Walkers (12 page)

Listen, I have to thank you for
being so kind to me this morning. I thought I was going to pass out. In fact, I
did pass
out, when I got home. Zonk!’

‘You look fine now,’ he told her.

‘Well, thank you, I have a date.’

‘So do I,’ said Henry. ‘That’s why I
waited for you. And look -’ he pointed across the front lot, to where Gil was taking
his parking check from the car-hop. ‘Our friend has a date here, too.’

Susan turned to look at Gil, and
then she turned back and stared at Henry. ‘Can this be coincidence?’ she asked
him, in a soft, alarmed whisper. ‘I mean, all three of us meeting on the beach
this morning, and now coming here?’ Gil came up to them, and stopped and stared
just as they were staring at him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I sure didn’t expect to
find you two here.’

‘And we sure didn’t expect to find
you
here, either,’ Susan told him.

‘Well... as a matter of fact, I was
invited here,’ said Gil.

‘Me too,’ said Susan.

‘And me,’ added Henry.

‘This is weird,’ Gil protested. ‘I
never saw either of you before today, and yet here you both are, waiting for
me. You’re sure this isn’t some kind of a practical joke?’

‘If it is,
we’re
not playing it,’ said Henry. ‘We’re just as much victims of
it as you are.’

‘Who invited you?’ asked Susan. ‘I
was asked to come here by a newspaper reporter, from the
Tribune.’

‘Well, it was a girl who asked me,’
said Gil. ‘She said she was writing an article for
San Diego
magazine.’

Henry lifted up his philosophy
books. ‘That settles it. It must be nothing more than an incredible
coincidence. The fellow I’m supposed to be meeting used to be one of my
evening-class students, when I was teaching up at Encinitas.’

Gil shook his head. ‘Some
coincidence, huh? I mean, the three of us meeting on the beach, and now meeting
here.’

Henry turned and peered inside the
restaurant doorway. ‘I hope that nothing’s
wrong,’
he remarked.

‘Wrong?’ asked Susan. ‘What do you
mean?’

‘I hope that what we saw on the
beach wasn’t something that we weren’t supposed to see.’

‘In what way?’ said Gil.

‘Well, just supposing that girl
wasn’t drowned by accident. Just supposing those eels didn’t drift in to shore
on a freak current, or whatever it was that the police were trying to suggest.
Just supposing those eels were actually bred as killers – deliberately bred to
attack swimmers or divers or anybody going into the water. You have your
Scripps Institute just down the road here, and you have your naval base at San
Diego. Supposing the Scripps people have been working on a government project
to supply the Navy with man-eating eels. And just supposing we saw the result,
and now we’ve all been invited along here to be dealt with. You know, like
Karen Silk wood.’

‘Boy, do you have an imagination!’
Gil whistled. Then he laughed, and said, ‘Are you serious, or are you just
trying to scare us?’

Henry said, a little too pompously,
‘I’m a philosopher, Gil. I’m trained to use my mind.

I’m trained to hypothesise, to think
problems out from every conceivable angle. All I’m saying is that the idea of
specially trained eels is a conceivable angle.’

‘But Karen Silkwood was killed,’
said Susan, worriedly.

‘This is nothing like Karen
Silkwood,’ Gil protested. ‘We don’t have any evidence at all. It’s just a
theory, right? And if I know anything at all about theories, the real
explanation will be uninteresting. That’s one thing you learn about life, that
the explanation for just about everything is really uninteresting.’

‘So cynical, so young,’ smiled
Henry, but not patronisingly. He agreed with Gil almost one hundred per cent.
In his experience, the wildest phenomena always seemed to have the most mundane
solutions. Like Bridey Murphy, or the
Mary
Celeste.
He nodded back towards the restaurant door, and said, ‘All we have
to decide for ourselves is whether we are in any kind of personal danger here.’

‘I can’t see how we could be,’ said
Gil. ‘I mean, this girl from
San Diego
wasn’t
threatening in any way that you could possibly think of. Just the opposite.’

