The City

by Dean Koontz

  “A boy?” the reporter pressed. “Is he here now, do you see him now, this boy?”

  She shook her head, and her voice quaked with emotion. “No. He was hurt bad. I thought he was dead. Like the girl. The girl … she was dead, it was horrible. This other boy was kneeling beside him. I tried to take him out of there with me, the white boy, I mean, but he said his friend was still alive, he couldn’t leave him.”

  “His friend?” the reporter asked.

  “The little Negro boy. Jonah. The other boy, he said, ‘Jonah’s still alive, I can’t leave him.’ ”

  Drackman might have killed Tilton at that moment, right there in the Quonset. But when he had looked at my father, he’d seen genuine shock. He’d decided against a hasty execution.

  Standing beside Drackman, Fiona had said ominously, “Juju.”

  The occult interested Lucas Drackman. “Juju? Voodoo? What’re you talking about?”

  “Jonah. Jonah Kirk. I should have smashed his monkey face that first day. He’s a weird little freak. He believes in juju. He has a metal box full of wangas.” When she saw that Drackman didn’t know the word, she described my collection of interesting junk as I would not have thought to define it: “Wangas. Charms. And fetishes—objects that are supposed to possess supernatural power.”

  Now, Wednesday morning, sixteen days later, Drackman, Smaller, and my father were sitting around the kitchen table in the farmhouse, talking about the coming revolution, when the TV news reported that the Colt-Thompson truck and the missing—and murdered—guard had been found, though of course the 1.6 million in cash was long gone.

  For days, Tilton had argued against ever going back to the city. Drackman had remained adamant: “We have a score to settle. Unless you don’t have the guts. No one’s immune if they’re in the way of the Cause, brother.” Smaller vacillated on the issue, but he had so long been steeped in paranoia that he tended to side with Drackman most of the time. Finally Tilton accepted the inevitability of the venture.

  Although they had planned to go back on Friday, Drackman felt that the discovery of the armored truck required an adjustment in their timetable. He was a great believer in bold action and in the predictive power of Tarot cards. He was also a great believer in Hitler and Stalin, but they were dead and could give him no advice. Following the counsel of the Tarot, he had already sent the new-look Fiona Cassidy back to spy on us. Now he opened the deck again and shuffled the seventy-eight cards and laid five of them on the kitchen table in the form of a cross. After revealing them one at a time, he brooded a while before saying, “What it’s telling me is not to pull back, not to delay, to move ahead even faster.”

  As Drackman would later tell the police, the best thing about having a big pile of cash and not giving a damn about the law is that you can get anything you want, and you can get it fast. As a man of means, he hadn’t needed what he and his crew stole from Colt-Thompson. But if you were going to be a player in the Cause, if you were on the revolutionary road, you should bring down the corrupt system with the system’s money, not with your own. After Fiona called him on Saturday to report that our house remained under surveillance, Drackman had made contact with like-minded individuals of long acquaintance, in a city other than ours. For a price, they agreed to supply a Ford van of the same year, model, and color as the stakeout vans on our street, credible license plates, and a registration card in the name of one of his false identities. The supplier intended to deliver it Thursday afternoon.

  Drackman’s intention had been to meet with Fiona on Friday, compare notes, and go into the Bledsoe place that night. But trusting his intuition and the Tarot cards, he said, “We drive back tomorrow instead, and we go into that house tomorrow night.”

  When the weather map on the TV news at that moment predicted heavy rains throughout the region beginning Thursday afternoon, Drackman knew that he must be right to move more quickly. A rainy night would provide perfect cover for the job.

  94

  When my mother came downstairs shortly after eleven o’clock Thursday morning, I was parked in my wheelchair at the kitchen table, reading one of my grandpa’s books, a memoir of Tin Pan Alley, which was a nickname for a neighborhood in New York City, a stretch of 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where music publishers and songwriters had flourished from 1886 until rock ’n’ roll changed that world in the late 1950s. I figured that a first step in becoming a songwriter should be to read about successful ones, the guys who made Tin Pan Alley famous: W. C. Handy, Harry Warren, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jimmy Van Heusen, Lerner and Loewe.…

  Mrs. Lorenzo worked at the cutting board, near the sink, slicing potatoes thin for home fries to accompany the omelets that would be Mom’s breakfast and my lunch.

