“You think Leon would have blabbed like he did, if Clark wasn’t there?” Quirk said.
“No. Leon sort of thought Clark would protect him. In twenty-eight years, he must have gotten pretty used to assuming the Feds would protect him,” I said.
“So we know why the Bureau sat on this thing,” Epstein said. “What we don’t know is who killed Emily Gold.”
“We could bring Bunny Karnofsky in and ask her,” I said.
“On Leon’s say-so?” Epstein asked. “Twenty-eight years later?”
“Capital crime,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “And Sonny Karnofsky’s daughter. They will have her lawyered up so tight we may not even be able to see her.”
“And then she’s on notice,” Quirk said. “And, my guess, she and her husband will take a long trip someplace and no one will be able to remember where.”
“You know the husband?” I said to Quirk.
“Ziggy Czernak. He used to be one of Sonny’s bodyguards.”
“Now he’s Bunny’s bodyguard.”
“Maybe it’s true love,” Quirk said.
“Maybe.”
Quirk looked at his watch. “Late,” he said. “My wife will be annoyed.”
“You scared of your wife?” I said.
“Yeah. You going to tell the kid?”
“Daryl?”
“Yeah.”
“That her parents aren’t who she thinks they are?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I still need to find out who killed . . . the woman she thinks is her mother.”
“Day at a time,” Epstein said.
Outside Quirk’s one window, the summer evening had settled in. It wasn’t quite dark, but the sky had turned that navy blue and the color permeated the atmosphere. There were occasions when this was my favorite time of day.
“So, what do you want to do?” I said.
Epstein and Quirk looked at each other.
“I still have the home office to fight,” Epstein said.
I nodded.
“Sonny’s got resources,” Quirk said. “I don’t want Bunny to get scared off and disappear.”
I decided not to mention that she might already have been scared off by me. I thought it best, for the moment, to assume that they’d leave her in place and try to bury me.
“We need to get Bunny alone,” I said.
“We do,” Quirk said.
“You have any suggestions?”
“You and Hawk could get her out of there,” Quirk said.
“Excellent idea,” Epstein said. “Unofficially speaking.”
“Hawk’s with Susan,” I said.
Quirk nodded.
“I figure Frank and I could sit in on that as, ah, private citizens during off-duty hours.”
“I could sit in on that,” Epstein said.
“Unofficially,” I said.
“Of course,” Epstein said. “Unofficially.”
“Be nice if we knew where Abner Fancy was.”
“Would be,” Quirk said.
“I wouldn’t want you to exhaust yourselves,” I said. “But have you looked?”
Quirk nodded.
“He’s not in the system,” Epstein said. “We don’t know where he is, or even if he’s alive.”
“Well,” I said. “When I get Bunny alone, I’ll ask her.”
“Let us know,” Quirk said, “when you want us in Cambridge.”
“I will,” I said. “You’ll get to meet the new Pearl.”
“Is she calm and relaxed?”
“No,” I said. “She’ll bark and race around and, if she likes you, jump up and rest her paws on your shoulders and lap your face.”
“I think I went out with her once,” Epstein said.
55
The car picked me up as I turned onto Mass. Avenue going home from Police Headquarters. It was a dark burgundy Lincoln, and the driver was pretty good. He dropped back several cars behind me, changed positions occasionally, and once even turned off and went around the block, in a stretch where there was no chance for him to lose me. It’s easier to tail at night, because mostly to the guy being tailed you’re merely a set of headlights like every other set. But in this part of town, the streetlights were bright and the traffic was heavy, so the ambient light was pretty good.
The last time anyone had tailed me, the plan had been to shoot me. I assumed there was a similar plan in place now. It would be someone from Sonny, and, given how badly it had gone the last time or two, I suspected that this time it would be Harvey, the specialist. I could go around the block and back to Police Headquarters and probably discourage the stalker. But that would just postpone things, and something happening was more likely to resolve this mare’s nest than nothing happening. The question was where to let it happen. I stayed on Mass. Avenue while I thought about this, through the South End and into the Back Bay. At Beacon Street, I turned left and, a block later, swung right up the ramp onto Storrow Drive. I drove west along the river into Allston and went up the slight ramp at the Anderson bridge, turning left away from the bridge onto North Harvard Street. A half block up, I turned right into the parking lot at Harvard Stadium and parked. I unlocked the glove compartment and took out the 9mm Browning I kept for emergency firepower. I ran a shell up into the chamber, let the hammer down, and got out and walked through the open doors into the nearly total darkness under the stands.
In less stressful moments, I had come here with Susan, who thought it a perfect conditioning plan to run up and down the stadium steps. I found it most effective in keeping my knees sore. I went up the entry stairs and into the moon-brightened area low down in the stands, close to the field.
Harvard Stadium was a bowl, open at the northerly end. At the top of the stadium was a covered arcade where people could circle until they found their seating section. With the Browning in my right hand, I went up the stairs on the run, grateful at this moment for the hours with Susan. It was still a long way to the top. I felt conspicuous in the bright moonlight. I thought of a line from Eliot . . . something about the nerve patterns displayed on the wall by a magic lantern . . . My back felt tight, I could feel a gun sight on it. I could hear my heartbeat and my labored breathing as I went up. I was wearing sneakers, but my footfalls still seemed blatant in the pale, empty stadium. No one shot me.
