“Owwww, Jesus, what is that?”
“Grand Funk?”
“No, I mean she’s got the fucking TV going in the living room, and the fucking stereo is on in the bedroom—a party? Would she have thrown a party without inviting us?”
“No. Try the bathroom,” Meg suggested, feeding him a spoonful of Maalox. Miles gulped it down and reached for his milk. He drained the glass and went back to work, carefully adjusting all the dials.
“Water dripping,” he said. “She really should have a plumber in.” Bored, he did Ronald Colman for Meg. “Hester, my darling, where are you? You can’t be asleep, not with all the racket.” He lapsed back into his own voice, and sulked. “Hester’s being impossible tonight.”
“She must have the lonelies.”
“Could be. Well. Kitchen.” Miles tuned in another bug. An unidentifiable sound issued from the headphones. Miles frowned, holding the phones so Meg could hear too.
“It might be an FM radio between stations,” Meg guessed.
“And it might be our lousy cold war equipment,” he muttered. “I mean this stuff is so dated. This is simply not my idea of sophisticated snooping.”
“Always been reliable.”
“We could use a thermal-imager and a people-sniffer, just for openers.”
“Probably there’s only so much gear to go around.”
“And we’re low priority. Very low priority.”
“Well—MORG wanted us back. That’s something,” She put her arms around him and rested her cheek against his shoulder.
“There’s one thing that still galls me, Meg.”
“I know …”
“After all we did for the Industry—rooting out all those goddamn Reds and Comsymps …”
“I know. I know.”
“The Duke wouldn’t shake hands with me. I went up to him at the benefit and introduced myself--`Mr. Wayne,’ I said, ‘I’m Miles Bundy, and I think we have a lot in common.’ I wasn’t expecting all that much—maybe a ‘Well done, fella.’ Hell, he hated Commies as much as I did! But the Big Guy just turned away. He snubbed me.”
Meg nuzzled the back of his neck.
Miles, listening, said, “There’s too much noise. Know what I mean?”
“Strategic noise. I was thinking the same thing. I wonder if it’s possible—why don’t we see if Hester is wearing our little present?”
Miles tried a different frequency, and suddenly they both could hear Hester quite clearly.
“Sooner or later,” Peter said, “Maylun will talk. So consider yourself unemployed. You’ll have to go with Gillian and me.”
“You bet I’m going.” Hester beamed and dropped two more pieces of floured plump chicken into the pot of boiling fat on the stove. The fat crackled loudly, another satisfying increment of sound to defeat the microphone aimed straight down at them from inside the light fixture on the ceiling. She’d placed a churning blender on top of the fridge and tied a transistor radio tuned to static within a few inches of the bug. They spoke in normal tones with the confidence that even the best filtering equipment available couldn’t isolate their voices in all this interference.
Peter had already eaten half of the chicken and was working over the bones of the last piece on his plate. Hester was pleased with his robust appetite.
“When was the last time you had something to eat?”
“I don’t remember.” Peter frowned and put down the bones and sat back in his chair, staring at the wall. “I don’t remember,” he said again, as if that lapse annoyed him.
“Hey, don’t quit on me now. This batch will be cooked in a minute.” Hester looked at her watch. “Do I have time to pack a few things?”
“We’ve hung around too long already,” Peter said.
“It’s only five past eight.”
“Shall I tell you what’s happening to Maylun about now?”
Hester turned cold. “No. No. Don’t. I can stuff an overnight bag quick as a wink. Are we taking my car?”
“No, you’ll be hot. O’Hanna fixed me up with wheels. I’m in a lot on Forty-seventh just off Third. Dark blue Cougar, this year’s model. We’ll leave here separately. I have to check you for loose tags. I’ll give you a pay phone number to call after you’ve walked around for a bit. If I’m satisfied, I’ll babysit while you pick up the car. Then we’ll find out just how useful Miss Gillian will be.”
“Peter, she knows where to find Robin. She must know. I think those birth charts I saw in Roth’s office belonged to Robin and Gillian.
