It seemed to me that at least one of us should be with Elaine whenever possible. I couldn’t be sure she was his primary target, and for all I knew he’d killed Monica and got on the next plane to Las Vegas, but until they ran him down and caught him I wasn’t taking any chances.
The way it looked to me, the man was the worst possible combination, an off-the-page homicidal maniac with an incisive, methodical mind.
You couldn’t wait for him to do something stupid, nor could you expect him to behave logically. He was crazy like a rabid fox, and all you could do was hope he ran out in front of a car.
Around seven I went around the corner and picked up dinner from the Chinese restaurant. We usually call down and have them deliver, but deliveries weren’t part of the new regimen. No one was getting upstairs but the three of us, and if that meant a little extra coming and going, I figured I could live with that.
I ordered more food than we were likely to eat, and I guess that too was part of the siege mentality we were operating under. “I guess I won’t be going out of the house much,” Elaine said, wielding her chop-sticks, and I told her she wouldn’t be going out of the house at all. She let herself get used to the idea, then picked up another piece of the co-conut beef.
I asked TJ if he owned a gun. He didn’t, and neither did I. A few years ago Mick Ballou and I had been at war with a gang that had taken up residence at his farm upstate in Sullivan County, and we’d gone out there armed and did a decade’s worth of shooting in a matter of minutes. I hadn’t had a gun in my hand since that night.
“If you had a gun,” I said, “would you know how to use it?”
“Learning curve can’t be too steep,” he said. “Some of the stupidest dudes I ever met did just fine at it.”
“What about you?” I asked Elaine. “Would you use a gun?”
“Would I use one?”
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“If he got up here,” I said, “and you were alone, or he got past whoever was here with you. Could you pick up a gun and shoot him?”
“It’s like a no-brainer camera, right? Point and shoot? I’d point it and shoot it.”
“If he was just standing here, say. No weapon in his hands and an explanation on his lips, telling you how it wasn’t his doing, some other man stole the letter opener from him, and—”
“In other words, he’s not coming at me. He’s acting like a gentleman. Could I shoot him anyway? I swear I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m some kind of shrinking violet. We’re talking about the prick that killed my friend. Would I shoot him? He could be lying on this couch taking a nap and if I had a gun I’d blow his fucking brains out. You’re gonna go get some guns?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Get three,” she said. “One for each of us. No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
23
Knives are beautiful.
Take this one, for instance. It is ten and three-quarters inches long, a bowie type, similar to that beautiful Randall-made knife he’d had to leave in Richmond. This knife, though, had been made not by the legendary Randall, but by a young Idahoan named Reinhold Messer. He’d bought the knife from Messer himself, a long-haired full- bearded bear of a man who’d sat behind his table at a knife show in Provo, Utah, and showed off his creations with hands as gently expressive as an orchestra conductor’s.
All of Messer’s knives were beautiful, but he’d liked this one the best.
It is heavy, you could hammer nails with the butt end, but its balance is so perfect it feels weightless in the hand. More, it feels like part of the hand itself.
Its grips, the half-round slabs on either side of the handle, are made of Micarta, a resin-based material favored by knife makers because they deem it superior to natural materials like wood and stone, ivory and oosik.
(They use these materials, too, and he has seen grips of rosewood and rare tropical hardwoods, of malachite and lapis lazuli, of elephant and walrus and mastodon ivory, and of oosik, which is the name, Inuit in origin, for the bone in the penis of the walrus. Who even knew such a thing existed?
Investigate any area thoroughly, he is delighted to observe, and you will acquire all manner of arcane knowledge.) A knife like this, he believes, is artisanship of the highest order, with 186
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form always following function, and beauty growing out of the synthesis of the two. The blade itself continues past the hilt to the very butt of the knife, a single piece of steel, with the part above the hilt known as the tang. (Who would guess there was a word for it, and a lovely word at that.) This particular blade is made of Damascus steel, which means not that it was imported from Syria—it was made right here in the good old U. S. of A.—but that it was produced by a venerable process that probably originated in Damascus, of bending a piece of steel back upon itself, hammering it flat, bending and hammering, over and over, until the resulting blade is almost infinitely layered, with the layers showing in the finished knife like the wood grain on a hardwood tabletop. Each Damascus blade is unique and each is beautiful, but the purpose of the process is not beauty but strength; every time the piece of steel is hammered and hardened and folded and hammered again, it grows stronger and more durable. The beauty grows out of the functionality, and who wouldn’t want to own that sort of beauty? Who wouldn’t want to wield it like a baton in his hand, to wave it like a wand, like the epee of a fencing master?
Who wouldn’t be proud to wear it on his belt and stride down the street with it?
Who wouldn’t yearn to draw it smoothly from its sheath and across a throat?
He’s used it twice, and one time he did in fact cut a throat with it. It was surprising, too, because it was as if it happened without his willing it, as if the knife acted on its own.
He remembers the occasion well, although it’s sometimes difficult to place events in a time frame. This was in southern Colorado, in a town called Durango, and he never lived there, never even spent an entire night there. He was passing through, and he stopped for dinner, and the waitress, who brought him first a welcome glass of Scotch on the rocks and then an equally welcome blood-rare steak, flirted with him in a manner that seemed aimed at
