Relic of Time (10 page)

“I could give you mine, sweetie.”

“You flatter me.”

Flatten would have been more like it. Was it the weather or just California that made growing old so dreadful a prospect?

“Come on back. It's lonely here.”

As he drove away, he wondered if Hannan's offered reward for the return of the portrait was having any more luck than he was. And what was Crosby up to? He had started south, drawn by the Miguel Arroyo brouhaha, when his cell phone vibrated in his shirt pocket.

“Traeger?”

“Yo.”

“I didn't know you spoke Spanish. This is Morgan.”

My God, they should call an alumni meeting. Himself, Crosby, and now Morgan. They could gather on Dortmund's patio.

“You got my number from Gladys.”

“Where can we meet?”

“Where are you?”

“Right behind you.”

In the rearview mirror he saw the open convertible. The driver's hand rose in a wave.

“I'll pull off.”

They sat at an outside table under an umbrella at a McDon-ald's, the building shielding them from the noise of traffic.

“They told me about you,” Traeger said. “In Washington.”

“What did they say?”

“Remember those laugh lines Dortmund used too often? ‘On the other hand, I have four fingers, a thumb, and a wart.'”

“ ‘And a mole on my father's side.' ”

Morgan being identified as the Company's plant in the Rough Riders, they got down to business.

“Where is it?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

Morgan lit a cigarette. When he exhaled, the smoke drifted away on the hot breeze.

“Ignatius Hannan has offered a reward for it.”

“Your pension isn't enough?”

“Hey, I'm still active.”

“Tell it to Gladys.”

Morgan laughed. “Isn't she something? Look, here's my plan.”

Morgan wanted the million Hannan was offering, but could he deliver?

“Trust me.”

Under the circumstances, that sounded like a joke. There had always been agents who, faced with oblivion, became double agents, working for the other side as well. Fear for one's life was, if not exculpating, an understandable motive for treachery.

“And there can't be any publicity, Traeger. My principals might not understand.”

Oh, they would understand. “You would have more to fear from Grady.”

“Grady's an ass. Remember Brando in
Viva Zapata
?”

“Will Crosby has been hired by Hannan. You should deal with him.”

“Where is he?”

“Good question.”

“I want to deal with you. Of course I'd cut you in, ten, fifteen percent.”

Traeger felt like the Sanhedrin bickering with Judas Escariot. He said nothing.

“You work out the transfer, Traeger.”

“How large is it?”

“Isn't it a million?”

“I meant the picture.”

Morgan thought. “It would fit in the trunk of my car.”

Two pairs of eyes drifted toward the convertible in which Morgan had followed him in to the drive-in.

“No,” Morgan said.

“I didn't think so.”

Traeger shook a cigarette free from the pack Morgan had tossed on the table. Morgan lit it for him, using an old-fashioned Zippo that flared up like a Bunsen burner at the flick of his thumb. Traeger was wondering how he could arrange to get the picture without Morgan getting the money. But then Morgan was probably thinking how to double-cross him as well.

“Give me a number to call.”

“I'll call you.”

A stupid precaution. After Traeger had avoided shaking hands with Morgan and was behind the wheel of his car, he checked his phone. Morgan's number was there. He punched it.

“Yes.”

“You should say ‘Yo.'”

After a pause, Morgan laughed. “Never kid a kidder.”

When she returned from Chicago after those wonderful three days with Lloyd, Catherine Dolan had waited for him to call. But several days went by and no call came. When she tried to reach him, there was no answer. She sat, sipping a martini and looking out at Lake Calhoun from the windows of her apartment in the high-rise just across the boulevard from the lake. Euclidean sails drifted across the rumpled water, going whither the wind whilst, and old problems in plane geometry distracted her. Why didn't he call?

The more she thought of those days in Chicago, the more her memories of them became unsettling. Lloyd had been ardent enough, God knows, but she had sensed that their meeting was an excursion out of character for him. She got down one of his books and stared at the photograph on the dust jacket. A popular account of Heloise and Abelard, which, she remembered, was surprisingly censorious. The usual thing was to romanticize the couple, but Lloyd had looked on the affair as Heloise did in her later letters to her maimed lover. Catherine had meant to kid Lloyd about that, but she hadn't. In the circumstances, it would not have been appropriate. Her own academic field, microbiology, was remote from his. She had taught for a time, then went to work for a private company and, unexpectedly, had made a pile from patented breakthroughs. So she had retired and, sitting in this very apartment, had daydreamed of the sweet long ago when she and Lloyd had walked along Minnehaha Creek in the summer evenings.

After days of silence and inability to reach him, she told herself that it was the way she had said good-bye to him, that final act of homage, that explained the silence. Every woman knows the transition from eager to sated lover, the act once done removing the allure that had drawn him to her. The eagerness would return, of course, and be succeeded by the same swift indifference. Finally, the eagerness, too, faded. Except in an animal like Richard, the son of a bitch she had married and then discarded in the interval between academe and commercial work. There had followed a string of affairs she did not like to remember. At the time, she had thought of herself as Edna St. Vincent Millay, or Dorothy Parker, promiscuous but what the hell, who's keeping score? Burning her candle at both ends, so to quote. She hadn't been successful in thinking of those men as mere toys, but then neither had Millay or Parker. Being a woman was hell. Men seemed able to take their pleasure and then forget. Look at Lloyd. The son of a bitch. Angry, she called again.

