As he watched the two chatting in the window he found his rage on the rise, and before he’d realised it he’d downed a sizable portion of the fifth of bourbon he always carried. And the alcohol fuelled the rage. Weird Stallone-style scenarios whipped through his head, and only a stumble that sent his bourbon bottle crashing to the pavement below sobered him enough to think straight.
It was not this kid who’d sent his life to hell—it was this kid’s father. The father was the sinner, not the son. “I’m only here to find the father,” he said aloud to the empty tenement room.
* * *
Later that day, he watched the broadcast of the president’s speech at the memorial service—and wondered what good it did. He doubted the whole concept of closure. He’d certainly had no closure since that cold day in Toronto when he sat in his police car with a very scared five-year-old boy named Decker Roberts.
He watched the Pacific mist roll in and felt it cool down the day.
At ten the actors all left.
He watched, and watched, and finally acted.
Breaking into the place wasn’t that difficult, although getting past the locked metal door took some doing. There were no guards, no nurses, and only one patient—Seth Roberts. He unlocked Seth’s door and quietly entered the room. The lights were off and the boy was lying on his back, his eyes wide open, but he was clearly asleep. From the rapid eye movement Garreth assumed he was in deep REM sleep, dreaming away.
He took out his camera and took a series of shots. Then he carefully tossed the room. He found nothing of interest except a photo of a dead boy encased in ice in a small river. On the bottom of the photo in Magic Marker were the words: This is what happens when you get close to people, Dad. Stay away from me. He was tempted to take the photo but decided instead to photograph it. As he took the third shot he was surprised to hear the young man call out in his sleep, “No. Please. I’m only twenty-one years old.”
He slipped out of the room, then out of the warehouse and returned to his tenement perch.
The moon set—and a blackness within the darkness of night entered his heart. Hate.
* * *
Three days after the funeral Garreth was running out of patience. He’d been casing the clinic for almost two weeks.
And every day he’d been drinking more and more heavily.
Why? he asked himself. Maybe after all these years I’m frightened to close this case.
Maybe Decker Roberts just gave him the excuse he needed to drink.
It was then he saw the first of the moving vans arrive. The actors all seemed to leave at once, some opening pay envelopes as they did. Then the doctor, or whatever the grey-haired freak was, giving orders as to what was to go where. Three hours later the vans were packed and ready to go when the freak wheeled out a gurney with the clinic’s sole patient, Seth Roberts, clearly sedated—and manacled hands and feet to the metal sides of the bed.
He took shot after shot until the gurney was inside the van and the van sped away.
66
A PAUCITY OF GOOD-BYES—AFTER
DECKER AWOKE WITH A START. SOMETHING WAS WRONG. HE leapt out of bed and called out, “One, boss, one.” No one answered. He yanked at the door. It opened—no guard.
He threw on his clothes and ran into the hall—no one.
Down the hall and then out onto the campus—everything was different. There were a few students but no army presence, no marines.
He ran to the provost’s office and was stopped by an octogenarian secretary he’d never seen before.
“Yes?”
“Who are you?”
“Professor Endicott’s secretary. Be polite, young man.”
It’d been a long time since he’d been called a young man, but he managed to respond. “Whose secretary?”
“The provost’s.”
“Ah, yeah, right.” He moved past her toward the provost’s closed door.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked brightly. Evidently politeness was compulsory on campus.
He threw open the provost’s door. The man looked up from his desk, then changed glasses so he could see his visitor.
“Yes?” he said.
“Where are—”
The provost sighed, then finally said, “Gone. Thank the heavens. Gone. It’s time for us all to try to just move on.” He was smiling. It bothered Decker.
Decker raced out of the building then up the hill toward the windowless room where they kept Viola Tripping.
There was no one guarding the door.
Decker pushed it open and stepped into the windowless room—and saw no one. He switched on the light and for the first time saw the depth of the room and that it was L shaped. He ran to the far end and found another long room—but it too was empty. He turned and retraced his steps. When he stepped into the front room, the door opened.
Yslan.
“Where is she?” Decker demanded.
“Clearly not here.”
“I know that, but—”
“She’s gone, Mr. Roberts.”
It didn’t compute. “Gone?”
She glanced at her watch. “Her plane left a while back.”
“Plane? Plane to where?”
“That’s for us to know. But believe this—you can search for a very long time and you’ll never find her.”
All Decker could think to say was, “Why?”
Yslan suddenly felt a sharp pain in her chest and knew it was his anguish affecting her physically. This was completely new and unexpected. “She left this for you.” She held out a slender volume.
Decker took it. It was Viola Tripping’s copy of Shakespeare’s Pericles.
He flipped through the pages.
“There are no notes—we checked, Mr. Roberts.”
“Of course. Of course you did.”
“So why that, Mr. Roberts? Why did she leave that play for you?”
Because Pericles gets redeemed by the love of his daughter, he thought, but what he said was, “That’s for me to know.”
