New Jerusalem News

by John Enright

  However, when Starks asked about Darby Point and the FBI, Dominick found himself being evasive. The whole anti-LNG thing was Atticus’s trip not his, and it didn’t feel right discussing his host’s politics. That would also entail entirely too much explaining. And as for Lord Witherspoon and the feds’ interest in him, there was no point in going there at all. “It’s all a matter of mistaken identity,” he said. “I’m sure they will sort it out themselves.”

  “But how did you know that blonde was an FBI agent?”

  “She was following me, and I’m sure it wasn’t for prurient reasons.”

  “Are you some sort of spy? I mean, the helicopter photos.”

  “No, I’m not any sort of spy. I was out there on a fishing trawler taking seagull shots when it flew over us and then went back to shore, that’s all. I asked the guy driving the boat where we were, and he said off Darby Point.”

  “Okay, we’ll leave it there. You have every right to be evasive, and I rather like the lingering mystery.”

  Dominick excused himself to go outside and smoke a cigar. Starks said he appreciated that courtesy. There was a built-in bench on the small porch at the top of the outside stairs, and Dominick settled in there in his jacket and watch cap to smoke. There was not a light in sight in the landscape. Even the big house at the top of the driveway was perfectly dark, just a blacker shape against the night. A lovely chilly emptiness to meditate in.

  About halfway through the cigar, Starks came out, wearing a parka and bearing two glasses of port. “You know, I envy you smokers your always available excuse to slip away.”

  “You’ve found us out. It isn’t the nicotine we are addicted to, but the freedom from being around nonsmokers.” He took a sip of port. It went well with the Churchill. “Tell me, John, what’s the story of the big house?”

  “It’s known as Broadmoor. No one has lived there since my parents died. I keep meaning to burn it down, but there is always something else that needs to be done first.”

  “Family?”

  “Only child. I’m not sure which one of them decided to go celibate after I was born.”

  “Why not sell it?”

  “Because it’s not mine. It belongs to the bank. I bought this piece. It’s all I need.”

  “So, the Starkses are landed gentry.”

  “I have an ancestor who is acclaimed for killing more Indians than any other original settler hereabouts. There’s a street named after him in town. He didn’t rate an avenue.”

  “Ever go up there?”

  “Quite often, actually. I kept a key. I check on things. There are many memories lurking in those rooms.”

  “Then why burn it down?”

  “I’m of two minds about memories.”

  “So, you will be the last of the Starkses.”

  “Not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a certain nobility in extinction, don’t you think? The Aztecs, saber-toothed tigers, Tyrannosaurus Rex?”

  “No stars tonight.”

  “You are a master at changing topics, Dominick. No, no stars, no moon, no sky. No anything out there really. If this was the first minute of your awareness, that would be your world—nothing and you, a nice dichotomy.”

  “You forgot my cigar, and the cold.”

  “See how quickly life gets complicated? It’s freezing out here. I’m going in. Your room is the one with the light on down the hall. Goodnight, Dominick or whoever you are.”

  The next morning they stopped for breakfast at a working-class diner on the non-touristy part of the waterfront, another spot where Starks was a regular, although no one called him Sir John here. When the waitress brought their coffees all she said was, “The usual?” and Starks just nodded. Dominick just had coffee. He never ate breakfast. Eggs repulsed him, and it was as if his digestive tract needed longer than the rest of him to wake up. As it was, he was up long before his usual hour. Starks had awakened him as he was getting ready to leave. “Last Jag to town,” he said as he shook Dominick’s shoulder.

  If Dominick did not eat upon rising, Starks did not talk. He was uncharacteristically quiet on their ride into town—not hostile, just silent. He picked up a copy of the New Jerusalem News from the pile on the counter beside the cash register when they came into the diner. This was his daily routine. Dominick was just along for the ride. He looked out the window as Starks unfolded and read his paper, thankful that no conversation was expected from him. This was an alien time of day for Dominick. Outside, people were bustling off to their jobs, most of them with their heads down against the cold wind off the bay. A few—mostly women—were talking into cell phones.

  Starks had awakened him in the middle of a vivid dream that lingered still, like a freeze-action shot on a stopped video. It had been in full color, which was special. Maybe the hashish had something to do with it. He had been in the great cabin of a clipper ship on a starboard tack, the cabin tilted that way, the ship beneath him straining and shivering for extra speed. It was a fine sunlit cabin, the glow of polished oak. There were other people in the cabin with him. They were sharing a moment of relaxed satisfaction, as if an agreement had just been reached or a goal accomplished. Atticus and Starks were there, dressed like naval officers, and his father was there as a very young man. In fact, they were all young, of an age. Dominick struggled to recapture what it was they had been celebrating. Was it a race they had just won? It was the feel of the boat that made the dream so real.

  “Your Darby Point is in the news again.” Starks said.

  “What was it you called it? Strawberry Point?”

  “The authorities have picked up a, quote, ‘person of interest’ in their investigation of the bombings there. You do know there have been bombings there, don’t you? I mean, you can admit to knowing that.”

  “Yes, of course, the LNG plant or whatever.”

