The Glass House

by David Rotenberg

  “Harrison I suppose.”

  “Harrison? Leonard Harrison?”

  “And nice to hear from you too, Special Agent Hicks.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Fuck what?”

  “Didn’t it ever occur to you to tell me that Harrison was out at the San Francisco Wellness Dream Clinic?”

  “No. Because it never occurred to me that you didn’t know he was there. He was your boss, not mine.”

  “Right.”

  “And he was on NSA business.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. So tell me what the fuck Harrison did at the clinic.”

  “Well, I’m not completely sure, cause I was protecting our asset.”

  “Roberts? Decker Roberts?”

  “Yeah, that’s how I came across the old Toronto homicide cop.”

  “And you drugged him and sent him to me rather than telling me to come out there?”

  “Harrison said that’s what you wanted.”

  “And you didn’t think—Oh, never mind. Tell me exactly what Harrison did at the clinic.”

  And Mr. T did. Harrison arriving angry, spending a lot of time in the room at the end of the hall, then in the open warehouse.

  “And where were you during all this?”

  “Where my superior officer told me to be—with the drugged ex–homicide cop who tried to kill Roberts. Our asset.”

  Yslan thought for a moment, then asked, “Did he say anything?”

  “When?”

  “Whenever.”

  “Harrison wasn’t very talkative. Told us to drug—”

  “Yes, the ex-homicide cop. Then what?”

  “Something about had I seen the boy.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yeah, some nonsense about the boy, the boy, number one, the boy. The man was clearly on something. Breathing the ozone with a straw, if you ask me.”

  “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When did he say that?”

  “At the end.”

  “After he left the room at the end of the hall?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Is it yes or no?”

  “Yes, after he left the room at the end of the hall.”

  She hit disconnect, pocketed her phone and looked at Seth’s room. Number 1’s room.

  She looked at the two large holes in the wall—cheap drywall, but it still needed some force to puncture them. She found a tile that had been pulled up—no doubt someone looking for a hiding place in the floor. The small bedside table had been turned over and the drawers emptied. She found the contents scattered in a corner. Two expensive pens, one almost empty, the other full of ink.

  “Have you been writing, Seth?” she said aloud.

  It was then that she saw the pen drawing on the wall. It was of a large unusually shaped tree—or was it a Victorian-style gaslight?

  She righted the bed and saw that the pillows had been slit open—of course, good technique. The bed had been stripped and the mattress T-cut—more good technique.

  “The kid’s room?” Emerson asked.

  She nodded, although she was unsure whether a twenty-something was still considered a kid.

  “Nice tree,” Emerson said, pointing at the pen drawing on the wall. Then he started into the speech that Mallory had written for him. “You know trees have a mythological significance . . .”

  Yslan ignored the rest of what she thought of as Emerson’s self-serving exegesis and concentrated on the image on the wall. She remembered Decker’s one acting-class lecture on art. There had only been one, so it stood out as anomaly, since he often repeated concepts for his actors, but not this concept. He quoted Gertrude Stein’s response to criticism of art: “If you enjoy it, you understand it. In an attempt to understand art we miss the meaning.” Then he went on to criticize the Steins themselves, saying, “The Steins surrounded themselves in their Paris salon with Picassos, Matisses, Renoirs, Bonnards, Manguins, Nadelmans, Morgan Russells and Cézannes—paintings, sketches, letters, memorabilia of all sorts—just to get a whiff, a passing tendril of something else. Paintings are reachings—elongated fingers trying to touch that something else.” That had engendered a flurry of questions about this something else, but Decker had sidestepped them and gotten on with the class. In fact, Yslan hadn’t thought about that lecture until this very moment, staring at Seth’s drawing. She adjusted the light in the room and continued to ignore Emerson’s endless lecture. In the dimmer light she saw what she thought she’d sensed before. She’d seen something like this tree. Where? Then it hit her. All those months ago when she was in Namibia, grabbing Decker to take him back to help with the bombing investigation at Ancaster College in upper New York State. On their long silent drive to the airport in Windhoek she’d stopped to allow the men to relieve themselves by the side of the road, and there, on the very top of one of the few hills, was a single tree—not so unlike the one on the wall of Seth Roberts’ room.

  She turned to Emerson, who was still standing in the door frame. His lips had stopped moving. Good. Then she tilted her head to the right.

  “Am I out of focus?” Emerson asked.

  “No,” she said, “but . . .”

  “What?”

  “Stand still, Emerson.”

  “Like this?” he said, striking a pose.

  “No, just at ease.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah. You are perfectly symmetrical, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Start in the warehouse, I’ll be there in a second.”

  Emerson turned and left.

  Yslan slowly approached the door frame. Emerson was a perfect specimen. Exactly symmetrical—that’s why he was so beautiful. But if that was the case, why did it seem that the midsection of the left side of the door frame bulged towards him? She ran her hand slowly along the cheap lumber of the frame and felt it. “Clever, Seth, very clever,” she said aloud. She pulled back the wood strip on the left side of the door frame and there it was—a three by five Moleskine notebook.

  She glanced at the door, then sat on the upturned bed and opened the small black book.

