The days that followed passed in a kind of pipe-dream mist, the component parts of which were one part sun to one part sensuality. We got up with the sun and went to sleep with the sun. In between we explored the riverbank for hours in either direction. We swam whenever our skins felt warm to the touch. We touched all the time. I came to cherish the lovemaking after the swimming, with her glistening cool body leaning over me to shade me. Gradually the welts on her rib cage faded, the way a bad dream fades in the brilliant light of the morning. Most of the time we wore shorts and nothing else. I rigged a laundry line from a dead tree to the Once in a Blue Moon, but there never seemed to be anything to hang on it. I taught Ornella to open her eyes underwater—she saw swarms of minnows and beautifully colored rocks. She taught me to open my eyes above water—I saw the Little Colorado tickling the sand out from under the soles of my feet as we prowled the riverbank, and the tiny insects scurrying into the holes the water punched in Friday’s footprints.
We didn’t talk all that much. Most of the communication between us took place in the spaces between the words, in the lingering soft silences after lovemaking. She told me she had fallen in love with me and repeated it at the most unlikely moments, as if it was a hidden treasure she had stumbled across. I told her that I was falling in love with her. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t like her—I didn’t have the courage, and I didn’t want to break the spell. Both of us understood that we were inventing ourselves as we went along. The self I invented, the person I made an effort to be when I wasn’t being me, tried hard not to believe that love and murder were at opposite ends of the spectrum; tried hard not to think that one sucked energy and life from the other. I never put this into so many words but I didn’t have to. She picked up on it from the way I had of closing my eyes and keeping them closed for several seconds and breathing hard through my nose. She picked up on it from the lovemaking. The acts of sex, the orgasms, were the same, but that became the problem—they should have been like the groundswells of an ocean that grew deeper and longer as you approached a coast.
In a sense, knowing where we were going—we were going nowhere—freed us. Every touch, every glance was heavy with nostalgia for what might have been. If only. If. Ifs lined up as far as the eye could see. An army of ifs saluting every time we walked the riverbank, our hips touching, to watch from a spit of sand as the sunset reverberated across the clay-colored desert.
So we drifted, and then we drifted apart.
Friday was the first to put it into words. “If I’d known the choice was between loving you or killing him,” she said one night as we watched the sun sizzle into the horizon, “I would have…”
She turned to look at me. An infinitely sad smile disfigured her seaweed green eyes. She was too honest to lie. “Damn it, Lemuel, I would have killed him anyhow.” She took my hand and held the back of it to her breast. “I told you I’d moved on from where I couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“I guess I know that. I guess that’s the heart of the problem. In a funny way I suppose I’m jealous of Emilio Gava—your unfinished business with him was more important than your unfinished business with me.”
I tried not to think about it, tried not to logic it out, but I could no more control the lobe of my brain that agonized over these things than I could control my pleasure at watching her wade naked in the river in search of colored rocks. I had liked a lot of women in my time, but some twitch of the brain had kept me from loving them, or at least loving them enough to abandon everything for them. Now Gunn, the eternal drifter, had finally come across someone he could love, but he didn’t much like her.
I came at what that tough old king of Siam would have called the puzzlement from every point of the compass, but I somehow couldn’t get a handle on it. I couldn’t bring myself to like the part of her that was able to jam a pistol into the mouth of a bound man and see the terror in the back of his eyes and take pleasure from it and pull the trigger, no matter how justified the homicide.
It crossed my mind that I was using this as an excuse not to stay involved. Still, I couldn’t shake off the doubt that was growing in me like a tumor. As a woman, as a lover, Friday was more than I’d bargained for, more than I’d ever experienced. As a human being, she was less.
“So you’re a nasty piece of work, Gunn,” she announced out of the blue one evening after we’d made love.
“Why am I a nasty piece of work?”
“I’m trying, you’re not.”
I educated her, which is what you do with people you love. “It’s got to come without trying, my beautiful bruised lady of the lake. You can’t fake the emotions you think you ought to have.”
“You told me you loved me. I was lost in the desert—I wanted to be lost with you.”
“I do love you.”
“So what’s the matter?” When I didn’t answer, she shuddered. “You can’t get it out of your head, can you?”
I shook my head no.
“You’re like all the others—what you really hate is that I had sex with him.”
She still didn’t understand. “At my age,” I said, “you don’t date many virgins.”
