Carnival of Shadows

by R.J. Ellory

  “But the past is a different country,” Greene continued. “The past is a different country, and sometimes we forget that in this country they speak a different language. We forget that tongue, and we forget part of our own life, and though it may not seem to be the case, that part of our life is vitally, vitally important. Why? Because that’s the attic, my friends. Because that’s where you find all those damp and dusty boxes. Because within those boxes are the memories you don’t want to remember, and sometimes you just have to steel yourself, you have to roll up your sleeves, you have to climb that ladder into the roof of your house and start opening those boxes once more.”

  Greene placed his hands together palm to palm and smiled with great sincerity.

  “Now, I am not a preacher,” Greene went on. “I am not a man of the Lord. Heaven knows, I have done enough in my life to earn myself a special hot place down there…”

  Greene nodded at the ground. There was a ripple of uncomfortable laughter from the audience, due perhaps more to the self-same recognition in the congregation than anything else. Weren’t we all our own worst judges? Didn’t we deem our own crimes, however small, worthy of a far more severe sentence than that which would be granted by others? Of course we did. That, once again, was simply human nature.

  “But perhaps I won’t find myself there, folks. And I’ll tell you why. Because we always tell ourselves it was worse than it was.”

  Travis looked at Greene. Hadn’t Travis just considered that same exact thought?

  “We always tell ourselves that what we did was far more serious than it really was, you know? We do that. We all do that. That’s just part of human nature.”

  Again, a murmur of consent from the audience.

  “So, if we learn nothing, we have to learn how to forgive ourselves. We have to remember that others will never be as harsh as we are with ourselves—”

  “I want to speak!”

  The crowd turned in unison.

  Sheriff Rourke stood forward. The people around him stepped away. There was no mistaking who he was. He was standing right there in front of everyone, and irrespective of the fact that he was out of uniform, there would have been few people who didn’t know who he was, even among the out-of-towners.

  Rourke stood for a moment in silence, and then he held out his hands at his sides, palms forward, as if saying, Here I am. This is me, and I am ready for everyone to hear what I have to say.

  “You want to say something?” Greene asked.

  “I just want to say something, Mr. Greene.”

  Travis was impressed with Rourke. He was the local representative for law and order, and now he was going to impress his authority on these proceedings. Despite asking everyone to call him Chas, despite his easygoing and avuncular manner, he was going to tell Chester Greene and the rest of these people exactly what he thought of them.

  Rourke cleared his throat. “Well, in truth,” he said, “I want to tender an apology, actually. I spoke badly of you and your people when you came here. I really did. I said some harsh things. I used words that it was not right to use, and I wanted to say I was sorry.”

  Travis was stunned. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  There was a small ripple of applause, and before it had a chance to grow, Greene raised his hand and silenced it.

  “We were received no better or worse here than anywhere else, Sheriff Rourke. I am sure what you said was not so bad, and certainly no worse than the things that are routinely said to my face, but I appreciate the sentiment, and I acknowledge your apology. However, I do not believe that this was really what you wanted to say, was it?”

  Travis wondered whether now was the time to speak up, to elbow his way to the front of the crowd and demand that they stop this charade immediately. Something within himself prevented him, yet had he been asked he would not have known how to describe it. Fear? Surely not. Perhaps some concern that the crowd would turn on him, that their belief in whatever it was that Greene was doing was far greater than their belief in Travis’s right to uphold the law?

  Greene stood up and walked to the front of the stage.

  Rourke took a single step back, but it was so clear that he was withdrawing from whatever it was that he was confronting.

  “I know it was a long time ago, Sheriff Rourke, but sometimes those things that happened in childhood are the most dangerous. The mind is impressionable. Everything seems so much more important to a child. Everything seems so much more significant. And those memories, the distant ones, are the ones that have had the longest time to fester and grow more bitter. And remember what I said… we judge ourselves ever more severely than others will judge us. It was an accident, perhaps?”

