Foul Matter Part 18

"Blaze." She held out a strand of hair again, winked at him.

"-you're not thinking of writing a book, are you?"

"Who, moi?" She pressed her hands against the green silk shirt that did much for her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "You're kidding. It never entered my mind."

Clive relaxed a little.

"I should tell you, though, I'm particular about the kind of case I take. I don't do divorces. I don't bust into crumby hotel rooms with a flash and start snapping pictures. Which I never do; I don't do stuff in the t.i.ts and d.i.c.k department. I don't do wires . . ."

As she rambled on, Clive stared. What was going on in the underbelly of New York City, anyway? Where had they come from, these boutique killers who wouldn't commit to a contract until they got to know their subject? Private eyes with more reservations than Danielle's on a Thursday night? It was all so d.a.m.ned genteel anymore. He hoped he'd never have to hire a stalker only to be told: "I don't do nasty messages; I don't do telephone calls at three A.M.; I don't go uptown if they move, which they usually do. I'm strictly TriBeCa, Village, SoHo, Chelsea. I might stretch a point and stalk the East Thirties, on occasion, if it's absolutely necessary."

What in h.e.l.l was New York City coming to?

"Don't worry. There's nothing in this job that requires any of that. All I want you to do is follow this person." (Should he come clean about Candy and Karl?) Clive shoved Ned's book across the desk, back jacket open.

She picked it up, looked at the photo. "An author! What's he been up to?"

"Nothing."

"You just want to know where he goes, what he does. Authors are pretty boring." She raised the book. "Can I have this?"

"Yes, of course." Clive felt his feathers slightly ruffled. "I wouldn't say authors are boring. Not the successful ones, anyway." Why was he defending them?

"I only mean, whatever goes on, goes on up here." She tapped a Chinese-red lacquered fingernail against her temple. "Their minds are so juiced up they don't have any energy left over. Except maybe to go to a movie. See, I went with one once. The guy was so into his thoughts he'd walk straight out in front of a fleet of yellow cabs when the light was changing. Or he'd stand on a corner and gape. Or he'd get on the subway, forget his stop-if he ever had one to begin with-and wander around wherever he did get off. His name was Sam Devene." The slightly raised eyebrow she turned on Clive suggested that possibly Clive knew him.

"Has it occurred to you that your friend Sam might have had some malady una.s.sociated with writing? I don't think Mr. Isaly has a problem with traffic and subway stops." Why was he engaging in this talk? "All you need to do is fly to Pittsburgh tomorrow-"

"Pittsburgh!" She hurtled forward in her chair as if she'd been shot in the back.

Clive shut his eyes. She was going to tell him she only "did" Manhattan (and not all of that).

"I lived there when I was married. Not right in the city. In Sewickley. It was so beautiful, Sewickley. Any chance he'd be going there?"

"I've no idea. He was born in Pittsburgh. As you can see from the flap copy." Clive nodded toward the book in her hands. That's all he needed, for someone to stroll down memory lane with Ned Isaly. Maybe neither one of them would ever come back, which would solve his problem. "Ned will be going to Pittsburgh tomorrow for a couple of days, perhaps three or four at most."

"Why's he going?"

"He's doing research-Look: does it matter?"

"Just curious. So what do I have to look out for, since you're not interested in where he goes?"

"Nothing in particular to look out for. I imagine it's just walking around." Clive fiddled with his letter opener. "I should tell you: he's being tailed."

"What? So what you want me to do is tail the tail? Who's doing the tailing?"

As she was looking over the top of his desk, probably for another book jacket photo of the tail, he said, in as acid a tone as he could manage, "I'm sorry I don't have a picture of them."

"Them? More than one?"

"Yes."

"So let me get this straight: What you really want is a bodyguard?"

"You could say so, yes. Except in this case the person you follow won't know he has one."

She held up her hands, palms toward him. "Just let's get one thing clear: I don't do wet work."

