Eventually, he said, “Alright, you guys have had your fun. But I don’t
want any stupid rumors starting from this. I want you to understand
there’s nothing between Rebecca and me. I think she is a sensitive
person under all those callouses. Beneath that cold-as-an-alligator
pose she works so hard at, there’s some warmth, tenderness. That’s what
I think, but I don’t know from personal experience. Understand?”
“Maybe there’s nothing between you two,” Phil said, “but judging by the
way your tongue hangs out when you talk about her, it’s obvious you wish
there was.”
“Yeah,” all said, “when you talk about her, you drool.”
The taunting started all over again, but this time they were much closer
to the truth than they had been before.
Jack didn’t know from personal experience that Rebecca was sensitive and
special, but he sensed it, and he wanted to be closer to her. He would
have given just about anything to be with her-not merely near her; he’d
been near her five or six days a week, for almost ten months-but really
with her, sharing her innermost thoughts, which she always guarded
jealously.
The biological pull was strong, the stirring in the gonads; no denying
it. After all, she was quite beautiful.
But it wasn’t her beauty that most intrigued him.
Her coolness, the distance she put between herself and everyone else,
made her a challenge that no male could resist. But that wasn’t the
thing that most intrigued him, either.
Now and then, rarely, no more than once a week, there was an unguarded
moment, a few seconds, never longer than a minute, when her hard shell
slipped slightly, giving him a glimpse of another and very different
Rebecca beyond the familiar cold exterior, someone vulnerable and
unique, someone worth knowing and perhaps worth holding on to. That was
what fascinated Jack Dawson: that brief glimpse of warmth and
tenderness, the dazzling radiance she always cut off the instant she
realized she had allowed it to escape through her mask of austerity.
Last Thursday, at the poker game, he had felt that getting past
Rebecca’s elaborate psychological defenses would always be, for him,
nothing more than a fantasy, a dream forever unattainable. After ten
months as her partner, ten months of working together and trusting each
other and putting their lives in each other’s hands, he felt that she
was, if anything, more of a mystery than ever ….
Now, less than a week later, Jack knew what lay under her mask. He knew
from personal experience.
Very personal experience. And what he had found was even better, more
appealing, more special than what he had hoped to find. She was
wonderful.
But this morning there was absolutely no sign of the inner Rebecca, not
the slightest hint that she was anything more than the cold and
forbidding Amazon that she assiduously impersonated.
It was as if last night had never happened.
In the hall, outside the study where Nevetski and Blaine were still
looking for evidence, she said, “I heard what you asked them-about the
Haitian.”
“So?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jack!”
“Well, Baba Lavelle is our only suspect so far.”
“It doesn’t bother me that you asked about him,” she said. “It’s the
way you asked about him.”
“I used English, didn’t I?”
“Jack-”
“Wasn’t I polite enough?”
“Jack-”
“It’s just that I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.” She mimicked him, pretending she was talking to Nevetski
and Blaine: . “Has either of you noticed anything odd about this one?
Anything out of the ordinary? Anything strange? Anything weird?”
“I was just pursuing a lead, ” he said defensively.
“Like you pursued it yesterday, wasting half the afternoon in the
library, reading about voodoo.”
“We were at the library less than an hour.”
“And then running up there to Harlem to talk to that sorcerer.”
“He’s not a sorcerer.”
“That nut.”
“Carver Hampton isn’t a nut,” Jack said.
“A real nut case,” she insisted.
“There was an article about him in that book.”
“Being written about in a book doesn’t automatically make him
respectable.”
“He’s a priest.”
“He’s not. He’s a fraud.”
“He’s a voodoo priest who practices only white magic, good magic. A