“How much more?”
“Half again. Seventy-five cents a mile. And you’re paying for the two trips I’ll have to make empty. Two round trips, that’s about forty-four hundred miles. Thirty-three hundred dollars, Mr. Murdison.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to buy your airplane.”
She smiled. “If you want a better price why don’t you try one of the commercial outfits down in Miami? Actually I think the airline fare to Saint Thomas is about sixty dollars.”
“Three thousand,” he said, “in cash.”
“That’s agreeable but I get two hundred a day for me and the plane while I’m waiting for you in Miami.”
“All right,” he said. “Be there on October third. Where do you usually lay over?”
“There’s a motel called the Flamingo a few blocks from the airport gate.”
“Fine. Check in with the desk every two hours after noon on the third.”
He dipped the fingers of his left hand into the flat wallet inside his jacket, extracted the envelope from it and put the envelope on the table. “That’s five hundred. I’ll give you another fifteen hundred when you pick us up at Coral Key and the rest when you pick us up at Charlotte Amalie for the return flight.”
“I guess that’s fair enough. If you’re making any deals with Maddox about papers you’ll have to do that personally with him-I don’t want to know anything about it.”
“I didn’t say anything about papers, Mrs. Fleming.”
“So you didn’t.” She put the envelope in her handbag; snapped the clasp shut and put the bag on the floor by her feet. “Now you may buy me a drink. Scotch mist, with Dewar’s.”
At half-past one he was in her apartment without quite being sure why. “There was a Mr. Fleming,” she said. “He’s a nice guy. One day we just decided neither one of us would be worth looking at across a breakfast table for the next thirty years.”
But she was vulnerable; it was evident in the way the apartment looked. It was a very personal place, she’d made it hers. The furniture looked Mexican: pale wood, very heavy with thick comfortable cushions. There were a couple of wicker armchairs with Indian patterns dyed into them. She had Navajo rugs on the walls and they looked as if she’d had them for a long time; the lower edges were frayed where cats had sharpened on them. The single painting was a limited-edition Georgia O’Keeffe reproduction. She had an air race trophy on an end table and the LP jackets by the stereo were thoroughly used clues to a taste in music which was catholic but not undiscriminating: she had Toscanini but not Fiedler, Ray Charles but not Bob Dylan, Sgt. Pepper but not the Stones, MJQ but not Brubeck.
The two cats were alley-bred grey tigers, aloof and athletic. They inspected Kendig. One chewed his finger. He let them prowl, not making a fuss over them. A little corner of his mind was pleased that there was a little flap cut into the screen at one of the windowsills so that the cats could come and go. And she didn’t baby-talk them. “They do care whether you like them or not,” she said, “but they’re too dignified to let it show.”
When he kissed her she drew back and smiled to show she was willing but not serious.
They were not touching but he could feel her warmth and the rhythm of her breathing. She got up from the bed, trailing her fingers along his arm, and he lay staring at the ceiling until she came back from the loo. Her dark eyes were heavy with sleep; she gave him a soft-lipped kiss and he felt a pang of weary sadness. She sat up then, hair tangled around her face; she offered him a cigarette but he shook his head, withdrawn.
“You’re a feline sort of man. I don’t mean that unkindly.” She touched her lips to his hair and lay down against him. “I’m a feline sort of girl. But sometimes you just need somebody.”
“Yes.”
“Usually it’s enough to be in the air. That’s the only real freedom I know-being in motion in three dimensions.” She switched off the light. He thought of leaving but hadn’t the desire to, nor reason to. Then she said, “Two strangers rutting in bed. But it’s not as sad as it might be.”
“No.”
“You just talk a blue streak sometimes, don’t you.”
She was fast asleep when he went down to his car. In the predawn half-light the furnace reddened and charred the sky: like a landscape out of Dickens. She lived on the steep side of the hill that led up toward Vestavia. In the shadows he stole the front license plate off a Buick; the owner probably wouldn’t notice its absence for a long time and then he’d chalk it up to accident or vandalism and the likelihood of its being reported to the police was remote. He mailed a letter to Ives and threaded the streets; by breakfast time he was a hundred miles toward the Georgia line. He ate in a truckers’ cafe. It was when he returned to the car that he saw the glint of metal in the back seat.
It was a woman’s compact the color of brass, mottled finish, monogrammed CJF in an engraved scroll. He opened it and saw himself in its round mirror but he couldn’t find anything particularly feline about the face. When he snapped it shut it left a little powder on his fingers. He twisted to smudge the prints and dropped it into his pocket. Impulse or calculation? He wondered which had made her leave it there. She hoped he’d bring it back to her. Well he’d see her in Miami.
He crossed the state line and toward midday he was in the pines. Heat trembled off the blacktop. The road was narrow, badly graded for the curves, an upward lip at each side. He felt nagged by an unease he could neither place nor comprehend. It made him think about obtaining a revolver. But a gun was always to be regarded as the last of all last resorts; he had not shot, at anyone since 1944 in Italy and that had been in the lines, in uniform, shooting at helmeted Wehrmacht soldiers who were shooting back. The use of a gun was the admission of amateurism and the only thing Kendig had was his professionalism.
He drove slowly up the rutted track. Insects talked in the heat. When he switched off he could hear the hot engine ping with contractions and distantly the roughhousing of the river. He sat in the car scrutinizing the dappled shadows-the edge of the forest, the barn, the abandoned machinery, the disheveled house. He sensed the place was empty. When he felt sure of it he walked up to the porch.
There was no one around and no one had been there; the telltales he’d left had not been disturbed except for the string at the bottom of the screen door and that likely had been a squirrel or perhaps during the night a raccoon.
He brought his purchases inside and retrieved the boxed unfinished typescript from its hiding place in the rusted wreckage of the DeSoto. For the next two hours he sat still, reading what he’d written.
The book was a brusque account of facts assembled in chains. It struck him now for the first time that what he was writing was essentially a moral outcry and that impressed him as a curious thing because he hadn’t had that in mind. Yet it was unquestionably an outraged narrative despite its matter-of-fact tone. When he made this discovery it caused him to realize that he must add something to the book that he had not intended including: there had to be a memoir, a self-history (however brief) to establish his bona-fides-not his credentials or sources but his motives.
The book had become more than a gambit; it had been born of him and now claimed its own existence. In no way did that negate the game itself; but he saw that in order to maintain the illusion of freedom he had to complete the book not as a means but as an end. Otherwise it was only a sham-toy money, counters on a game board. It had earned for itself the right to be much more than that; and if he failed in this new responsibility it made the game meaningless.
He put a new page in the typewriter.
— 11 -
They were ranked in three lines, the back row standing and the middle row kneeling and the front row sitting down with their arms around their calves. They were all grinning because they’d survived Basic Training. Three of the four corners had broken off the four-by-five print and it had faded with age.