The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  She stood in her room naked and sipped the wine, feeling the tinge of alcohol slide through her body. She breathed out deeply. For a moment she felt like staying naked, turning out all the lights and letting the darkness soothe her. The idea made her giggle and think that it had been a long time since she had done anything spontaneous and offbeat, anything that would remind herself that the world was not all murder and death. Then she shook her head and found a pair of shorts and an old Miami Dolphins tee-shirt from one of their Super Bowl years, which she slipped on.

  She padded barefoot into the living room, carrying her wineglass and the bottle. She went to her bookcase and picked out a leather-covered photo album, then retreated to an armchair and, perching the glass on her knee, opened the book of pictures. There was one in specific she was searching for.

  She flipped past snapshots of herself, of Susan and her parents, lingering momentarily over a few, a picture of a birthday party here, a graduation there. She was suffused with the warmth of memories, comforted. Finally she found the picture she wanted.

  It was a simple five-by-seven snapshot of Detective Barren at age twenty-one, standing between John Barren and her father. She thought: The summer before we were married, the summer Dad died. She looked at the background, an expanse of blue-green waves rolling steadily and benignly against the Jersey Shore. In the picture the three were all in bathing suits, and Detective Barren remembered how the two men had teased her mercilessly about her inability to swim, yet her constant attraction to the beach. She thought about how she would lie, hours on end, reading on the sand in the sun, peaceful, relaxed. When it became unbearably hot she would take a child’s red plastic water bucket down to the edge of the ocean and plop herself down in the damp sand, waiting for some slightly larger wave to send a small current of water shooting up the beach toward her. The foamy clear cool liquid would rise about her toes, curl around her buttocks, and refresh her. If need be, she would take the bucket, fill it in the shallow water, and unceremoniously dump it over her head. John would laugh and point and plead again for her to learn to swim, but not seriously, for he knew she wouldn’t, regardless of how ridiculous she appeared.

  She did not swim for the simplest of reasons.

  She had been young, barely more than a baby at age five. She closed her eyes in the apartment and felt the familiar anxiety pass through her, just as it always did when this particular recollection came back. Her heart seemed to pick up its pace momentarily, the sweat on the back of her neck grow slightly clammy and uncomfortable, her stomach tense. She thought for an instant of the potency of fear, undiminished even as it traveled over the decades of memory. She had been sitting on the sand with her mother, her father had been in the surf, riding the waves in on the beach, then dashing out again with the little boy’s exuberance that he always displayed at the shore. Her mother had glanced at her and said, “Merce, darling, go get your father and tell him it is time to eat.” It had been the meagerest of requests; even sitting in her apartment room, she thought it easy.

  Detective Barren closed her eyes and with absolute sun-drenched clarity remembered every step. She’d jumped up, and turned, and run down to the water, her eyes on her father as he turned and caught a large roller heading swiftly toward the beach. As she opened her mouth to call for him, she looked up, and in a frozen moment of utter terror realized that she had run right beneath a curling wave. The force of the water as it broke over her head knocked her onto her back, loosening all the air within her, stealing it from her little girl’s chest. The water suddenly seemed dark green, then black, and it was as if the world had been blotted out. She had struggled hard, searching for the surface, and then suddenly something great and heavy had landed on her, holding her down farther, blocking her from reaching the sunlight. She could still remember with an expected uncomfortableness the sensation of sand scoring her back. Her mind had spun, her eyes clouded, her little lungs seared, her heart been clenched by darkness. She did not know really what death was, but thought in that incredibly brief, interminable moment, that it surrounded her.

  And then, suddenly, she had been snatched from the blackness and lifted gasping into the sunlight.

  It was her father.

  His own ride had carried him directly over her. It had been he that held her down, he that raised her up.

  She remembered a few tears, drying quickly in the hot afternoon. She had played safely on the sand that day. But at night, tucked into her bed, as the light had faded from the day and nighttime filled her room, she had cried bitterly and vowed never to trust herself to the waves, never to know the sensation of the ocean closing over her head, and never ever to go into the water again.

  Stubborn, she thought. A stubborn little girl who kept her promise to herself.

  She laughed. The little girl has not changed a whit in thirty-how-many years. And probably won’t.

  She looked at the picture again. She smiled. John had a sleek, muscular body which glistened as the ocean water caught the sunlight. She thought of the way her father would tease him about his hairless chest, sticking out his own, with its swatch of curly black hair, puffed up, mocking a beach body-builder.

  They were such easy times, she thought.

  She looked at her father’s face. Sunlight was causing him to squint, just barely, giving his face an elvish look. It made her laugh out loud.

  “What,” she said to the man in the picture, “would you say about this case?”

  Mathematics, her father would lecture in his best academic drone, prefers a steady procession of data to reach for an elusive conclusion. But this was not always the case: sometimes you could prove a theorem through an absence of contradictory information.

  She suddenly felt a spasm of despair.

  There would be no way to prove that Sadegh Rhotzbadegh didn’t commit the murder of her niece.

