He opened the window. Fuel, wet concrete, sodden trash—these were preferable to the smell of the dead.
He thought: I could part company with the girl. I could pack my bag and split, stroll out of the girl’s life, abandon her to her own pursuits. But she’d taken the edge off of his loneliness. She had touched him. He couldn’t run out on her. Besides, where would he go? He had no idea. She’d taken him over; she was in charge of travel arrangements, routes, destinations.
The towel around Sajac’s face had become stained with blackened blood. It seemed preposterous now, a mask, a Halloween joke. At any moment Sajac would sit up, whip the thing away, laugh, and say, Gotcha going, huh? But it wasn’t to be like that. There was no practical joke here.
“They kill him,” Tennant said. “They dump him here. It’s a warning. It’s a message. It’s a fucking note written in blood telling me to mind my own business. Go away, Harry. Leave the past alone.”
“It’s more than a message, Harry. It’s a lock. Whoever killed Sajac knows you can’t go to the police.”
Tennant hadn’t thought that far ahead. He hadn’t considered police, the consequences, the legal ramifications. In shock you don’t make plans. You don’t manipulate the future.
“You’ll be the prime suspect. It’s your room. And there’s a dead man in it. The fuzz will take you downtown, pop your name in the computer. Bingo. Out comes the drug bust. You’re a criminal, Harry. Worse, a fugitive. A front-running candidate for a murder rap. You know how cops think. They see one crime and immediately assume you’re capable of another.”
“Okay, I don’t call the police.”
“More than that. You can’t call them.”
Tennant sat on the edge of the bed. A lock. Shackles. They had him straitjacketed. “How did they find me?” he asked. “How did they know I was here in this hotel?”
“There’s only one answer. We’re being followed. All the way from upstate, we’re being tracked.”
“Tracked. Yeah. By whom?”
Alison sat alongside him. For a moment he entertained a suspicion he didn’t need: This little girl had somehow left a trail for the Faceless Ones to follow. Inadvertently or otherwise. But he didn’t like the otherwise. It was that question of trust again. It was busy signals on a phone line, disembodied voices droning through ductwork, whispers behind walls.
“I know what you’re thinking, Harry,” she said. “You’re wondering about me. You’re saying to yourself—first the drug bust, then I show up, and maybe there’s a connection between the two. Take it a step further—am I on the level? Am I manipulating you for strange reasons of my own?”
He made a gesture of dispute. “You’re wrong—”
“I don’t think so. It’s perfectly natural. After all, I just blow into your life.” She touched the back of his hand. “You want to see my credentials? My Writer’s Guild membership? My driver’s license? You want me to show my plastic, Harry?”
He shook his head. He was uncomfortable. She’d divined his misgivings and her insight embarrassed him. He felt as if he’d been caught in an act of infidelity.
She said, “When it comes to me, what you see is what you get.”
What you see is what you get. He wondered what it was he saw. He got up from the bed. The room stifled him. It brutalized him. He had to get away from this place. He considered the corridor beyond the door. Was it empty? Or was the killer of Sajac somewhere nearby? Killer, killers, singular, plural. He realized he was thinking exactly the way Bear Sajac had done. How many others are with you? You got friends in the street? He wondered if he was destined to spend the rest of his life the way Bear had tried—a demented recluse. Go underground, create a disguise, live a life of fear.
“Okay. Maybe it is my goddamn fault,” Alison said. “If I hadn’t come into your life, you wouldn’t be here, would you? And maybe Sajac would still be alive, for Christ’s sake. Maybe I am responsible for his death, Harry—”
“You can’t think like that—”
“Why not? Why can’t I think like that? I was the one who dug out the guy’s address, I was the one who went looking for him, it was me that came up with the bright idea of doing a story on that goddamn photograph.” She had tears in her eyes, and her small hands were clenched tightly.
“Quit,” Tennant said. He drew her toward him and tried to calm her. “You can’t blame yourself for any of this.”
