Heaven's Rending Ch. 03

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Carpenter looked at her again. She was just too well dressed to be a spook, he said to himself. Wasn't it almost a cliche that you sent a friend in to lure out someone you really wanted to bag? Well, he said to himself, decision time.

He walked up beside the woman until he made it into her field of view, then simply stood there beside her, waiting.

"Following me again?" she said after a moment.

Carpenter looked at her and smiled. "Galicia, you said?"

"Indeed. You've never been, I take it?"

"No. I hear it's lovely in the summer."

"Oh, it's beautiful any time, but never more so than in the weeks just before Christmas."

"Ah."

"Ah? What does this 'ah' mean? I never know what it means."

"Christmas is the best time of year, my favorite."

"Really? I wouldn't have taken you for a sentimentalist. Have you changed your mind about Germany?"

"I was giving it some thought, yes. Would you like some company for a day or two?" He looked at her and smiled; she looked deceptively calm and subtly amused.

"I would not mind that. One condition, however, and non-negotiable."

"I see, and that would be?"

"No names. We shall forever remain a mystery to one another."

Carpenter smiled. "Of course."

__________

She had, it turned out, a Rolls Corniche convertible waiting at a nearby garage, and after putting her luggage in the boot she commented about his traveling with so little of his own. She took the wheel as he walked around to the left side and got in, putting his briefcase on the floor behind his seat.

"I had to leave in a hurry," he told her as he settled in beside her. "Hectic, really, at the office."

"I see. So, what did you do? Kill somebody?" she asked knowingly, but with a smile on her face.

He answered with a smile of his own, then looked at the car and made an appropriate comment about how well the car looked on her.

She laughed and pulled expertly into traffic, then made her way through the city like a native. The woman proceeded north to a smallish highway that led abruptly to the coast. Though the day was cool and the sun was rapidly fading behind a wall of cloud, she slowed at a turn-out and dropped the car's electric top, then slid back into traffic. Carpenter looked out at this open world above the grey Atlantic, and he took in the scudding clouds that slammed into rocky headlands before running up mountains into deeper gloom. He wondered what it would be like to be as free from the concerns of his life as these clouds were. Free to build on high until release became inevitable under the weight of being - only to reform and begin again anew. Forever becoming . . .

He looked at the woman again; she was elegance itself. Everything about the way she carried herself, even now behind the wheel of the Rolls, told him she was old world, and he would have put money on an aristocratic background. The bracelet danced solidly on her wrist - huge stones shimmered even in the receding sunlight. Her stockings were obviously silk, and it appeared her skin was as well. Too, he knew she had been traveling for almost a day and even now she appeared as fresh and gorgeous as when he had first seen her in Rio. She had been as beautiful then as the music that filled his soul. She was the real deal, he said to himself, but was this meeting really so fortuitous - so innocent. Was he her target? He had yet to convince himself of her role in the unfolding drama, yet her evident sophistication seemed to preclude evil intent.

"And you might tell me what you're thinking," he heard her saying.

"Pardon?"

"You might tell me what is running through your mind. You seem lost in thought one moment, and you're appraising me the next? So. What do you think?"

"I was thinking of the music in the bar yesterday. It was music from the soul, and it made me want to sing. And then I saw you."

"So prosaic. How interesting. Unexpected."

Carpenter turned and looked at the sea, and wondered why these words hurt so. He was now so tired of hurting.

__________

He knew he was asleep when he felt the Rolls turning off the road, and he woke with a start from a landscape of burning dreams. The car was making it's way easily up a steep drive. An immaculate stone wall lined both sides of the cobbled way, and trees heavy with withering vines and sensuous expectation hung over the winding road like a wounded sigh. Mountains loomed over forest in the near distance, though he could hardly make them out through the deep, blue-grey cloud of this enchanted air. It was almost evening, and he wondered how long he had been out, but the question seemed inconsequential in the presence of so much beauty.

