The Sisters (33 page)

Ourcq fumbled for another of the painkillers that the hotel doctor had given him. He had been fucking lucky in the end: fucking lucky that the bullet had passed cleanly through his foot, taking a toe along with it but not shattering any bones; fucking lucky, too, to have fallen on a doctor who, for a price, agreed not to report the shooting accident to the police. He had disinfected the wound, given him an injection against tetanus and another against pain, and pills to take when the injection wore off. He had even come up (again, for a price) with an old pair of wooden crutches, which Appleyard had imitated the sound of as soon as Ourcq hobbled across the floor on them.

"You want me maybe to pull over for a while?" Appleyard called from the driver's seat. He got a certain amount of satisfaction from being healthier than Ourcq, and he rubbed it in by being overly solicitous.

Ourcq, for his part, was touched by his colleague's concern. "You fucking want to do something for me?" he whined.

"You maybe name it," Appleyard shot back.

Groaning, Ourcq shifted his body to get more weight off his bad toot.

"Imitate the sound of the fucking sun setting," he demanded. "You said you could fucking do it, but you never fucking did it."

Appleyard shook his head stubbornly. "I got to he in the mood," he explained. "I got to be inspired. Mavbe later. Mavbe."

Kaat was all for turning back when the Chrysler's high beams picked out the sign nailed to the stump of a dead tree at the end of the driveway.

"Combes's Retreat, Whites Only," it read, and then in smaller print it specified: "No Animals, No Children Neither." But the Potter insisted on continuing. The rooming house at the bitter end of an unpaved road at the edge of the prairie, sixteen miles as the crow flies from the center of the city, was precisely what he was looking for. If the Prince of the Realm was really the target, if the Potter managed to figure out where the Sleeper would shoot from and find him, he would require an out-of-the-way place to take him to. They would need a breathing spell; time to put their heads together and come up with a permanent line of retreat.

Between them they would have money, false papers, a clearer idea of what had happened; a clearer idea of where to go from here.

Assuming there was anywhere to go from here.

Assuming the Prince of the Realm was really the target.

Assuming the Potter managed to figure out where the Sleeper would shoot from.

"Mighty late to be sucking around for a place to spend the night," the owner of the rooming house said, squinting out suspiciously at the Potter and Kaat through the partially opened door. He was wearing a jacket without any shirt or undershirt beneath it. "Got half a mind to send you packing."

"We're whites," Kaat said with a straight face.

"There are whites, and there are whites," the owner muttered.

"Let's go," Kaat whispered, tugging on the Potter's arm. She regarded the house, large, Victorian, with bay windows and shingles and rusted drainpipes angling off in every direction, with apprehension.

"It is this way," the Potter told the rooming-house owner. "We are not married. What we need is a place to stay, if you please."

"It'll cost you," the owner, the Combes of Combes's Retreat, said. He scratched at a cheek that hadn't seen the cutting edge of a razor in days.

"Only name your price," the Potter said.

The rooming-house owner, a policeman who had been kicked off the city force several years before for shaking down illegal aliens, opened the door a bit more and studied his prospective clients closely. "Twenty a night," he finally announced.

"We will take it," the Potter said immediately.

"Plus five dollars a night for hot water."

"That will be fine," the Potter agreed.

"In advance," Combes insisted. He was annoyed with himself for not having asked for more.

The Potter counted out one hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills and handed it to the owner through the open door. "This is for four nights, if you please," he explained.

"No refunds ii you leave early," Combes warned.

"That is perfectly reasonable," the Potter said. "Can we come in now?"

The room they got was a large one with a bay window looking out over a copper-colored prairie that stretched off to where the horizon would have been if it wasn't too dark to see it. There was a tarnished brass bed with a mattress that sagged like a hammock in the middle, and threadbare carpets that smelled of cigarette ashes and mildew. Kaat went out to use the toilet at the end of the hallway, and came back with a look of sheer disgust on her face.

