“Substance of it,” Gleason said, “was that Barbie-doll spotted someone trying to put a tail on me. She went to see Larry Badger, and Larry got Alton involved, and Alton talked to John. And the two or three of them figured out that who’s watching me’s Fred Consolo. Who is also watching you.
“So I said to John,” he said, “I said, ‘Well, if they’re watching me, because they’re watching her, why are they watching her? Because that is where we start.’ And John said it’s because you have been to see Sam, within the past six months.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yes,” Gleason said. “John knew this because Alton found it out, same way as Fred did. Although maybe not quite as legally. Alton poached on the government’s computer files and put your name on the screen, and bells rang and whistles blew, and he found out you went to London in June. You were gone ten days.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Now Alton’s a shrewd bastard,” Gleason said. “Just because somebody goes to London doesn’t mean she stayed in London. Maybe she went somewhere else. So Alton invaded the airlines’ computers, which coughed up the information that you were in England for a total of about eight hours.”
“Yes,” she said. “I was.”
“Just long enough, in other words,” he said, “to make the connection to Casablanca. Which Alton discovered you did, by raping another computer that also told him about the car you rented there.”
“I suppose he got the mileage, too,” she said. “When I brought it back.”
“That’s correct,” he said. “About fourteen hundred kilometers, at two-two dirham each.”
“I give the guy credit,” she said. “When he was working for James, I thought he was a little weird, but I thought the guy was good.”
“That he is,” Gleason said. “Having learned all of this, and keep in mind that my child bride hasn’t paid him or his uncle a dime for it, but when he gets started on something, the more he learns the more curious he gets. Having learned all of this, he said: ‘Why does the single music teacher go to Morocco by herself?’ That is what he said. ‘To meet somebody else,’ he said. ‘Let’s see who might be there.’ And you know what he found out?”
“I could guess,” she said.
“And that’s what Alton had to do,” Gleason said. “Because Sam’s still got his collection of passports, and he is using them. Doesn’t do any good to type ‘Tibbetts, S.,’ into the terminal, because Sam’s very seldom ‘Tibbetts’ these days when he goes a-traveling.”
She sighed. “He has a lot of them,” she said. “I didn’t know.… It never came up at the trial.”
“It never came up at the trial,” Gleason said, “because in those halcyon days, when we were protecting Mackenzie, we didn’t want it to. Back then Mackenzie said: ‘Eight.’ Would that have been correct?”
“It was at least eight,” she said. “We used to, when Sam was really humming, one of the things he had us do was spend the time between the jobs filling up the passport-bin. And I think Sam had about ten. Go into some little town. Search the library collection of the weekly papers for the year when Sam was born. Get the birth certificate for some infant that died that year, soon after birth. Show it to a Department of Motor Vehicles, and you’ve got a driver’s license. Submit it to the State Department with pictures of Sam. Presto, you’ve got a passport in another person’s name, which person you’ve become. He had a lot of them.”
“Alton,” Gleason said, “according to John Richards, Alton thinks Sam Tibbetts’s probably the Raymond Hickcock that registered with the police in Agadir on May sixth, as an American alien, not seeking employment, intending to remain in that country for more than ninety days.”
“That’s the name I used,” she said, “when I got in touch with him.”
“Alton also surmises,” Gleason said, “with the help of his computers and extremely fertile mind, that Sam Tibbetts is probably the Jay Cullinan who travels between Tangier and Zurich with remarkable regularity. And who is also registered with the police in Tangier as an American alien, not seeking employment. And that he is the same person who travels under the name of Francis Swift from Casablanca, on regular business to Athens. And that he’s the Joseph Thomas who flies to Beirut from Marrakech.”
“All possible,” she said. “The only one I know for sure is Raymond Hickcock. And the only reason I know that one is that I got the papers in Chester, Vermont, in Nineteen-seventy-three, and Sam took them for himself. So that was the name I used. Used for him, I mean.”
“Why?” Gleason said.
