“It would be nice.”
“You have any place like mat, Eva?”
“Nothing that comes to mind right away. Why did you ask me to come down here, Ike?”
“I’m really sorry to bother you like this. I really shouldn’t have called, I guess. Those machines. Those answering machines. I think you hear this machine and you think, okay, it’s like this middleman between you and the person you’re calling and you can say things that …”
“What am I doing here, Ike?”
“I’m really sorry about this, Eva. I think it was that fish today, seeing that fish, and nobody claiming box nine. I’m feeling a little over the edge, if you know what I mean.”
Eva comes forward in the rocker, leans the top part of her body over her lap, holds her chin up with clasped hands, and stares at Ike.
“This will sound, you know, not only dumb,” he says, “but, I guess, sort of childish.”
She stares.
“I was wondering if you could tell me, talk to me, tell me why the others hate me so much?”
“The others?”
“The other carriers, the others at the station.”
“Rourke?”
“Rourke, Wilson, Bromberg, even Jacobi. I swear I never did a thing to them. I’ve always tried to be friendly, even help out, you know. I’m union, I pay the dues. I don’t shirk the bad routes. I’m not some loud, insulting guy.”
“They hate me too, Ike.”
“Yeah,” he says sheepishly, “but, forgive me and all, but you’re the supervisor, okay? You’re the authority. You’re the boss. There’s a whole tradition there. This is what I mean. If I were in your position, which, by the way, I wouldn’t want, not in a million years, but if I were in your position, I’d be able to understand it. I probably wouldn’t even give it a lot of thought. It’d be — bang, okay, I’m the boss and they hate the boss. But I’m not the boss, I’m just another carrier, and it’s starting to drive me nuts. Why?”
“I think you’re looking at this the wrong way, Ike.”
“I think what I want is, like, what’s the word? An overview. Am I using the right word? I want an overview of my personality. I mean, let me come out and say it, I think you’re one of the most intelligent people I know”—Ike smiles—“and don’t let Ephraim hear me say this, right? I’m asking for some help. I’m asking you to identify the problems for me.”
“The problems?”
“With the way I act or speak or move. Or whatever. That’s got to be the first step in changing things.”
Eva sits back in the rocker and it makes a loud creaking noise.
“I was very pleased when I heard your message, Ike. I took it as a sign, as a good omen, a signal that I wasn’t alone. On my way home from the station I had been thinking about calling you.”
“Calling me?”
“Is there any other reason you asked me here today, Ike? Let’s face it, we’re both in that pretty awful position of not knowing how many cards to play.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“My guess would be that we’re both operating completely on instinct at this point. We both have information that we’re anxious to share, we’re dying to share, but we don’t know who to trust.”
“Information about what?”
“We’re dying to trust someone, and I think that we’ve both got a hunch that at some point, if this thing continues, there’ll come that moment, that leap, that cutting of all nets, when we have to trust someone, it’s an imperative, there’s no alternative.”
“What thing?”
“All right, take this moment, right now. My brain has a few avenues it can go down. A: everything is as it seems and you know nothing and you called me to discuss some inferiority problem. B: you’re so scared and confused and justifiably paranoid about what you do, in fact, know, that you’re hesitating over sharing your information with me until you can confirm that I’m on your side or, at the very least, unaware and innocent and not on their side. And then there’s C, which, if it’s the true avenue, I’ve made the big mistake right here in the beginning and the whole thing is over. C Avenue says you, Ike Thomas, are in on it, are part of their group, and you’ve been positioned as an apparent outsider to see how much I know, if anything.”
Ike squints at her and says, “I don’t get it. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything, does it?”
“I guess I’ve made a mistake here …”
“You ever been to the Bach Room, Ike?”
He starts to breathe heavily again. He wants to call Ephraim. He says, “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“What’s the story on the back room at the Bach Room, Ike?”
“I think maybe you’d better go, Ms. Barnes …”
“Ms. Barnes,” Eva says, her voice going high and loud. “Oh, please, can we at least address each other properly. Ms. Barnes?”
“I’ll show you to the door now.”
“What’s the story, Ike? You call Rourke now? You tell him there’s a new problem?”
“I’m not feeling too well, really …”
“You’re going a little green in the face there, Ike. How good an actor are you?”
“I don’t, I don’t, I have to …”
He bolts out of his rocker and runs across the room to the stacks. He darts into a random aisle and starts to hyperventilate.
Eva comes after him slowly and when she finds him, her voice is like that of an older, calmer doctor, reassuring, soothing, a wife’s voice of hope and control and protection.
“It’s all right, Ike,” she begins, measured, unrushed, slightly above a whisper. “Just sit on the floor here. That’s it, down on the floor, okay, good, now lower your head a little, to your knees, just like that, fine, you’re okay, you’re fine, slow down now, let the air come in, there you go.”
She ends up on her knees, holding his head against her breast, stroking his damp forehead, pushing back the hair, creating a rhythm with the calm sweep of her palm against his skull. His breath begins to come normally and after a few more minutes, he raises his head from her chest and mouths the word “sorry.”
They both lean back and sit, cross-legged, campfire style, facing each other in the quiet of the narrow aisleway.
“Something’s happened,” Ike says.
Eva just nods.
“I don’t know anything. I swear to you. But I can’t think of any way to prove that to you.”
“Neither can I,” Eva says.
Ike reaches across the space between them and takes her hand. He holds it lightly, lets his thumb run over the skin, the ridges of the knuckles.
“Tell me anyway,” he says.
Chapter Seventeen
The thing I hate most,” Lenore says, “is when I start breaking my own rules. And that’s what’s happening here. I vowed I wasn’t going to start having conversations with you, okay? I don’t want us to get to know each other. I’m going to get very tense if this continues.”
Woo gives the same smile she’s seen on his face too many times already. It never varies and it’s one of the most prominent items on the list of reasons she dislikes him.
They’re back in Bangkok Park, back inside the confines of the Barracuda, and though that’s exactly where Lenore wants to be, it also makes her uneasy. Standard procedure after a shooting would be for her to be relieved at once of any and all field work and start filing endless forms concerning her every move, submitting to hours of internal-affairs interviews, probably having to do ten hours or more with the department shrink for the relief of post-shooting trauma.
In fact, she feels no trauma at all. She has replayed her actions and decided she acted correctly. Zarelli was in the line of fire. Vicky had to be disarmed. She accomplished her objective. It proved to be a fatal shoot. There’s little control over these things. Though she didn’t ask, Woo has said that the odds are the dosage of Lingo running through Vicky’s body would have proved lethal anyway. If additional consolation is needed, she knows she can consider the fact that, given Vicky’s current life-style and environment, her life expectancy couldn’t have been gauged any higher than another year or so. Eighteen months tops.