The thug in the knit blue cap hovered above Mohle. He held the revolver in both hands, and the way he was resting the barrel alongside his mouth, you might have thought he was a painter considering his next brushstroke. His pal cowered a few steps off, at the very edge of what I could see.
“Just how stupid do you think we are?” the man in the blue knit cap said. “What do you mean, you’re not the man we’re looking for? We’ve been on your trail for four fucking months, buddy boy.”
“He’s . . . upstairs . . .” Mohle’s words were barely audible.
“What’s that?”
“The guy you’re after . . . he’s upstairs . . .”
The man in the blue knit cap hit him across the face with the barrel of the gun. Mohle toppled from the chair like a sack of grain. The two thugs loomed over him. Lying on his side, Mohle cupped his hands to his nose.
On my belly, I stared down through the air duct like an ice fisherman peering through the ice. Once, a long time ago, I had been trapped in the stairwell at the Children’s Center by two of the older boys who thought I’d stolen money from their lockers. Maybe I had stolen the money, maybe I hadn’t, but what I remember is how I pleaded with them, how I kept talking and talking, saying anything that came into my head. I remember how they stared at me, stupid as cattle, not listening to any of it. Words weren’t going to stop them. Words never stop anybody, really. It was a lesson I learned early: there are people in this world who, if they’ve made up their minds to beat you, they’re going to beat you.
“Check his wallet,” the man in the vinyl coat said.
The thug in the cap straddled Mohle and dug down in one of his pockets. It looked a little like he was groping him, but Mohle was in no shape to resist. A half dozen loose cards slithered to the floor. Checking the other pocket, the thug in the cap came up with a handful more.
“So what’s that?” his partner said.
The thug offered what he had and retrieved the rest. His partner looked through them and laughed.
“Nice try, buddy boy. You really had me going for a minute there.” He went to one knee. The thug in the blue knit cap stepped back. Viewed through the tiny squares of the grating, all of their movements were jerky, like a movie being run at the wrong speed.
“I’m going to be very straight with you, okay?” the man in the blue knit cap said. “And I want you to be straight with me. You and your pal Barry ran off with the key to a locker that matters a great deal to us. If you don’t know where that key is, we have ourselves a big problem . . .”
“I don’t know anybody named Barry. I don’t know about any key. I’m just a writer—”
The man in the navy-blue cap kicked Mohle in the wedding tackle. Mohle writhed on the carpet, making terrible sounds.
“Jesus Christ, mister!” the man in the vinyl coat said. “We’re so sick of this! You’re a writer? So what did you ever write?”
“Eat . . . Your . . . Wheaties . . .” Mohle gasped.
“Eat Your Wheaties? Sure. And I played center field for the Yankees. Now listen to us. These buddies of ours have talked to your wife and kid. They both basically agree that you’re a lying, worthless bag of shit, but if you hope to ever see them again, you’re going to have to come up with that key for us . . .”
“I don’t have a wife . . . I don’t have a kid . . .”
The man in the blue knit cap put the revolver to Mohle’s head. I pushed away from the grating, bracing myself for what came next. As I did, I must have dislodged some of the gunk from the edge of the vent. I heard a ting, and as I stared down, horrified, I could see the faintest plume of dust drifting into the foyer below.
The thug in the navy-blue cap barely noticed, swatting at his ear, but his partner flinched as if he’d been stung by a wasp. He looked up instantly, squinting one eye at the grating and the softly descending trickle of grit. We were face-to-face, no more than a dozen feet apart, and though I could see him, I was praying he couldn’t see me.
“I think we need to go have a look around,” he said.
I pushed to my feet and picked my way silently across the minefield of books and scattered manuscripts. Tiptoeing through the library, I went first to the windows that opened onto the roof of the back porch. If I could just get out there, I would be able to climb onto the main roof and to safety.
The first window I tried was totally jammed. The second I was able to open six or seven inches. I bent down and tried to lift it from below, but the frame was warped. One side came up two inches and then the other side came up three and then the window stuck altogether, no matter how hard I tugged.