  When my mother entered the room, I thought she was fast becoming like Grandpa Teddy, like Grandma Anita had been: a Presence. You just had to look at her, not merely because she was beautiful, but also because something about the way she carried herself, something about her quiet confidence and dazzling smile and sparkling eyes made you say to yourself, Now hold on a minute here, this isn’t just passing scenery, this is SOMEBODY.

  Her first night at Diamond Dust had gone exceptionally well, which surprised her, though it surely didn’t surprise me. She liked everyone she worked with, and they seemed to like her. Some of the patrons talked through the instrumental numbers, of course, but few talked when she sang, and in general the customers came there because they loved swing music and jazz and the blues; therefore, they had respect for musicians. If some of them were gawkers drawn by the fact that her ex-husband was wanted for a sensational crime, she couldn’t tell them apart from those who came for the music, food, and booze.

  By the time that lunch was on the table and the three of us had finished eating, the storm began with a flash of lightning and a long crash of thunder. To keep out the rain, Mom and Mrs. Lorenzo hurried around, closing the windows that had been opened for ventilation.

  Wearing a voluminous yellow slicker that he shed on the porch, Malcolm visited in the afternoon, just after Mrs. Lorenzo finished flexing my leg joints. He was having a butter-side-down day, unable to get his mind off Amalia. I knew how he felt, as I had bad patches of my own, days of melancholy, also hours of more piercing despair, especially when I woke at night and thought of her and couldn’t get back to sleep.

  He didn’t want to talk. He said he just needed to be somewhere that didn’t reek of cigarette smoke and wasn’t a garage. We sat in the living room, and I read aloud to him about Tin Pan Alley, about how Harry Warren and Al Dubin, a lyricist, came to write “Lullaby of Broadway” and also all those great songs in the movie 42nd Street. At one point, for a while, he turned his back to me, and I pretended I didn’t hear the small, sad, stifled sounds he made.

  95

  Tilton rode up front with Lucas Drackman, while Mr. Smaller stretched out on a pile of blankets in the back of the van. He slept through the larger part of the drive.

  The scourge of Bilderbergers was a little less hairy than usual. He had changed his appearance by shaving his head, though he had also grown a mustache, which had sprouted into a thick brush in no time. Although he had never before been able to lose weight, he’d dropped ten pounds in sixteen days, which he attributed to the fact that for the first time in his life he was “doing something that mattered.” Blowing up a bank, making off with a fortune, and thereby sticking it to the establishment gave him greater self-esteem than he’d ever had before, and he wanted to look better.

  Drackman had dyed his blond hair black and had started growing a beard, which he also had to color. Although it was necessary, he regretted the dye job, because he’d always been immensely pleased with his looks just the way they were.

  Like Mr. Smaller, Tilton had shaved his head and had started to cultivate a mustache. He didn’t think he had changed his appearance enough to be out in public when the police, the FBI, and every Dick and Jane were looking for him. He didn’t want to return t
o the city. He didn’t want any part of what Lucas intended to do. But the man terrified him, and he was in deep now, and he knew he couldn’t split, couldn’t survive and stay free on his own.

  He missed Aurora. She knew how to soothe a man’s nerves. She’d gotten him into this, just as she’d drawn Smaller into it. Playing at revolution excited the woman; it was a real-life romance novel to her, spiced with violence. She had an edge to her that he hadn’t been aware of at first, and for some reason guys wanted to cut themselves on that edge. He had thought she was a brainiac before he’d spent a lot of time with her; now he suspected that nothing complex happened in her head.

  The windshield wipers thumped, thumped, thumped like a hammer rhythmically striking something soft, and from time to time the rubber blades stroked a thin sound from the glass, reminiscent of the whimper of a beaten animal.

