Morris Panov sat listlessly in a chair by a window looking out over the pasture of a farm somewhere, he assumed, in Maryland. He was in a small second-floor bedroom dressed in a hospital nightshirt, his bare right arm confirming the story he knew only too well. He had been drugged repeatedly, taken up to the moon, in the parlance of those who usually administered such narcotics. He had been mentally raped, his mind penetrated, violated, his innermost thoughts and secrets brought chemically to the surface and exposed.
The damage he had done was incalculable, he understood that; what he did not understand was why he was still alive. Even more perplexing was why he was being treated so deferentially. Why was his guard with the foolish black mask so courteous, the food plentiful and decent? It was as if the present imperative of his captivity was to restore his strength—profoundly sapped by the drugs—and make him as comfortable as possible under the extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Why?
The door opened and his masked guard walked in, a short heavyset man with a rasping voice Panov placed somewhere in the northeastern United States or possibly Chicago. In another situation he might have appeared comic, his large head too massive for the asinine Lone Ranger eye-covering, which would certainly not impede instant identification. However, in the current state of affairs, he was not comic at all; his obsequiousness was in itself menacing. Over his left arm were the psychiatrist’s clothes.
“Okay, Doc, you gotta get dressed. I made sure everything was cleaned and pressed, even the undershorts. How about that?”
“You mean you have your own laundry and dry cleaners out here?”
“Fuck no, we take ’em over to—Oh, no, you don’t get me that way, Doc!” The guard grinned with slightly yellowed teeth. “Pretty smart, huh? You figure I’ll tell you where we are, huh?”
“I was simply curious.”
“Yeah, sure. Like I got a nephew, my sister’s kid, who’s always ‘simply curious,’ askin’ me questions I don’t wanna answer. Like, ‘Hey, Unc, how’d you put me through medical school, huh?’ Yeah! He’s a doctor, like you, what do you think of that?”
“I’d say his mother’s brother is a very generous person.”
“Yeah, well, wadda you gonna do, huh?… Come on, put on the threads, Doc, we’re going on a little trip.” The guard handed Mo his clothes.
“I suppose it would be foolish to ask where,” said Panov, getting out of the chair, removing his hospital nightshirt and putting on his shorts.
“Very foolish.”
“I hope not as foolish as your nephew not telling you about a symptom you have that I’d find somewhat alarming if I were you.” Mo casually pulled up his trousers.
“Wadda you talkin’?”
“Perhaps nothing,” replied Panov, putting on his shirt and sitting down to pull up his socks. “When did you last see your nephew?”
“A couple of weeks ago. I put in some bread to cover his insurance. Shit, those mothers are bleeders!… Wadda you mean when did I last see the prick?”
“I just wondered if he said anything to you.”
“About what?”
“About your mouth.” Mo laced his shoes and gestured with his head. “There’s a mirror over the bureau, go take a look.”
“At what?” The capo subordinato walked quickly to the mirror.
“Smile.”
“At what?”
“Yourself.… See the yellow on your teeth, the fading red of your gums and how the gums recede the higher they go?”
“So? They always been like that—”
“It might be nothing, but he should have spotted it.”
“Spotted what, for Christ’s sake?”
“Oral ameloblastoma. Possibly.”
“What the hell is that? I don’t brush too good and I don’t like dentists. They’re butchers!”
“You mean you haven’t seen a dentist or an oral surgeon in quite a while?”
“So?” The capo bared his teeth again in front of the mirror.
“That could explain why your nephew didn’t say anything.”
“Why?”
“He probably figures you have regular dental checkups, so let those people explain it to you.” Shoes tied, Panov stood up.
“I don’t getcha.”
“Well, he’s grateful for everything you’ve done for him, appreciative of your generosity. I can understand why he’d hesitate telling you.”
“Telling me what?” The guard spun away from the mirror.
“I could be wrong but you really ought to see a periodontist.” Mo put on his jacket. “I’m ready,” he said. “What do we do now?”
