Cut And Run

“Haven’t you?”

He gave her an unreadable half-smile, aware that she was lying. Of course she had. Lately, more than ever. But she couldn’t tell Shuji about the mornings she’d lain in bed wondering what her life would be like if she’d never taken up piano, if she never played again. What would she do? What could she do? She couldn’t tell him about her mounting exhaustion as the tour had worn on, about her fantasies of sticking a jazz improvisation into the middle of a Mozart sonata, about her tiresome fights with her manager, who wanted her to maintain a hundred-concert schedule and at the same time expand her repertoire and do more recordings. She couldn’t tell Shuji about her boredom with the review, the constant travel, the fancy dinners, the men she met. She couldn’t tell him about the growing monotony of it all and her fear that the monotony would follow her into the practice room, where it never had before. J.J. had counteracted some of the monotony, but she wouldn’t be around forever—and Shuji couldn’t know about J.J.

He was right. She was in a funk. But in nineteen years, she’d never once told Eric Shuji Shizumi he was right. They argued and struggled and discussed, but she never gave in to him, never permitted herself to be intimidated by his legendary status. When that happened, she would lose her independence as an artist and, she thought, as a person.

“I’m not worried about being around when I’m thirty-five, and I’m not in any funk.” She pushed aside her café au lait and sprang up, feeling tired and scared and so furious she couldn’t see clearly. Why the hell couldn’t Shuji just leave her alone! Why did he always have to push and press! “I hope to hell you’re happy, Shuji. You’ve ruined Vermont for me.”

“Good,” he said.

“Bastard. Go to hell.”

She stalked out, leaving him with the bill and a smug look on his handsome face.

From his shabby hotel room on Broadway, Hendrik de Geer put a call through to United States Senator Samuel Ryder. The Dutchman had been given the senator’s Georgetown number, and he wasn’t surprised when Ryder picked up on the first ring. It was precisely nine o’clock, when Hendrik had said he would call.

“You have your answer?” Ryder asked.

The Dutchman heard the tension in the young senator’s patrician tone, but he took no pleasure in it. “I will meet you at Lincoln Center on Saturday night.” His English was excellent, only lightly accented; he spoke Dutch only when there was no alternative. It was the language of his past. “After the concert. You’ll have a car?”

“Of course.”

“Meet me there.”

“All right. But take care the Stein woman doesn’t see you.”

Hendrik closed his eyes, just for a second, and felt the pain wash over him. The Stein woman…Rachel. But—“I need no instructions from you, Senator.” His voice was cold. “Bloch knows none of this?”

“Do you think I’m a fool?”

“Yes. You tell people what they want to hear, Senator. I know. See to it you tell Bloch nothing, do you understand? Otherwise, my friend, we have no deal.”

Two

Senator Samuel Ryder, Jr., edged into the narrow wooden booth of the crowded, smoke-filled Washington, D.C., diner. It was not the sort of place he frequented, ever, but he had chosen it for this meeting—a breakfast meeting not on any calendar known to his protective, thorough staff. His aides would have been horrified to see him give the chubby waitress a halfhearted smile as she slapped a sturdy mug of black coffee down in front of him.

“See a menu?” she asked.

The unappetizing menus were printed on cheap white paper and shoved between pieces of peeling plastic. “No, thank you,” Ryder said, concealing his distaste as he looked for any sign of recognition in her bored eyes. There was none. “I’ll just have coffee for now.”

She shrugged and waddled off, moving her bulk with surprising ease. Ryder tried the coffee; it was hot and strong, although not of high quality. He didn’t mind. During the past month he’d slept little. Coffee kept him going, as well as his sense of duty, of optimism. Things would work out; they had to.

Without a sound, Otis Raymond materialized in the opposite bench and slid into the corner with the ketchup and sugar packets and A-1 sauce, as if he were the one afraid to be seen. Ryder, forty-one and single, tall, sandy-haired, square-jawed, and well-dressed, stuck out in the greasy diner. Army Specialist Fourth Class Otis Raymond—the Weasel, his buddies in Vietnam had called him—fit right in. He had to be forty, but he was even ganglier than Ryder remembered. Otis still looked like a teenager, a doped-up kid on the road to hell. He wasn’t aging, he was yellowing. His bug-bitten skin, his sunken eyes, his teeth, his fingertips. Even his hair had a dead, yellowish cast.

Otis grinned. “Shit, man, it’s been a long time. You done good since ’Nam, huh, Sam?” Fortunately, he seemed not to expect an answer. He rubbed his hands together. “I gotta have coffee. Fucking freezing up here. How the hell do you stand it?”

“You get used to it,” Ryder said.

“Not me, man.”

The chubby waitress appeared with a mug and a fresh pot of coffee. She poured Otis a cup, refilled Ryder’s, and took out her order pad. Although Ryder gagged at the thought of what such a place might serve, he knew if he didn’t eat, Otis wouldn’t either, and the Weasel looked even more gaunt and hungry than Ryder remembered. He ordered ham and eggs. Otis said, “Make that two,” and gave Ryder a manic grin. “Can’t remember the last time I had a decent breakfast. You?”

