The Shadow Man (10 page)

“I don’t see why you can’t forget about it,” Millikin said to Ellen Andrews as they sat in the restaurant of a secluded Maine lodge and sipped cocktails. They weren’t staying at the lodge, but at a luxury motel whose owner was a longtime friend of Millikin’s. Outside the vast window beside them, the Atlantic rolled in wrinkled white lines and undulating planes of murky green. The motif of the restaurant was Spanish. There were sombreros on the walls.

Ellen put down her strawberry daiquiri on its cork coaster and stared across the table at Millikin, as if unable to comprehend his reluctance to understand what she was saying. “First the man who lied about his appointment with Jerry,” she said. “Then, I tell you, I’m sure I’m being followed. How can I forget it?”

Millikin gazed out to sea, as if really more interested in things that happened on water than on land. “Why would anyone be following you? There’s no reason for Jerry to hire someone; we all know the situation.”

“Do you think I’m imagining it?” Ellen asked. “Do you think I’m paranoid?”

“I love you because you’re paranoid,” Millikin said, still staring toward the indistinct horizon. It was one of those indecipherable remarks of his that sometimes distracted and irritated Ellen. A sort of verbal judo he practiced. Nobody ever got hurt, but she was always off balance, groping.

“I want us to go away,” she said firmly. “I’m afraid.”

Millikin turned his attention landward. “You? Afraid? But of what?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m afraid, naturally. That shouldn’t be so difficult for you to understand.”

“Good Christ!” Millikin said. He said it calmly but with emphasis. “You don’t think anyone intends to harm you, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Intuition. Mine is seldom wrong. I want us to go away, to Italy. To where we went before on the Ligurian coast.”

Millikin finished his drink and signaled for another. “I don’t know if I can do that, Ellen. I’m embroiled in an anti-trust case. Anyway, what would Jerry think? He was away himself the last time we were there.”

“He wouldn’t think anything even if he knew where I was. I’m not suggesting that we be gone for more than a few weeks. Jerry probably plans to spend his time with Pat Colombo.”

“Are you sure he’s still seeing her?” Millikin asked.

“He’s involved with some woman. And they’ve been seen together lately. She’s an editor for some financial magazine now, out of politics. But I’m sure it’s the Colombo woman.”

“Intuition again?” Millikin asked.

Ellen winced at the note of sarcasm in his voice. “It doesn’t matter, does it, as long as I’m correct?”

“No,” Millikin said. The waiter brought his drink and Ellen ordered another daiquiri. A very white gull soared in toward shore low and veered away an instant before striking the window. Millikin rested a hand on Ellen’s wrist. “You really are frightened, aren’t you?” he said, looking into her eyes as he had earlier looked out to sea.

She nodded, old in the harsh light reflected from the wide sea and sky. From hidden speakers, grandiose and somber Spanish trumpet music began playing softly.

“I’ll look into travel arrangements tomorrow,” Millikin told her. He opened his menu and peered down at it as if it were some complex legal document, trying to ignore her gratitude. “Shall we try the flounder?” he asked.

“You know I don’t like to dance,” she said. She was young again, joking.

They laughed.

They were going away.

Andrews hadn’t been able even to think of eating during the rest of the morning and afternoon. The image of the pale, dead Leola kept intruding in his mind, prompted by even the remotest stimuli. An old lady almost struck by a cab at an intersection: Woman: Death: Leola. A girl walking in front of Andrews, her only resemblance to Leola a high, artfully arranged mass of hair. Leola. The sight, the faint sound, of a topless bar on the other side of the street. Leola.

What Andrews did most of the rest of that day was walk. He had no particular destination, no direction. It seemed possible that by draining his physical strength he could also drain his memory of the dead woman, and perhaps drain the guilt that had settled like dark acid at the base of his mind. If he hadn’t drawn Leola into the Karpp affair, she might be alive, might be at this moment dancing.

Andrews hurried across an intersection against the light and tried to convince himself that his contact with Leola might have made no difference. After all, it was Dana Larsen who had actually resurrected “L. C. Chambers” for her.

But wasn’t it Dana Larsen whom Andrews had forgotten in the press of his work? Whose death he might have prevented?

But that, too, wasn’t a certainty. Andrews walked faster.

