Day of Reckoning

by John Katzenbach

  He put his finger into his mouth and tasted the sweet salty blood.

  “Oh, Duncan, do you need a Band-Aid?” Megan asked.

  He shook his head. I need a lot more than that, he thought. He glanced over toward Karen and Lauren, who sat in the corner quietly.

  “If something happened to you two—” he started, but they interrupted him.

  “We’ll be okay!” Karen said.

  “We’re not going to let some stranger threaten us,” Lauren continued.

  “You girls don’t understand,” Megan said. “You’re too young to understand how vulnerable we all are.”

  They had been arguing about this since Duncan’s return home. Megan had told him and the twins about Bill Lewis’s visit. Their reaction had been one of defiant stubbornness—traits that Megan assumed they had adopted whole cloth from their father. In a way, angry as she was at them for their persistent failure to feel the same fear and panic that she did, she was infinitely proud: They have the immortality of youth flowing through their veins. She remembered when she and Duncan, barely older, had thought the same: There was no comprehension that the weapons they practiced with up in the mountains could rip and tear and leave someone lifeless. There was no sensation of danger, only a heady feeling of living close to some undefined edge.

  Megan looked across at Duncan and the girls, who had grown quiet, and realized that everyone would think that they had won this argument. That was the way the family operated: Everyone stated their position, and believed that because they were undoubt­edly correct, everyone else would go along—when, of course, no one really did. All families are established on the same sorts of illusions, she thought. Everyone creates the same kind of workable relationships. Even Tommy knew that.

  She heard Duncan say, “Well, let’s be careful. Anyway, I don’t think Bill Lewis is our biggest problem. It’s still Olivia.”

  “But what does she want?” Megan said.

  “That’s what’s so difficult,” Duncan said. “She won’t say how much money. I don’t think the numbers are important to her, really, it’s how she wants me to get it.”

  “Well, how?”

  “She wants me to rob my own bank.”

  The room filled with silence. Megan’s head spun, and she tried to seize hold of any single idea, to form into words and speak, but she could not. She heard the girls’ voices, as if echoing from a great distance.

  “What?”

  “But how?”

  “I can do it,” Duncan said. “I’d have to work out the details, but I can do it.”

  “But, Dad! If you got caught—”

  “You could go to prison! What good would it do us to have Tommy and Grandfather back if you just go to jail? And anyway, why would she—”

  “It makes perfectly good sense from her point of view. She thinks I failed her in one bank robbery. Now she wants me to complete the job. That’s what she said. It has a kind of symmetry to it.”

  “Duncan!”

  “Well, it does. Olivia isn’t dumb.”

  “But suppose—”

  “Suppose what? Karen, Lauren, suppose what! What alternatives do we have?”

  “I still think we should go to the police. Then they’d give you the money.”

  “We can’t, we just can’t. Look, let’s go over it one last time. One, if we go to the cops and Olivia finds out, she might just decide the hell with it, and kill them both. Let me tell you one thing: She’s capable. Don’t think for an instant that she’s not. But at the moment, she’s feeling pretty confident and in control, and we can’t do anything that makes her worried, because then there’s no telling what she might do . . .”

  Duncan hesitated, aware of the envelope in his pocket and of what he had learned that afternoon.

  “She’s a killer, we’ve got to remember that.”

  He paused, watching for reaction about the room. He saw the effect the word had on the three women. He persisted:

  “. . . Two, if we go to the cops, your mother and I will then have to face charges in California, so what good is that? Three, even if we go to the cops, there’s no guarantee that they can do any better at getting the two Tommys back than we can by playing along. Think about it!”

  “What do you mean?” Megan asked.

  “Well, the girls don’t remember, but we do: Think about all the kidnappings you’ve ever heard about. The Lindbergh baby, for ex­ample: The cops got called and the baby died. How about Patty Hearst? Every damn FBI agent in the entire nation was looking for her and it was only after she became a revolutionary herself and robbed her own goddamn bank that they found her. She even called herself Tanya.”

  “I remember,” Megan said softly. “That’s what Olivia used to call herself, long before Patty Hearst.”

  Duncan half-smiled. “She even lost her nickname when she went to prison.”

  He went on: “Anyway, I just don’t think the police would be much help. Do you?”

  Megan shook her head.

  “Lauren? Karen? Do you remember reading anything in the daily papers that might suggest confidence in the Greenfield police?”

  It was an unfair question, but he posed it anyway.

  They remained quiet.

  “All right, then. Just maybe, after we’ve got them back, then we’ll call the cops. But not until we’ve got them back.”

  “But, Duncan,” Megan heard her voice, as if it was coming from someone else, “if you rob the bank to get the money, the place will be swarming with police. How can we get away with it?”

