Chameleon (27 page)

He’s on to it, Frazer thought. No’ let’s see what he does next.

Lavander made a funnel of the napkin, poured the sand back into the jar and handed it to Frazer. I’d like some more tea,’ he said. As Frazer turned to summon the waitress, Lavander folded the napkin, with two or three grams of sand in it, and slipped it into his pocket. Frazer acted as if he hadn’t noticed; instead he said, ‘Well, let’s see how good you are!’

Lavander seemed wary. ‘Central Pacific,’ he said, ‘someplace north of New Zealand. Perhaps somewhere along the Tonga Trench.’

‘I’ve just agreed to pay you sixty thousand dollars as a retainer for two months’ work, sir,’ said Frazer. ‘And the first thing you do is try to bullshit me.’

‘I beg your pardon!’

Now it was Frazer who took the offensive. ‘You know that core sample didn’t come from anywhere near New Zealand.’

‘Then why ask?’

‘It’s supposed to be your forte.’

‘Testing me?’

‘Why not? All I know is your reputation. And I knew that before I got here. How about the quality of that strain?’

‘You know the quality, Frazer.’

Frazer nodded very slowly.

‘I’m dealing in approximations now. Guesses,’ said Lavander. ‘To be accurate, I’d need some time in the lab.’

‘We have all that,’ Frazer said. ‘I just want you to know we had good reason to make the deal with Hensell.’

‘This is from the Hensell properties?’ Lavander said with surprise.

‘It wasn’t in the package as part of their oil property, Hensell acquired the tracts for other reasons. Our engineers more or less blundered into it, testing core samples for something else.’

‘I see.’

‘We feel we’re on to something, see what I mean? Nobody else is even aware there could be oil in this area.’

Lavander had lost control of the meeting, temporarily. Now was the time to get the ball back. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said flatly, and let the remark hang there for effect.

‘Wrong?’

‘Where is this field, roughly,’ Lavander said quietly, almost whispering.

Frazer leaned over the table. ‘North of Micronesia, roughly.’

Lavander’s ego was wavering, his need to put Frazer in his place and control the meeting becoming obsessive. ‘There is a strike ... ulf, northwest of there. Very high quality, just like yours.’

‘Impossible.’

‘I’m telling you a fact,’ Lavander said, bristling at the thought that his word should be questioned.

‘We’ve had photographic aerial surveillance, very high resolution, and the entire area for three thousand miles has been scanned by satellite. Nothing between us and Japan.’

‘And I’m telling you, there’s a strike ... not some core sample — a strike!’

‘Where?’

‘Between you and. . . Japan. Could even be part of the same strata.’

So there it is, Frazer thought — he actually said it. His ego’s bigger than his discretion, a fatal personality flaw.

‘Look,’ Frazer said, ‘you’ve convinced me. I’m off for Mexico tonight to meet my wife. I’ll take care of your business Monday morning and see you in Houston on the first. Our offices, nine A.M.?’

‘Excellent, I like an early start,’ Lavander agreed, and then, ‘Oh! The check!’

‘On me,’ Frazer insisted and summoned the waitress.

Lavander said goodbye and scurried from the shop. After Frazer had paid the check, he picked up his newspaper and walked outside, tore it in half and dropped it in a waste container.

Hinge had had less than an hour to plan the elimination of Lavander. He had left Eliza’s car and had driven his own Datsun to a dark side Street just off the square, where he parked and got the small bag from the trunk, Inside were a cigar-type blowgun, a hypodermic needle, a small vial of mercury and a double-edged knife in an arm sheath. The knife blade was eight inches long and sharpened on both edges.

Beautiful.

Simple tools for a simple job. In all probability he would not need the dart gun.

No guns. Carrying a gun in Jamaica could be inviting trouble. Besides, this job did not call for bullets.

He strapped the sheathed knife to his left forearm. Then he loaded three drops of mercury in the syringe opening, inserted the needle in the cigar blowgun and put it in his shirt pocket.

Fast and neat, he thought. Nothing complicated. Hit and run. Lavander would be an easy mark. Now to find the spot.

His information on the mark was skimpy and of little value, but he did know that normally Lavander preferred walking to taking cabs particularly over short distances.

Hinge hurriedly measured the distance from the square to the pier, by walking the obvious route first and heading away from the square and down the main street four blocks and then west another two. He arrived at the pier in seven minutes, During the next forty minutes he tracked back to the square, figuring the various combinations Lavander might choose if he tried a short cut. There were few paths he could take. The toughest for Hinge would be if he stuck to the main street. It was fairly well lit and there was a lot of traffic. The others had led him down long narrow side streets through the warehouse district.

