by Dean Koontz
Okay, but why did she take the stuffed-toy eye?
I do not have a theory. This Eve Adams, this Fiona Cassidy, is perhaps a psychopath, in which case we have no hope of understanding her motives or her mind.
That’s not very comforting, sir.
No, Jonah Kirk, it is not.
Our little get-together to mark the woman’s departure had taken on a decidedly solemn note for a celebration. When we found ourselves sharing dour silences more than conversation, I decided it was time to leave. As I opened the door, Mr. Yoshioka handed me a plain white business card that featured only his name, and centered under it a single word in italics, tailor, and under that a telephone number.
That is my work number. If I am not at home, you can call me there in an emergency.
What emergency?
Any emergency, Jonah Kirk.
Maybe there won’t be one.
Maybe there will not.
But I kinda think there might be.
I think so as well.
36
1966 had been a year of growing tumult. Escalating war in Vietnam. All those murdered student nurses in Chicago. The Austin tower sniper shooting down—and down upon—people as though he were a mad god on a high throne.
Race riots had rocked Atlanta and Chicago, and our city, too. In the civil-rights arena, sober men like Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy advised change by peaceable means, while Stokely Carmichael found threats effective, and more radical groups like the Black Panthers advocated violence. As you might assume, Grandpa Teddy’s sympathies were entirely with the advocates of nonviolence, as were Grandma Anita’s and Sylvia’s.
Anti-war protests were growing. In our city, on October 18, bombs went off during the night in two military-recruiting offices. No one was killed or injured. Police released an artist’s rendering of a suspect based on eyewitness accounts of a man seen lurking in the vicinity of one of the targets. I’d never seen him before … and yet something about him was familiar and intriguing. In fact, after my mother dropped the newspaper in the trash, I quietly retrieved it and clipped out the police artist’s portrait and put it in my La Florentine box.
I didn’t know what to make of all the social chaos, and I tried to heed my mother’s advice, which was essentially to live from the inside out, not from the outside in. The news wasn’t all the news, she’d said, and what held the world together was the way all those people who never made the news were inclined to live their lives.
Whatever else might be happening, the music that year was so fine. Percy Sledge. The Mamas and the Papas. Simon and Garfunkel. Motown—the Four Tops, the Supremes, the Miracles. The Beatles’ album Revolver. Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Jim McGuinn’s shimmering guitar on the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.”
October gave way to November, and with the approach of winter, the country calmed down somewhat—though not for long. The divorce papers came, signed by my absent father, approved by a court, and although marriage was a sacrament to Sylvia, we were living in a time when fewer and fewer people agreed with her. We enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ house, and they invited friends who had no families of their own.
On Christmas Eve, my mother and I and Teddy and Anita went to Mass together. The shadowy church was lit only by an overhead light trained on the altar and by the flames of hundreds of flickering candles in glass cups set all around the nave. If you squinted, the columns and vaults seemed to melt away, all the grandness of the architecture receded, and the space became intimate, almost as if you were cast back many centuries to a humble place where a miracle had occurred, where the radiance issued not from candles but from the air itself, back to a less hectic era before the invention of clocks, to a night of peace from which a renewed world would then begin to date itself.
Four days later, on the evening of December 28, after reading in bed for an hour, before turning off the light, I took the tin box from my nightstand. In the weeks immediately after the destruction of the two recruiting offices, I had occasionally studied the pencil portrait of the suspected bomber, not sure why it fascinated me, but my interest had waned, and I hadn’t looked at the drawing for perhaps a month. This time, the moment I turned the clipping faceup in the lamplight, I realized that the description given by the witness to the police artist had resulted in a woefully inaccurate portrait of Lucas Drackman.
