Bleeding Hearts (36 page)

There was a bottle of J&B on the table, along with a bucket of ice and a spare glass. But Hoffer shook his head. He gave a half-yawn, trying to unblock his ears. The flight had done for him again. Goddamned flying.

‘How was England?’ Walkins asked.

‘Like it had just lost the war.’

‘We took vacations there occasionally. I liked the people.’

There wasn’t much to say to this, so Hoffer stayed quiet. He noticed that Walkins was looking old these days. Maybe it was just that he looked bored: bored of doing nothing all day but waiting for Leo Hoffer to call with news.

‘Is he here?’ Walkins asked.

‘Yeah, he’s here.’ Hoffer was lighting a cigarette. Walkins didn’t mind him smoking out here, so long as he took the stubs home with him. Hoffer never did figure it; the whole of Chesapeake Bay for an ashtray, and he had to take his goddamned stubs home with him.

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m paid to know, sir.’ Hoffer tried to get comfortable on the chair. The thick wooden slats didn’t make things easy. ‘I’ve got contacts: airlines, travel companies, the airports...’

‘Yes?’

‘They flew into Boston. That part was easy. The woman was travelling under her real name, Belinda Harrison. There probably wasn’t time or opportunity enough for them to arrange a fake passport for her.’

‘And him?’ Walkins was nothing if not singleminded.

‘Her travelling companion was called Michael Weston. That’s the third name he’s used so far this time. I’ve got a contact in the FBI, I’ve got him keeping eyes and ears open. If they get into bother, we’ll hear about it.’

‘Good.’

‘Meantime, I’ve sent one of my team up to Boston to check hotels, car rental, that sort of thing.’

Hoffer was on auto-pilot. It gave him a chance to check out Walkins while he filled him in. Walkins had steel-grey hair and deep grooved lines in his face. He was a handsome man, ageing well despite his tragedies. But his eyes were filled to the brim with liquid, the pupils not quite fixed on the world outside. He took another drink of Scotch, but really the whisky was drinking
him.

‘This is a damned big country, Hoffer,’ Walkins said at last. He sounded like he was boasting.

‘Yes, sir,’ Hoffer replied.

‘A man could hide forever in a country this size.’

‘Not if someone wants him found.’

‘You believe that?’

‘Yes, sir, I do.’

Walkins stared at him, so Hoffer daren’t blink. He felt his eyes getting as watery as Walkins’s. At last the old man pulled himself to his feet and walked to the rail at the end of the deck, leaning on it as he spoke.

‘What now?’

‘I’ve got a few leads,’ Hoffer said, half-believing himself as he spoke.

‘A few leads,’ Walkins repeated, as though exhausted.

‘You might be able to help, sir.’

‘Oh? How?’

‘Well, I presume you still have friends in positions of seniority?’

‘What if I have?’

‘Maybe one of them could play with a name. The name’s Don Kline. He was in London, and interested in the D-Man. He told me he was agency, but I’m not sure he was. That’s K-l-i-n-e.’

‘I can ask around.’

The state Walkins was in, Hoffer doubted he’d recollect the name half an hour after Hoffer had driven away. He wrote it on the back of one of his cards and walked to the table, where he weighed it down with the lid from the ice bucket. Walkins was watching from the corner of his eye. He nodded towards Hoffer as Hoffer went back to his seat. Then he turned from the rail to face the detective, and took a good deep breath. Ah, at last, thought Hoffer: the floor-show.

‘I want that bastard dead,’ said Walkins, ‘do you hear? I want his ass as cold as a mountaintop, and I want it delivered to me here.’ The voice was growing louder, trembling with anger. Walkins started to move towards Hoffer. ‘And I don’t want a quick death either, it’s got to be slow ... slow like cancer, and burning like a fire inside. Do you understand?’

‘Loud and clear.’ It struck Hoffer, not for the first time, but now with absolute conviction, that Robert Walkins was howl-at-the-moon mad. There were white flecks at the edges of the old man’s lips, and his face was all tics and wriggling demons.

