afternoon.
As he waited for his prey, he thought again of that second night of his
relationship with Billy....
After the whore left Billy's apartment, they ate dinner in the kitchen.
Between them they consumed two salads, four steaks, four rashers of
bacon, six eggs, eight -ces of toast, and a large quantity of Scotch.
They ap ached the food as they had the woman: with inten _ty, with
singling mindedness, with appetites that were those of men but those of
supermen. -t midnight, over brandy, Bollinger had talked about the years
when he had lived with his grandmother.
Even now he could remember any part of that conversation he wished. He
was blessed with virtually total -,."recall, a talent honed by years of
memorizing complex poetry.
,So she called you Dwight. I like that name.
"Why are you talking that way?"
"The Southern accent? I was born in the South. I bad an accent until
I was twenty. I made a concerted effort to lose it. Took voice
lessons. But I can recall it when I want. Sometimes the drawl amuses
me."
"Why did you take voice lessons in the first place?
The accent is nice."
"Nobody up North takes you seriously when you've got a heavy drawl. They
think you're a redneck. Say, what if I call you Dwight?"
"If you want."
"I'm closer to you than anyone's been since your grandmother. Isn't
that true?"
"Yeah."
"Ishouldcallyou Dwight. In fact, I'm closer to you than your
grandmother was.
"I guess so."
"And you know me better than anyone else does.
"Do I? I suppose I do."
"Then we need special names for each other.
"So call me Dwight. I like it.
"And you call me-Billy- "Billy?"
"Billy lames Plover.
"Where'd you get that?"
I was born with it.
"You changed your name?"
"just like I did the accent.
"When?"
"A long time ago.
"Why?"
"I went to college up North. Didn't do as well as I should have done.
Didn't get the grades and Finally dropped out. But by then I knew why I
didn't make it. In those days, Ivy League professors didn't give you a
chance if you spoke with a drawl and hag a redneck name like Billy lames
Plover.
"You're exaggerating.
How would you know? How in the hell would you know? You've always
had a nice white All Protestant Northern name. Franklin D; boulinger.
What would you know about it?"
"I guess you're right."
"At that time, all the Ivy League intellectuals were involved in a
conspiracy of sorts against Southerners. They still are, except the
conspiracy isn't so broad or so vicious as it once was Back then, the
only way you could succeed in a Northern university or community was to
have ai Saxon name like yours-or else one that was out and out Jewish.
Frank Bollinger or Sol Cohen.
THE F OF FEM 'be accepted with either name. But not with Billy Lames
Plover.
,So you stopped being Billy.
"As soon as I could.
"And did your luck improve?"
,The same day I changed my name.
"But you want me to call you Billy.
"It wasn't the name that was wrong. It was the people who reacted
negatively to the name.
"Billy "Shouldn't we have special names for each other?"
"Doesn't matter. if you want.
"Aren't we special ourselves, Frank?"
,i think so."
"Aren't we different from other people?"
"Quite different.
"So we shouldn't use between us the names they call us by.
"If you say so.
"We're supermen, Frank.
"What?"
"Not like Clark Kent.
"We sure don't have X-ray vision."
"Supermen as Nietzsche meant.
"
"Nietzsche?"
"You aren't familiar with his work?"
"Not particularly."
"I'll lend you a book by him.
"Okay- "
"In fact, since Nietzsche should be read over and Over again, I'll give
you a book by him.
"Thank you ... Billy.
"You're welcome, Dwight.
At the half-open window, Bollinger glanced at his watch. The time was
12:30.
Neither Harris nor the woman had started dow from the thirty-third-floor
setback.
He couldn't wait any longer. He had squandered too much time already.
He would have to go looking for them. Connie hammered a piton into a
horizontal mortar seam. She hooked the safety tether to the piton with
a carabiner, then untied herself from the main line.
The moment it was free, Graham Feeled up the rope.
Climbing this face of the building was proving easier than scaling the
front on Lexington Avenue. Not that there was a greater number of
setbacks, ledges or footholds here than there; the distribution of those
was the same. However, the wind was much less fierce on the side street
than it had been on Lexington. Here, the snowflakes that struck her
face felt like snowflakes and not like tiny bullets. The cold air
hugged her legs, but it did not press through her jeans; it didn't pinch
her thighs and stab painfully into her calves as it had done earlier.
She had descended ten floors-and Graham fivesince they had seen
Bollinger waiting for them at the window. Graham had lowered her to the
yard-wide twenty-eighth-floor setback and had rappelled down after her.
Below that point there was only one other setback, this one at the sixth
floor, three hundred and thirty feet down. At the twenty-third level,
there was an eighteen-inch-wide decorative ledge-quintessential art
deco; the stone was carved into a band of connected, abstract bunches of
grapes-and they made that their next goal. Graham belayed her, and she
found that the carved ledge was large and strong enough to support her.
In less than a minute, powered by his new-found confidence, he would be
beside her.
She had no idea what they would do after that. The sixth-floor setback
was still a long way off; figuring five yards to a floor, that haven lay
two hundred and fifty-five feet below. Their ropes were only one
hundred feet long. Between this ledge of stone grapes and the sixth
story, there was nothing but a sheer wall and impossibly narrow window
ledges.
Graham had assured her that they were not at a dead end.
Nevertheless, she was worried.
Overhead, he began to rappel through the falling snow. She was
fascinated by the sight. He seemed to be creating the line as he went,
weaving it out of his own substance; he resembled a spider that was
swinging gracefully, smoothly on its own silk from one point to another
on a web that it was constructing.
In seconds he was standing beside her.
She gave him the hammer.
He placed two pitons in the wall between the windows, in different
horizontal mortar seams.
He was breathing hard; mist plumed from his open mouth.
"You all right?" she asked.
"So far."
Without benefit of a safety line, he sidled along the ledge, away from
her, his back to the street, his hands pressed against the stone.
On this side of the building, the gentler wind had formed miniature
drifts on the ledges and on the windowsills. He was putting his feet
down in two or three inches of snow and, here and there, on patches of
brittle ice.
Connie wanted to ask him where he was going, what he was doing; but she
was afraid that if she talked she would distract him an he would fall.
Past the window, he stopped and pounded in another piton, then hung the
hammer on the accessory strap at his waist.
He returned, inch by inch, to where he had placed the first two pegs. He
snapped his safety harness to one of those pitons.
"What was all that for?" she asked.
"We're going to rappel down a few floors," he said. "Both of'us.