Top Hook. Gordon Kent

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       7

      Suburban Virginia.

      Thursday morning, George Shreed made breakfast at the butcher-block island in their big kitchen, her great love, and he ate his breakfast standing there. He didn’t have to move a lot that way, the coffee-maker to hand in front of him, fruit in the basket where she had always kept it to his left, breads in a drawer where his pelvis pressed against the wood. The bread was stale; how long since he’d replaced it? Could she have bought it? No; she’d been gone for a month before she died, now dead two days. He felt as if hands pushed down on his shoulders, the weight of her absence.

      The cleaning woman would come in today. He wrote her a note. “Buy bread. Get good stuff, no white paste—you know.” He looked around the kitchen. What else did he need? He wrote, rice. He could live on rice. Chicken breasts. She had been a superb cook. He was not. Frozen dinners, a dozen or so. He put some money on the note, wrote the check for her, as Janey must have done, once a week, years and years. Had he ever seen the cleaning woman? Must have. An image of a too-thin white woman swam into his consciousness, swam away. Something about ADD or OCD or one of those goddam disorders everybody had now.

      The telephone rang. He hobbled to the extension on the kitchen wall, expecting it to be the cleaning woman saying she couldn’t come that day—also part of her image, a certain unreliability that had plagued Janey,

      something about her kids and her disorders.

      “Shreed.”

      “George, Stan.” Rat-a-tat machine-gun of a voice, instantly recognizable—a friend (of sorts) in Internal Investigations. “George, they’re calling off the Siciliano investigation. Just thought you’d like to know.”

      Fear surged, and he could feel himself flush. He controlled his voice, however, and said, “How come?”

      “She made a lot of noise, got a lawyer. More trouble than it’s worth, was the call.”

      “Bad call. Okay, thanks.”

      He thought about it as he flossed his teeth. He saw an angry man in his mirror, composed his face better, shrugged into his suit-jacket while watching himself and decided that he looked okay. Grieving, enraged, worried, but okay. The suit was for the memorial service, which he would endure because that was what you did, because memorial services were for the survivors, who needed to believe that when they died somebody would also remember and sing hymns and give eulogies. For his own part, no memorial was needed, and memory itself was enough, but grief was now turning one of its corners toward anger and the change was dangerous. He knew his own anger and knew to fear it.

      Bad times a-comin’, he thought.

      His people had missed the woman in Venice and Trieste. He thought he’d neutralized her by tossing Siciliano to Internals. Now the Siciliano thing was falling apart. Bad, bad.

      Shreed was no fool about his situation. Talk of a mole had rumbled around the Agency for years; anybody who put scraps of evidence and suppositions together would have had a look at him, if only because he had a finger in a lot of pies and he had been there a long time. But they wouldn’t do anything, not actually do anything (polygraphs, bugs, taps, interviews), not until somebody like this woman who wanted money gave them cause. Having the Siciliano woman to entertain themselves with would have kept them occupied for a couple of years—all the time he needed—and now they were washing that out and he couldn’t afford it.

      The Siciliano woman would have to stay a suspect.

      It was still too early to go to the office, and he vented his anger by stumping through the house on his canes, trying to erase the signs of Janey. He didn’t need mementos—how could he ever forget her?—and the house itself, its smell, its decor, was all hers, anyway. But things of hers that were now useless, from her toothbrush in the bathroom to a pair of old slippers near the back door, had to go.

      He stormed through the house. He jammed things into plastic trash bags. He threw things.

      When he got to the bedroom where she had hoped to die but where death had come too slowly, he almost refused to open the door. This one can stay a few days, he thought, and then, hating his own cowardice, he flung the door open so that it banged back against the wall, and he leaned in the doorway, glowering on his canes, taking in the futility of all fights against death. Magazines she had tried to read, a television he had bought for her, an IV rack, a godawful bedpan thing. He began to throw things into the corridor.

      It was when he got to the drawer in the bedside СКАЧАТЬ