Here, Kuhl instantly noticed that the ad began with “My Darling Anya” and ended with “Your Unforgetting Lover, Michael-Sebastian.”
These routine elements of the message elicited no reaction from him besides a rapid noting of the timetable. The short window of contact would open at one o’clock Greenwich Mean Time that afternoon — the GMT standard was used, again for consistency’s sake — and shut at two o’clock after the predetermined hour passed.
It was something in the body of the message that quickened his pulse.
The text between salutation and closing said:
Our ardor lifted me to a place beyond the stars, and I cannot bear the fall now that you are gone. Could we have gone too high, too fast, too far? Did our hearts burn too brightly for their flame to last? As I must endure the lonely darkness of love’s ashes, I think it would have been better if we had taken flight without them.
Kuhl stared at the newspaper, his eyes locked on a brief possessive phrase in the message’s fourth and last sentence.
Moments passed. Kuhl kept staring at the paper, at that pair of simple words, the sounds of automobiles and pedestrians in the intersection tamped and dulled by the bloodrush in his ears.
Together they formed a second mnemonic. Codewords he had hoped for, but never truly allowed himself to expect.
Kuhl thought of the flame he had lit in the church, that tiny surrendered spark of memory and passion. Then he closed his newspaper and resumed walking quickly toward his apartment hotel as the traffic light across the street changed from red to green.
For the next several hours he would do nothing but wait in his suite to make contact.
“This place is exquisitely nifty,” Megan said. “All we need now is for the Blob to come glooping over us.”
“The what?” Nimec said.
“The Blob,” Megan said. “As in that old fifties make-out movie. Starring Steve McQueen and a thousand tons of gelatin.”
“Oh, right,” Nimec said. He was staring out the windshield of his reconditioned ’57 Corvette roadster at an orange neon sign shimmering the words BIG EDDIE’S SNACK SHACK into the night.
Megan looked at him from the passenger seat.
“The gelatinous lump was known to be gracious and humble in real life, but tended to play very slimy characters. I suppose it was the usual Hollywood typecasting.”
“Hmm.”
“Winning an Oscar for its role must have been some consolation, though,” Megan said. “The story goes that nobody in the Academy knew whether to nominate it for best actor or actress, so they created some kind of special category. Best Performance by an Amorphous Gender-Neutral Green Thing.”
Nimec kept gazing silently at the entrance to the drive-in restaurant as a pretty, ponytailed carhop who seemed about the right age for a college sophomore came roller-skating out to the car.
He pushed in a chrome dashboard knob to douse the lights and glanced over at Megan.
“What are you having to eat?”
“I’m torn between the fried popcorn shrimp and fried clam strip baskets.”
“That time we stopped in Maine a couple years ago, you told me you didn’t like clams.”
“
Nimec looked at her.
“Let’s get one basket of each and split them,” he said.
“Yum, yum,” Megan said. “And don’t forget our side of potato skins. And my Diet Coke. While you’re treating, dear man.”
He grunted and rolled his window halfway down. Rockabilly music burst into the ’Vette from speakers above the diner’s wraparound awning — somebody who sounded like Buddy Holly but wasn’t.
“Hi.” The carhop outside leaned toward him with a pad, a pencil, and a very cute smile. “Will the two of you be needing menus?”
Nimec told her they wouldn’t and placed their orders and watched the carhop roll off across the parking lot with the diminishing clatter that skate wheels make when spinning away over paved surfaces.
Then he became quiet again.
“About the Blob winning an Oscar,” Megan said. “A nonhuman superstar of undetermined sexual identity must have caused quite a ruckus at the time. This was 1957 or ’58 and couldn’t have been more than three or four years after the McCarthy hearings, blacklisting… did you know even Lucille Ball came under investigation, by the way?
“Meg, give me a break.” Nimec glanced over at her. “There’re some things we need to discuss.”
She gave him a look of mock surprise.
“No kidding,” she said. “Here I thought you only dragged me out of my apartment at ten o’clock at night to go hot-rodding around the Bay Area and chowing down fast food.”
Nimec sat there unconsciously tapping the steering wheel.
“Ricci was over at my place before,” he said. “I asked him to come for shooting practice at the range. Figured it might loosen him up, get him talking. The way it did sometimes before he left here.”
“And it didn’t work.”
Nimec shook his head no.
“A big piece of him’s still gone,” he said. “Maybe most of him. He won’t tell me what he’s thinking, or what he’s feeling. I can guess some of it. But just enough to know he isn’t right.”
“Does it worry you?”
“Some, yeah,” Nimec said. He moved his shoulders. “Could be I’d feel different if I wasn’t heading off for Gabon the day after tomorrow. Once Ricci got back, I had myself convinced the normal routine would help him. You start on an everyday grind, it can smooth the edges from the outside in.”
“And you haven’t seen any change?”
“Not for the better.” Nimec said.
Megan mulled that over.
“I haven’t missed getting nicked by those edges you mentioned,” she said. “But I also haven’t been back in SanJo very long, and it’s an understatement to say I’m not close to him. I don’t believe he likes me too much. Sometimes I doubt he even respects me.” She paused. “I suppose that’s my way of making excuses for leaving you stuck with a problem that really needed attention from both of us.”
Nimec looked out over the sportster’s hood scoop and through the restaurant window and watched its short order cooks working over their deep fryers and grills. Big Eddie’s was a family business that had first opened its doors when Eisenhower was president and stayed under the same family’s continuous management for going on half a century. It still held annual sock hops and for all Nimec knew Big Eddie, if he’d ever existed, continued to run the show. Though more likely it would be Big Eddie Jr. or Big Eddie III.
“Don’t sweat it,” he told Megan. “You’ve had to make your own adjustments. I can see the boss handing over more responsibilities to you. See him easing himself out of things little by little. He’s still Gord. He’s looking healthier. But he isn’t what he was before the bio strike. And he won’t be again, will he?”
Megan looked at him.
“No,” she said. “He won’t.”
Nimec sat facing the windshield for several moments, then turned partially toward her.
“So you see where I am tonight,” he said. “Thinking about changes. The ones that are happening, and the ones that aren’t. And none of it’s in my control.”
Megan nodded. The carhop rolled up with a tray of food in disposable containers and hooked it over the half open window. She reached into her apron pocket to fill her hand with tubs of cocktail sauce, tartar sauce, and ketchup, set them on the tray with the meals, and then asked Nimec if he cared for anything else besides the check.
