Nine hours later, at three o’clock in the morning, they were in Albuquerque. The station wagon turned into a motel, putting an end to the grisly journey.
The Mercury skidded into an all-night filling station, knocked over a pile of cans, scraped against a gas pump, and banged into a fence. The Eye sat behind the wheel, chuckling at a disc jockey’s joke. ‘Doctor, it’s terrible, I’m losing my memory! What’ll I do?’ And the doctor said, ‘Well, first of all, pay me in advance.’ He turned off the radio, opened the door, tried to move his legs.
A girl in overalls came rushing out of the garage. ‘You fuckhead! What the fuck’s all this!’ Then she saw the bloody shawl and whistled.
He slid to the ground, leaned against the fender. ‘Can I have a glass of water?’
‘Sure.’
‘And give the young lady a Coke or something.’
‘What young lady?’
He squinted at the car. Maggie was gone. ‘Oh, that’s right … she got out in Arizona.’ It was true. She’d left him somewhere in the Petrified Forest. She’d just opened the door and jumped away into the night. He’d seen her once after that in New Mexico, standing in a field, waving to him …
The girl pulled a Smith and Wesson .38 out of her overalls and aimed it at him nonchalantly. ‘Now,’ she drawled, ‘I don’t want no part of whatever you’re mixed up with.’
‘Me?’ he grinned at her. ‘I’m not mixed up with anything.’
‘Cut yourself shavin’, maybe?’
‘Something like that, yeah.’ He gave her a fifty and told her to phone the local Watchmen, Inc. number. While he was waiting, he sat down on the curb, wrapped in the shawl like a tired old woman, and drank a quart of water. She kept the .38 pointed at him.
Twenty minutes later an operative named Dace arrived in a red MGB. He was wearing cowboy boots. The Eye waved to him. ‘Howdy!’
‘Can you move, pal?’
‘Nope.’
Dace picked him up and put him in the car. He drove him to an out-of-the-way house in Istela. A doctor probed the wound with hooks and pulled a ton of pig iron out of his shoulder. The Eye fainted twice. When he woke up the second time he was bandaged and high on M. The sun was shining.
‘So how do you feel?’ Dace asked him.
‘Keen!’ He got up and moved across the floor like a tightrope walker. ‘Nifty peachy keen.’ The hole in his back was smothered in numbness. His left arm was weightless. ‘Just dandy.’ He touched his chin. ‘I need a shave.’
‘Doc says you ought to stay put awhile.’
‘No way. Can’t.’
‘Your Mercury’s outside.’
‘Can’t do it. I have to – my what? The Mercury?’ He walked back and forth, the M seeping through him, untying all the knots. ‘You take care of that for me, will you, Race … Mace … Pace …’
‘Dace.’
‘Get rid of it. I won’t need it anymore.’
‘Are you lucid, pal?’
‘I’ll be leaving here by plane. You can drive me to the airport in your MG. What do you mean am I lucid?’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Certainly I can hear you.’
‘Good, because I got bad news for you.’
‘Just park it somewhere where they can find it. How far are we from Albuquerque? Let me put on a clean shirt and you can get me out of here … Bad news?’
‘Are you sure I’m getting through to you, pal?’
‘Yeah, speak up.’
‘I’ve just been talking to Mr. Baker on the phone. He says to tell you you’re fired. And he wants you to give me his Minolta camera.’
He checked his luggage at the airport and took a taxi to the motel. She was still there. It was eleven o’clock. She was running late. With the FBI one state behind her she’d have to move faster than that.
He went back to the airport, had a shave in the barbershop, and waited for her in the lounge. She’d be in sooner or later. She had to leave by plane. Keeping the station wagon was out of the question, and renting another car was almost as risky. And she was in too much of a hurry to take a train.
He sat sweating and squirming as the M faded, laying bare his pain. He thought about Watchmen, Inc. They could never fire him if he made an issue of it. Or if he groveled a bit. All he had to do was telephone Baker and promise him he’d be back at the office tomorrow. But why bother? He would never go back now.
