"Hey Joey, that's good," said Mary. I
"Go on, Doc."
"Well he's looking down at this young man he's just killed and gets an idea: if he removes the kid's fingers the police will automatically assume- at least for a while- that the kid did it.
This gives him an open field for an end run."
Joe sipped his vino rosso meditatively.
"Shit!" he said, and jumped for the phone. He punched in a familiar number with lightning speed. He used his drill-sergeant tone of voice, telling headquarters to check all clinics and emergency wards in New England for treatment to amputated fingers.
"Everything from Providence to Portland," he growled, "and let me know at this number."
Still grumbling, he returned to the veal, which he dipped in the batter and then in the seasoned bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. Then he set them on a rack to set, and helped Mary and me dip the eggplant slices in egg and Hour. We began frying them.
"You're right about one thing," he said over the sizzling skillet. "The corpse with the missing fingers fooled us enough so we didn't put the hospital call out. Damn! Gonna have my ass handed to me Monday morning-"
"But Joey, it wasn't even your day to work-"
"A good cop's always on duty, Mare. Hell, if I'd just come out here and loafed around… Nah, we did the right thing. We just got a little tripped up by a clever ruse. Actually, it's s.o.p. to do the clinic check. Maybe somebody did it already and I wasn't told."
With the veal and the eggplant slices lightly browned in the olive oil, Joe now stacked them alternately, with thin layers of Parmesan sprinkled between each piece, in a baking dish. There were four big stacks in the dish when he was finished. He covered them with more cheese and then lots of tomato sauce. He put it in a very hot oven to bake for twenty minutes.
When it was ready we lit into it like a pack of orcae. we needed an extra bottle of wine because in tasting it we had killed the first one. And the second was gone in a twinkling. The third took longer. The Krups machine whirred and whined, and shot out cup after cup of cappucino. We sat in the living room sipping it and eating ice cream. After that Mary took us on a tour of her atelier, showing us all the latest pots and standing sculpture she'd made. The dogs were with us the whole time, wagging around and whining. Then the phone rang again and Joe went to answer it. He came back saying it was Tom Costello on the line for me.
"And he sounds mad. Without his teeth he also sounds like a fairy," said Joe.
Tom was mad. I explained I was on the track of the bridge and hoped to have it to him shortly.
"Well leth hope tho! I'm thick of thounding like a goddamn panthy
…'Would you buy thtockth or bondth from thomeone who thounded like thith?"
"No, I would not-"
"I'll thue."' he promised, and hung up. I joined Mary and Joe. Joe was yawning.
I stared at my watch again, this time with some newfound distrust. Joe saw me staring at it.
"Any other fancy things that watch can do?" he asked.
"Glad you asked. Actually, I forgot one of the most important things of alclass="underline" the para-drop function."
"What the hell is the para-drop function? As if I can escape finding out."
"For paratroopers doing delayed-opening jumps. Let's say you're a commando ten thousand feet up in a transport plane over El Salvador. Okay. You want to pull your chute at exactly fifteen hundred, not before, to maximize speed and concealment. Okay. You set the outer ring for ten thousand… your rate of fall, and the altitude your chute should open at. Then when the jump light goes green, just before you leap out the door, you-"
"Goodnight, Doc. Night, Mare," he said, kissing her. He shuffled toward the stairs. "Uh, Doc? Happy landings."
"Hey wait a sec, Joe. There you are, see, with all this combat gear on, and the ground's rushing up to you at a hundred forty per.. . you've got to know when… James0e?"
"He went up, Charlie."
"Oh."
She came over and sat down next to me.
"Was that watch expensive, Charlie?"
"Kind of."
She undid the black band and removed it, hefted it.
"It's really heavy. You don't really use all these things do you?"
"Well not yet. But-"
"Whatever happened to that nice Omega I bought you?"
"Upstairs in the drawer with the rest. Honey, it's a nice watch. But it doesn't have… you know-"
"The gadgets?"
She read the tiny words on the instrument's face.
"Blackwatch Chronograph Adventurer. Adventurer? Adventurer, Charlie?"
"Can I help it if that's what they call it? You've got to admit it's handsome."
"I don't know about you sometimes, Charlie. The handgun shooting, the karate lessons from Liatis Roantis… then there's the motorcycle. And now this."
I thought about it for a moment.
"Well, next to the other things it's pretty innocent."
"You know, for most people having a nice house, a good family and friends, a good career in medicine, plenty of money… is enough. Hell Charlie, it's more than enough. I mean, you've got everything."
I stared at the wall, looking at nothing, like a character in a Hemingway story.
"I know. That's my problem."
She shook her head sadly and clicked her tongue at me in a quiet scold.
"I just don't understand I guess. Why can't you be content, like Joe?"
"Like Joe! Joe's miserable half the time. The other half he's desperate. How would you, like to go around nailing psychopaths? How would you like to have hardly a month go by without mopping up some poor battered teenage hooker from under a railroad bridge? That's what he did last Christmas Day, remember?"
She lowered her head and nodded slowly.
"And think of his previous incarnation. A priest! You've gotta be kidding-"
"He was so good at that. I don't see why-"
"He became a cop? He had to, don't you remember? He kept hitting those city punks in the kisser. He kept kicking ass, which is the only realistic way to deal with the situation, and the bishop didn't like it. Don't tell me how happy Joe is."
"I just don't see why you seem to need all these… adult toys, Charlie."
"I guess it's because I think we need to have adventures. When you strip off all the icing and poetry, Mary, life is a pretty grim enterprise. Grim and brief, to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes. And you better get in a few licks while you can. Otherwise you wind up spending your life reading The New Yorker, listening to your stereo and worrying about the IRS. And then you're in the ground for keeps."
We turned the lights out and went upstairs with our arms around each other.
How could I explain to her the desperate ache in the breasts of middle-aged men? Our fanatical devotion to the world of sports and our adoration of its heroes? Is it the heroes or their lives? The license for violence, the strength and endurance, danger and courage… all the elemental things so sadly missing in a world filled with glass-and-steel buildings, air conditioning, and Muzak? Why do we secretly yearn to follow the guy with the mustache and cowboy hat who spends his life roping mustangs, chasing horses that charge through clouds of red range dust? The guy we all want to be but can't, and so we smoke his cigarette or drink his beer instead?
How to explain this longing?
"I just think we need to have adventures," I repeated.
She sighed.
"Well the last adventure you had almost got you killed. You weren't the same for months afterward."
"Still not. But I'm not sorry it happened."
In the bedroom I stared at the watch in my hand, then put it into the bureau drawer. I picked up the Omega. Octagonal face, Roman numerals, gold case- it was almost as handsome as the watch worn by the murder victim. A perfect watch for a successful suburbanite. A bit boring perhaps, but we mustn't quibble…