Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “So have I.”

  “How close I am to you, for one thing. Waiting at the hospital, there was a time when I thought, God, he’s gone. I just had this feeling. And then I shook my head and said, no, it was nonsense, you were all right. And you know what they told us afterward? Your heart stopped during the operation, and it must have happened right when I got that feeling. I knew, and then I knew again when it resumed beating.”

  When I looked at my son I saw his mother’s smile. When I looked at Debbie I saw myself.

  “And another thing I learned, and that’s how much people need each other. People were so good to us! So many people called me, asked about you. Even Philip called, can you imagine? He just wanted to let me know that I should call on him if there was anything he could do.”

  “What could he possibly do?”

  “I have no idea. It was funny hearing from him, though. I hadn’t heard his voice since we were living together. But it was nice of him to call, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. “It must have made you wonder what might have been.”

  “What it made me wonder was how I ever thought Philip and I were made for each other. Scott was with me every minute, you know, except when he went down to give blood for you—”

  “He gave blood for me?”

  “Didn’t mother tell you? You and Scott are the same blood type. It’s one of the rarer types and you both have it. Maybe that’s why I fell in love with him.”

  “Not a bad reason.”

  “He was with me all the time, you know, and by the time you were out of danger I began to realize how close Scott and I have grown, how much I love him. And then when I heard Philip’s voice I thought what kid stuff that relationship of ours had been. I know you never approved.”

  “It wasn’t my business to approve or disapprove.”

  “Maybe not. But I know you approve of Scott, and that’s important to me.”

  I went home.

  I thought, What do You want from me? It’s not my son-in-law. You don’t try to kill a man and then donate blood for a transfusion. Nobody would do a thing like that.

  The person I cut off at the traffic circle? But that was insane. And how would I know him anyway? I wouldn’t know where to start looking for him.

  Some other enemy? But I had no enemies.

  Julia said, “The doctor called again. He still doesn’t see how you could check yourself out of the hospital. But he called to say he wants to schedule you for surgery.”

  Not yet, I told her. Not until I’m ready.

  “When will you be ready?”

  When I feel right about it, I told her.

  She called him back, relayed the message. “He’s very nice,” she reported. “He says any delay is hazardous, so you should let him schedule as soon as you possibly can. If you have something to attend to he says he can understand that, but try not to let it drag on too long.”

  I was glad he was a sympathetic and understanding man, and that she liked him. He might be a comfort to her later when she needed someone around to lean on.

  Something clicked.

  I called Debbie.

  “Just the one telephone call,” she said, puzzled. “He said he knew you never liked him but he always respected you and he knew what an influence you were in my life. And that I should feel free to call on him if I needed someone to turn to. It was nice of him, that’s what I told myself at the time, but there was something creepy about the conversation.”

  And what had she told him?

  “That it was nice to hear from him, and that, you know, my husband and I would be fine. Sort of stressing that I was married, but in a nice way. Why?”

  The police were very dubious. Ancient history, they said. The boy had lived with my daughter a while ago, parted amicably, never made any trouble. Had he ever threatened me? Had we ever fought?

  He’s the one, I said. Watch him, I said. Keep an eye on him.

  So they assigned men to watch Philip, and on the fourth day the surveillance paid off. They caught him tucking a bomb beneath the hood of a car. The car belonged to my son-in-law, Scott.

  “He thought you were standing between them. When she said she was happily married, well, he shifted his sights to the husband.”

  There had always been something about Philip that I had not liked. Something creepy, as Debbie put it. Perhaps he’ll get treatment now. In any event, he’ll be unable to harm anyone.

  Is that why I was permitted to return? So that I could prevent Philip from harming Scott?

  Perhaps that was the purpose. The conversations with Julia, with Monty, with Peg, with Mark and Debbie, those were fringe benefits.

  Or perhaps it was the other way around.

  All right.

  They’ve prepared me for surgery. The doctor, understanding as ever, called again. This time I let him schedule me, and I came here and let them prepare me. And I’ve prepared myself.

  All right.

  I’m ready now.

  As Good as a Rest

  Andrew says the whole point of a vacation is to change your perspective of the world. A change is as good as a rest, he says, and vacations are about change, not rest. If we just wanted a rest, he says, we could stop the mail and disconnect the phone and stay home: that would add up to more of a traditional rest than traipsing all over Europe. Sitting in front of the television set with your feet up, he says, is generally considered to be more restful than climbing the forty-two thousand steps to the top of Notre Dame.

  Of course, there aren’t forty-two thousand steps, but it did seem like it at the time. We were with the Dattners—by the time we got to Paris the four of us had already buddied up—and Harry kept wondering aloud why the genius who’d built the cathedral hadn’t thought to put in an elevator. And Sue, who’d struck me earlier as unlikely to be afraid of anything, turned out to be petrified of heights. There are two staircases at Notre Dame, one going up and one coming down, and to get from one to the other you have to walk along this high ledge. It’s really quite wide, even at its narrowest, and the view of the rooftops of Paris is magnificent, but all of this was wasted on Sue, who clung to the rear wall with her eyes clenched shut.

