The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  Yet he does not lower the gun, and I begin to see his problem. He is concerned about the promise Jack Ziegler made—the one of which he spoke in the cemetery on the day we buried my father, the one of which Maxine reminded me on the Vineyard, the one Uncle Jack told me in Aspen he intended to keep. The promise to protect my family. And this little drama is the result: Uncle Jack gave his orders, and even this professional killer, who has every reason to hate Jack Ziegler and to fear what I can tell the police, dares not disobey.

  “He can’t hurt us,” says Dana, the relief evident in her voice. Her hands come down.

  Colin Scott’s baleful eyes move, and the gun, too, swivels, ever so slightly.

  “My orders are not to harm Professor Garland or any of his family. But I am afraid, Professor Worth, that nobody said anything about his friends.”

  Dana sounds suddenly very small. “You’re going to kill me?”

  “It is necessary,” he sighs, and now the gun is pointed at the bridge of her nose. “And it has a certain . . . symmetry.”

  “Wait,” say both Dana and myself at the same time, our brains working full-bore to come up with the right words to slow him down.

  “Please stand clear of Professor Garland,” he says reasonably, as though keeping me from accidental harm would be her number-one concern at the moment. A graveyard rat materializes from the shadows, white and gross and huge, and sits on its hind legs, maybe sensing that dinner will soon be available. “Just close your eyes, Professor Worth, and you will not even have time to feel any pain. You, Professor Garland, will move aside and turn your face to the wall of the mausoleum.”

  “Don’t do this,” I protest.

  “Professor Garland, I must ask you to turn away. You have heard enough to send me to death row. But you will not act on it, no matter what I do tonight, because, if you do, the orders regarding protection for you and your family are no longer binding. You might risk your own life, but you have a wife and a son to think of. Do you understand me?”

  I thought I knew terror, but now it is alive within me, flapping about on mad, conscience-stealing wings. “Yes, but, you can’t just . . .”

  “Turn around, Professor.”

  “You’re going to kill me,” Dana repeats, her voice trembling.

  In that instant, I commit the boldest and stupidest act of my four decades on this planet. I lower my hands and step between Dana Worth and Colin Scott.

  “No, he isn’t,” I say, my voice shaking worse than Dana’s.

  “Step out of the way, please, Professor,” says the man who killed the man who killed Abby.

  “No.”

  Mr. Scott hesitates. I can almost hear the wheels going round: He does not want Dana to escape and does not really want me to escape either, and maybe the best thing is to kill us both and trust in his ability to escape Jack Ziegler’s wrath. Or he may think he can blame my murder on somebody else. Or he may bet that Uncle Jack is so sick that his word does not carry the force it once did. Or his new client, whoever it is, might be even more powerful than the dreaded Jack Ziegler. Or he may have another theory, one I could neither imagine nor comprehend, for I do not live in his world. But, whatever the reason, I know an instant later that the former intelligence officer has made up his mind. He is going to kill us both, right here in the Old Town Burial Ground. His unbothered gaze carries the message as firmly as if it were chiseled in granite.

  The gun barrel flicks up an inch or two and seems to grow very wide and dark, ready to swallow me up, and, even as I prepare to fling myself forward, I know I will never reach him in time to stop him from shooting, so I use my last seconds to pray instead and I wish I had a chance to say goodbye to my son and even my wife who is no longer fully my wife and I notice that Dana’s small hand is in mine and I hear the Twenty-third Psalm on her lips and I wonder where her fabled martial arts training has gone and my senses are brightly alive, I can see, almost, the individual hairs on Colin Scott’s red-dyed head, I can feel the pressure of his finger closing on the trigger, and then that deep and abiding instinct to live overwhelms my natural fatalism. I jerk free of Dana’s hand and leap across the small distance toward Colin Scott.

  Then everything happens at once.

