Josh gaped. The footage changed to Yankee Stadium, where a security expert talked about the extraordinary measures that would be taken to protect the world-hated premier during his visit, but Josh just went on gaping.
He knew.
12
TUESDAY HE DID GO INTO THE office again, where he wasn't much use to anybody, including himself. But he felt that he ought to keep up his regular schedule as much as possible, both to keep Levrin and his people lulled into believing everything was still all right with Redmont, and also as the best way to make it possible for Mr. Nimrin to get in touch. If Mr. Nimrin ever wanted to get in touch.
Mr. Nimrin had to want to get in touch! Josh was on the verge of blowing this whole thing up, out of nothing but blind fear and maddened panic. If there was a way to survive this mess without a whole panoply of bloodshed and madness, Mr. Nimrin would know it. Mr. Nimrin, it seemed to Josh, was a survivor. The thing to do was stand next to Mr. Nimrin.
But where was he? Hadn't Harriet Linde told him the state Josh was in? And yet, nothing all day Tuesday. He didn't particularly want a taxi home tonight, would have been happy to walk, clear his head, but since Mr. Nimrin had used a cab to make contact that first time, Josh—with difficulty—hailed one again today, and rode all the way home alone.
But he wasn't alone once he got there. He walked in his front door into the living room and this time, sitting on the sofa there, drink in hand, completely relaxed and at home, was not Levrin with his scotch and water but a very lanky longhaired brunette in a silver sheath, holding in one hand a tall champagne glass he recognized as one of his own, containing no doubt champagne. Yes; there on the coffee table, atop a Tweety potholder, was their white ceramic icebucket, with an opened champagne bottle angled up out of it, very like, he suddenly noticed, a howitzer out of a fort.
This woman, who might be thirty in a minute or two, rose when he came into the room, and was very tall indeed, probably six foot three, at least an inch taller than Josh, and about a hundred pounds lighter. Her nearly black hair fell in long folds to frame a long but delicately beautiful face and to brush her bare shoulders as she moved. Her smile was frank, but not quite suggestive. “You are Josh Redmont,” she said, with a charming hint of accent.
He almost said, I'm married, but a more appropriate moment for that statement would arrive eventually, he was sure. So all he said was, “Yes, I am. I live here.”
“It is a charming little apartment,” she told him. “I am Tina Pausto. I am to be billeted with you for a while.”
“Billeted? You're moving in?”
“Andrei Levrin thought,” she told him, “you would be too lonely here, without your family. As the day approaches, you see, we must all concentrate. You will forgive me if I say nothing about the operation itself.”
“Sure,” he said, because she didn't have to tell him anything about the operation itself. He already knew far too much about the operation itself.
With a graceful gesture, and a slight dip of the knee, she said, “Would you join me? Champagne at vespers.”
An empty glass stood on the coffee table beside the ice-bucket. Josh looked at it, looked at the half-full glass in Tina Pausto's hand, and said no, thank you. Or that's what he thought he was saying, but what he heard was, “Yes, thank you.”
She did a perfect bunny dip, emphasizing her breasts by not displaying them, and poured him half a glass, then topped up her own, then, as the bubbles receded, topped up his. As she put the bottle back into the icebucket and he reached for the glass, their arms did an intertwining thing, all in motion, never quite touching, that Josh found stunning, as though he'd just entered some sort of electric field. Like those science fiction movies where people shimmer through doorways because they're entering a different dimension.
Well, he didn't want to enter a different dimension. Levrin and Mr. Nimrin had him in trouble enough, with the FBI and no doubt the CIA and all the police departments of the world, and the giant army of Kamastan, and who knew who all; he wasn't going to let them get him in trouble with Eve.
So, as Tina Pausto resumed her place on the sofa, gesturing for him to join her there, he stayed on his feet. He said, “How many people are going to live here now?”
“Just we two, at present,” she said. “When you go away for the weekend, others may drop by.”
To suit up, no doubt. Desperate to quantify the dangers that surrounded him, and even eliminate one or two of them if possible, he said, “Are you supposed to sleep with me?”
