‘Would you believe I read about it in the New York Times? At first I thought it was just an expensive toy. Then I started realizing the potential. Man, I can tap into the Times, the Washington Post, United Press, You name it, I got it.’
‘Look, I think Izzy’s just great. Right now I’ve got other things on my mind.’
‘If you’re worried about missing Falmouth — I mean, if that’s what’s got you edgy, forget it. Falmouth told me to give you the letter whenever you showed up. lie said if the situation changed, he’d call me and I was to barn the envelope. So far he hasn’t called. If he does, I’ll tell him you’re on your way.’
‘What letter?’
Rothschild reached into a slot in the roll top desk and pulled out a business-size envelope and gave it to O’Hara.
‘You’re going to a travel agency in Fort Lauderdale,’ Rothschild said casually. ‘The agent there, a dame named Jackowitz, has your plans.’
O’Hara looked up at Rothschild. ‘You read my mail,’ he said with indignation.
Rothschild slumped and stared contritely at the floor. ‘Force of habit,’ he said. ‘I know it’s awful. Forgive me.’
‘He does it all the time, everybody’s mail,’ Joli said.
The envelope contained a ticket to Fort Lauderdale and a slip of paper with ‘See Carole Jackowitz, Anders Travel Agency,’ and the address and phone number of the agency written on
‘Doesn’t waste words, does he,’ Rothschild said.
‘What kind of merry-go-round is this? Why not send me straight to Lauderdale, why here?’
‘I guess because he trusts me. This Jackowitz woman is a travel agent. He needed me as a go-between in case something went wrong.’
‘Something went wrong with what?’
‘Whatever you two are up to. He didn’t tell me a thing, Sailor, just that the sanction had been lifted on you and he was expecting to meet up with you and it was very hush-hush, not something to gossip about. That’s all I know.’ He leaned over toward O’Hara with eyebrows arched quizzically and whispered, ‘Want to tell me about it?’
‘Oui,’ said Joli, ‘We have been trying to guess what it is for weeks.’
‘Not yet,’ O’Hara said.
‘Shit. My curiosity’s been eating me alive for three goddamn months and you say “Not yet.”
‘I don’t have anything to tell you.’
‘Well, you can be out of here at seven tonight and be in Miami by ten. Or you can wait until tomorrow morning and we’ll demolish this bottle of brandy and catch up on the past two years.’
‘I vote for the bottle,’ Joli said, offering another round.
‘Michael, I’ve been from Japan to Boston to here in less than three days. My tail is dragging. I’ve got jet lag. But the suspense is driving mc berserk and I’m gonna stay berserk until I find out what’s going on with Falmouth and I won’t know doodly-shit until I catch up with him. So, Joli, pour us some more brandy and make damn sure my jet’s on the way to Lauderdale tonight ... with me on it.’
8
When Hinge arrived at his hotel room, he took a shower and styled his hair with a blower, then he stood, naked, in front of the mirror. His body was hard and tight, sinews standing out like fishing lines along his biceps. He looked at his scars and smiled. Women loved them, loved to trace their fingers along the rigid tissue on his legs and arms and down his left side. He could have written a book with just the lies he had told about those scars. He returned to the bedroom and got dressed. Then he reached into the suitcase and took out a wide, rawhide belt with a large gold buckle on it and held it in his hand for several seconds as though weighing it. The buckle was engraved, its letters aglitter with small diamonds:
UNITED STATES RODEO ASSOCIATION
1963 National Champion
Cheyenne, Wyoming, January 6, 1964
He had come a long way from Del Ray, Texas.
Bucking horses in west Texas in the fresh snow, it didn’t hurt quite so goddamn bad when you went off, even though underneath the clean white blanket, the ground was like a brick. The soft fresh powder, early in the mornings when the horse’s breath was a thick wide cloud mixed with his own, cushioned the fall, so he wasn’t afraid of the crazy ponies with their long winter hair and wild eyes because it didn’t hurt like it hurt in the summer, when the drought had baked the earth in the corral until it cracked and the dust made the horses sneeze and they were mad with the heat anyway and they started fighting the minute they heard the saddle leather creaking, oh, God, he hated the summers.
‘Show some guts, boy, I’ll take th’ fuckin strap t’ yuh.’
‘Yes, Pap.’
‘Git back on that goddamn rogue pony and straighten his ass out or I’ll take an inch a hide off’n yer butt.’
‘Yes, Pap.’
‘Mount up, goddammit, don’t be hangin’ around that fuckin’ water bucket.’
‘Yes, Pap.’
‘Dontcha call me Pap, goddamniit ya bust that fuckin’ pony’s balls, git him on his knees, then I’m your goddamn Pap. We ain’t havin’ no fuckin’ fairies in this family.’
Tall, raw-boned, Texas kid, drawl-voiced and leather- handed, his old man’s venal temper and a two-inch fuse, on the rodeo circuit while he was still in high school, and by the time he was twenty-one and old enough to order his own beer in the endless saloons from Wichita to Cheyenne to Phoenix to El Paso, he had big, swollen knuckles from dusting off all the smart-ass bastards that made fun of his name (‘Hinkie Hinkle’), and he bad the trophies and the belt buckles, and he had hunted with the best of them, brown bear and eight-point buck and jaguar, and he also had more than a dozen broken bones and the miseries and it hurt to get up in the morning and he was living on eggs and bacon and uppers and downers and painkillers and washing it all down with Coors beer.
Twenty-two years old and peaking out.
At the Armed Forces rodeo he got drunk and missed his ride and a honey-voiced lady sergeant from recruiting fucked his brains out all night and all morning and had him signed and on his way to boot camp before his hangover was gone.
Nam,
seven months later,
human game,
fuck breaking horses and shooting longhorn buck.
In eight weeks in 1967 he kills twenty-seven Buddhaheads. Mot Sog, the Army’s special assassination squad, for which all records will be destroyed after the war, taps him. One night near the DMZ, using an infrared scope mounted on a Mannlicher single-action CD 13, from more than a quarter mile away, he picks off a Cong agent, sneaking across the lines, so unbelievable a shot that a couple of guys from the Corps of Engineers measure the distance with a transit, just for the record. Nineteen hundred and twenty-seven feet, the longest kill shot in Army history.
After that, it was a honky tonk shooting gallery, like knocking over ducks, barn, barn, barn.
Back in Texas, he went up for hire. In Rhodesia, where he earned three hundred dollars a day plus per diem, he took a postgraduate course in interrogation, and became an expert in the deadly art of persuasion, hanging captured blacks out of a helicopter at five hundred feet by the ankles until they talked, and letting them go if they didn’t. When he came home after two years, Pap never cussed at him again, even when he changed his name to Hinge. Pap was afraid to.
He decided the belt buckle was too ostentatious. By now, Spettro probably knew everything there was to know about Ray Hinge. He put on a more conservative belt, checked himself out in the mirror, and walking as straight as a sergeant in the Queen’s Guard, he opened his side of the door to the adjoining room and knocked. A moment later Falmouth opened the door from his side.
Hinge was surprised at how tall Spettro was. He was almost dapper in appearance, deeply tanned, with snow-white hair at his temples, and dressed in a three-piece raw-silk navy-blue suit with a tie striped with wine and gray.