Hopscotch

Kendig was not certain what he might have done if Myerson had given him a kill order. He’d had training in the use of weapons and the tactics of unarmed combat but he’d never had to use them; last night’s football yardage in the police station had been the most violent escape of his life except for the night he’d taken a bullet in the head on the Czech border wire; and he’d done no one any real injury. The game was one of wits, not of brute strength or ruthlessness.

But now they meant to kill him. This was something he’d known all along but the full realization had been creeping up on him for a while that there was a point at which they were bound to succeed if he kept playing the game with them: time, numbers and all the probabilities were in their favor. A matter of ten minutes one way or the other this morning might have delivered him onto Mikhail Yaskov’s chopping block.

He visualized himself walking through a door and into the guns. It would happen sooner or later. And what then?

It distressed him in an almost comical way to realize how ordinary he was after all. Neither a pacifist nor a first-strike Neanderthal; merely a man who believed in self-defense. He knew, studying it as honestly as he was able, that if they tried to kill him he would try to kill them first.

A squall rattled the windows; it had become a cloudburst, the rain oiled across the panes and shattered in a haze on the surface of the street, cars spraying high turbulent wakes from the spitting puddles. A man sprinted out holding a tent of newspaper over his head; dodged a car and dashed across the street to catch the tall red double-decker that swayed around the corner.

He saw no point going out into that. He had no dry clothes to change into.

The place had a saloon bar and he was able to get a drink at his table; he ordered Dewar’s straight up. He finished the meal, enjoying it, and when the whiskey came he sipped it and took pleasure in the flavor. His appetite had been ravenous for weeks—the voracity of a condemned man eating his last meal—but now he was luxuriating in the subtler tastes and textures of things.

The Dewar’s was Carla Fleming’s brand. He’d been flashing images of her. He’d no passion to rejoin her; she hadn’t been or done anything extraordinary; it wasn’t infatuation. But she was a vivid bookmark, marking the place where he’d turned a page. That night in Birmingham he’d begun to look at things beyond self-pity and the escape from boredom. That was when he’d discovered the moral outcry of the book he was writing.

The joy she took from flying had triggered something in him. It hadn’t been superficial; it was the genuine joy with which she justified her existence and in some profound osmotic way it had communicated itself to him: the rediscovery of pleasure in the simple act of living.

The challenge of the game had begun as a desperate lunge against the blackness of his terrible e

But he wasn’t sure he needed the excuse any more. Being alive had become its own justification. That was what he’d re-learned: that was what the Dewar’s reminded him of.

He was thinking too clearly today, no longer overcharged by the surge of emotionalism that had carried him soaring through the heady weeks of writing and ru

Of course Chartermain or Yaskov might get to him first but most likely it would be Joe Cutter who’d end up facing Kendig over gunsights—literal or figurative; pull the trigger or order it pulled, it came down to the same thing. But Joe Cutter was no more a killer than Kendig was. What gnawed Kendig was that he’d put Cutter in an intolerable dilemma. He was making a murderer of Cutter.

The irony was inescapable. He’d set the avalanche in motion; it was too late to get out from under it; and Cutter would be buried with him through no fault of Cutter’s own.

He ordered another Dewar’s and thought the thing the whole way through. There was no calling it off, not in the usual sense; he couldn’t simply phone them and tell them where to pick up the manuscript and say he was stopping the game. They’d come after him anyway—they could never trust him not to start it up again.

But there was a way it might be done. It depended on a number of things but most of all it depended on Joe Cutter’s willingness to be fooled as a means of escaping from his dilemma.

He paid his bill and went out, carrying his umbrella and the empty school-book briefcase. The rain had moved on; the air was fresh and wet. He went up the street almost jauntily.

– 23 –

CUTTER CAME INTO the storeroom, ducking his head to clear the doorway; Ross looked up from the scribbled note in his hand—Better luck next time. M.K.—and tossed it disgustedly back into the empty carton; and Myerson shot a bitter look at Cutter. “Have you ever considered shining shoes as a trade, Joe? Maybe you ought to keep it in mind—maybe you’re equipped for it.”

Cutter said, “I grant you in the long parade of stupid mistakes we’ve made this one deserves a special float all to itself.”

Myerson pulled the cigarette from his mouth with a perceptible tremor of his plump fingers. “By God this is enough. I want the bastard dead, you hear me?” It was the first time he’d seen one of Kendig’s pranks firsthand and he was distressed.

“All right,” Cutter said. He was squinting as if the light was too strong. “It’s got to be done but let’s not rationalize it into one of God’s Commandments.”

Myerson stood unsteady, the muscles of his feet making constant corrections in his balance. Abruptly Cutter smiled at him. Ross thought it wasn’t because there was anything worth smiling about; it was just that Myerson was already discomfited and Cutter’s smile was designed to make him more so.

Kendig had pulled the storeroom apart with a vengeance—to make sure it didn’t escape anyone’s notice that he’d been there. The housekeeper had reported it to the desk at breakfast time and the manager had reported it to the Yard and Myerson had been in Merritt’s office at the time; Myerson had collected Ross and they’d left a message for Cutter and now here they were looking at the strewn soap cartons and the amiable little note from Kendig in the box where the manuscript must have been.

“Under our noses,” Myerson grouched. “Right here under our noses all the time.”

He was talking to Cutter but Cutter was listening with a lack of interest that he didn’t bother to conceal. He was pensive; Myerson walked around him in a circle, too agitated to stand still, but Cutter didn’t turn to keep facing him and Myerson had to come around again to see Cutter’s face. Myerson began to shout but Cutter cut across him: “Spare me the recriminations, all right?”

The skin on Myerson’s ruddy face tightened. “I suppose you’ve got a rabbit to pull out of the hat now, have you? Because if you don’t Joe, I have a very strong premonition that you’re likely to spend the rest of your career decoding signals from the Russian scientific base in Antarctica.” Myerson beamed wickedly but the quality of Cutter’s answering glance smothered the smile quickly from his face.

“There aren’t any rabbits,” Cutter said quietly. “There’s only a fabric of assumptions and suppositions and surmises. He left it here forty-eight hours and then he collected it. He could have left it here indefinitely but he collected it. That means something.”

“Does it? I’ll ask my Ouija board.”