The Seal of Solomon
“You’re kidding.”
“And where my family lives.”
“You’re giving me the creeps, Ashley. For months I’ve been trying to convince myself that OIPEP is one of the good guys, then you tell me something like this.”
She shrugged. Most people don’t look good when they shrug. Shrugging makes their necks disappear, and nobody looks good without a neck—look at pro football players. But Ashley looked terrific when she shrugged. The blond hair bounced, one side of her mouth turned down, and a cute little line developed between her eyebrows.
“Sometimes good people have to do bad things,” she said.
“But isn’t that how you separate bad people from good? Bad people do bad things, good people do good things?”
“It’s probably a little more complicated than that.”
“Most things are. I can’t figure out if I just want things to be more simple or things seem more simple to me because I am.”
“Because you’re what?”
“Simple.”
She smiled. “You’re anything but simple, Alfred.”
I took that as a compliment, which I’m more likely to do when talking to a pretty girl.
“Why did you quit?”
She looked away. I said, “You quit because of what happened out there with the demons.”
She didn’t give a direct answer. She said, “I just . . . Sometimes you . . . sometimes things happen and you realize you’ve got your priorities all screwed up. I haven’t seen my family in over two years, not since the Company recruited me out of college. I miss them. I miss my old life. I don’t know if I can just pick it up after . . . after all that’s happened, but I’m going to try. That’s what they demand from you, Alfred: your life. And I’m not sure I can give it to them.”
“The First Protocol,” I said. She gave me a funny look. “That’s the First Protocol, isn’t it? Pledging to sacrifice your life for the greater good or something like that?”
She nodded. “Something like that, yes.”
“Well, all I can say is I thought you did a great job out there, Ashley. Really. And, you know, I’m sorry about what happened under the tarp . . .”
“The tarp?”
“You know, grabbing you and everything.”
She smiled and I could see the bright pink tip of her tongue.
“I was glad you did.”
She said she hadn’t seen her family in two years and the Company had recruited her right out of college. That would make her about twenty-four or twenty-five. Ten years wouldn’t matter so much ten years from now, when she was thirty-five and I was twenty-five—those kinds of things happen all the time, especially among Hollywood couples, but right now it mattered a lot.
My timing always sucked. I wondered if I was attracted to her for the very reason that she was too old for me and that she was leaving.
“Anyway,” she said. “I wanted to see you before I left.”
“How come?”
“To see how you were. And to say good-bye.”
She stared at me for a long moment, a moment so long, I began to feel uncomfortable—more uncomfortable than usual—and then she leaned over quickly and kissed me on the cheek. I smelled lilacs.
She whispered in my ear, “Be careful, Alfred. They lied to you and they’ll lie again if they need to. They’re using you.”
The door sprang open at that moment and two guys rolled in a couple of carts with my comfort-food feast. Ashley pulled away quickly and she wiped away a tear.
“Good-bye, Alfred,” she said, and then walked out the door. That’s the last I saw of Ashley for a long time.
31
I wasn’t feeling so good after my meal—go figure—and, as if on cue, the door opened and the doctor came in, the same doctor from the morgue. I never got his name, so in my head I called him Dr. Watson, after Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick. I don’t know why I chose Dr. Watson, except it was the first name that popped into my head after the word “doctor.” I always thought those were two different kinds of doctors, those who worked on the living and those who worked on the dead. Maybe this doctor was both kinds, but still it made me feel a little creepy being examined by him.
He told me both bullets had been removed and he expected a full recovery. I told him, “Until the next time.” Disaster had a way of following me around, like a faithful dog. You could forgive somebody maybe once for putting the world in imminent peril. Twice was really pushing it.
“You know what a dufus is?” I asked him.
“I know what a duffer is,” he said.
“What’s a duffer?” I asked. “Isn’t that something you put on your bed?” I was getting sidetracked.
“It’s a golfing term.”
“Oh, sure. You’re a doctor. Well, a dufus is somebody who can never get anything right.”
“Very close to a duffer.”
“Maybe dufus came from duffer.”
“Oddly enough, the root word, ‘duff,’ is slang for the bu**ocks,” said Dr. Watson.
“That is odd,” I said. “Because an ass really doesn’t have that hard of a job. Just sitting and—you know. There’s one thing I’ve always wondered and maybe you could answer this, being a doctor. Why do we have a crack? I mean, what’s the necessity of the dual cheeks?”
He thought about it for a minute.
“Basically, we need them for balance.”
“Football players use them to express team spirit. I wasn’t what you could call a star athlete, but when I was playing, I got my fair share of swats back there.”
“I’m not sure I understand why we’re having a discussion about bu**ocks.”
“Well,” I said. “That isn’t my fault. But sometimes it’s better to talk about things that are not what you don’t want to talk about.”
He stared at me. I asked, “Where are we, exactly?”
“OIPEP headquarters.”
“I know that. I meant where is OIPEP headquarters?”
“I don’t think I can tell you that.”
“How come?”
“Because I can’t tell anybody that.”
He left the room and after a few minutes Op Nine came in, wearing a fur-lined parka over a tailored suit and a pair of snow boots. Ashley had been dressed for cold weather too, and I wondered if OIPEP headquarters might be at one of the poles.
“Well, Alfred, you’ve been given a clean bill of health. Or nearly clean,” he said.