At the top I was in under the arcade roof, shielded by the chest-high wall. From where I stood, I could see most of the stadium. There was no movement. Harvey might not be a fan of the Crimson, and might not know the stadium as well as I did. He also knew I was in here, and he might proceed with caution. My throat was tight. My breath still rasped. Nothing happened. Where were they? I waited in the stillness and the moonlight. Nothing. I waited. Nothing. I waited. Across the stadium, I saw a figure rise cautiously from an entrance near the goal line. I looked below. There was another figure on this side. There were at least two of them. In the gentle moonlight, it was hard to say for sure, but neither of them looked like Harvey, which meant he was somewhere else in the stadium. They wouldn’t have sent anyone else, not after I had been to the Czernak home. Not after I’d actually spoken to Bunny. The men below were now fully out of their stairwells, crouching as they came. Both had shotguns. Swell. At the closed end of the stadium, behind the goalposts at the other end of the field, a third figure emerged from the stairwell. Even from where I was, I knew it was Harvey. I stayed where I was. The three men stood still now and slowly surveyed the stadium. Then they moved up a few steps and did it again.
I realized why they had been so long in coming. First they had swept the space under the stands, starting at either end and driving anyone there toward the middle, where Harvey waited. Now they were doing it in the stadium, working their way up, and if they found no one by the time they got to the top, they would move along the arcade toward the center, pushing anyone up there toward the center, where Harvey waited. It would not be good to let them do that. The guy across the way was a long shot w
ith a handgun, probably one hundred yards. The guy near me would be duck soup. I cocked the Browning and stood in the shadow of one of the support posts. I rested my elbows on the top of the wall, and, holding the gun in both hands, I centered in so that the middle of the far man’s body sat on top of the little gun sight at the front of the barrel. I centered the front sight in the V of the back sight and leveled it off. I took in some air and let it out and stopped breathing. I squeezed the trigger slowly and kept squeezing, firing five rounds. One of them got him, maybe more than one. He twisted suddenly and dropped the shotgun and fell forward. I didn’t see him hit. I was on my feet, firing at the second man, close to me. He had no place to go. He sank to a knee between the seats and raised the shotgun and fell backward, and the shotgun fell on top of him. I looked for Harvey. He was gone. My ears rang. The silence of the stadium after the eruption of gunfire was almost more assaultive than the gunshots.
I was alone with Harvey now, in the thin moonlit darkness, to play another kind of game in the big arena. Fight fiercely, Harvard. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t go back to Sonny and say I’d killed the other two and chased him off. He’d played this game before and never lost. He thought he could kill me. I had four rounds left in the Browning and five in the Chiefs Special on my hip. I thought I could kill him.
I stood motionless and didn’t breathe and listened. There were faint occasional traffic sounds from Soldier’s Field Road. There was a barely discernable breeze. There might have been a hint of river smell in it. There was no sound or scent or sight of Harvey. What would I do if I were he? He knew where I was, or where I had been when I shot his pals. He’d have run toward me. He’d be in the arcade. I put the Browning on the edge of the wall and took out the .38 and cocked it and transferred it to my left hand. Shooting left-handed, I couldn’t hit the ocean from a boat, but if Harvey were close enough . . . I picked up the Browning again. He’d expect me to stay against the back wall of the arcade so I wouldn’t get shot from the stadium. I stayed instead against the front wall. He’d expect me to stay where I was. Instead, I moved in a crouch, keeping my head below the wall.
The stadium smelled like stadiums always smell—of peanuts, or popped corn, or both. I speculated that the Roman Coliseum had probably smelled of peanuts, or popped corn, or both. I moved slowly and very carefully, sliding each foot silently along, feeling for anything that might crunch underfoot and give me away. There was nothing. My compliments to Harvard Facilities Maintenance. I moved this way past two stair openings, with the Browning held straight out in front of me ready to shoot. If he had gone up where I’d last seen him and started carefully toward where he’d last seen me, we would meet pretty soon.
I was breathing through my open mouth as quietly as I could. I was listening and looking. The effort to perceive was physical. If I were not where he was expecting me, if only for a moment, that distraction would be my edge. Or not. I could hear small murmuring pigeon sounds and realized that they were nesting under the rim of the arcade. Somewhere one of the pigeons fluttered a little as if he were turning over in bed, and there was Harvey, crouching as I was, against the front wall, his gun half pointed toward the back wall. He turned the muzzle toward me and I shot him in the middle of the mass with the four bullets left in the Browning.
It had been enough edge.
56
Alone in my apartment on Marlborough Street, I sat at my kitchen counter with a tall Scotch and soda and cleaned the Browning.
I had just killed three men, two of whom I didn’t even know. What kind of business was I in, where I had to kill three men on a pleasant moonlit night in an Ivy League football stadium. Hope tomorrow isn’t parents’ day. There had been two people at Taft awhile ago. If I shot anyone else on a college campus, I’d probably be eligible for tenure. I drank half my drink.