She slumped in the booth. “ ‘Why’?” she said. “Oh boy, this isn’t easy.”
“You’re the one that started it,” he said. “Wasn’t my idea.”
“Oh, shit,” she said. She put her elbows on the table and massaged her forehead with her fingers. She put her hands down on the table, crossing her arms at the wrists. “Look, all right?” she said. “I went because I had to. I had to go and find out. I called, when Jimmy asked me, I called up my mother. Because this wasn’t just something that involved me and Jimmy — it also involved her and Dad. And I tried to tell her that. That it mattered, that she had to think clearly for once, and tell me whether she thought I’d be doing the right thing if I did what Jimmy wanted.
“And she wouldn’t do it, of course,” Christina said. “Oh, she was very nice to me, just like she always is, and I said: ‘What am I going to do, Mother? What do I do now?’ And she went into that comforting voice she always uses when she’s putting you off, ducking another decision of her own, and said: Well, that I was the only one who could decide that. And I said: ‘Can’t you help me?’ And she said: ‘The only person who can help you is yourself.’ And I said I couldn’t, that I had to see Sam. And she said: ‘Then that’s your answer. That’s what you must do.’ And I said: ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’ And she told me, she said she understood perfectly how I felt. That one of the greatest regrets of her life was that Sam, and Jimmy, that she hadn’t been able, you know, to influence them more, because she was so impressed by what the two of them could do. The potential that they had.
“So, I did it,” she said. “I was totally at sea. I had to see how I would feel. Jimmy knew what he was doing. He was getting even. I could see why he’d want to do that. I could understand. But me? I wasn’t doing that. I didn’t want revenge on Sam. I was a free agent. But Jimmy needed me to do that. What he wanted for revenge. Needed me to make it happen. And, what he was asking me? I knew what it was. It was absolute betrayal. That was what it was.
“I’m not good at this shit,” she said. “I’m not used to moral questions. Not used to them, don’t like them, run away from them. You want to play the brio passage largo? That is fine by me. I may not think that you should do that, and that it won’t work out. But I will sit and listen, and if you can make it work that way, well, that’s all right by me.
“So,” she said, spreading her fingers on the table and looking down at them. She took a deep breath. “So, James asked me to do what I’m doing. And he is my brother. And, for my father. He’s old. Suddenly he’s old. I said to my mother: ‘And that’s another reason, why I may have to do this thing. Get James out of there.’ And she said all she wanted, all she wanted was to be sure that I would be all right. If Sam got free, I mean. And I said: ‘Oh, Mother, just this once, at least, let’s try to think of someone besides our two sweet selves.’
“So I wanted to do what James asked,” she said. “But I also wanted to be right. And I couldn’t know, whether I was right, unless I went and saw Sam. So that is what I did.”
“You told me,” Gleason said, “you told me a long time ago, it was all over. Between you and Sam.”
She nodded. “I did,” she said. “I did tell you that.”
“It wasn’t true,” he said.
“I thought it was,” she said. “At the time, I thought it was. If I misled you, well, I didn’t mean to.”
“ ‘Didn’t mean to’ doesn
’t count,” Gleason said. “This’s the adult world. No rehearsals and no retakes. You get me out there, swapping Sam’s ass for your brother’s, I’m gonna be in no position, if I make the deal, tell the guy agrees to it I really didn’t mean it.”
“No,” she said. “I know that. I know you can’t do that.”
“So,” he said, “level with me. What is going on?”
37
“When Jimmy asked me,” she said, “when Jimmy got in touch with me, and asked me to do this, he was really cruel about it. He can do that, you know. He can be really cruel.”
“This is news?” Gleason said. “You’re telling me a guy that shoots people behind the left ear when they’re nude and kneeling’s got a mean streak in him? I sort of figured that.”
“All right, all right,” she said. She waved her left hand and looked down at the table. She raised her gaze to meet Gleason’s. “This isn’t easy for me, you know.”
“A hundred thousand pardons,” he said. “Let me remind you once again: this was not my idea. You came back to me. You did tell me the truth, but you didn’t tell the whole truth. You left some things out.”
