Promised Land (16 page)

“I’ve done that already. On the phone when they called. They don’t trust you and they don’t like you.”

“Hard to imagine, isn’t it,” I said.

She smiled, and closed her eyes and shook her head slightly.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s get out and walk.”

The blue hills are actually spruce green and they form the center of a large reservation of woods and ponds in an upper-middle-class suburb that abuts Boston. The biggest of the blue hills supports on its flank a nature museum, and on its crest a fieldstone observatory from which one gets a fine view of Boston’s skyline, and an excellent wind for kite flying on the downside pitch of the hill below the building. It’s a hike of maybe fifteen minutes to the top, through woods and over small gullies, and there are usually Cub Scout packs and Audubon members clambering among the slate-colored outcroppings. I offered Pam Shepard a hand over one of the gullies and she declined. I didn’t offer on the next one. I’m a quick study.

The observatory at the top had two sets of stairs and two balconies and kids were running up and down the stairs and shouting at each other from the balconies. Several kites danced above us, one of them shaped like a large bat. “That’s auspicious,” I said to Pam, and nodded at the bat.

She smiled. “They have all sorts of fancy ones like that now,” she said. “The kids went through the kite stage. Harvey and I could never get them to fly… Or us either, now that I think of it.”

“It can be done,” I said. “I’ve seen it done.”

She shrugged and smiled again and shook her head. We stood on the upper balcony of the observatory and looked at the Boston skyline to the north. “What is it,” Pam Shepard said, “about a cluster of skyscrapers in the distance that makes you feel… What?… Romantic? Melancholy? Excited? Excited probably.”

“Promise,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Of everything,” I said. “From a distance they promise everything, whatever you’re after. They look clean and permanent against the sky like that. Up close you notice dog litter around the foundations.”

“Are you saying it’s not real? The look of the skyscrapers from a distance.”

“No. It’s real enough, I think. But so is the dog litter and if you spend all your time looking at the spires you’re going to step in it.”

“Into each life some shit must fall?”

“Ah,” I said, “you put it so much more gracefully than I.”

She laughed.

Below us to the left Jane emerged from behind some trees where the trail opened out into a small meadow below the observatory. She looked around carefully and then looked up at us on the balcony. Pam Shepard waved. I smiled inoffensively. Jane turned her head and said something and Rose emerged from the trees and stood beside her. Pam waved again and Rose waved back. My smile became even more inoffensive. And earnest. I fairly vibrated with earnestness. This was going to be the tough part. Guys like Powers you can get with money, or the hope of it. Or fear, if you’re in a position to scare them. But people like Rose, they were hard. Zealots were always hard. Zeal distorts them. Makes the normal impulses convolute. Makes people fearless and greedless and loveless and finally monstrous. I was against zeal. But being against it didn’t make it go away. I had to persuade these two zealots to go along with the plan or the plan washed away and maybe so did the Shepards.

They trudged up the hill to the observatory warily, alert for an ambush among the kite-flying kids and the Cub Scouts looking at lichen growth on the north side of rocks. They disappeared below us as they went into the stairwell and then appeared coming up the stairs behind us. As Rose reached the top of the stairs Pam Shepard went to her and embraced her. Rose patted her back as they hugged. With one arm still around Rose, Pam took Jane’s hand and squeezed it.

“It’s good to see you both,” she said.

Rose said, “Are you all right?”

Jane said, “Have you got a place to stay?”

“Yes, yes, I’m all right, I’m fine, I’ve been using his apartment.”

“With him?” Rose looked suddenly menopausal.

“No,” I said. The way I used to say it to my mother. “No, I’ve been down the Cape, working on a case. Besides I have a girlfriend, ah woman, ah, I have a person, I… I’m with Susan Silverman.”

Rose said to Pam Shepard, “That’s good of him.”

Jane said to Rose and Pam Shepard, “I still don’t trust him.”

“You can,” Pam said. “You really can. I trust him. He’s a good man.”

I smiled harder. Ingratiation. Jane eyes me for vulnerable points.

