LITMIR.BIZ

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There was something about the skin, which seemed whiter, cooler, enormously tactile. If you added to this the baking of fresh bread, the appeal was overwhelming. He wanted to put her on the rug and go to it. Unfortunately, her husband was standing next to him.

      Irene smiled at him as if they had a secret. “Almost done,” she said. She was back in the day’s long-skirted dress, without jewelry, little makeup that he could see on her broad face. She was a fairly tall woman, not Rubenesque or heavy but strong. Vegetarianism hadn’t made her thin the way it had Hackbutt. “Surprised?’ she said.

      “The bread? I guess I am. I didn’t figure you to cook.” Piat was surprised.

      “I’m a damned good cook. I do great country ham and shit like that, or I used to.”

      “Bread smells fantastic.” He was laying it on too thick, but the smell of the bread—he pushed his mind back into the role of case officer.

      “Baking bread is an art.” She opened the oven, looked in, poked something. “Did you boys talk?”

      “We did. Now you two need to talk.” That seemed to please her.

      Hackbutt went into the small living room, leaving the two of them in the kitchen.

      She took the bread out and put it on the already littered table. One loaf was a low-mounded oval with coarse salt and something else on the top; the other was more ordinary, but both were beautifully browned and high. “No tasting,” she said. “It has to cool.” She came past him, stopped where he was in the doorway. She kissed him lightly on the lips. “So do I.” She smiled. “All things in good time.” She went out.

      When he left, Piat paused at the dog again. This time, it sniffed his extended hand, then looked at him. He tried to pet it, but it withdrew its head; something like a warning, no more than the sound of the most distant thunder, came from its throat.

      “You’re a tough sell, doggie. Thank God you’re not the falconer.”

      Explaining Irene and her importance (tactically, not sexually) didn’t go down so well with Dave.

      “It was great until she got involved,” Piat said as if he hadn’t planned it that way. “Then I had hell’s own time with it.”

      “What the fuck did you even let her near it for?” Before Piat could answer, Dave shouted, “It’s not the way you do it! You don’t recruit the fucking girlfriend!” His broad face was red. Dave had been to the Ranch and had taken the courses, and so he knew at least in theory how things were done. Piat again had the feeling that he hadn’t put the theory into practice much.

      “This ‘girlfriend’ is different.”

      “You deal with the guy alone and keep her out of it. That’s how it’s done!”

      “There’d be no deal if I had.”

      Dave made a contemptuous sound. Piat said, in a voice that meant See how hard I’m working to keep from calling you a stupid asshole, “Dave, you don’t know this guy or this woman. They don’t do things without each other.”

      “You’ve blown security and you’ve saddled me with a big fucking problem. I’ve got to run this guy!”

      “Yeah, now thanks to me, you do.”

      “Christ, if I’d known you were going to tell the girlfriend, I’d have aborted you right the hell out. Jesus, what a bush-league thing to do. You know what Partlow would do to you if he knew?”

      “Yeah, Dave, I know what Partlow would do. He’d say, ‘Well, if that was your judgment call, okay.’”

      “He wouldn’t! He’d tell you you blew it and to get lost. Now I’m stuck with it.” Dave was standing by the window of his room in the Western Isles Hotel, his fists clenched, his face blotched with rage. He was scared, Piat realized. Scared because he was going to have to do something that wasn’t in the book. Dave said, “You’re a fucking loser.”

      Piat didn’t miss a beat: he didn’t raise his voice or get red or insist on the challenge of eye contact. He said, as if he were lecturing a beginning class, “You get to him through her, at least at the start. Hackbutt will take a lot of stroking. Pass some of it through her. It’ll please both of them and—”

      “Don’t tell me how to do my fucking job!”

      Piat waited for him to stop and then went right on. “Hackbutt’ll need a makeover. Clothes. A decent haircut. You’re going to have to teach him how to—”

      Dave lumbered toward him. “Get the fuck out of here! Stop talking to me! Get lost!”

      Piat waited for him to come close. He thought it would be nifty to put Dave on his back. Maybe Dave saw that that was a possibility, too, because he pulled up before he was quite close enough. He shouted “Get lost!” again. Piat looked him in the eye and, in the same tone of somebody doing a routine, file-it-and-forget-briefing, said, “You’re meeting Hackbutt at lunch tomorrow. I’ve made a reservation at a restaurant called the Mediterranea in Salen, partway down the island. Noon.” He waited for Dave to take it in. “The hardest part of all was getting Hackbutt to agree to anybody but me as his CO. It took me an hour. You’re going to have to turn on all the charm when you meet him, Dave.”

      “I know how to do my job.”

      “Hackbutt’s prepared to dislike you, because you aren’t me. Hackbutt thought it was going to be me. He’s a one-man man.”

      “That’s fucking laughable—that we’d trust a job like this to you.” Dave jabbed with his finger, but not very far, because there was always the possibility that Piat was fast enough to catch a flying finger and break it. “You’re an agent! You’re nothing but a goddam pissant agent! And don’t you forget it!”

      Piat put his hands up a little above his waist, palms out. Dave’s hands jerked as if he expected a blow. Piat said, “There’s an old Patsy Cline song—‘Why Can’t He Be You?’ You might want to give it a listen to understand Hackbutt’s position. Or you can just go on being an asshole and lose him and then you can tell Partlow why your agent won’t work with you. I won’t be around to blame, unfortunately for you. Lucky me. See you at noon tomorrow, Dave.”

      Piat went out and closed the door very softly.

      It rained most of the night and was still raining when they started for the meeting with Hackbutt, a depressing dribble from the low overcast, as if the universe above was saturated and had to let the water leak out somewhere. Dave was driving. Piat, in the left-hand seat, wasn’t sure how he was supposed to get back to Tobermory after lunch if Dave took off with Hackbutt, but there was a bus, at least; asking Dave what he had in mind would prove too explosive, he thought, and anyway he didn’t want Dave to get the idea that he could plan Piat’s day.

      Dave was still angry; maybe he’d been chewing on the scene in his room all night. He had bitched about the island roads all the way down, and he had come close to hitting another car more or less head on because he hadn’t gone into the lay-by that opened next to them, and instead he had thought the oncoming car would be terrorized into getting out of his way. It hadn’t been.

      “Nice move,” Piat couldn’t resist saying when they were as far off the road as a stone wall would let them. The other car was vanishing behind them. The passenger-side fender was crumpled against the wall, and Piat couldn’t have opened his door more than inch even if he’d wanted to.

      It hadn’t helped that another car had passed and the driver had laughed.

      When they got out in the drizzle at Salen, Dave was in the silent phase of anger. He didn’t bother with his raincoat but hunched his shoulders and walked toward the restaurant—if you can’t punish somebody else for being stupid, punish yourself. Piat regretted having said what he’d said, because he knew he had made things worse, and it would all rub off on the meeting with Hackbutt. He didn’t know why he cared that the meeting go well, but he did. Maybe for Hackbutt’s

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