They were at a corner table in the rear of a small dimly lit pub on Madison Avenue, a quiet, genteel watering hole frequented by the well-heeled clientele of the East Side neighborhood.
There was draft beer in mugs on their Table, accompanying half eaten steaks. Thomas's throat hurt when he swallowed, a nagging cough persisted, and he wondered whether or not he needed a doctor. Food was one thing he did need, he admitted, though the incident at the Anspacher Gallery was not the sort that triggered hearty appetites.
He sipped the beer.
"How's it feel?" she asked, apparently sympathetic.
"The throat?"
She nodded, concern on her face.
"Awful," he said, his voice catching and irritating as he spoke.
"But at least it works. Air goes in and out. What more can I ask?"
"You were on the verge of asking many things," she reminded him.
"So I was."
She worked on her steak with a fork and knife, holding the utensils European style, and eating with what he took to be a great deal of calm-unlike himself, he noted. He was still shaken.
"It's rather shattering," he pondered aloud.
"Someone trying to kill you " "It is 'she said.
He studied her.
"Of course," he said.
"You'd know, wouldn't you?"
She nodded.
He glanced at the razor-thin scar across her neck, barely visible in the dim pub. He was conscious of the soft pop voice of Judy Collins from the jukebox.
"All in all, my throat got off better than yours " He paused.
"Who were they?"
"I don't know," she said definitively. Her voice was brisk and authoritative. Not the voice of the aspiring artist, but rather that of the woman who carried a knife in her purse.
"You must have an ideal" he said.
"None at all. You're closer to the answer than I am."
"Me?" He coughed.
"Why do you keep coming back to me?"
"Because that's where it begins," she insisted.
"It's not just my father. It's Arthur Sandler's connection to William Ward Daniels."
"Lawyer and client" he answered.
She was shaking her head before he was finished.
"More than that" she insisted, eyes flashing.
"Much more."
"How can you be so certain?"
"Very easily. My aunt dies, bringing the family to an apparent end.
Her death means a will, a search for heirs. That means that the family's dirty laundry will have to be public. Old files opened, examined. What files burn? Yours. Your father's, more specifically."
She motioned at the air with both hands, palms open.
"Something was in those files. More than a will. Maybe the key to where my father is. Or who he is. Or maybe there's some indication that I exist " "But it's twenty years after the fact" he said, perplexed.
"Who'd care now?"
"My father," she offered quickly.
"How do you even know he's alive?"
"Maybe this proves it'" she said.
"You know as well as I do that the scarf around your neck was no accident. Maybe you know something," she pressed adamantly.
"Maybe something crucial which might not seem so important to you, but which-" He was shaking his head, every bit as insistent as she.
"Nothing" he said.
"I know absolutely nothing about the Sandlers. Only what you tell me.
And what's public record."
She fell silent, looking down at her plate in thought.
"Whom did you go see?" she asked.
"When you were away?"
He weighed the question and knew it was one he didn't yet want to answer.
"No one important" he said.
"Zenger again?"
"No one important" he said. Only people who insisted she was an imposter. No way he was delving into that yet. Someone in a well tailored female form existed. He knew because she'd just saved his life. When she'd come through in a moment like that, how much else could he hold against her?
"All right, don't tell me" she said sourly and with evident disappointment.
"But someone you've seen has betrayed you. Someone thinks you know too much already."
"Me?" he posed.
"Why not you?"
"They wanted to kill you first," she said. And she smiled with gloriously sweet sarcasm, letting her point rest.
"True," he admitted.
A waitress cleared the table and brought coffee. He was silent as he tried to put events in order and find the pattern. He glanced at her and felt helpless. There was no pattern.
Damn her, he thought, she was perfectly calm. She was asking better questions than he, and for that matter was running a damned fine interrogation. Maybe she should have gone to law school in his place, he thought. He'd learn how to paint.
He sipped the coffee. Its warmth soothed his throat slightly. He broke the silence, seeking to change the drift of the conversation at the same time.
"You know quite a bit aboutart" he said.
"Very little, actually."
"What about forgeries?"
Her coffee cup hesitated between the saucer and her mouth, then returned to the saucer untouched by her lips.
