SIGRID awoke in a pale gray dawn to the trill of the telephone beside her bed. An incautious movement sent such pain lancing down her arm she could hardly concentrate on Anne's breathless words.
"-and Charlie's simply having kittens! He keeps raving about how his father went completely gaga after fracturing his hip and he's sure El Diego's going to break out in waves of senility just because he twisted an ankle yesterday. Charlie says I have to be on the next plane or he'll send someone else. Now, honey, I can tell him what to do with this assignment, but it's such a plum. I mean, what if El Diego actually gets the Nobel after all these years of being kept out of the running? So if you're really sure you can manage-"
"I can manage," Sigrid reiterated patiently, wishing Anne would just say good-bye and go.
"Okay. Anyhow, Roman's promised to take care of you and the car and I'll send you over some fresh clothes and, Siga, honey,"-Anne's voice dropped into a confidential, all-us-girls-together tone-"why didn't you tell me? We've really got to sit down for a long talk when I get back."
With those alarming words, she clicked off. Sigrid was filled with foreboding. Mother-daughter talks always left her feeling guilty and depressed.
She lay back on the lumpy pillows and tried to imagine what Anne had seen in her apartment that could possibly make her think she had girlish secrets to confide. It certainly couldn't be Roman Tramegra, the man with whom Sigrid shared the roomy garden apartment.
An odd assortment of people wandered in and out of Anne Harald's slapdash life and Roman was one of them. Sigrid first met him when she mistook him for a burglar in Anne's apartment last spring while her mother was on a European assignment. A large, soft, slightly pompous man with thinning hair and a never-ending, monkeylike curiosity. Tramegra had been insulted by her suspicions because he had Anne's invitation to use the apartment until he found a place of his own.
His natural inquisitiveness had gotten the better of him, however, and upon learning that Sigrid was a homicide officer he was entirely captivated. He had always wanted to write a best-selling whodunit and immediately decided she would act as his technical adviser.
Roman Tramegra's age and self-absorption quickly overcame Sigrid's usual awkwardness in making friends. Indeed, the avuncular manner with which he treated her made his presence comfortable enough so that after her apartment building went co-op, she agreed to a trial lease on a larger apartment which Tramegra, through arcane family connections, had located on the lower West Side.
When she returned from Europe, Anne had not approved. If Sigrid wished to share an apartment, her mother had hoped it would be with someone romantically interested. "Where's the future in this?" she scolded when Roman had tactfully retired after dinner to his refurbished maid's quarters beyond the kitchen. "I know you two are supposed to overlap only in the kitchen, but he'll always be in and out if you have visitors. It's worse than a chaperone. It's like living with your grandmother."
"Not really," Sigrid had smiled, scraping the remains of Roman's eggplant parmesan into the garbage disposal. "Grandmother's a good cook."
"You know what I mean," Anne had said darkly.
But Anne was accustomed to Roman's presence now, so what could have set her off this morning? Time enough to worry when Anne returned from South America, Sigrid decided.
With that, she sat up, swung her legs off the bed and was halfway across the room before dizziness overtook her. Sheer willpower got her to the bathroom, where she splashed cold water on her face, but her head was reeling and her legs wobbly before she made it back to bed. Her arm throbbed torturously now and willpower no longer helped.:
Disgusted with herself for being so weak, Sigrid pushed the call button.
The nurse who promptly responded was the same young oriental woman from the early morning hours. "Awake so soon?" she asked cheerfully, then moved to check Sigrid's pulse and temperature. "Your arm, it hurts very much now, yes?"
"Yes," Sigrid admitted.
"You are very silly not to call me sooner," the nurse reproved. "The doctor would not leave the medicine if he did not think you needed it."
Still scolding, she expertly rolled Sigrid over, swabbed her hip with alcohol, and inserted the hypo so deftly that her patient barely felt it.
By eight, breakfast and bath were concluded and the doctor, a man who seemed to have modeled his bedside manner after Genghis Khan or Ivan the Terrible, had retaped her arm, pronounced it satisfactory, and given her some pills to keep the pain in abeyance.
"And take 'em," he'd snarled. "They're nonaddictive, so you don't get any Brownie points for a stiff upper lip."
