Текст книги "Death Wish"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

It was no good trying to sleep any more. Half-past two in the morning. He reached for a book but couldn’t focus his eyes on the print; put it away and switched off the light and sat up in bed in the dark, swearing, staring.

Even in the darkness—perhaps especially in the darkness—the room had snaggy edges where memories clung. I ought to give up the apartment, move somewhere. Maybe move into one of those residential hotels where you got daily maid service.

The hell, he thought, the only sane thing to do is move out of the city. Get an efficiency in one of those high-rises across the Hudson on the Palisades, or maybe even a cottage in Jersey or Orange County. Not Long Island, he thought; he couldn’t stand Long Island. But somewhere out of the city—out of this madness.

That’s wrong. That’s giving in to them. I’m not running away. Stay and fight.

Fight how?

The mind wove ridiculous fantasies in the middle of the night. Feeling like an ass he got a glass of water, washed down a sleeping pill, set the alarm and went back to bed.

“Damn it, Lieutenant, haven’t you got anywhere at all?”

“We’re doing everything we can, Mr. Benjamin. We’ve picked up several people for questioning.”

“That’s not enough!”

“Look, I know how you feel, sir, but we’re doing everything we know how to do. We’ve assigned several extra men to the case. Some of the best detectives on the force. I don’t know what else I could tell you.”

“You could tell me you’ve nailed the bastards.”

“I could, yes sir, but it wouldn’t be true.”

“The trail’s getting colder all the time, Lieutenant.”

“I know that, sir.”

“Damn it, I want results!”

But the haranguing gave him no satisfaction and after he hung up the phone he sat cracking his knuckles and looking for someone to hit.

*  *  *

Lunch in Schrafft’s—single tables occupied by little old ladies in prim hats. We are all dressing for dinner in the jungle. He remembered a year or so ago in the same restaurant—lunching with Sam Kreutzer that day—he’d sat and watched an elderly woman alone at a table suddenly hurl water tumblers and silverware at the wall mirror. He had been shocked. If it had happened today he would regard it as predictably logical behavior. Everybody lived like a character in a one-act play that nobody understood; getting by from one moment to the next was like trying to hold on to your hat in a gusty wind.

He returned to the office after lunch and spent an hour deliberating over the Amercon papers George Eng had delivered two days earlier. Steeping himself in figures and processes so he would be ready for the trip out West at the end of next week.

At half-past three he phoned Jack’s office but Jack was in court. He tried again just before five and caught him in. “How is she?”

“Rotten.”

His scalp contracted. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing sudden. It’s hard to describe—it’s like watching someone sink into quicksand and knowing there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

“She’s just not responding?”

“The doctor’s starting to talk about shock treatments. Insulin shock, not electric.”

He was tired, suddenly; his swollen eyes took longer to blink. Coming on top of the rest it was just too much to expect a man to bear.

Jack was saying, “… form of amnesiac catatonia. She looks at things and evidently she sees them, she recognizes you when you walk into the room, but it’s as if there’s no emotional reaction. As if she observes everything without any associations. You can turn her around and give her a push and she’ll walk across the room as obediently as a wind-up toy. She eats by herself if you put the food in front of her, but she doesn’t seem to care what it is. She ate a whole plate full of calves’ liver last night and you know how she detests the stuff. She didn’t even seem to notice. It’s as if there’s some kind of short-circuit somewhere between the taste-buds and the brain, or between the eyes and the brain. When I go in to see her she knows who I am, but she doesn’t recognize me—not in the sense of relating me to herself.”

He listened to Jack’s words and feeling almost burst his throat.

After he hung up, Dundee came into the office. Took one look at his face and said in alarm, “Paul?”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Bill. Not right now.”

He left the building and walked through Grand Central to the subway steps, moving with a heavy deliberation in his tread. Walked down to the platform and waited for the crosstown Shuttle. The tunnel was hot and crowded, stinking of stale air and urine and soot. Grease-sweaty people jostled angrily along the brink of the platform. He had never actually seen anyone pushed off onto the tracks, but he knew it happened. Whole rows of people, jammed together, leaning vertiginously out over the concrete lip to peer down the tracks in search of approaching headlight beams.

