Abruptly he thrust the frames back at Gideon. With his other hand he stuck his pipe into his mouth and took two quick, furious puffs, blowing out rather than sucking in. Glowing sparks of tobacco popped from the metal bowl.
'Would I get to keep ‘em?” he asked. “After you people've finished with ‘em?'
'I think so,” Gideon said. Empathy had made his own throat tight. “I can't see why not.'
'Good, then.” He wiped the back of his hand across his nose, shrugged, and went back to his chair, chewing on the pipe. The shoulders of his bright blue coveralls hunched slackly away from his body as he sat down, as if he had shrunk inside them.
'Well, then,” Gideon said into the awkward silence, “one more thing.'
As soon as he took the broken ice ax from the sack, Anna spoke out sharply.
'It's one of ours. An Alpiner.'
Judd nodded gravely. “Right you are. I remember.'
'Were they all exactly the same?” Gideon asked. “Is there any way to distinguish one from another?'
'After thirty years,” Tremaine snapped, “you expect us to remember who wrapped red tape around the handle and who used yellow? Not that there's any tape left on this one. Really, is there some purpose to this?'
'I'm just trying to come up with anything that might be useful in identifying the remains. If we knew for sure whose ice ax that was, it could help.'
'Well, it seems as if you'll have to figure it out on your own,” Tremaine said impatiently. He closed the loose- leaf binder in front of him, tucked it under his arm, and stood up with the brittle agility of a man who worked hard at aging gracefully. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Oliver. And now, if there's nothing else, the fire is dead, the Icebreaker Lounge is open for business, and I, for one, am in dire need of the comfort of a Rob Roy.” With a nod he was gone, his rich voice seeming to hang in the air behind him.
Tremaine's voice was all his own. Like the larger-than-life stars of Hollywood's golden era—Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne—he had created a way of speaking that was to be found in no one else on the planet. Lush but nasal, British but American, elegant but intimate.
About what you'd expect, was Gideon's grumpy and uncharitable thought, if you crossed John Gielgud with W. C. Fields.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 8
* * * *
'Five-squad. Lau.'
'Mr. Lau? The SAC would like to see you, please.'
With his shoulder hunched to prop the telephone receiver against his ear, John continued to fill out a quarterly progress report. Christ, the bureau put you through a lot of paperwork. Which was saying something, coming from a man who had put in four years in the NATO Security Directorate.
'Now?” he said, writing.
'Well, no, naturally not,” Charlie Appletree's secretary purred, “not if you have something more important to do.'
'Yeah, well, you see, my paper clips have gotten kind of tangled up and I was counting on separating them this afternoon. And you know how the telephone cord gets all twisted around itself? I was planning—'
Melva switched to her gravel voice, one of many, “All right, Lau. Get your ass up here right now.” Melva was a buxom, apple-cheeked woman in her fifties who had been Appletree's secretary for twenty-two years. Sassing whoever she pleased was one of her undisputed perks. “Or do you want me to come down there and drag you up by the—'
'No, ma'am,” John said. “Right away, ma'am.'
Smiling, he headed for the stairwell and climbed to the seventh floor. Appletree's office was an airy, properly impressive corner room in various shades of tan, with two big windows looking down rain-wet Madison Street toward the Seattle waterfront. There was a slate-gray sliver of Puget Sound visible between the buildings if you leaned in the right direction and looked hard. The other two windows, the ones overlooking the enormous peeling painting of Canadian geese in flight on the side of the old Warshall's sporting-goods building, and beyond that the tacky storefronts of First Avenue, were discreetly shuttered by beige venetian blinds.
The huge kidney-shaped desk—a table really, with no drawers—held a blotter, a small vase of fresh daisies, a picture of Appletree's wife and children, and a pen-and-pencil set on a marble base. There wasn't a paper on the oiled walnut top and there never was, a fact that always impressed visitors. John, however, was aware that the inconspicuous door to the left of the desk did not open into a small room with a cot, as was popularly believed, but into a comfortable office with an old desk that was every bit as cluttered as John's was.
Appletree was at the desk speaking into a dictating machine, his jacket off, immaculate white shirtsleeves turned back onto hairless forearms in wide, crisply perfect folds. When John came in he gestured toward the grouping of upholstered chairs around a coffee table in the corner.
Atop the table was a small, dark-brown bust with a lean, long-nosed head. On his first visit to the office, John, nervously looking for something to talk about, had picked it up and examined it.
'You're looking at my hero,” Appletree had said. “Know who it is?'
'Lincoln? Before he had a beard?'
