Irresistible Impulse (45 page)

“Are there any more tapes?”

“
Hits of the Seventies?
” Marlene offered.

“Yuck!” Lucy popped the glove, came up empty, looked on the floor behind the front seat.

“Here’s one,” she said, retrieving it.

“That’s not music,” said Marlene. “And put your belt back on!”

Lucy did so and looked at the plain black tape. The label had nothing on it but a numbered date. “What is it, then?”

“Oh, it’s like a lesson. Wolfe listens to it while he drives. It sort of helps him to be … I guess, better at his job.”

“I want to hear it,” said Lucy, and thrust it into the slot.

Click. Hiss. “You’re wrong, it is too music,” said Lucy.

Marlene jammed on the brakes so hard that her rear wheels fishtailed and Tranh had to swerve to avoid her as he pulled up on the shoulder behind. She turned off the engine and dashed back to the trunk. With shaking hands she inserted the key and jerked up the lid, revealing two long boxes of tape cassettes. She inspected a few, but knew beforehand what they were: commercial tapes and bootleg tapes from concerts, everything Edie Wooten had ever recorded.

Tranh came running up. “What is the matter? Has the car broken down?”

“No, and there’s no time to explain. We have to get back to the island immediately.” She slammed the trunk down and ran to take the wheel. The Caprice roared onto the road, tires shimmying on the slick pavement.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” asked Lucy as the car passed a truck at seventy in the face of incoming traffic, and the outraged horns blared.

“What’s wrong is I’m an idiot,” said Marlene tightly, half to herself. “Of course it was Wolfe. It was sticking in my face from the time I read his application. He was a security guard at Tanglewood, and the Music Lover letters started just after that. I let him into her apartment—of course he had the keys, he could come and go as he pleased. The night in Juilliard, same thing. Christ! I saw Robinson, and it never occurred to me that—shit! And when he came in the other night, he didn’t have to climb any walls—Sweety would’ve licked his hand. Conway Twitty, my ass!” She actually banged the heel of her hand against her forehead. She was puzzled about what she was feeling. A disaster like this … but somehow she found it hard to take seriously, as if a barrier had appeared between her and the world of feeling.

“Wolfe is really a
bad
guy?” asked Lucy, confused.

“Yeah, and he’s probably sitting in there right now because we left her alone with my famous guard dog. I was so damn
focused
on Robinson and that stupid sister …” She giggled, and Lucy shot her an odd look.

It was pouring when they reached the marina, and a sharp northeasterly wind was whipping up a strong chop in the channel. Wooten Island was invisible in the gray. The manager of the marina had wisely shut down for the day, put his rental motors away, and battened down his day sailors and Boston Whalers. In such situations visitors to Wooten Island were supposed to call from a pay phone at the foot of the marina dock so that Mr. Marney could come in with the island speedboat. Marlene did so and got a “temporary out of service” recording.

She explained the situation to Tranh, after which he said, in French, “You are not to blame, Marie-Helene. He was a plausible villain. I had no suspicions myself, and I am suspicious of nearly everyone. In any case, I presume you do not wish to involve the police.”

Marlene felt a surge of gratitude. Somehow Tranh understanding this made it all right. Police. It would be a zoo. Heiress held hostage by hired guard. End of business. Karp, his anger and disapproval. But now, she thought, it would all work out, simply and neatly. She felt full of power, as if rays of energy coursed from her head. She could even see the rays, a pale purple tingling to rose at the edges. She felt a warmth in her limbs and stomach, as if anticipating some good thing. The nasty day suddenly seemed brighter. “Right,” she said. “Our mess, our cleanup.” She laughed. Tranh looked at her strangely and said, “I will prepare one of these boats,” indicating the seventeen-foot Fiberglass day sailors.

“Oh, a sailboat,” she cried. “We’ll sail to the isle. Can you sail?”

Again the quizzical expression, blended now with worry. “I am not sure. I have only sailed from Nha Trang to Luzon in the Philippines. But the boat was smaller.” He jumped “down into the white craft, hauled the sails out of the cuddy, and began to bend the mainsail to the mast. “Lucy! Come help me!” He lifted the child down from the dock. He handed her the jib and showed her where it snapped to the fore-stay and jib sheets. Marlene was dancing along the dock, kicking at puddles. She studied the iridescence of some spilled oil. It was amazing that she had never noticed that you could make pictures in the spilled oil. No, not make pictures, the oil was
showing
her messages, vital messages, messages of cosmic significance, if only she could work them out.

