The Last Gentleman

longer. I’ll look in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Kitty?” He waited in the doorway without looking at her.
    When she did not move, he looked up. The girl was stricken. She was wringing the fingers of one hand. He had never seen anyone wring his hands.
    â€œAre you coming with me?”
    â€œI can’t,” she said, open-mouthed and soundless like a fourteen-year-old talking past the teacher.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBill,” said Rita, brow gone all quirky, “you can’t ask this child to travel with you. Suppose you do have to go to New Mexico.”
    â€œWe can be married in Louisiana tomorrow. My uncle lives there and can arrange it.”
    She shook her head fondly. “Listen, kids. Here’s what you do. Bill, go find Jamie. Then stay with him or bring him home. In either case I guarantee this girl will come a-running as fast as her little legs will carry her. Kitty, I assure you he is coming back. Look at her, Lance Corporal.”
    But he looked at Rita instead.
    She was daring him! If you leave, said the fine gray eyes, you know that I know that you won’t come back. I dare you!
    And Kitty: by some queer transformation the girl, his lordly lioness of a Kitty, had been turned into a twittering bird-girl with little bitty legs.
    â€œKitty, I have to go to my room for a minute. Then I’m leaving.”
    â€œWait.” Soundless as a little dove, she flew up to him, and still could not speak.
    â€œWhat?” he said, smiling.
    Rita linked arms with them and drew them together. “If it is of any interest to you, dearie,” she said to Kitty, “my money is on him. Lance Corporal?”
    â€œWhat?” said the puzzled engineer.
    â€œIdiot,” said Rita, giving him a dig in the ribs with her silken elbow. “The poor girl is wondering whether you are coming back.”
    Then, registering as he did a fine glint of appraisal in Rita’s eye, he saw the two of them, Kitty and Billy, as doll-like figures tumbling before the magic wand of an enchantress. Nor, and here was the strangest part of it, did he really mind.
    A note was clipped with a bobby pin to the ignition switch of the Trav-L-Aire.
    Meet me in one hour. Go out81 —
    Did she mean north or south 81?
    Turn right near top of ridge —
    Lord, which ridge and which side of it?
    Watch for For Sale sign and Mickle mailbox —
    Before or after turning off?
    Pull up out of sight of the highway and wait for me. K.
    Who was she afraid of?
    There was time then for a stop at Sutter’s apartment. For two reasons: to make sure Sutter had in fact left (for Rita was a liar), and if he had, maybe to find a clue or sign (Sutter might just leave one for him).
    Straight up and over the mountain and down through deserted streets—what day was this, a holiday? No, the game! Everybody had gone to the game or in to their TVs, and the streets and cars and the occasional loiterer had the look of not going to the game—to the Kenilworth Arms, an ancient blackened stucco battlement, relic of the baronial years of the twenties. He went up in an elevator with a ruby glass in the door and down a narrow tile corridor hollow as a gutter. The silence and emptiness of Sutter’s apartment met him at the open door, which had also been fitted with a ruby window. The apartment had a sunken living room and looked like Thelma Todd’s apartment in the Hollywood Hills of 1931. There was open on the floor an old black friable Gladstone bag with a freshly ruptured handle and in the bathroom a green can of Mennen’s talc. In a bureau drawer he found enclosed in a steno pad an Esso map of the Southeastern United States. A light penciled line ran southwest to an X marked in the badlands just above the Gulf Coast, turned northwest, and ran off the map past Shreveport. He cranked open a casement window. The faint uproar of the city below filled the tiled room like a sea shell. He sat on the steps of the balcony foyer and looked down into the littered well of the living room. It had an unmistakably sexual flavor. The orange candle flame bulbs, the ruby glass, the very sconces on the walls were somehow emblems of sex but of a lapsed archaic monkey-business sort of sex. Here, he reckoned, one used to have parties with flappers and make whoopee. Why did Sutter pick such a place to live in, with its echoes of ancient spectral orgies? He was not, after all, of that generation. The engineer opened the