The Green Ripper lion. of the emphasis on secrecy, I am assuming some link between Brother Titus and the twenty acres on which the Morgen Group made a down payment.”
“But there wouldn’t be any point in killing Gretel! What if she did recognize him? No matter what is going on, isn’t that one hell of an overreaction to being recognized?”
“That’s where I draw a blank, Travis. I have been trying to think of something big enough and bad enough and important enough for an organized group and believe me, they are organized to wipe out every possible trace of a vis* from an offlcial of an obscure religious sect. Eradication per se would not be difficult if one had the stomach for extreme measures. Float you out on the tide, and me also, to be totally safe. Eliminate Catherine Ladwigg, Stanley Broffski, Morse Slater, and anybody else Gretel worked with. Eradication of every trace without arousing suspicion is a lot tackier. It requires thought and organization and great care. If Gretel had not talked to you, it would have been successful. If you had been entirely truthful with Toomey and Kline, it would have been successful because they would have dealt with you.”
“Melodrama.”
Y l~now. I know. But fit the facts together in any other way and you get more nonsense instead of less.”
“So the Morgen Group was going to build some kind of top~secret installation at Bonnie Brae. Or a heroin refinery. Or maybe Brother Titus was the fellow behind the grassy knoll in Dallas. Come on, Meyer. How many coincidences can we string to- gether?”
I stood up and headed back across the field to the new asphalt road. I saw something glint in the grass, and bent down and pushed the grass aside and picked it up. I had seen her wear that pin several times when we had gone ashore from The Busted Flush during our long slow trip back around the peninsula It was of Mexican silver, framing a three-dimensional Aztec face carved out of a mottled hard green stone. It was crudely made, and the clasp was not very secure.
How many coincidences can we string together? Sure. If, retracing her jogging route, she had found the pin before Ladwigg drove Titus back to his airplane if she and her ax-husband had not traced her sister-in-law to that California encampment if she had found a different job in Lauderdale…
Looking down at the primitive green face in the palm of my hand, I felt dizzy. The world was all tied together in some mysterious tangle of invisible web, single strands that reached impossible distances, glimpsed but rarely when the light caught them just right.
The biggest if of all. If she had never met me. Because I had brought her here.
If her mother had never met her father.
The Green Ripper
If her aunt had wheels.
An empty path to walk. It leads toward superstition and paranoia, two whistle stops on the road to incurable depression. Once upon a time I took a random walk across a field. I went hither and yon, ambling along, looking at the slay and the trees, nibbling grass, kicking rocks. The first jeep to start across that field blew up. So did the people who went to get the people who’d been in the jeep. And I stood right there, sweaty and safe, trembling inside, while the experts dug over ninety mines out of that field, defused them, stacked them, and took them away. That’s the way it goes sometimes. Philosophy 401, with Professor McGee. Life is a minefield. Think that over and write a paper on it, class.
I put the pin in my pocket. Talisman of some nd. Rub the tiny green face with the ball of the thumb. Like a worry stone, to relieve executive tensions. The times I remembered seeing it, she had worn it on the left side, where the slope of the breast began. She had bought *, she said, at a craft shop in San Francisco at Girardelli Square. I hadn’t been there with her. All the places I hadn’t been with her, I would never be with her. And at those unknown places, at unknown times, there would be less of me present. There can be few things worse than unconsciously saving things up to tell someone you will never see again.