Ikon (13 page)

Daniel.

‘No, sir. If even one-half of this bears any relation to the real facts, then we’re dealing with some very heavy people indeed; and the fewer people who know what we know, the better. I don’t very much fancy being beheaded, do you?’

I thought you were going to publish the whole inside story in the FlagT

‘All I’m going to publish in the Flag, Mr Korvitz, is “My Kidnap Ordeal by Kathy Forbes” with all the salacious details of what they tried to do to me. I haven’t told anyone about my Marilyn Monroe theory yet, except you,

and Skellett, and that was only because Skellett tortured me. I really think it’s too early and it’s too damned dangerous. Unless, of course, you’re one of Skellett’s agents, in which case you’re probably going to take me out right now and string me up from the town gallows.’

Daniel finished his beer. ‘What do you think we can do? Any ideas? Any sane ideas? Maybe it’s best if we don’t do anything. Pretend it never happened. I mean, what possible effect can you and I have on the history of the entire world?’

‘Are you kidding?’ asked Kathy. ‘If Kennedy made a secret disarmament deal with Khruschev that US missiles should be totally ineffective against Soviet airplanes, and if President Roberts is still sticking to the terms of that agreement today - you know what a news story that would be? We’d be famous for ever. And rich. You want to run a diner all your life?’

‘I want to stay alive for all my life, that’s all.’

Kathy said briskly, ‘Well, it’s up to you. I’ve got to investigate it, because it’s my job. My instinct, too. If you don’t want to help me, well, that’s it, don’t help me. But I’ll have to make you promise not to blow the story to any other newspaper. I think after what I’ve been through I’m entitled to an exclusive, don’t you?’

‘You’re really going to start poking your nose around in this? You’re serious? After the way they’ve been killing people off, blowing people up, sticking goddamned -needles in you?’

‘Mr Korvitz - ‘

‘Please, Daniel.’

‘Daniel, I have to. It’s my vocation. This is the kind of break that every newspaper reporter has dreams about.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘First of all, I’m going to Los Angeles. I want to talk to as many people as I can who saw Marilyn Monroe in the last few days of her life, and particularly on the night of her alleged death. I want to talk to the mortician who laid her out and everybody who saw her body. If there’s even the slightest suggestion that the body they buried at Westwood isn’t Marilyn … well then, we’ll know that we’re on to something.’

Daniel rubbed his eyes, tiredly. ‘It would be easier, you know, if it didn’t all sound so goddamned far-fetched.’

‘Mr Korvitz, Daniel, the whole trouble is that it isn’t far-fetched. It’s actually less far-fetched than all the accepted historical explanations about Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It fits the facts better, and it could account for all kinds of apparently inexplicable trends in the way that this country has been governed for the past twenty years.’

‘If you say so,’ said Daniel, unconvinced.

‘Let me spend some time in Los Angeles, and then get back to you,’ said Kathy. ‘Maybe we can talk it over again.’

‘All right,’ Daniel agreed. Suddenly it didn’t seem so important to find out why Willy had died, or how. Suddenly it seemed more important that Willy should be left to rest in peace, and not have his sleep troubled by distant rumbles of thunder from 1962. Daniel had heard how violent thunderstorms could bring corpses rising out of the fresh earth in country graveyards; as well as cause women to miscarry, and milk to turn sour.

They said goodbye to each other in the dusty parking-lot. Daniel was fairly sure that he would never see her again, this snappy and over-enthusiastic lady reporter, although he would probably take the trouble to read her story in the Arizona Flag, and follow her investigations into the Cuban Missile Crisis. He shook hands with her politely and went back to his car. He sat down behind the steering-wheel, and sorted through his keys, and didn’t know why he felt so down.

He was just about to start up the engine when Kathy came across again, and leaned into the open passenger window.

‘You know what you’re feeling now, don’t you?’ she asked him.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

‘You’re feeling fear, that’s what,she told him. ‘And do you want to know something, I respect you for it. It means you’ve got enough imagination to recognize that what I’m saying to you is true, or could be. I know you’ve got a little girl, Daniel. I know you’re the kind of guy who wants to be left alone. But just remember you had enough guts to break into that airbase to find out what had happened to Willy; and you had enough guts to come here and talk to me about it.’