By the time Lavander had arrived at the pastry shop, Hinge was waiting across the square. He watched the mini-drama unfold in the shop. He had the advantage on Lavander. Lavander had to cross the square on the way back to the ship, and Hinge, who was between Lavander and the ship, had a good head start when Lavander left.

Hinge first concentrated on Frazer, saw him leave the shop and tear his newspaper in half, throwing it in a litter barrel. With this simple move, Frazer had approved the death of Lavander. Now Hinge began stalking his prey.

Lavander stopped a local and asked for directions. Hinge watched the man, first indicating a route down the main drag, arcing his hand off to the Left, then pointing straight down through the warehouses.

Lavander decided to take the short cut.

Hinge was elated. He hurried down the main street two blocks and cut west to the end of one of the long passages. And he waited.

Lavander was sweating by the time he reached Talisman Way, a narrow, cobblestone alley barely broad enough for two people to pass comfortably, stucco warehouse walls rising on either side, cutting off what light there was. But Lavander could see the lights from the pier at the other end. He started down, Thunder mumbled overhead arid a streak of lightning lit the passage for a second.

He was perhaps halfway down the tunnel-like walk when a man appeared at the other end and started toward him. Lavander felt momentary panic. But ii the dim light at the end of the street, he saw that the man was dressed in a suit and was white, so he assumed he was a tourist. Nevertheless, he quickened his pace. The man coming toward him was whistling.

As they drew closer together the man stopped whistling and said good-naturedly, ‘Hey, pal, how about a little ginja? Best in Jamaica.’

Lavander, his face burning with indignation, turned angrily, looking up at the man. ‘I’m not interested in your damn—’

He never finished the sentence. As he started it he was aware of a blur of movement, a sudden burning sensation in his neck, and his voice seemed to fade and the man was smiling at him, he could see the hard edges of his face, lit from the pier lights spilling into the street, and the man was holding something in front of Lavander’s eyes and Lavander seemed to have trouble focusing, then saw what it was, a stiletto, its thin blade soiled by a splash of blood, and then it was gone and he felt something tug his suit jacket and then the back pocket of his pants and the man was wiggling something else in front of his face and it was Lavander’s wallet, and Lavander felt as though he were in a dream and he could not feel his feet and he was floating and then he tasted salt and the burning sensation in his throat turned to fire. He looked down, saw a bubbling, crimson stain down the front of his white suit, then saw more crimson splashing down, and he realized it was his own blood and he opened his mouth to scream but his windpipe was filled with blood and he grabbed at it and a finger slipped into the slit in his throat.

The ground began to blur, to spin away from him.

He could see his feet, moving one in front of the other, but there was no feeling in them.

Something hit his knees and it was a few moments before he realized he had fallen.

Lavander began to crawl toward the lights, trying to scream, to attract attention, but there wasn’t anybody to hear him and then he felt the edge of the building and he crawled out on to the pavement and looked up and saw the face of a woman and she opened her mouth and seemed to be screaming, only he could hear nothing. He tried to speak, but his teeth started to chatter and for a moment his body was racked with spasms and then his back arched and he fell face down into King Street and died.

At the airport Frazer checked in and confirmed his reservation. Then he walked across the terminal and stood near the public phones. He had been there ten minutes when the first phone in the line rang. He picked it up immediately.

‘This is Mr Jackson,’ he said.

‘Avery Jackson?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

The cold flat voice on the other end said, ‘The package has been delivered.’

‘Any problems?’ Frazer asked.

‘Nothing I can’t take care of.’

‘Thanks very much.’

Frazer hung up, smiling with satisfaction as he left the booth. Ten minutes later his plane was announced. He bought a copy of Paris-Match and an Italian edition of Playboy in the newsstand and then boarded his plane.

Hinge hung up the phone and went back to his car. A rumble of thunder rolled slowly across the sky, and dark clouds drifted past the face of a full moon. Lightning shimmered among them and he felt the first tentative drops of rain. He ignored them. He was a few hundred yards from the entrance to the Half Moon Bay Club. He drove down to the palm-lined entrance and parked the car in the shadows, and hunching his shoulders against the raindrops that began pelting him, he hurried down o the beach. He stayed well back from the ocean as he studied the layout of the sprawling beachfront hotel, actually scurrying way from one small ripple of a wave.

