Playing with Fire

by Gerald Elias

  Nathaniel, sporting his new robe, stumbled into the kitchen. Hearing Nathaniel’s shuffling, Jacobus said, ‘You’ve certainly perfected the art of burning the candle at neither end. Hibernation suits you.’

  ‘I’ll get the cream and sugar,’ Nathaniel replied.

  Halfway through their second cup, Roy Miller, the town’s part-time police force, full-time plumber, and jack of all trades, arrived with his pickup to plow and sand Jacobus’s quarter-mile, U-shaped gravel driveway. His customary tack was to barrel down the steep end and utilize the momentum to make a lightning pass back up to Route 41. But today Miller maneuvered very deliberately, backing and filling, backing and filling. Jacobus heard it all, gears grinding and blades scraping.

  The noisy production awakened Yumi, who entered the kitchen with a loud yawn.

  ‘Morning! Ooh, it’s cold.’

  ‘What time is it?’ Jacobus asked Nathaniel.

  ‘Quarter after nine. Why? Yumi not allowed to sleep in on a weekday?’

  Jacobus didn’t answer, but pensively sipped his boiled coffee. When he heard the truck’s engine sputter to a stop, its door open and close, heavy footsteps approach the front of his house, and then the tamping of boots in his doorway, the cause of the distress that had crept insidiously into Jacobus’s sleep suddenly came into clear focus.

  ‘Damn,’ he muttered to himself. He placed the mug gently on the kitchen table’s worn Formica. ‘Damn. Damn. Damn. We’re too late.’

  Yumi welcomed Miller and invited him in, quickly closing the door to keep out the bitter cold and blowing snow. Miller held a copy of the Berkshire Eagle in his gloved hand.

  ‘Man, it smells good in here!’ Miller said, who, like Nathaniel, had a nose for food, especially in large quantities. ‘Been cooking lately?’ He had little difficulty tracking down the pot of stew that was still sitting on the woodstove. He sniffed again. ‘Jake, you burning pine again? You know you shouldn’t be burning fresh pine.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘Builds creosote. Especially when it’s not seasoned. Your flue’s too small as it is. You could end up with a chimney fire.’

  ‘Is that a segue?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘You’re here to tell me Amadeo Borlotti’s house burned down Saturday night and he’s missing, aren’t you?’

  ‘How the—?’ Miller stammered. ‘How did you—?’

  ‘Don’t sound so bewildered, Roy,’ Jacobus said. He then related his brief but troubling conversation with Amadeo Borlotti on Christmas Eve, followed by the disrupted phone line.

  ‘Sure you didn’t read the story in today’s Eagle?’ Miller asked.

  ‘What story?’

  Miller handed Nathaniel the newspaper. Nathaniel read the front-page headline: ‘Violin-Maker Missing, Home Burns.’

  ‘So you talked to him,’ Miller said, ‘but that was before it all happened. How did you know there’d been a fire? That he’s missing?’

  ‘Give the man a cup of coffee,’ Jacobus said to Yumi. ‘Have a seat, Roy, and I will endeavor to explain.’

  Miller balanced himself gingerly on a creaking kitchen counter stool, taking care that between its age and his weight it didn’t collapse.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Miller said.

  ‘It’s nine-fifteen.’

  Miller waited for more, but when none was forthcoming he asked, ‘That’s it? I must have missed something.’

  With the sigh of a schoolteacher reviewing multiplication tables for the eighth time with a recalcitrant student, Jacobus continued. ‘I’ll start from the beginning, but it’s the same reasoning as always. Just remember this: You start with a pattern. It’s like Beethoven’s Fifth. The entire piece is the inevitable consequence of the pattern set by the first four notes. When the pattern breaks you look for the reason; the stronger the pattern, the more significant the reason. It’s really just putting two and two together. Do you understand what I’m talking about, Roy?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue, Jake,’ Miller said. ‘I’m more a Grateful Dead kind of guy.’

  ‘Your loss.’ Jacobus took a sip of coffee.

  ‘There’s been a series of three strange events since Saturday night,’ he continued. ‘Number one: Borlotti’s out-of-the-blue, agitated call, which I’ve told you about. Number two: yesterday when you did not come to plow. What’s significant about that, Roy?’