Before I had dreamed of Fiona Cassidy, I had dreamed of Lucas Drackman, on the night of the day that I had gone to the community center, discovered the promised piano, and had begun formal lessons with Mrs. O’Toole. When, in sleep, I first saw him, he was a teenager who had already killed his parents in their bed and was busy stealing what cash and jewelry and credit cards he could find. In memory, I could still hear him as he stood beside the bloody bed, speaking to his dead father: Hey there, Bob. What’s it like in Hell, Bob? You think now maybe sending me away to a freakin’ military academy was really stupid, Bob? You ignorant, self-righteous son of a bitch.
Either the witness had given an inadequate description or the artist had not successfully translated the description to paper. Lucas Drackman’s deep-set eyes had not been captured, nor the true bone structure and shape of his face. Although the nose appeared hawkish, like the murderer’s, it was too narrow, too pointed. The feature most accurately portrayed was his ripe and almost girlish mouth, which in life contrasted even more dramatically with his otherwise ascetic face than it did in the drawing.
37
The next day, December 29, was a Thursday, and of course I was still on school holiday. Mom didn’t have to sing that night; Slinky’s had closed to be lavishly decorated for the huge business it would do on the last two nights of the year. She had a five-hour shift at Woolworth’s; and then she would come home to spend the evening with me. Because she couldn’t be there on New Year’s Eve or on the eve before, she wanted that night’s dinner to be our celebration. She gave me money to get takeout from The Royal, the nearby diner on Forestall Street, where on some of our most special days together we had breakfast. They made the best chili in the world—a sign in their window announced that fact—and cheese bread so good that I sometimes dreamed about it. I was tasked with buying chili (which Mom would serve over buttered noodles), cheese bread, and whatever I wanted for dessert.
The day was cold but not bitter. I wore my zip-up quilted jacket, which was somewhat too big for me, because even though I was skinny and a bit short for my age, I grew too fast to get much use out of clothes if everything was bought to fit perfectly. Coats were more expensive than jeans and shirts, so I always had to wear them somewhat large to start and then gradually grow into them. I wore my new toboggan hat, too, which was striped red and white and topped with a red pom-pom that—in retrospect I am amazed to reveal—I thought was the essence of cool.
Although it was smack between breakfast and lunch rushes when I got to The Royal, the place was busy, as always. A few tables were available, so that the only people standing were those at the takeout window near the front.
I got in line to place my order, not at all impatient because I delighted in the atmosphere of the diner. Such a mélange of aromas. Hamburger patties on the griddle, bubbling with melted cheese. Bacon. Butter-scrambled eggs with ham. Mere bread becoming toast. All of those smells and more were threaded through with cigarette smoke; if you did not live through those times, you will need some imagination to understand how reliably people tolerated one another’s habits and foibles in those days.
Clink of flatware, clatter of dishes, waitresses calling out orders in diner lingo, a ceaselessly rising and falling and rising tide of conversation among the customers: It was music of a kind, at the same time soothing and invigorating, such a human place and time, when no one texted at the table or had an Internet to surf while they ate or carried a cell phone the ring of which could never be ignored.
Waiting in line, I enjoyed looking around, seeing the different kinds of p
eople, wondering who they were, what lives they returned to when they left The Royal—and it was then that I saw Tilton, my father. Against the farther wall, a row of booths extended the length of the diner. He sat in one toward the back, in animated conversation with someone across the table from him, gesturing with a fork.
I almost didn’t recognize him because he’d grown a beard. He wore a black turtleneck and some kind of silver medallion on a silver chain.
Because the booths had high backs, I couldn’t see the companion with whom Tilton so vigorously conversed. I wondered if it might be Miss Delvane, the writer and would-be rodeo novelist. I was curious, of course, but I was more spooked than anything.
If Tilton glanced in my direction and spotted me, nothing good could follow. Not yet having placed my takeout order, I turned at once away from him and hurried to the door, praying that nothing I wore would identify me to him. The quilted jacket was identical to a million others. Although my striped toboggan cap was a beacon on my head, my mother had given it to me for Christmas, less than a week earlier, and my father had never seen it.
