Scavenger Hunt

by Dani Lamia

  “What were these boring, basic Midwesterners trying to smuggle?”

  “Pornography, at least according to Henley’s ex. The Party allows a certain amount of latitude, but when it comes to gay or trans porn, they are severe, you know? Evidently, these boring, basic, affable Midwesterners knew at least one CIA agent who was willing to help them out on the American end and throw them some cash, but they were having a hard time finding a distributor on the Chinese side. I’m talking any distributor, no matter how much they were offering. Everyone was too scared to deal with these Americans, even through a Russian proxy, and the Midwesterners would set up meetings for their token Russian only to have Chinese buyers fail to show up or even call the ministry, which led to some narrow escapes.”

  “It sounds like these boring, basic, affable Midwesterners were involved in a business that they didn’t really understand.”

  “Well, it wasn’t entirely their fault. Putin has been cracking down as well. Being gay is equivalent to being a child molester in both countries, so when you get caught and do time, it isn’t pretty. So the conventional methods of smuggling that have worked so well for years are simply evaporating.”

  “But obviously there are still gay and trans people in China and Russia,” I point out.

  “Obviously,” says Pez, finishing his salmon and cream cheese. “Fucking tyrants, you know? Their first step is always to flagrantly deny reality in order to pretend that they control it. Dumb people are always overawed, but eventually they fall.”

  “You are very hopeful.”

  “Gotta stay positive.”

  “So how does Henley fit into all of this?” I ask.

  “Well, after these affable, boring, basic Midwesterners had yet another shipment seized and destroyed, they were about to give up altogether, and that’s when your brother got involved. He was idealistic about it. He wanted them to keep going. He bought them endless drinks and endless meals and told them what good patriotic Americans they were, helping to promote human rights in a totalitarian country. Even though he was using a different last name, they eventually figured out who he really was. And that was when they got greedy.”

  It all adds up. Henley reaching out to the only people around who made any sense to him. Overpromising. Underdelivering.

  “They tried to blackmail him, didn’t they?” I ask.

  “Precisely,” says Pez. “You got it.” He stares at me sadly, sizing me up.

  “So then what?” I ask.

  “Well, you can play it out from there,” he says. “They threatened to expose his louche and luxurious lifestyle in China—the women he was sleeping with, the drugs he was doing, the conversations he was having about what comes next in China after communism. They said that they would wait until they were safely back in Michigan and then rat him out to the Party unless he used his connections at Nylo to help them smuggle porn into the country and distribute it.”

  “And that’s why he had to leave,” I say.

  “I am actually unclear about that,” says Pez. “You told me he was asking for a job here in the company? It is possible that he never actually told them no. I don’t actually know what happened with that part of it. That’s where things get hazy.”

  “Who would know the truth?” I wonder.

  “Henley, of course. I’m trying to get access to his email and phone records. And then these affable, basic, boring Midwesterners would know. I’ve tracked them down.” He pauses for effect. “You won’t believe this, but they’re actually here in New York. Whether they’re here because of Henley or it’s just a coincidence, I don’t know.”

  “It seems far-fetched that they would be the ones running this scavenger hunt game,” I say. “Smugglers and blackmailers don’t usually become serial murderers.”

  “I agree with you,” says Pez.

  “So what else have you learned?” I ask him, staring at the wall, not sure how all of these pieces fit together.

  “In one day?”

  “Yes, what else have you learned in one day?”

  “Well, I did do some background work,” he says, sighing. “Stuff the cops never would have got around to doing since they were so quick to classify your father’s death as an accident.”

  “Such as?”

  “His cardiologist told me that he had come in for an appointment earlier in the year. The cardiologist said that there was nothing irregular in any of his tests and that he was frankly surprised to learn that Prescott had a stroke. Although, he was quick to inform me that these things can sometimes come on fast in a person your dad’s age and that Prescott had always been prone to high stress and a poor diet.”

  “Even as skinny as he was,” I say. “He ate nothing but garbage and drank like he was trying to embalm himself.”

  “So that’s something,” Pez continues. “It doesn’t mean that he was murdered or that there was anything exceptional about the way he died. All it means is that there is a possibility there is more to it than we thought.”

  “What else?” I say.

  “I have done deep dives into the background for all the transportation that has been provided as part of this game,” says Pez. “Let me start with the most hopeful and obvious lead: the helicopter. Hiring a helicopter and pilot for an indeterminate amount of time is not cheap. The helicopter company is American Helicopters. Nothing strange there. But I figured out who is paying for it and where the money is coming from. You’re not going to like this.”

  “Where is the money coming from, Pez?”

  “According to the receipts, all of the transportation was hired or purchased anonymously using funds from a discretionary account supposedly set up and managed by your father. So the money is coming from you.”

  “That just seems so insane,” I say.