Even here, in midtown Manhattan at nine in the evening, people were beginning to stare at him. He caught them glancing at him in the reflections of shop windows, from the windows of passing cabs and busses. Or was that also his imagination?

Probably not, he decided, realizing how fast and recklessly he was striding along the sidewalk, how stricken and grim was his expression.

He slowed, made himself relax as much as possible. His heart was hammering from his unconscious effort, and when he raised a hand it trembled unless he willed it to be still. Something in him, some other Andrews, had almost loved Leola Raymond.

He decided that he had to eat some supper, ingest something for his system to work on besides grief, guilt and frustration. For the moment, he’d forgotten fear.

Near the opposite corner on West Fifty-seventh Street was a small stand-up deli with a neon sign out in front that blinked EAT GOOD FAST. Andrews angled toward the window that advertised pizza by the slice, hamburgers, eggs any way, bagels and hot coffee. From the fierce, perspiring counterman, he bought a bagel and a large cup of coffee that was indeed hot. He found a spot at the crowded counter and set the paper cup down gingerly before it seriously burned his fingers. A tall, morose man in a rumpled blue business suit glanced at him and grudgingly sidestepped to give Andrews elbow room.

“I asked for a fuckin’ large!” a voice argued behind Andrews. No one at the long counter seemed to hear, or if they did hear, to care how the disgruntled customer would come out in his disagreement with management.

Andrews ate slowly, chewing each bite deliberately before washing it down with a sip of the scalding coffee. When he was finished, the bagel seemed to have doubled in size and density in his stomach, but he felt better, stronger. The involuntary trembling of his hands had ceased. He finished his coffee slowly, added his trash to the overflowing contents of a container near the end of the counter and walked out.

He’d gone about half a block when he saw Martin Karpp.

Andrews was walking by the display window of a luggage shop when he glanced in, and there was Karpp staring back at him.

So startled was Andrews that he stopped and felt ice penetrate his bones. And so indistinct was the image of Karpp that he couldn’t be sure if what he’d seen was Karpp inside the luggage shop, or Karpp reflected in the wide plane of the window.

Andrews spun and looked behind him, eyes darting searchingly up and down the street, across the street. There was no sign of Karpp. Andrews barged into the luggage shop.

“A sale on attache cases today,” a bespectacled clerk announced.

Andrews ignored him and ran to the shop’s rear display area that afforded the only concealment for anyone inside. The only other customer, a young black man in jeans and a sport jacket, stared at him, then went back to examining the suede tote bag he was considering.

There was no one behind the racks of travel accessories at the rear of the shop. Accidentally knocking over a row of suitcases as if they were dominoes, Andrews hurried back toward the street. The bespectacled clerk glared at him with mild-mannered malevolence.

On the sidewalk, Andrews glanced about again, harboring no real hope of seeing Karpp. Had it been Karpp? Despite his indirect observation of the man, Andrews was positive he’d been looking at Martin Karpp. And yet...

Jangling the change in his pocket, Andrews charged into a phone booth on the corner. He was too curious even to wait until he’d returned to the hotel. He ensconced himself in the booth, armed with a handful of silver, and phoned Dr. Laidelier at the Belmont sanitarium.

Dr. Laidelier was still in his office. He listened to Andrews’ request and clucked his tongue thoughtfully into the receiver, as if he might be considering Andrews for future residency.

“It’s unusual, Senator,” he said. “But there’s no reason I can’t check on Karpp myself, if you’ll hold the line.”

“I’ll hold.”

Andrews stood silently, his eyes constantly moving as he watched the thronging scene around the booth.

“Needless to say,” Dr. Laidelier told Andrews, when he’d returned to the phone five minutes later, “Martin Karpp is right where he’s supposed to be, where he’s been since he was sent here.”

“I saw him not ten minutes ago on West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan,” Andrews said.

“Senator, with all due respect, that’s impossible.”

“You don’t have to remind me.” A sudden, wild thought struck Andrews. “Dr. Laidelier, does Martin Karpp have any brothers or sisters?”

“You mean a twin?”

“Even a brother who strongly resembles him.”

“Sorry, Senator, Karpp was an only child. And thank God for that. You simply saw someone who resembled Karpp.”

“It isn’t likely I’d glimpse someone who so closely resembles him,” Andrews said. “The same height and squarish shoulders, the same dark hair and thoughtful scowl.”