Daniel said, ‘You’re the second person today to tell me how gutsy I am. I’m beginning to feel like Audie Murphy.’ ‘I’ll be in touch, okay?’ said Kathy, and left him. He shrugged to himself, and started up his car. The engine coughed, backfired loudly, and died away with a whine like a broken washing-machine.

Kathy, who had been halfway back to her own car, walked over again and looked in at the passenger window. ‘You don’t happen to need a ride?’ she asked him. As they drove back to Apache Junction, they began to relax with each other. Kathy told Daniel how she had gone to California, and then come back to make her name on the Flag. ‘I thought I was going to win the Pulitzer Prize the first year I was there.’ Daniel told her about Candii and Susie; and about the attractions of living a simple and uncomplicated life in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains.

‘Are you afraid of life? Afraid of success? Or what?’ asked Kathy. ‘I’m not being rude. It’s just that you seem to want things out of life that don’t actually exist, like women out of country-and-western fantasies, and complete peace and quiet. There isn’t any such thing as complete peace and quiet. Life will never leave you alone. And all the women I’ve ever met who look like country-and-western fantasies are pretty as cotton-candy on the outside and hard as reinforced concrete on the inside.’

Daniel said, ‘I don’t lack confidence, I can tell you that. I don’t lack determination, either. But I look around me and begin to wonder what all that confidence and determination is going to bring me. Money? I’m eating okay. Happiness? I’ve got my daughter, and my occasional girlfriends. Fame? I’m famous with the people who know me. You may think I’m backing off, opting out, but I don’t seriously think so. What I want is what I’ve got, and I think the real strength comes in saying to yourself, thaf s it, I’m happy.’

The trouble is,’ said Kathy, ‘I don’t believe that you

are.’

They drew up in front of Daniel’s Downhome Diner. Kathy said, ‘I noticed this place on the way out here. Do you think you could spare us a cup of coffee, and a muffin maybe? Neither of us had time for lunch.’

Daniel hesitated, and Kathy said, ‘You could send the cheque to my paper. They’ll pay you.’

Daniel grinned. ‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘I think I can just about afford to treat you.’

But the second that Daniel walked into the place he realized there was something wrong. Pete Burns was in there, and two Highway Patrol officers, and three or four other regular customers, but none of them was eating. Then he saw Cara’s legs on the floor, in between the chair-legs, and he felt as if everything was suddenly rushing in to meet him with the velocity of a locomotive, faces, chairs, tables, walls, and Pete Burns was turning to say something with an expression which he knew in that first explosive instant meant bad news.

‘There were two guys. They came in here about a half-hour ago. Neil says they asked for you.’

‘She’s not dead, Daniel. Daniel, she’s not dead. Okay? She’s going to be fine. They hurt her a little, that’s all. But the doc put her under a sedative, and she’s fine. Listen, will you calm down?’

‘They asked for you by name. That’s what Neil says. Jimmy here heard them too. They said, where’s Daniel Korvitz; and when Cara said you were out, and she didn’t know where, they started pushing her around, you know? One of them hit her with something; nobody saw what it was, but it lacerated her face and her shoulder. Maybe a broken bottle. The ambulance is coming, anyway. The thing is, Daniel - ‘

Daniel stared at them blurrily. Somebody jostled against him and he turned around; but then Pete Burns said, The thing is, Daniel, Susie was coming home from school right then -‘ ‘Susie?’

‘Well, it was pretty bad luck. A couple of minutes later and she would’ve missed them completely. But they were just leaving and the school bus turned up, and when she came into the diner and said, you know, where’s my daddy -‘

‘Don’t know what the hell they hit her with. Will you look at those cuts?’

‘Pete, what happened? Where’s Susie?’ ‘Daniel, I’m real sorry about this. I was only about thirty seconds away from here myself. It was bad luck, that’s all. You know what I mean? A crappy combination of circumstances.’

Charlie McEvers said, in his gravelly gold-prospector’s voice, ‘She’s kidnapped, Daniel. That’s the meat of it. They just picked her up and carried her out and there wasn’t a damned thing that any of us could do about it.’ Daniel looked around. By the door, Kathy Forbes was watching him with sympathy and pain. ‘There isn’t any such thing as complete peace and quiet. Life will never leave you alone.’

