Foul Matter (27 page)

Twenty minutes later, another flight landed at Pittsburgh International nonstop from New York City.

As Clive waited for a cab, he wondered if Ned Isaly would recognize him, provided he even saw him. When Ned appeared in the Mackenzie-Haack offices, he came to see Tom Kidd and nobody else. The only contact Clive had had with Ned was when they’d passed a few times in the hallways, and Clive doubted that the absentminded smile or nod Ned gave him was proof that he’d even seen him. Anyway, what difference would it make if Ned did recognize him? They were both in Pittsburgh at the same time. So what?

Clive just wasn’t used to following people.

When he checked into the Pittsburgh Hilton, he scanned the lobby looking for Pascal. There was no sign of her; there was only a couple sitting in a section marked off for morning coffee, the couple and a blond woman whose face was bent over a newspaper. How could she see the print through those dark glasses?

The desk clerk returned his credit card to him along with a key card. Clive refused help from the bell captain, having only one small bag. He walked over to the bank of elevators. Two elevators arrived simultaneously and as he was about to step into one, he saw Ned coming out of another one on the other side. Ned didn’t even look at him. Clive thought he was probably wandering around in writer daze. He watched and saw him going up to the bar. So Clive would have time to leave his suitcase and wash up. Just as he pushed the up button, he saw a woman entering the glass door of the hotel.

It was Pascal.

At first glance he didn’t recognize her. It was her hair; it was pulled back and wound into a bun. He assumed she had done this the better to follow Ned. The hair loose and abundant would have called attention to her. He thought the makeup less liberally applied, too, not so heavy on the eye shadow. He thought how unnerving it was to think that a woman could so easily create a wholly new persona with nothing but a hairbrush and—sweet Christ! The guy in the boots with the beard coming through the automatic doors! Clive dived into the elevator as the door was closing. What was Dwight Staines doing here?

When Ned threaded his way through the tables, heading for the bar, Sally dropped the
Pittsburgh Press
on the floor and bent down to retrieve it, hitting her head on the edge of the table. He had come so close. But he hadn’t seen her. She pulled a bit on the blond wig to make sure the bump hadn’t dislodged it.

As she righted herself she caught a glimpse of a man who’d just boarded one of the elevators and thought surely she must be wrong. Why for God’s sakes would Clive Esterhaus be in Pittsburgh?

Ned had checked into his room, dumped his duffel bag, and gone down for a cup of coffee before setting out to look at Pittsburgh. He hadn’t been back since he was in high school, just the first year before they’d moved to Scranton.

Scranton was a sepia blur in his mind, but his Pittsburgh past, those days he could recall of it, were sharp and bright. He remembered “downtown,” those few city blocks that had seemed spectacularly bright—the movie theaters, the department stores. Horne’s, Kaufmann’s. He was surprised to see Joseph Horne’s all boarded up as if it had been a crack house, a broken-down haven for weepy-eyed druggies. He found that none of the downtown was as he remembered it; all of it looked condemned, or, he supposed, downtown had moved; it had relocated, and part of it was now the handsomely built-up area of the Point. That Golden Triangle Pittsburgh was so proud of. Deservedly so, he thought. It was a city that had rein-vented itself.

They had been walking for more than an hour when Candy exclaimed, “Fuck’s sake! Don’t this guy eat or anything?” All Candy had eaten for breakfast
and
lunch had been the mingy bagel and so-called cream cheese.

“Don’t worry. Even if he doesn’t, one of us can grab something to go.”

“I don’t feel much like eatin’ on my feet, K.”

“There she is again,” said Karl. He had called Candy’s attention to the redheaded woman originally because he thought that under the shapeless raincoat she had a great body; then he called Karl’s attention to the fact that the great body had been with them for an hour—sometimes walking behind, sometimes walking ahead. She was good, Karl said. If the two of them hadn’t been even better, they’d never have spotted her.

“There’s another thing. You see that guy go by in a cab? Well, he’s done it twice. I didn’t get a good look at him, but something about him’s familiar. Now why would he be going around and around?”

Saul decided he would have to forget this waving down of cabs and instead hire a car. Cabs were just too purposeful and too hard to direct if what you wanted to do was start and stop and circle back all the time.

He had seen the two men on the pavement stare after him; it was them all right, the same two men who’d appeared in the little park, later in Swill’s—Paulie and Larry-something?—to sit down at his and Ned’s table. Had they said they were from Pittsburgh? They’d talked about Pittsburgh somehow, only he’d tuned them out, thinking about his book (the last fifty pages of which he had brought with him, the way Ned always did, because you never know when something will hit, do you?).

And Saul wondered, as he had many times before, about convergences, confluences, sudden meetings of things you had never thought of as coming together. The rivers, for instance: the Monongahela and the Allegheny.

It would be easier if he knew just what he was looking for when it came to Ned. He didn’t know; it was just this general feeling of something’s being out of whack, skewed, even ominous.

The cab drove by a huge billboard advertising Porsche, Mercedes, and BMW. Ned, he saw, was coming back this way. It was nearly six P.M. Saul told the driver to drop him off at the Porsche dealership.

N
ed crossed the street to look at the river. It was wide and gray and not especially pretty, but he thought he could remember himself standing at some point along the river where it passed through the city; he saw himself looking over the barrier, perhaps being picked up and his feet squarely planted there by his father. He was fantasizing. He did not know if that had ever happened, but it could have. Over there, on the North Side he thought an aunt had lived, rather poorer than the other relatives. He was not sure about the aunt; he could not picture her, not her face not her voice not her mannerisms.

Sally walked on past him. She was getting pretty good at shadowing people, she thought. The trick, or one of them, was not to be taken by surprise, not to alter one’s course because the person you were following did. Sally considered this useful training because she lived most of her life startled. People could get a reaction out of her even if they weren’t looking for one. So Sally moved with great purpose past Ned, eyes looking straight ahead, her blond wig curls bouncing. A little farther along she would stop and take out her compact and look in the mirror to see when he started walking again.

“You like it? I don’t. As rivers go, this one sucks,” said Candy. “He still standing there?”

“Hasn’t moved. Probably caught up in some childhood dream.” Karl seemed to ponder what he’d said.

Candy made a face. “Ever since you been reading that book, you come out with shit like that. So what’s he looking at?”

“The other side of the river, looks like.”

“I sure hope he’s not thinking of going there. This ain’t a bad city, is it? Stuff to look at. That stadium over there.”

“If you’re from New York, it’s not much.”

“So no place is if you compare it with New York, fuck’s sake.” Candy looked across the wide water. “Paris, maybe. Rome.” But his tone was dismissive, suggesting he was convinced Paris could not go head to head with New York. Neither could Rome.

They stood looking across the river.

Karl pulled the guidebook out of his coat pocket, thumbed a few pages. “Heinz Field.” Helpfully, he explained: “Three Rivers Stadium—called that because these rivers meet there—it got torn down couple years ago.”