’ve got a line on him,” Ezio told him. “I want you to go out to Los Angeles and take charge personally.”

“Take charge of what?”

“This guy Bradleigh, he’s the one who’s keeping Edward Merle under wraps.”

“OK, I got you.”

“The reason we’re sending you, George, you were in the courtroom the whole time he was testifying, you know the guy’s face. We can’t have mistakes on this.”

“Sure, Ezio. I don’t mind. Getting too fat and lazy anyhow — I can use a little work.”

“You make contact out there with a guy named Fritz Deffeldorf.”

“Who?”

“Free-lance contractor. He’s been on this a while. Don’t step on him unless you have to, but he understands you’ll be taking charge.”

“He the guy that blew it the last time?”

“He’s one of them.”

“That’s nice.”

“He knows the setup, he’s on top of things out there. I can’t run in a whole new crew on this, George, we need people who know the Los Angeles area. Deffeldorf’s the one who got us this line on Glenn Bradleigh. You work with him, all right?”

“Just so he knows who’s running it.”

“He knows.” Ezio got the airline ticket out and pushed it across the desk. “You still carry that Magnum, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“The license is no good for a plane. Leave it home. Deffeldorf will give you another piece when you get out there.”

“When do I go?”

“Here’s the ticket. Flight leaves La Guardia at one. You’ve just about got time to throw things in a suitcase and get out there.”

“Miss my lunch.” Ramiro gathered the file and reached for the airline ticket. He opened it and smiled wryly. “Glad to see it’s round trip.”

Ezio laughed quietly and watched him walk out of the office.

1

Jason W. Greene, he thought. Remember it. Born April 1930 in Binghamton, New York. Antioch class of ’52. Investment counselor, retired, had a minor heart attack, came out West for my health, writing a book, as he told the realtor who had come out to settle the lease.

He watched the realtor’s Buick roll away — down the ruts of the driveway and a left turn into the road, past Caruso’s car and quickly out of sight in the pines. Caruso waved to Mathieson from the front seat of the car. Mathieson saw him turn a page in his paperback.

In the kitchen Jan inspected the cabinets. She had a dinner plate in her hand, upside down. “South Korea. But they’re not bad, are they.”

“Sure you can hack this place?”

“For the rest of the summer at least.”

“It’s better than a motel. God knows. If we don’t mind the winter we can look for a place of our own next spring.”

“And otherwise?”

“Well, ma’am, I reckon we’ll just drift on till we find a place that sizes up right.”

Her smile was distracted. She turned a slow circle, looking at things. “All the mod cons.” Her voice was a little dry. The refrigerator must have been twenty years old; the furniture was sturdy but battered — Salvation Army style. The uncovered log walls were self-consciously rustic and the high fireplace that separated kitchen from living room lent it a hunting-lodge flavor.

Ronny came in the back door. “That’s a freaky old plow in the barn.”

“It’s a disk cultivator.”

Jan said, “You’ve got grease on the knees of those Levi’s and you just put them on an hour ago.”

“Nag nag.” Ronny made a face and dodged Mathieson’s good-natured swat. He went outside again. The screen door slapped shut; Mathieson heard him running across the dry pine needles.

“I don’t think we need to worry about his adjusting. He’d be more traumatized by a trip to Disneyland.”

She said, “Were you worried about him?”

“I wasn’t sure how he’d take all this.”

“He’s got all the bounce in the world. We’ll rent him a horse for the rest of the summer — he’ll be in seventh heaven.” It was why they’d taken the rental — the three acres of woods behind it, the barn and the corral.

It was eight miles from town. The road served weekend and summer cabins — A-frames and mobile homes. It was the part of Arizona the world didn’t know about: the piney-woods high country. Nothing elegant about the neighborhood but he didn’t know how long their money was going to last; and it accorded with Bradleigh’s dictum — You can’t just change the name. You’ve got to create a whole new profile.

After lunch he took Ronny out to the rent-a-car to drive into town. Caruso’s partner got out of the stakeout car at the foot of the driveway. The partner was a slight man with a round dark face and eyes that always seemed amused. Mathieson had had difficulty figuring out his name until he’d seen it written on a luggage tag: Michael Cuernavan. The accent came on the second syllable. “Welsh,” Cuernavan explained.

