“Buzz off?” I said. “Buzz? Off? Which one are you? Archie? Or Jughead?”
The tall guy’s face reddened, but not enough. He was very pale with short white-blond hair and a big Adam’s apple. He put one hand, his left, gently on my chest.
“Just back off, cowboy,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”
I didn’t like him putting his hand on me, but defending my honor was not the first order of business here.
“Let’s go,” I said to Jill.
I moved to the left of the tall guy, keeping Jill behind me. My car was parked on the walkway, back of the limo with the tinted windows. As we moved, one of the windows slid silently down and a guy with a fine profile looked out.
“Randall,” the guy with the fine profile said, “get rid of him.”
The tall guy smiled. The hand on my chest slid over and gripped my leather jacket. He started to turn his left hip in toward me when I kneed him in the groin. He grunted and started to sag. I turned my left shoulder in on myself and brought up a left uppercut that straightened him against, then bounced him off the car. His head banged against the edge of the car roof and he slid down the door and sat with his legs sprawled in front of him on the cold brick of the hotel turnaround.
Behind me Jill said, “Jesus,” softly.
I bent and looked into the car at the man with the profile. He wasn’t showing it to me. He was showing me full face, and there was a gun in his hand.
“Wow,” I said. “A Sig Sauer, just like the cops are getting.”
Profile said to me, “What the hell is your name?”
“Zorro,” I said. “I forgot my cape.”
“Never seen anyone deal with Randall quite like that.”
“Randall’s too confident,” I said. “Makes him careless.”
“Perhaps this will have been good for him.”
“I surely hope so,” I said.
Profile looked past me at Jill Joyce.
“I’ve been trying to reach you, Jill,” he said. She didn’t look at him. “You’ve not returned my calls.”
“Come on,” Jill said to me. “We’re late already.”
I straightened.
“I won’t be put off, Jill,” the Profile said.
Jill started to walk away. I straightened from the window.
“See you around,” I said.
“Yes, you will,” the Profile said.
“Tell Randall,” I said, “that hip throw went out about the same time buzz off did.”
“Perhaps he knows that now,” the Profile said. “I’m sure you’ll see him again too.”
I followed Jill and got there in time to hold the door for her. As I pulled out around the Town Car, I saw the Profile getting out and walking around toward where Randall sat on the cold bricks.
We drove out past the Kennedy School and right onto JFK Street and headed out across the Larz Anderson Bridge.
“What was that in the car?” I said. “Darryl F. Zanuck?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“About many things, I think that’s true,” I said. “About the guy in the car-I don’t believe you.”
The Anderson Bridge looks like a bridge that would connect Cambridge to Boston. It is short. The river here was maybe a hundred yards wide. The bridge arched the way bridges do over the Seine, and was made of brick, or seemed to be, having enough brick dressing to fool your eye. To the right the river was broad and empty up as far as Mt. Auburn Hospital where it meandered west and out of sight. Downstream, looking left, it was spanned by the Western Avenue Bridge and the River Street Bridge before it meandered east near Boston University. The ice on the river still held, but the warmer weather would have its way and by late afternoon there would be water on top of the ice.
“Really-fans. They think they know you, and they are so insistent sometimes.” Jill stared out the window of the Cherokee as she talked. They were shooting on location today, in the Waterfront Park near the Marriott Hotel. I turned east onto Soldiers Field Road in front of the Business School. Jill stared at the big snow-covered lawn and the red brick Georgian buildings in a self-important cluster around it. “What’s that?”
“Business School,” I said.
“Which one?”
“Harvard Business School,” I said. “There are people in there who would suffer dyspepsia if they heard you ask which one. They don’t even use its abbreviated name. Mostly they call it the B School. Graduates platoons of people each year who are Captains of Industry at once.”
“Don’t sound so critical,” Jill said as we slid under the Western Avenue overpass. “What are you captain of?”
“My soul,” I said. “Who’s the guy in the Lincoln?”
