“Who knows.”

“Well that’s all right. I’ve got a cauliflower heart.” But her hand tightened into a quivering little fist around the compact. Her face, suddenly, was flaming. “I’m not going to get on the radio and start screaming the minute I take off. I’m not going to tell them anything in Corpus Christi—just that I dropped off a passenger from Miami there, name of Jim Murdison from Topeka Kansas.”

“All right. But if anybody asks questions you’d better tell them the truth.”

“Nobody will,” she said. “Nobody’s going to know. Not from me.”

He knew it was an unwise thing but he folded her against him and when she tipped her face up he kissed her long and hard. The drizzle misted their skin. There was nothing extraordinary about any of it but it was one of those moments he’d never forget—a spark that would grow brighter whenever it was touched by its associations: the smell of the desert drizzle and of airplane oil, the pale impressionism of the afternoon’s color, the loneliness of the solitary aircraft asleep on dusty ground.

He stood beside his suitcase with his jacket billowing in the wind of the plane’s passage when it roared by him and lifted, steeply banking, wings waggling in farewell; then he picked up the valise and walked away toward the narrow highway beyond the hill.

– 17 –

THE ROOM STANK of yesterday’s tobacco. The silence was such that Ross could hear Myerson’s ballpoint pen scrape across the pad. Cutter merely sat in a placenta of patience. Ross kept looking at the door and finally it opened and Glenn Follett entered, burly and freckled and as dewlappy as a Basset hound. “Greetings.”

Myerson looked up. He held the ballpoint upright, bouncing it on the desk. “Now that Mr. Follett has graced the room with his presence perhaps we can get started.”

Follett sat down. “There was a traffic jam. I’m sorry.”

Ross recalled Cutter’s comment on the way up twenty minutes ago in the elevator: If it was up to me I wouldn’t hire Follett to carry out my garbage. Follett was definitely cast against type. He seemed always desperate to reassure himself that he was lovable, that he had buddies like other people. His face in repose looked eagerly ready at an instant’s notice to burst into tears. Perhaps to counter his appearance he had a lexicon of mannerisms designed to accentuate a sort of forced bonhomie. His voice was always too loud, he spoke with great heaves and lunges of his arms: his emotions were ebulliently on the surface, there for anyone to read.

“All right,” Myerson said. “Let’s have a rough Sit Rep. What’s the score as of this morning?”

Cutter said, “Score? We’re not even sure we know who the players are.”

“You’re talking about other countries now, Joe?”

“We don’t know where he is, do we.”

Follett said, “Hell let’s don’t get sour this early in the morning, Joe. So he’s gone under again. People have gone to ground before. They always turn up sooner or later, right?”

“Later in this case could be too late,” Myerson said. “Let’s have the Sit Rep.”

The situation report was Ross’s department and he cleared his throat. “All right. Here’s what we know.” He consulted his notes. “On the twenty-fifth a man who was probably our subject spent half a day in an office-copying shop in Mobile, Alabama. He paid extra to run the machine himself so that nobody else could get a look at what he was running off, but according to Tobin’s reports the general appearance conforms with our estimate of Kendig’s needs. The man ran off thirty-three hundred copies and collated the sheets into approximately fifteen stacks. That works out to two hundred and twenty pages per stack. If his entire manuscript runs two hundred and seventy-odd pages and we subtract the fifty pages or so that he’s already delivered, it works out just about right. He’s got fourteen publishers and the fifteenth copy would be for his agent in New York. He retains the original and the carbon.”

“Interesting to speculate on what use he’s got in mind for the carbon,” Myerson said. “All right—go on, Ross.”

“Right. On the twenty-seventh he bought a ’fifty-five Buick in Pensacola for a hundred dollars cash.” He felt the blood rise to his cheeks. “He had to use a driver’s license and other identification of course—automobile insurance card, that kind of thing. He used mine—the wallet he took off me in Georgia.”

“Cute,” Cutter remarked. Ross was surprised to see him smile.

Ross went on: “He spent the night of the twenty-sixth in Tampa, a motel. Leonard Ross, but it’s Kendig’s handwriting on the registry card. All this stuff is from Tobin’s people over at the Bureau.”

Follett said, “Jesus. They must have put a ton of guys on the canvassing job.”

“They’ve blanketed the South,” Myerson said grudgingly. “They’re pretty good at that.”

“We had one piece of blind luck,” Ross continued. “On the twenty-seventh a Florida state trooper issued him a warning because the car was throwing smoke. Safety check, you know. But he was still being Leonard Ross—the cop got it down in his book. That was near Plant City—it’s roughly due east of Clearwater, maybe halfway down the Florida peninsula. So he was definitely headed south. Tobin sent his people into south Florida on the twenty-ninth to drag the net. They found out Leonard Ross had spent the night of the twenty-seventh in a motel near Sarasota.”

“He wasn’t in any hurry,” Cutter said. “It’s not that far from Tampa to Sarasota. Even in an old oil-burner he could have gone three times as far in in a day’s drive if he’d wanted to.”

Ross said, “Well of course he was staying off the Interstates, that would slow him down. There’ve been FBI spotters along the big highways but he never showed on any of them. He’s using back roads.”

“Or was,” Cutter said. “This was a week ago. He could be in Hong Kong by now.”

Ross felt heat in his face again. “He stopped using my ID at that point. He mailed the wallet and the badge back to me on the twenty-eighth from Sarasota. I received them two days ago.”

“He’s very funny,” Myerson said.

Glenn Follett shot his arm into the air. “Did you check them out for fingerprints?”

“Naturally,” Cutter said.

“And?”

Cutter only shook his head in disgust: disgust with Follett, not with the predictable results of the lab tests.

Follett was oblivious. “I still don’t understand how he could have used Ross’s driver’s license to buy a car and fool a state trooper. How old are you, Ross? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Hell Kendig’s nearly twice your age. How’d he get by with it?”

Ross said, “The cop described him as thirtyish.”

“He used to be pretty good with makeup,” Cutter said. “He could be an Arab one day, a Swede the next.”

Ross went back to his notes. “On the thirtieth that bootlegger’s Oldsmobile turned up in Mobile—he left it on a pay lot there. That was the car he used to bust out of our trap.”

“The one you had a little ride in,” Cutter said.

“Yeah.” He hurried on. “But that didn’t help—we already knew he’d been in Mobile. Okay, the last item is this—my wallet wasn’t the only thing he mailed from Sarasota on the twenty-eighth, He shipped out fifteen copies of chapter four as well. Ives got his copy yesterday. Desrosiers hasn’t reported yet. They’ll be showing up in the next day or two, I expect.”

“What’s it about?” Myerson asked.

“It’s the one about Duvalier being assassinated on White House orders.”

“Wonderful,” Myerson said. It was close to a groan. “Why doesn’t he pick on the other side for a change?”

“That comes next. The Nasser chapter.”

Cutter said, “On the twenty-eighth he dropped out of sight. Sarasota was the last fix we had on him. That was a week ago today. He’s taken cover.”

Follett said, “I don’t get it, Joe. If the bastard’s still in south Florida what am I doing here? Florida’s not my bailiwick.”