“Consider yourself begged.”
“Not good enough.”
“What is it, Larry? You want me to swear I’m on my knees or something?”
He giggled. “I wouldn’t care if you were standing on your head.”
“Then what is it?” I was really starting to regret finding him at home.
“Did you like me?” he asked.
“Did I what?”
He repeated: “Did you like me?”
“Christ, Larry, I feel like I’m in Fiddler on the Roof. What does it matter?”
“Maybe your future depends on it or maybe you would like your brother to defend you?”
“I didn’t ask my brother. I’m asking you.”
“Answer my question,” he persisted.
“Yes, Larry, I liked you. What, do you think I was always sticking my neck out for you because I was Abraham Lincoln? I’m no hero. I did that shit when we were kids because you were different, driven, but not like Jeffrey. With him it was like success was preordained, like he had it coming. If I had what you had, Larry, I’d be the most famous fucking writer in the world, not some putz peddling his screenplay ideas like a Fuller Brush man. And you could make me laugh. That’s it, you could make me laugh.”
“You’re not a putz, Dylan, but I’m real tired of owing you.”
“That’s the joke,” I told him, “you never owed me anything.”
“I’ll take the case,” he said almost before I finished my sentence.
“Don’t you wanna know if I-”
“You didn’t do it, so shut up and stop wasting my time.”
“Okay.”
“Dylan, just one thing. Why do you need a lawyer?”
“I want to turn myself in.” The words came out, but I couldn’t believe I’d said them. “There’s some people I need to protect.”
“This have anything to do with your nephew? Don’t tell me he whacked the girl.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Larry.”
“I have to meet you and talk,” he explained, “then we can arrange terms with the cops to turn yourself in. Where are you?”
“I’m in-”
MacClough stepped out of the shadows and depressed the phone button before I could finish. I could barely make his face out in the dark, but I knew it was him. I continued to hold the mute phone to my ear like a stage prop.
“No one,” MacClough whispered, taking the phone from my hand, “is turning himself in. No one.”
I thought about arguing with him, but his face told me not to bother. That face of his made me think twice. MacClough wasn’t an unreasonable guy. You could sway him sometimes. Then there were times, times like this, that you just knew he wasn’t moving. You would have better luck lifting the Statue of Liberty on your back and walking it to Prospect Park. I was just as glad to go to bed right then. I wasn’t so eager to surrender that I needed to throw myself at the cops in the middle of the night.
Cancer Face
For the first time since I’d gotten to Guppy’s underground palace of Red paranoia, we ate breakfast together. I whipped up some omelets and bacon and toast, keeping Guppy as far away from the kitchen as possible. We dined in the bunker. The fact was, we had spent little if any time as a group. We all seemed far too preoccupied with our own guilts and ghosts to bother with socializing. And when we did attempt to make small talk, the small talk tended to degenerate into anger, the anger into silence, the silence into separation.
The only noise at breakfast was the scraping of silverware on cheap china. No one mentioned my phone calls or my plans of surrender, though I felt sure that Zak and Guppy had some sense of what was going on. The weather had broken finally and Guppy could no longer avoid work. With the better weather came the paper. As we ate, it sat folded and untouched like a boobytrapped centerpiece at your cousin Mary’s wedding. Everybody wanted to take it home, but were afraid of what might happen if they made the first grab. I thought I caught Zak’s arm twitch as if he had decided to go for it only to change his mind at the last moment.
“For chrissakes!” MacClough growled, unfolding the paper to show us the front page. “Take a gander.”
