Mao II (15 page)

Charlie said, “Your man Scott showed up not long after you left. I was in the boardroom for a luncheon meeting. He apparently raised something of a ruckus in the lobby. Tried to get up to our offices. Security finally called up and asked me to speak to him. He wanted to know where you were. Of course I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know.”

“You still don’t.”

“This is true, Bill.”

“You didn’t say anything about our London chat.”

“London is the last thing I’d tell anyone. But he’s not an easy fellow to pacify. I finally had to go down there and talk to him. First I convinced security to produce the guard who accompanies special guests. Then the guard convinced Scott that he took you up and he took you down and you weren’t lying dead in the elevator. Eternally riding. A warning to us all.”

They talked about arrangements.

Then Bill said, “He’ll call you. He’ll keep calling. Not a word.”

“I haven’t revealed a thing about you to a single soul in twenty-five years, Bill. I keep the faith.”

When Gail came back they played rummy for a while. The women wanted to go to sleep and Bill tried to keep them going with card tricks. The wine was gone. He read for an hour and made up the sofa, recalling how cramped it was. Then he found a scratch pad and a pencil and made notes for some revisions on his novel.

 

 

Scott came out of the bathroom with toothpaste on a brush. He looked at Karen, who was sitting up in bed watching TV. He stared, waiting for her to see him. There were times she became lost in the dusty light, observing some survivor of a national news disaster, there’s the lonely fuselage smoking in a field, and she was able to study the face and shade into it at the same time, even sneak a half second ahead, inferring the strange dazed grin or gesturing hand, which made her seem involved not just in the coverage but in the terror that came blowing through the fog.

He stared until she turned and saw him.

“Then where is he?” she said.

“I’ll figure it out. It’s been a long time since he was a step ahead of me. Bastard.”

“But where could he go?”

“Somewhere that makes sense only to him. But if it makes sense to him, I’ll eventually figure it out.”

“But how can you be sure he’s not sick or hurt?”

“I went in the building and talked to them. We had an actual scuffle, some bumping and pushing. They have security at the level of war is imminent. Anyway it’s clear to me he just walked out the door.”

“Well then I think he’s with Brita.”

Scott stood with the toothbrush held level across his chest.

“He’s not with Brita. Why is he with Brita?”

“Because why else would he stay in New York?”

“We don’t know he stayed there. We don’t even know for sure why he went there. He told me it was just a visit with Charles Everson. Everson told me they talked about the new book. No, he hasn’t been in touch with Brita or I’d know it. The phone bill came the other day. The calls would be itemized.”

“Maybe she called him.”

“No, he’s got something deeper. He’s down deeper somewhere. ”

“He’s running away from his book again.”

“The book is finished.”

“Not to him.”

“He never left without telling me where he was going. No, he’s down deeper this time.”

He went in and brushed his teeth. When he came out he stared at her until she realized he was looking.

“We need to do lists,” he said.

“But if he’s not here.”

“All the more reason. We need to give his workroom a good going-over. ”

“He doesn’t like us in there.”

“He doesn’t like me in there,” Scott said. “I believe there are times in the night when he definitely consents to your presence. In the night or in the late afternoon when I’m out buying the onions for the stew.”

“Or the cucumbers for the salad.”

“The workroom needs to be cleaned and organized. So when he gets back he can find things for a change.”

“He’ll call us in a day or two and we can ask him if it’s okay.”

“He won’t call.”

“I’m hopeful he’ll call.”

“If there was something he wanted to call us about, he’d still be here, living amongst us.”

He got into bed, turning up the collar of his pajama shirt.

“Let’s give him a chance to call,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying. ”

“He’s got some deep and dire plan and it doesn’t include us.”

“He loves us, Scott.”

She watched the set at the foot of the bed. There was a woman on an exercise bike and she wore a gleaming skintight suit and talked into the camera as she pedaled and there was a second woman inserted in a corner of the screen, thumb-sized, relaying the first woman’s monologue in sign language. Karen studied them both, her eyes sweeping the screen. She was thinboundaried. She took it all in, she believed it all, pain, ecstasy, dog food, all the seraphic matter, the baby bliss that falls from the air. Scott stared at her and waited. She carried the virus of the future. Quoting Bill.

