The Sisters Page 25

  The Sleeper shifted into the window seat and pressed his forehead against the glass. The Greyhound was cutting across Main Street now, and the Sleeper, peering down it, was struck by how closely it resembled a canyon. Near the end of it several new buildings protruded, like new shoots in a hedge, from the mass of older ones. The modern steel-and-glass monsters reminded him of the pair of Polaroid sunglasses he had once bought and then thrown away because Kaat categorically refused to talk to someone if she couldn't see his eyes. I miss Kaat, the Sleeper admitted to himself. I miss her sadness and her insolence and her independence. I miss her telling me to watch out for ides, or who I was in a previous incarnation. I miss making love with her. Most women, in the Sleeper's experience, treated their lovers as fathers or sons, either snuggling into their arms or talking baby talk to them. Kaat treated hers as comrades, as someone she could share conspiracies with.

  And she gave and took pleasure according to a meticulously measured formula that never varied very far from fifty-fifty. Which was, when all was said and done, the way the Sleeper liked it.

  "End of the line," the bus driver called as he swung the Greyhound into its berth and braked to a stop. The doors opened with a rush of air.

  "See you in seventeen years," the cowboy told the Sleeper as he headed down the aisle.

  Carrying his viola-da-gamba case in one hand and his worn leather valise in the other, the Sleeper turned his back on the downtown canyon and made his way toward a run-down section of town and the shabby one-story rooming house specified in the original orders he had recovered from the dead-letter drop in Brooklyn. Perspiring from the long walk, he eventually passed the yellow-brick self-service laundry and the pharmacy with a parking lot next to it full of pickup trucks. He stopped to loosen his tie and pass his handkerchief under his collar, and glancing back over his shoulder, took a long look at the center of the city rising from the flat like a wart. Tomorrow, if things went well, he would look back at the wart for the last time. If things went badly, he would be trapped in it.

  Ignoring the "No Vacancy" dangling under the "Rooms for Rent" sign on the front lawn of the rooming house-his room would have been reserved for him by letter-the Sleeper cut across the front lawn to the porch. A cat with its head cocked, as if it expected the Sleeper to say something, stared impassively at him from the top step. "I am not a cat person," the Sleeper told the cat, but he knew he didn't mean it; given half a chance, he could become a cat person. He pushed open the screen door with his foot. A wiry young man was going out as the Sleeper entered. He held the screen door open so the Sleeper could pass, and nodded impersonally when he thanked him. Inside, the Sleeper found a room reserved in the name he was travelling under. "You must be a musician," the woman who ran the rooming house said when she spotted his viola-da-gamba case. "Don't get many musicians out here. More's the pity, 'cause if there's one thing I admire, it's music played by musicians." She reached under the desk blotter and produced a letter.

  "This here came for you. It was marked hold, so I went and held it."

  The Sleeper deposited his belongings in his room, locked the door from the inside and opened the letter the woman had given him. In it he found a street map of the downtown wart, along with an item, clipped from a local newspaper, giving readers the route that the target would take on his way from the airport to the luncheon the following day.

  The Sleeper didn't have time to waste. "Going prowling so soon?" the woman who ran the rooming house asked in a singsong voice when she spotted him on his way out several minutes later. The Sleeper mumbled something about wanting to see the downtown area while there was still some light left in the sky, and the answer seemed to please her because she reeled off a list of the things in the city he shouldn't miss. He put several blocks between himself and the rooming house, then hailed a passing cab and instructed the driver to take him to the far end of the downtown wart. The Sleeper remembered the Potter's lessons well. There was no point in starting at the airport itself. Having just landed in a strange city, the people responsible for security would be at their sharpest there. On the roads leading from the airport to the wart, the motorcade would move at a brisk clip, and since there would be relatively few people lining the route it would be difficult for the Sleeper to judge from the cheers when the car containing the target was approaching. Even if he managed to get off a shot, the problem of escaping afterward would be compounded by the fact that there wouldn't be many onlookers.