There was a washbasin in a corner of the room, but no hot water. Kaat wanted to complain; it was a matter of principle, she said. But the Potter told her not to bother. He would have paid three times as much for the room if the owner had had the sense to ask for it, he explained, and he sat her on the edge of the sagging bed and told her why.

"I never thought about what we would do after we found him, Kaat admitted. "That’s very smart of you, actually.

"It is not a question of intelligence,' the Potter said. "It is a question of experience. Generally speaking, people in my business live longer if they think about what to do after."

The Potter wedged a chair under the doorknob, placed his Beretta on a low table, loosened his tie and settled into the only seat in the room, an old easy chair that smelled as if it had once been in a fire. Biting nervously on a cuticle, Kaat asked why they didn't scout the downtown area immediately. The Potter said he preferred to wait for daylight because he would be able to see more, and because people strolling the streets would be less conspicuous. Kaat kicked off her shoes, propped the two old pillows up and leaned back against them. "You remember the other night?" she began. She left the rest of the thought hanging.

"The other night?"

"The other night, in the motel, when you wanted to make love to me,"

Kaat said. "You remember what I said about needing to share conspiracies?"

The Potter nodded tiredly. He wanted to sleep, not talk.

Kaat took a deep breath. "Here's the thing," she said. "I still think I need to share, but I'm not so sure about the conspiracies part. What I'm trying to say is, if you're still in the market to make love ... The sentence trailed off. Kaat smiled at the Potter across the room.

The Potter shifted in his chair, cleared a constricted throat. "You are an extremely nice human being," he told her. He spoke slowly, deliberately, anxious to express his own feelings without hurting hers.

"Please understand, I did want to make love with you. I still do. But I am an old man, and I am getting older by the minute. I am tied up to the pier of old age. And the moment has passed. Which is not to say that it will not come again. Until it does, I thank you for bringing up the subject. I appreciate it. I appreciate you. Most affection between men and women these days is a matter of habit. But I am pleased to think that there is a real affection between us. Offered without being asked.

Accepted without owing anything in return. Now go to sleep, my noiseless patient spider. In the morning we will find Piotr Borisovich, and then we will, all three of us together, contemplate the elusive thing called the future." The Potter reached over and switched off the table lamp.

"Okay?" he asked into the darkness. "Okay," Kaat replied in a puzzled voice.

The owner of the motel waited until he was sure the dwarf and his lady friend would be asleep. Then, taking his six-battery flashlight down from its hook, he went out to take a closer look at the Chrysler.

Somewhere out on the prairie behind the house, a coyote howled. Combes flicked on the flashlight and played it over the car. Eventually he came to the license plates. They were from New York State, yet the sticker on the rear bumper advertised the advantages of vacationing in Ohio. Combes knelt and ran his fingers over the rear license plate. He could feel a crease in it where the screw held it to the body of the car, almost as if it had been pried loose and then replaced.

Combes straightened up. Maybe it had been the sight of the dwarflike man with a beautiful young girl trailing up the steps after him. Maybe it had been the way he spoke English with a foreign accent. Maybe it had been the ease with which he peeled off twenty-dollar bills from a wad as thick as a fist. Whatever it was, the dwarf had gotten on Combes's nerves. It would give him a certain amount of visceral pleasure to tag him.

The owner returned to the rooming house and dialed the number of his old precinct downtown. "It's me, Combes," he said when the patrolman on duty answered. "Who's minding the store? Pass him to me, will you?... Mac, it's me, Combes. Listen up. I got me a car out here with New York plates and an Ohio bumper sticker. I thought maybe you could see if" anything was on the wire. . . . Sure I can." Combes described the Chrysler and gave the license-plate number. "Sure thing, Mac. I'll wait on your call." He hung up the phone and stared out of a window across the prairie. It would sure as hell tickle him to tag the foreigner. Yes, indeed. It would tickle the hell out of him.

Studying the canyon formed by the buildings on either side of Main Street, the Potter sensed he had reached the end of the line. The sun was still out of sight behind the canyon, but shards of metallic light filtered through the narrow spaces between the buildings, sending alternating slats of shadow and light slanting across the gutter.

