by Ralph Dennis
The house was on Cameron Avenue, past the Carolina Inn and the frat houses and courts. It was wood frame, painted white, and the porch ran the length of the front of it and down the left side as well. The porch lights were on and as Hall drove past, he saw a couple mount the stairs and head for the front door.
Hall drove past once. Down the street a distance, he turned around in a driveway. He’d seen nothing out of the ordinary the first time by. The problem was that he wasn’t certain what to look for. He didn’t know what to expect. Somewhere, knowing that, Rivers was having his laugh.
Hall parked in a place on the street about half a block from the house. The Python .357 was in his parka pocket.
Wherever Rivers went there was security. There was no way he’d still have the Python on him when he met with Rivers. He looked around the car. There was a plastic litter bag hanging from the dashboard. Half full, cigarette packages, candy wrappers and kleenexes. He shoved the Python into the litter bag and molded the trash around the shape.
It was his second visit to the house. Denise shared it with two other girls. The other time he’d been there, the whole house smelled of perfume and talc. That followed the meeting with Denise at the Cat’s Cradle when he’d picked her up. Or had it been the other way around? He wasn’t certain now. Bed and breakfast with Denise. The time in bed had been strangely awkward, as if Denise’s experience to this point had been a kind of instruction by the numbers. Breakfast, that Sunday morning, had been relaxed, fun and talk. Three young girls and their sleep over boyfriends.
Hall stopped on the bottom step. Wryly, he wondered what sort of report Denise had turned in on him. Good in bed? Kinky? And he tried to remember what they’d talked about. The research she was doing that would lead to her dissertation? His fabricated tale of his life and what he was doing now? Or what he wasn’t doing now?
Denise was near the front door when he entered and stopped in the hallway. She was slim and dark-haired, high-rumped with breasts that were too large for the rest of her body. Tonight she wore a long evening gown, green as bottle glass, and high necked, almost to her chin. Overdressed, he thought, or it could be a way of telling people that she knew what was proper even if they didn’t.
When Denise saw him, she rushed through a crowd to reach him. While she hugged him, her hands moved down him, from his shoulders to his waist. From a distance it probably looked warm and friendly. Hall knew it for what it was. A competent frisk. All she left out was a kick to both legs to see if there was anything strapped to his calves.
“I’m glad you could come,” Denise said.
“Wouldn’t miss it for anything.” Hall looked past her. He didn’t see Rivers. “Anybody I know here?”
“A friend of a friend.” Denise leaned close to him, as if to say something secret and tender. “He’s in the upstairs bedroom.”
“Yours?”
A nod. “You remember which one that was, don’t you?”
He stepped around her. There was a cluster of graduate students at the bottom of the stairs. In the group, he recognized one of Denise’s housemates, a doll-like blonde girl who was in English. He dipped his head toward her and smiled. With a mumbled “excuse me” he threaded his way through the group and climbed four steps before he turned. It wasn’t like Rivers to be alone. When he travelled, there was usually a driver and a backup man. He didn’t think Denise counted as either.
Then, in the corner of one eye, he saw the first one. He was trying to blend in, hoping to be taken as either an older graduate student or a professor who’d been invited because he was a good guy. A pale man in a Harris tweed jacket and a red knit tie. Now he was hunched over a book, one elbow hooked on the top of a tall bookcase. Hall remembered him from the Farm, the training ground for field men. The name slipped Hall but he recalled the man had taught silent killing. Hall put a hand on the bannister and waited. The man lifted his eyes from the book page and Hall winked at him before he turned and climbed the remainder of the staircase that led to the second floor.
So? Unless Rivers had changed his pattern, that left the driver. It was possible that Hall was going to see Rivers alone. Or had it been planned that way so that Hall would make that assumption? Perhaps.
The door to Denise’s bedroom was at the near end of the hallway. The first door to the right. Hall stopped in front of the door and knocked. Once, twice.
The voice was muffled. “Come in, Hall.”