What had to happen happened. One dazzling morning I backed the pickup up to the mobile home and hitched the two together and we headed back down the one-lane road toward civilization. From time to time I caught a glimpse of Friday, shirtless in the seat next to me, her right arm dangling lazily out the window, her head angled away from the sun, her breasts glistening with perspiration, staring at a horizon beyond the one I could see.
At one halt to fill the gas tank from the jerry cans, she disappeared into the Once in a Blue Moon for a moment. Later, when we were on the road again, she came up with the things we’d exchanged back in Nipton—the war-wound hunk of shrapnel I’d worn on my key chain, her St. Christopher medallion, tokens of an eternal love with a shorter half-life than we’d counted on. She even produced the beer cap compressed into a ball, a souvenir of the power of anger. She pulled the shoelace from one of her sneakers and strung the mementos together.
“So you’re getting off on being superior to me,” she said with sudden bitterness. “I hate that. I hate the part of you I don’t love.”
The desert, streaked with shimmering seams of yellow and red clay, seemed for an instant like the surface of a planet that wouldn’t sustain human life. With a tight-lipped smile playing on her Scott Fitzgerald lips, Friday tossed the tokens out the window. I thought vaguely of fixing my position and marking it on my army map and calling it in to the survey people so they could warn lovers to avoid this particular patch of quicksand.
It was dark by the time we made the outskirts of Albuquerque. I pulled into a trailer park for the night and whipped up some pasta al dente with tomato sauce and opened a Bordeaux that’d been bottled at a château, so the label informed us. We managed to kill that bottle and half of a second one and made believe we were more drunk than we were so we wouldn’t have to face the awkwardness of a last lovemaking. In the morning I heard water running in the shower and remembered the times I had squeezed in with her to lather down that long-stemmed body of hers, and I thought maybe I was making the mistake of my life, and then I thought I should give up thinking inasmuch as it is clearly dangerous for your mental health.
After a quick breakfast, I uncoupled the Once in a Blue Moon and drove Friday in the pickup to the Albuquerque airport and stood like a dumb waiter, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, while she bought a one-way ticket to a world away. I muttered something about the weather being too overcast to fly. I muttered something about the plane having to defy the pull of gravity to get off the ground. I muttered something about this being the thirteenth day of the month.
She caught her breath. “It’s really not complicated,” she whispered. “All you have to do is pipe-dream me into not going.”
When I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, she smiled one of those barefoot contessa smiles of hers. The traces of joy that had seeped into it
in the last weeks were gone. “Fuck you,” she said.
“Fuck me,” I agreed.
I kissed her good-bye in front of the metal detector and waved and nodded and waved again when she reached the other side. Then I picked up my mobile home and crawled back to Hatch like a dog with his tail tucked between his legs, sick to the gut knowing my best years were behind me. The late-night music on the car radio was a golden oldie—one of Kubra’s favorites from Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man, which reminded me of what I wasn’t. I lost track of time, I lost track of place. Savoring every heartache, I concentrated on the white ribbon that runs down the middle of the road hoping against hope it would lead me somewhere I hadn’t been.
That night I arranged some cushions on the roof of the Once in a Blue Moon and stretched out on them to see if I could hear what Kubra calls the music of the spheres originating in the endless expanse of universe over our heads.
All I heard was the empty awful silence of my life.
Gunn, you prick, what have you done?
ALSO BY ROBERT LITTELL
Fiction
Young Philby
The Stalin Epigram
Vicious Circle
Legends
The Company
Walking Back the Cat
The Visiting Professor
An Agent in Place
The Once and Future Spy
The Revolutionist
The Sisters
The Amateur
The Debriefing
Mother Russia
The October Circle
Sweet Reason
The Defection of A.J. Lewinter
Nonfiction
For the Future of Israel (with Shimon Peres)
About the Author
ROBERT LITTELL is the author of seventeen previous novels, most recently Young Philby, and the nonfiction book For the Future of Israel, written with Shimon Peres, president of Israel. He has been awarded both the English Gold Dagger and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his fiction. His novel The Company was a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a television miniseries. His novel Legends is currently being made into a television series by Twentieth Century Fox Television and will air on TNT. He makes his home in France.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An Imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
A NASTY PIECE OF WORK. Copyright © 2013 by Robert Littell. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Littell, Robert, 1935–
A nasty piece of work: A novel / Robert Littell.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-250-02145-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02280-6 (e-book)
1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Bail bond agents—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. New Mexico—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.I7827N37 2013
813'.54—dc23
2013023797
e-ISBN 9781250022806
First Edition: November 2013
A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel Page 20