She raised an eyebrow at him, with the faintest of smiles, as though he were guilty of some breach of politesse, as though he'd raised a topic that would not have been voiced in gracious company. “That was not discussed,” she said.
“Well, where are you going to sleep?”
“Wherever we decide,” she told him. “The apartment is small, but not that small. I'm sure the living arrangements will sort themselves out.”
She was supposed to get him into bed! To keep his loyalty, to interrogate him when he was befuddled, for whatever reasons spies had when they employed femme fatales.
Damn damn damn. If he were tired of Eve, or if he were by nature an unfaithful kind of guy, what a hell of a week he could have before the shit hit the fan.
But, no. “Maybe that sofa'd be okay,” he said, nodding at it.
She patted the cushion beside her hip. “Very comfortable, I should think,” she said, not as though she believed it, and the phone rang.
Josh leaped like an adulterer. “That's my wife! She calls every—” In motion, he said, “I'll take it in the bedroom.”
“I shall not listen in,” she assured him, and he ran to the bedroom, shutting the door, thinking that it hadn't even occurred to him that she might listen in.
“Eve—”
“Barnes and Noble,” Mr. Nimrin's voice said. “Broadway and Sixty-fifth Street. An author reading on the third floor at seven P.M.”
“But—” Josh said to the dial tone, then broke the connection and, before he could think about it, speed-dialed the Fire Island number.
“Yes?”
“Eve, it's me, I couldn't wait to talk to you.”
“Just a minute, I'm feeding him. Hold on.”
“Should I call back?”
“No no, we're almost done. Damn! Oh, that's all right, sweetie, Daddy never liked that plate anyway.”
“Our damage deposit,” Josh said, “is going to look like the far end of a Ponzi scheme.”
“There!” she said. “Just a little clean-up…”
Josh heard water running, a baby crying, more water, more baby, then just baby, then receding baby, then door closing. Not slamming, closing. But forcefully.
“There! How are you?”
“Things are getting worse around here, to tell the truth,” he said. “I'll give you the ugly details on Friday.”
“Should I come back for a day? I could leave Jer—”
“No no, that's fine,” Josh said, preferring to describe his new roommate to Eve from afar on the weekend than have her see Tina Pausto in situ and in the flesh. “What's going on out there, anyway?” he asked, because it was always possible to change the topic to the latest beach gossip.
They chatted a few minutes, about nothing at all. During it, Josh fervently wished that nothing at all was all they could possibly chat about, and when they were finished, winding down, he said, “Tomorrow, I'll wait for you to make the call.”
“That is better,” she said.
“Love you.”
“Love you.”
In the living room, Tina Pausto, like her predecessor on that sofa, sat leafing through the New Yorker. Josh said, “I have to go out for a while. You'll take care of your own dinner?”
She gave him a comfortable smile. “I am very self-sufficient,” she assured him. “Like a cat.”
13
7 P.M. July 26
Author David L. Fogware reads from Enchantress of Nyin Volume VII in the Farbender Nether
bender Series 3rd floor
THIS POSTER-STYLE SIGN rested on an easel beside the ground-floor escalator. Josh rode up, the bookstore becoming more open to him as he rose, with a few dozen customers visible, none of them apparently here for Volume VII of the Farbender Netherbender Series.
It was a little trickier to find the next escalator, and then there he was on 3, where a more generic poster read AUTHOR READING with an arrow. Josh followed the arrow to a corner of the building, where the late summer twilight showed Broadway beyond the windows. Within, a carpeted lecture area had been constructed. Within an L of bookshelves about thirty wooden chairs faced a lectern beside a small desk, on which hardcover books were stacked, their spines all reading ENCHANTRESS in large letters, and on a second line of Nyin in smaller letters, and then some even smaller letters that were presumably the author's name.
It was not quite seven P.M., and half the chairs were occupied, none of them by Mr. Nimrin, unless he was even more a master of disguise than be claimed. Anyway, nobody here looked either like Mr. Nimrin or a bartender, so Josh took the last chair on the right in the last row and looked around to see who was here.
