by Robert Pobi
“While we wait for the press conference at Federal Plaza to begin, we have—for the first time in our studio—gun rights advocate and president of the NRA, Dwayne Laroche. Mr. Laroche, thank you for being here.”
“My pleasure, Wolf.”
“Mr. Laroche, over the past few days, you have refused to condemn the actions of the sniper stalking our city. Now that we have a little more information on him, are you willing to maybe walk that endorsement back a bit?”
“First of all, Wolf, I never endorsed the alleged suspect. What I did was suggest that until we know all the facts, we should suspend rush judgments to ban all firearms in urban centers. Now, before I continue, I reserve the right to modify or change my comments in the future. But let’s look at the facts as we now know them.
“With the recent phenomenon of police overstepping their assigned authority, the citizens of this fine country are increasingly worried about their safety. From a Second Amendment standpoint—and, Wolf, I am sure you and your viewers know that one of the foundation walls of the Second Amendment is for the right of citizens to defend themselves against the tyranny of the government—it is conceivable that this individual was defending himself against tyrannical governmental employees and—”
“Don’t you think that is a bit of a stretch?”
“I’m not finished. When the investigation is over, and if we find out that this individual is, in fact, the victim of governmental overreach or even criminal actions on behalf of the government, then it could be argued that he was defending and expressing his God-granted Second Amendment right.
“And if you look at the imam he allegedly killed, the man preached a doctrine diametrically opposed to the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. It could be argued that he was an enemy of America and that this young man did America a great favor. And while we are on the subject of the Second Amendment…”
79
26 Federal Plaza
His hands were cuffed to the leather belt encircling his waist, which was, in turn, fastened to the manacles on his ankles with another four feet of hardened chrome chain. The contraption only allowed him to move in a tight-stepped shuffle, but now that he was attached to a table, he didn’t think that exercise was one of their objectives. It was the beginning of the waiting game.
Kirby Clibbon knew there was a roomful of excited people at the other end of the camera in the corner, slapping one another on the back for a job well done.
They had the temperature turned down and the humidity cranked up, and Kirby recognized the clumsy attempt at psychological warfare. If they really wanted to get his attention, they’d need to pump him full of LSD, fold him into a fifty-gallon drum with a bag of camel spiders, turn up the Michael Bolton, and leave him in the ground for a week. Barring that kind of determination, this was going to be a one-sided conversation.
The door opened, and a tall black chick in a suit came in. Not one of those deep blue motherfuckers who were always hanging out down in eyes-and-teeth-park—no, this gal was good old American, that common mixture produced by the union of too horny and too stupid that filled every inner city in the country. She looked pissed, but they all looked pissed. It was one of those character traits they couldn’t hide with all the education in the world.
The second person was a white guy who definitely walked the walk. He wore a suit that his FBI salary definitely couldn’t pay for and he had the polished movements of an expensive finishing school—Kirby had seen a few guys like him back in the forces, all visiting senators or governors or other useless hand-shaking positions—men who couldn’t change a tire if their fucking lives depended on it. He looked all calm and collected. Kirby knew calm. He knew collected. And this guy had them both down. Of the two, it was the white dude in the suit that he’d have to watch—his type specialized in fucking the workingman; it was just how they were put together.
This was the FBI, so Kirby didn’t expect good cop / bad cop. He expected polite conversation followed by threats of deep dark holes for the rest of his life—boilerplate government cliché kind of speak. He had been ready for this for a while now. That it had taken them this long was some kind of a miracle. The rest was up to him.
The black chick sat down facing him, and the nice suit took up his place in the corner. None of this mattered because Kirby had nowhere else to be right now.
“Mr. Clibbon, I’m Special Agent Whitaker. That’s Special Agent in Charge of Manhattan, Brett Kehoe.”
Kirby just stared down at his forearms, adorned with left and right Mr. Horsepower tattoos; three years of dealing with Haji sand niggers in Afghanistan, followed by his time yessiring those fucking Hasidic Jews down at the garage, had taught him a lot about how to ignore people.
The Nubian went into her sales pitch. “You know why you’re here. We know why you’re here. The AR-15 in your guitar case will be how we kick things off. For starters, you are going to be indicted on Criminal Possession of a Firearm, under Penal Law section 265.01-b. It’s unregistered, so that’s a straight five if we make a point of it. And we will make a point of it.
“The firearms charge gives us everything we need to keep you locked up for a few days as we go through your life, one tiny bit at a time. We’re eventually going to convict you of the murder of six law enforcement officers and two civilians, including the two murders you committed in Wyoming three years back. We have you at the scene of three of the murders before they happened, which shows clear intent and premeditation. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your days at the bottom of a deep dark hole in our federal penal system, you might want to consider helping us out here.” Whitaker opened her hands in a way that showed they were at the point in the monologue where she expected some kind of response.
Kirby could not believe the lack of imagination they were showing. These two couldn’t scare a cat. He kept his focus on the Woody Woodpecker images, cigars clamped in the corners of their mouths.