  Colin Scott is very fast. In the fraction of an instant between the time I leave the ground and the time I come down on top of him, he squeezes the trigger, not once but twice, and the entire cemetery rocks with the sound of the gun’s report as my body goes suddenly icy, then numb, and I spin to one side, stumbling against an alabaster angel standing guard atop a headstone. I am amazed at the reverberations—his gun has a silencer, it should not be so loud—but I also realize that he was right, that I feel nothing at all, and then I realize that Dana is yelling something I am unable to hear, and also that I am not dead, the bullets must have missed, and Colin Scott is down on his knees and there is an awful lot of blood on the upper half of his shirt and the frozen gravel seems slick and my first thought is that somehow his gun has misfired, that it has exploded in his hand, and I am still on my feet, although woozy, and I push Dana back into the darkness toward the drainage pipe. She is clutching her shovel again, and it occurs to me that she must have hit Colin Scott with it, because there is a bloody gash on his forehead. Still trying to make Dana move, I keep my eye on Mr. Scott, who is swiveling around, one hand pressed to the ground, trying to point the gun behind him at something out in the darkness, and he fires twice more, very fast, two quick spits lighting up the cemetery and then vanishing in the flooding black, and then there is a loud cry from the shadows and Dana and I decide to hunker down and an instant later comes the sharp explosion of another gunshot and Colin Scott is flat on the ground now, the gun inches from his twitching hand, and his neck is very bloody and he is trying to say something, words are forming on his lips even as the light of life dies in his tear-filled, unseeing eyes, and I dare not go any closer because I do not know who is out there in the darkness waiting, but I see the shape of the simple sounds he is making and I know that his last living thought is of his mother.

  Dana and I are flat on the ground.

  Waiting.

  Listening.

  Footsteps crunching on the gravel. Moving slowly. Cautiously. Wary of a trap.

  Dana is weeping. I don’t know why. We are the survivors. I am holding her close to me on the grass along the side of the path. I feel chilly despite my parka. Dana is shivering and light as a feather in my arms. Mr. Scott is a bloody mess.

  We are too frightened to move.

  A flashlight flicks over us, picks out what is left of Colin Scott, slices the air above our heads as dancing specks cloud my vision.

  We lie still. I sense that there is something I should be doing, but a lethargy has stolen over me. My body no longer wants to move. Perhaps it is the aftereffect of mortal terror.

  The light is very close, almost blinding. I see what might be sneakers. Jeans. But whoever shot Colin Scott does not say a word, and Dana and I cannot see a thing. We hear a metallic scrape, then the light clicks off.

  The footsteps begin to recede, and Dana vaults to her feet with an angry cry. Grabs Colin Scott’s gun from the ground. Runs. Not toward the exit. Into the darkness.

  “Dana!” I cry, scrambling after her, stepping around what is left of Mr. Scott. My voice is faint, tinny, an echo of an echo. “Dana, wait!” But my cry is a whimper. “Dana!”

  I start to sway. The darkness swirls from black-black to black-gray to gray-gray, and the ground spins up to meet me once more. Dana disappears. I start to pick myself up again. I want to tell her that she is being foolish, that we should take the box and head for the gate or the drainpipe, but I lack the strength to call out. I slump against the headstone. I see the alabaster angel towering above me. Dana is gone. But it all seems very unimportant. My hands grow numb. Leaning against the stone is like clutching water. No, ice. I slide to the ground. One of my feet is twitching horribly. My stomach itches but I cannot lift a finger to scratch. In the glow
of my fallen flashlight, I see why Dana ran. The metal box is gone; whoever shot Colin Scott must have taken it while we were blinded by the flashlight. That was the metallic scrape I heard.

  I try to pray. Our Father who . . . who art . . . who art in . . .

  I gather my energy, trying again to rise, to think, to focus.

  God, please . . . please . . .

  But sustaining these thoughts requires too much energy. I need to rest. The grass is sticky red underneath my cheek. Just before the shadows close in, I realize that not all the blood belongs to Mr. Scott.

  I was shot after all.

  CHAPTER 52

  OLD FRIENDS VISIT

  (I)

  “THE KIDS ALL WANT TO SEE YOU,” gushes Mariah, sitting next to my hospital bed. “It’s like you’re some kind of hero to them.”

