I'll Let You Go Read Free Page B

cemeteries of greater Paris (for a seven-figure fee, a dubious realtor promised a shadier berth at Père-Lachaise near one of two pairs: Abélard and Héloïse or Gertrude and Alice B.)—on to Venice, then Campo Verano in Rome—Malta and Milan, Staglieno in Genoa and Almudena in Madrid—St. Petersburg, Cambria, Prague, Turkey, Cairo, Scotland … Brompton, Kensal Green and Highgate (they’d plant him, said yet another Underworld broker, “not sixteen meters from George Eliot”) with jaunts to the thirty-one necropoli of New Orleans—Metairie, Lafayette and Odd Fellow’s Rest—then on to the song-line haunts of the Outback—squatter-infested mausoleums of Manila, Ecuador, Brazil and beyond the infinite. Yet all roads led to Westwood, and he had to laugh. Wasn’t it always like that? If his soul was in Bel-Air, then its gloved hand could the more easily reach over to that humble little place in the Village; you-can’t-go-home-again be damned. Here would lie Louis Trotter, in a mildly meditative, sedately urban place, proximal to the variegated myths of his life. Yet who would build his tomb?
    As usual, the quandary made him chuff; Dot’s chafing panty hose, sounding not unlike sandpaper, made him turn.
    â€œWe haven’t seen
you
in a while!”
    She was a plain, doughty nurse and he tolerated her well enough—no sense alienating the afterlife custodians. (Once, he’d almost done just that by proffering her a hundred-dollar bill to leave him in peace.) She wore a heinous frock, one in a series which he detested and thought almost an incentive to be elsewhere interred.
    â€œI’ve been traveling,” he said, with a wince.
    â€œ
I
used to have the travel bug. But it’s important to be safe, don’t you think? World’s become such a dangerous place. I’d like to go to New York, where my sister Ethel lives; they’ve done a marvelous job getting the murders down. Nothing could be as terrible as
this
town—my Lord, you’re as likely to be killed by the
police
as you are by a rapster. The police used to be
helpful
, but now, well they gun you down for jaywalking. Plant dope on you without batting an eye. But the terrorists! I think the McVeighs, the
homegrowns
, are worse than the Jackal types any day—that’s what Ethel says and I agree. There was a man on the morning show, his entire job is smuggling guns through airport metal detectors, looking for weak spots. Works for the government. Even
he
said there’s nothing you can do. Did you read in the
Times
about the man who impersonated a pilot?
Everyone
knew him at LAX—well, he stole baggageand came and went just as he pleased for five years! Lived in Venice. Police found a whole room full of Tumi luggage; he took them right off the conveyor! They said once he even got in the cockpit. Now, what in the world would he be doing in a cockpit? Just chatting away! The man on the morning show was saying that kind of thing wasn’t even the problem. It’s the
viruses
—and I’m not talking computer. Oh, I am sick to death of the viruses! Did you know that if someone blew a cloud of anthrax in over Manhattan—and believe me, they’re out there figuring out how to do it—it would be three days before anyone even got symptoms?”
    The old man smiled and floated backward like a jack-o’-lantern putting out to sea; she went after him with a long pole.
    â€œThis was on the morning show, can you imagine? I’m not sure I want to start my day hearing it. Anyway, he said that by then—by the time they even found out about it—a lot of folks who were exposed would’ve already disappeared and gone back home: you know, tourists flying all around, some of ’em right back to Westwood for all we know. And the way the planes recirculate the air—well if someone in the last row of coach so much as clears his throat,