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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 She sat up then, hair tangled around her face; she offered him a cigarette but he shook his head, withdrawn.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’ café. 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 boná-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.

The second print was a grainy enlargement of a small section of the first. It showed one young face and parts of the adjacent two.

Ross said, “Kendig all right. But you’d have to know him to tell. This was a nineteen-year-old kid.”

“It’s the only picture of him we’ve got, so far,” Cutter said.

“Where’d it come from?”

“Myerson went through the Army personnel records division in Saint Louis. This belonged to some guy who went through boot camp with Kendig. Then they shipped out to different outfits. This guy never saw Kendig again.”

Ross put the photographs down and went back to packing things into his attaché case. “Doesn’t he have any friends? I mean everybody’s got friends.”

“With the possible exception of Kendig. Well there was me for a while. And there was a woman.”

“Would he get in touch with her?”

“He might, if he knows a medium,” Cutter said drily. “She’s been dead for three years.”

Ross looked at him sharply. “Three years. That was about the time he got his cover blown, wasn’t it?”

“Around then, yes.”

“One thing have anything to do with the other?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Kendig.”

“I will.”

“Sure,” Cutter said. He was smiling but there were subtle vibrating signs of great controlled pressures in him. “Look, don’t leave yourself absolutely wide open, will you?”

“I’ll be careful.”

“All the time I knew him I never saw him sleep more than four hours at a stretch. Kendig’s got a consummate control of time. And he knows how to pace himself. If you ever get close to him you’ve got to intercept him, you can’t chase him—he’ll outrun you every time.”

“You make him sound like some kind of four-minute-miler.”

“He’s fifty-three years old but I imagine he could run the shoe leather off you, Ross, if he had a hundred yards’ head start.”

“But he’s no sprinter?”

“He doesn’t let himself get caught in a position where he needs to sprint.”

Ross picked up the attaché case and hung his jacket over his shoulder by one fingertip. “I guess that’s everything. My bag’s down in the car.”

“Good hunting,” Cutter told him. “I guess I ought to say something like that.”

“You’re just absolutely convinced it’s a blind alley, aren’t you.”