Cuernavan rode into Showlow with them. They explored the village and did their shopping. At half past three they all had McDonald’s milk shakes and then went car shopping. “If we’ve got to feed a horse we’d better look at pickup trucks.”

At the third used-car lot they found a four-year-old El Camino. It was dented and the truck-bed had wisps of straw stuck in the corners but it seemed to run smoothly. Mathieson kicked the tires and slammed the doors. Ronny tested the radio. Cuernavan announced, “I’m the best amateur Chevy mechanic this side of the Bonneville Salt Flats,” and prowled around under the hood while the used-car dealer watched with a great show of nothing-to-hide confidence, beaming at all of them, singling out Ronny as the most impressionable and zeroing in on him with amiable ebullience: “You’ll have yourself a ball tootling around in this here machine. What’s your name, son?”

“Ronny. Ronny Math — Ronny Greene.”

Red-faced, the boy wheeled away on the pretext of ducking to look under the back of the pickup. Mathieson caught Cuernavan’s sharp glance. Cuernavan spoke quickly: “Probably need a valve job in another ten, fifteen thousand.” He went around to shut off the engine. “But she’s reasonably sound.”

They transferred the day’s purchases into the bed of the truck and turned in the rental car. Mathieson drove the El Camino slowly, getting the feel of it. Ronny sat between the men poking at controls on the dash — air-conditioner, radio, cigar lighter. Finally he said in a low voice, “I’m sorry, Dad. It won’t happen again.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it too much. I still think of myself as Fred Mathieson. It’ll be a long time before it comes easy.”

But it had unnerved him more than he liked to show. The burden on the boy would be heavy.

Cuernavan said gently, “Best way to handle it, just take your time every time somebody asks you a question. Any question at all. Wait a couple seconds before you answer. Give yourself time to make sure before you talk.”

“Yes, sir,” Ronny said.

When they returned to Cochise Road a Mountain Bell truck was pulling out of the driveway; they had to wait for it to emerge. Caruso was still parked at the side of the road. The truck drove away into the pines and Cuernavan let himself out of the pickup.

Caruso said, “I checked him out. Genuine telephone company. Your phone’s connected. How you getting along, Mr. Greene?”

“Pretty good, thanks.”

“We’ll see you in the morning, then. Relief shift takes over in a little while; we’ll be going off.”

“How long do you have to keep watch on us?”

“Until Glenn Bradleigh pulls us off.”

“It must be boring as hell.”

“We get paid for it.” Caruso had a kind smile. He displayed his paperback. “I catch up on my trash reading. Anyhow this is a picnic, running surveillance out in quiet countryside like this. Anybody comes along, we hear them coming from half a mile away. It’s not like a city stakeout where you’ve got to watch everything that moves.”

Cuernavan said, “Check the oil every hundred miles or so until you find out how much she’s using.”

“Will do. Thanks for the help.”

“Thanks for the company,” Cuernavan replied. He slid into the car beside Caruso.

Mathieson drove it into the driveway. Ronny said, “They’re good guys.”

“Aeah.” He parked by the kitchen door and they unloaded into the house. Jan had the place dusted and swept to her satisfaction; it was time to line the shelves.

Mathieson picked up the receiver and listened to the buzz. Then he put it down; there was nobody he could call.

The air was crisp and thin. After supper he built a fire and they sat around it until it was time to turn in. They slept under doubled blankets. Somewhere in the run of the night he awoke briefly and thought how cold it was, and thought about the two men in the night-shift car at the foot of the driveway: They must be half frozen.

They had an early breakfast. Immediately afterward Ronny disappeared to explore the woods. Jan’s admonishment followed him: “Don’t go beyond earshot.”

“Fat chance of him obeying that one,” Mathieson said.

“I know. But there’s no way Frank Pastor’s people could find us here.”

He hadn’t told her about Ronny’s slip of the tongue; he didn’t tell her now. He set up the typewriter on a table near the fireplace; he stacked the paper beside it but did not sit down to write anything. That would come later. It needed some thinking first.

The phone. It startled him; the adrenaline made his hand shake when he picked it up.

“Hi, Jason. It’s Glenn. How’re you making it?”

“We’re fine. Where are you?”

“Sky Harbor Airport, Phoenix. I’ll be up there this evening, see how you’re getting along.”

