Hopscotch (16 page)

The plane approached on the wind, preceded by its sound; he watched it descend, wingtips teetering in the uncertain air currents above the mild surf. It made a half-circle inland and made its final approach into the wind, nosing down over the trees and settling gingerly on its tricycle gear at a very low stalling speed—evidently out of respect for the tangled weeds on the surface. She kept the tail down after touchdown and rolled forward on two wheels, nose in the air; twice the tailskid bounced.
She used up a good deal of runway before the speed was down sufficiently to make the U-turn and taxi back toward him. Kendig picked up his suitcase.

She cut the port engine and opened the door. He climbed onto the step and passed the suitcase inside, stepped onto the root of the wing and ducked to enter the cabin.

The sun was behind him; he saw her Modigliani face twinned in the mirror of the opposite window. She wore Levi's and a denim jacket over a blouse that looked like yellow satin. He pushed the suitcase across one of the rear seats and moved forward to settle into the right-hand seat beside her—the copilot's position.

“Where's my other passenger?”

“Been a change in plan. I'm flying out alone.”

“The price is the same.”

“Naturally.”

She said, “You picked a hell of a field. I hope we don't snag something.”

He only smiled and she fixed the door shut behind her; then she pushed the starter switch to mesh the port engine. The props ran up and there was too much noise for talk; she pointed toward his lap and he fastened the safety belt.

It was a bumpy ride but nothing grabbed the wheels; she had them airborne a quarter mile short of the beach. The sun hit them square in the eyes. Kendig said, “Turn around now. Make your course two-sixty-five magnetic.”

“What?”

“We're going to Mexico.”

“I think you're a little crazy, you know?” The plane came out of its bank; the sun was behind
them now. They were still in a steady climb but they had airspeed now and the wind took the engine noise with it; she could talk without shouting. “I filed for Saint Thomas. If I don't show up they'll organize a search.”

“Call Miami control. Tell them your charter passenger changed his mind. Request clearance for Corpus Christi. And remember you're still on the flight plan to Saint Thomas right now—give them a position report a couple of hours east of here. That'll add a couple of hours to your ETA. You'll have time to drop me in Mexico and get into Corpus Christi on schedule.”

She gave him a sudden smile. “Hey that's pretty good.”

Then he opened his pocketknife.

Her face whitened.

“It gets you off the hook,” he said. “The man held a knife on you.”

“That's hijacking.”

“No,” he said. “It's my charter. A man can't hijack his own plane. But you'll be making an illegal entry into Mexico and this covers you for that.” He folded the knife and put it back in his pocket.

He took the oval compact from the same pocket. “You left this in my car.”

“I know.”

He remembered the cats, the O'Keeffe painting, the bed. But there was reserve between them now, they were talking like strangers—as if they ought to be calling each other Mr. Murdison and Mrs. Fleming.

“What happened to your lady friend?”

“There never was one.”

“Then Mexico was the destination all the time?”

“That's right.”

“What did you do? Hold up a bank? What's in that suitcase?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“I've never driven a getaway car before,” she said. “It's sort of fun.”

She was good. They were just north of the Tropic of Cancer and they crossed a patch of turbulent air; she didn't buck it, she rode with it. Her fingers never whitened on the half-wheel. She made the corrections without hurry or tension; when they were through it they were cruising at nine thousand feet with a patchwork of fluffy clouds beneath them, sectors of choppy sea visible through the holes. She had the twin engines nicely in synch and there wasn't much vibration; it was a well-cared-for plane. Kendig said, “Mind if I steer for a while?”

“Help self.” Then after a while she said, “You're not bad. You don't clench up when she pockets.”

“I took flying lessons for a while. Though I wanted to do air races.”

“What happened?”

“I found out my talents were pretty rudimentary. I didn't stick it out—didn't take the license.” He locked the autopilot in. “How'd you get the money to buy it?”

“My ex settled a lump sum on me in lieu of alimony. That was the down payment. People like you are buying the rest of it for me.”

“It does something for you, being up here. Doesn't it.”

