"Did it come back to you at the interview, John?"
"Did what come back?"
"The… feeling you get sometimes. What we've worked on."
"Is that what we've been working on, Gold? That oldtime feeling?"
"It did, didn't it? You wanted to hurt him, didn't you?
Isn't that what upset you? Isn't that what the shower was about-he brought back that feeling? Or rather, the prison did, the circumstances, the claustrophobia…"
"Wrong on two counts, but otherwise, dead-on."
"Which two?"
"One, the interview, the claustrophobia, whatever it was-it didn't bring the feeling back, because the feeling was never really gone, is never really gone. You should attend more twelve-step programs, Gold. You'd realize that old habits don't go away, they just get under control."
"And?"
"Wrong on count two. I didn't have the feeling that I wanted to hurt him … I had the feeling that I wanted to kill him… But you knew that, didn't you?"
"Yes, I knew," said Gold.
Becker twisted a corner of his mouth ironically. "So nice to be understood," he said.
Karen wrapped herself in silence for half the flight to New York, burying her face in files and typing memos on her laptop computer.
Becker was grateful for the interlude of peace. He knew that in time he would have to account for his stop in the motel with Pegeen. Karen was not suspicious, nor had he ever given her cause to be, but trust beyond a certain point veered toward indifference, and he knew that Karen was not indifferent to him. She had based her career on a mastery of details, and she would want to know all the particulars of his motel visit when she got around to asking.
Becker pretended to sleep and then slept. Karen woke him as they approached New York.
"You'll be pleased to know that Hatcher has taken you off the case."
"Oh?"
"That's what you wanted, isn't it? That's why you behaved that way with Swann."
"What way?"
"Hitting him."
"I didn't hit him."
"He says you did. He requested medical treatment after you left."
"The little shit."
"No doubt. But he is also considering a lawsuit. I don't think he'll go,through with it-Hatcher will mollify him one way or another."
"Why is he so involved, Karen? What does Hatcher want with this case?
It can't do him any particular good, can it? He's operating on too lofty a scale to benefit from the capture of one man."
"If you're a black hole of ambition like Hatcher, ultimately you suck in everything to your benefit, but in this case it wasn't very hard. One of those two girls who was found in the coal mine-her uncle was Quincy Beggs."
"Never heard of him."
"No one else had when his niece disappeared-what, ten years ago? As a result, he ran on a fiercely aggressive law-and-order platform and got elected as a congressman from West Virginia."
"I've still never heard of him."
"But Hatcher has. Now four-term Congressman Beggs is on the Oversight Committee, the congressional committee that deals with our budget and, not indirectly, some of our top-level promotions. You have heard of that onehaven't you?"
"So Hatcher has a chance to deliver to Beggs the man who killed his niece. No wonder he's so involved."
"Just thought you'd be pleased to know you're off the hook," Karen said.
"And you're still on it."
Karen shrugged.
"I really am sorry," he said.
"I'll manage."
"I'm sorry you have to."
Karen returned her attention to the computer. Becker put his hand on her arm. "It really was just a shower…
"I believe that. I do."
"Good… Nothing went on at all. She's just an agent."
Karen smiled patiently. "The sorry thing is, you probably believe that, too… Men..
"What does that mean?"
"Something 'went on' with her whether you noticed it or not. I saw the way she looked at you. And she knows I saw it."
"There wasn't anything special in the way she looked at me or the way I looked at her or the way Hatcher looked at you or any combination thereof," Becker said.
Karen shook her head patronizingly. "John, you're a very sweet man in your special way, but you don't understand women at all."
"I was there, Karen. Nothing happened, nothing was said, nothing was intimated. I did nothing to lead her on, she did nothing to lead me on.
I bent over backwards to treat her like another agent. I wouldn't have made a man sit in the car-"
"You really don't get it, do you?":'There's nothing to get." 'You didn't take a shower because you have a fetish for cleanliness. You took a shower because you felt deeply soiled by your encounter with Swann, isn't that right?":'Yes." 'And you let her see that about you. You showed her how vulnerable you are underneath the super agent exterior. Don't you realize how attractive that is, John? If you share your vulnerabilities with a woman, that is intimacy. To her, you had a very intimate moment together. Not because she was in the next room when you took a shower, but because you allowed her to know you needed it in the first place."
"It doesn't really work that way, does it?" Becker asked.
"It worked with me," she said. She took his hand and held it until they landed.
Nahir Patel had reached the fourth chapter of The Satanic Verses when the battered Oldsmobile pulled into the station. Nahir didn't consider himself much of a Muslim. His mother had dragged him to Episcopal Sunday school until he was in his mid-teens and was able to mount an effective rebellion, and his father seemed to have no religion whatsoever beyond an abhorrence of pork sausage. As a family they attended a mosque-which required a trip to Memphis-only when relatives visited. Nahir himself had drifted into a vague belief in an essentially indifferent creator to whom one applied for relief in emergencies but otherwise ignored. With mild variations, he discovered, it was the basic American concept of the deity, based primarily on convenience, with no thought required. Best of all, it was a maintenance-free credo, plastic enough to cover a variety of permutations-he knew one girl who thought God was revealing herself through the anim ' alswhile demanding absolutely nothing of the believer. Islam, on the other hand, had some rigorous requirements, the hardest one being, for Patel, belief.
However, thoroughly non-Muslim though he was, Patel could not help feeling an illicit, not to say mildly dangerous thrill when reading the work of a man condemned to death for heresy by a large segment of Islam.
It seemed akin to deliberately walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror just to prove one was not superstitious. Rationally, there was no danger, yet one did not take such unnecessary chances without the sense of tempting retribution.
A man seemingly larger than the car itself got out of the Oldsmobile and puzzled for a moment at the gas pump. Nahir watched him with half an eye, wondering briefly that there were some people in this day and age who still did not understand that one must pay before receiving the gasoline. The instructions were written large, but somehow some people never managed to see them.
The big man stuck the hose in his tank and squeezed and looked at the pump and squeezed some more.
Nahir returned to his book. He had been working — the five-to-midnight shift for six months now and had seen all manner of dummies in that time. They all caught on eventually and came to visit him in his Plexiglas booth.
He had a microphone at his disposal if he had wanted to help the customer, but he chose not to use it. He would be off duty shortly and he wanted to read a bit more. At home, he kept the book out of sight, not wanting to risk stirring up any atavistic orthodoxy in either parent. He thought they were enlightened-for parents-but there seemed no reason to press the point. He had time enough to read while on the job, after all.