The pain in her chest subsided and Yslan shrugged.
“So it’s finished here?” Decker asked.
“Yeah, we’re finished here.”
“But what about—”
“We’ll catch him. The manhunt is on.”
Decker nodded. He was tempted to ask what would happen to Walter Jones when she caught Walter Jones but didn’t. What he did ask was, “Can I go? You don’t need me here anymore.”
He looked around—still no guards.
“Can I?”
Yslan shrugged again.
“Where’s my son?”
Yslan stepped toward him. Her face for the first time since he’d been shanghaied from Namibia was relaxed. For a moment Decker thought she was going to hug him or something. But, although her translucent blue eyes were locked on his, he couldn’t read anything there.
“If I didn’t know better, Special Agent Yslan Hicks, I’d say you were calm.”
“Not until we have Walter Jones.”
Decker nodded and finally said, “Right.”
“What? You don’t think we should hunt him down?”
“No. I think he needs to be caught and incarcerated.”
“But not executed?”
“Will that bring back any of those who died here?”
Yslan didn’t answer.
“Do you really think it will stop anyone from imitating this . . .” He waved his hands in the air, not knowing what word he wanted to use to describe what had happened at Ancaster College.
“No. There’s no way to stop a madman.”
Decker looked away.
“Now what? You don’t think he was a madman?”
Decker shook his head. “Can a madman plan and execute something like this? Can he dupe Professor Frost? Can he manage to escape what I assume is already a massive countrywide search? You don’t have to answer any of those questions.”
“So how would you go about stopping men like Walter J
ones?”
“The hard way.”
“What are you talking about?”
Decker took a deep breath and was about to forget it, then decided not to. “It’s that winner crap again.”
“Excuse me!” Yslan said. It wasn’t a question. It was a demand for an explanation.
“Winners. We’ve made a religion out of winning.”
“You’d prefer losing?”
“I’d prefer a world where there didn’t have to be thousands of losers so the few winners can feel that they are special.”
“Come again?”
“Think. Our whole system is set up to reward winners. To get people to work themselves to the bone to be winners. To climb over top of one another to win.”
Yslan looked at him but said nothing.
“Don’t you see?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“If winning is everything, then what do you do with all those who haven’t won? How can you make them feel part of all this?”
“Of what?” Yslan was clearly getting exasperated.
“How can there be a civil society—a place that doesn’t need gated communities and private police forces—if people don’t feel they’re part of the same world as the winners?”
“So now you’re a communist?”
“No. I worked in Moscow under Brezhnev and directed in Shanghai before the changeover. Their answer isn’t right either. ‘I pretend to work and they pretend to pay me.’ ”
“You’ve lost me yet again.”
“It was the Moscow joke.”
“Those wacky Russians—always good for a laugh.”
“Not so ha-ha funny when you sat for hours waiting for a server to take your order in a restaurant because he was paid the same if he worked hard or if he didn’t work at all. I’m not proposing that.”
“Then what are you proposing?”
“A system where somehow we all feel part of what is happening to us. Where we don’t use the SUV answer.”
“Well, I have to congratulate you, Mr. Roberts, you’ve lost me twice in under two minutes.” Decker turned away. “No, you’re not allowed to do that. The SUV answer? What the fuck’s that?”
“Do you know what the thinking was behind the making of SUVs?”
“There was thinking from Detroit, how novel.”
Decker looked at her—she’d spoken almost exactly like him. For a moment both felt the bizarre connection. Finally Decker said, “Yeah. There was some thinking from Motor City. The death toll on American highways had hit a new high. The roads were fucking dangerous.”
“So?”
“So, rather than dealing with the hard problem—”
“Which was?”
“How to make people more respectful of one another and hence drive more carefully, Detroit came up with a simpler solution. Make a car like a truck—which is what an SUV is. Let the winners buy the safety of a truck and be damned what happens to the losers who drive small cars.”
Yslan thought about that for long moment, then said, “So you want a world without winners?”
Decker didn’t answer.
“Wasn’t it you who told me that this university produced an important product—brain power? Surely that’s special, about winning. Surely this kind of brain power will make the majority of these kids winners. On top of which you said that the brain power that elite institutions like this produce is essential for the good of the country—fuck, you said for the good of the world.”
Decker again didn’t answer.
“So what you’re saying doesn’t really make any sense, does it? Besides your other business, your acting business, deals with stars—not workaday actors, stars, aka winners. And to completely demolish your argument, and to get somewhat more personal, you know that you’re not ‘one of the people.’ ” She made air quotes as she said that, then continued, “You’re special, Mr. Roberts, and you know it.”
“As are you, Special Agent Yslan Hicks.”
“I worked hard for that Special title.”
“I have no doubt you did. I also assume that unlike your jerk of a boss, you don’t hold it over the heads of the people you work with.”
“How would you know that?” But the moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew how he knew. He’d been watching her as much as she’d been watching him.
