An alarm went off and the sprinkler system opened up.
Lissa dragged me down the next flight of stairs. She was strong. At the bottom, I recovered enough to grab a rail and get to my feet. I lurched after her into the twilight.
The sidewalk and street were covered with glass and shrapnel. We looked up to see flames and steam blow out of the second floor in hot, eager rhythm, like the breath of a panting dragon.
The skinny salesman in the tight herringbone suit leaned against Lissa’s car as if he had been waiting patiently the entire time. “You all right?” he asked. He tossed a well-used toothpick onto the lawn and pulled a pistol from his coat pocket, as casually as if it were a sales contract. Pointed the gun at me, not Lissa, and dressed his weasel face in a cool smile. A blob of spittle glinted on his chin. We backed away. “Goddamn it, just stay right here,” he said, facing me. “You’re making me lose some sales.”
I flinched at the crack of a gun. That’s it. I clutched my stomach. Nothing. No blood, no pain. I looked up from my belt just in time to see the man drop back a couple of steps, as if punched. A small black hole opened in his suit.
He still had enough blood in his brain to try to aim, but when he realized what had happened, the gun was the last thing he cared about. His legs gave way and he hit the ground with a grunt. He lay there kicking and making rough husking sounds.
“Oh, Jesus, oh, Mother,” he said.
His face went empty but his foot kept twitching.
I had never seen a man die before.
Lissa was putting her pistol away in her purse when I spun around to look at her. Her face was white as a full moon in the light from the car dealership. Her blond hair and shoulders reflected orange from the puffing flames in the window above.
“Fucking amateur,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.” She looked furious, and she scared the last dregs of hell right out of me.
PART TWO
BEN BRIDGER
“They have turned germs into comrades and allies. They speak to them, and through them. They have opened a telephone line into the human psyche. This is power beyond imagination.”
—“’Secret Report of Central Investigation Committee to Lavrenti Beria,” 1937 (from the Golokhov papers, released by the Irkutsk University Committee for Openness and Historical Accuracy, August 16, 2001)
27
JUNE 6 • EL CAJON, CALIFORNIA
I was a mess when Rob Cousins called.
The coffee machine had burned through a gasket and spouted hot water from all its joints. The house was a national park for dust bunnies. Our old white cat had skipped out to play pinochle with the coyotes and the coyotes had won. He had preferred Janie anyway.
About the only joy in my life was going to used bookstores, and most of my favorites had closed down to sell on-line. Janie haunted the kitchen so I rarely cooked. The lawn was so high I didn’t dare push a mower through it. I spent mornings in such a goddamned funk I could hardly get out of bed.
Evenings were the best. At dusk, the summer heat dropped to a dull furnace glow and a sea breeze glided in through the canyons like angel’s breath. The swamp cooler shut off at seven-thirty or eight and the house became quiet. Outside, the stars rose over the black hills and the crickets started their thermometer chirrups.
I was sixty-three years old. My book on guerrilla submarine operations in the Philippines was an inch deep and dead in the water. After all my research, I still couldn’t find the story. I was tired of writing about brave young men fighting a good war sixty years ago. Writing seemed to be through with me.
I couldn’t see any future, and that made the past useless.
I sat in my overstuffed chair with the cat-frayed leather arms and sipped a martini. I don’t like gin, but Janie did. After the martini, I planned to have a beer, then, an hour later, a Scotch. I’m not suicidal, so I always stopped at three. Three drinks sufficed to make me feel sad rather than frantic.
The windows were shiny black and the shaded lamp by the chair cast a warm glow over everything. By nine o’clock, grief was starting to feel almost comfortable.
My daughter lived in Minneapolis. Always a chameleon, she had acquired the distinctive Minne-sooa-tah Norwegian-Chippewa accent after six years and seldom called. My son in Baltimore couldn’t even be at his mom’s funeral. He had claimed to be sick with seafood poisoning. Maybe he was.
Janie and I had just sent off the kids’ unclaimed stuff to Goodwill and started thinking about our second honeymoon when the stroke felled her. The hell with relationships. I would never again fall in love, never again trust a woman not to get up and walk into another room and die on me.
I would haunt the dark like the lone white barn owl I saw at night in the backyard, scissoring mice in the tall grass.
There is nothing sadder than a rugged son of a bitch minus his life partner.
The phone rang. Janie had bought one of the cordless kind but I kept an old Bakelite Ma Bell special by my chair. It had once been used by Admiral Halsey. I answered and a young man’s voice said, “Is this Ben Bridger? The author of Uncommon Graves?”
“It is,” I said, and pushed my chair forward so I could lower my voice to a dignified baritone. “Who’s this?”
“My name is Rob Cousins. I’m a biologist.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“I read your books when I was a kid. The old Ballantine and Bantam paperbacks. I think I may still have a few somewhere. They were great.”
“Thank you,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“You wrote a book with Beria’s aide, the one who escaped getting shot, right?”
“Yeah.” Waltzing with the Beast, Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Four printings in hardback and a couple of paperback editions.
“Do you know a writer named Rudy Banning?”
“Used to outsell me four to one.”
“And now?”
