Brian Garfield: Hopscotch

“Does it? I’ll ask my Ouija board.”

“It means one of two things,” Cutter went on. “Either he wants to mail out another chapter or he’s planning to leave the country.”

“Give that man a cigar.”

“Am I still running this show?”

Myerson dropped his cigarette and ground it out under the sole of his shoe. “Hell Joe, of course you are.”

“Then I want more men. I want to double the cover on every airplane and boat that leaves this island. And I want to double up on Follett’s idea, covering the post offices.”

“Makes sense,” Myerson conceded. He turned a final distasteful glance on the jumbled array of overturned cartons, fished Kendig’s note out of the empty one and dropped it gingerly into ah envelope, glanced bleakly at Ross, scowled again at Cutter and went.

Ross said, “I have a feeling it’s the post office idea that’s going to do the trick. I don’t mean anything personal, Joe.”

“I misjudged Follett. It was a brilliant idea. Don’t apologize.”

The Yard technicians arrived. Cutter and Ross relinquished the basement to them and went upstairs through the lobby to the car. Ross got behind the wheel. “Where to?”

“Chartermain’s office.”

Ross put it in gear and vectored into the traffic. The sun was a pale disk in the haze. Last night he’d dropped by Cutter’s room to ask him something. Cutter had been reading the Bible. Ross had picked it up and glanced at the open pages. Deuteronomy. Something had leaped out at him. I have set before thee life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life.

Suspicion wormed in him. “Sometimes I get the feeling Kendig thinks if he just charges head-on hard enough at death it’ll get out of his way.”

Cutter said, “There’s a classic rat-psychology experiment where they send a hungry rat down a tunnel. There’s food at the far end of the tunnel. But to get to the food the rat has to walk across an electric grid. The shock current is increased as he gets closer to the food. They keep testing the rat, increasing the current. The rat has to decide for himself how hungry he is-whether the reward’s worth the pain.”

Ross pulled up in the jammed lane of traffic. He looked straight at Cutter. “Who are you talking about, Joe-you or Kendig?”

“When I was a little kid there was a fight on my street. A couple of kids a little older than me-maybe they were eight or nine. I don’t know what the fight was about. One of them hit the other one in the nose and the kid fell down flat on his back. He was a little dazed-I mean an eight-year-old can’t hit very hard. But the kid died. They told us later if we’d turned him over on his side he’d have been fine. But the blood ran back in his throat, he drew it into his lungs and strangled on it.”

“Christ.”

“It wasn’t anybody’s fault. But sometimes you get the feeling it’s all been written down in the book long before you were born,” Cutter said. “I think I was talking about Kendig before. If there’s food in sight you can’t starve to death. He’ll cross the grid sooner or later, even though he knows the shock current’s too high to survive. But he’s got no choice. It’s an inevitable accident-like the kid dying because the rest of us were too ignorant to turn him over.”

Ross said, “You could duck it. You could tell Myerson to pull you off the job.”

“Wouldn’t help. I’m still the most likely one to catch him. If it’s not me it might be Yaskov and we don’t want to think about what Yaskov’s people would do to him before he died.”

“I’m sorry, Joe. But he brought it on himself, didn’t he?”

“Sure he did. Just like the rat in the tunnel.”

He had pads in his cheeks again; he dyed his hair jet black, trimmed and blackened the eyebrows, made himself up swarthy with a pencil mustache and a dark mole on the left cheek.

It was October eighteenth, Friday evening; the West London Terminal was crowded with week-enders on their way to and from the airports. His cursory study fixed at least five stakeouts holding up walls, reading newspapers on benches and standing in queues at the airline counters. He passed a pair of them close enough to hear their Russian dialogue; they were deciding whether the bald man at BOAC check-in was their quarry in disguise. They stood face to face so that between them they had a 360-degree field of view. Their eyes slid across Kendig and moved right on as if he weren’t there. Disguise was only minimally a matter of makeup; attitude was at least half of it and Kendig moved at a hunched shuffle like a mongrel dog who’d begun life by making friendly overtures and been kicked hard and spent the rest of his lifetime being reprimanded for violations he didn’t comprehend. His expression in repose was a cowardly half-smile and he was ready at all times to burst into apologies. He stopped as if uncertain of his bearings and snatched off his hat and clutched it in both hands, looking around anxiously-a man who’d come here to meet his nephew and didn’t see the lad anywhere.

Ready to cringe at the slightest hint of reproof he sized up the stakeouts. He wouldn’t get a crack at anyone nearly as ideal as Dwight Liddell had been but whoever he picked had to be in the right physical ball park. They’d be checking the passport descriptions closely these days. He’d already drawn blanks at Waterloo and Euston Stations; both of them were crawling with hunters but none had been suitable. One trouble was that most of them were far too young.

Outside, night had come right down. He’d spent forty minutes in the reserved car park a block away until a stewardess had driven her own car into the lot, locked it up and walked to the terminal. He’d come in five minutes behind her. Now he saw her come out of the ladies’ loo dropping a crumpled lipstick-smeared tissue into the open maw of her handbag. She carried a smart shoulder bag as well, not an airline job but a chic leather affair; but the handbag was not shoulder-strapped and that was why he’d picked her.

He had his awed attention on a big-breasted tourist in an outrageous skintight outfit; he wasn’t looking where he was going and that was why he banged into the stewardess. Her open handbag fell tumbling, spewing its contents.

Kendig gushed profusely with Italian-accented apologies; he dropped in anguished sorrow to his knees to help her pick up wallet and hairpins and tissues and lipstick and a dozen other possessions. He flooded her with obsequious self-laceration and the girl impatiently checked to make sure he hadn’t pilfered money out of her wallet; she stuffed everything irritably into the handbag, brushed off his axious flow of apologies with a quick, “It’s quite all right, there’s no harm done,” and strode away clicking, hips undulating because she knew people were watching.

Kendig shuffled away, dropping the car keys into his pocket. She wouldn’t miss them right away. If she did she wouldn’t worry about it until she returned to London.

He moved around the place like a park pigeon, still searching for his nephew. One of the stakeouts was tipped on one shoulder against the wall, bored, sipping a Coke out of a paper cup. Kendig logged the man point by point: five-eleven, 170 pounds, dark hair, rectangular face.

He wasn’t going to do much better than this one.

The American gave him a brief uninterested glance. Kendig spoke softly through an agonized smile.

“You’ll save a lot of lives if you stand still and listen. I’ve put a bomb in this building. Don’t show your surprise. Take a sip of your Coke.”

The American’s eyes went bright like an animal at night pinioned by headlight beams. “You’re Kendig.” He drank; and held Kendig’s stare over the rim of the cup.