Necessity (18 page)

“Sweet Jesus.” He closes his eyes and draws a deep breath. “Ellen. That's your kid's real name?”

“I'd planned to call her Wendy from here on.”

He walks forward, ducks under the strut, kicks the second tire and looks back at her. Having followed, she tries to touch his hand but he retreats a pace and bangs his head on the strut; he utters an oath and wheels out from under the wing, sidestepping to keep his distance—as if he can't stand the smell of her.

“Charlie, doesn't it help you understand why I have to get her away from there?”

“You could've told me, you know. You could've.”

“Why? So you could lie awake worrying?”

“Come on. You were afraid you'd scare me off. You had to have me to fly the fucking airplane and you calculated just how much you could tell me without risking that I might take a walk.”

She says slowly, “Yes, that's true.”

One side of his mouth curls up.

She says, “I'm sorry. I didn't know you well enough then.”

“Nobody likes to be used. Don't you know that yet?”

“She's fifteen months old and defenseless, Charlie. That's what I know. I never set out to hurt you. I didn't tell you any lies that mattered.”

“Leaving out the undigestible parts isn't the same thing as telling lies?”

“Haven't
you
ever rationalized something? I haven't done you any harm. And you've been paid. I expect you to keep your part of the agreement.”

He glances toward the radio shack with its tall loran pylon; the kid is in there behind glass reading a comic book. Charlie turns a full circle on his heels, scowling at the trees. “The last couple of days—I thought we were getting to know each other. Now I think you were just sinking the hook. One good fuck and I'd follow you anywhere—that the idea?”

“No. That's not the idea. It wasn't any part of my plans.”

Charlie opens the pilot's door and reaches into the cabin, prodding the yoke and then the pedals, watching the movements of control surfaces at wing and tail.

He says: “I'm vain enough to want to believe that. Let's say I buy it. Let's say I buy everything you're telling me the same way I bought the horseshit you sold me before.” He isn't talking loudly but his voice makes her wince.

He says, “Let's say it's all true this time. What it comes down to, you want to take the kid out of that house and there's a pretty good chance you could get yourself killed, these guys being that kind of people.”

“You won't be in danger, Charlie. I'm not asking you to—”

“You're missing the point, luscious one. I'm pretty good at worrying about my own hide. What bothers me is worrying about yours.”

“Thank you.”

“Wasn't fishing for gratitude. The thing is, you know—what happens if you die or something? How do I explain that to myself?”

“I'd be doing it with you or without you. Put your conscience away, all right? I can't afford it. What time have you got?”

He looks at his watch. “Ten-forty.”

She confirms it against her own watch. “My feet are freezing. Are my boots in the Jeep?”

“Back seat.”

“Are you ready to go?”

“Airplane is. Not so sure about you and me.”

“Come on, Charlie, I can't fight with you all day.”

“Go on. Dry your feet off. Put your boots on. I've got to pay Dennis the Menace for the gas.”

By the time he comes back from the shack she's in the Jeep tugging her boots on. She feels it sway when Charlie puts his weight on the open door sill. He leans in, scraping his head on the top of the doorway, and levels upon her at close range a grave stare.

“Tell me about the landing field.”

She's showed it to him on the map; he marked it. She says, “It's about a mile and a half from the house. On government land, I think. They put down the strip a year ago last spring.”

“If it's a grass runway we'll need a long throw to get off the ground. It'll be pretty wet. Happen to know the length of the strip?”

“It's about three quarters of a mile, I think. In any case it isn't just grass. They laid down some sort of metal webbing. It came on big flat trucks in rolls.”

He's astonished. “Marsden matting? That stuff costs a fortune. They used to use it to build temporary fighter strips during the war.”

“I don't know what it's called. I know they've landed bigger planes than this there—even in the snow.”

“If they spent that kind of money on the strip … I take it we're talking about smuggling now. What is it—cocaine?”

