The Shadow Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

phoned that afternoon.
    There was no one in the hall when he knocked. She opened the door immediately and smiled at him. After he kissed her, she suggested that he close the door and take off his coat.
    “It’s raining out there,” Andrews told her, unnecessarily. He always was at an initial loss for meaningful words when they met.
    “It doesn’t matter what’s happening outside,” she said.
    Pat Colombo was a dark-eyed brunette with a short, fetchingly ten pounds overweight figure and a smile straight out of Italian Renaissance art. Her features were classic and serene, but her real beauty lay in her gracefulness and her seeming unawareness of self. They both knew that she was not at all like Ellen.
    Two years ago Pat had been one of the aides to Senator Jack Zale, and had been assigned by Zale to work with Andrews in organizing the opposition to an accelerated arms-race bill. They had worked closely for months, and Pat had sensed Andrews’ problems with Ellen. But it was Andrews who had made the abrupt and unplanned advance that resulted in their becoming lovers. He’d never regretted it.
    On the table before the suite’s sofa was a scotch and water waiting for Andrews. A half-full wineglass was beside it. Andrews draped his wet raincoat over the back of a vinyl chair and picked up his drink. It was hardly diluted; she must have just mixed it.
    “Tough week?” she asked, posing the question almost like a suburban housewife asking her husband if he’d had a hard day. She brushed past him, picked up her wine and sat down on the sofa.
    “A busy week,” he said.
    “But you love your work.”
    “Do I?”
    “Too strong a word, love?”
    “I don’t know yet. Politics is like scuba diving. The deeper you get, the more pressure comes to bear.”
    Pat’s dark eyes appraised him as she sipped her drink. “I’d have thought you’d regard your progress as getting higher rather than deeper.”
    “Maybe I should.” He sat next to her, near her. “Each day in office, power becomes a more recognizable currency: favors owed, favors paid. If you’re not careful, the balance of one to the other becomes the object of the game.”
    “You’ve just described politics in the proverbial nutshell,” Pat told him. “But isn’t the important thing how you use that accumulated power?”
    “The important thing is what’s backing up that power as currency. Is it the will of your constituents or the fear of your peers?”
    “It sounds complicated enough to provide plenty of convenient outs,” Pat observed.
    Andrews laughed and pulled her to him, kissing her again and feeling himself drawn toward her calm and mysterious center. She spilled the rest of her wine, splashing some of it onto her dress. Ellen would have leaped up, screaming her indignation, calculatingly choosing words to further wound their already maimed marriage.
    Pat said nothing as Andrews released her. Then she suddenly clung to him, working her fingertips into his back as if reassuring herself of his presence. He carried her to the bed, as he often did jokingly, but this time he didn’t laugh and she didn’t do her usual exaggerated swoon.
    Pat Colombo approached sex as she did everything else, directly and honestly. A need recognized and filled, a giving and sharing without implications. As Andrews held her more tightly and thrust himself into her with increasing intensity, she seemed to encourage him with her own compounding passion, her lush body writhing and contracting beneath him as if straining to give birth to their relief and renewal.
    When Andrews withdrew from her, lay breathing deeply beside her, she rested a weightless hand on his arm. Someone ran water in the room above or alongside theirs, and Andrews could hear and feel the flow of it through the pipes within the walls. For a moment he felt as if he and Pat were within some protective massive organism, with copper pipes, air conditioning and heating ducts for arteries, electrical wiring