He got in the battered Pontiac and drove slowly, rutting down the overgrown track, bottoming a couple of times before he tipped it onto the county road scraping the tail pipe. He didn’t push it past forty miles an hour because for one thing he wasn’t sure the car would take it and for another there was a sheriff’s cruiser that made a practice of lying in wait behind the Dr Pepper billboard a mile west of his turnoff.
The road two-laned through the pines, here and there a clearing with its lopsided grey shack and its tumbledown barn painted with the attractions of Coca-Cola and Jesus and Prince Albert tobacco. Every yard was an auto graveyard. The blacktop for a while went curling along the steep slope of the riverbank and he had glimpses of white water through the dusky boles. The occasional side road would lead back to a tumbledown cemetery or a sharecropper outfit or a moonshine still. Insects crashed into the windshield, leaving smears. He switched on the radio and got the tag end of Waylon Jennings singing “Not Comin’ Home to You” and then the announcer came on cheerfully, stumbling over basic words. He twisted the dial, driving left-handed, until he picked up the weak fringe signal of an Atlanta station and went on down the road accompanied by Tchaikovsky.
The edge of town grew uncertainly from weeds: eyeless shacks, cluttered lots, rusty corrugated lean-to roofs. Fat women in cotton and old men in dungarees sat on sagging porches.
He had to be in town today but he was two hours early and his weakness annoyed him; it had been a stupid lapse. But there was no point going back now; it would take forty minutes each way and that wouldn’t leave time for any work before he’d have to make the trip again. He parked aslant in front of the country store, racking it between a dusty Cadillac and a dented Ford pickup.
The shade porch supported four hookwormed backwoods folk who stood around with their hands in their back pockets, their heads covered by old straw hats that had turned an uneven brown. They watched him with lizard eyes. When he got out of the car the sun drew the sweat out of him. He climbed the porch and gave them his grave nod-it was returned unblinkingly by all four-and tramped inside.
A huge ceiling fan revolved slowly, stirring the heat; the place was perfectly preserved, a relic of forty years ago, the few unshelved patches of wall crowded with faded photos of forgotten pugilistic champions and rifle meets. There was even a sody-cracker barrel by the fountain. The proprietor went by the name of Leroy; he had the suspicious face of mountain inbreeding and his belly made a perilous arc over the waistband of his beltless Levi’s. “How do, Mr. Hannaway.”
“Sure is a hot one,” Kendig said. “Draw me a beer.”
He was representing himself to be a writer who’d come into the piney woods in search of solitude to finish a book. He’d let it drop that it was a book about fishing the Arkansas River-a topic he’d chosen because he’d once used up the better part of a two-week vacation flatboating and fishing out of Fort Smith at the insistence of Joe Cutter. It had taught him he despised fishing but it had also taught him the lingo and enough local color to bluff out any questions that might be asked. Not many were likely to be asked; he’d picked the deep South to go to ground because it was a country of close-mouthed xenophobia. But it was also the most cheerless land he’d ever entered and it was already on his nerves.
He drank his beer in silence; then he bought a newspaper and a magazine and sat at the counter over them and gnawed on a chicken-fried steak and cornbread. It had been a slow day for news; a school-bus wreck had made the headlines. He read the paper and the magazine from cover to cover and finally it was five minutes to five and he finished his third beer and went outside and hung around the phone booth pretending to look up a number in his pocket notebook until it was 4:59; then he stepped into the booth and made the call.
The number was that of a public phone in a booth in the lobby of the Pan Am Building in New York. It rang only once before it was picked up and the operator said, “Please deposit eighty-five cents for the first three minutes.”
The coins bonged and pinged. Then Ives’s voice said, “You’re right on time.”
“How’s it going?”
“Desrosiers balked a bit but he finally went the price. And I think we’ve sewed it up with the New York publisher. When we’ve got that one signed the rest of them will fall in line. In London they’re drooling over it-they can’t wait to have the finished manuscript, they’re planning a crash schedule to get it on the market as fast as they can. I’d say you’re in fabulous shape.”
“Have you been approached by government types?”
“I had a call this afternoon from someone named Ross. He was pretty vague about his function but I gathered it was official. He wants to come up and meet with me tomorrow morning.”
“All right. Tell him the truth-whatever he asks.”
“Yes.”
Kendig said, “You won’t hear from me again for quite a while. I’m on my way out of the country tonight.”
“Well-good luck to you then.”
Kendig cradled it and went straight to the car and drove back into the pines.
— 9 -
Ross disliked John Ives immediately and it was reciprocated: he sensed the underlayer of distaste and it came to the surface before he had been in the office five minutes. Ives said, “I know why you’re here. Let’s not waste each other’s time.”
“That suits me. All right, you’re representing Miles Kendig.”
“Who told you that?”
“I thought we weren’t going to fence. Claude Des-rosiers’s publishing company is negotiating a contract on Kendig’s book through you, isn’t that right?”
“When a contract’s pending I don’t make it a habit to give away information,” Ives said. He was young and smooth but the brown beard made Ross think of porcupines. “This is a competitive business, Mr. Ross. And I regard the agent-client relationship as confidential.”
“I don’t represent a rival publishing house.”
“I know. Miles Kendig warned me I’d be questioned by people from your agency. He instructed me to answer any questions with the whole truth. If you find me evasive it’s my own doing. You see I don’t like dealing with people like you. I don’t like what you stand for.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t got time to get sidetracked into a philosophical debate,” Ross said. “But I’d advise you to obey your client’s instructions. It would make things painless for both of us.”
“And the alternatives?”
Ross couldn’t help smiling a little. “I didn’t come here to make any threats. Why, were you expecting me to? Are you by any chance recording this conversation?”
Ives made no answer but his expression revealed that Ross had scored a hit. Ross shook his head. “I’m only going to ask you to do your duty as a public-spirited citizen. I’ve got no power to force you to do anything against your will. But we’re concerned with possible violations of the national security here. Kendig is threatening to publish material which is highly classified.”
“No,” Ives said flatly. “You can’t take that tack.”
“Why the hell not? It’s perfectly true and you know it.”
“I know it damn well, Mr. Ross, but it’s something you can’t take into court. If you accused Kendig of stealing legitimate government secrets you’d have to admit under oath that the material in Kendig’s book is true.” Then he grinned infuriatingly.
“It’s not. He’s a liar, obviously.”
“I see. And his motive?”
“How much money do you suppose this sensationalist tract will earn him if it’s published in fourteen countries, Mr. Ives? Isn’t that motive enough?”
“Not for a man as wealthy as Kendig.”
“Has it occurred to you that he may have lied to you about the extent of his wealth? Kendig was a salaried government employee for twenty-five years, Mr. Ives. I can assure you none of us has much opportunity to salt away a fortune on a civil service salary.”