Hamilton, Donald - Novel 02 (26 page)

 
          
In
the morning he rode up in the elevator and went down the hall and knocked on
the door. It was opened for him by Mr. Nicholson, holding a telephone and
stretching just about as far as he could reach to turn the knob. The older man
waved Emmett inside and went back to his conversation with someone in Chicago
who was catching hell. Emmett walked slowly across the room and caught sight of
himself in the mirror: a young man neatly and, for that climate, almost
formally dressed in a light tropical worsted suit, a green sports shirt, and
white shoes. He had debated putting on a white shirt and tie, but had
restrained himself. Even so, he decided grimly, he looked as if he only needed
a stiff straw hat and a small bouquet of flowers to complete his costume.

 
          
Mr.
Nicholson said, “I don’t give a damn where you get it, Smith. Just give me a
ring when you’ve got it; I’ll be waiting to hear from you.” He put down the
telephone heavily. “I swear to God,” he said to Emmett. “If one of the
chewing-gum vending machines in the plant went on the bum, they’d call me long distance
to ask what to do with it. Well, you look as if you got yourself a night’s
sleep, John.”

 
          
“Yes,”
Emmett said. “I slept all right.”

 
          
“That’s
more than I did,” Mr. Nicholson said. “I’m glad you got here. I’ve got to go to
Washington and have my wrist slapped and I wanted to have a talk with you
first. Drink?”

 
          
“No,
thanks,” Emmett said. He watched the gray-haired man pour himself a stiff one. “What’s
the matter in Washington, Mr. Nicholson; if it’s any of my business?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Ann’s father said.
“They
don’t know. I guess they don’t like a man to make money. Every so often they
have to stand up on their hind legs and come out against making money. We’re
supposed to be in business for the fun of it, I guess.” He tasted his drink. “Oh,
hell, boy, don’t look so goddamn righteous. So I’m a bloated war profiteer.
What the hell have you got to brag about? You sat on your can in a laboratory
and pulled down your monthly check, didn’t you? At least I fought in one war,
young man!”

 
          
Even
as he felt anger flare in him, Emmett realized that the older man facing him
was dead tired, a little drunk, and rather frightened at the idea that he might
be held up to contempt as a man who had made a profit on his country’s
suffering, even if the final result would be, as he had said, no more than a
slap on the wrist. Emmett was silent, watching Mr. Nicholson turn wearily away
from him.

 
          
“I
take that back,” Ann’s father said without looking around. “Pass up that
remark, John.”

 
          
“Sure.”

 
          
“What
are you going to do about this marriage?”

 
          
“What
do you mean?”

 
          
“Well,”
said Mr. Nicholson, “is it or ain’t it?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Emmett said.

 
          
Mr.
Nicholson turned back to look at him, nursing the glass between his hands. Then
he put it aside and, leaning over the telephone table, wrote a name and address
on a card which he gave to Emmett.

 
          
“When
you find out,” he said, “either way, and if you want that South American job,
which is a hell of a fine opportunity for a man your age, incidentally, this is
the lad you contact.” He held up his hand quickly. “Don’t answer now. Maybe
your heart will be broken and you’ll want to get away. Maybe she loves you and
you’ll want to take her into new surroundings for a while. I think I’d like to
see that. But I’m going to be pretty damn busy for the next couple of months,
and God only knows how this mess is going to turn out; so I thought I’d get you
fixed up before I left. There it is. Take it or leave it.” He picked up his
glass and stared into it. “John, tell me,
did
she do it?” he asked softly. “Did she betray them?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Emmett said. “I don’t know any more than you do, Mr. Nicholson.”

 
          
“Well,”
said Mr. Nicholson, “the war’s been over a long time. I think I’d rather just
leave it at not knowing.”

 
          
“Yes,”
Emmett said.

 
          
Ann’s
father looked up. The two men stared at each other for a measurable length of
time. Then Mr. Nicholson jerked his head toward the connecting door.

 
          
“I
guess you can go in,” he said.

 
          
She
was sitting on a low stool by the dresser when Emmett looked up from closing
the door behind him; and for a moment he was afraid that he had made a mistake,
that he had not heard her voice tell him to come in, that she was not aware
that he was in the room. Then she laid the emery board aside.

 
          
“It’s
shocking how disgraceful your hands can get in a week,” she said lightly. “I
seem to have broken half my fingernails.”

 
          
He
watched her rise and come toward him, and he knew suddenly that he had never
seen this girl before, even though he was married to her. Always before she had
been fleeing something; always before she had been a little hot or tired or
mussed or frightened. He was seeing her for the first time on her own terms,
among her own surroundings.

 
          
She
was wearing white sandals and a light print dress of a shade of pale violet
that gave the illusion of matching her eyes, although he knew that her eyes
were gray. It was hard to reconcile her appearance with anything he remembered
of her; she even seemed to have become taller than could be accounted for merely
by the high heels of her sandals. He tried to find a phrase to tell her,
without betraying himself, that she looked very nice. While he was still
groping among the inadequate words in his mind, she had held out her hand to
him.

 
          
“I’m
glad you could come before we left,” she said. “I wanted to thank you, Mr.
Emmett.”

