“If you tell them, I’ll kill you.”
“But if they don’t know, if that isn’t the reason, then why me? Why me?”
“Because you were the hawks’ jester. You’re here because you are who you are. I’m here because you are who you are. It all comes together.”
“Who—who was—” But Koo can’t ask the question, even though he craves the answer. He stares at the boy’s face, trying to see some other face in it, some face he can recognize.
Mark understands the unasked question, and it makes him laugh, not pleasantly. “Who is my mother? That’s up to you.”
No familiar feature can show through that mask of rage. Koo stares and stares, but it’s impossible. And if he knew, would it make anything better? Cozier, more familiar? Familiar; family. He gestures helplessly: “I never knew.”
“You have cockroaches,” Mark whispers at him, gloating, intimate. “Cockroaches in the walls. Me.”
“Don’t. Please.”
But Mark is no longer under control. The break that Koo feared has occurred; suddenly everything is different: “I’m the cockroach in the wall,” Mark says. His eyes are bright and lifeless, pieces of quartz. “Call the exterminator, Koo, call him back. I’m still here.”
“Wait.”
“You shouldn’t have asked, Koo. You really shouldn’t have asked.”
Mark’s face is closer, larger, filling Koo’s vision; a stone face, not human. Mark’s hand reaches out again, this time rests on Koo’s shoulder, a neutral weight like a board or a hangman’s rope. Everything drains from Mark’s stone face, and Koo closes his eyes. He’s going to kill me now. There’s no evasion, no salvation.
The other hand touches Koo’s trembling throat at the same instant that Peter’s voice says, “Well, now what?”
The hands lift from Koo’s body. He opens his eyes, seeing the expressionless face receding, Peter in the open doorway at the other end of the room. Koo droops against the window and Peter comes deeper into the room, saying, “Mark? What are you doing?”
“A discussion,” Mark says, and gives Koo a flat look. “Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” Koo says.
“Discussion?” Peter looks from face to face. “About what?”
“A private discussion.” Mark looks again at Koo, again says, “Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” Koo says.
Peter continues to frown at them both, then shrugs, giving it up. “Get dressed, Koo,” he says. “There’s been a change of plan.”
18
At ten past four, Mike Wiskiel was in the Butler Aviation waiting room at Los Angeles International Airport, awkwardly shaking hands with Lily Davis, wife of the kidnapped man, who had flown with her two sons out from New York in a private plane owned by one of the companies that sponsored her husband’s TV specials. Mike was awkward because he knew Lily Davis had a lot of friends back in Washington, and he didn’t know how severely the fuck-up with the transmitter had hurt his chances for getting back there himself. It could be he smelled too bad now for any recovery, no matter how brilliantly he handled the Koo Davis case from this point forward, but if there was even the slightest chance he could recoup his losses he wanted to be sure he had no unnecessary enemies with D.C. strings to pull. Lily Davis, a powerful figure in her own right as well as Koo Davis’ wife, could help or hurt Mike’s comeback with a casual lift of the eyebrow.
Meeting the problem head-on, Mike said, “Mrs. Davis, I’m the man who did it wrong last night. I hope very soon to be able to apologize to your husband; in the meantime, let me assure you just how sorry I am for what happened.”
“Mr. Wiskiel,” Lily Davis said, her manner calm and her handshake strong, “there’s no apology needed. You have an excellent reputation, and you did what you thought best under the circumstances.”
The word for Lily Davis was magisterial. A stocky, compact woman of not quite sixty, she carried herself with a patrician grace; a matron of ancient Rome, shopping at the slave market. (There was in her no remnant of that timid hausfrau abandoned all those years ago by her husband.) A committeewoman, active in any number of worthy organizations, she possessed the rather forbidding calm of a person who has learned how to control people in groups. Her assurances to Mike seemed sincere but impersonal, as though at bottom she didn’t really give a damn, not about Mike and not about her husband. Mike said, “Thank you, Mrs. Davis. It was still a mistake, and a bad one. I hope to make up for it.”
“I’m sure you will.” Calmly dismissing that subject, she said, “May I introduce my sons. Barry, and Frank.”
Both men were probably under forty. Barry, fastidious in blue suit with vest, white shirt and narrow striped tie, was the one who lived in London as part-owner of an antique business; there were odd traces of English accent in his voice, and his manner seemed to Mike obviously homosexual. Frank, on the other hand, the television network executive from New York, less formal in tweed jacket and open-collared blue shirt and slacks, showed a hearty easygoing masculinity that mostly suggested some kind of salesman; anything from insurance to used cars. Both men had, in their very different ways, firm handshakes, and neither seemed particularly broken up by what had happened to their father.
After the introductions, Lily Davis said, “Mr. Wiskiel, would you ride along in our car and tell us the current situation?”
“My own car is here.”
Lily Davis was a long-time professional organizer: “Frank can follow us in your car.”
But wouldn’t Frank also like to be told the current situation? Apparently not; a willing smile on his amiable salesman’s face, Frank said, “Good idea, Mom. You can fill me in at the house.”
“Okay, then,” Mike said.
As they moved toward the exit Lily Davis said, “You’ve managed to keep us free of reporters. Thank you.”
“Part of our job, Mrs. Davis.”
A black Cadillac limousine was waiting just outside. While Lily and Barry were handed into the back seat by the chauffeur, Mike gave his car keys to Frank and pointed out his Buick Riviera parked just across the way. “I’ll take good care of it, Mike,” Frank said cheerfully, and trotted off.
Didn’t any of these people care? Taking the limousine’s fur-covered jump seat, just ahead of Lily and Barry Davis’ knees, it occurred to Mike that neither son looked very much like the father. In fact, not at all. Koo Davis’ rubbery face was so well known that surely any trace of it in these men would be immediately obvious. Salesman Frank had some of his mother’s square-jawed heavy-boned look, but exquisite Barry’s face was a series of delicate ovals, reminiscent of neither parent.
The glass partition was up between the chauffeur and the passenger compartment; but apparently the man knew the way, and required no instructions. As the limousine moved out, Mike half-turned in the jump seat (seeing his own Buick obediently following) and said, “As a matter of fact, we have a hopeful clue that Koo Davis himself gave us.”
“Koo gave it?” Even her surprise was even-tempered. “How did he manage that?”
Mike told her about the reference to Gilbert Freeman in the second tape. “We’ve checked Freeman and there’s just no way he can be involved. So the thinking is, maybe your husband meant he’s being held in a house that used to be owned by Freeman. Unfortunately, Freeman moves a lot; we’ve got seven houses to check.”
“That’s being done now?”
“Right. So it’s possible we’ll end this thing any minute. On the other hand, most of life isn’t that easy.” And he went on to tell them about the four o’clock radio announcement, which he himself had taped at three-thirty and then heard over the car radio as he was arriving at the airport.