'Oh, Mike, you stubborn fool.'
'Anybody home?' I asked her.
'No, you always pick an off day for the servants.' She smiled again now. 'You're clever and I'm glad.'
I nodded. For some reason my side had started to ache and it was getting hard to breathe. There were other places that had pain areas all their own and they weren't going to get better. It had only just started. I said, 'I'm tired.'
So we went out back to the pool. She helped me off with my clothes and once more I put the trunks on, then eased down into a plastic contour chair and let the sun warm me. There were blue marks from my shoulders down and where the rib was broken a welt had raised, an angry red that arched from front to back. Laura found antiseptic and cleaned out the furrow where the two shots had grazed me and I thought back to the moment of getting them, realizing how lucky I was because the big jerk was too impatient, just like I had been, taking too much pleasure out of something that should have been strictly business.
I slept for a while. I felt the sun travel across my body from one side to the other, then I awoke abruptly because events had compacted themselves into my thoughts and I knew that there was still that one thing more to do.
Laura said, 'You were talking in your sleep, Mike.'
She had changed back into that black bikini and it was wet like her skin so she must have just come from the water. The tight band of black at her loins had rolled down some from the swim and fitted tightly into the crevasses of her body. The top half was like an artist's brush stroke, a quick motion of impatience at a critical sex-conscious world that concealed by reason of design only. She was more nearly naked dressed than nude.
How lovely.
Large, flowing thighs. Full, round calves. They blended into a softly concave stomach and emerged, higher, into proud, outthrust breasts. Her face and hair were a composite halo reaching for the perfection of beauty and she was smiling.
Lovely.
'What did I say, Laura?'
She stopped smiling then. 'You were talking about dragons.'
I nodded. 'Today, I'm St. George.'
'Mike--'
'Sit down, baby.'
'Can we talk again?'
'Yes, we'll talk.'
'Would you mind if I got dressed first? It's getting chilly out here now. You ought to get dressed yourself.'
She was right. The sun was a thick red now, hanging just over the crest of a mountain. While one side was a blaze of green, the other was in the deep purple of the shadow.
I held out my hand and she helped me up, and together we walked around the pool to the bathhouse, touching each other, feeling the warmth of skin against skin, the motion of muscle against muscle. At the door she turned and I took her in my arms. 'Back to back?' she said.
'Like prudes,' I told her.
Her eyes grew soft and her lips wet her tongue. Slowly, with an insistent hunger, her mouth turned up to mine and I took it, tasting her again, knowing her, feeling the surge of desire go through me and through her too.
I let her go reluctantly and she went inside with me behind her. The setting sun threw long orange rays through the window, so there was no need of the overhead light. She went into the shower and turned on a soft drizzle while I got dressed slowly, aching and hurting as I pulled on my clothes.
She called out, 'When will it all be over, Mike?'
'Today,' I said quietly.
'Today?'
I heard her stop soaping herself in the shower. 'Are you sure?'
'Yes.'
'You were dreaming about dragons,' she called out.
'About how they die, honey. They die hard. This one will die especially hard. You know, you wouldn't believe how things come about. Things that were planted long ago suddenly bear fruit now. Like what I told you. Remember all I told you about Velda?'
'Yes, Mike, I do.'
'I had to revise and add to the story, Laura.'
'Really?' She turned the shower off and stood there behind me soaping herself down, the sound of it so nice and natural I wanted to turn around and watch. I knew what she'd look like darkly beautiful, blondely beautiful, the sun having turned all of her hair white.
I said, 'Pat was right and I was right. Your jewels did come into it. They were like Mrs. Civac's jewels and the fact that Richie Cole was a jewel smuggler.'
'Oh?' That was all she said.
'They were all devices. Decoys. Red herrings. How would you like to hear the rest of what I think?'
'All right, Mike.'
She didn't see me, but I nodded. 'In the government are certain key men. Their importance is apparent to critical eyes long before it is to the public. Your husband was like that. It was evident that he was going to be a top dog one day and the kind of top dog our Red enemy could hardly afford to have up there.
'That was Leo Knapp, your husband. Mr. Missile Man. Mr. America. He sure was a big one. But our wary enemy knew his stuff. Kill him off and you had a public martyr or a great investigation that might lead to even greater international stuff and those Reds just aren't the kind who can stand the big push. Like it or not, they're still a lousy bunch of peasants who killed to control but who can be knocked into line by the likes of us. They're shouting slobs who'll run like hell when class shows and they know this inside their feeble little heads. So they didn't want Leo Knapp put on a pedestal.
'Control comes other ways, however. For instance, he could marry a woman who would listen to him as a sounding board and relay his thoughts and secrets to the right persons so that whatever he did could be quickly annulled by some other action. He could marry a woman who, as his official Washington hostess, had the ear of respected persons and could pick up things here and there that were as important to enemy ears as any sealed documents. He could find his work being stymied at every turn.
'Then one day he figured it all out. He pinpointed the enemy and found it within his own house. He baited a trap by planting supposedly important papers in his safe and one night while the enemy, his wife, was rifling his safe with her compatriot who was to photograph the papers and transport the photos to higher headquarters, he came downstairs. He saw her, accused her, but blundered into a game bigger than he was.
'Let's say she shot him. It doesn't really matter. She was just as guilty even if it was the other one. At least the other one carried the gun off--a pickup rod traceable to no one if it was thrown away printless. His wife delayed long enough so she and her compatriot could fake a robbery, let the guy get away, then call in the cops.
'Nor does it end there. The same wife still acts as the big Washington hostess with her same ear to the same ground and is an important and inexhaustible supply of information to the enemy. Let's say that she is so big as to even be part of The Dragon team. He was Tooth, she was Nail, both spies, both assassins, both deadly enemies of this country.'
Behind me the water went on again, a downpour that would rinse the bubbles of soap from her body.
'All went well until Richie Cole was killed. Tooth went and used the same gun again. It tied things in. Like I told you when I let you be
'A guy like me doesn't stay dumb forever, though. Things change. You either die or smarten up. I had The Dragon on my back and when I think about it all the little things make sense too. At least I think so. Remember how when Gorlin shot the radio you shook with what I thought was fear? Hell, baby, that was rage. You were