I looked like hell in black and white. Sometimes I think newspapers purposefully hunt down your ugliest photo before going to press. The Riversborough Gazette had nearly succeeded. It wasn’t my investigator’s license photo-Sorry, MacClough. It wasn’t my bar mitzvah portrait-I’d burned all the copies. What it was was a head shot of me at Sissy Randazzo’s prom. I sported an afro the size of a small asteroid, no beard, and a mustache that could have been a caterpillar, but never a moth. The grainy reproduction made it impossible to differentiate between my acne and freckles. The lapels on my polyester tux were piped in dark felt and wider than the thirteenth and fourteenth fairways at Augusta. The ruffles on my shirt added three inches to my chest and my bow tie looked like two yield signs welded together. The fact that one of my eyes was half closed when the picture was taken did nothing to enhance my already splendid visage and attire. It did, however, make me look like an escapee from an Ed Wood movie.
And all along I was thinking that Sissy Randazzo had forgiven me for grabbing her nipples that night and pretending to tune in Radio Free Europe. You never can tell. On the other hand, as Guppy was quick to point out, no one would ever recognize me now from that picture. We all actually had a pretty good laugh at my old self. MacClough stopped laughing first. We were quiet again.
“What?”
“They think you’re here,” Johnny said.
“Here!” Guppy was disbelieving.
Zak jumped up. “Let’s get-”
“Not in this house,” MacClough shoved Zak back down in his seat. “In Riversborough.”
“So what?” I was curious. “We know that from TV.”
“From what it says here, the cops are thinking of starting a house to house for you now that the weather’s calmed down.”
“I’m safe down here,” I said.
MacClough sneered: “Yeah, Hitler had the same idea.”
“Maybe I should not go to work.”
“No!” Johnny and I chimed. “You go. We can’t afford to raise any suspicions,” he finished.
Then something hit me. I don’t know, it was like stepping into a hole that was camouflaged by fallen leaves. You’re not expecting to fall and all of a sudden boom, you’re down.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what, Uncle Dylan?
“Why here?”
“Why here what?” Guppy joined in.
“Don’t mind him,” MacClough teased, “the pressure’s gettin’ to him.”
“No. Listen, we’ve been going round and around, asking ourselves a thousand questions, but not getting the answers we need. Why do you think that is? It’s because we haven’t been asking the right question.”
“So,” Zak wondered, “what’s the right question?”
“Why here?” I repeated.
“Jesus, that shit again.”
“Why Riversborough?” I screamed at MacClough. “Why here? What makes Riversborough the Isotope capital of the northeast? What’s here? Come on guys, what’s here?
“The school,” Zak said.
“The ski resorts,” Guppy added.
“Canada,” MacClough chimed in unenthusiastically.
“Exactly.,” I counted off on my fingers.‘ “The school, ski resorts, and Canada’s just a few miles north of here.”
John was unimpressed. “So what? There must be twenty places in northern New York within pissing distance of Canada that have schools and resorts of one kind or another. Look at Plattsburgh.”
“But Valencia Jones didn’t go to the state university at Plattsburgh. She wasn’t arrested for drug smuggling leaving a ski resort near Plattsburgh. No one in Plattsburgh felt threatened enough by our presence to have people murdered, MacClough. No one felt they had to burn down a ski resort in-”
“Okay,” he relented, “you’ve made your point, but how does this ge
t us any closer to anything?”
“Guppy, you think you can find out who owns Cyclone Ridge and the Old Watermill?”
“When I arrive home from work, I will set out to accomplish what you ask. I believe I should be able to get into some systems which will-”
“Yes or no?” I cut him off.
“Probably.”
“I’ll settle for probably.”
Guppy thought about expanding on his answer, but one look at MacClough and me convinced him to skip it. He excused himself and went off to work. Johnny admonished him to keep his eyes and ears open and to try and get hold of the New York City papers. When Guppy had gone, we finished our breakfasts and passed the paper around.
“I know who owns the Old Watermill,” Zak said almost sheepishly.
“You do?” I asked. “Who?”
“The school.”
“The school!” MacClough puzzled. “Your school?”
“My school.”
MacClough was skeptical. “I never heard of such a thing. You sure?”
