Recoil (8 page)

Roger said, “I hope all your trails keep downslope with the wind at your back, old-timer.”

“Maybe one of these days we'll come back.”

“Yeah.”

“At least I'll see you in the movies.”

“You do that.”

“Christ this is a pain in the ass.”

“Just look after that good family you got, Fred.”

“So long, Roger.” When he hung up he couldn't stop the tears.

3

Bradleigh woke him up, banging on the motel room door. Mathieson crawled out of bed, glanced at Ronny on the cot and went to the door. When the three-and-three knock repeated itself he opened up.

“Come next door a minute.” Bradleigh talked in a whisper.

He locked the door and carried the key with him, padding along the galleried porch in his pajamas. It was still dark.

When he entered the room Caruso gave him a tired nod. The bed was made; nobody had slept in there. Bradleigh closed the door and handed Mathieson a styrofoam cup of coffee.

He stumbled to the chair with it. “Thanks. I need it.”

“A little hung?”

“You could say that.” He'd thrown the empty vodka bottle in the wastebasket; it was the last thing he remembered.

“I had a call from Washington. They've found the leak. I thought you wouldn't mind being rousted early for that bit of news.”

“Uh-huh. Time's it, anyway?”

“Quarter to five.”

“Jesus Christ don't you guys ever sleep?”

“When we have time to. It's one of the secretaries in our office. They were blackmailing her—never mind for what. Ever heard the name C. K. Gillespie—a lawyer in Washington?”

“No. Gillespie? No. You mean he was blackmailing her and he was stupid enough to tell her his
name?
”

“No. She was smart enough to follow him after one of their meetings. She took down his license number.”

“He's a lawyer? Then it's a dead end. He'll plead confidential privilege.”

“He doesn't know we're onto him. We're keeping the woman on ice. We're going to bug Gillespie every way from Sunday. Phones, office, apartment, car, even his clothes. After a while he'll realize she's disappeared—then we're hoping he'll panic and start calling people.”

“This wiretapping and bugging. Is it legal?”

“Warrants from the Circuit Court, sure. We want them airtight, we're not going to fuck around with illegal taps.”

“She's the one who fingered me to this Gillespie?”

“And Benson and John Fusco and Draper. All four of you. We've got the other three under cover, we're relocating them all. Incidentally it looks like Benson's going to make it all right. But don't worry about C. K. Gillespie, he's a drop in the bucket.” The smell of Bradleigh's cigarette was slightly nauseating. “We may have a chance at the whole megillah this time, Fred. All we need is a few breaks. If we can get enough on Gillespie we can make a deal with him and maybe bring the whole structure toppling down.”

“Immunity from prosecution and a new identity if he'll blow the whistle on Pastor and Ezio Martin and the rest of them. That's the ‘deal'?”

“Sure.”

“So Gillespie set us up, and he ends up going scot-free.”

“Come on, Fred, be sensible. He'll lose his law practice, that's for openers. I told you, forget him. He doesn't matter; he's the smallest potato in the sack.” Bradleigh picked up an ashtray; he kept his feet, holding the ashtray left-handed like a guest at a cocktail party. “Given any thought to where you want to go? Discussed it with Jan and Ronny any?”

“Ronny's all for doing a Swiss Family Robinson somewhere in the South Pacific.”

“That what you want?”

“No. I'd go nuts if I didn't have people around me who talked the same language.”

“So?”

“We've talked. I realize you want the decision fast but we're talking about the rest of our lives, Glenn. I'll let you know as soon as I can—we're not crazy about motel rooms either.” He threw the empty styrofoam cup at the wastebasket, missed, ignored it and leaned back in the chair. “Got any aspirin?”

Caruso went toward the bathroom.

Bradleigh said gently, “Scared, aren't you.”

“Sure I am. They found us—they can do it again. I don't really care how they did it, Glenn. I don't care if you've plugged this leak. They can find another one. That's what gives me nightmares.”

“No more leaks.”

“Suppose my kid had gone home to get his baseball bat or any damn thing. Suppose he'd been in the house when they threw the bomb.”

