The Lure (49 page)

“Your boyfriend.” She inhaled deeply, then offered the grass.

He declined it. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” he said.

“Then it isn’t true?” She seemed unrelieved by this fact.

“It was. Sort of. It isn’t. It’s a long and complicated story, Mirella. And I don’t want to go into it.” But she had settled back into her pillows and seemed ready to listen to
War and Peace
cover to cover. Since he knew she’d eventually worm it out of him with more whys, and whens, and wheres, he decided to give it to her. “He’s dead. He was killed two months ago. That same night, as a matter of fact,” he added, probably to make her feel guilty.

“Oh, no! I
am
sorry, Noel. I didn’t mean to…”

She let it drop, and so did he, concentrating on twisting a recalcitrant screw into the molding. He wondered if she’d already heard about Randy, if she were here to give him another chance.

“I’ll get right to the point,” she suddenly said after a few minutes of silence, punctuated by his swearing at the screw. “I want to go to the party at Window Wall. Now don’t tell me you aren’t going. I’ve got to go, Noel.”

“But it’s a gay club.”

“I just have to go, Noel. You’re going, aren’t you?”

“Of course. But I’m friends with the manager, Cal Goldberg.”

“And with Eric Redfern, too,” she added. “Don’t deny it, I know you’re being kept by that handsome playboy. Don’t deny it.”

Noel had to laugh at the way she put it. It sounded so much like an excerpt from a Liz Smith column. If Mirella only knew the half of it. And of all the crazy things, she wanted to go to the reopening party. For a moment Noel wondered if she had other motives for coming here. Then told himself no, whatever Mirella was capable of—which was a great deal—it was all ethical: her ego demanded it be ethical.

“But why?” he asked again.

“Because I told everyone I was going, that’s why. And because,” and here she rattled off a list of names of some of the people she’d read would be there. “That’s why. By the way, is it true that Teddy Kennedy will be there?”

“I doubt it.”

She went into utter despair. “I
have
to go, Noel.”

“The celebrities will hang around for an hour or so, posing,” he said, trying to discourage her, “then it will be just another gay club. You’ll feel out of place. You’ll hate it.”

“I’ll
love
it. I’ll leave you at the door and not even nod at you during the party if we pass each other.” She began to beg. “I’ll never ask you for another thing as long as we both shall live.” Then she turned to bargaining. “I’ll stop bad-mouthing your project. I’ll give you a favorable review when it’s published.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Never more serious in my life.”

“But it’s only a party, Mirella,” he tried once more. He looked at this attractive, intelligent, accomplished, and chic woman; a colleague, a professional rival, once a lover, a possible wife—and saw nothing but a little girl not invited to a party.

“You can’t come in with me. I’m invited to the dinner that’s being held before the crowd arrives.”

Each word was like a tiny slap to her sizable ego. He could see that clearly.

“All right,” she said, getting out of the pillows, and speaking in a low register Noel didn’t recognize but instinctively knew to be her version of noble-acceptance-in-the-face-of-defeat, “you have every right in the world to do this.” She was smoothing her skirt, trying to look like Irene Papas—tragic, regal—in some film version of an ancient Greek play.

Noel got down from the window ledge, walked over to the door, and began opening it. “I’ll leave your name at the door,” he said.

“You sweetheart!” She jumped up to kiss him on the cheek. Like a sister-in-law would kiss him, he thought. “Can you make it for two?”

“Why not?”

“Right away,” she urged. “The party’s the fifth, the day after tomorrow.”

“The fifth?” Wasn’t that within the last week listed on the plan Loomis had computed? The time the weapon was to go off? “I’ll call,” he said, closing the door behind her.

Where was Priscilla? And the damned tape?

By ten o’clock the following morning, all the plants had been delivered and hung in their appropriate spots. There were no telephone calls on his answering machine. And when Noel checked the mailbox in the lobby, the cassette had not arrived.

He called Priscilla Vega, listening to her phone ring a dozen or more times, and decided to try her at home once more. She may have decided her phone, too, was being tapped.

As ever, since four days before, he was on the lookout for the two toughs. They’d probably been sacked by now, sent back to wherever they’d come from, Noel suspected. Still…

No one answered Priscilla’s bell. When a face appeared out the side window of the first floor of the building, Noel asked for Mrs. Vega, and was rewarded with a shrug and a quickly drawn window shade.

He decided on a stakeout at the small luncheonette at the nearest corner, within view of the front of the brownstone. A window seat was empty. He took it. Not knowing how long he would have to be here, he ordered breakfast.

He’d brought a steno pad with him and spent a long time working out details of his redone apartment. Right after Mirella’s visit, he had asked his own questions about his sudden obsession with renovation. It was keeping him busy, he knew; he was doing something, something that had not even been mentioned in the goddamn report. That’s why.

But there was another reason. It was the only thing he felt he still could do that he could control. The book was unthinkable. Working with Eric at Window Wall would put them too closely in contact for safety. Since the seduction fiasco, Eric had changed toward him subtly. He might still be frightened of Noel, but it was as though he had needed Noel to come on to him, to go that far, and now that it had happened, Eric was somehow satisfied, even relieved, and probably also triumphant. Besides, he was so busy these days with the party, there was no possibility he would waste precious time or energy on what he would call “negative vibes.”

Noel had been staring at the brownstones—façade after façade, jutting high stoop after stoop—of the West Side street. After almost two hours of watching, only two people had emerged—an elderly couple, each with a cane, each holding a plastic shopping bag that looked empty. Noel looked down at his room plan for the twentieth time and quickly sketched in what he thought would be the perfect speaker placement. Then he looked up again, continuing his vigil.

Those six little marks he’d just made were the finger in the dike, he knew.

