33

“Isn’t there some other way we can go?” asked Sarah.

Five trucks had double parked on Geary street, and traffic in downtown San Francisco had halted. Two traffic helicopters rattled overhead, hidden, except for an occasional glimpse, by the buildings.

“I don’t think so,” said Bell ruefully.

“There has to be.”

“This is the way,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t stand it, either.”

It was the way, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. She realized that. But there was something strange about his manner. He was keeping something from her, she could tell. And it wasn’t only the information he had gleaned from the telephone. There was something else going on behind his smile, a secret intention that made him guarded.

Bell braked—it took no effort, since they were barely rolling—to let a parked Volvo work its way out in front of them.

Sarah clenched her fists. She couldn’t believe how slow they were going. His courtesy struck her as untimely, at the very least. But she began to reprove herself. It was possible, after all, that she was being unfair, suffering nothing more than an emotional hiccup. Her father had believed in the stakeout, and if the suspect fled, in going through the motel trash cans, if need be, to find out where he might be going. She could easily imagine him telling her to let things happen and not get upset. “Slow sometimes gets you where you want to go,” he would tell her.

But, she asked herself, wasn’t Chris absurdly slow, painfully deliberate? Even now he was letting cars drift before him, waving politely. He was making even less progress than anyone else on the entire street.

It was strange how someone so charming could seem so plodding. She tried to say it nicely. “We could go a little faster, don’t you think?”

“Are you saying that through clenched teeth?”

“It seems to me you aren’t really trying.”

“I can’t, really do much about that taxi right there. And that double parked—whatever that is, that truck full of rolls of paper.”

“Try.” They were rolls of paper, she saw. Giant rolls of what looked like shelf paper.

“I am trying. This is me making every earnest effort to travel forward. See—look.” He shifted out of first and then back again as a string of pedestrians jaywalked before them. “I’ve never known a woman who made me feel so—”

She guessed that he had been about to say “inadequate,” but had not been delighted by the word’s broader implications. “So I begin to irritate you,” she said, as though in mock despair. “After such a short affair.”

She wasn’t despairing, but she was continuing to see her relationship with him in a new, afternoon light.

“My mind,” he said, “isn’t on my driving.”

She could not say a civil word, so she made no sound.

“I spoke to a woman named Jessica Moe,” Bell was saying, trying to saw the Fiat into a new lane. “We used to get along pretty well.”

“And?”

“There was some sort of murky story. I didn’t get the entire tale. But I got enough. I called her, and lo and behold she talked.”

And talked, Sarah did not say.

“The thing with Jessica is: she’s very reliable.”

“An old girlfriend?” suggested Sarah. What did she care? she told herself. Her romantic interest in Chris was suddenly muted. She could think only of Ham. But she knew what “reliability” meant to Chris. Reliable meant believable. It meant: facts.

“I worked with Jessica briefly,” he said. “There was a big drug story in Oakland. Enough cocaine to fill Squaw Valley was intercepted at the Port of Oakland. There was gunfire, drug-sniffing dogs, everything but flying elephants. But that wasn’t the story. One-third of the cocaine was missing a month later, and that got everyone’s attention for about two days. During one of those two days I met Jessica.”

How interesting, said Sarah to herself, grinding her teeth.

“Jessica has a knack for digging up the secret everyone else misses. Someone pilfered hundreds of kilos of warhead-quality cocaine that was supposed to be state’s evidence.” Bell was attempting a breezy tone but failing for some reason. “She was free-lancing at the time, but she had been working for Newsweek, and right afterward she worked for UPI, which was I think a little bit of a desperation move for her. She’s one of those people who get cold sores from worrying.”

Perhaps he was hoping for some conversational encouragement from Sarah. She offered none. Still, she sensed that Jessica was, in truth, a source of information, and she had the strangest prickling sensation in her stomach.

“Well, I liked her. She was very serious and smart in a way that’s good to be around. She made everyone else work hard, just to keep up. But she irritated me, too. She was so slow and deliberate about everything. She was so painfully methodical, running after bleeding gunshot victims to make sure she had the name spelled right. And she was always on the phone. It drove me crazy. She was good at her job, though. In fact, she encouraged me to write the Speke book. And she sent me some artifacts, the old tapes I mentioned.”

Sarah nearly rolled her eyes. She had never known such a prosey human being in her life. “You knew her fairly well.”

“I knew her professionally. We had a beer together now and then.”

She gritted her teeth because of the green and white cab insinuating itself in front of the Fiat. Bell had the good sense to lean on his horn, and the cab seemed to take this as express, written permission to force its way even farther.

