So here he was in Berkeley, and the Taurus coughed and cruised through the corridor of traffic lights to the western edge of the university. Weiss turned to the north, rolled closer to the professor’s address on Euclid Avenue. He became aware of a little hum of excitement under his skin. He was kind of looking forward to meeting this Freyberg. He’d been living with the professor’s sex fantasies for days now. He’d even acted them out once with a couple of Casey’s whores. He was curious—even eager—to find out what the man himself was like. Sissy had found a photo of him on one of his books. A narrow, handsome face, fiftyish, with a serious mouth and an intense gaze. Weiss imagined him as energetic, brilliant, and vital, in touch with his Natural Being. A little rakish, maybe, but wise to the ways of men and maids. And what with Julie and the Shadowman and the whores and his loneliness and so on, he felt he could use some wisdom on that subject right now.
I will remake you into your body. Only flesh, only sensation. The moment of desire! The moment of desire!
The Taurus turned onto Euclid.
Twenty-Nine
The house was a few miles north of the campus, up where the road began to curve hard and climb hard into the foothills. The lots here were nestled side by side, but private, each building hidden on its own quarter acre of dense foliage. In the warm of the afternoon, the birds were singing loudly in those leaves and the cicadas buzzing in them and woodpeckers were working at the telephone poles—and every minute or so all those noises were washed away by the whooshing of the cars that went busily rushing up and down the street.
Weiss parked at the curb. Looked up a hump of grass to the house. It was a two-story brown shingle, the lower floor obscured by a broad olive tree, the upper floor an airy cube of latticed windows rising above the tree’s crown. The big detective lumbered toward it over the slate walk. Him and his expectations
I will remake you into your body. The moment of desire!
It occurred to him that Marianne Brinks was waiting to hear from him and that she had her expectations, too, her hopes and dreams and expectations about the man who had been writing to her.
Now in the shade of the olive tree, he came to an open door. He knocked at the frame of the inner screen.
Freyberg appeared within. And for a second, Weiss was speechless.
The man was dying. The investigator could smell it wafting out into the summer air. Freyberg had probably never been particularly brilliant or vital or in touch with his Natural Being, but he was nothing now, eaten to a cancerous nothing. His flesh hung like a wrinkled overcoat on a skeleton two sizes too small. He was slumped and quivering, with a wide, frightened, querulous stare. Through the mesh of the screen, he seemed almost insubstantial. Shadowy and transparent as a specter, his own specter.
“Who is it?” he said. His voice was a death rattle.
“My name is Weiss. My secretary called you? Earlier?”
“Oh yes, the private detec—” It was all he could say. He started to cough, a thick, wet, strangling cough that seized his body like an inner fist. It made Weiss wince to watch it happen. He half expected blood to come gouting out of the man’s mouth. Finally Freyberg managed to stop, managed to rasp, “All right, well, come in.”
He turned away. Weiss pulled the screen open, stepped over the threshold. He followed Freyberg’s shadow through a murky foyer. With every step, the smell of his dying grew stronger. It was the smell of medication and closed windows and weeks without a visitor and the stagnant dark.
They came into the living room. Blankets spilling off the sofa to the floor. Crumpled tissues, some of them bloody, in a line of piles along the sofa’s skirt. A bedpan with lamplight reflecting off the piss in it. Medicine bottles, morphine flasks, an oxygen tank. And books everywhere—on tables, chairs, the floor—open and facedown most of them, some closed, some it seemed just flung away. The room had probably always been shabby. Just frayed armchairs facing the sofa over a frayed rug. But with the curtains pulled across the garden doors and the windows shuttered and the one lamp on, and with that smell of days, maybe weeks, of loneliness, Weiss found it suffocating.
“What a mess, what a mess,” said Freyberg. He looked around as if searching for a place Weiss could sit. Then he seemed to give up and sank down weakly on the sofa. He had to take hold of the armrest while he lowered himself to the cushions. And when he was down, the way he slumped and sagged, his corduroy pants and plaid shirt seemed to billow around a ghostly emptiness.
