“Sure. Why not?”
“They have my blessing,” he said and drank some of his whisky.
“You ever married?” she said after tasting her own drink.
“Once. For fifteen months.”
“What happened?”
“She disappeared.”
“You mean she split.”
“No. She just — disappeared.”
“Where?”
“San Salvador.”
She waited for him to continue, but when he didn’t she slapped the bar with her palm and used a loud voice to say, “Wake up, Partain!”
He stared at her. “I’m awake.”
“You sure you don’t suffer from seizures of the eyes-wide-open kind? Or is it just too, too painful to talk about? When you start something, finish it. Even if it’s the saddest of all sad tales.”
“You’re curious,” he said, sounding surprised.
“That’s quick of you.”
“Why?”
“You mean why am I curious? Because I’m normal and have a lot of respect for beginnings, middles and endings. You did pretty good with the beginning. ‘She just — disappeared.’ Why don’t you just go on from—”
He interrupted her. “You’re a good mimic, aren’t you? You had my intonation and pause down pat. Even my featureless California accent. Okay. The rest of the story. She was Salvadoran and eleven years younger than me. Or I, if you’re a grammarian. We were living in San Salvador. One morning she went out to buy stationery. She liked the thick creamy stuff, which was hard to find. She’d heard of a small shop nearby where she might buy some. She’d walked exactly forty-two meters up our street when a black nineteen-eighty-nine SEL four-fifty sedan stopped and three guys got out. Maybe they wore masks. Maybe they didn’t. Witnesses differ. They forced her into the backseat. The driver stayed behind the wheel. The car drove off and she disappeared.”
Her eyes now as wide as they could go, Jessica Carver gave her head a small hard side-to-side shake, as if to dispel the image of the abduction. “That’s awful,” she said. “God, that’s awful.”
Partain nodded.
“You never found any trace of—”
“No trace,” he said. “No body. Nothing.”
“Any chance she’s still—” Carver read the answer in Partain’s expression and said, “No. I suppose not. What about the four guys—”
Again, he didn’t let her finish. “They were never identified. It was apparently a political abduction but she was totally without politics. The only political crime she ever committed was marrying me. If she’d been of the right or the left, somebody might’ve done something. Retaliated, if nothing else, or even tracked down the guys who kidnapped her. But the apolitical have no headquarters, no chairman, no cadre, no money, no muscle. So nobody did anything.”
“What’d you do?” she asked.
“Offered a reward. Had three thousand posters printed. Paid kids to put them up everywhere. Then I had to give up.”
“Why?”
“Because she disappeared just nineteen days before I beat up the Colonel.”
“You think he—”
Partain again didn’t let her finish. “No, I don’t think that. If I thought that, he’d’ve never made general.”
The slight noise awoke Partain. It lasted only a few seconds, just long enough for him to identify it as the sound of leather heels and soles on the foyer’s black and white marble floor. The General, he thought and looked at his watch — squinted at it really because of what he diagnosed as a medium hangover. It was 5:22 A.M. and he guessed that the General had left the hospital at 5 A.M. and, with little traffic, had made it to the Eden in less than twenty minutes.
There was another sound. It was a long sigh and Partain turned to look at the sleeping Jessica Carver. After their second drink, she had come around the bar to sit on a stool next to him. A drink or so later he had kissed her and she had kissed back and they had stayed there for a time, doing all the things a pair of overly experienced teenagers might have done, until by mutual consent they came down off the barstools and headed for the nearest bedroom, which happened to be his. There they had shucked off each other’s clothes, giggled over a condom and fallen into bed.
She was experienced, creative and eager. He was experienced, creative and overeager. That was the first time. The second time had been like sex between old lovers too long apart. Nothing had gone wrong. Nothing he could remember anyway.
He heard yet another sound, this time from the kitchen. It was the unmistakable, if faint, clink of a china cup being placed in a saucer. Partain rose, pulled on his pants and the old plaid robe and headed barefoot for the kitchen, where he found General Winfield in pants, shirt and socks. The General already had the Braun coffeemaker primed and was conducting a search for the coffee itself.
“She keeps it down here,” Partain said, knelt and opened a cabinet door beneath the sink.
“What a perfectly illogical place,” the General said, accepting the can of coffee. “Did I wake you?”
“You tempted me,” Partain said and rose. “The sound of a cup and saucer means coffee.”
The General studied him for a moment. “Pleasant night?”
“Not too bad. And you?”
“Not too bad at all,” the General said as he spooned coffee into the machine.
Chapter 23
The Safeway was the one on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown and, after a forty-two-minute wait, Colonel Ralph Millwed’s vigil was rewarded with the gray six-year-old Volvo station wagon that entered the parking lot and nosed into a space only one row up and four cars to his left.
The driver of the Volvo continued to sit in the car for a minute or so before she slowly got out, as if either stiff or tired, and headed for the Safeway’s entrance. She wore a denim skirt, a man’s white shirt and black leather speed-lace boots that didn’t quite reach mid-calf. The right boot even had a small snap-close pocket for a jackknife. For warmth, she wore an obviously old double-breasted navy-blue coat that would’ve had six ivory buttons if one of them hadn’t been missing. She wore the coat over her shoulders like a cape.
Shawnee Viar Lewis, only child of a CIA pensioner and widow of an AIDS victim, was halfway to the supermarket entrance when she turned, went back to the Volvo and locked it. The Colonel waited until she was well inside the Safeway before he got out of his rented black Mustang convertible.
Millwed wore what he’d always regarded as standard casual dress: a tweed jacket, tieless white shirt, sleeveless black cashmere sweater and twill pants of that peculiar shade once called officer’s pinks. On his feet were black cashmere socks and old but well-cared-for brown loafers.
They met at the frozen pizzas. Her shopping cart contained milk, a carton of Pall Malls, bread, butter, eggs, bacon, salad stuff and a matched pair of Idaho potatoes. The Colonel’s cart contained far more wholesome fare of nonfat milk, broccoli, three kinds of fruit, oatmeal and a small roasting chicken.
Shawnee Viar was reading the label on a twelve-inch pepperoni pizza when the Colonel said, “It’s none of my business, but if you’re going to eat that crap, you might as well eat the best. Here.”
He handed her a pizza that bore the name of Wolfgang Puck, a West Coast restaurateur who skillfully marketed not only his frozen pizzas but himself. Shawnee Viar put the pepperoni pizza back, accepted the one offered by the Colonel, examined it dubiously and said, “What’s so great about these?”
“They’re almost like the real thing.”
“Well, that’s about as close as I ever get,” she said, dropped the Puck pizza into her cart, gave his cart a quick inspection, looked up and said, “What happens when you come down with an acute attack of the munchies?”