I agreed. No princess could have dismissed a peasant with a more gracious hauteur. She walked me to the door, turning on the hallway light.
“What was his work, Janna?”
“Please. You must not say that name for me. Not ever.”
“What did he do for a living, Shaja?”
She shrugged. “A teacher of history. A man not quite as tall as me. A mild man, getting bald on his head in the middle. Just one year married. It was necessary, what he did. But then all of the world turned its back on our land. As you know. That is the shame of the world. Not his shame. Not mine. I came out because I was no use there. Not to help him there.” She put her hand out. “Goodnight,” she said. “Thank you.”
It was the abrupt continental handshake, accompanied by a small bow, an immediate release of the clasp. As I walked to my car I looked back and saw her still standing there in the open door silhouetted against the hallway lights, hips canted in the way a model stands. We both knew of the hidden smoldering awareness. But there would be no breakink of vows, not with that one. It made her that much more valuable. Dobrak, the history teacher, bald on his head in the middle, mild slayer of tanks, had his hand on her loyal heart at all times. And she would wait out her years for him, unused and prideful.
As I drove back to Bahia Mar I wanted to hold fast to all the small speculations about her, the forlorn erotic fancies, because I knew that as she slipped out of my mind, Sam Taggart would take her place.
And he did, before I was home. I found a slot and then I shoved my hands into my pockets and walked across to the public beach. I walked slowly where the outgoing tide had left the sand damp and hard. The sea and the night sky can make death a small thing. Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other.
It was a cheap and dirty little death, a dingy way to die. When dawn came, there would be a hundred thousand more souls alive in the world than on the previous day, three quarters of a million more every week. This is the virus theory of mankind. The pretentious virus, never knowing that it is a disease.
Imagine the great ship from a far galaxy which inspects a thousand green planets and then comes to ours and, from on high, looks down at all the scabs, the buzzings, the electronic jabberings, the poisoned air and water, the fetid night glow. A little cave-dwelling virus mutated, slew the things which balanced the ecology, and turned the fair planet sick. An overnight disease, racing and explosive compared with geological time. I think they would be concerned. They would be glad to have caught it in time. By the time of their next inspection, a hundred thousand years hence, this scabrous growth might have infected this whole region of an unimportant galaxy. They would push the button. Too bad. This happens every once in a while. Make a note to re-seed it the next time around, after it has cooled down.
Lofty McGee, shoulders hunched against the cold of the small hours, trying to diminish the impact of the death of a friend.
But Sam was still there, in a ghastly dying sprawl on the floor of my mind. He wasn’t going to make the PTA. They had closed his account. I squatted on my heels and picked up a handful of the damp sand and clenched it until my shoulder muscles creaked and my wrist ached like an infected tooth.
This time they had taken one of mine. One of the displaced ones. A fellow refugee from a plastic structured culture, uninsured, unadjusted, unconvinced.
So I had to have a little word or two with the account closers.
That was what I had been trying not to admit to myself.
It wasn’t dramatics. It wasn’t a juvenile taste for vengeance. It was just a cold, searching, speculative curiosity.
What makes you people think it’s that easy? That was the question I wanted to ask them. I would ask the question even though I already had the answer. It isn’t.
Five
AT FIFTEEN-MINUTE intervals I went into the bedroom to look at Nora Gardino. In the darkened room, she was a curled girl-shape under a fuzzy green blanket, a black tousle of hair, a single closed eye, a very deep slow soft sound of breathing.
At ten-thirty I heard a sound in there. I went in. She stood by the dressing table, belting a navy blue robe. I startled her. She stared at me, shaped my name with silent lips, then came on the run for holding and hugging, shuddering and snorting against me, her breath sour.
“It was a dirty dream,” she whispered, and made a gagging sound. “Just a dirty wretched dream.”
I stroked her back and said, “He never came back. That’s all.”
She pushed herself away. “You think you can make it that easy?”
“Not really”
“Don’t try then,” she said, and ran into the bath room and slammed the door. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself some more coffee. I went back to the magazine article I was reading. A southern pusgut who fancied himself a liberal was patting the coons on their burry heads by asking them to live up to the responsibilities of conditional oquality, the implication being that his white brethren were so doing. I would have liked to have sent that jolly racist crawling across bad terrain with a couple of skilled Negro infantrymen giving him covering fire. I decided that I wouldn’t want to marry his daughter, and threw the magazine aside just as Nora came into the kitchen, taking small steps. I got the orange juice from the refrigerator and handed it to her.
She sat at the table and took several small sips and said, “I’m pretty flippy today Trav. Don’t listen too hard to anything I say.”
“Shaj took off at quarter to nine. She said the shop is under control.”
“Bless her. And you too, my friend.”
She had not put on makeup. Her face had a new dry papery texture, as though it would crackle to the touch.
I told her about Branks. I gave her the same detailed report I’d given Shaj.
“Can you handle it?” I asked.
“I guess so. You mean, on the level that he was nothing more than a friend who’d been away. Yes. I can manage. But why?”
“Maybe I don’t want him to know that we have a very intense personal interest in finding out who…”
“Who killed him. Don’t hunt for easier words. Use the brutal ones. Let them sting. Why shouldn’t he know we have that personal interest, Trav?”
“Because we don’t want him interfering with any looking we may want to do. If it is personal. If it is intense, we want a part of it, don’t we?”
She put the empty juice glass down.
“Do you know something about it?”
“I think so.”
“Did you tell that man?”
“No.
I cannot describe the look on her face then, a hunting look, a merciless look, a look of dreadful anticipation. It reminded me that the worst thing the Indians could do to their enemy prisoners was turn them over to the women. “I want to keep it very very personal,” she whispered.
“Then don’t give Branks the slightest clue. He’s a sharp man.”
“If I thought there was no point to it, if it was just some murderous animal trying to rob cabins…”
“More than that.”
She locked icy fingers on my wrist. “Then what? The thing he had to take care of. What?”
“Later, Nora. It will keep.”
I saw her accept that promise. I had polarized her, with one of the most ancient and ugly emotions. It was irresponsible of me, perhaps. I plead a shining motive. Without direction she had nothing but pain, loss, grief. I gave her a bullet to bite on while they amputated her heart. It is a temporizing world, fading into uncertain shades of grey, so full of complexities all worth and value are questioned, hag-ridden by the apologistics of Freud, festering with so many billions of us that every dab of excellence has to be spread so thin it becomes a faint coat of grease, indistinguishable from the Eva-Last plastics. In this toboggan ride into total, perfectly adjusted mediocrity, the great conundrum is what is worth living for and what is worth dying for. I choose not to live for the insurance program, for creative selling, for suburban adjustments, for the little warm cage of kiddy-kisses, serial television, silky wife-nights, zoning squabbles.