The beach swung in a wide crescent from the squat two..story hotel at one end to the far side, where a stone breakwater separated its beach from that of the Holiday Inn. The registration desk was attached to the main building but was in the open, under a roof of shingles covered with palm fronds. Adjacent to it was an open-air bar and restaurant overlooking the bay. People were moving under the shingled awnings to escape the rain while a calypso band, accustomed to sudden storms, continued playing in the restaurant, its steely music echoing out across the bay.

The cottages began just beyond the restaurant, stretching around to the breakwater. They were built fifty or sixty feet from the water’s edge, one-story stucco units, most of them dark. He counted them. Eighteen in all. Lights gleamed from the last three in the line. Despite the impending storm, the sea was placid, slapping lazily at the shore.

It started raining harder as he followed the beach to cottage 16.

13

O’Hara and the Magician arrived at Eliza’s cottage two minutes after she did. She stammered as she described her encounter with Hinge, the terror still in her eyes.

‘You’re lucky,’ O’Hara said. ‘He probably didn’t have time to chase you.’ He shook his head. ‘We acted like a bunch of amateurs this time around.’

‘I’m the amateur,’ Eliza said. ‘If—’

‘Nobody’s to blame,’ said the Magician.

‘Yeah,’ said O’Hara, ‘we fumbled in the clutch. Best thing we can do is move on.’

The bright spring colors of the cottage, the yellow-and green-print slipcovers, the vase with cut flowers on the dresser and fresh fruit on the night tables did not help their mood. They sat glumly mulling over their options.

‘Maybe we should call the police, at least they could put out an APJ3 on Lavander and Hinge,’ Eliza suggested.

‘This isn’t the Bronx,’ O’Hara said. ‘I doubt they have ten cops on this end of the island.’

‘What a mess,’ Eliza said, genuinely concerned over Lavander’s welfare, or lack thereof.

The Magician scratched an unshaven chin. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you think this is bad, how’d you like to be caught in the middle of a fight between six truck drivers and fourteen midgets in the Soperton, Georgia, Waffle House at one o’clock in the morning?’

‘What!’ Eliza said, and started to giggle.

‘This is about ten years ago. I was down on my uppers and playing calliope for a little half -assed circus, and it went broke in Texarkana and there we were, stranded in the middle of nowhere. So I got the fourteen midgets together and formed this basketball team. I thought it would be a real novelty, them riding on each other’s shoulders to make baskets, running between the opponent’s legs, stuff like that. Only it turned out to be a one-line joke, funny for about half the first quarter, after that the audience started throwing their popcorn boxes at us. We were stuck in Dalton-fuckin’ Georgia, with all our games cancelled, so broke we were rubbing buffalo nickels together hoping they’d mate.

‘Dismal.

‘And then, damned if I didn’t find out these little suckers could sing! Man, they could belt it out like angels. Fourteen- part harmony. So we changed our name from Mike Rothschild’s Little Big Men to Jesus Rothschild and the Gospel Midgets, and to, everybody loved us. We were doing state fairs, charity gigs, revival meetings. The black people loved us. Kids loved us. Red dirt farmers would come with their families and fruit jars and get drunk and get religion. Sweet Jesus, we were saving souls and making money. Hallelujah, what a summer!’

‘Magician, what in hell are you talking about?’ O’Hara asked.

‘There’s a point, stick with me. One night we pull into Soperton, Georgia, which is about as big as a flea’s ass, and it’s maybe one o’clock in the morning and we pass this Waffle House, which is open, so we all pile in for coffee. There’s maybe half a dozen or so truck drivers in there raising hell and one thing leads to another and it’s getting a little nasty what with the midget jokes and shit, so Herman Heartfinder, who was kind of the spokesman for the little guys — he also had a very bad temper — he says for them to go easy on the midget jokes. This one driver says to Herman, “Hey, shortie, if your pecker was twice as big as your mouth, you’d still have to jack off with two fingers,” and Herman stands straight up, all three-foot-six of him, and lets fly with one of those old- fashioned glass sugar dispensers, the ones that weigh about two tons. Splat, right across the side of the head. All of a sudden, it’s John Wayne time. Truck drivers and midgets, all kickin’ the shit out of each other and, incidentally, wasting the Soperton, Georgia, Waffle House while they’re at it.

‘Right then I figured Soperton, Georgia, was no place to be if you’re a six-fingered Jewish piano player hustling fourteen midgets who are at that moment inciting a riot. So! just walked away from it, down to the Trailways bus station, where I stood around for about an hour, listening to the police cars and ambulance, until the bus came and I headed south and got off when we ran out of road in Key West.’