He made a feeble gesture toward the armchair across from him. Weiss removed a splayed copy of Don Juan from the seat, sat down.
“Cancer,” Freyberg said hoarsely. “If you’re wondering. Maybe being a detective you already detected it. Started in my eye, of all places. I thought it must be glaucoma…But they tell me it’s everywhere now. Lungs…” He waved a branchlike hand. “Bones.” He coughed, softly this time but still a deep, painful sound. “The last few days, I’ve been getting these spasms in my thigh—damned if I know what that’s about.”
Weiss, his hands clasped in his lap, inclined his head politely. He was listening—but he was also thinking about how awful this was, what a disappointment for poor Professor Brinks.
“I don’t suppose it matters, really,” Freyberg was saying. “I mean, if it’s everywhere, what difference does it make? But I just wonder. I mean, why my thigh? What would make it spasm like that? You think it’s in my brain now? You think that’s it? Or in some nerves or something?” He snatched a Kleenex from a box on the sofa, held it to his mouth. Hacked into it, wiped his lips with it. Weiss thought he saw a red blot on the sheet before Freyberg stuffed it into his pocket. “It’s strange, that’s all. Strange…”
With that, he subsided into abstraction, his chin almost to his chest, his gaze somewhere in the dim middle distance. Weiss, sympathetic, let him be. Still thinking of Brinks. Remembering how she’d worried that her e-mail seducer would turn out to be “married or gay or a woman or deformed or ten years old.” She hadn’t thought of this.
Freyberg breathed in, wheezing softly. Worked his lips like a toothless old man. He came out of his fugue and looked at Weiss as if he only now remembered he was there. “I’m sorry, I…What did you want to see me about? I assume it’s about my insurance claims. Your secretary wouldn’t say.”
“It’s not about insurance. I’ve been hired to find the author of some e-mails,” Weiss said.
This clearly took Freyberg by surprise. He narrowed his eyes at Weiss as if trying to make him out from a distance. “E-mails?”
“Yeah. They were written to a woman, a professor like you at the university here.”
And still, Freyberg stared at him in that quizzical way, his glistening lips parted. It went on so long that Weiss began to wonder if maybe the Agency had gotten it wrong. Maybe this sick, suffering man hadn’t written the letters at all; maybe he had no clue what Weiss was talking about.
But then Freyberg said—said as if amazed, “Marianne? Marianne Brinks hired you to find me?”
“You did write them, then?”
The withered creature gestured in helpless confusion. Looking this way and that way into the shadowy room as if for help, as if for someone who would explain what was going on. “Jesus. Does she know yet?” His lips started trembling. “Have you told her? Have you told her it was me?”
Weiss shook his head. “Not yet. No.”
The professor’s skeletal hand fluttered over his face. “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ. This is—” Then, when the hand had passed, there were the eyes, rheumy now, protruding, staring, scared. He tried to laugh the whole thing off. It made a dreadful sound. He settled for a damp smile, sickly pink. “Well, it’s not going to be pleasant when she hears.”
Weiss hesitated a moment. “You mean because you two had arguments at the university.”
“Arguments? She hates my guts. It’s like a bad comedy, isn’t it?” He wheezed. “Uptight feminist gets an e-mail from a stranger. She falls in love with him. And all the while it
’s the chauvinist male she despises, a man she practically hounded out of his job. Hollywood couldn’t do worse.”
He grabbed a fresh Kleenex and hocked some more blood into it. Weiss sat and watched, bemused. He’d been right about one thing, at least. This was a big-time romantic disaster in the making, there was no question about that. “So on your side, it was hate mail,” he said. “You were angry about losing your job, so you wrote Professor Brinks hate mail. That’s why you took the trouble to disguise yourself and block a trace.”
