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Authors: Madison Smartt Bell

BOOK: Straight Cut
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Do you think that he loves you?

I don’t know. Not all the time. I said he was impulsive.

Your marriage to Tracy Bateman has not been a great success.

No. Not really. He blames me for that.

Do you blame yourself?

No. Though my ...my withdrawals were part of the problem.

By “withdrawals” you mean your sense of not really existing.

Yes. But he does it too. Something similar. Usually when he’s drinking.

His abuse of alcohol disturbs you?

Yes. Very much.

Why?

He disappears inside it.

Do you think that he loves you?

I know that he does.

Do you love him?

Yes.

Why don’t you stay with him?

I don’t know.

Does he also make you feel that you are, as you put it, “really there”?

He makes me feel that I ought to be.

Do you relate your sense of nonexistence with his withdrawals?

In a sense.

In what sense?

I fear that it is the condition of all human life.

Let me change the subject. You have said that sometimes you are troubled by very severe nightmares.

Yes.

Recently?

Yes.

Can you explain them?

Not really.

Try.

I feel that there is someone inside of me trying to talk to me. Maybe it wants to get out.

Do you associate your nightmares with your occasional sense of nonexistence?

Yes.

Recently, have these feelings of nonexistence got better or worse? .

They’ve changed.

In what way?

I have realized that I am no longer only my own life but something else too.

That’s rather cryptic. Could you elaborate?

I’d prefer not to. At least not now.

Is this new sensation related to your nightmares? The idea that something inside of you wants to get out?

Not at all. It’s much more concrete.

And when did you first become aware of it?

Gradually. But I became certain of it today. On this airplane.

What do you plan to do about it?

I haven’t the slightest idea.

PART III
CHOC EN RETOUR
11

“B
ETWEEN
J
ULY 11 AND
July 13, the accused (Tracy Bateman, a United States citizen) traveled in the north of Italy, ostensibly for the purpose of tourism, using as transport a rented automobile. On the morning of July 14 (Bastille Day — how do you like that?) he crossed the French-Italian border, again ostensibly for the purpose of tourism, but with a covert intention to …”

To what? Even I didn’t know the answer to that one, though I was assuming it would all become clear in due course. But it did while away the time, when I was doing all that driving, to make up different police or prosecutors’ reports about my activities. The problem was that they were all rather inconclusive. Could I be guilty of committing a crime without knowing what it was? You bet I could.

My big hope was that if I did get nailed it would be in a country where the judges and lawyers still wear wigs.

Well. I hadn’t been far behind Mimmo, getting out of Strozzi’s. I went back to the apartment, drank some more water and two raw eggs, and slept for about twelve hours. In the morning I was fit to face the world again. Not knowing when I’d have another such convenient opportunity, I spent an hour doing some more tricks with the metalworking equipage. There was a creaky old manual typewriter in the apartment and I typed a couple of address labels and then went out to mail a package. There was a minor hassle about postage, because the mail clerk and I didn’t understand each other too well, but no problem over the customs declaration. “Books and papers.” No insurance required. I went back to the apartment.

As always seems to happen, my gear had swelled or something during the time I’d spent in Rome. But I finally managed to get it all shut in the shoulder bag somehow. I went over to Strozzi’s to drop off the key, and drank a cappuccino while he called me a taxi.

Another minor hassle, over the fare at the airport. I argued and beat the man down a little. It’s expected; you’re noticed if you don’t. Inside the airport I went to the car rental desk, where they spoke English. I negotiated a one-way rental on a four-seater Renault and tore off a rather thick sheaf of traveler’s checks, to pay half in advance. There was no hitch. The teenagers with the Uzis didn’t seem to be interested in me today. It took only ten minutes for the car to be delivered to the front of the building. The little Renault was clean and still smelled new. I threw my bags on the passenger seat and drove away.