  Rourke’s eyes widened. He looked at Greene, and then he turned and looked at the faces around him.

  The sense of anticipation was almost physical. Travis could sense that the air itself had changed. It seemed harder to breathe. There was a constrictive sensation in his chest. His hands were sweating, and he found himself willing Rourke to speak. He wanted to know what had happened. He needed to know what had happened.

  “W-we were just ch-children, you understand?” Rourke said. “We were just little kids, and we didn’t think…” He lowered his head for a moment. His chest rose and fell as if he was suppressing some huge wave of emotion. “We didn’t think,” he said. “That was the problem right there, wasn’t it? We just didn’t think about what we were doing, what we were saying, and this has haunted me all of my life. I try so hard to forget, and weeks, sometimes months will go by, and I won’t even think of it, but it’s always there…”

  He looked up at Greene and smiled in recognition. “In the attic, Mr. Greene. Right up there in the attic, isn’t it?”

  Greene nodded, but did not speak.

  “We chased that kid every day,” Rourke went on, his voice hurried. “We called him names. We threw stones. We pushed him into puddles of dirty water. One time we pushed him off the bridge into the river, and he was damned near swept away. Hell, he could have died, you know? That poor defenseless, dumb son of a bitch could have died, and we would have murdered him, wouldn’t we? We would have been murderers; at ten or eleven years of age, we would have been responsible for taking the life of another child.”

  All of a sudden Rourke was not alone. Another man stood beside him, his hand on Rourke’s shoulder. A gesture of support, of understanding. It took a moment for Travis to realize that it was Larry Youngman. Rourke reached up and gripped that consoling hand, and the two of them continued to stand there together as Rourke went on.

  “His name was Bobby, and he was a Jew.” Rourke looked up at stage. “Which, considering present company, makes it seem all the worse, Mr. Greene.”

  Greene waved his hand dismissively.

  “He was just a regular kid. He didn’t look no different, and he didn’t sound no different, but he was a Jew. That made him different. That made him a target for our name-calling and baiting, our… our mental torture. Because that’s what we did to him, you see? We tortured him. I mean, it was before all this stuff came out about what happened during the war, the way the Jews were persecuted and murdered. We didn’t know about that, you know? That’s not why we chased him and bullied him. We chased him and bullied him because he was different, that was all… And when you people came into town, when I saw you for the first time, I was reminded of this so terribly. It was such a strong memory, Mr. Greene, and it’s been preying on my mind ever since you arrived, and I just knew I had to say something…”

  Rourke lowered his head.

  “Thank you for opening the box, Sheriff Rourke,” Greene said. “And I can tell you right now that Bobby is just fine.”

  Rourke looked up, his eyes wide.

  Greene smiled. “Believe me or not, Bobby Alberstein is fine and well. He got married, has three kids, and runs a successful chain of conv
enience stores in the Midwest.”

  Rourke stepped back. Youngman stepped aside.

  “But… but… his name? How did you know his name?”

  Greene shook his head. “You opened the box, Sheriff Rourke… I just had a moment to look inside.”

  Travis looked at Chester Greene, this Jewish dwarf from Oklahoma City, and then he turned and looked at Sheriff Charles Rourke of Seneca Falls, Kansas. Had they really staged this? Had they planned this together? And, if so, was he somehow involved in the death of the Hungarian man? Surely not.

  Rourke’s reaction to this revelation seemed genuine enough, but perhaps Rourke was as skilled an actor as he was a liar. Perhaps the friendly and cooperative small-town sheriff persona that he seemed to wear so effortlessly was nothing more than a facade.

  Travis was confused. Here was something that ran far deeper than he’d at first believed. Either that, or…

  The other possibility seemed too ludicrous and surreal to consider.

  “He’s o-okay?” Rourke asked.

