Double Deuce (6 page)

Hawk shook his head. We were back in the Double Deuce quadrangle looking at nothing.

“Why not?” Jackie said.

“Trivial,” Hawk said.

“But it’s a challenge, isn’t it?”

“Not if we not challenged,” Hawk said.

We were quiet. Nothing moved in Double Deuce. The sun was steady. There was no wind and the temperature was in the sixties.

Jackie sighed.

“Are you familiar with the word enigmatic?” she said.

“Un huh,” Hawk said. He was looking at the empty courtyard just as if there were something to see.

“How about the word uncommunicative?” Hawk grinned and didn’t speak.

“Hawk, I’m not just asking to be nosy. I’m a reporter, I’m trying to work.”

He nodded and turned his head to look at her. She was in the front seat beside him.

“What would you like to know?” he said.

“Everything,” she said. “Including answers to questions I don’t know enough to ask.”

“That’s a lot,” Hawk said.

“Between strangers, yes,” Jackie said. “Among casual acquaintances, even friends, yes. But I am under the impression that we are more than that.”

“Un huh,” Hawk said.

I was in the backseat, sitting crosswise with my legs stretched out as much as you can stretch legs out in the backseat of a Jaguar sedan. I had found a way to sit so that my gun didn’t dig into my back, and I was at peace.

“Is that impression accurate?” Jackie said.

“Yes,” Hawk said.

“Then for Christ sake why don’t you, goddamn it, talk?”

“Jackie,” Hawk said, “you think there’s a plan. You’d have a plan. Probably do. So you ask questions like there was some plan at work. In the kind of work I do, there is no plan. Reason we so good at this work is we know it.”

When he said “we” he moved his head slightly in my direction so she’d know who “we” was.

“So how do you decide?” Jackie said. “Like now, how do you decide that you won’t respond to the trash fires?”

“Same way I decided that you and I be more than friends,” Hawk said. “Seem like the right thing to do.”

“I had something to do with deciding that,” Jackie said.

“Sure,” Hawk said.

“So you have a feeling that it’s best to let the trash fires slide?” Jackie said.

Hawk looked at me.

“Jump in anytime you like,” he said.

“I was just congratulating myself on not being in on this,” I said.

Jackie turned in her seat. Her lipstick was very bright, and she had on a carmine blouse open at the throat. She looked like about twenty-two million dollars. More than friends, I thought. Hawk, you devil.

“You too?” she said. “What’s wrong with you people, don’t you talk?”

“Most people are grateful,” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You are just like him, a master of the fucking oblique answer.”

Hawk and I were silent for a moment.

“It’s not willful,” I said. “It’s that very often we don’t know how to explain what we know. We tend to think from the inside out. We tend to feel our way along. And because of the way we live it is more important usually to know what to do than to know how we know it.”

“God-I thought that was the woman’s rap,” Jackie said. “Creatures of feeling. I thought men were supposed to be reasonable.”

“I wouldn’t generalize about men and women,” I said. “But I don’t think Hawk or I are operating on emotional whim. It’s just the way we experience things sometimes needs to get translated sort of promptly into a, ah, course of action. So we have tended to bypass the meditative circuit.”

“Wow,” Hawk said.

I nodded. “I kind of like that myself,” I said. “And going back afterwards and filling in feels like kind of a waste of time.”

“Because the consequences of your actions will prove if you were right,” Jackie said.

“Ya,” I said.

Hawk nodded. He smiled happily.

“Is it intuition?” Jackie said.

“No, it’s the sort of automatic compilation of data without thinking about it, and comparing it with other data previously recorded,” I said. “Most of it sort of volition-less.”

“The thing with these kids,” Hawk said, “they want to see what I do, or Major does, and he seems to be the one calls the plays, because they want to know who we are and what we’re like.”

“Because of you,” Jackie said.

“Un huh. And if they can get us to chase around after them for a misdemeanor like setting trash fires we going to look like fools. What do we do about it? Do we shoot them? For torching trash barrels? Do we slap them around? How do we know who did it?”

“So you let them get away with it?”

“Sure,” Hawk said. “We ignore it. We’re above it.”

“You know those junior high school principals,” I said, “who suspend students for stuff like wearing Bart Simpson T-shirts?”

“Yes,” Jackie said. “They make themselves look like jerks.”