  “Of course it is,” he says. “Actually, I kinda fell in love with this lady at the bank. She is about my age and she has two grown children who live with her, which is not ideal, but we definitely had chemistry. Anyway, you don’t care about that. I looked at the signature on the account and on the checks and they were definitely his signatures, but they were two different versions of his signature. One was a little spikier than the other. I asked her for a description of the person who opened up the accounts and she actually remembered your father rather well, even though she said he came in years ago. She described him down to his pink and black striped socks. So. There we are.”

  “So this was definitely his plan all along?” I say. “So what? It was hijacked somehow?”

  “The bad news is that your father was definitely involved. The good news is that we are crossing things off as far as where his plans started and where this Game Master has taken over. I am assuming that your father was in charge of the budget and possibly procuring the technology, but not necessarily in charge of the execution of his plan. This makes sense, right? Your father would be dead when the game would begin. He would need somebody he trusts to set everything up and make sure that they couldn’t be bribed or threatened by one of you. Somebody he trusted but that none of you knew about.”

  I think about this. Faces of strangers loom up over the years, people hanging out with my father in the booths of dark bars, cronies with whom he gamed, business buddies, short-term and long-term love affairs ended by his short attention span and long memory.

  “So where does all of this leave us?” I ask.

  “Listen, like I said, we do have one good lead. These affable, basic, boring Midwesterners. I know where they are staying in the city. The best way to be certain that they have nothing to do with the murder of your brother is to confront them.”

  “So when are you planning on doing that?” I ask.

  “Actually,” he says. “It won’t work unless you do it. But I’ll go with you. I am willing to do that for you.”

  21

  I make Pez wait while I call Alistair. I ask
him if he has cracked the riddle yet. He hasn’t. We talk about it for a little bit, trying to puzzle out our memories of our mother and Sea Farmers and the sea, but neither of us have any flashes of insight. I call Bernard but he doesn’t pick up. I call Gabriella but she hangs up on me as soon as she hears my voice.

  “Would it be possible to have their regular phones traced?” I ask Pez. “I want to know where they are at all times.”

  “So you can follow them? And cheat?”

  “Can you do it or not?” I push. “There aren’t any rules to this game, evidently. I might as well try to chisel any advantage that I can.”

  “If anybody can do it, it’s Alistair,” says Pez. “Which means he probably already has.”

  “He’s too sweet-natured for that,” I say. “He wouldn’t even dream of it.”

  “In my experience, nobody enjoys losing if they don’t have to lose,” says Pez. “A good and gentle nature is its own kind of moral deformity. It is one of the things I love most about humans. The way we hide ourselves. The way we are constantly flowing to fit our circumstances. We are all terrifying creatures of dark intelligence and twisted imagination. Even your brother. He is a creative man. He will compete creatively.”

  “I don’t think he will cheat,” I say.

  “You just said it wasn’t cheating,” Pez counters. “Don’t you think he will be capable of the same moral contortions?”

  “Are you going to help me trace the phones or not?”

  “Of course I will help you,” says Pez. “But part of helping you is getting you to realize that your siblings are fully human and will want the same things that you want. They will be keeping their own tabs on you. They have their own access to boffins and detectives.”

  I chew on this for a while.

  “So where are we going then?” I ask. “Where are these Midwesterners holed up?”

  “They are in K-Town,” says Pez. “Staying in one of those pod hotels. They spend all night getting coked up and doing karaoke and eating Korean barbecue.”

  “Will they be there now?” I ask.

  “Not yet,” he says. “Not until the sun goes down.”

  “You knew my mother,” I say. “Any insights into today’s clue?”

  “Well, there are a lot of places where you can stand and see the ocean in this town,” says Pez. “But I think we can rule out Manhattan, since it is technically bounded by rivers. Unless she liked to hang out in Battery Park.”

  “She hated the beach,” I say. “She got seasick on boats.”

  “What about Coney Island?” asks Pez. “It is technically the beach. Did she like rollercoasters and freak shows and parades and all that?”

  “No,” I say. “She hated Coney Island. She hated amusement parks of all kinds.”

  “Did she like seafood?” asks Pez. “Some of these restaurants have fairly spectacular aquariums inside them.”

  Aquariums! I nearly fall out of my chair, the memory comes on so sudden and bright. I instantly understand why only Gabriella and Bernard have figured out the clue.

  Alistair and I weren’t there when our mother dragged our two youngest siblings to the Coney Island Aquarium at two in the morning to go see the jellyfish. We only heard about it later, after our father called the cops. It was the incident that got her sent away for a few months to a treatment facility. She returned to us just as listless and moody as before, but more subdued.

  The whole episode must have been seared into their minds. Alistair, Henley, and I were already in school. The three of us had gone to bed just as we would on a normal night, exhausted by our studies, but Gabriella and Bernard were notoriously bad sleepers and our mother was often indulgent about their bedtimes. Our father was still at work, which I resented back then but which I understand all too well now.

