Ira Levin (22 page)

    Andy had spoken as if the Lighting were the one and only, the be-all and end-all. Naturally he saw it that way now, under a week away…

    She sipped, pacing…

    Why hadn't she met any of those major backers? She'd met people who gave thousands annually-at affairs in New York and Ireland, and at Mike Van Buren's on Thanksgiving day. Rob Patterson's Christian Consortium, she knew, was a significant contributor, but multimillions? She hadn't gotten that impression. A few million altogether maybe, over the past three years.

    Wouldn't at least some of the top-level givers have wanted to meet her? Wouldn't Andy have wanted to oblige them?

    Only that elderly Frenchman, Refie, at the airport, and maybe the man with him be their handshakes and few words had been the full extent of her contact with GC'S non-angelic angels. Rene had certainly been giving Andy a devil of a time on the phone the morning she'd barged into his office; Andy had sounded well accustomed to placating, or try to placate, the old man.. .

    She stopped in the center of the room.

    Stood for a moment. Swallowed.

    Closed her eyes, put a hand to her forehead.

    Drew a breath and opened her eyes. Turned to the coffee table. Moved to it, bent, put the trembling cup down, pulled the Times around to face her.

    Stood looking down at the front page.

    Turned, rubbing her forehead. Walked slowly to the Scrabble table. Church bells began bonging.

    She stood wincing at snow-bright daylight shining through chiffon. Looked down at the tiles on the table.

    Not the Ten.

    The rest of the herd, the other ninety-two, lying mostly face-up from her hunt for the outcasts.

    She fingertipped a tile, drew it out through others onto the table's margin of polished wood. Left it there-a B. As in bells bonging Oh lit-tle town of Beth-le-hem… She fingered another tile, drew that one out too, giving the B an I alongside it. And an

    O…

    Gimme a C…

    Gimme an H…

    Gimme an E, M, I…

    She didn't see the other C. Didn't keep looking.

    She went back to the coffee table, picked up the phone, tapped a number.

    Said, "Hi, Joe."

    She said, "A little better. Let's get together now, okay? Someplace we can talk but not here, I'm sick of this tower. I'll come there; I've seen pigsties, I won't faint."

    She sighed. "Where's that Chinese restaurant? It'll be empty today."

    She said, "I don't care about that. The food's good, isn't it? Where is it?" 9-JSZANDr*and" i fand-9 caret iTt's a dump," was what he had said. Off Ninth JL Avenue, a faded twelve-table restaurant with plate- glass windows and frozen ceiling fans, decor by Edward Hopper.

    In a side booth, one of the two occupied tables, they toasted the holiday with Chinese beer and got the presents out of the way first. His was a huge, handsomely bound and jacketed book she had found in the hotel's Rizzoli shop-photographs and blueprints of classic Italian autos, including his AlfaRojneo.

    "Oh this is just beautiful*." he said, turning the heavy pages. "I didn't even know such a book existed! Bello! Bellisimo!" He leaned across the table and kissed her.

    Her present was a small gold i caret andy pin with a ruby heart. Van Cleef and Arpels.

    She sighed, said, "You shouldn't fiave…" Leaned across the table and kissed him. "I love it, thank you, Joe." She pinned it to her sweater while he and the waitress gathered the wrappings and he ordered for both of them, not using a menu.

    "What's on your mind?" he asked when the waitress had gone.

    "Something really heavy," she said, "and I don't want to worry Andy about it."

    "A threat?"

    "You could say." She looked him in the eye. "Judy dropped a few remarks," she said, "that make me think-now that I know who she was, and now that these things have happened in Hamburg and now Quebec-they make me think her gang might have somehow tampered with the candles. Or a gang in the Far East they had connections with."

    He sat back. Blinked a few times, looked at her. "Tampered with the Lighting candles," he said.

    She nodded. "These might be cases where someone lit one early, or maybe a store or a house burned with candles in it."

    He sat looking at her. "The first two times ever," he said. "The candles have been around all over the world for months and these are the first two times one got lit or burned."

    She said, "Maybe there's some kind of built-in timer. I don't know anything about biochemicals, I'm pretty sure that's what's involved here, but there are two parts to the candles, right, the blue and the yellow? Maybe they're more complicated than that. Maybe there's some chemical something that keeps them safe or unarmed or whatever till a certain time, and a few of the candles are a little off. And a few of those few were in Hamburg and Quebec…"

    They looked at each other. Sipped from their glasses of beer.

    He gave her a sidelong smile and said, "Do you think maybe this could be a case of opening-night jitters? You're Andy's Mom, you want everything to go off picture perfect…"

    "It might be," she said. "I hope so. But maybe it's more be we have to check it out, Joe. Do you know someone who could? Not in the Police Crime Lab or the FBI, though. Someone private, a forensic chemist who does consulting work. Someone like that. With access to up-to-date equipment."

    "Did Judy really say anything?" he asked. "Or was this a vision?"

    She looked away, stayed silent, looked back at him. "A little of each," she said.

    They sat back as the waitress put plates on the table and doled out dumplings with a pair of chopsticks.

    They ate, he with chopsticks, she with a fork.

    "Aren't these good?" he said.

