by John Enright
Wasn’t that telling? Dominick thought, poking a log back into place to burn like a proper log. The folks who set out to save the bay can count as a victory escaping a charge of blowing it up. How far off the original mark was that?
Atticus was animated. He asked once about Lydia, whom, Dominick informed him, was still safely at Ms. Arnold’s. He decided not to give Atticus the rest of the news about Boston and all. Did Napoleon worry about what Josephine had for lunch back in Paris?
They went rummaging for supper in the kitchen, Atticus still going on. “Their case is so busted they are going back to looking for the fictional Lord Witherspoon. Theo loved this part. At their press conference today when they had to admit to letting Mohammed go, all they could say was that they had other leads they were pursuing, including someone passing himself off as one Lord Witherspoon. They never once mentioned Bay Savers by name. We are off that bogus hook, I tell you. They won’t mess with us again, fucking feds.”
Dominick fixed them grilled cheese sandwiches.
Chapter 17
Dominick went through the list—who knew Lord Witherspoon? There was Charlie and Brenda, of course, and Atticus and Lydia and Ms. Arnold; none of whom were going to go running to the feds saying It’s Dominick! There were the realtors they played with in the summer, but all they could say was that a Lord Witherspoon had been looking at houses in the area. Then there was Angelica. What would she do when she heard the feds were looking for him? What could she tell them? That Lord Witherspoon had made a bid on her property, that she had met with him once in Boston. But that would only get her more entangled with the feds and her property suspected as being possibly involved in illegal activities. There was no good reason for her to go to them, and she couldn’t connect Lord Witherspoon to Dominick. He would probably be getting an e-mail from her, though, canceling any deal on the house. That was it, wasn’t it? Starks didn’t know. Wait—Theo knew, but he was hardly going to reveal that his fake lordship had helped him escape from the raid. Bay Savers had to have nothing to do with Lord Witherspoon, and the longer he was on the lam the better for them. No, as long as the feds couldn’t make the connection between Lord Witherspoon and Dominick, let them search all they wanted. Besides, no crimes had been committed by either Lord Witherspoon or Dominick, and he knew that as long as no charges had been brought against him, avoiding being interviewed was not against the law.
He was half through his grilled cheese sandwich when it hit him. That Boston desk cop, Sergeant O’Shea, had asked him if he was Witherspoon before taking his driver’s license off to Xerox. Even though Dominick hadn’t answered the question, O’Shea could, probably would, make the connection to the fed’s announcement. The Florida address on the license would be useless, but they had Lydia’s and Ms. Arnold’s addresses on their booking records. Dominick got up and walked to the back porch door and turned on the outside light. The snow was still coming in sideways. It hadn’t let up. Pretty soon they would be snowed in.
“I have to leave, Atticus.”
“What? In this? Where would you go? If this is about the feds saying they’re looking for Lord Witherspoon, forget it. They only said that because they had to say something, just spin. How could they track him here anyway? Don’t be silly.”
“Then I will just give them a bit longer to prove their disinterest.” Dominick went up to his room and packed as quickly as he could. He ended up making several trips out to his car with armfuls of clothes and piling them in the back seat. An emergency exit. He had done it before. There was always stuff you missed. When he had finished he found Atticus back in the parlor with the fire.
“Atticus, I don’t want you lying to the feds, so I’m not going to tell you where I am going. Just tell them I left and you don’t know where I went.”
“They won’t come here again,” Atticus said. “Why would they?”
Dominick didn’t have time to try to explain. “They’ll be back. Whatever they ask you, answer them honestly, just don’t volunteer anything.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m not sure, Atticus. I know it is time to move on is all I can tell you. I wish you luck with your protest and all. Best to Lydia. Now, I’ve got to get going before I can’t get out.”
“Wait.” Atticus got up from his wing chair beside the fire and came over to where Dominick was standing by the parlor door, his shoes and pants legs melting snow onto the floor. He gave Dominick a hug. “Let me hear from you,” he said matter-of-factly. “You want a gun? I’ve a pistol hidden upstairs.”
