At the El Al desk they directed me to the crew lounge. Stern wasn’t there. An older pilot thought Stern was in the hangar. He gave me a pass, told me the way. There are still some innocent people in the world.
The hangar was dark, only, workbench lamps casting small pools of light. I stepped carefully among the giant jets, and saw Stern under a bench lamp. He had a suitcase, and looked at his watch. A very tall, thin specter like some silent hawk. When he heard me, his gaunt-ugly face looked up as if he expected someone. The deep-set blue eyes had not expected me.
“Waiting for someone?” I asked. “Mrs. Morgan?”
“She comes sometimes to meet me,” he said.
“You let her go around alone? All the men after her?”
“For that I am sorry.” His thin mouth was apologetic. “Mia was difficult, evasive, would tell me nothing about you. I have a temper, sometimes I lose control. I apologize, yes?”
As calm now as he had been violent earlier. A hair trigger inside. Too much pain in Germany, struggle in Israel.
I leaned on the bench. “She didn’t say why she hired me?”
“Only that it was a private matter.”
“If it was business, she’d have told you? Partners?”
“Partners?” He shook his head. “Sometimes I bring her some small craft object, but I have little interest in such merchandise. A pastime for bored nations.”
“Maybe you’re interested in other merchandise?”
When I said it, I sensed the dark hangar all around me. He only frowned, implying that he didn’t follow my reasoning.
“You’re a pilot, Mrs. Morgan travels,” I said. “Turkey, the Far East. She’s young to own a shop. There’s a lot of money in-”
“Drugs! You suggest that I-!”
That trigger tripped inside him. I saw the tattooed numbers on his arm as he reached toward me. This time I was ready. I grabbed a long steel rod from the workbench. His eyes flickered at the rod. He stopped, took a breath.
“You think I would deal in such filth? We, in Israel? After such pain to survive? All we have endured?”
“Mia Morgan’s not an Israeli.”
“She would never touch such dirt! That I know!”
“You’re sure? How?”
“I know, that is all!”
His words denied, but his voice shook, and his eyes darted for an opening to attack. Habit? Or was I a real threat, and how long could I hold him in check?
“What’s Diana Wood to you, Stern?” I said.
“Who?” He blinked, shook his head, refused to be distracted. Denying that he knew any Diana Wood, or cared to know about her.
I backed away slowly.
“Okay,” I said, “give Mrs. Morgan a message. Tell her, I was warned off by men with guns and muscles. Tell her I want to know exactly why she hired me, or I’m going to walk away.”
Stern was a man trained in danger, and he knew how to hide his reactions. He showed little now, but there was a change. His eyes stopped moving, and his hands dropped to his sides.
“Men?” he said.
“Three men. One with yellow gloves. Tell her to call me.”
I backed some more, but he remained unmoving at the bench. I turned and walked out. I tried hard not to run until I was outside. Then I ran. Fifty yards to the next hangar, and looked back. He wasn’t after me. I settled to watch. One way or another, for some reason, I’d shaken Stern.
He came out of the hangar, paced in the dark and cold for almost an hour. Then a pale orange sports car drove up. Stern got in-with his suitcase. The car sat there, as if Stern and the driver were talking, before it ground gears and screeched away toward the roadway and New York.
It took me half an hour to get a taxi, and when I finally reached the city, I went to my office. I sat waiting for the call that didn’t come. I lay down on my couch, watched the phone.
Sun filtered down my air shaft when I jerked awake. The phone stood silent. I felt rotten. I need my waiting coffee, and there was no coffee in the cold office, so I had a cigarette.
I didn’t want to go out until Mia Morgan called. I didn’t want to walk the streets wondering what I’d been warned to stop. But I had to have coffee. So I got up, stiff in every bone, and the telephone rang. I grabbed it.
“You want to talk to me?” Mia Morgan’s voice said.
“I want to know why you’re after Diana Wood.”
“I’m not,” she said. “You can stop.”
“No,” I said. “Why was I warned? What did Sid Meyer-?”
“You’ve been paid.” She hung up.
I should have been angry, the determined detective. I was relieved. I liked Diana Wood. The police could solve Sid Meyer’s murder. I was fired. I hoped that yellow-gloves got the word.
I went down among the people on the sunny street. Even the slush looked good. But everyone seemed to be watching me, and I saw movement in hidden doorways. My nerves were jumping.
I had two eggs with my coffee, and began to feel peaceful. I had most of Mia Morgan’s thousand, maybe I’d take a vacation-after I told Gazzo about yellow-gloves. I left the diner, and my peace took a dive. Someone in a gray herringbone tweed coat jumped into a store when I appeared. Or was it just my nerves?
I walked past my office and on toward the river. There were too many people to be sure he was following me. If he was, he was only one. I walked to a pier, and out to the end. I looked at the black river with its ice floes, and across to the walls of New Jersey. I sensed him behind me, turned.
The gray herringbone coat had fooled me. Hands in his pockets, he walked toward me, and I recognized the boyish face: Harold Wood. At the end of the pier, he looked down at the river.
“Have you seen her?” he said. “Diana, I mean?”
“No,” I said.
“She hasn’t come home. Can I hire you?”
“To do what?”
“I lied to you last night. I’m not sure where she is, or what she’s doing.”
“She’s not in Philadelphia on business with Dunlap?”
“Maybe she is.” He sat on a low piling. “Dunlap likes his PR assistant with him, but we both know she’s decoration. We laugh about it. She’s done it before-meetings, parties, dinners. Tuesday and yesterday she called me from Philly, the conference was still going. She said she was in Philly, anyway. Maybe she is with Dunlap, and maybe it is just business.”
“But you don’t think so?”
“I guess I’ve known something was wrong for months.” His voice was miserable. “I’ve never done this before. Suspicious, a detective. I guess you see it happen all the time.”
Miserable over her, Diana, and over me. Sure he was right, and miserable over what she was doing to him. Sure he was wrong, and miserable for suspecting her.
“All the time,” I said, cynical. I softened it. “But I get all the bad side.”
“It must be discouraging for you.”
What do you say to that? In my trade you get used to the bums and shysters, the cheats and hustlers, the greedy and the cruel. But I never get used to the nice ones. They try to smile, and look around as if wondering what they’re doing talking to me. It can’t be happening, some mistake.
“I can pay, I think,” he said. “I just have to know.”
If Mia Morgan hadn’t fired me, I could have said I had a client. But maybe it was better for him to know. Knowledge is supposed to make you free. Sometimes I think it only makes you know that no one is free, part of a capricious, arbitrary world. Victims of the way the ball bounces, no one’s fault, like Marty and me. Then, maybe to know that, accept it, is freedom.
“I get twenty-five a day,” I said. So much for cynicism.
He nodded, not even aware of the cut rate. “It’s not so much her. I won’t stand in her way. It’s me, sort of my dream. My woman, you know? In Korea, behind the lines and scared of anything that even moved, I used to keep going by imagining coming home to a woman like Diana, built a whole life on that. I didn’t find her so easy. Most women use you, just like the big shots do.”