She put out her left hand and touched his right wrist. “Terry,” she said, “we met what seems like a long time ago, and we went through a lot. But you don’t know me very well. I’m not, I’m not an ambitious person. My wants are fairly simple. The things that mean a lot to most people just don’t seem to matter much to me. I have my little apartment and my little car, and my little life with my music. And I’m content with that. If I can just do my job, do what I like, and now and then make love with someone that I like, that’s enough for me.
“My mother,” she said, “neither my mother nor my father really understand that. They look at me with this puzzled expression on their faces, staring out of their elegant lives onto what looks to them like the craters of the moon, and they can’t see why I am happy. They’re glad that I am, I think, or at least they seem to be, but they can’t really comprehend how I could be. No husband. No children. No social life to speak of. And, really, not so great a job. Teaching music to high-school kids in Waterford, Massachusetts? The only man in my life is married, and bland, and he runs a record store? Shouldn’t I, don’t I, miss Sutton Place? The Upper East Side and Bloomie’s? Don’t I care that all of my friends in school are married now, a couple of them for the second time, and to men that get their names in the New York Times, not for being arrested? Shouldn’t I’ve had a great career now, as a touring concert artist? Even though I’m not really good enough for that? Don’t I miss those things? Don’t I regret them? Well, no, actually, I don’t. And if that, if that baffles them, I’m sorry, but I really don’t.
“But at the same time,” she said, “at the same time I’m never completely sure that I’m doing the right thing. That I should be satisfied. That there isn’t, really, something wrong with me, and they’re the ones that are right. And that I won’t wake up some morning when I’m fifty-two or something, and have it dawn on me that my attendance record in this life hasn’t been good enough. That I’ll realize I haven’t taken the full course, and I’m not fit to graduate.
“So I do things,” she said. “When I get uneasy like that, I do things. I make little adjustments in my life, tinker with it. Break up with the guy, if I’m seeing someone at the time, even though it hurts him and I’m really not tired of him, just to see if doing things a little differently will improve my life. And to see, you know, well, whether something that seems okay to me, something that’s working all right if you don’t push it too hard, whether it actually means that much to me. You know? And it almost never does. I get along all right, no matter what I do to change the way I get along. You see?”
“Imperfectly,” he said. “It sounds like a pretty cold-blooded way to live. Almost suspended animation. Like you’d frozen yourself in one of those silver tanks of nitrogen they use to preserve rich dead California nutbags until the medical millennium. The way you would live on the moon, where your parents see you now.”
“It is like that,” she said. “It’s a lot like that. And I’m aware of that. So when something like Jimmy asked me to do this spring comes along, it’s a real jolt, you know? I’m not used to dealing with decisions like that. Not just the specific, particular problem that happens to come along, but any kind of a major decision that might affect the way I see myself, and how I live. Because that is how I live — making no major decisions.
“So I get very cautious,” she said. “I circle around things, and pick them up and handle them, and try to see what shape they are and whether they will keep that shape, before I put them down. And when Jimmy asked me to do that, well, that is what I did. I had to see Sam again before I could decide.
“So I went,” she said. “I went to Morocco to see Sam. I went there in June. I took a BritAir plane to Heathrow, and I sat in the transit lounge with all the people with their yellow plastic bags full of duty-free perfume and booze, and I had two Bloody Marys and I bought three hundred Camels, because that’s what Sam always smoked, and then in the late afternoon I got on another airplane, and I flew to Africa.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “And I got wedged in between two fat guys, and Royal Air Maroc is six across in coach class, so it really is crowded. And I got to Casablanca and it’s raining.”
“And Rick wasn’t there,” he said.
“Rick wasn’t there,” she said. “Ingrid wasn’t there. Claude Rains wasn’t there. None of the usual suspects. Not even Dopley Wilson. And I went to one of the hotels along the beach where everybody swims in the pools and nobody goes to the ocean because the hotels pump their sewerage right out into the surf, and I waited there two days, and then I got a call. From him.