“I don't know. More likely heroin, wouldn't it be? I really don't know much about it. I suppose I made it a point not to know anything. I know the airplanes don't always bring things in. Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes he sends suitcases full of cash out.”

“Out to where? Switzerland? The Bahamas?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Doesn't matter.” He's still watching her, head ducked under the door frame. He says, “I guess I believe you. How often do they use the runway?”

“Two or three times a month. That was last year, of course. I don't know about now.”

“Just my luck to run right into one of their shipments.”

But then he smiles in an odd way. “I seem to have decided to go through with this bullshit. Just for God's sake don't ask me why.”

She knows why; he probably does too. It's because he has an image of himself as a man who keeps his word, protects women and children, takes heroic risks.

She says: “You're a romantic, Charlie.”

“I am?”

“You'll be there at one o'clock exactly.”

“Yeah. I'll be there.”

“You know that if you change your mind—”

“I'll be there.” His paw locks around the back of her neck and pulls her forward: his kiss is hard on her lips.

Then he draws back and before he turns away he makes a silly face at her. “Jesus H. Christ. A fucking Mafia gun moll.”

46
Driving the Jeep through town she is thinking: maybe there is some way Charlie and I can include each other in our futures.

She still can taste his mouth. Preoccupied, she nearly rear-ends a little car when it stops abruptly. Its bald driver begins to jockey it into a parallel parking space. Irritated, she leans on the horn when she pulls out to get past. Then she misses the light and bucks to an awkward stop and feels a flush across her face when in the mirror she sees a police car right behind her.

It follows her several blocks and she clenches the wheel until her knuckles turn white but finally the police car turns off behind her and she drives on out of town at a sedate speed, waiting for the tremor in all her fibers to dwindle.

Look, it could have been worse. Suppose you'd run the red light? You could be spending the next half hour explaining things to a justice of the peace.

Quit jumping at shadows. You need to have your wits about you this morning.

The road forks and narrows; it's a darker day here in the trees. Climbing into the soft hills she feels a chill bite in the air. Strong scent of pine sap here.

Charlie …

No. One thing at a time. Ellen comes first.

She watches the mirror anxiously but there's nothing behind her. Never mind that; they'll be chasing soon enough.

The Jeep runs easily along turnings she knows by heart, carrying her across a range of wooded hills and down the length of a valley—a slow country road that undulates beside the stream. Birch forest here—in twenty minutes there'll be pines as the road takes her higher.

The air is emphatically clean, washed by yesterday's rain. Sunlight dapples the water and throws striking shadows across the white tree trunks that march beside the road. The day is aflutter with dragonflies; a chirruping of cicadas is loud enough to be heard over the grinding whine of the Jeep's heavy-duty transmission. Fields of merry goldenrod climb the slopes beyond the stream.

Got to think clearly now. All the things that may go wrong—the things she didn't mention to Charlie. What if there are new dogs? What if the locks or the burglar alarm have been changed? What if they've moved the nursery to some other room? What if Ellen isn't here at all?

What if it's like the last time and it goes crucially wrong? What if this time you don't get away at all?

What if they know you're coming and they're waiting for you?

Last time in a strange way it was easier than this because she hadn't been through it before and she hadn't really thought about all the things that could go wrong. The advantage presented itself; she acted on the spur of the moment. The decision itself had been premeditated but the timing of it was not—she was taken utterly by surprise by her own action.

She'd known for months that she had to rescue the baby: that they had to leave Bert and go in search of sanity.

She'd known it in the back of her mind since Ellen's birth but she hadn't been ready to face it squarely. Her feelings kept changing: she didn't know what she wanted or what she needed.

At first there wasn't sufficient evidence to support her sprouting apprehensive consternation. Instinct was all she had: an intuition of darkening evil. There was nothing to which she could have given testimony.

He didn't seem to have changed; he was still the same big hearty slab-hard hoarse sportin' man who'd swept her off her feet with his contradictory streaks of considerate courtliness and bizarre vulgarity.