A building hove into view; long, low, elegant - it was almost a villa - but much too large to belong to one family. The woman pulled into the porte cochere of the low stone building. Carpenter felt warmed by the amber light coming from inside the elegant lobby; indeed, he felt comforted by the presence of so much money. Magic suffused the air here - the magic of old money - wherever here was. Men - uniformed men - were waiting for the car, but he saw they were - apparently - hotel staff and relaxed. As the car stopped the men opened their doors, and Carpenter heard chamber music in the distance. He pulled himself from the car; the remains of troubled sleep and the tension of the past few days pulled at him like a gravity perverted by the intent to crush the breath from his aching body. He shook himself and followed the woman up a small flight of stone steps and walked into another world.

Carpenter had grown up in a small New England town, and had known a comfortably middle-class existence until making his way to Harvard and into the notice of a professor political science who introduced him to Robert Kennedy one evening. He interned in John Kennedy's Senate office his junior year, and went to work for the Senator after graduating. He had traveled in some pretty rare air ever since, but nothing like this.

An old man - as well dressed as any corporate chieftain Carpenter had ever come along in his political journey - came and said hello to the woman as if she was family, or at the very least an old friend. He told her that he was glad to see her again - and so soon! - and that her suite by the river was ready.

"Ah, Arturo," she said warmly to the man, "wonderful!" She turned to look at Carpenter and with broad sweeps of elegant hand asked if perhaps they could provide her flagging companion with oysters and champagne, and Carpenter felt his ears burning bright despite his growing indifference to the woman's tendency to put him down. 'Arturo' sized up Carpenter with imminent disdain and said that he would see to it immediately. The woman took him in tow and walked out onto a broad stone terrace. A distant swimming pool was covered from the coming of winter down a broad, green lawn, while an ornate baroque fountain danced joyfully in the amber glow of the main building. Grey trees stood in ancient wisdom as silent sentinels around the grounds; they stood as if waiting to ward off the coming of night for as long as possible. The woman, apparently oblivious to magic and transcendent beauty, walked across the terrace with practiced ease to a path that led to a deep wood, and here their way was lit by small lamps lost close to the ground in waves of ivied ground cover. They walked in lingering shadow toward the sound of rushing water and came to a cluster of outlying bungalows. The woman took her key and opened the door; soft light revealed a room as elegant as any Carpenter had ever seen. He had hardly taken any of this in when the woman grabbed him and turned him to face her and kissed him.

"You need to bathe, Jonas, before I take you to supper," she said with her arms draped loosely over his shoulders. She turned him and gave his bottom a playful pat. "Now go, and use lots of soap!"

Carpenter made it into the bathroom before he remembered her one precondition: no names. He thought then of his briefcase and remembered he'd left it in the car.

__________

He let the water run on his back for what might have been an hour - had he cared enough to keep track of time. He stood there - feet back, leaning forward on his outstretched arms - with the pulsing warmth beating into the back of his neck like war-drums, and he wondered when it would come, and who it would be.

He was blown. He was dead.

He heard a man's voice in the other room, heard something bump into a wall and he jumped - really jumped - when the sound reached him. The noise echoed in his mind like an accusation, and he went back over his flight from D.C. the past three days and looked hard at where he might have slipped up - where had he missed her? - and he kept coming up with black holes in his memory. Pools of emptiness . . . he could feel them forming in the air around him . . . great pools in an amber glowing river were forming around his legs . . . cool waters . . . soul's ease . . .

He felt like he was adrift in a great natural pool - surrounded by cliffs that rose in the darkness yet seemed lit from within by the fires of creation - and he was hit by the thought that he was living in two worlds within this very moment - the world he had known and a world yet to be. The water was luminous cobalt and the air shimmered with tattered resolve - while fragments of a distant sun danced on the water's surface in kaleidoscopic fury. The water from one world beat on his neck while he looked down into the water of this other place, and he saw fish drifting by on errant currents.

One fish turned into the current and swam back to his leg and circled there, and Carpenter groaned inwardly when he felt the fish brush against the skin of his thigh. The fish pulsated with scarlet intensity, and looked up at Carpenter with soulful eyes full of ancient wisdom as it circled his leg beneath the shimmering water. He jumped at a sound - this sound coming from within this other place - and he turned to see a huge snake running like an electric current through tall grass. He was suddenly very aware of his vulnerably exposed position in the water, but he felt the fish on his thigh and he looked down again into the infinity of this place. The fish was pure scarlet now, he saw, but there were three whitish circles on its back.

