“This a business expense?” she said.
He nodded.
“And here I was thinking my newest and dearest friends had gathered to feast and reminisce about the late Henry Viar, bad husband, worse father, aged spy and, late in his career, the disappearer’s failed apprentice.”
“The what?” Jessica Carver said.
“In Central America,” Shawnee said, “in San Salvador, to be precise, old Hank sort of apprenticed himself to those who made people disappear. But he really wasn’t any good at it. ‘The mind accepts,’ he wrote, ‘but the stomach rejects.’ ”
“He wrote that or said it?” Partain asked.
“Wrote it. Up until almost the very end he’d pound out his daily pensées on the old Smith-Corona, then copy them into red spiral notebooks with a Mont Blanc pen that some shit gave him. The Shah’s sister, I think, just after the Kurds got dished.”
“You read them — these journals?” Partain said.
“Sure. Sometimes I’d read the wadded-up typewritten pages in the wastebasket and sometimes I’d read the notebooks themselves. All thirty-two of them. One for each year.” She paused, still staring at Partain, then said, “You had a wife, I think. In fact, I know you did because old Hank always referred to her as Senora Partain.”
Partain thought he felt the blood drain from his face. It prickled. Then his face turned hot and he wondered if his color had gone from flour white to Valentine red. When he saw them all staring at him, he sucked in air, held it, let it out slowly, then smiled what he knew must be a ghastly smile at Shawnee Viar and asked, “What else did he say about her?”
“Your wife?”
“Yes.”
“You want it verbatim?” she said. “I have this trick memory that recalls stuff like that verbatim — well, almost verbatim. It’s how I made Phi Beta Kappa, fat lot of good it did me.”
“As close as you can,” Partain said, his voice cracking on “can.”
“Okay,” she said. “About your wife my old dad wrote something like this, but remember, it’s not exactly word for word.”
Partain made himself nod. Shawnee Viar closed her eyes for a moment, as if trying to visualize the words, then opened her eyes, stared at something that seemed to hover a foot above Partain’s head and began to recite:
“ ‘Colonel H. and Captain M. dropped by to discuss the wife of Major P. Seems they’re getting pressure from our hosts to do something or other about the lovely Senora Partain. What, pray? I ask. My two militarists suggest she might disappear — at least for a while. How long is a while? I ask. Just arrange it, Hank, says my Colonel. Put it in writing, say I. They refuse, brave lads, and I think of calling Major P., but such a call could be self-incriminating and, after all, perhaps nothing will happen. Still, something probably should be done and I must think more about it. It’s now three days later and I apparently thought too long. Yesterday, Senora Partain disappeared one hundred meters from her house. Perhaps I should try to buy her back. Or is it too late? I’ll talk to Colonel H. about it. And Captain M., of course. Later. I’ve talked to them and it is, alas, far too late.’ ”
Shawnee Viar stopped talking, lowered her gaze to Partain’s face, saw what was there, said, “Christ!” and shrank away from it. The others were also staring at Partain, whose eyes glittered and whose lips were twisted into a snarl. The color in his face had again deepened into a dark dangerous-looking red. He closed his eyes then, willing them back to normal. The snarl went away and the dark red face changed quickly to bright pink and then, more slowly, to normal.
Partain opened his eyes and very softly said, “I’d like to read that one journal, Shawnee.”
She gave her head a single slow shake. “It’s gone. They’re all gone. The day Hank was killed I looked for them. They were behind a baseboard that was behind his couch upstairs. The photo’s gone, too.” She looked at Patrokis, as if for corroboration. “Remember when I went upstairs to pee?”
He nodded, still watching Partain.
“That’s when I looked for them,” she said. “Maybe that’s why they killed him. For the journals. I’m very sorry, Major.”
“I’m not a major.”
“I’m still sorry,” she said and turned to Patrokis. “I can’t go back to Volta Place tonight.”
“Stay with me,” he said.
“At VOMIT?”
“I don’t really live there. I’ve got an apartment on Nineteenth.” He paused. “You can have the couch or the bed.”
Shawnee’s glance toured the table and stopped at Jessica Carver. “What d’you think?”
“I think you might be a little spacey right now and if you don’t take Nick up on his offer, I’ll know you are.”
“What if he wants to fuck?”
Carver shrugged. “Think of it as therapy.”
Shawnee Viar turned to Patrokis and said, “Let’s go.”
They both rose. Partain, still seated, looked up at Shawnee Viar and asked, “Was that really what the journal said?”
“Not word for word,” she said. “But close. Very close.”
After they left, Partain and Jessica Carver sat in silence for what seemed to her an interminable three minutes until she ended it with a question. “You going to sit and brood all night?”
He shook his head. “Of course not. I’ll get you a cab.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll walk back.”
“Walk?”
He ignored the question. “Tell your mother I need to see her. Tonight. Late. After eleven.”
“Should I mention General Winfield and his dirty plastic?”
“Not yet.”
She leaned forward to examine him carefully, even critically, as if for character fissures or crumbling resolve. “I don’t want anything to happen to Millie,” she said. “A little mild excitement and adventure, fine. But nothing bad.”
He nodded.
“As for you, you’ve just had a rotten shock. How rotten I can’t even imagine. After you see Millie, I’ll sit up with you all night. Get drunk with you. Listen to you.” She paused. “Come as you are. Anytime. No reservation needed.”
He wanted to smile at her and felt his lips stretch into something that he hoped resembled one. He then tried to make his eyes crinkle, although he wasn’t at all sure what muscles to use.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“What?”
“You look like you’re in pain.”
“I am,” he said, rose and went around the table. “Let’s get you a cab.”
Partain walked south down the east side of 14th Street to L, then turned west and went the rest of the way to Connecticut Avenue and the Mayflower Hotel. He was propositioned by no whores. Importuned by no beggars. Threatened by no jackrollers. A patrol car slowed beside him near 14th and T. The near cop gave him a long speculative look and, in return, received a savage smile. The cop car rolled on.
As he walked he wondered why he hadn’t suspected long ago that his dead wife’s lack of politics would’ve been interpreted as a disguise. A Salvadoran intellectual marries a mustang major in the U.S. Army assigned to intelligence, but claims she has no interest in the politics of her own country. That’d bother them all right — enough to make them go to the Major’s superiors, to that fucking Hudson, and maybe that equally fucking Millwed, and say this woman of Major Partain’s is a cleverly disguised spy and something must be done about her either by you or us. So those two fuckers, Hudson and Millwed, hand the problem off to the Great Ditherer, Hank Viar, the Pepys of El Salvador, who says nothing to me, does nothing, as those two fuckers knew he wouldn’t. But tells dear diary he maybe ought to do something. But doesn’t. And they, whoever they are or were, make her disappear. And isn’t it awful that Viar is dead and you can’t ask him what really happened to her and then kill him no matter what his reply.