  ‘Well, is it that I usually plow right after the snow stops?’

  ‘Usually! You’re being modest. After all these years, yesterday was the very first time you missed plowing after a snowstorm, ever.’

  ‘But yesterday was Christmas,’ Miller responded.

  ‘Yeah, just like it was two years ago when it snowed on Christmas. What happened then?’

  ‘I plowed first thing so I could get to church with the family.’

  ‘My point exactly. I figured there must’ve been a damn important reason to keep you away yesterday, especially from an extra paycheck to pay for all the Christmas presents. So I asked myself, why wouldn’t you be here to plow? Odds were it was an emergency. But was it a plumbing emergency or was it a police emergency? Unlikely you’d disrupt Christmas with the family to fix a frozen pipe. So I’m thinking police emergency, and coming the morning after Borlotti’s call, strange event number one, it was not unreasonable to guess there could be – might be – a link. And another unprecedented thing. You didn’t even call to tell me you weren’t coming.

  ‘Then, when you didn’t even show up by last night, that convinced me even more. You’ve always been the conscientious type. What, I asked myself, would make it so difficult for you to get here? I started with several simple, obvious possibilities, one of which was that you were too far away. Now, as the crow flies, no one could ever say that Egremont Falls, where Borlotti lives, is far away. It’s usually only about a twenty-minute drive from here, but in the snowstorm, that twenty minutes could be two hours. Of course you could’ve been just about anywhere else, too, but after Borlotti’s melodramatics, Egremont Falls was at least within the realm of possibility.

  ‘Now for strange event number three: it’s now nine fifteen. In the past, when you’ve cleared my driveway the morning after a night-time snowstorm, it’s usually at the crack of dawn because I’m lucky enough to be the first stop on your plowing route, but when you showed up today, a Monday morning, it was already after nine. What could that mean? Knowing your considerate nature, it might have meant that for some reason you first plowed the customers who, unlike me, had to get to work. But what would prompt you, today only, to change the usual order? Why make me last and not first? Simple answer: To be able to spend more time here without worrying about angering your other customers by being late to their driveways. By keeping me last you’d have ample time to talk.’

  ‘I did try calling you.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously?’

  ‘My damn phone line is down, which you wouldn’t have known unless you had already tried calling. That’s why you had to change the plowing order.

  ‘If, then, the conversation couldn’t wait for the phone company to do its usual magic, it would likely mean urgent business. And why in the world would you need to talk to little old me about police work? Answer: only if it related to my single, esoteric field of expertise. That would be fiddles. If Borlotti were in trouble – and by his phone call it sure sounded like trouble, you’d only need to talk to me if you couldn’t talk to him – i.e. if he were dead, missing, or otherwise unavailable.

  ‘So, I ask myself, what might cause you to think that he was missing and not just visiting his Aunt Sadie or unleashing his inner wanderlust? Certainly he wasn’t missing when he called me, and nobody in his right mind was out and about Saturday night in the middle of a blizzard.

  ‘Could he have suddenly gone on vacation? I don’t think so! He was pretty anxious to want to see me yesterday morning, so it’s highly unlikely he packed his Bermuda shorts and flew to Miami
Beach for a spur-of-the-moment Christmas getaway. But even if he had, that wouldn’t have been cause for concern because there would at least have been a paper trail for you to work with. Absent that, you must have had a heckuva reason to believe things weren’t kosher. Something dramatic. Hell, you’re not even the cop on his beat, so that means the Egremont Falls police had a special need for you.

  ‘A burglary, maybe? Again, I don’t think so. Let’s say for the moment his shop had been broken into. If Borlotti had been there he would’ve called it in and you wouldn’t be here this morning. So, it can only be that he wasn’t there and you have no way of figuring out his whereabouts. What’s a possible scenario, consistent with Borlotti’s anxiety, that would prevent you from being able to find his metaphorical Bermuda shorts? A fire.’

  ‘Or a kidnapping,’ Nathaniel said.

  ‘I considered that,’ Jacobus replied. ‘It’s possible. But on a night like that getting away with it and not leaving any trace would have been a challenge. And since Roy here obviously hasn’t heard from anyone with a ransom demand, I vote for fire.’

