The Fraternity of the Stone (12 page)

He did so. At once he heard the rustle of cloth behind him. Alarmed, he turned. Too late. With practiced efficiency, she'd dropped her plastic raincoat, tugged off her Celtics sweatshirt, and was now yanking down her leather skirt.

He raised a hand. "No. What I said I wanted to do - I lied."

She froze in an awkward crouch, her skirt down around her knees, wearing only panty hose, her pubic hair showing darkly through them. Her eyes blazed. Stooped as she was, her breasts dangled, making her look vulnerable. "What?" Furious, she straightened. "What?"

Her breasts and hips showed creamy stretchmarks against the smooth chocolate skin, evidence that she'd once had a child.

"It's not what I had in mind. I wanted to explain on the street, but I didn't think you'd - "

"Hey, I told you. Any rough stuff, anything kinky and - " She raised a fist to slam it against the wall of the room.

"No! Stop!" Drew held up his arms. He knew that the walls were so thin that shouts would be as disastrous as her pounding.

He strained to speak softly. "Please, don't do it. Look, I'm backing away. I'm nowhere close. You've got nothing to be afraid of."

"What the hell?"

"I meant exactly what I said on the street. I want to spend the night. That's all. To have a bath. To use your razor and make myself presentable. And go to bed. And sleep."

Her eyebrows arched. "You're into baths? I'm supposed to wash you, is that it?"

"Not at all." Though he tried not to look at her pubic hair, his body betrayed him. After all, he hadn't seen a woman, let alone a naked woman, since 1979, and he couldn't help feeling attracted to her. But he had to resist, and struggled to focus on her dark boyish face, ignoring her breasts. "Please, I wish you'd put some clothes on."

"Now that," she said, but her voice was no longer angry, "is kinky for sure. You mean to tell me" - she posed suggestively, her eyes amused, sticking out one hip - "you don't like what you see?"

"If it helps you to understand, I'm... or almost was... a priest."

She narrowed her eyes. "So what? A friend of mine, she does two priests a week. I believe in equal opportunity. I don't discriminate."

Drew laughed.

"There, that's the idea. Loosen up, huh?"

"Really, how much for the night? But no sex."

"You're serious?"

He nodded.

"Would I have to leave?"

He shook his head. "In fact, I'd prefer it if you stayed."

"If that isn't weird." She calculated. "Okay, then, two hundred bucks." The furtive movement in her eyes suggested that she expected him to argue.

"That's just about what I have." He pulled out the wallets he'd taken from the man on the hill and the one in the van, tossing money on the pulled-out bed.

"You never heard of a hotel?"

He gestured toward his dirty clothes. "Like this? I'd be remembered."

"And you don't want to be remembered?"

"Let's just say I'm shy."

Her smile became a sober reassessment of him. "And love, you're also cool. Okay, I read you now. No need to fret. You're safe here. Have your bath."

"But if it's all the same to you," Drew said.

She opened the closet, pulling out a housecoat.

"I'd feel better if... "

She turned to him, putting it on.

"You were in there with me."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I've got some questions for you."

Chapter 7.

And, he didn't add, he wanted to keep her in sight.

In the bathroom, he took off his grimy vest. She sat on a chair in the corner and lit a joint.

"You sure you don't want a drag?" she asked.

"It goes against my religion."

"What does, relaxing?"

"Dulling my senses."

She chuckled. "We wouldn't want to do that."

Hot water trom the faucet cascaded into the bathtub, raising steam that coated the mirror above the sink.

Drew put his clothes on the shelf behind him, unobtrusively shoving his Mauser beneath the padded vest. The act of stripping in front of her wasn't difficult. Physical shame had never been one of his - what was the slang from the old days? - hang-ups.

"Not bad," she said, judging his physique, then inhaling sharply, retaining the smoke. "A little gaunt in the haunches." She gestured with the joint. "A little skinny in the ass. If I had your rear end, I'd have to go on welfare. All the same, not bad."

Drew laughed. "I owe it all to diet and exercise."

"Exercise? Hell, you look like one of those guys that runs."

Drew's chest warmed; he'd been a passionate runner. "Yeah." He smiled. "Jim Fixx, Bill Rodgers."

"God, I hope not. Fixx is dead."

Drew felt a jolt. "You're kidding."

She sucked on the joint and shook her head. "Nope. He went out happy. Died on his jog." She looked at him. "Where have you been? If you're into that stuff, you'd know Fixx is dead. He had an inherited heart condition. All that jogging and - "

Drew tried to recover from his shock. "I guess there aren't any guarantees." He turned to step into the bathtub.

Abruptly she leaned forward from her chair. "Holy shit!"

He swung back, ready to grasp for the gun beneath his pile of clothes. "What's wrong?"

"What's wrong? Good Christ, your back! What happened to you?"

"Keep your voice down."

"Sorry, I forgot. My boyfriend."

"What about my back?"

"The scars."

"The what?"

"It looks like somebody whipped you."

Drew felt cold. He'd never realized. The years of penance he'd inflicted upon himself. The skipping rope with which he'd lashed his back. "Yeah, I was in Nam. Tortured."

"It must have been awful."

"I don't like to talk about it. I don't want to think about it anymore."

Drew kept his back turned away from her and stepped over the side of the bathtub. He shut off the water and slowly sank down, feeling it rise past his groin, then above his waist, the heat relaxing his aching muscles. Indeed, he hadn't had a hot bath since he'd entered the monastery, and the unaccustomed luxury made him feel vaguely guilty. He inhaled the lilac fragrance of the soap. As if he'd never seen one before, he studied a huge sponge that she'd given him to use as a washcloth, then soaked it and squeezed soapy water over his head.