He stopped and smiled rather grandly and added, ‘And that’s the point.’

‘What’s the point?’ Eliza asked.

‘The point is, this is no place for us to be right now.’

‘Amen,’ said O’Hara.

‘But Lavander could still be alive. If the police had a description of Lavander and Hinge...’

‘They wouldn’t do doodly-shit,’ said the Magician.

‘Lavander’s had it,’ O’Hara said. ‘By now Hinge is probably on his way back to Tucson or wherever he’s from, and all we’ve got is Lavander’s little black book of gibberish.’

Outside, Hinge huddled close to the cottage to escape the driving rain. He was grateful for the storm, since it provided excellent sound cover. The raindrops, battering palm leaves and ferns, sounded like drums accompanied by the timpani of thunder. He had moved as close to the window as possible, standing just outside its orbit of light but close enough to hear their conversation through the open window.

My God, he thought, they know my name and they know about Lavander! And what’s this about Lavander’s book?

Who the hell are these people, anyway?

It made no difference. Hinge decided very quickly that he had to kill all three of them. The question was when and how. He concluded that each of them had a cottage, accounting for the lights in the last three cottages. He would wait until they were each in their rooms and take them one at a time.

Piece a cake.

He continued his eavesdropping.

‘I think the book’s going to give up something,’ said the Magician.

‘All we gotta do is break Lavander’s code.’

‘All,’ Eliza said.

‘He carries the book with him. Obviously he makes entries in it all the time, so he must have memorized his own code. And if he memorized it, I can break it. And if I can’t, Izzy certainly can.’ He got up to leave. ‘What time did the pilot say he’d meet us at the airport?’

‘Five-thirty,’ O’Hara said.

‘I’ll wake everybody up,’ he said and left, scampering through the rain to his cottage, the last one in the row.

O’Hara hunched deep in one of the yellow-and-green chairs and said, ‘I’ll sleep here in the chair.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ Eliza said.

‘We’ve already underestimated Hinge once tonight. I’d feel better being here.’

Thunder rumbled outside the window and lightning snapped close by.

‘Better be careful, O’Hara, I’m liable to get the wrong impression, think you have a heart after all.’

‘Now, what does that mean?’

‘Up until now, you’ve been a robot.’

‘A robot!’

‘That’s right, a robot.’

‘Well, I don’t feel like a robot,’ he said, looking at her through half-closed eyes.

O’Hara had already dismissed the Lavander affair from his mind. They had botched it. Enough said. Now he concentrated on his competitor across the room, for that was how he still thought of her. Five feet tall, proficient and dangerously naïve.

That was the professional view. Personally, other things about her crowded his mind. She was prettier than he remembered from their brief meeting in Japan, and he had been too startled when she showed up in St. Lucifer to really pay any attention to her. Now he realized what a stunning woman she was. Her tininess simply added to her allure. Shaggy jet-black hair, cut short with curled strands peeking around her neck; wide, almost startled eyes, appearing even more vulnerable because of her size; a wondrously perfect nose and a tentative, pouty mouth that could, in an instant, become the most dazzling smile he had ever seen.

Beautiful, smart and tempting.

Very dangerous.

She was momentarily flustered and avoided contact with his green eyes. She Sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at the floor. O’Hara intimidated her and 1ad since before she met him. The biographical material she had read had commended him for many things, including his investigative ability. But it was his apparent mastery of the Japanese philosophy that both fascinated and unsettled her. He moved with oiled grace, which she attributed to his martial-arts training in Japan. She remembered the speed with which he accepted and defeated his attacker in Japan. Unruffled. Even with a stab wound, he was simply unruffled. In fact, he was uncomfortably calm. And now he seemed able to accept the inevitability of Lavander’s death without guilt or remorse. And yet, what she read to be something almost mystical might simply be the result of years of armouring. Perhaps O’Hara was so thoroughly shielded that he just seemed mystical.

She sighed and said, I can’t get used to the fact that we may have caused Lavander’s death.’

‘No, didn’t cause it. We didn’t save him. There’s a big difference.’

‘But can’t we do something? I’d recognize the car. And it was a rental, so he’ll have to turn it in and—’

‘A good hunter knows when the hunt is over.’

‘There you go. Mr Kimura talks like that all the time. “The smart man doesn’t wear wet socks.” How’s that?’

‘Actually, it would be, “The wise man does not put on his sock until the sun blesses it.”

‘Oh, bullshit.’ She paused for a second. ‘I’d just like to get another look at that creep, anyway. I’ve never seen a real live assassin before.’