“That's why I'm up here.” She looked at peace, “Van wasn't a bad guy. But we got into a triangle—Van, me and the
hausfrau
he wanted me to be. I'm not a fanatic libber, you know. But I'm nobody's ornament. I like to fly. I mean I
really
like it. It's my life.”

“You're not a Southerner. Why do you live in Alabama?”

“Flying weather. I don't like winter. I worked charters around the islands for a year but it was too chancy—I've got to keep up the payments on the albatross here. It had to be an industrial city, that's where the business charters are. I don't like Houston at all. Atlanta's too self-conscious and I just can't stand California plastic. They're hypocrites and bastards in Birmingham but I'm sort of tuned into them—they don't disappoint me. What about you? You don't really live in Topeka.”

“No.”

“You don't volunteer much about yourself.”

“People may ask you questions about me.”

“So the less I know the better off you are, is that it?”

“Yes.”

She said, “I don't believe that's all there is to it, Jim. Is that your name? Jim?”

“It'll do.”

“You really don't want anybody digging into you, do you. Not even yourself.” She had a blinding smile when she chose to use it. “You're a lovely man, you know that? The night I took you home—I don't do that with just anybody. You've got something rare. I don't know exactly what it is—you seem to be
alive
, that's what it amounts to.”

She couldn't know how much it pleased him to hear that.

The descent began to clog his ears. The sun was in their faces again: it had moved across the sky faster than they had. Carla Fleming said, “I'm a little scared. It's the first time I've ever done anything like this.”

“You'd be just as scared the second time, and the third.”

“Good.” That smile again. “I like it a little.”

They mushed down through heavy cloud. Underneath there was a faint drizzle of rain and the afternoon light was poor but her navigation had been right on the button and the dusty reddish strip was right there ahead, ringed with scrub brush and rock-craggy mountains sprouting tufts of cactus and weeds. “How did you find out about this place?”

“It used to be a training area for exiled Haitian guerrillas. I expect it's used for narcotics flights.”

“What did you have to do with the Haitians?”

“No comment.”

“Off limits. Okay. You don't mind my asking, though?”

“No.”

Then she had her attention on procedures. She was judging the wind, adjusting for the barometric pressure, making her preparations. She made one low pass over the runway before she made a 360-degree turn and came in low on final and when she touched down it was feather light. They threw up a great deal of dust but the surface was quite smooth and the Bonanza came to rest with plenty of runway left over.

She cut both engines and the propellers hiccuped a little before they stopped. The silence was a sudden tangible absence.

“What do you do from here? Walk?”

“It's not far to where I'm going.”

He crawled back between the empty seats, gathered his suitcase and climbed out the door. She was already outside, standing by the wing in the drizzle, not minding the wet. He jumped down and dropped the suitcase and got the envelope out of his pocket. She opened it without bashful pretense and counted it.

“It's too much,” she said. “I'm not picking you up after two weeks, am I.”

“No.”

“Then you've paid twice the rate.”

“Three thousand. It's what we agreed on.”

“That was for two trips.”

“Call it hazardous duty pay,” he said. “Thanks for the ride. You'd better be going.”

She put the envelope in the pocket of her jacket. She had a little trouble fitting it in; her hand came out holding the compact. She looked at it as if it were a completely unfamiliar object, turning it over in her hands, opening it, snapping it shut. “I guess I won't see you again.”

“Who knows.”

“Well that's all right. I've got a cauliflower heart.” But her hand tightened into a quivering little fist around the compact. Her face, suddenly, was flaming. “I'm not going to get on the radio and start screaming the minute I take off. I'm not going to tell them anything in Corpus Christi—just that I dropped off a passenger from Miami there, name of Jim Murdison from Topeka Kansas.”

“All right. But if anybody asks questions you'd better tell them the truth.”

“Nobody will,” she said. “Nobody's going to know. Not from me.”

He knew it was an unwise thing but he folded her against him and when she tipped her face up he kissed her long and hard. The drizzle misted their skin. There was nothing extraordinary about any of it but it was one of those moments he'd never forget—a spark that would grow brighter whenever it was touched by its associations: the smell of the desert drizzle and of airplane oil, the pale impressionism of the afternoon's color, the loneliness of the solitary aircraft asleep on dusty ground.

