Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“So am I. This could be a problem for us down the road.”

“I hope not,” Pace said. And he meant it.

Pace intended to talk to Kathy about the incident with Jill Hughes. He wanted her to know it happened and how he reacted. He wanted her to believe that he wouldn’t let a big story—he wouldn’t let anything ever again—jeopardize their relationship.

But he didn’t quite get around to mentioning it.

When Kathy knocked on the apartment door shortly after seven, he had been waiting and on edge for nearly an hour. When he heard her, his heart skipped.

“Why didn’t you use your key?” was all he could think to ask her. It was a dopey question from a man who felt dopey and dizzy and very much in love.

“I didn’t think it would be appropriate, at least not this time,” she answered.

“You look wonderful,” he said, feeling like a schoolboy seeing his first prom date.

“So do you,” she replied. “It feels like it’s been a long time.”

“It has.”

“Are you going to ask me in?”

“Is begging okay?”

“Begging is good.”

They embraced as though they wanted to meld their bodies, which, if the truth be known, was exactly what they intended to do. But they progressed as tentatively as two kids on a first date. He asked her about her family. She asked him about his job. It was stiff. But halfway through the first glass of wine, they made eye contact and began to laugh.

“Why don’t we have dessert?” Pace suggested.

“Just what I’m hungry for,” Kathy agreed.

Had they been younger, they might have ripped each other’s clothes off there in the quiet familiarity of his bedroom. But as adults, they relished the preparations. She took off her blouse. He helped her take off her bra and bent to caress her breasts with his mouth. She nuzzled his neck and undid his belt and his pants. She slid her hands beneath his briefs and teased him there, and he lifted her skirt and did the same for her.

“Oh, God, Steve, let’s go to bed,” she said.

The first time, it was quick for both of them. The second time, they made a project of it, exploring each other’s bodies with their hands and their mouths, relishing the renewal of desire. The second time, it was long, and it was loving, and when it was over, Pace laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

He caught his breath. “When I won the Pulitzer Prize, I remember I told somebody it was better than an orgasm. But now I think I overstated it.”

“You haven’t won a Pulitzer in ten years,” she reminded him. “Maybe you’ve forgotten how good it is.”

He put his mouth over the nipple of her right breast and caressed it with his tongue. He thrilled when he felt the little mound of flesh dimple and harden in response. “The Pulitzer never did that for me,” he said.

At Evelyn Bracken’s insistence, Harold Marshall called his doctor at home after dinner to report the dizzy spells. The doctor came over and examined Marshall but found nothing wrong. He ordered him to the hospital for tests first thing the next morning.

Ultimately, the tests told the doctors nothing. There was nothing apparent in the pictures from the CAT scan to explain the spells Marshall described. In the absence of proof of a problem, the doctors were left to their diagnostic instincts. Since they read newspapers and knew who they were treating, they believed their best clue lay in Marshall’s high blood-pressure readings. The problem had to be related to stress and should be treated as such. They prescribed medication and weekly checkups. They knew of nothing else to do.

Their error in diagnosis would be obvious soon enough, although in the aftermath of the next episode, they would examine the CAT scan again and agree the problem was too small to detect at the time. Doctors protecting other doctors? Perhaps. But the aneurysm that had formed in the wall of a blood vessel at the base of Harold Marshall’s brain—in the balance center—was tiny, indeed. The bouts of dizziness he experienced were caused by the aneurysm’s pressure against a major posterior communicating artery in a network of arteries known as the Circle of Willis.

Had the CAT scan been done two days later, the aneurysm would have been apparent to anyone trained to read the pictures. But it wasn’t apparent on this day.

And later, it would be too late.

Monday morning it was still raining.

It was the fourth straight day of the deluge, and the radio news people talked about flooding in the low-lying areas, especially along the George Washington Parkway. The traffic jams were enormous, and everyone shared the gray mood that rivaled the color of the sky. But Steve Pace showed up for work looking renewed.

He and Kathy spent the weekend doing anything that struck them of a moment. They took long walks in the warm rain. They rented a bunch of classic old movies and watched them on the VCR. They cooked exotic meals and drank great wines. They watched a thunderstorm from the roof of the apartment building, risking being struck by lightning to see the light-and-water show.

“Do you think if we drove out to the country, you could put on an airy dress and run through a field of wildflowers in slow motion?” Pace asked her as they stood on the roof.

“In slow motion?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty girls do it all the time in perfume commercials on television.”

“Those are tampon commercials,” she corrected.

“Then forget it,” he said. “Please, don’t let tampons interfere with this weekend.”

Kathy laughed in the breezy way Pace loved. “Don’t worry,” she assured him.

They even talked of marriage, and neither shrank from the thought. It was a breakthrough for Pace, as he thought it must be for Kathy. Hell, having an honest and open relationship was a breakthrough for him.

It was the greatest feeling in the world.

And he would have some time to enjoy it before his euphoria was shattered.

Avery Schaeffer came ambling by Pace’s desk. “You weren’t in the paper all weekend, you know,” he reminded the reporter. “I figure you didn’t work the requisite eighty hours last week.”

The words were harsh. But the light in Schaeffer’s eye gave him away.

“Yeah, I think I quit at sixty-seven or sixty-eight,” Pace replied.

Schaeffer slid into Jack Tarshis’s ever-vacant chair. “What do you have in mind for the week now that your extended vacation is over?”

“Extended vacation?”

“You took the whole weekend off?”

“I made some phone calls on Saturday and Sunday.”

“Produce anything?”

“No. Nobody called me back.”

“Then they don’t count for much.”

“And I was going to put in for overtime.”

“Forget it. You’ll be lucky if you get paid at all.”

“Then I guess I’d better get to work.” Pace got serious. “The major question is, where is Elliott Parkhall? I checked in with that crazy desk man at his building. The police are still standing guard over his apartment, and Parkhall hasn’t showed. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s left the country, or more likely, he’s dead.”

“There’s still the critical question of what caused the ConPac crash,” Schaeffer said.

“Absolutely,” Pace agreed. “Ken Sachs is first on my call list this morning.”

“They going to resume daily briefings?”

“No. I talked to Mitch Gabriel on Friday. He said since there’s a criminal matter involved, the agency more than likely won’t say anything more about its investigation. Whatever they find will go straight to the Justice Department.”