She stared into the glistening pool. Images of battles and palaces appeared; weird hierarchical figures swam to the surface and mouthed oracles. Yes, all of this she had thought to be reality was merely a cover, and made sense only if you knew the secret. The interplanetary secret. She dropped to her knees, studying it, full of wonder. It was all perfectly clear.

A man grasped her arm, a man who was Tranh yet not Tranh, who had a golden face and coruscations of red fire darting from his head. She let him lead her to the ship. How clever of them to disguise the star vessel as an ordinary sailboat! She went aboard and allowed herself to be placed on a seat in the cockpit. There was a small figure there too, shining like mother of pearl, speaking to her in a language she could not understand. She smiled back at the figure and closed her eyes so she could help to navigate across the stars.

“Lucy, listen to me,” Tranh said in Cantonese as he cast off the lines and kicked the bow away from the dock. “Your mother is not well. Has she taken a drug or fallen and hit her head?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Lucy in a quavering voice. “She just had some lemonade and a ham and cheese sandwich that Mrs. Marney made.”

“And did you eat this food too?”

“Uh-huh, but the lemonade was too sour.”

“Did you meet anyone on the beach?”

“Just that doctor, the bad one. He was waiting for us by our blanket. Sweety chased him away.”

“
Wah!
This must be the answer. Some drug. Lucy, she will not be able to help me with Wolfe, and I will not be able to do all necessary things by myself. So you must be a brave girl and help me.” He had her get herself and her mother into life jackets, dropped the centerboard, and showed her how to work the jib sheets. Then he sheeted in, and the boat began to move rapidly across the bay in the stiffening breeze.

When they were past the stone breakwater, the boat took the full force of the surge and the twenty-five-knot easterly wind that was blasting up the Sound. Lucy gave a little cry as the boat heeled over on its beam ends. Tranh steadied it, eased the main-sheet, and set out on a broad reach toward Wooten Island. Marlene rolled off her seat and onto the deck of the cockpit. Her eyes were still closed, and she had a blissful smile on her face. They were all soaked to the skin from the rain and spray, and Lucy had started to cry, the tears invisible against her wet face. The island was still lost in the rain, but Tranh had a superb sense of direction. Many times he had taken boats through the mangrove marshes of the Mekong Delta at night, in the teeth of enemy patrols. When he judged it proper, he tacked, Lucy letting fly the jib sheet at his command. The boat whipped about. Marlene rolled languidly across the deck to the lee bulkhead. A gray mass appeared ahead of them, and in a few minutes Tranh spotted the flagpole at the foot of the Wooten Island dock. Tranh brought the boat alongside, tied its bow and stern lines to cleats, rummaged through Marlene’s straw bag for her pistol and spare magazine, and lifted Lucy out of the boat. Marlene he covered with a spare sail and left her where she lay, smiling to herself between Proxima Centauri and Arcturus.

TWENTY-TWO

T
ranh led Lucy through the sparse pines, keeping well away from the paths. It had been some years since he had done this, and then it was in a thicker and warmer forest, but he found that he recalled the art of moving through woods against an unseen enemy. He worked his way around to the west of the big house, toward the boathouse. There was no sound but the rain on its tin roof, no motion not made by the gusts. He left Lucy at the wood line with a comforting word, and taking his Russian pistol in hand, he darted across the narrow lawn and slipped into the building.

All the boats were in their places, but as he walked along the wooden decking built around the basin, he could smell the stink of gas and saw that the surface of the water was thick with greenish oil. Some one had poured the gas out of all the gas cans and opened the drain cocks on the big cruiser, spilling its diesel fuel. But the speedboat was loosely tied at the far end of the boathouse dock, its prow pointing out to the Sound. Tranh jumped down into the boat and made a quick inspection. There were two suitcases in the cockpit. Tranh opened them. One was neatly packed with men’s things. The other was full of women’s clothes, roughly stuffed in. The craft was fueled and ready to go. Its engine was still warm. Someone was planning an escape by sea. He popped the engine coming and examined the Chrysler six.