“Do you have something you’d like to say?” Whitaker pushed.
Kirby lifted his focus and locked her in a heavy-lidded thousand-yard stare. Just who the fuck did these people think they were dealing with?
After thirty seconds of silence, he turned and spoke to the camera. “I want a lawyer. A white lawyer.” And with that, he closed his eyes and went into himself.
80
The Long Island Railroad
After the elegant interior of the bureau’s Gulfstream G550, the Long Island Railroad car possessed all the panache of a garden shed. Yes, the walls and ceiling were paneled in nicely vacuum-formed plastic; yes, the seats were upholstered in a man-made blue-and-green pseudo-leatherette; yes, they had tried to do away with hard corners à la Steve Jobs. But the general effect could only be described as modern extinct with a hint of ugly thrown in.
From Penn Station to Montauk was three hours and three minutes, with a five-minute stop at Babylon, fifty-eight minutes in. Lucas liked the train almost as much as the kids did. There was something about the passengers and the rhythm that gave the whole exercise a sense of adventure, like you were really going someplace. Maybe it was because of the destination. They’d get to the beach, and when they walked into the house, it had that smell, that beach smell.
Tonight it was business mannequins thumbing their phone screens offset by college kids in Canada Goose parkas. Lucas hated cell phones. But not because they were isolating people from one another—he remembered way back when the Walkman first hit public consciousness. No, what he hated was the identity crisis they had imparted on young people.
But he was in a good mood, and he remembered to forget about the world for a moment, on the countryside sliding by, and for some reason thought back to that night all those years ago when Mr. Teach had called him home from school.
He took the train down from Boston, arriving late at night.
Mr. Teach answered the door. He was in one of his impeccably tailored suits, but his hair and beard would still do a bushman proud—they had g
one gray over the past few years. Lucas gave him a hug, and Mr. Teach had tears in his eyes.
It was a warm spring evening, and all the windows, including the doors to the balcony, were open. The silk curtains hung limp in the night air, and the apartment smelled like furniture polish, perfume, and home.
As he walked through the space, he saw that the painting of Mrs. Page’s mother was not there, and he assumed that it was on loan to a museum or gallery.
Mrs. Page was awake when he went to her room. “I’ve been waiting for you, Lucas.” In all their time together, she had never called him anything else.
He went to the bed and kissed her, then sat down at her side. “A heart attack?”
She shrugged and took his hand. “My dinner guests were so boring, I just couldn’t take it. I would have much preferred a stroke that made me speak in gibberish, but this was the best I could do under the circumstances.” She smiled at the joke and gave his hand a squeeze. “I so miss our talks. It’s lonely here without you.”
“I can come back. There are a lot of good universities in the city.”
“No, you can’t. You have a responsibility.”
“To whom?”
“To yourself. And to me. Life is going to give you some difficult choices, and when it does, you make them.”
Mr. Teach came in with a root beer for him and a lemonade for her.
She took a sip and made a face that got him smiling. “Like our first time together, remember?”
“Have I ever said thank you?”
She waved it away. “Every single day. With your enthusiasm and kindness and discipline. You have been the single greatest joy of my life—my very long life—and my only regret is that we won’t have more time together.”
He tried to take a sip of his root beer but it suddenly tasted very flat. “Don’t say that.”
She held out the lemonade, and he put it on the nightstand. Then she took his hand again. “It’s all right. You’re still young, but life will teach you—my death will teach you—that this is all very temporary. The trick is knowing that it’s short—finding value in that commodity time you seem so fascinated by.” She paused and caught her breath. “But I didn’t have Mr. Teach call you home to give you life lessons. I hope I’ve done that enough already. I called you home because I need you to know about a few things.
“All of this,” she said, waving her hand, signifying the room, the apartment, her life. “Is going away. The fortune my grandfather made has run its course. My accountant tells me that the last market collapse made a larger dent in the portfolio than I can recover from. There are debts and obligations. There is a small trust that will pay for your education—and not much more. But I want to do one more thing for you, Lucas. I want you to have a little insurance for the day when you need it, so I put something into a trust for you years ago. Something the creditors won’t be able to touch—the painting of my mother.”
Lucas remembered the first time he had seen it all those years ago, when Mr. Teach had walked him through the apartment and he thought he was in a palace. And for years after, that painting had looked down on him while he did his homework at the big desk in the living room. Every line, hue, detail, and crack in the pigment was as much a part of himself as any physical object could be. The portrait was of Francesca Johnson, Mrs. Page’s mother, done by John Singer Sargent during her twenty-second year.
“Don’t look so puzzled.” She smiled up at him. “Mr. Teach has already had it crated up; it is at my barrister’s office so the debt collectors can’t get their hooks into it through some loophole. It is very valuable now but will only increase. Put it somewhere and leave it there. One day, you may have a wife and a family, and it will pay for a house. Or the education of your children. Hold on to it as long as you can. I was hoping to leave you more, but I haven’t made the best decisions with my money.” She smiled weakly. “That’s another thing—don’t trust stockbrokers or bankers. They’re worse than the religious boobs. They don’t have the imagination to invent anything other than confidence games. It is a recipe for disaster. They can’t help themselves, it’s what they were bred for, but that’s no excuse.”
