What an image! Max ducked his head, blinked at the page of The Book, tried to concentrate, tried to read the editors’ comments, tried to find the loophole.
So hard to concentrate, so hard to read. And what namby-pamby is this from the editors? It might as well be out of Ann Landers. No, worse, Joyce Brothers. They say, these Hallmark-level editors, they say this terrifying image of the superior man understanding the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end, they say it simply means friends should avoid misunderstandings that will make their relationships turn sour.
Oh, please. How can they say such a thing? Max read and read, time going by, the pages turning this way and that, and finally he calmed enough to realize that the hexagram of the Marrying Maiden was at its literate level simply about the ways in which a girl adapts herself to her bridegroom’s household, the difficulties and delicacies of being low woman on the totem pole in a traditional Chinese family.
Still, even though that was the literal meaning of what he’d just read, the whole point of the I Ching was to adapt the concrete imagery of its hexagrams to the specifics of one’s own life. Max Fairbanks was no blushing bride, cowed by her new mother-in-law. So what could this mean? Somehow, he had entered into a relationship the way a bride enters into a relationship with her new husband’s family, fraught with peril. Once she accepts the ring—
No. It can’t be.
Max stared at The Book, stared at the pennies, stared at the window, which had become opaque with a rise in humidity outside, a passing mist, so that what he saw was his own startled self, squat on the sofa.
The burglary at the N-Joy.
He returned to the Carrport house.
He knows where I am. Well, of course he does, everybody knows where I am, the newspapers know where I am. And he’s following me, because he wants this ring.
He can’t have it. Max looked at the ring, glinting and winking on his finger. It felt so good there, so warm, so right. This is my trigram!
The Watergate apartment. He expects me to be there, next.
I could still be wrong, he thought, trying to soothe himself. It could still be something else, anything else. There’s still more to the answer, there’s the one moving line that I haven’t consulted yet, the nine in the second place. That could change everything.
Max turned the page. He bent his head over The Book. He read the two sentences, then read them again, then looked up at himself in the window.
It’s about him. The Book has done it again, and I can’t argue. First it described me, as I am at this moment. Then it described the situation that was coming closer to me. Then it pointed to the person who had caused that situation. And now it says what that person is doing:
Nine in the second place means:
A one-eyed man who is able to see.
The perseverance of a solitary man furthers.
He’s coming to get me.
35
“John! Ssshhh! John! Wake up! Pssst! John! Ssshhh!”
“I’m awake, I’m awake,” Dortmunder grumbled, and opened his eyes to look at a color-deprived room with the lights on dim.
Andy was leaning over him, still jostling his shoulder. “You fell asleep, John,” he said.
“What gives you that idea?” Dortmunder sat up to put his feet over the edge of the bed, and looked around. It was a big bed with a big soft spread on it. His shoes were on the tan wall-to-wall carpet. The room looked like it should be in the Carrport house. “What time is it?”
“A quarter to five. He isn’t coming, John.”
“Sure he’s coming,” Dortmunder said. “He’s got to talk to Congress tomorrow. Today. You don’t stand up Congress.”
“He isn’t coming here at quarter to five in the morning, John. You want a cup of coffee?”
“Yes.”
“You want some breakfast?”
“Yes.”
Andy went away at last, and Dortmunder got up from the bed, creaking a lot, and went over into the bathroom, where there was a fresh toothbrush in the medicine chest, along with many other little amenities.
This was some apartment. Two large bedrooms, each with its own full bath, plus a long living room, a pretty good compact kitchen, a smallish dining room, and a half bath off the hall between living room and bedrooms. Also off the living room was one of those balconies with all the concrete teeth, providing a view of Virginia’s low hills over the river. The design throughout was like the inoffensive design at Carrport, except this was much more basic and minimal, without the antiques and little fineries that would fit so nicely into the pocket of a passing wayfarer. There was damn-all here to steal, if it came to that. Unless you felt like roaming the halls with a television set in your arms, which they didn’t at all feel like doing, you could leave this place starved for a sense of accomplishment.
The lights had been on all over the apartment, turned low, when they’d arrived, so they’d left them like that. It made it easy to move around the place, and wouldn’t startle Fairbanks when he arrived. Except the son of a bitch wasn’t arriving.
In the dining room, also dimly lit, Andy had set a nice spread at one end of the table, toast and jam and butter and orange juice and milk and coffee. “Looks good,” Dortmunder admitted, as he sat down.
“There was Cheerios,” Andy said, “but it had little bugs in it.”
“No,” Dortmunder agreed.
“I figured,” Andy said, “one thing you don’t want your food to do is walk.”
Dortmunder filled his mouth with toast and butter and jam and said, “I wonder where the hell Fairbanks is.”
Andy looked at him. “What?”
So Dortmunder chewed for quite a long while, and swallowed coffee with the toast and the other stuff, and said, “Fairbanks.”
“I wonder where the hell he is,” Andy said.
“Me, too,” Dortmunder said.
“He was supposed to be as regular, this guy,” Andy said, “as a person full of bran.”
Dortmunder said, “Things started going wrong when all of a sudden he’s off the radar screen for the weekend.”
“Maybe he knows you’re after him,” Andy said, and grinned to show he was kidding.
Nevertheless, Dortmunder took the idea seriously, but then shook his head. “No way. He can’t know there’s anybody looking for him, not yet. And even if he did, the last time we saw each other, I didn’t look like somebody was gonna go after anybody.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Andy said, and he might have been smiling in an unacceptable way, but before Dortmunder could be sure one way or the other, Andy’d covered his mouth with his coffee cup.
Dortmunder chewed some more jam and butter and toast, and thought about things. He drank coffee. “Maybe there’s something on television,” he said.
Andy looked at him. “You mean a movie? Watch a movie?”
“No. Maybe there’s something about Fairbanks.”
Andy didn’t get it. “Why would there be something about Fairbanks on television?”
“Because,” Dortmunder said, “the guy is rich and famous, and Congress is pretty well known itself, so maybe when the one goes to see the other, there’s something about it on television.”
“Huh,” Andy said. “I never would of thought of that. Could be you could be right.”
“Thank you, Andy,” Dortmunder said, with dignity.
After breakfast—they left the dishes in the dining room for the maid service—they went into the living room, where there was a television set you wouldn’t want to carry around the halls. It was as big as a drive-in movie, a huge screen almost up to the ceiling that made everything look slightly gray and grainy; not out of focus, exactly, but as though it were a copy of a copy of a copy.