  It was divided into three sections, each carefully titled: “Out of the Forest,” “In the Clearing” and “To the Glass House.”

  She read it carefully, cover to cover. There was a reference to two books he’d written and left on the hard drive of a library computer at the University of Victoria—and a poem on the very last page. She read that twice, then looked at the pen-drawn tree on the wall. “Maybe,” she whispered. “He’s a resourceful boy, so just maybe this is the way.” Then she stopped herself. How long had she been saying what she thought out loud? She didn’t know. But it had to stop—now.

  50

  YSLAN SEARCHES

  YSLAN LEFT SETH’S ROOM AND saw Emerson reading from his BlackBerry. “What?” she asked.

  He quickly erased the text message from Mallory—Has she found the tree drawing?—and turned it to her. She read the ad there calling for actors to play in a new reality show called The Institution.

  “So? That’s what Garreth Laurence told us.” She took a quick look at Emerson. He didn’t look all that good. She dismissed the notion and turned to the room and thought, It’s why the walls pivot and there are concealed camera ports, hidden microphones—all interesting, but not all that helpful in trying to figure out what happened here. She knew from Mr. T that Harrison had been there, but where the mysterious WJ was, who the fuck knew. She pushed against the wall behind the receptionist’s desk and it pivoted out of the way to reveal the large empty warehouse space. She allowed her feet to lead her. She forced herself not to think, just to follow instinct. She walked into the vast, empty warehouse. Then she stopped and turned back to the set of the fake reality TV show, The Institution. She saw Emerson standing by the fake receptionist’s desk and a thought hit her. Fake reality? Where’s the truth in a fake reality TV show
? And how the hell did the words “fake” and “reality” go together? More Brooklyn/Yankees. And more to the point, why were they trying to go together in her mind?

  She shook herself free of the thought and walked right to the middle of the huge space. She stopped and allowed herself to turn slowly, taking in every detail, cataloguing them as she turned. Halfway through her turn she saw it: a set of iron stairs leading up to a catwalk. There was something wrong with it; as she approached she saw what it was. The area beneath the stairs had been walled in and painted to look exactly like the wall behind it. Why would someone bother to do that? She banged her hand against the drywall. Hollow. It took her several minutes before she found the hidden latch. She opened the door and was confronted by video monitors on every wall, now unplugged, and what seemed to be a master console in the middle of the room.

  Everywhere the most modern of modern electronics—except to one side was a record player, a turntable. She hadn’t seen one in years, and she guessed that this one was quite expensive. She hit the power switch and the platter rotated silently. A quick search turned up four albums. All by Yo-Yo Ma.

  “Yo-Yo Ma—cello concerts,” she said aloud.

  There was a simple hard chair to one side—not an office chair at all. Attached to the front left leg was a flat wooden board with holes in it. Beside it were several long strands of hair. As she leaned down to pick one up, Emerson said, “Horsehair, expensive but necessary if you want to get the full sound from a classic cello.”

  She turned and saw him holding the Yo-Yo Ma records. She wanted to ask him why the hell he kept on sneaking up on her, but her cell phone buzzed—Homeland.

  She listened and then began to run.

  Emerson caught up to her. “What?”

  “They got a positive ID.”

  “Where?”

  “The Coronado Hotel, San Diego.”

  51

  YSLAN AT THE CORONADO HOTEL

  THE GUESTS AT THE SWANKY hotel, which featured an outdoor skating rink despite the eighty-degree temperature, were stunned when they were ordered, “Stay exactly where you are until you are told that you can move.”

  Forty Homeland Security agents circulated WJ’s photo to the annoyed and often annoying guests. Small bits of information began to flow to Yslan’s command centre in the front lobby. The man in the photo had arrived two days ago but had left. He’d taken an entire floor of the hotel. Had a hospital bed moved in. A sleeping young man was brought in on a gurney. And a doctor arrived.

  “Who was the doctor?”

  The hotel manager had no idea.

  “Surveillance videos?”

  The manager hesitated. Yslan turned to the nearest Homeland Security agent and announced loudly, “Arrest this man.”

  Before the agent had his cuffs out the manager had “managed” to find the surveillance videos.

  While Emerson oversaw the viewing of the tapes, Yslan went up to the room where the boy on the gurney had been kept. The gurney was still there, but of course there was no boy. Rosin dust by one of the chairs suggested that the cello player had been here. And then there was the tiny pencil drawing by the mirror above the sink in the bathroom, so faint it was almost invisible, of the same tree she’d seen drawn in pen in Seth’s room at the Wellness Dream Clinic. She leaned down and ran her fingers over the pencil lines. “What does this mean, Seth?”

  Her BlackBerry buzzed. “Yeah?”

  It was Emerson. “We found the doctor.”

  • • •

  There was no doctor in the small desert town. The best that WJ could find was an EMT who came to the motel and administered a huge dose of steroids to Seth. Then he hooked up the boy’s morphine drip and gave Seth the button. “You know how to administer this?” he asked.

  Seth nodded slowly and injected himself with a long hit of morphine.

  At the door the EMT pocketed WJ’s money, then said, “This boy needs a real doctor and a real hospital.”

