“Sure. I remember you.”
He hesitated, not certain how to proceed. Then he blurted out a request or an invitation; he wasn’t sure which it was. “My name’s Chase, Benjamin Chase, and I’d like to see you again, see you today, if that’s at all possible.”
“See me?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
After a hesitation, she said, “Mr. Chase … are you asking me for a date?”
He was so out of practice – and so surprised to discover that he did, indeed, want to see her again for reasons that had nothing to do with Judge – that he was as awkward as a schoolboy. “Well, yes, more or less, I suppose, yeah, a date, if that’s okay.”
“You have an interesting approach,” she said.
“I guess so.” He was afraid that she would turn him down – and was simultaneously frightened that she would accept.
“What time?” she asked.
“Well, actually, I was thinking today, this evening, dinner.”
She was silent.
“But now,” he said, “I realize that isn’t much notice-”
“It’s fine.”
“Really?” His throat was tight, and his voice rose toward an adolescent pitch. He amazed himself.
“One problem, though,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve already started marinating a lovely sea bass for dinner. Started preparing other dishes too. I don’t like wasting any of this. Could you come here for supper?”
“Okay,” he said.
She gave him the address. “Dress casually, please. And I’ll see you at seven.”
“At seven.”
When the connection was broken, Chase stood for a while in the booth, trembling. Into his mind’s eye came vivid memories of Operation Jules Verne: the narrow tunnel, the descent, the awful darkness, the fear, the bamboo gate, the women, the guns … the blood. His knees felt weak, and his heart beat rabbit-fast, as it had done in that subterranean battleground. Shaking violently, he leaned against the Plexiglas wall of the booth and closed his eyes.
Making a date with Glenda Kleaver was in no way a rejection of his responsibility in the deaths of those Vietnamese women. A long time had passed, after all, and a great deal of penitence had been suffered. And suffered alone.
Nevertheless, he still felt that making a date with her was wrong. Callous and selfish and wrong.
He left the booth.
The day was hot and humid. His damp shirt clung to him nearly as tenaciously as guilt.
* * *
At the shopping mall, Chase browsed in the bookstore until shortly after noon, then walked up the carpeted slope of the main promenade to the tavern. The bartender said that Blentz was expected at one o’clock. Chase sat on a stool at the bar, watching the door, and nursed a beer while he waited.
When Eric Blentz arrived, wearing a rumpled white linen suit and a pale-yellow shirt, looking even heavier than he had appeared the previous night, he was friendly and willing to chat.
“I’m looking for a guy who used to come here,” Chase said.
Blentz overwhelmed a bar stool and ordered a beer. He listened to the description but claimed that he didn’t know anyone who fit it.
“He might not have been a customer. Maybe an employee.”
“Not here, he wasn’t. What do you want him for, anyway? He owe you some money?”
“Just the opposite,” Chase said. “I owe him.”
“Yeah? How much?”
“Two hundred bucks,” Chase lied. “You still don’t know him?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
Disappointed, Chase got up. “Thanks anyway.”
Blentz turned on his stool. “How did you go about borrowing two hundred bucks from a guy without learning his name?”
Chase said, “We were both drunk. If I’d been half sober, I’d have remembered it.”
Blentz smiled. “And if he’d been half sober, he wouldn’t have made the loan.”
“Probably not.”
Blentz raised his glass and took a swallow of beer. Light sparkled on the polished edges of his silver ring. A double lightning bolt.
As Chase walked across the tavern and out the door into the mall, he knew that Eric Blentz was still twisted away from the bar, watching.
Aryan Alliance. Some sort of club, like the Elks Club or the Moose Lodge, for God’s sake, but for a bunch of white supremacists who had perhaps grown tired of running around the countryside in hooded white sheets and were looking for a more modern, urban image.