The driver leaned his head out the window, squinting in sunlight. “My picture?”
“For the night man,” Eddie explained. “So he’ll know you’re the real driver, not a ringer. Not somebody from one of those rags like the Weekly Galaxy”
“Weekly Galaxy ” echoed the driver, musing, as though those were words in a foreign language. “Never heard of it. I’m a simple Aussie myself.”
“If you’d just step out of the car for a minute,” Eddie suggested, “so I can get a good clear shot.”
“Take two, mate,” the driver said, cheerfully climbing from the car. “One to send home to me mum in Sydney. You want me right here, next to me rickshaw?”
“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Eddie told him, crouching like a linebacker on a must-pass play, peering into the black box of the camera. “Just lift your head a little into the sunlight. There, that’s got it.”
Smiling, Eddie took the extruded print from the front of the camera and tucked it away in his shirt pocket.
“Is that it, then?” the driver asked, reaching for the door handle. Then he stopped himself, saying, “No, you were going to do me another.”
“For your mum,” Eddie agreed. “Let’s just wait and see how this one comes out.”
“Wonderful machines, those cameras,” the driver said. “Takes all the guesswork out. Snap your picture, just like that you know what you’ve got.”
“Oh, I know what I’ve got,” Eddie told him. Taking the picture from his shirt pocket, he saw that the ambers and sepias were beginning to rise, that the picture was going to be good and clear and identifiable. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said, and put the picture away again.
“Could I have a look, then?” the driver asked, stepping closer.
“Let’s take the other one,” Eddie said. Shifting the camera to his left hand, he took one step forward and drove a mean hard right fist into the driver’s body, just above the belt and just below the rib cage. Then he stepped back, put the Polaroid to his eye, and snapped an excellent photo of a man not breathing.
“Hnghnghnghnghng” said the driver, mouth open wide, arms folded across stomach.
“Now, don’t you throw up on hotel property,” Eddie told him, and tucked the second photo into the breast pocket of the fellow’s dark blue jacket. “For your mum,” he said. “Down in Florida, wasn’t it?”
“Hhhhhhhhhhhhh,” said the driver.
“Our manager here,” Eddie explained, “that’s Mr. Ferguson, he does everything he can to keep his guests comfortable and happy. So he phoned up to Boston, to the limo company, and he asked about their driver, and it turns out you ain’t him.”
The driver, having remembered how to breathe, breathed. His face became less purple, his eyes less distended, his posture less pain-wracked. “That was,” he said, still gasping, “an unnecessarily cruel act.”
Eddie nodded, agreeing with that appraisal. “Think what I’d do if I got mad,” he said.
“Die of apoplexy, I hope.” The driver’s voice stuttered and rasped.
“Don’t count on it.” Eddie pointed, away from the hotel. “Out to the public highway, bo. Leg it.”
“May I at least call a taxi?”
“From somewhere,” Eddie said. “Not from here. All you can do from here is leave. And don’t come back.”
“Oh, not to fret,” the driver assured him. He’d regained some of his jauntiness along with the ability to breathe. “I won’t be back. Someone will, but not me. What I will do, I believe, is go to Green’s Hotel, and give myself a drink.”
Three
Ida said, “Jack tells me you got this. Took it away from Cartwright.”
“He did?” Pleased, Sara smiled at Ida for possibly the first time in her life. They were seated near one another in the command center living room of the house in Oak Bluffs, late that same afternoon, several hours after arrival on the island. A routine had already been established, controllable chaos wrestled from pure chaos, and several of the staff were now lounging about—never very far from the phones—waiting for whatever would happen next. Surprised and pleased that Jack would go out of his way to give her credit for their being there, Sara said, “It was just luck, really.”
“You hooked a telephone girl,” Ida said, nodding. “On your own.”
“I was just mad at Phyllis, mosdy,” Sara told her. “I got mad enough, I guess, to really start thinking.”
“You doing anything else on your own?”
She’s jealous of me! Sara thought, with a lit- de thrill, looking into Ida’s icy eyes. She knows I’m competition. And I am, doggone it, I really am! “No, nothing else,” she answered, “not right now. But if I think of something, I’ll land running.”