  96

  Malcolm stayed for dinner with Grandpa, Mrs. Lorenzo, and me. Mom was already off to Diamond Dust. We dined on chopped salad, slow-cooked Swiss steak, baked corn custard, carrots with tarragon, and green beans with minced onions.

  Grandpa said he felt too full to have a slice of the peach pie right then, but maybe he would enjoy it later, when he got home from his gig at the hotel restaurant. Because of the bad weather, he left early, making sure that Mrs. Lorenzo locked both deadbolts on the front door.

  Malcolm’s mood had improved somewhat through dinner. He scooped the vanilla ice cream while Mrs. Lorenzo plated three pieces of pie.

  When he put my dessert on the table in front of me, he said, “You okay?”

  “Huh? Sure. I’m great.”

  “You have indigestion or something?”

  “Indigestion?”

  “The way you keep touching your chest.”

  The pendant. I was repeatedly feeling for the Lucite heart, as if some sneak thief might have slipped it from the chain and made off with it.

  97

  The three arrived in the city as the daylight steadily washed out of the turbulent sky. The storm had no more lightning in its quiver, but rain still fell in torrents, flooding some intersections.

  Judging by the few cars in the parking lot, the motel had many vacancies. A two-star enterprise in a one-star part of town.

  Lucas Drackman took a parking slot close to Room 14. There was no one in sight when he rapped on the door. After Fiona ushered them inside, she looked left and right along the covered promenade that served the rooms, saw no one.

  She’d gotten sandwiches and bags of potato chips from a deli. They plucked bottles of beer from the bathroom sink, which was filled with ice.

  Two of them had chairs, and the other two sat on the bed. In recognition of the thin walls between units, they spoke softly, but for the most part, they ate in silence.

  Drackman could tell that Fiona was wired, strung tight. She’d drunk a Mountain Dew instead of beer, but it wasn’t the caffeine-laden soft drink that had drawn her so taut. Whatever she had taken, if anything, her condition probably had less to do with drugs than with anticipation of the pending operation. She was excited, ready. Fiona loved action. And she had a particular appetite for action against the Bledsoe family.

  To remind them that they were part of something cool, he said, “Man, all these riots, huh? New York, Toledo, Grand Rapids. I mean, how radical is that—riots in Grand Rapids?”

  “Detroit’s half burned down,” Tilton said.

  “Carl Sandburg’s dying,” Fiona said.

  Smaller frowned. “Who the hell is he?”

  “A poet.”

  “Ah, that’s all phony shit, all them rhymes and stuff.”

  “Sandburg’s poems don’t rhyme,” she said.

  “That ain’t right. So how’s he a poet?”

  “Because he says he is.”

  “Then I’m a damn poet,” Smaller declared.

  “We’re all poets,” Drackman said.

  “We’re all something,” said Tilton.

  Fiona drilled him with her purple gaze. “You up for this?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “You better be up for this,” she said.

  “I’m here, okay? I’m here.”

  They weren’t going into the Bledsoe house until eleven o’clock. Drackman glanced at his watch. Going to be a long evening.

  98

  After Malcolm went home, Mrs. Lorenzo wanted to talk over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, so I had a cup, too. She was happy to be living with us, and she didn’t get teary every time she mentioned her husband, so I thought she must be healing from that loss. But she had been alone for a year during which she’d had a lot of time to think. I suppose there were thoughts she’d had when all by herself that she wanted to share with someone.

  Over coffee, she told me that the four things she loved most, loved with all her heart and soul, were her father, her husband, God, and food. Her father died young. So did her husband. She still loved God, she said, in spite of His habit of taking from her the people she loved with all her heart. The problem was that no matter how much she loved God, He remained invisible, and the only way she knew how much He loved her was to read scripture, which could be hard going. Meanwhile, the love that she brought to her cooking was returned to her daily by the flavor of what she put on her plate.