She clung to him for a time in silence. He stroked the back of her head gently. When she stepped back from him, she rubbed her eyes against her sleeve. She was working at being composed again. “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m a hundred percent now. I can’t hang this shit on myself. You’re right.”
“I know I’m right,” he said.
“Okay.” She ran a hand through her short hair in a determined manner. “Okay. Let’s get practical here. First thing, we move. We can’t stay in this place.”
The idea of movement was attractive. Do something. Walk, run, anything. Besides, this room wasn’t his anymore. It belonged to the dead, who had that habit of disenfranchising the living.
“How far are we going to get before Sajac’s devils catch up with us?” he asked.
“I don’t think that’s the question. They’ve already caught up with us. The real question is why they don’t put a stop to us right now. Why let us go any further?” She glanced at the corpse. “If they don’t want us to dig, why not do a disposal job and get it over with?”
Tennant had no answers. He began to stuff his few possessions into his canvas bag. He thought of the darkness outside; it had changed now, populated as it was by phantoms who had his private number. He took the gun from his coat and dropped it inside the bag, where it fell heavily among his clothes. He gazed at the weapon—half-concealed by the sleeve of a shirt—and he thought of Rayland Tennant.
He said, “My father knew where I’d been living. He knew my address for years. He’s got a nose for keeping track.”
“Sure, but it’s quite a leap from that fact to the idea he might somehow be responsible for …” She gestured vaguely, as if she didn’t know what she truly meant. “For us being followed. Why would he set people on our trail? And here’s another biggie for you, Harry. If he did send spies, were they the same people that committed murder? If so, why?”
Around and around, Tennant thought. The carousel of problems. The teasers and the twisters. Around and around. You took a seat and you couldn’t get off because the machine never stopped. When he thought of his father, he inevitably brought Colonel Harker to mind. It was all so undeniably clear, so reachable. Harker’s bullet head, the military haircut, the absence of sideburns that gave him a sharp, terrifying, well-defined look, as if his face were constantly lit by an invisible lamp. Tennant remembered the implacable way the man had conducted himself in a court of law. Schooled and prompted by Rayland, Harker had hidden behind the veneer of duty. He was a soldier and X was the enemy and his function was to eliminate X and that was it. End of the ballgame. Tennant recalled, with biting clarity, a TV news report that pictured Rayland and the colonel strolling shoulder to shoulder from the court after the verdict had come down. Two self-satisfied men with blood on their hands. Absent from their expressions were any feelings for the dead women and babies Harker had left behind in Vietnam. Nothing of regret. Just graves. Just charred remains.
Another perfect memory. Something preserved. If he had amnesia, it was a selective sickness. It chose its moments. Now and then the clouds rolled off the horizon and you saw something: the prize of vision. The razor of insight.
He zipped his bag. He felt curiously callous: How could he walk away and leave the corpse in this room? Alison was already moving toward the door. “I only need to toss some stuff together,” she said.
They went out into the corridor. Small pear-shaped lights lining the walls threw a dismal light that seemed sinister to him, as if the wattage had been reduced for a malignant purpose. Emptiness was spooky. He longed for crowded places, bright light
s, clamor, all the things he’d spent the last nine years of his life avoiding. The strange lights diminished in shadows as the corridor stretched away. Ceiling and floor created parallel lines that seemingly met in infinity.
Alison went into her room and came back seconds later hurriedly thrusting things into a small leather overnight bag: tights, toothpaste, a red plastic hairbrush.
Tennant pushed the elevator button, then decided he didn’t want to wait. He drew Alison toward the stairs. What lay in the streets? He felt he was rushing into blindness, into a deeper fugitive condition than he’d known before. Flight was a way of life, something to which you adapted quickly. If you didn’t, you perished.