Now, if Dwight Staines (and Danny Zito) had taught him anything, he had taught him this term. "That only applies to hit men. Contract killers." Clive felt a chill and shivered. "You'd only be acting defensively. And there'll be no need for anything like that anyway." He said this with more conviction than he felt.

She appeared to be turning this over in her mind. "Okay, but this'll cost you double my usual fee. And I'd want some now."

Clive pulled his checkbook out of a drawer. It hardly seemed right that he couldn't put this on an expense account. Maybe he could if he called it something else. Wet work. That'd be good. That'd go down in the old expenses column really well. He snickered as he wrote the check, tore it out. "Five thousand. That enough?"

She took it, blew on it. "That should do it. What's his flight number?"

Clive smiled because he had managed to get this information. There weren't all that many daily flights to Pittsburgh. "American 204. Leaving Kennedy nine o'clock, Wednesday morning. It's ticketed electronically."

"I'll be going, then." She rose, book in one hand, purse in the other. "Nice talking to you. Expenses, of course, are added on. Hotels, food, et cetera."

Clive nodded his understanding, rose, and showed her to the office door. "Enjoy Pittsburgh."

He shoved a wad of StandOff into his briefcase, thinking first he'd go to Le Cirque, his usual restaurant, then go home and read it. Home was his co-op on Sutton Place, which he'd first rented, then bought at a considerably lower price than was being offered to strangers off the street.

If Candy and Karl were going to move on Ned, somewhere out of New York would be a golden opportunity, wouldn't it? When Ned was alone and hadn't much chance of hooking up with friends, wasn't as sure of himself or of his surroundings? Maybe as disoriented as Pascal's boyfriend, Sam?

Clive closed up his briefcase and turned to look out of his window at Manhattan, darkening even as he looked. And as he looked the Chrysler Building's lights switched on, then the Empire State and MetLife. What a triangle of light it was! No other city in the world had it, that configuration of light. Not London, not even Paris.

And G.o.d only knew, not Pittsburgh.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

Saul sat in the living room of his house in the wing chair his greatgrandfather had brought from Paris; he knew even more specifically that it had come from the house of a good friend who lived in the Marais. In all of this time, the chair had never needed reupholstering. Perhaps this was because his family, his grandfather and then his father, had not used it much, out of respect for the old friend. The family wanted to keep it in as perfect condition as possible. It was upholstered in tapestry with a dull gold background upon which unlikely birds embroidered in blues and greens spread their wings.

Saul knew the provenance of every piece of furniture in this room-a hand-painted table belonging to his great-aunt Laura; the butler's desk his grandfather had chosen to place at the window where he could write letters and do his accounts. Saul also used this table for writing. He had turned it around, though, so he was facing the window rather than the interior; he liked to look out and see the pa.s.sersby: the au pairs and child tenders pushing baby carriages; joggers; cyclists; old men bent over walking sticks. Their movements did not distract him; he could see them and yet they did not register on his mind as separate beings, but seemed all of one with his writing, though they made no appearances in it.

He wrote at this table every morning and some afternoons, despite Jamie's thinking he'd "retired." He felt ashamed that she had drawn this conclusion, but then he reminded himself that this was Jamie, whose output was like a rabbit's, two and sometimes three books a year, year in, year out.

He read all of her books; he couldn't imagine not doing so; he was her friend. And he was delighted to find in them glimmers of truly fine writing, though not one taken as a whole was finely written. He didn't see how it could be, not with the weighty superstructure of one or another genre in whose confines she had to fight her way around. He would have liked to talk to her about this, but who was he, with his monumental problem and minimal output, who seemed never able to get to the end to give advice to someone who could cross the finish line twice yearly?

Rising to get the cigarette box, he walked over to the desk and peered down at the ma.n.u.script lying there, pages neatly stacked beside an elderly Olivetti typewriter. Upstairs in a small room off his bedroom was the computer that he used only to type the final draft. When there was a final draft. This ma.n.u.script here didn't look like it would ever become one.

