Libra - Don Delillo [118]
There were anemones in a bud vase on the table. The phone rang and Beryl went to her desk in the living room to answer. It was a man named Thomas Stainback. She knew from the tone of voice that it was a call Larry would take upstairs. She simply stood in the doorway. When he saw her, he got up from the table. She waited for him to climb the stairs to the guest room and pick up the phone and then she put the receiver down softly and went in to drink her coffee.
Parmenter said, “I’m here,” and waited for Everett to ask the first question on the list.
“What do we know about schedule?”
“It looks like mid-November.”
“That gives us time. I’m anxious to hear what Mackey is doing.”
“He knows we’ve got Miami. I haven’t told him when.”
“Tell him right away.”
“I can’t find him,” Parmenter said.
A pause on the other end.
“Is he reassigned?”
“I did some very delicate checking. He’s not at the Farm or anywhere else he might logically be. There is no trace. It’s beginning to look like he just submerged for a time.”
“It’s a reassignment,” Everett said.
“I looked into it, Win. I was extremely goddamn thorough. He is not in a cover situation. He is supposed to be training JOTs and he isn’t.”
“Does it mean he’s out? We can’t operate without Mackey.”
“He’s setting up. That’s all. He’ll get in touch.”
“He can’t just walk away.” ,
“He’ll get in touch. You know the man is solid.”
“I’ve had a foreboding,” Everett said.
“He’s setting up. I’ll get in my car one morning and find him sitting there. He wants this to happen as much as we do.”
“I’ve had a feeling these past weeks that something isn’t right.”
“Everything is right. The city, the time, the preparations. The man is absolutely solid.”
“I believe in the power of premonitions.”
Larry put down the phone. Downstairs he found Beryl at the table with the newspaper, her coffee and a pair of scissors. Pages were spread over the wineglasses and dinner plates.
He’d stopped commenting on this oddness of hers. She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because these are the things that tell us how we live.
Baby LeGrand stood at the end of the runway, knees bent, hands locked behind her neck, the drummer going boom to the jolt of her pelvis, and she scanned the club meantime, making out shapes beneath the tinted lights, whole lives that she could diagram in seconds, oh sailors and college boys, just the usual, plus a waitress taking setups to the hard drinkers, a kid in a skimpy outfit that makes her titties bulge. She ran a sash between her legs and waved it slow-motion through the baby spot. She eyed the table of off-duty cops drinking their cut-rate beer. She saw the odd-job boy taking Polaroids of the customers which Jack will present as gifts. These are men in suit and tie, on business in the city, and men who come with dates to do the twist between sets. Brenda knows the twist crowd. She likes the younger cops if they are blue-eyed. She knows the smallest tomato stain on the narrowest tie because the only food is pizza from up the street, which somebody sticks in the warmer. Meantime the drummer’s picking up the beat and a sailor says go go go. She drags the sash through the smoke and dust, scans the bar for the lowlife types that Jack drags in off the street, sad sacks and drifters he feels sorry for. And there is the gambling element or whatever