by Peter Straub
“The kid’ll beat the shit out of it for a couple of weeks, total it, and I’ll get the insurance. Perfect.” He all but covered his own face with kisses. Then he remembered that I had been in an accident and looked at me with a sort of humorous concern. “So you got run off the road? What happened?”
I went into the bathroom, and he stood outside the door while I splashed water on my face and told him about coming back from Tangent.
I rubbed my face with a towel. John was standing in the doorway, chewing on the inside of his cheek.
“He pulled a knife on me, but I got lucky. I broke his arm.”
“Jesus,” John said.
“Then I went inside the hotel and took a look at the room where they found April.”
“What happened to the guy?”
“He’s in the hospital now.”
I went toward the door, and John backed away and slapped me on the back as I came through. “What was the point of going to the room?”
“To see if I’d notice anything.”
“It must be pretty bad,” John said.
“I have the feeling I missed something, but I can’t work out what it was.”
“The cops have been over that room a million times. Ah, what am I saying? A cop is the one who did it.”
“I know who he is,” I said. “Let’s go downstairs, and I’ll tell you the rest of my adventures.”
“You found out his name in Tangent? Somebody described him?”
“Better than that,” I said.
3
JOHN,” I SAID, “I want to know where you were assigned after you brought the man you thought was Franklin Bachelor back to the States.”
We were sitting at the table, eating a dinner both of us had made up out of food we had come across in the refrigerator and the freezer. John wolfed down the meal as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. He’d had two substantial glasses of the hyacinth vodka while we worked in the kitchen and opened another bottle of the Chateau Petrus from his cellar.
Since we had come downstairs, he had been debating out loud with himself whether he should really go back to Arkham next year. If you thought about it, he said, his book was really a higher duty than meeting his classes. Maybe he should admit that he had to move on to a new phase of his life. My question interrupted this self-absorbed flow, and he looked up from his plate and stopped chewing. He washed down the food in his mouth with wine.
“You know exactly where I was. Lang Vei.”
“Weren’t you really somewhere else? A camp not far from Lang Vei?”
He frowned at me and sliced off another bit of veal. He took some more of the wine. “Is this more wild stuff you got from that quartermaster colonel?”
“Tell me.”
He set down his knife and fork. “Don’t you think the name of the cop is a lot more important? I’ve been really patient with you, Tim, I let you do your Julia Child number at the stove, but I don’t feel like rooting around in ancient history.”
“Did someone tell you to say that you’d been at Lang Vei?”
He gave me the look you’d give a mule that had decided to stop moving. Then he sighed. “Okay. After I finally made it to Khe Sanh, a colonel in Intelligence showed up and ordered me to tell people I’d been at Lang Vei. My orders were all rewritten, so as far as history goes, I was at Lang Vei.”
“Did you know why you were given those orders?”
“Sure. The army didn’t want to admit how badly it fucked up.”
“Where were you, if you weren’t at Lang Vei?”
“A little encampment called Lang Vo. We got wiped out right after Lang Vei was overrun. Me and a dozen Bru. The North Vietnamese took us apart.”
“After you came back from Langley, they sent you off to a postage stamp in the jungle.” So far, Colonel Runnel had been telling the truth. “Why did they do that?”
“Why do they do anything? That’s the kind of thing we did.”
“Did you think you were being punished for having brought back the wrong man?”
“It wasn’t punishment.” He glared at me. “I didn’t lose any rank.”
Maybe he was right. But I thought that Runnel was right, too. John was beginning to flush, turning red from the neck up. “Tell me what happened at Lang Vo.”
“It was a massacre.” He was looking straight into my eyes. “First they shelled us, and then North Vietnamese regulars swarmed in, and then the tanks blasted the hell out of whatever was left standing.” His entire face had turned red. “I felt like fucking Custer.”
“Custer didn’t get out alive,” I said.
“I don’t have to defend myself to you.” He jammed his fork into the home fries, brought one up to his mouth, and looked at it as if it had turned into a cockroach. He put the fork back down on his plate.
I said that I wanted to know what had happened.
“I made a mistake,” he said, and met my eyes again. “You want to know what happened, that’s what happened. I didn’t think they’d send so much force after us. I didn’t think it’d be a goddamn siege.”
I waited for him to explain how he had survived.
“Once things got hairy, I ordered everybody into this bunker, with firing slits raised above the ground. Two tunnels. It was a good system. It just didn’t work against that many men. They pounded the shit out of us. They fired a grenade in through one of the slits, and that was pretty much that. I wound up flat on the ground with about a dozen guys lying on top of me. I couldn’t see or hear. I could hardly breathe. All the blood almost drowned me. Finally, some guy got in through the tunnel and emptied a clip into us. Two, I think, but I wasn’t really counting.”
“You couldn’t see him.”
“I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “I thought I was dead. The way it turned out, I caught a round in my ass, and I had some grenade fragments in my legs. When I realized I was still alive, I crawled out. It took a long time.” He picked up his fork and stared at the fried bit of potato again before putting it back on his plate. “A hell of a long time. The tunnels had collapsed.”
