Читать книгу Koko - Peter Straub - Страница 29

Harry Beevers presented the chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to an astonished, gratified William Tharpe, and spent five or ten minutes in hypocritical raptures over the forthcoming number of Rilke Street. Then he took plain, greying Pat Caldwell Beevers, who was beginning more than ever to suggest an English sheep-dog that had been mooning around him half his life, out to a TriBeCa restaurant of the sort he had learned from Tim Underhill to call piss-elegant. The walls were red lacquer. Discreet lamps with brass shades sat on each table. Portly waiters hovered. Harry thought of Maggie Lah, of her golden skin, of champagne bottles and other interesting things between her small but undoubtedly affecting breasts. All the while he elaborated various necessary fictions concerning his ‘mission.’ Now and then, although Pat frequently smiled and seemed to enjoy her wine, her soup, her fish, he thought she knew that he was lying. Like Jimmy Lah, she asked him how Michael looked, how he thought he was doing, and Harry answered fine, fine. Her smiles seemed to Harry to be full of regret – whether for him, for herself, for Michael Poole, or the world at large, he could not tell. When the moment came when he asked for money, she said only, ‘How much?’ Around two thousand. She reached into her bag, took out her checkbook and fountain pen, and without expression of any kind on her face wrote out a check for three thousand dollars.

She passed the check across the table. Her face was now flushed in a mottled band from cheekbone to cheekbone, Harry thought unattractively so.

‘Of course I consider this strictly a loan,’ he said. ‘You’re doing a lot of good with this money, Pat. I mean that.’

‘So the government wants you to track down this man to see if he might be a murderer?’

‘In a nutshell. Of course it’s a semi-private operation, which is how I’ll be able to do the book deals, the film deals, and so on. You can appreciate the need for strict confidentiality.’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, I know you could always read between the lines, but…’ He let the sentence complete itself. ‘I’d be kidding you if I said there wasn’t quite a bit of potential danger involved in this.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Pat said, nodding.

‘I shouldn’t even be thinking like this, but if I don’t come back, I think it would be fitting for me to be buried at Arlington.’

She nodded again.

Harry gave up and began looking around the room for the waiter.

Pat startled him by saying, ‘There are still times when I’m sorry that you ever set foot in Vietnam.’

‘What’s the point,’ he asked. ‘I’m me, I always was me, I’ve never been anything but me.’

They parted outside the restaurant.

After Harry had gone a short distance down the sidewalk, he turned around, smiling, knowing that Pat was watching him walk away. But she was moving straight ahead, her shoulders slumped, her overstuffed, lumpy bag swinging at her side.

He went to his bank and let himself into the empty vestibule with his bank card. There he used the cash machine to deposit Pat’s check and one other he had obtained that day and to withdraw four hundred dollars in cash. He bought a copy of Screw at a corner newsstand and folded it under his arm so that no one would be able to identify it. Harry walked back through the cold to West 24th Street and the studio apartment he had found shortly after Pat told him, more forcefully than she had ever said anything in the entire course of their marriage, that she had to have a divorce.