The capo subordinato, his eyes squinting, his forehead creased in ignorance and suspicion, reached into his pocket and pulled out a large black kerchief. “Sorry, Doc, but I gotta blindfold you.”
“Is that so you can put a bullet in my head when, mercifully, I don’t know it’s going to happen?”
“No, Doctor. No bam-bam for you. You’re too valuable.”
“Valuable?” asked the capo supremo rhetorically in his opulent living room in Brooklyn Heights. “Like a gold mine just popped out of the ground and landed in your minestrone. This Jew has worked on the heads of some of the biggest lasagnas in Washington. His files have got to be worth the price of Detroit.”
“You’ll never get them, Louis,” said the attractive middle-aged man dressed in an expensive tropical worsted suit sitting across from his host. “They’ll be sealed and carted off out of your reach.”
“Well, we’re working on that, Mr. Park Avenue, Manhattan. Say—just for laughs—say we got ’em. What are they worth to you?”
The guest permitted himself a thin aristocratic smile. “Detroit?” he replied.
“Va bene! I like you, you got a sense of humor.” As abruptly as he had grinned, the mafioso became serious, even ugly. “The five mill still holds for this Bourne-Webb character, right?”
“With a proviso.”
“I don’t like provisos, Mr. Lawyer, I don’t like them at all.”
“We can go elsewhere. You’re not the only game in town.”
“Let me explain something to you, Signor Avvocato. In a lot of ways, we—all of we—are the only game in town. We don’t mess with other families’ hits, you know what I mean? Our councils have decided hits are too personal; it makes for bad blood.”
“Will you listen to the proviso? I don’t think you’ll be offended.”
“Shoot.”
“I wish you’d use another word—”
“Go ahead.”
“There’ll be a two-million-dollar bonus because we insist you include Webb’s wife and his government friend Conklin.”
“Done, Mr. Park Avenue, Manhattan.”
“Good. Now to the rest of our business.”
“I want to talk about the Jew.”
“We’ll get to him—”
“Now.”
“Please don’t give orders to me,” said the attorney from one of Wall Street’s most prestigious firms. “You’re really not in a position to do that, wop.”
“Hey, farabutto! You don’t talk to me like that!”
“I’ll talk to you any way I like.… On the outside, and to your credit in negotiations, you’re a very masculine, very macho fellow.” The lawyer calmly uncrossed and crossed his legs. “But the inside’s quite different, isn’t it? You’ve got a soft heart, or should I say hard loins, for pretty young men.”
“Silenzio!” The Italian shot forward on the couch.
“I have no wish to exploit the information. On the other hand, I don’t believe Gay Rights are very high on the Cosa Nostra’s agenda, do you?”
“You son of a bitch!”
“You know, when I was a young army lawyer in Saigon, I defended a career lieutenant who was caught in flagrante delicto with a Vietnamese boy, a male prostitute obviously. Through legal maneuvers, using ambiguous phrases in the military code regarding civilians, I saved him from a dishonorable discharge, but it was obvious that he had to resign from the service. Unfortunately, he never went on to a productive life; he shot himself two hours after the verdict. You see, he’d become a pariah, a disgrace before his peers and he couldn’t handle the burden.”
“Get on with your business,” said the capo supremo named Louis, his voice low and flat and filled with hatred.
“Thank you.… First, I left an envelope on your foyer table. It contains payment for Armbruster’s tragic confrontation in Georgetown and Teagarten’s equally tragic assassination in Brussels.”
“According to the yid head doctor,” interrupted the mafioso, “you got two more they know about. An ambassador in London and that admiral on the Joint Chiefs. You wanna add another bonus?”
