Something happened.
Weiss drove alone across the Bay Bridge. Eastward, out of the city. It was only early afternoon, still bright outside, but down on the lower deck, with the upper roadway blocking out the sky, it was shadowy and somber. Traffic was unbroken, slow but steady, five lines of cars in five lanes. Weiss’s Taurus chugged along in the queue at a deliberate pace so that the bridge’s side rails whisked by the window in a soporific rhythm and the natural light flickered over the dash in a monotonous counterbeat and the upper tier flashed past the top of the windshield, all very hypnotic. After a while it seemed as if the car drove itself. Weiss was barely there in spirit, pensive behind the wheel.
Something happened. I’m getting the girl out…
But what? he wondered. What happened? Was it, as he suspected, the girl, in fact? Had Bishop fallen in love with her? Weiss liked to think that that was possible, that Bishop could fall in love, make a life with some nice girl. But under the circumstances, he had to admit, it was a whole lot easier to imagine him simply snakebit by someone as hellbound as himself. Especially if another man had her first. Especially if it was a man like Cobra.
The Taurus rolled on and the side rails whisked by and the light flickered and the upper tier raced overhead. And Weiss in his Weiss-like way did not so much analyze the situation as get a sense of it, a general inner impression. He saw Bishop on one side—on his side—and Cobra on the other, like a shadow soul. And the girl in between the two of them. And what a girl. A girl like that? A ruined princess like Beverly Graham? She might’ve been the woman Bishop would’ve won if he were the man he might’ve been. And Weiss could almost feel—he could feel—Bishop’s yearning not just to have her, but to win her away from his rival, to win out yet again in that man-on-man competition that seemed forever undecided in some arena of his mind.
He did not think but somehow knew that the death of Mad Dog had been part of that competition. And he did not know but somehow feared that this plan to take down Cobra—this plan he had just helped arrange with Ketchum—was part of it, too.
The car broke out from under the roadway. The sky was suddenly dazzling in the windshield. The boxes and modest towers of the city’s lowlands fanned out around him. The white stone and red slate rooftops of the university campus rose before him into the misty hills.
Weiss blinked as if awaking. His thoughts or his intuitions or whatever they were became scattered, fragmented. One minute he was thinking of Bishop and Honey Graham and Cobra—a sort of tableau with the men on either side and the girl in the middle—and then the tableau was himself and Julie Wyant and Ben Fry, the Shadowman. He fell into a daydream, one of his usuals: about running up a flight of steps, kicking down a door, trading gunfire with the Shadowman and carrying Julie to safety. From there, the scene shifted to the predictable clichés, Weiss and his missing whore locked together—as he’d imagined it now for days—in several positions inspired by those erotic letters, those e-mails to Professor Brinks.
In that way, Weiss’s reason for coming here to Berkeley slowly swam back to the forefront of his consciousness. The letters. Brinks. Arnold Freyberg.
Library research by Sissy and some expert tracking by Hwang the Computer Guy had now more or less confirmed my lead. It was all but certain that Freyberg, the disgruntled professor of William Blake and Wilfred K. Green hounded out of his job by Marianne Brinks, among others, was the e-mails’ author. If Weiss had wanted to, he could’ve simply delivered this information to his client at this point. He could’ve left it up to the lovelorn Professor Brinks to decide what to do next. He should’ve, probably, according to the rules of the trade.
But he wasn’t going to. He told himself he had to make sure first. He had to confront Freyberg in person and make absolutely certain he had the right man. That’s what he told himself. But really, it was that protective routine of his again. He was positive Brinks was setting herself up for a heartbreaking rejection, a big-time romantic disaster, and he wanted to be able to prepare her for it if he could, even talk her out of going forward if he had to.
So here he was in Berkeley, and the Taurus coughed and cruised through the corridor of traffic lights to the western edge of the university. Weiss turned to the north, rolled closer to the professor’s address on Euclid Avenue. He became aware of a little hum of excitement under his skin. He was kind of looking forward to meeting this Freyberg. He’d been living with the professor’s sex fantasies for days now. He’d even acted them out once with a couple of Casey’s whores. He was curious—even eager—to find out what the man himself was like. Sissy had found a photo of him on one of his books. A narrow, handsome face, fiftyish, with a serious mouth and an intense gaze. Weiss imagined him as energetic, brilliant, and vital, in touch with his Natural Being. A little rakish, maybe, but wise to the ways of men and maids. And what with Julie and the Shadowman and the whores and his loneliness and so on, he felt he could use some wisdom on that subject right now.
I will remake you into your body. Only flesh, only sensation. The moment of desire! The moment of desire!
The Taurus turned onto Euclid.