The Judas Goat

by Robert B. Parker

  Hawk looked like he was going to puke. I gave her a glass of wine. “Drink some,” I said. “And get it back together. Take your time. We got lots of time. When you’re ready, we’ll talk a little. Okay?”

  Kathie nodded.

  Hawk said, “You remember she blew up some guy’s wife and kids? You remember she trying to set you up in the London Zoo? You remember she gonna stand around while her boyfriend wasted you in Copenhagen? You remember what she is?”

  “I’m not worrying about what she is,” I said. “I’m worrying about what I am.”

  “Gonna get you killed someday, babe.”

  “We’ll do it my way, Hawk.”

  “You paying the money, babe, you can pick the music.” He put his shirt back on.

  We ate the rest of the late night special in silence. “Okay, Kathie. Is that your name?”

  “It is one of them.”

  “Well, I’m used to thinking of you as Kathie so I’ll stick with it.”

  She nodded. Her eyes were red but dry. She slumped as she sat.

  “Tell me about you and your group, Kathie.”

  “I should tell you nothing.”

  “Why? Who do you owe? Who is there to be loyal to?” She looked at her lap.

  “Tell me about you and your group.”

  “It is Paul’s group.”

  “What is it for?”

  “It is for keeping Africa white.” Hawk snorted.

  “Keeping,” I said.

  “Keeping the control in white hands. Keeping the blacks from destroying what white civilization had made of Africa.” She wouldn’t look at Hawk.

  “And how was blowing up some people in a London restaurant going to do that?”

  “The British were wrong on Rhodesia and wrong on South Africa. It was punishment.”

  Hawk had stood and gone to the window. He was whistling “Saint James Infirmary Blues” through his teeth as he stood looking down into the street.

  “What were you doing in England?”

  “Organizing the English unit. Paul sent me.”

  “Any connection with IRA?”

  “No.”

  “Try?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re only concerned with their own hatreds,” I said. “Are there many more left in England of your unit?”

  “No. You… you overcame us all.”

  “Gonna overcome all the rest of you too,” Hawk said from the window.

  Kathie looked blank.

  “What’s shaking in Copenhagen?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Why did you go to Denmark when you left London?”

  “Paul was there.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “He lives there sometimes. He lives many places and that’s one of them.”

  “The apartment on Vester Søgade?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when Hawk busted that up you and he came here.”

  “Yes. ”The address on the Kalverstraat?“

  “Yes.”

  “And you spotted us watching?”

  “Paul did. He is very careful.” I looked at Hawk. Hawk said, “He pretty good too. I never saw him.”

  “And?”

  “And he called me on the telephone and made me stay inside. Then he watched you while you watched me. When you left for the night he came in.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “And you moved out of that place?”

  “Yes, to Paul’s apartment.”

  “And today while we were staking out the empty place on the Kalverstraat, Paul brought you and the two stiffs here.”

  “Yes, Milo and Antone. They thought we were coming to ambush you. I did too.”

  “And when you got in here Paul burned Milo and Antone?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Paul killed the two men.”

  “Paul and a man named Zachary. Paul said it was time for a sacrifice. Then he bound me and gagged me and left me for you. He said he was sorry.”

  “Where’s the apartment?”

  “It doesn’t matter. They won’t be there.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “It’s on the Prinsengracht.” She told us the number. I looked at Hawk. He nodded, slipped into the shotgun rig, put on his jacket and went out. Hawk needed a shotgun less than most. “What are Paul’s plans now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know something. Until last night you were his darling.” Her eyes filled. “And now you aren’t. You should start getting used to that.” She nodded. “So being as you were his darling up till today, didn’t he tell you anything about his plans?”

  “He told no one. When he was ready we were told what to do, but not before.”

  “So you didn’t know what was coming down tomorrow?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You didn’t even know what was going to be done tomorrow.”

  “That is right.”

  “And you don’t think he’s at the place on Prinsengracht?”

  “No. No one will be there when the black man gets there.”

  “His name is Hawk,” I said. She nodded. “If the police penetrated your organization, or if they raided the apartment on Prinsengracht, where would the survivors meet?”

  “We have a calling system. Each person has two people to call.”

  “Who were you supposed to call?”

  “Milo and Antone.”

  “Balls.”

  “I cannot help you.”

  “Maybe you can’t,” I said. Maybe I’d used her up. And maybe she couldn’t.

  20

  Hawk was back in less than an hour. When he came in he shook his head. “Gone?” I said. “

  Uh huh.“

  “Clues?” Hawk said, “Clues?”

  “You know,” I said, “like an airplane schedule with a flight to Beirut underlined. A hotel confirmation slip from the Paris Hilton. Some tourist brochures from Orange County, California. A tinkling piano in the next apartment. Clues.”

  “No clues, man.”

  “Anyone see them leave?”

  “Nope.”

  “So the only thing we know for sure is he isn’t in his place on Prinsengracht, and he isn’t here in this room.”

  “He wasn’t when I looked. She tell you anything?”

  “Everything she knows.”

  “Maybe you believe that, babe. I don’t.”