The trains were running slow today; when the next one came in he had to squeeze into it and suck in his belly against the closing doors. It was impossible to breathe. He flattened his hand over his wallet pocket and kept it there for the duration of the brief ride to Times Square. A black fist clutched the steel overhead strap by his cheek. Scarred knuckles, pink cuticles. He looked over his shoulder and for a moment he could have sworn it was the same man in the cowboy hat who’d been standing on his corner a few nights ago, staring at him, smiling. After a moment he realized it wasn’t the same face. Getting paranoid for sure, he thought.

For some indeterminate reason the Broadway Express was less crowded; usually it was packed more thickly than the Shuttle. But he found a seat and sat with his legs close together and his elbows tight against his abdomen, squeezed between two women. One of them had a sickening load of garlic on her breath; he averted his face and breathed as shallowly as he could. The train lurched and swayed on its worn-out rails. Motes of filth hung visibly in the air. Some of the ceiling lights had blown out; half the car was in gloom. He found he was looking from face to face along the rows of crowded passengers, resentfully scanning them for signs of redeeming worth: if you wanted to do something about overpopulation this was the place to start. He made a head-count and discovered that of the fifty-eight faces he could see, seven appeared to belong to people who had a right to survive. The rest were fodder.

Ishould have been a Nazi. A shrieking scrape of brake shoes; the train bucked to a halt. He dived out of the car onto the Seventy-second Street platform and followed the crowd to the narrow stairs. The funnel blocked everything and the crowd stood and milled like bees around a hive; it was an inexcusable time before he was on the stairs. They were cattle being prodded up a chute. Human cattle most of them: you could see in their faces and bodies they didn’t deserve life, they had nothing to contribute except the smelly unimaginative existences of their wretched carcasses. They had never read a book, created a phrase, looked at a budding flower and really seen it. All they did was get in your way. Their lives were unending litanies of anger and frustration and complaint; they whined their way from cradle to grave. What good were they to anyone? Exterminate them.

He batted his way through to the turnstile, using his elbows with indiscriminate discourtesy; rushed outside onto the concrete island and stood there getting his breath while the light changed.

He cried at the corny sad dramas on television; he knew every commercial by heart. At half-past nine in the middle of a program an announcer said, “… will continue following station identification,” and he stormed across the room and switched the set off.

After, he thought, not “following.” Where the hell did those imbeciles go to school? It’s after station identification.

I am strung out. Need something. A woman?

No whores. With a whore it would be a mockery. Maybe a woman: a compatible stranger. In the city they were supposed to be easy to find, although he had never tried.

A bar, he thought. Wasn’t that where lonely people were supposed to go? But he never went to bars alone. He had never been able to understand people who did.

Still it was better than rotting in this caged isolation. He knotted his tie and shouldered into his jacket and went out.

10

He sat on the bar stool with his heels hooked on its chrome ring, holding his knees together stiffly to avoid touching the man next to him. “God damn right I’m a bigot,” the man was saying. “I’m a better man than any nigger I ever met.”

He was big without much black hair left on top of his skull; a man who worked with his hands and probably with his back. Grease-smeared gray trousers, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and hair crawling on his arms. If he had tattoos they weren’t on his forearms but he looked the type.

There had been a black couple in the place: well-dressed in flaunt-it-baby outfits, the leather and the bright colors and the Afro hair. When they had left the bar the big man had turned without preamble and started talking to Paul: “Fucking spades come in here like they own the place. You work for a living, right? I work for a living, my kids go to crummy schools, they don’t get to no summer camps—the fucking politicians ain’t worried about my kids, all they worry about is the fucking spades get the summer camps and the schools. You know how many million niggers we got on welfare you and me are supporting with our taxes? Here I read in the paper this morning some fat welfare niggers put on a demonstration march down at City Hall, you read about that?”