Eleven forty-five. Where the fuck was she? For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. He swallowed an aspirin. He wondered who would take over his desk in the corner by the window. It had been his only home for twenty years. Jesus! What had he left in the drawer? A bottle of Old Smuggler, a tube of glue, his sewing kit and razor, pens and pencils. Twenty years!
‘Yeah,’ he said aloud.
She arrived at noon, wearing a red wig. She bought a ticket to Savannah.
What kept you so long? We should have been out of here hours ago!
Do you think Rex is dead?
I don’t know. Probably.
If he is, how long will it be before the bank knows about it?
What bank?
His bank, stupid!
A couple of days. They’ll notify his family first. Why? You’re worried about the check?
Yes. How’s your arm?
Petrified. Listen, you’re not going to try to cash that fucking check, are you, Joanna?
He dropped into a rear seat and fell sound asleep. He walked for hours along the school corridor, looking for the classrooms. But there were no doors, just walls. He pounded on them with his left fist until his arm dropped off. Then, in a dim alcove in the back of the building, he found a bulletin board. There was a message from Maggie pinned to it, scribbled on a piece of wrinkled brown wrapping paper.
Dear Daddy,
Thanks for the postcard. I’m sorry I couldn’t wait for you. I don’t like to hang around here after school.
These corridors are haunted by the ghost of a madman who beats on the walls.
Give my regards to Joanna.
Sincerely,
Mag
The throbbing in his shoulder subsided, and he knew that everything was going to be all right.
They landed in Savannah at three thirty. Using her Mrs. Mary Linda Hollander identity (blond wig), she cashed Rex’s forty-thousand-dollar check at his bank in Port Wentworth, then, the same night, flew to Miami and checked into a beach-front hotel in Dania, registering as Miss Ada Larkin (pewter wig).
The Eye moved into a smaller and cheaper place a block from the beach. His wound healed slowly. In March he could bend his arm behind his back without agony and by April was doing five push-ups a day.
He telephoned his bank and learned that his Watchmen paychecks had stopped coming in on February the twenty-eighth. So he was officially retired – and in Florida already! He prepared a budget and estimated that he could live off his account for at least three years.
After that – fuck it! He’d see.
He bought another suit – he now had three – and an old Fiat. He did four or five crossword puzzles a day, and at night he dreamed not only of the corridor but of the rattlesnake and the shark. Sometimes, alone in his room or walking along the beach, he found himself whistling ‘La Paloma.’
Joanna AKA Ada Larkin gradually became herself again, eating pears, buying clothes, drinking cognac, and reading her horoscope.
She slept all morning, swam in the afternoon, and gambled every evening. In four weeks she’d almost doubled the forty grand playing roulette. The Eye played for much lower stakes at the blackjack and crap tables, averaging a comfortable profit of about two hundred a night, which paid for his rent and most of his expenses.
One hot noontime he dropped into a bar for a drink and saw a sign on the wall: TRY PILSEN – The Czechoslavakian Beer. This reminded him that he still hadn’t finished Puzzle Number Seven.
He went to the public library and spent an hour reading the history of Czechoslovakia in several encyclopedias and almanacs. It was, he discovered, a totalitarian Communist-bloc people’s democracy, but formerly an independent republic, founded after World War I and comprising the former countries of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia, each with a capital – a capital in Czechoslavakia; Prague, Bninn, Breslau, and Bratislava. Six letters, five letters, seven letters, and ten letters. None of them could be squeezed into Capital in Czechoslovakia’s four letters.
He finally decided to look up the solution in the last pages of the paperback. But he didn’t.
He went to the beach instead and watched Joanna diving in the surf.
He began getting restless.
She kept too much to herself. That was a mistake. A lone female wandering around Miami was a come-on more blatant than skywriting. People were beginning to notice her and gossip – guests at the hotel, croupiers, bartenders, waiters, bellhops.
