Silence

vehicle to worry about yet, he certainly saw it, so now is a good time to change. We’ll also block his move.”

“What move?”

“He rented his car here. He got off the freeway a few miles back, so we’re ahead of him. But he’s on his way here to turn in his car. Either he’ll just dump it and try to get on a plane to Los Angeles—which I doubt—or he’ll rent a new car, too.”

“And?”

“He’ll still be looking for the black SUV, and we’ll know what his new car is.”

Paul walked into the car rental building. At the counter, he took out his keys and the papers he’d been given when he’d rented the SUV. “I’d like to trade in my SUV for something smaller, please,” he said to the young woman behind the desk. She reminded him of a girl named Beth he had dated about twenty years ago. She had the same red-brown hair and the same light skin and blue eyes. This girl could be a close relative of Beth’s. He wished he could say something. Sylvie was too prickly and difficult to listen to even neutral observations about women. Pointing them out made her want to kill them. The girl handed his keys to a man in blue overalls and watched him disappear out a back door.

As he watched the girl turn to her computer to tap in some information, he was tempted to say something to her; but he had dated Beth under his real name, so he couldn’t. Anyway, Sylvie was a few feet away at the magazine rack near the door watching for Jack Till’s beige Lincoln to come up the access road to the rental buildings.

Sylvie’s jealousy was ridiculous, and that seemed to be part of her reason for it. The jealousy was her way of denying that she had done what he had seen her do in about fifty movies with at least a hundred men. When he first met her, he pretended that he didn’t recognize her, and never let the topic of pornographic movies enter a conversation. He waited patiently, and when she made a big event out of gently, gradually telling him about her two-year career, he brought in a box from the garage to show her that he had already bought copies of all of her films. He said little more than the fact that he knew, and that it made no difference to him. That fantastic claim had struck Sylvie as entirely true.

The truth was that her film career had intrigued him and added to his attraction to her. What he had found to be a more difficult topic was his profession. For a time he tried telling her he was an entrepreneur who had made some money selling an Internet start-up business, then that he acted as a business consultant, and sometimes traveled to other cities to solve clients’ problems.

In those days, he received most of his referrals from Bobby Mosca, the bartender at the Palazzo di Conti restaurant on La Brea. The Palazzo was a landmark where well-known people sometimes went, partly because it served good southern Italian food, and partly because it had a reputation. Sometimes the story was that it was a remote outpost for members of the Balacontano family who came west on business. A competing story was that Bugsy Siegel had once been the silent owner, and that when he was shot in the bungalow on the other side of town, one of the unintended consequences was that the apparent owners became the real owners.

One night Paul’s telephone rang, and Sylvie answered and handed it to Paul. When the call was finished, he looked up and saw her in the doorway. She said, “I know.”

Paul sat back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach. “You know what?”

“I know who Bobby is. I know what you do for a living.”

Paul nodded, keeping his eyes on her.

“You killed Darren so you could have me. Surely you must have expected me to know that much. When the police came here, they told me it was a professional execution. And after living with you for months, how could I not know?”

“So now what?”

“Are you asking me what I’m going to do about it?”

“No, I’m asking you what you feel about it.”

She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest, then kissed him, hard. “I love you.”

He had left late that night to complete the job Bobby had called about. He came home to find her waiting up for him.

She said, “How did it go? Tell me everything that happened.”

“Why?” he said. “Why would you want to hear about that?”

“How else am I going to learn?”

As he looked away from the counter at Sylvie, he forgave her for the arguments and the idiotic defensiveness and lack of confidence. She was everything he had ever wanted. If he could just keep her convinced of that, then things would be tolerable. He heard the rental agent behind him, and turned.

He accepted the keys to the new car and looked at the tags. The car was a blue four-door Ford. That was acceptable: It wasn’t anything like the SUV. “Thank you,” he said. He turned and walked to Sylvie, picked up the two suitcases, and let Sylvie hold the door open for him. He walked to the car and put the suitcases into the trunk. Paul was pleased to see that the mechanic had already driven the black SUV around to the back of the building to clean and service it.

He and Sylvie got in. “Have you kept watching for Till’s beige rental car?”

“Of course. There’s only this one road for rental return. So far there have been fourteen cars since we got here. Two were beige or brown, but neither went to the Cheapcars lot, and neither had Till or the girl in them.”

“Good watching.” He reminded himself that he had thought of her as stupid, but Sylvie was absolutely not unintelligent. She could make all sorts of calculations and computations without engaging the major parts of her brain, and then announce them as though they were self-evident. It had been imprecise of him to let the word stupid float into his mind.

He felt his affection for her surge. He would never be able to separate what he saw from what he felt or what he thought. She was beautiful, therefore she was enticing, therefore he wanted her. The beauty itself was even more complicated because it was not perfection—Sylvie would never leave a flawless corpse—but depended upon an expression of the lips and a look about the eyes and a way of moving.

Paul understood his long attraction to her, but had never fully accounted for the moments when he reached the other extreme and felt rage. This gave his perceptions of her a tentative quality that made him uncomfortable. He watched the road, looking to the left and then the right, then pulled out of the lot.

“There it is,” she said. The beige Lincoln Town Car popped into Paul’s rearview mirror. He lifted his foot from the gas pedal and let the car slow down so it would stay on the straight section long enough for him to see the Lincoln turn into the Cheapcars lot. “Hurry up! You’ve got to make it all the way around the loop past the terminals and come by again in time to see.”

“I will,” he said. “Calm down.” He sped up again and went around the corner out of sight of the rental lots, and toward the airport. He went past the terminals, maneuvering patiently among the shuttle buses, cars, and taxi vans. He kept to the left so he could take the rental-car loop again. When he came to it he took it and went slowly along the road until he could see the Cheapcars lot, and then pulled the car over to wait. He watched as a maintenance man came out and took charge of the beige Town Car, reaching toward the steering wheel shaft to turn on the engine and check the gauges.

Suddenly there was a movement in Paul’s peripheral vision. The unexpectedness of it made him jump. He looked up and saw the front of a police car growing to fill the rearview mirror.

Paul noted that the cop had not turned on his blue-and-red flashers. The cop got out of the driver’s seat instantly, which meant that he was not calling in the stop yet. He appeared at the side of the car beside Paul’s window. He was less than thirty years old, with a chubby boyish face that didn’t seem to go with his trim body, and black hair that seemed to start too low on his forehead, like a knit cap. Paul noticed the squared-off surface of his torso that revealed the body armor under his uniform.

Paul looked ahead through the windshield. This was just the kind of thing that Paul could not permit to happen. He had done everything right, followed patiently when a less-clever person would have made some premature, impulsive attempt that would have alarmed Jack Till. Now, when Till had finally come together with Wendy Harper, this fat-faced cherub of a cop was here to ruin everything. Paul read the metal tag on his right pocket: Rodeno.

The cop leaned on the car so he could look in at them. “Afternoon, folks.”

“Afternoon,” Paul said.