L’autostrada del sole.
Superhighways are truly all the same. This one, the road to the north, was flat and straight as a string. The countryside it went through was quite without interest. The monotony of the road was enough to depersonalize even Italian drivers, no mean achievement, that. I might as well have been driving through Kansas.

Around what some people would call tea time, I arrived at Siena, and parked the car outside the city wall. Buses, many of them with German plates, were disgorging thousands of tourists in the same area. I merged with this crowd walking into town, and near the square I broke away. It took me several failed attempts before I found a
pensione
with a room free for the night. I left my bags in the room and walked out around the sweep of the tilted square. The piazza was full of pigeons and people who seemed to be hippies of a kind. I climbed the campanile and looked down on the fan of yellow flagstones from above. Then I came down and had an early supper. A couple of local papers that I’d bought to try to read in my room quickly put me to sleep.

I’d done my work and now I was on vacation. I looked like a tourist. I even
felt
like a tourist.

Early in the morning, I was on the
autostrada
again. I wasn’t paying much attention to where I was going. The drone of the road kept me reasonably tranquil. I would put my mind to selecting a nice border crossing when I got farther north. But when I saw the road sign for Firenze I had to pull off the road for a moment to think.

The thing was so obvious, and especially in view of recent events, it was hard to believe that I could have forgotten it. Lauren had been in Florence with Kevin. I had the people, the place, and even a rough date, all thanks to Harvey’s super-8 film. April.
Sync it up.
Kevin had let me assume that Lauren had been in New York. Lauren had let me think much the same thing. But chances were she’d been in Italy all along. Terrific, but what did it mean? I ran Harvey’s film back across my mental shadow box, as well as I could remember it. The Halliburton hadn’t been in the shot, had it? I looked at the thing, lying there in the passenger seat next to the bag I’d started out with. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t take something like that on a sightseeing excursion anyway. Though everyone did seem to be terribly casual about this deal, whatever it might turn put to be.

How would I like to cut that scene? I’d like to cut it out, is what. I decided against going to Florence, and took the road west toward the Mediterranean coast, where I remembered, among other things, that the border posts were agreeably casual.

I made good time along the western road and got off it as soon as I was near the water. The
autostrada
had begun to get to me. I found a winding coastal secondary road and continued north, more slowly. There was an almost uninterrupted chain of little resort towns on the west side of the road, but there was not much traffic. At many bends of the road I could see the ocean. Among the older buildings along the beach, there were a lot of modern high-rise-style hotels. A few miles short of Ventimiglia, I checked into one of these.

The hotel seemed to be nearly empty, but for some reason they gave me a room on the sixth floor. It was an American-type single, much like what you’d find at any Holiday Inn, but there was a small balcony overlooking the sea. I dropped my bags, opened the glass doors to the balcony to air the room, and went out to walk on the pink cement promenade which ran along a shelf above the beach. There were palms along the walk. I saw few other people. The sand below was a startling white, and sea and sky were different fantastic shades of blue. I walked about a mile past more hotels and shops and came into a little town built in terraces down toward the waterline. Halfway down a flight of stairs to the shore I found a seafood restaurant which proved quite good, though overpriced. I ate alone on the porch in the twilight, and it was dark by the time I paid and left. I bought a bottle of Campari and some
aequa minerale
on the way back to the hotel.

A sliver of moon hung above the balcony. There were not many lights along the shore. I could just see the white foam of the surf lapping against a stone breakwater around a curve of the beach to the south. Except for the water it was utterly quiet. I could have stayed there happily for a week or a month, but unluckily I seemed to have deadlines to meet.

Kevin. Kevin and Lauren and me. Well, I had cut Lauren out of the picture, or hoped that I had. Kevin and me and persons unknown. “Anne Morrison’s” friends, or enemies, or whatever.