"Forgeries?" she asked, as if seeking a further elaboration of the word.
He nodded, his turn to be calm.
"Art forgeries?" she asked. He nodded again.
"I know they exist" she said.
"Usually a counterfeit is made of a painting that actually exists. Then a transfer is made, gulling people into believing that the bogus one is the original She frowned.
"Why?" Her voice was suspicious.
"Think that could be done with people?" he asked, leaning back slightly. Damn it, he had to cough slightly.
"Counterfeit people?" she asked.
He nodded as they considered it.
"An imposter for the original? Is that the question?" She was pensive and his impression was that she was not acting. But he couldn't be certain.
"I suppose it could be done," she said.
"Why?"
"Just a theory."
"I'd love to hear it'" she said, leaning forward with obvious interest.
He shook his head.
"I told you, I discuss facts, not theories.
Sorry. When I have facts I'll be glad to-' "I save your life and this is my thanks?" she inquired, gently chiding and not really challenging him. If he didn't want to tell her now, she seemed to be saying, he didn't have to.
So he changed the subject.
"That reminds me" he said, 'that wasn't an emery board you cut me down with. Do you always carry it?"
"A girl needs protection "It's against the law, you know."
"Law?" She looked at him disbelievingly and laughed. 'n take my chances," she said with a certain bitterness. He didn't ask how she'd become so proficient with it. Instead he had the sense of having said something silly.
Again he changed the subject.
"Let's go way back before the elevator," he said.
"You were about to tell me about George McAdam and Peter Whiteside'
There was an uneasy silence for a moment. She pursed her lips, as if wondering how much to say, then folded her hands on the table before her, pushing the plate away. She looked him in the eye as if to speak from the soul.
"Yes, of course" she said absently.
"You should know. I should have told you anyway." It was as if an eloquent debate were taking place within her, conflicting urges to tell the truth against an impulse not to reveal too much. Clearly she was struggling with it. She looked up at him and saw him studying her. She perhaps realized that she appeared evasive. So she blurted out the truth.
"George McAdam was a 'sandhog.'"?.
"A what.
She looked perplexed, as if to wonder,
"You mean you don't even know that? Are you lying to me, or are you just plain ignorant?" But she said nothing other than,
"Let's go for a walk. I'll tell you About it."
They were on Lexington-as usual she was choosing the direction. They carefully watched around them, nervously paying attention to each car that passed and anyone walking too closely behind them. She chose to walk uptown on an avenue that went downtown, so that they could see traffic approaching. No mistake. She knew the tricks. More than he did, he was reminded, and it was a good thing she did. She'd saved his life once already But then again, it was his sudden involvement with her that had almost cost him his life in the first place.
Or so it appeared.
"Sandhogs," he said.
"A nickname' She walked beside him, close but not holding his arm. Her coat was pulled tightly around her and her hands were thrust protectively into her coat pockets. She watched ahead and didn't look at him as she spoke.
"Keep going" he said.
"It was the nickname given to agents within a certain branch of the S. I. S ' ISIS.?"
She glanced at him quickly, then looked way again.
"Never heard of it?" she asked. He wasn't sure if there was suspicion in her voice.
"Never.Sorry. Secret Intelligence Service," she said.
"British, of course."
"Continue."
They walked northward.
"In this branch were the agents who had a certain sort of expertise' she said.
"You already know my foster father was in the Middle East when he was shot. What comes out of sand?"
It took him only a moment.
"Oil."
"Oh," she confirmed.
"I pieced it all together over the years, just as I pieced together who I was. The sandhogs were the British agents in oil intelligence. Long ago the British government realized that it was burning more oil than was healthy. Great Britain is an island, dependent on its imports. As long ago as the fifties any intelligent observer could have told you that England could be brought to its knees if its petroleum imports were cut off. There's never been any secret."
He listened intently as they walked.
"I have no idea what the sandhogs were doing. All I know is that he, McAdam, was back and forth in different parts of the world.
Standard cloak-and-dagger stuff, I'm sure. It was on one of those intrigues that he got shot in the hip in 1953. Before he retired and took me on as a daughter."
He nodded. The icy wind made him pull his coat collar tight.
"Well," she continued, 'some men can never retire. They miss the excitement. Or maybe it's just the violence and the blood they miss.
