The Judas Goat

12

I was back out in the street by the hospital behind my shrub in the rain when Katherine returned. Her real name was probably none of the four, but Katherine was the easiest one so I called her that. Having a name made her easier to think about. She was wearing a white belted raincoat and carrying a transparent plastic umbrella that had a deep bow so that she was able to protect her whole head and shoulders. There were black slacks and black boots showing under the raincoat. I speculated on the undies. Hot pink perhaps? She went in her apartment and didn’t come out again. No one else went in.

I stood in the rain for three more hours. My feet were very wet and very tired of being stood on. I walked back to the Mayfair. That night I made a sixty-three-dollar phone call to Susan. The first dollar’s worth told me that Henry had got in touch with Hawk and Hawk would be over right away. The next sixty-two dollars were about who missed who and what we’d do and see when she came over. There was some brief talk about whether anyone was going to do me in. I maintained that no one was, and Susan said she hoped I was right. I thought I wouldn’t mention my wounds right then. I hung up feeling worse than I had for a while. Talking on the phone from 5000 miles away was like the myth of Tantalus. It was better not to. The telephone company has lied to us for years, I thought. Always tell you that long distance is the next best thing to being there. All those people call up and feel swell afterward. I didn’t. I felt like beating up a nun.

I had room service bring up some beer and sandwiches and I sat in my chair by the airshaft and read Regeneration Through Violence and ate sandwiches and drank beer for nearly four hours. Then I went to bed and slept. Hawk didn’t make it the next day, and I didn’t either. Katherine stayed in her apartment all day, modeling her lingerie and spraying herself with deodorant or whatever she did. I stayed outside in the rain modeling my walking hat and trench coat and listening to my shoes squish. No urban guerrillas appeared. No one went in or out of the apartment building that looked even vaguely like he might carry a knuckle knife. The rain was hard and steady and persistent. No one wanted to be out in it.

There was little movement on Katherine’s street, almost none in or out of her building. From where I stood I could see the call buttons in the foyer: No one pushed hers. I spent my time figuring out the time sequence for Hawk’s likely arrival. To expect him today was cutting it too close. Tomorrow he’d come. I kept adding and subtracting six hours to all my calculations until my head began to hurt and I thought about other things. Interesting girl, old Katherine. Everything black and white and stainless steel. Spotless and deodorized and exactly symmetrical and a drawer full of peepshow underwear. Times Square sexy. Repression. Maybe I should pick up a copy of Krafft-Ebing on my way back to the Mayfair. Then I could call up Susan and have her explain it to me.

While I stood, I ate a Hershey bar with almonds, and a green apple. Lunch. I don’t remember James Bond doing this, I thought. He was always having stone crab and pink champagne. I called it quits at dinner time and went back to the Mayfair, did a repeat of the previous evening. High adventure in swinging London. I was in bed before ten.

In the morning I followed Katherine to the Reading Room in the British Museum. She got a desk and began to read. I stood around outside in the entry foyer and looked into the enormous high-domed room. There was a grand and august quality about it all. It looked like one thought it would. Lots of places don’t. Times Square, for instance. Or Piccadilly, for that matter. But when I’d first seen Stonehenge it was everything it should have been, and so was the British Museum. I could imagine Karl Marx writing the Communist Manifesto there, hunched over one of the desks in the whispering semi-silence beneath the enormous dome. At noon she came out of the Reading Room and went to have lunch in the small cafeteria downstairs beyond the Mausoleum Room. When she was seated, I left her and went back to call the hotel.

“Yes, sir, there is a message for you,” the clerk said. “A Mr. Stepinfetchit is waiting for you near the Pan American ticket counter at Heathrow Airport.” There was nothing incorrect in the clerk’s voice, and if the name struck him as odd he didn’t let on.

“Thank you,” I said. Time to leave Katherine and go get Hawk. I got a cab on Great Russell Street and rode out to the airport. Hawk was easy to spot if you knew what you were looking for. I saw him leaning back in a chair with his feet on a suitcase and a white straw hat with a lavender band and a broad brim tipped forward over his face. He had on a dark blue three-piece suit, with a fine pinstripe of light gray, a white shirt with a collar pin underneath the small tight four-in-hand knot of a lavender silk tie. The points of a lavender handkerchief showed in his breast pocket. His black over-the-ankle boots gleamed with wax. The suitcase on which they rested must have cost half a grand. Hawk was stylish.

I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Fetchit, I’ve seen all your movies and was wondering if you’d care to join me for a bite of watermelon.” Hawk didn’t move. His voice came from under the hat, “Y’all can call me Stepin, bawse.” The seat next to him was empty. I sat down beside him. “I’m sorry,” I said, “things must be going bad for you, Hawk, having to wear that rag over here and all.”

“Boy, I brought this last time I was here. Bond Street. The man fitted it right to my body.” He took his hat off and held it in his lap while he looked at me. He was completely bald and his black skin glistened in the airport fluorescence. Everything fitted Hawk well. His skin was smooth and tight over his face and skull. The cheekbones were high and prominent. “You got a gun,” I said. He shook his head. “I didn’t want no hassle at the customs. You know I got no license.”

