The last problem was easiest to deal with, thanks to the heaviness of the rain. Anyone still outdoors would have better things to do than gawk at cars in a parking lot. He opened his door, swiveled on his seat and planted both shoes on the ground as if he intended to get out, and urinated between his feet.
By the time he was as close to done as he felt he absolutely needed to be, and could swing back inside and slam the door, he was soaking wet from the knees down, and both his shoes were overflowing. He removed them, tipped water out of each, removed his socks, and wrung them out. He did his best to wring out his pant legs, but was not willing to remove them to do a proper job because he had seen too many comedies use that set-up to introduce a policeman. He started the car, forced himself to wait patiently while the engine warmed, then set heat and fan to max, and arranged all the fan grilles he could to aim at either his ice cold calves or his sodden shoes and socks. It gave him plenty of time to consider his other problems.
He could carry the GPS receiver around with him as long as he kept it dry, and it didn't need headphones to work as an alarm. It was smaller than an iPod. He could set it so that if the target's vehicle started up, or another started nearby, or there was loud conversation, the receiver would imitate the sound of a ringing cell. No one thought anything of it if you shut the phone off inside your pocket without bothering to take it out.
So it was safe to go find caffeine and food, in that order. And about time—dear God, it was nearly 5:00 PM! He had not fallen asleep so much as passed out from hunger. He could not have articulated why that was less dismaying, but it was. He found a way to fit his socks over two of the dashboard grilles and turn them into warmwindsocks, held his shoes before two others. Waiting for everything to dry, for the first time he had spare attention to notice that he had a vicious pulsing headache, so powerful it ran halfway to his shoulder blades, as if yearning toward the duller but deeper ache below, in the muscles of his lower back. It serves me right, he thought darkly, not only for passing out on a stakeout, but for not at least admitting it to myself and putting the damn seat back first.
By the time everything was dry enough to put back on, he was speaking to his own blood sugar, telling it that it wasn't the boss of him, and close to doing so aloud. He thought about accessing the net with his phone and googling up a decent restaurant—then realized he was being silly: there wouldn't be any. Nor any shortage of mediocre ones near the ferry ramp and marina. He put his shoes and socks back on, got his top on and over his head, popped the trunk, got out into the rain and looked inside it, saw no umbrella, cursed the car's owner, turned at once on his heel and set off uphill on what appeared to be not only the village's main, but its only, street.
Nearly at once his luck took a sharp turn for the better.
The first business establishment he encountered, only a hundred meters or so after leaving the marina lot, was a restaurant.
That at least was his first assessment. As he neared the door, a number of subliminal signals caused him to revise it to "a very good restaurant." Because an overhang kept him dry enough, he took a moment to glance at the small discreet menu in the window, and nearly at once knew that somehow, absurdly, he had stumbled onto an excellent restaurant in the middle of nowhere. There were only four main courses offered! He was nearly drooling as he entered.
He was nearly weeping as he left. Collinsia Verna's was not a mere excellent restaurant—but one of only three genuinely great ones he had ever been privileged to worship at. By polite inquiry he learned that a culinary genius, chef at a Vancouver restaurant so good McKinnon had heard of it, called Bishop's, had tired of the urban rat race and decided to move to the country for a while instead; her husband Stephen ran the restaurant with equal genius while Carol cooked with a baby on her hip. Few on the island could afford their prices—but those who could seldom ate anywhere else. And those who couldn't, McKinnon learned, could usually afford to buy prepared frozen dinners and microwave them at home, accepting or failing to notice that this reduced their quality from sublime to merely superb.
Sublime food is good for thinking. By the time he finished his appetizer, he realized his target might well be here for the night, in which case so was he. Ideal in several ways. He could take the target's own vehicle back to the mainland, and abandon it somewhere near the border. The question was, should he bother to stay here above-radar, in some motel or B&B, or was it better to just find a quiet place near his target to park unobserved until daybreak? The answer depended in part on whether such a quiet place existed.
