Straight Cut

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Another minor hassle, over the fare at the airport. I argued and beat the man down a little. It’s expected; you’re noticed if you don’t. Inside the airport I went to the car rental desk, where they spoke English. I negotiated a one-way rental on a four-seater Renault and tore off a rather thick sheaf of traveler’s checks, to pay half in advance. There was no hitch. The teenagers with the Uzis didn’t seem to be interested in me today. It took only ten minutes for the car to be delivered to the front of the building. The little Renault was clean and still smelled new. I threw my bags on the passenger seat and drove away.

  L’autostrada del sole. Superhighways are truly all the same. This one, the road to the north, was flat and straight as a string. The countryside it went through was quite without interest. The monotony of the road was enough to depersonalize even Italian drivers, no mean achievement, that. I might as well have been driving through Kansas.

  Around what some people would call tea time, I arrived at Siena, and parked the car outside the city wall. Buses, many of them with German plates, were disgorging thousands of tourists in the same area. I merged with this crowd walking into town, and near the square I broke away. It took me several failed attempts before I found a pensione with a room free for the night. I left my bags in the room and walked out around the sweep of the tilted square. The piazza was full of pigeons and people who seemed to be hippies of a kind. I climbed the campanile and looked down on the fan of yellow flagstones from above. Then I came down and had an early supper. A couple of local papers that I’d bought to try to read in my room quickly put me to sleep.

  I’d done my work and now I was on vacation. I looked like a tourist. I even felt like a tourist.

  Early in the morning, I was on the autostrada again. I wasn’t paying much attention to where I was going. The drone of the road kept me reasonably tranquil. I would put my mind to selecting a nice border crossing when I got farther north. But when I saw the road sign for Firenze I had to pull off the road for a moment to think.

  The thing was so obvious, and especially in view of recent events, it was hard to believe that I could have forgotten it. Lauren had been in Florence with Kevin. I had the people, the place, and even a rough date, all thanks to Harvey’s super-8 film. April. Sync it up. Kevin had let me assume that Lauren had been in New York. Lauren had let me think much the same thing. But chances were she’d been in Italy all along. Terrific, but what did it mean? I ran Harvey’s film back across my mental shadow box, as well as I could remember it. The Halliburton hadn’t been in the shot, had it? I looked at the thing, lying there in the passenger seat next to the bag I’d started out with. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t take something like that on a sightseeing excursion anyway. Though everyone did seem to be terribly casual about this deal, whatever it might turn put to be.

  How would I like to cut that scene? I’d like to cut it out, is what. I decided against going to Florence, and took the road west toward the Mediterranean coast, where I remembered, among other things, that the border posts were agreeably casual.

  I made good time along the western road and got off it as soon as I was near the water. The autostrada had begun to get to me. I found a winding coastal secondary road and continued north, more slowly. There was an almost uninterrupted chain of little resort towns on the west side of the road, but there was not much traffic. At many bends of the road I could see the ocean. Among the older buildings along the beach, there were a lot of modern high-rise-style hotels. A few miles short of Ventimiglia, I checked into one of these.

  The hotel seemed to be nearly empty, but for some reason they gave me a room on the sixth floor. It was an American-type single, much like what you’d find at any Holiday Inn, but there was a small balcony overlooking the sea. I dropped my bags, opened the glass doors to the balcony to air the room, and went out to walk on the pink cement promenade which ran along a shelf above the beach. There were palms along the walk. I saw few other people. The sand below was a startling white, and sea and sky were different fantastic shades of blue. I walked about a mile past more hotels and shops and came into a little town built in terraces down toward the waterline. Halfway down a flight of stairs to the shore I found a seafood restaurant which proved quite good, though overpriced. I ate alone on the porch in the twilight, and it was dark by the time I paid and left. I bought a bottle of Campari and some aequa minerale on the way back to the hotel.

  A sliver of moon hung above the balcony. There were not many lights along the shore. I could just see the white foam of the surf lapping against a stone breakwater around a curve of the beach to the south. Except for the water it was utterly quiet. I could have stayed there happily for a week or a month, but unluckily I seemed to have deadlines to meet.