“No, no guns, thanks. I’ll be in touch.”
Dominick had to rock the car back and forth a few times to get it loose, but the driveway was downhill to the road, and in reverse he had enough traction. A few more cars had gone down the road since he had come home, and he stayed in their tracks to the intersection, where the going got easier because there had been more traffic. The roads were all but deserted now. He saw only four other sets of headlights between Mt. Sinai and Charlie and Brenda’s house, where he shifted to low and plowed right up the driveway to their two-car garage. He retrieved the hidden house key and in the kitchen found the keys to the garage right where they should be. He got the door up and pulled his car into the space Charlie had vacated when he left, beside his summer car, the yellow MGA. He got the garage door closed again and hauled all his stuff into the house. By the time he was done, the blizzard had almost erased his tracks up the driveway. He turned up the heat and turned off all the outside lights. The darkened house inside the storm was like a perfect tomb. Dominick reclaimed his old bedroom. Just to make sure, he checked the phone, and it had been turned off for the season. He retired with a fine sense of relief. He dreamed of Queen Emma. It was all about looking for exits.
The next morning was brilliant and frozen. The snow had stopped, but the sky was almost as white as the landscape. Nothing moved, nothing sparkled. The world was a matte black-and-white photograph, with only the lee side of trees and power poles black. Dominick ventured outside as far as the porch to take photographs while his coffee was brewing. There was nothing alive besides himself. This was his idea of heaven. He spent the day eating, drinking, reading, napping. The cable TV connection had been shut off for the season along with the phone, and if there was a radio in the house Dominick didn’t go looking for it. So his removal from the world was doubly blessed.
He returned to reading the collection of Morison’s essays, but after a while the know-it-all voice became tiresome. Luckily, he had brought other books from Atticus’s, one of which was Carl Sauer’s Land & Life, a collection of his papers about American geography. Sauer’s cold prose suited the situation. In Sauer’s world there was the pleasing assumption that man was just another passing natural phenomenon, that the rise and fall of Homo sapiens as a dominant species would occupy in geologic time but a tiny fraction of the time that dinosaurs reigned. There was one chapter entitled “Seashore—Primitive Home of Man?”
Dominick copied out a passage from it in his quotes notebook:
Ranging from beach into shoal water, from wading to swimming and diving are steps that Professor Hardy has invoked to explain certain characteristics of the human body, such as the symmetry of his body, the erect and graceful carriage, the loss of body hair and development of hair on the head, the distribution of subcutaneous fat, the streamlined hair tracts.
It is a curious fact that no other primates appear to have taken to living on seashores. . . . Most primates seem not to forage in water, and some do not swim at all.
May it be that by seaside living our physiologic system established its particular needs of iodine and salt, its apparent benefits from unsaturated fats, and its inclination to high protein intake?
Dominick satisfied his sudden craving for fish with a can of sardines from Brenda’s well-stocked larder. By sundown the sky had cleared.
The next day brought bright sunlight and snow melt from the roof, forming icicles on south-facing eaves. By midday
a snowplow had passed down Charlie’s street and one or two cars ventured out. Dominick stayed inside and read about nascent culture in the last deglaciation.
The third day after the storm it rained all day, a very mournful insistent rain that melted away most of the snow except for the mound the plow had pushed up along the edge of the street. The morning of the fourth day after the storm was clear and almost balmy, an invitation out. The snow was largely gone. Dominick showered and on an impulse chopped away his beard and moustache and shaved. It took him two disposable razors. The battery in Charlie’s MGA was dead, but Dominick found a set of jumper cables in the garage and started it up with a charge from his car and let it run. Instead of dressing like Nick he dressed as Lord Witherspoon in proper slacks, a turtleneck sweater, and the London Fog raincoat he had yet to wear. From the hall closet he borrowed one of Charlie’s hats, a tan trilby. He drove into the village in the yellow MGA.