Hall opened the door. He gave it a push and stood there, getting a full, long look at the room.
“Come in, Hall. We are alone.”
“I had my doubts.” Hall entered and closed the door behind him with a push. It was warm in the room and there were warring smells, perfume and talc and the harshness of the John Cotton’s Mixture that Rivers smoked in his pipe. Hall took off his parka and dropped it on a chair.
Rivers sat on the edge of Denise’s bed. He was partially dressed, wearing silk underwear, calf length socks and a blue quilted winter bathrobe. Rivers was around fifty and his hair had been gray since he was thirty. His eyes were a hard ice blue and he wore the neat, narrow mustache that was like a relic from the past. His hands were pale and lean and girl-like.
“You’re early or I’m late,” Rivers said.
“It might be a little of both. I don’t think a time was set.”
“One moment, please.” River went into the bathroom. When he returned a minute later, he was wearing heavy tan twill trousers. “Do you think these are casual enough for this sort of gathering?”
“Probably.”
Rivers sat in a low chair beside the bed and slipped his feet into black tassel loafers.
“How does Denise fit into this?” Hall said.
“A niece of mine.” Rivers laughed. “She’s one of our political study girls. Russian and Russian history. It just happened she was enrolled here when you moved back to North Carolina. When it turned out you spend a weekend here now and then, and that you liked decadent rock-and-roll, it was simple enough to set up a meeting between the two of you.”
“Why go to the trouble?”
“We thought you might invite her to your house in Blowing Rock.”
“Not likely,” Hall said.
“She thought she was making progress.”
“A beginner.” Hall kept it hard, with an edge. “She’ll never bait a decent honeytrap.”
Rivers shook his head, a mock sadness on his face. “I’ll tell her. She’ll be disappointed.”
“She knows. Women always know.”
Rivers untied his robe and dropped it at the foot of the bed. He shook out a white broadcloth shirt and put it on quickly, as if ashamed to let Hall see his narrow chest and thin arms. Pale fingers worried at the buttons. “You, my friend,” he said, “are in white water without a paddle.”
“Part of that might be true. I am not, however, your friend.”
“The rules are cut in stone and mounted on the mountain. That is the contract you signed. There was, you agreed, to be no publication without a prior review of the writing by the Director and the Assistant Director.”
“I kept my bargain.”
Rivers worked a tie under the collar of his shirt and began to tie a half Windsor. The tie was heavy tweed. His back was to Hall but he watched Hall in the mirror. “I am not sure I understand.”
“I’ve been jobbed. I thought you did it.”
“Tell me about it,” Rivers said.
At the end of it, the recital of the facts by Hall, Rivers was dressed and ready for the party. He’d put on a stiff Irish tweed jacket and he’d brushed his gray hair with care and precision. He dropped his silver-backed hairbrush on the dressing table.
“It sounds like a cookie jar story to me.” He mimicked a child’s plaintive voice. “I didn’t touch the cookie jar, mommy. It fell off the shelf and I caught it so it wouldn’t break.”
“What’s my motive?”
“Disenchantment. The usual. A misdirected vision of what is good for our coun
try.
Hall shook his head. “I’m out of it and good riddance to it. But I’ve got to admit it’s a good box somebody built around me.”
“I’ve seen the piece.” Rivers smiled. “We have our ways as you well know. It’s all there. The inside details you know from your time in Costa Verde. And one new fact. That snipers fired the first shots into Marcos and the girl. That the Team was in Costa Verde.”
“Anybody with access to the file knows what I know.”
“The thousand dollars?”
“Tell me where you bank and I’ll deposit a thousand dollars into your account.”
“The phone calls to Enos Blackman.”
“All made on my phone on weekends, while I was away from Blowing Rock.”
“Photographs of you entering and leaving Blackman’s offices on Sheridan Square.”
“Are they dated? Blackman says he only knows me from letters and phone calls.”
“All of it fits,” Rivers said.