‘You really have a taste for this, don’t you?’

‘For what?’

‘Chasing the big story. How did you get into this business, anyway? Hell, you’ve read my K-file, you know everything about me right down to my underwear size. I don’t know anything about you.’

How did she get into the business? Well, it had started because she was chubby.

When Eliza Gunn was growing up in Nebraska she was plump. Well, perhaps ‘plump’ is being generous. Actually she was somewhere between plump and fat. Chipmunk-cheeks- and-dimpled-legs chubby is what she was.

She lived in Ozone. Once you got a chuckle out of the name, it was all downhill. Dull. Dull. Dull. The only statue in town was of Calvin Coolidge, who once waved at Ozone from the rear of a passing train. So much for Ozone, Nebraska.

Her father owned the local drugstore and was a kind, patient, Christian man. Reserved, the kind that thinks a pat on the head is as good as a hug. Alwyn Gunn died thinking that only perverts read Playboy and that Quaaludes were tranquilizers. And that was in 1977.

Her mother died when she was three in a car wreck driving back from a shopping trip to Omaha. The drive was so dull that she fell asleep at the wheel. Alwyn hired a housekeeper, a German widow whose husband died in a fall off a tractor, and went about business as usual. He never remarried. Too much effort.

Chubby kids are cute. Until they get to be about six. A fat twelve-year-old is not cute. Eliza didn’t enter puberty, she stomped into it.

One of the reasons Lizzie Gunn was chubby is that if you lived in Ozone, there was no reason to be skinny. Actually there wasn’t much reason to do anything but eat, read books and get pregnant. A lot of Eliza’s friends got pregnant. Eliza read books and ate. Among his many ‘virtues, Alwyn Gunn was a lover of books. When she was just beginning to read, Alwyn would bring home half a dozen kids’ books to her from the library. By the time she was ten she was into the adult section.

She also realized, at about age ten, that she was different from everyone else. Not because she was chubby/fat, but because she didn’t want to be like everybody else. She had no desire to be one of the gang. If she couldn’t win, she would rather have come in ten minutes after everybody else. Anything to avoid being part of the herd. Fat or thin, the thought of being common repelled her. It was mental, not physical.

She also had a passion to find out, to be the first to know. To have a secret nobody else shared

The more she read, the more her fantasies blossomed.

No, they exploded.

She rode to Valhalla with Kipling; stormed the gates of Moscow with Tolstoy; conned her ,ay to New Orleans with Twain. She learned class from Shaw, grace from Galsworthy, elegance from Henry James. She was Anna Karenina, Sarah Bernhardt and Holly Golightly. She made up stories in school, told them to her toothbrush in the bathroom, to her dog, her cat, to anyone who would listen. And when old movies started appearing on television, she was Rosalind Russell, James Cagney and Pat O’Brien all wrapped in one, in hot pursuit of the big story. The scoop.

She was editor of the school paper, a job usually relegated to chubby girls who wore glasses, since it was assumed that they were more serious than pretty girls with tits and ass, or to boys, who were too horny to do an anything right. She wore her father’s old fedora with a press pass in the brim, barked orders and drove everybody crazy. The paper won the Sigma Chi award as the best high school newspaper in the state. She got a personal award for best editorial. It was about the passing of the town’s last blacksmith. That was when she was sixteen, her junior year.

And then she became seventeen. That year something happened to Lizzy. She got skinny. Skinny the way girls dream of being skinny.

It happened suddenly. Like a cocoon bursting open, the fat just fell away and suddenly there was Lizzie Gunn, five feet tail, ninety-four pounds, with the best tits and ass in Ozone High School. The Hair-breath Harrys of the school went crazy. Her phone rang constantly, now she was cute.

She was also independent, somewhat eccentric, a daydreamer and a loner. Slimmed down, she had boundless energy.

Ozone to Missouri U. to Lincoln to Chicago to Boston. Life had been upbeat ever since. After Ozone, nothing would ever be dull again. Dull dissolved into the six o’clock nightly news and a constant what she called ‘twiddle’ in her stomach. Her stomach had been in a ‘twiddle’ ever since. And now, sitting with Frank O’Hara chasing a chimera named Chameleon, all her fantasies, daydreams, aspirations, everything! had come true.

She kept the story short. Sunk down in the comfortable chair, he kept looking at her over his kneecaps as though he were sighting a gun. This time she stared back, and when she was finished she went right back to the subject at hand.

‘I can’t believe a man is probably getting killed at this very moment and we’re just sitting here helplessly.’