Freyberg, groaning out of his conniption, nodded wearily. “At first. It was hate mail, at first. But then she answered. I never expected that. And so I answered and…. Well, she’s not a stupid woman, after all. I could just never get her to listen to me before. She was always too busy shouting me down, rattling off her nonsense…And now she was listening. Not just listening…”
After a while, when he didn’t go on, Weiss shifted, uncertain. He scratched his head. “So…here are you on this exactly?”
“Hm?” said Freyberg. “Me?”
“Yeah, I mean, how do you feel about her? She says she wanted to meet with you. She says you refused and then stopped writing to her. Is that because you still hate her or what?”
“No. No. I don’t still hate her. Not the way she is in her letters, anyway.”
“You like her.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re afraid if she found out who it was writing to her, she’d just go back to hating you, the way she did before.”
Freyberg answered with an almost imperceptible shake of his head. “There’s that, yes. I guess.”
“Or was it just because you didn’t want her to see that you were sick? Is that it?”
Freyberg sat rigid, but his lips convulsed into a frown. “Well,” he answered miserably, “look at me. Look at me.”
Weiss did look—and Freyberg looked away. For a moment, it seemed he had gone abstract again, gone off into another abstract study of the death-scented dark. But Weiss soon noticed the way his head was quaking up and down, the way his shoulders were quaking. Then Freyberg made a noise, a low stuttering chuckle. It came from so deep inside him it sounded as if it were drifting up from the bowels of a cave.
His tears were more horrible than his laughter. They wracked him, but they never really fell. He shook and quaked and moaned and his face crumpled like a child’s and spittle gathered at the corners of his open mouth. But it was as if his illness had left him arid inside so that even his misery was so much dust. He sobbed painfully, his eyes dry.
Weiss was silent. The outburst seemed to go on a long time.
“Don’t tell her!” Freyberg cried out hoarsely at last. “Don’t let her come here. Don’t let her see me like this. Please!”
The professor buried his face in his hands. He made noises Weiss had never heard before. Weiss sat and watched. His heavy features were impassive except for that sad, weighty expression already written into his sagging cheeks, his deep-ringed eyes.
At last, exhausted, Freyberg raised his head. He wiped the snot and blood off his mouth with his palm. “Just for a little while,” he said. “Just keep her away for a little while. A few more weeks and it’ll all be over. Let her go on the way she is, picturing me in her head. Don’t let her see me like this, the way I am.”
Still Weiss didn’t move. Still Weiss only listened.
The professor reached a shivering hand out to him. “I don’t want to die unloved,” he whispered. “Dear Jesus Christ in heaven. I don’t want to die unloved.”
Thirty
That night, she slipped away and came to him again. Walked in without a word and pulled herself close against Bishop’s body. Her breath was hot in his mouth. The smell of her was all around him. One of his hands slipped down the back of her jeans and one ran across her shoulder and up into her soft hair. His feeling for her was fierce. He carried her into the bedroom without speaking.
It was one of his moments. One of those times that took him out of himself. They happened usually on his motorcycle, moving fast. Or dodging thunderheads in a small plane or dropping it on instruments through a storm at three hundred feet onto a sudden runway. They happened in the final seconds before a fistfight or during the minutes when he was inside a woman, in motion through a medium of indifferent sweetness. They happened, and the knot in his chest would loosen and the red atmosphere of fury through which he saw the world would turn clear for a little while.
But this was something else with her, a whole other level of mindlessness. If it had only been the elegance of her features or the photographs in her father’s house or the silken softness of her naked skin or the way she thrashed and cried almost as if she were dying into the action between them, it might’ve seemed to him just the usual business, the usual bridge of dumb pleasure between tedium and anxiety, or anxiety and pain. But it was more than that. He went inside her and inside her with such ferocious awareness that there was almost a kind of music to it, a kind of music even to his interior silence.
Just before the end, Bishop placed his palm against her cheek and looked down at her with what for him was rare seriousness. And when she closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against his palm, he felt it come up from the core of him into his chest, He felt a fullness in his chest, and the finish was bright and blinding.