I could hear thumping on the stairs; it sounded like a team of Clydesdales. Frantically I surveyed the room. The other two offices were locked. There was a bathroom, door ajar, but that would be the first place anyone would look. For a second I considered smashing one of the windows with my forearm and leaping onto the roof of the porch, but it didn’t take long to see how suicidal that would be.
Next to the door was a portable blackboard, set up on a tripod, and the bookcase with all the Schoeninger books. I squeezed my way past the blackboard and pressed myself behind the bookcase. It wasn’t much of a hiding place—the shelves couldn’t have been more than a foot wide—but it was all I had.
The light on the landing snapped on. A floorboard creaked. The first voice I heard was Mohle’s, no more than ten feet away.
“This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. We’re all in the same boat here. You’ve been ripped off, I’ve been ripped off—”
“Just shut up.”
The voices moved away. It sounded as if they’d gone into my office. I thought I heard a clank on metal; they must have discovered the loose grating. All the talking stopped. I leaned my head against the bookcase and felt it teeter.
Without warning, there was a voice, alarmingly close. “Okay, buddy boy, we’re tired of playing. You can come out now.”
I turned my head sideways, not daring to breathe. Mohle, the weasel, was the first one to enter the room. Stooped, with his hands cupped over his bleeding nose, he looked like a medieval monk. The man in the blue knit cap was at his heels, prodding him forward with the barrel of his gun. They took one cautious step into the room, and then another.
I had no idea why they didn’t see me right away, except that I was tucked in between the blackboard and the bookcase and they both seemed focused on the half-opened bathroom door.
The thug in the vinyl jacket was another story. Being slammed into the asphalt by Mohle had shaken all the bravado out of him. His eyes darted this way and that. When he spied me, he jumped like a six-year-old in his first fun house. For a moment he was too overcome to even speak. He tugged at his partner’s elbow. I reached for the corner of the bookcase with both hands.
The killer in the blue knit cap turned. A slow smile spread across his face; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a look of such pure pleasure. “Well, what do you know.”
The bookcase ran from floor to ceiling, nearly ten feet high. It was nothing but Schoeninger books. All his novels were there, in English and in their many translations—Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Urdu, and Hindi. There were large-print editions for the elderly and buffalo-hide-bound editions for the well-heeled. The novels must have averaged eight hundred pages; you had to figure two pounds apiece. Multiply that times fifty books, multiply that by eight for all the translations, throw in a few heavy bronze plaques and a lethal-looking paperweight made up of a piece of the Berlin Wall encased in glass, and you were looking at something over half a ton.
As unstable as the bookcase was, it did not tip as easily as I thought it would, but when it came, it sounded like the Hoover Dam collapsing.
The thug in the cap was buried instantly. His partner tried to dodge out of the way, but got his legs tangled with Mohle’s, and that fraction of a second doomed them both. Books thundered down on them, knocking them to the floor.
I stood for a moment, staring at
the three of them as they moaned and coughed under two million years of history, but there wasn’t time to gloat. I leapt like a gazelle over the fallen bookshelf and ran down the stairs.
As I came out the front door, a police car was pulling to the curb forty yards to my left. I sprinted to the Volvo and threw myself in behind the steering wheel. Starting the engine, I glanced in the rearview mirror. Wayne was running toward me, red-faced and hollering, arms waving. Walking fast up the sidewalk behind him was a big old cop.
I yanked the transmission into drive and squealed away from the curb. As I did, the rear window exploded in a shower of glass. I looked over my shoulder. Wayne was spread-eagled on the lawn, covering his head. The cop had his revolver drawn as he scurried for cover behind a row of parked cars.
The last thing I saw before the line of trees blotted everything out was the cop firing up at the second floor of the Fiction Institute. As I sped off, I was still able to hear the erratic exchange of gunfire, but after a couple of blocks, the sound became less distinct. If you hadn’t known better, you would have thought the pops were nothing more serious than something you’d hear in a penny arcade.
