Amused, Campbell said, "And did it feel scary?"
"Scary enough."
"Your brother says you're not a man for guns."
"He knows me better than I know him."
"So where did you get this?"
"My wife thought we should keep one in the house."
"How right she was."
"It's been in a nightstand drawer since the day we bought it," Mitch lied.
Campbell rose to his feet. With his right arm extended full length, he pointed the pistol at Mitch's face. "Stand up."
Chapter 27
Meeting the blind stare of the pistol, Mitch rose from the armchair.
The two nameless gunmen moved to new positions, as though their intent was to cut down Mitch in triangulated fire.
"Take off your coat and put it on the table," Campbell said.
Mitch did as he was told, and then followed another instruction to turn out the pockets of his jeans. He put his ring of keys, his wallet, and a couple of wadded Kleenex on the coffee table.
He recalled being a boy in darkness and silence. Instead of concentrating for days on the simple lesson his incarceration was meant to teach him, he had conducted imaginary conversations with a spider named Charlotte, a pig named Wilbur, a rat named Templeton. That had been the closest he had come to defiance — then or since.
He doubted that these men would shoot him while in the house. Even when scrubbed away and no longer visible to the signature mat special chemicals and lights could reveal.
One of the gunmen picked up Mitch's coat, searched the pockets, and found only the cell phone.
To his watchful host, Mitch said, "How did you go from being an FBI hero to this?"
Campbell's puzzlement was brief. "Is that the yarn Anson spun to get you here? Julian Campbell — FBI hero?"
Although the gunmen had seemed as humorless as carrion-eating beetles, the one with smooth skin laughed, and the other smiled.
"You probably didn't make your money in entertainment, either," Mitch said.
"Entertainment? That could be true enough," Campbell said, "if you have an elastic definition of entertainment."
The acne-scarred gunman had produced a folded plastic garbage bag from a hip pocket. He shook it open.
Campbell said, "And Mitch, if Anson told you these two gentlemen are candidates for the priesthood, I should warn you they aren't."
The carrion beetles were further amused.
The gunman with the plastic bag stuffed it with the sports coat, cell phone, and other items that they had taken off Mitch. Before throwing away the wallet, he stripped out the cash and gave it to Campbell.
Mitch remained on his feet, waiting.
The three men were more relaxed with him than they had first been. They knew him now.
He was Anson's brother but only by blood. He was an evader, not a hunter. He would obey. They knew he would not effectively resist. He would retreat within himself. Eventually he would beg.
They knew him, knew his kind, and after the gunman finished putting items in the garbage bag, he produced a pair of handcuffs.
Before Mitch could be asked to extend his hands, he offered them.
The man with the cuffs hesitated, and Campbell shrugged, and the man with the cuffs snapped them around Mitch's wrists.
"You seem very tired," Campbell said.
"Funny how tired," Mitch agreed.
Putting down the gun they had confiscated, Campbell said, "It's that way sometimes."
Mitch didn't bother to test the cuffs. They were tight, and the shackle chain between the wrists was short.
As Campbell counted the forty-odd dollars that had been taken from Mitch's wallet, his voice had an almost tender quality: "You might even fall asleep on the way."
"Where are we going?"
"I knew a guy who fell asleep one night, on a drive like the one you're taking. It was almost a shame to wake him when we got there."
"Are you coming?" Mitch asked.
"Oh, I haven't in years. I'll stay here with my books. You don't need me. You'll be all right. Everyone's all right, at the end."
Mitch looked around at the aisles of books. "Have you read any?"
"The histories. I'm fascinated by history, how almost no one ever learns from it."
"Have you learned from it?"
"I am history. I'm the thing nobody wants to learn."
Campbell's hands, as dexterous as those of a magician, folded Mitch's money into his own wallet with an economy of movement that was nevertheless theatrical.
"These gentlemen will be taking you to the car pavilion. Not through the house, but across the gardens."
Mitch assumed that the household staff — night maids, the butler — either were not aware of the hard side of Campbell's business or collaborated in a pretense of ignorance.
"Good-bye, Mitch. You'll be all right. It's not long now. You might even doze on the way."
Flanking Mitch, each holding him by one arm, the gunmen walked him across the library to the French doors. The man with the pitted face, on his right, pressed the muzzle of a pistol into his side, not cruelly, only as a reminder.
Just before stepping across the threshold, Mitch glanced back and saw Campbell reviewing the titles on a shelf of books. He stood with the hipshot grace of a loitering ballet dancer.
He appeared to be choosing a book to take to bed. Or maybe not to bed. A spider does not sleep; neither does history.
Terrace to steps, descending to another terrace, the gunmen expertly conveyed Mitch.
The moon lay drowned in the swimming pool, as pale and undulant as an apparition.
Along garden pathways where hidden toads sang, across a broad lawn, through a copse of tall lacy silver sheens shimmering like the scales of schooling fish, by a roundabout route, they
came to a large but elegant building encircled by a romantically lighted loggia.
The gunmen's vigilance never wavered during the walk.
Night-blooming jasmine twined the columns of the loggia and festooned the eaves.
Mitch drew slow deep breaths. The heavy fragrance was so sweet as to be almost narcoleptic.
A slow-moving black long-horned beetle crossed the floor of the loggia. The gunmen guided Mitch around the insect.
The pavilion contained exquisitely restored cars from the 1930s and 1940s — Buicks, Lincolns, Packards, Cadillacs, Pontiacs, Fords, Chevrolets, Kaizers, Studebakers, even a Tucker Torpedo. They were displayed like jewels under precisely focused arrays of pin lights.
Estate vehicles in daily use were not kept here. Evidently, by taking him to the main garage, they would have risked encountering members of the household staff.
The gunman with the pitted face fished from his pocket a set of keys and opened the trunk of a midnight-blue Chrysler Windsor from the late 1940s. "Get in."
For the same reason they had not shot him in the library, they would not shoot him here. Besides, they wouldn't want to risk doing damage to the car.
The trunk was roomier than those of contemporary cars. Mitch lay on his side, in the fetal position.
"You can't unlock it from the inside," the scarred man said. "They had no child-safety awareness in those days."
His partner said, "We'll be on back roads where no one will hear you. So if you make a lot of noise, it won't do you any good."
Mitch said nothing.
The scarred man said, "It'll just piss us off. Then we'll be harder on you at the other end than we have to be."
"I don't want that."
"No. You don't want that."
Mitch said, "I wish we didn't have to do this."
"Well," said the one with smooth skin, "that's how it is."