“It's no good supposing. He didn't. Nobody was home. They tried Benson and they tried you and they came up losers on both. Mobsters aren't supermen, you know. They get power by keeping people afraid, but take away the guns and they'll never last a day in the real world.”

“They may not be mental giants but they frighten the hell out of me.” Mathieson took the aspirin with the glass of water Caruso gave him. He rubbed his eyes; they'd be bloodshot all day.

Bradleigh said with unusual heat, “It's a crazy mythology we've created about the mob. The cold professionals, the never-miss hit men. All they know is triggers and bombs. More often than not they can't even handle the simplest job without screwing it up. Look at you. Look at Benson. Benson's off the critical list, incidentally. About the worst they did to him was inconvenience him.”

“Inconvenience.” Mathieson clenched his eyes against the ache. “I'm sorry—I don't feel grateful. I don't even feel relieved. I'll feel grateful when there's nobody out there with guns and bombs looking for my wife and my son.”

“I know how you feel.”

Bradleigh's detachment enraged him. He sat with his eyes closed. He was remembering different people, different times. A cheerful young lawyer and his sparkling young wife and their bubbling three-year-old son. Friendships that were built on laughter and simple enjoyments. They had taken warm pleasure in one another: That had been the center of their world—warmth. He remembered the cramped apartment on Thirteenth Street and the laughter that always filled it—and then a man in a men's room had handed a white envelope to another man and it had all taken on weight and begun to sink beneath the surface.

He bestirred himself. “Phil Adler's drawing up dissolution agreements. You'll have to use that power of attorney for me, wrap things up with him.”

“Sure.”

“Sell the cars, handle the insurance people about the house, you know.”
Scrape up the leavings of the life of Fredric Mathieson, 1967–1976—born by fiat and died of fear, aged eight and one half years
.

Bradleigh said, “We'll make it as though you never existed at all.”

4

They had the pool to themselves: noon in a motel. A few cars were parked in the diagonal slots—the day sleepers who didn't have air-conditioned cars and drove by night. The pool was in the center of the two-story court, out of sight of the street; outside, Bradleigh's four operatives were positioned to enfilade the entrances. Caruso was the only visible official presence; he wore a loud Hawaiian shirt with the tails out over his slacks and Mathieson knew there was a revolver under his waistband.

“How about a drink?”

She shook her head. “It's not even one o'clock.”

“What the hell, we're on vacation.”

She was watching the boy swim across the pool. “I wouldn't call it that. For God's sake stop patronizing me, I'm not made out of bone china.” Finally she looked straight at him. “I'm not going to pieces. You can stop treating me as if I were.”

“OK. I'm sorry.”

“And quit apologizing all the time.”

“I'm sor—” And then they both laughed. But it was uneasy laughter.

Mathieson hitched his aluminum chair six inches closer to Jan's. “Been thinking about where we go?”

She pulled the sunglasses down off her forehead and adjusted them on the bridge of her nose. Now he could no longer see her eyes; but her face kept turning toward the pool. “My mind's still blank. I wish I could think.” Her face dipped. “It's so damned unfair.”

“We've got to make up our minds, you know. We can't stay here. Glenn's itching to get us out of here.”

“I know—I know.”

Ronny climbed the ladder, perched at the top of the slide, made sure he had an audience and chuted into the water. He went in straight, feet first, holding his nose. When he surfaced at the ladder he said, “I wish they had a diving board.”

“Do your surface dives,” Mathieson told him.

“Yeah but it's not the same thing.” But the boy went off the ladder step, curving neatly through the blue water.

5

Bradleigh went out first. Mathieson heard his soft talk: “All right?”

“All clear.”

Bradleigh waved them out. Mathieson went ahead of Jan and Ronny. “Feels a little foolish.”

“Let's just play it by the rules,” Bradleigh told him. They walked through the archway to the back parking lot. Phosphor lamps on high arched stalks of aluminum threw pools of white light around the tarmac. The three cars were drawn up side by side. Caruso was feeding luggage into an open car trunk.

Bradleigh opened doors for them and stood to one side. “You understand the drill?”