I answered for Zak and explained how it made perfect sense for a college to own a hotel, particularly in a small town. Schools often have to put visiting faculty up for a few days or for a few months. On parents’ weekends, you could guarantee a large number of rooms. I confessed that I had never thought Riversborough the kind of school that needed its own hotel. Usually, it was the sports powerhouse schools that invested in hotels.
“So,” MacClough’s voice smiled, “if colleges can own hotels, they can own ski resorts, right?”
“Holy shit!” Zak and I exclaimed in unison.
“My thoughts exactly,” Johnny winked. “Holy fuckin’ shit indeed.” Now I almost wished the Guppster had hung around.
I hadn’t noticed myself in the mirror since. . in days, anyway. Maybe it was that glorious reproduction of Sissy Randazzo’s prom picture that moved me to do it, to take a look. Maybe it was about time to face the truth about things, about my future or lack thereof. I’d like to think it was simply because my beard was getting scruffy and itchy and I needed a shave.
A lost face stared back at me, lonesome, childish almost. But for the beard it was my face at four. I was four when we first found out about my dad. Well, we found out he was sick. With what, we weren’t told. But its name was whispered in dark corners when my parents thought they were alone. It’s funny how parents try to protect themselves by protecting you. That was the face, the cancer face, the word whispered in the dark. I was lost then, too.
Most of the superficial scratches had already faded so that they were just traces now. I guess you can’t force a dead hand to scratch with the same enthusiasm as a live one might in anger. The deeper cuts had begun to scab over. Very attractive and not too obvious to a blind man. I shaved my beard off. And I was fully four years old again; wide, sad eyes and chubby-cheeked. But back then, I didn’t know my eyes were blue. I swear to God, I assumed they were brown. What do four-year-olds know from blue eyes? To me, the world had brown eyes like my father. It was good to have the beard off. I was tired of hiding from myself, even more so than from the authorities.
Staring into the mirror, my face morphed into Kira’s. The details of her face were sketchy to me. I hadn’t had the time to know it, its range of expressions, its lines and creases. What I had of it, all I would ever have of it, would have to be enough. And I vowed to the faces in the mirror, all the faces-my beardless face, cancer face, and Kira’s-that I would find some reason in her death even if finding it meant sacrificing myself in the process. You know the kind of promise. You’ve read the words in a hundred cheesy novels. You’ve heard them spoken in twenty cheesy movies. But the words I spoke were not empty words. Some promises are meant to be kept.
Another Planet
The end began with Guppy’s most elegant exclamation: “He’s gone!”
Guppy had gotten back from work at 7:00 P.M. with a bag of groceries and the New York City papers. He seemed edgy, which was saying something for Guppy. With his dark puppy-dog eyes and calm, sweet expression, he often appeared unaffected by the pressure. Not tonight. It was as if he had sensed what was coming. His report to John and me about the Riversborough scuttlebutt was terse and discouraging.
The cops had tracked down the trucker who’d given me the lift back into town. And after coming up dry north of the border, the cops were now prepared to believe I was still in the vicinity of Riversborough. They had, as John had earlier mentioned, begun canvassing whole sections of town. It wouldn’t be long, Guppy said, before they got to his neighborhood. We agreed that the cops, lacking a warrant, were unlikely to find the old bomb shelter. Even so, Guppy was unnerved.
“For chrissakes,” MacClough prodded, “if there’s somethin’ else, you gotta tell us now. We can’t afford for the cops to show up here and catch us with our pants around our ankles.”
“I am afraid,” he said, “that we are in danger of being found out.”
“Why?” I was more than curious. “How?”
“Apparently, it has raised some suspicions with the constabulary that the waiter at the Manhattan Court Coffee House remembered me speaking with you that day and that you asked after me.”
“Coincidence,” MacClough dismissed. “Klein musta talked to a hundred people since he got here. I don’t think the cops suspect any of them.”
“Unfortunately, Mr. MacClough, I don’t think you are fully aware of all the specifics. You see, Mr. Klein came to me the day of the murder. A woman customer reported seeing him at the bookstore only a short while after he left.”