I asked him if he remembered Francis Pinkel.
John almost smiled. “The little twerp who worked for Burrman? Sure. He came in the day before the shit hit the fan, gave us an hour of his precious time, and climbed back into the helicopter.”
According to Runnel’s mysterious informant, Pinkel had visited Lang Vo on the day of the assault. It made more sense as John told it: the assault on John’s camp would have taken at least a day to coordinate.
“Well,” I said, “the twerp reported sighting an A Team under an American officer after he lifted off.”
“Really?” John raised his eyebrows.
“Do you remember Tom Pasmore asking if anyone might have a reason to want to injure you?”
“Pasmore? He’s just living off his reputation.”
I said I didn’t think that was true, and John snorted in contempt. “What if I’d offered him a hundred thousand? Don’t kid yourself.”
“But the point is, can you think of anyone with a grudge against you?”
“Sure,” he said. He was beginning to get irritated again. “Last year I flunked a kid out of graduate school because he could hardly read. He has a grudge against me, but I don’t think he’d murder anybody.” John looked at me as if I were being deliberately simpleminded. “Am I wrong, or is there actually some point to this?”
“Did you ever think about the name of Fee Bandolier’s corporation?”
“Elvee? No. I never thought about it. I’m getting a little tired of this, Tim.” He pushed his plate away and poured more wine into his glass.
“Lang Vei,” I said. “Lang Vo.”
“This is nuts. I ask you a question, and you give me gobbledygook.”
“Fielding Bandolier enlisted in the army in 1961.”
“Great.”
“Under the name Franklin Bachelor,” I said. “I guess he has a thing about initials.”
John had been ra
ising his glass to his mouth. His arm stopped moving. His mouth opened a little wider, and his eyes turned cloudy. He took a big gulp of the wine and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Are you accusing me of something?”
“I’m accusing him, not you,” I said. “Bachelor is resourceful enough to have made it back to the States under someone else’s name. And he blamed you for his wife’s death.”
Anger flared in John’s eyes, and for a second I thought he might try to strangle me again. Then I saw a curtain of reflection pass across his face, and he began to look at me with a growing sense of understanding.
“Why would he wait all this time to get his revenge?”
“Because after he came into your bunker and emptied a couple of clips into the bodies, he thought you were dead.”
“So he wound up back here.” He said it flatly, as if this was to have been expected.
“He’s been living in Millhaven since 1979, but he had no idea that you were back here, too.”
“How did he find out that I was alive?”
“He saw your picture in the paper. He killed Grant Hoffman two days later. Five days after that, he tried to kill your wife. His father murdered people at five-day intervals, and he was just following the pattern, even writing the same words.”
“To make the murders look like they were connected to the old Blue Rose case.”
“When April began writing to the department about the case, he went into the files and removed his father’s statements. And moved his notes out of the Green Woman, in case anyone else got curious.”
“Franklin Bachelor,” John said. “The Last Irregular.”
“Nobody knew what he really was,” I said. “He had a lifetime of pretending to be someone else.”
“Tell me his name,” John said.
“Paul Fontaine,” I said.
John repeated the detective’s name, slowly, his voice rising at the end. “I can’t believe it. Are you sure?”
“The man I saw in Ohio put his finger right on Fontaine’s face,” I said.
The telephone went off like a bomb, and I jumped no more than a foot or two.
The answering machine cut in, and we heard Alan Brookner’s conversational bellow, raised about 10 percent above its usual volume. “Goddamn it, will you answer the phone? I’m sitting here all alone, the whole city’s going crazy, and—”
John was already on his feet. Alan’s voice clicked off as soon as John picked up the receiver, and from then on I could hear only half of the conversation. John was being placating, but to judge from the number of times he said, “Alan, I can hear you” and “No, I haven’t been avoiding you,” placation did not occur. “No, the police haven’t been in touch,” he said, and moved the receiver a few inches from his ear. “I will, I will,” he said. “Of course you’re worried. Everybody’s worried.” He moved the receiver away from his ear again. Then: “I know you don’t care about what everybody else does, Alan, you never have.” He endured another long tirade, during which my guilt at not having visited Alan Brookner increased exponentially.
He put down the receiver and did a brief mime of exhausted patience, wobbling his knees and shaking his hands and his head. “He assured me that he was going to call again. Is that startling news? No, it is not.”
“I guess we’ve been ignoring him,” I said.
“Alan Brookner has never been ignored for five whole minutes at a time.” John came back into the living room and collapsed into his chair. “The problem is that Eliza goes home at five o’clock. All he has to do is eat the dinner she has warming in the oven, take off his clothes, and go to bed. But of course he doesn’t do that. He has a couple of drinks and forgets about dinner. He watches the news, imagining it will be about himself and his daughter, there can’t possibly be any other topic, the concept is ridiculous, and when he sees burning buildings and gunmen flitting through the fog he imagines that he is in danger”—John paused for a deep breath—“because it cannot be possible that what’s on the news is not directly related to him.”