“We’re settling in. Your men are handling things beautifully.”

“Caruso’s a Goddamn gem,” Bradleigh said. “See you around eight, OK?”

“Scotch and water, light on the water. Right?”

“Right.”

At lunch Ronny described his discoveries — the overgrown wreckage of a 1949 DeSoto, the rotted remains of a tree house evidently built by an earlier generation of children. The lady two houses down said she had a son Ronny’s age, he’d be home from camp on Sunday.

Jan stood to clear the table. Ronny said, “When are we going to go look at horses?”

“How about tomorrow morning.”

“Hey, yeah. Then I better get the stable cleaned out.” And the boy was off and running.

Mathieson broke the seal on the vodka. “Bloody Mary?”

“It’s awfully early.”

“I’m still jumpy.”

“You go ahead then. I don’t want anything.” She was cool, distant.

He mixed the drink and sat at the kitchen table watching her rearrange things in the cabinet. She kept taking things down and putting them back. Then abruptly she took the drink out of his hand and swallowed half of it.

“I changed my mind.” She gave the glass back to him. “I’m sorry. I’m feeling snappish.”

“Yeah.”

He drained it and went to the sink to wash the glass. Through the window he could see the open maw of the barn. Ronny was wielding a rusty rake, dragging piles of ancient straw.

“Fred?”

He turned. “Jason.”

“I’m sorry. It doesn’t fit you.”

“Couldn’t be helped. Those were the papers they happened to have. Short notice...”

“It’s just not fair.” She slammed a frying pan back onto its shelf. “I wasn’t made for this rustic nonsense. I miss Roger and Amy — I miss everything.”

He took her in the circle of his arms. “Go ahead.”

She was still: rigid. She turned away from him and went to the fireplace. She kept her arms folded; he saw her shoulders lift defensively.

It was no good trying to go to her. He knew how she felt: She wanted to start smashing things. He said, “Right offhand I can’t think of any platitudes that would help.”

“I want my house back.” She turned and stared at him. “I want my family’s name back. Our friends. Our Goddamned life. I want our son to live like a normal human being again. Adjusting, hell — when would he ever be eager to go off by himself and muck out a falling-down barn? If he weren’t desperately upset he’d be running all over the neighborhood making new friends. Look at him — he’s crying inside, Fred, he’s just barely holding himself together.”

After a long time she said, “We’re not going to last like this.”

He took a long ragged breath. “What do you want me to do?”

“I wish I knew.”

2

They waited for Bradleigh. The night shift came on but Caruso and Cuernavan stayed, taking coffee with them in the house. Cuernavan and Ronny played gin rummy with a great deal of mock ferocity: They had struck up a friendship. Cuernavan seemed to sense that the boy needed it. Caruso sipped his coffee and remained inobtrusive. Jan had cut drapes from a bolt of streaked brown fabric and was running the sewing machine as if it were a Formula One racing car. She kept looking sharply over her shoulder as if to make sure Ronny was still there.

Mathieson drank the Bloody Mary too fast and tried to remember whether it was his fourth or fifth since lunch.

The downing sun threw a red blaze through the window. Caruso left his seat and went to the screen door to stand watch. “This is fine coffee.”

Jan said, “Shouldn’t he have been here by now?”

“I don’t know,” Caruso said. “I wouldn’t worry about Glenn Bradleigh.”

“Have you known him long?”

“Worked for him six years now. He’s one of the best.”

Mathieson was thinking: This is no good. We’re just kidding ourselves. We’ve both got to find something sensible to do with our lives or we’ll go insane up here.

“Gin.”

“Hell, Ronny, you must have cheated. I’ve got at least seventy points here. Let’s see, forty, forty-nine, fifty-seven...”

“Seventy-three.” Ronny had always had a quick accurate head for figures. If he didn’t devote the rest of his life to horses he’d probably turn mathematician or engineer or computer scientist. It was something he’d inherited from Mathieson: a quick deft competence with the exactitudes of numerical and mechanical things. He’d always been handy with tools and he could handle anything electrical. He enjoyed rewiring toasters and doing handyman carpentry: He’d built all their kitchen cabinets himself in Sherman Oaks.

Maybe I’ll become a cabinet maker. Give me something to do with my hands at least.

