Philip Kerr - The Shot

Tom decided to content himself with having discovered Ralston’s real name. As he was sure it was. Maybe he had seen John Rosselli on a list of movie credits, but Tom was certain he must have heard that name somewhere before. Maybe Mary would know who he was. He would ask her at breakfast. He finished his drink and drove home.

Mary was painting her nails while watching TV, but as soon as Tom came through the living room door she put down the Revlon bottle on the boomerang coffee table and, waving her hands in the air as if she had burned her fingers, went to turn off the TV. The room darkened a little as the light given off by the illuminated white frame around the screen of the Sylvania Halovision went out, prompting her to switch on the free-standing lamp.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ said Tom, heading toward the small wrought-iron bar that occupied the corner of the room.

‘S’okay, I wasn’t really watching it. It was just company.’

‘You’re not usually short of that,’ he said pointedly, and poured out some rum. ‘You want one?’

‘No, thanks, I’ve just taken a pill.’

‘Didn’t expect to find you in,’ he said, going into the kitchen to fetch some lime juice from the refrigerator.

Mary was a Democratic Party worker at the Miami office, and with the presidential elections less than two months away, she was often working late. Not that this was any different to how it always was. Mary liked to go out. Tom didn’t. Mary liked people, too. Tom didn’t. Mary was a Chigro — half Chinese, half Negro — born in Kingston, Jamaica. In her it was a spectacularly successful combination for she was as beautiful and athletic as she was intelligent and industrious. Tom had been introduced to her in Japan, while convalescing at the US Navy Hospital in Yokosaka, after his release from a North Korean POW camp. At the time Mary had been working as a hostess in an expensive Tokyo night-club. Just a few weeks later they had married. Seven years later they still got along pretty well, bound together by a powerful physical attraction and a mutual amorality, not to mention their politics.

‘I didn’t expect to be in myself,’ she explained. ‘I had a headache. I spent the whole day collating canvass reports.’

Tom found the lime juice and some ice and started back toward the living room, but checked himself in front of the cooker as he felt the heat coming off the Hotpoint oven. A quick glance inside revealed that it was empty.

‘You left the oven on,’ he called out to her.

‘For you,’ she said. ‘In case you were hungry. There’s a TV dinner on the worktop.’

‘Thanks.’

Tom drew the tripartite foil container — turkey, gravy, whipped sweet potatoes, and peas — out of the Swanson carton and sniffed it instinctively. Nobody in Florida had forgotten the great TV dinner scare of 1955 when solvent-contaminated chicken dinners had been dumped on the market at rock-bottom prices, but this one smelled okay, and anyway, Tom was hungry. Besides, he liked TV dinners. They reminded him of being in the army. He always liked army chow. He slid the tray into the oven and went back into the sitting room to find Mary reading the novel Rosselli had given him.

‘The final words of advice,’ she said, reading aloud, ‘given to Lord Templeton by the Minister of State for the Colonies had been, “When in any doubt produce a simile from the cricket field.” His Excellency remembered that advice when he prepared the speech with which he was to announce the new constitution.’ Mary smiled. ‘I wouldn’t have thought this was your kind of thing at all.’

‘No? Well check out the title page.’ Tom poured the lime juice into the iced rum and toasted her discovery of the five one-hundred-dollar bills.

‘It beats an author signature, I guess,’ said Mary.

Tom dropped down on the two-piece pink sofa that occupied the centre of the cherrywood floor. A couple of rattan chairs, some potted palms, and a blond-wood hi-fi console made up the rest of the living room furniture. Round the corner of the L-shaped room was the popsicle table and plastic shell chairs where, sometimes, they ate a meal together. The taste, impeccably modern, was all Mary’s. Tom preferred antiques, which Mary hated as a Philistine disliked outsiders.

‘Some guy wants me to do a feasibility study. For a contract on Castro.’

‘A feasibility study?’

‘Those are the words he used.’

‘Who is this guy? Vance Packard?’ Mary shook her head and sat down beside him. ‘And what’s he think he’s going to do when Castro is dead? Check the Nielsen figures?’

Tom hadn’t heard of any of those guys, but he let her talk for a moment before answering the one question he could.

‘He calls himself Ralston. But his real name is Rosselli, John Rosselli.’ Tom sipped some of his drink, adding by way of explanation, ‘I followed him to his hotel and got the low-down from the parking attendant.’

‘John Rosselli?’ Mary frowned.

‘You heard of him?’

‘It seems like I ought to have,’ she said. ‘But don’t ask me from where.’

‘Pity. I was depending on that memory of yours.’ One of the qualities that made Mary such an excellent party-worker was that she possessed a tremendous capacity for remembering names, faces, facts, and figures. Tom was in awe of her memory. She knew things he had forgotten about himself. ‘Is it a bad headache?’

‘Bad enough. I took some pain killers.’

‘You’ve been working too hard.’ Tom began to rub the back of her neck but she was too preoccupied by what he had told her to find much comfort in it.

‘It’s not that.’

‘What then?’

‘Every night I go to bed I wonder if any of us are going to be here in the morning,’ she said. ‘With all the bombs and missiles, the world is dangerous enough as it is. I mean, what would the Russians do if Castro was killed?’

‘We just have to try and live our lives as if none of that matters’ said Tom.

‘I suppose so.’

Tom put his arms around Mary and hugged her tight, enjoying the scent of her silky hair and her cool body. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘But you’re going to give yourself an ulcer if you start worrying if we’re going to be here in the morning and stuff like that. Don’t worry about it. Life’s complicated enough. Just accept that I’ll be here and leave it at that.’

‘Okay,’ said Mary. She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. She sensed he wanted more but held herself back a little.

They were both silent for a minute. Then Tom said: ‘I guess I’d better go and see Alex.’

Mary grimaced. She didn’t much care for Alex, nor the interest he took in their lives. He was always turning up, uninvited, unannounced, as if he was checking up on them or something. She supposed it came with the territory — who Alex was and what he did — but that didn’t make it any better. About the only thing she appreciated was that he had never tried to make a pass at her. Like most of the other guys she met. Quite a few of whom she even slept with.

‘You know? I think I remembered,’ she said. ‘I think there’s a Rosselli who is in the mob.’

Tom thought for a moment about what Rosselli had actually said: that he worked for the government. For the CIA. Absently, he said, ‘I wonder if it’s the same guy.’

‘In your line of work, honey, I doubt that it’s any Rosselli selling vacuum cleaners.’

Tom smiled at that. But there were times when he thought Mary’s mouth, beautiful though it was, might be a little too smart for her own good.

Alex Goldman was an old friend of Tom’s from way back, who now worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the Miami headquarters on Biscayne Boulevard, in northwest Miami. Like most of the agents working there, Alex was concerned with the fight against communism. But he and Tom shared information on a regular basis, about a whole host of subjects that was not necessarily anything to do with commies. So when Tom had eaten his turkey dinner he went out again. Usually, Alex was not a difficult man to find at eleven o’clock at night. Just about every evening when he was in town he could be found in Zissen’s Bowery on North Miami Avenue, only a few blocks away from the FBI building.