“Isn’t he just alarmed?”
“I’ve known him a lot longer than you have,” John said. “He’s going to keep on calling until I go over there.” He looked up at me with a speculative gleam. “Unless you go. He adores you.”
“I don’t mind visiting Alan,” I said.
“You must be some kind of frustrated nurse,” John grumbled. “Anyhow, what do you say? If we’re going to take a look inside Fontaine’s house, this is the night.” He made a third attempt at eating the home fry on his fork, and this time got it into his mouth. Chewing, he challenged me with a look. I did not respond. He shook his head in disgust and polished off the last of the veal. Then he slugged down a mouthful of wine and kept his eyes on me, trying to provoke me into agreement.
“God, Tim, I hate to say this, but I seem to be the only guy around here who’s willing to see a little action.”
I stared at him, and then I began to laugh.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I spoke out of turn. Let’s see how bad it is before we make up our minds.”
4
WE SETTLED ONTO THE COUCH in the living room, and John flicked on the television with the remote.
Looking more distressed than I had ever seen him, his hair slightly rumpled, his conservative tie out of plumb, Jimbo appeared on the screen, announcing for the hundredth time that the members of the Committee for a Just Millhaven had appeared at City Hall, led by the Reverend Clement Moore and accompanied by several hundred demonstrators, demanding a meeting with Merlin Waterford and a reconsideration of their demands. The mayor had sent out his deputy with the message that unscheduled appointments had never been and never would be permitted. The delegation had refused to leave the building. Arden Vass had sent in police to disperse the crowd, and after demands, counterdemands, and speeches, a teenage boy had been shot and killed by an officer who thought he had seen a pistol in the boy’s hand. From a jail cell, the Reverend Clement Moore had issued the statement that “Decades of racial injustice, racial insensitivity, and economic oppression had finally come home to roost, and the fires of rage will not be banked.”
A police car had been overturned and set on fire on North Sixteenth Street. Homemade incendiary bombs thrown into two white-owned businesses on Messmer Avenue had spread through the neighboring buildings, and fire fighters responding to the emergency had been fired upon from rooftops across the street.
Behind Jimbo’s face, a camera showed figures running through the fog carrying television sets, piles of suits and dresses, armloads of groceries, mufflers, running shoes tied together by their laces. People trotted out of the fog, waved steaks and halogen lamps and cane-backed chairs at the camera, and disappeared again into the haze.
“Damage is presently estimated at the five-million-dollar level,” Jimbo said. “For a report on some other disturbing aspects of the situation, here is Isobel Archer, live from Armory Place.”
Isobel appeared on the near side of a solid line of policemen separating her from a chaotic mob. She raised her voice to be heard over chants and howls. “Reports of isolated fires and incidents of shooting have begun to come in from other sections of the city,” she said. A faint but distinct noise of breaking glass made her look over her shoulder. “There have been several accounts of drivers being dragged from their cars on Central Divide and Illinois Avenue, and several downtown merchants have hired private security firms to protect their stores. I’m told that gangs of armed rioters are traveling in cars and shooting at other vehicles. Lone pedestrians have been attacked and beaten on Livermore Avenue and Fifteenth Street Avenue.” She winced at loud gunshots from somewhere on the far side of the line of police. “At this point, I’m told that we are moving to the top of police headquarters, where we may be able to show you something of the scale of the destruction.”
The anchor’s stolid face appeared again on a split screen. “On a personal note, Isobel, do you feel in danger yourself?”
“I
believe that’s why we’re going to try to get to the roof,” she said.
Jimbo filled the entire screen again. “While Isobel moves to a safer location, we advise all residents to draw their curtains, stay away from their windows, and refrain from leaving the house. Now. This just in. There are unconfirmed reports of arson and random gunfire in the fifteen hundred block of Western Boulevard, the twelve hundred block of Fifteenth Street Avenue, and sections of the near west side near the Galaxy Shopping Center. And now, Joe Ruddier with a commentary.”
Mouth already open, eyes flaring, cheeks blazing, Joe Ruddier’s irate, balloonlike visage zoomed onto the screen. He looked as if he had just charged out of a cage. “If any good comes out of this, it ought to be that those uninformed, soft-headed idiots who babble about gun control will finally come to their senses!”
“This is the ideal time to take Fontaine’s house apart,” John said. He went into the kitchen and came back with his glass and the rest of the wine. A little windblown and out of breath, Isobel Archer appeared on top of police headquarters to point at the places where we would be able to see fires, had we been able to see them.
“This place is going to look like San Francisco after the great quake,” John said.
“The fog won’t last that long,” I said. “It’ll be gone by about midnight.”
“Oh, yeah,” John said. “And Paul Fontaine will turn up at the front door, tell us he found Jesus too, and apologize for all the trouble he caused me.”
Alan Brookner called back around ten o’clock and held John on the phone for twenty minutes, ten of which John spent with the receiver a foot away from his head. When he hung up, he went straight into the kitchen and made a fresh drink.