“She knew Speke and Asquith,” Bell continued, “in the early days, when they all lived in North Beach. She developed a theory, all by herself, that the solid, energetic and compassionate Hamilton Speke might not be—just might not be—the playwright who penned Stripsearch. She had known them both, and she had remembered Asquith as being shy to the point of agony, and Speke being very protective of him and, at the same time, very outgoing. Asquith was the genius, she thought, and Speke was the man who could get things done. She had a hunch, the sort of guess that might end up as a snappy six inches in a book review tabloid or Book-of-the-Month Club selection, or might end up as nothing. Her thesis was: what if Speke hadn’t written the plays?”

“She thought up this theory out of a vacuum?”

“She’s smart.”

“She sounds more than smart. She sounds psychic.”

“She says that it’s a thought that would occur to anyone who had known the two of them. She didn’t think it too much insight to at least be able to wonder. Apparently one or two people have even written about the possible collaboration—”

“Where? Who?”

He shrugged. “This is what Jessica says.”

Traffic churned forward, a crude imitation of progress. “During the last few years,” Bell said, “she’s been living in New York. She did some reading—the New York Public Library has several cubic meters of Speke. The Asquith bibliography was a blank sheet. What happened, she wondered, to the man so sensitive that seeing people gave him sunburn?”

Then, as a light turned green, traffic quickened, cars skittering from lane to lane. At last they reached the freeway, but as soon as they ascended the onramp, traffic clogged again. Sunlight glittered off back windows, and the Fiat wedged into another lane, only to be stuck behind a beer truck.

“Jessica is methodical,” Bell continued. “She found Asquith, living in rural Pennsylvania with his sister, and phoned them to beg an interview. The sister was very much against it. But when Jessica begs, she gets. Asquith, when he heard her theory, was delighted. More than delighted. Too eager—in fact, he came to see her before she even had a chance to plan a trip to see him. He came uninvited.”

A large arrow composed of flowing spots of light directed cars left, into one lane.

“She didn’t enjoy the interview?” Sarah prompted. All of this was, despite her exasperation, fascinating, vital.

Bell was being deliberately laconic on this point. “Not too much.”

“What happened?”

“She didn’t say, but knowing Jessica—”

He hesitated, aware that he was telling Sarah how well, in fact, he knew this fellow reporter. At the moment Sarah didn’t care if Jessica Moe were Bell’s secret wife.

“I got the impression,” he said, “that he was very strange. Possibly even dangerous.”

“In what way?”

He shrugged. “Her conclusion was that Asquith was brilliant enough, but that he could not have written the coherent plots, the consistent characters, the stunning dialogue in any of the plays. He was too—I think her word was ‘twisted.’ She decided that Speke was the playwright, and dropped the project as a dead end.”

Traffic had stopped. Sarah folded her arms.

“Then she began to hear from Asquith again, and when she explained her decision—and she is very forthright—he began to ask if he could pay her a visit. And the basic point is—Jessica is terrified of him.”

“So she’s not avoiding people.”

“No, but she’d do anything to avoid seeing Asquith. She was sorry she’d ever thought of him again. She was only too pleased to warn me away from him.”

Sarah went rigid, her fist gripping the door handle. “Where are we going?”

His voice was tense. “This was something I was afraid to mention.”

Bell had wormed the Fiat into the wrong lane. The San Jose turnoff, which they should have taken, was three lanes away, across a small legion of immobile trucks.

“What is this, Chris?” Her voice was cold, and Bell shrank against the door.

“We have to go to Berkeley.”

She stared. This was impossible. This wasn’t happening. She could feel veins protrude in her neck. She could feel a great surf of color wash through her.

“I’ve made up my mind,” he said in a thin voice.

She dug her nails into the cloth of her skirt. Whatever they did, they were stuck in the jam, and it would be fifteen minutes before they would reach the next off-ramp.

“I want to get organized,” he said in a burst. “I want to know exactly who Asquith is before I have to deal with him.”

He must have misunderstood her silence.

“You have to see my point,” he continued. “Jessica said there was some work by Asquith in the UC library, a pamphlet, a one-act play. It’s my chance to do a little extra research, Sarah. It’s a chance to get some facts on Asquith and really figure the guy out.”

Figure the guy out, she echoed to herself. She felt herself turn to cold steel.

She did not know anything about Asquith. For all she knew, Maria was as great a threat. She knew only that she belonged with Ham, and that every moment away from him was agony.

Still, her silence seemed to encourage Bell. “Look, Sarah,” he said in a steadier tone, “I know this is practically a character defect of mine. I can’t help it. I don’t like to take any kind of action until I get my ducks in a row.”

The vision of glittering rear windows and chrome swam for a moment in her eyes.

Before she could stop herself she was out of the car.