Metzger's Dog (23 page)

They stood up and walked to the escalator, then rode it down to the ground floor and stepped onto the moving walkway. In front a family wearing Hawaiian shirts blocked them from passing, but the young woman didn’t seem to care. They stood on the long conveyor and drifted sedately toward the main foyer. In a moment, Porterfield knew, they’d be past the bank of metal detectors. From here on there would be danger. Armed men could reach this part of the airport from the parking lots without even passing security guards. He said quietly, “Did you have the courtesy to make a return reservation for me?”

She said, “Here. You might as well have this.” She reached into her purse and produced another airline ticket.

Porterfield accepted the ticket and studied it, then said, “This plane leaves in forty-five minutes. Am I going to make it?”

“As your travel agent, I sincerely hope so. You will unless you managed to get word of your itinerary to someone.”

“How could I do that?”

“The airplane has a radio, and I’m sure you also have a little card that says you can use everybody’s radio.”

“No, my electronic underpants cause static.”

The couple in front of them wearing Hawaiian shirts whispered together. The husband shook his head, but the wife said loudly, “He said ‘electronic underpants.’ I heard him.”

When they reached the end of the conveyor the young woman walked across the main foyer and through the exit to the sidewalk. Hundreds of people were moving into and out of the airline terminal, taxis stopped and started, pudgy little buses deposited streams of passengers. Porterfield said, “What now? We drive to a desert shack and hold me hostage for another”—he glanced at his watch—“thirty-eight minutes?”

“Some other time. Our desert shack is being remodeled, so the paint’s still tacky in the guest room. You’ll have to drop in and see us later. We’re expecting to be able to entertain more lavishly soon.”

“Thank you. I’d enjoy that. What do we do while we’re waiting?” He stepped back to allow a cabdriver to swing a suitcase onto the curb.

“Nothing,” she said, and put her arm in Porterfield’s, walking him to the bench beside the wall. “Sit here, relax. Some nice men in cars out there in the darkness have rifles trained on you right now. Some others are in the airport waiting for you to make a move, so you won’t be lonely. Right now I have to leave you, but I’ll be back.” She turned and walked down the sidewalk and into the terminal again.

Porterfield looked out at the thousands of cars in the lot, then scanned the five-story parking ramp across the drive. He could see nothing for certain—there were silhouettes of heads in many of the cars, and people stood on some of the tiers of the parking ramps, some fumbling with baggage, others just loitering, apparently without another way to pass the time before they expected an airplane to arrive or leave. Probably she hadn’t lied, and at least one of them was there to blow his head off if something went wrong. There was no reason to doubt it, and he knew he wouldn’t do anything different if there were no one watching.

The plan wasn’t bad, he thought. Even if he’d managed to shake the woman and get to a telephone, there was no way he could have done anything. He could tell the San Diego field office that a person arriving on the seven-thirty flight would pick up two brown suitcases that he had baggage claims to match. It would have taken longer than the three-quarter-hour flight even to organize a team, and then they’d see fifty or sixty people arrive and pick up two brown suitcases each. They had no way to arrest anyone or even examine the suitcases. Meanwhile, Porterfield would be here with guns trained on him. It wasn’t bad. He smiled as he glanced at his watch again. It was after seven-thirty already, and the baggage would now be rolling down the ramp in the San Diego airport. He waited.

The young woman appeared again far down the sidewalk. He watched as she walked toward him. She had one hand in her purse, fumbling around for something. His jaw tightened, then the hand emerged and it held a cigarette and a lighter. He leaned back on the bench and sighed.

She stopped in front of the bench and lit the cigarette. “Stretch your legs, Daddy. You’ve got a long flight ahead of you.”

“That’s a relief.” Porterfield stood up. “My wife will be pleased. I left word I might be gone for a couple of days.”

“You people have wives?” She seemed startled.

“Sure. Wives, kids. Of course, my kids are grown up and married. We even had a dog, but he died a few years ago.”

They walked on in silence between the metal detectors, along the moving walkway, and up the escalator to the boarding area. Finally she stopped him. “Wait. Here’s the locker key. Inside the locker is the original set of papers. You’ve got a minute or two. Don’t bother to be careful about the briefcase or the papers. There aren’t any fingerprints on anything.”

He stared at her. “That’s not necessary. We have copies.”

“But we wanted you to know, and we thought that if you had them back—”

“Know what?”

“That it’s over. As of this minute, we’re out of this business. There’s no reason now to hunt for us.”

Porterfield handed the key back to her. “Do me a favor. Just take it with you and burn it. Burn the other copies you have. Forget you ever saw it.” He turned and walked to the boarding gate.

36
                  
Goldschmidt sat in the massive leather armchair in front of Porterfield’s desk. Far behind him on the wall above the door the portrait of Theophilus Seyell’s father stared into the room like a malevolent voyeur at a window. Goldschmidt said, “If we devote sufficient time and energy to it, the problem can be settled.”

Porterfield leaned back and studied Theophilus Seyell’s father. It was an impossible face, the features a child’s imagination would create to complete the specter that seemed to materialize at night among the clothes in his darkened closet. “There isn’t any problem unless we invent one. Everyone who might have been vulnerable has been rotated. Most of the people responsible for the papers are dead.”