My natural impulse was to attack the situation with logic, and logic turned it into a simple conspiracy, albeit with some quite elegant manipulations involved. Assuming complete premeditation, the scenario ran like this: Kevin had cooked up a proposition for me whose main function was only to position me in Rome. That went a long way toward explaining why he’d offered me twice what the edit was really worth. With the fellowship of thieves and schemers, I could now properly appreciate the fact that he’d only paid me half up front. My bet was that the other half, supposing I ever saw any of it, would be called my cut of whatever the deal turned out to be, and considering the size of the initial investment, he’d probably be getting my services pretty cheap. For stage one, then, all points go to Kevin.

Stage two: Kevin seduces Lauren with a script and some fluff about the mythical feature, or if he happened to catch her in one of her periodic spells of ennui, a promise of activity of any kind might have done the trick. By whatever means, he props her up with the suitcase full of cash and a set of instructions and then gives her a little nudge my way.

If Kevin understood me as well as I understand him, he could have predicted what was going to happen next. He could anticipate that I would worm Lauren’s mission out of her before I let her get away. That once I knew, I would chew her out and send her home and take over the job myself. Then it wouldn’t matter a bit that Lauren was not completely up to doing it herself, that she would have been either shot or arrested the second or third move she made. (Though I did intend to have a conversation with Kevin about those kinds of possibilities if and when I ever made it back to the States.)

If Kevin were me, that’s how he would have planned it. And so far he’d still be scoring a hundred percent. It seemed to boil down to a more sophisticated version of sending Jerry Hansen to me for advice, that other time.

The flaw in all this reasoning was that Kevin wasn’t me. Kevin didn’t operate on this sort of logic. He ran on instinct and sense of smell. I honestly believed that a plot of such complexity was beyond the capacity of his conscious mind. And yet it was sure enough happening the way I had it diagrammed on my chart. I was dealing with something else in Kevin: not a reasoned plan, but dark and secret currents somewhere down beneath the foam.

And if I wanted to survive one of Kevin’s subliminal schemes, I was going to have to think and feel and be like Kevin. That was the thought I took to bed with me.

I slept very lightly and woke up at dawn. The sun was rising by the time I checked out of the hotel. I continued north on the coast road; it was not far to the border now. Again, my own little car was almost the only thing on the road.

But just past Ventimiglia, I did see some activity. A truck was parked on the shoulder, and a group of what I took at a glance to be
carabinieri
was prowling the slope above the highway. The men, five or six of them, were uniformed and carried automatic weapons. I went by too fast to be quite sure if they were military or civil. They didn’t do my nerves any good either way.

However, there seemed to be no real cause for concern. A little short of Grimaldi I fell into a line of several sporty little cars, probably bound for Monaco from the looks of them. We reached the border between eight and nine, and the post was asleep, as I’d hoped it would be. None of the cars was pulled over, not even for a passport check.

Pas de problème.

The
autostrada
had now become the
autoroute.
I got back on it on the French side; it was time to pick up some speed. The Maritime Alps blocked this part of the route, and the French engineers had just blasted right through them. It made for fairly unnerving driving, especially since the road was fast. Wham, a tunnel; wham, daylight; wham, a tunnel again. To make it worse, I was having an ex post facto case of the jitters, even though I had no more frontiers to cross for the next few days.

The last set of machine-gunning
carabinieri
had got under my skin somehow. It had to be a trick of the fast-changing light, but every time I went into a tunnel I thought I saw muzzle flashes. Though I grew up around guns, I’ve never much liked them. The house on the farm was still full of them, and in the first bad weeks after Lauren had left, I’d wake up regularly around four in the morning, dry-mouthed and aching from a bourbon overdose, and find myself thinking about one gun or another. It was peculiar. The moment I woke, the picture of the gun would already be focused in my mind. There was no reason for it. I would not think about doing anything in particular with the gun. But I would have a desire to find it and touch it. The fact that I could handle it, load it, point it somewhere, pull the trigger, intrigued me endlessly as I lay on my back in the dark, waiting for the night to be over. It was all a little unsettling. When I finally quit drinking, it stopped.

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