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‘We’d have made a good team,’ she said. ‘We are a good
team. You should come back to Chicago with me.’
‘I’m a wanderer,’ he said.
‘OK, I won’t push,’ she said. ‘And look on the bright side with
Froelich. Cut her some slack. She’s probably worth it. She’s a
nice woman. Have some fun. You’re good together.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I guess.’
Neagley stood up and yawned.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘I’m fine.’
Then she put a kiss on the tips of her fingers and blew it to
him from six feet away. Walked out of the room without saying
another word.
He was tired,-but he was agitated and the room was cold
and the bed was lumpy and he couldn’t sleep. So he put his
pants and shirt back on and walked to the closet and pulled
Joe’s box out. He didn’t expect to find anything of interest in it.
It would be abandoned stuff, that was all. Nobody leaves important
things in a girlfriend’s house when he knows he’s going to
skip out some day soon.
He put the box on the bed and pulled the flaps open. First
thing he saw was a pair of shoes. They were packed heel to
toe sideways across one end of the box. They were formal
black shoes, good leather, reasonably heavy. They had proper
stitched welts and toe caps. Thin laces in five holes. Imported,
probably. But not Italian. They were too substantial. British,
maybe. Like the air force tie.
He placed them on the bed cover. Put the heels six inches
apart and the toes a little farther. Th-e right heel was worn more
than the left. The shoes were fairly old, fairly battered. He could
see the whole shape of Joe’s feet in them. The whole shape of
his body, towering above them, like he was standing right there
wearing them, invisible. They were like a death mask.
There were three books in the box, packed edge up. One
was Du c6t de chez Swarm, which was the first volume of Marcel Proust’s , la recherche du temps perdu. It was a French
paperback with a characteristic severe plain cover. He leafed
through. He could manage the language, but the content
243
passed over his head. The second book was a college text about statistical analysis. It was heavy and dense. He leafed through
and gave up on both the language and the content. Piled it on
top of Proust on the bed.
He picked up the third book. Stared at it. He recognized it.
He had bought it for Joe himself, a long time ago, for his
thirtieth birthday. It was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It
was in English, but he had bought it in Paris at a used-book
store. He could even remember exactly what it had cost, which
wasn’t very much. The Paris bookseller had relegated it to the
foreign-language section, and it wasn’t a first edition or anything.
It was just a nice-looking volume, and a great story.
He opened it to the flyleaf. He had written: Joe. Avoid both,
OK? Happy birthday. Jack. He had used the bookseller’s pen,
and the ink had smudged. Now it had faded a little. Then he
had written out an address label, because the bookseller had
offered to mail it for him. The address was the Pentagon back
then, because Joe was still in Military Intelligence when he was
thirty. The bookseller had been very impressed. The Pentagon,
Arlington, Virginia, USA.
He leafed past the title page to the first line: At the beginning
of July, during a spell of exceptionally hot weather, towards
evening, a certain young man came down to the street from the
room he was renting. Then he leafed ahead, looking for the
axe murder itself, and a folded paper fell out of the book. It
was there as a bookmark, he guessed, about halfway through,
where Raskolnikov is arguing with Svidrigailov.
He unfolded the paper. It was army issue. He could tell by the
colour and the texture. Dull cream, smooth surface. It was
the start of a letter, in Joe’s familiar neat handwriting. The date
was six weeks after his birthday. The text said: Dear Jack,