Ida nodded slowly, absorbing and accepting the challenge. “You came along pretty fast,” she said.
“I guess I did.” Sara smiled again, very happy about herself. When this wedding is over, she thought, Jack will just have to give me a couple of days off, he’ll have to, I’m so close to home, I’ll go over to Great Barrington and see Mom, and tell her . . .
Sara’s smile slowly faded to a look of puzzlement instead, as Ida looked away, picking up a pen and starting to make tiny precise notes to herself. Sara frowned, as she tried to figure out just exacdy how to tell her mother about these triumphs. How to make them sound . . . heroic. Brilliant. Fun.
Maybe, she thought, maybe you just have to be there.
Over by the side window, next to the big Vineyard map crucified to the wall by Ida, Jack stood, looking out. Turning, he waved a pair of binoculars toward Sara, calling, “Comere. Take a look at this.”
Sara rose and threaded her way through the room. When she reached him, Jack handed her the binoculars, pointed out the window, and said, “Take a look.”
Straight ahead, outside the window, were some pine trees and shrubs, and beyond them faint indications of another house. At an angle to the right, beyond the last trees, some distance away, Nantucket Sound could be seen, the arm of the Adantic Ocean hugging this island on the east.
Looking out in that direction, adjusting the binoculars for her own vision, Sara found herself looking at a beautiful white yacht, at least forty feet long, with royal blue trim and bits of gleaming honey-colored woodwork. The ship was lying offshore, in fact was moving very slowly southward along the coast, the late afternoon sun lying on it from this direction like a coat of lacquer, heightening its elegance and beauty, making it stand out from its surroundings like a perfect slide of itself. “That’s beautiful,” Sara murmured, gazing at the ship, holding the binoculars close against her eyes. “I wonder whose it is.”
“Ours,” Jack said.
Sara slowly lowered the binoculars and turned to look at him. She knew him well enough by now to know he didn’t joke, or at least he didn’t joke in any normal and expected way. “Ours?” she echoed.
“Not to keep,” he told her. “Just to give away.”
“I didn’t know we were that nice. Who are we—”
She was interrupted by Don Grove, sounding more terrified than pessimistic this time, as he called from across the room, “Jack! It’s Mr. DeMassi!”
“Come along and listen,” Jack suggested, grinning.
Sara followed him over to where Don Grove sat, holding up the telephone receiver as though it were a poisonous snake he’d been lucky enough to pick up just behind its jaws, so it couldn’t get at him, but had no idea how to put down. “Mr. DeMassi,” he whispered, as Jack took the phone.
“Thank you, Don.” Holding the phone to his ear, Jack took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket as he said, “Mr. DeMassi? Good afternoon, sir. Yes, sir, everything’s under control. I have the text of the telegram right here and”— he looked quickly at his watch—“Mercer should be reading it just about five minutes from now.” The word that Massa himself was on the phone from Florida had spread immediately through the building, and people were gathering around Jack as though he were an accident victim; with the same mo
rbid fascination and unstated relief that it hadn’t happened to them. They all, Sara included, watched and listened in total silence as Jack shook open the folded sheet of paper in his hand and said, “Yes, sir, here it is here. Shall I read it? Yes, sir.” Clearing his throat, holding the paper up in the air, Jack read, “ ‘John Michael Mercer, Katama Bay Country Club, Martha’s Vineyard. Dear John Michael Mercer. All of America is thrilled and delighted at the news of your impending marriage to Ms. Felicia Nelson of Whittier, California, and Miami, Florida. Knowing how important privacy is for you at this major turning point in your life, the Weekly Galaxy wishes to give you, all expenses paid, two weeks on the first-class yacht, Princess Pat, which you can at this moment see outside your window.’ ” Sara, mouth hanging open, turned to stare out the window—she couldn’t see the Sound at all from here—then stared at Jack again.