“No.…”

“Demanding—not asking, demanding a fucking allowance for Christmas presents for their fucking bastard kids. Anybody ever send you a Christmas allowance for your kids? Christ, I work for a living and I don’t get no fancy presents for my kids, I can’t afford it, they’re lucky they get a couple toy cars and a new outfit of clothes to go to school in. And everybody always bleeding about the fucking spades, Jesus H. Christ if I hear that three-hundred-years-slavery number one more time I’m gonna strangle the son of a bitch that pitches it at me, I swear to God. They don’t just want to move in next door to you, they want to burn your fucking house down, and what happens? Some niggerlovin’ son of a bitch says we got to pay more taxes and give the spades more of our hard-earned money and let them take our jobs away from us because that way maybe they’ll be nice to us and they won’t burn my house down after all. Well I’m tellin’ you”—he leveled a finger at Paul—“it’s all a crock of shit and any spade bastard tries to toss a brick through my window is gonna get his nigger hide blown in a lot of pieces. I got a legal registered shotgun by my front door and I see any black son of a bitch prowling around my place he’s gonna get killed first and asked questions later. You got to get tough with the bastards, it’s the only thing they understand.”

A month ago Paul would have tried to find a way to show him it wasn’t that simple, wasn’t that cut-and-dried. Now he was no longer sure the man wasn’t right. Permissive societies were like permissive parents: they produced hellish children.

He thought bitterly, A man ought to be able to keep a few illusions.…

Finally the man looked at the revolving clock above the bar, drained his beer and left. Paul ordered his third gin and tonic and sat rotating the glass between his palms, seeking something to look at. There were five booths along the wall behind him; two were occupied by couples who seemed to be arguing in tense whispers. A big woman sat alone in the front booth watching the street; now and then she would turn to signal the bartender and Paul had glimpses of a puffy face, too old and ravaged to go with the blonde-dyed hair. She kept getting up and putting coins in the jukebox by the door; the room vibrated and Paul wondered why saloon jukeboxes inevitably emphasized the heavy bass thumpings.

All I’d have to do is go over and say, ‘Mind if I sit down?’

He didn’t; he knew he wouldn’t.

Once she even stopped on her way back to the booth and stared straight at him. He dropped his eyes and had an impression of her shrugging and turning away. When he looked up she was sliding into the booth, buttocks writhing, the cotton dress stretched tight across her fullnesses.

The bartender refilled his glass and Paul tried to strike up a conversation but the bartender wasn’t the talkative kind, or possibly something had put him in a mood. There were five or six men clustered at the far end of the bar, half-watching the television ball game, talking among themselves with the easy familiarity of long acquaintance; probably neighborhood shop managers—dry cleaners, shoe repairmen, delicatessen types—and they didn’t look as if they would welcome a stranger’s intrusion.

He paid the tab and got off the stool and swallowed the fourth drink too fast, and felt the effect of it a moment after he hit the sidewalk. The traffic on Broadway seemed to be moving too fast for his eyes to track. He had to make an effort to walk without weaving. At the corner of Seventy-fourth Street he decided to cut across town on the side street because he didn’t want all the people on Seventy-second to see him in this condition.

He was several yards into the block before the fear hit him. There was no one in sight down the entire length of the street; the shadows were sinister and the heavily massed buildings threw dangerous projections into the street—steps, awnings, parked vans: killers could be hiding behind them, or in the narrow service alleys.…

He remembered the other night, his terror crossing the East Side in the Forties; he drew himself up. It’s about time to quit getting railroaded into panic. He walked forward with quicker steps; but his hand in his pocket closed around the sock-wrapped roll of coins and his bowels were knotted and it was no good pretending the soul-sucking darkness wasn’t alive with terrors. The beat of his heart was as loud as the echoes of his heels on the concrete.

At first he did not hear the movement behind him.

In the corner of his vision an apparitious shape. He did not stop or turn; he kept moving and kept his eyes straight ahead in the insane hope that if he pretended it wasn’t there it would go away. He was walking fast but he couldn’t betray his fear by breaking into a run. Life was suddenly all he had, and all he wanted. Maybe it was his imagination after all—maybe there was no one, only the echoes of his own steps, his own shadow moving across a stucco wall? Yet he did not look back, he could not. Half the long block yet to traverse, the street-lamp throwing a pool of light that made the shadows deeper.

“Hey, hold it, motherfucker.”

The voice like a blade against his spine.

Close enough to touch. Right there behind him.

“Hold up. Turn around, honkie.”

I’m hearing things it’s my imagination.

He stood bolt still in his tracks, shoulders tensed against awaited violence.

“Motherfuck, I said turn around.” It was quiet, tense—high-pitched, a little crack in it. An adolescent voice, a tone of raging bravado—bravado to mask fear.

Petrified. But: My God he’s as scared as I am!