“Seems melodramatic to me,” Mathieson said.

“I know. Think of it as a game you're playing.”

Ronny said, “Funny kind of game if you ask me.”

“It won't last long,” Bradleigh said. “A couple of days you'll be up in those Arizona mountains learning how to be an Indian scout.” He gripped Jan's hand. “You take care of each other now.”

“Glenn, you told us not to thank you but—”

“That's right.” But Bradleigh smiled a little; Mathieson took his firm brief handshake. “Look after them, Jason. I'll check in with you in a few days.”

Jason W. Greene
. “Take care, Glenn.”

Then they were in the back seat of the Plymouth and Caruso was sliding in behind the wheel. The doors chunked shut, starters meshed, headlights stabbed across the lot. The car on Mathieson's right pulled away and Caruso drove after it. Mathieson looked around: The third car rolled into place behind them.

They went up along the freeways with the two outrider cars bracketing them front and rear. Caruso kept a steady hundred feet behind the point car. Three in the morning: There was no traffic. Caruso's small talk dried up quickly. In the back seat Ronny fell asleep between them. Mathieson tried to sleep. He thought of the Gilfillans, the rubble that had been his own house, Phil Adler's complacent fat smile. He felt buffeted by events and resentful of his own passivity; but an innocent civilian on the battlefield couldn't make the war stop. You could only run for cover and hate yourself for it.

At El Centro the convoy stopped for gas and breakfast: Caruso made a phone call; after a while they were on the road again.

Ronny became restive; Jan gave him her place by the window but everything was shut tight, the air-conditioner feebly holding back the desert heat. The land was painfully bright, mirages in the road ahead, blinding slivers darting at them from the chrome of passing cars.

They crossed the Colorado River into Arizona and the temperature kept climbing. Twice the convoy left the Interstate and went two-laning along straight country roads, into the cotton and citrus towns, all dusty pickups and slow-moving tractors and endless irrigation hoses. The outrider cars ahead and behind were never out of sight. There was no pursuit but Caruso was obeying instructions.

The detouring and doubling-back ate up hours. At noon they were at a drab oasis somewhere near Buckeye and he tried to revive himself by splashing cold water in his face in the flyspecked lavatory. The overcooked hamburger kept coming back at him through the afternoon.

The procession took a roundabout route through the Phoenix suburbs; as the traffic thickened the outriders moved in closer like mother quail. One of the marshals spelled Caruso at the wheel of the Plymouth; Caruso slept with his head lolling while Mathieson and Jan kept Ronny occupied with Twenty Questions and Botticelli; after a while the boy grew tired of word games and took to counting telephone poles.

East past the Superstition Range, Florence Junction, up the grades through the smelters of Superior, the mines of Miami and Globe, the dark red earth of the Apache reservation. They switchbacked down the limestone cliffs of the Salt River Canyon, crossed the bridge and stopped at the filling station for gas and Nehis.

Going up the north cliff one of the cars overheated and they waited in the scenic overlook until it could cool down enough to empty a Thermos of water into the radiator. Caruso sat on the stone retaining wall and stiffened whenever a tourist car pulled into the parking strip. Ronny ran from point to point, plugged Mathieson's money into the coin-telescope, read the embossed metal legends about Indian battles and Spanish explorations.

Mathieson took Jan's hand and they stretched their legs. It was bright and dry but the altitude was enough to take the heat out of the air and there was a mountain breeze.

Above the canyon Caruso took them off the highway and they wound through the back roads of the reservation through Whiteriver and up the twisting bends of the Mogollon Rim into piney woods, with a trout lake on the left, and for the first time Jan gave Mathieson her slow smile. “Almost there.”

They reached Showlow at suppertime. Caruso said, “End of the line, everybody out,” and they trooped into a roadside steak house made of lodgepole logs. A heavyset Apache sat in a chair on the porch and tipped his head back to peer at them under the brim of his curled cowboy hat; he did not smile.

Mathieson pulled out a chair for Jan and then settled at the table. “All right. Tomorrow we start house hunting.”