It wouldn’t work and he knew it but he explored the fantasy dutifully. He had been devoted to professions that involved human complexities; to sustain his spirit he had to deal with people, not with pieces of wood.

Twilight, then dusk. Jan left the sewing machine and moved behind Caruso toward the window. “He really should have been here by now.”

“Might have got held up at the Phoenix office,” Caruso said. “I’m sure he’ll be—”

The phone. Mathieson shot to his feet, unnerved. “I’ll get it.” He strode past the gin players at the kitchen table and snatched the receiver up, breaking off the second ring in its middle. “Yes?”

“Glenn Bradleigh. Is Caruso there?”

“Yes. Are you—”

“Put him on. Fast.”

Goddamnit I am so sick and tired of being pushed around... But he waved Caruso over and stood back. “Caruso.”

He watched Caruso’s eyes widen and then narrow. “You sure?... Christ, that’s going to be a pill for them to swallow... Well how much time have we got, then?... I see, yeah. But we’d be stupid to take the chance, the town’s just too damn small... How the hell did they pull it off?... Christ, they must have put a lot of manpower on it then. Where do I report to you?... All right, I’ll call in. We’d better do it from pay phones on both ends, so just leave a time and phone number at the office for me. I’ll check in with them between six and eight tomorrow night... Yeah, I’ll need it. Thanks.”

When Caruso hung up his face took on a studied blankness before he turned. Mathieson took a step forward. “What now?”

Jan came through past the fireplace and searched Caruso’s face. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“You’re not going to like it. I’m sorry.” Caruso’s grimace was half angry, half apologetic. “This is our fault. Glenn made a mistake but it’s something we all should have thought of. It looks like the Pastor organization got a make on Glenn. Either they picked him up in Phoenix or they’ve been tailing him all the way from Los Angeles. Either way, they shadowed his car up here from Phoenix. Apparently they’re using at least two cars; they were leapfrogging him and that’s why he didn’t tumble to it earlier.”

Jan reached out, braced her hand against the fireplace to steady herself and looked quickly from Mathieson to Caruso. “You mean they’ve found us again.”

“No, ma’am. Not yet.”

Cuernavan said, “Where’s Glenn?”

“Next town up the road, calling from a gas station. He’s going to keep driving as far as Gallup tonight.”

“Where’d he disclose them?”

Caruso made a face. “Not until he turned into Cochise Road. The one that had jumped ahead of him on the highway hung a U-turn — that’s what tipped him. He pulled over and waited, and both cars went right by him. He didn’t recognize anybody but he’s pretty sure. Both carrying California plates. Glenn ran them a little wild-goose hunt and got back on the highway. Tried to make it look as if he’d only pulled off onto Cochise Road to shake the tails. He’s going to try to distract them as far as Gallup. But we can’t take the chance they’ll buy it. They’ll come back to this town and they’ll start asking questions about families who just moved in. It won’t take them much time to find out about the Jason Greenes.”

Cuernavan turned to Mathieson and spread his hands, palms up. Ronny was shuffling the deck. He set it down on the table and squared it neatly, with care, eyes fixed on it. “You mean we’re going away again?”

Caruso rammed his hands in his pockets. “That’s about the size of it.”

Mathieson had trouble controlling his voice. It shook. “How long do we have?”

Caruso shook his head. “No telling. Long enough to pack, I guess. Jesus I’m sorry.”

Jan turned away and walked back into the living room. She moved like a mechanical wind-up toy.

Mathieson’s fists were clenched so tight they began to hurt. He opened his hands and studied them. Dear God I can’t take any more of this. I just can’t do it.

1

Bradleigh was waiting for him in the parking lot of the Tucson airport — taking short quick puffs of his filter tip. The open ashtray under the dashboard was filled with butts.

Mathieson got out of Caruso’s car and slid into Bradleigh’s. The air conditioning blew the smoke around Bradleigh’s face in fragile wreaths. Mathieson pulled the door shut. “You keep it idling in this heat with the air-conditioner on, you’ll overheat the engine.”

“Yeah, well it’s rented.”

Caruso was parking fifty feet away. Mathieson removed his sunglasses briefly to study Bradleigh’s face but then he put them back on.

Bradleigh was waiting for him to say something. Waiting for his forgiveness. Mathieson didn’t give it to him. “You get the papers for us?”