“And I did what he told me,” she said. “I rented a car and I drove south to Marrakech and I checked into the Sahara there. And that evening I went down to the tables that they have around the pool and just sat there in the middle of all these French teenagers with their tight jeans on, dreaming up new ways to do the same old things that night, and Sam walked up and sat down.
“He didn’t say anything at first,” she said. “He didn’t touch me, and I didn’t reach out to him, either. We just sat there and looked at each other, and I guess we must’ve looked so odd, almost like we were in a trance, that one of the French kids finally couldn’t stand it anymore and came up to me and asked if ‘Mademoiselle’ could spare a cigarette. His English wasn’t very good but I knew what he meant, and it sort of reminded me that I’d brought the Camels for Sam and I had them in my bag, so I took out the carton, and it wasn’t open, I hadn’t opened it, and I pushed it across the table to Sam and told the kid he should ask ‘Monsieur’ for his smoke. So the kid looked at Sam, and by now this poor kid is probably convinced he’s struck up a conversation with a pair of lunatics, and repeats his question. And Sam opened the carton and took out a pack and gave it to him, without saying a word or even really ever looking at him. And the kid says: ‘Packet, M’sieu? Packet entire?’ And Sam looked at him like the kid’d just stepped off a spacecraft, and nodded. And the kid made this kind of little bow and said ‘Merci,’ and went away. Like he’d been dismissed. Which, of course, he had.”
“The habit of command,” Gleason said. “Imperial demeanor. Bearing. You’re so used to being obeyed it never even occurs to the other guy not to do what you want.”
“Something like that,” she said. “Whatever it is, ever since I’ve known Sam, he’s always had it. He just radiates this damned assurance that of course you will do what he says, and he does it so well that half the time it never even enters your mind that you could do something else.”
“So you went to bed with him,” Gleason said.
“Of course,” she said. “Not immediately, I mean. But that night. And then the next day we got up early and got into my little Fiat rental and he drove down to Essouira.” She paused. “I don’t know what I expected,” she said. “From him, f
rom the country, from the people — from any of it. But whatever, nothing was like I expected. We drove through these dry plateaus, where I guess they mine phosphate or something, and all the men in their brown robes were out there just standing along the road, absolutely motionless, and there’d be women and children sometimes with these little flocks of dirty sheep there, and I couldn’t understand why they were there. Because there didn’t seem to be anything growing in the sort of clumpy red dirt for them to eat. Some of the men were holding up bunches of asparagus, and some of them had strings of fish, and there were some that had live birds tied by their feet on a string — I suppose they must’ve snared them. And dogs. Ratty, scrawny, mongrel dogs.
“Then we got into the Atlas,” she said. “The road is two-lane blacktop, and when you get into the mountains there are all these chicanes, and you get behind one of these lumbering old diesel lorries, Bedfords, that’s hauling cattle, or maybe’s loaded up to the sky with some kind of fodder or something, and you’re behind it for miles, breathing the smoke, no way to get around.
“It was early afternoon when we got to Essouira,” she said. “He hadn’t told me anything, so I’d just sort of assumed we were going to one of the hotels, but instead he stopped outside this white wall that had an iron gate in it, and he got out and unlocked it and then drove the car inside, and locked the gate again. And we were in this courtyard of this little villa, really. White, with a red tile roof. Like you’d see in Palm Springs, maybe — that kind of architecture. And he unlocked the front door and we went inside, and that was where we were staying.”
“Was it his?” Gleason said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask him. I had the feeling that it wasn’t. That it belonged to somebody else who just happened not to’ve been there for a long time, and was letting Sam use it. Because it had that sort of closed-up, almost moist smell to it, like beach houses get when you’ve left them closed up all winter and then you come back in the spring and open all the doors and windows just to let some fresh air in. But I don’t know, really. It could’ve belonged to Sam, I suppose. Maybe he just hadn’t been there. He did know where everything was.”
Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) Page 33