“I don’t need the painting. I don’t—”
“Lucas,” she said, a little sternly. “Of course you don’t need the painting. But you will be able to focus on your education and career a lot easier if you don’t have to worry about subway fare.”
And that was his turn to smile. Every New Year’s Day, they took the subway downtown to the site of her grandfather’s long-razed first factory. Lucas always got a kick out of watching her count out the change at the token booth, Mr. Teach standing back, her own private guardian angel. “Okay,” he said.
“I am glad you like learning, my boy. When I was young, about a thousand years ago, people wanted an education so that they could better their financial position. Now, with the rise of the merchant class, the buying and selling of things no longer makes education a necessity. People amass wealth without realizing that they need to amass knowledge to better use that wealth—the Peggy Guggenheims of this world are dying. Those stupid people I see on television are the future, and they will fight you every step of the way. They will try to make you like them.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Good.” She waved her hand again, this time signaling that commerce was over. “Now tell me about school.”
They spent the rest of the night talking about his studies and friends and how he was enjoying Boston and the girl he was dating and his upcoming studies in England and myriad topics of no immediate import. They drank lemonade and root beer, and the doctor came in to administer blood thinners, and for a few hours they were like they had been that first day, all those years ago.
He got to tell her that he loved her one last time. And just as the sun was bleeding into the morning sky, Mrs. Page died.
The train hit some turbulence, and he was jostled back to the blue-and-green vinyl and the smell of too many passengers and not enough fresh air.
He looked up and blinked one time, feeling his eyelid get caught on his bad eye. He took his pocket square and used his original fingers to reach up behind the dark lens, rotating the prosthetic.
He refolded his pocket square before turning to the polished character reflected back at him in the window.
He had kept the painting crated up for years. Through his first marriage. Through the stint in the hospital. Through tough financial times and upticks in the art market. Until that day that he and Erin realized they needed someplace to raise their family. And when he sold it, Mrs. Page once again took care of him. But even she would have been shocked at how much her mother’s portrait would eventually be worth. After the brownstone, there had been a significant chunk of cash left over, enough to last him the rest of his life. He gave a good slice to Mr. Teach, who was by that time almost eighty and living in Florida, spending his days golfing and two-for-one-ing it at happy hour on Casey Key. Lucas was grateful to be able to return some of the kindness Mr. Teach had shown him over the years.
After the house and Mr. Teach, Lucas followed her advice, keeping it out of the markets, away from the parasites who ran Wall Street. She had been right about them as well.
And as he sat there, staring at his reflection in the window, her words came back to him. They can’t help themselves. It’s what they were bred for.
They.
Can’t.
Help.
Themselves.
The voice of the announcer added a score to the image staring back at him. “Babylon, Long Island, next stop.”
What.
They.
Were.
Bred.
For.
And it all slipped into place.
All of it.
Myrna Mercer.
Margolis and his disappearing magic bullets.
Detective Atchison’s house in Jersey.
Hartke and the sealed hearings.
Oscar.
Bible Hill and Sheriff Doyle with the tooled Jesus holsters.
Hartke and Kavanagh and the imam.
And Kirby Clibbon and the destroyed rifle hanging in his closet.
Lucas stood up as the train pulled into the station. His prosthetic was running fine, but his good leg had fallen asleep, and he had a difficult time resetting his internal gyroscope. He stood in the aisle, holding the seats so he wouldn’t fall over as the decreasing speed pulled his center of gravity forward.
A woman behind him said, “Mind if I get by?”
Lucas turned toward her with the right side of his face. He couldn’t see her straight on, but he caught a reflected view of her in the window with his good eye. He knew she was looking up into his disconnected prosthetic, visible at this distance, even behind the tinted lenses. “Please give me a second,” he said politely, but firmly.
She scurried to the rear exit, mumbling under her breath, the word cocksucker somewhere in the mix.
Lucas waited for the pain to bleed out of his leg. By the time the train rolled to a stop in the town of Babylon, the pins and needles had dulled to a numb electrical current.
He hobbled down the steps and stopped under the awning. He didn’t want to call in the Indians unless he was certain, so he stood there as the snow came down, staring off into the distance, looking for holes in the storyline.
He couldn’t find a single one.
The train started to pull away, and Lucas watched the faces of the people in the lit windows as it got up to speed. He didn’t realize that his phone was in his hand until the final doubt had left the station with the train.
He dialed Whitaker’s number, and when she answered she sounded different—maybe even relaxed. “Dr. Page! Hey, man.”
“I’m in Babylon, and I need you to send someone for me.” He looked up at the snow coming down; a helicopter wouldn’t get through this.
“Why?” She didn’t bother to hide the concern in the question.
