Spiral (16 page)

After that, Bias had spoken with his rejected mentor only one other time. It was two years later, and Bias had already begun the career that would eventually suck from him everything the priest had given. But he had heard the priest was quite ill, and in an awkward effort to rekindle a lost friendship, he went to visit. It was an unsatisfactory reunion. After a few false starts at conversation, Bias related a recent dream in an effort to amuse the older man. It had been a strange dream, a kind of fable of confusion, of loss, and of being lost. The frail priest began to cry. Perplexed and embarrassed, Bias turned around and walked out. They had not even really talked. Six weeks later, he heard that Father Carlos Donato had been found dead in his rooms.

Lord God of the Armies, General in Chief of the Brigade, let me be first in holy combat, do not refuse me the vanguard. Give courage to my burning heart that I might obey without question.

Lord God of the Armies, give me the satisfaction to see the victory, but if it is too much to ask, let me die for you, so that my soul can enjoy you for century after century. Sprinkle my blood jubilantly over the countryside of my homeland so that those who come after me will return to that place and say: He died for God and for Mexico.

Lord God of the Armies ...

Perhaps Father Donato had indeed seen the future. Perhaps he had seen in Bias's dream the foretelling of his ultimate defeat in a realm of struggle far more tragic than his misguided politics. Bias would never complete the puzzle of God because he had lost the key piece, somewhere within himself. He had lost the understanding mind, the gift of discernment. To him the moral landscape had become a vast and empty plain with no distinguishing landmarks to guide him. Good and evil had disappeared.

Bias put his napkin on the table and stood. He looked at the dinner that no longer appealed to him, and turned and walked into the bedroom. Grabbing the first suitcase, he threw it on the bed and turned the combination to the first three digits of the Belgrano address. He snapped open the latches and took out plastic-wrapped packages of new underclothing, new socks, new shirts, new neckties, two boxes of new Ferragamo shoes, a new shaving kit. From the other side of the suitcase, he unpacked two new Ermenegildo Zegna suits, two pairs of dress pants, and a new sport coat. He had bought them at three separate stores within a two-hour period, the suits first so that they could be altered while he finished shopping. He had paid lavishly to have the alterations done immediately. They bowed and scraped, and did it. Money, he had long known, was the blood of the true aristocracy.

When he had put everything away, he sat the empty suitcase beside the armoire and hoisted the second one onto the bed. He dialed the first three digits of his father's telephone number, and the latch snapped. Carefully, he laid open the two sides of the suitcase. He folded back the flap covering one side and removed a canvas airline satchel, a piece of plywood eighteen inches square, a small handsaw, a packet of screwdrivers with red plastic handles, a shrink-wrapped toggle switch, and several packets of wood screws of various sizes. Everything still had the hardware store's price tag.

From the other side of the suitcase he removed a plastic sack that had been stapled closed. "Post Oak Hobby Shop" was printed in yellow on the side of the sack. He ripped it open and took out a green-striped box with a red triangle above the words "Futaba: the Number One Choice for Remote Control Models." Tearing off the end of the box, he slipped out a Styrofoam molded carton containing a two-channel radio transmitter, two servos, a receiver, and a power pack. It was a nice set. Gringos made everything so easy. You just walked into a store and bought it. Incredible.

The first problem was sawing the board to fit into the airline bag without anyone hearing it. He turned on the stereo near the bed and selected a channel playing jazz. A saxophone was conveniently raking the scales. He placed the board between two chairs with a newspaper underneath to catch the sawdust, approximated the dimensions, and started sawing. It was slow because he had to pause when the music softened, but the new saw was sharp and it went quickly. He put the board on the bed and arranged the receiver, one servo, and one power pack near one side. Using the long screws from the hardware store, he made everything stationary and stretched the flexible antenna the full length of the board for maximum reception potential. Next he took the switch and placed it beside the servo and fastened it to the board with shorter screws. With the switch off, he connected one end of a small push rod to the toggle with copper wire, and then wired the other end of the push rod to one of the little holes on the servo disk. He made sure the wire was taut when the switch was in the off position, and then he connected the servo to the power pack and the receiver. One more item; he wired a small light bulb to the two lead wires coming off the toggle switch. It was ready.

He lifted the board off the bed and turned out the lights. Feeling his way, he walked across the suite and sat the board at one end of the dining table. He went back to the bed, checked the batteries in the transmitter, and telescoped the antenna. He flipped on the switch. There were two channels on the transmitter, and he had made sure to wire the servo controlled by the control stick on the right. The dim light on the power indicator dial was glowing ready. He tilted the control stick to the left, being careful to notice how much play it had before it activated the servo across the room. There was very little. The servo exerted pull on the push rod immediately. He pushed the stick all the way and the light bulb flashed on. He tilted the stick to the right and the light went off. To the left on, to the right off.

He tried it several times. On. Off. On. Off. On. Sitting in the dark, he stared across the suite to the light. He concentrated on the center of it until his eyes created the illusion that he was looking at it through a long dark tunnel. It grew, slowly at first, then with increasing speed like a rolling, expanding ball of fire until it encompassed his entire vision in exploding brilliance. Off.

Chapter 17

WHEN
Haydon drove through the gates and saw the lights on downstairs, he knew that Nina had already heard. It was Dystal. He would have called her. He parked the Vanden Plas and had started up the steps to the front door when it opened and Nina stood in the entry with the soft golden light behind her. She had already dressed for bed, her hair down, her gown hiding her feet. Her face was almost obscured in blue shadow, but he recognized in the attitude of her body the mosaic of her emotions. In that instant, everything she meant to him was summed up in the recognition of that complexity. There were no words in language that would have enabled him to articulate what he instinctively understood about her at that moment in the doorway.

