Oakley’s palms felt moist. He felt his face color when he caught Orozco looking at him, bland-faced. He sees everything, Oakley thought, and made a note to quit taking Orozco for granted — lunatic chicano land-schemes aside, Orozco was a vigilant and clever man, possibly dangerous. The inscrutable Mexican, he thought dryly: Orozco had superb control, he never let you see anything he didn’t want you to see.
They kept vigil by the telephone, the prime umbilical. It did not ring. Oakley began to feel drowsy; he hadn’t had much sleep in the past three days. Getting old, he thought, and felt solemn and sad, regretting all the things he had not done when he was young and all the things he would never do, either because of lack of time or because of lack of passion. He had never been a man of passions; he saw himself as a repressed man, cool, channeled, deliberate. He thought of the unsubtle suggestion Louise had left hanging in the air (anything but inscrutable) and it focused his weary thinking once again on the fact that he was no longer young, that it was time to settle for something less than the unachievable perfection of a Technicolor marriage with violins. Something made not in heaven but in kitchen, bed, living room. It seemed a wry irony that his reputation was that of a blade. He couldn’t even remember most of their names — an endless procession of soft humid bodies with interchangeable faces. It was always easiest that way: no attachments, no commitments, no passions. Yet it gave him little joy, left him ragged, sapped his energies — the timeless ritual of pretense and mutual seduction. Once he had met a girl in a bar who had said to him refreshingly, “You don’t have to buy me drinks and dinner. I only want to get laid.” Blunt, forthright — yet she had been attractive, young, charming. But she had been just passing through. They were all just passing through.
He came back to Louise. Young, attractive, widowed, sensual. Rich besides. If he played his cards right she would marry him; he was certain of it. But it wouldn’t do. He could endure a marriage without love; he probably wasn’t capable of making any other kind. But marriage to Louise would be a duel — a constant abrasive antagonism; a clashing of desires, the headstrong against the reasoned, the passionate against the temperate. He didn’t need a Louise. He needed a milkmaid.
His reveries began to distend and wander; he leaned back in the tilting chair and put his feet up on Earle’s desk, glanced drowsily at Orozco and closed his eyes... The morning sun beamed across the desk and he came awake with a start, searched guiltily for Orozco and learned the room was empty. He mouthed a mild oath, lowered his feet to the floor, sat up.
His tongue felt dry and bloated; he scraped a hand over his stubbled chin and blinked ferociously, cupped a big hand around the back of his neck and reared his head back until the bones creaked.
He crossed the hall, tired and rumpled, and found Orozco sitting on his bed with a fat paw across the telephone receiver and a slight frown on his face. Orozco’s chin lifted: “I came in here to take the calls. Didn’t want to wake you.”
“Thanks, Diego.” It had been an unexpected kindness. Orozco kept displaying new facets, each of which further eroded the slothful impassive image.
Orozco said, “Things are starting to break.”
“Good. Can it wait ten minutes? I’ve got to wash the sleep off.”
“Go ahead.”
He stripped to his underwear and closed himself into the bathroom to shower and shave and clean his teeth. He felt stiff and sore, with a particularly insistent ache in the muscles of his neck and knees; Getting old, he thought, and realized the phrase was becoming an obsessive repetition in his lexicon. It didn’t help to look in the mirror; the haggard face was not reassuring. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had really looked at his face in a mirror. When he shaved or combed his hair he never looked at himself to the extent of appraising the whole. Now he saw the creases that bracketed his mouth, the beginnings of sag under the eyes, the crow’s feet, the spreading gray in the hair. It was still a photogenic visage, younger than his years, but the flesh beneath his chin was beginning to loosen and he thought with a harsh defensiveness which he immediately knew was designed to mask deep-rooted panic, I’m forty-six, after all.
He hurried out of the mirrored room, climbed into clean-pressed clothes and said, “I could use a cup of coffee.”
“So could I.” Orozco went to the kitchen with him and stood hip-shot against the counter while Oakley searched the unfamiliar cabinets for a coffeepot and finally settled for a covered cooking pan in which he set out water to boil. He glanced at the electric clock above the door — seven fifteen — and took down a jar of instant coffee and a pair of cups. “You take anything in it?”
“Just black.”
“Me too.” Black for my youth: I’m in mourning. He made a wry face at his own melodramatic sourness and turned, leaning against the refrigerator with his arms folded across his chest. “Well?”
“They found Terry’s car in Nogales. Parked on a side street. Nothing much left in it but there were fingerprints all over it and we’re running them through for identification. One funny thing, though — somebody’d hot-wired it. So the prints we come up with may belong to some clown who stole it from the kidnapers.”
“Swell.”
“There’ll be a plane coming in sometime in the next half-hour with dossiers on the two dead guys and the people they associated with. One of them had a brother — they all three worked in the same nightclub combo. There was a fourth guy in it too. That may be our gang.”
“A band of musicians?”
“They lost their last job in Tucson a few weeks ago. The skinny one we found dead was an addict. I don’t know what else he was but a habit his size would take a hell of a lot of money. It was his brother that was the bandleader. It adds up for motive and opportunity, Carl. They needed money bad, they had no work.”
“And they’re as slippery as watermelon seeds. We’ve got to do better than this, Diego.”
“It’s coming along,” Orozco said mildly. “We’ll crack it. You remember that voice on the phone — too much conceit there. When you get an amateur who thinks he knows more about strategy than Clausewitz you got a character who’s going to make mistakes. When he does we’ll have him.”
Oakley took the lid off the boiling water and poured. “Maybe. But I can’t stand sitting around here waiting. Get a man in here to keep an eye on Adams and Louise. I’m going back to that ghost town with you. Maybe we’ll find something they missed yesterday.”
An hour later he was ready to go when the phone rang. He answered it and heard the words he had been waiting for: “Carl? You’ve got your uptick. The market opened with Conniston up.”
“Good. You’ve got your instructions.”
He had to make a dozen phone calls to put the machinery in motion; now that things had begun to stir he found that he had snapped out of his melancholy dirge. It was like the opening rounds of a courtroom battle. After the morose night of stage fright he was at last in the arena of action; it brought him up on his toes, settled his mind into a new clarity of focus, rekindled his confidence and decisiveness. Before, trying to keep control of the whole mess had been like trying to hold onto his hat in a gusty wind. The risks had appeared formidable, the juggling task a formidable one. But now he moved with sure firm steps. He phoned Earle’s doctor, and while they waited for the physician he held a curt briefing session in Earle’s office, instructing Louise and Frankie Adams — in Orozco’s absence — in what they were to tell the doctor. The doctor arrived at ten, acquisitive and tame; the mendacious ritual was attended to and Oakley walked the doctor out to his car: “You’ll receive the — fee — in cash, of course, and I’d prefer it if you didn’t deposit it in any bank accounts. Put it in a lock box and spend it where nobody knows you. It isn’t reported from our end and we won’t want you reporting it as coming from us. You never know when they’ll hit you with a spot-check out of the computer.”