“From the kitchen setup,” she said, “it would appear that you’d bagged a German delicatessen.” Then she put her tennis racket on the bedside table and jumped on top of me. She put both arms around my neck and kissed me on the mouth and held it. When she stopped I said, “Nice girls don’t kiss with their mouths open.” She said, “Did you have an operation in Denmark? You’re wearing perfume.” I said, “No. I used your shampoo.” She said, “Oh, thank heavens,” and pressed her mouth on me again. I slid my hand down her back and under the tennis dress. I’d had small experience with tennis dresses and wasn’t doing well with this one. She lifted her face from mine. “I’m all sweaty,” she said. “Even if you weren’t,” I said, “you would be soon.”
“No,” she said, “I’ve got to take a bath first.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “I can’t help it,” she said. “I have to.” Her voice was a little hoarse. “Well, for crissake why not a shower. A bath, for God sake. I may commit a public disgrace on your stereo by the time you run a bath.”
“A shower will ruin my hair.”
“Do you know the ruination I face?”
“I’ll be quick,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in a long time either.” She got up from the bed and ran the water in the bathtub off the bedroom. Then she came back in and pulled the shades and undressed. I watched her. The tennis dress had pants underneath. “Ah ha,” I said. “That’s why my progress was slower than I’m used to.”
“Poor thing,” she said, “you’ve seduced a low-class clientele. With a better upbringing you’d have learned years ago how to cope with a tennis dress.” She was wearing a white bra and white bikini underpants. She looked at me with that look she had, nine parts innocence and one part evil, and said, “All the guys at the club know.”
“If they only knew what to do after they’d gotten the dress off,” I said. “How come you wear pants under pants?”
“Only a cheap hussy would play tennis without underwear.” She took off the bra. “Or kiss with her mouth open,” I said. “Oh no,” she said as she wiggled out of the underpants, “everyone at the club does that.” I’d seen her naked now enough times to stop counting. But I never lost interest. She wasn’t fragile. She was strong-looking. Her stomach was flat and her breasts didn’t sag. She was beautiful and she always looked a little uncomfortable naked, as if someone might burst in and say, “Ah hah!”
“Take your bath, Suze,” I said. “Tomorrow I may go beat up the club.” She went into the bathroom and I could hear her splashing around in the water. “If you’re playing with a rubber ducky in there I’m going to drown you.”
“Patience,” she yelled. “I’m soaking in an herbal bubble bath that will drive you wild.”
“I’m wild enough,” I said. I took off my white ducks and my Pumas. She came out of the bathroom with a towel tucked under her chin. It hung to her knees. With her right hand she removed it, the way you open a curtain, and said, “Tada.”
“Not bad,” I said. “I like a person who stays in shape.” She dropped the towel and got on the bed with me. I opened my arms and she got inside. I hugged her. “I’m glad you’re back in one piece,” she said, her mouth very close to mine. “Me too,” I said, “and speaking of one piece…”
“Now,” she said, “I’m not sweaty.” I kissed her. She pressed harder against me and I could hear her breath go in deep once through her nose and come out slowly in a long sigh. She ran her hand over my hip and down along my backside. It stopped when she felt the scar of the bullet wound. With her lips lightly against mine she said, “What’s this?”
“Bullet wound.”
“I gather you weren’t attacking,” she said. “I am now,” I said.
24
“In the ass?” Susan said. “I like to think of it as a hamstring wound,” I said. “I’ll bet you do,” she said. “Was it bad?”
“Undignified but not serious,” I said. We were eating deli and drinking champagne in her kitchen. I had my white ducks back on and my Pumas. She had on a bathrobe. Outside it was dark now. Nonurban night sounds drifted in through the open back door. Night insects pinged against the screen. “Tell me. All of it. From the beginning.” I put two slices of veal loaf on some rye bread, added a small application of Dusseldorf mustard, put another slice of bread on top and bit. I chewed and swallowed. “Two shots in the ass and I was off on the greatest adventure of my career,” I said. I took a bite of half sour pickle. It clashed a little with the champagne, but life is flawed. “Be serious,” Susan said. “I want to hear about it. Have you had a bad time? You look tired.”
“I am tired,” I said. “I’ve just been screwing my brains out.”
“Oh really?”
“Oh really,” I said. “How come you were doing all that sighing and moaning?”
“Boredom,” she said. “Those weren’t sighs and moans. Those were yawns.”
“Nice talk to a wounded man.”
