The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “Your friend understands why you did what you did,” Henderson tells me in his smooth, sparkling voice. “He does not blame you for the fact that the contents of the box were . . . disappointing. On the contrary. He is pleased.”

  This surprises me. “He is?”

  “Your friend is of the view that all involved parties are satisfied with this outcome.”

  Rubbing an aching ear, I think this one over. What Dana and I feared appears to be true: Jack Ziegler is too old a hand to be fooled so easily. I suppose the other involved parties are old hands too. Yet they are satisfied. And Henderson is here. Which means that . . .

  “Somebody else ended up with the box,” I murmur. The good guys, I am thinking. Not the great guys, the good guys. “My . . . friend doesn’t have it. Am I right?”

  Henderson declines to enlighten me. His strong face is smoothly impassive. “Your friend is of the view that if nothing was found, then perhaps there was nothing to be found. Some threats are bluffs.”

  “I see.”

  “Perhaps you agree.”

  I realize, finally, where I am being led: what I am being forgiven for, and what words I must recite to earn forgiveness. “I agree. Some threats are bluffs.”

  “Perhaps there were never any real arrangements.”

  “That is certainly possible.”

  “Even likely.”

  “Even likely,” I echo, closing the deal.

  Henderson is on his feet, wide shoulders flexing, catlike, under the loose jacket. I wonder how many seconds it would take him to kill me with his bare hands should the need arise. “Thank you for your hospitality, Professor.”

  “Thank you for stopping by.”

  Before folding up his electronic baffler, Henderson adds a final point: “Your friend also wants you to know that if you should, in the future, discover contents that are . . . less disappointing . . . he will expect to hear from you. In the meanwhile, he assures you that you will not be troubled further over this matter.”

  I think this one over, too. Some threats are bluffs. He is implying a little bit more than he is saying. “And my family and I . . .”

  “Will be perfectly safe. Naturally.” But no smile. “You have your friend’s promise.”

  As long as I keep my end of the bargain, he means. Before, Uncle Jack’s ability to protect me was driven by his assurance to involved parties that I would track down the arrangements. Now that things have changed, his ability to protect me rests on his assurance that I will not. They cannot know whether I have found the real contents someplace else; whether, like my father, I have hidden them away, and made arrangements of my own, to be launched in the event of my unexpected demise. The involved parties and I shall live henceforth in a balance of terror.

  “All right,” I say.

  We do not shake hands.

  (III)

  EVERY NIGHT I WATCH THE WEATHER CHANNEL. Near the end of the third week of the month, while Bentley is with me for a few days, I turn on the television and note with approval a terrible hurricane on its way up the coast. If it keeps on its present course, it will hit the Vineyard four days from now. Perfect.

  The next morning, Saturday, I take Bentley back to his mother. My son and I stand together out on the front lawn, and Don Felsenfeld, tending his flowers, raises a trowel in greeting. I decide not to wonder whether Don, who notices everything, knew about Lionel before I did.

  “When Bemley see you ’gain?”

  “Next weekend, sweetheart.”

  “Promise?”

  “God willing, Bentley. God willing.”

  His keen eyes search my face. “Dare Daddy?” he inquires, lapsing into the secret language we hardly ever hear any more.

  “Yes, sweetheart. Dare Daddy. Absolutely.”

  I lead my son up the crooked brick path to Number 41 Hobby Road. Crooked because Kimmer and I, shortly after moving in, laid the bricks ourselves. A two-day job that took us, busy, love-struck rookies that we were, about a month.

  My hand trembles on the cane.

  The house is empty. The thought comes to me unbidden but with all the moral force of absolute truth. It is an empty house . . . no, an empty home. Kimmer is certainly inside somewhere, waiting for her son. Her BMW is parked in the turnaround, as usual, in defiance of my counsel. And if my wife has been careless and broken her solemn word—nothing new there!—Lionel Eldridge might be lurking around the place, his powder-blue Porsche safely hidden away in the garage. Yet the Victorian sits empty, for a home that once housed a family and now holds only its shards is like a beach whose sand has eroded to rock—retaining only the name, and none of the reason for the name.

