She’d stared with revulsion at the fused bottle of gasoline. Crobey had said, “When the crossbow was introduced in the twelfth century the Pope called it an inhuman engine of destruction and banned its use.”
“If I were still a college sophomore I might find that world-weary cynicism of, yours dramatically mysterious. Right now I’m not too thrilled by it.”
“Cynicism,” he’d replied, “is idealism corrupted by experience, like Machiavelli said. Remember one thing: You haven’t been there. I have. Listen to old Harry once in a while.”
Now, watching him peer back into the darkness with his chin on his forearm, she remembered the quiet tolerant tone he’d used.
He faced front and let the brake out and put the vehicle forward at a crawl, hunching over the wheel to peer through the night. Carole couldn’t see a thing. Branches slapped the truck, coming out of nowhere; the suspension bucked and pitched as roots and rocks went under the wheels. But Crobey seemed to know where he was going. Finally he switched on the headlights. When she looked behind she saw nothing in the red taillights’ glow except forest — the road was out of sight back there.
After a while they reached the yard of Santana’s farm and Crobey parked the truck behind the house; they went inside and Santana, dressed as if he planned to go somewhere — a shabby seersucker jacket, a white shirt frayed at the collar — stood up in deference to Carole’s presence. He had an open can of beer in his fist: He looked, she thought, rather like a can of beer himself — stubby, squat, cylindrical.
Santana’s face was animated. He began to speak in something approximating English but neither of them understood it and Santana lapsed into Spanish. Crobey snapped a few monosyllabic questions at him, got answers and translated for her:
“He thinks he’s got a line on Rodriguez’s family.”
“Where?”
“Here. Rio Piedras.”
Santana spoke again, with gestures, and Crobey said, “All right, but keep your head down. Don’t show yourself.”
An adventurously brash grin and Santana was gone, the screen door slapping shut behind him.
“Where’s he going?”
“To stake out the house.”
“He knows the house?”
“Sure. Probably the one where Rodriguez spent the night when Glenn’s cop spotted him.”
“Then why send Santana? Let’s question them ourselves.” She was already turning toward the door.
“Calm down, ducks. We’d get nowhere.”
“What?”
“Elementary security — if you’ve gone to ground you don’t tell civilians where you are. Not even your own wife. We could torture the children and force the wife to talk but she wouldn’t be able to tell us what she doesn’t know, would she? All we’d do is expose ourselves.” Crobey tossed his jacket onto the couch. “If Rodriguez turns up Santana will spot him. I kind of doubt he’ll turn up. He knows people are looking for him.”
She was shocked. “Don’t you even want to know—”
“Know what? What his wife and kiddies look like? I don’t care all that much, ducks. Go on — go to bed. You’ve got to learn how to wait things out.”
She lowered herself into one of Santana’s ruined chairs. “How did he find them?”
“Mostly on the telephone. He hunted down some of the old-timers from the days we all worked training fields in Alabama. You know how it goes. You dig up one veteran and he gives you the number of two others. It’s like a chain letter. The first nineteen don’t know a thing but number twenty happened to bump into Rodriguez’s wife in a supermarket or whatever. It’s harder to disappear than most people think it is. Especially if you’ve got reasons to stay around an island where people know you. If Rodriguez had really wanted to evaporate he’d have had to move to Africa or the Philippines. But he didn’t because he’s a soldier, of sorts, and this is where his army is.”
“And Santana was able to make this contact while all Glenn Anders’ minions couldn’t?”
“In the first place I kind of get the feeling Glenn’s minions have dried up on him. I don’t think he’s got police co-operation any longer. If he did he wouldn’t be so eager to have our help. And in the second place Glenn didn’t know all those people the way Santana did. Santana was one of them. He knew who to ask.”
She was still tracking Anders. “Why wouldn’t he have police co-operation?”
“My guess is they’ve told him to soft-pedal the investigation.”
She tipped her head back onto the top of the chair and closed her eyes. She’d been running on her nerve ends too long; exhaustion was overtaking her.
Crobey said, “Maybe tomorrow we’ll show ourselves again and let them follow us around a while. Maybe we can pull them in and ask them questions.”
She opened her eyes. He stood in the middle of the room looking down at her, lamplight reflecting frostily off the surface of his eyes. She said, “We? Us?”
“You wanted to be dealt in, didn’t you?”
It made her sit up. “You’ve changed your tune.”
“Have I?” He turned away. “Go on to bed, ducks.”
He stood with his back to her; his spine seemed rigid — defensive; but against what?
Too tired to resist his suggestion, she went into her cell — she thought of it as a celclass="underline" the cot, plaster flaking off the wall. There was no shade at the window; she took one or two things out of her case and then switched off the light before undressing. A narrow rind of moon had come out, throwing a bit of light through the glass, and for a while she stood taut in tawny underwear looking up toward the mountain peak. It was quite clearly silhouetted against the stars.
The floor creaked; she turned; and knuckles rapped her door.
“Yes?”
She watched the knob turn. She could have spoken; she didn’t. A bit of faint illumination bounced around corners from the kitchen and outlined Crobey when the door came open. He didn’t advance, he only stood there.
“I sort of was wondering what you’d look like without your clothes.” His voice had gone raspy.
Almost with relief she stirred, with a slow, carnal smile. “Ah Crobey,” she murmured, “you’ve got twenty-four hours to get out of my bedroom.”
He flipped the door shut with his heel. His hands lifted to her shoulders and dropped upon them. He stood at arm’s length. His hands seemed weightless. “You’re vibrating.”
“I’m terrified.”
“Tell me to leave. I’ll go.”
With hesitant fascination she reached up, palms against his grizzled cheeks. Crobey had a face like a leather coat, she thought; the kind that looked better the more battered it got. He turned his lips into her palm, kissing her hand; everything seemed to move at sixty-four-frame slow motion. She felt the pound of a pulse in her throat and an odd vertigo — her head thrown back to look into his eyes, she felt as if he were bearing down on her like an avalanche. She cried out; but what emerged from her lips was only breath. Then he tugged her forward.
His face loomed an inch from her own. His eyes had gone wide and the preposterous idea struck her that he was as intimidated as she was — that the monumental self-confidence was all facade.
Astonishingly tender, he bore her down.
Sex, to Carole, was always followed by feelings of starvation. She came back from the kitchen with a plate of cheese and half-crumbled crackers. Crobey was crowded far over on the edge of the narrow cot, hands under the back of his head, long hard body full-length. She almost tripped over the heaped tangle of his clothes where he’d left them on the floor. Even in the faint light she could see how his eyes explored her body when she sat down on the cot and set the plate beside her and began to nibble.