And as Paul turned slowly to face his fear he heard the snap-blade knife open with a click and something inside him exploded like a brilliant deafening burst of discovery:

Anger.

A furious physical rage.

The adrenalin was shooting through him and he felt the heat exploding through his head; even as he came around and the attacker came in view Paul was lifting the roll of coins from his pocket, whipping his arm up overhead, stretching to smite this enemy the mightiest blow his inflamed muscles could deliver.…

He caught the fragmentary race of reflected lamplight along the moving blade of the knife; saw it but did not register it, all he knew was the target and the weight of the kosh swinging from his hand, swinging down toward that dark narrow weaving skull.… And he heard the enormous bellow that thundered from his own chest, the bestial cry of berserk assault.…

.…And the kid with the knife was falling back in panic, dodging, arms whipping up over his head; wheeling, scrabbling, getting his balance, digging in his toes—running….

The savage downswing found no target and Paul stayed his hand before the roll of coins could smash his own knee but it made him lose his balance and he broke his fall with a palm—got one knee under him and knelt there watching the kid who wasn’t more than half his size or weight, the kid running away up the street, flitting into an alley, instantly absorbed into the city as if he hadn’t been there at all.

The street was empty and he got to his feet but it hit him then, the reaction, and he began to shake so badly he had to reach for the railing of a brown-stone’s front steps. He hung on to it and pivoted on his hands, collapsing in a circle until he was seated on the third step from the bottom. Hot flushes and chills prickled his flesh, his vision spun, and a surge of uncontainable exultation lifted his voice to a high call of joy:

“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

11

Trying to conceal the fact that he was breathing hard he gave the doorman an idiot grin and crossed the lobby on drunken legs and stood in the elevator until its doors closed; he slid to the floor and sat there until they opened, crawled out and let himself into the apartment with vomit pain convulsing his stomach. Leaned over the kitchen sink and catted up everything.

He rinsed his mouth and threw up again and rinsed again. Hung in the sink with painful dry heaves until it subsided. Sweating, scalp prickling, he made it to the living room couch and lay down weak and wet. Felt himself pass out.

.… When the grinding of the garbage trucks awakened him, his first thought was I wasn’t nearly that drunk. Then he remembered it all.

But he hadn’t slept as well in weeks: when he looked at the time it was half-past eight. It couldn’t have been much later than eleven when he’d come home. There was no hangover; he hadn’t felt this well since—he couldn’t remember when.

In the subway he got out of his seat to give it to an old woman; he smiled at her look of surprise. When he left the Express at Times Square and stood on the Shuttle platform waiting for the crosstown train he realized he was still smiling and he wiped it off his face with an effort; it was occurring to him that he was experiencing all the symptoms of a sexual release and that worried him.

All morning in the office he tried to keep his attention on the figures and notes in front of him but last night kept getting in the way. Why hadn’t he called the police? Well, he hadn’t really seen the kid’s face, he probably wouldn’t know it if he saw him again; and anyhow judging by experience the cops wouldn’t accomplish a damned thing and he’d only have to waste hours telling the story half a dozen times, signing statements, looking through mug-shots. A waste of my time and theirs.

But that wasn’t really it; those were rationalizations and he knew that much.

Rationalizations for what?

He still didn’t have the answer when Dundee came in and took him to lunch at the Pen and Pencil.

“Christ, you’re eating like you haven’t seen a square meal in a month.”

“Just getting my appetite back,” Paul said.

“Well, that’s a good thing. Or maybe it isn’t. You’ve lost some weight—it looks good on you. Wish I could. I’ve spent the last two years on cottage cheese lunches and no potatoes. Haven’t dropped a pound. You’re lucky—you’re just about ready to have your clothes taken in.”

He hadn’t even noticed.

Dundee said, “I guess this Amercon deal’s put you back on your feed, hey? That’s a good break, getting that thing tossed your way. I kind of envy you.”

It made him feel guilty because by now he ought to be on top of the case, he ought to have every figure and fact on the tip of his tongue; he felt like a schoolboy who’d daydreamed his way through his homework.

That afternoon he made a great effort to buckle down to it. But when he left the office he realized how little of it had penetrated. His mind was too crowded to admit digits and decimals; they simply didn’t matter enough any more.