By eight-thirty, rain was sluicing down her window and she'd begun to give up on whomever her mother had sent out with her clothes. There was no television in the room, but an aide brought in a newspaper which had the Maintenon explosion all over the front page and Sigrid quickly skimmed the scanty details.
The blast had occurred shortly after nine P.M. at the rear of one of the ballrooms where, according to the paper, a cabbage tournament was in progress.
(Irritably and half-subliminally, Sigrid noted that proofreading seemed to be a dying craft.)
Those dead at the scene were Zachary A. Wolferman and John Sutton; in critical condition were T. J. Dixon and Charles Tildon; five others were listed as serious but stable.
No motive for the bombing had been advanced and, except for the usual crazies, no one had claimed credit. Police refused to speculate whether it was politically motivated or inspired by purely personal animosities.
There were side stories on Wolferman's considerable financial holdings and on Sutton as a former SDS activist and contemporary historian. It was reported that Sutton's wife and Wolferman's cousin were among those also present at the tournament. Mrs. Sutton had collapsed upon seeing her husband's body and was currently in seclusion with the two children, ages four and seven.
As the clock ticked toward nine, Sigrid impatiently tossed the paper aside and examined once more the clothes she'd arrived at the hospital in. The jacket was impossibly stiff with her dried blood, but the gray slacks and black print shirt merely looked oil-stained. There was no way she'd be able to hook her bra or put her hair up unaided; still, if she could get someone downstairs to flag her a cab, she could probably make it home without any help from Anne's unreliable courier.
She eased out of the hospital gown and was reaching for her shirt when the door swooshed open and a tall lean man whose thick white hair stood up in angry tufts stopped in her doorway to glare at her with piercing blue eyes.
"What the hell kind of Valkyrie theatricals were you trying to pull last night? Wrestling with knife-bearing madmen! You idiot-you could have been killed."
The exasperated, warring emotions which this man could arouse in her held Sigrid speechless for a moment, then abruptly realizing her nakedness, she pulled a sheet around her thin body.
Her gesture increased his fury, and he slammed her own overnight case down on the hospital bed.
"I'm here to bring you clothes, dammit, not strip you," he snarled. As he turned and stomped out of the room, he flung over his shoulder. "I'll wait at the front entrance. Ten minutes."
And that, Sigrid realized wryly, explained why Anne had gone all chirpy and twittering earlier. Awkwardly getting to her feet, she opened the case and found a knit suit in autumn shades of rust and gold.
For years, Sigrid had owned two sets of clothes: the serviceable, severely cut and neutrally colored suits she invariably chose for herself and the brighter, more feminine things Anne chose for her to wear whenever they made duty visits south. Sigrid had never enjoyed clothes, but it was easier to wear Anne's selections than listen to Grandmother Lattimore's complaints that 'Sigrid simply isn't trying.'
'Gilding the turnip' had always been Sigrid's private feelings on the subject and Anne usually bowed to the inevitable, but Oscar Nauman's appearance that morning seemed to have impelled her to pick from the Carolina side of her daughter's closet.
Why he should have been at her apartment that early in the morning, Sigrid had no idea. Nothing about the man was safely predictable anyhow, except that if a panel of randomly selected art critics or scholars were asked to list America's top five artists, one could be sure that Oscar Nauman's name would appear on every list. His paintings were so eagerly snapped up that he could have long since resigned his position as chairman of Vanderlyn College 's art department and lived on the proceeds; but money slipped through his fingers and he loved teaching too much to give it up even though he grumbled considerably about the time it took from his painting.
And time was passing, Sigrid would occasionally remember. The thought gave her inexplicable regret. Oscar Nauman must be nearing sixty, yet he retained the vigor and virility of a much younger man. Indeed his freewheeling spirit frequently made Sigrid feel ages older than he.
They had met last spring during a homicide investigation at the college when there was a possibility that Nauman had been the intended victim. The end of the case had been the beginning of their prickly relationship. She did nothing to encourage him, nothing of which she was conscious, yet he kept turning up at odd times, keeping her emotionally off-balance, poking and prodding until she felt like a science fair project while he endeavored to change her dress, her palate, and her taste in art. No matter how rudely she resisted, he refused to bed riven away and kept walking in and out of her life as if it were simply an extension of his own.
She wasn't quite sure why she permitted it.