  “Well, it seems they finally have a suspect, or at least a lead.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Not surprisingly, the young man has an Arab name.”

  “Ah, the usual suspects.”

  “Are you Muslim, Dominick?”

  “Not that I am aware of. Wait, John. Why ask such a ridiculous question? Of course I’m not Muslim. What is it? The beard? Do I look like an imam or something?”

  “One never knows these days. Of course, you do drink alcohol, but that could be just a clever cover. Before I woke you up this morning, you were talking in your sleep. It sounded like Arabic, like some sort of prayer.”

  “I was sailing a clipper ship.”

  “Oh, that explains it.”

  “I don’t know any Arabic.”

  Starks started to laugh. The waitress came with his plate—two eggs over easy, bacon, toast, and hash browns. He put his paper aside. “Dominick, what do you expect? You persist in your mysteries. I get to make guesses. You are a tabula rasa. I get to invent things about you.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? Life’s a game.”

  “Here. I will prove it to you.” Dominick reached across and took a piece of bacon from Starks’s plate and ate it.

  “Okay, so I guess you’re not Jewish either.”

  “Allah be praised,” Dominick said.

  Chapter 14

  One of his names was Mohammed. An Art Institute student, he was the only person on the Bay Savers membership list with an Arab name. Atticus had never met the man, had no idea who he was. In fact, no one seemed to know anything about him beyond the fact that he was in federal custody. Find someone named Mohammed and arrest him. Oh, yes, he was Canadian, which made him an even more likely suspect somehow. A foreigner, in any event, not an American, thank god. The New Jerusalem News editorialists were quite relieved on that point. The idea of a homegrown New England terrorist had obviously unnerved them. The editorial even dubbed him “the non-suicide bomber,” implying that he was too much of a yellowbellied coward to blow himself up with his own bombs.

  When they left the diner, Starks had handed the newspaper to D
ominick, who read it in the ferry waiting room. According to the front-page news story, Mohammed had been picked up by Homeland Security officers for questioning. He had not yet been charged with anything. He was not only a “person of interest” but also a “possible prime suspect,” whose apprehension was “precautionary” and meant to prevent any more immediate bombings. An ICE Agent named Kaczynski was quoted as telling the News that the suspect had come under scrutiny when irregularities were discovered in his Canadian papers. It did not say why he was being investigated in the first place, only that the search for other possible unnamed coconspirators was ongoing. It was the editorial that mentioned the leaked information about Mohammed’s Bay Savers membership—the group’s brochures and bumper stickers had been found in his room—by innuendo implicating the group as the unnamed coconspirators.

  When Dominick got home to Mt. Sinai, Atticus had not yet heard the news, and Dominick had to break it to him. Bay Savers had now been painted permanently with a big black brush. That was when Atticus started making phone calls to discover that no one knew this Mohammed. He had signed up on campus but never seemed to have come to a meeting. Someone was assigned the task of drafting a suitably irate response. Then Atticus headed off for an emergency meeting.

  For Dominick it was a long-overdue town errand day—the laundromat, grocery shopping, the post office, the library to check his e-mail, St. Edgar’s Church basement thrift shop. He needed a warmer winter coat. Real life. It was a suitably shitty-weather day for such tasks. He made a list and found Lydia to ask her if she needed anything from town. All she wanted was a bag of chocolate-covered doughnuts. “The cheap ones,” she said, “the ones that never go stale.”

  Finally hungry, Dominick had lunch at the deli down by the ferry dock. This was one of the rewards for going to town. They made a good roast beef sandwich, and the place was staffed entirely by lovely young women. The deli was owned and run by women, and somehow they managed to hire only the comeliest local post-adolescents to work there, girls with perfect skin in that magic potent flash between high school and first marriages. The girl next door you wanted to ravage when you were that age. Something to watch as you munched your sandwich and chips. And they liked being watched—male attention like sunlight on a young plant’s leaves—they dressed to attract it. Dominick tried to recall how long it had been since he had crossed over to the old-man’s spectator part of the game, from which any fantasy of actually being a player had been wholly excised. There should be separate words for a sport you can still actually play and for one that you can only imagine having once played. The girls’ almost cinematic distance did not matter. They were still lovely to look at. One poignantly reminded him of his first and only wife. What was the name of that slim geriatric Japanese novel? The House of Sleeping Beauties?

  While his clothes were in the washing machine at the laundromat Dominick went to the church basement thrift shop. It being a fairly miserable day, there were few customers, so he didn’t feel rushed as he went through the racks of men’s coats and jackets. He couldn’t believe his luck. There was both a tan London Fog raincoat with liner that looked like it had never been worn and a well-worn but still sturdy dark-blue peacoat, and they both were large enough to fit him. He debated which to buy, then bought them both for twenty-five dollars. He wore the peacoat out of the shop, the collar turned up.

  When he got online at the library, there were a couple of business queries to answer—“Yes, the Bugatti is for sale as is, even if it’s not running”—and an e-mail from Angelica. It was a long e-mail, long and disturbingly intimate. She missed him, his company. She thought of him daily, wondering where he was and what he was doing. She wanted to fly over to London to be with him, if only for a few days and if she could come up with a good excuse to tell her husband. She had never been to England. What was his life like there? Did he have any children? She gushed and rambled on like this for half a page with no paragraph breaks and ended: “My menstrual cramps were severe this last period. I know it’s because I never took that gorgeous cock of yours inside me and my pussy was punishing me for that.”