Rose said, “Well, whether or not we can trust him, we can talk some business with him at least. I’ll reserve my opinion of his trustworthiness. What is his offer exactly?” And, while she hadn’t yet addressed me directly, she looked at me. Once they did that I always had them. I think it was the puckish charm. “Well?” she said. Yeah, it was the puckish charm.

“I can get you all the guns you need, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth. And bullets. No questions asked.”

“Why?”

“I get a broker’s fee.”

Rose nodded. Jane said, “Perhaps that’s why we can trust him.”

Rose said, “I suppose we give you the money and then you have the guns delivered? Something like that perhaps? And when we get tired of waiting for delivery and call you up you seem to have moved?”

Pam Shepard said, “No. Rose, believe me, you can trust him. He’s not dishonest.”

“Pam, almost everyone is dishonest. He’s as dishonest as anyone else. I don’t want to do business with him.”

“That’s dumb,” I said. “It’s the kind of dumb that smart people get because they think they’re smart.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Jane said.

“It means that if everyone’s dishonest you aren’t going to do better elsewhere. And the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. I got one character witness. Where you going to find a gun dealer that has that many?”

Rose said, “We are not fools. You assume women can’t manage this sort of thing? That gunrunning is a masculine profession?”

“I don’t assume anything. What I know is that amateurs can’t handle this sort of thing. You will get ripped off if you’re lucky and ripped off and busted if you’re not.” Ah, Spenser, master of the revolutionary argot. Word maven of the counterculture.

“And why should we believe you won’t rip us off?” Jane said.

“You got my word, and the assurance of one of your own people. Have I lied to you yet? Have I turned Pam in to her husband, or the fuzz? You held up a bank and killed an old man. He used to be a cop and the New Bedford cops are not going to forget that. They are going to be looking for you until Harvard wins the Rose Bowl. You are fugitives from justice as the saying goes. And you are in no position to be advertising for a gun dealer. If the word gets out that a group of women are looking to make a gun buy, who do you think the first dealer will be? The easy one, the one that shows up one day and says he’s got what you want?”

“So far,” Rose said, “it seems to be you.”

“Yeah, and you know who I am. The next one will be somebody undercover. An FBI informant, a special serices cop, an agent from the Treasury Department, maybe a woman, a nice black woman with all the proper hatreds who wants to help a sister. And you show up with the cash and she shows up with thirteen cops and the paddy wagon.”

“He’s right, you know,” Pam Shepard said. “He knows about this kind of thing, and we don’t. Who would get us guns that we could trust better?”

“Perhaps,” Rose said, “we can merely sit on the money for a while.”

I shook my head. “No, you can’t. Then you’re just a felon, a robber and murderer. Now you’re a revolutionary who killed because she had to. If you don’t do what you set out to do then you have no justification for murdering that old man and the guilt will get you.”

“I killed the guard,” Jane said. “Rose didn’t. He tried to stop us and I shot him.” She seemed proud.

“Same, same,” I said. “She’s an accessory and as responsible as you are. Doesn’t matter who squeezed off the round.”

“We can do without the amateur psychoanalyzing, Spenser,” Rose said. “How do we prevent you from taking our money and running?”

“I’ll just be the broker. You and the gun dealer meet face to face. You see the guns, he sees the money.”

“And if they’re defective?”

“Examine them before you buy.”

They were silent.

“If you’re not familiar with the particular type of weapon, I’ll examine it too. Have you thought of what kinds of guns you want?”

“Any kind,” Jane said. “Just so they fire.”

“No, Jane. Let’s be honest. We don’t know much about guns. You know that anyway. We want guns appropriate for guerrilla fighting. Including handguns that we can conceal easily, and, I should think, some kind of machine guns.”

“You mean hand-held automatic weapons, you don’t mean something you’d mount on a tripod.”

“That’s right. Whatever the proper terminology. Does that seem sensible to you?”

“Yeah. Let me check with my dealer. Any other preferences?”

“Just so they shoot,” Jane said.

“Are we in business?” I said.

“Let us talk a bit, Mr. Spenser,” Rose said. And the three women walked to the other end of the balcony and huddled.

On the walls of the observatory, mostly in spray paint, were graffiti. Mostly names, but also a pitch for gay liberation, a suggestion that blacks be bused to Africa and some remarks about the sister of somebody named Mangan. The conference broke up and Rose came back and said, “All right, we’re agreed. When can you get the guns?”