I think we have to get moving, Joanna, he warned her.
Not yet.
She bought a new wig (auburn). She went to an oculist and had her eyes examined. She visited the animal veldt in Boca Raton. She went to the movies. He made a list of the films she saw.
(April 15) Klute
(April 19) I Heard the Owl Call My Name
(April 20) Jane Eyre
(April 21) Catholics
(April 23) Jane Eyre (again)
(April 25) Dollars
(April 27) Jane Eyre (again)
He made a list of the magazines she bought.
| Vogue | Newsweek |
| Elle | The New Yorker |
| Time | Cosmopolitan |
| Glamour | Good Housekeeping |
| McCall’s | Paris-Match |
He made a list of the books she read.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
War and Peace by Tolstoy
Nana by Zola
Moby Dick by Melville
The End of the Affair by Greene
Hamlet
He made a list of her killings.
Paul Hugo
Dr. Brice
Bing Argyle
Cop in NYC
Cora Earl
Jerome Vight
Rex Hollander
Seven of them that he was sure of. Four husbands.
Come on, Joanna, we have to move now!
Oh. Not yet.
Then in May, three or four limousines drove up to the hotel and a swarm of Arabs took over all the top-floor suites. There was an item about them in the paper that morning: Arab Delegation in Town for Real Estate Talks.
When the Eye saw them in the lobby, he almost fell through the floor. One of them was Abdel Idfa!
Jesus Christ!
For the rest of the afternoon the playful elves of impending doom took over the situation.
They made Joanna pick that very day of days to change her schedule. Instead of going to the beach she went out to the pool and practiced diving for an hour. Abdel Idfa joined her there, as if by appointment, and lay sprawled in a deck chair sunbathing less than twenty feet away from her.
Then they both spent a half-hour in the patio cocktail lounge, drinking martinis, entering one behind the other, each sipping two drinks at opposite ends of the bar, then leaving together so simultaneously that they almost collided at the door.
The Eye went berserk with funk. The crowds saved her! Thank God for all these vacationing walk-ons, these Beautiful Miami People – the athletic Tarzans in Ted Lapidus jockstraps and the innumerable undressed chicks darting around and the purple-haired old women in giant sunglasses and their beefsteak-faced husbands wearing Bermuda shorts! They were everywhere, vast gaggles of them, encompassing everything in moats and ramparts of noise and movement and denseness.
Then, at two o’clock on the dot, they both had lunch in the hotel dining room, Abdel and several fellow tribesmen at one table, Joanna at another, separated from him only by some potted plants and a few dozen other diners.
Then she spent two hours reading in her room, and he went off somewhere. But, lo and behold, they both met again in the lobby at four thirty, she coming out of the elevator, he emerging from the barbershop. They passed each other just in front of the desk, a few centimeters apart, she tossing her key into the slot, he asking the clerk for some cablegram blanks.
The Eye couldn’t take any more.
He went to a florist shop on Tampa Street and bought two dozen roses to be delivered to her room. He scribbled a card to go with them.
Dear Miss Larkin,
I saw you in the swimming pool this
afternoon and ever since have been
wondering if you are the same
young lady I met in Chicago some time
ago. But whether you are or
not, can you join me for a drink?
I am in 196–197.
Abdel Idfa, Esq.
She checked out so fast he didn’t even have time to sell his Fiat. He left it in the airport parking lot.
She put on her new auburn wig, and they flew to Detroit.
Her name was now Roxane Devorak.
She spent four months in Michigan, living in Lansing, Grand Rapids, and St. Joseph, just across the lake from the Chicago apartment house where she stabbed Bing Argyle.
In September she went to Pittsburgh for a month, then spent two months in Buffalo and another month in Tonawanda, near Niagara Falls, gambling every night in a local clip joint. She lost nine thousand dollars. The Eye won eleven thousand.
One morning he looked out the window and saw that it was snowing.
It was Christmas Eve. Another year had passed.
They flew to Philadelphia and landed in a blizzard.