Slowly, she dressed herself in the rust and gold suit, repacked the drab bloodstained things, and was waiting under the hospital canopy when Oscar Nauman splashed up in his yellow, much-abused MG.
The morning was still gray with rain so he had the top up. The inside of the car smelled of damp leather and the clean blend of turpentine, cologne and pipe tobacco that she had come to associate with him.
"Sorry about this damn top," he apologized.
"I like it. You don't drive like Richard Petty when it's up."
She hated his competitive driving, especially since Manhattan 's streets belonged mostly to kamikaze cabbies, cumbersome buses and lane-hogging delivery vans. How Nauman hung onto a driver's license was something she'd quit wondering about. She had personally been present at four separate issuances of careless-and-reckless citations. Either the computer hadn't yet tagged him as a scofflaw or someone in DMV kept cleaning up his record for him. Probably the latter, since Nauman's circle of acquaintances was even wider than her peripatetic mother's.
Nauman seemed to have forgotten his earlier anger. On good behavior now, he drove at a moderate speed, obeying all the laws. At the first stop light, he twisted in his seat to study her.
"How bad is it really?" he asked, turning her bandaged left hand gently in his.
"Not bad," she answered, reclaiming her hand. "There's no nerve damage. The knife cut into some arm muscle, but they've stitched it all up and if I keep it in a sling, it's supposed to stop hurting in four or five days."
The light changed and Nauman allowed a cab to cut in front of him unchallenged.
"Your mother exaggerates a bit, doesn't she?" He smiled. "I expected black eyes, bruises, and slash marks all over."
"Mother enjoys dramatics."
"And you didn't actually wrestle with that guy?"
"No."
"But you did shoot him." Nauman had been truly shocked the first time he realized that she always carried a gun. "Yes."
"That doesn't bother you?"
"It's the first time I've ever shot someone," Sigrid said slowly. "I always wondered how I'd feel if I ever had to.
Now that it's happened, I don't know."
The windshield wiper on her sides wished back and forth erratically, smearing raindrops, and she stared blankly through the obscured glass.
"I guess I'm glad I didn't kill him."
"But you would have?"
"Yes."
They'd had this discussion before,
"He may have been poor and he may not have a father, but that boy wasn't looking for food or love or even money to feed a drug habit last night, Nauman.
It was violence pure and simple. Hew as there to rape that girl and he was ready to knife anyone who got in his way."
She leaned back against the headrest wearily. "Do me a favor, will you? Swing past Metro Medical?"
"What's wrong?" The little car swerved as Nauman's attention swiftly shifted to her pale face. "Are you bleeding? Your stitches come loose?"
"No, it's-Look out!" she cried and braced herself as the left fender kissed the side of a passing van. The driver gave them an obscene gesture and roared ahead while Nauman sheepishly wheeled back to the center of his own lane.
"Sorry about that, but why Metro Medical?"
"My partner's there. Tillie. He was nearly killed in that explosion at the Maintenon last night."
"That's why I tried to find you this morning."
Sigrid was puzzled. "Because of Tillie?"
"No, John Sutton. He was killed in that blast. He teaches-taught at Vanderlyn. He and Val-his wife-met in a seminar I gave one summer at McClellan. I've known them for years."
"I'm sorry, Nauman."
"Just the damn waste," he said, showing his anger and grief. "John was one of the best. Genuine idealist. Intelligent. And Val-I went as soon as I heard. Falling apart. Told her you'd, but your mother said slashed and anyhow so crazy."
When upset or distracted, Oscar Nauman's speech became almost telegraphic as his mind raced ahead, forcing his tongue to omit words in order to catch up.
"SDS, of course, but that was years. He's teacher. Real teacher. So why?"
By now, Sigrid could follow his words with a fair degree of comprehension. "Maybe he wasn't the intended target," she suggested. "Don't forget that a man named Wolferman, a banker, was killed, too. And others are in critical condition."
"Somebody killed him without caring?"
That would be the sticking point, Sigrid knew. Nauman was an old-style liberal with a touching belief that, given adequate housing, full bellies, and meaningful work, mankind would automatically live the Golden Rule. The resistence of pure amoral evil was not something the liberal mind liked to admit.
"The police care," she reminded him quietly.