Gideon's Corpse

48

After a while he managed to get himself under control. He wiped his eyes with his damp sleeve, then raised his head. He felt his face growing scarlet with shame.

“Well, well,” Alida said. “A man who can cry.” She smiled at him in the darkness, but it was a gentle smile, with no trace of irony.

“How embarrassing,” he muttered. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. He hadn’t even cried on his mother’s deathbed. It might have been on that terrible day in 1988, on the blazing green grass outside Arlington Hall Station, when he’d realized that his father wasn’t still alive, after all, but had been shot dead by a sniper.

“I don’t know what got into me,” he said. He felt mortified to have broken down in front of Alida, of all people. But at the same time, a part of him felt relief. She seemed to sense his embarrassment and did not pursue the subject. For a long time they lay side by side, in silence.

Gideon propped himself up on an elbow. “I’ve been thinking. When Fordyce and I arrived in New Mexico, we interviewed just three people. We must’ve scored a direct hit and never realized it. One of those people was so frightened by that interview that he tried to kill us. First he sabotaged our plane, and when that didn’t work, he did a frame job on me.”

“Who are they?”

“The imam of the local mosque. A cult leader named Willis Lockhart. And then…of course, your father.”

Alida snorted. “My father is no terrorist.”

“Granted, it seems unlikely, but I can’t rule out anyone. Sorry.” A pause. “Why does he call you ‘Miracle Daughter,’ anyway?”

“My mother died giving birth to me. Since then, we’ve only had each other. And he’s always looked on me as some kind of miracle.” She smiled again despite herself. “So tell me about the other two.”

“Lockhart runs a doomsday cult at a place called the Paiute Creek Ranch, in the southern Jemez Mountains. Chalker’s wife had an affair with him and joined the cult, and it could very well be that Chalker was drawn into it, too. They’re looking forward to apocalypse. They’re no slouches when it comes to technology. They’ve got incredibly sophisticated communications and computing facilities, all run on solar power.”

“And?”

“And, well, maybe—just maybe—they’re trying to hasten along the apocalypse. You know, give it a little nudge by detonating a bomb.”

“Are they Muslim?”

“Not at all. But it occurred to me that the cult might be planning to set off a nuke and see it blamed on the Muslims. Great way to start World War Three. It’s the Charles Manson strategy.”

“The Manson strategy?”

“Manson and his followers tried to start a race war by murdering a bunch of people and making it look like it was done by black radicals.”

She nodded slowly.

There was a long silence before Gideon spoke again. “You know, the more I think about it, the more I feel in my bones that Lockhart and his cult are behind this. The imam and the members of his mosque seem like nice, rational people. But I get really bad vibes from Lockhart.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“I’m going to confront Lockhart.” Gideon inhaled deeply. “It means crossing the mountains again to get to the Paiute Creek Ranch. We’re going to head parallel to the river until we reach—”

“I’ve got a better plan,” Alida interrupted.

He fell silent.

She held up a finger. “First, we take these wet clothes off, build a fire, and dry them out. Because it’s cold and getting colder.”

“Fair enough.”

“Second, we sleep.”

Another beat.

“Third, we need help. And I know just the person: my father.”

“You’re forgetting he’s on my short list of suspects.”

“Knock it off, for God’s sake. He can hide us up at the ranch he has out of town. We’ll use that as a base while we figure out who framed you.”

“And your father is going to help a suspected nuclear terrorist?”

“My father is going to help me. And trust me, if I tell him you’re innocent, he’ll believe me. And he’s a good man, with a strong sense of justice, of right and wrong. If he believes you’re innocent—and he will—he’ll move heaven and earth to help you.”

Gideon was too weary to argue. He let the matter drop.

Working together, they built a small fire in the back of the shelter, concealed from the outside. The thin stream of smoke rose and trickled along the roof, exiting through a narrow crack. Alida blew on the fire until it was blazing merrily, then rigged up a couple of sticks to use as drying racks.

She held out a hand. “Let me have your shirt and pants,” she demanded.

Gideon hesitated a moment, then reluctantly stripped. She pulled off her own shirt, bra, pants, and panties, and hung everything together on the line. Gideon was simply too wiped out to go through the motions of averting his eyes. It was, in fact, pleasant to watch the firelight play off her skin as she moved. Her long blond hair fell in wild tangles down her bare back, swaying with the movement of her body.

She turned to him and, somewhat reluctantly, he glanced away.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, with a laugh. “I used to go skinny-dipping with the boys in the stock tank at our ranch all the time.”

“Okay.” He looked back and found her eyes also lingering on him.

She quickly adjusted the wet clothes, added a few more sticks to the fire, then sat down.

