Looking for Rachel Wallace (3 page)

“Probably right,” I said.

“He’s quite a pain in the ass, sometimes,” Susan said. “He knows you want him to reassure you and he won’t. But I will. He doesn’t much care about radical feminism one way or the other. But if he says he’ll protect you, he will.”

“I’m not being a pain in the ass,” I said. “Saying I have no distaste for her won’t reassure her. Or it shouldn’t. There’s no way to prove anything to her until something happens. Words don’t do it.”

“Words can,” Susan said. “And tone of voice. You’re just so goddamned autonomous that you won’t explain yourself to anybody.”

The waitress came back with wine for Susan and Beck’s beer for me, and another martini for Rachel Wallace. The five she’d had this afternoon seemed to have had no effect on her.

“Maybe I shouldn’t cart her around everyplace,” I said to Rachel.

“Machismo,” Rachel said. “The machismo code. He’s locked into it, and he can’t explain himself, or apologize, or cry probably, or show emotion.”

“I throw up good, though. And I will in a minute.”

Wallace’s head snapped around at me. Her face was harsh and tight. Susan patted her arm. “Give him time,” she said. “He grows on you. He’s hard to classify. But he’ll look out for you. And he’ll care what happens to you. And he’ll keep you out of harm’s way.” Susan sipped her wine. “He really will,” she said to Rachel Wallace.

“And you,” Rachel said, “does he look out for you?”

“We look out for each other,” Susan said. “I’m doing it now.”

Rachel Wallace smiled, her face loosened. “Yes,” she said. “You are, aren’t you?”

The waitress came again, and we ordered dinner.

I was having a nice time eating Rosalie’s cream of carrot soup when Rachel Wallace said, “John tells me you used to be a prizefighter.”

I nodded. I had a sense where the discussion would lead.

“And you were in combat in Korea?”

I nodded again.

“And you were a policeman?”

Another nod.

“And now you do this.”

It was a statement. No nod required.

“Why did you stop fighting?”

“I had plateaued,” I said.

“Were you not a good fighter?”

“I was good. I was not great. Being a good fighter is no life. Only, great ones lead a life worth too much. It’s not that clean a business, either.”

“Did you tire of the violence?”

“Not in the ring,” I said.

“You didn’t mind beating someone bloody.”

“He volunteered. The gloves are padded. It’s not pacifism, but if it’s violence, it is controlled and regulated and patterned. I never hurt anyone badly. I never got badly hurt.”

“Your nose has obviously been broken.”

“Many times,” I said. “But that’s sort of minor. It hurts, but it’s not serious.”

“And you’ve killed people.”

“Yes.”

“Not just in the army.”

“No.”

“What kind of a person does that?” she said.

Susan was looking very closely at some of the decor in Rosalie’s. “That is a magnificent old icechest,” she said. “Look at the brass hinges.”

“Don’t change the subject for him,” Rachel Wallace said. “Let him answer.”

She spoke a little sharply for my taste. But if there was anything sure on this earth, it was that Susan could take care of herself. She was hard to overpower.

“Actually,” she said, “I was changing the subject for me. You’d be surprised at how many times I’ve heard this conversation.”

“You mean we are boring you.”

Susan smiled at her. “A tweak,” she said.

“I bore a lot of people,” Rachel said. “I don’t mind. I’m willing to be boring to find out what I wish to know.”

The waitress brought me veal Giorgio. I ate a bite.

“What is it you want to know?”

“Why you engage in things that are violent and dangerous.”

I sipped half a glass of beer. I took another bite of veal. “Well,” I said, “the violence is a kind of side-effect, I think. I have always wanted to live life on my own terms. And I have always tried to do what I can do. I am good at certain kinds of things; I have tried to go in that direction.”

“The answer doesn’t satisfy me,” Rachel said.

“It doesn’t have to. It satisfies me.”

“What he won’t say,” Susan said, “and what he may not even admit to himself is that he’d like to be Sir Gawain. He was born five hundred years too late. If you understand that, you understand most of what you are asking.”

“Six hundred years,” I said.

We got through the rest of dinner. Susan asked Rachel about her books and her work, and that got her off me and onto something she liked much better. Susan is good at that. After dinner I had to drive Rachel back to the Ritz. I said goodbye to Susan in the bank parking lot behind Rosalie’s where we’d parked.

