John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Fuck ’er,” Royce said. “Cash the fucking check and the fuck with ’er.”

Craine gave him a look. Royce shrugged.

“It’s illogical,” Meakins said. Voice like a detective. “Somebody’s trying to kill her, so she goes out on the streets and starts tailing somebody. You’d think she’d stay in bed, or maybe under it. It’s—” He paused, hunting for the word. “Fishy.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking hard.

“That’s true, Craine,” Hannah said.

Craine rolled his eyes up, clear behind the lids, a gesture that, though overdone, meant, “Lord send us patience.” He was unaware that he’d done that act for them many, many times.

“You got it solved then?” Meakins said. He stood waiting, fingers interlocked to hold his belly up.

“Not solved,” Craine said. “But you know yourself there’s only a few possibilities, case like this.” They were all waiting now. Even Royce was watching with the corner of his lip raised in something remotely like interest. There was a time, Craine thought, when he’d have savored that, would have rubbed his hands, metaphorically speaking, and grinned at the wall— the cheaply framed licenses, the framed apparition of himself at twenty-four in his police uniform, eager young man wearing crew cut and dimples; a time he would have gloated and inkled them slyly toward the obvious. But his ability to see to the end of things — his talent, drunk or sober, for catching by logic or a flash of intuition what would be mysterious for days to a lesser private eye — no longer gave Craine pleasure. There are no new stories (he was thinking of Ira Katz), that was the dusty, gray bone of the matter — no startling discoveries to be made about the character of man. Age on age, dead civilization on dead civilization, from now till the witlessly spiralling universe vanished in thin air, there was only plodding labor, dull problem solving, the profession (not even a duty, to Craine) of determining which story it was this time.

He opened his pouch and with a cracked, dry finger began scraping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. He said — sourly, since they’d come to it themselves if you gave them two, three weeks to think—“We know we’re dealing with some woman, or else some peculiar young man, who’s a liar — a person who may and then again may not have anything to do with that clipping they sent — whole thing may be a plot — and for that matter may and then again may not be watching for a sign from this window. They don’t need to, after all. It’s no matter for suspense. I’ve got the check.” He shook his head. “I’m in the business.”

Meakins moved nearer, bent forward, and touched Craine’s desk with his fingertips. “You think it might be a man , Craine?” His eyes were wide, indignant.

“Mere possibility. Anyone can put on a wig and go buy a cashier’s check.”

“That’s true,” Hannah said. Her chin drew inward and her eyebrows rose.

Meakins said, snatching up Craine’s line of thought, “Maybe it’s two people working in cahoots.”

“Maybe it’s a whole invasion force of intergalactic aliens,” Craine said, and leered.

Royce grinned, showing his teeth. Hannah and Meakins were offended.

When Craine said no more — trying to get hold of some thought that had escaped him, had flared and vanished, some alarming recognition — Meakins asked, “So what are we gonna do, Craine? Put Hannah on it?”

Craine considered the question, or pretended to. Something was at work on him, quiet as a shark, down below the floor of his drunkenness — a fearful and attractive, maybe lurid emotion of the sort he’d sometimes felt when he was forced to pass a night in some decaying, gray-balustered old hotel on the river — no, more specific: down in Cairo it was, where he’d done guarding and patrolling at the time of the troubles. He tried to sink deeper into the feeling, get hold of it. The wide Mississippi lay glinting, brown, placid on the surface, no sound but the whippoorwills now, at dusk — day and night inextricable as the water and mud of the marsh from which the gloomy, antique city rose. It was the hour of the wolf, as astrologers say; the hour Gerald Craine had been born in.

The image was strong, as firm in his mind as a photograph; the swollen river — floodtime was approaching — dark leafless trees on the farther bank, the river hurrying, an unspeakable power, greater than a cyclone yet making no more sound in the deepening twilight than a swift-moving snake. He stood waiting, cold sober. He could hear tinkling music; some dive farther in. Black girls in hotpants. Wind briefly touched the hotel like a footstep; a wooden door banged, as if slammed in anger. Then nothing. He looked out across the water. It seemed the earth, not the water, that was moving. He was a grown man; he’d played with death many times, both the slow kind and the quick. Why was he afraid?

Craine drained his glass, carefully set it down, carefully lifted the bottle and splashed in more Scotch.

When he picked up the letter to study it again, one phrase leaped out at him: the known superiority of female intelligence. He knew, all at once — as he’d known the first moment he’d glanced at it — what kind of person had written the letter. (Again he saw the river. It was like a code beamed down at him, some foreign mind laboring, terrible and serene, to get through.) And it seemed to him now that he’d known from the beginning what it was that he intended. “What I’m not gonna do,” he said suddenly, drily, “is nod out that window.”

Dreams, illusions — they should’ve known better than to play with him! He was Lazarus come back from the dead, not amused. If God were in the room — a metaphor, a metaphor — Craine would have shot him between the eyes.

The pipe in his hands came cleanly into focus, the dirt in the cracks of his fingers, the crooked, gray nails. The room was suddenly full of the smell of perked coffee.

“Royce,” he said, and sat forward, preparing to get up, “we’re going hunting, you and me.” He rose from his desk, steadying himself with his left hand, drained the Scotch in the glass and set the glass down harder than he’d meant to. “Meakins, check out this Elaine Glass. If that’s really her name, she’s probably university, probably a student, undergraduate.”

Hannah broke in, “What makes you think—”

“Glass. Jewish. Has to be university.” He added quickly, nastily, “Whole thing’s too bold for those faculty people, and for a graduate student, too expensive. Undergraduates have daddies.” He hurried on, pointing his pipe stems at Meakins. “Also, check out this clipping.” He groped for, found, and jimmied himself into his shoulder holster, clumsily, as if he’d never before done it, and shoved in the.357 magnum. Hannah looked alarmed, and no wonder, no wonder; — something had gotten into him. Though his hands were shaking badly, he felt unnaturally calm. He glanced at Royce, who was pouring himself coffee. And now back again came the frightening, ungraspable memory. The room flashed white and it seemed to him that blood came out of Royce’s mouth. He struggled to think clearly, get control of himself, and immediately everything was perfectly normal, except distant, as if seen through clear, high-quality tinted glass. Meakins was supporting him, looking at him oddly, with his mouth open, but helping him into his old brown suit coat and, after that, into his limp gray overcoat.

Meakins said, “You mean you want us to—”

Craine nodded. “That’s what I mean. Exactly.”

Hannah, over by the window, cried out suddenly, “Craine, there’s somebody watching us!”

Craine turned, in fact jumped, and looked out in pure terror. Despite the weakness of his eyes, he spotted immediately a frail, dwarfish creature with a ratty brown beard and a rounded back, lumpy shoes that toed inward. He was standing in plain view in the parking lot — Craine had seen him before, though he couldn’t think where. His hands were crammed down into the pockets of a beltless, uneven trench coat — now one hand came up to touch his beard — and he stood bent forward, looking up as if myopically, like a rabbi, at Craine’s window. He had on the back of his head a wide-brimmed gray hat that might have come from an old-time gangster movie. Craine’s heart hammered.