  I smile reassuringly from deep inside my undignified tangle of bandages and sensors and sutures and tubes. My doctors have assured me happily that I lost so much blood in the Burial Ground that I nearly died. I have had sufficient pain since awakening that I have wondered once or twice whether I might have been better off had the paramedics taken a little longer to find me. Not all the pain has been physical. Yesterday afternoon, I opened my eyes to find Kimmer dozing in the armchair, a thick legal memo on her lap, then opened them again to find her gone. I decided I might have dreamed her presence. When the nurse dropped in to see whether I was dead yet, or at least whether there might be a reason to call in a code and have everybody come running, I asked if my wife had been in to visit. My voice did not come out right, but the nurse was very patient and, eventually, we managed to make contact. Yes, I was told, your wife was here for a while, but she had to go to a meeting. Which is when the pain settled in as a permanent companion. Same old Kimmer. Dutiful enough to visit me despite our estrangement, but not at the risk of losing billable hours.

  I asked the nurse if I could have something for the pain. She flipped coolly through my chart, then fiddled with my IV for a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes again it was night and I had two detectives as company.

  Dr. Serra, my surgeon, bustled in and told them I was too weak to talk.

  Lots of flowers, but nobody from the law school on the first day, because I was not allowed visitors other than my wife. One of the critical care nurses, a robust black woman named White, turned the television on and surfed through the channels for me, but I paid little attention to the programs. She finally settled on a movie, something involving Jean-Claude Van Damme and lots and lots of guns. I turned my face to the pale green ceiling, remembered those last moments in the cemetery, and wondered when I could see my son.

  I slept some more.

  At some point I asked Dr. Serra how it was that I came to be in a private room, but he only shrugged, his palms turning upward as his shoulders sashayed, suggesting through this ornate Mediterranean gesture that his concern was the state of my health, not the state of my finances. I asked for a phone and was refused. A hospital can be like a prison. I wanted to make this point to Dr. Serra, but he rushed off to see his other almost-dead patients. Then Nurse White was back, explaining to me that, because of my guarded condition, I could have only a few visitors, which I had to list for her; once she told me that children were barred from Intensive Care, I lost interest in the exercise.

  Five names, she told me, plus family.

  I quickly listed Dana Worth and Rob Saltpeter. I listed John Brown. After a moment’s desperate thought, I listed my next-door neighbor Don Felsenfeld. And I asked Nurse White, as a favor to me, to call the Reverend Morris Young, the fifth name on my list. She smiled, impressed. As Nurse White left, I noticed a man in dark blue serge sitting outside the door, and I wondered before falling asleep again whether I was under guard or under arrest.

  When I next awakened, there was a Bible on the table next to the bed, a large-print King James Version, along with a note from Dr. Young in an old man’s shaky hand. Call me anytime, he had written. Another nurse came in, and I asked her if she would read to me from Genesis 9.

  She was too busy.

  The police came back, with Dr. Serra’s grudging permission, and one of them was my old friend Chrebet. I told them what I remembered, but they had talked to the FBI and Dana Worth and Uncle Mal and Sergeant Ames, and seemed to know an awful lot already. They asked me only one question that really seemed to matter: whether I had seen my assailant. That was the word they used, assailant. A word from the newspapers and the movies. I found I liked it. Despite pain and muzziness, the semiotician awakened, wondering why officialdom would choose so impressive-sounding a term to describe a brutal criminal. Perhaps because it made their job seem to lie higher on the social scale than it really did. They were not catching petty hoods, the uneducated and desperate detritus who had been, in the lovely coinage of Marx and Engels, “precipitated” into the Lumpenproletariat, they were chasing down assailants. Well, I had been assailed, all right. I had been struck by an assail of gunfire. Croaking out the words, I explained to the two patient officers that Colin Scott, the man who had done the assailing, was dead. They looked at each other and then shook their heads and told me that the three bullets that struck my abdomen, my thigh, and my neck were recovered, and only two of them were fired from the gun of the late Mr. Scott. Meaning that I was also shot by a fourth person in the cemetery that night.

  The person Dana tried to catch. Now I knew why. Because, certainly, there was no need to recover the stolen box.