Sometimes the work helped people. But who was getting helped this time? Did Daryl want to know what I had learned? Would it help her? Was I the one to decide that? Several people had died so far in pursuit of information that no one might wish to acquire. They hadn’t been good people. But I had known I’d have to kill them when I led them to the stadium, where I knew the layout and they didn’t. I hadn’t known there’d be backup. But I hadn’t known there wouldn’t be. Did I stick at it because I was curious? Because I was a nosy guy who wanted to know what everyone had been covering up? Now I knew. Or at least I knew most of it. Was it worth a lot of dead guys? I did this work because I could. And maybe because I couldn’t do any other. I’d never been good at working for someone. At least this work let me live life on my terms.
I ran the swab through the barrel of the Browning, and it came out clean. I looked down the barrel. Spotless. I wiped the gun off with a cloth and let the receiver forward, let the hammer down, and had more Scotch. The nearly full half gallon on the counter gleamed reassuringly in the light from under my kitchen cabinets. I fed cartridges into the magazine of the Browning. They went in economically, each one taking no more space than it needed to. Nice-looking things, bullets. Compact. Bright brass casing, copper coating on the slug, leaving some gray lead exposed at the blunt nose. When it was loaded, I slid the magazine into the pistol butt.
My glass was empty. I made another drink and took it to the front window and looked out at Marlborough Street at 2:15 A.M. The brick and brownstone faces of the buildings were blank. No windows were lighted. The cars parked on the street seemed abandoned in their stillness, and the bleak street lamps made the street look lonelier than I knew it was.
I was doing this because I had started out to do this, and if you are going to live life on your own terms, there need to be terms, and somehow you need to live up to them. What was that line from Hemingway? What’s right is what feels good after? That didn’t help. I took a long drink of Scotch and soda. There was that line from who, Auden? Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man. I could see my face reflected in the window glass. It was the face of a guy who used to box—the nose especially, and a little scarring around the eyes.
I went back to the counter and sat and looked at the Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol as it lay there. As an artifact, it was nice-looking. Well-made. Precise. Nice balance to it. Blued finish. Black handle. Everything it should be and no more than that. Form follows function. The magazine was full and in place. But there was no round in the chamber. As it lay on my countertop, it was less dangerous than a sixteen-ounce hammer.
Maybe Harvey lived life on his own terms, too. And maybe he was faithful to the terms. Maybe that was why he’d kept coming in the dark unknown stadium when both his backup were gone. What would he be doing tonight if he’d won? Was that the only difference? That it maybe bothered me more than it would have bothered him?
I took my drink with me and went around the counter and picked up the phone and called Susan. Her voice was full of sleep.
“Guess I woke you up,” I said.
“It’s quarter to three,” Susan said. “Are you all right?” “More or less,” I said. “I needed to hear your voice.”
The sleepy thickness vanished from her voice.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Home.”
“Are you drunk.”
“Somewhat,” I said.
“Do you need me to come over?”
“No,” I said. “I need you to tell me you love me.”
“I do love you,” Susan said. “Sometimes I think I have loved you all my life.”
“You haven’t known me all your life.”
“A meaningless technicality,” Susan said.
“I love you,” I said.
“I know,” Susan said. “Has something bad happened?”
“I’ve had to shoot some people,” I said.
“You’re not hurt.”
“No.”
“You’ve had to shoot people before. It’s part of what you do.”
“I know.”
“But?”
“But,” I said, “rarely
in pursuit of so measly a grail.”
“The truth?”
“The truth sometimes sounds better than it is,” I said.
“I agree. But it’s no measly grail.”
“And the violence.”
“You are a violent man,” Susan said. “You have been all your life.”
“How good a thing is that,” I said.
“It’s neither good nor bad,” Susan said. “It simply is. What makes you who you are is that you have contained it within a set of rules that you can’t even articulate.”
“Sonova bitch,” I said.
“You know it’s true,” she said. “Even bad as you feel right now, and some of that is booze talking, at the center of your soul you know you didn’t do a wrong thing.”
“Maybe that’s a lie I tell myself.”
“No,” Susan said.
“Flat no?”
“I’m a shrink. I’m allowed to say that. Besides,” Susan said, “you are the damn grail.”
“I am?”
“You are,” she said. “A lifelong quest to be true to who you are.”
“And that’s a good thing?” I said.
“It’s the only thing,” she said. “Good or bad. It is the simple fact of you.” I could hear the smile in Susan’s voice. “And for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t want you to be different.”
“Even if I could be,” I said.
“Which you can’t,” Susan said.
“So what makes me better than Harvey?”
“Would I ever fall in love with Harvey?”
“No.”
I didn’t say anything. Susan let me be quiet for awhile. Silence was never a problem for us.
“No,” I said. “You couldn’t.”
“There’s your difference,” Susan said. “I’m okay because you love me?” I said.
“No. I love you because you’re okay.”
Again we shared a silence.
Then I said, “Thank you, Doctor.”
“Take some Scotch,” Susan said. “Call me in the morning.”
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