  At the door, I tell Kimmer I am returning to the Vineyard for a few days. She nods indifferently, then stops and peers at me. The resolution in my voice frightens her.

  “What are you going to do, Misha?”

  “I’m going to finish it, Kimmer. I have to.”

  “No, you don’t. There’s nothing to finish. It’s over, it’s all over.” Hugging our son to her thigh now, wishing the truth away.

  “Take care of him, Kimmer. I mean, if anything happens to me.”

  “Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that!”

  “I have to go.” I peel her hand from my sleeve. Then I spot the real panic in her face and I realize she has it all wrong. She thinks I’m going off to Oak Bluffs to kill myself. Over her! I love her, yes, I am in pain, sure, but suicide! So I smile and take her hand and lead her down the steps onto the lawn. She is savvy enough to shoo Bentley into the house.

  “Please don’t talk that way,” Kimmer mumbles, shuddering. She does not object when I put my arm around her.

  “Kimmer, listen to me. Listen, please. I’m not going to do anything foolish. There’s a piece of the mystery that hasn’t been solved yet. Everybody’s forgotten about it. But I haven’t. And I have to go and see.”

  “Go and see what?”

  I think about the shadows I have sensed, ponder how to put it. I think about the still-unexplained attack on me in the middle of the campus. I think about my bullet holes. I think about my chat with Mr. Henderson. From my memory I draw the Judge’s line: “The way it was before, darling. I have to see the way it was before.”

  She licks her lips. She is wearing jeans and a polo shirt and is as fetching as ever. Her hair is awry, and I wonder, with distress, if she was too busy in bed last night to braid it. She shoves her glasses up on her forehead and asks only one question: “Is it going to be dangerous, Misha? For you, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 61

  ANGELA’S BOYFRIEND

  (I)

  THE HURRICANE HITS on my second day in Oak Bluffs, and it is a triumph of a storm, one of the greats, a storm to be talked about for years to come, just as I hoped it would be. All morning the police go up and down the roads with megaphones, warning everyone living near the water to take shelter. The radio stations, both on the Island and from the Cape, predict horrific property damage. I stay in the house or on the porch, watching the storm arrive. By early afternoon, the wind has knocked down tree branches and power lines all over the Island, and my electricity is gone. I hear creaking up in the attic, as though the chimney is deciding whether to jump. A couple of decades ago, in a storm less severe than this one, the chimney fell over flat on the roof of the house. I open the front door. Rain forms a wet, shimmery shield just beyond the steps, as though to walk through the curtain would be to enter a magical world where leaves fly and lawn furniture tumbles aimlessly through the streets and trees crack sharply in two.

  Still I wait.

  No more cars on Ocean Avenue or Seaview, nobody playing in the park. As always, a few foolish souls are out walking along the seawall, perhaps waiting to see whether the storm surge will be high enough to wash them away. But they are no more foolish than Talcott Garland, Misha to his friends, sitting in the unboarded front window of his house in defiance of official orders to evacuate. Of course I cannot leave
. I have planned for, searched for, hoped for this moment since the day I left the hospital and saw Kimmer standing militantly in the front hall of Number 41 Hobby Road and solved the mystery. I dared not let on, not to anybody, and only Dana even guessed that I might know. I cannot evacuate. I am waiting, waiting for the worst of the storm, waiting for the only instant since encountering Jack Ziegler in the cemetery when I can know, absolutely know, that I am alone. Nobody, I am betting, can maintain surveillance through a hurricane like this one.

  At three-twenty, the storm surge strikes. Water careens over the seawall, carrying sand and seaweed and even fish onto Seaview Avenue. Another tree falls. I see a lone little car struggling along the road, but the wind turns it completely around, and the driver jumps out and flees. I watch to make sure he is not doubling back. I hear a terrible crack as a tree branch goes through a window of the house next door.

