The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (17 page)

             
"May I come in?" I asked.

             
No line of his face welcomed me as he gestured towards the inside of the house with his hand, adding immediately, "I thought you would not be coming any more..."  In his hand, as usual, a white handkerchief appeared.  "Very impressive, the reinforcements you have received..."

             
I waited patiently until he had finished wiping his face. 

             
"It was necessary, after everything that happened..."  I walked behind him into the house, peering out of the corner of my eye into the kitchen, a small, empty niche.  "...And who knows what else you had planned to do..."

             
"You said ‘you had planned'..." he noted drily.  The living room was empty too.  On the table stood the usual bowl of apples and the curtain was drawn.  Where could the other man, the one who had sat so still at the window, be hiding?

             
He did not ask me to sit down, but stood behind the table, gripping its edge with strong hands.

             
"Yes?"

             
"I was here in the afternoon," I said carefully.

             
He replied immediately, "I always study at that time."

             
The words came out of his mouth so rapidly that for a moment I wondered whether there was not a simple explanation.  Something mundane and trifling, like a back door through which he had gone out some way to the wood and returned straight away. 

             
"Can we talk?" I hesitated.

             
"Go ahead."

             
Nonetheless, I sensed something in the air:  the smell of secrecy and conspiracy.  I glanced around.  "Alone, I mean..."

             
He had inexhaustible reserves of confidence.  "We are alone," he asserted patiently.

             
"A few questions," I said quietly, "have occurred to me, and have joined with all kinds of rumors..."

             
His face remained calm but something in the way he stood indicated a quick moment in which impatience and some inner concern had overcome the control he was displaying.  A wave of satisfaction swelled within me.  If he did not want to exchange his arrogance for friendship or cooperation, I could at least melt it into anxiety. 

             
"We may have to search here..." I looked around.

             
It was precisely at that point that the gray shadow of apprehension left his face and he recovered his composure. 

             
"That is your job, I suppose..."

             
The time had come to set the trap for him.  "I can help you."

             
"Why?"  All I had succeeded in doing was rekindle the anger in his face.  His voice became hard and harsh.  "Why do you want to help?"

             
"Maybe because I think one step ahead of you..."

             
He thought for a long moment, then asked suddenly, "Do you expect me to cooperate with you?"  In his directness there was something out of place, unexpected from an agent, let alone a double agent.

             
"Yes," I said in a low voice.

             
"And if I do not agree?"

             
I spread out my hands.  "We'll have to start investigating..."

             
Suddenly the sour smile I remembered from our first meeting in the church appeared again. 

             
"Simon," he said.  "That's the name, isn't it?  Like the Samaritan who offered the apostles money to become an apostle too..."  His fingers massaged the nape of his neck, near the red chafe-mark left by his woolen habit.  "He made the apostles choose between comfort in this world and a reward in the next.  You are proposing that I choose between discomfort and nothing.  An investigation and death..."

             
"Who said anything about death?"

             
"Everyone who has cooperated with you, wherever you have ruled, has been killed eventually, after you left.  It happened in Gaza in Fifty-Seven, in the Sinai in Seventy-Nine, and it will happen here too..."  He wiped himself with the handkerchief again.  For a moment I could see myself in his eyes.

"Nobody will know," I said with all the sincerity I could muster.  "I'm ready to undertake..."

              He moved his head slowly.  "No.  Not me."

             
Would he consent with a bit more convincing conversation?  I did not have the patience to continue.  The changing light of the afternoon, which brought the memory of the clinic and Yvonne, hit me at once with the full force of desire.  It was as if the center of gravity of my life at Dura had shifted up the mountain.  From the Athenaeum to the sandy square of the clinic, from the priest's house to the ruin at the summit. 

             
"All the same," I returned to my plan, "I am prepared to help..."

             
His eyes wandered impassively over the tabletop.  His heavy lips rested in an expression of peace, almost complacency.  But now I knew him better than to let him mislead me. 

             
"The man who visits you from time to time," I added softly, with the meticulous care of someone setting a particularly delicate mechanism, "who damaged my car, who rolled the burning barrel onto us, who hit our soldier and used your paint-sprayer to spray the same green paint I saw staining the table the last time I was here - that man had better give himself up.  Perhaps we might treat it as a youthful prank."

             
His face remained calm.  My chance, if it existed at all, lay in the slight tension concentrated in the knuckles of his hands. 

             
"You won't manage to restore peace to Dura," the voice was hard behind his usual pronouncement, "until you bring Anton back."

             
I turned toward the door.  He responded immediately, as though he had been waiting for that moment, and glided behind me.  I looked outside.  If there had been someone else sitting at the window, perhaps he had slipped out to hide in the garden while we were talking?  The priest's body and voice and the urgent shuffling of his feet exuded impatience. 

             
"You cannot get away from it," he grumbled.  "You are responsible for his welfare."

             
In a burst of aggression, I responded.  Maybe I had arrested the doctor, but who had caused the arrest by the reports he had sent from this place for months, maybe years? 

             
I turned back to him.  "If things are as I understand them, you are more to blame than I am."

             
He did not protest, simply fixed me with his gaze, steady, expressionless and frozen, the way people look when they feel guilty or are caught red-handed or lying.

***

              Successfully implemented plans can cause me as much worry as joy.  The ability to mock chance raises the question: whose plan am I a part of now, what objectives am I serving unknowingly?