“In the folder.” Bradleigh tipped his head back and Mathieson found the folder in the back seat. He unwound the string closing and opened the brown flap.

“Paul and Alice Baxter,” Bradleigh said.

“Alice? She won’t stand for it. It took her four years to get used to Jan.”

“Jan for Janice. You could try calling her Al.”

Mathieson shuffled through the documents. “Nothing in here for Ronny.”

“We’re still preparing them. He doesn’t need paper ID right away — how often does a kid need ID? But we’re doing a birth-certificate search. We want to find one for a kid named Ronald. We can doctor the last name. Whatever town it turns out to come from, you can always say you were just passing through there when he was born.”

Mathieson stared at Bradleigh. “Do you think we’ll have time to get used to the name this time?”

“Look, Fred — Paul — I know how you feel, and I wish there was—”

“Some way to make it all up to us? I understand, Glenn. I understand it’s not your fault.” He tapped his temple. “I understand it up here. But down in the gut it’s something else. Have you ever felt real honest-to-God flat-out rage? Have you any idea how much it can corrupt your thinking...?”

“You want to take a poke at me? Would that help?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake.”

Bradleigh stubbed the cigarette out. “You’re not in a mood for much talk right now. All right, the tedious details, let’s get them over with. I assume you’ve talked it over with the family. Otherwise you wouldn’t have insisted on a meeting today. Where do you want to go?”

“We’ve got a place in mind.”

Bradleigh shook out a cigarette and offered the pack. Mathieson ignored it. Bradleigh’s smile came slowly. “And?”

“That’s all. We’ve picked a place. It’s on a need-to-know basis, Glenn. You don’t need to know.”

Bradleigh put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He braced both hands against the top of the steering wheel, straightening his arms, pressing himself back in the seat and staring straight ahead out the windshield. “You want off the hook?”

“Yes.”

“I know how you feel. But it’s not wise.”

“I see. But it was wise to move to Showlow with a retinue a half-blind man could have spotted. It was wise to get tracked there within forty-eight hours.”

“That was my stupid fault.”

“Yeah, it was.” He was in no mood to give Bradleigh an inch.

“All right. I asked for that. But there are still good reasons why you need—”

“It’s my responsibility to look after the safety of my family, Glenn. It may be your job but it’s my life. All I’m doing now, I’m taking the authority that goes with the responsibility.”

“You’re a novice. An amateur. Out there alone you three wouldn’t last any time at all.”

“We’ll have help.”

Bradleigh’s face swiveled. “Whose help?”

“Need-to-know.”

“The fact remains we’re the experts at this. All right, we’ve blundered but don’t forget we caught this blunder in time. An amateur might not have caught it until it was too late.”

“I’m not going to sit here all day and argue the point. You know my position.”

“Your position’s counter to our policy. I’m committed to render every possible protective service.”

“You’ll be doing that best if you turn us loose.”

“Not according to our regulations.”

“Screw regulations, Glenn.”

On the dashboard the temperature idiot-light began to flicker red. The engine idled roughly, skipping a beat now and then, shaking the car.

Finally Bradleigh said, “I’m not just a good German, you know. I don’t just follow every order I get whether I like it or not. But this time I agree with policy. A fair number have turned state’s evidence and then refused our protection. Tough guys. They figured they could hold out on their own. Mostly they get killed. I’m not bragging, Fred. That’s just the way it is.”

“I’m not being a tough guy. I’m not going to stand in one place and dare them to come get me. We’re going to ground and they won’t find us. But a secret’s only a secret as long as nobody else knows it, and this time we don’t want anybody at all to know where we are. Not Caruso, not you, not the President of the United States.”

“You’ve always been a stubborn son of a bitch.”

“Stubbornness got me into this in the first place. If I hadn’t dug in my heels against the well-meaning advice of the whole world I wouldn’t have got into this fix. All right. I haven’t changed. Stubbornness got me in, it’ll get me out.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“It’s all I’ve got to count on.”

Bradleigh stirred in the seat. The red warning light flickered brighter. “I made a stupid mistake. I figured they were looking for you, not for me. It should have occurred to me they’d try to follow me to you. All right, it’s a mistake I’ll never make again. I lost them in Gallup and they haven’t picked me up again. That’s not conjecture. It’s fact. You believe it?”