“Possibly later, not now. They both know very little and nothing about the financial operations. Burton thinks that we’re essentially an ultraconservative veterans’ lobbying effort that grew out of the Vietnam disgrace—legally borderline for him, but then he has strong patriotic feelings. Atkinson’s a rich dilettante; he does what he’s told, but he doesn’t know why or by whom. He’d do anything to hold on to the Court of Saint James’s and has; his only connection was with Teagarten.… Conklin hit pay dirt with Swayne and Armbruster, Teagarten and, of course, DeSole, but the other two are window dressing, quite respectable window dressing. I wonder how it happened.”
“When I find out, and I will find out, I’ll let you know, gratis.”
“Oh?” The attorney raised his eyebrows. “How?”
“We’ll get to it. What’s your other business?”
“Two items, both vital, and the first I’ll give you—gratis. Get rid of your current boyfriend. He goes to places he shouldn’t and throws money around like a cheap hoodlum. We’re told he boasts about his connections in high places. We don’t know what else he talks about or what he knows or what he’s pieced together, but he concerns us. I’d think he’d concern you, too.”
“Il prostituto!” roared Louis, slamming his clenched fist down on the arm of the couch. “Il pinguino! He’s dead.”
“I accept your thanks. The other item is far more important, certainly to us. Swayne’s house in Manassas. A book was removed, an office diary, which Swayne’s lawyer in Manassas—our lawyer in Manassas—could not find. It was on a bookshelf, its binding identical with all the other books in that row, the entire row on the shelf. A person would have to know exactly which one to take.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“The gardener was your man. He was put in place to do his job, and he was given the only number we knew was totally secure, namely, DeSole’s.”
“So?”
“To do his job, to mount the suicide authentically, he had to study Swayne’s every move. You yourself explained that to me ad nauseam when you demanded your outrageous fee. It’s not hard to picture your man peering through the window at Swayne in his study, the place where Swayne supposedly would take his life. Gradually your man realizes that the general keeps taking a specific book from off his shelf, writes in it, and returns it to the same spot. That has to intrigue him; that particular book has to be valuable. Why wouldn’t he take it? I would, you would. So where is it?”
The mafioso got slowly, menacingly to his feet. “Listen to me, avvocato, you gotta lot of fancy words that make for conclusions, but we ain’t got no book like that and I’ll tell you how I can prove it! If there was anything anywhere written down that could burn your ass, I’d be shoving it in your face right now, capisce?”
“That’s not illogical,” said the well-dressed attorney, once again uncrossing and crossing his legs as the resentful capo sullenly returned to the couch. “Flannagan,” added the Wall Street lawyer. “Naturally … of course, Flannagan. He and his hairdresser bitch had to have their insurance policy, no doubt with minor extortion in the bargain. Actually, I’m relieved. They could never use it without exposing themselves. Accept my apologies, Louis.”
“Your business finished?”
“I believe so.”
“Now, the Jew shrink.”
“What about him?”
“Like I said, he’s a gold mine.”
“Without his patients’ files, less than twenty-four carat, I think.”
“Then you think wrong,” countered Louis. “Like I told Armbruster before he became another big impediment for you, we got doctors, too. Specialists in all kinds of medical things, including what they call motor responses and, get this, ‘triggered mental recall under states of external control’—I remembered that one especially. It’s a whole different kind of gun at your head, only no blood.”
“I assume there’s a point to this.”
“You can bet your country club on it. We’re moving the Jew to a place in Pennsylvania, a kind of nursing home where only the richest people go to get dried out or straightened out, if ya know what I mean.”
“I believe I do. Advanced medical equipment, superior staff—well-patrolled grounds.”
“Yeah, sure you do. A lot of your crowd passes through—”
“Go on,” interrupted the attorney, looking at his gold Rolex watch. “I haven’t much time.”
“Make time for this. According to my specialists—and I purposely used the word ‘my,’ if you follow me—on a prearranged schedule, say every fourth or fifth day, the new patient is ‘shot up to the moon’—that’s the phrase they use, it’s not mine, Christ knows. Between times he’s been treated real good. He’s been fed the right neutermints or whatever they are, given the proper exercise, a lot of sleep and all the rest of that shit.… We should all be so careful of our bodies, right, avvocato?”
