Part 22 (1/2)

Candy picked up the binoculars and was training them on the end of the street. ”Lookie who's here.”

”Who?”

”Old Clive. See that bookstore? It's got books outside in those carts. Don't the owner know it's snowing?”

”It's stopping. Put down the binoculars, Christ's sake. You want another coffee?”

”Uh-huh. Maybe a latte this time.”

”It's hard getting just plain coffee anymore. It's coffee with an att.i.tude.” Karl stood with the cups in his hand, shaking his head. ”What I want to know, where's our Ned get his ideas? I mean he never goes anyplace or does anything. Relatively speaking, I mean. How can he think up stuff to write about?”

Candy picked up the binoculars. ”He came to Pitts-f.u.c.king-burgh, didn't he?”

Karl said, ”Yeah, lucky us.” He turned to go to the counter for refills, but stopped. He was looking again at the tall fellow across the street who had stopped to look in the window of a florist's. ”C? You don't really suppose that crazy Mackenzie put out more than one contract?”

This truly startled Candy, who looked up, wide eyed. ”What the f.u.c.k, K, why would he do that?”

”Because he's an arrogant son of a b.i.t.c.h and a publisher. And remember we were very clear about the way we worked.”

”So he goes and hires somebody else to cap him? Some slob without any fastidiousness or principles-”

”If so, it means Ned could get smeared all over the pavement anytime now. Maybe we ought to forget the coffee and get out of here.”

Clive had never realized how few transactions good writers made with the physical world. The bad ones, like Dwight Staines, were in constant contact with the world outside because they lacked boundaries, like babies. Everything was theirs. They were the world and everything in it.

What was it that made the crucial difference? He would have to ask Tom Kidd-wait a minute! He never spoke to Tom Kidd beyond an unenthusiastic ”h.e.l.lo” if he pa.s.sed Tom in the hall; it was further evidence of his psyche's crumbling if he could say almost automatically ”Ask Tom Kidd.”

Clive shuddered and looked up the street. Ned had been standing there in front of that ice cream store for nearly twenty minutes, halfway between Clive and the two goons down there at the other end of the pavement. He didn't have to get any closer to know they were Candy and Karl.

There were the usual people going about their business: a tall man walking out of the florist's a few doors up, a woman into a laundromat; a blonde hanging in the doorway of a beauty shop; and the token beggar sitting near the bookstalls.

Where the h.e.l.l was Pascal? What was he paying her for? To play f.u.c.kall with Ned Isaly in her free time? Clive was feeling put upon as he wandered into the used-book store, comforting in its smell of old bindings and page rot. Clive fussed around in the fiction shelves looking for Mackenzie-Haack authors, found a couple of Dwight Staines and a copy of Ned's Solace. He had never read it, but he had certainly never advertised that fact at his workplace. One by Dwight Staines he took up to the cash register to a waif of a clerk who looked as if putting in the energy to read one book would fell her where she stood. He paid for the book, returned to hide among the shelves, where he took out a penknife and cut a square in the center pages big enough to deposit the handgun he'd been carrying in his pocket. It was small, a .22, and fit nicely.

He had a vague and s.h.i.+fting scene in his mind of police trolling by after somebody had shot somebody and Clive didn't want them to know he was carrying a .22. Good thinking, Clive. (His addresses to himself had grown increasingly sarcastic ever since Bobby's ”plan” had been put into operation.) Good thinking. You hold the book the wrong way and the gun falls out at their feet.

So n.o.body's perfect, big deal.

He ran a finger along the row of P s, looking for that book of Saul Prouil's that had received so much praise. Here it was in the first edition and it was expensive. That didn't surprise Clive, given the landslide of awards it had won, that and the fact that Saul Prouil had up to now not published another book. It probably took him decades to write one, and no wonder.

Clive walked up to the cash register where now a beetle-browed old man was taking money from a woman with a coil of dark red hair. He was about to tap her on the shoulder and ask her how she could keep her eye on her mark when she turned and looked at him blankly, as if he were indeed not worth the change the old man returned to her. He had been so certain that she was Pascal.

He paid for his Prouil book, the old man fussing over the AmEx card and finally putting the books in a worn paper bag and handing them over.

Clive took them and left, glancing at the beggar woman and taking out some coins-even this act of mild kindness surprised him. He thought of a line of Yeats-”the rag and bone-shop of the heart”-and dropped the coins in a little metal box. The clothes fairly swarmed on the old woman, layers and layers of cloaks and scarves. There were additional garments in a baby carriage nearby.

”Seventy-seven cents, geez, thanks a lot.”