A woman answered. Okay. A little revenge.

“I'm a friend of Lloyd's.”

“The wake is tomorrow.”

“The wake?”

“The Mass is the following day.”

“For Lloyd?”

A long pause. “Good Lord, hadn't you heard?”

“Tell me about it.”

“Who are you?”

“Catherine Dolan. We grew up together in Minneapolis.”

She realized she was speaking with one of Lloyd's daughters, Judith, who broke down as she told Catherine what had happened. Catherine, knowing certain facts Judith did not, listened in disbelief. Had he gone on pilgrimage in repentance for their three days in bed?

“Where will the wake be held?”

She jotted down the address in Indianapolis.

“Thank you,” she said and hung up.

She sat stunned. Dead. Images of the two of them in that hotel bed in Chicago came to her, and she seemed in the grips of necrophilia. Then she began calling airlines. By God, she would go. There was a direct flight out of Hubert Humphrey and she booked a seat.

From the stack of newspapers in the back hall, waiting to go out with the trash, she took those that had covered the outrage in Mexico City and for half the night she tried to reconstruct what had happened to Lloyd. But it was what must have sent him off to that shrine that filled her with dread.

The flight to Indianapolis was turbulent and she imagined the newspaper account of the crash. How would she be described? Who would care? She was in a proper mood for the wake, held in a dreadful funeral home on Meridian Avenue, on which governors and other notables once had dwelt. She parked her rental car and sat looking at the people going inside. Finally she had the courage to do the same.

An unctuous undertaker greeted her with brows raised in a question.

“Lloyd Kaiser,” she said.

“Of course.” He directed her to a viewing room, where chairs were set in rows. At the entrance was a book in which mourners entered their names. She wrote “Heloise Abelard,” and went in among the chattering people, avoiding them all, seeking anonymity. She took a chair in the back row, but her eyes were drawn to the closed casket on which mourners converged, kneeling for a time, crossing themselves, and then going off. Catherine felt like an anthropologist studying a strange tribe. But they were her tribe, all Catholics as she herself once had been. As Lloyd had remained. She thought of the medal he had worn and her silly comments on it.

A tall young priest with a serious expression led the rosary and, listening to the once familiar prayer, repeated over and over, Catherine tried to remember what it had been like to believe all that, that God had become man and come to dwell among us, that by His stripes we are healed, that earthly life is the anteroom to eternity. But memories of her final sexual act with Lloyd disturbed her thoughts. Had he confessed and been absolved, once more all right with this world and the next? Irony and sarcasm were difficult in the room where his friends and children prayed for the repose of Lloyd's soul. She left before the general exodus and drove to her hotel.

The funeral Mass was at ten the following morning. It was easier to be anonymous in the church. She sat through it all, watching the priest at the altar, the same slim man who had led the rosary the night before. The Mass. She tried to remember the last time she had been to Mass. She and the son of a bitch had been married by a priest; she tried to remember why. There was incense and much blessing of the casket under a white covering in the central aisle. In the front pews were several young couples, his children, one youngster. It seemed an assumption of the occasion that any grief was concealed. It was all Catherine could do not to cry, for herself, for Lloyd perhaps, for the whole world of lost innocence the ceremony recalled.

The family followed the casket down the aisle, smiling almost cheerfully. Well, why not? Several had spoken after the Mass, maudlin commemorations of their dead father. At communion time, Catherine heard the words, “O Lord, I am not worthy to receive you.” She could not have put it better herself. She remained seated in her pew while everyone else went forward. The body and blood of Christ. She had made her First Communion at the age of ten. Had Lloyd been among the group when for the first time they approached the communion rail at Saint Helena's?

When she left, she avoided the family and those pressing around them. She was behind the wheel of her car when a man came toward her.

“Going to the cemetery?”

She looked at him for a moment, then nodded. He attached a pennant to the front fender.

The procession through Indianapolis was under police escort. They drove through red lights, other motorists stopping in recognition of their supposed sorrow. Had anyone even wept? She remembered Judith, who had broken down on the telephone when Catherine called.

For years she had schooled herself to think, insofar as she let such questions form, that death is the end, that all the fuss over the decaying husk left when the run was over, funerals, mourning, monuments, all the rest, were carryovers from barbarism. Even cremation seemed overly dramatic. But at least it scattered the supposed remains and allowed the living to go on living. These were not convictions, just unexamined presuppositions, and she felt them assaulted by the graveside ceremony. Finally, there were tears, honest-to-God weeping, and she could have cheered. Lloyd deserved at least that from those whom he had left orphans, apparently well-provided-for orphans. Her own eyes blurred with tears as she looked on.