“Well,” she said, “I am glad the bullet didn’t go all the way through.” I poured some champagne in her glass and mine. I put the bottle down, raised the glass and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” She smiled. The smile made me want to say Oh boy, but I’m too worldly to say it out loud. “Begin at the beginning,” she said. “You got on the plane after you left me and… ?”
“And I landed in London about eight hours later. I didn’t like leaving you.”
“I know,” she said. “And a guy named Flanders that works for Hugh Dixon met me at the airport…” and I told her all, the people that tried to kill me, the people I killed, all of it. “No wonder you look tired,” she said when I finished. We were on the last bottle of champagne and most of the food was gone. She was easy to tell things to. She understood quickly, she supplied missing pieces without asking questions, and she was interested. She wanted to hear. “What do you think about Kathie?” I said. “She needs a master. She needs structure. When you destroyed her structure, and her master turned her out, she latched on to you. When she wanted to solidify the relationship by complete submission, which for her must be sexual, you turned her out. I would guess she’ll be Hawk’s as long as he’ll have her. How’s that for instant psychoanalysis. Just add a bottle of champagne and serve off the top of the head.”
“I’d say you were right, though.”
“If you report accurately, and it’s something you’re good at,” Susan said, “certainly she’s a rigid and repressed personality. The way her room was, the colorless clothing and the flashy underwear, the tight-lipped commitment to a kind of Nazi absolutism.”
“Yeah, she’s all of that. She’s some kind of masochist. Maybe that’s not quite the right term. But when she was tied up and gagged on the bed she liked it. Or at least it aroused her to be tied like that and have us there. She went crazy when Hawk searched her while she was tied.”
“I’m not sure masochist is the right word. But obviously she finds some connection between sex and helplessness and helplessness and humiliation and humiliation and pleasure. Most of us have conflicting tendencies toward aggression and passivity. If we have healthy childhoods and get through adolescence okay we tend to work them out. If we don’t, then we confuse them and tend to be like Kathie, who hasn’t worked out her passivity impulses.” Susan smiled. “Or you, who are quite aggressive.”
“But gallant,” I said. “How do you think Hawk will deal with her?” Susan said. “Hawk has no feelings,” I said. “But he has rules. If she fits one of his rules, he’ll treat her very well. If she doesn’t, he’ll treat her any way the mood strikes him.”
“Do you really think he has no feelings?”
“I have never seen any. He’s as good as anyone I ever saw at what he does. But he never seems happy or sad or frightened or elated. He never, in the twenty-some years I’ve known him, here and there, has shown any sign of love or compassion. He’s never been nervous. He’s never been mad.”
“Is he as good as you?” Susan was resting her chin on her folded ha
nds and looking at me. “He might be,” I said. “He might be better.”
“He didn’t kill you last year on Cape Cod when he was supposed to. He must have felt something then.”
“I think he likes me, the way he likes wine, the way he doesn’t like gin. He preferred me to the guy he was working for. He sees me as a version of himself. And, somewhere in there, killing me on the say-so of a guy like Powers was in violation of one of the rules. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have killed him either.”
“Are you a version of him?”
“I got feelings,” I said. “I love.”
“Yes, you do,” Susan said. “And quite well too. Let us take this last bottle of champagne to the bedroom and lie down and drink it and continue the conversation and perhaps once more you would care to, as the kids at the high school say, do it.”
“Suze,” I said, “I’m a middle-aged man.”
“I know,” Susan said. “I see it as a challenge.” We went into the bedroom and lay close in the bed, sipping the champagne and watching the late movie in the air-conditioned darkness. Life may be flawed but sometimes things are just right. The late movie was The Magnificent Seven. When Steve McQueen looked at Eli Wallach and said, “We deal in lead, friend,” I said it along with him. “How many times have you seen this movie?” Susan asked. “Oh, I don’t know. Six, seven times, I guess. It’s on a lot of late shows in hotel rooms in a lot of cities.”
“How can you stand to watch it again?”
“It’s like watching a dance, or listening to music. It’s not plot, it’s pattern.” She laughed in the darkness. “Of course it is,” she said. “That’s the story of your life. What doesn’t matter. It’s how you look when you do it.”
“Not just how you look,” I said. “I know,” she said. “My champagne is gone. Do you think you are, if you’ll pardon the phrase, up for another transport of ecstasy?” I finished the last of my champagne. “With a little help,” I said, “from my friends.” She ran her hand lightly across my stomach. “I’m all the friend you’ve got, big fella.”
