The nurse returned pushing a wheelchair. She went into Helen’s room and Blaise stepped out where he could see into both rooms. Appearing alert, Helen helped get herself into the chair.
Blaise caught a handle, guiding the chair and Nurse Levitt to the elevator. “You’ve got to leave, Helen,” he said quietly, “with two men downstairs in a black Rolls-Royce.” He looked at the nurse. “You’ll be all alone but you will get her there.”
“Do exactly as he says, Nurse.” MacReedy stood in the doorway of Bruno’s intensive care ward. “Then get an emergency team going for surgery and send someone up with a gurney.” MacReedy looked intently at Levitt, willing her not to screw up.
Helen was scared but she smiled timidly. “It’ll be all right, Blaise.” The elevator opened and Blaise shoved the nurse in with the wheel chair.
“The Roils is at the front door.”
Nurse Levitt glared like a cat, wishing she dared bite.
Dr. MacReedy had started oxygen for Bruno. He didn’t look up when Blaise opened the stairway door. Blaise waited for the door to settle back into the frame, then ran up a flight and a half, stopping only when he was above the seventh-floor entrance. He put Bruno’s pistol on the cement step. Sergio had cautioned him about using a gun he knew nothing about. It might not be loaded, or it could blow up in his face, Sergio said. Blaise unholstered the little Bufalo. The slide made a nerve-wrenching metallic sound. He waited.
Noise came and went in the stairwell like smoke in a vacuum. A scrape of shoe erupted, blossomed, and disappeared so quickly it never existed. The walls and pipe railing were off-cream, a pseudocolor without enough character to be described. Stains on the gray cement steps and landings gave the impression of dirt even though the slick surfaces had no grime. Stair landing lights glowed dimly. A door slammed below, then feet began scuffing concrete steps.
Blaise pulled off his shoes, sticking one in each pocket of his sports jacket. A hole in his black sock exposed the middle toe of his left foot, providing something to concentrate on while waiting. The waiting was the hardest. Sweat itched his back.
Sudden noise burst from the overhead landing. Voices arguing, a door slamming. Footsteps. Blaise bolted down to the turn between seventh and sixth floors. He stopped, panting even though he’d sprinted no more than fifty feet. Footsteps thudded downstairs. Stopped. A door opened again and more noise.
Blaise sprinted back upstairs and sat again midway between the seventh and eighth floors. Sergio had guessed they wouldn’t have enough men for a floor-by-floor sweep so they’d try to flush him downward. He went back to waiting. Waiting even after the door below opened and closed again and the footsteps clumped downstairs, followed by the clang of another door.
Without his watch, time would have lost all meaning. The police Nurse Levitt would call should conclude he was gone. West’s men by now would have the gnawing suspicion that somehow he fled the building even though they knew it was impossible.
Blaise checked his watch, then took the engraved name tag out of his pocket and pinned it to his shirt. Dr. H. Williams put his shoes on, hung his jacket over a banister, and walked out onto the seventh floor. Shift change was right on time and he was instantly swallowed in the group waiting for the elevator. On the way down more people packed into the little metal cage but he kept easing his way to the front. At the main lobby they all spewed out of the elevator in a loose mass. Blaise’s long legs got him out the door first. Two paces later he reached the curb just as the car door swung open.
The glass door exploded behind him as someone; inside the hospital lobby tried a desperate shot, but he was already dropping into the seat while Sergio drove as if for his own life instead of Blaise’s.
Blaise forced the cramped fingers of his right hand open. Through the elevator ride and rush for the door no one had noticed the automatic. “I had to leave the holster,” he said.
“Too bad.” Sergio looked at Blaise. “But you got your girl.” He studied the mirror as they took back roads to the house Blaise had rented. “I gather Bruno was waiting?”
Blaise told him what had happened. At the end Sergio said simply, “You were lucky.”
“I thought I did all right.” Blaise was not complaining. It was a question.
“You let Bruno catch you.”