B
ill reminded himself to read the pavement signs before he crossed the street. It was so perfectly damn sensible they ought to make it the law in every city, long-lettered words in white paint that tell you which way to look if you want to live.

He wasn’t interested in seeing London. He’d seen it before. A glimpse of Trafalgar Square from a taxi, three routine seconds of memory, aura, repetition, the place unchanged despite construction fences and plastic sheeting—a dream locus, a double-ness that famous places share, making them seem remote and unreceptive but at the same time intimately familiar, an experience you’ve been carrying forever. The pavement signs were the only things he paid attention to. Look left. Look right. They seemed to speak to the whole vexed question of existence.

He hated these shoes. His ribs felt soft today. There was a slight seizing in his throat.

He wanted to get back to the hotel and sleep a while. He wasn’t staying at the place in Mayfair that Charlie had mentioned. He was in a middling gray relic and already beginning to grouse to himself about reimbursement.

In his room he took off his shirt and blew on the inside of the collar, getting rid of lint and hair, drying the light sweat. He had Lizzie’s overnight bag with his robe and pajamas and there were some socks, underwear and toilet articles he’d bought in Boston.

He didn’t know if he wanted to do this thing. It didn’t feel so right anymore. He had a foreboding, the little clinging tightness in the throat that he knew so well from his work, the times he was afraid and hemmed in by doubt, knowing there was something up ahead he didn’t want to face, a character, a life he thought he could not handle.

He called Charlie’s hotel.

“Where are you, Bill?”

“I can see a hospital from my window.”

“And you find this encouraging.”

“I look for one thing in a hotel. Proximity to the essential services.”

“You’re supposed to be at the Chesterfield.”

“The very name is incompatible with my price structure. It smells of figured velvet.”

“You’re not paying. We’re paying.”

“I understood about the plane fare.”

“And the hotel. It goes without saying. And the incidentals. Do you want me to see if the room’s still available?”

“I’m settled in here.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“It’ll come to me in a minute. In the meantime tell me if we’re set for this evening.”

“We’re working on a change of site. We had a wonderful venue all set up, thanks to a well-connected colleague of mine. The library chamber at Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Precisely the dignified setting I was hoping to find. Oak and stone carving, thousands of books. At noon today they began receiving phone calls. Anonymous.”

“Threats.”

“Bomb threats. We’re trying to keep it absolutely quiet. But the librarian did ask if we wouldn’t like to conduct our meeting elsewhere. We think we’ve got a secure site just about pinned down and we’re arranging a very discreet police presence. But it hurts, Bill. We had a gallery and vaulted ceiling. We had wood-block floors.”

“People who make phone calls don’t set off bombs. The real terrorists make their calls after the damage is done. If at all.”

“I know,” Charlie said, “but we still want to take every possible precaution. We’re cutting the number of press people invited. And we’re not revealing the location to anyone until the last possible moment. People will gather at a decoy location, then be driven to the real site in a chartered bus.”

“Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.”

“Come to the Chesterfield at seven. You’ll have some time to look at the poems you’re going to read. Then we’ll go off together. And when it’s over, a late dinner, just the two of us. I want to talk about your book.”

Bill felt better about the reading now that he knew someone was paying his hotel bill. He put a menu card on the coffee table and got his medication tin from his jacket pocket. He emptied the contents onto the card, a total of four uncut tablets. The rest of his supply sat in prescription vials of lovely amber plastic in a bureau drawer in his bedroom at home. Depressants, antidepressants, sleep-inducers, speed-makers, diuretics, antibiotics, heart-starters, muscle relaxants. In front of him now were three kinds of sedatives and a single pink cortical steroid for intractable skin itches. Pathetic. But of course he hadn’t known he’d be doing Boston and London. And the meager sampling would not diminish the surgical pleasure of slicing and dividing, the happy sacrament of color mixing. He bent over the low table, wrapped in the calm that fell upon him when he was cutting up his pills. He liked the sense of soldierly preparation, the diligence and rigor that helped him pretend he knew what he was doing. It was the sweetest play of hand and eye, slicing the pills, choosing elements to take in combination. It was right there on the card, nicely and brightly pebbled, a way to manage the confusion, to search out a state of being, actually shop among the colors for some altering force that might get him past a momentary panic or some mischance of the body or take him safely through the long evening tides, the western end of the day, a wash of desperation coming over him.

