I gave a big stupid grin.
“There you go,” Mose said. “Now you’ve got it. Nobody’ll find against a retard.” He signaled for more coffee. “Come home with me for dinner.”
It sounded good. They were all good people, Mose and his wife, Patty, and their two kids. The daughter I had saved was now nineteen. She was a forest ranger, a child of the earth, a lovely young woman. I hadn’t seen her in a long time.
But not tonight. “Think I’m gonna work awhile,” I said. “I’ve gotta make something out of this day.”
“You’re a real Type-A, Clifford,” Mose said over his coffee. “You better learn to relax, pal, or what happens to you won’t be so funny.”
I was looking through the front window when the Lamborghini pulled up and stopped in front of Levin’s office. Jackie Newton and Barbara Crowell got out just as Levin began to close shop for the day. It was cold in Denver. They huddled for a moment at the front door, then Levin pointed at the cafe and they started across the street. Mose must’ve seen me tighten up. He looked where I was looking, but we didn’t say anything. A little bell rang when they came in. The place was crowded: the only open tables were against the far wall, and they had to walk past us to get there. Levin saw me and hesitated. He said something to Jackie and they all looked. Jackie smiled and said something: he pointed to one of the tables and they came toward us. Barbara passed two feet from where I sat. I hadn’t seen her in all these weeks: she looked haggard, worn out, drained of life.
“Hello, Barbara,” I said.
She couldn’t look at me. Her mouth quivered, and Jackie took her arm and propelled her past our table. They sat in a far corner, as far away as possible.
Mose was looking at me over the sugar bowl. “That was Crowell?”
“That was the lady.”
“She looks like a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.”
“When Jackie gets his hooks in you, he doesn’t leave much.”
“He’ll need more than a hook when I get hold of her. I really think you can stop worrying about this, Clifford. They are in very deep doodoo if that’s their main witness.”
This was good to hear even if I didn’t quite believe it. Mose didn’t know how strong Barbara’s fear of Jackie Newton could be. I knew it was stronger than any threat of perjury or the risk of public ridicule: I thought it might even be running neck-and-neck with the will to survive. If the fear is intense enough, if it goes on forever and there’s still no end in sight, death might begin to look almost appealing.
“You don’t look convinced,” Mose said. “I promise you, Cliff, I know how to get to people like her.”
“Yeah, but what happens to her afterwards?”
“Not your concern.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Her only crime, you know, is being too scared to think.”
“Her real crime is that she’s a self-centered lying bitch. She’ll destroy you or anybody else to get the pressure off herself. I can’t work up much sympathy for people like her.”
Poor Barbara, I thought, and I looked at her across the room.
“Want some more coffee?” Mose said. “I was gonna go home, but I hate to have those bastards think they ran us off. Let’s have another cup.”
I took a piece of apple pie with mine. We lingered over small talk far removed from our case. Mose had taken up fishing in his middle age: he was engaged in a herculean effort to master the fly rod. He asked, out of politeness, how the book business was, and I told him it was a lot like urban fishing. On any weekend morning, the fisherman and the bookscout went through the same motions and emotions. A nice catch for both was a dozen good ones. The hunt was the main thing, the chase was its own reward.
I glanced at the table where Levin and Newton sat hunched over papers and briefs. Barbara was wedged between them, her eyes cast into the bottomless gulf of her coffee cup. Any minute now, if she looked deep enough and hard enough, the Loch Ness monster might surface and show her its face. Jackie said something to her and she nodded: he said something else and she looked at him, looked into the face of the monster. Then she looked at me. I could feel her pain half a room away. I tried to smile and then—I couldn’t help myself—I winked at her.
She excused herself and went back to the narrow hallway where the rest rooms were.
All I could think in that moment was that line from Shakespeare, how cowards die a dozen times before their deaths.
Death was on my mind.
And I was suddenly very uneasy.
Mose was talking about the summer’s best fishing trip. I should take up fishing, he was saying: it was good therapy for us Type-A types. Scouting for books might bear some superficial resemblances to fishing, if you had a good