Blaise waited.
“Bruno’s in intensive care because he was hurt bad enough to be put there where he could watch for you. If he’d been faking you’d be dead, Doc.” Sergio glanced at him, his face sober. “Almost killed you, and he’s not well enough to get out of bed.”
“I did the best I could.”
“You should have killed Bruno.”
“He’s your cousin!”
“Should have killed him, Doc. Even if he was your cousin.” Blaise didn’t say anything. Sergio was offering him a reality that Blaise did not think he could face.
Mathematical precision does not allow for the incoherence of hopes and terrors, daydreams and nightmares. And yet this is precisely the part of intelligence that requires the most study.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 25
Sergio dropped Blaise in front of the house.
“You’re not staying?”
“No. You see your girlfriend. Rest. Come out to the spa around eight, right at dark. Only when you come off the freeway, instead of north, turn south. Stop at the first motel and rent a room as Mr. Clark. Park out of sight of the street and wait.” Sergio contemplated Blaise in silence, brown eyes giving nothing away but reflections. “You should have killed Bruno,” he added.
Shrugging, Blaise closed the door and stepped away. “All your cars are painted like hearses,” he said.
“We’re in a funereal business.” Sergio drove away.
“It’s not my business,” Blaise said to the disappearing car. But it was a business, and he was in it. He began whistling, trying to feel better before he went in the house. The whistling was off key and all he could think of was Saint James Infirmary.
Helen leaned against a felt-covered colonial wingback, wearing a wooly white robe he recognized as one of his. The chair arms were wide enough to be benches, but they helped her stand without wobbling.
Neatly wrapped in white bandage, the top of her head came to just below his eyes. When she realized that, Helen ducked against his shoulder and mumbled, “Don’t look.”
Blaise touched the bandage gingerly, sliding his hand down to the smooth, creamy skin of her neck. His other hand held her around the waist and he felt Helen’s weight shift from her legs to his hand. “You’re tired,” he said.
“Not now.” Her hands were on his chest, like a small bird huddling for warmth. Her lips pressed against him until he felt them even through his shirt, and she talked to his skin rather than his ears.
“You’ve got to go back to bed.” His lungs felt squeezed by the shock of how weak she really was. He’d been confident in the hospital that she was getting better, getting stronger, and he’d never considered the possibility that she couldn’t be moved. He stepped away and she slumped. Blaise caught her in his arms and carried her into the bedroom.
“Don’t,” she murmured. “I’m too heavy.”
He eased her gently into bed and tucked her in.
She caught his arm with her hand and stared up at him. “Don’t go.” She whispered it, timidly.
Blaise sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand.
The window faced southwest and sun printed a jagged yellow pattern on the shades he had drawn to keep the light dim.
“What are you and Mr. Paoli doing later?”
“Nothing. I mean, nothing that concerns you, Helen.” The question startled him. He’d been thinking about how serious her condition really was, if he’d been right to take her out of the hospital. He didn’t want Helen to worry.
Helen looked at him until he was uneasy. “I want you to make love with me.”
“My God, you’re too weak!”
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“You don’t want to.” A tear rolled down the side of her face and wet him.
“That’s not true, Helen. I want to.” The tightness in his chest constricted his throat and he had trouble talking.
“Then prove it!” Helen was pulling him down into the bed and he couldn’t help himself. He kicked off his shoes and she coaxed him out of his clothes and then under the covers she opened her robe and pressed her body against his.
Her mouth was hot and demanding, but Blaise felt the weakness in her, the timid pulse of her life against him and he held her tight and said over and over, “I can’t,” until she stopped urging him.
“Alcohol and impotence are like love and marriage,” Gordon had told him. “Stop drowning your sorrows in C2H5OH and it’ll come back.” Feeling the weak tick of her irregular pulse, Blaise was grateful not to be enslaved to raging machismo. Miraculously, her heart continued its precarious pace and after a while she burrowed noiselessly into the pillows. Her eyes closed and her breathing became more regular.