“It should. It’s tailored.”
Rivers closed his eyes and shook his head. “I’ll have to talk to the Director.”
Hall picked up his parka. “In that case, I’ll have a drink with the hostess and go home and wait to hear from you.”
“One more matter. You have a weapon belonging to Webb.”
Hall smiled. “It fell off a shelf and I caught it to keep it from breaking.”
“I never liked you,” Rivers said.
“Now you’ve wounded me.” Hall left the room. The backup man in the Harris tweed jacket stood in the hallway, near the head of the stairs. Hall walked straight at him. The backup man stepped aside. “Not yet?” Hall mumbled at him. The man didn’t answer.
Hall stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Denise. She held a glass of white wine in one hand while she gestured with the other. Her back was to Hall and he watched the ripple of muscles in her back. A tall young man with the scars of an old case of acne on his forehead was nodding, almost mesmerized, while Denise lectured on the geopolitical consequences of something or other.
Hall wasn’t sure why he hadn’t just walked out the front door. There wasn’t any face to be saved. He’d been fooled, gulled in a game that was supposed to be played by professionals only.
Perhaps that was what angered him. He couldn’t decide whether she was what Rivers said she was, a political staffer who just happened to be in the area doing graduate work, or a new agent with the Company or someone on loan from another agency.
It didn’t matter, he told himself. Chances were good that he wouldn’t see her after tonight. Unless there was a hunt and she was part of the pack that followed him. And that would not be friendly, what happened then.
Denise must have sensed he was behind her. She looked over her shoulder and smiled and said, “Hello, William.” The tall graduate student blinked, the mood broken, and he excused himself and left the kitchen.
“A drink?” There was a jug of white wine in ice in the sink.
“Not tonight,” Hall said. “I’ve got a long drive.”
“You don’t have to. You can stay here.” She took three steps and she was close enough so that he could smell her. A perfume that was partly sandalwood and something else that he thought was anxiety.
“Three in a bed? Me and you and your uncle?” He shook his head. “I feel better in my own territory.”
“I’m not his niece.”
“I know. It’s a term around the Company that Rivers has for the young girls who let him wipe his cock on their chins.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Don’t make bets,” Hall said. “The night’s still young.”
“You’re talking this way because I made a fool out of you. You’re angry with me.”
“It’s no worse than what I’ve done to people in my time.” He stepped around her and found a glass and drew tap water. He drank it down in one swallow. “That’s for the road.”
Hall put on his parka and buttoned it. “See you.” He went out the back door and down the back steps and circled the house. He was three paces from his BMW when the backup man stepped away from the heavy shadow of an old oak tree. “He said to tell you something.”
“Tell me.”
“He said to tell you not to dig a hole. He’ll find you if it takes ten years.”
“And he’d love every month of it?” Hall walked around the man and unlocked the BMW. He started the engine and waited for it to warm up. He extended a hand and touched the litter bag. It had the right weight, the weight of the Python he’d hidden there.
He drove to Blowing Rock with only two stops along the way for coffee. He slept in his own bed that night, wondering just before he went to sleep in which bed Denise slept, and when he awoke early in the morning a heavy fog was rolling up from the Gap, the valley, below.
CHAPTER FIVE
Four days passed. He heard nothing from Rivers or the Company. All Wednesday he watched a late storm brewing. A heavy snow might pin him in the mountains when he needed to move, and move quickly. That afternoon, he readied the house. He packed away clothing he wouldn’t take with him and he stored his books in the attic. He plugged the fireplace. Last of all, he emptied the refrigerator and filled two beer boxes with frozen food and perishables.
On the way down the mountain, he dropped off the food and the house key with John Mix. John would care for the house. He’d look in once or twice a week to make sure kids didn’t break in and plunder the place. When he arrived at Mix’s, there was barely time to deal with the utilities before the offices closed. On Mix’s phone, he arranged for the water and the electricity to be switched off. The phone, he told Southern Bell, would be needed until the following Monday. All the bills were to be sent to his lawyer, Joe Bennett, in Winston-Salem.
