by Brett Adams
The wheelchair’s tires squealed on the floor as the orderly pivoted it to face Jack. The man’s face was studiously attempting to appear uninterested.
“He foreshadowed it the night he set the plot in motion, an hour before he left the notes on the tiles outside my office. That night he gave me a choice. Play-acting, but the choice was lose fingers or a thumb. Flesh of my flesh.”
Marten frowned.
“You’re saying you should have realized he was targeting you?”
“More. Man is pulled from normal life into unfamiliar waters is Narrative 101, turning point, Act One. But if the rest of his novel was simply a rising body count, rinse and repeat, barring that I was just further from home or closer to the victim . . . well, to Hiero’s mind, that’s no immortal novel. It’s an airport novel.
“Worse: it’s melodrama. Surface detail with no depth.”
“I still don’t get it,” said Marten, rising from her chair. “Why isn’t it enough that you’re the last body? How could you assume Hiero would protect you until the very end?”
“Because he needed something from me that my corpse couldn’t give.”
Jack scrunched sideways on the bed with a grimace, ready to launch at the wheelchair.
“But why me? Why my fingers?” He raised his hand and examined his thumb and forefinger as if the answer was written on them.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. I cast my mind back over every encounter with Hiero since the start of the year. There had to be more to his fixation with me than my simply being a ready patsy.
“He always seemed to want my approval, of an idea, a piece of writing, a novel review—I guess it’s natural for a student to want the approval of a teacher. But it was more than that. He would talk about his father—a version of his father, filtered through his fantasies—as if the memories he described were somehow shared memories. As if I just needed the highlights, could fill in the gaps myself. When he talked to me about those times, it was as if we were reminiscing.”
“You know,” said Marten, “the old lady I spoke to in Germanton said Hiero’s father was a hole in every conversation she had with him.”
Jack grunted. “Seems he saved it all for me.” He slipped across the gap from bed to wheelchair, but the orderly made no move to wheel him out.
“I was a man who had already walked out on his family. I’m about the age of Hiero’s father when he left him and his mother.”
“So Hiero was punishing you?”
“Punishing? No. Experimenting, although he felt sure of the outcome. And he thought the result would hold true for every father, every man. Hence immortal. That when crushed in the vice of physical necessity—when forced to choose between Kim and Tracey—I would make the choice.” He passed a hand across his brow. “. . . I mean, can you even?”
It beggared the imagination. What would Benjamin have done if jammed into that dark shed with her and David? Could she have chosen between her husband and her little boy?
“And if a man could do that?” said Jack. “Anything—anything—from the smallest white lie on up was just normal life. Expected. Explained. It wasn’t Hiero that caused his father to leave. It wasn’t his fault. His father just got squeezed too hard by life and bailed out.”
“What did Kim make of this,” said Marten, “finding herself in the middle of Hiero’s experiment?”
“Kim?” A half-smile twisted his lips. “After telling me to choose her, she took the opportunity to ask why I left nine years ago.”
My God. The guts of the woman.
“And what was your answer?”
A nurse appeared. “I’m sorry, Mr Griffen really must begin his physiotherapy.”
Marten ignored her. “Jack, what did you say?”
“You heard the lady. Torture time.”
Marten decided her hands could hold a gun one more time.
89
The breeze blowing across Fremantle harbor carried the clean smell of countless miles of open Indian Ocean.
I could inhale that every day of eternity and never grow tired of it.
Above, a gull beat its wings to hover in the cloudless sky and complained.
“I think he’s aiming for you, Jack.”
I turned to Kim and smiled. Even bird shit wouldn’t dent my mood today.
“Is that them?” she said, squinting and pointing to the mouth of the groin that protected the harbor.
Between the tumbled rocks of the walls a small vessel had appeared, silhouetted against the descending sun. The yacht’s sail was reefed, and it was entering the harbor under power. A handful of gulls flocking above it looked like a swarm of midges at this distance.
“Know in a minute,” I replied, and descended the steps to the wharf to shed nervous energy.
