Reluctantly, I moved to it and started climbing down. At the bottom I craned my neck and stared up for just one yearning moment, a suitor exiled to the shadows beneath the balcony. Then I climbed onto my bike and pedaled off.
As I went I reviewed the kiss, relived it. An extraordinary kiss, everything a kiss should be. But I hadn't gone more than fifty feet when the memory of it grew clouded and ambiguous. Bumping over the coral gravel of the boatyard, my confused and thwarted loins ached worse than ever. Tendrils of pain climbed up toward my stomach, carrying with them an insidious question: Why had she kissed me just then?
It was an odd moment to embrace, after all. We'd been discussing blackmail, murder. Maggie had been not just tough-minded, but almost hard and cynical in her shrugging off of Mickey Veale's denials. And it had been her idea to send me out into the ocean in a tiny craft in the middle of the night. True, she volunteered to come along, pretended, even, to insist on it. But she must have known that I'd say no to that, that her clamoring to accompany me would only strengthen my resolve to go alone. Alone, where there was nowhere to hide and no witness to see, within easy reach of an enemy who'd just threatened me to my face.
I thought about the kiss, about the salt and raspberry flavor of Maggie's mouth, the texture of her flesh against me. If the kiss, and the promise of more to come, was, by some wild and appalling chance, part of a plan to set me up, I couldn't imagine how she might have done it better.
29
At home, I thought of napping but was far too wired even to imagine keeping my head down on the pillow.
So I cracked a bottle of old-growth zinfandel, laid out a plate of crackers and pate, and settled into the music room. If I couldn't stop the world with lovemaking, at least maybe I could keep it at bay behind thick walls and a heavy door with felt-lined edges.
I put on some Schubert—the string quintet that has two cellos. There is nothing more serene than Schubert; he never fails to calm me. Or he never had until that evening, when the gorgeous melodies and effortless transitions were wasted on me. Worse than wasted—in some crazy way they pissed me off. How could he bushwhack through such complexity and emerge without a scratch, in a triumph of grace and balance? There was something smug about it, something of the African explorer returning from the heart of darkness with his mustache trimmed and the crisp crease still centered in his khakis. So I yanked that disc and switched to Brahms, who oscillates between the poles of rage and heartbreak, with few punier or more resigned emotions in between.
The wine was good, the music was great, but still the time went slowly. Nine o'clock. Ten. I corked what was left of the zin and made some coffee. Then I thought of something that made my fingers itch. I went into the living room and moved a watercolor of a mangrove islet and opened up the wall safe behind it. My unfired pistol was the only thing in the little metal box suspended between two studs.
A cup of coffee in one hand, I laid the other across the gun. It was neither warm nor cold, but there was something clammy in the way it felt. I lifted it out into the light, felt its falsely reassuring weight. Stainless steel, it hadn't tarnished, though there was a handsome gray patina on the pebbled butt. The gun was loaded, and reloading had at one time been explained to me—something about a magazine that snapped into the handle. Then there was a sequence that you went through to get the trigger ready. My tongue poised at the corner of my mouth, I made a weak try at remembering, at tracing the logic of levers and springs. But my heart wasn't in it. I just didn't like guns; I never would. Life or death, I'd be the guy who froze and couldn't shoot, and felt like a sucker for not shooting.
I put the pistol back into the safe. Spun the lock and put the watercolor back in place. And felt, once again, a compelling need to wash my hands.
By now it was eleven. The wine in my veins was breaking down to sugar, the caffeine was kicking in, and I was getting very jumpy. I took a lukewarm shower and got ready to go out for the night.
——
I put on fresh shorts and a clean shirt and a cotton sweater. I unlocked my bike from the palm I always chain it to, wiped the tiny beads of condensation from the seat, and climbed aboard.
I'd gone three or four blocks when I began to suspect that I was being followed.
The suspicion took shape only gradually, deriving from an oddly constant spray of headlights that fanned out from some vague but nearly steady point behind me. Their glow stuck to the shrubs on either side of the street I rode on; when I turned, the lights raked almost audibly against white picket fences, as though a child were dragging a stick along the planks.
I swallowed, and kept pedaling, and told myself not to speed up, not to panic. I'd only gone a little distance, after all, and I was on a not- untraveled route that led downtown. Then again, it was nearly midnight on a Tuesday out of season. Houses were dark. Locusts were the loudest sound. Little was moving except for cats, scratching their flanks against warm curbstones.