  Still I wait.

  Vinerd Howse is shadowy and shuddering. No power anywhere in the area. Nobody moving on the street. Not a car or a truck or an SUV Not a bicycle. I see, literally, zero people, and when I step out into the storm, stabbing the endless gray with the powerful light I bought on the mainland, I can see the boarded fronts of every house on Ocean Park. I play the light over windows and porches, over trees and the bandstand, looking for any sign of a lurking human.

  Nothing.

  I repeat the process on both sides of the house and in the back. My rain slicker does little to protect me as I cross our narrow yard, shining my light into neighbors’ windows.

  I am alone. Everyone else in the world is sensible. The present moment belongs to the insane.

  My moment.

  Back inside, I leave my portable searchlight and pick up an ordinary flashlight. Passing the dining room, I see that silly Newsweek cover again: THE CONSERVATIVE HOUR. But not so silly after all. Perhaps the Judge kept it as a reminder. Of someone to whom he owed an apology of sorts. I remember the very different pictures on the wall in Thera’s foyer. The way it was before. Over and over again, my father used that line, drumming it into me. Hoping I would never forget.

  I hurry to the second floor of the house, then pull down the ladder into the attic.

  (II)

  THE LOW-CEILINGED ATTIC of Vinerd Howse is not a place to spend more than twenty or thirty seconds in the middle of the summer. Through some trick of physics—hot air rising, perhaps, or bad ventilation—the attic is stifling, the air all but unbreatheable, even when the rest of the house has cooled for the evening. In the hurricane, the air is even worse. Outside it is cold, but, in here, every step leaves me soaking with sweat. And I almost lose my nerve besides, because I can actually see the ceiling tremble. But the scholar in me takes over, fascinated by its chaotic movements. I have never seen a roof heaving and rippling, the very rafters shaking, the way I suppose they do in an earthquake.

  I feel remarkably safe.

  I begin to hunt around the cramped space. I know it is up here someplace. Hidden over the years by an accumulation of junk, but it is here. It has to be.

  Uncle Derek, I am thinking. How could I have forgotten Uncle Derek? As Sally said, he gave me my name.

  I stumble over trunks and aged crockery and lanterns, I sort through old clothes and older books, and I cannot seem to find it. Rain and wind crash against the lone window as though demanding entry. I hear a trickle or two and know the roof has sprung a leak. The room is not that cluttered, it is quite unlike the attic Mariah frequents down on Shepard Street: finding what I am looking for should not be this hard. I bark my shin on a wilted sofa, and marvel at the energy, and foolishness, required to get it up here. Under a coat, I find my old baseball mitt, which I had thought lost forever. I find a child’s notebook filled with scrawling pictures of lighthouses. Mine, too? Abby’s? I cannot recall. The chimney creaks. I find a beach umbrella that has not been opened in a decade or two, and a couple of beach towels that have gone about that long since being washed. I am ready to give up. Maybe my theory is wrong, maybe I am so far off base . . .

  But I know I am right.

  The way it was before.

  B4. The first move of the Double Excelsior when the white side loses. Signifying, however, not a square on an imaginary chessboard in a cemetery, but a word. B4. Before.

  The way it was before.

  Meaning, before it all went bad.

  But it didn’t go bad when my father left the bench. It went bad long before that. It went bad—so he kept saying, according to Alma—it went bad when he split with his brother for the sake of ambition. Uncle Derek, his younger brother, who gave me my nickname. Uncle Derek, the lifelong Communist who, late in his life, got big into nationalism. Not for him the peaceful protest—praying while the cops beat your head in, he used to call it—but fighting back. The armed struggle. When the Judge was not around, we all used to sit at Derek’s feet, enthralled, especially Abigail. Uncle Derek would preach activism, activism, activism. But only with the right ideology. He liked the Panthers, even if he thought their ideology was a little bit thin. He liked SNCC. But most of all, Derek admired the black Communists who were active in the struggle.

  And who was the most prominent black Communist?

