Which is why, when Bobby had called her that night and told her Pete was going off the deep end, she’d hurried over. Of course she’d tried to talk him out of his “epic” revenge plan, knowing all the time that asking Pete to listen to reason simply goaded him on to further insanity. After he screamed “fuck you!” and slammed the door to his bedroom, she sat there with Bobby trying to figure out what they could do for him.
Pete had had a great run: four or five years as major act fronting the DreamKrushers, then a successful solo album that reached number 4 on the pop chart, and then a Greatest Hits compilation and a couple of solo releases that had done decently just by selling to his fan base. So, ten years of success, and after that he could have retired gracefully and produced other artists, kept his hand in, stayed current enough to slip in a hit later on, like Robert Plant or John Fogerty did years after their bands had split up. He had a certain second-tier “classic rock” status he could have parlayed.
But that wasn’t Pete. He’d kept flogging it long after it had gotten sad. First with the New DreamKrushers, then, after the lawsuit over the name DreamKrushers, with a fairly desperate succession of styles: ska, reggae, techno. Finally that rap album, so brutally bad that the late-night television shows ran the unaltered promotional video as parody. And now she and Bobby were sitting silently in Pete’s soon-to-be-foreclosed-on house with his last “fuck you!” hanging in the air.
“What are we going to do?” she asked Bobby.
The manager tossed his head to the side. “We’ll pay Lev to get his financial shit in order, get a bankruptcy lawyer, hire someone to sell his stuff and move him into a new place. After that? Try and get him back into rehab.”
“What about this tour?”
Bobby grimaced. “I’m not sure the word ‘tour’ applies here, Beth. We’ve got a confirmed gig in Elko, Nevada, some interest at Harrah’s in Reno, and a probable date in Anchorage, Alaska. That’s it.”
She wondered how hard Bobby was pushing that tour, but, at the same time, she knew firsthand the dispiriting sensation of whipping a dead horse. Pete had heard the noise, and the noise had been deafening. But now the noise was gone. The arena was empty. “So there’s nothing you can do?”
Bobby pronounced his verdict with weary professionalism. “It’s over, Beth.”
She sat with the depressing news, trying to imagine Pete pulling himself together, but not really believing it. She knew where he was headed, and it wasn’t a pretty place: another drunken, drug-addled Peter Pan with dyed hair and wrinkles flunking out of rehab that some desperate family member had paid for. Pete was almost there already. He probably knew it himself, and that’s why he’d tried to throw this absurd hero scheme up between himself and the inevitable.
“He’s right, you know,” Bobby said at last. “About wanting to beat that guy down. The fucker deserves it. If Pete ever really does that, I definitely want to see the video.”
“Yeah,” she said absently. She heard the words and let them pass, and then circled back around and heard the words again, but suddenly they were different. She saw the image of that video in her mind, and then that image multiplied and opened suddenly into a myriad of images that went shooting in a hundred directions, so that in the space of five seconds it lay clear in front of her like fireworks dazzling and disappearing in the sky. What had Pete said? I’m going to beat this guy down … and the whole world’s going to stand up and cheer! “Oh my God!”
“What is it?”
“He’s right!” She laughed softly, then shook her head. “He’s right! Bankers are as popular as dogshit on a dinner plate, and they’re completely untouchable. Right?” She laughed again, excited. “Listen! Say Pete goes and clocks this guy. And, Bobby, that in itself would make him a national hero. But hey! Somebody got it on a cell phone! Hey, it’s on YouTube! Hey! It turns out there’s a video, and it’s all over the Internet! Wow! Some fan takes the footage and turns it into a music video of Pete’s new song, and it goes viral! And then the gods really smile on us and the victim presses charges! This is a guy who ripped off … how many people? And Pete’s on the front of every tabloid in the country for decking him in broad daylight? Bobby, you can call it ‘epic’ or ‘hero shit’ or ‘assault,’ or whatever, but tracking down a widely hated financial operator and punching him in the face is what we in the business call a ‘publicizable moment.’ And that, my friend, is golden!”