I nodded. Hawk nodded. Jackie smiled. And she nodded.

“I get it,” she said. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

Hawk and I were both silent for a moment. “We didn’t know it,” Hawk said, “in the first place.”

“Marge always likes to make a site visit,” Jackie said to us. “She’s very thorough.”

“Inconspicuous, too,” I said.

The Housing Authority cops got out and looked around. The civilians got out and grouped near the van. The driver got out and opened the van doors. The secretary got out of the back. The cameraman and the soundwoman got out of the front. And then Marge Eagen stepped out into the sunlight. The civilians stood a little straighter. The cops looked at her. One of them said something under his breath to the other one. They both looked like they wanted to laugh, but knew they shouldn’t. Marge stopped with one foot on the ground and one foot still in the van. A lot of her leg showed. The cameraman took her picture.

“Good leg,” I said to Hawk.

“From here,” Hawk said.

“Her legs are very good,” Jackie said. “And she wants the world to know it. Don’t you ever watch?”

“No,” I said.

Hawk shook his head.

“It’s the trademark opening shot every day. Low shot, her with a hand mike, sitting on a high stool, key lit, legs crossed. Tight skirt.”

The cameraman finished. Marge Eagen finished stepping from the van and strode across toward us. Everyone in Boston knew her. She was a television fixture. Blonde hair, wide mouth, straight nose, and an on-camera persona that resonated with compassion. I had never actually watched her show, but she was legendarily intense and caring and issue-oriented. Jackie got out of the car. Hawk and I didn’t.

“Jackie,” she said. “How bleak.”

Her voice had a soft husky quality that made you think of perfume and silk lingerie. At least it made me think of that, but Susan had once suggested that almost everything did.

“Her voice make you think of perfume and silk lingerie?” I said to Hawk.

He shook his head. “Money,” he said.

“Everything makes you think of that,” I said.

“Are these the two centurions?” Marge Eagen said. She bent forward and looked in the car at us. She had on a black silk raincoat open over a lowcut ruffled blouse that looked like a man’s tuxedo shirt. While she was bent over looking in at us, I could see that she was also wearing a white bra with lace trim, probably a C cup.

Jackie introduced us.

“Step out,” Marge said, “so we can get a picture of you.”

“No picture,” Hawk said.

“Oh come on, Hawk,” Marge said. “We need it for interior promo. This is going to be the biggest series ever done on local.”

Hawk shook his head. Marge pretended not to see him. With a big smile she opened the car door.

“In fact I suspect it’s going to show up on network. Just the idea circulating has got the network kiddies on the horn already. Don’t be shy.”

she said. “Crawl out of there. Let’s get that handsome punim on film.”

Hawk stepped lazily out of the car. He looked past Marge Eagen to the cameraman.

“If you take a picture of me,” he said, “I will take your camera away and hit you with it.” He looked steadily at the cameraman, who was a friendly-looking little guy with receding hair which he concealed by artful combing. He stepped back a full step under the impact of Hawk’s stare and glanced quickly at the two Housing cops.

“Oh, stop the nonsense,” Marge Eagen was saying. “Don’t be-”

Hawk shifted his gaze to her. There was something in his eyes, though his face seemed entirely still. She stopped in midsentence, and while she didn’t step back, she seemed somehow to recede a little. Jackie stepped slightly between them as if she weren’t aware she was doing it.

“We want pictures of Marge really, Harry. That’s the big thing. Against the background of the buildings, looking at them, gazing down an alley. Pointing maybe, while she talks with Mr. Albanese.”

Harry nodded and began looking at the light. Marge Eagen sort of snorted and walked away with him. The soundwoman followed.

“Why couldn’t you let him take a picture, for God’s sake?” Jackie said under her breath.

“Rather not,” Hawk said pleasantly.

“That’s no reason,” Jackie said and turned as the suits from the Housing Authority approached. “Sam Albanese, Jim Doyle,” she said and introduced us. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name,” she said to the third guy.

“John Boc,” he said. “Authority Police Force.” He didn’t offer to shake hands.

“Oh, sure.” Jackie was jollier than the hostess at a sock hop. “You’re the Chief, of course.”

“This isn’t the time,” Albanese said. “But we don’t appreciate a couple of hired thugs trying to do our job for us. It’s vigilante-ism.”

“Actually,” I said, “vigilante-ism would be if the residents banded together to do your job for you. This is more like consulting-ism, I think.”

