A Catskill Eagle s-12

by Robert B. Parker

  “About Hawk? Yes.”

  “And you got him out of jail.”

  “Un huh.”

  “And you both came looking for me.”

  “Un huh.”

  “I knew that security intensified. Russ always traveled with bodyguards, but a little while after I wrote you, everything got much more serious. ”

  “Where were you when it got serious, ” I said.

  “At a lodge Russ has in Washington State.”

  “Had,” I said.

  “Had?”

  “We burned it down.”

  “My God,” Susan said. “We were there to fish for trout, but one day Russ said we had to go to Connecticut. He said we could fish the Farmington River instead.”

  “They were setting an ambush for us.”

  “Which didn’t work.”

  “No.”

  Susan drank her coffee, and kept looking at me over the rim.

  “Start from the beginning,” she said. “And tell me everything that happened up to last night.”

  My eyes felt scratchy and I was jittery with coffee and raw from sleeplessness. I finished my croissant and got up and put another one in the oven to warm. I took an orange from the bowl on the counter and began to peel it.

  “I had a leg cast made with a gun in the foot. Then I got myself arrested in Mill River and when they put me in jail I produced the gun and Hawk and I left.”

  The smell of the orange peel brightened the room. It was a domestic smell, a smell of Sunday morning mingling with the smell of coffee and warming bread.

  “‘Death is the mother of Beauty,’” I said. Susan raised her eyebrows, like she did when something puzzled her.

  “Poem by Wallace Stevens,” I said. “The possibility of loss is what makes things valuable.”

  Susan smiled. “Tell me what happened,” she said over the rim of the cup.

  I did, chronologically. I paused occasionally to eat a segment of orange and then, when it was heated, to eat a second croissant. Susan poured more coffee for me when the cup was empty.

  “And here we are,” I said when I finished.

  “What did you think of Dr. Hilliard,” Susan said.

  “I didn’t spend enough time with her to think much,” I said. “She’s smart. She can decide things and act on what she’s decided. She seems to care about you.”

  Susan nodded.

  “Now you have me and you haven’t done anything about Jerry,” she said. “What about that.”

  “We’ll still have to do something about Jerry,” I said. “We have a lot of things we can be arrested for and unless we get the feds to bury them, we’ll have to be on the dodge for the rest of our lives.”

  “And you couldn’t be acquitted if you gave yourselves up and went to court?”

  “Susan, we did the things we’re accused of. We’re guilty. Hawk did kill a guy. I did bust him out of jail. And all the rest.”

  Susan had put her cup down. Most of the coffee was still in it. It had the little iridescent swirls on the surface that cold coffee gets.

  “You have to kill Jerry Costigan or go to jail.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of a government is that? To give you that kind of choice?”

  “The usual kind,” I said.

  “They’ve required you to be simply a paid assassin.”

  “They helped me find you,” I said.

  She nodded. There was a small rounded end of croissant on her plate. She rolled it between her fingers, looking at it and not seeing it.

  “And,” I said, “we have annoyed the daylights out of Jerry Costigan. We have burned down his lodge, trashed his factory, invaded his home, taken his son’s girl friend, killed some of his people.”

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  “You think he’ll shrug and put another record on the Gramophone?”

  “No,” she said. “He’ll hunt you down and have you killed.” Her voice was quiet and clear, but flat, the way it had been in the car last night.

  “Or vice versa,” I said.

  Susan stood and began to clear the table of the cups and plates. She rinsed them under the running water and put them on the drainboard. Without turning from the sink she said, “What about Russ?”

  “My question exactly,” I said.

  She rinsed the second cup and put it on the drainboard and shut off the faucet and turned toward me. She, leaned her hips against the sink. She shook her head. “I don’t know how…” she said. I waited.

  She took a deep breath. She picked up a pink sponge from the sink and wet it and wrung it out and wiped off the table and put the sponge back. She walked into the living room and looked out the window. Then she walked over to the couch and sat on it and put her feet on the coffee table. I turned in my chair at the table and looked at her.

  “First, you understand. I love you,” she said.

  I nodded. She took her feet off the coffee table and stood and walked to the window again. There was a pencil on the window ledge. She picked it up and carried it back to the sofa and sat again and put her feet back on the coffee table. She turned the pencil between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.

  “My relationship with Russ is a real relationship,” she said.

  She turned the pencil between her hands.

  “It didn’t start out that way. It started to be a gesture of freedom and maturity.”

  She paused and looked at the pencil in her hands and tapped her left thumb with the pencil and sucked on her lower lip. I was quiet.

  Susan nodded. “It’s hard,” she said. “The work with Dr. Hilliard.”

  “I imagine,” I said. “I imagine it takes will and courage and intelligence.”

  Susan nodded again. The pencil turned slowly in her hands.

  “You have those things in great number,” I said.

  Susan stood again and walked to the window. “Growing up…” She was looking out the win dow again as she spoke. “You don’t have any siblings, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I was the youngest,” she said.

  She walked from the window to the kitchen and picked up the bowl of oranges and brought them into the living room and put them on the table. Then she sat on the sofa again.