    "Mmm," she said, eating.f

    "This is the worst time of the year to get anything done," he said, "let alone something as complicated as this,- everybody's on vacation. The NYU School of Medicine is closed down, which is where the first person who comes to mind is on the faculty, a classic-car collector up in Armonk. If he can't do it himself, he'll know who can. Except he's probably in Aspen or someplace, he and his wife and kids all ski. Look, if you're this serious about it, then we should go to the FBI. I know guys in the office here, and they have the facilities in Arlington to do the job right and do it fast."

    She shook her head. "I don't want to get Andy involved in a-whole investigation," she said. Covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes tearing.

    "Hey, hey, aaah…" He reached across the table, patted her shoulder, her cheek. "Andy wouldn't be involved," he said, "not in any bad way. I'm sure he'd be the first one to-was

    "still don't want to go to the FBI," she said. "Maybe I'm-hallucinating, you're right, and I don't want to open up a whole can of worms. Please, Joe!"

    He sat back frowning, watching her as she pressed a paper napkin to her eyes. "Okay," he said. "I'll get after this guy this afternoon. He's in something with biochemistry in it, Dr. George Stamos. One of his lab assistants was making designer drugs, right there in the lab, until her boyfriend shot her. In "94. George has two Alfas but they don't come anywhere near mine." caret szandrfandefSzftj v

    H

    e called her around five that afternoon. The Starnos family was away but their message said they'd be back Monday morning. "I didn't say why I was calling; he'll think I'm ready to sell the car, I'll be his first callback. You can't realistically expect to get any action before Monday anyway. But Rosie, the more I think about it… If Hamburg was a sample, then you're talking about something that could maybe wipe out the whole human race. Nobody is crazy enough to want to do that."

    She drew a breath; said, "I hope you're right, Joe. Thanks for following through."

    "No sweat. Feel better soon."

    She went back to reading a trade paperback she had bought that afternoon in the Doubleday's on Fifth AvenueBiochemistry: The Two-Edged Sword. She was up to the chapter on nerve gases and flesh-eating viruses.

    The Stamos family was back from its skiing vacation by Monday morning-all except George, who was in a hospital in Zurich, in traction. Joe got his phone number from Helen Stamos after he explained that it was about a favor for Rosemary, not cars, but he couldn't make the call till Tuesday morning because of the time difference.

    That was the bad news he phoned to Rosemary on Tuesday afternoon. The good news was that George had

    S

    immediately come up with the man for the job, a colleague who was a partner in a laboratory in Syosset, Long Island, that did free-lance forensfLc work in criminal cases. Joe had spoken to the man, telling him that he himself, as an employee of GC, had heard a candle- tampering rumor that he wanted to check out just for his own peace of mind; almost certainly nothing to it, but still… "He's going to check a few of them. He'll know whether or not they're clean by tomorrow morning."

    She said, "You told him "biochemicals"?"

    "Yes. He says it's not impossible but would be an amazing feat for a gang of PA'S to pull off."

    She watched TV, thumbing through the multichannel mix-being told time and again by Andy and by herself, in ten-second and thirty-second formats, how moving and inspiring the Lighting was going to be, and how great it was that everybody in the whole human race was going to take part in the glorious, symbolic, artistic happening, and that the time to unwrap and light here in this area is seven p.m. this coming Friday, just do it along with the TV, any channel, don't miss the warm-up starting at six, and remember, out of reach of the kids. Andy winked at her. "Sick of these by now, right?" He chuckled, she didn't. "Okay, but it's so important," he said. "I ask you please to make sure that everyone you know lights at the right time; will you do that for me? Thanks. Love ya."

    She wondered if there could be something he did, something he projected, that she was immune to, because of their kinship. It seemed no less impossible than gases that could turn a person to jelly in fifteen minutes.

    Joe had managed to get Wednesday-matinee house seats for the first solid hit of the Broadway season, a revival of a failed 1965 musical for which, ironically, Guy had auditioned back in the happy days before they'd moved into the Bram, when they were still living in his one-room walk-up on Third Avenue. The show was a charmer, as she'd thought then, but she had a hard time focusing on the first act; Joe hadn't heard yet from the lab in Syosset.

    He went to phone his answering machine during the intermission. She smiled and signed a few autographs for people sitting nearby, then sat looking at her open Playbill.

    Joe didn't get back till the house lights were down and the second-act overture had begun. "Clean," he whispered, sitting down in the seat alongside. She looked wide-eyed at him. He nodded. "Perfectly clean. No biochemicals. Not even any perfume." "Shhh!"from behind them.

    She had a hard time focusing on the second act too, but clapped wildly at the end and joined with Joe in the standing ovation.

    They hustled into a bar next door and found a foot- square table in a dusky corner. "He analyzed everything," he said, "the wax, the wicks, the glasses. Four candles-two from here, one from out of state, and one from out of the country. One hundred percent clean."

    "You spoke to him?" she asked.

    "The message was on the machine," he said. "Written report will follow."

    "Whew!" she said. "That is one big relief."

    "You know," he said, "I hate to mention it, but it's not conclusive. Don't forget there were fourteen factories turning them out. There could have been tampering at one, or some, and these were from another."

    "No," she said, "my-impressipn was that all the candles were affected."

    "All? At all fourteen factories? You really thought that?"

    She smiled, shrugged. "Opening-night jitters," she said.

    The waiter brought them her Gibson, his Glenlivet. "Cheers," they said, and clinked glasses and sipped.

    "Thank you so much, Joe," she said. "I'm so grateful to you." Kissed him.