  You must start to look for a place to shoot from, the Sleeper could almost hear the Potter explaining in the patient voice he used when he was very sure of himself, where the crowds grow thick; where the cheers of the people lining the route announce the approach of the target; where the sound of a shot will send people scurrying in every direction, which means that you can run away from the scene along with everyone else without attracting attention. In the case at hand, the crowds would grow thick at the downtown wart, or more precisely at the point where the car containing the target turned into the Main Street canyon and proceeded through it at a leisurely pace so that the people lining the route could get a good look at him.

  The Sleeper walked the route from one end to the other. He began at the city jail, where the motorcade was scheduled to enter the canyon, and wound up at the far end where the motorcade would jog right toward a warehouse and then left before turning up onto the freeway. Having gotten the general lay of the land, he flagged a taxi and returned to the city-jail end of the downtown canyon and started over the route a second time. There was a hotel situated at the corner where the motorcade would turn into Main Street, but hotels had house detectives who would be curious about a client carrying a viola-da-gamba case and asking for a room overlooking the route the Prince of the Realm would take. There was a mercantile bank building two blocks down the canyon from the hotel that attracted his attention. It wasn't so much the roof that interested the Sleeper (every policeman in town would be scanning roofs for the silhouette of a rifleman) as the upper-floor windows, which would give an excellent view of the canyon floor below. But when the Sleeper stuck his nose inside the lobby, he saw instantly that the mercantile bank building was not for him. Two uniformed policemen stationed behind a table were waving on the employees they recognized, and questioning everyone else. An hour before the motorcade passed, the Sleeper reasoned, it would be a risky business trying to talk his way past the guards.

  There were several other buildings along the route that tempted the Sleeper, but in the end he dismissed them all: one because there seemed to be a series of factories on every floor, which meant the windows would be lined with workers; another because the lobby was plastered with "Wanted for Treason" posters carrying a photograph of the Prince of the Realm on them, and the local police would be sure to plant a handful of plainclothes detectives around the building the moment the motorcade passed; a third because a poster in the lobby announced that the pro-Prince contingent planned to rain confetti down on him from every window as he went by. The warehouse at the far end of the downtown canyon would have been an ideal choice, but the Sleeper decided it was so obvious-at one point the motorcade would jog directly toward it, and then move off obliquely away from it-that the building would certainly be crawling with police.

  What you really want, the Potter had instructed him back in Moscow when they were scouting the route that the Indian Prime Minister would take from the airport to the Kremlin, is an open space. A window is an excellent place to shoot from if you have a great deal of time to prepare the assignment. You can select your building carefully, and even get a job in it so that it will seem natural for you to be there; natural also when you leave the building in the confusion that inevitably follows an assassination attempt. But for an assignment that you don't have weeks, or even months, to prepare, what you need is an open space, some place you can get to easily-and just as easily get away from afterward.

  Several open spaces were scattered along the route that the Prince of the Realm would take.
Two blocks down the canyon from the mercantile bank, there was a construction site with two cranes lying on their sides that might have provided excellent cover for a sniper. But workers wearing hard hats were installing the last segment of a chain-link fence that would make access to the construction site difficult. Farther along the canyon, on the right side, the Sleeper explored a small vest-pocket park sandwiched between two buildings. It had a patch of shrubbery in which a rifleman could hide as he waited for the motorcade to pass. But the park was set into a slight depression, and the Sleeper was afraid that the people lining the route would mask the target. Toward the end of the canyon, near the old courthouse building, there was a series of open plazas, but the areas were paved and didn't offer an obvious place to shoot from.

  Which narrowed the choice of an assassination site down to the open space that the Sleeper had spotted the first time he had gone over the route of the motorcade. It had the advantage of being at the end of the downtown canyon, between the warehouse and the freeway, which meant that the people protecting the target would have passed the hundreds of windows on Main Street in a state of full alert, and with the freeway in sight just ahead would be breathing their first sighs of relief. It was a grassy area, elevated above street level, with a line of shrubs to obscure a rifleman, and a parking lot behind it to make access-and escape- relatively easy. There was one disadvantage: the target would be passing at practically right angles to the shooter, which would complicate the ballistic problem, but the Sleeper was confident of his ability to calculate lead angles.