  Jacobus paused for another sip, as did Miller. His mug, poised in his hand since Jacobus had begun his explication, actually had not yet made as far as his lips.

  ‘But how do you know he’s missing and not dead?’ Miller asked, pouring the now-cold coffee into the sink for a hot refill.

  ‘That’s self-evident, isn’t it?’ said Jacobus. ‘If Borlotti had died of natural causes you wouldn’t have come here at all. By the same token, if he’d been murdered you’d have had more important business than to chitchat over coffee. But because you don’t know for certain he’s alive, you want to find him before he isn’t, and you need my help to find him. And that’s why the Egremont Falls police wanted you on the scene, because of your connection to me.’

  ‘Well, maybe you’re making sense, Jake. Maybe not. You’ve got to admit it’s just a theory.’

  ‘Yeah, well Darwin had a theory, too.’

  ‘And some people still doubt it.’

  ‘That’s because they haven’t evolved yet.’

  ‘Well, there was a fire. And Borlotti is missing … probably. But we don’t know yet if it was arson.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Everything will work out for the worst.’

  FOUR

  The outside temperature had dipped below zero, and only Miller’s promise of a free brunch at K&J’s Diner pried Jacobus, reclusive even in the best of times, from the snug familiarity of his cottage for the frigid drive to Egremont Falls. Yumi bundled Jacobus into two wool sweaters and helped him on with his brown, corduroy jacket. She pulled a beaked hunter’s cap with wooly earflaps over his head, and protected his precious hands with over-sized leather mittens lined with fake fleece. She began to wrap his frayed tartan wool scarf around his neck.

  Jacobus took off his dark glasses and put them in his pocket.

  ‘Wrap it around my head,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said wrap the scarf around my head. Eyes and all. Just leave an air hole for me to breathe.’

  ‘That freaks me out,’ Yumi said. ‘You’ll look like the Mummy That Invaded Scotland.’

  ‘That’s your problem. I want to stay warm.’

  As Nathaniel gave him a leg up into the front seat of Miller’s eighteen-year-old Ford pickup, Jacobus said to Yumi, ‘Stay here and keep the home fries burning.’

  ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ she replied. ‘If you think I’m going to stay here and let Trotsky slobber over me all day,’ Yumi replied, ‘you’re even more senile than I thought.’

  ‘What way is that to speak to a helpless old man?’ Jacobus said, outwardly outraged, inwardly delighted. ‘I thought they taught manners in Japan. Respect, obedience, and perhaps even filial piety.’

  ‘Yes, they did,’ said Yumi, blushing with embarrassment that Jacobus couldn’t see. Had she gone over the line of informality? She decided not. ‘But then I came here and studied with you.’

  ‘Touché!’ said Nathaniel.

  ‘Ganging up on me again, are you? Well, if you insist on all three of us getting frostbite, that’s your business. But don’t think I need someone holding my hand.’

  Nathaniel helped Yumi into the truck. She had to sit on Jacobus’s lap to make room for Nathaniel.

  ‘Isn’t this fun?’ Yumi said to Jacobus, who offered no response.

  The acrid odor of Amadeo Borlotti’s burnt house permeated the truck’s cabin even before Miller opened the door. Jacobus, last in line, shuffled along a snow-packed path that had been improvised by the fire brigade to reach the perimeter of the accident scene. The path had become icy and Jacobus had to use his cane as a third limb in order to maintain his balance. With Yumi huddling against him, they hunched between the protective buffers of Nathaniel and Miller against the biting cold.

  ‘We’re like four penguins in Antarctica,’ Yumi said.

  ‘Only one difference,’ Jacobus replied.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m fucking cold.’

  The scene, too, could have been Antarctica, except for the obvious, disconcerting discrepancy: the smoldering, sodden rubble that had once been Amadeo Borlotti’s home and shop. A stinging wind blew errant flakes of soot or snow – Jacobus couldn’t tell which – on to a patch of exposed cheek, making his skin burn. Awaiting the arrival of Sigurd Benson, the local fire chief, he stomped his feet to ward off numbness, leaning on his cane to maintain his balance.