He bought two frozen entrées for takeout without even thinking about it, a brisket of beef in mustard gravy with mashed and a butter chicken with rice, confident that he would be hungry again at least twice before either could spoil, and had an engine block for a stove. It took nearly all the American cash he had left on him—but he could not bear to stiff such an artist with a fugazee credit card.
An hour had passed by the time he got back to his car, so the ferry line was exactly as he had left it, just getting long enough to disappear around the curve at the distant top of the hill. The rain had not changed in intensity either. But the sun was nearly down now, and the streetlights came on as he set his frozen dinners on the passenger seat beside him. Thinking about his bogus credit card had reminded him that his identity might be melting already and surely would eventually; he lost no time in driving toward the location of the target's vehicle.
He lost a fair amount of time in finding it, however. A GPS fix is only as accurate as someone has paid to make it, and nobody with a big checkbook was interested in Heron Island. More than one road his locator confidently told him to take turned out not to exist; one was a fifty meter long driveway serving three small cottages. It was close to eight o'clock by the time he drove slowly past the driveway where his target's car was parked. He couldn't see it through the trees and brush—this driveway seemed to be hundreds of meters long—but his locator was sure. A rural postbox station just past it offered a convenient place and excuse to pull over and think the situation over.
So far he'd seen no good prospects for an overnight hideaway. Lots of tempting dirt roads . . . but any of them could lead to the cabin of some paranoid hermit, and if they went nowhere, kids probably used them at night for social purposes. He'd seen no municipal lots with buses or trucks to hide behind. Not even one big snowplow—wasn't this Canada? A chain motel seemed like his best choice; or failing that, a B&B. Apple Computer had recently stunned the world by releasing a breakthrough phone which was nearly as good as his own; he used it now to access the net. So it took him less time to learn that Heron Island had no motels, chain or otherwise, and only a single B&B with the sense to have a URL or a listing with Google, than it took him to marvel over the information. He phoned the B&B before he was quite finished, was able to make a reservation for that evening, and smiled when Mrs. Meade the owner cautioned him that he must be there to pick up his key before nine o'clock, when she went to bed. He agreed he would.
Well. He had just over an hour to reach a place at most fifteen minutes away. If he came back later, the rain might just stop, aiding reconnaisance. But if it did, the sound of his car would carry a long way, and would be an unusual sound after the last ferry of the day.
How would he explain to Mrs. Meade his being soaked to the skin on arrival?
Who said he had to?
God damn it. He shut the engine, restarted it in neutral with the parking brake engaged so that it would idle without lights, disabled the overhead light, and got out of the car. He looked longingly at the driveway . . . and entered the woods. It was still early enough that his target might decide to go get in line for the last ferry of the night at any time.
How was it, he wondered, that James Bond had never found himself in Africa in the rainy season, or in Bangladesh in monsoon season, or in the Pacific Northwest ever? He did have an umbrella, which he had seen carried into Collinsia Verna's by a man who had disrespected its food, but as he'd
expected it provided minimal help in the trees. He was wet pretty much everywhere below the diaphragm by the time he saw the lights.
The way the terrain was laid out, he saw the two vehicles in the driveway before he had a good view of the house. The target's Honda, all right, and a recent Toyota just past it. When he could see the house he knew it was candy. He could walk in anytime he liked and walk out with anything he wanted. A kid could. The same with the big toolshed or pottery studio or whatever the hell that adjacent outbuilding was. He couldn't understand people like that. Why have a house, if it wouldn't keep bad guys out? It was like keeping a dog that wouldn't bite, or feeding a cat.
—which, most unexpectedly, he did just then. A sudden shocking agony in his right ankle reached his attention simultaneously with the hallucinatory image of a light-coloured short-haired cat running away from him at full speed, backwards. Long training aided him in squelching a scream of pain and outrage; he was shocked to hear it anyway, and realized it was coming from the damned cat. As feral as himself, by the sound of it, and territorial. Damn it, here it came again—sideways, this time, but no less rapidly.