“Yeah, okay. I can supply one. How you feel about a Colt .22 target pistol?” Hawk looked at me. “What you doing with that trash? You showing off how good you are?”

“Nope, I took it off somebody.” Hawk shrugged. “It’s better than nothing, till I can accumulate something better. What you into?” I told him I was bounty-hunting. “Twenty-five hundred a head,” he said. “How much of that is mine?”

“None, you’re overhead. I’ll pay a hundred fifty a day and expenses, and bill it to Dixon.” Hawk shrugged. “Okay.” I gave him 500 pounds. “Get a room at the Mayfair. Pretend you don’t know me. They are trying to tail me and if they see us together they’ll know you too.” I gave him my room number. “You can call me after you’ve checked in and we’ll get together.”

“How you know they didn’t tail you out here and spot us together, old buddy?” I scowled at him. “Are you kidding,” I said. “O yeah, tha’s you, babe, Mr. Humble.”

“Nobody tailed me. These people are dangerous but they are amateurs,” I said. “And you and me ain’t,” Hawk said. “We surely ain’t.” An hour later, I was back at my room at the Mayfair waiting for Hawk to call. When he did, I got one of the .22 target pistols I’d taken from the assassins and went down to see him. He was four floors below me but I went up and down and on and off the elevator a few times to make sure I didn’t have a tail. Hawk was in his underwear, hanging up his clothes very carefully and sipping champagne from a tall tulip-shaped glass. His shorts were lavender-colored silk. I took the .22 out of the waist band of my pants and put it on the table. “I see you’ve already found the room service number,” I said.

“I surely have. There’s some beer in the bathroom sink.” Hawk rehung a pair of pearl gray slacks on a hanger so that the creases in each pant leg were exactly even. I went into the bathroom. Hawk had filled the sink with ice and put six bottles of Amstel beer and another bottle of Taittinger champagne in to chill. I opened a beer on the bottle opener by the bathroom door and stepped back into the bedroom. Hawk had the clip out of the .22 I had brought and was checking the action. Shaking his head. “The bad guys use these over here?”

“Not all the time,” I said. “It’s just what they could get.” Hawk shrugged and slipped the clip back in the butt. “Better than screaming for help,” he said. I drank some beer. Amstel. No one imported it at home anymore. Fools. Hawk said, “While I’m hanging up the vines, man, you might want to talk some more about why I’m here.” I did. I gave him everything, from the first time I’d met Hugh Dixon on the terrace in Weston, until this morning when I’d left Katherine sorting her French bikini undies and musing passionately about the teachings of Savonarola.

“Shit,” Hawk said. “French bikinis. What she look like?”

“She’s up to your standards, Hawk, but we’ve come to follow Katherine, not to screw her.”

“Doing one don’t mean you can’t do the other.”

“We’ll threaten her with that when we want information,” I said. Hawk drank some more champagne. “You hungry?” I nodded. I couldn’t ever really remember when I hadn’t been. “I’ll have them send up something,” Hawk said. “How about a mess of shrimp cocktail?” He didn’t bother to look at the room service menu on the bureau. I nodded again. Hawk ordered. The first bottle of champagne was gone and he popped the cork on the second. He showed no sign that he’d drunk anything. In fact in the time I’d known Hawk, I’d never seen him show a sign of anything. He laughed easily and he was never off balance. But whatever went on inside stayed inside. Or maybe nothing went on inside. Hawk was as impassive and hard as an obsidian carving. Maybe that was what went on inside. He sipped some champagne. “And you want me to keep your ass covered while you chase these crazies.”

“Yes.”

“What do we do with them when you catch them?”

“That’s sort of up to them.”

“You mean if they give us trouble we whack them out?”

“If we have to.”

“Why not go the easy route and whack ‘em out right off?” I shook my head. Hawk laughed. “Same old Spenser. You still go the hard way.” I shrugged and got another Amstel from the sink. The room service waiter arrived with the shrimp cocktail and I stayed in the bathroom out of sight until he was gone. When the door closed, Hawk said, “Okay, Spenser. I paid for it, you can come out.”

“You can’t tell who they have in their employ,” I said. On the room service cart were ten shrimp cocktails, each in its individual ice dish, and two forks. Hawk ate a shrimp. “Not bad,” he said. “Okay. I can dig it. You paying the ace and half a day, you say how we do it.” I nodded again. “What we going to do first?”

“We’ll eat this shrimp and drink this beer and wine and go to sleep. Tomorrow morning I’m going to watch Katherine some more. I’ll call you before I leave and you can cover me.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“Then we’ll see what happens.”

“What happens if I pick up somebody tagging after you?”

“Just watch them. Don’t let them shoot me.”

“Do mah best.” Hawk grinned, his teeth flawless and white in the glistening ebony face. “Long as I don’t get too distracted by the lady with the French bikinis.”

“You can probably bribe her with a pair of yours.” I said.