  Proving a negative. Her father would shake his head and smile. Now, that, he would say, requires some real intellect, some pure mathe­matical reasoning.

  She felt that she wanted to scream.

  Then she took a deep breath and a sip of wine.

  She thought angrily about the concept of proof. Legal proof. Proof that stands up and is counted in a courtroom. Proof that clears murder cases. Evidence coupled with opportunity equals supposition of guilt, and finally an absence of alternative hypotheses amounts to a verdict. The hypotenuse squared is equal to the sum of the squares of the two remaining sides. Logic, she thought, is insidious. All logic points to the Arab. We live in a world that insists on accommodation. For every action there is an equal opposite reaction.

  All instinct points away.

  What did she have? A murder that happens not exactly as the investigators would want. A suspect who fits almost perfectly into the niche required of him—save for one or two critical details.

  Start at the source of the dilemma, her father would say.

  That was easy enough, she thought. And she knew where she would drive in the morning. She felt a rush of excitement and drained the remainder of her wineglass. She stared a last time down at the picture in the album resting in her lap.

  Two weeks after her mother snapped the picture, the summer had ended. They had piled blankets, towels, umbrellas, and all the other traveling paraphernalia into their old bedraggled station wagon. The Labor Day weekend traffic had been horrendous, bumper to bumper at sixty miles per hour. She remembered the way her father had gripped the wheel, cursing mildly, complaining as the other cars swerved and swooped about them. An invitation to slaughter, was what he said. He said it every year when they packed up after the holiday and headed home. No wonder so many people die on the highway, he complained. They leave their brains at the beach. One hour slid into two, then three, and finally they turned up the street to their own home. She remembered her father adopting his best Charles Laughton accent and hunching over the wheel: “
Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” he cried out as the exhausted family cheered. She stared again at the picture and in her mind’s eye saw them unloading the car and her mother turning to her father and saying, “Oh, there’s nothing in the house for dinner, just run down to the corner store and pick up some hamburger.” Her father had nodded, jumped back into the car, waving, be back in fifteen minutes.

  But he wasn’t, she thought.

  She and John had been on the front lawn, hauling the stuff inside, and they’d heard ambulance and police sirens in the distance, looked up, thought nothing, and lifted another load.

  Two drunken teenagers had run a stop sign and broadsided his car. He had been knocked clear across the seat and out and crushed as the vehicle rolled over him.

  She smiled. He probably appreciated the irony of a mathematician becoming a statistic on Labor Day weekend fatalities. I still miss him, she thought. I still miss all of them. She looked again at the picture. She was standing between the two men in her life and they had each thrown an arm across her back. She remembered the moments before the snapshot had been taken: there had been a mock argument between boyfriend and father as to whose arm was going where on her back. They had loved each other, she thought, and I loved both of them. She felt a pleasurable rush of memory, as if she could feel the weight and pressure of those two arms draped across her shoulders and the warmth flowing from their bodies as she squeezed between them.

  Sanctuary, she thought.

  She closed the book and went to bed.

  10. She was shading her eyes from the noontime glare and almost missed the small square green sign by the side of the road. It was set back a few yards farther than most roadside signs, which Detective Barren thought reflected a concession to distaste. No one wants a prison as a neighbor. It said: lake butler classification and evaluation center f.s.d.o.c. next right. There was a dusty black macadam road a hundred yards up from the sign. The road cut between two stands of tall pine trees, their needles turning a brownish green in the unrelenting Florida summer sun. Detective Barren slowly steered her car down the road, passing beneath a huge willow tree that threw shade down defiantly. The road curled around, across a brown field where some cattle grazed idly, contentedly, and Detective Barren caught her first sight of a cluster of low gray buildings that seemed to glow in the midday heat. She stopped the car to read a large black and yellow sign that dominated the side of the road: caution. anyone passing over yellow line subject to search. anyone carrying contraband into l.b.c.e.c. will be prosecuted to fullest extent of law. Painted across the road surface was a wide strip of yellow. Detective Barren accelerated gently, picking up her first sight of a twelve-foot-tall, barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence that surrounded the clutch of buildings.

  Detective Barren parked the car in an area designated visitors and walked toward a pair of wide glass doors. Another sign informed her that this building housed the prison administration, although the word “prison” was not used. This was typical: We live in an enlightened age which is dependent upon euphemism, she thought. Thus, prisons are correctional facilities, manned not by guards but by correction officers, and prisoners are subjects. If we change the designation, somehow we believe the reality to be less evil and distasteful, though in actuality nothing ever changes. She stepped through the doors into the dark, cool interior, where she was blinded by the sudden shift in light. Her eyes adjusted slowly. Then she walked to a receptionist.