  Our mother was up reading Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea to the smaller children, surely swilling a gin and tonic, wrapped in her robe, alternating between maudlin and angry in a way that was always captivating and seductive and scary. Bernard and Gabriella were mesmerized by her descriptions of ocean life, and they kept turning to the big Encyclopedia Britannica in our library to look up pictures of sharks, whales, squid, shoals of bright ocean fish.

  But it was the jellyfish that were the most captivating to Bernard and Gabriella. The jellyfish were brainless and beautiful, more like bedazzled free-floating organs than animals. Yet they were also supremely deadly. Bernard was especially compelled by the pictures of the Portuguese man-of-war. He was fascinated and disgusted by the polyp fins and the colorful tendrils hanging below like red cabbage.

  “I love jellyfish,” our mom said. “They don’t lift a finger and just wait for you to drift into them and then they paralyze you dead. Would you like to see them? I know where to see jellyfish right now.”

  She was staggeringly drunk. But Gabriella and Bernard took the bait. She called for a car and soon the three of them were on their way to the Coney Island Aquarium. They got there right around 3 a.m. Of course, it was closed. Instead, they went to an after-hours aquarium-themed bar across the street. Our mother continued to drink while Gabriella and Bernard were entertained by a group of merchant Marines on leave.

  Eventually, our father got home from work. He panicked, waking us up and asking us where Mom and the other kids were. We didn’t know, but we were also less worried than he was. We had known our mother our entire lives and were not particularly impressed by her nighttime departures. Her insanity was normal for us in a way that it wasn’t for him.

  Our mother fell asleep at the bar and slept there until dawn. When she woke up, the three of them tromped off to the aquarium, which was just opening up for the morning, receiving its first batch of tourists. They marched right up to the tank containing the jellyfish, where our mother plopped down on her ass right on the floor, exhausted, while Gabriella and Bernard wandered around in the shimmering half-light, enthralled.

  “I never want to leave here,” our mother said. “I never want to leave this place right here. I want to stay right here in front of this jellyfish tank forever.”

  Eventually, she fell asleep again on a bench in front of the shark tank. Luckily, Bernard remembered our home phone number. The aquarium people called our father and he went and picked them all up.

  After that episode, Mom went away for a while to “rest.” When she returned, she was thinner and paler and seemed even more haunted. It would only be one more year before she blew her brains out in the White Room.

  For Alistair, Henley, and me, the part of the episode that we remembered was our dad freaking out and calling every single person he knew in an effort to locate her. He was convinced that she had left him. But Gabriella and Bernard had more tangible memories of the affair.

  “Pez, you are a goddamn genius,” I tell him. “The aquarium! Exactly right.”

  I call Alistair again.

  “I know the answer to today’s hunt,” I say. “The jellyfish tank. Remember the time Mom dragged Bernard and Gabriella to Coney Island in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t remember that at all,” he says. “When was that?”

  “Listen, just come up here,” I say, hanging up the phone.

  Pez smiles at me.

  “Why are you helping him?” he asks.

  “He’s only got one life left,” I say. “Until we know what’s going on, I don’t want anybody to end up like Henley. I’ll take the hit this time.”

  “That’s not the only reason,” he says. “You aren’t telling me everything.”

  “We’ll have to take the train,” I say. “By the time we get there, the aquarium will be closed.”

  “So what?” he says.

  “Alistair has the game superpower to open any door,” I say.

  Alistair, Pez, and I go down to the F train. As I approach the turnstile, all the electronics shut off fo
r them just like they did for me. All three of us click through and go down to the platform. It seems that I am allowed to hook others up with my train pass without consequences.

  On the train, I remind Alistair of the time when our mother went crazy and dragged our youngest siblings to the aquarium to kick off her nervous breakdown. He believes me, but I can tell that he is only pretending to remember. So much of what happened in our childhood has fallen to me to tell the story. I was the oldest and I remember everything the most clearly.

  It is dark outside by the time the three of us arrive at Coney Island. We walk down Coney Island Avenue past the Applebee’s and the IHOP, to the aquarium. It was washed out to sea during Hurricane Sandy and most of it was utterly destroyed, but it has finally been rebuilt. One of the strangest things about the aquarium is that it is open 365 days a year, even on Christmas.

  I have been out here on my own quite a bit, actually, especially since it has reopened. I find the shark tanks soothing. Watching the silent predators prowl around ceaselessly calms me.

  A security guard stands in front of the aquarium, smoking, but as we approach, he turns and walks away, doing his rounds in the back where they keep the penguins and otters. We don’t look like burglars or terrorists. We look like we are on our way to some charity gala. We approach the front doors and Alistair holds up his phone.

  The doors open and the red lights in the windows turn to green. Not only have the doors opened for us, but the security system seems to have been shut down as well.