  He explored the site from every side; in the fading light he turned around it like a moth. There was an old man stationed in the parking lot behind the hedges, but he didn't appear to pay any attention to the Sleeper as he wandered through the area. From the street side the shrubs looked perfectly innocent, a small screen of decorative foliage that would be unlikely to draw more than a cursory glance from the people who were responsible for the safety of the Prince. At this point in their route they would be more interested in the windows of the warehouse behind them, and the overpass ahead.

  "So," the woman who ran the rooming house asked when the Sleeper reappeared at the screen door, "what did you think of it?" She nodded toward the downtown wart. "The city, I mean? Some folks say it's pretty much like New York."

  It dawned on the Sleeper that she seemed to be desperate for reassurance that she was not wasting her life in a backwater. "It would be difficult to tell them apart," he said, suddenly anxious to supply her with what she needed.

  But the woman only turned away, shaking her head in disappointment, as if to say she knew a backwater when she saw one; as if to say she recognized an exaggeration when she heard one.

  The Sisters arrived on the last flight that night, Carroll struggling to control a twitching facial muscle, Francis nervously fingering the knot of a taxi cab-yellow silk bow tie and smiling angelically, as if he were going to officiate at a baptism. G. Sprowls, who had flown into the city the previous day, picked them up in a rented car and drove them into town, depositing them on the doorstep of a hotel overlooking Main Street, at the city-jail end of the downtown canyon. "I still don't see why we had to be here personally." Carroll complained as G. Sprowls pulled up to the curb.

  "It's a matter of loose ends,' G. Sprowls replied.

  "That's what you told us over the phone when you asked us to come,"

  Francis noted. "I wasn't sure what you meant by loose ends then. I'm still not sure."

  G. Sprowls focused his half-smile on Francis, and the two men eyed each other for a moment. "There will be pieces to pick up after an operation of this kind," G. Sprowls finally drawled. "Depending on whether this sleeper of yours succeeds, depending on whether he is caught in the act or manages to elude capture, there will be clues to draw attention to, people to point in certain directions.

  "That is the kind of thing you are supposed to excel at," Francis said.

  He tried to sound as if he were thinking out loud. "Carroll and I, on the other hand, have not operated in the field for years."

  "If someone has to lend a hand, we thought"-G. Sprowls managed to put a subtle emphasis on the word "we"-"that it would be more discreet to call upon yon two than to bring someone else into the picture."

  "It was the Director's idea to have us come down here, then?" Francis asked. In his mind's eye he was already composing a memorandum on the conversation to add to the pile in the false bottom of his garbage pail.

  "Trust me," was all that G. Sprowls uttered, and he said it in a wav that left them few alternatives.

  There was no position that Ourcq could find to alleviate the pain that throbbed through his foot. "Maybe take another one of those painkillers," Appleyard, his eyes glued to the road ahead, suggested from the front seat.

  "I took one of those fucking pills twenty fucking minutes ago," Ourcq snapped. He rearranged his leg on the pillow that he had swiped from the hotel, but it didn't seem to make any difference. Each time the Dodge went over a bump, he cried out in agony. "I am supposed to take one of them every four fucking hours, not every twenty fucking minutes."

  "I was only trying to be helpful," Appleyard remarked, and he went back to imitating the sound of the windshield wipers.

  For once, Ourcq didn't complain. The sound made him drowsy, and the drowsiness seemed to dull the pain in his foot. "How fucking far are we from-" He cried out as the front wheels of the car rippled over a washboard section of road.

  "Maybe another hour," Appleyard called back over his shoulder. "Maybe forty-five minutes if I do not run into traffic when we get there."

  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 Sleepe
r 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.