My foster mother died in 1968. That left my foster father in Switzerland, limping around in an empty house staring at the lake and longing to be back in the service.
"At his age?"
"At his age. And as it happened, SIS. were willing to take him back. They had an operation in a different part of the world that needed sorting out. An area where no one would know him, they thought.
Venezuela. South American oil instead of Middle Eastern." She smiled.
"It all gives off the same stench when it burns " They turned another corner and were now on a side street east of Lexington Avenue.
"Can I ask where we're going?" he said.
"See that sign down there?" she asked, pointing halfway down the block to a sign saying READER AND ADVISER, MADAME DIANE.
"That's where we're going."
They walked. She continued to speak.
"My foster father had contacted another man in the Service. The man in Whitehall who was his immediate superior and to whom he would be reporting once his new assignment began. They planned to rendezvous in Maracaibo. They did, in fact. Then they went on to Caracas.
Eventually they were heading north to the United States. There might have been a meeting with some U.S. intelligence service. I don't know.
I only know they never arrived."
"Why not?"
They stopped short and stood immediately beneath the READER AND ADVISER sign.
Leslie glanced at the vacant doorway to the gypsy's parlor.
"The airplane blew up an hour after takeoff," she said.
"A Caracas-to-Miami flight. June 14, 1971. Sabotaged And it wasn't an accident that they were on it. I suspect it was sabotaged for them expressly. After all, there are agents from the 'other side'-as my foster father used to call it-who are actively seeking the oil down there. And with one well-placed bomb, the top British sandhog and his superior were eliminated from the region." She looked at Thomas, studying him for his reaction.
He listened to her story with compassion and sympathy. He believed her just as he had on the first day she'd come to his office.
And just as he'd believed the man in London calling himself Peter Whiteside.
"And that, Thomas'" she said in softer tones, "is why my foster father can't be of help anymore."
"What about Peter Whiteside?" he asked.
Her smile was pained. She shook her head.
"Sometimes you can be very slow," she answered.
He looked at her quizzically as if to ask what she meant.
"Who do you think his superior was?" she asked.
"The second man on the airplane' There was a long pause and he felt a tumbling sensation in his stomach.
"Naturally," he finally muttered.
"You've learned a lot today," she said.
"Now I'll teach you one thing more. The defense of the rabbit. The fleet escape. Never go into a place which you can't get out of in at least three ways. Follow me in five seconds. You'll see what I mean She leaned forward and was no longer a teacher, but rather a woman and a lover. She kissed him on the lips and had him so starved for her physical affection that he tried to pull her closer by drawing her into his arms.
But she'd have none of that. It wasn't time. No sooner did he try to draw her closer than she resisted firmly and pulled back.
'I'll be back in touch," she said.
"Remember. Follow in five seconds' ' He stood there completely mystified as she briskly went up the stairs beneath the sign of Madame Diane. Thomas watched from the sidewalk, then followed after a slow count to five.
He went quickly up the stairs, reached a dingy hallway at the top, and heard nothing. There were four alternatives. More steps leading up. A corridor to the right, a corridor to the left. Back stairs leading down. All four marked with exit signs.
She'd known this place, which thicket could best confuse the hounds.
She was gone. Had anyone been following them, she would have led the pursuer here and easily slipped away.
Her lesson had been well illustrated. He'd learned it.
For himself, he chose the corridor to the left, the one leading past Madame Diane's emporium of guidance. He passed down a side stairway into an alleyway between buildings.
He thought of sandhogs, alive and dead, on his way home, men whose lives and jobs orbited the three spheres of blood, sand, and oil.
McAdam and Whiteside. Men or mirages? And what about Leslie? A cooperative client in desperate need of help? Or a treacherous conniver?
Or both?
During the long walk through the icy wind, he wondered who was real, who was imagined, and who lay in the murky area somewhere in between.
He pulled his coat close to him. Each shadow he passed on that cold night, each stranger coming near him on the sidewalk, represented a multitude of fears. In the same way, the empty apartment he would return to represented a certain loneliness which, at this point in life, he no longer wished to face each night.
He wished that she were coming home with him. But he had no idea where she was, much less who she was.