In fact, she mostly thought of them as the Three Stooges, bulky men hunched in their little tan Taurus. When the siege started—she supposed it had to be called a siege, however ineffective—they’d all worn plaid shirts, like lumberjacks on holiday, but as the weather had warmed they’d switched to T-shirts with words on them. She’d never been able to study those shirts, but she supposed most of the words were about beer.
The stop sign, that must be it, where she’d lost them. She’d had to wait for that gasoline truck to go by, but then she’d managed to dash across the intersection before that tasteless stretch limousine had arrived, and what was that thing doing in this neck of the woods?
It must have been the limousine that had made them lose her. Lord knows how long a thing like that would take to cross an intersection, so by the time the Three Stooges could once again take up the chase, their quarry was gone. What a shame.
Well, she’d been out and about long enough for today, anyway, so why not go back along the same route, have another look at the intersection? Wouldn’t it be funny if the Stooges were still there, stuck, lost, unable to decide which way to turn? She could sail on by, pretend not to notice them, but give them plenty of time to get back into position in her train. Of course they wouldn’t be there, but it was fun to think of them that way, and why not drive back past there in any case?
She knew all these roads around here by now, knew them as well as she’d once known Madison Avenue, so she didn’t have to U-turn. A left here, and another left farther on, and so forth. The next thing you knew, she’d be at the intersection, and the next thing you knew, she’d be home again, home again, jiggety jig.
Home. Not such fun, these days. If only Monroe didn’t have those travel restrictions on him, there were so many lively places they could go. Nowhere among old friends, of course, but still. Monroe could grow a beard, call himself something else. Almost anything else. Monroe Hall was a stupid name, anyway; Alicia had always thought it made him sound like a private school dormitory.
Of course, she could go if she wanted, and anywhere she wanted. She could even go among their friends, who would sympathize with her, and press her for gossip, and offer their tin sympathy, and praise her for having left the monster, but she didn’t want to go by herself. She didn’t want to leave Monroe, unfortunately.
Yes, that was it. She loved Monroe, unfortunately. Also, he’d covered for her, which had been very good of him. Back in the heady days of their massive rip-off of SomniTech she had been a willing, even eager, co-conspirator, using her remembered expertise from the world of advertising to help them gloss, shift attention, misdirect. Company reports, or at least the most fictitious ones, had been mostly written by her.
And yet, through all his subsequent travail, Monroe had never once pointed a finger in her direction. Yes, it was true that bringing her down wouldn’t have been of any help to him, but apparently this was one instance where misery did not love company, and Monroe had faced the music all alone.
For that, by itself, he deserved to have her stand by him. But even without that, the fact was, she loved him. She knew everything that was wrong with him, she knew he was a selfish, infantile, coldhearted monster, because, with absolute openness, he had let her see to the depths of his black heart. But she also knew that she was the one spot of color he was able to see in the world outside himself.
What love he contained, Monroe had given to Alicia. He had made her rich and happy. They were still rich, and she could hope that some day they would once again be happy. And out of the compound, Lord, please.
The intersection. Coming to it from the other direction, slowing for the stop sign, she was startled to see that the Taurus was parked just off the road over there. Good heavens, were they that lost?
Behind the Taurus was another vehicle, a black Lincoln Navigator, like the bigger fish behind the smaller fish, mouth open to eat it. That car she’d never seen before.
There was no other traffic. Slowly she drove across the intersection, frankly staring at the Taurus, and was further surprised to see it was empty. Its driver’s window was open.
The Navigator was occupied, by a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel, reading a copy of Harper’s. He didn’t look up when Alicia drove by.
There was something odd about all that. Driving on, frowning at her mirror, Alicia watched the empty Taurus and the chauffeured Navigator recede, then disappear around a bend in the road.
What was that all about?
8
SEATED BESIDE HIS PARTNER Os in the forward seat of the stretch, just behind the driver beyond his soundproof partition, Mark Sterling surveyed the trio from the Taurus, now arrayed across the forward-facing rear seat as though they really should be doing see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil. They were not an inspiring lot. Years of factory jobs interspersed with bowling had left them soft and paunchy, with blurred round faces. Their T-shirts were walking billboards for Miller Lite, Bud, and the Philadelphia Eagles football team. They did not, at first blush, look like anything a truly serious conspirator would want in his cabal.
Well, this had been Mark’s idea to begin with, Os being on the fence vis-à-vis the proposal, leaning toward the negative. So now was the moment of truth, the plunge, the spin of the wheel.
“I should begin,” Mark said, smiling in his clubby fashion at the trio, hoping to put them a bit more at their ease, since at the moment they couldn’t have looked less at their ease had they been seated in a tumbrel surrounded by people speaking French. “We should introduce ourselves,” he said, then gestured gracefully at Meadle, saying, “Well, Buddy, we’ve already introduced you. It is Buddy, isn’t it? You don’t use Alfred much?”
“Not much,” Meadle admitted. Seated in the middle—hear-no-evil—he was blinking a lot.
Time to move the process along. “Well, I’m Mark Sterling, Mark to my friends, of whom I hope to soon count yourselves, and this is Osbourne Faulk, known as Os to friend and foe alike.”
“Mr. Os to foe,” Os said.
“Yes, of course,” Mark agreed, bouncing his negotiator’s smile off Os’s prominent cheekbone. “If you’d like to introduce your friends, Buddy,” he went on, and spread his hands in a welcoming way, “even if only by nickname at this moment, it would certainly help us to move forward.”
“I’m Mac,” said the fellow on the left: see-no-evil, of course.
Buddy turned to look at the profile of his other friend, who now looked like a man in a swarm of gnats, intolerably pestered yet unwilling to open his mouth to complain. Buddy said, “You want me to innerduce you?”
“I don’t know what this is all about,” cried speak-no-evil. “What are we doing here?”
“Introducing ourselves, at the moment,” Mark told him, pleasantly enough. “What we are doing here in a larger sense, however, if I take that to be your question, I believe we have all been brought to this corner of the world by a desire for revenge against one Monroe Hall.”
Mac gave him a skeptical look. “You didn’t work for Hall.”