The craft that pulled alongside the jetty minutes later was unmistakably the stink potter, Chuck Longman’s yacht. The boy, Scrub, leapt from the still moving craft with the mooring line as soon as the gap closed to a few feet. The figure behind the wheel was intent on maneuvering the yacht and didn’t appear to have noticed us yet.
“Has he had a growth spurt?” Tracey had come up behind us, and was looking at Scrub. “I thought you said he was small for his age.”
Scrub hadn’t looked small when pointing a gun at me, I remembered. But that seemed like an eon ago.
“Come on. Let’s see if they need help,” I said, knowing full well they’d done this a thousand times, and certainly did not need our help. I suddenly felt nervous. Longman and Scrub were going to be staying with us for two weeks, and I feared it was too much, too soon.
Longman greeted us with a gruff hello and invited us onto the boat.
“I wasn’t expecting a party,” he said, and I noted his troubled gaze settle on Scrub. The boy had tied off and now squatted motionless by the bollard, coiled like a cat, his gaze flicking restlessly between us. “No offence,” Longman finished, with a glance at Kim and Tracey.
Kim smiled to set him at ease. “I told Jack he should have stayed home.”
“Hi Scrub,” I said.
In answer, he pointed at me. “Why does your t-shirt say ‘L’?”
Hiding my shock at the first words I’d heard him utter, I glanced at Longman. His eyes twinkled, and the barest smile touched his lips. For him, it was a burst of pride and joy.
I dipped my chin to peer at my shirt front, as if I’d forgotten I was bearing a one-foot tall black letter ‘L’ on a yellow back ground. “Oh, this? It was a present from my daughter, Tracey,” and indicated her. “I’m a professor. It stands for ‘Learned’.”
Tracey walked smoothly over to Scrub and squatted to whisper in his ear. To my surprise, he let her. His brow crinkled in concentration as she spoke, and then all at once he burst into gales of laughter.
I turned to Longman. “You probably want a proper shower and something to eat that doesn’t come out of a can.”
“To be honest,” he said, pausing to lock the cabin door, “I could kill an ice-cold beer followed by a scalding hot coffee.”
“Sail and Anchor?” I suggested.
“Then Gino’s,” finished Kim.
Longman climbed from the yacht with an agility belied by his spindly legs surmounted by an improbably large torso. Somehow, he looked older and seemed younger.
Scrub rose and followed his grandfather as he headed for the marina office. Tracey gave us a surreptitious thumbs-up and followed.
Ever since I had suggested Longman and Scrub visit for a couple of weeks, my mind had constructed disaster after disaster for how this would play out. As usual, all that the worry had done was eat tomorrow’s energy. Again, my anxiety had not fully reckoned with a Tracey on a mission.
Feeling the little fizz of adrenaline, I twisted my wrist toward me and out of habit looked for my Medline, fearing to see its sullen orange—or worse, its angry red.
But all that met my gaze was my naked wrist. A crisp tan line on the edges of a band of white skin.
I took a
deep breath, conscious of Kim regarding me.
“You okay?” she said.
It had been Kim’s suggestion that I leave it home today. I nodded.
“Good,” she said, and shoved me over the side of the yacht.
I tipped overboard like a tin soldier, rigid with surprise. The marina’s salty water embraced me, cold enough to take my breath away. I swallowed water before remembering to shut my mouth, and thrashed to turn upright as fleeting thoughts of sharks filled my mind.
My head broke the surface, and I blew a geyser of water from my mouth.
When I’d knuckled the water from eyes, I looked up to see Kim standing on the jetty watching me. One of her hands gripped the top of a corroded metal ladder that descended into the water, the other was caught halfway to her throat, betraying a hesitancy uncharacteristic in Kim.
Half-floundering, half-stroking I made my way to the bottom of the ladder. Kim’s silhouette loomed above me. My mind returned to that night months ago, in the dark of a shed on Sandsage Bison Reserve, half a world away, and the scene for the climax of Hiero’s novel. And to Kim, and her question: “Why did you leave?”