Somebody brought Daniel a chair and he sat down. He kept saying to Pete Burns, ‘You’ve got to find her, you understand? I want her found. And, by God, if anybody touches one hair of her head, I’m going to kill them. I warn you now, Pete. I’m going to kill them stone dead.’ ‘Sure, Daniel. Nobody blames you.’ The ambulance arrived outside, its siren moaning in the afternoon heat. The medics lifted Cara on to a stretcher, and carried her past Daniel as if she were just another victim of the disaster he called his life. She was deeply sedated, her eyes closed, her mouth open. But Daniel could clearly see the rows of parallel lash-marks that lacerated her cheek and her collar-bone. She looked almost as if she had been clawed by a tiger.

Pete Burns said to Daniel, ‘How about some coffee? A shot of brandy, maybe?’

Daniel shook his head.

‘You don’t know what these guys wanted, do you?’ asked Pete. ‘What I’m trying to get at is this: what would they want from you?.’

‘I don’t know, said Daniel. ‘I don’t have any idea. I sure don’t have any money worth speaking of.’

‘You haven’t been threatened recently? No mafiosi hanging around? Sometimes somebody’s Sicilian brother wants to open a liquor store or a restaurant, and then everybody around gets leaned on, just to make sure that nobody objects.’

‘Nothing like that, said Daniel.

Kathy came up and laid her hand on his shoulder. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked him. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

One of the customers was saying, ‘Kind of skinny guy, one of them, but the other was big. Real gorilla, with a red birthmark,

Daniel raised his eyes and looked at Kathy with angry intensity.

‘Skellett,she whispered, and Daniel nodded, and for the first time in his life he felt like killing a man.

Twenty-Two

She met Ikon in a private dining-room on the sixth floor. He rarely went out these days; even though he still harboured a longing for the sole fourree tzarine at the Mont-pellier restaurant on 15th and M. He had grown old in a particularly Russian way, as if all the gravity to which his thickset body had been subjected in the 82 years of his

life had cumulatively dragged him down, pouching his eyes and jowling his chin, and spreading his stomach until it pressed against the rim of his antique dining-table. He spoke thickly, and took frequent sips of the rare Tokaj wine which was specially imported for him from Hungary. In the dark, densely-carpeted room, with the drapes drawn so closely that only a tall two-dimensional triangle of summer sunlight could penetrate, he looked like one of the decaying provincial gentry from Mikhail Saltykov’s novel The Golovlev Family.

‘You looked tired,’ she told him, as she squeezed lemon on her Sevruga caviare.

‘Well,’ said Ikon, ‘I am tired. Those who have to struggle will always have to pay the price.’

‘As long as you can carry on for two or three months; long enough for Marshall Roberts to get the RING talks restarted.’

Ikon shrugged heavily, and reached for one of the small buckwheat pancakes which were always served to him with his caviare. He spread the sturgeon’s eggs as thick as a child would spread bread with peanut-butter, and then ladled sour cream on top, and took a quick and unexpectedly avaricious mouthful.

‘Marshall had better act soon, otherwise he may very well sink both of us.’

‘He’s doing his best. But you can understand what a difficult situation he’s in.’

‘Of course,said Ikon, wiping his mouth with his napkin. ‘But he is the President, nietl And the President should be capable of dealing with any problem which confronts him. That is what Presidents are for.’

‘Your English improves every day,’ smiled Nadine.

‘Hmmph,’ said Ikon. ‘I never get out as much as I should. I should go to parties, and receptions. I am beginning to speak like an American television anchorman. I even understand what ‘what’s coming down,’ means. Now, there’s a colloquial rarity for you, ‘what’s coming down.’ In Russia, we would say “what is it that flows this way”.’

‘Did you see the doctor?’ asked Nadine. Ikon looked at her with unconcealed fondness. In all the years he had been in Washington, in all the days and nights he had lived in this building, he had never come across anyone so alive and so determined as Nadine. He had never come across a woman who combined so successfully the values of Leninism with the enthusiasm of the modern age. If only he were forty years younger; if only he could show her what he had been like in his pre-war days, as one of the udarniki, the shockworkers; or as a political commissar during the war. She was such an ideal, sexual woman. Tall, and proud, and intelligent. The sort of woman who could look any man commandingly in the eye.

‘The doctor?’ he said. ‘The doctor is as pessimistic as ever. I believe that all doctors are born pessimists; or perhaps all pessimists become doctors. In any case, my leukemia is as virulent as ever, and I shall be lucky to see next May Day.’