They encountered nobody on the way down. In the lobby there was only a night clerk and a uniformed doorman who eyed them in the way of doormen everywhere, assessing them for their tip potential. The man lost interest and turned away, coughing into a white-gloved hand. Outside it was raining, a soft drizzling rain that billowed down through the street lamps like strands of a broken silvery web.
The street was quiet. Alison’s car, parked half a block away, was bright and conspicuous under the lamps. A red Cadillac convertible—why didn’t she own something utterly nondescript, a Ford, a Dodge? When they reached the car, Tennant told her to drive—anywhere, it didn’t matter for the moment.
Alison drove to the end of the street, where she made a left turn into one-way traffic. “Now what?”
“Out of this city for starters.”
He watched the street, yellow cabs speeding down through their own violent spray, trucks clattering wildly. Traffic obeyed its own laws of gravity. The Hudson appeared, shivering, trapping fragments of light and dispersing them like glittering, distended fish. The random slipstream of things: Tennant had a sense of being caught up in an arbitrary universe. The bridge over the river seemed insubstantial to him, fragile as nylon, and yet it somehow supported the mass of traffic flowing over it. Like everything else, it could snap.
He needed space, quiet, a time in which he could collect himself. Speech was suddenly impossible. Words formed in his head, coagulated, fell apart in nonsense. He imagined he heard bells ringing in his head, and then the sound of demonic gulls screeching—and there was an uneasy familiarity in these noises, as if he’d heard them a long time ago.
Alison pulled the Cadillac over into the forecourt of a gas station, turned off the motor, sat for a time in the kind of silence that suggests frustration.
“The sensible part of me tells me this whole thing is fucked,” she said eventually. “If we back off now, maybe we’ll have some kind of chance. Maybe we won’t end up like that miserable bastard.”
“Is that what you want? To walk away?”
“I’m not the walking type, Harry. I don’t always listen to the reasonable part of my brain. If I did, I’d be raising kids of my own in a ranch-style house in Tonawanda and cooking suppers for my workaholic husband. Something like that.”
Tennant was quiet for a while, gazing at the darkened gas pumps and the solitary neon that said EXXON in a window. It was an eerie little pocket of civilization; each pump was a square motionless figure, the neon a malevolent formation of gasses.
“I hate this … this goddamn manipulation,” he said. “Somebody’s trying to tell me to stay away from my own past. I’m sick to death of threats. I’m up to here with people taking away things that belong to me.” And I’m scared, he thought. He punched the palm of his left hand and sighed.
Turning, looking back, he saw the skyline of Manhattan, the light show. “Drive,” he said.
He had no sense of destination, no purpose. He knew only that he’d underestimated flight. It was more than a mere way of life; it consumed you. He thought of nothing but distance, space between himself and the pathetic remains of Sajac.
10
The motel, a barren, balconied affair, was located outside the town of Bethlehem just across the Pennsylvania state line from New Jersey. Bethlehem: Christmas and old steelworks and German immigrants. In the 3:00 A.M. darkness the town struck Tennant as sad, as if it were dying, withering into itself. He and Alison checked into a single room with twin beds, a shabby box in which thousands of people had come and gone, leaving behind grease marks on the wallpaper, cigarette burns on the edge of the coffee table, a crack in the bathroom mirror. Happy days in Christmas City.
The drive had been tense, Alison constantly checking the rearview mirror, Tennant looking back every five minutes or so to scrutinize the dark highway. He wasn’t aware of having been followed. And yet the sensation that he was somehow being perceived wouldn’t leave him.
He sat on the bed that was situated close to the window. Alison drew the curtains. To keep out the night, he thought. To create an illusion of safety. He watched her switch on the TV, which played without sound. An underwater explorer floated silently among shivering sea plants while exotic fish moved away from him in translucent schools, like small flickers of electricity. Bubbles rose in a constant stream from the swimmer’s mask. Tennant looked at the picture a moment, drawn into its placid quality. Alison lay on the other bed and stared at the ceiling. Her expression was remote, as if she were gazing into the future and seeing there absolutely nothing; the void at the center of a crystal ball.
