any real enemies, either. And if he wanted to beat me up, why didn’t he
just catch me when I was putting our bags in the trunk?”
Fluttering laces of sunshine and shadow flipped rapidly over the
windshield. Ahead, a stoplight turned green just in time to spare Alex
the inconvenience of braking.
After a while Colin said, “Maybe he’s a SPY.
“A spy?” Alex asked.
“A Russian or something.”
“I thought we were friends with the Russians these days,” Alex said,
looking at the van in the rear-view mirror and smiling again.
“And even if we aren’t friends with the Russians these days-why would a
spy be interested in you or me?”
“That’s easy,” Colin said. “He has us mixed up with someone else.
He was assigned to tail someone living on our block, and he got
confused.”
“I’m not scared of any spy who’s that inept,” Alex said. He reached out
and fiddled with the air-conditioning controls, brought a gentle, cool
breeze into the stuffy car.
“He might not be a spy,” Colin said, his attention captured by the
unimposing little van. “He might be something else.”
“Like what?
“Let me think about it awhile,” the boy said.
While Colin thought about what the man in the van might be, Alex Doyle
watched the street ahead and thought about San Francisco. That hilly
city was not just a geographical identity so far as Alex was concerned.
To him, it was a synonym for the future and a symbol for everything that
a man wanted in life. The new job was there, the innovative advertising
agency that recognized and cultivated talented young commercial artists.
The new house was there, the three-bedroom Spanish stucco on the edge of
Lincoln Park, with its spectacular view of the Golden Gate area and the
shaggy palm outside the masterbedroom window. And Courtney was there,
of course.
If she had not been, the new job and the house would not have meant
anything. He and Courtney had met in Philadelphia, had fallen in love
there, had been married in the city hall on Market Street, with her
brother, Colin, as honorary best man and a woman from the Justice
Department steno pool as their required adult witness. Then Colin had
been packed off to stay two weeks with Alex’s Aunt Pauline in Boston,
while the newlyweds flew to San Francisco to honeymoon, to meet Alex’s
new employers to whom he had spoken only over the telephone, and to find
and buy the house in which they would start their life together.
It was in San Francisco, more than Philly, that the future took shape
and meaning. San Francisco became the future. And Courtney became
inextricably entwined with that city. In Doyle’s mind, she was San
Francisco, just as San Francisco was the future. She was golden and
even-tempered, exotic, sensuous, intellectually intriguing, comfortable
yet exciting-everything that San Francisco was. And now, as he thought
about Courtney, the hilly streets and the crisp blue bay rose clearly
on the screen behind his eyes.
“He’s still back there,” Colin said, peering through the narrow rear
window at the van.
“At least he hasn’t tried to run us into a ditch yet,” Alex said.
“He won’t do that,” Colin said.
“He’ll just tail us. He’s a government man. ”
“FBI, is he?”
“I think so,” Colin said, grimly compressing his lips.
“Why would he be after us?”
“He’s probably got us mixed up with someone else,” Colin said.
“He was assigned to tail some-radicals. He saw our long hair and got
confused. He thinks we’re the radicals.”
“Well,” Alex said, “our own spies are just as inefficient as the
Russians’, aren’t they?”
Doyle’s smile was too large for his face, a generous curve that was
punctuated at each end with a dimple. He held the smile both because he
felt so damned fine and because he knew that it was the best thing about
his face. In all his thirty years, no one had ever told him that he was
handsome. Despite the fact that he was one-quarter Irish, there was too
much strong-jawed Italian in him, too much of a Roman nose. Three
months after they met, when they began to sleep together, Courtney