3

Devereaux picked up the telephone in the living room of the three-room safe “house” on West Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan.

He was just over six feet tall, with graying hair and absolutely pewter eyes. For a moment, he only listened to the complex whine of the scrambler becoming activated.

“November,” Hanley said.

“Control,” Devereaux responded.

“There’s been… a rather bad thing,” Hanley said. His voice was so unusually delicate, almost hesitant. It was the voice of someone trying to be a friend while conveying both sympathy and bad news.

What a peculiar tone of voice. Hanley was only control and not his friend by any means.

“Rita Macklin was shot this morning in the parking lot of her apartment building,” Hanley said. “We were only notified a little while ago, through the editor of that magazine she worked for. She had left her building at the usual time, according to him; she was catching a flight to Phoenix.”

Devereaux waited. If he spoke now, he would betray himself to Hanley. He thought of the voice on the answering machine and how he had been tempted to call her and catch the shuttle back to her. But he had not because it would have been no good again. They had loved each other too much to put up with hurts and disappointments in his work for Section. He understood how much he hurt her, and there was no way not to go on hurting her. So he had cut it off, finally, even if she could not. He always dreaded returning to this apartment, dreaded the blinking red light on the answering machine that meant someone had called. Would it be her voice? “Call me.” But he loved her too much to do that.

“Goddamn you, Hanley, is she dead?”

“She’s in surgery. She lost a lot of blood before they got to her. She was in shock at the scene; her eyes were rolling back above her lids.” He paused; the graphic description chilled both of them. There was a long silence before Devereaux spoke.

“Who shot her?”

“An assassin,” Hanley said. “Shot from a grove of maples behind her apartment house. She wasn’t robbed, she was set up to be shot.”

“Who shot her?” Devereaux said.

“The police say they don’t have any clues, that—”

“Screw the police. Screw the goddamn police.” Just this close to losing control. They both understood it. More silence, more waiting. The telephone line buzzed faintly. Devereaux pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “I want to know who shot her.”

“Devereaux,” Hanley said. “I don’t know. We’re working on it through liaisons. With the Bureau. We’re doing what we can—”

“Where is she?”

“Saint Margaret’s Hospital. We made certain she had the best. Has. The doctor has a good reputation, but she was in shock and the loss of blood… Also a concussion when she fell. After she was hit. That concerned him greatly for a time. They took X rays, a C-scan, EEG…” The medical terms were supposed to soothe; they did not. “Everything is being done…”

Devereaux again made a silence by not propping up the dying words of Hanley’s monologue. He looked out the single living room window at the hurly-burly below. Eighth Avenue was in full early-evening swing. The streets were crowded with commuters and idlers, ladies of the evening and boys of the night, theatergoers and tired young women walking home from work in limp gray suits and tennis shoes. The city had worked desperately hard all day and now it would play desperately hard all night. There was no respite from the sense of desperation, even in the nightmares of sleep.

Devereaux saw Rita as she was the first time, on that beach in Florida a long time ago when he only meant to use her and not to love her. Call me. He could have picked up the phone yesterday or the day before or a year before.

“What was she working on?” He tried a calm tone in the face of the nightmare. A fire engine wailed beyond his windows, one more scream in the night.

“A piece about the renaissance in city life in Pittsburgh. Also this story in Phoenix, about the crime syndicate. It was about the reporter who was killed there years ago. Don Bolles, blown up in his car,” Hanley said. “Her editor, MacCormick, he told me that. He didn’t seem surprised that I had called him. I told him I was with the Bureau but I knew he didn’t believe me. He knew about you, about her… relationship to you.”

“That was past,” Devereaux said.

“But he knew I wasn’t FBI,” Hanley said.

“What else was she working on?”

“Nothing of importance, nothing to get shot over. It was the anniversary of his death, this Bolles fellow, it was a retrospective and a look at the city today. I don’t really understand journalists but he told me it was routine.”

“Is he sure? Who has her notes on the Outfit?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Devereaux closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“The crime syndicate in Phoenix. Did he have her notes?”

“No.”

“Then why—”

“I notified the Bureau, I told you. They’re looking into it.”

“Yes. You told me.”

More silence.

“Are you coming to Washington?”

“Yes,” Devereaux said.

“We can send a man to the airport to meet you. Drive you to the hospital. You can have a car at your disposal.”

“Yes.” He said it in a dull voice, keeping the conversation from flickering into silence now because he was suddenly afraid of silence, afraid he would hear her voice.

The apartment was dark. He had been sitting in the dark, drinking vodka, listening to the roar of the city outside his windows. He had not thought about Rita Macklin for days and he had wondered if he would eventually reach the point when he would not think about her at all. Memory can be contained and all old wounds turned to healed scars by new experience. It wasn’t the passage of time at all that did it but burying the past under each new, unrelated experience. Now she was back in all his thoughts, she was all old wounds torn open again.

“There’s been a lot of this. Murder. In the capital. The police think it was unrelated to her, perhaps—”

“Don’t tell me that. Not in Bethesda, not in the morning. That’s bullshit, Hanley.”

“You’re upset. You have every reason to be. I called you as soon as I was told…”

Hanley’s voice craved sympathy. He wanted Devereaux to be glad that he had acted so humanely. He wanted Devereaux’s forgiveness for whatever it was he had ever done.

Devereaux replaced the receiver.

He walked into the bedroom and turned on the small brass lamp at the side of his bed. He rarely slept in the bed but on the couch, under a single prickly wool blanket, generally falling asleep while he read a book. The apartment was littered with books. They were stacked on the floor everywhere because the safe house had no bookshelves, although it contained two television sets. The books made some mark of his on the place. And he kept vodka in the refrigerator, neat rows of bottles of vodka so that he would never be without it.

He placed the 9-millimeter Beretta in the bag with a few bits of clothing. And the blue passport. And the British passport, too, in case he would have to become someone else. He slipped the money pouch—Velcro close, waterproof—inside his waistband.

He zipped the canvas bag and turned toward the door. The front entry had four locks. He opened the door, stepped into the tiled hall, and closed the door. He relocked all four locks, sending the dead bolts home four times, four thuds of metal against metal in the silent chamber of the hall. The door was solid steel and so was the framing around the door.

He walked to the elevator cage and pressed the button. The machinery pulled the elevator slowly to the sixth level.

“Call me,” she had said on the message tape. He had wanted to purge her from his life.

The doors opened and he stepped inside the cage.

Call me.

He wanted tears in that moment but none came. He listened to her voice over and over as the cage descended.