"No ending" could mean the ma.n.u.script lacked a chapter, or one page, or even one paragraph. A longish paragraph it would have been, too. But it had never gotten written. In the deep drawers of a dresser upstairs were ma.n.u.scripts. There were other ma.n.u.scripts, each with some fatal flaw (Saul thought). He was vague about them with his friends.

He looked at the ma.n.u.script pages sitting beside the typewriter, anch.o.r.ed by a paperweight of cobalt blue Murano gla.s.s he'd bought in Venice. He liked the color and egg shape. It held down the top pages that otherwise might have blown away in a breeze through the window. The growing stack of pages was a comfort to Saul. The stack was substantial, a good two or three inches. There would be only one more chapter, possibly long, but probably short. How he knew this without knowing the substance of that chapter, he couldn't say. Except that he knew its nature; he knew its ethos. He just didn't know its form in words. There was a chance that the end would become clear in the course of that chapter. The end, he believed, was always there, there since he'd written the first chapter. The problem was something within himself that prevented him seeing the end.

He removed the last page and read it:"The square was empty of everything but the two cats slinking around the base of the fountain. The woman walked out of the mist and across the cobblestones that looked wet in the moonlight. She did not hurry; her walk was slow even in this lonely hour of the night. She was dressed in black and white, an eerie echo of the two cats, one white, one black, as if a photographer had arranged both cats and model to create a dramatic view of Venice. The Venetian moonlight ebbed and flowed in little waves, so that the woman, moving slowly, appeared to be wading through a river of light, an aqua alta of light. Where, then, was she going? She asked herself this question. And why-?"

And why-? And why-? Saul looked at this, shook his head, returned the page to the stack and the paperweight to the pages. It was harrowing. The form he had used for the entire story was harrowing, and difficult. Its movement was backward, last to first. He had started at the end, that is, at what one would normally suppose to be the end. This character who had traveled to that most ambiguous city, Venice, and who was uncertain of her destination had begun-or had appeared to, rather-at the beginning as a woman strongly grounded, rooted in small-town life, marriage, kids. A reversal had occurred.

He looked out of the window and poured himself a brandy. The bottle was on the desk. He thought about Ned. He wondered, not for the first time, how their friends could attribute qualities to Saul that were much more clearly Ned's. The reclusiveness, the vulnerability, the confidence, the almost nave disdain of reviewers-all of these were Ned's virtues (for Saul saw them as virtues) and not his own. No, it wasn't he who would occupy the high room in the ivory tower; it was Ned. Of course, if he said this to Ned, Ned would tell him he was nuts.

And then there was all of this business at the publisher's. He wondered about what Sally said she'd overheard. There were probably a dozen different explanations. But Saul knew Bobby Mackenzie was ruthless. He'd do anything to get a book or a writer. It was the reason Saul had refused to go with Mackenzie-Haack, though his then-agent had pushed to move him there. She had defended this by saying it was because Mackenzie-Haack was "a better house, more literary, more prestigious. It wasn't (she'd said) the money."

"You're an agent; they're a publisher. It's always the money." Had she even felt the sting of that rebuke? Probably not; agents didn't appear to think they ever got rebuked. She continued to press for Mackenzie-Haack. He dropped her.

He returned to the wing chair. He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket, remembered he'd smoked the last one, and pulled over the silver cigarette box. He didn't really use it and thought the cigarettes in it now must be stale. There were a number of articles in this room he would never have chosen for himself-that embroidered fire screen, for one-but he kept everything in the same place as his mother had done, and she had done it for the same reason, he was sure, for he could remember her admonishing him sometimes after he'd picked something up and returned it to another place ("That's your aunt Livvy's special pillow, so put it back in her chair, dear.").

The sense of loss made him wince. Don't go there, he told himself, then realized the expression was the t.i.tle of Paul Giverney's new book. He'd seen it that morning on Tenth Street when he'd stopped by the Barnes & n.o.ble near the square. More power to him, Saul thought. Fame and money. He wondered how much the lack of money shaped what a writer did, how good his books turned out to be. There had to be some effect. He was lucky to have as much as he needed. But, then, one could argue he'd have been better off without money; that might have pushed him to finish the book.

