Death Will Have Your Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

course: by some.”
    Neither of us spoke for a time then. Out on the ledge the bird’s audition continued. Darkening clouds nudged at the sky. Finally, as imperceptibly as, earlier, he had nodded, he shook his head.
    â€œBe cautious about settling for memory, David. It’s far too thin a gruel for the like of us to live on.”
    I said nothing.
    â€œI suppose that you may have changed in fundamental ways, after all. And I cannot say, finally, that I am sorry for that. I suppose it’s time for you to go back to your Gabrielle now, back to your work, your ‘pieces.’ Thank you for coming.”
    I stood and held out my hand. After a moment his own left his lap and falteringly searched mine out.
    â€œForgive me,” he said. “I forget, and you could not have known. But for several years now I have been quite blind.”
    I told him that I was sorry, and to take care.
    â€œDavid…,” he said when I was almost to the door. “A single favor.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œAn old friend has many times asked after you. Go and see him. It will not take you long.”
    â€œBlaise.”
    He nodded.
    â€œYou will find him here.”
    He held out a card. I walked back across the room and took it from him. His hand lingered there after it was gone.

7
    Two days past, on a hillside in Oak Cliff, the motel-room TV won’t work, bringing in only dim gray forms and phantoms behind a wash of dots, and the real world outside my window, awash with gray drizzle, is little more defined.
    Jorge Sanchez lies on his bed in paint- and plaster-spattered jeans and sweatshirt waiting. Occasionally there is lightning far off, or a climb of car lights up the wall. The couple next door (possibly a threesome) has left off its lovemaking, and someone over there’s drawing a bath now. The whining glide of a steel guitar reaches out from a radio nearby.
    A knock at the door, then: “Pizza.”
    â€œSanchez?” she says when I open the door. In her mid-twenties and in sweats, with a face that still could go either way: towards beauty and character, towards plainness, a kind of vacancy. Her nose is peeling from recent sunburn. Hair tucked into a long-billed baseball cap. “Comes to eleven ninety-seven.”
    I hand over a ten and a five and tell her to keep it.
    â€œHave a good stay,” she tells me in return. Her car is an ancient VW beetle, once beige, in other incarnations green and canary yellow. There’s a sign on top, FREE DELIVERY , that’s almost as big as the car itself. In a good wind you could use it to sail the thing.
    Under the pizza there are two waxed envelopes.
    The first one contains a dossier on Luc Planchat. I know a lot of this, up till about ten years ago, and go through it hurriedly. There’s a gap then for most of that ten years until, six months ago, entries resume.
    Planchat had been the pride of a new program established in one of those backwashes we learn to live with, hawkish after several years of a kindler, gentler leadership. Someone with sufficient political clout had decided the only answer to terrorism was an elite killer corps and went about calling in sufficient favors to make it happen. Planchat was first car off the assembly line, the prototype, a real dazzler. He was also a loner. And became ever more so as his fellow grads started checking out to brute craziness: some suddenly proclaiming themselves free agents (as though they were, after all, only football players), many either on their own or with a little help from their friends back at the factory heading out in search of what Rabelais called le grand peut-être .
    The ensuing backwash was liberal, of course. When word came down that his program was deactivated, Planchat declined further government service and, in time-honored tradition, fostered out to a new identity.
    Of three program graduates still undocumented (agency code meaning not dead ), that accounted for