“Some of us play squash every other day.”
“Well, you’ll forgive me, Mr. Park Avenue, Manhattan, but squash to me is zucchini and I eat it.”
“Linguistic and cultural differences do crop up, don’t they?”
“Yeah, I can’t fault you there, Consigliere.”
“Hardly. And my title is attorney.”
“Give me time. It could be Consigliere.”
“There’s not enough years in our lifetimes, Louis. Do you go on or do I leave?”
“I go on, Mr. Attorney.… So each time the Jew shrink is shot up to that moon my specialist talks about, he’s in pretty good shape, right?”
“I see the periodic remissions to normalcy, but then I’m not a doctor.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but then I’m not a doctor, either, so I’ll take my specialist’s word for it. You see, every time he’s shot up, his mind is pretty clear inside, and then he’s fed name after name after name. A lot, maybe most, won’t mean a thing, but every now and then one will, and then another, and another. With each, they start what they call a probe, finding out bits and pieces of information, just enough to get a sketch of the patient he’s talking about—just enough to scare the shit out of that lasagna when he’s reached. Remember, these are stressful times and this Hebe doctor treats some of the fattest cats in Washington, in and outside the government. How does that grab you, Mr. Attorney?”
“It’s certainly unique,” replied the guest slowly, studying the capo supremo. “His files, of course, would be infinitely preferable.”
“Yeah, well, like I say, we’re working on that, but it’ll take time. This is now, immediato. He’ll be in Pennsylvania in a couple of hours. You want to deal? You and me?”
“Over what? Something you don’t have and may never get?”
“Hey, come on, what do you think I am?”
“I’m sure you don’t want to hear that—”
“Cut the crap. Say in a day or so, maybe a week, we meet, and I give you a list of names I think you might be interested in, all of which we got information on—let’s say information not readily available. You pick one or two or maybe none, what can you lose? We’re talkin’ spitballs anyway, ’cause the deal’s between you and me only. No one else is involved except my specialist and his assistant who don’t know you and you don’t know them.”
“A side arrangement, as it were?”
“Not as it were, like it is. Depending on the information, I’ll figure out the charge. It may only be a thou or two, or it may go to twenty, or it may be gratis, who knows? I’d be fair because I want your business, capisce?”
“It’s very interesting.”
“You know what my specialist says? He says we could start our own cottage industry, he called it. Snatch a dozen shrinks, all with heavy government connections, like in the Senate or even the White House—”
“I understand fully,” interrupted the attorney, getting to his feet, “but my time’s up.… Bring me a list, Louis.” The guest walked toward the short marble foyer.
“No fancy attaché case, Signor Avvocato?” said the capo, rising from the couch.
“And upset the not so delicate mechanisms in your doorway?”
“Hey, it’s a violent world out there.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
The Wall Street attorney left, and at the sound of the closing door, Louis rushed across the room to the inlaid Queen Anne desk and virtually pounced on the ivory French telephone—as usual, tipping over the tall thin instrument twice before securing the stem with one hand while dialing with the other. “Fucking swish horn!” he mumbled. “Goddamned fairy decorator!… Mario?”
“Hello, Lou,” said the pleasant voice in New Rochelle. “I’ll bet you called to wish Anthony a happy birthday, huh?”
“Who?”
“My kid, Anthony. He’s fifteen today, did you forget? The whole family’s out in the garden and we miss you, Cousin. And hey, Lou, what a garden this year. I’m a real artist.”
“You also may be something else.”
“What?”
“Buy Anthony a present and send me the bill. At fifteen, maybe a broad. He’s ready for manhood.”
“Lou, you’re too much. There are other things—”
“There’s only one thing now, Mario, and I want the truth from your lips or I’ll carve them out of your face!”