  Angela Davis. Angela Davis.

  I move a rolled-up carpet, and, suddenly, there it is.

  I straighten up.

  I am looking down at the stuffed animal that Abby won at the fair so many years ago: the deteriorating panda my late sister named after George Jackson, who was shot dead trying to escape from San Quentin Prison. At the time, every black woman in America of a certain age seemed to be in love with him, as well as some who, like Abby, were way too young. George Jackson, the handsome, dynamic revolutionary. George Jackson, Angela Davis’s supposed lover.

  Angela’s boyfriend.

  (III)

  I AM DOWNSTAIRS IN THE KITCHEN, thinking. The storm continues to shake the house. A few minutes ago, I took my portable searchlight outside again, braving wind and rain and lightning, all nature’s summer fury, to be sure I am not being watched. For an eerie instant, shining the beam toward the bandstand, now clouded with rain, I almost caught that whiff of a shadow once more, so I raced across Ocean Avenue and hunted around to be sure.

  Nothing. Nobody. But now I am sopping and my searchlight is showing definite signs of exhaustion. Too late to shop for fresh batteries.

  I have a portable indoor lamp, which I now use to illuminate George.

  The bear is on the butcher-block island, lying inert as though awaiting dissection. I am touching it lightly with my fingers, not missing an inch, carefully parting the fur, looking for evidence of a tear or cut that has been sewn up by hand. I find nothing. I lift the animal and shake it, waiting for a secret message to spill out, but none does. I scrape the plastic eyes with my fingernails, but nothing comes off. I pull the panda’s little blue tee shirt (it once fit Abby) inside out, but I find no hidden missive. So I turn my attention to where, in truth, it has been from the moment that I moved the rug and discovered it: the seam where the right leg meets the torso, and from which some sort of hideous pink stuffing has been dribbling for thirty years. I insert a finger, then two, into the tear, but all I encounter is more stuffing. Slowly, carefully, not wanting to disturb whatever I am going to discover, I pull the filler out and spread it on the counter.

  And, without going very much deeper, my fingers catch hold of something. It feels flat and hard, three or four inches wide.

  Pulling, pulling, gently, don’t break it . . .

  . . . it feels almost like . . . like . . .

  . . . like a diskette for a computer.

  Which is exactly what it is.

  (IV)

  I LIFT THE DISK UP, using two fingers, holding it close to the light, checking for damage. I am furious at the Judge. All this searching, all the clues, all the death and mayhem, for this! A disk! In the heat of that attic for almost two years! What could he have been thinking? Maybe it never occurred to him that high temperatur
es could cause a problem. He was never technically inclined, my father; the digital revolution was, in his oft-repeated judgment, a gigantic mistake. Trying to calm down, I set the disk on the counter. It has warped a little, and I do not dare try to force it into the slot on the right-hand side of my laptop.

  Unbelievable. What a waste.

  But maybe there is something left. Who do I know who might have some expertise at retrieving data from a damaged diskette? Only one name comes to mind: my old college friend John Brown, professor of electrical engineering at Ohio State. The last time I was with John, he spotted Lionel Eldridge in the woods behind my house—not that either of us knew it was Lionel at the time. That same innocent afternoon, Mariah told me the private detective’s report was missing, and my father’s arrangements seemed infinitely distant. Now, at last, I hold the arrangements in my hand, and I need John again to help me unpack them.

  Why wait? I can call him right now, unless the storm has knocked out the phones along with the power.

  I first take the precaution of sliding the disk back into my little sister’s bear. With the storm blasting the windows, that might be the safest place. I have just turned around to look for my address book in the family room when the kitchen door smashes open.

  I spin around, expecting to discover that it is the wind.

  It isn’t.

  Standing just over the threshold as rain sheets into the house, a small gun glittering in his hand, is Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Wallace Warrenton Wainwright.

  CHAPTER 62

  THE BATTLE FOR GEORGE

  (I)

  “HELLO, MR. JUSTICE,” I say as calmly as I can.