He lay on his back and she lay curled against him. The sheets and covers were bunched at their feet. He looked down the white length of her. He kissed her hair.
“Is it on?” she asked after a little while.
“Yes,” he told her.
He had gotten the e-mail from Weiss that afternoon: Ketchum is in. The girl is up to you.
“What will I have to do?” asked Honey.
“Just get away, just come here. Your father will pick you up.”
She moved a slender hand across his skin. She toyed with the small hairs around his nipple. “And will you kill him, Cowboy?” she whispered. “Cobra, I mean. Will you?”
He smiled a little, shook his head. “I told you. He’ll be in prison forever. You’ll be fine.”
“But it’s not that. It’s not just that.”
He waited for her to go on, breathing the scent of her in deep, not just the scent of her perfume but the scent of her and of the sex with her.
“In my house, my father’s house, we go to church every Sunday,” she said quietly. “My sister Tara’s in the high school choir, my sister Zoe’s on the soccer team; she won first prize at the science fair last year. My mother works at a children’s hospital. She raises funds for them. She loves my father and he loves her. They tell each other all the time. They tell us, too, me and my sisters, and my sisters tell each other.”
Bishop laughed. “Jesus.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s a fucking nightmare. My father wants us all to be perfect all the time. His perfect little girls.”
“I’d say you’ve pretty well scotched that plan, don’t worry about it,” said Bishop.
He felt her smile, her lips against his flesh. “I feel like I’m in a coffin when I’m there. In a coffin buried alive. Or like…I read somewhere that in the old days, pregnant women sometimes used to give birth in their coffins after they were dead. They’d start rotting, you know, and the gases would build up and the baby would get pushed out into the coffin, even though the mother was dead. That’s what I feel like when I’m home. Like I’m a dead pregnant woman in a coffin. It’s like I’m dead only there’s something alive inside me. And the gases build up and build up until this thing that’s alive has gotta explode out of me. And I feel like when the living thing explodes, it’s gonna be, like, this…this crazy, angry monster. And it’s gonna rip its way out of the coffin and just tear everything apart, just kill everyone and rip them all to pieces with their fucking Sundays and their science fairs and I-love-yous all the time.”
Her head was on his chest, so Bishop couldn’t see her face. He was surprised when he felt a tear work its way through his chest h
air to touch his skin.
“You’re like that, too,” she told him after a minute.
“Like a dead pregnant woman in a coffin?” he said.
She sniffled and laughed. “Oh, fuck you, Cowboy.”
“I’m just trying to follow you here. It’s a complicated thought.”
“No. Well, yes. You’re like, you wanna explode like I do. You’re like, somebody told you you’re supposed to be the good guy, so you’re trying to be the good guy, but you just want to explode out of it and…and tear off and…tear things up and go wild. And you think you shouldn’t. Everybody tells you you shouldn’t, so you think it’s wrong, but you want to anyway.”
Bishop rested his cheek against her hair. He listened to her voice and breathed the scent of her. There was something to what she said, he guessed. He thought about Weiss. About the things Weiss wanted from him.
You wanna be a piece of shit your whole life? A man like you.
He thought about Weiss writing him that e-mail before he killed Mad Dog: Don’t cross the line.
“You don’t know me,” he told her.
“I know you,” said Honey, in his arms. “Because you’re like me. It’s like you’ve always got to choose between doing what’s right and being who you really are. But it’s not what’s right, Cowboy. It’s just what they say is right. It’s all about what they want, really, what they’re after in their lives. You know? I mean, my family goes to church and plays soccer and raises money for charity so everyone will say how wonderful they are and my father can make a lot of money at his business and win his fucking election. Well, I’m not gonna change who I am just so my father can win some fucking election.”
Bishop drew in that scent, that scent of her and of her sex, and considered what she said. And there really was something to it. People told you what was right and wrong, but everybody was running his own game somehow. Hell, Honey’s father could go to church all he wanted. When he needed to get his daughter back without the press finding out, he’d hired Bishop to seduce her. What would the minister have to say about that?
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