I hid myself well in a thicket of oleanders, facing the sandy square.  It was difficult to assess how long it would take for the priest to act - an hour, two, maybe more.  Meanwhile I watched the games the dogs
played, the reflection of the last rays of the sun in the windows and the lazy movements of the waves of sand in the wind.  Around seven o'clock, soon after the heavy chime of the church bell, the sound of metal scraping on metal together with the low hum of a human voice could be heard coming up the mountain.  I crouched down, holding my breath.  A boy was pedaling along slowly on a rusty bicycle, accompanying the rhythmic movements of his legs with a soft singing, the embodiment of patience.  Even before he reached the edge of the sandy square I recognized him as the boy I had seen in the backyard of the church and afterwards in the café.  The dogs burst into their usual outcry.  He wheeled his bicycle along the invisible path and knocked on the clinic door.  After a moment he put his hand out to the corner of the doorpost.  The door of the house opened.  Michel peeped out then emerged.

             
They spoke calmly, without excitement, until I began to think that this was not the conversation I had hoped to cause.  Michel looked beyond him towards the village.  For a moment his glance lingered on the clump of oleander bushes.  Experience had taught me to restrain my impulse to dig myself in.  As still as a dead branch I waited, among all the insects and bugs which shared the dry carpet beneath my feet: dragonflies, field-mice, snakes and others waiting for the night.  My yearning for the woman made me part of the design.  We were all going to the same places, at the same pace, with the same fervor.  The carriage which contained me was simply larger and less confident.

             
Michel went back into the house.  The boy waited for him, leaning on his bicycle.  He called playfully to the dogs and toyed with a cross on a chain he pulled out of his shirt.  Suddenly the Rolls started up very loudly.  A black cloud ascended slowly to the top of the sycamore.  The boy got onto his bicycle.  The Rolls sailed across the sand, awkward and majestic.  As it passed the clinic the boy put his hand out and gripped the back wing.  Michel shouted something through the open roof and accelerated, the youth lifted his feet off the pedals, which began turning at an insane pace, as they rode along the road down the mountain.

             
The square in front of the clinic was deserted.  The windows became dark.  The crow which nested in the summit of the sycamore hovered silently, waiting to get at the dogs' food.  As usual, the dogs growled as I walked along the fringes of their domain.  As they watched me, the crow plunged rapidly and pecked out the best morsels behind their backs.  When I reached the clinic door I felt for the electric button on the top of the frame which was as sticky as a used sweet.  I pressed once, then again.  Somewhere a bell rang shrilly.  Nothing else happened.

             
Between me and the house was a short stretch of ground.  How could I cross it?  The dogs watched too, waiting for me to step outside the permitted boundary of the clinic.  Could I beat them at a run?  No, not at my age.  Could I frighten them, scare them off?  There were too many.  I picked up a stone and threw it at the crow.  In the clatter of plates, the shrieks of the greedy bird and the offended anger of the dogs, I crossed the ground to the door with three rapid strides.

             
I knew the first room.  The big table was empty.  Photographs of the doctor admonished me darkly from the mantelpiece, in the fading light of dusk.  There were already signs of a woman living on her own around: a comb with hairs trapped in it, a chewed pencil, a record on the turntable of an old Garrard record-player.  I bent down to look: "Dalida - her best songs."  On tip toes, I advanced along a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor.  A half-open door led into a small, untidy room, shrouded in the usual atmosphere of adolescence.  The door to the next room was closed.  I turned the handle cautiously.  The little light which came from the corridor cast a pale stain on a long-haired carpet and a narrow bed.

             
She woke immediately and switched on the fussy bedside lamp.  Her hair was loose.  She looked rapidly from me to the door and back.  The next moment lay before us like a doughy lump of tepid time which could have contained everything - coercion, gallantry, faintheartedness, promise.  All I could put into it was impersonal practicality. 

             
"He's gone out," I said in an attempt to allay her non-existent fear.  "Michel, that is..."

             
She moved where she lay uncomfortably.  I retreated backwards, to the corner of the room and then, wrapped in a sheet, she backed off the bed and slipped behind a creaking door.

             
Something of the yearning which had motivated me vanished, leaving behind it dizzy exhaustion.  I sat down on a stool, facing an imperfect mirror which reflected my face, swollen and impassive.  The silence around me was astoundingly complete, almost absolute.  I went over to the door and listened with concern.  After that I knocked.  There was no answer.  I pushed the handle and went in.

             
It was a bathroom - tiny, monastic and painted blue.  A line of ants maneuvered between the stains of damp on the wall.  Water was running from a blackened tap into a concrete basin.  The woman was standing in it, beneath the stream of water, her back to me.  I rattled the door-latch.  She did not react.  I put out a heavy, hesitating hand to her hair, her neck, her shoulders. 

             
She turned round slowly, with the mechanical movements of a sleepwalker.  In effect, it was her body which turned round, an emissary appointed to preserve the agreement between us.  Her eyes, her look and any feeling behind it remained somewhere far away on the wall.

             
I touched her face.  Her wet clinging hair had made it smaller.  Streaks of silver shone in her hair like trails left by snails.  Her long, somewhat sinewy hands rested on the lower part of her body, from her groin down, trying unsuccessfully to conceal a long shadow on her left thigh, a very deep cut, a furrow plowed in her flesh.  I could feel the beat of a changing mood, perhaps inspired by the house, with the photographs in the next room.