His first stop was the barber shop, where he received an almost military haircut and a better shave. He then checked his post office box—nothing—and stopped by the library to check his e-mail. There was news from his agent and his accountant that the sale of the last of the antique cars had been successfully finalized. The sale, thanks to the sheik, had fetched more than anticipated, and the funds—minus fees—were now safely stashed in interest-bearing accounts. As long as the country stayed solvent and his lifestyle did not change, Dominick could coast to forever now. There was nothing from Angelica at his Lord Witherspoon address, so he was successfully disappearing as well.
He shopped to replace and augment what he had taken from Brenda’s larder and Charlie’s liquor cabinet. He stopped at the drugstore to buy a pair of dark glasses and some magazines. He resisted picking up a copy of the New Jerusalem News as well, though he did check the front page banner to see what day of the week it was. He had lost track again. It was a Thursday. No one seemed to notice him. If he could remain invisible here, perhaps he would stay a bit longer. At least he had a familiar bed to sleep in and he was free of the unwanted domestic entanglements at Mt. Sinai. Having a house all to himself was a plus.
The next day, Dominick drove back to the village in the MGA and parked on a side street near the ferry. Dressed in what he now thought of as his Lord Witherspoon disguise of London Fog, tan trilby, dark glasses, and best clothes, he took the midmorning boat to New Jerusalem. No men talking into their lapels or blondes with bad breath in blue down ski jackets followed him. He needed cigars, and he wanted to retrieve that last batch of photos and negatives that he had left behind at Starks’s museum.
Also, he had to admit that he was feeling a flush of excitement and satisfaction, blending in with the crowd of his fellow anonymous passengers as they boarded the ferry and found seats in the heated cabin. He had brought a magazine to read but he could only pretend to read it. He was too absorbed in his fellow passengers and what was and was not going on around him. He was enjoying his camouflage—disguised as what they were looking for, aka Lord Witherspoon, not Dominick or Nick or Nickel. Hell, he had to admit he enjoyed being Lord Witherspoon again, enjoyed the distance that gave him. Distance from what, he was not sure. His clothes felt good on his body. He felt alive, like a total stranger among strangers, passing for one of them. Maybe he should have been a spy, proper employment for a solitary man. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to prove that you are a fictional character and therefore uncatchable.
Lord Witherspoon had lunch—oysters—at the Trafalgar, the fanciest eatery on the waterfront. He paid in cash and left a big tip. He strolled up to the central square and stopped in a gallery featuring oil seascapes in fancy frames, paintings suitable solely for hanging in galleries. He stopped in a swank men’s haberdashery and purchased a pair of kid gloves and a reversible silk and wool scarf—items his costume lacked. At his tobacconist’s he bought a box of Churchills. He was only blocks from Ms. Arnold’s place, so he detoured past there. One of the parked cars he walked past on her block had its motor running and a man and a woman sitting in the front seat looking bored. They paid him no attention.
At the New Jerusalem Historical Society Museum Starks did not recognize Dominick when he walked in. Dominick stopped in the hallway to study a display of harpoons. “There is a coat rack by the door, sir,” Starks called out from his unseen station in the library room. “We keep it warm in here.” Starks enjoyed that invisible voice bit. Dominick hung his outer garments on the antlers then returned to the harpoons, his back to the mirror where Starks could see him, ignoring the invisible voice. Soon enough Starks came out into the hallway. “Welcome to the museum, sir. If there is anything specific I could help you with, just ask.”
“Actually, John, I just came to pick up those photographs I left here and to settle up my bill with you,” Dominick said, turning around to face him.
Starks took a surprised step backwards and looked Dominick up and down. “My god, you are a bloody spy after all.”
“I’m headed south,” Dominick said. “That requires a slightly different presentation.”
“I’d wondered what had happened to you. Headed south? Good choice. Come on in,” and Starks led the way into his library office. “What photographs you left here? I wasn’t aware you left any.”