“Don’t be mean to her,” Susan said softly. “She’s scared to death, and she’s badly ill at ease with you and with her fear.”

“I don’t blame her for being scared,” I said. “But it’s not my fault.”

From the front seat of my car Rachel said, “Spenser, I have work to do.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said to Susan.

“She’s scared,” Susan said. “It makes her bitchy. Think how you’d feel if she were your only protection.”

I gave Susan a pat on the fanny, decided a kiss would be hokey, and opened the door for her before she climbed into her MG. I was delighted. She’d gotten rid of the Nova. She was not Chevy. She was sports car.

Through the open window Susan said, “You held the door just to spite her.”

“Yeah, baby, but I’m going home with her.”

Susan slid into gear and wheeled the sports car out of the lot. I got in beside Rachel and started up my car.

“For heaven’s sake, what year is this car?” Rachel said.

“1968,” I said. “I’d buy a new one, but they don’t make convertibles anymore.” Maybe I should get a sports car. Was I old Chevy?

“Susan is a very attractive person,” Rachel said.

“That’s true,” I said.

“It makes me think better of you that she likes you.”

“That gets me by in a lot of places,” I said.

“Your affection for each other shows.”

I nodded.

“It is not my kind of love, but I can respond to it in others. You are lucky to have a relationship as vital as that.”

“That’s true, too,” I said.

“You don’t like me.”

I shrugged.

“You don’t,” she said.

“It’s irrelevant,” I said.

“You don’t like me, and you don’t like what I stand for.”

“What is it you stand for?” I said.

“The right of every woman to be what she will be. To shape her life in conformity to her own impulse, not to bend her will to the whims of men.”

I said, “Wow.”

“Do you realize I bear my father’s name?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I had no choice,” she said. “It was assigned me.”

“That’s true of me, too,” I said.

She looked at me.

“It was assigned me. Spenser. I had no choice. I couldn’t say I’d rather be named Spade. Samuel Spade. That would have been a terrific name, but no. I had to get a name like an English poet. You know what Spenser wrote?”

“
The Faerie Queen
?”

“Yeah. So what are you bitching about?”

We were out of Marblehead now and driving on Route 1A through Swampscott.

“It’s not the same,” she said.

“Why isn’t it?”

“Because I’m a woman and was given a man’s name.”

“Whatever name would have been without your consent. Your mother’s, your father’s, and if you’d taken your mother’s name, wouldn’t that merely have been your grandfather’s?”

There was a blue Buick Electra in front of me. It began to slow down as we passed the drive-in theater on the Lynnway. Behind me a Dodge swung out into the left lane and pulled up beside me.

“Get on the floor,” I said.

She said, “What—” and I put my right hand behind her neck and pushed her down toward the floor. With my left hand I yanked the steering wheel hard over and went inside the Buick. My right wheels went up on the curb. The Buick pulled right to crowd me, and I floored the Chevy and dragged my bumper along his entire righthand side and spun off the curb in front of him with a strong smell of skun* rubber behind me. I went up over the General Edwards Bridge with the accelerator to the floor and my elbow on the horn, and with the Buick and the Dodge behind me. I had my elbow on the horn because I had my gun in my hand.

The Lynnway was too bright and too busy, and it was too early in the evening. The Buick swung off into Point of Pines, and the Dodge went with it. I swerved into the passing lane to avoid a car and swerved back to the right to avoid another and began to slow down.

Rachel Wallace crouched, half fetal, toward the floor on the passenger’s side. I put the gun down on the seat beside me. “One of the advantages of driving a 1968 Chevy,” I said, “is you don’t care all that much about an occasional dent.”

“May I sit up?” she said. Her voice was strong.

“Yeah.”

She squirmed back up onto the seat.

“Was that necessary?”

“Yeah.”

“Was there someone really chasing us?”

“Yeah.”

“If there was, you handled it well. My reactions would not have been as quick.”

I said, “Thank you.”

“I’m not complimenting you. I’m merely observing a fact. Did you get their license numbers?”

“Yes, 469AAG, and D60240, both Mass. But it won’t do us any good unless they are bad amateurs, and the way they boxed me on the road before I noticed, they aren’t amateurs.”