‘You’ve got it, sir,’ Hoffer said, trying to calm things down. He was in the employ of a lunatic, but a lunatic who paid the bills and the rent. Besides, rich lunatics were never crazy ... they were
eccentric.
Hoffer tried to remember that.

Finally, Walkins seemed to grow tired. He nodded a few times, reached out a hand and patted Hoffer’s shoulder.

‘Good, son, that’s good.’ Then he went and sat down again, poured himself another whisky, and dropped some ice into the glass. He sat back, sipped, and exhaled.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘how will you do it?’

It took Hoffer a minute to answer. He was still trying to imagine himself as the Good Son.

21

No sightseeing now, just concentrated travel. North on Interstate 27 to Amarillo, then the 287. We were going to be travelling west back in time, from Mountain to Pacific. But we were heading nowhere but north to begin with. It was over 500 miles from Lubbock to Denver. We skirted the peaks to the west of Denver and crossed into Wyoming just south of Cheyenne.

‘Tell me again,’ said Bel. ‘Why aren’t we flying?’

‘Air travel’s easy to check if you’re someone with the clout of a government agency. Also, it’s easy for them to have airports covered, or car rental facilities at airports. This way, we’re sort of sneaking up on them.’

She nodded, but didn’t look convinced. I could have added that I needed time to think, time to plan, time this drive would give me. The thing was, I didn’t know what we’d do in Seattle. I hadn’t a clear plan of attack. I was praying something would come to me between here and there.

We’d covered over 600 miles by early evening. I’d been thinking about a lot of things. One of them was that it was crazy to arrive at our destination wiped out. Just off the interchange we found a motel. Or it found us. We just cruised into the first forecourt of many on the road and booked ourselves a room.

Standing up and walking were strange. My whole body tingled. In my head I was still in the car, still driving. I’d been on automatic for the past hour or so. My left arm was sunburnt from leaning on the driver-side sill. Bel had done her share of the driving too, seeming to understand the car better than I did, at least at first. We had our differences about choice of music and choice of stops along the route, but otherwise hadn’t said much really. Oh, at first we chattered away, but then we ran out of things to say. She bought a trashy novel in a service area and read that for a while, before tipping it out of the window on to the verge.

‘I can’t concentrate,’ she explained. ‘Every time I think I’m managing to block it out, I see it again ... I see Max.’

She didn’t have to say any more.

At the motel, we each took a bath. We phoned out and had a restaurant deliver ribs and apple pie. We stared at the TV. We drank Coke with lots of ice. And we slept. The beds were too soft, so I swapped mine for the floor. When I woke up in the night, Bel was lying beside me. I listened to her breathing and to the vibration of the traffic outside. Our room held a pale orange glow, like when my parents had left the landing light on and my bedroom door ajar. To keep away the monsters.

How come the monsters would only come at night? What were they, stupid?

In the morning, we ate at another diner. ‘The coffee gets better out west,’ I promised. But Bel took a proffered refill anyway.

We took I-80 west across the continental divide. This was high country, and there were tourists around, slowing us down sometimes. They travelled in state of the art vehicles which were like motor caravans only the length of a bus. And behind they usually towed the family car. They probably saw themselves as descendants of the pioneers, but they were just vacationers. It was hard not to get into conversation with them at stops along the route. But if we did, there were endless questions about Europe. One woman even insisted on capturing us on video. We tried to look lovey and huggy for the seeing-eye. It wasn’t easy.

‘Maybe drugs would help,’ Bel suggested.

‘Not in the long run. They’d keep us driving, but they only mask the symptoms, they don’t cure them. We’d end up hospital cases.’

‘You’ve been there before?’

I nodded and she smiled. ‘I keep forgetting how much more
worldly
than me you are, Michael.’

‘Come on, let’s see if we can fill up the cool box.’

We stopped outside Ogden on I-84. Another motel room, another long soak, another diner.

Bel rested her head on the table top. ‘Remind me,’ she said, ‘which state are we in?’

‘Utah, I think. But not for much longer. It’ll be Idaho soon.’ The waitress took our order.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked Bel.

‘I’m fine, thanks, just tired.’