Outside, leaving the congenial world of The Royal, slapped in the face by a gust of cold wind, I initially intended to run, to get out of the immediate neighborhood and beyond Tilton’s reach. But I’d gone not ten feet when intuition took hold of me as surely as a hand gripping my arm, brought me to a stop, and told me that I needed to know with whom my father was having a late breakfast or early lunch, that the identity of his companion must be of crucial importance.
After all these years, I occasionally wonder how my life would have been different if in that fateful moment I had followed my first impulse and had run. But I suppose that what we call intuition is just one of the many ways that the still small voice in our souls speaks to us, if we will listen, and that inner companion wants only what is best for us. If I had run, no doubt what might have happened to me would have been far worse than what did happen, my losses even greater than they have been, my story darker than the one I’ve lived. And yet I wonder.
38
Directly across Forestall Street from The Royal stood a shoe-repair shop on the ground level of a century-old four-story brick building, the upper floors of which might have offered either offices for businesses with uncertain prospects or apartments even cheaper than our own. Beside that structure lay an empty plot of ground, where another building had been torn down in the name of progress; but progress evidently had gone elsewhere. A decrepit chain-link fence surrounded the lot; years earlier the gate had been broken down and never replaced. In warmer weather, neighborhood kids gathered there to play kickball and other games.
When I came out of the diner, traffic was light, and I crossed the street in mid-block. The bright sun painted the pavement with the black shadows of bare-limbed trees, and in the fitful winter wind, those silhouettes twitched underfoot like the many tangled legs of agitated spiders.
I went through the gap in the fence where the gate had once been and stood behind the chain-link, watching the diner. Around me, the ground was mostly barren, hard-packed dirt with here and there a few bristles of withered weeds, empty soda-pop cans, and scraps of paper litter.
Overhead, the winter-stripped limbs of the trees scratched at one another and rattled when a gust of the inconstant wind passed through them. The last birds hardy enough to perch in those leafless bowers cast themselves, with much flapping of wings and shrieking, into a rush of wind and let it carry them to roosts in the more sheltered eaves of nearby buildings.
When my father came out of the diner, he was not in the company of Miss Delvane. Instead, the man with him was a few inches past six feet, with long dirty-blond hair that the wind tossed. They huddled for a moment, sharing a last word, and then my father walked west toward the avenue. His tall companion stood at the curb until a cluster of cars passed, and then he crossed the street as if he had business at the shoe-repair shop.
Having crossed, however, he turned east toward me, and I found a soda can to kick along the fence, hoping to pass for a bored kid with nothing more interesting to do than to haunt a vacant lot and hope others like me might come along for a game of kickball. I noisily booted the can eastward, then turned and kicked it toward the west, looking up at him as he approached along the farther side of the chain-link.
Although his short hair was now long, although he had a poorly groomed mustache when once he had been clean-shaven, although he was perhaps twenty-five instead of seventeen, as he had been when I had seen him in a dream, I recognized him at once. Lucas Drackman. Murderer of his parents. Bomber of military-recruitment offices. He so little resembled the police artist’s portrait that he was in no danger whatsoever of being identified by it.
In memory, I heard the voice of Miss Pearl, who had seemed to be in my bedroom, sitting on the edge of my bed, on the night that I dreamed of this killer: Go to sleep, Ducks. Go to sleep now. I have a name for you, a name and a face and a dream. The name is Lucas Drackman and the face is his.
His dragon-smoke breath pluming from his open mouth, he met my eyes through the fence, and for a moment I couldn’t look away from him, for I felt that I was staring into the eyes not of a man but of a demon. Perhaps in that moment, he sensed that my interest was not that of someone to whom he was a stranger, because when I moved again and sent the can tumbling, he came to a halt. I kept going, kicking that tortured scrap of aluminum to the west end of the property, turned, and started back, pretending that I didn’t realize he was waiting for me.
As I approached him, he said, “Hey, kid.”
Trying to look pissed-off at the world rather than frightened, I dared to look at him.
He studied me for a moment and then said, “What’s with you?”