Now damn it, straighten up. It’s your job you’re risking.

He had a hamburger in Squire’s coffee shop on the corner and afterward he still felt hungry but he didn’t order dessert. He kept remembering Dundee’s compliments. He walked home and weighed himself and discovered he was down to 175 for the first time in ten years. The skin hung a little loose on his face and belly but he could feel his ribs. He decided to join a health club and start doing daily workouts in a gym—there was one in the Shelton Hotel a few blocks up from the office, three or four of the accountants went there every day. You’ve got to be in shape.

In shape for what?

He thumbed through the Post and his eyes paused on an ad for a karate school and that put everything together; he said aloud, “You’re nuts,” and threw the newspaper across the room. But ten minutes later he found he was thinking about going back to that same bar on Broadway and he was now alert enough to realize why: it wasn’t the bar he was thinking of, it was the walk home.

It brought him bolt upright in the chair. He wanted that kid to try it again.

He got up and began to pace back and forth through the apartment. “Now take—take it easy. For God’s sake don’t get carried away.”

He had started talking to himself sometime in the past week or two; he realized he was going to have to watch that or one day he’d catch himself doing it on the street. At least he began to feel he understood the people you saw doing it on the sidewalks—walking along by themselves having loud animated arguments with imaginary companions, complete with gestures and positive emphatic answers to questions no one in earshot had asked. You passed them all the time and you edged away from them and refused to meet their eyes. But now he was beginning to know them.

“Easy,” he muttered again. He knew he was getting as filled up with inflated bravado as that kid had been last night. One accidental victory and he had become as smug as an armed guard in a prison for the blind.

You were lucky. That kid was scared. Most of them aren’t scared. Most of them are killers. And he remembered the rage that had flooded his tissues, overcoming every inhibition: if he’d pulled that on a veteran street mugger he’d have been dead now, or in an emergency ward bleeding from sixteen slices.

He’d had twenty-four hours of euphoria; it was time to be realistic. It wasn’t his courage that had saved him; it wasn’t even the poor weapon, the roll of quarters; it was luck, the kid’s fear. Maybe it had been the kid’s first attempt.

But what if it had been a hardened thug? Or a pack of them?

His toe caught the discarded Post and he bent to pick it up and take it to the wastebasket. The ad for the karate school returned to mind, and the resolve to take up gym workouts. That’s no answer, he thought. It took years to develop hand-to-hand skills; he’d heard enough cocktail party chitchat to know that much. Two, three years and you might be good enough to earn yourself a black belt or whatever they called it. But what good was that against a killer with a gun, or six kids with knives?

He turned on the TV and sat down to watch it. One of the local unaffiliated channels; a rerun of a horse-opera series the networks had canceled years ago. Cowboys picking on sodbusters and a drifting hero standing up for the farmers against the gun-slingers. He watched it for an hour. It was easy to see why Westerns were always popular and he was amazed he hadn’t understood it before. It was human history. As far back as you wanted to go, there were always men who tilled the soil and there were always men on horseback who wanted to exploit them and take everything away from them, and the hero of every myth was the hero who defended the farmers against the raiders on horseback, and the constant contradiction was that the hero himself was always a man on horseback. The bad guys might be Romans or Huns or Mongols or cattlemen, it was always the same, and the good guy was always a reformed Roman or Hun or Mongol or cattleman; either that or a farmer who learned to fight like a Hun. Organize the farmers into imitation Huns and beat the real Huns at their own game.

There had never been a successful TV series about a Gandhi; there were only cowboys and private eyes. Robin Hood was a gunslinger in a white hat and the Sheriff of Nottingham was a gunslinger in a black hat and there was no difference between ways of fighting, it was only a question of who fought best. And most of the time the theme was the same: you had to be willing to stand and fight for your own or the gunslingers on horseback would take it away from you.

You had to be willing to fight. That was what the hero always taught the sodbusters.

We have been teaching ourselves that lesson for thousands of years and we haven’t learned it yet.

He was beginning to learn it. It was what made him want to return to the dark street and find the scared kid with the knife.

I feel like a fight. So help me I feel like a fight.

But you had to use your head. Your guts said one thing, your head said another, and your guts usually won; but still you had to use your head, and the head made it crystal clear it wasn’t enough to let blind rage sweep over you—because next time it wouldn’t be a scared kid, next time it would be a hoodlum with a gun, and lunatic rage was no match for a gun. The only match for a gun was a gun of your own.