  “We’ve been trying. You want some more wine? I ordered some while you were gone.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” I poured some for Hawk and some for Kathie. “Okay, kid,” I said to Kathie. “He’s gone and all we’ve got is you. Where might he be?”

  “He could be anywhere,” she said. Her face was a little flushed. She’d had a lot of wine. “He can go anywhere in the world.”

  “Phony passport?”

  “Yes. I don’t know how many. Many.” Hawk had taken off his coat and hung the shotgun rig from the corner of a chair. He was leaning far back with his Frye boots crossed on the bureau and the glass of red wine balanced on his chest. His eyes almost closed. “Where would the places be that he wouldn’t go?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I going too fast for you, sugar? Watch my lips close. Where would he not go?” Kathie drank some wine. She looked at Hawk the way sparrows are supposed to look at tree snakes. It was a look of fearful fascination. “I don’t know.”

  “She don’t know,” Hawk said to me. “You do take up with some winners, babe.”

  “What the hell are you going to do, Hawk, keep eliminating the places he wouldn’t go until there’s only one left?”

  “You got a better idea, babe?”

  “No. Where would he be least likely to go, Kathie?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “Think a little. Would he go to Russia?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Red China?”

  “No, no. No Communist cou
ntry.” Hawk made a gesture of triumph with his open palms turned up. “See, babe, eliminate half the world just like that.

  “Swell,” I said. “This sounds like an old Abbott and Costello routine.”

  Hawk said, “You know a better game?”

  Kathie said, “Have they had the Olympics yet?” Hawk and I looked at her. “The Olympic games?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re on now.”

  “Last year he sent away for tickets to the Olympic games. Where are they being held?”

  Hawk and I said, “In Montreal,” at the same time.

  Kathie drank some wine and made a small giggle and said, “Well, that’s probably where he went, then.”

  I said, “Why in hell didn’t you tell us?”

  “I didn’t think of it. I don’t know about sports. I didn’t even know when they were being held or where. I just know Paul had tickets for them.”

  Hawk said, “It’s pretty much on the way home anyway, man.”

  “There’s a restaurant in Montreal called Bacco’s that you’re going to like,” I said.

  “What we do with fancy pants here?” Hawk said.

  “Please don’t be dirty.”

  The white linen dress was very simple, square-necked and straight-lined. She had a thick silver chain around her neck and white sling high-heeled shoes with no stockings. Her wrists and ankles were red and marked from the ropes. Her mouth was red and her eyes were puffy and red. Her hair was matted and tangled from her long struggle on the bed.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “she’s all we have.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said. Her voice was small when she said it. Quite different from the one she’d used when she said she’d kill us when she could. Didn’t mean she’d changed her mind. But it didn’t mean she hadn’t. I figured between us we could keep her from killing us.

  “She change sides awful fast,” Hawk said.

  “They got changed on her,” I said. “We’ll take her. She may be helpful.”

  “She may stick something in us when we ain’t looking too.”

  “One of us will always look,” I said. “She knows this Zachary. We don’t. If he’s in on this he might be there. Maybe others. She’s the only thing connected to Paul we have. We’ll keep her.”

  Hawk shrugged and drank some wine.

  “In the morning we’ll check out and get the first flight we can to Montreal.”

  “What about the two stiffs?”

  “We’ll ditch them in the morning.”

  “Hope they don’t start to stink before then.”

  “We can’t ditch them before that. The cops will be all over the place. We’ll never get out of here. What time is it?”

  “It’s three-thirty.”

  “About nine-thirty in Boston. Too late to call Jason Carroll. I only got his office number anyway. ”

  “Who Jason Carroll?”

  “Dixon’s lawyer, He’s sort of in charge of this thing. I’ll feel better when I’ve talked with Dixon about our plans.”

  “Maybe your wallet feel better too.”

  “No, I think this one will be on me. But Dixon’s got a right to know what’s going on.”

  “And I got a right to sleep. Who she sleep with?”

  “I’ll put a mattress off the floor and she can sleep on the box spring.”

  “She look disappointed. I think she had another plan.”

  Kathie said, “May I take a bath?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  I dragged the mattress off the bed closest to the door, and stretched it out across the doorway. Kathie went into the bathroom and closed the door. The lock snicked into place. I could hear the water running in the tub.

  Hawk stripped to his shorts and got into bed. He took the shotgun under the covers with him. I lay down on the mattress with my pants still on. I put my gun under the pillow. It made a lump, but not as big a lump as it would make in my body if Kathie got it in the night. The lights were out and just a thin line of light came under the bathroom door. As I lay in the dark I began to smell, only vaguely so far, a smell I’d smelled before. It was the smell of bodies that had been dead too long. It would have been a lot worse without air conditioning. It wouldn’t get better before morning.

  Tired as I was, I didn’t sleep until Kathie came out of the bathroom and stepped across me and went to bed on the box spring of the near bed.

  21

  In the morning after we checked out, Hawk stole a laundry hamper from a utility closet whose lock I picked. We put the two bodies in the hamper, covered them with dirty linen, put the hamper in an empty elevator and sent the elevator to the top floor. We did all this while keeping a close eye on Kathie, who didn’t show any sign of wanting to bolt. Or kill us. She seemed to want to stay with us as badly as we wanted her. Or I wanted, her. I think Hawk would have dropped her in a canal if he’d been on his own.

