She didn’t say anything for several minutes. Then she said, “Don’t call again tonight.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’ll be suspicious. Calling and then hanging up — if it just happens once he’ll shrug it off, but if it happens more than that he’ll get suspicious. We can’t let him be on guard. The best thing for us right now is that nobody even knows about us. Lublin doesn’t know we exist and the two men don’t know we’re looking for them. We can’t afford to let them find out.”
She was right. “I’ll go there around three in the morning,” he said. “The party’ll be over by then.”
“No.”
“Why not, Jill?”
“He might not live alone.” She sat next to him and held his hands in hers. “Please,” she said. “We don’t know anything about him yet, about the setup there. Let’s wait until tomorrow. We can go there after a call, or if nobody’s home we can go there and break in and wait for him. Either way. Right now he’s there and he has company, and we don’t even know if he lives in a house or an apartment, we don’t know anything. Can’t we wait until morning?”
“Are you nervous?”
“Partly. And I’m exhausted, for another thing. A good sleep wouldn’t hurt either of us. Tomorrow—”
He nodded slowly. She was right, there was no sense wasting their major advantage of surprise. And it wouldn’t hurt to wait another day. They had plenty of time.
He got the bottle of V.O. from the drawer and lay on the bed with it. She went over and turned on the television set. There was a doctor program on, something about an immigrant who wouldn’t consent to surgery, and they watched it together. He didn’t pay very much attention to it. He stretched out on the bed and sipped the V.O. straight from the bottle, not working hard at it but just sipping as he watched the program. She said she didn’t want anything to drink.
After that, they watched a cops-and-robbers thing for an hour, then caught the eleven o’clock news. There was nothing important on the news. During the weather report she turned off the television set and suggested that they go to sleep. He was tired without being sleepy. He could feel the exhaustion in his body, the need for sleep, but at the same time he felt entirely awake. But sleep was a good idea. He took another long swig from the bottle to make sleep come easier.
They undressed in the same room with no embarrassment, no need for privacy. The adjustment of the honeymoon, he thought wryly. They had accomplished that much, surely. There was no longer any question of embarrassment. He felt that he could not possibly be embarrassed now in front of this woman, that they had lived through too much together, had shared too much, had grown too intimate to be separated by that variety of distance. They undressed, and he switched on the bedside lamp and turned off the overhead light, and they got into bed, and he switched off the bedside lamp and they lay together in darkness.
She was breathing very heavily. He moved toward her and she flowed into his arms and her mouth was warm and eager. He kissed her and felt her warmth against him, and he kissed her again and touched her sleeping breasts and she said his name in a husky whisper. His hands were filled with the sweet flesh.
It didn’t work. It began well, but there was tension for him and tension for her and it did not work at all. The desire was there but the capacity was not.
She lay very close to him. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Shhhh.”
“I love you. We were married Sunday. What’s today? Tuesday night? We’ve only been married two days.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Two days,” she said. “It seems so long. I don’t think I knew you at all when we got married. Not at all. Courtship, engagement, all of that, and I hardly knew you. And two days.”
He kissed her lightly.
“I love you,” she said. “Sleep.”
He lay in the darkness, sure he wouldn’t sleep. Lublin was in Brooklyn, on Newkirk Avenue. He had called him on the phone, had hung up before Lublin could take the call. He should have waited another minute, he thought. Just long enough to hear the man’s voice so he would know it.
But it was real now, it was all real. Before there had been the fury, the need to Do Something, but the reality had not been present. And then that day there had been the article in the paper, the visual proof again of Corelli’s death. And the trip to Hicksville, to Corelli’s home and to Corelli’s office.
It was very real. He had a gun now, Corelli’s gun, and all he knew about a gun was what he had learned ages ago in basic training. Could he hit anything with a gun? Could he use it properly?
And he had never fired at a human target. Not with a revolver, not with a rifle, not with anything. He had never aimed at a living person and tried to kill that person.
He reached out a hand and lightly touched his wife’s body. She did not stir. He drew his hand back, then, and settled himself in the bed and took a deep breath.
He woke up very suddenly. He had fallen asleep without expecting to, and now he woke up as though he had been dynamited from the bed. His mouth was dry and his head ached dully. He sat bolt upright in the bed and tried to catch his breath. He was out of breath, as if he had been running furiously for a bus.
His cigarettes were on the bedside table. He reached out and got the pack, shook out a cigarette, lit it, cupping the flame to avoid awakening Jill. The smoke was strong in his lungs. He smothered a cough, breathed in air, then drew once more on the cigarette.
He looked at her side of the bed and could not see her in the darkness. He reached out a tentative hand to touch her.
She was not there.
In the bathroom, then. He called her name, and there was no answer, no answer.
“Jill!”
Nothing. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. It was empty. He turned on lights, looked around for a note. No note.
She was gone.
Chapter 7
The desk clerk said, “Mrs. Wade left about a half hour ago, sir. Or maybe a little more than that. Let me see, I came on at midnight, and then I had a cup of coffee at two-thirty, and then your wife left the hotel just as I was finishing my coffee. It must have been a quarter to three, I would guess.” It was just three-thirty now. Forty-five minutes, he thought. Jill had been gone for forty-five minutes.
“Is anything wrong, Mr. Wade?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong.” He forced a smile. “She probably couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Probably went out for coffee.”
He went back upstairs and sat in the room and smoked another cigarette. Jill was gone. Jill had gotten up in the middle of the night, alone, and had dressed and left. For coffee? It was possible, he guessed. But for three-quarters of an hour?
She had left the hotel by herself. The immediate fear, the automatic reaction once he realized she was gone, was the worry that someone had come to take her away. But that was senseless. No one knew about either of them, no one knew where they were staying. And no one had called their room, either. He would have heard the phone no matter how deeply he was sleeping, for one thing. And the desk clerk would probably have mentioned a call.
He checked the whiskey bottle. It was as full as it had been. If she wanted a drink, he thought, she would have had it there. She wouldn’t go barhopping by herself in the middle of the night. Coffee, then. Coffee and a sandwich, maybe.
Why hadn’t she come back?
He put on a coat and went down to the lobby and out into the night. It was still raining, but the rain had slowed to a drizzle. Most of the lights were out on Forty-fifth Street. He walked to the corner of Sixth. The Cobb’s Corner was open, and he went inside and looked around, but she wasn’t there. He went out again and stood on the corner in the rain, looking around, trying to figure out where she might be. There were three or four open restaurants that he could see and, along Sixth Avenue, more than a dozen bars. She could be anywhere. Or she could be somewhere else, and not in any of these places.