“That’s right,” Drexel said. “A man who is insane, a man who somehow found out we were the ones who robbed that armored car in Granite City, a man who’s decided in his twisted mind that we’re directly responsible for a lot of things that happened to him as a result of the holdup. A man like Leo Helgerman.”
“Who?” Kilduff asked.
“Helgerman, the goddamned Mannerling guard Jim hit when he blew his cool in that parking lot.”
“Oh Christ!” Conradin said. He poured his snifter full again and drank it off. He had begun to tremble noticeably. His face blanched.
Kilduff said, “Larry, you’re dreaming!”
“The hell I am,” Drexel said vehemently. “He was partially paralyzed with spinal damage for a while, wasn’t he? It was in the papers how bitter he was, how badly he wanted all of us caught.”
“That’s a natural reaction, after what happened.”
“Maybe it turned into an unnatural vendetta.”
Kilduff stared at him incredulously. “Are you saying Helgerman’s mind snapped and he’s become some kind of avenging angel who’s killing us off one by one eleven years later? Larry, you can’t expect us to accept an incredible fantasy like that.”
“Goddamn it, stranger things have happened.”
“So have stranger coincidences than three of us dying by accident in the same month.”
“Look, do you think I like the idea? It scares the hell out of me. But there’s the possibility that I’m right, and you’d better face up to it.”
Conradin came back to the couch with the snifter full again. He sat down and stared at the dark liquid as if it held some kind of hypnotic fascination for him. But Kilduff felt a subtle release of tension; all the melodrama on the phone and all the cold, frightened sweating of the afternoon and early evening had been unnecessary. The pressure in his chest had begun to abate. He said, “How could Helgerman have found out we were the ones? It’s been eleven years, Larry, eleven years. The entire state of Illinois hasn’t been able to find out in that time.”
“I don’t have any answers,” Drexel said. “I’m not psychic. I’m just telling you the way it is.”
“Well, all right. Suppose you’re right. Just suppose you are. What do you think we ought to do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We can’t go to the police,” Kilduff said. “That’s obvious. And I’m not going to run on the strength of a monstrous improbability. I wouldn’t know how to run anyway.”
“You think we ought to just sit around and wait, is that it?” Drexel asked. “Until another one of us dies in an ‘accident’?”
“What the hell else is there for us to do?” Kilduff said. “We haven’t got any concrete reason to panic, no proof that the others died except by accident, no proof that Helgerman is insane and a murderer, or, for Christ’s sake, that he’s even still alive.”
“Then we’ve got to find out,” Drexel said. “One way or another.”
“How?” Kilduff asked. “Larry, we’re three guys pushing thirty-five who somehow managed to pull off a major crime when we were little more than kids. We’re no more experienced now than we were then; if anything, we’re less equipped today—we haven’t got that crazy, irrational, what-the-screw disregard for what happens tomorrow or next week or next month. Do you expect us to carry a .45 automatic in a shoulder holster like some Spillane character, peering furtively into shadows and asking veiled questions in dingy bars?”
Drexel put his hands flat on his knees, his cold eyes darkly flashing. “That’s a nice speech, Steve,” he said tonelessly.
“Listen,” Kilduff said, “all I’m trying to say is that I can’t accept the idea that Helgerman is going around picking us off one by one because we robbed an armored car eleven years ago and he ended up on disability. If you believe it, then you can do what you want.”
“But you’re not going to do anything.”
“No,” Kilduff said. “I’m not.”
Without looking at him, Drexel said to Conradin, “And what about you, Jim? Is that your position, too?”
“I don’t know,” Conradin answered slowly. “I don’t know what my position is.”
“All right, then,” Drexel said. Abruptly, he got on his feet. “You’re both damned fools, curled up in your secure, complacent little worlds like a couple of foetuses and you think you’re inviolate, you think nothing out of the past can reach you any more. Well, all right. I don’t much care what happens to either one of you, but I care about my own neck and I’m going to do something.” He took two small white business cards from the inside pocket of his jacket and threw them on the coffee table. “If you decide to face reality, you can reach me at either of the numbers on those cards.”
Without waiting for either of the others to say anything, he crossed to the door and went out, slamming it shut behind him.
Kilduff and Conradin sat in unbroken silence for several moments, a pair of sculpted figures in some impressionistic museum exhibit. At length, Kilduff said quietly, “It’s impossible. You know that, too, don’t you, Jim? The whole idea of it is inconceivable.”
Conradin gave a slow, tremulous sigh. “Is it?” he asked. “Is it really, Steve? Or are we too afraid to admit the chance of it to ourselves, like Drexel said? Are we too afraid that we wouldn’t be able to cope with it if it were somehow true?”
“No,” Kilduff said emphatically.
Conradin picked up one of the white cards from the coffee table and put it into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. “I’d better be going now.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“Nothing,” Conradin answered. He started toward the door, and Kilduff stood and followed him there. “Except maybe say a prayer that Drexel is wrong and you’re right.”
“I’m right,” Kilduff said.
“I hope to God you are.”
“We don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Don’t we?” Conradin asked, opening the door.
“No, nothing.”
“Except maybe ourselves,” Conradin said. “Good night, Steve.” And he was gone.
Except maybe ourselves.
Kilduff shut the door and returned to the living room and sat in the chair again, he seemed to be doing a lot of sitting in that chair. He sat there and stared at nothing and thought about Drexel and what he had said, and Conradin and what he had said, and about Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp lying in cold dark boxes beneath the cold dark earth; he thought about them for a long, long time ...
... And Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom, nude and unashamed, an alabaster naiad haloed in sweet innocence, diminutive and Elysian and proud in the so very pale honeymoon-shine drifting in through the minute apertures in the bamboo blinds. She came to him with her arms held wide and her mouth scrubbed free of rouge, her eyes lidded with unaffected, loving sensuality, her breasts small-white and tense, the nipples and aureoles fine exquisite black diamonds, the melanoid triangle of her pubic hair a swath of the softest velvet demurely hiding the pure still waters beneath. She came to him with his name on her lips and lay beside him on the conjugal bed, breathing warm honey against his neck, warm honey, and there was the taste of her, feel of her, an aching of acute pleasure in his genitals. He was moving within her now—strange, there seemed to have been no virginal obstruction, no innocence, strange. And then he was saying her name over and over, “Andreal Andrea! Andrea!” moving faster and faster and faster but she began to dissolve beside him, no no no, began to fade into a nebulous shadow, no no, and then she was gone, no, gone, and he was alone again, alone not in the tiny cottage bedroom with its honeymoon-shine but alone in a dank, fetid cave, so very dark, and the smell of millenniums of decay was in his nostrils. He shrank into a corner and felt the viscid slime of subterranean stone against his nude body, and then from across that malefic cavern there came a movement, a slithering of something unimaginable, a foul sucking, crawling sound, and he shrank deeper into the corner, terrified, seeing a fulvous pinpoint of light appear before him, gradually expanding, illuminating a shape within the hazy glow, a shape which became a faceless, monstrous thing of such unspeakable horror that he opened his mouth and began to scream with his very soul, for the nameless faceless thing was coming nearer, coming closer, reaching for him with an extremity that dripped putrefaction . . .