  “He sure is, Sheriff Rourke,” Greene said. “In fact, he tells his friends that the bullying and harassment he received as a child toughened him up. He tells them that had he not been bullied, he would never have had the courage to ask his wife to marry him, and he would have been too indecisive and nervous to take a punt on his own business. He even mentions you by name. Chas Rourke, he says. That asshole made me the man I am today.”

  The audience erupted into laughter. Rourke stood there for a moment, and then he started laughing too, crying as well, and Larry Youngman stepped forward once more and put his arm around Rourke’s shoulder. Rourke’s entire body seemed to shake with emotion. Travis had never seen anything quite like it. If this was an act…

  The crowd seemed to swallow Sheriff Rourke. There were hands on his shoulders, people hugging him, and then—after a minute or two—the audience settled down.

  Greene stood there in silence for a little while, and then he smiled and nodded his head. “And now I am tired,” he said. “I am very tired.”

  One person started clapping, and then two, three, ten, twenty, and soon the tent was bursting with riotous applause. There were whoops and screams and whistles, and Travis watched in wonder as the entire congregation closed up toward the edge of the stage, reaching out to the little man, trying to touch him, as if merely making contact would somehow realize some supernatural effect on themselves and their lives. Travis had never seen anything like this outside of evangelical gatherings. Greene had taken on the mantle of preacher, confessor, savior. It was almost religious in its enthusiasm, and Travis was both appalled and transfixed.

  Greene received their enthusiasm, but he did not stay long. He was gone within a minute or two, and the people were left talking animatedly among themselves, little crowds assembling around Sheriff Rourke, Miss Petersen, the young pregnant woman and her husband.

  Travis was sweating profusely beneath his shirt. He had not realized how hot it was inside. He knew that he couldn’t absorb any more. His emotions wrestled with his certainties, his suspicions with his convictions, and he had to get away. He walked around the back of the gathering, along the edge of the tent itself, until he came to the doorway. He passed out into the cool night air unnoticed, and he stood there—once again looking at the sky—and his body felt like a thousand pounds of darkness, so much blacker than the sky, so much heavier than the earth beneath his feet.

  He breathed deeply—in, out, in, out—and he felt the vista before his eyes waver just a little. The horizon seemed to disappear, and then it was right back where it was supposed to be. He felt as if he were hallucinating, as if someone had perhaps put a drug in his coffee, and now he was seeing and feeling things that were not even real. He wondered if he had been drugged… if he had actually been drugged before, that night when someone crept into his room and typed a single word on a sheet of paper…

  “Good, eh?”

  Travis turned to see Doyle standing no more than six feet away. He was smoking a pipe.

  Travis just started at Doyle, momentarily incapable of speech.

  “Is your head still square, Agent Travis?”

  “I-if th-that question is designed to elicit some reaction from me, Mr. Doyle, then I am afraid it will not. I believe I understand what you are asking me, and I will not play the game.”

  “Which is answer enough,” Doyle said. “Such a shame.”

  “A shame? What’s a shame, Mr. Doyle? That I am not fooled by such performances? Granted, they are very impressive, both Mr. Slate and Mr. Greene. Extraordinary talents for sleight of hand, even sleight of mind, might we say, but the truth of that matter is that I have not seen anything that has proven beyond a reasonable doubt—”

  “Proven what, Agent Travis? What do you think anyone is trying to prove here?”

  “That you can read people’s minds, Mr. Doyle. That you can see into the past. That you can know things about people that they don’t even know themselves. This kind of thing has been going on for hundreds of years. You people set yourselves up somewhere, you make people believe that you are capable of something, that you possess some kind of ability or power that is beyond the parameters of human capability, and then you fleece them for all you can get—”

  Doyle raised his hand. “I am not of a mind to argue with you, Agent Travis, nor am I of a mind to counter your accusations, all of which, I might add, are utterly unfounded and entirely without substance. What happened in there tonight was what happened. How people reacted to it was how they reacted to it. Some people feel better. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of people who were present tonight have gone home feeling better than when they arrived. Everyone but you, Agent Travis. Perhaps it touched a raw nerve; perhaps it made you feel vulnerable or exposed or afraid. I don’t know, and I don’t know that I care to know. What I see, what I hear, what I feel is what I see and hear and feel, and I do not need anyone to agree with me to know that it is true.”