“That last batch you developed for me, the seagulls.”
“And the black helicopter, yes. I thought I gave them to you. They’re not here.”
“Oh, I didn’t take them. I hid them before I left, in the archival box of photos we were looking at, the ones of Strawberry Point.”
Starks made a strange noise in his throat and went off. He came back with an archival box and opened it. There was Dominick’s manila envelope. Starks handed it over. “No storage fee,” he said. “And forget about owing me anything for developing them, just chemicals and paper, a public service we supply for spies.”
“Thank you, John.”
“How about you buy me a drink instead?”
“A bribe?”
“Precisely.”
“Capital idea. The Harp?”
“I’ll close up shop early, meet you there in, say, an hour?”
The phone was ringing. Starks went to answer it. Dominick stuck the envelope of photos into the plastic bag with his box of cigars and let himself out, tinkling the bell above the door. The wind off the bay had picked up, and he raised the tall collar of his coat against it. He was glad for his new scarf and gloves.
Dominick again took the corner booth farthest from the bar. He ordered a pint of Guinness and a shot of Jameson’s. He had his magazine to read. It was still early; the place was quiet, just a murmur of conversation from the patrons along the bar where a muted flat-screen TV played a soccer game. It was less than an hour before Queen Emma arrived. She was obviously searching for someone. Dominick just watched over the top of his magazine. She scoped out the bar patrons once, then ordered a drink. As the bartender poured her a glass of red wine she asked him a question, and he shook his head as he answered. Was she looking for Starks, Dominick wondered? Emma sat on a bar stool with her back to the bar, a very unladylike pose except that her ankles were politely crossed beneath her long skirt. She surveyed the room again. There was nothing tentative about her walk across the room, but there was nothing definite either. It was like a stroll through a garden as she made her way to Dominick’s booth. She reached out to touch his trilby and coat and silk scarf where they hung on the hook outside his booth. “Nice threads,” she said, “but I think I liked you better when you looked less respectable, less groomed. Why didn’t you say hello, Nickel? Didn’t you know I was looking for you?”
“Hello, Emma. Just trying out my new disguise. Why would I know you were looking for me?”
“Well, isn’t everyone? May I?” Emma slid into the booth seat opposite Dominick.
“And why would you look for me here at The Harp?”
“No mystery there. John Starks called me and said you would be here.”
“And why would
John Starks do that?”
“Because I asked him to contact me if he heard from you.”
“And why would you do that?”
“Because I want to help you.”
“Help me? Help me do what?”
“Why, hide out, of course. God, you are such a white guy, shaved and with that haircut and those clothes. You look like a Republican.”
“Emma, I don’t know what you think you know, but—”
“Theo told me all about it,” Emma interrupted him. “He called me up, delighted to be able to inform me that my ‘new lover’ as he put it was now the feds’ primary terrorist target. My ‘new lover’ being ‘Lord Witherspoon’—and I said both of those inside quotation marks.”
“What is it about Theo?”
“I don’t think you two hit it off well. A couple of days later he called me back to let me know that the feds had also put it together that you were Lord Witherspoon. I don’t think he told them. Why would he? In fact, he called me the second time to tell me to forget that he had mentioned you being Lord Witherspoon and if the feds questioned me to tell them I knew nothing of Your Lordship or any connection he might have with Bay Savers. He said that’s what he told them.”
“The feds have questioned Theo?”
“Oh, yes. Theo and Atticus and everyone else identified as ‘sitting at the head table’—as they put it—at that meeting they raided.”
“Including you?”
“Well, they’ve had trouble finding me, so not yet.”
“Have any charges been brought?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Because if no charges have been brought then you don’t have to talk to them.”
“Why would the feds want to question me anyway? I don’t know anything. They’ve already gotten me in enough trouble as it is.”
“How so?” Dominick motioned to the waitress to bring them another round of drinks.
