SATURDAY I was a little more mobile. I needed a drink again on awakening but I made it a short one, and the first one stayed down this time. I had a shower, drank the last can of ale, and went downstairs and had breakfast at the Red Flame. I left half of the eggs but ate the potatoes and a double order of rye toast and drank a lot of coffee. I read the paper, or tried to. I couldn't make much sense out of what I read.
After breakfast I stopped in McGovern's for a quick one. Then I went around the corner toSt. Paul 's and sat there in the soft stillness for a half-hour or so.
Then back to the hotel.
I watched a baseball game in my room, and a fight on "Wide World of Sports," along with the arm-wrestling championship of the world and some women doing some kind of aquatic mono-ski exhibition. What they were doing was evidently very difficult, but not terribly interesting to look at. I turned them off and left. I dropped in at Armstrong's and talked to a couple of people, then went over to Joey Farrell's for a bowl of three-alarm chili and a couple ofCartaBlancas.
I had a brandy with my coffee before returning to the hotel for the night. I had enough bourbon in the room to get me through Sunday but I stopped and picked up some beer because I was almost out and the stores can't sell it before noon on Sunday. Nobody knows why. Maybe the churches are behind it, maybe they want the faithful showing up with their hangovers sharp at the edges,maybe repentance is easier to sell to the severely afflicted.
I sipped and watched TV movies. I slept in front of the set, woke up in the middle of a war movie, had a shower and shaved and sat around in my underwear watching the end of that movie and the start of another, sipping bourbon and beer until I could go back to sleep again.
When I woke up again, it was Sunday afternoon and it was still raining.
AROUND three-thirty the phone rang. I picked it up on the third ring and said hello.
"Matthew?" It was a woman, and for an instant I thought it was Anita. Then she said, "I tried you day before yesterday, but there was no answer," and I heard theTarheel in her voice.
"I want to thank you," she said.
"Nothing to thank me for, Carolyn."
"I want to thank you for being a gentleman," she said, and her laughter came gently."A bourbon-drinking gentleman. I seem to remember having a lot to say on that subject."
"As I recall, you were reasonably eloquent."
"And on other subjects as well.I apologized to Billie for being less than a lady and he assured me I was fine, but bartenders always tell you that, don't they? I want to thank you-all for seeing me home."A pause. "Uh, did we-"
"No."
A sigh."Well, I'm glad of that, but only 'cause I'd hate to not remember it. I hope I wasn't too disgraceful, Matthew."
"You were perfectly fine."
"I was not perfectly fine. I remember that much. Matthew, I said some hard things about Tommy. I was bad-mouthing him something awful, and I hope you know that was just the drink talking."
"I never thought otherwise."
"He treats me fine, you know. He's a good man. He's got his faults. He's strong, but he has his weaknesses."
At a fellow police officer's wake, I once heard an Irish woman speak thus of the drink. "Sure, it's a strong man's weakness," she had said.
"He cares for me," Carolyn said. "Don't you pay any mind to what I saidbefore. "
I told her I'd never doubted he cared for her, and that I wasn't all that clear on what she had or hadn't said, that I'd been hitting it pretty hard that night myself.
SUNDAY night I walked over to Miss Kitty's. A light rain was falling but it didn't amount to much.
I'd stopped at Armstrong's first, briefly, and Miss Kitty's had the same Sunday-night feel to it. A handful of regulars and neighborhood people rode a mood that was the flip side of Thank God It's Friday. On the jukebox, a girl sang about having a brand-new pair of roller skates. Her voice seemed to slip in between the notes and find sounds that weren't on the scale.
I didn't know the bartender. When I asked for Skip he pointed toward the office in back.
Skip was there, and so was his partner. JohnKasabian had a round face, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses with circular lenses that magnified his deep-set dark eyes. He was Skip's age or close to it, but he looked younger, an owlish schoolboy. He had tattoos on both forearms, and he didn't look at all to be the sort of person who got tattooed.
One tattoo was a conventional if garish representation of a snake entwined around a dagger. The snake was ready to strike, and the tip of the dagger dripped blood. The other tattoo was simpler, even tastefuclass="underline" a chain-link bracelet encircling his right wrist. "If I'd at least had it on the other wrist," he had said, "at least thewatch'd cover it."
I don't know how he really felt about the tattoos. He affected disdain for them, contempt for the young man who'd elected to get himself thus branded, and sometimes he did seem genuinely embarrassed by them. At other times I sensed that he was proud of them.
I didn't really know him all that well. His was a less expansive personality than Skip's. He didn't like to bounce around the bars, worked the early shift and did the marketing before that. And he wasn't the drinker his partner was. He liked his beer, but he didn't hit it the way Skip did.
"Matt," he said, and pointed to a chair. "Glad you're going to help us with this."
"Whatever I can."
"It's tomorrow night," Skip said. "We're supposed to be in this room, eight o'clock sharp, phone'sgonna ring."
"And?"
"We get instructions. I should have a car ready. That's part of the instructions."
"Have you got a car?"
"I got mycar, it's no hassle having it ready."
"Has John got a car?"
"I'll get it out of the garage," John said. "You think we might want to take two cars?"
"I don't know. He told you to have a car and I presume he told you to have the money ready-"
"Yeah, strangely enough he happened to mention it."
"- but he didn't give any indication of where he's going to want you to drive."
"None."
I thought about it. "What concerns me-"
"Is walking into something."
"That's right."
"I got the same concern. It's like walking point, you're out there and they can just bang away at you. It's bad enough paying ransom, but who knows if we're evengonna get what we pay for? It could wind up being a hijack, and they could waste us while they're at it."
"Why would they do that?"
"I don't know. 'Dead men tell no tales.' Isn't that what they say?"
"Maybe they do, but murder brings heat." I was trying to concentrate, and I wasn't thinking as clearly as I wanted to. I asked if I could have a beer.
"Oh, Jesus, where's my manners? What do you want, bourbon, cup of coffee?"
"I think just a beer."
Skip went to get it. While he was gone his partner said, "This is crazy. It's unreal, you know what I mean?Stolen books, extortion, voices over the phone. It has no reality."
"I guess."
"The money has no reality. I can't relate to it. The number-"
Skip brought me a bottle of Carlsberg and a bell-shaped glass. I sipped a little beer and frowned in what was supposed to be thought. Skip lit a cigarette, offered the pack to me, then said, "No, of course you don't want one, you don't smoke," and put the pack in his pocket.
I said, "It shouldn't be a hijack. But there's one way it could be."
"How's that?"
"If they haven't got the books."
"Of course they got the books. The books are gone and there's this voice on the phone."