12

Jack handed him the drink. “Prosit.”

He carried it to the couch and sat. “You think she’s really feeling better then.”

“Dr. Metz said he was encouraged.”

“They’re not going to use insulin shock?”

“He wants to hold off a little while and see if she comes out of it by herself.” Jack pulled a chair out and sat down with elbows on the dining table. A pack of cards sat neatly squared on the table; he had probably worn them out playing solitaire. He looked haggard. “I guess there’s nothing else to do. Just wait and see. Christ, but it doesn’t get any easier, Pop.”

“I know.”

“Watching her just sit on the edge of the bed like that, picking fluff.…”

“I’d like to see her.”

“Believe me, it wouldn’t make you feel any better.”

“They’re excluding me from things, these doctors. There’s no sane reason for it.”

“Her reasons aren’t sane right now, Pop. But I’ll ask Metz, I’ll see what I can do.”

Paul swallowed a sulfurous comment. He knew if he kicked up enough of a fuss they would let him see her, but was there sufficient point to it? Yet in the meantime they were acting as though he were a poor relation with some sort of communicable disease. He was insulted. But Jack seemed too vulnerable; his eyes now pleaded with Paul not to ask him any more questions to which he didn’t have answers.

He set down his glass empty. He was doing a lot of fast drinking lately. Well it was understandable, wasn’t it; he wasn’t going to start worrying about that, there were too many other things to think about right now.

He knew what he wanted to ask Jack; he wasn’t sure how to lead into it. Finally he said, “I was attacked the other night.”

“You what?”

“A kid on the street. He had a knife. I suppose he wanted money.”

“You suppose? You don’t know?”

“I scared him off.” He took pride in saying it.

Jack gaped at him. “You scared.…” It was unconsciously a comic reaction; Paul had to force himself not to smile. “For God’s sake, Pop.”

“Well, I suppose I was lucky. A Negro kid, probably not more than twelve or thirteen. He had a knife but he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. I yelled at him and started to hit him—I was mad clear through, you can understand that. I didn’t stop to think. I suppose if he’d known what he was doing I’d have been sliced to ribbons.”

“Jesus,” Jack whispered. He stared, not blinking.

“Anyhow the next thing I knew he was running away.”

“But—where’d this happen?”

“Right around the corner from the apartment. Seventy-fourth between West End and Amsterdam.”

“Late at night?”

“Not very late, no. It must have been around eleven.”

“What did the police do?”

“Nothing. I didn’t call them.”

“Christ, Pop, you should have—”

“Oh, to hell with that, I didn’t get much of a look at him. What could they have done? By the time I got anywhere near a phone that kid was six blocks away.”

“A junkie?”

“I have no idea. I guess it’s likely, isn’t it?”

“Most of them are.”

“Well, the truth is I was angry. I was madder than I’ve ever been in my life.”

“So you just started hitting the kid? Jesus, that’s a ballsy thing to do.…”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking straight, obviously. I never landed a blow on him—he bolted and ran the minute I started to swing at him. I had a roll of coins in my hand, I suppose he mistook it for something more lethal.” Paul leaned forward for emphasis. “But suppose it hadn’t been a mixed-up kid? Suppose it had been a real tough?”

“You’re leading up to something, aren’t you?”

“Jack, they’re on every street. They jump people at five o’clock in broad daylight. They hold up subway cars as if they were stagecoaches. All right, it happens all the time, but what are we supposed to do about it? What am I supposed to do about it? Throw my arms up over my head and yell for help?”

“Well, usually if you just keep calm and give them the money they’ll leave you alone, Pop. All most of them want is money. There aren’t too many of them like the ones who killed Mom.”

“So we’re just supposed to turn the other cheek, are we?” He stood up abruptly. It made Jack’s head skew back. Paul said, “Damn it, that’s not enough for me. Not any more. The next time one of the bastards accosts me in the street I want to have a gun in my pocket.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“What for? Wait until the next mugger jumps me and decides to stick a knife in me?” He was on his feet and it felt stagey, foolish; for something to do he picked up his empty glass and carried it to the bar cabinet. He talked while he mixed a drink.