“Of course.”

“I guess you do. If you didn’t you wouldn’t be sitting here with me.” He crushed the butt out. Mathieson wondered what was going on in his mind: Usually Bradleigh was transparent; now he was struggling with something inside.

Bradleigh said in a different voice, “You know my office number. Call collect. Whenever you want to. If you want money we’ll arrange a postal drop of some kind. Just let me know.” He sounded hoarse and hollow: It was a confession of failure and his accession was a form of penance.

Mathieson had counted on it. It gave him no pleasure; neither did it sadden him. The coldness was something he needed to sustain close inside him for however long it might take to learn to live with the wild rage that these past days had thrown into his life.

Bradleigh leaned across him to open the glove compartment in the dashboard. A box of .38 cartridges rolled out onto the open hinged door. Bradleigh closed his hand around it and then slammed the compartment shut. He pulled his revolver out from inside his shirt and put it with the ammunition on top of the document case in Mathieson’s lap. “You know how to use it, don’t you?”

“Yes. But I don’t want it.”

“You’d better take it, Fred.”

“I’m not a killer. That’s one of the differences between me and them. I doubt I’d shoot even Frank Pastor — even if I had the chance.”

“Your life could depend on it.” Bradleigh’s voice hardened. “Jan’s life. Ronny’s life.”

He saw that it was something that would make a great difference to Bradleigh. “All right,” he conceded.

“I hope you’ll never need it. Just keep a little oil on it.” Bradleigh put the gun and ammunition into the envelope with the documents.

“How do you explain losing your gun?”

“I don’t. It’s personal property. I’ve got two more at home just like it. It’s registered to me, of course. But if you have to use it you know damn well I’ll support you all the way.”

“All the way to my funeral, I expect. If I ever have to use a gun it’ll mean they’ve got too close to us.”

“Just keep it close at hand. Promise me you’ll do that, Fred.”

Mathieson made no answer; he wasn’t going to make promises he didn’t intend keeping and he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life with a gun in his pocket.

Bradleigh’s shoulders drooped a little. “All right. You’ll suit yourself, I guess.”

Mathieson said, “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t try to trace us. I’d appreciate it even more if you’d wipe these new names and ID’s off our records but I don’t suppose you can do that.”

“No. I can’t.”

“All right. We’ll settle for what we can get.”

“I’ll have to tell them you got away from us. I’ll pull Caruso and Cuernavan away tonight at ten o’clock for a short conference. You’ll have about ten minutes to be out and gone.”

“Tell it any way you want. As long as they don’t come looking for us.”

“I’ll do what I can. It’s the least I owe you. Fred—”

“I know. Good luck yourself.”

“Send me a postcard. Or give me a ring. Anything — just let me know you’re all right. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” he said, not sure whether he would do it. He opened the door. “You’re about to boil over, Glenn.” He picked up the heavy envelope and walked across the lot toward Caruso’s car. He didn’t look back.

2

When they drove away from the motel he saw no sign of pursuit but he doubled through the dark back streets anyhow, zigzagging through silent residential areas, avoiding the main arteries and keeping half his attention on the mirrors.

Jan and Ronny were silent with the washed-out enervation of something near hopelessness. He’d made the decisions himself. Jan had neither argued nor offered suggestions.

He avoided the freeway and drove south from Tucson along the highway to Nogales. It was fifty miles to the Mexican border; they were there in less than an hour. The station wagon needed only a few gallons but he made a point of filling the tank at a station within a few blocks of the border gate and he engaged the station’s owner in conversation because he wanted the man to remember them.

At the border he applied for three temporary visitor visas in the Baxter family name. The visas weren’t necessary for entry to the border town itself but they were required if you went more than a few miles deeper into the country. He was laying a false trail; it would buy them a little time.

They drove into the Mexican side of Nogales and ate dinner at the Cavern Restaurant; he’d been there once years before and remembered the turtle soup and it was still as good as it had been but he hardly noticed.

It was midnight when they put it back on the road. He’d studied the map and it looked like a rugged but passable highway; it proved to be a barely graded dirt track filled with chuckholes from the last rains and it took the rest of the night at snail’s pace to cross eastward along the south side of the border, across the Sonora provincial boundary and through the dry hills to the village of Agua Prieta. At eight in the morning they crossed back into the United States. The Mexican guards merely waved them through; the American customs men tossed their luggage cursorily but showed no other interest and only glanced at the Mexican visitors’ permits; he was sure they hadn’t taken down the names and wouldn’t remember faces for more than a day.