Bobby had perked up. “You’re a very bad woman, Beth.”
“This is it, Bobby! Pete decks this guy, and he’s living out the fantasies of three hundred million people! And not just screwing groupies and trashing hotel rooms, but knocking the crap out of an elite criminal who ripped his victims off and then laughed at them. Pete was right: this is epic-heroic! If he does this, I can make it huge! I can get him Late Night. I can get him radio station breaks. I can get him a million places he probably couldn’t touch even in his best days! He will be an American hero! And that, Bobby, is when you take him on tour!”
Bobby nodded, excited. “He played me a few lines of his song! It actually sounds pretty good!”
She wasn’t listening to him—she was seeing. Get him to the right parties, red-carpet him at some awards shows, a few stunt dates … Maybe a slightly older actress, someone that still had some juice and maybe had just ended a stable relationship and could use some “bad boy” credibility to show she was back in the mix. He could be Mr. Wrong. Or maybe an up-and-coming starlet, someone sexy. Or both. At the same time. You’d want him on the big gossip blogs, and you’d want to get him ambushed by a camera crew someplace hip, like the front row at a Lakers game or announcing an MMA cage fight. He could catch a second wave, get the old songs on some younger iPods, placement in a hot video game, and, with a little luck and the right backing, get one of his new songs into heavy rotation. Down the line, they could start pitching reality shows.
Of course, there were certain things Pete was and wasn’t capable of. Punching the banker out: he could do that. He was reckless enough. Writing songs and performing: it hadn’t really happened in a while, but she still had faith that he could reach deep down one more time and pull out whatever had made him successful before.
But Pete would never do this as a publicity stunt. As a messianic quest, no problem, but as a self-serving ploy to jump-start his stalled career—he’d never agree to do it, and even if he agreed, he’d never be able to cover it up. Pete didn’t know how to lie. And while the story of a man looking for justice was powerful, the story of a man looking for free media coverage was one of the most tawdry narratives around. The slightest hint of that and the world would revile him as quickly as it had lifted him up. He’d be a laughingstock, and she’d be responsible.
So that other part—getting the video footage, managing the media exposure, initiating a long-term career strategy that built on his past, above all, keeping the whole thing secret—that would have to fall to her and Bobby, and Pete could never know.
Which was why when Bobby showed up at her office without an appointment and asked to see her right away, she’d felt a deep uneasiness.
“We’ve got problems.”
“What do you mean?”
“Today Pete asked me if we were behind those videos. Frankie Lang interviewed him this morning and accused him of setting the whole thing up as a publicity stunt. Pete wasn’t cool about it.”
“I told Pete to ignore those questions.”
“Why didn’t you send a minder with him?”
“Frankie Lang does fluff! He was supposed to talk up the new songs and the tour. How bad is it? What’d Pete tell them?”
“I think the phrase ‘fucking witch hunt’ came up. But that was probably after Pete accused him of being a huckster for sexual lubricants.”
She raised her eyebrows. “I’ll call Frankie and try to get the whole thing pulled. What got Pete thinking about this? Could Charlie have tipped him off somehow?”
“I highly doubt Charlie would have said anythi
ng. In fact, if someone does find out, I suggest we hire Charlie to kill them.”
Beth rolled her eyes. “I love Charlie, too, but we’ve still got a problem. What made Pete think we were behind this?”
“He’s been seeing this crap on the Internet and I guess he started to wonder. Also”—Bobby looked down—“when he first got back, I accidentally asked him if he’d gotten any footage. I tried to play it off, but he keeps coming back to that.”
She gave a long sigh. People made mistakes. It didn’t matter now. “So what was the upshot of your conversation today? Did you tell him?”
“That depends. Do you mean literally?”
“Bobby—!”
“I didn’t not tell him.” Bobby could see she wasn’t happy with the answer, but he pressed on. “He wants to meet with both of us, tonight.”