  Kevin. Kevin and Lauren and me. Well, I had cut Lauren out of the picture, or hoped that I had. Kevin and me and persons unknown. “Anne Morrison’s” friends, or enemies, or whatever.

  My natural impulse was to attack the situation with logic, and logic turned it into a simple conspiracy, albeit with some quite elegant manipulations involved. Assuming complete premeditation, the scenario ran like this: Kevin had cooked up a proposition for me whose main function was only to position me in Rome. That went a long way toward explaining why he’d offered me twice what the edit was really worth. With the fellowship of thieves and schemers, I could now properly appreciate the fact that he’d only paid me half up front. My bet was that the other half, supposing I ever saw any of it, would be called my cut of whatever the deal turned out to be, and considering the size of the initial investment, he’d probably be getting my services pretty cheap. For stage one, then, all points go to Kevin.

  Stage two: Kevin seduces Lauren with a script and some fluff about the mythical feature, or if he happened to catch her in one of her periodic spells of ennui, a promise of activity of any kind might have done the trick. By whatever means, he props her up with the suitcase full of cash and a set of instructions and then gives her a little nudge my way.

  If Kevin understood me as well as I understand him, he could have predicted what was going to happen next. He could anticipate that I would worm Lauren’s mission out of her before I let her get away. That once I knew, I would chew her out and send her home and take over the job myself. Then it wouldn’t matter a bit that Lauren was not completely up to doing it herself, that she would have been either shot or arrested the second or third move she made. (Though I did intend to have a conversation with Kevin about those kinds of possibilities if and when I ever made it back to the States.)

  If Kevin were me, that’s how he would have planned it. And so far he’d still be scoring a hundred percent. It seemed to boil down to a more sophisticated version of sending Jerry Hansen to me for advice, that other time.

  The flaw in all this reasoning was that Kevin wasn’t me. Kevin didn’t operate on this sort of logic. He ran on instinct and sense of smell. I honestly believed that a plot of such complexity was beyond the capacity of his conscious mind. And yet it was sure enough happening the way I had it diagrammed on my chart. I was dealing with something else in Kevin: not a reasoned plan, but dark and secret currents somewhere down beneath the foam.

  And if I wanted to survive one of Kevin’s subliminal schemes, I was going to have to think and feel and be like Kevin. That was the thought I took to bed with me.

  I slept very lightly and woke up at dawn. The sun was rising by the time I checked out of the hotel. I continued north on the coast road; it was not far to the border now. Again, my own little car was almost the only thing on the road.

  But just past Ventimiglia, I did see some activity. A truck was parked on the shoulder, and a group of what I took at a glance to be carabinieri was prowling the slope above the highway. The men, five or six of them, were uniformed and carried automatic weapons. I went by too fast to be quite sure if they were military or civil. They didn’t do my nerves any good either way.

  However, there seemed to be no real cause for concern. A little short of Gri
maldi I fell into a line of several sporty little cars, probably bound for Monaco from the looks of them. We reached the border between eight and nine, and the post was asleep, as I’d hoped it would be. None of the cars was pulled over, not even for a passport check.

  Pas de problème.

  The autostrada had now become the autoroute. I got back on it on the French side; it was time to pick up some speed. The Maritime Alps blocked this part of the route, and the French engineers had just blasted right through them. It made for fairly unnerving driving, especially since the road was fast. Wham, a tunnel; wham, daylight; wham, a tunnel again. To make it worse, I was having an ex post facto case of the jitters, even though I had no more frontiers to cross for the next few days.