Sometimes the excitement still overwhelmed her and in their fevered thrashings she'd find herself thinking
Yes, yes, my God, more—I want more
and she'd wonder how she ever could have dreamed of giving him up.

Yet her unease intensified. When she held the vulnerable baby in her arms the qualms turned into outright fear, even though at first she could not define it.

Then she found out about the drug business.

It wasn't a big dramatic moment. She didn't catch him with glass envelopes full of white powder. It was nothing more than the appearance of his name in a newspaper article. No accusation; just journalistic innuendo:

Another name that has surfaced in the DEA's investigations is that of Manhattan building contractor Albert LaCasse. It is not yet clear what connection, if any, LaCasse may have to the unfolding story of drug-trafficking indictments.…

No more than that. But it was the last of many segments; when it fell into place the pattern came instantly clear.

Perhaps it always had been: sometimes she wondered if she hadn't deliberately avoided finding out, like an Albert Speer who wanted to be left alone with his architecture, not caring to know anything about Hitler that could compromise his relationship with his own conscience.

Bert came home that evening to the condominium on Third Avenue and she was waiting for him in icy calm and after one look at her face he said, “I see you've been reading the
Daily News.
”

“It's all true, isn't it.”

“No.” He was hanging his coat in the hall closet. “Where are Philip and Marjorie?”

“She's in with the baby. I told him to go to the movies. I thought we'd better talk in private.”

“I pity you, Madeleine, if you think you're ever getting truth for your quarter. They're not peddling truth. They're peddling newspapers.”

“You're right to pity me. I've been such a pathetic fool.”

He tossed his jacket on the couch and jerked his tie loose and strode toward the wet bar; then he changed his mind and came to her.

She was at the window by the balcony. Snow on the railing had melted a bit during the day, then refrozen; it had a hard sooty crust.

He didn't make the mistake of reaching out for her. He stood at arm's length and tried to stare her down. He said, “If they had any proof, don't you think I'd have been indicted by now? Listen—it's all distortions. I'm in this fight with the unions. They're animals. They'll spread any kind of lies to cut you down.”

He continued to stare at her; he endeavored to smile.

“That's all it is—a couple of union buttons got paid to peddle a bunch of garbage and the reporters ate it up like the pigs they are. You understand?”

Her stubborn silence argued with him. He threw his hands high in a violent gesture of exasperation and now the hoarse voice thundered at her:

“It's a bunch of fucking lies. I don't deal dope. You ought to know that. Have you ever seen me dealing dope? Come on. These creeps, I expect this kind of shit from them—but what hurts, what really hurts all the way down, it hurts me to see you believing this swill. That's what hurts. That's what I hate the bastards for.”

She was afraid of the violence in him. And it was a good act, full of bombast, almost persuasive.

But she didn't believe him.

It all fitted too well. She'd spent the past two hours remembering things and putting them together. The suitcases full of cash—for “union payoffs.” The twin-engine planes on the Fort Keene airstrip with their furtive Latin American pilots. The obsessive secrecy that always cloaked his expeditions out of town with Jack Sertic and one or more bodyguards. The guns everywhere—in the apartment, in his Lexington Avenue suite of offices, in the Fort Keene cabin. And the getaway preparations in the leather jacket he always kept in the front hall closet, its lining sewn with a passport in a phony name and God knows how many cut diamonds. She hadn't been prying; she'd been going through the closet yesterday looking for things to donate to the Armory benefit and she'd felt the hard flat passport in the jacket and its presence had made her examine the jacket more closely.

Strange how careless he could be about things like that when he was so cautious about other aspects of his security. Once a week a man with a heavy briefcase came in to sweep the apartment for electronic bugs. The unlisted phone numbers and the combination of the burglar alarm were changed at irregular intervals. All their cars were equipped with break-in alarm systems.