He regretted not having his illustrated guides with their cautions and warnings and side effects and interactions and lovely color charts. But he hadn’t known he’d be doing an ocean.

He concentrated deeply, sectioning the tablets with his old scarred stag-handle folding knife, undetected by security at three airports.

 

 

The taxi swung onto Southwark Bridge. Bill had the poems in his lap and occasionally raised a page to his face, muttering lines. A soft warm rain made shaded patterns on the river, bands of wind-brushed shimmer.

Charlie said, “About this fellow.”

“Who?”

“The fellow in Athens who initiated the whole business. I’d like to get your sense of the man.”

“Is he Lebanese?”

“Yes. A political scientist. He says he’s only an intermediary, with imperfect knowledge of the group in Beirut. Claims they’re eager to release the hostage.”

“Are they a new fundamentalist element?”

“They’re a new communist element.”

“Are we surprised?” Bill said.

“There’s a Lebanese Communist Party. There are leftist elements, I understand, aligned with Syria. The PLO has always had a Marxist component and they’re active again in Lebanon.”

“So we’re not surprised.”

“We’re not unduly surprised.”

“I depend on you to tell me when we’re surprised.”

Two detectives met them in a deserted street not far from Saint Saviours Dock. There was renovation in progress in the area but the buildings here were still intact, mainly red brick structures with hoists and loading bays. They approached an old grain-warehouse leased to a plumbing-supply firm that had just gone out of business. The police had arranged entry and there was still a working telephone.

The four men went inside. They checked the open space being used for the conference. A rostrum, folding chairs, auxiliary lighting. Then they went into the main office and Charlie telephoned his colleagues and told them to load the bus and come ahead. Bill looked around for a toilet. Seconds after Charlie hung up, the phone rang. One of the detectives answered and all of them could hear the voice at the other end shouting, “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” and the man’s accent made it sound like boom boom boom. This seemed pretty funny to Bill, who had to take a leak and saw no reason to do it in the street.

The call annoyed the detectives. One of them anyway. The other just gazed across the office at a bookshelf filled with specification manuals. Bill found a toilet and was the last one out. One detective took up a position near the front door and the second man moved their car about fifty yards up the street and then called headquarters.

Charlie said, “I wish I understood the point.”

He and Bill went across the street and waited for the bomb unit to arrive and search the building.

“The point is control,” Bill said. “They want to believe they have the power to move us out of a building and into the street. In their minds they see a hundred people trooping down the fire stairs. I told you, Charlie. Some people make bombs, some people make phone calls.”

Soon they were talking about something else. The rain stopped. Charlie crossed the street, said something to the detective and came back shrugging. They talked about a book Charlie was doing. They talked about the day Charlie’s divorce became final, six years earlier. He recalled the weather, the high clear sky, distanceless, flags whipping on Fifth Avenue and a movie actress getting out of a taxi. Bill reached for his handkerchief. The blast made him jerk half around but he didn’t leave his feet or go back against the wall. He felt the sound in his chest and arms. He jerked and ducked, shielding his head with his forearm, windows blowing out. Charlie said goddamn or go down. He turned his back to the blast wave, bracing himself against the wall with his elbows, hands clasped behind his head, and Bill knew he would have no remember to be impressed. He also knew it was over, nothing worse coming, and he straightened up slowly, looking toward the building but reaching out to touch Charlie’s arm, make sure he was still there, standing and able to move. The detective across the street was in a deep crouch, fumbling with the radio on his belt. The street was filled with glass, snowblinking. The second detective remained in the car a moment, calling in, and then walked toward his partner. They looked over at Charlie and Bill. Dust hung at the second-storey level of the warehouse. The four men met in the middle of the street, glass crunching under their shoes. Charlie brushed off his lapels.