“You did say glimpse,” Dr. Laidelier reminded.

“I didn’t get a chance to study him.”

“And New York is a big city. Unless I’m lying to you, Senator, you couldn’t have seen Martin Karpp. And I assure you I’m speaking the truth.”

“I’m sure you are, Doctor. But... well, I can’t come up with any explanations.”

“I can’t offer any, either,” Laidelier said, “except to suggest that what you saw was the manifestation of an overactive imagination. Not as unusual as you might suspect, Senator. And certainly nothing to worry about unless it happens recurrently.”

The last thing Andrews wanted was psychoanalysis over the phone. What really aggravated him was that Laidelier might be right. In fact,
had
to be right.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you, Doctor.”

“That’s all right, Senator. It really is.”

Andrews thanked Dr. Laidelier and hung up.

When he stepped from the phone booth, he realized for the first time how exhausted he was from his day of tension and ceaseless, aimless walking. It had been the sort of day that could well bring on the hallucination Dr. Laidelier was sure Andrews had experienced. Andrews had to concede that point. And wouldn’t he be the person least capable of judging whether he’d hallucinated?

Then he remembered that contemplative, intent scowl directed at him through, or in, the luggage-shop display window. Three-dimensional or two? Andrews really didn’t know. So how could he be so gut-deep positive of what he’d seen? Positive of anything? In so many ways, the world seemed at last to be revealing its vacillation of fact and substance, to be becoming unreal.

Andrews began walking again, this time slowly and wearily, head bowed, in the direction of his hotel.

It had seemed to Ellen like a transfiguration by an act of magic. Millikin had been as good as his word. One day they were in Maine, the next they were here in Italy, unpacking in the tiny pink villa that overlooked a quarter mile of gently sloping beach and then the sea.

They had stayed at the villa here on the Ligurian coast the year before. It belonged to a man in Rome, an old acquaintance of Millikin’s, and usually sat empty. As he had last time, the man refused to accept rent from Millikin. And, like last time, Millikin had insisted and paid generously in advance by wire. The man never asked why Millikin wanted the use of the villa or whether he would have someone there with him. Millikin told Ellen that the villa’s owner was slowly dying of cancer and had no more use for the sun, which he claimed had caused his illness.

The interior walls of the villa were rough plaster, here and there marked with fine cracks that resembled a system of roads seen from high above. The furniture was draped with heavy black plastic that was folded and fastened to the floor with wide strips of brown tape. Near the window on the seaward wall hung a framed, yellowed newspaper photograph of a pretty, dark-haired woman receiving a loving cup from a smiling elderly man in a tuxedo. There was no accompanying text, and the woman’s plain dark dress gave no hint of when the photograph was taken. She was young, possibly still in her twenties, with expectation in her eyes.

“How long can we stay?” Ellen asked. She felt safe now, as far removed from danger as she had ever been. An abrupt and complete change of scenery can affect the senses like that. Though she knew this, she gave in to the effect gladly. It was why she had come.

“Indefinitely, really,” Millikin told her. “No one but the owner knows we’re here, and he forgets he owns this place until a yearly bill from a hired man comes in for maintenance expenses.”

The surf whispered sibilant reassurances to Ellen. She sat down on the plastic-covered bed and simply enjoyed no longer feeling the vague uneasiness, the dark anticipation, that had threatened to overpower her at home.

“That’s the way you wanted it, isn’t it?” Millikin said, hitching his thumbs in the beltless waistband of his chino slacks and smiling at her. “Private and anonymous.”

There was an Anglo-Saxon colony on this part of the coast, but not near enough to disturb them. Their nearest neighbor was half a mile away, an old Italian woman who lived in a yellow villa with an overgrown wild garden. Yet they could walk to the small town of Pescare and buy what supplies they needed other than their weekly grocery delivery. “Seclusion and convenience,” Millikin had said.

Ellen smiled up at Millikin. “It’s what I wanted,” she told him. “Thank you.”

Millikin shrugged smoothly, almost indifferently. He was always embarrassed to be thanked. Anyway, he knew from experience how Ellen would demonstrate her gratitude. He said, “Well, here we are,” and began to walk in aimless patterns, glancing about. “Shall we uncover the furniture?”

Ellen was still smiling. “Let’s uncover a few other things first,” she said.