He stood beside his suitcase with his jacket billowing in the wind of the plane's passage when it roared by him and lifted, steeply banking, wings waggling in farewell; then he picked up the valise and walked away toward the narrow highway beyond the hill.

– 17 –

T
HE ROOM STANK
of yesterday's tobacco. The silence was such that Ross could hear Myerson's ballpoint pen scrape across the pad. Cutter merely sat in a placenta of patience. Ross kept looking at the door and finally it opened and Glenn Follett entered, burly and freckled and as dewlappy as a Basset hound. “Greetings.”

Myerson looked up. He held the ballpoint upright, bouncing it on the desk. “Now that Mr. Follett has graced the room with his presence perhaps we can get started.”

Follett sat down. “There was a traffic jam. I'm sorry.”

Ross recalled Cutter's comment on the way up twenty minutes ago in the elevator:
If it was up to me I wouldn't hire Follett to carry out my garbage
. Follett was definitely cast against type. He seemed always desperate to reassure himself that he was lovable, that he had buddies like other people. His face in repose looked eagerly ready at an instant's notice to burst into tears. Perhaps to counter his appearance he had a lexicon of mannerisms designed to accentuate a sort of forced bonhomie. His voice was always too loud, he spoke with great heaves and lunges of his arms: his emotions were ebulliently on the surface, there for anyone to read.

“All right,” Myerson said. “Let's have a rough Sit Rep. What's the score as of this morning?”

Cutter said, “Score? We're not even sure we know who the players are.”

“You're talking about other countries now, Joe?”

“We don't know where he is, do we.”

Follett said, “Hell let's don't get sour this early in the morning, Joe. So he's gone under again. People have gone to ground before. They always turn up sooner or later, right?”

“Later in this case could be too late,” Myerson said. “Let's have the Sit Rep.”

The situation report was Ross's department and he cleared his throat. “All right. Here's what we know.” He consulted his notes. “On the twenty-fifth a man who was probably our subject spent half a day in an office-copying shop in Mobile, Alabama. He paid extra to run the machine himself so that nobody else could get a look at what he was running off, but according to Tobin's reports the general appearance conforms with our estimate of Kendig's needs. The man ran off thirty-three hundred copies and collated the sheets into approximately fifteen stacks. That works out to two hundred and twenty pages per stack. If his entire manuscript runs two hundred and seventy-odd pages and we subtract the fifty pages or so that he's already delivered, it works out just about right. He's got fourteen publishers and the fifteenth copy would be for his agent in New York. He retains the original and the carbon.”

“Interesting to speculate on what use he's got in mind for the carbon,” Myerson said. “All right—go on, Ross.”

“Right. On the twenty-seventh he bought a 'fifty-five
Buick in Pensacola for a hundred dollars cash.” He felt the blood rise to his cheeks. “He had to use a driver's license and other identification of course—automobile insurance card, that kind of thing. He used mine—the wallet he took off me in Georgia.”

“Cute,” Cutter remarked. Ross was surprised to see him smile.

Ross went on: “He spent the night of the twenty-sixth in Tampa, a motel. Leonard Ross, but it's Kendig's handwriting on the registry card. All this stuff is from Tobin's people over at the Bureau.”

Follett said, “Jesus. They must have put a ton of guys on the canvassing job.”

“They've blanketed the South,” Myerson said grudgingly. “They're pretty good at that.”

“We had one piece of blind luck,” Ross continued. “On the twenty-seventh a Florida state trooper issued him a warning because the car was throwing smoke. Safety check, you know. But he was still being Leonard Ross—the cop got it down in his book. That was near Plant City—it's roughly due east of Clearwater, maybe halfway down the Florida peninsula. So he was definitely headed south. Tobin sent his people into south Florida on the twenty-ninth to drag the net. They found out Leonard Ross had spent the night of the twenty-seventh in a motel near Sarasota.”