There was a brief pause from New Rochelle before the pleasant-sounding executioner spoke. “I don’t deserve to be talked to that way, cugino.”
“Maybe, maybe not. There was a book taken from that general’s place in Manassas, a very valuable book.”
“They found out it was missing, huh?”
“Holy shit! You got it?”
“I had it, Lou. It was going to be a present to you, but I lost it.”
“You lost it? What the fuck did you do, leave it in a taxi?”
“No, I was running for my life, that maniac with the flares, what’s his name, Webb, unloading at me in the driveway. He grazed me and I fell and the lousy book flew out of my hand—just as the police car arrived. He picked it up and I ran like hell for the fence.”
“Webb’s got it?”
“I guess so.”
“Christ on a trampoline …!”
“Anything else, Lou? We’re about to light the candles on the cake.”
“Yeah, Mario, I may need you in Washington—a big cannoli without a foot but with a book.”
“Hey, wait a minute, cugino, you know my rules. Always a month between business trips. What did Manassas take? Six weeks? And last May in Key West, three, almost four weeks? I can’t call, I can’t write a postcard—no, Lou, always a month. I got responsibilities to Angie and the children. I’m not going to be an absentee parent; they’ve got to have a role model, you know what I mean?”
“I got Ozzie Nelson for a fuckin’ cousin!” Louis slammed down the phone, and instantly grabbed it as it crashed over on the desk, its delicate ivory stem displaying a crack. “The best hit man in the business and he’s a freak,” mumbled the capo supremo as he dialed frantically. When the line was picked up, the anxiety and the anger disappeared from his voice; it was not apparent but it had not gone away. “Hello, Frankie baby, how’s my closest friend?”
“Oh, hi, Lou,” came the floating, but hesitant, languorous tones from an expensive apartment in Greenwich Village. “Can I call you back in two minutes? I’m just putting my mother into a cab to take her back to Jersey. Okay?”
“Sure, kid. Two minutes.” Mother? The whore! Il pinguino! Louis walked to his mirrored marble bar with the pink angels flying over the Lalique inset above the whisky bottles. He poured himself a drink and took several calming swallows. The bar phone rang. “Yeah?” he said, carefully picking up the fragile crystal instrument.
“It’s me, Lou. Frankie. I said good-bye to Mama.”
“That’s a good boy, Frankie. Never forget your mama.”
“Oh, I never do, Lou. You taught me that. You told me you gave your mama the biggest funeral they ever saw in East Hartford.”
“Yeah, I bought the fuckin’ church, man.”
“Real nice, real nice.”
“Now let’s get to something else real nice, okay? It’s been one of those days, Frankie, lots of turmoil, you know what I mean?”
“Sure, Lou.”
“So I got an itch. I gotta get some relief. Come on over here, Frankie.”
“As fast as a cab can take me, Lou.”
Prostituto! It would be Frankie the Big Mouth’s last service for him.
Out on the street the well-dressed attorney walked two blocks south and a block east to his waiting limousine parked beneath the canopy of another impressive residence in Brooklyn Heights. His stocky chauffeur of middle years was talking pleasantly with the uniformed doorman, whom he had generously tipped by now. Spotting his employer, the driver walked rapidly to the limousine’s rear door and opened it. Several minutes later they were in traffic heading for the bridge.
In the quiet of the backseat, the lawyer undid his alligator belt, pressed the upper and lower rims of the buckle, and a small cartridge fell out between his legs. He picked it up and refastened the belt.
Holding the cartridge up to the filtered light from the window, he studied the miniaturized voice-activated recording device. It was an extraordinary machine, tiny enough and with an acrylic mechanism that permitted it to fly through the most sophisticated detectors. The attorney leaned forward in his seat and spoke to the driver. “William?”
“Yes, sir.” The chauffeur glanced up at his rearview mirror and saw his employer’s outstretched hand; he reached back.
“Take this over to the house and put it on a cassette, will you, please?”
“Right, Major.”
