Panic! (2 page)

There was a static, humming sound inside the bus now, and Lennox became aware that the loudspeaker system had been switched on. He raised his head, and the flat, toneless voice of the bus driver filtered out from a speaker on the roof above him. “There’s a roadside oasis a few miles ahead, folks, and since it’s past noon we’ll be stopping there a half-hour for lunch. They’ve got hamburgers, assorted sandwiches, beer and soft drinks, reasonably priced ...”

Lennox doubled forward again, pressing his forehead against the rear of the seat in front of him, his hands burrowing up under his wishbone. Violently and abruptly, the pain had come back.

In a large city sixty miles to the north, in an air-conditioned downtown restaurant, a short, plump man sat in a corner booth and rubbed stubby fingers across his round paunch, cherubic face twisted into a momentary grimace.

The red-haired waitress standing before the booth said, “Is something the matter, sir?”

The plump man, whose name was Harry Vollyer, sighed audibly. “I’ve got a mild ulcer,” he said. “Gives me trouble, every now and then.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, it’s all part of the game.”

“Game?”

“Life,” Vollyer told her. “The greatest game of them all.”

“I guess so,” the waitress said. “Would you like to order now?”

“A grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk—cold milk.”

“Yes, sir. And your friend?”

“He’ll have a steak sandwich, no fries, and black coffee.”

The waitress moved away, and Vollyer belched delicately, if sourly, and sighed again. He wore a tailored powder-blue suit and a handmade silk shirt the color of fresh grapefruit juice; his tie was by Bronzini, dark blue with faint black diamonds, fastened to his shirt by a tiny white-gold tack; his shoes were bench-crafted from imported Spanish leather, polished to a high gloss. On the little fingers of each hand he wore thick white-gold rings, with platinum-and-onyx settings in simple geometric designs. He had wide, bright blue eyes that gave him the appearance of being perpetually incredulous, and silvered hair that was cut and shaped immaculately to the roundness of his skull. The curve of his lips was benign and cheerful, and from the faint wrinkles at each corner you could tell that he laughed often, that he was a complacent and happy man.

There was movement from across the room, and Vollyer saw that Di Parma was finally coming back from the telephone booth. He smiled in a fatherly way. He had felt paternal toward Di Parma from the moment he met him, he didn’t know exactly why; Livio was thirty-six, only fifteen years younger than Vollyer, but he gave the impression of being just a youth, of needing constant guidance and direction. It wasn’t that his actions, his thoughts, were juvenile, it was just that he had this habitual look of being lost, of being about to burst into tears, which got right down and pulled at your heart. Vollyer liked Di Parma. He had only been working with him for eight months now, but he liked him considerably more than any of the others he had worked with over the years; he hoped that they could stay together for a while, that nothing would come up to necessitate a severance of their relationship. There were a lot of things he could teach Di Parma, and Livio was a willing student. It gave you a sense of well-being, of completion, when you had somebody like that to work with, somebody who didn’t claim to know all the answers because he’d been around in some of the other channels for a while, somebody who could follow orders without back-talking or petulance.

Di Parma slipped into the booth across from him, a frown tugging at the edges of his mouth, corrugating the faintly freckled surface of his forehead. He was a very tall man with crew-cut brown hair and medium-length sideburns, dressed in a dove-gray suit that managed to look rumpled most of the time, in spite of the fact that it had cost as much money as Vollyer’s powder-blue one. His shirt and tie were striped, colors harmonious, but he wore no clip or tack, no jewelry of any kind; he had an intense personal aversion to it and he refused to wear it, even refused to wear a wedding ring—a fact which never ceased to amaze Vollyer. He possessed a slender, aquiline nose that gave the illusion of turning up like an inverted fishhook when you faced him, and liquid brown eyes that conveyed the sense of bemusement which Vollyer found so appealing. His hands were oversized, spatulate, and he was self-conscious about them; he put them under the table now, because he had the inveterate feeling that everybody, even Vollyer, would stare at them if they were in plain sight, although Harry had told him on a number of occasions that his hands were not anywhere near as conspicuous as he imagined.

Vollyer smiled paternally and said, “Did you get through to Jean all right?”

“No,” Di Parma answered, frowning, “no, she wasn’t home. I called back twice but she didn’t answer.”

“Maybe she went out shopping.”

“She does her shopping on Tuesdays and Fridays,” Di Parma said. “This is Monday, Harry.”

“A movie then, or a walk.”

“Jean doesn’t like movies, and she’s been having this trouble with her arches. She’s been to a podiatrist three times already this month.” He worried his lower lip. “Damn, I don’t know what to think.”

“Livio, Livio, you just talked to her this morning. She was fine then, wasn’t she?”

“Sure. Sure, she was okay.”

“Then she’s okay now, too,” Vollyer said reasonably. “It’s only been four hours.”

“But she’s not home and she’s always home this time of day.”

“Are you sure she didn’t say something to you this morning about going out? Or maybe last night? Think about it, Livio.”

Di Parma thought about it—and then he blinked and looked surprised and said, “One of the neighbors asked her to come over to some kind of luncheon. Us being new in the neighborhood and all.”

Vollyer nodded tolerantly. “You see? Nothing to get excited about.”

Di Parma was embarrassed. “Hell, Harry, I—”

“Forget it,” Vollyer said. He made a dismissive gesture. “You’re too tense all the time. Relax a little.”

“Well,” Di Parma said, and cleared his throat. “Did you order yet? I’m hungrier than I thought I was.”

“All taken care of.”

“A steak sandwich for me, no fries?”

“Just like always.”

