“Where were you when it got serious, ” I said.
“At a lodge Russ has in Washington State.”
“Had,” I said.
“Had?”
“We burned it down.”
“My God,” Susan said. “We were there to fish for trout, but one day Russ said we had to go to Connecticut. He said we could fish the Farmington River instead.”
“They were setting an ambush for us.”
“Which didn’t work.”
“No.”
Susan drank her coffee, and kept looking at me over the rim.
“Start from the beginning,” she said. “And tell me everything that happened up to last night.”
My eyes felt scratchy and I was jittery with coffee and raw from sleeplessness. I finished my croissant and got up and put another one in the oven to warm. I took an orange from the bowl on the counter and began to peel it.
“I had a leg cast made with a gun in the foot. Then I got myself arrested in Mill River and when they put me in jail I produced the gun and Hawk and I left.”
The smell of the orange peel brightened the room. It was a domestic smell, a smell of Sunday morning mingling with the smell of coffee and warming bread.
“‘Death is the mother of Beauty,’” I said. Susan raised her eyebrows, like she did when something puzzled her.
“Poem by Wallace Stevens,” I said. “The possibility of loss is what makes things valuable.”
Susan smiled. “Tell me what happened,” she said over the rim of the cup.
I did, chronologically. I paused occasionally to eat a segment of orange and then, when it was heated, to eat a second croissant. Susan poured more coffee for me when the cup was empty.
“And here we are,” I said when I finished.
“What did you think of Dr. Hilliard,” Susan said.
“I didn’t spend enough time with her to think much,” I said. “She’s smart. She can decide things and act on what she’s decided. She seems to care about you.”
Susan nodded.
“Now you have me and you haven’t done anything about Jerry,” she said. “What about that.”
“We’ll still have to do something about Jerry,” I said. “We have a lot of things we can be arrested for and unless we get the feds to bury them, we’ll have to be on the dodge for the rest of our lives.”
“And you couldn’t be acquitted if you gave yourselves up and went to court?”
“Susan, we did the things we’re accused of. We’re guilty. Hawk did kill a guy. I did bust him out of jail. And all the rest.”
Susan had put her cup down. Most of the coffee was still in it. It had the little iridescent swirls on the surface that cold coffee gets.
“You have to kill Jerry Costigan or go to jail.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of a government is that? To give you that kind of choice?”
“The usual kind,” I said.
“They’ve required you to be simply a paid assassin.”
“They helped me find you,” I said.
She nodded. There was a small rounded end of croissant on her plate. She rolled it between her fingers, looking at it and not seeing it.
“And,” I said, “we have annoyed the daylights out of Jerry Costigan. We have burned down his lodge, trashed his factory, invaded his home, taken his son’s girl friend, killed some of his people.”
“Yes,” Susan said.
“You think he’ll shrug and put another record on the Gramophone?”
“No,” she said. “He’ll hunt you down and have you killed.” Her voice was quiet and clear, but flat, the way it had been in the car last night.
“Or vice versa,” I said.
Susan stood and began to clear the table of the cups and plates. She rinsed them under the running water and put them on the drainboard. Without turning from the sink she said, “What about Russ?”
“My question exactly,” I said.
She rinsed the second cup and put it on the drainboard and shut off the faucet and turned toward me. She, leaned her hips against the sink. She shook her head. “I don’t know how…” she said. I waited.