“I’ll have to be in touch with you,” I said. “Couple days, probably.”

“We’re not giving you an address or phone number.”

“No need to.” I gave her my card. “You have my number. I’ll leave a message with my answering service. Call every day at noon and check in. Collect is okay.”

“We’ll pay our way, Mr. Spenser.”

“Of course you will, I was just being pleasant.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t bother, Mr. Spenser. It seems very hard for you.”

Rose and Jane left as furtively as they’d come. They were hooked. I might pull it off. Jane hadn’t even kicked me.

“It’s going to work,” I said to Pam Shepard.

“Are they going to get hurt?”

“That’s my worry, not yours.”

“But I’m like the Judas goat if they are. They are trusting you because of me.”

We were driving back into Boston passing the outbound commuting traffic. “Somebody has to go down,” I said, “for the bank guard. It isn’t going to be you and that’s all you have to concentrate on.”

“Damnit, Spenser, am I selling them out?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You son of a bitch.”

“If you kick me in the groin while I’m driving a traffic accident might ensue.”

“I won’t do it. I’ll warn them now. As soon as I get home.”

“First, you don’t know how to reach them except through an ad in the paper, which you can’t do right now. Second, if you warn them you will screw yourself and your husband, whose troubles are as serious as yours and whose salvation is tied to selling out Rose and Jane.”

“What’s wrong? What’s the matter with Harvey? Are the kids okay?”

“Everyone’s okay at the moment. But Harv’s in hock to a loan shark. I didn’t want to tell you all this but you can’t trust me if I lie to you. You kept asking.”

“You have no right to manipulate me. Not even for my own good. You have not got that right maybe especially for my own good.”

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you. You’re better off not knowing, but you have the right to know and I don’t have the right to decide for you.”

“So what in hell is going on?”

I told her. By the time I got through we were heading down Boylston Street through Copley Square with the sun reflecting off the empty John Hancock Building and the fountain sparkling in the plaza. I left out only the part about Hawk shoving one of the kids. Paternalism is hard to shake.

“Good Jesus,” she said. “What the hell have we become.”

“You’ve become endangered species among other things. The only way out for you is to do what I say. That includes throwing Rose and Jane off the back of the sleigh.”

“I can’t… double-cross them. I know that sounds melodramatic but I don’t know how else to put it.”

“It’s better than saying you can’t betray them. But however you put it, you’re wrong. You’ve gotten yourself into a place where all the choices are lousy. But they seem clear. You’ve got kids that need a mother, you’ve got a husband that needs a wife. You’ve got a life and it needs you to live it. You’re a handsome intelligent broad in the middle of something that could still be a good life.” I turned left at Bonwit’s onto Berkeley Street. “Somebody has got to go inside for that old cop. And I won’t be crying if it’s Rose and Jane. They snuffed him like a candle when he got in their way. And if we can hook King Powers on the same line, I say we’ve done good.”

I turned right onto Marlborough Street and pulled into the curb by the hydrant in front of my apartment. We went up in silence. And we were silent when we got inside. The silence got awkward inside because it was pregnant with self-awareness. We were awkwardly aware that we were alone together in my apartment and that awareness hung between us as if Kate Millett had never been born. “I’ll make us some supper,” I said. “Want a drink first?” My voice was a little husky but I didn’t want to clear my throat. That would have been embarrassing, like an old Leon Errol movie.

“Are you having one?” she said.

“I’m having a beer.” My voice had gone from husky to hoarse. I coughed to conceal the fact that I was clearing it.

“I’ll have one too,” she said.

I got two cans of Utica Club cream ale out of the refrigerator.

“Glass?” I said.

“No, can’s fine,” she said.

“Ever try this,” I said. “Really very good. Since they stopped importing Amstel, I’ve been experimenting around.”

“It’s very nice,” she said.

“Want spaghetti?”

“Sure, that would be fine.”

I took a container of sauce from the freezer and ran it under hot water and popped the crimson block of frozen sauce out into a saucepan. I put the gas on very low under the pan, covered it and drank some Utica Club cream ale.