  Within a few minutes she had checked her automatic with a uniformed security guard who’d eyed her with suspicion when she produced the heavy pistol and been ushered into a small office with the name and title of Arthur Gonzales, Classification Officer, on the door. It was a cramped space, filled with file cabinets, a small, cluttered desk, and two chairs. A window overlooked the prison’s exercise area. Detective Barren stared out, watching a small cluster of men play basketball. They were stripped to their waists, and sweat made their bodies gleam as they maneuvered about the court. The window was closed to contain the air conditioning and Detective Barren could not hear the men. But she knew the sounds they were making, of sneakers pounding the cement surface and bodies slapping together.

  She thought idly of her husband, who’d loved the game.

  “There’s a zone, Merce, a time, I guess, I don’t know, but you get hot. It’s like no other sport I can think of, but you just get possessed by this sense that you can throw anything toward the basket and it will fall. Hot. Electric, I suppose. It’s hard to describe, but it sometimes seems that you can jump just a little higher, a little faster, and that the basket seems suddenly closer and the rim wider, and you know, you just know, that what you put up will slip in. It just happens, you see, in the course of the game. I don’t know why. And then, just as the sensation arrives, it disappears. The ball starts to clank about and fall off. Your feet slow down. The magic evaporates. Maybe it passes on to someone else. You become mortal, suddenly, sadly. But the moments of immortality, Merce, they’re something. It’s as if you’ve been touched. Graced by some god of athletics. And until his mood changes and he plucks someone else out, you’re on fire . . .”

  She smiled.

  He would take her to the outdoor courts on summer mornings and they would play against each other. At first he restricted himself to shooting only left-handed. Then she beat him one morning on a running, giggling jump-shot.

  She smiled again, thinking how foolish men were with their games. Foolish but a little bit wonderful, as well. What she had liked about John was that the morning she beat him, he’d been the first to announce the event to her family. Without alibi, as well. Of course, the next day he’d suddenly shifted the ball from left to right and swooped past her. That was how he announced that the rules of their game were changing.

  “Cheater!” she’d yelled.

  “No, no, no,” he’d replied. “Just returning to the proper balance between the sexes.”

  That night he’d been especially tender and tentative when he touched her.

  Detective Barren shook her head and couldn’t prevent the memory from making her grin.

  She turned when she heard the door open behind her.

  A rotund man in a pair of tan double-knit slacks and a white guayabera shirt entered. He stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, detective, how can I help you?” in a tone that told her that he no more wanted to see her or help her than he wanted to catch a disease. He instantly buried his head in files of paper, as if to indicate that her presence demanded only a portion of his attention. All detectives hate dealing with prison personnel, she thought. Because they always act like this. They are concerned with logistics and containment, who gets sent where and what bed does he occupy. Not issues of guilt or innocence.

  She sat down opposite him.

  “Sadegh Rhotzbadegh.”

  “He is one of my clients, yes . . .”

  A new euphemism, thought Detective Barren.

  “I would like to interview him, please.”

  “ls this another case like the ones he pleaded to?”

  “Yes,”

  “And this is an official request?”

  “No. Not really. Informal.”

  “No? Even so, I would probably counsel him to seek legal assistance before talking with you . . .”

  Just whose side are you on? thought Detective Barren angrily. She kept her thoughts to herself.

  “Mr. Gonzales, this is an informal inquiry. I believe Mr. Rhotzbadegh has been unfairly linked to a crime, and I think he can swiftly clear the matter up. He does, of course, have the right to an attorney. I will read him his rights if need be . . .”

  She looked hard across the table.

  “. . . But you sure as hell don’t have the right to tell him anything. Much less give him advice. Now, if you want me to talk to your supervisor . . .”

  “No, of course, that won’t be necessar
y.”

  He shuffled some papers quickly.

  “Well?”

  “Well, Mr. Rhotzbadegh is currently in his activities period. There is a rest time which follows, right before dinner. You can talk then . . . if he’ll see you. He has the right, you know, to refuse . . .”

  “But you’re going to see he doesn’t exercise that right.”

  “Well, I can’t . . .”

  “You sure as hell can. I didn’t drive three and one-half hours just to have a convicted killer say, ‘No thanks, not today.’ You get him and bring him to a room where he and I can talk. If he wants to sit there and not say anything, well, that’s his business and mine. Not yours.”

  “I can arrange for the room. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Well, we have just finished our evaluation and he’s scheduled to be shipped out at the end of the week . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, he’s going to the psychiatric facility at Gainesville. We don’t think he’d be safe in the regular population.”

  “You don’t think he’d be safe!”

  “Well, he’s decompensated . . .”

  “You think he needs to be protected!”

  “That’s the opinion of the evaluation and classification staff.”

  “So you’re going to send him to some country club?”

  “It’s a maximum-security unit.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, that’s where he’s going.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Detective, if we send him to the state prison, someone will kill him. He’s, well, no other word to describe it, he’s obnoxious and near-psychotic. The other men don’t like his religious mumblings. Or his conceited postures. Rapists have enough trouble in general population without these, uh, characteristics. What can I say?”

  Detective Barren absorbed the news slowly. Her mouth was dry and her stomach churned. She shook her head.