“Look who’s talking!” she said in English.
They returned to their room, picked up their bags and the case, and went to the car. They drove off without checking out, since Kickaha did not think it wise to let anybody know what they were doing if it could be helped. In Tarzana, he went into a department store and checked out clothes for himself and Anana. This took an hour, but he did not mind keeping Cambring waiting. Let him and his boss sweat for a while. While he was waiting for his trousers to be altered, he made the call. Again, Cambring answered immediately.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Kickaha said. “I’ll be at a place fairly close to your house. I’ll call you when I get there, and I’ll give you twelve minutes to get to our meeting place. If you aren’t there by then, I move on. Or if it looks like a trap, I’ll take off, and that’ll be the last you’ll see of me-at a meeting place, that is. Your boss can take care of the Beller himself.”
“What the hell is this Beller you’re talking about?” Cambring said angrily.
“Ask your boss,” Kickaha said, knowing that Cambring would not dare do this. “Look, I’m going to be in a place where I can see on all sides. I want just two men to meet me. You, because I know you, and your boss. You’ll advance no closer than sixty yards, and your boss will then come ahead. Got it? So long!”
At noon, after eating half a hamburger and a glass of milk, he called Cambring. He was at a restaurant only a few blocks from the meeting place. Cambring answered again before the phone had finished its third ring. Kickaha told him where he was to meet him and under what conditions.
“Remember,” he said, “if I smell anything fishy, I take off like an Easter bunny with birth pangs.”
He hung up. He and Anana drove as quickly as traffic would permit. His destination was the Los Angeles County Art Museum. Kickaha parked the car around the corner and put the keys under the floor mat, in case only one of them could get back to it. They proceeded on foot behind the museum and walked through the parking lot.
Anana had dropped behind him so that anyone watching would not know she was with Kickaha. Her long, glossy black hair was coiled up into a Psyche knot, and she wore a white low-cat frilly blouse and very tight green-and-red striped culottes. Dark glasses covered her eyes, and she carried an artists’ sketch pad and pencils. She also carried a big leather purse which contained a number of items that would have startled any scientifically knowledgeable Earthling.
While Kickaha hailed down a cab, she walked slowly across the grass. Kickaha gave the cab driver a twenty-dollar bill as evidence of his good intentions and of the tip to come. He told him to wait in the parking lot, motor running, ready to take off when Kickaha gave the word. The cab driver raised his eyebrows and said, “You aren’t planning on robbing the museum?”
“I’m planning on nothing illegal,” Kickaha said. “Call me eccentric. I just like to leave in a hurry sometimes.”
“If there’s any shooting, I’m taking off,” the driver said. “With or without you. And I’m reporting to the cops. Just so you know, see?”
Kickaha liked to have more than one avenue of escape. If Cambring’s men should be cruising around the neighborhood, they might spot their stolen car and set a trap for Kickaha. In fact, he was betting that they would. But if the way to the cab was blocked, and he had to take the route to the car, and that wasn’t blocked, he would use the car.
However, he felt that the driver was untrustworthy, not that he blamed him for feeling suspicious.
He added a ten to the twenty and said, “Call the cops now, if you want. I don’t care, I’m clean.”
Hoping that the cabbie wouldn’t take him up, he turned and strode across the cement of the parking lot and then across the grass to the tar pit. Anana was sitting down on a concrete bench and sketching the mammoth which seemed to be sinking into the black liquid. She was an excellent artist, so that anybody who looked over her shoulder would see that she knew her business.