'The workroom needs to be cleaned and organized. So when he gets back he can find things for a change.'
'He'll call us in a day or two and we can ask him if it's okay.'
'He won't call.'
'I'm hopeful he'll call.'
'If there was something he wanted to call us about, he'd still be here, living amongst us.'
He got into bed, turning up the collar of his pajama shirt.
'Let's give him a chance to call,' she said. 'That's all I'm saying.'
'He's got some deep and dire plan and it doesn't include us.'
'He loves us, Scott.'
She watched the set at the foot of the bed. There was a woman on an exercise bike and she wore a gleaming skintight suit and talked into the camera as she pedaled and there was a second woman inserted in a corner of the screen, thumb-sized, relaying the first woman's monologue in sign language. Karen studied them both, her eyes sweeping the screen. She was thin-boundaried. She took it all in, she believed it all, pain, ecstasy, dog food, all the seraphic matter, the baby bliss that falls from the air. Scott stared at her and waited. She carried the virus of the future. Quoting Bill.
Bill reminded himself to read the pavement signs before he crossed the street. It was so perfectly damn sensible they ought to make it the law in every city, long-lettered words in white paint that tell you which way to look if you want to live.
He wasn't interested in seeing London. He'd seen it before. A glimpse of Trafalgar Square from a taxi, three routine seconds of memory, aura, repetition, the place unchanged despite construction fences and plastic sheeting-a dream locus, a double-ness that famous places share, making them seem remote and unreceptive but at the same time intimately familiar, an experience you've been carrying forever. The pavement signs were the only things he paid attention to. Look left. Look right. They seemed to speak to the whole vexed question of existence.
He hated these shoes. His ribs felt soft today. There was a slight seizing in his throat.
He wanted to get back to the hotel and sleep a while. He wasn't staying at the place in Mayfair that Charlie had mentioned. He was in a middling gray relic and already beginning to grouse to himself about reimbursement.
In his room he took off his shirt and blew on the inside of the collar, getting rid of lint and hair, drying the light sweat. He had Lizzie's overnight bag with his robe and pajamas and there were some socks, underwear and toilet articles he'd bought in Boston.
He didn't know if he wanted to do this thing. It didn't feel so right anymore. He had a foreboding, the little clinging tightness in the throat that he knew so well from his work, the times he was afraid and hemmed in by doubt, knowing there was something up ahead he didn't want to face, a character, a life he thought he could not handle.
He called Charlie's hotel.
'Where are you, Bill?'
'I can see a hospital from my window.'
'And you find this encouraging.'
'I look for one thing in a hotel. Proximity to the essential services.'
'You're supposed to be at the Chesterfield.'
'The very name is incompatible with my price structure. It smells of figured velvet.'
'You're not paying. We're paying.'
'I understood about the plane fare.'
'And the hotel. It goes without saying. And the incidentals. Do you want me to see if the room's still available?'
'I'm settled in here.'
'What's the name of the place?'
'It'll come to me in a minute. In the meantime tell me if we're set for this evening.'
'We're working on a change of site. We had a wonderful venue all set up, thanks to a well-connected colleague of mine. The library chamber at Saint Paul 's Cathedral. Precisely the dignified setting I was hoping to find. Oak and stone carving, thousands of books. At noon today they began receiving phone calls. Anonymous.'
'Threats.'
'Bomb threats. We're trying to keep it absolutely quiet. But the librarian did ask if we wouldn't like to conduct our meeting elsewhere. We think we've got a secure site just about pinned down and we're arranging a very discreet police presence. But it hurts, Bill. We had a gallery and vaulted ceiling. We had woodblock floors.'
'People who make phone calls don't set off bombs. The real terrorists make their calls after the damage is done. If at all.'
'I know,' Charlie said, 'but we still want to take every possible precaution. We're cutting the number of press people invited. And we're not revealing the location to anyone until the last possible moment. People will gather at a decoy location, then be driven to the real site in a chartered bus.'
'Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.'
'Come to the Chesterfield at seven. You'll have some time to look at the poems you're going to read. Then we'll go off together. And when it's over, a late dinner, just the two of us. I want to talk about your book.'
Bill felt better about the reading now that he knew someone was paying his hotel bill. He put a menu card on the coffee table and got his medication tin from his jacket pocket. He emptied the contents onto the card, a total of four uncut tablets. The rest of his supply sat in prescription vials of lovely amber plastic in a bureau drawer in his bedroom at home. Depressants, anti-depressants, sleep-inducers, speed-makers, diuretics, antibiotics, heart- starters, muscle relaxants. In front of him now were three kinds of sedatives and a single pink cortical steroid for intractable skin itches. Pathetic. But of course he hadn't known he'd be doing Boston and London. And the meager sampling would not diminish the surgical pleasure of slicing and dividing, the happy sacrament of color mixing. He bent over the low table, wrapped in the calm that fell upon him when he was cutting up his pills. He liked the sense of soldierly preparation, the diligence and rigor that helped him pretend he knew what he was doing. It was the sweetest play of hand and eye, slicing the pills, choosing elements to take in combination. It was right there on the card, nicely and brightly pebbled, a way to manage the confusion, to search out a state of being, actually shop among the colors for some altering force that might get him past a momentary panic or some mischance of the body or take him safely through the long evening tides, the western end of the day, a wash of desperation coming over him.
He regretted not having his illustrated guides with their cautions and warnings and side effects and interactions and lovely color charts. But he hadn't known he'd be doing an ocean.
He concentrated deeply, sectioning the tablets with his old scarred stag-handle folding knife, undetected by security at three airports.
The taxi swung onto Southwark Bridge. Bill had the poems in his lap and occasionally raised a page to his face, muttering lines. A soft warm rain made shaded patterns on the river, bands of wind-brushed shimmer.
Charlie said, 'About this fellow.'
'Who?'
'The fellow in Athens who initiated the whole business. I'd like to get your sense of the man.'
'Is he Lebanese?'
'Yes. A political scientist. He says he's only an intermediary, with imperfect knowledge of the group in Beirut. Claims they're eager to release the hostage.'
'Are they a new fundamentalist element?'
'They're a new communist element.'
'Are we surprised?' Bill said.
'There's a Lebanese Communist Party. There are leftist elements, I understand, aligned with Syria. The PLO has always had a Marxist component and they're active again in Lebanon.'
'So we're not surprised.'
'We're not unduly surprised.'
'I depend on you to tell me when we're surprised.'
Two detectives met them in a deserted street not far from Saint Saviours Dock. There was renovation in progress in the area but the buildings here were still intact, mainly red brick structures with hoists and loading bays.