“All I need,” I said.
25
Next day Susan drove me to the airport. We stopped on the way in the hot bright summer morning at a Dunkin‘ Donut shop, and had coffee and two plain donuts apiece. “A night of ecstasy followed by a morning of delight,” I said, and bit into a donut. “Did William Powell take Myrna Loy to a Dunkin’ Donut shop?”
“He didn’t know enough,” I said. I raised my coffee cup toward her. She said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” I said, “How’d you know what I was going to say?”
“Lucky guess,” she said. We were quiet on the ride to the airport. Susan was a terrible driver and I spent a lot of time stomping my right foot on the floorboards. When she stopped at the terminal she said, “I’m getting sick of doing this. How long this time?”
“Not long,” I said. “Maybe a week, no longer than the Olympic games.”
“You promised me London,” she said. “If you don’t make it back to pay off I’ll be really angry with you.” I kissed her on “I love you, Suze.” She said, “I love you too,” and I got out and went into the terminal. Two hours and twenty minutes later I was back in Montreal at the house near Henri Bourassa Boulevard. It was empty. There was O’Keefe’s ale in the refrigerator along with several bottles of champagne. Hawk had been shopping. I opened a bottle of O’Keefe’s and sat in the living room and watched some of the games on television. At about two-thirty a man knocked at the front door. I stuck my gun in my hip pocket, just in case, and answered. “Mr. Spenser?” The man was wearing a seersucker suit and a small-brimmed straw hat with a big blue band. He sounded American, although so did half the people in Canada. At the curb with the motor running was a Dodge Monaco with Quebec plates. “Yeah,” I said, very snappy. “I’m from Dixon Industries. I have an envelope for you, but first could I see some ID?” I showed him my PI license with my picture on it. I looked like one of the friends of Eddie Coyle. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s you.”
“It disappoints me too,” I said. He smiled automatically, gave me back my license and took a thick envelope out of his side coat pocket. It had my name on it, and the Dixon Industries logo up in the left-hand comer. I took the envelope. The man in the seersucker suit said, “Goodbye, have a nice day,” went back to his waiting Monaco, and drove off. I went in the house and opened the envelope. It was three sets of tickets for all the events at the Olympic stadium for the duration of the games. There was nothing else. Not even a preprinted card that said HAVE A NICE DAY. The world becomes impersonal. Hawk and Kathie returned while I was on my fourth O’Keefe’s. Hawk opened some champagne and poured a glass for Kathie and one for him. “Haw old Suze doing?” he asked. He sat on the couch, Kathie sat beside him. She didn’t say anything. “Fine. She said hello.”
“Dixon go along?”
“Yeah. I think it gave him another purpose. Something else to think about.”
“Better than watching daytime TV,” Hawk said. “You turn up anything yesterday or today?” He shook his head. “Me and Kathie been looking, but we haven’t seen anyone she know. Stadium’s big. We haven’t looked at it all yet.”
“You scalp some tickets?” Hawk smiled. “Yeah. Hated to. But it’s your bread. Been my bread I might have taken them away. Hate scalpers.”
“Yeah. How’s the security?” Hawk shrugged. “Tight, but you know. How you gonna be airtight with seventy, eighty thousand people walking in and out two, three times a day. There’s a lot of buttons around, but if I wanted to do somebody in there, I could. No sweat.”
“And get out?”
“Sure, with a little luck. It’s a big place, man. Lot of people. ”
“Well, tomorrow I’ll see. I got us all tickets so we don’t have to deal with the scalpers.”
“All right,” Hawk said. “Hate corruption in all its aspects, don’t you, Hawk.”
“Been fighting it all my life, bawse.” Hawk drank some more champagne. Kathie filled his glass as soon as he put it down. She sat so that her thigh touched his and watched him all the time. I drank some ale. “Been enjoying the games, Kath?” She nodded without looking at me. Hawk grinned at me. “She don’t like you,” he said. “She say you ain’t much of a man. Say you weak, you soft, say her and me we should shake you. I getting the feeling she don’t care for you. She think you a degenerate.”
“I got a real way with the broads,” I said. Kathie reddened but was silent, still looking at Hawk. “I told her she was a little hasty in her judgment.”
“She believe you?”
“No. You buy anything besides booze, like for supper.”
“Naw, man, you was telling me about a place called Bacco’s. Figured you’d like to take me and Kath out and show her you ain’t no degenerate. Treat her to a fine meal. Me too.”
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