  Andrew took her arm and walked her through it, while Harry and I looked out at the City of Light. “It’s high open spaces that does it to her,” he told me. “Yesterday, the Eiffel Tower, no problem, because the space was enclosed. But when it’s open she starts getting afraid that she’ll get sucked over the side or that she’ll get this sudden impulse to jump, and, well, you see what it does to her.”

  While neither Andrew nor I have ever been troubled by heights, whether open or enclosed, the climb to the top of the cathedral wasn’t the sort of thing we’d have done at home, especially since we’d already had a spectacular view of the city the day before from the Eiffel Tower. I’m not mad about walking up stairs, but it didn’t occur to me to pass up the climb. For that matter, I’m not that mad about walking generally—Andrew says I won’t go anywhere without a guaranteed parking space—but it seems to me that I walked from one end of Europe to the other, and didn’t mind a bit.

  When we weren’t walking through streets or up staircases, we were parading through museums. That’s hardly a departure for me, but for Andrew it is uncharacteristic behavior in the extreme. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is one of the best in the country, and it’s not twenty minutes from our house. We have a membership, and I go all the time, but it’s almost impossible to get Andrew to go.

  But in Paris he went to the Louvre, and the Rodin Museum, and that little museum in the sixteenth arrondissement with the most wonderful collection of Monets. And in London he led the way to the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert—and in Amsterdam he spent three hours in the Rijksmuseum and hurried us to the Van Gogh Museum first thing the next morning. By the time we got to Madrid, I was museumed out. I knew it was a sin to miss the Prado but I just couldn’t face it, and I wound up walking around t
he city with Harry while my husband dragged Sue through galleries of El Grecos and Goyas and Velázquezes.

  “Now that you’ve discovered museums,” I told Andrew, “you may take a different view of the Museum of Fine Arts. There’s a show of American landscape painters that’ll still be running when we get back—I think you’ll like it.”

  He assured me he was looking forward to it. But you know he never went. Museums are strictly a vacation pleasure for him. He doesn’t even want to hear about them when he’s at home.

  For my part, you’d think I’d have learned by now not to buy clothes when we travel. Of course, it’s impossible not to—there are some genuine bargains and some things you couldn’t find at home—but I almost always wind up buying something that remains unworn in my closet forever after. It seems so right in some foreign capital, but once I get it home I realize it’s not me at all, and so it lives out its days on a hanger, a source in turn of fond memories and faint guilt. It’s not that I lose judgment when I travel, or become wildly impulsive. It’s more that I become a slightly different person during the course of the trip and the clothes I buy for that person aren’t always right for the person I am in Boston.

  Oh, why am I nattering on like this? You don’t have to look in my closet to see how travel changes a person. For heaven’s sake, just look at the Dattners.

  If we hadn’t all been on vacation together, we would never have come to know Harry and Sue, let alone spend so much time with them. We would never have encountered them in the first place—day-to-day living would not have brought them to Boston, or us to Enid, Oklahoma. But even if they’d lived down the street from us, we would never have become close friends at home. To put it as simply as possible, they were not our kind of people.

  The package tour we’d booked wasn’t one of those escorted ventures in which your every minute is accounted for. It included our charter flights over and back, all our hotel accommodations, and our transportation from one city to the next. We “did” six countries in twenty-two days, but what we did in each, and where and with whom, was strictly up to us. We could have kept to ourselves altogether, and have often done so when traveling, but by the time we checked into our hotel in London the first day we’d made arrangements to join the Dattners that night for dinner, and before we knocked off our after-dinner brandies that night it had been tacitly agreed that we would be a foursome throughout the trip—unless, of course, it turned out that we tired of each other.

  “They’re a pair,” Andrew said that first night, unknotting his tie and giving it a shake before hanging it over the doorknob. “That y’all-come-back accent of hers sounds like syrup flowing over corn cakes.”

  “She’s a little flashy, too,” I said. “But that sport jacket of his—”

  “I know,” Andrew said. “Somewhere, even as we speak, a horse is shivering, his blanket having been transformed into a jacket for Harry.”

  “And yet there’s something about them, isn’t there?”

  “They’re nice people,” Andrew said. “Not our kind at all, but what does that matter? We’re on a trip. We’re ripe for a change . . .”

  In Paris, after a night watching a floor show at what I’m sure was a rather disreputable little nightclub in Les Halles, I lay in bed while Andrew sat up smoking a last cigarette. “I’m glad we met the Dattners,” he said. “This trip would be fun anyway, but they add to it. That joint tonight was a treat, and I’m sure we wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been for them. And do you know something? I don’t think they’d have gone if it hadn’t been for us.”

  “Where would we be without them?” I rolled onto my side. “I know where Sue would be without your helping hand. Up on top of Notre Dame, frozen with fear. Do you suppose that’s how the gargoyles got there? Are they nothing but tourists turned to stone?”

  “Then you’ll never be a gargoyle. You were a long way from petrification whirling around the dance floor tonight.”

  “Harry’s a good dancer. I didn’t think he would be, but he’s very light on his feet.”