  The last set of machine-gunning carabinieri had got under my skin somehow. It had to be a trick of the fast-changing light, but every time I went into a tunnel I thought I saw muzzle flashes. Though I grew up around guns, I’ve never much liked them. The house on the farm was still full of them, and in the first bad weeks after Lauren had left, I’d wake up regularly around four in the morning, dry-mouthed and aching from a bourbon overdose, and find myself thinking about one gun or another. It was peculiar. The moment I woke, the picture of the gun would already be focused in my mind. There was no reason for it. I would not think about doing anything in particular with the gun. But I would have a desire to find it and touch it. The fact that I could handle it, load it, point it somewhere, pull the trigger, intrigued me endlessly as I lay on my back in the dark, waiting for the night to be over. It was all a little unsettling. When I finally quit drinking, it stopped.

  If it started again now, I wasn’t going to like it. In an effort to distract myself, I wound up thinking about the knife I’d given Kevin. Bad luck. I was convinced it was really bad luck now. But was it coming to him or me?

  Then I was through the mountains at last. I took the highway north of Nice toward Lyon, Dijon, Calais. Someone in a serious hurry might have made the channel in a day, but I let it take me two. Time was not a critical factor, so far as I was concerned, though some might have said it should have been. My attitude wasn’t completely tuned to the circumstances and I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be. Somewhere a little better than halfway I made a buttonhook off the autoroute and found a tolerable hotel to spend the night in. I got a deluxe meal, which I could afford on the cheap franc, and forced a little conversation on the man who ran the place. My French, while not good, was a lot better than my Italian, and I wanted to brush it up some in case I needed it seriously in Belgium. In the morning I got up early and took off driving again.

  I had not been in Calais before and I was looking forward to a pretty old seaport town. It had slipped my mind that the entire city had been bombed to dust during World War II. Rebuilt Calais was a quick job of jerry-rigging and ugly as sin. I checked into a no-star hotel, a hideous pile of brown concrete, and then went out to turn in the car. Walking back to the hotel, I stopped in a second-hand clothes store and bought a shirt, a tie, and a slightly seedy gray business suit. Back in my room, I put it all on before I went down to the dining room, where I had my worst meal yet in France. But I could watch myself in the mirrors that lined one wall, and I thought I looked about right — like a second-rate middle-aged businessman, too dull for anyone to bother about.

  I caught a morning boat for Dover. It was a pleasant crossing, though the weather was a little iffy. There was a menacing shelf of purple cloud on the west horizon, and the water kept changing from green to gray. I thought we were probably making it just ahead of a storm. Most of the trip I spent sitting on the stern deck, where I drank a couple of stiff gins, the best the boat had to offer, to brace myself for customs. I had no story to explain why I couldn’t open that briefcase. The gins helped, though, and by the time the chalk cliffs came into view I felt capable of ad-libbing if there was trouble. Do what Kevin would do. Wing it. There was no problem. I stated my intentions, tourism, and went through without a luggage check. Maybe the suit worked, or maybe they just weren’t in the mood. No more car rentals. I decided I wasn’t up to driving on the wrong side of the road. I got a taxi and then caught the train for London. Aboard the train, I discovered how tired I finally was, and for maybe a couple of hours I slept. I woke up disoriented. It was peculiar to hear people around me speaking English again. That I could understand it didn’t really seem to help.

  I took the tube from Victoria to Paddington, remembering that there was a lot of cheap lodging around the second station. In the lobby I picked up a handful of rooming house flyers and took them to a pub counter to go through. Most of them were twelve-pound-a-night bed-and-breakfasts, riddled with curfews and visitor restrictions. They would not do. Then there was an ad for “efficiency flats,” by day or by week, a nice glossy brochure, with fish-eye photographs in color. “Suitable for military personnel,” it said.

  The place was just off Leinster Square, an easy walk from the station. The entrance was not nearly so prepossessing as the flyer might have led me to expect, but I was tired and in a hurry and hadn’t believed the flyer in the first place. I went in and negotiated. The best lies are the ones that have the most truth built into them, and I told the manager (a lady of a certain age) that I was a film editor and (with a judicious amount of winking and smirking) that though I was traveling on a tourist visa I was actually scouting for work. I would be in and out, possibly absent for a week or more at a stretch, but I wanted the place nailed down for a month. Cash in advance, provided she was willing to make a minor adjustment in the weekly rate, which, after some argument, she was.