The Manhattan lawyer reclined in the seat, smiling to himself. Louis would give him anything he wanted from now on. A capo did not make side arrangements where the family was concerned, to say nothing of acknowledging certain sexual preferences.
Morris Panov sat blindfolded in the front seat of the sedan with his guard, his hands loosely, almost courteously bound, as if the capo subordinato felt he was following unnecessary orders. They had been driving for about thirty minutes in silence when the guard spoke.
“What’s a perry-oh-dentist?” he asked.
“An oral surgeon, a doctor trained to operate inside patients’ mouths on problems relating to teeth and gum tissue.”
Silence. Then seven minutes later: “What kind of problems?”
“Any number of them, from infections to scraping the roots to more complicated surgery usually in tandem with an oncologist.”
Silence. Four minutes later: “What was that last—the tandy-uncle stuff?”
“Oral cancer. If it’s caught in time, it can be arrested with minor bone removal.… If not, the entire jaw might have to go.” Panov could feel the car briefly swerve as the driver momentarily lost control.
Silence. A minute and a half later: “The whole fuckin’ jaw? Half the face?”
“It’s either that or the whole of the patient’s life.”
Thirty seconds later: “You think I could have something like that?”
“I’m a doctor, not an alarmist. I merely noted a symptom, I did not make a diagnosis.”
“So bullshit! So make a dagassnossis!”
“I’m not qualified.”
“Bullshit! You’re a doctor, ain’t you? I mean a real doctor, not a fasullo who says he is but ain’t got no shingle that’s legit.”
“If you mean medical school, yes, I’m that kind of doctor.”
“So look at me!”
“I can’t. I’m blindfolded.” Panov suddenly felt the guard’s thick strong hand clawing at his head, yanking the kerchief off him. The dark interior of the automobile answered a question for Mo: How could anyone travel in a car with a blindfolded passenger? In that car it was no problem; except for the windshield, the windows were not merely tinted, they were damn near opaque, which meant from the outside they were opaque. No one could see inside.
“Go on, look!” The capo subordinato, his eyes on the road, tilted his large head grotesquely toward Panov; his thick lips were parted and his teeth bared like those of a child playing monster in the mirror, he shouted again. “So tell me what you see!”
“It’s too dark in here,” replied Mo, seeing essentially what he wanted to see in the front window; they were on a country road, so narrow and so country the next step lower was dirt. Wherever he was being taken, he was being driven there by an extremely circuitous route.
“Open the fuckin’ window!” yelled the guard, his head still twisted, his eyes still on the road, his gaping mouth approaching a caricature of Orca, the about-to-vomit whale. “Don’t hold nothin’ back. I’ll break every goddamn finger in that prick’s hands! He can do his fuckin’ surgery with his elbows!… I told that stupid sister of mine he was no fuckin’ good, that fairy. Always readin’ books, no action on the street, y’know what I mean?”
“If you’ll stop shouting for a few seconds, I can get a closer look,” said Panov, having lowered the window at his side, seeing nothing but trees and the coarse underbrush of a distinctly back-country road, one he doubted was on too many maps. “There we are,” continued Mo, raising his loosely bound hands to the capo’s mouth, his eyes, however, not on that mouth but on the road ahead. “Oh, my God!” cried Panov.
“What?” screamed the guard.
“Pus. Pockets of pus everywhere. In the upper and lower mandibles. The worst sign.”
“Oh, Christ!” The car swerved wildly, but it did not swerve enough.
A huge tree. Up ahead. On the left-hand side of the deserted road! Morris Panov surged his bound hands over to the wheel, lifting his body off the seat as he propelled the steering wheel to the left. Then at the last second before the car hit the tree, he hurled himself to the right, curling into a fetal position for protection.
The crash was enormous. Shattered glass and crushed metal accompanied the rising mists of steam from burst cylinders, and the growing fires of viscous fluids underneath that would soon reach a gas tank. The guard was moaning, semiconscious, his face bleeding; Panov pulled him out of the wreck and into the grass as far as he could until exhaustion overtook him, just before the car exploded.