  Dominick leaned back from the computer screen and looked around him. All the other Internet computers at the long library table were in use. No one seemed to be paying him any attention. He wondered how secure his messages were here. Funny how in this instance secure meant private. Surely the library had rules against or filters blocking pornography, and Angelica was getting pretty close. He wasn’t sure he wanted to read on.

  But the next block of prose was about her parents, how much she loved them, how dear they were to her, how she worried about them in that big old house. “Old people just get so stuck in their ways. I know they would just love the condo I got for them in Sarasota if they would only go there.” It was all Daddy and Mum and how they deserved a golden retirement. But—it took Dominick another five lines to reach the but—they needed one more incentive to move, which was knowing that the old family house (she refused to call it Mt. Sinai) would be loved and well cared for. This was where the nongenital part of Lord Witherspoon came in. If she was going to do what was best for her parents, she would have to be able to tell them that the house had a new owner as devoted as they were to maintaining it—Lord Witherspoon. It was the right thing to do, even if it meant her selling the house at a loss in a buyer’s market. Her lovely parents didn’t have that many years left to bask in Gulf Coast sunlight. So, she would be open to another bid from Lord Witherspoon—not as low as his first, but closer to that range.

  Darling, just type a number out and send it to me and we can negotiate from there, maybe even face-to-face again in another hotel room with a lovely view. I long to hear from you. I imagine you out hunting real estate deals in countries I’d have to find on a map or on a safari somewhere hundreds of miles from the nearest computer. But do get back to me. That house means a great deal to me. I spent every summer of my youth there. Just think, when you own it you and I can make love in the big master bedroom where I used to watch Mommy and Daddy do it, peeking through a keyhole.

  Dominick had to go outdoors. He wanted to smoke a cigar and think, but it was much too cold and wet outside to enjoy one, and there was nowhere public indoors anymore in this so-called civilized world to do so either. In his new peacoat and watch cap he stood for a while out of the rain in the shelter of the entryway. After the Boston visit with Angelica, Lord Witherspoon had pretty much vanished. Perhaps he had had a small say in the purchase of that other coat today, the London Fog, but generally speaking Lord Witherspoon might just as well have been out of the country. Dominick seriously considered leaving him there. A nonresponse to Angelica at this point might well be just as effective as responding and continuing the charade. That would be the reasonable thing to do. Kill Lord Witherspoon. He could even reply to her e-mail as someone else, an executor or relative, informing her of Lord Witherspoon’s unfortunate demise in a Bulgarian car crash.

  But then, how many such adventures did Dominick have in his life anymore? He may well be lashed to the mast of his superannuation when it came to the deli sirens, but Lord Witherspoon was being invited as a player out onto the court—or in Angelica’s case was it a racecourse? What would it hurt to play along further? A sudden death could always end Lord Witherspoon’s career whenever Dominick pleased. Let him live a scene or two longer into this caper. Angelica’s athletic body was still unexplored. He returned to the library as Lord Witherspoon. What the hell.

  Dear Angelica: I was thrilled, of course, to get your e-mail. Sorry for the lag in response. I have been, in fact, off on another family acquisition mission in the north of Ireland, godforsaken Donegal, where the dearth of sunlight is exceeded only by the lack of Internet cafés. The bottom has fallen out of the Irish real estate bubble. (Do bottoms fall out of bubbles?) To the extent that newly foreclosed developments can be had for a fraction of what they cost to build. Busy. I have no immediate plans of returning to the States, though your personal enticements might be
nd a man’s resolve in that respect.

  As per Mt. Sinai. I am touched by your concern for your parents’ well-being, and I must say the family foundation is still interested in diversifying its holdings in New England. (Like my buying spree here in Ireland, it is a bit like buying the escaped empire back one piece at a time.) However, that being said, I must be honest with you, dear, and say that I have not received any authorization to augment our initial bid. BUT, but your personal appeal has not fallen on deaf ears, and I will pursue seeking an offer more in your favor. I cannot give you a new figure today, but I will get back to you soon. If only the market there would take a tick upward to justify our reconsideration.

  You ask if I have children. No, no children. No wife. I am still waiting for the right woman to come into my life.

  It was dusk before Dominick finished all his town errands. Shopping was last, with a final stop at the liquor store. It was only four o’clock, but the solstice was approaching, days were shrinking to less than nine hours of daylight. On his drive through the village he was surprised by all the Christmas lights—on houses, stores, trees. They seemed early. Or were they? Whatever schedule they were on had nothing to do with his. What a special mixture of hubris and generosity were Christmas decorations. People spent hundreds of dollars decorating a public space—the outsides of their houses—for the pleasure of others, while at the same time taking part in a competition that drew attention to themselves and the extent—or lack—of their esthetic sense. Just the electricity bills for some of the displays had to be meaningful. In any event, it was another one of those impulses that remained a mystery to him.