There was no question in his mind that he could kick its head off. That might draw attention from inside the house—the cat squalling must be a common sound, the cat dying not so much. The truth was he didn't want to. He identified. He temporized by slamming the umbrella against the ground just in time to make the cat abort its attack in panic. As it did, he saw that one of its eyes was solid white. That decided him; before it could regroup, he turned and bugged out. One of the features his phone lacked was a flashlight: he risked using his to avoid breaking an ankle or a leg. Or a hip, he reluctantly admitted to himself.
Back in the car, breathing hard for the first time in entirely too long, he imagined what the Major would have had to say about his performance. Routed by a cat! He staunched his bleeding with Kleenex from a box the previous Mr. McKinnon had tucked between the front seats, and found that he had lost about a quarter's worth of meat to the vicious little carnivore. Well, good for it. Pretty good for a critter that couldn't possibly have any depth perception. He glanced again at the Kleenex . . . checked the trunk and found that the same thoughtful previous incarnation of himself kept a first-aid kit there.
Okay. Temporary setback. Go check in at—he shuddered—the HereOnHeron B&B before the window closed, take a shower, dry his clothes, do a little websurfing without rain doing a drum roll just above his head. At midnight, park a reasonable distance away from this spot, hike here in stolen rain-gear nobody will have bothered to lock up, and walk down the center of that driveway bold as brass, prepared to meet any oncoming cat with a handful of butter chicken in the snoot. Drift in and out of that house without waking anyone, and with a lot of information and any weapons or computer hard drives he encountered. Possibly return once more before dawn, move in, and commence interrogations.
As he backed into the driveway to turn around and head back to the village, he caught himself humming the chorus of an old militant antiwar song by Graham Nash, and smirked as he remembered the words. "We can change the world/rearrange the world/it's dying to get better."
It was good to have hope again.
The car did seem a bit too noisy as he pulled away, but it wasn't going to be his car much longer. And he did keep automatic watch for a tail, from force of long habit, all the way to his B&B. But it did not occur to him that there weren't that many roads on Heron. Or that after dark in such a rustic place, he could be tailed by sound alone, almost as well as if there were an expensive GPS bug on his bumper. Nor that it is possible to drive with the lights off in a modern car, if you don't mind replacing the fuse when you're done.
8.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Coveney Island, British Columbia, Canada
The downside of talking with a telepath, of course, is that he knows when you've stopped being out of breath. Long before I wanted to be, I was on my feet and following Zandor Zudenigo home. I divided my attention between careful observation of where I was putting my feet, and equally careful assessment of the pain in my right upper chest. I was already pretty sure I was okay, but the bad news can arrive as much as half an hour after the trauma sometimes. (And once there was no cause: I reached for a cup of coffee and a lung went.)
Well, the division of my attention was not really fifty-fifty. More like forty-forty. A good twenty percent of my mind, despite everything I could do to censor it, insisted on marveling at Zudie's body. He was barefoot to his scalp, wearing only an oversized wristwatch on his left wrist.
When I'd roomed with him back in the late sixties, I had on rare occasions seen him without a shirt or without pants, though never entirely naked, and he'd basically been a pile of bread dough in the approximate size and shape of a walrus. A couple of years ago, when I'd seen him for the first time since those days, he'd been the same size and shape, so I had assumed the same body under his clothes. Wrong. It wasn't a matter of muscle definition: he was still padded . . . but not with flab. He was in the same kind of shape Nika was, now. It was obvious from the way he moved and carried himself. I reminded myself he had been living alone in the wilderness for . . . an indeterminate number of years.
And although I was looking mostly at his back, I could still clearly see his chest and groin in my mind's eye. Third nipples are not that rare, but they almost always occur near one of standard ones; Zudie's was smack dab in the middle of his nearly hairless chest, just above an imaginary line connecting the other two. And he was hung like Rocco Siffredi.