  “When you came back from California and asked more from me, needed me to help you recover from failure, needed the support of a whole person, there wasn’t enough of me for the job.”

  I sat without moving in the imitation leather chair across from her.

  She stood again and went to the kitchen and got a glass of water and drank a third of it and put the partly full glass on the counter. She came to the entry between the kitchen and the living room and leaned against the entry wall and folded her arms.

  “You did help,” I said.

  “No. I was the thing you used to help yourself. You projected your strength and love onto me and used it to feel better. In a sense I never knew if you loved me or merely loved the projection of yourself, an idealized…” She shrugged and shook her head.

  “So you found someone who didn’t idealize you.”

  She unfolded her arms and picked up the pencil again and began to turn it. Her throat moved as she swallowed. She put her feet up on the coffee table and crossed her ankles.

  “You can’t have us both,” I said. “I’d be pleased to spend the rest of my life working on this relationship. That includes the damage your childhood did you, the damage I did you. But it doesn’t include Russell. He goes or I do.”

  “You’ll leave me?” Susan said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “If I don’t give up Russell?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You could have killed him in Connecticut.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know as much as you know, about civilization and its discontents. But I know if you are going to be whole, you’ve got to resolve this with Russell, and if he dies before you do, you’ll be robbed of that chance.”

  Susan leaned
forward on the couch, her feet still on the coffee table, like someone doing a sit-up. She held the pencil still between her hands.

  “You do love me,” she said.

  “I do, I always have.”

  She leaned back on the couch. She swallowed visibly again, and began to tap her chin with the eraser end of the pencil.

  “I cannot imagine a life without you,” she said.

  “Don’t fool yourself,” I said. “If Russell’s in your life I won’t be.”

  “I know,” she said. “I can’t give him up either.”

  “I can’t force you to,” I said. “But I can force you to give me up. And I will.”

  Susan shifted on the couch.

  She said, “I’ll have to give him up.”

  “If’t‘were be done,’t’were well it be done quickly,” I said.

  She shook her head and folded her arms and hugged herself, the pencil still in her right hand.

  “What are you waiting for,” I said.

  “The strength,” she said.

  CHAPTER 39

  “YOU’RE MAKING PROGRESS,” IVES SAID. “BUT don’t think because you have the maiden back that you don’t have to slay the dragon.”

  Hawk and I were walking on either side of Ives along the waterfront down Atlantic Avenue. Everywhere the mobility was upward.

  “We’ll kill Costigan,” I said.

  “You have abandoned considerable government property along the way so far,” Ives said. The trousers of his seersucker suit were cuffed at least two inches above the tops of his wing-tipped cordovans.

  “Really fuck up the GNP,” Hawk said.

  “Not the point,” Ives said. “The car, the weapons, they have to be accounted for.”

  “We could skip killing Costigan,” I said, “and concentrate on recovering the stuff we left in Pequod.”

  “Not funny, McGee,” Ives said.

  We turned into the waterfront park near the new Marriott and walked to the edge and looked at the water.

  “What is your plan,” Ives said.

  “We were thinking about stopping in here at Tia’s and having some fried squid and a couple of beers,” I said.

  Ives frowned and looked at me hard. “You work too hard at being a wise guy, Lochinvar.”

  “It’s worth the effort,” I said.

  “Man ain’t lazy,” Hawk said.

  “Listen, both of you. You think you’re a couple of hard cases. I know. I’ve seen a lot of hard cases. Well, you two hard cases have your balls in a squeeze, you understand. You are in hock to us and we’re calling in the chit. You want to learn about how hard a case someone can be you keep fucking around with us. You’ll find yourself hanging out to dry in a slow wind.”

  “Eek,” I said.

  “Keep it up,” Ives said. “You’ve got Costigan on one side, and us on the other. You don’t know what pressure is if we start squeezing.”

  “Here,” Hawk said. “Why don’t you just give this a gentle squeeze to show you’re serious.”

  Ives’s face flushed and small dimples formed near the corners of his thin mouth. He breathed in a large lungful of salt air and let it out, turning to lean on one of the capstan posts that lined the edge of the harbor.

  “You know Costigan will be after you,” Ives said in a voice tight with the obvious effort of control. “He’s got a contract out on both of you now, and he has an organization that can find you anywhere in the world.”

  “We’ll kill Costigan,” I said.

  “If you have any doubts remember that he’ll kill you if you don’t, and without us to back you up, you won’t.”

  “With or without,” Hawk said.

  “And what do I tell my people when they ask me your plan?”

  “Tell them you don’t know,” I said.

  “And how do I look telling them that? I’m supposed to be running you.”

  “They think so,” Hawk said, “you think so, but we don’t think so.”

  “And,” I said, “we don’t have a plan. Yet.”

  “Well, you weren’t signed aboard this cruise to sit around and soak up per diem. Every unproductive day is another expense I have to justify to the shoo flies. They want some cost efficiency here.”

  “We artists,” Hawk said. “We ain’t cost efficient.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ives said.

  “We know something,” I said, “we’ll tell you. But if it helps, we will do it. Not only because it’s him or us, but because we said we would. We’ll kill him.”

