“Yeah.”
“They would have killed you.”
“Yeah.”
“Then it had to be, didn’t it?”
“I set them up,” I said. “I got them up there to kill them.”
“Yes, and you walked in on them from the front, two of them to one of you, like a John Wayne movie. How many men do you think would have done that?”
I shook my head.
“Do you think they would have done it? They weren’t doing it. They were trying to ambush you. And if they’d succeeded, would they be agonizing about it now?”
I shook my head again.
“You’d have had to kill them,” Susan said. “Sometime.
Now it’s done. What does it matter how?”
“That’s the part that does matter. How. It’s the only part that matters.”
“Honor?” Susan said.
“Yeah,” I said. The waiter came and took the crocks and returned with scrod for Susan and steak for me. We ate a little.
“I am not making fun,” Susan said, “but aren’t you older and wiser than that?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Neither is Rabb. I know what’s killing him. It’s killing me too. The code didn’t work.”
“The code,” Susan said.
“Yeah, jock ethic, honor, code, whatever. It didn’t cover this situation.”
“Can’t it be adjusted?”
“Then it’s not a code anymore. See, being a person is kind of random and arbitrary business. You may have noticed that. And you need to believe in something to keep it from being too random and arbitrary to handle. Some people take religion, or success, or patriotism, or family, but for a lot of guys those things don’t work. A guy like me. I don’t have religion or family, that sort of thing. So you accept some system of order, and you stick to it. For Rabb it’s playing ball.
You give it all you got and you play hurt and you don’t complain and so on and if you’re good you win and the better you are the more you win so the more you win the more you prove you’re good. But for Rabb it’s also taking care of the wife and kid, and the two systems came into conflict. He couldn’t be true to both. And now he’s compromised and he’ll never have the same sense of self he had before.”
“And you, Spenser?”
“Me too, I guess. I don’t know if there is even a name for the system I’ve chosen, but it has to do with honor. And honor is behavior for its own reason. You know?”
“Who has it,” Susan said, “he that died a Wednesday?”
“Yeah, sure, I know that too. But all I have is how I act. It’s the only system I fit into. Whatever the hell I am is based in part on not doing things I don’t think I should do. Or don’t want to do. That’s why I couldn’t last with the cops.
That’s the difference between me and Martin Quirk.”
“Perhaps Quirk has simply chosen a different system,” Susan said.
“Yeah. I think he has. You’re catching on.”
“And,” Susan said, “two moral imperatives in your system are never to allow innocents to be victimized and never to kill people except involuntarily. Perhaps the words aren’t quite the right ones, but that’s the idea, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“And,” she said, “this time you couldn’t obey both those imperatives. You had to violate one.”
I nodded again.
“I understand,” she said.
We ate for a bit in silence.
“I can’t make it better,” she said.
“No,” I said. “You can’t.”
We ate the rest of the entree in silence.
The waiter brought coffee. “You will live a little diminished, won’t you?” she said.
“Well, I got a small sniff of my own mortality. I guess everyone does once in a while. I don’t know if that’s diminishment or not. Maybe it’s got to do with being human.”
She looked at me over her coffee cup. “I think maybe it has to do with that,” she said.
I didn’t feel good, but I felt better. The waiter brought the check.