Vollyer settled back comfortably against the cool leather of the booth, folding his hands across his paunch. That Livio. Thirty-six years old, married a full five months now, and he went around like a kid on the third day of his honeymoon, calling Jean two and three times in a twenty-four-hour period whenever they were away from the city, worrying about her, talking about her incessantly. There was nothing wrong with love, Vollyer supposed, even though he had never experienced it and did not feel particularly cheated because he hadn‘t—there was nothing wrong with love but there were limits, and he could not understand how a grown man could become that hung up on a woman. Women had their purpose, Vollyer had never been one to put women down, but you had to treat them as simple equals—or inferiors if they deserved it; you just didn’t put them up on pedestals like Roman goddesses or something.

Even though he could not understand Di Parma’s constant preoccupation with his wife, he condoned it, he was indulgent of it. The thing was, Livio had not let this personal hang-up of his interfere in any way with the efficiency of his professional life; when he was working, he was cool and thinking, following orders, making all the right moves. That being the case, how could you put him down for a simple character flaw? Vollyer had decided that Di Parma’s shortcomings were just a part of the game, and as such, had to be accepted, tolerated, because he liked Di Parma, he really did like Di Parma. He hoped that nothing would happen to change things; he hoped Livio would keep right on being cool and efficient when it counted.

The waitress came around with their lunch and set the plates down and went away again. Di Parma said, “What happens after we eat, Harry? Do we stay here or do we make the rest of the drive today?”

“Better if we stay here,” Vollyer answered. “We’ll find a motel, something with a pool and a nice lounge. We’ve only got sixty miles left, over the desert, and we can make that in an hour in the morning.”

“What time do we leave?”

“Seven. We want to get there around eight.”

“There shouldn’t be much doing that early.”

“We don’t want
anything
doing.”

“How soon do you figure we can get back home?”

“If everything goes okay, the day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll call Jean tomorrow night,” Di Parma said. “She’ll meet us at the airport. Listen, Harry, why don’t you come out to the house then? You haven’t seen the new house.”

Vollyer had no particular desire to see the new house, but he smiled and said, “Sure, Livio, all right.”

There was no getting around it, he really did like Di Parma.

From the window of her room at the Joshua Hotel, Jana Hennessey stood looking down the length of Cuenca Seco’s dusty main street to the spanning arch of the huge wooden banner marking the town’s westward entrance. Even though the black lettering on the front of the sign was not visible from there, she had taken her yellow Triumph TR-6 beneath it late the previous afternoon —after better than fifty miles of desert driving—and she remembered clearly what it said:

As far as Jana was concerned, the wording was misrepre-sentational. The Wonderland it spoke of was little more than a dead sea sustaining grotesque cacti with spines like razor-edged daggers, a haven for vultures and scorpions and fat brown venom-filled snakes, an arid and polychromatic graveyard strewn with the very bones of time. And the Gateway—well, the Gateway was an anachronism in a world of steel-and-glass, of hurtling chrome-toothed machines, of great, rushing, ant-busy throngs of people; it was an elaborate set for an Old West movie, with too many false-fronted buildings and sun-bonneted women and Stetsoned men moving ponderously beneath a demoniacal sun, with dust-caked metal extras miscast in the roles of horses and carriages; it was make-believe that had magically become a reality, and been given an aura of antiquity that was somehow a little frightening.

Jana expelled a long, soft breath. The trouble with me is, she thought, I’m a big-city girl. I can’t appreciate native Americana because I’ve never seen any of it face-to-face; I’ve never really been out of New York City until now. How much of the grass roots can you see in Brooklyn or Long Island or downtown Manhattan? It’s not so easy to adjust to a different way of life, it’s not so easy to surround yourself with nature instead of with people, with life-in-the-raw instead of life-insulated-by-luxury; it’s not so easy to break away, to change, to forget.

To forget ...

Abruptly, Jana turned from the window—tall and lithe in her mid-twenties, figure reminiscent of a lingerie model’s, sable hair worn long and straight, with stray wisps falling over her shoulders, almost to the gentle swell of her breasts. A pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses gave her narrow face a quality of introspective intelligence that was enhanced by the prominence of delicately boned cheeks, by the firm set of a small, naturally pink mouth. Her eyes, behind the lens of the glasses, were an intense brown that contained, like an alien presence, a small dull glow of pain.

The room was small and hot, in spite of a portable air-conditioning unit mounted in the frame of the window; but since the Joshua Hotel was the only lodging in town—and since this was considered one of its finer accommodations—she had not had much choice in the matter. It contained a brass-framed double bed, two nightstands, a small private bathroom, and a child-sized writing desk; the walls were of a varnished blond wood, decorated with desert lithographs. The white bedspread depicted a stoic, war-painted Indian astride a pinto horse, a feathered lance in one hand.

Jana crossed the room, stood behind the desk, and studied the typewritten sheets laid out beside the portable Royal, the first two pages of the outline she had begun earlier that morning. Then she looked at the half-filled third page rolled into the platen of the machine, at the x-ed out lines there. She turned again and went to the bed and sat down, staring at the telephone on the nightstand nearest the door.

She had put off calling Harold Klein for a week now, and she knew that that had been a mistake. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him because of the book, the fact that she hadn’t even started it; and, more important, because he represented an integral part of the life in New York from which she had so completely severed herself. Time to think, uninterrupted, had been what she desperately needed during the two thousand five hundred miles she had driven this past week—time to sort things out in her mind so that she would be able to work again. And Harold would not have understood, would still not understand. Oh, he knew about Don Harper, of course—the bare facts of the affair—but that was all he knew. He was a fine agent, a good friend, but she had just never been able to talk to him on a personal level—and the things which had been on her mind of late were such that she would have found it almost impossible to discuss them with a priest, much less a man of Harold’s uncomplicated nature.