Otherwise why should he be so secretive about them? If they were born so close together, almost to the second, then it’s possible they’re, they could be like twins, you know? Astrological and psychic twins.”
Peter smiled painfully. “I don’t put much faith in astrology.”
“Never mind; I’m convinced Gillian’s on his wavelength. And she’ll take us right to him.”
The oil on the stove was smoking. Hester turned down the gas jet and turned on the stove exhaust fan. She fished out the pieces of deep-fried, crusty chicken. Her own stomach was hollow, and her mouth watered. She sat down quickly opposite Peter to eat.
Meg poured another half-cup of lukewarm tea, added a squeeze of lemon and sat on an arm of the sofa, looking across the room at her husband. “We were given carte blanche in this matter,” she said.
“They never expected us to come up with the big fish.”
“If we don’t exercise our privilege, then we won’t be granted any more privileges.”
Miles toyed with the headphones in his lap and said nothing.
“In our line of work, even one step backward is a step into oblivion.” They both thought about that. Meg sipped her tea. “I’m not ready to self-destruct, babes,” she said softly.
Miles looked up. “I was only feeling a little sorry about Hester.” Meg nodded, but she was firm with him and wouldn’t smile.
“Yes. There’s that. But Hester’s not what you would call innocent, is she?”
Meg set the teacup aside and picked up the receiver of the telephone. She held it without dialing, eyes steady. Thirty-three years as a team. She liked the final word to come from Miles. It was one of the courtesies that had kept their marriage solid.
Hester, wincing, detached the silver-and-opal earrings.
“I’m not used to wearing these things,” she said. “They each weigh a ton.” She held them out for inspection in the palm of her hand. “Do you like them?”
“Pretty,” Peter commented, his mind elsewhere.
“The Bundys gave them to me.” She waited for him to be impressed. “Meg and Miles Bundy. They were in all those movie musicals back in the forties and fifties. I gave them a hand when they were moving in upstairs, so—a couple of days later they gifted me.”
The phone rang on the wall behind Hester.
She looked wide-eyed at Peter, who said, “Maybe you should.” Hester put the earrings on the table, leaned back and snagged the receiver.
“‘Lo. Oh, hi! I was just ta—thinking about you. No, no. Listen, I meant to call about the Scrabble, okay if I beg off? Oh. Oh, he is? Serious? What are you doing for him? Hmmm, well, I bet he’ll like that. Uh-huh. You’re in luck, I didn’t throw it out, it’s still in the bedroom. The whole paper or just the crossword? No, you don’t have to bother, Meg—well, okay.”
Hester hung up smiling.
“That was Meg. Miles is sweating out a cold and wants the crossword from Sunday’s Times—”
“She’s coming down?”
“Just to the door, I’ll get rid of her super-quick.”
Hester had pushed open the swinging door of the kitchen before Peter thought to ask, “When did they move in?”
“Oh, like, three weeks ago. And you should see what they’ve done with their place already.”
“Love to,” Peter murmured, as the door swung shut in his face.
In the living room Hester turned the volume of the TV down. She saw Peter’s Colt Python on
a corner of the coffee table—he’d put it there after it slipped from his belt during their love-making. She picked up the Colt and carried it to the bedroom. There she stuffed it into her purse, which was lying at the foot of the bed. She turned off Grand Funk. The sudden quiet was a blessing. Hester leafed through the sections of last Sunday’s Times looking for the magazine.
Peter, hands locked behind his head, stared at the light fixture from which the transistor radio was dangling. Then he looked at the telephone on the wall. Something crawled uneasily in the back of his mind; lay down to rest; crawled again. He shifted his attention to the earrings lying on the table.
The front door buzzer sounded.
Hester, carrying the Times magazine section, left the bedroom. She paused to shut the door behind her, looked around the living room.
The shag carpet was well-trampled where they’d made out, but who else would notice? She hurried to meet Meg.