‘Well, you may be right,’ said
Henry. ‘My philosophy student wasn’t exactly your stereotypical hit-man.’

Susan said, ‘I vote we go in and see
what happens. Nothing ventured, you know.’

Henry thought about it, and then
shrugged. ‘Come on, then.’

Inside Bully’s North, it was noisy
and dark and crowded. The television was tuned to the Padres, playing at home,
and people were smoking and laughing and drinking beer.

The three of them walked the length
of the cocktail bar, and up to the young blow-dried maître d’, who was
answering the telephone and handing out menus at the same time.

After a moment, the maître d’ hung
up the telephone and grinned, and said, ‘Good evening. Can I help you folks?
Table for three?’

‘Well, we’re not together, as a
matter of fact,’ said Henry. ‘Each of us is meeting somebody.’

He turned to Susan, and said, ‘What
was the name of your
Tribune
reporter?’

‘Springer,’ Susan told the maître
d’. ‘Mr Paul Springer.’

Henry looked at Gil and his
expression was shocked. ‘That was the name of my philosophy student,’ he said,
in bewilderment.

‘And the girl from San
Diego,
her name’s
Paulette
Springer,’ said Gil.

The maître d’ stared at them as if
they were playing some kind of lunatic party game.

‘You’re not together, each of you is
meeting somebody, but each of those

“somebodies” happens to have the
same name?’

‘It appears so,’ said Henry, in a
tight, constricted voice.

The maître d’ skimmed down the list
of names on his clipboard. Halfway down, his pen came to a stop. ‘Here it is,
Springer. Table nine.’ The pen went down further, right to the bottom of the
page, and then the maître d’ shook his head. ‘Only one Springer. I’m sorry.’

Susan glanced at Henry anxiously.
‘What you said outside. You don’t think that -?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Henry. ‘I think
we’d all better stay together, and see which Springer we’ve got here, mine, or
yours – or Gil’s.’

The maître d’ whipped out three
menus. ‘You all want to go to the same table?’ he asked them.

‘If there’s only one table booked in
the name of Springer, I don’t think we have a lot of choice,’ said Henry.

The maître d’ led them between the
crowded tables, where diners were laughing and drinking wine and tucking into
ribs and cracked crab. At the very back of the restaurant, beside a frondy
coconut-palm in a wicker basket, was table nine; and at table nine sat a single
figure in a black Homburg-style hat and a black three-piece suit. The brim of the
hat was lowered so that as they crossed the restaurant they were unable to see
the figure’s face. But Henry immediately noticed the hands, which were spread
flat on the salmon-coloured tablecloth. They were very white, the same hue as
blanched almonds, and very long fingered.

‘Here you go, then,’ said the maître
d’, and dragged out three of the four chairs. ‘Mr Springer? One of these people
is a guest of yours. Well, I don’t know – maybe they all are.’

Henry and Susan and Gil stood around
the table apprehensively as the figure very slowly raised its face towards
them, in the way that a white-petalled flower raises its face to the sun.
‘Yes,’ said the figure, quietly but distinctly. ‘They
all
are.’

Henry was transfixed. The figure’s
face was pale and smooth and androgynous, like the almond-shaped face of a
portrait by Modigliani. Yet despite its smoothness and despite its sexlessness,
it was quite clearly Paul Springer, the same Paul Springer that he had met
outside his cottage on the shore. It was not so much the detail of the face
that carried his character, but the personality that it projected. The
difference between the man he had met on the beach and this man here was the
difference between a highly finished portrait and a deft but accurate sketch.

Gil slowly sat down. To Gil, the
figure was Paulette. A severely dressed Paulette, with her hair scraped back,
away from her face, yet undisputably the same girl who had called round to the
Mini-Market and asked him out for dinner. He understood that she was different,
although he would have found it difficult to say exactly how.