  I paid up, claimed my key, and went up the stairs. To call the place a flat of any kind was a masterpiece of euphemism. There was one room and a tiny bath. The kitchen facilities consisted of a hot plate and a miniature refrigerator, which did, I was pleased to note, contain a couple of ice trays. There were two dingy armchairs, a small table edged with cigarette burns, where a plain dial telephone sat, and a window which was painted shut. The bed folded into the wall, and a smell of mildew leaked from its niche. The place would have made a good set for a suicide.

  I went out. There were plenty of other little hotels in Leinster Square and Prince’s Square, but none of them would have been any better. On the Bayswater Road, near the corner of Kensington Gardens, I found a booze shop and bought a quart of dark naval rum. Circling back around Queensway, I picked up some plastic cups at a grocer’s and then I went back to the room.

  It was time to get drunk and think it over. The old ice in the trays was flecked and gray, but the rum camouflaged that nicely. I had a couple of belts and pounded on the window until I could open it. It was warm out, even for July, and clear. With some difficulty, I let down the bed. To accomplish that, the chairs had to be moved against the far wall. I dragged the table around to the head of the bed and set up the bottle and an ashtray within easy reach, then took off my shoes and lay down.

  Halfway down my second cup of rum I began to feel a lot better. The jolly tar smiled at me from the bottle; he looked like a friendly sort. With the lights off I could forget the room and see only the darkening square of the window, and past it a single waving branch and a patch of sky. I was reasonably pleased with myself, so far. No one of any importance had the foggiest notion where I was anymore, and that made me happy, though for no clear reason. Since I hadn’t been visaed in France, it would take even Interpol an extra few minutes to pin me down. An enterprising person with the right connections could always trace me through the car rental, but I didn’t think that would apply to Kevin either way. So far as Kevin was concerned, I might as well have dropped off the face of the earth.

  Would Kevin be worrying about me at all, though? I really doubted that. If he already knew I’d picked up the relay from Lauren, he probably wouldn’t be anything but pleased. He’d assume, in that half-conscious way of his, that things had worked out just the way he’d planned. He wouldn’t be fretting over me at all. It was maddening. When I hit the halfway
mark on the rum bottle, it began to be sad too.

  Why me? Why not Kevin? Why not both of us together? It wasn’t only a matter of wishing he’d do his own dirty work and leave me out. I actually missed the son of a bitch, strange as that might sound. Eyes closed, I constructed a montage of all the things we’d done together: shoots that ran for sleepless weeks, panic edits, late-night scheming of one thing or another, be it a movie or the real thing. Kevin’s quick flashes of insight that cut through so many difficulties. If he was a plague to me, he’d always been an inspiration too, and in a mood like this one, when I rode on the familiar adrenal surge that preceded the first serious move of any of our games, I wanted him with me or at least on my side. During the long charged moment when whatever we’d been brewing was finally committed to action, it had always seemed that nothing could come between us. I did miss him. I knew I could do the job without him, believed I could do it against him if it had to be that way, but it wasn’t going to be half as much fun.

  12

  THE MAIL CALL AT American Express was the scariest thing on my agenda yet, enough so that my legs got rubbery during the walk from the tube to the office, and a couple of times they even tried to swivel out from under me and turn back. This time there really was something tangible to worry about. My only safety net was that those address labels were typed Italian style, with some minor variations on the spelling of my name, but that was thin. Extremely thin. It might just barely be enough to get me out of an indictment, but only after long hours or maybe days and weeks of slow frying in various interrogation rooms. I wasn’t looking forward to any of that.

  But I went ahead to the office and once I was there it occurred to me that the box might not even have arrived yet, what with the Italian mail and all. But it had. The girl handling the mail that day looked to be about sixteen and was as cute as a button, reedy thin with honey-colored hair hanging down to her waist, and she didn’t appear to be the suspicious type. She forked over the package with a smile and no questions. I dropped it into a shopping bag I’d brought along in hopes that everything would work out this way, and then I got the hell out of there.