John Mix followed him from the house and stood on the porch. “You headed any place in particular?”
Hall said he wasn’t. “I think I was getting what they used to call cabin fever.”
He was halfway to Washington when he ran into the first snow. It was heavy and visibility was limited. When he passed the first snow plow, he left the highway and found a motel and slept for ten hours. He awoke and didn’t hear snow plows. He opened the blinds. It wasn’t snowing anymore.
He reached Washington before the late afternoon traffic snarl. Or, perhaps because another snow was expected, many people had left work early. A ten-minute drive away from the heart of the city and he reached the Madison Hill Bar and Grill. He passed the bar front and circled the block. He negotiated the cramped driveway that went from the other side of the block into a small lot reserved for the bar employees. There wasn’t an open space. Hall parked front bumper to back bumper of a black 1979 Continental with a dented and rusting left rear fender.
He stomped through the kitchen and waved at the startled cooks, as if to say he belonged there and knew all of them. A year before, he might have known them. Jackson’s turnover with the kitchen help was a legend. Why work for Jackson and put up with his tirades when you could make the same money somewhere else?
He pushed open the double doors to the bar and stood there until Jackson looked up from his newspaper. The bar was almost empty. Usually, after working hours, during the cocktail hour, the place was a madhouse. Now, with the weather the way it was, it was too early to guess what the day’s trade would be like.
“Now I don’t have to close,” Jackson said. He folded the newspaper and dropped it in a trash barrel behind the bar.
“Pour one, Bilbo,” Hall said. Hall had nicknamed him Bilbo after the Senator. When Jackson arrived in Washington in 1976, in the flood of other southerners who crowded the city after the election of Carter, he talked like he had a mouthful of spoonbread. Hall met him then and, though his accent had improved over the years, he’d put the tag on Jackson and refused to peel it away.
Jackson poured a double Jack Daniels that was really a triple and dropped in two ice cubes. “The way you told it, you were going to spend the winter
pissing snowballs off your porch into a valley a mile below.”
Hall tipped the drink toward Jackson, a salute, and took a long swallow. “I thought you might have heard something.”
Jackson leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the bar. “I heard a rumor. It wasn’t good. It didn’t sound like you, no matter how mad you got.”
Hall nodded. “You still see Franklin?”
“He’s the one told me. He said some people thought you were talking out of school.”
“What did he think?”
“Like I did.”
“You know if he’s in town?”
“In town,” Jackson said, “and at home with a cold, I think.”
“Do me a favor. Call him and tell him a visiting redneck is looking for him.”
“He’ll know?”
“Give him the name Billy Babcock,” Hall said.
Jackson hunched over the house phone at the other end of the bar for a couple of minutes. Hall sipped his drink and felt the tension easing in his arms and shoulders. The warmth of the Jack Daniels spread from his toes to the tip of his ears.
Jackson returned. “He said an hour. But not in here. In the parking lot out back.”
Hall touched his glass. “One more.”
Jackson poured. He poured himself a shot as well and threw it back in one gulp. “What’s happening?”
“I’m in a box. It’s been nailed together by experts. All but the top. I’m trying to learn to fly.”
Hall watched the clock behind the bar. He talked sports with Jackson. The college basketball season about to wind down. The NBA and the baseball season that was only a short time away. During the hour, a dozen or so men and women drifted in. A cocktail waitress checked in and took her place at the serving counter. At the hour mark exactly, Jackson drifted past Hall and pointed at the clock.
“You need a place to stay?”
“I’ve got to see where I stand first, how bad the pressure is.” He dropped a few bills on the bar counter and put on his parka. “See you in a few minutes.”
He passed through the kitchen. One of the cooks almost had a heart attack when he heard the door open and close. He was swigging from a wine bottle. Hall grinned and shook his head. Nothing to fear from him. He pushed through the rear door and reached the parking area.