The boathouse had a small repair shop, a workbench with tools and supplies. From a pegboard he took a coil of thin steel wire and roll of duct tape, and stuck them in his jacket pocket, along with the distributor rotor he had taken from the speedboat’s engine. He found an old greasy blanket and a tarpaulin on a shelf, and he took them too.

He came out of the boathouse and found Lucy where he had left her. She was pale and shivering. He slit the blanket and the tarp with his knife and made a rough poncho out of it and slipped it over the child’s head. He led her back into the pine wood.

He smiled at her and smoothed the damp hair off her forehead. “Little sister,” he said in Cantonese, “now we must be soldiers for a little while. In my country, during the war, girls the same age as you were soldiers and they did very well, and you will do very well too. Wolfe is planning to escape with one of the boats, and he plans to take Wooten-siujè with him. So, he must come down this path with her, and we will prepare an ambush for him. Do you know this word, ambush? No? We lie here in wait, and when they come out we will capture them.”

“With our guns?”

“Just so, with our guns. Now, we must examine the ground and see where is the best place.”

The Music Lover finished tying up Edie Wooten with adhesive tape. The Marneys were tied up similarly and locked in the cellar, as was the dog, who had been perfectly friendly throughout. It was going very well. The summer storm had been a good break, because it would have been difficult to handle Marlene, Tranh, and the little girl all at once, and now they were off the island with no way to return in time to stop him. He certainly didn’t want to hurt anyone without it being absolutely necessary, especially not Marlene, who had been kind to poor dumb Wolfe.

He left Edie lying on the couch and went to get the cello. Reverently, he caressed the miraculous finish, and reflected that the instrument was much like himself. Stradivarius had taken mute spruce and sycamore and willow, and with varnish and glue had made it into something divine, just as the dull material of Jack Wolfe, a hick security guard, a hopeless loser, had been transmogrified by the power of Edie Wooten’s playing into the Music Lover, the perfect audience, soon to be the eternal and only audience.

He lifted the cello and placed it carefully into its case, and put the bow into its velvet clips. Now, should he take the cello down to the boat first, or the musician first and then her instrument? Perhaps he should ask Edie? No, it was important to show decision. He went over to her and said in his music lover voice, so much deeper and more cultured than Wolfe’s voice, the voice of an announcer on WQXR, “I’m going to put your cello on the boat now. I’ll be right back.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” she whimpered.

That was puzzling. His brow wrinkled. How could she not understand? She had been telling him to do this in everything she played. “Of course I’m not going to hurt you, silly! I love you. You just rest here for a minute. Be right back.”

He hoisted the cello and slung Marlon Dane’s MP5 on his free shoulder. The cello was lighter than he had expected. It seemed, indeed, lighter than the machine gun. He walked out the front door, swung right and down the garden path to the boathouse.

“You see, little sister, there is the path he must follow to the boathouse,” explained Tranh. They were squatting in the wood line to the west of the house. “It leads through the rose garden and then sinks between two banks and then rises and curves around before it goes down to the boathouse. You see how I have wired and taped your mother’s pistol to the tree there. It is what we call a fixed gun. It is very useful when you have few troops. We have very few troops, only you and me, but if we are clever, we will win. Now, this wire will fire the gun when you pull it. Take it in your hand. You will crawl under the bush. Do it now! Now lift your head over the stone wall. Can you see the path?”

“Yes. A little of it.”

“And that white rose bush at the end. Can you see that too?”

“Yes.”

“Good. This is very important, so listen. When Wolfe passes that bush, not before, you duck your head behind the wall, all the way down to the ground, and you pull your wire twice, then wait one breath, then twice more. I think that when he hears the bullets pass him, he will drop down behind that low bank for shelter, and fire back at the flash and sound of our gun. I think also that he has a machine gun, so you will hear a very loud banging, and you will also hear the bullets passing overhead. They will make a sharp noise like firecrackers, and pieces of wood and leaves may fall down on you. Will you be frightened?”

“No,” said Lucy; then, after a pause, “A little bit, perhaps.”