Don't go there. He thought about Pittsburgh. He picked up the phone at his elbow and then put it back. Saul went to the bookcase across the room, pulled out a Pennsylvania travel guide. (Rarely did he travel, but he had guides to everywhere.) He thumbed up Pittsburgh accommodations and found the Pittsburgh Hilton, which he then called. Yes, a Mr. Isaly was due in tomorrow and did he want to leave a message? No, no message. He hung up. When he read the description of the Hilton, it didn't surprise Saul that Ned had chosen it; it was located on the Point where the rivers come together.

Saul took the guidebook to the wing chair, pausing to pour himself another small measure of brandy. He sat down and thought about the men in suits, the "two suits," as he came to know them. Why did they keep turning up?

And would they, he wondered, turn up in Pittsburgh?

Saul looked at the book, got the number again, called the Hilton a second time, and made a reservation.

Like the woman in his story, Saul wasn't sure precisely where he was going, or why.

PITTSBURGH.

TWENTY-NINE.

When he was a boy, there was one snowless winter when he dreamed all of the time about snow-daydreams and night dreams. He saw himself crouched on the window seat in the living room of their house, staring out at a hill that fell away at a perfect angle for sledding or else those round aluminum dish things a kid could position himself on to go twirling downhill, or even on the old rubber tires that served the same purpose. He would crouch in the window seat and imagine the hill with its fine icy crust that cracked under the first bit of pressure. He did not remember the house so well as the hill and the steps up to the house, a few more than the neighboring house on one side and a few fewer than the one on the other for the houses also flowed uphill. Pittsburgh was a city of hills. Snow mounded on these steps and they lost their sharp outlines. He would wake up in the early morning, only the rim of the sun risen and casting a cold bluish light across the snow. He could look out of his bedroom window, right over the porch. From up there he could see the steps better, the tantalizing smoothness of the mounds he would be the first to disturb.

As he sat there, in his mind's eye, from the dark behind him he heard a voice, probably his mother's. "What are you doing, Ned?"

The only answer if you didn't want what was in your head to blow away with words was "Nothing." If you went ahead and said, "I'm sledding," you'd have her in there right away saying, "There's no snow, how can you?" It was hard enough to do it in your head without somebody's coming along and saying you couldn't. That was him; that was winter.

All of this went through Ned's mind as he waited for a cab on the concrete island of the Pittsburgh International Airport. He was so taken up in this dream of snow that he didn't think that the two men behind him should have looked familiar.

"Christ! It's dropped ten degrees just standing here," said Karl.

"Where's the f.u.c.king cabs? They got a hundred lines of them at Kennedy."

"It's not New York. Pittsburgh's a pretty small city as cities go. Philly, that's three, maybe four times as big as Pittsburgh."

"Philly is? I never knew that." Candy gave Karl an appreciative look. "Hey, you're wound, K. You must have been researching."

"Nah. It's just stuff you pick up. Here's a cab, thank G.o.d-Hey! Hey! You see that? That b.i.t.c.h muscled right into our cab." As her cab drew away, she gave them a tiny smile and a shrug. Candy and Karl gave the cab a slap.

The next cab was taken almost before they could register the fact it was their turn. "Get that! Did you see that guy take our cab?" said Candy.

"What guy?"

Sally didn't care; she'd seen worse than those two in New York. If it had been New York, those two would probably have shot her. But where had she seen them before?

The black-and-white cab behind her was now pulling abreast of this cab and going on ahead. When the driver asked her where to, she said, "Just follow that black-and-white cab up there."

"Follow it?"

He was trying to meet her eyes in the mirror as if they would prove or disprove Sally's intentions toward the black-and-white cab were honorable. "Yes, that's what I said." Why was she bothering to explain to a cabbie? "It's my friend and I got separated from him in the airport."

The driver was still trying to engage eye contact. "Your friend?"