Sarcasm? Clive was about to say ”Ungrateful wretch!” when he realized it was Pascal who'd said it. ”Ah, Pascal. This is truly a marvel of disguise; who'd ever have thought of a beggar?”

”f.u.c.k you. A cigarette? I'm all out.” She held out her mittened hand, and he handed her the pack that he carried for emergencies (though hard to explain to himself what const.i.tuted a smoking emergency). She took one from the tight pack and wiggled it for a light. ”Thanks. Nice talking to you.”

Clive walked on by, shaking his head. He should write a book.

Purchasing a red Porsche was not one of his better ideas, but Saul had gotten tired of standing in the snow and trying to hail a cab, so the WHITE GLOVE SERVICE sign over the Porsche showroom had seduced him. Lord, but weren't those beautiful cars! He had entered the showroom with a view toward renting a car for the day and had become more and more enamored of them.

Put it this way: he might need to yank Ned from the sidewalk where he was so determinedly standing but that would be difficult in a cab, even if he could find one. One needed one's own vehicle if one were rescuing somebody. That still didn't explain buying one.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught a figure moving in Ned's direction. But when Saul turned his head, the person was gone. It had looked almost as if he were shadowing Ned.

Ned was at the end of Separation and didn't know what to do about it. He was walking around Shadyside, stalling. All of Pittsburgh was a stall. Or maybe not, maybe not. Maybe Nathalie was thinking what to do as he stood staring at the ice cream store before going in. He had found another Isaly's.

Sally watched from the doorway of a hairstylist's, fingering her wig as if the stylist had misplaced the curls.

In the bookstore down the block she had bought Pittsburgh: Little Known Facts. She was hoping a knowledge of arcane facts would make her appear more interesting to Ned, if not more lovable. Another red sports car-was everybody in Pittsburgh driving one?-came out of an alleyway up ahead and turned onto this street. Where did all these Porsches come from? It could be the same one-she couldn't see the driver-but she didn't think so; no Porsche owner would drive about aimlessly at 25 mph. He wouldn't be caught dead.

Personally, Clive disliked ice cream but it served as rather a good cover, he thought. He was licking a cone of vanilla, that being the blandest of all in those tubs at the Isaly place. He was clutching the book. It made him sn.i.g.g.e.r when he thought of asking Dwight Staines to autograph it, and Staines opening it and finding the center cut out (minus the gun, of course).

He was keeping a good way back from Ned, thinking he must be wrong, that Candy and Karl had had several opportunities to plug Ned and if they hadn't done it by now, they probably wouldn't. They must have decided Ned was okay and they'd let him live. G.o.d, he hoped so. Never having handled a gun in his life, the idea of having to shoot one made his adrenaline pump.

”K, is there something about all this that strikes you as awful peculiar?” Candy was looking up and down the street.

Karl was looking, too, but he was watching through the binoculars. ”What do you mean?” Funny that there weren't more people around, but that's the only thing he thought at all peculiar. There was Clive over there doing G.o.d knows what, in and out of that bookstore, then the ice cream place (another one of those!), now carrying a cone and a book. The blonde they'd seen in Schenley Park leaving a hairdresser's where he didn't think they'd done much of a job on her. A woman in dark gla.s.ses, pus.h.i.+ng a baby carriage along their side of the street, and now here came that G.o.dd.a.m.ned red Porsche again. He sighed. ”Sweet ride,” he said.

”What?”

”That Porsche.”

”Again? Uh.”

Candy was reaching beneath his jacket to one of his rear trouser pockets to get his Juicy Fruit gum when he felt something sting him. He slapped his face. ”G.o.dd.a.m.ned mosquitoes this cold-?”

Karl stared. Had the binoculars not been on a strap around his neck, he would have dropped them to the ground. There was a red streak, a blood streak across Candy's face. ”No mosquito, C. Look.”

Candy pulled his hand from his face and saw blood. ”Wha-”

Their hands went for their guns, Karl's to his shoulder holster, Candy's hand dove to the belt at his back. They didn't fire because they weren't sure what they should be firing at.

Then their mouths fell open.

The woman several yards away sent the baby carriage flying toward them, just after she'd pulled a gun from beneath the blanket and rags. The blonde on the other side was pointing a small gun in their direction; even old Clive had pulled a gun out of the book he was carrying, and in the course of doing so shot the book, which made a wide spiral in the air before landing.

Candy's voice was just flirting with hysteria. ”What kinda city is this, Chrissakes, everybody's packin' heat?”

The red Porsche, as if it had lost both driver and direction, was coming straight at them, its erratic path from street to pavement to street again forcing everyone to drop back into doorways and press against walls.