 
          
He
thought he took it without flinching. “You’re leaving?” he asked flatly.

 
          
“Yes,”
she said. “With Dad.”

 
          
“He
didn’t say—”

 
          
She
smiled. “He doesn’t know yet.”

 
          
He
felt her fingers press his hand lightly and release it. “Thank you,” she
murmured.

 
          
“For
what?”

 
          
She
smiled at him again. “I’d forgotten you were like that,” she said. “Why, for
helping me.”

 
          
“I
didn’t get very far,” he said. “It was rather inconclusive.”

 
          
“You
didn’t have very much to work with,” she said. She walked past him to the
window. “Dad’s lawyers are Fairman and Bannister, Chicago,” she said without
turning her head.

 
          
“Check.”

 
          
She
asked, “How much did you know? Did you know that man was going to turn out not
to be Dr. Kissel? You might have told me.”

 
          
It
was all settled, he realized. Her lawyers were Fairman and Bannister, and that
was taken care of; now he could just explain a few things before he went out,
closing the door behind him like a gentleman.

 
          
He
said, “No, I didn’t know.”

 
          
“But
you must have known something,” she insisted. “You were so intent on having me
meet him.”

 
          
Emmett
said, “You’d started out to see him. I figured I’d help you go through with it.”

 
          
“Was
that the only reason?”

 
          
“Well,”
he said, “they’d tried to kill you. It seemed to me they were doing their best
to stop you. And then I got the impression that Kirkpatrick, in spite of acting
dead set against the interview, really wanted his hand forced. Talking to me,
he had intimated that it would be nice for you if Kissel were to say you hadn’t
betrayed anybody. That sounded like bait to me, when I got to thinking it over.
And then he had hinted that if your dad were to put pressure on him, he might
have to let you see the man. I didn’t think he’d have let that slip if he’d
really thought I was a foreign agent—it sounded kind of like a cue. And then he
didn’t stop you when he could have, at Mrs. Pruitt’s place. It might have been
some kind of a trap; he could have been working with the Chicago police, for
instance, to get the final evidence against you; but I figured it was worth the
gamble to play along with him and see what happened.” He went on after a short
pause, “Of course, I never suspected that anybody was worried about Kissel. I
thought you were the center of interest all along. I figured that somebody, for
some reason, didn’t want you to know the truth about what had happened to you
in France. That seemed to me to indicate that the truth might be the opposite
to what everybody was thinking.” He smiled. “Actually, you weren’t that
important, and I hit on what Kissel was going to say merely by a wild
coincidence.”

 
          
She
laughed, glancing at him over her shoulder. “It
is
rather disconcerting, isn’t it? To find that I’m just a
supporting member of the cast. Do you remember when I was seeing it all as a
great plot directed against myself? The night we drove away from Mrs. Pruitt’s…”

 
          
“Yes,”
he said, “I remember.”

 
          
“I
was very close to the edge that night,” she said. “I wanted to let go and just
throw a beautiful scene, completely mad, and you wouldn’t let me. Every time I
started to go over, you’d pull me back. I think I hated you.” She looked away
abruptly, as if sensing that reminiscences were dangerous. “Mr. Kirkpatrick
seems to be quite a clever man,” she said.

 
          
“Yes,”
Emmett said. “That beef fools you.”

 
          
“Did
he explain why I had to let you all think that I hadn’t told him about Dr.
Kissel not being the right man?” He could see the roofs of the city of Santa Fe
beyond her. The sun was very bright beyond the immediate shadow of the building
in which they stood. There was not a cloud in the sky. He felt as if the two of
them were standing there by the window, casually putting the last pieces into a
jigsaw puzzle in which they had lost interest, but which they could not quite
bring themselves to leave uncompleted.

 
          
“When
did you tell him?” he asked; and, asking, he remembered the terrible ride from
Numa to Santa Fe yesterday, sitting beside her wanting to hate her. Wanting to
hate, and not being able to, could be as dreadful, he thought, as wanting to
love and not being able to.

 
          
“When
he picked me up after I’d pretended to faint,” she said. “I did think, when I
saw it wasn’t the right man, that it might be some kind of a trick, but it was
a little too important. But I didn’t want to blurt it out in front of all of
you, in case… So I fainted.”

 
          
He
said, “And you’re the little girl your dad wanted to stick in an asylum because
you’re not quite bright enough to cope with the outside world.”

 
          
She
did not smile. “It wasn’t quite fair to you or Dad, but I had to do it, don’t
you see?”

 
          
“Sure.”

 
          
“Why
didn’t he want them to know? What is he going to do about them?”

 
          
Emmett
said, “Nothing.”

 
          
“But
they’re murderers!”

 
          
“It’s
more important than that,” he said. “You see, in order to show that he’s the
genuine Kissel, and to prove that he’s worthy of confidence, the guy with the
cane back there is apparently revealing a lot of stuff that we didn’t know.
Probably his superiors figure it’s worth while. We’re still ahead of them, you
know. They figure they can throw us a few tidbits of their research, Kissel of
course pretending it’s stuff he picked up in a Nazi lab during the war, on the
gamble that we’ll let slip some big gimmick they can use.”