Page 180 of Two Marlboros

He reciprocated, then I hung up. I crossed my arms on the table and put my head on it, ready to start again with another thinking session.

Facing the desk I again found the urge to rewrite everything all over again. I was dismayed at the idea of jotting down rivers of words yet again, but I wanted to try to jam Nathan’s information together.

So, the phone that was found, the one that belonged to Waitch and was related to the robbery, could have been Harvey’s. Nathan had communicated this to me with some confidence, but I didn’t want to take it for granted.

I grabbed my pen again without delay and placed it on the paper; overcoming laziness, I wrote down once more the information in my possession and the names of all the people involved. How could I tie up Harvey and Waitch?

I dropped the pen. It was still the same story, no more and no less.

Another flash.

One, however, that I managed to capture.

The first night we had gone to Webster Hall, the Waitch thing had come up. I had immediately thought of initials, which I had quickly traced back to the name of the nightclub, although Church had nipped my hypothesis in the bud.

Still, it could also be a person’s initials, couldn’t it?Nathan had said.

A person’s initials.

W.H.

I checked my notes again, full of dotted letters, but no sign of W.H. I was on the verge of dropping everything when I realized thatthere wasa match.

W.H.

H.W.

Harvey Walker.

Well...it made sense. I wasn’t sure when he had resurfaced in Nathan’s life, but I speculated that it was shortly after the robbery; what if he had really been in cahoots with Ryan and, following Nathan’s statement, had decided to handle the situation more closely?

Nathan had been good at finding out all that stuff on his own, he had to be credited, but perhaps with his research he had put a spoke in the wheels of the two’s plans. Perhaps things had not gone as they had expected, and they had run for cover with the attack to discourage him. As for the notes and the cell phone, it made sense of Nathan’s idea that he had been used as the naïve person on duty to try to pin the blame on in case of trouble.

The speech was spinning. It had a beginning and an end; all questions were answered from that perspective. All that was missing was evidence or a confession. On closer inspection,there was only one thing I could do and that was to request a new interrogation for Ryan. I had to find a way to get him to talk at any cost, since he knew both of us and could tell us the truth without any trouble.

I felt my breath catch somewhere between excitement and fear. We would find a way to get Ryan to spill the beans sooner or later, but what if he didn’t cooperate?

I got up from my chair again, this time for good; I closed my pen, rearranged the index cards, and took one last look at the initial ones. I heaved a sigh and, pajamas in hand, dropped everything to go to bed.

33

The dragon and the kid

(?Anggun - Snow on the Sahara)

That morning, I had dropped by the station to give my statement on the cell phone. It had not been as traumatic as when they had summoned me after finding it under my couch, but still it had loaded me with quite a bit of anxiety.

I had dicked around in the afternoon until it was evening and I had found refuge on the couch at home, which, however, had never seemed so uncomfortable. While I laid there, my eyes turned to the TV, I had tried to fall asleep more than once, without ever succeeding. The clock read almost ten o’clock in the evening, a time when I could have gone out to enjoy myself, but the phone call with Alan the day before and the statement I had made had left me with a sense of suspense about me, as if my fate had depended only on his skill as an agent.

Every time I closed my eyes, I immediately opened them again with a gasp, so I started watching the images scrolling on the television again and let go a sigh. After yet another awakening, I found it wiser to put on my pajamas and concentrate on the broadcast, but even that could not conciliate my sleep.

I gasped at the trill of the intercom. I looked at the clock: it was a quarter past ten. Who the heck could it be at that hour? I straightened up on the couch and lingered for a moment, during which Harvey’s face darted into my mind and left me a little queasy. I got up and dragged myself to the intercom more out of curiosity than anything else, then picked up the receiver to find out who it was.

“Alan,” was the answer on the other end. I was relieved to know it was not Harvey, but the fact that it was Alan did not reassure me as it had done other times. I opened the door for him and waited for him to come up, while somewhere I began to fear that he had come with another pair of cops ready to arrest me.

As was to be expected, however, he arrived alone. His face was tired, but he quickly hid that weariness behind a sketchy smile.

“Sorry about the indecent hour. Were you sleeping?”

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