Wielding canvas fire hoses that snaked back along the curb to a large mobile water wagon, two Chicanos in hip boots were hosing down the route the motorcade would take in a few hours. Up ahead, several men in impeccable three-piece suits looked on as sanitation workers pried up manhole covers and then lowered themselves through the openings to search for explosives.

"What about the hotel across the street?" Kaat asked.

The Potter sized it up with a professional eye. "Hotels," he said, "are the natural habitat of a very special breed called house detectives. The farther you stay from them, the better off you are. No, I don't see Piotr Borisovich marching up to the front desk, probably carrying some kind of package in which a rifle is hidden, and asking for a room with a view of the street through which the target will soon pass."

Around them scores of people, their heads angled against a nonexistent wind, were hurrying to work. Did they really think that getting there on time would change their lives? the Potter wondered. He made a mental note to toll Kaat how, in Moscow, people moved as if getting where they were going wouldn't change anything. Maybe he had put his finger on the real difference between the two countries, the two systems. Maybe hurrying to where you were going didn't have anything to do with an extra wet dream a week. He would have to talk to the Sleeper about it later, he decided.

The Potter strolled into the lobby of the mercantile bank building, and strolled out again two minutes later shaking his head. "Too much security," he muttered. "He would not pick this one.' Making his way down Main Street, the Potter resembled nothing so much as a diviner searching for water, the only difference being he didn't have a forked stick. He examined several other buildings, always with the same result.

One building he thought extremely promising until he discovered that it housed a factory on every floor.

Kaat asked him about the roofs. Even if he could get to them without attracting attention, the Potter explained, it was the last place a professional would shoot from, if only because every policeman was trained to scan rooftops for the silhouette of a sniper. Also, there was a good chance that the police would station snipers of their own on several of the highest roofs along Main Street to make sure the others were secure. If I were planning to pick off the target, the Potter reasoned, I would look for an open space. And if I would look for an open space, Piotr Borisovich would also look for an open space.

"What if you're wrong?" Kaat asked, biting on a hangnail.

The Potter looked down the canyon. The Sleeper was out there somewhere, he felt it in his bones. "I am not wrong,' he told Kaat. "I cannot be wrong."

"What if?" Kaat persisted. But when she saw the expression on the Potter's face, she said, "I take back the 'what if "

Continuing down Main Street, the Potter investigated the construction site with several cranes lying on their sides, but saw the chain-link fence around the area and the uniformed guard checking work papers at the only door in the fence. The vest-pocket park sandwiched between two buildings on the right side of the street looked promising until the Potter discovered that it was in a slight depression, which meant that the people who would eventually line the route would mask the target from anyone in the park. At the far end of the downtown canyon there was an old sandstone courthouse, and a series of paved plazas around it, but for the life of him the Potter could not see where a rifleman could hide. Beyond the courthouse the motorcade would jog to the right and then left again, going directly toward and then passing under a rust-colored brick warehouse with a red-white-and-blue Hertz sign on the roof that told the time and the temperature.

"What's wrong with that building?" Kaat asked.

"Nothing," the Potter said, "which is what is wrong with it. It is probably the single best site for a rifleman along the entire route. The angle of fire, the distance to the target, are ideal. Unless the local police are fast asleep, they will post a man at every window."

"What are you staring at?" Kaat asked suddenly.

"I have found what I was looking for," the Potter announced in a low voice. "Look there, to the left of the warehouse building. Do you see it?"

"You mean the slope over there?" Kaat asked.

"Those bushes provide a perfect screen for a rifleman," the Potter said excitedly. "Come on, I want to get a closer look at it."

They crossed Main Street and skirted behind the warehouse, through the parking lot, to the top of the incline at the edge of the lot. The Potter studied the street below through the bushes. "This is it," he told Kaat. "The perfect place for a sniper. The only drawback is that the target will pass at almost right angles to the rifleman, but Piotr Borisovich is an excellent marksman and would not hesitate because of that. He would consider the parking lot at his back a great advantage for the escape, because he does not suspect that he is not meant to escape. He is meant to be caught."