The next step was to get rid of the car because Caruso knew it, the year and color and plate number.

Sleeplessness laid a grit on his eyeballs but Jan was too groggy to drive and he made do on three cups of strong road-house coffee and a big breakfast of steak and eggs. It kept him going along the highway north from Douglas to Benson. He kept checking the mirror and found nothing alarming there. The station wagon’s air-conditioner was inadequate against the Arizona desert and they sat three abreast because the cooling didn’t reach into the back. He filled the tank and checked the oil in Benson; they had lunch in a café and went eastward. The Interstate brought them into Willcox in midafternoon and he drove down the exit ramp into the town.

He dropped Jan and the boy with all the luggage at the Trailways depot and checked the wall-posted schedules: There was a four o’clock express to Tucson, Phoenix, El Centro, Riverside and Los Angeles. It gave him forty-five minutes. He drove along one of the main streets until he found a shopping center; he parked the car in a slot near the edge of the big parking lot, left the keys in the ignition and walked to a telephone booth. He looked up the number of the local taxicab company, “Fast Service Radio Dispatched,” and arrived back at the depot with fifteen minutes to spare.

They bought the tickets and waited for the bus; it was on time and they found seats without difficulty. He was speculating on how long it might be before someone spotted the keys in the ignition of the station wagon he’d left behind. Probably it would be stolen within twenty-four hours.

The Tucson stop was a dinner stop; they were on the road again at nine, out of Phoenix by midnight and barreling westward along the same route they’d taken last week coming the other direction with Caruso’s three-car convoy. The starlit desert was nearly invisible through the tinted windows; the air conditioning was too cold in the half-empty bus and condensation gathered along the chrome strips of the overhead luggage racks. Mathieson slowly blinked his raw eyes and felt the anger eat at him like an ulcer.

It was nearly three o’clock when the bus stopped in El Centro. He made several calls from a booth and finally found a motel that was still open for business and had vacancies. He booked a double room with a cot and they took a taxi from the depot. At half past three they carried their bags into the room. Mathieson said, “We’ll buy a car tomorrow. Let’s try to get some rest — we’ll talk tomorrow.”

3

The Gilfillans were at the cabin waiting for them and he watched to see if the reunion would revive Jan. She was nodding and talking and smiling in response to things addressed to her but it might be automatic.

Finally the luggage was carried inside, Ronny and Billy were dispatched to the creek with Roger’s fishing tackle, four chairs were set out on the porch, drinks were distributed.

He hoped that telling their story to Roger and Amy would restore reality to the nightmare experiences they had endured.

He let Jan tell it; he watched Roger’s and Amy’s reactions. As she spoke Jan became more animated, angrier; twice she laughed but it was laughter twisted inward. She drank too much too quickly and slurred. She’d had a headache all day; it became blinding and she went inside, moving like an old woman, Amy taking her along with an arm across her shoulders like a practical nurse.

It left him alone with Roger on the porch. Roger stood up. “Bourbon and branch again?”

“All right.”

“Girl needs rest.”

“Yes.”

“I reckon you do too.”

“I’ll put the car away.” Mathieson walked down to the old Ford they’d bought in El Centro and drove it around the house under the carport. When he emerged he found Roger on the steps holding both drinks.

Amy stood in the doorway. “She’s out for the night, I expect. But the rest of us got to eat. I better repair to the cuisine department. You boys take a hike or something.”

The men walked down along the edge of the pines. “We’re right proud you decided to come to us, old horse.”

There was nothing to say to that, nothing that wouldn’t sound saccharine.

“Y’all welcome to stay on up here as long as you want. You know that.”

“We don’t want to weigh you down, Roger.”

“Ain’t no weight. But winters up here get pretty hard and kind of lonesome. You got to drive fourteen mile to the country store on the main highway. Sometimes it’ll take you the whole day to do it.”

Roger gestured with his drink toward the heavy interior of the forest. “Ain’t likely to ever run out of firewood but this shack wasn’t never built for winter living. You likely find yourselves spending two-three hours every day just cutting up dead trees to feed the fireplace. If y’all decide to stay on why I reckon I could bring in a Kohler plant.”