“So this is it.” She leaned back in her chair. The screen saver on her computer had come on and a picture of her and Ira and their two children in Saint Barth’s was floating across the screen. Damn! This wasn’t just about telling Pete. The first problem was that she’d have to tell Ira. “If this gets out, Pete’s finished. Forever.”
“It’s not going to make us look too good either.”
“Yes, but it will destroy Pete. In every way you can destroy a person in this town, except death. And the ironic thing will be that he’s the one who’s actually innocent.” She closed her eyes to shut out the world, then opened them again. “I should have left him alone.”
“No. We both knew where that went. You tried to help him, Beth. We both did. That’s not wrong.”
“Be that as it may, I can’t keep lying to him. And if I don’t lie to him, he won’t be able to keep lying to everybody else.”
“We’ll just tell Pete to say ‘no comment’ whenever it comes up.”
“Yeah, Pete’s always exercised a lot of restraint. Like in China, when he made that announcement about Tiananmen Square.”
“We took that one all the way to the bank!”
“Hear me, Bobby: this one doesn’t end at the bank!”
“So what do you want to tell him?” Bobby asked.
“The truth. I don’t see what else we can tell him. It’s up to him now. He’s going to have to stick to his lines. And that’s something he’s never been very good at.”
Bobby looked pretty down, in a genuine way, not in the usual I guess I’d better look sad about this way. “Let’s do this, Bobby: let’s all meet at my house after dinner. Ira can be there: he’s a stabilizing influence on Pete. I haven’t told him anything, but I’ll talk with him this afternoon. Call Pete and tell him seven thirty.”
Bobby stood up, holding his porkpie hat. “We’re doing our best, Beth.”
“God, I hope so.”
Bobby left, and she stayed at her desk, staring absently at the computer. It all depended on Pete now. He’d have to decide.
The screen saver filled her monitor with another photo, and at this moment, with the whole complicated problem with Pete that she had created hanging over her, the simplicity of the image sent a pang through her.
It was of a small stone house with a peaked wooden roof. There were icicles hanging from the eaves and behind it the sky was full of clouds that glowed on the screen as if with some secret meaning. Beth remembered the sound of the goats that she never saw, and the possessions of the family all neatly in their places, and the stairway that disappeared into the upper floor. The picture showed all of that without showing any of it, while outside the frame, in a photograph visible only in Beth’s memory, the Swiss woman was standing and staring expectantly at the mountains as the snow blew in. In all these years, Beth Blackman had never stopped wondering what that woman was waiting for.
8
Blue Winter Light
When she woke up the blue winter light hung like enamel inlays in the gray walls of the house. The comforter had slipped off her shoulder, and the cool touch of the night reminded her that the house was cold. Her husband lay there, partly awake, unsettled by the fresh snow that had fallen outside, the way he always was on mornings like this. She reached for her robe and pulled down the soft mass of darkness from the wall, fit her feet into the fuzzy charcoal islands on the floor beside her bed, and closed the door behind her. The wooden stairway creaked with her footsteps, like ice on a frozen lake.
She loved this time of morning in the winter. The rooms of the house were boxes of shadow, and in each box was the twilight version of all the things in her life: her son’s snowboard, her daughter’s sweater flung over the couch, the woodstove, her husband’s boots. These were all her things, her possessions, and she felt as close to them as she did her own body. A wonderful body made of other people’s lives.
In the meager light from the window she could make out the neat basket of kindling. She knelt in front of the open door of the stove and began stacking the rectangular sticks across two larger pieces. He had a knack for sizing the wood. He could split a cord in two hours and come out with three perfect sizes for fire, plus the big knotty chunks that you threw on top once things were really going.
She crumpled up a piece of newspaper and pushed it underneath, then struck a wooden match and touched it to the paper. The flame was intensely orange in the slate-colored light, like sunrise. And she was its servant.
She leaned back on her haunches and watched the lines of embers grow along the edges of the kindling. The tin sheeting of the stovepipe began to tick. This moment of the day, just when the fire was catching with its soft catlike purr—this was the moment when she had everything. Her children were asleep upstairs, her husband was in their bed, and she had all of them safe and close.