“We the Arthur D. Little,” Hawk said, “of hired thugdom.”

“Go ahead,” Albanese said, “be funny. I’ve asked our counsel”-he nodded at Mr. Doyle, who was looking at us sternly-“to see if there may not be some violation of statute here.”

Jackie clicked her tape recorder on very quietly while Albanese was talking. But he heard it. He was the kind of guy who spent his life listening for the click of tape recorders and the hum of a television camera.

Without breaking stride he said, “I think what Ms. Eagen is doing will be a major television event, and I can tell you here and now that every resource of my office will be at your disposal. Gangs are the scourge of public housing. The few bad kids give a lot of decent hardworking citizens a bad name.”

“And drank rapidly a glass of water,” I said.

“Excuse me?” Albanese said.

“A literary allusion,” I said, “e.e. cummings.”

“Don’t know him,” Albanese said.

I smiled politely.

We all stood without anything to say for a while and watched Marge being filmed. When they were through, she came back over to us. Harry took some film of her with Albanese. The soundwoman followed along behind although no one was talking and as far as I could see there was no sound to record.

Then it was our turn again. Marge was going to charm us. She gave us a very big smile and the full force of her large blue eyes.

“Now,” she said, “what are we to do with you gentlemen?”

“We could go bowling,” I said. “And maybe pizza after?”

She shook her head the way a parent does to willful child.

“We’d like you to be in this piece,” she said. “Both of you.”

Hawk and I remained calm.

“This series will make a real contribution to the most disadvantaged among us,” she said. “I’d like to get your slant on it, two men who have bridged the racial gulf and are teamed up to try and help others bridge it.”

Hawk turned his head and looked over his shoulder. Then he looked back at Marge Eagen. “You reading that off something?” he said.

“You don’t believe in what you’re doing?” she said.

Up close I could see the small crowsfeet around her eyes. It didn’t hurt her appearance. In some ways I thought it helped, made her look like a grown-up.

“I don’t believe much,” Hawk said, “and one of the things I don’t believe is that some broad in a Donna Karan dress gonna do much to liberate the darkies.”

“Well,” Marge Eagen said, “there’s no need to be offensive.”

“Hell there ain’t,” Hawk said.

Marge Eagen said, “Jackie,” and jerked her head at the van, did a brisk about-face, and marched away. Everybody except Boc, the Authority Police Chief, hustled after her. Hawk and I watched them silently.

“Don’t pay attention to Albanese,” Boc said. “We need all the help we can get down here, and if you can keep these fucking maggots quiet, you’re not going to get any shit from us.”

Hawk nodded. He was still looking after Marge.

“Good to know,” he said.

Boc turned and went after the rest of them.

After maybe five minutes Jackie came back from the van. Her face was very tight.

“You asshole,” she said to Hawk. “She’s yanking me out of here. I don’t even know if we’re going to do the series.”

Hawk nodded. Jackie got her purse out of Hawk’s car, put her tape recorder in it, and went back to the van. She got in the van. It started up and pulled away. The Housing Authority car and the police car followed and Hawk and I were alone again in the middle of Double Deuce.

We looked at each other.

“How’d you know it was a Donna Karan dress,” I said.

It was 9:30 at night. I was reading Calvin and Hobbes in the morning edition of the Globe.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

“I didn’t notice,” I said. “Besides, why shouldn’t she eat a bone on the couch?”

“Because she gets bone juice all over my cushions,” Susan said. “How could you not notice?”

Answering questions like that had never proven fruitful. So I smiled ruefully and gave my head a beguiling twist and started back to Calvin and Hobbes. Then I would move to Tank McNamara, and finish with Doonesbury. I had my evening all planned out.

“It is not funny,” Susan said.

“No,” I said, “that was a rueful smile.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “My stuff means a lot to me.”

“I thought it was our stuff,” I said.

“You know what I mean. I care about it. You don’t.”

“I know,” I said. “I know that a lot of you goes into design and decor. It is part of your art. And the results are in fact artful. It’s just that preventing the dog getting bone juice on your cushions was sort of on the back burner. I was feeling like I could read the paper and relax my vigilance for a bit.”

“You were reading the comics,” Susan said and walked out of the living room. I looked at Pearl, she did not seem abashed. She was vigorously getting bone juice on the rug.