Sally felt like taking a swing at him with her carryall. He was, at least, following the cab as he was attempting to wrest the story out of her about her relationship with that cab ahead. "My fiance."

The driver laughed. "And he just takes off and leaves you standing there? Jesus G.o.d. You sure you want to marry the guy? You had a fight on the plane, I bet. I bet you and him-" and he went on, making up a story for his own amus.e.m.e.nt.

Was everybody on G.o.d's green earth a fledgling writer?

When the next cab pulled out of the line and stopped, Candy gently shoved an old lady out of the way, said excuse me ma'am, we got this emergency, and the two of them climbed in.

"Pittsburgh Hilton." They'd got it right away when they started phoning up hotels. This was not sheer coincidence; Candy and Karl worked on the supposition that anyone would choose the hotel the two of them would choose.

Twenty minutes later, another flight landed at Pittsburgh International nonstop from New York City.

As Clive waited for a cab, he wondered if Ned Isaly would recognize him, provided he even saw him. When Ned appeared in the Mackenzie-Haack offices, he came to see Tom Kidd and n.o.body else. The only contact Clive had had with Ned was when they'd pa.s.sed a few times in the hallways, and Clive doubted that the absentminded smile or nod Ned gave him was proof that he'd even seen him. Anyway, what difference would it make if Ned did recognize him? They were both in Pittsburgh at the same time. So what?

Clive just wasn't used to following people.

When he checked into the Pittsburgh Hilton, he scanned the lobby looking for Pascal. There was no sign of her; there was only a couple sitting in a section marked off for morning coffee, the couple and a blond woman whose face was bent over a newspaper. How could she see the print through those dark gla.s.ses?

The desk clerk returned his credit card to him along with a key card. Clive refused help from the bell captain, having only one small bag. He walked over to the bank of elevators. Two elevators arrived simultaneously and as he was about to step into one, he saw Ned coming out of another one on the other side. Ned didn't even look at him. Clive thought he was probably wandering around in writer daze. He watched and saw him going up to the bar. So Clive would have time to leave his suitcase and wash up. Just as he pushed the up b.u.t.ton, he saw a woman entering the gla.s.s door of the hotel.

It was Pascal.

At first glance he didn't recognize her. It was her hair; it was pulled back and wound into a bun. He a.s.sumed she had done this the better to follow Ned. The hair loose and abundant would have called attention to her. He thought the makeup less liberally applied, too, not so heavy on the eye shadow. He thought how unnerving it was to think that a woman could so easily create a wholly new persona with nothing but a hairbrush and-sweet Christ! The guy in the boots with the beard coming through the automatic doors! Clive dived into the elevator as the door was closing. What was Dwight Staines doing here?

When Ned threaded his way through the tables, heading for the bar, Sally dropped the Pittsburgh Press on the floor and bent down to retrieve it, hitting her head on the edge of the table. He had come so close. But he hadn't seen her. She pulled a bit on the blond wig to make sure the b.u.mp hadn't dislodged it.

As she righted herself she caught a glimpse of a man who'd just boarded one of the elevators and thought surely she must be wrong. Why for G.o.d's sakes would Clive Esterhaus be in Pittsburgh?

Ned had checked into his room, dumped his duffel bag, and gone down for a cup of coffee before setting out to look at Pittsburgh. He hadn't been back since he was in high school, just the first year before they'd moved to Scranton.

Scranton was a sepia blur in his mind, but his Pittsburgh past, those days he could recall of it, were sharp and bright. He remembered "downtown," those few city blocks that had seemed spectacularly bright-the movie theaters, the department stores. Horne's, Kaufmann's. He was surprised to see Joseph Horne's all boarded up as if it had been a crack house, a broken-down haven for weepy-eyed druggies. He found that none of the downtown was as he remembered it; all of it looked condemned, or, he supposed, downtown had moved; it had relocated, and part of it was now the handsomely built-up area of the Point. That Golden Triangle Pittsburgh was so proud of. Deservedly so, he thought. It was a city that had rein-vented itself.