“I have to stir the soup,” she said, and brought them into a spacious kitchen with a maple floor finished in a gray wash, matching cabinets, black-granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances. The soup-in-the-making stood on the cooktop, blue flames caressing the bottom of the large pot. “Potato leek,” she said. Pax smelled potatoes and leeks and tarragon and an abundance of butter. Padded stools were lined up along one side of the large center island, and St. Croix suggested they sit there.
On the island stood a bottle of eighteen-year-old Macallan Scotch, a container of half-and-half kept cool in a bowl of ice, and a Baccarat-crystal on-the-rocks glass containing those three ingredients. Whether Dr. St. Croix began drinking by 3:10 on the average Sunday or whether this indulgence was an exception, she evidently felt no need whatsoever to justify herself. After she finished stirring the soup and set the lid askew on the pot, she produced two more Baccarat glasses. With the certitude of someone who had always done what she wanted and encountered no objections, the professor neither asked if they would join her in a cocktail nor inquired if they would like something different. Standing across the island from them, as she spoke of her love of cooking and built the drinks, Pax realized that declining the Scotch would be taken as a gross insult and that in spite of her girlish delight in their visit and her hospitality, she could turn on them in an instant.
Pogo watched her through squinted eyes, as if he suspected that she might be concocting poison, but he appeared to have reached the same conclusion as Pax.
As St. Croix pushed their drinks across the black granite to them, she said, “So…you called it a matter of life and death.”
Concerned about dropping Bibi’s name without preparation, Pax injected the equivalent of Scotch and cream into the absurd military-intelligence fantasy. “Life and death, yes, and although it sounds melodramatic, it’s also a matter of national security.”
“A little melodrama is good now and then,” the professor said. “If life were nothing but Raymond Carver stories, we’d all go mad.”
Pax knew who Raymond Carver was, but he thought it more in character if he looked puzzled for a moment before continuing. “Anyway, we’re here to ask you about a person of interest to us—”
“A suspect,” she interrupted, seeming to take this as seriously as some people took the con men who phoned and, posing as IRS agents, induced them to wire money to foreign bank accounts.
“A suspect, more or less,” Pax said. “But we’re not able to share the details of her activities with you. For security reasons.”
“A woman? I know a genuine security threat? How stimulating!”
“Yes, ma’am, a former student. Bibi Blair.”
The Sunday softness in her face hardened into school-day stone. “That syphilitic little whore.”
Paranoia of a reasonable potency was an essential survival tool. But intense and universal paranoia of the everyone-I-know-is-an-evil-space-alien variety was the mantra of a loser. The landscape promoted disorientation. Small clusters of buildings punctuated the barren vastness, but at that hour all were dark, seemingly long abandoned. In the black land, a glow only far to the north. Square miles of yellow and cold-blue scintillation. But not a light that confirmed civilization. An unearthly fungal phosphorescence. Hot plains of radioactive glass. As Bibi drove through the ever stranger and more hostile night, as it seemed that she had driven out of California into a place with no name and no exit, she felt herself traveling a narrow line between sanity and derangement, her balance precarious.
In spite of the antibiotic ointment that the tattoo artist had applied, under the layers of enwrapping gauze, the four words on her right wrist burned as if something worse than inflammation must be at work. Bacteria eating through the flesh. Or a toxic chemical imparted with the ink. The eighteen letters stung. Itched. She had been told not to scratch. She’d left the analgesic cream and fresh bandages at the motel. Nothing with which to change the dressing. No time to change it, anyway. She wondered if the increasing irritation of the eighteen small wounds might arise from an intentionally imparted infection. But since she had chosen the parlor at random, worrying that the tattooist might be in league with Terezin was as flaky as the evil-space-alien theory.
When for a few minutes she encountered no traffic moving in either direction, she wondered if roadblocks had been set up behind and ahead of her, and she waited to turn a bend or top a rise and find an execution squad of Wrong People. On the other hand, when a vehicle appeared in the oncoming lane, she tensed in expectation that the windshield of the Honda might dissolve in a rain of gunfire. Every motorist closing in behind her might be a tail, and when she cut her speed to let him pass, he always lingered alongside her—or she thought he did—to look her over with malevolent intent.