  “We don’t have to.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look,” Duncan said. “All we need is the money and a little time. If I do this, say, Friday night, it won’t be discovered until Monday. We can get the Tommys back over the weekend. Then, on Monday, I can go to Phillips and tell him the truth—or enough of it to explain why I did what I did. Remember, he’s one of your dad’s oldest friends. We can make restitution to the bank—we’ll sell everything if we have to. You dad will help us. But, given the circumstances, I don’t think I’ll get prosecuted—”

  “That sounds ridiculous.”

  “You got any better ideas?”

  “I mean, it’s filled with—”

  “Sure, chance. Luck. Goodwill. Christ, I know. But what else can we do?”

  “We could—”

  “What? Tomorrow I’ll call our broker, sell all our stocks. I’ll call a realtor up in Vermont and put the property on the market. We can cash in everything, but it will take time. More than two days, and that’s all she’s given us.”

  “Do you really think you can?”

  Duncan laughed bitterly. “It’s probably a more common fantasy then any banker would like to admit. And usually they embezzle the money. But what I’m going to do is rob the fucking bank. Just like some goddamn Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “They all got caught,” Megan replied abruptly. “And killed.” She ignored Duncan’s obscenity, thinking it was somehow pertinent to the tone of the conversation.

  Duncan frowned.

  “Two days. That’s all we’ve got. And anyway, what are we gambling with? Our son’s life. The judge’s. We have to go along with what she wants, even if it seems wrong, or it screws everything up in the future. We have to deal with these things right now! And anyway, Megan, you’ve got to see what’s really going on here: It’s not the money that she’s interested in. Maybe for the others, like Bill Lewis and whoever else she’s got helping her, but for Olivia, I’m sure: It’s not the money . . .”

  He looked around at the faces of his family.

  Slowly he pulled the envelope containing the death notice and the picture of the two Tommys from his pocket. He dropped them on a coffee table in front of his wife and daught
ers.

  “It’s us.”

  7

  THURSDAY

  Megan spent the day utterly at the mercy of renegade emotions, unable to control the visions that rose up within her. It was like being caught in a fast-running river, dragged one moment beneath the suffocating white-green froth, the next, thrust upward, gasping for breath, into the clear air. One instant she hallucinated Tommy swinging in the tire hanging from the great oak in the front yard, and she’d give a cry of pleasure, and start to rush outdoors to hug him—only to pull back sharply when she saw the empty tire. The next second, she’d turn, cocking an ear, realizing she could hear the familiar, unmistakable tread of her father’s steps creaking on the house’s stairway. She’d have to hold herself back from running to the foyer to greet this ghost, bitterly forcing herself to recognize he had not returned, except in her mind.

  Megan thought about her father’s footsteps. He has the lightness of age in his walk: It is a mistake to think that elderly people always walk heavily, as if burdened by their time on earth. For some of them, there comes a time when suddenly they are lighter, as if the brittleness of their years is finally lifted by removing the humdrum responsibilities of life. That is why the two Tommys always seemed to race a foot or two up in the air. It is we in middle age who walk with stolid, thumping determination, stuck in mire and routine.

  Megan stared out into the gray late afternoon sky. A gust of wind swirled a last dry bunch of leaves down across the lawn, and for just an instant, they seemed alive as they jumped and tossed about, following the dictates of the breeze.

  She placed her hand against the windowpane. She could feel the steady cold through the glass.

  When Mother died, it was warm. Indian summer filled the tree leaves with a deceiver’s hot wind. She wondered whether her mother had fought against death, or accepted it with the quiet ease with which she’d accepted most things in life. She died quickly, in her sleep, her heart just stopping one morning as she rocked on a porch swing. The mailman had found her and called the ambulance, but it was far too late. He was a young man with a beard, who always had a nice word for Tommy. He stopped by and said that when he found her, she was smiling, and he thought at first she was simply sleeping, but then he’d seen that she’d dropped her glass of lemonade, and there was something in the limp way her arm hung down which told him he was mistaken.

  I wish I’d had a chance to say goodbye, before she snuck away like that. But that was her style; quiet, efficient.

  I wish she were here right now, Megan thought suddenly, because she would know what to do. She wouldn’t be crying every minute and wringing her hands together. Instead, she would be filled with plans and ideas. She would take charge of all her emotions, and put them in order. And then she would figure out what she should do, instead of simply waiting for the next awful thing to happen, like I am.

  She would never let them die.

  All those years acting as the judge’s alter ego had given her the confidence of her strength. He has always been filled with a com­bination football-lawyer-Marine-judge bluster. In a fight, he would never waver for an instant. He approaches life like he did all those beachheads: He throws himself forward, shooting dead ahead, pick­ing out the straight path.

  But she was subtle.

  She saw all the small ramifications, the tiny effects of each action, and she measured all those things together. She picked her way across the minefield of life gingerly, walking lightly, so that all the dangers never knew she was there. I was so blind, when I was young, thinking she had given up too much when she didn’t remain in law school herself, but instead dropped out to support her husband.

