Death Will Have Your Eyes by James Sallis Page B

Johnsson that henceforth he would, could, send none of us into Central or South America without that body’s express consent. Johnsson immediately posted every man in the agency to Panama. We all passed a pleasant three-week vacation there, filling Panama City’s hotels, while back home they went about trying to untangle threads, blame, careers, feet, tongues.
    The phone was ringing as I tossed luggage and book bag onto the bed in cabin six of The Cambridge Arms in Piltdown, Alabama. I picked it up, listened a moment and went back out, past the motel’s corner office and down the street to a pay phone.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œThis is the rabbit returning Alice’s call.”
    Neither of us spoke as computers swept the line.
    â€œI’m afraid Alice has just stepped out.”
    I waited five minutes and called back. Anyone breaking into the line now would be shunted over to a recorded conversation.
    â€œIn the Bible in your room, second drawer of the bedside table, when you return,” Johnsson said without preamble, “there will be a…document, that against all regulation and simple good sense I’ve caused to be forwarded on to you—only, I would add, because of the circumstances under which it arrived here, circumstances indicating that the document has a certain urgency, both to its sender and, I assume, to its recipient.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œI will tell you also that the document appears to be truly blind. That we have been unable to trace its origin and route and thereby assume that no one else would be able to do so.”
    I waited. There was more, or he would have hung up. I listened to crackles in the wires, tiny electronic fires flaring up, draining away.
    â€œOften those close to us know far more about us than we think, David. More than we wish them to know. That is, I suppose, in its own quiet way a danger. But it can also be a comfort.”
    This time he broke the connection. I caught a snatch of recorded conversation before that line, too, was released. Something about mountains and the timberline.
    In the drawer alongside a long-out-of-date telephone directory and yellowing hotel stationery inexplicably bearing the crest of the old Fontainebleu in New Orleans, I found the Bible. Gideon checked out and left it no doubt. And in the divide between New and Old Testaments, a blue, unmarked envelope.
    The letter began, as Johnsson had, without preamble.
    All the things I might ordinarily say, I leave to the silence between us; but there are things even that silence will not bear.
    You are altogether an extraordinary man, Dave. Gentle and strong, principled, supple—in many ways the most complete person I’ve ever known. And I do know that you have given yourself to me as never before with anyone else. But there has always been something else as well, a closed-up room inside you, an attic where long ago you put things away, whatever those things were, and never went back.
    Often at night I would lie beside you, especially when we were first together, feeling the pain that you did not, would not, allow yourself to feel. With time that faded, as everything does; but it has become as much a part of me now as it is of you.
    It doesn’t matter how I discovered what little I actually know of your past. It was not knowledge I sought; but knowledge that came to me unbidden. Perhaps if we see one another again, if from that uncertain, unreal place we call the future, you return to me (and I must hold close to me the very real chance that you will not), this will become important, but it isn’t now.
    What is important is that you understand how I feel about you, about my life and your place in it. We never talked about such things much, or needed to. Maybe now we do. I do.
    It’s a warm, strangely undark night and I’m sitting outside on an old wood porch with wind in my hair (I cut it a few days ago), remembering your face that first day at the