“Roger, we’re not going to move in permanently.”

“Winters you need to keep the cover on the well when you ain’t using it and keep a big rock on the end of a rope to bust the ice down there.”

“We may only be here a few days.”

“And then what? Where else you got to go?”

“I only came here to give us a chance to get our wind back.”

“Where do you go afterward? Why not stay right here?”

Mathieson only shook his head, mute. They stopped along the edge of a mountain track that passed for a road. Roger said, “Jeep trail. The fire rangers use it. I brought in a grader last year, smoothed it out down to the county road. See, the reason we didn’t spend anything on work up here, we don’t own it. It’s National Forest land. We got temporary possession — tag end of a forty-nine-year lease. When the thing expires the land reverts to the government. They’ll demolish the cabin. They want to go back to virgin forest, all these old lumber and mining leases. Matter of fact that’s why I figured we ought to meet up here. My name’s not on any public record.”

Roger hunkered down with his back against a pine. He balanced the drink carelessly on his knee. “Old horse, you want to talk?”

“I don’t know, Roger.”

“You never did wear your feelings on your sleeve but this thing’s got you clamped up tighter than a schoolmarm’s cunt. You keep it all bottled up it’ll start to rot inside you.”

The stillness and the whiskey began to relax him. He watched the late sun rays flicker through the high trees. Needles and cones made a crisp resin fragrance.

Finally he said, “When you think about hiding out it looks like retirement. Pension, sixty-five years old and a gold watch. Spending the rest of your life trying to think of ways to kill time until you crumble away of old age. That’s the vision I keep having and I can’t stand the sight of it.”

Roger tipped his head back against the tree and watched him. Mathieson said, “You know I grew up in New York. We had, you know, La Guardia and the Yankees and the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. We were about a half a block from the Second Avenue El. My father was a druggist, we lived in the top two floors of a converted brownstone. It wasn’t an elegant neighborhood then. It is now. But it was just middle class at the time. A lot of grit and that God-awful noise from the El trains. It was just New York, hell, nobody thought of it as a pesthole in those days.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We grew up on stickball and comic books and movie matinees, you know. Gangsters — to me a gangster was the same thing as the crooked banker in the Western movie, the guy that twists his moustache and forecloses on the girl’s ranch. Bad guys — all right. But as far as I was concerned they were pure comic-book fictions. Something Hollywood dreamed up for the B-movie formula. To give Alan Ladd and Pat O’Brien somebody to fight it out with.”

“I was raised on Jesse James, myself.”

“The whole idea of willful evil was a comic-book fantasy. I guess I didn’t grow up for the longest time. I mean, even combat in the army was like a movie. The reality was a bunch of ordinary people digging holes and eating out of mess kits and swapping dull stories to pass the time. It was like getting through your junior year. Waiting for mail, waiting for new orders. Thinking about girls. Lying a lot. Hell, there was an enemy army out there, there was a lot of noise and confusion but that was all part of the unreality. Am I making any sense?”

“Reckon you are, some.”

“Frank Pastor, that whole world. Inside my head it’s still a B movie. I keep thinking all I need to do is tell the writer to do a script rewrite.”

Mathieson leaned forward and coiled his arms around his knees. “I want a crack at rewriting this script.”

“Now I ain’t sure I see what you’re talking about there.”

“Frank Pastor’s had all the initiatives. He acts, I react. He shoots, I duck. He’s the star, the writer and the director — the hell with it, Roger, I’m sick of being an extra in Frank Pastor’s grade-B programmer.”

“Well you had those cards dealt to you, old horse.”

“If you’re the mouse in the shooting gallery, sooner or later you’re bound to get an urge to pick up one of the rifles and start shooting back.”

Roger rolled his glass between his palms. “You mean that literally? I mean, picking up a gun and going after the son of a bitch?”

“That’s not my line. I wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Then that kind of thinking, it’s only going to misery you. Torturing yourself ain’t going to help.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Amy must just about have supper on the table. Let’s us go eat. Look here — you got a plan of some kind kicking around back there inside your head?”

“It’s beginning to.”

“You know there’s one man you ought to go and see. You know who that is.”

“Yes.” Mathieson knew.