Peter picked up the earrings, one in each hand. He weighted them. Perhaps there was a difference in weight, but he wasn’t sure. He put both earrings down, lifted a glass salt shaker with a thick bottom and brought it down hard. One of the “opals” cracked into a dozen pieces. He picked it apart, found a small radio transmitter known in the trade as a “sugar cube,” and a subminiature surveillance microphone that would fit into a tooth cavity. The sugar cube was powerful enough to broadcast their voices more than two hundred yards.
He shot straight up out of his chair.
“Hester! No!”
As Peter cried out Hester opened the front door on its chain. She caught just a glimpse of Meg standing outside. Shocked at hearing Peter’s voice, Hester turned her head toward the kitchen.
The shot from the silenced pistol in Meg’s hand struck Hester behind the left eye and two inches below the temple. The hollow-nosed bullet blew most of her brains out and broke her neck and the impact hurled her halfway across the room. Miles stepped forward with bolt cutters in his gloved hands and chopped through the door chain. Meg kicked the door open and they rushed inside, nimbly jumping over Hester’s twisted body. The front door slammed shut. Miles had his own revolver in his hand. They bracketed the kitchen door. All of it—the shooting, the forced entry, the stake-out—was beautifully choreographed. It took them four seconds.
“Peter!” Meg called.
“Peter, it’s over,” Miles said. “We’re familiar with the layout of the kitchen. There’s no other door, and no place you can hide. If you’re armed, you don’t have a hope of hitting us. We’ll shoot through this door if we have to.”
Seconds wound down with the slow pressure of thumbscrews. Meg and Miles were too well disciplined to look at each other. Even a momentary distraction could be fatal for them. They waited, tense but confident.
A muffled; indecipherable sound from inside the kitchen.
“Say again, Peter?”
“H-Hester?”
Meg said calmly, “Hester is done for, Peter.”
Another pause, and then they heard him sobbing.
“Oh God, oh God I’m so tired—can’t make it any more. I just can’t—”
Meg couldn’t help herself, she had to glance at Miles. He was every bit as surprised as she was.
Peter’s breakdown quickly verged on hysteria.
“We sympathize, Peter,” Miles said, his mouth twisted in contempt.
“Now you simply must do this our way, and the sooner the better.”
“I don’t want to die!” Peter wailed.
“But we won’t shoot. You have our solemn word.”
They heard him shuffling and sniffing in there. A chair scraped on the tile floor.
“Come out, Peter. Hands where we can see them.”
The swinging door creaked open a bit. Peter had his back against it. He peered through the thin crack at Miles. Tears ran down his cheeks.
Meg moved a full step to her left so the door wouldn’t be in the way when Peter came out. Miles nodded almost imperceptibly at her. She was the marksman of the team. She would be only about eight feet from Peter. She would shoot again for the head to end his charmed life in a gusher millisecond.
Miles smelled fried chicken and hot cooking fat; his gassy stomach rumbled.
“Don’t shoot!” Peter begged them. “I, I, I’m COMMMINNNGGGG!”
As he screamed he threw the door wide open, swinging around with the pot from the stove held head-high; insulated mittens protected his hands. Meg’s quick shot glanced off the iron pot an instant before she and Miles were drenched with a gallon of scalding fat.
Miles caught the worst of it, full in the face, but Meg was sufficiently splattered to ruin her aim. Her second shot was a clear miss as Peter swung all the way around and smashed in the left side of her face with the pot. Miles, rooting in the carpet, made ghastly pig yard noises. His eyes were poaching in their sockets from the heat of seared-shut lids; half his head had been flash-cooked to the bone.
Peter wrenched Meg’s revolver from her outstretched hand, stepped over the still-smoking Miles and kneeled beside Hester. She was all but unrecognizable. Peter bared his teeth in a terrible grimace. He got up and turned on the TV to cover the sounds Miles was making.
“Mercy! Mercy!” Miles cried, curving around and around his agony like bait on a hook.
Peter took aim and shot him twice in the head. Then he returned to Meg. She was still conscious; her mouth hung open and her eyes had backed up in her head. Her fingers plodded nowhere in the carpet. She was blistering the length of her fine body. Her left jawbone was crushed and her nose had been spectacularly displaced.