  “Well, it better be quick, or by God there’s going to be some accounting called for.”

  “First we have to find him,” I said.

  “He’s not at Mill River,” Ives said. “We can tell you that.”

  “And he’s not here in Waterfront Park,” I said. “So that’s already two places we don’t have to look.

  “Gonna be easy,” Hawk said.

  “I know it’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got so far,” Ives said. “We get more we’ll let you know. But you’ve got to check in.”

  I nodded.

  “You people did pretty good in Pequod with the two instructors,” I said.

  “We have our moments,” Ives said. “You guys didn’t do so bad either. The Transpan facility is a shambles. Connecticut State arson people are climbing all over it. Federal Immigration people are chasing illegal aliens all over Connecticut… hell, all over the Northeast. They will have many questions to ask Transpan.”

  “What about the aliens,” Hawk said.

  “You sound like Steven Spielberg,” Ives said and laughed.

  Hawk didn’t say anything.

  “We’ll do what we can,” Ives said. “Remember, we made no promises beyond doing what we could.”

  Hawk nodded.

  A cycle cart selling chocolate chip ice-cream sandwiches cruised by us, turned in by the Marriott and set up shop near the railing along the water. A fat old woman with short hair was selling helium-filled balloons at the crosswalk on Atlantic Avenue. Ives was leaning on the capstan gazing at the cabin cruisers moored in the slip.

  “How do you expect to find Costigan,” he said.

  “We have a private intelligence service,” I said.

  “Well, be sure that we coordinate,” Ives said. “We don’t want a lot of people churning around in the mud obliterating the footprints.”

  “We’ll be careful,” I said.

  Ives nodded, straightened, and turned toward Quincy Market.

  “Tally ho the fox,” he said.

  I nodded. Hawk nodded. Ives left, crossing Atlantic Avenue toward the market.

  “You think the Russians maybe winning,” Hawk said.

  “Maybe their people are worse,” I said.

  “Hard to picture,” Hawk said.

  CHAPTER 40

  SUSAN HAD SET UP RESIDENCE IN MY BEDROOM and I had moved in with Hawk. The safe house had twin beds in both bedrooms so nobody had to sleep with anybody. Even if somebody wanted to. Which they didn’t.

  “I assume this is not because you prefer me,” Hawk said.

  I was getting a clean shirt from the top drawer of the other bureau-a squat thing with a warping mahogany veneer and ugly glass knobs.

  “There’s a book by a guy named Leslie Fiedler,” I said. “Claims guys like us are really repressing homoerotic impulses.”

  “Doing a hell of a job of it too,” Hawk said. He was lying on the bed wearing a Sony Walkman with the earphones on.

  “Who you listening to,” I said. I had the shirt on and was buttoning down the collar. Not easy with a lot of starch in the shirt.

  “Mongo Santamaria,” he said.

  “God bless the earphones,” I said and went out into the living room. Susan was on the couch reading Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. I tucked my shirt in and sat on the couch beside her.

  “Coffee?” I said. “Juice? A twelve-course breakfast elegantly prepared by me and gracefully served by me also?”

  She dog-
eared the page to mark her place and smiled at me.

  “I’ve started water boiling,” she said. “Why don’t I make you breakfast?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “Mind if I sit on the stool and gaze at you across the pass-through?”

  “My pleasure,” she said.

  In the kitchen she put coffee in the filter and poured boiling water over it. While it dripped she squeezed some orange juice and poured three glasses.

  “Is Hawk decent,” she said.

  “He’s dressed,” I said.

  She took him a glass of juice and when she came back the coffee had dripped so she poured three cups and brought one to Hawk. She wore white linen shorts and a pink sleeveless shirt with a big collar. Her legs and arms were tan. She turned on the oven.

  I drank my juice and took a sip of coffee. Susan got out cornmeal and eggs and milk. “No corn flour,” she said.

  “I didn’t do the shopping,” I said. “This stuff is all government issue.”

  She took out a bag of whole wheat flour. “We’ll make do,” she said. She put dry ingredients in a bowl, added milk and eggs, and began to stir it with a wire whisk. I drank some more coffee.

  “I know I haven’t explained very much to you,” Susan said. She was stirring the batter briskly as she talked. Her back was to me.

  “Plenty of time,” I said.

  “Dr. Hilliard has impressed upon me that I can’t keep talking about everything, that I need to set some boundaries on myself, do you understand that?”

  “No,” I said. “But I don’t need to.”

  She lifted the whisk from the batter and watched carefully as the batter dripped back into the bowl. Then she shook her head and began to whisk it some more.

  “When you came to San Francisco last year, I began to draw away from Russell.”

  She held up the whisk again and watched and made a small nod and waited while the batter drained off it into the bowl.

  “I couldn’t leave him but I tried to distance the relationship as a start.”

  I got up and came around the counter and got some more coffee.

  “And Russell knew at once what I was doing and he… he hung on tighter. He put a wiretap on my phone. He had some people watch me. He wouldn’t let me come to New York last winter to watch Paul perform.”