She'd taken another drag off the joint and now exhaled the smoke she'd been holding as long as she could in her lungs. "Well, I was wrong. About your being shy."

"It's only a body."

"Yeah, I learned that quite a while ago. The shampoo's on that plastic shelf near your head. Talk about dirty. Look at the water. You'll have to drain the tub and start all over. What were you doing, rolling in mud?"

The irony amused him. "You don't know how right you are."

He scratched his stubble. "We both agreed that I need a shave."

"The razor's next to the shampoo on that shelf."

She didn't have shaving cream, and he had to use hand soap. "I'm sure this'll sound odd," he said. "Who's President?"

She choked on the smoke she'd inhaled. "You're kidding me."

"I wish I was."

"But that's the second time you've... When I mentioned Fixx. Don't you watch television, read the papers?"

"Not where I've been."

"Even in jail, they've got television and newspapers."

"Then that should tell you something."

"You weren't in jail? But I had the impression... "

"Believe me, don't ask. The less I tell you... "

"The better off I am. All right, you claim you're a priest."

"Almost. What they call a brother."

"If that's your story, I'll pretend to believe you were in a monastery. Reagan's President."

Surprised, Drew stopped shaving for a moment. "So Carter didn't get reelected."

"Not the way he let those Iranians make fools of us."

"Iranians?"

"The hostage crisis. Don't you know anything?"

"I guess that's becoming obvious. Tell me."

Class was in session, and it distressed him. He learned about the Iranian assault on the American Embassy in Teheran in 1979. He learned that in 1980 the Soviets, claiming to be nervous about the violence in Iran, had invaded Afghanistan to make that country a protective buffer. Both of these crises, he realized with a shudder, had occurred because of him, because of something he'd done, or rather hadn't done. Ripples. Causes and consequences. If he'd completed his last assignment, if he'd killed the man his network had ordered him to, the sequence would probably never have started. Instead, he'd entered the monastery, and his target had risen to power in Iran.

Was I wrong? Drew thought. How many people have suffered because of me? But how can the decision not to kill be wrong?

The woman continued. Because of Afghanistan, President Carter had refused to allow American athletes to attend the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The Soviets in turn had refused to allow their athletes to attend the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

"The Russians claimed they didn't go to the Olympics because they were worried about terrorists," the woman said. "But everybody knew they were just getting even for what Carter did."

Terrorists. Inwardly, Drew groaned. He'd hoped never to hear that word again.

But there was more, much more. As she smoked another joint, free-associating about the major events of the past six years, the sickness in his soul became worse. He learned that Reagan had nearly been assassinated by a love-struck maniac who wanted to attract the attention of a teenage movie star who'd just begun classes at Yale. The Pope had been wounded during a procession in St. Peter's Square by a Turkish religious fanatic supposedly working for the Bulgarian secret police. A South Korean commercial airliner filled with passengers, some American, had intruded on Soviet airspace and been shot down with no survivors, but nothing really had been done about it.

"Why not?" she asked indignantly. "How come we let them push us around?"

Drew couldn't bring himself to tell her that nothing in such matters was ever what it seemed, that commercial airliners didn't just happen to stray into hostile airspace.

The gist was clear. These disasters seemed commonplace to her, but after his six peaceful years in the monastery, the effect of her list was devastating to him. He tried to avoid concluding that the unacceptable had become ordinary, that the world had gone insane.

"D,tente?" he asked.

"What's that?"

"The arms talks. Nuclear treaties."

"Oh, they keep trying. But do you know what some assholes - they call themselves experts - are claiming? That we can actually win, survive, a nuclear war. They say it's predicted in the Bible. That Christians will defeat the Communists."

Drew moaned. "Don't tell me any more." He stood, dripping water, preparing to step from the tub.

She threw him a towel. "Better cover yourself up, love. Otherwise" - she raised an eyebrow - "you never know. I might get interested."

He'd made the right choice, he decided. She was good for him; she made him laugh. He wrapped the towel around his waist, then glanced at his clothes. "I guess I'd better wash them."

"I might as well do something for what you paid me. Let me help."

He wasn't able to stop her in time. With a look of disgust, she picked up his grimy clothes. And stared at the Mauser beneath them.

She was motionless. "You're full of surprises."

He regarded her intensely. "So what do we do about this one?"

"I scream. Then my boyfriend comes running."

"I hope not."

She studied his eyes.

He didn't want to hurt her. What would he do if she did start to scream?

"All right, I won't."

He exhaled.

"Half the people I know pack guns, but they don't mind their manners like you do. I'll grant you this. You sure give a girl an interesting time for two hundred dollars." Still holding the clothes, she wrinkled her nose. "But what's this bundle in your vest pocket? It smells kind of off."

"I told you, you'd better not ask."

He took the vest and set in on top of the shelf. Then he drained the tub and washed the socks, underwear, jeans, and wool shirt in fresh water. He asked her for a plastic bag, and while she phoned to find out what was taking their food so long to be delivered, he put the bloated body of Stuart Little into the plastic bag and tied the end in an airtight knot. Next, he set the bag and the Mauser beneath a towel, along with the photographs he'd brought with him from the monastery, and finally washed the vest.

Later, when she gave him a brown corduroy housecoat to wear, he waited until she wasn't looking and transferred the mouse, the photographs, and the gun to its pockets. She noticed the bulges, but by now she'd learned.

"I know," she said. 'Don't ask."

Chapter 8.

The knock made him nervous. Holding the gun in the pocket of the housecoat, he stood on the blind side of the door while she asked, "Who is it?"