Peter shot her too.
For a while after he lowered the gun Peter stood staring down at Meg, feeling a balloon-spot on his cheek where he’d been scalded by a drop of oil. The air he breathed was burnt, atrocious. It would have taken a stronger stomach than his to stand it. He turned and vomited.
When he looked up someone else was there.
Gillian stood just inside the front door, holding it open behind her back. She was looking at Hester’s warped remains, engrossed, her face just beginning to twitch out of control. Peter wiped his mouth with one hand. Gillian’s head flew up at this gesture, but she continued to stand stock-still, hands behind her back, as if they concealed a surprise. She gave him a look through stinking blue haze.
Madcap laughter on TV. Gillian’s eyelids fluttery as bats. Gillian, taking in this repository of hell.
“I knocked,” she said.
“Gillian.”
“I knocked but—”
She slid back through the door fast but without panic and was gone.
Peter let the revolver drop from his hand and went after her. Down two flights of rubber-treaded stairs. Through the inside door and the outside door. Gillian, running in the street, confronted a speeding cab. She missed it with a swift change of direction and by the length of her outstretched arm and leaped to the sidewalk. Peter hung back until the cab screeched on. She was a good runner but the parka had to be heavy as an anchor.
Gillian came to an excavation that had eaten away half of the block on the north side of the street. It was surrounded by a high board fence and a long boardwalk with a roof over it. She balked at entering this tunnel and turned back to the street. As she tried to climb between two sports cars jammed bumper-to-bumper at the curb Peter caught up, snatched her back by the hood and threw her ruthlessly against the fence.
Gillian yelled but there was only surprise in her voice, not terror. It sounded like kids playing, and anyone looking their way would have had trouble locating them in that dark and cluttered pocket of the street. When her chin came up Peter jammed a thumb under the angle of her jaw. Gillian blacked out instantly, before she felt pain, and swayed drunkenly into his arms.
He lugged her down the cellar steps of a gutted brownstone beside the excavation. Out of sight of the street, he sat Gillian on an overturned trash can and held her head up so she would come around faster. When she moaned he used the wide belt fr
om her parka as a gag, holding it tight-fisted behind her head.
Peter was shaking; he wasn’t wearing a jacket, only a lightweight turtleneck sweater. His breath echoed back through window-sized gaps in the facade of the old house.
When Gillian opened her eyes and focused on him her instinctive reaction was to fight. She kicked and grappled wildly and slid off the trash can, which made a rolling racket in that narrow place. But he held her head steady and made her look at him in the light reflected from a sill of polished ice directly above them.
“Gillian, it’s Peter. Don’t you remember? The hospital. I helped you there. I said I’d be back. Remember, Gillian!”
A wind whipped along the street, singing its eerie cold tune. A car swished by, Hispanic radio loud and gay. Gillian still struggled, but more deliberately, eyes crossing and recrossing his face until, in a moment of startled comprehension, they froze full upon him.
“I didn’t kill Hester. She was my friend. The man and the woman were spying on her. One of them shot her, just a few minutes ago. And I … I killed them both.”
Gillian’s eyes closed; she made small sickened sounds behind the chewed gag but her hands, which had pounded him, were now quiet and clinging.
“I’m Robin’s father,” Peter told her.
He loosened the ties of the hood and put a hand inside, stroking one side of her face. Her breathing had quieted. He loosened the gag too.
“I have to find my son. Hester thought you could help me. That’s all I want from you, Gillian. Help.”
Gillian looked up sharply but he missed the trouble in her eyes, the warning: his attention had been diverted by another car on the street.
This car stopped abruptly. When the curbside doors opened Peter heard the unmistakable blast of static from a police radio, followed by a droning voice that cut in and out. The radio was turned down, or off. Footsteps. Two, no, three men running up the steps of a brownstone. A second official car went by above their heads, traveling the wrong way on the one-way street. The driver rode the brakes too hard.
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