“Are you all right, sir?” the nurse asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a minute.”
She watched me uncertainly as I fought down the nausea and the laboredness of my breathing. When I took a couple of steps to where a pay phone with the receiver placed carefully on its lower shelf sat on the adjacent wall, she seemed satisfied that I was not going to keel over on her and moved away.
I caught up the receiver and said hello.
A familiar voice said, very sourly, “Well, you must be in pretty good shape if they let you come to the phone. You goddamn dagos have hide six inches thick.”
Eberhardt. I smiled a little. “Thanks for your touching concern, jewboy,” I said. The racial jibes were an old thing between us, but they were nothing more than an expression of warmth, of understanding, of comradeship; we had known each other when it was fashionable for the masses to hate and deride the Jews and the Italians along with the other minorities, and we had taken plenty of abuse in our time. We had lived with it, and weathered it, and we had earned the right to make a small joke of it between us. We could relax with our heritage at long last, and God, how nice that was! Maybe there would be a day when this same ease would supplant the bristling hatred extant in some of the other minorities today, and an understanding shrug would replace the stiffened back and the defiantly jutting chin. It would be a fine day if it came.
I said, “How did you hear about it, Eb?”
“I came on at four today,” he said, “and there it was on my desk. I thought somebody was pulling a gag at first.”
“It’s no gag, brother.”
“Yeah. How you feeling?”
“Not too bad.”
“When they letting you out?”
“Tonight, maybe.”
“Jesus,” he said, “twenty-seven stitches in the belly,” and his voice had gotten softer. He was not nearly as hard or as confirmed a cynic as he liked you to believe; it was a facade, the same way Donleavy’s sleepy appearance was a facade. Eberhardt was a good man, a good cop, a good friend; I had been the best man at his wedding twenty-one years ago, and I was his oldest daughter’s godfather. I knew that the report on what had happened to me had affected him considerably more than he was letting on.
He said, “Look, as soon as I heard about it and checked with the hospital, I called up Erika and told her. I knew damned well you wouldn’t have, and I figured it was better coming from me than from the newspapers.”
“I hope you didn’t alarm her, Eb.”
“How do you sugar-coat a knife in the guts?”
I took a breath. “What did she say?”
“She said she was leaving right away to come down there,” Eberhardt said. “She was scared and she was worried, what did you expect?”
“Just that, I guess.”
“I’d come down myself if I wasn’t on duty.”
“I can get along without it.”
“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment; then: “Listen, take it easy, will you?”
“Don’t worry.”
He said, “Some chance, a big tough private-eye guy like you,” and hung up very gently in my ear.
When I returned to my room, the nervously energetic doctor was waiting for me. He examined my wound, supervised the changing of the dressing, and pronounced me fit to go home-after delivering a list of instructions as to what I could or could not do, eat, and subject myself to.
I asked one of the nurses for the afternoon newspapers, and she brought me copies of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Mateo Times. The pictures of Lockridge, and the boy in his military uniform, were spread across the front page of both, and the accompanying stories under seventeen-point heads were sketchy and suffered from a lack of salient facts. My name was mentioned twice in the Examiner, three times in the Times, misspelled once in the latter; I was purported to have been wounded, though not seriously, during the delivery of the ransom money, but my whereabouts were not divulged. I could imagine the number of reporter-placed calls my answering service had gotten in San Francisco, and I wished that the District Attorney’s Office had not given out my name at all.
I got out of bed, carefully, because I had developed a restlessness, and went over to the window. I was standing there, watching vacillating threads of gold and burnished brass and coralline interweave on the clear western horizon to fashion the intricate symmetry of an autumn sunset, when Erika arrived at a quarter to six.
She was all in pink-pink scoop-necked shift, pink square-heeled shoes, pink coat with big leather buttons, pink handbag, her hair done up with a pink velvet ribbon in it. She looked twenty-seven instead of thirty-seven. She looked very good.
She came over to me and I kissed her and held her shoulders. Her eyes were deep pools of translucent water, and in them I could read a curious mixture of emotions, some I wanted, some I did not.
“Eberhardt called me,” she said. “I had to hear it from him.”
“I didn’t want to worry you, Erika.”
“That’s very considerate of you.”
“Honey, please, it’s not that serious …”
“You were almost killed, that’s not serious?”
“But I wasn’t killed,” I said. “I’m alive, I’m going to be all right. Isn’t that the important thing?”
Her eyes probed mine for a long moment, and then her face softened and she lifted her arms and cupped my face between her palms. “Yes, yes, that’s the important thing. Oh God, old bear, it makes me sick inside just to think about you being cut that way, with a knife!” I could feel her shoulders trembling beneath my hands, but she did not cry; Erika had ceased shedding tears in response to a crisis a long time ago.
I drew a long breath, holding her, and then I noticed that in her left hand was a large paper bag with the name of some clothing store on it. I said lightly, “Hey, what’d you bring me?”
“I stopped to buy you some clothes. Eberhardt said yours were … ruined and you needed something to get home in …”
“Lord, you’re a wonder.”
“Sure.”
I took the bag gently out of her hand and kissed her again and said, “It’s time I got out of here, honey. Let’s go home.”
Twenty minutes later I was dressed in a white shirt and a pair of flannel slacks and a poplin jacket, checking out at the reception desk. They gave me a statement there, and the amount on it seemed exorbitant at first-but I did not say anything about it; perhaps it wasn’t really so much, after all, for my life. The doctor was there with more instructions, and I promised him that I would see a local physician in San Francisco within the next couple of days to have the dressing changed and healing progress on the wound checked. We shook hands, solemnly, like two church deacons at a Sunday social, and then Erika and I went out into the cool night air.
She had a three-year-old beige Valiant, and she drove it like an old lady in an Essex: body rigidly erect, both hands locked on the wheel, the speedometer needle frozen at fifty-five once we got onto Bayshore North at San Bruno Avenue. She made me nervous watching her, and I stared out through the windshield instead, sitting low on the seat with my legs splayed out to ease the constriction in my stomach.
I made a couple of attempts at conversation, but Erika wasn’t having any. She had her mouth pulled tight at the corners, and I knew that she was brooding and why she was brooding, and I thought that it was a good thing she wanted silence. I kept on staring out the windshield, trying to decide what I was going to do about Martinetti’s offer.
I went over the pros and cons of it a half dozen times, and resolved nothing at all. I knew what I ought to do, and that was to tell Martinetti no when he called, to just wash my hands of the whole thing. And yet, the prospect of doing that made me feel edgy and impotent. I was not a quitter, and to step out of the affair now made me just that; as long as I did not violate any laws, or get in anybody’s hair, I had something of an obligation to myself to stay with it until it was concluded, one way or another.