“But there are still interests that need to be insured.”

Porterfield nodded. “Of course.”

“I’ll start organizing a field team as quietly as possible. My own people may be the only ones I can afford to use right now, but—”

“Don’t bother.”

“Given the time and the resources, anyone can be hunted down. And these people have too much money to remain invisible for long.”

“No. I’ll handle it.”

“Ben, be reasonable. The first time we heard of these people it was because they attacked a college campus with an automatic cannon. For all we know they’re brigade strength and spending the five million on military weapons.”

Porterfield shifted his gaze from the portrait to Goldschmidt. His tired eyes narrowed. “For all you know they’re from another galaxy and live on whipped cream.” He looked back at the portrait. “We can’t open this thing up again on a grand scale or the word will go out to the operational people. The rest of this is going to take me about a week. After that there won’t be any terrorists and the papers will never see the light.”

“Is that all you’re going to tell me?”

“You don’t need the extra headache.”

“Then I’ll talk to you in a week.” Goldschmidt stood up and walked across the broad Oriental carpet to the door. He stopped and pointed up at the portrait. “Fascinating, really, isn’t it? That a man with Seyell’s money and power would choose to have a thing like that on his wall?” Without waiting for an answer, he went out and closed the door.

Porterfield took a scrap of paper and wrote on it, “Enjoyed the pictures you showed me the other day. I’d appreciate it if you could order me a set from last Thursday in Los Angeles. I’d especially like shots of my daughter and me. I’d do it myself, but once you get on the mailing list you never get off.”

He sealed the paper in an envelope and dialed the intercom. He said, “Karl, I’m afraid I have to send you on an errand in Miami today. Come on in and I’ll explain it.”

I
N THE GARDEN OF THE
B
ILTMORE
H
OTEL
the only sound came from the rhythmic advance of the tide over the sand of Butterfly Beach. The sun had stopped at the horizon line and seemed to have flattened on the glassy surface of the ocean like the yolk of an egg, and now the purple blossoms of the jacaranda trees glowed whitish in the sky.

“This is it,” whispered Chinese Gordon. “Zero minus sixty seconds and counting. We can still call Mission Control if you don’t want to marry an inert and unpromising object like me.”

Margaret held up her bouquet of ranunculus and poppies like a microphone and intoned into it, “This is Houston. We have ignition. I repeat, we have ignition.”

Margaret’s father, a tall man with wavy gray hair at his temples and a bald pate that caught the weak glow of the sun, walked up to them, lifting his feet three inches off the ground at each step in unconscious guilt at crushing the soft carpet of grass. “It’s just about time for me to do my only official act in this. I hope I give her away without making any mistakes. She’s the only daughter I’ve got, so I’d better not make a mess of it.”

“Daddy, you’re walking like a chicken. How much champagne did you have?”

“Mr. Kepler and Mr. Immelmann have made sure we were supplied. Liberally. Magnificently.”

Chinese Gordon said, “I’ll be good to her, Doctor Crisp.”

“Don’t call me that. I’ve been a proctologist for over thirty years now, and every time somebody calls me Doctor I think the worst is yet to come. Call me Baird.”

“Baird. Stop that,” said Mrs. Crisp as she came around the corner of the bungalow with Immelmann. Behind them the judge, a short, fat man, was putting on his black robe. Kepler straightened the judge’s collar and patted him heavily on the back. “There you go, sport. Want me to dust off home plate for you?”

The judge beamed. “I think I’ll manage. I’ve done over two thousand weddings, you know—career total.”

“Ever figure your won-lost record?”

The judge stepped onto the grass, smiling and holding his arms out in their flowing sleeves to herd everyone into position. High in a eucalyptus across the lawn with scarlet bougainvillea vines woven into its dark green leaves an invisible bird began to sing.

“How beautiful this is,” Mrs. Crisp said to her husband. “And look, far out there on the ocean. The lights on that ship are gorgeous, red and green and blue. It looks like a sailing ship. Magical.”

Kepler said to Immelmann, “She’s got a great eye. Never seen an oil rig before.”

Immelmann glared at him and said to Mrs. Crisp, “You’re right. We’re very lucky. Must be anchored out there waiting for the right wind to take it out to sea—maybe to Hawaii or even Tahiti.”

Kepler whispered, “Anchored nine miles out with fifteen hundred feet of pipe. The good ship
Standard Oil
.”

“Dearly beloved,” the judge’s melodious voice rolled in the still air of the evening, “we are gathered here this evening to witness the joining together in matrimony of Margaret Anne Crisp and Leroy Charles Gordon. It is a solemn occasion and yet a happy one….”

Mrs. Crisp whispered to no one in particular, “I’ve never seen a civil ceremony before. He’s very good.”

The judge, with faintly antiquated diction, ceremoniously repeated to the small group of smiling people the traditional wisdom concerning love and the founding of families and the sharing of responsibility. Mrs. Crisp looked with wide, soft eyes over his head at the eucalyptus tree, nodding slightly to herself.