“ ‘You may travel,’ ” Jack was saying, continuing to read from the sheet of paper, “ ‘anywhere in the world you wish on this yacht, safe and secure from all interruption. In this brief period before your nuptials, the Weekly Galaxy would be proud to present to the American people your thoughts at this important milestone in your life.’ ”
My gosh, Sara thought, my gosh! We can do that? This organization, my organization, we have that much money, that much power, that much determination? The last tiny shred of nostalgia for the poor old, fusty old, ineffective old Courier- Observer fell away from Sara’s brain at that point like dead ash days after the fire.
“ ‘Our discreet interviewer’,” Jack was saying, continuing to read into the phone, “ ‘will be available at your convenience. With warmest wishes and sincere congratulations, John R. Ingersoll, Senior Editor, Weekly Galaxy.’ And I put this address, Mr. DeMassi, so he’ll know we’re really here.”
We’re really here, Sara thought. She was so excited she kept bobbing up and down on the balls of her feet.
“Yes, sir,” Jack was saying, smiling at the phone. “I’ll be right here, sir, and I’ll relay the information to you the instant we get Mercer’s answer.”
“No,” John Michael Mercer said, and slammed the door.
Four
It was 4:45, nearly the end of the working day at the Weekly Galaxy. Mary Kate Scudder, the only member of the Jack Ingersoll team still in Florida, holding the fort, typed a letter to her sister, a WAF at Landsruhe Air Base in West Germany, “Not much news from here,” she had just written, when a general stir made her look up.
There was a flurry of activity all about her in Editorial, people rising, moving with startled expressions in the direction of the elevator bank. Something was going on over there, something disturbing. People trotted toward that disturbance, alarmed, calling out to one another, but still obeying the black lines on the floor, still quartering this way and that through the maze. Abandoning her sister, Mary Kate rose and called to a staffer rushing by this squaricle, “What’s up?”
“Massa’s stuck between floors!”
And Jack is missing this, Mary Kate thought, not without some satisfaction, as she joined the flow, hurrying over to the elevators, where a pair of sweating editors struggled vainly with the door facing the conference table. As Mary Kate arrived, so did an officious janitor, jangling a handful of keys above his head like a symbolic gesture in some religious service, and crying, “Don’t break the door! Don’t break the door!
The janitor forced himself through the gathering crowd, Mary Kate slithering along in his wake in order to assure herself a good view, and the futile editors stood back, brows damp and hands filthy. The janitor dropped to one knee and inserted a long narrow key into a small round hole near the bottom comer of the door. The click was clearly audible to Mary Kate above the excited hubbub of the crowd. The janitor stood, and the elevator doors slid back to reveal only the top third of Massa’s office, with its roof and machinery and cables above. Looking down past the janitor’s elbow, Mary Kate could see Massa down in there, red-faced, staring upward, standing on top of his desk and hopping up and down in his agitation. “Don’t worry, Mr. DeMassi,” the janitor called. “We got Maintenance on the way!”
But the stuck elevator didn’t seem to be what was agitating Massa. Ignoring the janitor, still hopping up and down on his desk, kicking over papers and empty beer bottles and framed testimonials from service organizations, Massa yelled, “Get me Boy! Get me Boy Cartwright!”
The janitor, bewildered, stepped back as Boy pushed himself through the crowd and dropped to one knee at the edge of the floor, the better to look down into the office. He looked, in that position, like one of the viler vassals of one of the baser barons of the Age of Chivalry. “Yes, sir,
Mr. DeMassi,” he called down to his liege. “Did you want me to help you up, sir?”
“I got it, Boy!” Massa yelled, waving his fists above his head. “I got the John Michael Mercer story!”
Boy looked pleased, but puzzled. “The interview, sir? You have that?”
“He won’t give us an interview!” Massa roared. “The son of a bitch! If he won’t take the goddamn yacht, there’s no way to get to him!”
“No, sir,” Boy agreed. “Looks like no one up there can get to him.”
You snake in the grass, Mary Kate thought, I wonder if I could just accidentally step on your hand while you’re down there.
But Massa was saying, “No one could get to that ungrateful son of a bitch, Boy! We need a different story, and I’ve got it!”
