The blue hills are actually spruce green and they form the center of a large reservation of woods and ponds in an upper-middle-class suburb that abuts Boston. The biggest of the blue hills supports on its flank a nature museum, and on its crest a fieldstone observatory from which one gets a fine view of Boston’s skyline, and an excellent wind for kite flying on the downside pitch of the hill below the building. It’s a hike of maybe fifteen minutes to the top, through woods and over small gullies, and there are usually Cub Scout packs and Audubon members clambering among the slate-colored outcroppings. I offered Pam Shepard a hand over one of the gullies and she declined. I didn’t offer on the next one. I’m a quick study.
The observatory at the top had two sets of stairs and two balconies and kids were running up and down the stairs and shouting at each other from the balconies. Several kites danced above us, one of them shaped like a large bat. “That’s auspicious,” I said to Pam, and nodded at the bat.
She smiled. “They have all sorts of fancy ones like that now,” she said. “The kids went through the kite stage. Harvey and I could never get them to fly… Or us either, now that I think of it.”
“It can be done,” I said. “I’ve seen it done.”
She shrugged and smiled again and shook her head. We stood on the upper balcony of the observatory and looked at the Boston skyline to the north. “What is it,” Pam Shepard said, “about a cluster of skyscrapers in the distance that makes you feel… What?… Romantic? Melancholy? Excited? Excited probably.”
“Promise,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Of everything,” I said. “From a distance they promise everything, whatever you’re after. They look clean and permanent against the sky like that. Up close you notice dog litter around the foundations.”
“Are you saying it’s not real? The look of the skyscrapers from a distance.”
“No. It’s real enough, I think. But so is the dog litter and if you spend all your time looking at the spires you’re going to step in it.”
“Into each life some shit must fall?”
“Ah,” I said, “you put it so much more gracefully than I.”
She laughed.
Below us to the left Jane emerged from behind some trees where the trail opened out into a small meadow below the observatory. She looked around carefully and then looked up at us on the balcony. Pam Shepard waved. I smiled inoffensively. Jane turned her head and said something and Rose emerged from the trees and stood beside her. Pam waved again and Rose waved back. My smile became even more inoffensive. And earnest. I fairly vibrated with earnestness. This was going to be the tough part. Guys like Powers you can get with money, or the hope of it. Or fear, if you’re in a position to scare them. But people like Rose, they were hard. Zealots were always hard. Zeal distorts them. Makes the normal impulses convolute. Makes people fearless and greedless and loveless and finally monstrous. I was against zeal. But being against it didn’t make it go away. I had to persuade these two zealots to go along with the plan or the plan washed away and maybe so did the Shepards.
They trudged up the hill to the observatory warily, alert for an ambush among the kite-flying kids and the Cub Scouts looking at lichen growth on the north side of rocks. They disappeared below us as they went into the stairwell and then appeared coming up the stairs behind us. As Rose reached the top of the stairs Pam Shepard went to her and embraced her. Rose patted her back as they hugged. With one arm still around Rose, Pam took Jane’s hand and squeezed it.
“It’s good to see you both,” she said.
Rose said, “Are you all right?”
Jane said, “Have you got a place to stay?”
“Yes, yes, I’m all right, I’m fine, I’ve been using his apartment.”
“With him?” Rose looked suddenly menopausal.
“No,” I said. The way I used to say it to my mother. “No, I’ve been down the Cape, working on a case. Besides I have a girlfriend, ah woman, ah, I have a person, I… I’m with Susan Silverman.”
Rose said to Pam Shepard, “That’s good of him.”
Jane said to Rose and Pam Shepard, “I still don’t trust him.”
“You can,” Pam said. “You really can. I trust him. He’s a good man.”
I smiled harder. Ingratiation. Jane eyes me for vulnerable points.
Rose said, “Well, whether or not we can trust him, we can talk some business with him at least. I’ll reserve my opinion of his trustworthiness. What is his offer exactly?” And, while she hadn’t yet addressed me directly, she looked at me. Once they did that I always had them. I think it was the puckish charm. “Well?” she said. Yeah, it was the puckish charm.
“I can get you all the guns you need, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth. And bullets. No questions asked.”
“Why?”
“I get a broker’s fee.”
Rose nodded. Jane said, “Perhaps that’s why we can trust him.”
Rose said, “I suppose we give you the money and then you have the guns delivered? Something like that perhaps? And when we get tired of waiting for delivery and call you up you seem to have moved?”
Pam Shepard said, “No. Rose, believe me, you can trust him. He’s not dishonest.”
“Pam, almost everyone is dishonest. He’s as dishonest as anyone else. I don’t want to do business with him.”
“That’s dumb,” I said. “It’s the kind of dumb that smart people get because they think they’re smart.”