I did what I thought a juvenile delinquent in the making might have done. I flipped him my middle finger and turned away and booted the can hard toward the center of the vacant lot. I gave that can hell for a while, kicking it this way and that half a dozen times, and when at last I looked toward the fence, Lucas Drackman had gone.
39
At home, after putting the cheese bread in the oven, which served as our breadbox, the chili and cupcakes in the refrigerator, I took Mr. Yoshioka’s business card from my wallet and went to the telephone.
The card provided no company name, but a woman answered the phone with, “Metropolitan Suits. May I help you?”
Although she must have thought it peculiar that a young boy would be ringing them up, she didn’t hesitate to give me their address when I asked for it.
I felt the need to consult with Mr. Yoshioka at once, but what I had to tell him could be conveyed convincingly only face-to-face. The address I’d been given was in the city’s Garment District, two short blocks and four long blocks from our apartment, farther than I had permission to roam alone. I regret to say that I hesitated not at all to be disobedient, but instead set out at once.
At the street number that I’d written on the card, I found a large, plain single-story building, impressive only for its size. The street was almost clogged with big trucks making deliveries and picking up shipments at an array of businesses. A marshaling yard on the north side of Metropolitan Suits, adjacent to the company’s loading docks, seemed to be the busiest place of all.
The front door brought me into a reception area. To the right, a counter separated the public space from four desks where women sat typing, working adding machines, and answering phones. The center of the room was open, and to the left were eight chairs, all empty, and a coffee table on which glossy magazines were fanned like a hand of cards.
One of the women got up from her desk, a nice older lady with curly gray hair, and came to the counter and smiled and asked if she could help me.
“I need to see Mr. George T. Yoshioka, please. I’m sorry to bother him on the job, I don’t want to get him fired or anything, but it’s very important, it’s an emergency.”
“And your name?” she asked.
“Jonah Ellington Ba
sie Hines—” I checked myself. “Jonah Kirk, ma’am. I’m Mr. Yoshioka’s neighbor. He’s fifth floor, see, and my mom and me are on the fourth.”
Indicating the chairs around the table of magazines, she said, “Have a seat, Jonah, and I’ll let Mr. Yoshioka know you’re here.”
I was too nervous to sit. I stood in the center of the room, shifting from foot to foot, taking off my gloves and stuffing them in my jacket pockets.
When the lady returned to her desk and picked up the phone, I could hear her voice, soft and low, but I couldn’t make out a word.
The many trucks in the marshaling yard suggested the company must be successful, but you wouldn’t know it from the condition of the reception lounge. Painted concrete floor. Cheap wood paneling. An acoustic-tile ceiling. The chairs looked like army surplus.
At the counter again, the gray-haired lady said, “Mr. Yoshioka will join you in a minute.” She seemed to realize that in my highly agitated state, I couldn’t bear to sit down. Pointing to an inner door directly opposite the outer one, she said, “He’ll be coming through there.”
She didn’t invite me to open that door, but I opened it anyway, without thinking. Beyond lay an immense, well-lighted chamber with a complex truss ceiling, the thick tie beams of which were supported by rows of tall steel poles. A couple of hundred people toiled in what appeared to be long-practiced rhythms. At the nearer end, men worked in pairs at wide tables, with great bolts of material that could be drawn as needed from enormous spools suspended from the beams overhead. They chalked the material to match patterns they placed upon it and then, with large and wickedly sharp shears, cut quickly and precisely to the chalk line. Farther back, still more men sat at smaller tables, operating industrial sewing machines; each was attended by a younger man ever on his feet, supplying his superior with pre-cut pieces of material, lining fabric, and other items just when needed. These younger men were the only employees on the floor who didn’t wear suits and ties, though the older men worked in their shirtsleeves, their suit coats draped on nearby chairs. To a boy’s eye, that farther end of the vast room had a macabre quality, for throughout stood tailors’ dummies, mannequins of various sizes, all of them headless. In the back wall were three widely separated pairs of doors leading to other realms of the Metropolitan maze.