“Tell me everything,” she said. “About yourself, I mean.”

Slowly, haltingly, Gideon began to talk. Normally, he spoke of his past to no one. But whether it was the exhaustion, the stress, or simply having an interested and sympathetic human being nearby, he started to tell her about his life: how he became an art thief; how easy it had been to rip off most historical societies and rinky-dink museums; how he was able to do it most of the time without the victims even knowing they had been robbed. “A lot of those places don’t take care of their art,” he told her. “They don’t display it or light it well, and nobody sees it. They may have an inventory list, but they never check it against their collections, so years might go by before they realize they’ve been robbed. If ever. It’s the perfect crime, if you don’t set your sights too high, and there are literally thousands of places out there just begging to be victimized.”

Alida pulled a stray strand of damp hair away from her forehead with a finger. “Wow. Are you still doing it?”

“I quit years ago.”

“Don’t you ever feel guilty?”

Gideon couldn’t quite put out of his mind the fact that he was talking to a nude woman. He tried to put it in perspective—after all, the fellows in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe didn’t seem to have thought much about it. The clothes on the racks were starting to steam and would be dry soon, anyway. “Sometimes. Once in particular. I got arrogant and went to a fund-raising cocktail party at a historical society I had ripped off. I thought it would be funny. I met the curator in charge of the collection and he was all shaken up, upset. Not only did he notice the little watercolor was gone, but it turns out that was his particular favorite in the whole place. It was all he could talk about, he felt so bad. He really took it personally.”

“Did you give it back?”

“I’d already sold it. But I gave serious thought to stealing it back for him.”

Alida laughed. “You’re terrible!” She took his hand in hers, gave it a little caress. “How’d you lose the end of your finger?”

“That’s a story I never tell anyone.”

“Come on. You can tell me.”

“No. Really. I’m taking that secret to the grave.”

Saying this, Gideon suddenly remembered that the grave, for him, might be a lot closer than for most people. It was a fact he recalled every single day, almost every single hour—but this time, sitting in the cave, the remembrance came on him like a blow to the gut.

“What is it?” Alida asked, sensing it immediately.

Without hesitating, he knew he was going to tell her. “There’s a good chance that I’m not long for this world myself.” He tried to laugh, his attempt to make light of it falling flat.

She stared at him, her brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I allegedly have something called a vein of Galen aneurysmal malformation.”

“A what?”

Gideon stared into the fire. “It’s a tangle of arteries and veins in the brain, a big knot of blood vessels in which the arteries connect directly to the veins without going through a network of capillaries. As a result, the high arterial pressure dilates the vein of Galen, blowing it up like a balloon. At a certain point it bursts—and you’re dead.”

“No.”

“You’re born with it, but after the age of twenty it can start to grow.”

“What can they do about it?”

“Nothing. It’s inoperable. There are no symptoms and no treatment. And it’ll kill me in about a year, more or less. I’ll die suddenly, without warning, boom, sayonara.”

He fell into silence, still staring into the fire.

“This is one of your jokes, right? Tell me you’re joking.”

Gideon remained silent.

“Oh my God,” Alida whispered at last. “There’s really nothing that can be done?”

After a moment, Gideon responded. “The thing is, I was told all this by a man back in New York. The one who hired me for this job. He’s…a manipulator. There’s a chance he might be making it all up. To find out one way or another, I got an MRI in Santa Fe a few days ago, but of course I haven’t had a chance to get the results.”

“So it’s just hanging over your head, a potential death sentence.”

“More or less.”

“How awful.”

Instead of answering, Gideon tossed a twig onto the fire.

“And you’ve been carrying this around with you, not sharing it with anyone?”

“I’ve told one or two others. Not in this much detail.”

She was still holding his hand. “I can’t imagine what that would be like. Wondering if your days are numbered. Or whether it’s just some cruel joke.” She raised her other hand, stroked his fingers, caressed the hair of his wrist. “How awful it must be.”

“Yes.” He looked up at her. “But you know what? At this particular moment, I feel pretty good. More than good, in fact.”

She returned the look. Without a word, she took his hand and placed it on her naked breast. He traced its contours, feeling her warm skin, her nipple growing erect. Then she placed her own hand on his chest and slowly pushed him back, onto the sand. As he lay there, she knelt next to him and caressed his chest, his flat stomach. Then she swung over and straddled him, lowering herself and leaning close to kiss him, her breasts softly caressing his chest. And then she began easing him into her: gently at first, then with the pressure of swiftly increasing passion.

“Oh my God,” he gasped. “What…are we doing?”

“We may have a lot less time than I thought,” she answered huskily.