He slid out of bed and drew the covers up to her chin, watching her as he dressed. Unable to tear himself away, he was obsessed with the mystical notion that only his presence kept the thin wisp of her life from departing.
He dozed in a chair until shadows made the bedroom murky, then stretched, went into the kitchen, and drank half a bottle of orange juice. He looked at Dobie in the garage, then came back to the bedroom and left the telephone, a glass of juice, and a note on the nightstand.
Dobie had been comatose, chest flexing with his barely existent breathing.
He had to get Gordon.
The best laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft a-gley.
ROBERT BURNS;
QUOTED IN A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 26
Like the ball of a giant’s thumb, Earth was snuffing out the sun when Sergio walked into the room rented to Bob Clark. That he neglected to knock didn’t matter. Blaise heard his feet on the second-story cement landing long before he got there.
Flopping face down on the bed, Sergio asked, “Am I sunburned?”
“How can I tell?” Blaise shifted in the chair by the window. The angle made it possible to see out the blinds with a minimum of effort and unlikely that he would be seen from outside. “To me you’re a half-baked Italian.”
“A New Jerseyan of the Sicilian persuasion.”
“Is that a religious preference?”
Rolling on his back, Sergio closed his eyes. “An accident of birth. If you can get through to Dr. Hill, try to get him outside fifteen minutes after you hang up.”
Blaise waited, but Sergio faked sleep, either because he didn’t want to be bothered or because he was as tired as he looked. The blue pinstripes and narrow cuffs were long gone and he had difficulty identifying Sergio as the same man who had approached him on the plane from San Francisco. The old Sergio had been absorbed by a pearl-gray suit, one image erased and replaced by another.
Dialing the old-style phone brought the almost instantaneous sound of a ring. Gordon answered.
“Cunningham here. I want to give something back to you.”
“You’ll have to give me a hint,” Gordon said.
“I can’t afford to keep your dog any longer.” Blaise held the phone through a long pause. Someone had muted the other end because the line was still open, though silent.
Gordon came back on. “That’s probably wise, Blaise. A good man knows his limitations.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s becoming too expensive.”
“Inflation.” Gordon sighed. “Could you bring him?”
“No. I don’t believe you’re aware of the situation right now, but I want you to have Dobie and I don’t think it would be wise or safe for me to get too close to your employers.
After a pause, Gordon said, “I understand. Have you any suggestions?”
“The desiccated analogue?” It was their oblique reference to the zoo instead of Sea World.
“No.”
Blaise could feel Gordon shaking his head at the other end of the line. “It has to be closer.”
“Can you take a stroll?”
“Yes.”
“Eleventh hole on the golf course, by the dry stream. I’ll take Dobie for a run in half an hour. Walk around awhile and give me a chance to see if you’re being followed.”
“If you think it’s necessary, Blaise. But you are becoming very devious.”
“It’s a learning situation, Gordon. We never know how we’re doing until the grades are in. Just be sure you know where the meeting spot is so you don’t get lost in the dark.”
“I won’t be lost in the dark.” Gordon didn’t even sound cynical.
“Very good.” Sergio covered his eyes with his hand after Blaise hung up. “You think he understood?”
“He said he wouldn’t get lost in the dark.”
“Che sera, sera. You should use Italian more, for expression.” Sergio thought a moment, weighing the variables, the myriad manifestations of Murphy’s Law. “I’ll set up the blind. Watch about ten minutes. Keep an eye on me. When I move to the edge of the golf course by the eleventh hole, you come in. If I blink my lights, pass by and back me.” Sergio seemed faded, like a watercolor exposed to the sun.
“You feel all right?”
He snorted. “Watch out for yourself, Doc, Bruno had you down one-handed while he was on his back in a hospital.” Blaise pulled his suit coat on. It was a charcoal polyester that looked like gabardine. The little Bufalo was stretching his pocket out of shape. “Forty-five’s in the dashbox if you want it.” The .45 was the gun he’d taken off the man in his house.