It had taken me forty-eight hours to give her an answer, from a hospital bed the morning of the day Marten visited me.
I’d had a day of semi-waking, and then another of fevered lucid thought to compose my answer. I say ‘compose’, because I’d known the answer for years. Just needed to find the words for my ex-wife.
Why did you leave?
The answer: I broke my life before it could be broken. Like the tigeress who devours her cubs rather than let another predator take them.
Tracey’s illness was the last and biggest; the straw that broke this camel’s back. And if I couldn’t have my life in the shape I wanted, then no one could.
Kim’s response? She had said, “Jack, life is fragile. If you play with it, yes, it might break. The alternative is, well . . . There’s a name for a place where you don’t touch things: a museum. Is that what you want your life to be?”
Fragile. Lying on a hospital bed, my face bruised with the pattern of Hiero’s boot, my chest stiff from the rough handling of a heart attack patient. The irony did not escape me. That there of all places I was talking to Kim, really talking, for the first time in years.
I climbed the ladder, water cascading from my sodden clothes. At the top, I found her outstretched hand and took it.
“You, okay?” she said, her expression a curious mingling of concern and a smile that wanted out.
Okay?
Visible at the end of the jetty, emerging from the office, were the forms of Longman and Scrub and Tracey. I had invited them into my life. Longman pushing seventy, and fragile. Scrub, beginning to bud. Fragile.
Tracey appeared beside Scrub, talking animatedly.
What did she think of me? Her dad, who had disappeared down a hole when she was twelve. Could it have been a worse time? Fragile.
And Kim. Standing there on a jetty on the other side of the world from the life she had begun again, holding the hand of her one-time husband, getting wet for the privilege.
Fragile.
I could offer a prayer of hope for Hiero. Snarled up as he was now in legal proceedings that would sooner or later commit him to life behind bars for decades. I could thank him, too, after a fashion.
Without him I wouldn’t have written my book.
The one you’re holding.
“I’m okay,” I said to Kim. “But handle with caution.”
Our footprints made lines along the jetty, fading with distance.
Epilogue
A month after Longman and Scrub sailed out of Fremantle harbor, almost a year to the day after I made it back to Australia, I got a call from my young IT friend, Matt Price.
I knew from the first moment he was excited.
“Matt?”
“You won’t believe it,” he said, breathless, “but I did it.”
“Did what?” I grunted. It was after midnight. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Cracked the code.”
“What code?”
“The rest of Hiero’s blog.”
That woke me up.
“Wait,” I said, dragging myself upright in bed. “The rest of Hiero’s blog was a hash of random garbage.” It turned to junk right after ‘3PM and the best cheesecake in New York.’ Just before I finally caught up with him. And found Tracey.
“No,” he said, barely containing his glee. “It was a code, and I cracked it.
“Underneath that junk, it begins: The All-Concealing ‘I’ . . .”
The skin at the nape of my neck prickled. Because The All-Concealing ‘I’ is a narrative trope, a term for when a first person narrator—normally a candid sharer of their inner world—subtly withdraws that intimacy. Begins to omit things and play on a reader’s false assumptions.
The technique is often used in detective fiction to put distance between the narrator and the reader, to allow a plot twist without the reader feeling cheated. Like when your spouse appears not to hear you ask how their afternoon went, only to reveal the next day—your birthday—that their afternoon was spent hunting in book shops for your present, a first edition of The Demolished Man.
Matt was still speaking. I tuned in again.
“Don’t ask me how much time I put into this. It’s embarrassing. But when you mentioned the blog turning to garbage, I couldn’t help taking a look. There was no good explanation for why the data should become corrupted. So I hit it with every kind of code-cracker I could get my hands on: I tried simple ciphers, Caesar, Null, Vigenere—you know, spy stuff. Then heavy duty computational encodings of the shared-secret kind—Triple DES, Blowfish—and got nothing. After two months of brute-forcing top-of-the-line AES, still nothing. And it just gripped me tighter.”