The waitress moved off. ‘She thinks you’re on drugs,’ I told Bel.

‘Only adrenaline.’

‘This isn’t the best way to see the country. Actually, that’s a lie. This is the
only
way to see America. We’ll do it properly one day, if you’d like to.’

‘I’d love to, Michael.’ She rested her head on the table again. ‘Say, in a decade or two.’

‘I once spent a week in a car going across the country. I slept in that car.’

‘You must have felt like shit.’

I smiled at the memory. ‘I felt very, very alive.’

‘Well, I feel half-alive at best, but that’s better than nothing.’ She took a long drink of iced water. ‘You know, if I hadn’t gone off with you, I mean to London and Scotland ...’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Christ, Michael, I’d be dead now.’ There were tears in her eyes. She looked away, staring out of the window, and put her hand to her mouth. The hand was trembling. When I made to touch her, she jumped up from the table and ran outside.

I ran out to join her. Our diner was a truck stop. There was a vast tarmac parking area, with only a couple of trucks at its farthest edge. Stadium-style lights shone down on us from the lot’s four corners. Our waitress was peering out of the diner window.

Bel was walking in a rough circle, eyes to the ground, and she was wailing. She flapped her arms to keep me away, so I took a few steps back and crouched down on the ground. The tarmac was warm to the touch. I sat there with my legs out in front of me, watching the exorcism with little pleasure.

She was saying things, sometimes yelling them. Curses, swear-words, imprecations. Finally she got to her father’s name. When it came out, it was stretched to breaking point, like she was tearing it out of her system. She repeated it over and over, then had a coughing fit. The coughing became a dry retch, and she fell over on to her hands and knees. A huge lorry was pulling into the car park, air-brakes wheezing. The headlights picked out the figure of a crazy woman. The driver made sure to park at a good distance.

Eventually, when Bel was taking deep uneven breaths, I got up and walked over to her and crouched down again to put my arm around her.

‘Buy you a coffee?’ I said.

Next morning we crossed into Idaho. The state licence plates all had ‛Famous Potatoes’ written on them.

‘Potatoes?’ Bel said.

‘Potatoes. These are a proud people.’

We were about 800 miles from Seattle. I thought we should get as close as we could then stop for another night, so we’d arrive fresh in the city. Bel wanted to push on. The road really had become her drug. She could hardly relax when we stopped. Even in the motel she fidgeted as she watched TV, her knees pumping. Her diet now comprised hamburgers and milk shakes. Her skin and hair had lost some vitality, and her eyes were dark. All my fault, I kept telling myself. She’d seemed better since last night though, a bit more together. Her voice was hoarse from shouting, and her eyes were red-rimmed. But I didn’t think she was going to fall apart again. She seemed more confident, tougher ... and she was ready to rock.

‘No,’ I told her, ‘we’ll stop somewhere, pamper ourselves, take a little time off.’

Problem was, where did you pamper yourself in the wasteland between Salt Lake City and Seattle? A detour to Portland wouldn’t make sense. The answer started as a sort of joke. We decided to stop at a place called Pasco, for no other reasons than that it was a decent size and Bel’s mother’s maiden name had been Pascoe. But on the road into town, alongside all the other cheap anonymous motels, there was a Love Motel, with heart-shaped waterbeds, champagne, chocolates, adult movies ... Our room was like a department store Santa’s Grotto, done in red velvet and satin. There were black sheets on the bed and a single plastic rose on the pillow.

‘It’s like being inside a nosebleed,’ Bel said, collapsing on to the bed. When it floated beneath her, she managed a laugh, her first in a while. But after a bottle of something that had never been within five hundred kilometres of Champagne, everything looked better. And lying on the bed, as Bel pointed out, was a bit like still being in the car. We didn’t watch much of the porn flick, but we did take a bath together. It was a spa-bath, and Bel turned the jets up all the way. We started making love in the bath, but ended on the waterbed. We ended up so damp, I thought the bed had sprung a leak. I’d not known Bel so passionate, holding me hard against her like she was drowning. It was the kind of sex you have before dying or going off to war. Maybe we were about to do both.