“Oh yeah.”
“So now it’s real. You would kill him.”
“In a Hungarian heartbeat. But don’t tell Koko yet; I don’t want her to get her hopes up in case it doesn’t work out that way.”
Suddenly she seemed to change the subject. “Do you remember the night we met?”
“Are you kidding? That was one of my all-time high spots.”
“Do you remember what I said?”
“How could I forget? Among other things, you called me a wimp.”
“I never said that. I only wondered innocently how you’d have done in Burton’s shoes.”
“I tried to tell you. All I got for my trouble was ridicule and the rolling-eyes routine.”
“Tell me now.”
“I’d have leaped up from my stretcher and shaken off the fever, found the big lake, made a map that even the Royal Geographic Society couldn’t challenge, left Speke dead in the hot sun, raced home and claimed the glory I should have had all along. So what’s your point?”
“There is no point. Except maybe I love you.” She rose on her toes and kissed me fiercely. “I guess that’s my point.”
“It’s a good one. Maybe now it won’t hurt so much…you know, when we all die together.”
CHAPTER 37
Inside, we planned our next move. Erin and Koko had put their bags near the bottom of the museum ramp. Koko had hung her clothes over the rail and crawled into her bag, and she watched us sleepily from the floor, occasionally piping in with an opinion while the two of us stood there and talked. We all hated to quit Charleston with Burton’s journal still in limbo. Erin wanted another try at Archer on her way out of town, but that struck me as risky with little to be gained. “Something might well be gained,” she said, “if Archer told us what happened to the journal.” At this point I had to doubt if Archer had ever planned to produce Burton’s journal, no matter how much money Lee was able to throw at him—he had come up empty, with new conditions or half-baked reasons to stall, every time. Erin couldn’t believe that. “Lee has done nothing but defend Archer and praise him to the rooftops. What would Archer gain by taunting his oldest friend? What would be the point if he’s not going to sell us the book anyway? Now he’s alienated Lee, they can’t even speak to each other, and what good does that do him?”
Well, Archer was a prick: at least we could all agree on that. “Maybe he’s secretly hated Lee all these years for being born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” I said. There were plenty of precedents both in history and literature for such unholy relationships. One party is undercut and sabotaged for years without ever dreaming that his so- called friend is behind it all. If that were true, the only mystery, aside from the enigmas of a black heart, was why Archer would let his secret out now instead of any other time. Koko said, “Maybe Lee found out what Archer really thinks and Archer no longer had any reason to hide it.” Erin shook her head. “No, I’m sure Lee would’ve told me that.” Since we were into wild ideas, it was also possible that Archer had never had the book at all, or maybe Dante had taken it from him if he had. But if Dante now had it, he’d probably have been on the first flight back to Baltimore. He’d want to dispose of the goods first, get what money there was to get, and settle old scores later. So I thought, with no facts to go on, but at that point I wasn’t sure enough to bet on anything.
Erin hated to give up on Archer. “I’ll do it your way but I don’t want to forget why I was sent here. I would still feel better if I could see him once more, even if he doesn’t do anything but have me thrown out again.” What worried me about this was that the hospital was such an obvious place for someone to set up a watch and catch us coming or going. I had plans for Dante, but I wanted them to unfold on my timetable, not his: I needed to live long enough to put them in motion and see how they went. In the end we were all just talking. Always in the back of my mind was the possibility that Dante knew exactly where we were, and whatever was going to happen would be on his schedule after all.
Our only hard decision was that we were done with Charleston: there was nothing more for us to find here. If things went well and we could get away in the morning without being seen, I had at least some reason for optimism. We’d retrieve my rental car and head north to Florence; from there to Charlotte, and on to Denver. Koko didn’t see why she needed to go to Denver. “We’ve got to stick together for now,” I said, and Denver was my home base. “You can stay with me,” Erin said, “as long as you need to.” “Good,” I said. If we made it that far, I had to feel good about our prospects. Then I could go on offense. We left it at that and I went back up to the entryway where I had stashed my sleeping bag.
The sight of it gave me no craving for sleep. I was in one of those dark moods, bone-tired but still wide awake, and for a long time I sat outside on the edge of the battery with my legs dangling, watching the sky and listening to the air. I thought of Libby and I under-stood how she could come to love this place. Ultimately it would get on my nerves—I am too much a product of my time and this is undoubtedly one of my failings, among many. I can go like Erin on long sabbaticals in the mountains, but at some point cabin fever sets in and I need to hunker down in civilization’s dirty places, go book hunting around the fringes of Denver, talk to someone, mix it up with crazies, go to a party of book lovers at Miranda’s, or just sit in a bar with an old pal. My life went from the nearest pockets of the sublime to the most distant reaches of the ridiculous, and I didn’t know if that was my ideal or if I could even guess what an ideal was. But in any other time, in limited doses, I would love it here.
A rumble of thunder sounded far away in the east, but soon it got quiet again, with only the wind and the sea in my ears. I closed my eyes and at some point I found myself thinking of Vince Mar-ranzino. Vinnie: that told me how long ago our mutual history had been. He didn’t seem like a Vinnie to me. That sounded too much like a gangster’s nickname, and no matter how much I had learned about him via newspapers and our own departmental intelligence, I still thought of him as a kid named Vince, not a Vinnie-hood. I heard his voice out there with the ghosts of Battery Wagner:
I took out my notebook and wrote a short message:
