Elizabeth sat on the bed feeling exhaustion beginning to flood into her mind, taking possession of whole sections of her brain at once like water rushing into a sinking ship. Too many things were going on at once, and she was beginning to lose the strength of will that kept them separate. Everything was beginning to get muddled together and hazy. She couldn’t remember anymore whether she was collecting information that was supposed to lead in some particular direction, or just collecting information. Pervading all of it was an impression, a sense that an awful lot of people seemed to be dying. There was something unreal about it.
You knew they were dying because somebody told you so over the telephone, and by the time you got there, there wasn’t even a body. At most there was a chalk outline like the one on the floor at her feet. The discreet efficient functionaries had already cleaned everything up, so there wasn’t the palpable and substantial residue of an act of violence, just a question; the murder itself just an intellectual postulate and you were supposed to deduce its causes and corollaries starting with an infinite range of things that could have preceded it in time. All you had to work with was your ability to see the relationships, to pick the single thread of logic that might lead to the one who’d done it, and then follow it slowly forward, trying hard to take each step faster to bring yourself closer and closer to the present moment, where the murderer would be waiting for you. And all the time, the act itself was moving backward, further and further into the past. Everything you chose to look at put the act farther from your reach—trace the poison? check the airline records for suspicious travelers? check the police reports? the other rooms in the hotel? the Senator’s personal life? the CIA’s foreign agents? the world?
She was aware that Hart was saying something to her that had just battered against the tired receptors in her brain without their being fast enough to decipher it. “Huh?” she said.
“I said I think we ought to go to bed.”
“So do I,” she said, and sensed in herself a tiny warm tremor of joy. Then she realized that part of her mind had heard him differently, and had rushed upward to meet him without being held back or delayed by the restraints. She caught it in time to keep it from blurting out, “Oh, you mean each of us, not both of us.” She smiled to herself as she stood up and walked out the door. All the barriers seemed to be going at once; things were tearing through them without warning, things she hadn’t suspected were there. This one would take some thought. Not that it meant anything, but it was interesting, like a dream.
THEY WENT OUT TO THE parking lot and got into Little Norman’s white Mark IV, then drove to the Marina Hotel.
At the bar, which was set back and above the casino, Little Norman said, “Grab a table where I can see the action; I’ll be back in a second.”
He said, “Where are you going?”
“Just a quick phone call, kid. I’m looking after your interests.”
He waited as Norman plowed through the knots of gamblers to a bank of telephones near a men’s room. When Norman got there, he dialed and then turned back to face him, smiling as he talked.
The waitress leaned across him with Little Norman’s drink, actually placing a breast on his shoulder for an instant. Everything here was different, he thought. It was calculated to put things that secretly delighted just out of reach, always as though it had been a fortuitous chance. They probably had a class that taught them to do that, as the last girl in the line of the dinner show at the Lido had her G-string snap, always in the last few bars of the performance.
Little Norman said, “To your health, kid,” and took a drink.
He responded, “And yours,” and drank too, but only enough to wet his mouth and let the ice click against his teeth. There wasn’t much point in overdoing it, and he would overdo it if he had to drink one for one with Little Norman. Besides, he had been on the road for over a month, and he never drank on the road. You had to keep your head clear on the road.
On the other side of the casino the crowd around one of the crap tables was two deep and growing. The man who was rolling was wearing a sport coat, but had stuffed his tie in a pocket and opened his shirt at the neck. He rolled again and a little cry went up from the table that was just loud enough to reach the bar. More people strolled over attempting looks of detachment, but joined the crowd and riveted their eyes to the table. From where he sat in the bar it was hard to tell whether they were betting or watching. The quick, mechanical movements of the croupier didn’t reveal anything to him. From this distance they all just looked hungry.
“You a gambler?”
“I may try my luck a little later,” he said. “Why?”
“Some people in that line of work are, some aren’t. Henckel once lost twenty thousand in one night. Personally I didn’t like it much until after I quit. Couldn’t see the point in it. When you’re old you need some kind of excitement that doesn’t involve your body.”
Another cry reached them from the crap table across the casino, not a cheer, exactly, but a wordless, spontaneous howl from all the throats gathered around the table, as though it were the collective sound of their blood pressures going up in unison.
“You’re no more retired than I am, Norman,” he said. “Just got a steady job now.”
“It ain’t so, kid,” said Little Norman, his eyes suddenly open wide and his smile gone. “I’m sixty-one years old. But once I was good. One of the best. Quiet and reliable. Maybe the best button man in the Midwest.” Then his eyes narrowed and the opaque smile returned. “Not as good as you, though. I was real surprised to see your face like that. I never expected to see you looking like that. Not ever.”
“It happens,” he replied.
“I didn’t say it couldn’t happen,” said Little Norman. “What I said was I didn’t think I’d see it. That’s a loser’s face.”
Across the casino the man rolled again; this time he rolled into a silence, a deep-drawn inbreathing like a wall of anticipation. From the bar it was hard to tell whether he made his point, but the silence seemed to draw spectators even faster, like particles rushing to fill a void. When the stickman leaned across the table, bestowing and gathering in single economical movements, the man was still visible, standing with his back to the bar. But then the crowd shifted a little and he disappeared behind it.
“Maybe so,” he said. “Hard to tell about winning until you count the money.”
“That’s a fact,” said Little Norman. He gulped down the last finger of Scotch in his glass and stood up. “Be seeing you, kid. It’s always a pleasure.”
“Thanks for the drink, Norman.”
“Any time,” he said as he stepped down to the casino floor. For a long time it was possible to watch his head and shoulders moving along above the crowd, but then he was gone.
He finished his drink and left the hotel. There wasn’t any particular reason to leave. He wasn’t hiding from anyone and didn’t have anywhere else as a destination. It was just the normal thing to do, as automatic as the urge to blink his eyes, as automatic as going outside and then waiting beside the door to see if the next one out paused for a second to see which way he’d gone. He was on vacation for two more days. That was no time to let himself slide into a position where he’d feel uncomfortable.
He walked across the parking lot to the street, and joined the anonymous hundreds moving along the Strip from casino to casino. Just before they got to the MGM Grand Hotel he parted from his companions and took a shortcut through a closed gas station, then stopped in the shadows behind it. Nobody came after him, so he went on. If there was a watcher, he at least had sense enough to keep his distance and not be annoying.
He went in the front entrance of the Grand Hotel and moved quickly to the other end of the gigantic casino, where the blackjack games were proceeding in an atmosphere of spurious calm. At one table a man piled his remaining chips on the square in front of him and waited, one foot already on the floor to push his chair away from the table. The dealer’s deft fingers peeled cards out of the shoe and made them re-materialize in front of the players, and the man found himself sitting behind a ten and a four. He didn’t seem surprised or disappointed by it, just watched while the second ten appeared and the dealer’s hand snatched away the chips. Then his foot pushed off and he relinquished his chair.
The dealer’s face didn’t seem to notice that the man was gone, or that he’d ever been there. Only his