Chapter Twenty
I’m not sure there’s any reason to go into all the details of my escape, as hair-raising as they were—ditching the Volvo behind a Shamrock station in Round Rock, hitching a ride with a simpleton truck driver, catching a Trailways bus in Dallas. The point is that twenty-four hours later I was standing on Michigan Avenue in Chicago with a hundred dollars in my pocket, not a friend in the world, and a whole new life to piece together.
By Tuesday the story was in all the papers. It stayed there all week. There were pictures of the two thugs being led, handcuffed, into the Travis County Jail. (They were identified in the caption as low-level functionaries of the Delmonico crime family.) There were interviews with Ramona and Wayne and the president of the university, who was appointing a panel to explore how such a hoax could have gone undetected for as long as it did. The old mug shot of me they ran made me look like a deranged serial killer.
Waiting for the storm to pass, I spent most of my time in a fleabag hotel near Wrigley Field. Television and the newspapers I picked up in the lobby were my only connection to the outside world. It seemed as if there was something on every other channel I turned to—footage of Mildred, fighting her way through a crowd of reporters on the back steps of the Fiction Institute, an interview with several of the students talking about how shocked and betrayed they felt, a clip of some old coot who claimed I’d swindled him out of his retirement money fifteen years before. God knows where they’d dug him up, but the geezer was still irate, shaking his cane at the camera.
The media had a field day. There was a skit on Saturday Night Live and Dave Letterman made wisecracks about me a regular feature of his opening monologue: “You read about this con artist down in Texas who passed himself off as V. S. Mohle? He taught a semester and nobody figured it out. You could never fool a New Yorker with something like that. Mayor Giuliani shows up at a press conference dressed as Marilyn Monroe, we’re on to him in a minute.”
I read a piece by some guy named Rich in the New York Times. I’m not sure I understood much of it—what the term bricolage means, I have no idea—but the general drift was that I was a symptom of everything wrong with society. We were living, he said, in a time of virtual reality, computer-driven images, spin doctors, and the death of the author, not to mention the blurring of the line between high and low culture. It was the Age of Postmodernism and the Big Lie. It was a historical moment when we couldn’t tell the difference between the original and the copy. He compared me to Milli Vanilli, Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, Bill Clinton. Here I was, thinking I was just a poor schlub, trying to get by, and it turns out I was what was happening.
But I had more important things to do than sit around reading press clippings. Once I was finally able to get up enough nerve to venture out on the street, I started working a few short cons in some of the bars and bus stations around town to put a few dollars in my pocket. It took a little scuffling around, but by the end of the month I was a new man, with yet another driver’s license and Social Security number. The snug little beard I’d grown made me look like the marine biologist in Jaws, but it wasn’t the worst disguise. I never did have the heart to use Schoeninger’s checkbook.
As comfortable as I was being back on the streets, I knew that it was only a matter of time before the cops or the replacement troops for the Delmonico family showed up looking for me. What I needed was to drop off the face of the earth for a while.
One Sunday afternoon I struck up a conversation in a sports bar with this fellow from Wisconsin. He was down from Neenah-Menasha, visiting his sister. When I mentioned to him that I was thinking of relocating, he suggested that if I didn’t mind a little cold weather, I might try their Division of Motor Vehicles. In just the last year, three people had retired in his office alone; if I wanted to apply, this was the time.
A month later I was living in Appleton, Wisconsin, Harry Houdini’s hometown, working as a license examiner. It was the middle of January and in the mornings when I scurried out to scrape the windshield on my car, ice crystals would bead up in my beard like glistening Christmas decorations. When the wind chased snow across the playground of the parochial school next door, it felt as if I was exiled in Siberia, which, come to think of it, was probably what I deserved.