The fire had caught enough now that she could leave it and go into the kitchen. Still in the dark, she flipped the switch on the coffeemaker and it glowed red. Then she went to the back door and dug the cast-iron Dutch oven out of the snow and brought it inside. It was chicken and dumplings, still uncooked and frozen solid overnight. When she left she would put it on the stove and turn the heat on low so that it would be ready for Saturday dinner.
The window had started to turn light blue, and she could see that it had stopped snowing. The porch railing had a sharp pyramid of snow running along it, and the cars outside had been turned into pillows. For the last three days it had come down almost constantly, day and night, in a way that felt dreamlike and eternal. It covered all the details of the world, transformed all of the hard things into distant suggestions of a tree stump or an abandoned shovel. She could walk out the front door and step into her skis and go for hours in the woods, stride after stride. Up high, it would be dangerous: they’d be trying to knock down the avalanches over the main road with a howitzer. Here, though, it was perfect. All footsteps were gone. The world had been rewritten.
Her husband’s weight creaked across the ceiling to the bathroom; then she heard the soft clunk of the toilet seat. He didn’t need to be up for another hour, but on these kinds of mornings it seemed like the snow itself woke him up, the sound of it, or the smell of it. He’d roll around in the bed from his back to his side, like he was rolling around in a drift, and then he’d wake up in one of those moods where he was distant and in his own thoughts.
She opened the glass door of the woodstove and placed some larger pieces of wood on top, about the thickness of her wrist, then closed it. She’d built thousands of fires over the years, and every one of them was fascinating. This was the most primitive form of chemistry, a form every caveman or -woman had understood from the beginning, not as the process of oxidation giving off heat, but, more deeply, as a sure sign of all that was divine in this physical world, hiding within wood. It warmed you; it danced for you. A god that made fire had to be a god that loved humanity.
The coffeemaker was starting to gurgle. If her husband got up, she would make him some oatmeal or bacon and eggs, eat breakfast with him before she ran out.
A magazine was lying next to the stove, and she could see it in the light coming from t
he windows. She still had a subscription to The New Yorker that her husband renewed every Christmas. The last vestige of her old life. The page was open to a perfume ad. An Asian model getting out of a car someplace expensive. Someplace far away.
She’d had a bottle of that perfume once, or rather, a vial. Her son had gotten it for her at one of the tourist shops downtown for her birthday, a little tiny sample that they’d probably given to him: he was only ten. And when they went out to dinner that night, just she and her husband, they’d gone to the Gold Room at the Baranof Hotel and he’d looked so handsome in his sport jacket, and she’d been wearing a black dress and the pearls her mother had given her, and for a minute there, with the candles and the waiters in tuxedoes and the shining metal serving platters with their mirrored tops, she’d felt like they were elegant.
She heard the creaking moving across the ceiling, then his footsteps coming down the stairs. The coffee was ready and the warmth was starting to pour off the front of the stove. His feet appeared, then his legs. It was happening. Their day together was beginning.
9
Zombie Apocalypse
Pete Harrington pulled his Volkswagen shitbox in between Beth’s maroon-colored Jaguar and the huge black SUV that looked like the kind of government vehicle that always got nuked by some dude with an RPG in action movies. And nuking shit with an RPG was definitely the theme for tonight, a theme that came on even stronger when he saw Bobby’s 1961 Cadillac convertible parked across the driveway. He already had a plan. He was taking no bullshit and no prisoners. He was going to find out everything: who’d shadowed them in China, how they’d set it up, and why it had all been done behind his back. And then he was going to tell Charlie about it.
He crunched across the gravel and knocked extra loudly on the door, just to let them know he was pissed. The bullshit was over. No small talk, no cocktails. When that door opened, it was Go time.
He raised his fist again and brought it down hard on the wood. Knock knock, I’m pissed! Before he could finish the third knock, the locks clicked and the big wooden door swung open. A small teenage boy was standing in the entry. Dylan.
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