“I usually play tennis early Friday mornings,” Ryder said.

Otis laughed, snorting. “Tennis, shit. You wear them little white shorts?”

“They’re considered de rigueur, yes.”

“Fuck that.”

The Weasel pulled out a crushed pack of Camels and tapped out a cigarette, taking three matches to light it. The matches were cheap and damp, and his hands were shaking. Ryder had a feeling they always shook. He dragged deeply on his cigarette, his fingers trembling noticeably. Raymond had always believed he and Ryder had some sort of special rapport because he’d saved Ryder’s life in Vietnam, but of course that was absurd. Raymond had just been doing his job. Ryder didn’t feel he owed Otis any special thanks. He appreciated the former helicopter door gunner’s extraordinary skill with an M-60 machine gun, his principal weapon, which he’d treated with more care and concern than he had himself. But that came as no surprise: Otis Raymond had never planned on making it out of Southeast Asia. And in many ways, he hadn’t.

Breakfast arrived, smelling of salt and grill grease, and the Weasel attacked his with the relish of the half-starved. The coffee and cigarette seemed to have calmed him, and his hands were steadier. He bit into the butter-slathered toast. “Bloch thinks you’re up to something, Sam.” Otis seemed to enjoy calling a U.S. senator by his first name. He swallowed the toast. “That’s why he sent me up here. He doesn’t give a shit what you do, so long as he gets his money. He’s not worried about you giving away his operation, because he knows if you do, you’ll end up swimming in shit, too.”

“He’s overextended,” Ryder said coldly, wishing he could feel as confident as he sounded.

“Yeah, I know, but that don’t matter. He’s putting the screws to you so you can pull him out. Man, he’s been doing this crap for years. You try and mess him up, you don’t come out of it. He will; you won’t.”

Ryder said nothing. It rankled him that Bloch—Master Sergeant (ret.) Phillip Bloch—had sent Otis Raymond as his messenger. The Weasel, for the love of God. A drug-addicted loser giving him, a United States senator, advice!

“Don’t bullshit Bloch, man. You got something going, level with him.”

The acidic coffee burned in Ryder’s stomach as his contempt for Raymond and Block and the underlife they represented again assaulted him. They’d been in Vietnam together—or, more accurately, at the same time. Weasel, Block, Ryder. And Stark. Mustn’t forget Matthew Stark, although he’d tried. Of the four, only Ryder had successfully put their shared past behind him. He’d overcome all that had happened to him in Vietnam, all he’d done, all he’d seen, all he’d had done to him. He’d been a first lieutenant, a platoon leader, and Bloch had been his platoon sergeant. Stark had been a helicopter pilot, Otis Raymond his door gunner. They’d all survived their tours of duty.

Ryder understood tragedy as well as anyone—better than most, he felt. But why dwell on what you couldn’t change? Why not move forward? He loathed men like Otis Raymond, still living the war, letting it destroy them, but at least Otis wasn’t always whining and complaining the way so many were. Ryder had never had much in common with the men with whom he’d served, the men he’d led. Most were from the dregs of American society and had gone to Vietnam not because they believed in or understood the cause for which they were fighting, but because they had had no other real option. “I got into some trouble,” Otis had explained once. “Judge told me, go to school, go to war, or go to jail.” But Ryder came from an old, prestigious central Florida family and was himself the son of a U.S. senator; going to Vietnam for him had been an honor and, as his father’s son, a duty.

“What more does Bloch want from me?” Ryder asked, hating the hoarseness in his voice. Normally his strong sense of self, which some called arrogance, could conceal his fear.

“Anything he can get, Sam.”

He licked his lips, resisting the impulse to bite down. “What does he know?”

Otis shrugged. “He knows de Geer’s in New York, that you two got something cooked up.”

“Did de Geer tell him?”

“The sergeant’s got snitches all over camp. He knows what’s going on.”

“He would,” Ryder said, dispirited.

If he leveled with Bloch, the Dutchman would be furious and perhaps impossible to control. Technically, de Geer worked for Bloch, although as an independent his only loyalty was to himself. It was in his role as Bloch’s messenger that Ryder had first met the Dutchman. De Geer turned the screws on Ryder on the sergeant’s behalf—demanding more money, more favors, making those demands impossible to refuse. But now Ryder was the one turning the screws on the Dutchman.

Still, Ryder knew that if he didn’t level with Bloch, the sergeant would keep digging until he found out what he wanted to know. Right now, Ryder didn’t need that kind of interference. He needed to keep Bloch where he was, at least for the moment. “Can’t you stall him?”

“Me?” Otis gave a croaking laugh that ended in a fit of coughing. He slurped some coffee and settled back, his bony frame almost disappearing against the tall wooden back of the booth. “Shit, Sam, you got a sense of humor, huh? I don’t stall Bloch—man, nobody stalls that fucker. I try, I’m a dead man.”

“My God, what have I gotten myself into?”

Ryder hadn’t intended for Otis to hear him, but the skinny army combat veteran nodded solemnly. “You know it, Sam, don’t you? Let me help, okay? Trust me, I know Bloch. Man, I ain’t going to let you go down.”