The people I worked with were nice as pie. They were always inviting me to some Friday night fish fry or trying to fix me up with the youth director at their church. More often than not, I said no. I developed a reputation as a loner and a bit of an odd duck.
During the week I gave driving tests, bracing my knees against the dashboard as pimply sixteen-year-olds spun their fathers’ cars into snowbanks and palsied senior citizens mistook the gas pedal for the brake as we careened back into the DMV parking lot.
The winter nights were long and in the mornings I’d have to drive to work with my lights on, crawling through sleet and rain. There wasn’t a day I didn’t think about Rex and wonder if he was still alive. I wondered if Ramona had ever told him what a fake I was. I kept going back over all my screwups, like a dog coming back to inspect its vomit.
Sometime in March the snow began to melt and just when everybody started to get their hopes up, a storm would drop another four inches. Three days later it would warm again, water would run in the gutters, and finally one Sunday morning I saw my first robin in a muddy yard.
A week later I was having lunch at Wendy’s when I picked up a discarded copy of USA Today from the table next to me and saw that Schoeninger had died. The obituary went on for half a page, detailing his rags-to-riches career, his world travels, his blockbuster best sellers, and his extraordinary philanthropy. It talked about him being an orphan and how all his life he’d been haunted by the mystery of his origins. It mentioned how he’d been dismissed by the critics—one reviewer had compared his prose to the lone and level sands of Ozymandias. In the end it hadn’t mattered what the critics said—he’d kept generations of readers reading.
There was a picture of him—it must have been at least forty years old—dog-paddling in some jungle pool. The lei around his neck floated on the surface of the water. What made the photo so strange was that he was swimming with his glasses on, the kind with the old-fashioned clear frames. It made him look a little like a midwestern banker. He was a little hefty and grinning like he was having the time of his life. If the picture hadn’t had a caption under it there was no way I would have believed this was the same man as the scrap of a human being I’d left in a hospital bed four months before.
The article said there would be a funeral in Austin on Saturday and a memorial service in New York on Tuesday.
I sat there unable to finish my double cheeseburger. Contrary to what you may believe, phony guys have feelings too. I remember Barry once, he’d just lifted the life savings off this poor sucker, but as the guy was getting out of the
car, he slammed his finger in the door. Barry felt just terrible for him, insisted on taking him to the hospital, and even paid for his bill. Barry was a big softie. Or what about Mark McGwire, the guy who broke Roger Maris’s home-run record? The man was totally pumped on steroids, he knew he was a fraud and half the country suspected it, but when he hit number sixty-two, the stadium went crazy. He picked up his kid and ran over to the stands where all the Maris family were sitting. He gave the sons big hugs and when he turned and took off his hat to acknowledge the cheers, the tears streamed down his face. The man was as fake as a two-dollar bill, but what he was feeling was real. He didn’t deserve it, but he felt it, all the same.
That Sunday I put on my white shirt and tie, dragged my blazer out of the closet, and went off to church. I don’t know exactly why I went. Maybe I was trying to cover my bets. I probably hadn’t been inside a church in twenty-five years and it was a lot different than I remembered. There was no organ, just this bearded guy in a woolly sweater with a guitar, and right in the middle of the service you had to give everybody around you these hugs.
All the regulars were smiling at me, I guess because I was a newcomer, but I did nothing to encourage them. There were some hymns, a little reading from the New Testament, a few announcements, and then we all got down on our knees for a moment to recite the Lord’s Prayer.
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against my clasped hands. I’ve never been a big fan of the Lord’s Prayer, to tell you the truth. Give us this day our daily bread—who’s going to argue with that? But having to forgive all the sins of all your enemies before you get forgiven for yours? Anybody but a sap should be able to cut a better deal than that.
But this time it kind of hit home. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t as if I was totally blaming myself for everything that had happened. Maybe I’d been a snake, but Stainforth had been a nastier one. Besides, Rex pretty much had one foot in the grave when I met him. What did I have to feel guilty for? Hadn’t I given him what he’d paid for?
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