  “We’re not sure yet whether it was an accident,” one of the detectives said. It was that third bullet, they added, that did most of the damage, catching me low in the chest. In the movies, they told me, people shoot for the heart, not a bad idea, but the heart has ribs around it; in real life, you often do more damage aiming for the belly, hoping to smash a kidney or, better still, the liver. And even if you miss those organs, they went on, you cause so much bleeding that there is a good chance that the victim will die long before help arrives.

  Trying to scare me. Worked pretty well, too.

  Then they told me the rest. Colin Scott was also hit three times. But only the final shot, the one that killed him, was from the same mysterious gun that pinpointed my abdomen from the darkness. The first two bullets to strike him were fired from yet another weapon. Two slugs dug out of headstones near the site of our confrontation also matched this gun. One possibility, the detectives said, is that the secret shooter out there in the mist ran out of bullets and pulled a second gun. Another is that there were not four but five people in the cemetery that night: Dana, myself, Scott, and two unknowns.

  Stunned, I told them part of the truth: that I saw nothing except the muzzle flash, that I never knew I had been shot until I collapsed.

  They shrugged and went away, never asking me the right question. I dozed, worrying about accident versus intention.

  The next time I awakened, Mariah was at my bedside, and I gaze at her now, pert and mature and decidedly rich in designer jeans and ski sweater, a breath of royalty come to call on the commoners’ wing. Crying for me, and telling me that her children think I am a hero.

  “What are you doing here?” I manage to croak.

  “Your dean tracked me down.”

  “No, I mean . . . I mean, you’re a new mommy.”

  “And I can’t leave you alone for a minute,” she sobs, but laughing at the same time. “I go into labor and you go and get yourself shot.”

  “How’s the baby?”

  “The baby is beautiful. The baby is perfect.”

  “And, what? Two days old?”

  “Four. She’s fine, Tal. She’s perfect. She’s downstairs in the van with Szusza. Matter of fact, Mommy has to go feed her in a few minutes.” Mariah is smiling as she weeps. “But look at you,” she whispers, twisting her hands in her lap. “Just look at you.”

  “I’m fine. You should have stayed home. Really.” I stifle a cough, because coughing hurts. A lot. “I mean, I’m glad you’re here, kiddo, but . . . w
ell, you really didn’t have to leave the baby for this.” I do not want her to know how touched I am. Nor could I form the words if I wanted to. I may be in Intensive Care, but I am still a Garland.

  “Well, no, maybe if they just shot you once. Or even twice. For that I would have stayed in Darien. But, Tal, you’ve always been an overachiever. You have to go and get yourself shot three times!”

  I manage a smile, more for Mariah’s sake than mine. I remember, when my mother was dying, how she seemed to think it her role to offer some word of comfort to every tongue-tied visitor who dropped by Vinerd Howse to pay next-to-last respects. I spend a moment’s thought on my brother, wondering why only Mariah is here, but he never came to the Judge’s confirmation hearings either: Addison only likes happy endings.

  “I guess you have enough to do,” says Mariah, pointing. My pocket chess set and my laptop computer are lined up neatly next to the bed. I smile like a kid on Christmas. Resting my voice, I gesture. My sister opens my laptop for me on the little table arm that swivels over the bed and turns it on.

  Thank you, I mouth as Windows toots its cheery hello.

  Kimberly brought them, says Mariah. “She thought you might want them.”

  Kind of her, but infuriating too.

  “Kimmer’s leaving me,” I tell my sister in a flat tone, but I have to say it three times before my words are clear.

  Mariah has the good grace to look embarrassed by her answer. “I think everybody on the East Coast knows that,” she says gently. She turns chipper. “But you’re better off without her. You know what Mom used to tell me when some guy broke my heart? There are many fish in the sea.”

  I close my eyes for a moment. If a hospital is a prison, this is my sentence: listening to my sister telling me that I am better off living without the mother of my child.

  “I love her,” I say, but so softly that I doubt Mariah hears. “It hurts,” I add, but far beneath the range of sound detectable by the human ear.

  “I never liked her,” my sister continues, too distracted to heed any voice but her own. “She wasn’t good for you, Tal.”