'This means something,' Carpenter said to himself. 'This . . . this . . .' and he jumped again as he heard the grass on the other side of the river give way as something huge came crashing towards the water's edge. He turned in time to see a tiger burst into view by a large, flat rock; the huge cat shuddered to a stop and took the measure of this new place, then walked with it's head down for a moment. After a few steps the tiger stopped. Carpenter stood breathlessly in the water, afraid to even blink an eye. The tiger was staring at a porcupine, wondering - Carpenter thought - whether the small animal would be worth the effort to kill and eat. The porcupine seemed oblivious to it's fate, indeed it hardly took notice of the tiger at all, and he watched as the little animal walked slowly down the path by the water's edge until . . . he felt the tiger's eyes on him. Carpenter stood perfectly still and looked at the tiger, who too stood in majestic if not perfect ease looking him in the eye, and seemed to be waiting - as if - there was a decision to be made.

Carpenter felt himself on the edge of an immense precipice when he jumped at a new sound . . .

. . . knocking on a door . . . loud, insistent knocking . . . then a voice . . .

"Are you alright in there?" Pulsing light . . . echoes of time within time . . .

Knock-knock-knock! Receding light, something long and mean in the water, coming for him . . .

"Jonas! Are you alright?!"

The woman's words hit him, they bit into him and pulled him back . . . from . . .

"Jonas!"

"Yes, I'm alright . . . think I dozed off for a moment . . . be right out . . ." He shook his head, shook echoes of the river from his mind's eye as he fought to regain the water on his neck and he could see white tile . . . a drain . . . but a red fish hovered there in the air for a moment, looking at him, wondering with eyes full of ancient wisdom and ready purpose at what was to be . . . and then the fish too was gone . . . and there was only the white steam of the bathroom. The white air of this world . . .

Carpenter turned off the water and stood up; he took a deep breath, then another . . . the steam-filled air felt good inside his lungs as it drifted deep inside him. He opened the glass door and walked to the sink and wiped heat-borne fog from cold glass. He leaned on white marble and looked for a moment - or was it a lifetime? - at the smeared reflection that met his gaze there, looked to see if the reality of this space was his memory of place, and so satisfied he walked to the door and took the plush red robe that hung there and wrapped himself in it.

He walked into the room, into the cool air of her world.

The woman stood with her back to him; there was a rolling cart by the bed loaded with fresh-shucked oysters, some lemons and limes - and there, toast and caviar - as well as bottles of champagne and mineral water, and he smiled inside at the reprieve. He saw his briefcase on the desk by the far wall, and her luggage already half-unpacked. He felt a paranoid fool.

"Sorry about that. Must have dozed . . ."

The woman turned, and he saw the little Walther in her hand almost immediately.

"Oh, that's alright Mr Carpenter. It's no problem at all."

He looked at the little pistol like it was the last thing he would see and know in this life, and he was surprised when it wasn't cold dread that filled his heart - but the subtle relief of release.

"So. This is to be a last supper, is it?"

The woman smiled and indicated with the gun that he should sit.

"Well, why not?" he said as he sat on the bed. He took an oyster an put it on a piece of toast, then squeezed a bit of lime on it and popped it in his mouth. The bottle of champagne was open, so he poured himself a glass, thought better of it and poured one for the woman as well. "Join me?" he said to the black eye of the gun's blunt muzzle.

To his surprise, the woman slipped the TPK into her handbag and came to the bed and took the proffered glass and took a sip, then another.

"How are the oysters?" she asked.

"Not bad really. A little briny, but all in all, not too goddamn bad. Want one?"

"Please, but with just a little lemon; I can't abide the way you Americans drown the poor things in Ketchup."

Carpenter bent to the task filled with barely repressed need to laugh at surreal nature of the exchange, and after he passed her oyster along he fixed another for himself and ate it, then polished off his charge of champagne.

"Yes, a bit strong," she said. "Perhaps the waters were too warm this summer."

He filled his glass and took another strong pull of champagne and looked at her.

"You really are quite beautiful, you know," he said to her as he looked at the line of her neck once again. She looked him in the eye and time shimmered within the arc of his life, and as she held there in her eyes.