Which started me thinking, for the first time in decades, of Oksana Besher.
And she was an extremely awkward thing to think about in the close vicinity of Zandor Zudenigo, for at least two reasons. Because I was fairly sure the memories must be hurting him, and because I knew for certain they were shaming me.
"Go ahead," he called back over his shoulder. "I let go of her long ago. And forgave you way before that."
Feeling my ears get hot, I let the memories return.
Smelly, as everyone called Zudie back then, put the administration of William Joseph College in a quandary. Complaints about his eye-watering reek, and world-class weirdness even in the context of the sixties, were continuous and angry from students, faculty and staff . . . but such was his reputation in the world of mathematics that he raised the school a whole couple of notches in international prestige all by himself, simply by attending an occasional class there, and choosing its professors and grad students to discuss his work with once in a while. Professors from other schools, and occasional students, would sometimes come long distances just to talk with someone who had talked with Smelly.
That at least was how I explained the administration's extraordinary tolerance level to myself at the time. It wasn't until later that I learned the Zudenigo family had given old Billy Joe U. a large enough endowment for a new gymnasium and a celebrity coach to run it . . . on the condition that young Zandor not be sent, or encouraged to go, home again for at least four years. The school was motivated to put up with a few problems.
I myself solved one of the administration's biggest problems for them by agreeing to room with Smelly. Down the road, their gratitude would have a lot to do with my being able to end my college career with a Bachelor's degree rather than a prison record.
He solved another problem for them by quietly agreeing to eat his meals after everyone else was done. Smelly could not be reasoned with on the subject of his monstrous body odor—he would not discuss it at all, rationally or otherwise—but he was willing to at least listen to reason when absolutely necessary. The cafeteria staff didn't mind remaining to serve him, because he actually got them home faster: almost nobody else ever loitered after their meal once Smelly arrived. Nor did he necessarily always eat alone. I frequently shared a meal with him simply because I was late to everything. A bare handful of others had the same quirk. And there were even one or two so fiercely committed to personal weird behavior of the
ir own—this was the sixties, remember—that they felt obliged to pretend they didn't notice anything odd about Smelly.
So there were witnesses when Oksana Besher appeared across the cafeteria table from him one afternoon, cleared her throat, and asked if this seat were taken. He blushed and nodded; she sat; and they ate their lunches together in perfect silence. Then they got up and left together in silence, not touching, but side by side. The story was so good, one witness would have been enough: it was all over campus by dinnertime. Because they were perfect for each other.
"It's a Battle of The Giants, like Godzilla versus Rodan," as Slinky John put it. "Dueling Freaks." As a child, Oksana had dived into a lake somewhere and shattered her nose on an unseen rock. They rebuilt it, of course, but she had managed to destroy her sense of smell, and for that they could do nothing. She was perfect for Zudie.
It was impossible to say which was the more ridiculous. He looked and sounded like Baby Huey; her overpronounced overbite and lisp and absurdly thick finger- and toenails made her look and sound like Bugs Bunny with an earectomy. Zandor was tall, Oksana was short; he was wide, she was thin; he was as heavy as his smell, she as insubstantial as her self-opinion. Smelly could be detected approaching from a city block away; nobody but him was ever likely to get close enough to her to notice what, if anything, Oxy smelled like. Each was cursed with almost unmeasurably high IQ and a freak intellectual gift: mathematics in his case, poetry in hers. You tell me which had drawn the short straw there. He was a perfect and total social failure as a man, she as a woman: put them side by side and their individual weirdness was not doubled but squared. As a couple, they'd have made a cat laugh.
They didn't appear to notice the stifled grins. They began eating lunch together most days. Perhaps they felt the pressure of everyone else's amused expectations. Within a week or so they were observed to take walks together, and the gossip mill exploded in laughter and jeers.
Very Hard Choices Page 9