s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

had been through some serious damage, but that was purely cosmetic.
Under the hood, it was mainly original numbers.  Fuck, man, you can t have
my car that s my car.
But it came out like a whine, a token protest, and Tony realized with a
deep sense of shock that he was afraid of this man; it was just that he could
not say exactly why.
Big, almost luminous eyes peering into his. Christ, Tony thought, he
can see right through me!
Without blinking, the Chess Player pulled out his roll of bills again.
Tony stared at the cash as it came off the roll. It was like a machine at
work. Crisp new money. He counted up to $5000; then without
thinking he said,  Hey, look, I paid less than that for it ... it needs
bodywork, you know?
The Chess Player put the money in Tony s vest pocket. The touch of
his fingers there was weirdly disturbing.  Buy a new car, the Chess Player
said.  Give me the keys.
Be damned if Tony didn t do just that. Handed them over without a
word. Mysterious.
He would spend a lot of long nights wondering about it.
The Chess Player was about to climb in and drive away when Tony
shook his head it was like waking up from a bad dream into a
hangover and said,  Hey! My property!
 Take what you want, the Chess Player said.
Panicking, Tony retrieved ten ounces of seeded brown marijuana and
a milk carton of Valium and stuffed them hastily into a brown paper A&P
bag.
The door slammed closed as the Corvette pulled away.
He watched as the automobile faded into the night traffic, southbound
on Church, all the while thinking to himself: What was that? Jesus Christ
almighty! what was that?
* * * *
John Shaw stopped off at the apartment to pack a change of clothes and
leave a note.
Within ten minutes he had folded every useful item into two denim
shoulderbags, including the bulk of the money he had withdrawn from his
private accounts. The note to Amelie was more difficult.
He hesitated over pen and paper, thinking about the man who had
sold him the Corvette.
He wasn t proud of what he d done. It was a skill he had mastered a
long time ago, a finely honed vocabulary of body and voice. With the right
gestures and the necessary words, he could intimidate almost
anyone play the primate chords of fear, anger, love, or distaste, and do so
at will. For a time, when his contempt for humanity had reached its zenith,
he did it often. It was a means to an end, as irrelevant to ethical
considerations as the shearing of a sheep.
Or so he had thought.
That time had passed; but he was pleased by the outcome of the little
experiment he had just performed on Tony Morriseau. Old skills intact. So
much had been lost, obscured by unconsciousness. But maybe not
permanently.
He had been asleep. Now he was awake.
He wrote:
Must leave. Try to understand.
He wondered how much more he ought to say. He could summon up
Benjamin long enough to compose a more serious message. Could even
play at being Benjamin without invoking the real, or potent, Benjamin. But he
was reluctant to do that now ... it was a mistake he had made too often
before.
He debated signing Benjamin s name, then decided it would be more
honest, and possibly kinder, not to. In the end he simply hung the note (two
sentences, five words) on the kitchen cupboard.
Hurrying to escape these small, crowded rooms.
* * * *
The Corvette protested only a little when he nosed it onto the expressway
and into the light midnight traffic northbound out of the city. He had been
awake for two days now and some of the old clarity had come back to him.
He was able to read the condition of the Corvette s engine through the
grammar of its purrs and hesitations, and his sense was that the vehicle
was old but basically sound. Something catastrophic might happen, a crack
in the engine block or an embolism in an oil line; but the pistons were
turning over neatly, the gears meshed, the brakes were clean. With any
luck, the car would get him where he was going.
The rain that had hovered over the province for the last two weeks
had finally drifted off eastward. It was a clear, cold night. Between the
glaring road-lights growing sparse out here in farm territory he was able
to see a scatter of stars. He had always liked looking at the stars and
sometimes felt a special connection with them, in their isolation in the dark
sky. It was the kinship he felt for all lost, strange, and distant things.
The road arrowed up a long incline, an ancient glacial moraine, and
suddenly the stars were right in front of him. Impulsively, he edged the
Corvette s gas pedal down. It was long past midnight and nothing was
moving here but a heavily freighted lumber truck. He took the Corvette past
it in an eyeblink. A brief taste of diesel through the cracked wing window,
then onward. He watched the speedometer creep up. At eighty-five mph
the Corvette was showing some of its age and neglect. He read a whiff of
hot metal and oil, the spark plugs burning themselves clean.
He liked this the farms and empty autumn fields blurring behind him;
the sense of motion. But more than that. It was a private pleasure, uniquely
his own. His reflexes and his sense of timing seldom came up against their
inherent limits; it was exhilarating to push that envelope a little. He was very
far from those limits even now the speedometer still inching upward but
he was attentive, focused, and energized. Every shiver of the chassis or
tremor of the road became significant information, raw data flooding him.
He came up fast on a sixteen-wheel Mayflower truck and passed it, left the
trucker s horn screaming impotently down a corridor of cold night air.
This was a world only he was fit to inhabit, he thought, this landscape
of speed and reflex. For anyone else it would be next door to death. For
John it was a sunny meadowland through which his thoughts ran in a cool,
rapid cascade.
There was a shimmy now from the rear end of the Corvette.
And he would have to slow down soon in any case, or risk running [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]