Sergio stood, shaking away his lethargy. “You trust too much in guns, Doc. Get yourself a crummy pea shooter and you do everything except throw it at people.” The walnut grips on the Magnum showed against his shirt like some hard growth. “I never shot anybody, Doc. I’d like to keep it that way.”
Blaise tried a crooked grin. “Take care of yourself. Someone will be waiting.”
“If they’re not, we wasted a quarter.” Sergio held out his hand and Blaise took it.
Following the black sedan to the turnoff, Blaise swung onto the freeway while Sergio continued to where he could sit and watch the Heaven’s Gate grounds as long as the light lasted.
Five miles disappears in a hurry on an empty freeway. Blaise came off the rolling hills north of Heaven’s Gate in time to see Sergio parked off the road half a mile the other side of the spa. The sedan was a black speck in the dusk, but the lights came on and started moving down the road past the golf course.
Sergio hadn’t blinked, so Gordon was walking in the murk as instructed, neither crossing the golf course nor locked in a room somewhere. Blaise pulled into the parking lot, rolling silently toward the restaurant where cars already clustered. Light poured from the building in an attempt to create an air of security.
Most of the buildings behind the restaurant and administrative annex were dark. A few squares of yellow light glowed. Photo sensors had already switched on an occasional pole light around the complex as well as the cabana door lights.
Helen’s white Buick was innocent, too conspicuous to be dangerous. Sergio had said so, and Blaise accepted his judgment. But he could not cruise forever. Nor could he park and sit without alerting somebody who knew he was there to meet Gordon.
He neared the door to the club and stopped. The immediate spaces were full. A man in the entrance way wearing a black dinner suit and a vacant expression did not have the air of a customer or parking attendant. He turned to stare at the Buick.
Blaise averted his face and backed up as if returning to a space that had seemed too far. The face in the entrance, cadaverous with sodium vapor shadows, had been familiar. Blaise remembered the hate that filled that face the day he took Dobie. The Heaven’s Gate manager would remember Blaise.
He pulled into a space facing the complex, motor churning quietly. T
houghtful, Jensen still stood in front of the building, looking. The glare on the closed window obscured his vision, but if Blaise didn’t get out he would come for a look.
Where are you, Gordon? Staring into the gloom, he sensed movement as something passed in front of a window. He squinted. He also saw the manager stalking toward him, very stylish in tailored dinner clothes and black bow tie. Jensen still didn’t know, or he’d be running.
Blaise jammed the transmission into low and floored it. Front-end-drive wheels hit the curb and bounced, then came down clawing at cement. His head slammed into the roof when the back wheels hit, and then he was gouging tracks through manicured turf. He eased off. The car skidded broadside across wet grass until he jolted against the walk behind the main building. Running the electric window down, he yelled, “Get in!”
Gordon darted around the car and Blaise heard the door open, felt the car rock, the door slam. The manager was behind them, sprinting across the grass. Blaise jammed the pedal to the metal. The car bucked and skittered.
“The grass is wet.” Gordon’s voice was coolly amused.
Blaise tapped the brake and they stopped spinning. He nudged the throttle and front wheels caught. A firecracker went off in his ear, opening a tiny hole in the windshield. Immediately, cracks started radiating. Startled, Blaise turned his face to the left, toward the ear that rang. He was staring through the open window into Jensen’s face over the barrel of a pistol held in both hands. The next shot was wild behind them as they schussed down the slope onto the first tee.
Gaining speed across the green, the Buick hit the fence that kept the unmonied and unwelcome masses away. The chain link was low and the top pole popped off, allowing the wire to stretch until momentum carried them over and onto the street.
Blaise aimed south. He was on the crossroad before he saw Sergio’s car slewed sideways blocking the other street.
He hit the brake. The Buick swung like a pendulum as it lost momentum.
The Cunningham Equations Page 25