smile speak for him a moment longer.
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Then he said, “Sonny, do you know how we get to the Bev-
erly Hills Hotel?” So he was a stranger after all. Jack experienced an odd little flicker of disappointment.
He pointed straight up the street. The hotel was right up
there, close enough so that his father had been able to walk to breakfast meetings in the Loggia.
“Straight ahead?” the driver asked, still smiling.
Jack nodded.
“You’re a pretty smart little fellow,” the man told him, and the other man chuckled. “Any idea of how far up it is?” Jack shook his head. “Couple of blocks, maybe?”
“Yeah.” He had begun to get uncomfortable. The driver
was still smiling, but now the smile looked bright and hard and empty. And the passenger’s chuckle had been wheezy and
damp, as if he were sucking on something wet.
“Five, maybe? Six? What do you say?”
“About five or six, I guess,” Jack said, stepping backward.
“Well, I sure do want to thank you, little fellow,” the driver said. “You don’t happen to like candy, do you?” He extended a closed fist through the window, turned it palm-up, and
opened his fingers: a Tootsie Roll. “It’s yours. Take it.”
Jack tentatively stepped forward, hearing in his mind the
words of a thousand warnings involving strange men and
candy. But this man was still in his car; if he tried anything, Jack could be half a block away before the man got his door open. And to not take it somehow seemed a breach of civility.
Jack took another step nearer. He looked at the man’s eyes, which were blue and as bright and hard as his smile. Jack’s instincts told him to lower his hand and walk away. He let his hand drift an inch or two nearer the Tootsie Roll. Then he
made a little stabbing peck at it with his fingers.
The driver’s hand clamped around Jack’s, and the passen-
ger in blind-man glasses laughed out loud. Astonished, Jack stared into the eyes of the man gripping his hand and saw
them start to change— thought he saw them start to change—
from blue to yellow.
But later they were yellow.
The man in the other seat pushed his door open and trotted
around the back of the car. He was wearing a small gold cross in the lapel of his silk suit coat. Jack pulled frantically away,
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but the driver smiled brightly, emptily, and held him fast.
“NO!” Jack yelled. “HELP!”
The man in dark glasses opened the rear door on Jack’s
side.
“HELP ME!” Jack screamed.
The man holding him began to squeeze him down into a
shape that would fit into the open door. Jack bucked, still yelling, but the man effortlessly tightened his hold. Jack
struck at his hands, then tried to push the hands off him. With horror, he realized that what he felt beneath his fingers was not skin. He twisted his head and saw that clamped to his side and protruding from the black sleeve was a hard, pinching
thing like a claw or a jointed talon. Jack screamed again.
From up the street came a loud voice: “Hey, stop messin
with that boy! You! Leave that boy alone!”
Jack gasped with relief, and twisted as hard as he could in the man’s arms. Running toward them from the end of the
block was a tall thin black man, still shouting. The man holding him dropped Jack to the sidewalk and took off around the back of the car. The front door of one of the houses behind Jack slammed open—another witness.
“Move, move,” said the driver, already stepping on the accelerator. White Suit jumped back into the passenger seat, and the car spun its wheels and squealed diagonally across Rodeo Drive, barely missing a long white Clenet driven by a suntanned man in tennis whites. The Clenet’s horn blared.
Jack picked himself up off the sidewalk. He felt dizzy. A
bald man in a tan safari suit appeared beside him and said,
“Who were they? Did you get their names?”
Jack shook his head.
“How do you feel? We ought to call the police.”
“I want to sit down,” Jack said, and the man backed away a
step.
“You want me to call the police?” he asked, and Jack
shook his head.
“I can’t believe this,” the man said. “Do you live around
here? I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”
“I’m Jack Sawyer. My house is just down there.”
“The white house,” the man said, nodding. “You’re Lily
Cavanaugh’s kid. I’ll walk you home, if you like.”
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THE TALISMAN
“Where’s the other man?” Jack asked him. “The black
man—the one who was shouting.”
He took an uneasy step away from the man in the safari
suit. Apart from the two of them, the street was empty.
Lester Speedy Parker had been the man running toward
him. Speedy had saved his life back then, Jack realized, and ran all the harder toward the hotel.
3
“You get any breakfast?” his mother asked him, spilling a
cloud of smoke out of her mouth. She wore a scarf over her
hair like a turban, and with her hair hidden that way, her face looked bony and vulnerable to Jack. A half-inch of cigarette smouldered between her second and third fingers, and when
she saw him glance at it, she snubbed it out in the ashtray on her dressing table.
“Ah, no, not really,” he said, hovering in the door of her
bedroom.
“Give me a clear yes or no,” she said, turning back to the
mirror. “The ambiguity is killing me.” Her mirror-wrist and mirror-hand, applying the makeup to Lily’s face, looked stick-thin.
“No,” he said.
“Well, hang on for a second and when your mother has
made herself beautiful she’ll take you downstairs and buy you whatever your heart desires.”
“Okay,” he said. “It just seemed so depressing, being there all alone.”
“I swear, what you have to be depressed about . . .” She
leaned forward and inspected her face in the mirror. “I don’t suppose you’d mind waiting in the living room, Jacky? I’d
rather do this alone. Tribal secrets.”
Jack wordlessly turned away and wandered back into the
living room.
When the telephone rang, he jumped about a foot.
“Should I get that?” he called out.
“Thank you,” her cool voice came back.
Jack picked up the receiver and said hello.
“Hey kid, I finally got you,” said Uncle Morgan Sloat.
“What in the world is going on in your momma’s head? Jesus,
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we could have a real situation here if somebody doesn’t start paying attention to details. Is she there? Tell her she has to talk to me—I don’t care what she says, she has to talk to me.
Trust me, kiddo.”
Jack let the phone dangle in his hand. He wanted to hang
up, to get in the car with his mother and drive to another hotel in another state. He did not hang up. He called out, “Mom,
Uncle Morgan’s on the phone. He says you have to talk to
him.”
She was silent for a moment, and he wished he could have
seen her face. Finally she said, “I’ll take it in here, Jacky.”
Jack already knew what he was going to have to do. His
mother gently shut her bedroom door; he heard her walking
back to the dressing table. She picked up the telephone in her bedroom. “Okay, Jacky,” she called through the door. “Okay,”
he called back. Then he put the telephone back to his ear and covered the mouthpiece with his hand so that no one would
hear him breathing.
“Great stunt, Lily,” Uncle Morgan said. “Terrific. If you
were still in pictures, we could probably get a little mileage out of this. Kind of a ‘Why Has This Actress Disappeared?’
thing. But don’t you think it’s time you started acting like a rational person again?”
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“You think you’re hard to find? Give me a break, Lily, I
want you to get your ass back to New York. It’s time you
stopped running away.”
“Is that what I’m doing, Morgan?”
“You don’t exactly have all the time in the world, Lily, and I don’t have enough time to waste to chase you all over New England. Hey, hold on. Your kid never hung up his phone.”
“Of course he did.”
Jack’s heart had stopped some seconds earlier.
“Get off the line, kid,” Morgan Sloat’s voice said to him.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sloat,” his mother said.
“I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous, lady. You holing up in some seedy resort when you ought to be in the hospital, that’s ridiculous. Jesus, don’t you know we have about a million