“Death in a bottle that held American vodka,” Henry said. He smiled. “I like that.”
“Be very careful,” Mr. Juno said.
But Henry was up now, the bottle bag in hand. “I’ll be in touch.”
“We’ll have other dealings?” Mr. Juno said.
“We’ve only just begun, honey.” And Henry was loping up the street, carrying the bottle by the neck of the bag. He had left the newspaper. After all, he had read everything twice about the plane, and he remembered all the names.
10
Devereaux floated near the ceiling of the hospital room. He looked down at the man in the bed. It was himself.
The man in the bed had tubes in his nose and his arm. The tubes were connected to many things. There were electrodes attached to his head by wax and more electrodes attached to his chest.
Devereaux smiled down at the man in the bed. He wondered if the man was dying or recovering. He considered the question and saw the irony of it: Even if he was recovering, he was dying. Life is just dying. A typically dark thought. Devereaux smiled at his own lack of compassion for the human condition. Yes, that was it exactly. He had no passion, not for life or for death. It made him so detached that he could not speak of it.
The problem, Devereaux decided as he floated slowly around the darkened room, was that he could not say the things that were in his heart.
He was certain he had been human at one time. He could bleed and even feel loss. He was a man after all but he never considered himself that way. These things were unspoken because he could not reveal one crack in the armor coating of his soul. Why not? Because that single act of weakness would destroy him.
Why did it matter now? He was clearly out of his body, and in a little while, his body would cease and then he would cease. There was nothing beyond the end because the end justified its own means. In this case, life. Devereaux smiled at his jaded cleverness. He could have been a very clever man if he had stayed at Columbia University as a teacher, if he had merely dreamed his Asian dreams instead of realizing them, if he had not become an intelligence officer (as they put it) and gone to war for Lucky Strike. Very clever. All those clever thighs seated in the first row, longish skirts back then at the beginning of the 1960s, but tight enough to reveal all the secret teacherly lusts. Devereaux was prematurely gray and he had compelling gray eyes. How can I get an A, Professor Devereaux? asked the comely thighs. The same way Hester Prynne did, replied the professor. Ah, hell. What were the uses of memory of everything except to burden the soul unto death?
Die and put an end to it, said the floating Devereaux to the man in the bed.
I love you, said the comely thighs. Red hair. Red-haired lover with milky breath and milky breasts and milky thighs, milked hard until his red head poked his redheaded lover, spreading her lap beneath him, feeling all that rage turned into a single tool of lovemaking, enveloped wetly by her purse. Spent himself into her purse. No change? He held out his hand and looked down and saw the woman in the hospital bed, nose and arm penetrated by tubes, eyes closed, breathing, breast heaving softly, unlapped, slapped down, unloved because he had no words and no love, comely, thighs and whispers… Rita. Rita was dying and he was helpless. He could not save her or himself. This was stupid and intolerable.
Devereaux disappeared.
Devereaux, the man in the bed, opened his eyes and saw palpable half darkness. Felt no pain at all. They had dosed him again and the same goddamned heroin dream had come and he had tripped a thousand levers in memory, remembering words, poems, vignettes of a wasted life.
Goddamnit, Devereaux thought.
“Goddamnit.”
He pushed the button beside the bed.
A woman appeared. She stared at him. “What do you want?”
He smiled but she did not see it. He wanted it to do over again. He fixed his mind to make his thoughts words.
“I want to talk to someone about getting out of here.”
She smiled insanely. The woman had blood on her lips. She was a vampire and would bite his neck and he would have to sleep in a box with Lon Chaney or Bela Lugosi. He wasn’t queer, he wasn’t going to get into a box with one of them, he wanted his girlfriend and wanted it to do over again, to make love as they made love in the Baie des Anges on the Côte d’Azur that time, lying on the balcony of the hideous Le Corbusier — style building, making love in the Mediterranean sunshine, fondling her bare breasts, her hands pulling him toward her… yes, exactly what he wished again: yes.
The nurse looked up from her People magazine and looked at the other one returning from the half-darkened hall that led to the intensive care units.
“What did he want?”
“He said he wanted to talk to someone about getting out of here,” the second nurse said. She smiled. “I suppose that’s a good sign.”
“I’m amazed. He’s got enough dope in him to tranquilize a horse.”
“Well, maybe he’s going to make it.”
It was a thing they never talked about, the odds of someone making it. There was too much death to talk about it all the time. You had to make life seem normal and apart from these sick people. The nurse seated at the station desk looked hard at the second one. The second nurse had black hair and pretty doll-like features and too much softness for the job. Her name was Lu Ann Palmer and she was a Baptist. She actually told people she was a Baptist.
The first nurse turned back to her magazine. The story was about the crash of Flight 147 over the North Atlantic last week. A Palestinian terrorist. Well, it happened all the time. What were you going to do about it? Briefly, she remembered her vacation in August in Hawaii. Terrorists were a fact of life but the odds of being blown up on an airplane were still incredible.
She turned the page and settled in. The brief piece was about plans for Halloween Heaven II and it passed the time of night, reading about it.
11
The big man had been in the Horseshoe Bar in the venerable Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin for an hour. He had finished two whiskeys and was working on his third. His manner was deliberate and unhurried. He wore a tweed jacket and a white shirt and tie. He had sandy hair and freckles across his wide nose. His eyes were merry and green and he looked like anything in the world except a terrorist. He had been a terrorist for thirty of his forty-five years.
The girl came in as he sipped at the third whiskey. She sat across the glittering bar from him and watched him. When the elderly barman came to her, she asked for beer. He brought her a foaming glass and picked up the five-pound note she had left on the bar.
The room was crowded with the usual lunchtime mix of businessmen and writers, horse breeders and country squires and visiting Englishmen and vague personalities identified with radio or television. It was a glamorous but faded place, like the hotel itself.
He watched her. She wore a simple white blouse and no jewelry. Her face was sharp, her eyes were cynical. Her brown hair was short and swept back from her face.
The big man was surprised it was a girl. They hadn’t said it would be a girl. Not that he didn’t know girls usually made better terrorists than men, once they were committed to the cause. He thought of Maureen Kilkenny, waiting back at the farm in Clare. She’d terrorize the devil, the big man thought. There was such unreserved wildness in Maureen that he realized the quality was in every woman and he sometimes felt like he was the only man in the world who understood that.
And smiled at the girl across the bar because the girl was watching him.