  We got a bus from the KLM terminal in Museumplein and caught a KLM flight from Schiphol to London at nine-fifty-five, connecting with an Air Canada flight to Montreal at noon. At one-fifteen London time I was sitting on the outside seat with Kathie next to me and Hawk on the window, drinking a Labatt 50 ale and waiting for the meal to be served. Six hours later, early afternoon Montreal time, we set down in Canada, changed money, collected luggage, and by three o’clock we were standing in line at the Olympic housing office in Place Ville Marie waiting to get lodging. By four-fifteen we had gotten to the man at the desk, and by quarter of six we were in a rented Ford heading out Boulevard St. Laurent for an address near Boulevard Henri Bourassa. I felt like I had gone fifteen rounds with Dino the Boxing Rhinoceros. Even Hawk looked a little tired, and Kathie seemed to be asleep in the back seat of the car.

  The address was one half of a duplex on a side street a block from Henri Bourassa Boulevard. The name was Boucher. The husband spoke English, the wife and daughter only French. They were going to their summer home on a lake and were picking up two weeks’ worth of rent leasing their home to Olympic visitors. I gave them the voucher from the Olympic housing office. They smiled and showed us where things were. The wife spoke to Kathie in French, showing her the laundry and where the cookware was kept. Kathie looked blank. Hawk answered her in very polite French.

  When they had gone and left us the key I said to Hawk, “Where’d you come up with the French?”

  “I done some time in the Foreign Legion, babe, when things was sorta mean in Boston. You dig?”

  “Hawk, you amaze me. Vietnam?”

  “Yeah, and Algeria, all of that.”

  “Beau Geste,” I said.

  “The lady she think Kathie your wife,” Hawk said. He smiled very wide. “I told her she your daughter and she don’t know much about cooking and things.”

  “I told the man we brought you along to stand outside in a jockey suit and hold horses.”

  “Ah’m powerful good at sittin‘ on a bale of cotton and singin’ `Old Black Joe‘ too, bawse.”

  Kathie sat at the counter in the small kitchen and watched us without understanding.

  The house was small and lovingly done. The kitchen was pine-paneled and the cabinets were new. The adjoining dining room had an antique table and on the wall a pair of antlers, obviously home-shot. The living room had little furniture and a worn rug. Everything was clean and careful. In one corner was an old television with the screen outlined in white, giving the illusion of greater screen size. There were three small bedrooms upstairs, and a bath. One of the bedrooms was obviously a room for boys, with twin beds, two bureaus and a host of wildlife pictures and stuffed animals. The bathroom was pink.

  It was a house that its owners loved. It made me ill at ease to be here with Hawk and Kathie. We had no business in a house like this.

  Hawk went out and bought some beer and wine and cheese and French bread, and we ate and drank in near silence. After supper Kathie went up to one of the small bedrooms, filled with dolls and dust ruffles, and went to bed, with her clothes
on. She still wore the white linen dress. It was getting pretty wrinkled but there wasn’t a change of clothes. Hawk and I watched some of the Olympic action on CBC. We were on the wrong side of the mountain to get U.S. stations and thus most of the coverage focused on Canadians, not many of whom were in medal contention.

  We finished up the beer and wine and went to bed before eleven o’clock, exhausted from traveling and silent and out of place in the quiet suburb among artifacts of family.

  I slept in the boys’ room, Hawk in the master bedroom. There were early bird sounds but the room was still dark when I woke up and saw Kathie standing at the foot of the bed. The door was closed behind her. She turned the light on. Her breath in the silence was short and heavy. She wore no clothes. She was the kind of woman who should take her clothes off when she can. She looked best without them; the proportions were better than they looked dressed. She did not seem to be carrying a concealed weapon. I was naked and on top of the covers in the warm summer. It embarrassed me. I slid under the sheet until I was covered from the waist down and rolled on to my back.

  I said, “Hard to sleep these hot nights, isn’t it?”

  She walked across the room and dropped to her knees beside the bed and settled back with her buttocks resting on her heels.

  “Maybe a little warm milk,” I said.

  She took my left hand where it was resting on my chest and pulled it over to her and held it between her breasts. “Sometimes counting. sheep helps,” I said. My voice was getting a little hoarse.

  Her breath was very short, as if she’d been sprinting, and the place between her breasts was damp with sweat. She said, “Do with me what you will.”

  “Wasn’t that the title of a book?” I said.

  “I’ll do anything,” she said, “You may have me. I’ll be your slave. Anything.” She bent over, keeping my hand between her breasts and began to kiss me on the chest. Her hair smelled strongly of shampoo and her body of soap. She must have bathed before she came in.

  “I’m not into slaves, Kath,” I said.

  Her kisses were moving down over my stomach. I felt like a pubescent billy goat.

  “Kathie,” I said. “I barely know you. I mean I thought we were just friends.”

  She kept kissing. I sat up in bed and pulled my hand away from her sternum. She slid onto the bed as I made room, her whole body insinuated against me, her left hand running along my back.