His next thought was an odd one—he hadn’t talked to Loomis, to anyone at Whisper, since that afternoon at the Automat. Maybe he ought to call. He might not like what he heard. But when had that ever stopped him from calling?

Or was it part of his programming to call, to feel the urge to keep in contact? Of course. It must be. There was a pay phone on the wall behind him, still within view of the apartment fronts.

He dialed one of the loops numbers last given to him, heard the familiar but now slightly sinister silence. Priscilla and Buddy Vega had listened in on this line. Who else might be listening right now?

It was the motherly middle-aged woman who finally answered. “Lure here,” he reported in. “Can you connect me with the Fisherman?”

“
How are
you?” she asked, as though she knew him. “One minute, please. I’m ringing.”

He wondered what to say to Loomis.

“Sorry,” she announced, “I can’t seem to find him anywhere.”

“This is the Lure,” he repeated. “I haven’t been able to keep in contact. Are there any messages for me from the Fisherman or anyone else?”

“I’ll look.” She didn’t sound hopeful. He shouldn’t have added that last phrase. What if someone
were
listening? How stupid of him!

“Hello.” She was back. “Shall I read it? It is from the Fisherman. It says, ‘Expecting a large, easy catch tomorrow night. Proceed as planned.’”

“Yes?” Noel wrote it down. “Go on.”

“That’s all there is. Should I repeat it?”

“Proceed as planned? What does that mean?”

“Don’t know, dearie,” she said breezily. “That’s what’s written here.”

He thanked her and said he’d call back later.

While he’d been on the phone the little restaurant had filled with customers. Lunchtime. Probably workers from nearby. He moved his things to the back, to a two-seat table, near the phone, then ordered more food. When it arrived he shoveled it in, still thinking about Loomis’s message.

It had been foolish to think that even in an emergency Priscilla Vega would use the loops to contact him. What did “proceed as planned” mean? They hadn’t planned anything the last time they’d talked. Maybe Noel had missed one of the messages. He wouldn’t know what to do. The control pattern would be broken. Loomis had said he was to do nothing. That meant Loomis, too, suspected that his plan had been botched somehow and that he was going ahead with the bust, not the assassination.

“My mom wants to know if you have a tapeworm.”

Noel looked up. The slightly overweight teenaged boy who’d been serving him was standing by the edge of the table.

“Because if you do, she knows a doctor who’ll cure it.”

Behind the boy, Noel saw his mother—slim, grayhaired, plain-faced, looking back at him with concern. He paid the check. “Tell your mom I was just hungry.”

“Okay.” The boy disappeared.

Noel found that he was no longer looking at the brownstones, not outside at all, but at the boy as he went over to his mother, gave her the money to ring up, reported what they’d said, all of it casual, indifferent. The compact adolescent acted like a little man, but Noel envied something in him that wasn’t at all adult. It seemed as though the boy really was indifferent to Noel, to anything but his own interests-his friends, his comic books, who knew what else? Just the way Noel had been as a child: as all children really were. Who would have guessed that the child he had been, fixing his Schwinn Roadmaster in the driveway that morning when Monica Sherman had come by, would now be doing what he was doing, acting as he was acting, being who he was? Waiting for someone. Expecting a call from someone else. Thinking about yet someone else. Fearing, resisting, denying, desiring, avoiding, all the someone elses.

He was no longer doing anything for himself, because he no longer had any self. Everything was for Loomis, or Eric, or Alana, or Vega, or an idea, or a title, or a career, or some value, a notion of cowardice that had to be overcome, or an entire set of emotions and responses about who he was and what he was supposed to be, do, and not do. He’d been programmed long before Loomis. All the Fisherman had needed to do was a little fine-tuning: because long ago Noel had been set on this very path, never doing for himself, always for someone else. And if that selfishness, that self-interest he’d denied for years, was really what innocence was, he wished he could get it again.

The boy came back to his table with the change. He was holding a glass of water and a small packet of Alka-Seltzer.

“It wasn’t
my
idea,” the boy said.

Noel wouldn’t wait for Priscilla Vega, or the call, or the cassette, or Loomis’s motivations, none of it another minute more. Not today. Not tomorrow! Not ever again.

He awoke that day—the last of the AIN memo, he immediately reminded himself—to an unexpected, fierce morning thunderstorm, which caused him to shut off the air-conditioning and throw open both windows. Now that he only slept a few feet away instead of at the far end of the long studio, this was a new luxury.

Soon enough the thunder stopped, although the rain continued steadily, putting him back to sleep. When he woke again it was eleven o’ clock, a glorious sunny day with only tiny, fast-drying puddles near sewer gratings to corroborate the downpour. But the fresh breeze of early morning had come to stay for a while. He showered, then dried off by the window, enjoying the hot sun and cool air.

The morning mail did not contain the cassette—he had almost ceased to care about it—but it did include a check from the upstate social research agency for the past month’s work. An unpleasant reminder. When he finally got around to opening it, after breakfast, he had another unpleasant surprise: a piece of onionskin paper was inside. On it, someone had drawn a cartoon of a deep-sea fisher almost capsizing his small yacht to haul in a large and quite dead giant fish. For once Noel was happy to burn one of Loomis’s messages.

His ten-speed was still in the storage room of the building and apparently in working order. Only when he’d ridden a block or so did he realize one of the gears wasn’t catching properly. The vehicle was as temperamental as a thoroughbred; and like one, didn’t like being unridden over long periods of time.

He’d just gotten the gear working when he realized he was riding past the pharmacy on Madison Avenue where those two blond toughs had first come up to him. Noel swerved right quickly, crossing the avenue, and found himself in front of the newspaper store where he’d photocopied documents for Whisper, where that man had been run down, killed instantly. What had been his name? Noel couldn’t recall.