Strange people. There appeared to be some sixties flower children who'd been cryogenically stored for thirty years and then imperfectly thawed. Scruffy round-shouldered baggilydressed people of both sexes—or indeterminate sex—carried an unmistakable aura of homelessness about them. Others looked like people who'd lost their luggage, but decided to come anyway. And down front were half a dozen burly guys in dark-toned T-shirts and light-toned windbreakers and ponytails and scraggly beards and bent eyeglasses in either tortoise-shell or black. Josh originally assumed those guys must be a group, but then he saw nobody here knew anybody else, though most people, including the ponytails up front, were amiable about it.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the store's loudspeaker informed them, “best-selling author David L. Fogware is about to read from Enchantress of Nyin from his best-selling Farbender series in our author area on 3. The reading will begin in just a minute at seven o'clock in our author's area on 3.”
This announcement produced another half-dozen people, smiling, glad not to be late, scuttling in to take up more of the chairs, giving more of a sense of a full house. Then a slim bespectacled man with a black moustache, white shirt, penguard and pens in shirt pocket, and black slacks, stood at the lectern and spoke into the microphone there:
“We are very proud to present,” he began, and read David L. Fogware's press release with a certain enthusiasm, while Josh suddenly came to the conclusion that David L. Fogware would turn out to be Mr. Nimrin.
But no. Introduction finished, the spectacled store employee smilingly made his exit, and a fellow carrying a book came out to take his place at the lectern. He was David L. Fogware, and he looked exactly like the half-dozen fellows in the front row, who gave him the most enthusiastic applause of all, the rattle of hand-clapping that greeted his presence. He, too, was a burly guy with specs and beard and ponytail and wind-breaker over T-shirt over baggy jeans over L.L. Bean boots, and he accepted the acclaim with becoming modesty.
Josh hadn't had occasion to notice this before, but there are in this world two kinds of burliness. There's the burliness of muscle and brawn and large bone, and there's the burliness of beer. These fellows, applauders and applaudee alike, represented the burliness of beer.
When the group quieted down, David L. Fogware opened his book, which was hardcover and very tall and thick, and briefly studied its first page. Then he looked up and said, “You know, when I first started the Farbender Netherbender series, I had no idea it would take me this far. In those early days, I used to say I was at work on a trilogy.”
He chuckled at himself, shook his head at his earlier innocence and the vagaries of fate, and then said, “But what happened was, the deeper I got into the history of the Netherbenders, the richness of those worlds, the tapestry of it all, the implications just kept coming on. Folks would say to me, ‘David, what about this implication? What about that implication?’ And I could see just what they were talking about. Every road I took, in this journey through the Netherbender epos, every road I took left who knew how many roads un taken? Unexplored. Unrealized. It became clear”—here he chuckled again, nodding at his audience—“that three wasn't going to be my lucky number after all. We left trilogy behind us in the Lind of Lirt!”
His audience, who must all be his readers, did their own chuckle at this in-joke, and they had a moment of everybody smiling around at everybody else in comfortable in-group companionship, while Josh looked around in increasing desperation. Where was Mr. Nimrin?
“Well, now, we've reached volume seven of the trilogy,” Fogware announced, stretching his joke a bit beyond capacity, “and we're all about to meet the Enchantress of Nyin.” He lowered his head toward his book. “It was Finwards Day, and the princess Li-Whon would birthe, all the scholars said so. But where was Gahorn? ‘He has never failed me before,’ Li-Whon told the faithful Muglurk, ‘and I know he will not fail me now, no matter what unimaginable perils he must go through to return to Elgadaare.’ And even as she spoke, in the forests of Mahrsohn on faroff Hilvet V, Gahorn himself urged his fleet Silverdart onward. ‘Hi!’ he cried. ‘The portal, Silverdart! We must not fail!’ And the powerful six-legged steed galloped up the quegs.”
