“You shouldn’t saddle yourself like that,” Moira had said. Lamplight touched the small lines around her eyes, almost the only signal that she was forty. “You aren’t well.”
“I told you and I told you,” Benrud answered, “it’s some damn allergy, and until they find out what it is I’ll have to make the best of things. Did you know I’ve been practicing coughing in different keys? I’m best in A sharp, but I sound so well on all notes that I think I’ll arrange a concert tour.”
She smiled, still worried, but comforted by him and by her own negligible knowledge of medicine. “Well, do find out quick,” she said, “because it’s getting awful boring alone at night.”
“For me too,” he said. He had moved into the spare bedroom since he got the diagnosis. Partly, as he told her, so his noise would not keep her awake, and partly, as he did not tell her, so she wouldn’t see the blood he had begun to spit up.
“I still think it must be something in the lab,” she said. “All that stuff you handle.”
He shrugged, having already claimed negative results in allergy tests for the organic compounds he used daily. Which was true enough, or would have been if those tests had actually been made. In reality, he hadn’t bothered with
188
The Unicorn Trade
tests, for by the time he was to have taken them he knew what the trouble was.
She leaned forward in her chair and touched his hand. The light glowed off mahogany hair as she moved, and this evening her eyes were almost green. “Can’t you at least take a vacation?” she asked. “Jim will understand. He can handle everything while you’re away, and if you get well then it proves” She sensed his invisible frown and stopped. “Anyhow, a rest would help you. Jim urged me himself to make you take off, the last time I saw him.”
“Good old Jim Homer,” muttered Benrud.
“Look, why don’t we leave the kids at my mother’s and take off? She’ll understand. Just us. Maybe down to that little place in Mexico again. It can’t have changed much, sweetheart, even in, how long, eighteen years, and”
“Good idea.” He wished he had the strength to sound enthusiastic. “Yes, I want a vacation. Sure. But I’ve got to clear away this business first, or I’ll have it on my mind all the while.” She nodded acceptingly, having come to know him in their time together. “That’s why I want you to go off now, let me clear the decks. As soon as that’s taken care of, sure, I’ll have a long rest.”
“You’ll call me the minute you’re through, promise?”
“Uh-huh.”
So she left.
Benrud hesitated by the phone a bit longer. That was one pledge he wanted to keep. It was a small self-indulgence, to call and say I love you
SINGLE JEOPARDY
189
and hang up again. But no, it wouldn’t be in his character to do that.
Horner’s knife lay by the phone. Benrud touched the broad keen blade with a fingernail. Good workmanship there, Swedish of a generation ago. Knives like that were hard to find nowadays.
Jim Horner had always done himself well.
Benrud realized that he had attempted a sigh, but it was lost in the noise of his disintegrating lungs. He left the table by the couch and moved slowly across the living room, past the bookshelves to the liquor cabinet. He and Jim had installed a small modern refrigerator within the Victorian oak, five years ago, so that there was no need to go to the kitchen for ice cubes or cold soda. Benrud remembered Horner’s large hands, holding a drink, and the quick pleasantry flung at Moira as she went by. When had the man changed? Or had he ever, really? Remembering impulses of violence within himself, from time to time, as they occur in all men, Benrud wondered. And he had been a quiet, bookish sort. So perhaps Horner, who pursued mountain goats, had always had his calculating side.
Benrud filled two glasses with ice, splashed in whisky, and set one on an occasional table by the Morris chair for Horner. The other one, he held. We two have the same tastes in liquor, at least, he thought. And then: But there’s no “at least” about it. We have also worked with the same metal, and laughed at the same jokes, and sailed the same boat, and, I rather suspect, continued to love the same woman.