  WJ held out more money. The EMT took it and left the shabby room.

  Moments later, Seth’s back arched and he vomited onto the bedspread.

  WJ pulled the thing off and threw it out the motel room door, then sat at the foot of the bed and said, “Hold on. The steroids will kick in soon and we’ll continue our little journey.”

  Seth didn’t reply—he’d already retreated into sleep.

  • • •

  Viola awoke with a start. She pulled her shawl around her tiny shoulders and stared out the window. “What lake is that?”

  “Superior,” Martin Armistaad said as he negotiated a tight turn on the two-lane Trans-Canada Highway.

  “Cold,” she said.

  “You’re cold?”

  “Yes, but that lake is cold—and so deep, so black, so cold.”

  They both knew it was cold like death, but neither said as much as the deep night of northern Ontario came in quickly and surrounded them.

  • • •

  Without warning or warrant Yslan and Emerson burst into the posh offices of Dr. Henry Kristoff in the Hillcrest district of San Diego. Emerson shoved the receptionist out of the way, and Yslan threw open the door to the good doctor’s office. The man was in the midst of a conference call, his speakerphone alive with voices. Yslan strode quickly to the large reclaimed wood desk and hit the disconnect button.

  A few moments of bluster and who-do-you-think-you-ares were followed by a surprising contrition and willingness to be of assistance.

  “And you didn’t think it odd to be called to the Coronado Hotel rather than a hospital for someone that sick?”

  “Not actually. I have a very wealthy clientele, and the really rich seem to resent death, as if it were only meant for lesser beings. So I’ve been summoned to various places on short notice. I was once flown by private plane to an island in the Caribbean to treat a man’s dying wife.”

  Yslan waited.

  “And, yes, she died.”

  “As we all must,” Emerson chimed in.

  The doctor nodded.

  “The Coronado Hotel?” Yslan prompted.

  “Two days ago. A very young, very sick man.”

  “Name?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Who called for you?”

  “It came through my service.” He quickly gave them the service name, and a tech was on it.

  “You said the boy was very sick. How sick?”

  “Dying. If he had two weeks I’d be surprised.”

  “Cancer?”

  “Badly treated cancer. There is no reason to die from bladder cancer of his sort.”

  “But he was dying?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “So what did you do for him?”

  “Everything possible, then I hooked him up to a strong morphine pump for the pain.”

  “Was he in much pain?”

  “Excruciating, I would think. I filled him up with steroids and a cocktail of supports that might, if he’s lucky, extend his life.”

  Yslan thought about that and finally said, “But not for long?”

  The doctor nodded. “The body is a magnificent machine, but just a machine, and it must be treated properly when it malfunctions.”

  “And it wasn’t this time?”

  Again the doctor nodded.

  Emerson took out the photo of WJ and put it in front of the doctor.

  The doctor put on a pair of reading glasses and glanced at the picture. “Yes. That is the boy’s father.”

  Emerson looked at Yslan.

  “Did that man say anything to you?”

  “Just ‘Do what you can for my boy.’ ”

  “That was it?”

  “Not another word.”

  Yslan thought about that, then said, “What about the boy?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “At first nothing. He was asleep, which was odd.”

  “Why odd?”

  “Well, as I
said, he had to be in tremendous pain. And . . .”

  “And what?”

  “He was asleep with his eyes open—and his eyes were in constant motion.”

  “REM cycles?” Emerson asked.

  “That would be my guess.”

  “Fine,” Yslan said, “but did he say anything, anything at all?”

  “He was in pain and on elaborate medication.”

  “Yes, but did he say anything?”

  “Nothing important—”

  “What did he say?”

  “The tree, the lamp, the tree, the lamp.”

  “What?”

  “Over and over again he said something about going to the tree, to the lamp, meet me at the tree, meet me at the lamp.”

  Back in the car, while Emerson was wrapping up, Yslan took out the book she’d found in Seth’s room at the Wellness Dream Clinic and read the poem at the end again, slowly:

  Story.

  With my dad

  At the Park.

  Hot.

  He sat beneath the great Tree.

  I wanted to explore.

  He said okay.

  As I ran down the hill he shouted.

  “I’m here beneath the tree.”

  I looked.

  He was sitting on the ground beneath a street lamp.

  Old street lamp—gaslight?

  He spoke again.

  “I’ll always be here beneath the tree waiting for you.

  “Whatever happens I’ll be here—waiting for you.”

  Yslan looked at the page and saw the tearstains on it and knew that to find the boy she’d have to find the father. And to find the father she’d have to get hold of Crazy Eddie—in the Junction.

  52

  YSLAN CALLS EDDIE

  THE PHONE BURRED ON EDDIE’S desk and he glanced at it. A phone number he didn’t recognize. He quickly punched the number into his ID RECON program and got the message Federal Restriction.

  Well, he only knew one fed of any sort, so he punched receive and said, “Couldn’t stand to be away from me a moment longer, Special Agent Yslan Hicks?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Too bad,” Eddie said, lighting a bomber and hitting disconnect on his phone all in one motion.

  His phone buzzed again. “Pizza, Pizza, would you like anchovies on your NSA special or just the usual crap?”