Feldspan gulped Witcher’s Gibson.
“Gerry,” Witcher said, “get hold of yourself.”
While reading her book, Valerie ate her shrimp cocktail with her fingers, licking her fingers after each shrimp. Two businessmen at a nearby table watched her intently, all talk of tractor tires forgotten.
Lemuel tried to call the waitress without attracting attention to himself.
The other waitress brought two more Gibsons to Witcher and Feldspan, saying, “Feeling better?”
“Not yet,” Feldspan said.
The waitresses passed one another. “Some really weird ones tonight,” said the one. “Mm-mm,” said the other. Then, seeing Lemuel’s hand waving discreetly next to his ear, she veered away in that direction: “Sir?”
“On second thought,” Lemuel said, “I believe I’ll have another vodka sour. No, wait a minute, make it a vodka on the rocks.”
“Water on the side?”
“Yes.”
“He could be bribing the waitress,” Feldspan said. “They’re awfully chummy over there.”
“Bribe her to do what?”
Feldspan leaned forward. Three Gibsons on an empty stomach had turned his eyes into cocktail onions. “Poison us,” he whispered.
“Gerry, please.”
Valerie finished the last shrimp. For the last time, she inserted a finger into her mouth, pursed her lips around it, and drew the finger slowly out, freed of red sauce. She read her book. The businessmen discussed tractor tires.
In his nervousness, Lemuel crunched duckling bones, eating the little wings entire.
“He’s eating bones,” Feldspan said.
“Gerry, stop looking at him.”
Feldspan blinked. He wanted Witcher’s Gibson, but Witcher kept holding it. He said, “He looks like Meyer Lansky.”
“He does not,” Witcher said, though he didn’t turn around to look. “Meyer Lansky was about a hundred, and Jewish.”
“He could be Jewish.”
“Gerry.”
“Meyer Lansky wasn’t always a hundred. It’s just like The Godfather; they almost look like normal people, but they have dead eyes. It’s because their souls are so black.”
Valerie looked up from her book, and her face suddenly suffused with a bright red blush. The waitress, removing the empty shrimp cocktail goblet, glanced at the blush and at the book and went away, shaking her head.
But it wasn’t the book that had done it; there’s nothing in Maya: The Riddle And Rediscovery Of A Lost Civilization to make any damsel blush. Valerie had just remembered where she’d seen Lemuel before.
Lemuel, peeking around his own left shoulder, looked off toward Valerie and found her staring directly at him, wide-eyed. “She’s recognized me!” Hunching down, shielding his face with his shoulder and arm, he ate frantically, hurriedly gnawing at his dinner, trying to finish it and get out of here.
“He eats like an animal,” Feldspan said.
“Gerry, will you please eat your nice shrimps, and stop looking at that man?”
Maybe she isn’t absolutely sure it’s me, Lemuel thought. If I can just get out of here— He picked up his fresh vodka with greasy fingers, and drained half.
It all came back to Valerie in a rush of mortification. She’d had a little bit too much to drink that time, too, and she’d gotten on that hobby horse of hers about stolen antiquities. Of course it was a problem, worldwide, ranging from the current Greek demand that the British return the Elgin marbles to the recent pillaging-under-cover-of-warfare at Angkor Wat. But still Valerie knew she tended to take it all a bit too personally, and that she could very easily become a bore on the subject, and loud as well. Particularly at parties.
She could always tell when she was behaving badly in that fashion; men walked away from her. In the normal course of events, men walked toward her, but when she was carrying on about her crusade they walked away from her. That night in New York, at that party— Why, that poor man had probably thought she was accusing him of stealing ancient treasures!
Oh, she thought, I do hope he doesn’t recognize me.
“Miss,” Feldspan said, to the passing waitress, “may I have another Gibson, please?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Gerry, are you crazy?”
Valerie’s chicken was placed in front of her. She ducked her head to eat it, hoping the man across the way was too absorbed in his magazine to look around and recognize her.
Lemuel, wiping his messy hands, waved the napkin at the wrong waitress, who sent him the right waitress. “Check, please.”
“No dessert? We have ice cream, cheesecake—”
“No, please, just the check.”
“Nice tropical fruit, very—”
“Just the check, please.”
“No coffee?”
“Check!”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Alan, give me the room key.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to throw up.”
“Gerry, you’re just too emotional.”
Lemuel, blinking, watched one of the drug dealers leave the restaurant and the other one stay. It’s a pincer movement, he thought. One is in front of me now, and the other behind me. His mind filled with visions of what might happen when he opened his room door. Why hadn’t he asked for his check earlier, or just simply left the restaurant at the beginning, no matter what they thought?
“Miss, my friend and I were wondering if we could buy you an after-dinner drink?”
Valerie looked up at the tractor-tire salesman and smiled. She had seen Lemuel ask for his check, and she knew her ordeal would soon be over. “No, thank you,” she said. “But I do appreciate the thought.”
The waitress brought Feldspan’s last Gibson, and looked at the empty chair. “I knew these things wouldn’t help,” she said.
“That’s all right,” Witcher told her. “Just leave it, I’ll find something to do with it.”
“Will your friend be back?”
“I trust not.”
She picked up the plate of barely-touched shrimp. “Shall I put these in a bag for you?”
“Good God, no.”
Lemuel signed his check. I can’t go to the room, he thought, not by myself. I’ll tell the desk clerk I’m having trouble with the air conditioner and insist on a bellboy to come with me and look at it. If no one’s there, I’ll just lock myself in for the night. And I’ll stay in the room until Galway comes to pick me up tomorrow to take me to the temple. And now I know I never should have involved myself with a man like that in the first place.
Valerie was so pleased to see Lemuel get up to leave that she almost changed her mind and said yes to the tractor-tire salesman after all.
Witcher watched Lemuel go by, noticing the grim set to the mobster’s jaw. Most likely, the man did suspect something, and he’d moved to that other chair to warn them to mind their own business. Well, they certainly would mind their own business, wouldn’t they? And tomorrow morning they would get on the plane and leave this place.
Lemuel felt Witcher’s eyes burning into his back as he left the room.
Valerie asked for tropical fruit for dessert.
Witcher, knowing that Feldspan would have disgustingly passed out in the room by now, dawdled over the final Gibson, but eventually he signed the check and departed.
“Thank you,” Valerie said to the waitress as she left. “It was a lovely dinner.”
16
Sunrise
When the sun rose, Innocent St. Michael stepped nude from his house, smiled, stretched, walked across the cool dew-damp lawn (emerald green, aglisten in the orange birth of day), and then over the cool terracotta tiles to the pool’s edge. There was only the faintest of breezes, turning the water into pale blue-green brushed chrome. “Nice,” Innocent murmured, and dove like a dolphin into the water, swimming strongly beneath the surface to the far end, where he burst up into the air like a walrus blowing, releasing breath with an exuberant, “PAH!” and shaking water drops from his hair in a great fan around his head.