The savings and loan man came to the ranch on two more occasions. He was stout, in his late fifties, and wore custom-made alligator-hide cowboy boots. He sat on the porch in the old rocker and looked at the mountains against the blue sky and talked about how tough times were in Texas since the oil business cratered. On each visit he mentioned the names of men connected with the savings and loan industry in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The first man subsequently drowned on a fishing trip in Honduras and the other apparently shot himself with a Luger pistol, a family heirloom his father had brought back from World War II, one evening when he was home alone.
The last time Henry Charon saw the original client he brought another man with him, introduced him, then got back into his Mercedes and drove off down the dirt road, dust swirling. The new man’s name was Tassone. From Vegas, the savings-and-loan man said.
Tassone was as lean as his chauffeur was fat. He looked over the house and grounds with a deadpan expression and made himself comfortable on the porch. “Awful quiet out here,” he observed.
Charon nodded to be sociable. He scanned the hillsides slowly, carefully.
“I hear you got a talent.”
Charon again examined the draw where the ranch road went down to the paved road. He shrugged. Tassone had his feet on the rail.
“A man with talent can make a good living,” Tassone said. When Charon made no reply, he added, “If he stays alive.”
Charon seated himself on the porch rail, one leg up, his hands on his leg. He turned his gaze to Tassone.
“If he’s smart enough,” the man in the chair said.
Charon stared at the visitor for a moment, as if he were sizing him up. Then he said, “Why don’t you take the pistol out of that holster under your jacket and put it on the floor.”
“And if I don’t?”
Charon uncoiled explosively. He drew the hunting knife from his boot with his right hand and launched himself at the man in the chair, all in the same motion. Before Tassone could move, the knife was at his throat and Charon’s face was inches from his.
“If you don’t, I’ll bury you out here.”
“What about Sweet?” Sweet was the Texas savings-and-loan man. “He knows I’m here.”
“Sweet will go in the same hole. He’ll be easy to find. He just drove about a mile down the road and stopped. He’s sitting down there now, waiting for you.”
“Reach under my coat and help yourself to the gun.”
Charon did so, then moved back to the rail. The pistol was a small automatic, a Walther, in .380 caliber. He thumbed the cartridges from the clip, jacked the shell from the chamber, then tossed the weapon back to Tassone.
With his eyes on Charon, Tassone holstered the gun. “How’d you know Sweet didn’t leave?”
“The road goes down that draw over there.” Charon jerked his head a half inch. “I was watching for dust. There wasn’t any. There’s a wide place under a cottonwood where the creek still has water in it this time of year. He’s sitting there in the shade waiting for you.”
“Maybe he’s circling around on foot to get a shot at you. Maybe he thinks you’ve outlived your usefulness.”
“Sweet isn’t stupid. I took him hunting. He knows he wouldn’t have a chance in a hundred to kill me at my game, on my own ground. Now you may have dropped off someone on your way up here, someone who’s a lot better than Sweet. So I’ve been looking. Those cattle out there on that hillside in front of the house are three-quarters wild, and they’re not edgy. Behind the house — that’s a possibility, but there’s a flock of pheasants up there. Saw ’em fly in before you drove up.”
Tassone looked carefully around him, perhaps really seeing the setting for the first time. In a moment he said, “Cities aren’t like this. Ain’t no spooky cows or cowshit or pheasants. Think you can handle that?”
“The principles are the same.”
The visitor crossed his legs and settled back into his chair. He took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “Got a little business proposition for you.” An hour later he walked down the road toward the car where Sweet was waiting.
That was the last time Charon saw Sweet, the savings-and-loan man. Three years had passed since then, busy years.
This afternoon, when the plane landed, Henry Charon joined the throng in the aisle and eased his one soft bag from the overhead bin. As usual, the stewardess at the door of the plane gave him her mindless thank-you while her eyes automatically shifted to the person behind him. Anonymous as always, Henry Charon followed the striding lawyer into the National Airport concourse.
Taking his time, his eyes in constant motion, Charon moved with the crowd, not too fast, not too slow. He avoided the cab stand in front of the terminal and started for the buses, only to change his mind when he glimpsed the train at the Metro station a hundred yards away.
He studied a posted map of the system, then bought one at a kiosk. Soon he was in a window seat on the yellow train.
The second hotel he tried had a vacant single room. Charon registered under a false name and paid cash for a four-day stay. He didn’t even have to show his false driver’s license or credit card.
With his bag in his room and the room key in his pocket, Henry Charon set forth upon the streets. He wandered along looking at everything, reading street signs and occasionally referring to a map. After an hour of strolling he found himself in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House.
Comfortable in spite of the sixty-degree temperature, he sat on a bench and watched the squirrels. One paused a few feet away and stared at him. “Sorry,” he muttered with genuine regret. “Don’t have a thing for you today.”
After a few moments he strolled toward the south edge of the block-sized park.
Four portable billboards stood on the wide sidewalk facing the White House. ANTINUCLEAR PEACE VIGIL the signs proclaimed. Two aging hippies in sandals, one male, one female, attended the billboards.
Across the eight-lane boulevard, surrounded by lush grass and a ten-foot-high, black wrought-iron fence, stood the White House, like something from a set for Gone With the Wind. The incongruity was jarring amid the stone-and-steel office buildings that stretched away in all directions.
Along the sidewalk curb were bullet-shaped concrete barricades linked together at the top by a heavy chain. Henry Charon correctly assumed they had been erected to impede truck-bomb terrorists. Similar barricades were erected around the White House gates, to his left and right, down toward the corners.
Tourists crowded the sidewalk. They pointed cameras through the black fence and photographed each other with the White House in the background. Many of the tourists, at least half, appeared to be Japanese.
On the sidewalk, parked back-in against the fence, sat a security guard on his motorcycle, a Kawasaki CSR 350, doing paperwork. Charon walked closer and examined his uniform; black trousers with a blue stripe up each leg, white shirt, the ubiquitous portable radio transceiver, nightstick, and pistol. The shoulder patch on his shirt said U.S. PARK POLICE.
Another man standing beside Charon spoke to the guard: “Whatever happened to the Harleys?”
“We got them too,” the guard responded, and didn’t raise his eyes from his report.
Charon walked on, proceeding east, then turned at the corner by the Treasury building and walked south along the fence. Looking in at the mansion grounds he could see the guards standing at their little kiosks, the trees and flowers, the driveway that curved up the entrance. A black limo stood in the shade under the roof overhang, waiting for someone.
He strolled westward toward the vast expanse of grass that formed the Ellipse. Tourists hurried by him without so much as a glance. Never a smile or a head nod. The little man who wasn’t there found a spot to sit and watch the people.