Her eyes were still the same, her
cheekbones were still the same, her mouth was just as tempting as before. She
attracted him just as much, yet she was something else now, apart from
Paulette. She wasn’t less than she had been before, but
more’

Susan said, shyly, ‘Hello.’ Because
for her, too, the figure was the same Paul Springer she had met outside her
grandmother’s house. A changed Paul Springer, certainly – more mysterious, more
remote, and much less chatty -but the same presence, the same personality. The
same calm and penetrating eyes.

‘Please, all of you, sit down,’ said
Springer. ‘You’re confused, I understand that, and you’re concerned for your
own safety. But I hope that I can set your minds at rest, and that you will
forgive me for playing some little tricks on you.’

Henry dragged out a chair, and sat
down. Susan hesitated for a moment or two, and then perched herself on the edge
of the chair next to him.

‘You’re one and the same person,’
said Henry, his voice thick and off-balance.

‘You’re three people, all rolled up
into one. Not all the same sex, either. Now, how do you do that? How come I
think you’re my old philosophy student, and Gil here thinks you’re a lady
journalist, and Susan believes you work for the
Tribune!’

Springer removed his, or her, hat.
Underneath, his hair had been razored very short, and combed straight back. The
style was completely neutral, completely sexless, just like his clothes. He
laid his hat on the table and rested his long pale hands on either side of the
brim.

‘Let me put it this way,’ he said.
‘It was necessary for me to appear to each of you in a guise which you would
find irresistible. You all had a severe shock this morning, when you came across
that girl’s body. None of you were in the mood for going out to dinner with a
complete stranger. Because of that, I considered it more effective to use my
particular facility for appearing – how shall I put it? – all things to all
men. And women, of course,’ he added, nodding to Susan.

Gil said sharply, ‘All right, then.
Just exactly what kind of a trick is this? You’ve got us all here. Now what?’

Susan stood up. ‘I’m going home. I
don’t like this at all.’

Springer raised one hand, palm
outwards. He lifted it towards Susan’s face almost as if he had a mirror hidden
in it, because Susan found herself staring at it as if she were mesmerised. She
hesitated, and then she sat down again. Henry laid a hand on her arm, and said,’
What’ s the matter, Susan? Are you all right?’ but all she did was nod, and
whisper, ‘I’m all right,’ and touch her fingers to her forehead.

‘What did you do to her?’ Henry
demanded. ‘What was that? Hypnotic suggestion?’

‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Springer,
gently. ‘I simply assured her that there was no need for her to be afraid.
There is equally no need
for you
to
be afraid, either.’

A waiter came up and asked them what
they wanted to drink. Henry ordered a large vodka; Gil asked for a beer; Susan
wanted a fruit punch. Springer said, ‘The driest white wine that you can find.’

Gil said, ‘Are you a woman or a man
or what?’

The waiter heard that, and turned
around to stare at Springer curiously. Springer waited until he had gone to fix
their order, and then he said quietly, ‘I am neither. I am an agent of sorts. A
messenger. I am neither man nor woman, flesh nor spirit. I am not even “ I” in
the sense that you would normally understand it.’

‘So what are you?’ Henry asked him.
‘If you’re not either of the Paul Springers, and not Paulette Springer, and not
a man, and not a woman, and not flesh, and not a spirit, what in Heaven’s name
are
you?’

‘Are you hungry?’ asked Springer.

‘Not exactly,’ said Henry. ‘Gil, how
about you?’

Gil shook his head. ‘I couldn’t eat
if you held a gun to my head.’

Susan said, ‘Me neither.’

‘All right, then,’ said Springer.
‘Let us all take a walk somewhere quiet, where we can talk. I have one or two
things to show you. Things which will startle you, perhaps, but which you will
find most fascinating.’

Susan had been watching Springer
very closely. Just as the waiter brought their drinks, she said, ‘Could I touch
you? I mean, could I touch your hand?’ Springer turned his eyes towards her
without moving his head. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I don’t know. There’s something
about you that makes me want to touch you, that’s all.’