“Matt, I don’t know what those things are.”
He barreled on. “Well, finally, I thought, this thing is uncrackable. But there’s only one kind of code that is uncrackable—truly, theoretically, all-computing-power-to-the-end-of-time uncrackable, and that’s a one-time pad.”
“One-time pad? Isn’t that back to spies and dead-letter drops?”
“Right. A one-time pad takes an enciphered text—that’s the blog garbage—and a secret cipher, some text that tells you which letter to substitute for which, and voila! you get back your plain text: the rest of Hiero’s blog.
“Technically a one-time pad requires a random cipher, and I searched for that, but came up empty. That’s when I began trying other chunks of writing. I tried earlier blog posts. I tried the murder sheets. I tried the text of email correspondence between Hiero and Rhianne, Hiero and Mitchell. But all those cipher texts did was turn the garbage into different garbage.
“Finally, knowing your history, I began piping novels through it. Then one morning I woke to find The All-Concealing ‘I’, and I knew I’d cracked it. Want to know what it was?”
We spoke over each other:
“In Cold Blood—”
“In Cold Blood.”
“To be precise, part one of its serialization in the New Yorker, September 1965,” he said. “Sending the fully decoded blog now.”
The feeling of reading the rest of Hiero’s blog, which until that day had been hidden beneath a layer of encryption was like discovering a photo of yourself in a place you’ve never visited.
I read it in one sitting. Then reread it. Then read it again. Then sat at my desk, staring through the window at the river as the sky paled and the stars disappeared.
Hiero had carried on in the same vein, faking the perspective to be mine—me, Jack Griffen.
So much was spot on, if skewed. Our long-haul drive into the middle of nowhere, Kansas. Only in Hiero’s version, I was the one holding Tracey and Hiero in thrall. Rhianne showed up on cue, with Kim, at the pull-off south of Garden City.
Then came the dark shed in the middle of Sandsage Bison Reserve.
Hiero’s version was pres
cient on a number of points.
In Hiero’s version, too, when it came to the crunch Ghost had lit out. Apparently Hiero had always known Mitchell Cooper had the heart of a mercenary. Hiero had dangled Rhianne in front of him—this smart guy whose smarts disappeared in front of girls—but when things started falling apart, he’d decided his own hide was priority number one.
But we’d already figured that out.
As for Rhianne, she was cast as the student ‘Jack’ had secretly seduced in Perth. She had then dragged Kim into it, the older model she suspected Jack still loved. But when it came time to shed blood, she’d folded. Rhianne was no Barbara Ann Oswald, to crash and die in a helicopter attempting to break a hijacker like Garrett Trapnell from prison. Hiero’s fictional Rhianne claimed she was under compulsion, and threw herself on the mercy of the victims, Hiero, Kim, and Tracey.
Real life mirrored this, albeit with the sluggish pace at which the wheels of justice turned in Rhianne’s court case. She ultimately plead duress and accused Hiero of forcing her to aid him against her will.
But just last week her case had been damaged by the arrival at her parents home of a 1.00 carat diamond. The diamond was the product of a company called SoulDiamond, which specializes in artificially growing gem quality rocks from organic material. The diamond of course could not be interrogated for DNA, and SoulDiamond had not kept any residue of the original material provided by Rhianne—loved ones, humans or pets, just needed two-thirds of a cup of ash, or half a cup of hair. They were, however, able to tell the court that the sample had been human hair. The prosecution was not lax in pointing out that both Li Min and Annika Kreider had hair taken from them post-mortem, and that Rhianne had contacted a number of orderlies at Queen Mary Hospital, which held Li Min’s body, with an offer of five thousand dollars to do ‘a favor’ for a grieving friend.
It seemed Rhianne would suffer no rivals to Hiero’s attentions, even if it were ‘play-acting’ for the true crime of the ages. She had exacted a kind of revenge on these girls who dared to get into Hiero’s bed. She, too, had made sacrifices for art.