  “The gun doesn’t weigh him down, eh?”

  I sat up. “I thought he was wearing a gun,” I said. “How on earth does he get it past the airport scanners?”

  “Undoubtedly by packing it in his luggage and checking it through. He wouldn’t need it on the plane—not unless he was planning to divert the flight to Havana.”

  “I don’t think they go to Havana anymore. Why would he need it off the plane? I suppose tonight he’d feel safer armed. That place was a bit on the rough side.”

  “He was carrying it at the Tower of London, and in and out of a slew of museums. In fact, I think he carries it all the time except on planes. Most likely he feels naked without it.”

  “I wonder if he sleeps with it.”

  “I think he sleeps with her.”

  “Well, I know that.”

  “To their mutual pleasure, I shouldn’t wonder. Even as you and I.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  And, a bit later, he said, “You like them, don’t you?”

  “Well, of course I do. I don’t want to pack them up and take them home to Boston with us, but—”

  “You like him.”

  “Harry? Oh, I see what you’re getting at.”

  “Quite.”

  “And she’s attractive, isn’t she? You’re attracted to her.”

  “At home I wouldn’t look at her twice, but here—”

  “Say no more. That’s how I feel about him. That’s exactly how I feel about him.”

  “Do you suppose we’ll do anything about it?”

  “I don’t know. Do you suppose they’re having this very conversation two floors below?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. If they are having this conversation, and if they had the same silent prelude to this conversation, they’re probably feeling very good indeed.”

  “Mmmmm,” I said dreamily. “Even as you and I.”

  I don’t know if the Dattners had that conversation that particular evening, but they certainly had it somewhere along the way. The little tensions and energy currents between the four of us began to build until it seemed almost as though the air were crackling with electricity. More often than not we’d find ourselves pairing off on our walks, Andrew with Sue, Harry with me. I remember one moment when he took my hand crossing the street—I remember the instant but not the street, or even the city—and a little shiver went right through me.

  By the time we were in Madrid, with Andrew and Sue trekking through the Prado while Harry and I ate garlicky shrimp and sipped a sweetish white wine in a little café on the Plaza Mayor, it was clear what was going to happen. We were almost ready to talk about it.

  “I hope they’re having a good time,” I told Harry. “I just couldn’t manage another museum.”

  “I’m glad we’re out here instead,” he said, with a wave at the plaza. “But I would have gone to the Prado if you went.” And he reached out and covered my hand with his.

  “Sue and Andy seem to be getting along pretty good,” he said.

  Andy! Had anyone else ever called my husband Andy?

  “And you and me, we get along all right, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” I said, giving his hand a little squeeze. “Yes, we do.”

  Andrew and I were up late that night, talking and talking. The next day we flew to Rome. We were all tired our first night there and ate at the restaurant in our hotel rather than venture forth. The food was good, but I wonder if any of us really tasted it.

  Andrew insisted that we all drink grappa with our coffee. It turned out to be a rather nasty brandy, clear in color and quite powerful. The men had a second round of it. Sue and I had enough work finishing our first.

  Harry held his glass aloft and proposed a toast. “To good friends,” he said. “To close friendship with good people.” And after everyone had taken a sip he said, “You know, in a couple of days we all go back to the lives we used to lead. Sue and I go back to Oklahoma, you t
wo go back to Boston, Mass. Andy, you go back to your investments business and I’ll be doin’ what I do. And we got each other’s addresses and phone, and we say we’ll keep in touch, and maybe we will. But if we do or we don’t, either way one thing’s sure. The minute we get off that plane at JFK, that’s when the carriage turns into a pumpkin and the horses go back to bein’ mice. You know what I mean?”

  Everyone did.

  “Anyway,” he said, “what me an’ Sue were thinkin’, we thought there’s a whole lot of Rome, a mess of good restaurants, and things to see and places to go. We thought it’s silly to have four people all do the same things and go the same places and miss out on all the rest. We thought, you know, after breakfast tomorrow, we’d split up and spend the day separate.” He took a breath. “Like Sue and Andy’d team up for the day and, Elaine, you an’ me’d be together.”

  “The way we did in Madrid,” somebody said.

  “Except I mean for the whole day,” Harry said. A light film of perspiration gleamed on his forehead. I looked at his jacket and tried to decide if he was wearing his gun. I’d seen it on our afternoon in Madrid. His jacket had come open and I’d seen the gun, snug in his shoulder holster. “The whole day and then the evening, too. Dinner—and after.”

  There was a silence which I don’t suppose could have lasted nearly as long as it seemed to. Then Andrew said he thought it was a good idea, and Sue agreed, and so did I.

  Later, in our hotel room, Andrew assured me that we could back out. “I don’t think they have any more experience with this than we do. You saw how nervous Harry was during his little speech. He’d probably be relieved to a certain degree if we did back out.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  He thought for a moment. “For my part,” he said, “I’d as soon go through with it.”

  “So would I. My only concern is if it made some difference between us afterward.”

  “I don’t think it will. This is fantasy, you know. It’s not the real world. We’re not in Boston or Oklahoma. We’re in Rome, and you know what they say. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”