  Some things smell good when they burn. A steak. A good cigarette. Maple and oak and, yes, pine logs in his living-room woodstove. Warm and inviting. So why was it that the smell of burnt wreckage made him sick to his stomach? Jacobus, inhaling the frozen air as deeply as his nicotine-coated lungs would allow, confirmed his ambivalent suspicions: To his relief, there was no trace of the stench of charred flesh. But on the other hand, where the hell was Borlotti? Jacobus asked himself yet again why he was there, freezing his ass off.

  ‘It’s so strange, Jake,’ Yumi said. ‘Everything is so pristine. So white. Except for the house. It’s like a dark, ugly bruise surrounded by pale skin.’

  That poetic information wasn’t of much use to Jacobus, who shrugged. He had only a vague recollection of what white was, let alone a dark, ugly bruise. What a bruise felt like was much more important than what it looked like. Visual perception was a distant memory, and he hardly missed it anymore. There were even times when he felt that by losing his sight he had shed a burdensome encumbrance, like a caterpillar emerging from a cocoon, freeing his imagination to take wing. He didn’t care that he might look more like a caterpillar than a butterfly.

  ‘Where the hell’s this Benson?’ Jacobus asked. ‘He gone missing, too?’

  ‘He should be here any minute, Jake,’ said Miller. ‘Chilly?’

  ‘Me chilly? Why do you say that? Can’t be much less than twenty below. How’d you get roped into this anyway, Roy? This isn’t your usual terrain.’

  ‘As you said, Sigurd knows that I’m a friend of yours and wanted you to be here.’

  ‘You could still have said no.’

  ‘Sigurd’s family and mine are from Rockdale, where I grew up. He was actually my scoutmaster when I was a kid and still acts like it sometimes, even though he’s less than ten years older than I am. He can be a little on the dry side but we get along OK. He used to make us iron our Scout uniforms and we had to call him sir, and he called us mister. ‘Mr Miller, you need to work on your taut-line hitch.’ But he taught me how to start a fire without a match and got me out of hot water with my folks more than once. When he called yesterday for help with this situation it was hard to say no.’

  ‘Not so hard,’ Jacobus said. With his mitten, he wiped his nose that was running from the cold. ‘Just takes a little practice. Watch me.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you say no to coming today, Jake,’ Nathaniel said.

  ‘That’s because you were covering my mouth with your fat hand,’ Jacobus said, his voice even more
phlegmy from the ice in his lungs. ‘And if I die of pneumonia, don’t think you’re getting any of my worldly goods.’

  ‘Who’d want your stuff, anyway?’ asked Nathaniel. ‘The Goodwill?’

  ‘Trotsky, my sole heir.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me you hoped Trotsky would die so you wouldn’t have to spend money on dog food?’ Yumi asked.

  ‘Morning, fellows,’ a new voice called, accompanied by the sound of boots crunching quickly and lightly through the snow. ‘Another beautiful day in the Berkshires.’

  ‘Morning, sir,’ said Miller, who did the introductions. Benson passed around a Thermos of hot, black coffee.

  ‘This one was about the worst ever,’ Benson said.

  Jacobus opened enough space in his wrapped scarf to take a sip.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘Tastes all right to me.’

  Yumi gave him an elbow to his ribs, which would have been painful but for his staunch bulwark of clothing.

  ‘I mean the fire,’ Benson continued, taking Jacobus’s comment at face value. ‘Borlotti’s house is so far off the beaten track, no one called it in until the fire was out of control, and then with the roads the way they were Saturday night, and his long, unplowed driveway … We did our best, but by the time we got here, it was pretty much a total loss. The bedroom’s still standing – it was an add-on – but it can never be rebuilt.’

  ‘Were there many violins?’ Yumi asked.

  ‘No way to know yet. But you can be sure they made Grade A kindling. And the flammables – glues, varnishes, oils, thinners. Shoot, even if we could’ve gotten here in one minute it would’ve been a dandy to put out. A perfect storm.’

  ‘Is that where it started?’ Nathaniel asked. ‘In the shop with the instruments?’

  ‘As far as we know at this point. And it burned so hot and so fast the roof collapsed under the weight of the snow before the heat could melt it. So even though most of the house is flat as a pancake, there are patches that hardly had time to burn at all.’

  ‘What patches?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘Bedroom, like I said. Basement.’