The shapes divided again, after a couple of minutes, and Proxmire’s voice said, “We’d better be getting back, honey, before we’re missed. Are you all right now?”
“Yes.”
“Everything will work out, believe me. Try to be brave.”
“I’ll try.”
I listened to their footfalls moving away, not watching them, not moving. I gave them five minutes to get back inside the house, and then I got up slowly and walked back along the creek bed to a spot opposite the outdoor bar. I climbed up the bank and went across the grass and onto the terrace and inside through the sliding glass door at the side of the bay window.
There was no one in the living room; maybe she’d gone upstairs to lie down, and he’d gone with her. It was just as well, because I did not want to have to look at either of them. I sat down on the couch and poured some cold coffee into my cup and balanced the saucer on my knee. My wristwatch said that it was a quarter past seven. I had two hours yet; it was going to be more like two days. I wanted nothing so much as I wanted to be finished with this whole thing.
A half-hour went by, dragging chains. I got up finally and stepped to where a console color television sat at an angle against the near wall, and turned it on just to have some sound, some movement. When Proxmire put in an appearance ten minutes later, I was watching a guy in an astronaut suit exhibit the patience of Job with a five-year-old kid who kept demanding another cartoon.
He looked at me as if I were committing an unnatural sin. “For Christ’s sake, do you have to have that thing on now?”
“Would you rather I locked myself in the coat closet until it’s time to leave?”
“Listen, you don’t have to get snotty.”
“No,” I said, “I guess I don’t.”
“We’re all on edge around here, you know,” he said, and went over on the other side of the planter wall and stared at the empty fireplace.
Another half-hour crawled away, and then it was eight-thirty. I lit a cigarette and coughed my way through it and went outside again for more air. I walked around. I sat by the pool. I came back into the living room and sat on the couch some more. Nine o’clock.
I gave it another five minutes; then I went out through the entrance hall and down the side hallway and knocked on the study doors. Martinetti’s voice said to come in, and I opened one of the doors and walked inside.
Martinetti was standing at the bar, but not drinking, and Channing was sitting on the couch; they looked like a couple of old, old men in the pale light from the lamp on the desk-perhaps for different reasons. The suitcase was on the desk, too.
I said, “I think it’s about time I was going.”
Martinetti nodded and rubbed wearily at his haunted eyes. “I was going to give you another ten minutes, but maybe it’s better if you leave a little early.”
“Maybe so.” I had trouble meeting his gaze, after what I had overheard by the creek.
“You know exactly what you are supposed to do?”
I said I knew.
He nodded again. “I’m very grateful to you,” he said. “For being here today and for doing this tonight.”
“Sure,” I said.
Martinetti took the suitcase off the desk and started toward the door. Channing got to his feet wordlessly, and we followed Martinetti out into the entrance hall. Proxmire was there, and when we stepped outside he came tagging along. We looked like a single file of grim-visaged bank examiners walking along the gravel path and through the gate and across the footbridge.
There was a street lamp about ten feet in back of my car, and it cast a pool of pale amber light on the dark, silent street. I got inside the car, and Martinetti handed me the case and I put it on the seat beside me.
He said, “Luck.”
I tried a little smile, and nodded, and made a sign with my thumb and forefinger. He stepped back and I got the car going.
When I reached the corner, I looked up at my rear-view mirror. They were all standing there on the edge of the amber pool of light, three black silhouettes against the illumination, watching me. Then I turned the corner and they were gone, and I was alone.
* * * *
7
I drove out of Hillsborough and onto El Camino Real, north. I drove slowly, both hands on the wheel, concentrating on the pavement sweeping by beneath the car’s headlights and letting the rest of my mind lie fallow.
Traffic was heavy, as it has a tendency to be in the evenings, through Burlingame and Millbrae; when I reached San Bruno, it thinned out considerably and I could make a little better time. At Sneath Lane, I turned left and followed it past the Golden Gate National Cemetery and across Junipero Serra Boulevard, and then across Skyline, and finally into the hills well south of Riverside Park.
Skyline seemed to be the dividing line between a bright, cold, clear sky and the restless tendrils of blanketing fog that drifted in above Pacifica from the ocean. The fog was thick and wet in the hills, and gave an eerie, disembodied quality to the lights of the Peninsula behind and below me. I put on my windshield wipers after a while and closed the wing window; the wind was sharp and icy up there, and the penetrating dampness of the sea mist had sucked away all the warmth inside the car in a matter of a few seconds. I switched the heater on to the High position. Thick, stale air rushed through the floor and dash vents, but it seemed still to be cold, as if the moistness had somehow gotten permanently into the upholstery and the head-liner.
I found Old Southbridge Road without difficulty, and the narrow dirt road leading off it. I slowed there, just as I made the turn, and pulled off to the side and stared down as much of the road as I could see in the swirling, enveloping grayness. There were trees scattered on both sides-oak and bay and eucalyptus-and they had a strange, ethereal quality, like nightmarish illustrations in a book by Poe. There were not many homes in this particular area, and consequently, few lights and scarcely any sound at all except for the faint, wet slithering of the fog through the branches of the trees.
I looked at my watch, and it was ten minutes to ten. Okay. I checked the odometer, and then pulled out onto the road again and drove along exactly one mile. The fog swallowed the road behind me, and seemed to part reluctantly under the probing yellow cones of my headlight beams. The turnaround was there, on my right, a flat space beneath several bunched eucalyptus with their bark peeling off in great gray strips like dead and diseased skin. I stopped the car there and shut off the engine and the headlamps.
It was heavy dark, and I could just see the outlines of the trees on the opposite side of the road. What night sounds there were seemed muted and directionless, distorted by the thick and enshrouding fog. The luminescent dial of my wristwatch showed that it was now five minutes to ten.
I lit a cigarette, and in the flare of the match I could see my face reflected back at me in the door window; it looked pinched and apprehensive, a little old, a little tired. I shook out the match and dragged slowly on the cigarette and tried to ignore the viscid coldness which seemed to have settled between my shoulder blades.
Three minutes to ten.
I stabbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and caught up the suitcase in my right hand. All right, I thought. Here we go. I stepped out of the car and shut the door without slamming it. Cold tongues of fog licked at my face, wet and feathery, and I shivered involuntarily and hunched my shoulders inside the suit jacket. I wished I had had the sense to bring an overcoat; it was going to take me a long time to get warm again on this night.