“What’s the private name you had for yourself when you were a little girl, Special Agent Yslan Hicks?”
She was stunned by his question. How did he know she had a private name for herself when she was a little girl? A name she told no one. She looked away. She wasn’t going to tell him that when she was a little girl she had a secret name for herself—from a card game. She thought of herself as a waif called Solitaire.
She smiled.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. She looked at it for a long moment, then handed it to Decker.
He took it, opened it and read: I’ve okayed the publishing of your book on acting.
“You stopped—”
“Turn it over, Mr. Roberts.”
He did and read: Your son, Seth, is in the Wellness Dream Clinic in San Francisco.
He looked at her. She’d changed a lot since he first met her when she kissed him in the restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.
“Be seeing you around, Mr. Roberts. You can count on that. And, oh yeah, our deal is still in place—you don’t leave the country without notifying me.”
“Won’t you be watching me anyway?”
“What do you think, Mr. Roberts?”
“I think you will.’
“And why would that be, Mr. Roberts?”
“Because I’m an asset.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, Mr. Roberts—you’re a valued asset.” Then she winked as she said, “Travel safe,” turned and left Decker to his thoughts.
He raced back to his dorm room. Threw his things into his knapsack—contemplated leaving his script of Love and Pain and the Dwarf in the Garden, then stuffed it into a side pocket—and after taking a brief moment to look at the church headed to the nearest airport.
67
A SCHEMING OF CRAZY EDDIE—AFTER
EDDIE DIDN’T LIKE LINES, SO HE HAD TO WORK AT KEEPING HIS feelings in check as he waited to clear security at the Hamilton International Airport.
He glanced at his watch. He still had lots of time to make his plane. Then he checked the GPS on his BlackBerry and saw that Decker’s plane was somewhere over Middle America. He rechecked his watch. Decker’s flight was early—too much ahead of him.
He whispered an apology to the gods of flying and punched in a twenty-digit code. When the prompt came up he typed in “Potential right engine failure—advise landing in nearest airport for safety check.”
Then he looked down at his pant leg. A police dog was there—and way too interested.
He saw a cop coming toward him with a grim look he’d known for a very long time—that every pot smoker has known for a long time. He pulled up his pant leg revealing the old metal gizmo that lifted his foot so he wouldn’t trip on his downturned toes.
The cop stopped and looked at the contraption.
“What—”
“Torn Achilles tendon—long time ago. Football injury.”
The dog whined.
“Come on, Copper,” the cop said.
Eddie thought, Fuck, the cop called his dog Copper. More cleverness from the constabulary, but decided silence was a better response to the situation.
“Next!” the immigration guy hollered.
Eddie elaborated his limp as he made his way to the counter. Over his shoulder he heard Copper growl, then bark. Life’s tough then you die, he thought, then added a second thought: Eat crap, Copper. But he had a large smile on his face and said to the immigration officer, “Good morning. How’s your day going?”
The officer looked at Eddie, then at his pa
ssport. “Where’re you off to today?” the man asked—no, demanded.
“Portland, Oregon, then on to San Francisco.”
“Ticket.”
Eddie produced it and the officer looked at it closely.
“Not a very long stopover in Portland.”
“No, just long enough to pick up someone.”
* * *
The “someone” was waiting for him at the Portland airport. Standing by herself in the midst of the arrivals terminal, she had a small bag in her hand, a torn teddy bear in her arms, and a profoundly lost look in her eyes.
“Marina,” Eddie said gently.
The girl turned toward him and for a long moment didn’t know who he was. Then a smile creased her frightened face.
“Where’s your mom, Marina?”
“She said I was to stay here and that someone would come for me.”
Eddie had to control his fury. “She just left you here?”
“She drove me.”
“But she just left you here?”
“She said someone’d come for me.”
Eddie let out a long breath. “Well, I’m here for you.”
“Yes.”
“And Marina—”
“What?”
“I’ll always be here for you—always. Promise.”
The girl reached up and took his hand. She was almost fourteen years old, but clearly she was closer emotionally to a six-year-old. Eddie didn’t care.
He had his daughter back.
68
A MEETING OF OLD ACQUAINTANCES—AFTER
IT WAS AFTER SUNSET WHEN DECKER FINALLY HOPPED OUT OF THE cab in front of the warehouse building that matched the address Special Agent Yslan Hicks had given him. There was no indication that this was a doctor’s clinic, and when he approached the front door he was surprised that there was no buzzer or bell. No sign that this was the Wellness Clinic—no sign that this was anything but an old warehouse.
He stepped back from the door and noticed the glass pane embedded in the upper panel. Odd for a warehouse, he thought. Then he saw the outline of a square in glue residue on the glass. He ran his hand over the ridge.
Something ticked in his head. He’d worked on so many film sets and film sets used stick ’em etchings that adhere to glass with cheap glue—like this. With the right lens and lighting it looked like expensive etched glass rather than a cheap Mylar cut out.
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