He asked Leroy Charles Gordon if he took this woman to love, honor, and cherish as long as they both should live, and Leroy Charles Gordon said he did. Then he asked Margaret Anne Crisp if she took this man, and she said she did.

As the judge raised his voice to pronounce them man and wife, Dr. Crisp turned his face away from the couple to catch his wife’s eye and noticed that it was Kepler, the one who looked like a professional boxer, who had tears in his eyes. Dr. Crisp wasn’t surprised. It was always the tough ones who fainted at the sight of a needle or a sigmoidoscope. He turned back toward his daughter. At that moment she seemed the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen—her mother’s large, soft eyes and tiny waist. She seemed impossibly delicate in that little blue dress. Then he looked off toward the sea, his own eyes beginning to cloud over.

It was then that he saw the other couple standing apart under the broad, umbrella-shaped magnolia tree. The man seemed to be about his own age. Could it be that Leroy’s parents had been able to make it here to Santa Barbara after all? Suddenly everyone moved at once. People were shaking his hand, and Margaret gave him a bone-crushing hug. There was laughter, and the judge floated among them in his dark robe, obscuring one person, then another in the dusk. He lost sight of the two people under the magnolia tree for a moment as Immelmann forced a glass of champagne into his hand.

As Doctor Crisp lifted his champagne glass he saw that Margaret had noticed the two newcomers too. She seemed to drift toward them into the deeper darkness under the magnolia tree. She must have recognized them, he thought, so in a moment there would be introductions. The only thing he could do that might be any use was to hunt for Immelmann or Kepler. Each of them seemed to have his own red-coated barman with a tray of champagne glasses following him around the lawn like a caddie on a golf course. Whoever these people were, they’d apparently come some distance to see his daughter married, and they were going to be made welcome. He scanned the shapes in the dusk and recognized Immelmann’s girlfriend, the one he called Sunshine. She’d help him get things organized. She seemed to be a sweet girl, although she was a little too shy for conversation. She had a striking appearance, almost like one of the blond starlets of the fifties, and she stood out in the dim light well enough to help him get people together. What kind of parents would name a girl Sunshine?

M
ARGARET PASSED INTO THE SHADOW
of the magnolia tree. She said quietly, “Mr. Porterfield.”

Porterfield moved toward her, and she winced, but he was saying, “This is my wife, Alice.” Margaret felt her hands beginning to tremble but she didn’t have time to pay attention to it, because the woman seemed to materialize when Porterfield named her, as though she were part of a dream.

The woman stepped into the light, and Margaret could see she made no sense either. She seemed to be the kind of middle-aged lady who must spend her time running charities and going to concerts. Her graying hair was still lustrous, worn tied up behind, showing her tiny emerald earrings. The woman embraced Margaret and said, “Your wedding is just lovely, dear. I’m so glad we got to see it.”

Margaret heard voices murmuring behind her, and she grasped the chance. She turned her head to see Kepler talking to a waiter. “Kepler, there’s someone I want you to see.”

Kepler sidled up to them. When he was about eight feet away he said quietly, “You.”

Margaret said, “This is Alice Porterfield. Can you introduce her to everyone?”

Kepler hesitated for a moment, then said, “Sure. Of course. I’d be delighted.” He took Alice Porterfield’s arm and they moved off onto the lawn.

She heard Porterfield chuckle in the darkness. “That was very good.”

“He wouldn’t hesitate to kill her, you know. I don’t know if she’s really your wife, but you can’t want that.”

“She’s really my wife. About thirty years, and I love her very much.”

“What a cold-blooded bastard you are to bring her here.”

She could see Porterfield shake his head, but his face was obscured. He said, “She’s safer here than she’d be at our hotel. We both enjoyed your wedding.”

“How did you know who we are?”

“Now and then some people I know take pictures in airports. It’s usually international flights, but not always, so I thought I’d ask. There were three very good pictures of you and me. I have other friends who can call up the records of the Department of Motor Vehicles, including pictures on licenses, and others who can lift a fingerprint from a used airline ticket. It’s a long story.”

“You must be exhausted. What are you going to do now?”

“Drink champagne, meet your parents, maybe dance a little if Alice is willing to put up with me.”

“You said to burn the papers, but we didn’t. We still have them.”

Porterfield touched her arm. “Of course you do. Hang onto them. Your job is to protect them for us. Stay healthy, live a long life. Have lots of kids so there will always be somebody around to take care of those papers. As long as there is, we’re not going to worry, because you’re never going to reveal them.”

“Because you know who we are.”

Porterfield let the implications settle into Margaret’s consciousness, then said, “Now let me join Alice and celebrate your wedding. I doubt that there’s anybody here who more sincerely wishes you a long and happy life.”

“Thanks,” said a male voice behind him.

Porterfield didn’t move his head. “Is that you, Chinese? After all I’ve read about you in the past few days I’m glad to finally meet you.”

“Thick file?”

Porterfield shrugged. “You and your friends have done a lot of soldiering in a lot of places. American ex-sergeants who turn up as majors and colonels in Africa or Asia make the people at the regional desks curious. But you’re too rich now for anything but early retirement.” He shook Chinese Gordon’s hand. “Congratulations. She’s a beautiful girl.”