He had the urge to hold her, to make a connection. He imagined, as he’d done in the hotel bar, that contact might defuse the menace surrounding them. But he didn’t move. She got up from the bed and strolled into the bathroom. After she’d closed the door, there was the sound of the shower drumming upon tiles. He thought of water falling across her naked body, rolling over her breasts and her flat stomach and between her thighs—pictures going nowhere except into dead ends and impossibilities.
He gazed back at the explorer, who was surrounded by a blaze of pink coral. A large crab scuttled across the seabed, tossing up puffy little clouds of sand. He thought of a day when he’d gone to Pacifica where, stoned on some wicked acid, he’d sat on the beach and watched the sun set. People did that back then, a common ritual, a cool thing. Tripping on mushrooms, LSD, zonked on Thai sticks, any viable substance that would loosen the stranglehold of the senses, they gazed blankly into that great Californian orange disk of the sun, seeing all manner of patterns in light on water and thinking all kinds of disconnected cosmic thoughts, the intensity of which suggested they simply had to be real.
He remembered a blond, long-haired, doped boy walking past, muttering that he was the sun. Wowee! You oughta be there, man! Wasted, Tennant had experienced a deep, druggy lethargy that kept him motionless on the sand; in his torpor, he was detached from the world.
There was an oddity about the memory, a shadow of sorts. He’d gone to Pacifica with somebody, he was certain of that. Only he couldn’t bring to mind the face of the other. No name, no face. Simply a presence. A spook. Another specter. A ghost in sunlight. He pressed his fingertips on his eyelids, as if he might force the image into view. Broken, he thought. My whole life is broken.
The bathroom door opened. Alison, wearing a gray silk slip, her hair wrapped in a damp towel, stepped toward her bed. She lay down without looking at him. “I needed that,” she said. “God bless the therapy of water.” She stretched both arms upward, her fingers extended. The graceful little movement suggested a passage in a dance. She pulled the towel free of her head and tossed it aside.
Her short hair sparkled with drops of water. A damp patch was visible through her slip at the thigh where she hadn’t dried herself completely. Tennant was absorbed in this discolored area. He imagined feeling it, then raising the slip up and over her shoulders. Down into her flesh, her mouth, down inside her.
“I don’t think it would help, Harry,” she said. “You know that, don’t you.”
Perceptive little thing. “I guess I do.”
“It would only be a complication, Harry.”
“Some complications are easier than others,” he said.
A droplet of water adhered to the shade of the bed
side lamp, where it glowed before dissolving. “I can see where it would be a kind of escape hatch,” she said, and she smiled at him. “On a temporary basis. Only I don’t do temporary too well, Harry. I like commitment. But I don’t need it in my life, especially in these circumstances. Does that clarify things for you?”
She rose from her bed and approached him; she sat, taking his hand, gently running her fingertips between the mounds of his knuckles.
“I like you,” she said. “I like you a lot.”
“Is this a tease?”
“Teasing you isn’t in my repertoire, Harry.”
“What you see is what you get.”
“Right.”
“Maybe you can tell me what I’m seeing right now.”
“Somebody on the edge, Harry. Somebody who’s become fond of you except she isn’t sure what that involves because she doesn’t really know who you are. Somebody whose future is a tad uncertain and who has a murder on her mind. Somebody who might be developing a really substantial paranoia.”
Bad timing, Tennant thought. The room was filled, not with the breathless possibility of sex, but with the smell of Sajac’s death. He looked into her eyes; the blackness there resembled one of those incredible starless nights in which nothing whispers, no wind shakes the trees, no animal forages. You could fall in love with those eyes alone.
“Have you ever been in love?” he asked.
“You come out of left field sometimes, don’t you?”
“Curiosity, that’s all.” I want to know you, he thought. I want to reach a place where there are no secrets.
“I’m not sure I know how to define love, Harry.”
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