“Now, I know that you’re part of this—”
“Not on your life. I never mix with foreigners of any type, friend or foe,” she said. “But I just wanted to remind you that a diplomat’s job is to be charming.”
“Well, he was. I met with the embassy’s cultural attaché. Let me get his card.” He fumbled through the handful of cards that marked his progress through town. “Ah, yes, here it is, Hassan Farudi. Nice guy.”
“What were you talking about? If I may ask.”
“Sure, I’m not sworn to secrecy like you. Lots of people want to come and study with the Rainmaker. I’m trying to process a new batch. Most of them did their earlier work in European or English—I guess England is part of Europe—universities. I have to check them out with the Jordanians—they act as kind of a clearinghouse for the Arabic countries in international exchanges.”
“What’d the Jordanians have to say about these guys?”
“Oh, hell, they’re all fine. Just farmers like you and me, Bets, who want to learn how to build a better cow. That’s all routine stuff. We had a nice dinner together, had a few drinks, bullshitted about politics.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Kevin laughed. “The Jordanians definitely have a different take on things. They were talking about how they and all the responsible countries are working against the Iranians, who they say are working with the Israelis.” He gave her a conspiratorial look. “Does that sound right to you?”
“It could be. But I don’t know much about that stuff.”
Kevin gave his sister a wink as if to say, I know that you know, and I know that you can’t say what you know. “Anyway, I’ll go over to USIA tomorrow to the office where all the student visas are handled and give them the relevant paperwork. You’d be amazed how much you can speed up the wheels of government just by hand-carrying forms across town. That’s why Larsen’s so good—he understands these things.” Kevin yawned and stretched lazily. “You getting up at four again tomorrow? I heard you go out today.”
“I’ll try to,” Betsy said. “I have a lot on my mind.”
June
Chapter Sixteen
The call came in at four-thirty A.M. Clyde had backed his unit into a narrow dirt road between fields, facing east, and so when he opened his eyes and grabbed the microphone, he could look straight down a tunnel of corn into a translucent pink sky. As he was depressing the thumb switch on the microphone, it came into his head, for some reason, that the sky looked the way it must have looked to little Maggie when she had been in the womb and Clyde had taken out his big battered black cop flashlight and played its light against the flawless porcelain dome of Desiree’s belly.
The call had come in from a farmhouse about five miles away. A motorist had struck a deer and gone into the ditch. Clyde arrived in a few minutes and saw the business laid out very clearly: short skid marks veering right onto the soft shoulder, trenches cut into the deep grass by the tires, the car stopped in the bottom of the ditch, crumpled at the right front corner where it had tried to climb out and instead had dug into the trench’s steep bank. The deer was lying dead across the yellow line. It was huge, probably an eight-point buck, though this detail would have to remain hazy in Clyde’s report, because extensive antler damage made it hard to get a meaningful count. If Clyde were still a bachelor, he would give some thought to having the buck’s mangled head mounted in its current condition as a nice bit of cop humor.
After Clyde had set out a few road flares, he went and found the driver, who was holed up at a farmhouse half a mile away on the far side of the bridge over the creek. She was a nurse at the hospital, a colleague of Desiree’s, on her way into town to do some night work, and the buck had simply come out too fast for her to avoid it. She had a stiff neck, which the farmer’s wife was treating with ice.
Towing the car out of the ditch would be the responsibility of the owners, which they would see to in a few hours when the garages opened up. Getting the debris off the road was Clyde’s problem.
Clyde grabbed the animal’s legs and rolled its body this way and that, verifying his impression that there had been almost no bleeding. Most of the points had been sheared off the buck’s antlers, but the armatures still remained more or less intact.