agitated and warn me not to go, and so I couldn’t resist.”
“But later on, you were disappointed?”
“Well, you know. He’s got money and power and all that, but those things don’t come to bed with him. What’s there is a sixty-five-year-old fat guy with a hairy back and trouble getting hard. So I guess that’s what I get out of the experience. I learned that.”
“I suppose that’s worth something,” Spence said.
“Yeah. I suppose.”
Manco Kapak stood in the shower in the guesthouse, feeling the jets of warm water scouring his body, then running down in soothing streams to his toes. He had mixed feelings about this shower. It was perfect in every way. It was much better than the ones in the various bathrooms in the main house, because he had decreed it. He had not merely bought this one when he bought the property. He had talked with the architect and the contractor during the building of the guesthouse and made sure they understood what he wanted. He had also made sure they understood that Kapak wanted what he wanted, not something they thought was similar to what he wanted. The more he enjoyed the beauty, tastefulness, strength, and even warmth of the shower, the more resentful he became that it was so much better than the ones he usually used. Was he supposed to walk all the way out here to the end of the path every time he took a shower, or stay in the main house and use inferior facilities? The whole idea made him furious. He was going to have to remodel the main house.
His train of thought brought him to how much money it would cost, and how much money he had been losing lately. His mind struggled with the thought. He was beginning to feel the unfamiliar sensation that he wanted to go see the police as quickly as possible. They seemed to know what had happened last night, and he certainly didn’t. This morning he could hardly call any of the five men he had sent after Joe Carver. That police lieutenant might very well have forgotten to mention that his five men had found Carver and killed him or something.
But Kapak knew his luck wasn’t that good. This guy Carver was an unknown. The man had simply appeared beside Kapak one night wearing a ski mask, stuck a gun against his head, and said he would pull the trigger if Kapak didn’t drop the bank deposit pouch and stand with his hands on the wall of the bank for five minutes while he disappeared. At first Kapak had almost laughed. He had considered saying it out loud: “You really don’t want the one you rob to be me.”
But small-time characters were the most likely to panic and shoot somebody. There was no point in incurring that risk. For five minutes Kapak could be silent and stand there. After that it would be different. It would be his turn. It still seemed perfectly fair to Kapak. He had been robbed of cash receipts, so he had asked around about new people with a lot of cash and come up with the name Joe Carver. Kapak had never seen or heard of the robber before, and he had never seen or heard of Joe Carver, so it seemed like a match. It had to be somebody new if he didn’t know who Kapak was.
He had to admit to himself in the solitude of his guesthouse shower that he had probably been overconfident in being satisfied with Joe Carver as the robber. The truth was that he had not really considered it absolutely essential that he catch and punish the right man. It was essential that he find and punish
Kapak dried off and walked naked back up the path toward the big house. He was sure the girl would be gone by now, and he could get dressed for the police interview in peace. The tedium of these interviews was their most striking quality, and this made it difficult to maintain the level of concentration he would need to avoid their purpose, which was entrapment. The cops obviously knew something was up, and the two cars registered to his company proved he was somehow connected with whatever had happened, and they needed to wear him down so they could fool him into incriminating himself. Actually, the process was more like being nagged than fooled.
Kapak came into the house through the sliding door into the living room and padded along barefoot on the polished hardwood floor for five paces before his eye caught the unfamiliar shape and identified it as a man.
The man was about forty, with a short beard that looked as though he hadn’t had a chance to shave. He wore a pair of black jeans and a T-shirt with a long-sleeved cotton shirt open over it like a jacket. He was standing absolutely still near the fireplace.
Kapak was naked and unarmed, and there was no way to retreat unnoticed, so he resorted to bluster. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Joe Carver.”
“
“Yes. I came this morning because I wanted you to get a chance to look at me. Now you know that I’m somebody you never saw before. I never held you up.”
Manco Kapak’s mind was stalled, caught up in the contemplation of details. It was absolutely undeniable that this Joe Carver did not seem to be the man who had stuck a gun against his head a month ago. He hadn’t seen the man’s face, but the voice seemed different, and the shape of the body. But had Carver forgotten he’d been wearing a ski mask? Kapak tried to follow these thoughts to some kind of conclusion but was distracted by the feeling that he was exceptionally vulnerable.
At the same time, he couldn’t help thinking that this situation was likely to change radically within ten or twenty minutes. Spence would return, perceive instantly that there was an intruder in the house, and probably shoot him. Or a couple of survivors of last night’s debacle would show up to tell Kapak all about it, recognize Joe Carver, and take revenge for whatever he’d done last night. And, if nothing else happened, the police lieutenant would probably send a patrol car out at 9:01 to drag Kapak to headquarters. They’d bang on the door, get no answer, and then kick it in. Not only would Kapak’s immediate problem be solved, but so would the larger question of what to do about Joe Carver. The courts would put him away for a home invasion and for the sheer weirdness of keeping a naked man prisoner. Kapak had to stall until one of these things came to pass.
“Look,” he said. “I can see you’re a sensible, reasonable man. You didn’t come in here talking nasty and waving metal around. I’d love to talk to you about this and come up with some sort of mutually satisfactory arrangement.”
“That’s exactly what I want.”
“Good, good,” Kapak said, nodding his head. “Since we’re both civilized and neither of us is crazy, I’d like to get dressed before we do that. I feel at a loss here, standing around like this. It’s hard to concentrate.”
“That’s okay,” Carver said. “This doesn’t need to take a lot of your time. Now that you know I’m not the one you’ve been looking for, I’ll just go. You and I don’t have a problem.” He turned and moved toward the back door.
That wasn’t satisfactory. It would allow Carver to slip out into the yard and probably through the tall grove of bamboo on that side of the yard and over the fence. It wouldn’t bring him into a collision with Spence or the Gaffney brothers or the police.
“Wait” said Kapak.
Carver stopped and turned to face Kapak. For a moment Kapak endured Carver’s stare and tried to hold his eyes on Carver’s. The expression on Carver’s face changed to disappointment—not, Kapak reflected, anger or fright. “Sorry. Got to go.”
Kapak persisted. “It’s all well and good that you didn’t take my money. But what if you did something to my guys, or my cars? Is everything supposed to be even because you didn’t do one thing, but did five worse things?”
“If I could do five worse, I could do ten worse. It’s best to be forgiving.”
“But is that fair to me?”
Carver slid the window open on the other side of the room and sat on the sill. He swung one leg out. “Be satisfied with peace. I could have hurt you today”
“I’m just saying…”
But Carver’s other leg swung over the sill and he slid off. Kapak heard him drop to the grass below, then heard him begin to run. Kapak had already begun moving, sidestepping closer to the master bedroom suite. Now he ran toward it. His bare feet gave him good traction on the slippery floors, and he made it to his bedroom quickly.