She put her arms around him as he stepped inside, and they held each other, the dim light from the lamps in the entrance hall keeping back the night that approached, but could not enter, the opened door.

"I'm so sorry," she said after a minute, her voice smoothed by the meaning of her words.

"Bob called you?" he asked.

He felt her nod.

He pulled away, but kept his left arm around her, away from the blood-soaked right pants leg.

"Let's go upstairs," he said. "I want to clean up, and then we'll talk."

They went up the stairs together, and he was aware of the extraordinary satisfaction he got from feeling her body under his arm, moving in step with him, alive and reassuring as if her very presence was the signal to him that it was over.As he entered the bathroom and turned on the light, the first thing he did was to look at himself in the mirror. He was surprised. At first he thought he looked as if nothing had happened. He wondered if he was supposed to
see
that he had stood next to a friend who had been killed. What was that supposed to look like? But there was no difference.

Yet, as he continued to look at himself, he saw that there were differences. The distinctions appeared gradually, like the details of a photograph in a tray of developing solution.

First, there was the blood. Speckles of it the size of pinheads on the left shoulder of the suit. He couldn't imagine how they got there. It didn't seem possible, remembering what had happened. But there they were, and there was a rusty smear of it on the right side of his chin. Then with revulsion he remembered holding Nina. Had she touched it? But her head was on his left side, the left side of his chin had touched her hair. The left side? His eyes returned to the speckles. He didn't even know whose blood it was.

Swearing, he wrenched off the coat and threw it on the floor. He turned on the shower, wanting to hear something besides his own breathing.

Again he turned his attention to the mirror, searching for some visible evidence of what he had been through. He looked at the feathering of gray mixed in the sable hair at his temples, the first hints of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. They were not new. Keeping his eyes on his eyes, he removed his shirt and threw it behind him. He looked at his chest, his shoulders, his neck. He was in good shape. He put his hands on the vanity and leaned closer. It was there, something was different, but he couldn't see it. In two weeks, a month, he would see it. An additional line by the eyes, half a dozen more gray hairs. He couldn't see them now, but they were predetermined. He wondered where, precisely, they would be.

He straightened up, took the Beretta from the small of his back, and laid it inside one of the towel cabinets. Turning from the mirror, he stooped and took off his shoes, and then his socks and pants. He threw everything in the corner on top of the suit coat.

He stood under the freshet of cold water as if it were the oxygen that kept him alive. He concentrated on the way it felt, the manipulations of the individual jets from the shower head. He heard the bathroom door, and opened his eyes. Through the blur of water he saw Nina come in and begin picking up his clothes. Impulsively he started to stop her, then didn't. He simply stood there and watched her remove his wallet and shield from his coat. He had forgotten about them. She went through his other pockets and laid the coat aside, then picked up his pants. She removed his comb and handkerchief from the right hip pocket, some change from the front pockets. Suddenly she jerked them away from her, held them out. He watched her stare dumbly at the blood on his pants leg. She hadn't seen it downstairs. Oddly, he felt ashamed that she should find it, as if she had caught him in an infidelity, or a secret baseness.

It was an absurd reaction. He closed his eyes and stretched out his hands to lean against the cool marble wall.

Nina had gone downstairs and made them both large and strong gin limes, which she brought up to the bedroom. Haydon turned the lights off, and they sat together on the small sofa under the slow sweep of the ceiling fan and looked toward the night through the tall bedroom windows. After a few minutes of silence, he started talking, and told her everything that had happened that day, from the first victim until the last. Twice he had to stop when he was telling her about Mooney, emotion strangling him until he couldn't breathe, couldn't go on. She leaned her head against him in the dark, and he waited until she stopped crying.

He was himself surprised at how strange a day it had been, including his telling of it. Never before had he been this free with the details of his work. He had narrated the day's events with an even, thorough completeness, and though he spared her the brutal specifics and an examination of his own emotions, he had shared more of it with her than he had expected to. He simply began talking, knowing she would want to hear and knowing, perhaps subconsciously, that for the first time he wanted her to hear it.

When he finished they sat quietly, and Haydon could feel Nina's relief. It was the sort of thing he should have done on many occasions in the past. He didn't know why he hadn't, but was glad that this time he had.

He held the tall cold glass to the side of his neck. He could feel his carotid throbbing against it.

After a moment she said, "What about his family, Stuart?"

He had already thought about that, on the sidewalk.

"None in Houston. I think there's a sister in Atlanta, a brother in, I believe, Arlington, Virginia. Captain Mercer will have that responsibility."

"Are they married?"

"I've heard him talk about his sister's children. His brother . . . it seems to me he isn't married either."

"That would be unusual, wouldn't it? Two bachelor brothers. Never married."

Haydon nodded. It seemed that for the most part everyone was accepted as being more or less average, until he was dead. Then people began to look at him more closely than they ever had before, and discovered that he was unusual. The truth was that everyone was unusual beneath the surface, but few people ever took the time to look there. It was a human failing to accept people as they presented themselves. Yet, to do otherwise was emotionally expensive and, some would argue, injudicious. Yes, Ed Mooney was an unusual man, more so now than this morning, and he would become even more so tomorrow when the media began their background interviews and the newspapers printed profiles of the friendly homicide detective everyone liked. An especially tragic loss.

"What happens next?" Nina asked.