In the moist overgrowth, his breath somewhat restored but his fear still at the forefront, Mo released his loosely bound hands and picked the fragments of glass out of his guard’s face. He then checked for broken bones—the right arm and the left leg were candidates—and with stolen stationery from a hotel he had never heard of from the capo’s pocket, he used the guard’s pen to write out his diagnosis. Among the items he removed was a gun—what kind, he had no idea—but it was heavy and too large for his pocket and sagged in his belt.
Enough. Hippocrates had his limits.
Panov searched the guard’s clothing, astonished at the money that was there—some six thousand dollars—and the various driver’s licenses—five different identities from five different states. He took the money and the licenses to turn them over to Alex Conklin, but he left the capo’s wallet otherwise intact. There were photographs of his family, his children, grandchildren and assorted relatives—and somewhere among them a young surgeon he had put through medical school. Ciao, amico, thought Mo as he crawled over to the road, stood up and smoothed his clothes, trying to look as respectable as possible.
Standing on the hard coarse surface, common sense dictated that he continue north, in the direction the car was heading; to return south was not only pointless but conceivably dangerous. Suddenly, it struck him.
Good God! Did I just do what I just did?
He began to tremble, the trained psychiatrically oriented part of him telling him it was posttraumatic stress.
Bullshit, you asshole. It wasn’t you!
He started walking, and then kept walking and walking and walking. He was not on a backcountry road, he was on Tobacco Road. There were no signs of civilization, not a car in either direction, not a house—not even the ruins of an old farmhouse—or a primitive stone wall that would at least have proved that humans had visited the environs. Mile after mile passed and Mo fought off the effects of the drug-induced exhaustion. How long had it been? They had taken his watch, his watch with the day and date in impossible small print, so he had no idea of either the present time or the time that had elapsed since he had been taken from Walter Reed Hospital. He had to find a telephone. He had to reach Alex Conklin! Something had to happen soon!
It did.
He heard the growing roar of an engine and spun around. A red car was speeding up the road from the south—no, not speeding, but racing, with its accelerator flat on the floor. He waved his arms wildly—gestures of helplessness and appeal. To no avail; the vehicle rushed past him in a blur … then to his delighted surprise the air was filled with dust and screeching brakes. The car stopped! He ran ahead as the automobile actually backed up, the tires still screaming. He remembered the words his mother incessantly repeated when he was a youngster in the Bronx: Always tell the truth, Morris. It’s the shield God gave us to keep us righteous.
Panov did not precisely subscribe to the admonition, but there were times when he felt it had socially interactive validity. This might be one of them. So, somewhat out of breath he approached the opened passenger window of the red automobile. He looked inside at the woman driver, a platinum blonde in her mid-thirties with an overly made-up face and large breasts encased in décolletage more fitting to an X-rated film than a back-country road in Maryland. Nevertheless, his mother’s words echoed in his ears, so he spoke the truth.
“I realize that I look rather shabby, madam, but I assure you it’s purely an exterior impression. I’m a doctor and I’ve been in an accident—”
“Get in, for Christ’s sake!”
“Thank you so very much.” No sooner had Mo closed the door than the woman slammed the car into gear, gunned the engine to its maximum, and seemingly launched off the rough pavement and down the road. “You’re obviously in a hurry,” offered Panov.
“So would you be, pal, if you were me. I gotta husband back there who’s puttin’ his truck together to come after my ass!”
“Oh, really?”
“Stupid fuckin’ jerk! He rolls across the country three weeks outta the month layin’ every broad on the highways, then blows his keister when he finds out I had a little fun of my own.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.”
“You’ll be a hell of a lot sorrier if he catches up with us.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You really a doctor?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Maybe we can do business.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Can you handle an abortion?”
Morris Panov closed his eyes.