She shrugged after a moment and laughed a little; "Beauty is important to some, I suppose," she said as she plucked thoughts like petals from the air apparent, "but it means nothing if it is unmatched by what you hold in your soul."

"So who sent you? Morales?"

"Now there is a heart of darkness, Mr Carpenter. No, I am not from your CIA."

"So? Cuba?"

"The Mossad, Jonas."

"You're kidding, right?"

She smiled at him. Waiting.

"You killed the President?"

"Don't be absurd, Jonas. You have all the proof the world needs to prove who was behind the assassination. It's our job to get that information into safe hands."

"Where did you pick me up; I mean, I thought my cut-outs were pretty good."

For an amateur, perhaps, Mr Carpenter, but we've been with you since you left your office. So have your people, for that matter."

"Morales?" Carpenter felt his heart lurch in his chest.

"No. He's still in Texas, taking care of, what do you call it? Loose ends? Campbell's men are, I understand, drawing near even now. Like your Mr Thomas, this morning, at the airport."

"Great. That's just great. He's a friend, so just how . . . " The woman looked at Carpenter while this disappointing insight flooded in. Who to trust? Deflect, parry, he said to himself, gain time, seek an advantage . . . "So. You are not, I take it, Maria Benevides?"

She looked at him quickly, and her eyes twinkled at his gambit. "Ah, you have hidden talents after all, Jonas Carpenter. Perhaps you will be reborn, and yes, may it not be sooner than you wish." She looked at him again, slowly, as if making a sudden appraisal. "Have another oyster," she said with a little laugh that concealed a million haunting questions. "Then perhaps we could make love?"

__________

He lay beside her in the moonlight, lost in the afterglow of her touch, wishing the sun would never rise again. She seemed an echo of another age; knowing yet almost unknowable, all touching and yet irresolutely untouchable. Like quicksand. He felt lost next to her, as if she was somehow of a fundamentally different order than he, and the notion struck him as simultaneously fatuous and profound as he grappled with the idea that without her he really would be lost.

He had been out of college now for seven years, and had been with a fair number of women since coming to work for the Kennedy's, but this woman was different in so many ways he was at a loss to fathom even the context of her being. If he was the tiger in a spotlight, did she wield the whip?

No? Yes?

She was a paradox, and Carpenter's mind had a hard time grasping that very simple idea. She was regal, she was beautiful almost beyond description, and she possessed a type of class that few women knew even existed. And she was - apparently - a spy. An Israeli spy. An Israeli spy shadowing a member of the President's National Security Council laison staff. An American president who had been murdered less than a week ago.

Beauty. Enigma. Purpose unknown.

'So what am I?' Carpenter asked himself as sleep paced far away on the fringes of this night. 'What role am I to play, or has the part even been cast?'

She felt him stir and turn to him, felt her hand reach for him, felt the warmth of her mouth coming for him.

No, he did not want this night to end.

__________

But of course it had to.

He woke with this new day to the sounds of voices in the bathroom, another door closing, the shower turning on and the glass door closing. He sat up and slipped on his trousers and shoes, threw his shirt on and grabbed his briefcase, then slipped out the bungalow's front door and walked quickly to the main building.

"Ah, Mr Carpenter, you're table is ready. Madam said you might come ahead. Please. Her associates are waiting for you."

So suddenly defeated, Carpenter followed Arturo toward the dining room and half expected to find Guido-the-killer-pimp and a couple of goons waiting for him, but instead walked into a small room filled with radio and electronic gear stacked on a table along one wall and an old couple sitting at a small table by a large open window on the far side of the room. Arturo sat Carpenter by the old woman and asked if he wanted coffee this morning, then left the room as silently as the breeze that whispered through the pines outside the window. This cool breeze crossed the table, the scent of burning oak drifted in small eddies through the room as well. The couple seemed familiar to Carpenter, yet they seemed content to wait in silence; the man looked him over as a surgeon might a tumor.

"Ah, there she is!" the old woman finally said as 'Maria' came into the little room. Three other men and a woman followed and sat themselves at the table. Introductions, Carpenter said to himself, would presumably not be needed.