By this point, Josh was regretting the lack of a laughtrack almost as much as the lack of Mr. Nimrin. Looking around for the thirtieth time, the only one in this little isolated group, this separate world, not mesmerized by Volume VII, he saw, shambling down an aisle in his direction, then slowly and painfully turning off, a fat elderly woman with a walker. As she turned leftward into a side aisle, the right forefinger on the walker twitched.
Poor woman. Josh looked back at David L. Fogware, for whom the implications of wedding Arthurian romance with Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth century would never exhaust themselves.
He thought, That was Mr. Nimrin.
14
SINCE HE WAS ALREADY AT THE outer edge of the enchanted forest, Josh didn't disturb anybody when he rose and sidled away, in cautious pursuit of the old lady with the walker. He reached the aisle where she'd turned off, and there she was, straight ahead, bumping along, just reaching the far end of the aisle, where an empty armchair stood beside a small round table. Making the turn, she/he glanced back at him, then dropped a sheet of paper on the table and continued on out of sight.
Josh hurried down the aisle, slid into the seat, and looked at the sheet of paper. It was a copy of a newspaper item, date-lined July 25, yesterday, apparently from a smalltown paper:
HANGING DEATH
LABELED SUSPICIOUS
by Edward Tassel
Moore, Jul 25—The discovery of the hanged body of Robert Van Bark, 34, of Moore and New York City, suspended from the rafters of a barn adjacent to his property on Wiggins Road, has been labeled suspicious by state police investigators.
The body of Van Bark, a weekend resident of the area the last four years and a computer technician in New York City, was discovered by his wife, Wendy, 31, at six-thirty P.M., when she could not find him in or near their home when it was time to return to their apartment in New York City.
The piece went on for another three paragraphs of incidental detail and fuzzy speculation. Josh read it all, wondering why he was reading it all, then sat there for a few minutes, watching the other customers and wondering when the old lady would come back. Surely that was why he'd been directed to stay here.
But it wasn't the old lady who came back. It was an overweight workman in paint-spattered bib overalls, a full black beard, thick black hair, a black canvas backpack, and a Benjamin Moore cap worn backward, carrying a short metal ladder on his right shoulder, who paused for one significant second in front of Josh and then moved on.
Startled, Josh almost forgot to grab the copy of the clipping before he stood to follow the workman down the maze of aisles. Along the way, he realized the ladder was ma
de from the same pieces that had once been the walker. And the old lady's dress and wig would be in that backpack.
The workman took the down escalator, Josh trailing, and went out to Broadway. He turned right, Josh well behind him, and they made their way into the pocket park where Broadway crosses Columbus Avenue. There the workman found an empty bench and settled wearily onto the far end of it, leaning his ladder against the armrest.
As Josh approached, the workman made a quick movingaway gesture while looking elsewhere. When Josh paused, not sure what he meant by that, he impatiently pointed down at the seat, then did the move-away again.
Oh; sit on the bench, but at the other end. Josh did so, and Mr. Nimrin looked out at all the noisy traffic and the big blocky buildings of Lincoln Center and said, “You wished to see me. But I wished to see you. And so we are together.”
“What they're—” Josh said.
“One moment. You read the news item.”
“I never heard of him,” Josh said.
“I did,” Mr. Nimrin told him. “There were three of you taking my money these last seven years. He was the second.”
“Oh,” Josh said.
“Clearly,” Mr. Nimrin said, “he did not behave as wisely as you. They felt their security was threatened. They act swiftly, these people.”
“Hanged him,” Josh said. He felt nauseous.
“That was handiest, where he was. You they might drown. After torture, of course.”
“Good God,” Josh said.
“If you are to be helped,” Mr. Nimrin told him, “you must look elsewhere than the Almighty. And I must look for Mitchell Robbie. You don't know him by any chance, do you?”
“Mitchell Robbie? No. Is he number three?”
“Yes, of course.” Mr. Nimrin was very irritated. “I need to get to him before he makes the same sort of mistake Van Bark made. If two of my sleepers turn out to be rotten, they'll come for me in a trice. Frankly, your cooperation with them is the only thing at this moment that allays their suspicions.”
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