Rita felt so very strange.
Mac sat across from her at the chess table in the living room and made a move. He moved his knight to the position where he could take the queen. She saw it and moved the queen away.
Mac took a sip of his whiskey. He drank martinis out, whiskey in. He remembered it had to do with his wife, who liked a tot of whiskey now and then and who thought men should only drink whiskey because it was a man’s smell, it had been the smell of her father. He drank whiskey at home for her. Now she was gone and he drank it for her still.
“You can’t get away,” he said.
She looked at the queen and saw it was true. The rook was behind her, waiting to take her. The knight was before her.
“I give up,” she said.
Mac smiled at her. He was so sweet. He had always been so sweet. She had once thought she would let Mac make a pass at her and have her if he did. But he didn’t. She knew he had wanted to but he didn’t. When was it? The lonely night of her thirty-fifth birthday when she knew Devereaux would never come to see her again. She had loved Devereaux and he had still been able to walk out on her.
She looked at Mac and smiled. “What are you thinking about?”
Mac blinked his eyes to end his reverie. Then he blushed. He actually blushed. “It was nothing. I was thinking about something. Another time. Something about that dress reminded me of something.”
“It’s a beautiful dress,” she said.
“Yes. It is. It’s beautiful on you, Rita.”
“Oh, Mac.”
She understood. She felt so bad and she understood everything in the world, understood Devereaux and the way of all men and their bravenesses and deceits and vulnerabilities. It made her sad to think of it. It made her sad to see Mac blush and end his reverie.
She got up and crossed the carpet to stand next to him. He looked up at her.
She knelt down on the rug and held him and kissed him. She kissed him on the lips and kissed him gently but with wetness and with warmth and with all the wonderful things that a woman can keep in her belly to comfort men on lonely mornings.
There was rain against the windowpanes. Washington shivered at the end of fall. The fall was so long and soft and lingering in Washington that you began to believe sometimes that the fall would never end, that there would just be this falling and falling through the colors on the trees in the Virginia hills all around, that fall would be like life and go on and on despite the common belief that all things ended. And then there was rain like this and it reminded you of the end of things and made you lonely.
He said, “I don’t want to hurt you, Rita. I really love you. I would do anything for you.”
“You’ve done everything,” she said.
“You. And him,” he said. He shook his head.
“No,” she whispered. “Me. Me.”
“I thought of her. I thought of a time when she wore that dress at a party. The magazine or something. We were in the ballroom at the Willard. It was a cocktail party and I hurried over from work and when I saw her, it was a new dress, I just loved her and we didn’t even go home, we went upstairs to the corporate suite and we made love on the bed, in our clothes, made love without even taking the sheets out, just as if we were young.”
“Then make love to me,” Rita Macklin said.
“No. That would be wrong—”
“No. It would be wrong the other way,” she said. “I love you, Mac, I really do.”
“You love him.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t—”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes I can.”
“Rita,” he protested one last time. But she took his hand and he had to rise with her and follow her. In the morning bedroom where the bed lay unmade, she turned and kissed him again, sure of herself, pulling his head to her lips and letting the smell of herself fill this room and empty space in him. He touched her as she wanted to be touched. He slipped his hand down the satiny flesh of the dress to her lower back and lower and held her and she pressed against him, gaunt and bony and not sick at all anymore but filled with sunshine and pity for the world that endured darkness and hardness.
“Rita,” he said to catch his breath.
“Do it now,” she said, pulling him to the sheets. She opened her legs for him and the dress rode up her thighs and he fumbled and found her and he fell upon her, consumed her with his kisses. Touches. Love.
32
But he didn’t go to Dublin after all.
Hanley told him the morning scan as they rode to Dulles for the Concorde Air France flight to Paris. It would be faster to reach Ireland from Paris than to wait for the usual nighttime flight of Aer Lingus.
“Tell me.”
“British intelligence has a murder on their hands. Actually, four murders. Four people all struck dead in a town house in Mayfair yesterday. But the Brits can’t figure out why or how and don’t want to panic the public by saying there might be a secret nerve gas or something being used to kill innocent people in the heart of London.”
The Lincoln limousine was not to Hanley’s style or liking but this was a matter of security. The driver behind the partition was cleared to the level of N inside Section. The automobile was secured against eavesdropping devices by constant static produced by three amplifiers around the passenger compartments. The tires were puncture proof.
“And this links to Henry McGee?”
“I remembered something. I spent two hours going back through computers and I really am not that expert at it. I brought in Mrs. Neumann and told her what I thought I had remembered. There is so much to remember and most of it is junk and it just piles up in the brain and—”
“Tell me,” Devereaux said. They were in the sprawl of Virginia suburbia now; there were signs of Dulles International flashing by.
“Four weeks ago. In Naples. Our naval intelligence people have been helping on the investigation of the bombing of Flight One forty-seven. You remember, you were conscious then, it was in the papers—”
“The Euro-American Airlines plane,” Devereaux said. “That’s a cheerful thought to bring up on the way to the airport.”
Hanley frowned. “The point is, they were eyeballing a Mediterranean arms dealer who goes by the name of Juno. Juno has all kinds of contacts, all kinds of people he deals with. He’s strictly For Sale. Well, the NI people were eye-balling him constantly and they happened to record a meeting he had with an American. They put out the description on him but it zipped right by me. I didn’t connect. They had a photograph even but if you didn’t call it up on computer, you didn’t get it. Today, I called it up. NI wasn’t interested in the man Juno was talking to; they were interested in getting as much information about Juno as they could to see if he was involved in the terror bombing of Flight One forty-seven.”
“Was he?”
“Nobody knows. I think it’s a case of nobody wanting to know very much. If it’s Libya, what are we going to do again, bomb Khaddafi or his children?”
“Who was Juno meeting in Naples?”
“Henry McGee.”
“And what transpired?”
“Juno gave him a bottle of vodka. Smirnoff.”
“Is that what they think?”
“They saw it with their own eyes.”
“And four people were killed in a house in London with no apparent causes.”
“You didn’t ask me whose house it was.”
Devereaux smiled at Hanley. “You’re getting interested in this finally.”
Hanley had betrayed eagerness. He shook it off. It wasn’t like him to have enthusiasm. “Trevor Armstrong. Chief executive for Euro-American Airlines. I ran him through the routine and they’re still looking at him in New York. The point is, what is the connection between the IRA terrorism and the murder in that pub and the blowing-up of a Euro-American plane? I mean, what’s the connection?”