MacClough’s face soured. “Shit!”
“By your expression,” said Guppy, “I can see you understand the full implications of these two incidents.”
“Is this guy from India or another planet?” MacClough wondered half-jokingly. “I was a fuckin’ NYPD detective. Of course I understand. We gotta get you outta here, Klein, and fast. You,” he pointed to Guppy, “get Zak and tell him he’s got five minutes to get his ass in gear.”
“But-” Guppy began.
“But nothin’. There’s a good shot the cops are gonna show up here with a warrant in hand. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an unmarked car sitting out front right now. So move,” John shouted at our host.
This time, Guppy did not question John’s reasoning and ran to fetch my nephew. MacClough and I just stared at one another. What was there to say? I knew that my life as a free man was about to end.
“I’m just going to give myself up.”
“Christ, Klein, not that shit again.”
“No, John, I have to. I’m not going to get caught slinking around. I owe it to Kira to tell my story with my head up. If they catch me trying to escape, no one will listen. The whole world’ll think I’m guilty.”
“The whole world already does.”
“I’m sorry, MacClough, I’ve gotta do this.” I started to move to the bulkhead door.
He grabbed me, straining more than he should have to to hold on. I noticed his skin and the whites of his eyes were jaundiced. I wanted to ask him what was the matter, but I knew he wouldn’t tell me. He had something to say and he meant for me to hear it.
“Listen, Dylan.” That got my attention. He only called me that when he was serious. “I guess maybe I understand about you wanting to turn yourself in. I wanted to do it after the Hernandez case, but your brother talked me out of it. And he was right to do it. It was the right thing for me and it was the right thing for the department.”
“So, you did kill him.”
“That’s for another telling,” he said.
“You’re not my brother, John, and I didn’t kill anyone. So let go of me and let me do what I have to do.”
“Can’t you figure out what I’m tryin’ to say? You can’t give yourself up, because they’ll never let you live long enough to tell your story. There won’t be any arraignment or trial. They’ll find you hanging in your cell before the sun comes up. Or maybe some vigilante will whack yo
u on the way into the station. Maybe the the local cops’ll shoot you and claim you went for one of their guns. It’s been known to happen. Whoever’s behind this has power and influence. And if they went this far to stop you, they can’t afford to let you have your day in court. You walk into that police station and you’re sentencing yourself to death.”
“I’ll do it through Larry-”
“Bad idea. Too late, anyhow.”
“Maybe we’re over-reacting,” I proposed halfheartedly. “We don’t know how long the cops questioned Guppy for. Maybe he took their questions the wrong way. If the cops really suspected him, wouldn’t they have barged in here already?”
“You’re whistling in the graveyard, Klein.” MacClough knocked my theory down. “They wouldn’t barge in. They’d have no way of knowing whether you were armed or how heavily armed. They wouldn’t know if you and the Gupster were here alone or whether you had reinforcements. No, they’d wait for you and grab you on the way out.”
“You mean kill me on the way out.”
“Maybe, but not likely, not unless you resisted. They’d probably wait until they had you in private.”
“God, that’s a comfort.”
MacClough pulled his.38 and signaled me to be quiet. The bulkhead door flew open and a panicked Guppy stepped through.
“He’s gone!”
“Who’s g-”
“Zak!” Guppy gasped. “Zak is nowhere to be found in the house.”
“What is it with the fuckin’ Kleins, the gene for martyrdom dominant in your family or what?” Johnny’s face twisted with worry and what looked to be hints of pain.
“Guppy, can you run through all those Isotope Web sites and chat rooms?”
“I thought we were in a rush?”
“We are,” Johnny said, “but do it anyway.”
I knew the way MacClough thought. He was looking for something specific. And after only two minutes of scanning, Guppy found what MacClough had been hunting for.
“Oh my god!” Guppy barely got the words out. “Look.”
This is what he pointed to on the screen:
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