“Yes, sir?” Boy asked, alert and eager.
“The wedding album!” Massa cried, dancing on his desk like Rumpelstiltskin when nobody could guess his name. “The wedding pictures are the story!”
“Yes, sir!” cried Boy. Still on one knee, he waved his own fists around in imitation of his master.
“Go up there, Boy!” Massa shouted, while Mary Kate stared in shock. “Go up there and get me those pictures!”
“Yes, sir/”
“If anybody can do it, Boy, you can!”
“Yes, sir!”
Boy was up and away. Mary Kate, still in shock, stared down at Massa, wondering if she dared speak up for Jack, knowing in her heart it would be much too dangerous, seeing Massa look around himself, frowning at the position of his office in relation to the floor, frowning at his own feet on his desk. “What is this?” he demanded, just now noticing the fix he was in. “Get me out of here!”
“Yes, sir!” cried the janitor. “Here comes Maintenance now!”
And as Maintenance came, Mary Kate left, running across Editorial, this way and that through the black lines, the shortest route to the Ingersoll squaricle where she flung herself on the phone and called the house in Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard.
Jack was out, nobody knew exactly where. Don Grove was the one who answered. He took Mary Kate’s message, and it didn’t decrease his pessimism one little bit.
The first shot woke Sara, startling and frightening her but leaving her bewildered, aware only of the after-sound of breaking glass, not sure what she’d heard that had brought her up from sleep. Jack shifted sluggishly beside her—the news about Boy’s imminent arrival had caused him to drink just a teeny bit too much at dinner—his arm moving heavily on her rib cage. What? she thought, but drowsily, eyes half open, brain not yet really at work.
But then came the fusillade, and snapped them both back into the world, sitting bolt upright together in the darkness. A thunder of shots, closely spaced, intermixed with more chitters of falling glass, and then silence, a silence full of round silent implosions, sharp silent junctures, furry silent menace, and the drifting scent of gunpowder. “Wha—?” started Sara, but Jack clapped a hand over her mouth, his breath in her ear whispering, “Sshhhhhhh . . .”
Distant noises, people shouting, doors banging. Sara and Jack clung together, her arms around him, his right arm around her, left hand cupped to her mouth. Moving her head under that hand, she looked to her right, to the dim red glow of numbers from the clock-radio provided by the inn and bolted to
the bedside table: 3:07 a.m.
They were in Jack’s bed. They might have been next door in Sara’s bed, but the teeny bit too much Jack had taken to drink had caused him, when they’d returned to the inn tonight, to totter directly toward his own room, so Sara had followed, through the connecting door, and their comforting of one another over the bad news of Boy’s resurgence into their lives had led to one thing and another, all in this room, in this bed, as slowly solace became sleep. And so here they still were, four hours later, when the night was blown apart with gunshots.
Sara moved her head again, freeing her mouth from his grasp. Softer than soft, she murmured toward his ear in the darkness, “Revolution? Starting in Martha’s Vineyard?”
His lips touched her ear. His warm breath whispered, “It was in your room.”
She stiffened, holding him tighter, feeling chilled. The connecting door still stood open. Was the person with the gun still in there?
A sudden banging sounded at the hall door in that room, and a male voice called, “Miss Joslyn! Miss Joslyn!”
“Wait here,” Jack whispered, and disengaged himself from her, and slid out of bed. She heard him pulling on trousers, and could just make out his form crossing past the drapes over the sliding glass door. Then he opened the hall door of this room, leaned cautiously out, and called to someone outside, “Down here.”
Light-spill from the hall, passing Jack, gendy illuminated this room. Sara threw a fearful glance toward the doorway to her own room, the blackness in there still total. Nothing seemed to move in there. While Jack and one or more other voices murmured in the hall, she found on the floor the jeans and shirt she’d discarded just a few hours ago, and pulled them on.
“Just a minute, let me see,” Jack said firmly, and shut the door over what seemed to be protests. As Sara stood, Jack came running around the bed, grabbing her arm, whispering rapidly as he propelled her toward the frightening darkness of her room, “You were in the bathroom when it happened.”
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