“You think you should have noticed them sooner?”

“Yeah. I was too busy arguing patristic nomenclature with you. I should never have had to hit the curb like that.”

“Then partly it is my fault for distracting you.”

“It’s not your line of work. It is mine. You don’t know better. I do.”

“Well,” she said, “no harm done. We got away.”

“If the guy in front of us in the Buick was just a mohair better, we wouldn’t have.”

“He would have cut you off?”

I nodded. “And the Dodge would have blasted us.”

“Actually would he not have blasted you? I was on the floor, and you were much closer anyway.”

I shrugged. “It wouldn’t have mattered. If you survived the crash they’d have waited and blasted you.”

“You seem, so, so at ease with all of this.”

“I’m not. It scares me.”

“Perhaps. It scares me, too. But you seem to expect it. There’s no moral outrage. You’re not appalled. Or offended. Or … aghast. I don’t know. You make this seem so commonplace.”

“
Aghast
is irrelevant, too. It’s useless. Or expressing it is useless. On the other hand I’m not one of the guys in the other car.”

We went past the dog track and around Bell Circle. There was no one noticeable in the rearview mirror.

“Then you do what you do in part from moral outrage.”

I looked at her and shook my head. “I do what I do because I’m comfortable doing it.”

“My God,” she said, “you’re a stubborn man.”

“Some consider it a virtue in my work,” I said.

She looked at the gun lying on the seat.

“Oughtn’t you to put that away?”

“I think I’ll leave it there till we get to the Ritz.”

“I’ve never touched a gun in my life.”

“They’re a well-made apparatus,” I said. “If they’re good. Very precise.”

“Is this good?”

“Yes. It’s a very nice gun.”

“No gun is nice,” she said.

“If those gentlemen from the Lynnway return,” I said, “you may come to like it better.”

She shook her head. “It’s come to that. Sometimes I feel sick thinking about it.”

“What?”

“In this country—the land of the free and all that shit—I need a man with a gun to protect me simply because I am what I am.”

“That’s fairly sickening,” I said.

I picked Rachel Wallace up at her door at eight thirty the next morning, and we went down to breakfast in the Ritz Cafe. I was wearing my bodyguard outfit—jeans, T-shirt, corduroy Levi jacket, and a daring new pair of Pumas: royal-blue suede with a bold gold stripe. Smith and Wesson .38 Police Special in a shoulder holster.

Rachel Wallace said, “Well, we are somewhat less formal this morning, aren’t we? If you’re dressed that way tonight, they won’t let you in the dining room.”

“Work clothes,” I said. “I can move well in them.”

She nodded and ate an egg. She wore a quiet gray dress with a paisley scarf at her throat. “You expect to have to move?”

“Probably not,” I said. “But like they say at the Pentagon, you have to plan for the enemy’s capacity, not his intentions.”

She signed the check. “Come along,” she said. She picked up her briefcase from under the table, and we walked out through the lobby. She got her coat from the check room, a pale tan trenchcoat. It had cost money. I made no effort to hold it for her. She ignored me while she put it on. I looked at the lobby. There were people, but they looked like they belonged there. No one had a Gatling gun. At least no one had one visible. In fact I’d have been the only one I would have been suspicious of if I hadn’t known me so well, and so fondly.

A young woman in a green tweed suit and a brown beret came toward us from the Arlington Street entrance.

“Ms. Wallace. Hi. I’ve got a car waiting.”

“Do you know her?” I said.

“Yes,” Rachel said. “Linda Smith.”

“I mean by sight,” I said. “Not just by hearing of her or getting mail from her.”

“Yes, we’ve met several times before.”

“Okay.”

We went out onto Arlington Street. I went first. The street was normal nine AM busy. There was a tan Volvo sedan parked at the yellow curb with the motor running and the doorman standing with his hand on the passenger door. When he saw Linda Smith, he opened the passenger door. I looked inside the car and then stepped aside. Rachel Wallace got in; the doorman closed the door. I got in the back, and Linda Smith got in the driver’s seat.

As we pulled into traffic Rachel said, “Have you met Mr. Spenser, Linda?”

“No, I haven’t. Nice to meet you, Mr. Spenser.”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Smith,” I said. Rachel would like the
Ms
.