  Megan walked away from the window and went over to the wall where the family pictures were hung. She saw the photograph of Tommy with its broken frame. Duncan had cut his finger, then been unsure whether to hang it on the wall again or not. Finally, he had plucked as many shards of glass as possible from the frame and then returned the picture to the wall. She had felt a great sense of relief at that; she had not been able to stand the idea that Tommy’s picture—even broken—would not occupy its customary place on the wall, next to the twins and a little above a portrait of the entire family. She glanced across the pictures until she came to one of the judge and her mother. It had been taken a few years before her death. Her hair had turned a silver-white, but her eyes were wild and filled with life.

  I will be more like you, Megan thought.

  I will be stronger.

  Megan looked into the eyes in the picture and thought:

  I know what you would do.

  What is that, dear?

  You would fight for your child.

  Of course I would. That is what women are here for.

  We’re here for lots of things.

  Of course, dear. We’re here to be lawyers and doctors and realtors and whatever you want to be. But when all is said and done, we’re here for our children. You may think it sounds silly and traditional, but it’s true. It is we who bring them into the world, and it is we who must guard them.

  But Duncan . . .

  Oh, Megan. I know, you’re very modern. But he is a man and doesn’t know.

  Doesn’t know what?

  That the pain of childbirth is only the first, and then we endure many others.

  I know that.

  Then you know the other thing too, dear.

  What’s that?

  That when we bring these children into the world, they never stop being the part of us that they once were. And that is why we fight for them so hard. We must fight to bring them out, then we must fight to see them grow. We never give this up, no matter how many other things occupy us. Never.

  You’re right.

  Of course I am. Do you know what else?

  What?

  This is what makes us far stronger than anyone, even ourselves, ever realizes. This is why we are always being underestimated, mostly by men. Look inside yourself There is steel and iron, sinew and muscle. Look deep. You will find it. And when you need this strength, it will be there.

  I’m scared. I’m scared for both Tommys.

  There is nothing wrong with being scared, dear. As long as we don’t let it get in the way of doing what we must.

  What we must. How will I know?

  You will know.

  Are you sure?

  Totally.

  “Then I am sure too,” she said out loud.

  She took a deep breath and sighed. Then she heard Karen and ­Lauren calling from the kitchen: “Mom! Are you okay? Is someone there?”

  “No,” she called back. “I’m just talking to myself.”

  She picked herself up and went in to where the girls were seated.

  Duncan sat at his desk, figuring out how to raise money for Olivia.

  He had spent much of the day on the telephone with his stock­broker in New York, a realtor in Vermont, and assorted other people connected to his assets. Each had been dismayed when he used the single word: sell. They had tried to dissuade him, yet he had persisted in a jocular way, worried that some of his panic would emerge, and someone would guess his needs and his plans. Consequently, he made jokes, told anecdotes, laughed and acted unconcerned—always trying to give the impression that he was doing something normal, as opposed to the actuality: liquidating his life’s profit in order to buy another.

  By noontime, he was starting to estimate how much, in theory, he had raised. He knew he would have to take a quick offer on the property, so he was ready to take a loss there. And the sale of the stocks and other investments would likely bring a check from his broker of more than $86,ooo. But it would take several days for that to arrive, and weeks before he would see any money from the sale of the land. His house was already mortgaged, but the mortgage was more than a half-dozen years old and he had a line
of credit based on the equity he had established within it. He did not want instantly to exercise that money—he figured when it came time, he would need those funds to make good on what he would steal. That’s the trouble with cash in this era: You can’t get it unless you’re willing to stick up a liquor store some ghetto night. Cash is outdated. Money is all on paper now, in plastic cards and computer banks. If you want some, you need to fill out forms in triplicate, undergo pro­cessing and examination, and then wait. He was mildly aware of the irony it presented: I have made so many people do exactly that, he thought. Now it is my turn to wait. But he guessed that, at least, he would have a check from his brokerage house by the following week, which would be enough to make a minimum down payment on what he would owe the bank.

  I should take the money to Las Vegas or Atlantic City. Play blackjack or the slots and try to walk away a winner. I would have just as much chance there. Because that is what I’m doing—gambling.

  Duncan shrugged. He would do what she asked. Then, afterward, he could try to work his way through whatever the consequences might be.

  First, he told himself, get Tommy back.

  He kept his mind on the problem of stealing the money and then trying to outguess how she would want him to hand it over. It must be a direct transfer, he thought. I must force that on her—I’ll hand her the money and take Tommy from her. Don’t trust her for an instant. He continued trying to anticipate Olivia’s maneuvering, although he did not expect to hear from her or any of the other kidnappers, that day.

  She will let me stew. She knows how much pressure she’s created already, and now she will let her silence simply build. The more tension she is able to deliver to me, the more willing she expects I will be to do precisely what she asks, without question. She recognizes that it is equally terrible to hear from her as to not hear from her.