  Doyle looked away toward the horizon, and then he looked back at Travis with a knowing smile.

  “I will bid you good night, sir, with the hope that you sleep well, that you do not dream, that you wake refreshed and content. Personally, I cannot even begin to imagine the claustrophobic sense of isolation you must feel each and every day of your life. To have no faith, to have no belief, to have no magic? Oh, that must be the worst hell of all.”

  Travis opened his mouth to speak, to give some sharp rebuttal, but he had nothing.

  By the time he realized he had nothing, Doyle was gone.

  31

  That night the dream returned, almost as if Doyle’s words had been a premonition.

  The shadow of a man, the cracked and arid field, the laughing crow.

  This time, however, Travis was aware of other aspects of the dream that he had not previously noticed. Somewhere in the background was the sound of calliope music—distant and almost inaudible but definitely there. Every once in a while he believed he heard the sound of child calling his name. Far to his right, there along the horizon, was a disappearing line of telegraph poles, the wire between them black with grackles and other birds he did not recognize. And there between the telegraph poles the ground was blanketed with endless forget-me-nots.

  And then the footsteps came, and they were slow and labored, and each time he sensed from which direction they were coming, he would turn, and there would be nothing there but more distance, the horizon beyond, a deep and profound sense of being alone. And yet the feeling of being watched. The certainty that he was being watched.

  Travis did not like this feeling at all. It slipped beneath his skin and enveloped his nerves.

  Even as he dreamed, he knew he was dreaming. He knew he was sleeping, right there in the McCaffrey Hotel in Seneca Falls, but he could not bring himself awake.

  Over and over in his min
d, he turned the events of the evening—the things he had seen and felt, the things he had witnessed in others, the fact that however much he wrestled with his conscience and his rationality, he could not explain what had happened. He knew there was an explanation—he knew this without doubt—and yet he could not find it. The death of Ron Petersen, the story from Sheriff Rourke about Bobby Alberstein, the fact that such things had happened when the carnival had gathered before.

  It was with that thought that Travis woke.

  And he lay there for half an hour, his throat as parched as the arid field, still the echo of the laughing crow, the grackles on the telegraph wire, the sound of the footsteps that yet never reached him.

  Eventually he rose and took a drink of water from the glass beside his bed. He walked to the window, drew back the curtain a handful of inches, and looked out into the cool blue of nascent dawn. It was a little before five, and already the light was rapidly peeling back the shadows.

  He knew in which direction the carnival lay, and though his first instinct was to dress, to walk back out there, to look at this place in daylight once more—but with a different eye, a different state of mind, a different scale of perceptions—he withheld himself. A calm and measured state of mind was required. But it seemed as if his own past, his present, even his future were being undermined. Travis walked back to the bed and sat down. Most everything had been objective. Most everything had been studied, right back to college, the things he had learned in the army, everything he had been taught in Bureau training, everything he had recorded, annotated, and transcribed while working with Unit X in Kansas City. Academic, always maintaining a safe distance, and yet who were they fooling with their reports and documents, their detailed summaries and color-coordinated filing systems? Life was not paperwork. Life was not observing, analyzing and documenting. Life was living. Life was losing his parents, losing Esther. Life was hurtling through an obstacle course while flash charges deafened you, some drill sergeant screaming obscenities at you, finding yourself waist deep in mud, your rifle buried beyond reach in the filth beneath you. Life was the Scarapetto raid, the certainty that you had killed a man. Life was standing in a morgue and questioning the presence of inexplicable tattoos on the unidentified body of a murdered Hungarian. Life was seeing a woman like Laura McCaffrey and knowing that a girl like that could never love the kind of man that you were.