  She was well aware that gluttony was a deadly sin, but there were three reasons why she didn’t worry about that. First, the formal definition of gluttony was eating and drinking to excess, but Mrs. Lorenzo didn’t drink. Second, before eating her meals all by herself back in the apartment, she always said grace, thanking the Lord for His bounty. Therefore it seemed to her that if the Lord disapproved of the size of the portions she ate, He would make her even poorer, so that she couldn’t afford so much food. Or He would reclaim from her the culinary genius that was her gift, so that what she cooked didn’t taste worth eating. Third, she kept a list of what she ate, soberly considered what might be excessive, and at the end of the week read every item during her confession and received absolution. “Whatever weight I put on, Jonah, is sanctified fat.”

  “I sure wish I could get some sanctified fat,” I said. “I’m still a stick.”

  “If I cook long enough for you, child, you’ll be a regular Godfrey Cambridge.”

  He was a terrific comedian and actor back then, a bit on the hefty side. I might have given up music to be as funny as Godfrey Cambridge.

  Anyway, after a while, Mrs. Lorenzo decided to go upstairs and read in bed, either scripture or recipes, she couldn’t decide which. She checked the locks on all the doors and windows before leaving me alone on the first floor.

  After I brushed my teeth and completed my other bathroom business, I put on my pajama top and wrestled my uncooperative legs into pajama pants. I sat up in bed for a while, reading about Tin Pan Alley: the legendary Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton; Jerome Kern; George Gershwin, who started out by writing a song for Sophie Tucker to sing and went on to become the greatest composer of the century.

  All of it was interesting and inspiring, but I couldn’t see myself in anyone I read about. Nevertheless, I intended to keep reading a thousand such books, if I had to, until I figured out how they did what they did.

  At ten o’clock, I took the penlight from the nightstand drawer and switched off the lamp. Lying in the dark, I listened to the storm for a while, and it bothered me that the drumming of the rain masked all other sounds.

  Eventually I clicked the penlight and swept the room with the narrow beam. I discovered no zombies or emotionless seed-pod people from outer space, no monsters of any kind. I decided to leave the penlight on for a few minutes.

  99

  Earlier in the day, using her second set of false ID, Fiona had rented another car, a Chevrolet, and parked it at the motel. Before leaving Room 14, at Lucas’s direction, she gave the keys to Mr. Smaller and said, “Don’t make it too easy for the sneaky bastard. We’re in this soup because of him.”

  “You sure maybe they ain’t
watchin’ him, too?”

  “If they are, they’re invisible.”

  Mr. Smaller departed in the Chevy. Drackman and Tilton drove away in the paneled van, and Fiona followed in the Dodge that she had rented when she’d first returned from their farmhouse hideaway.

  The metropolis glistened in the storm, all silver and black, headlamp beams wriggling like bright snakes across the streaming streets, every bulb and tube of light reflected in one or more wet surfaces, and yet Drackman thought the city appeared darker than usual, cloaked and riddled with mystery. Perhaps because the oily blacktop contrasted so starkly with the reflected lights, it looked blacker than on other nights, blacker than black. There were vistas, scenes, moments when the buildings and bridges, all of it, seemed like an illusion projected on the screen of rain, nothing really there except the rain-captured light and a fearsome void beyond it, an abyss below. It spoke to him, this trembling city of ephemeral light and the darkness underlying it, and he felt at home.

  When Drackman turned the corner onto the Bledsoes’ street, the surveillance van, identical to the one he drove, stood at the curb where he had been told it would be. Police stakeouts often involved three shifts, eight hours each, but just as often, as in this case, they ran it in two twelve-hour shifts, maybe because it allowed the cops to pile up overtime hours at double their usual pay, maybe because at the moment the department was understaffed. Twelve-hour shifts, day after day, were a big mistake. The detectives grew bored, tired, less than fully observant, slow to react, and if they returned for duty every twelve hours, the effects were cumulative.

  Fiona had observed that the shift changes came at four o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon. When Drackman pulled to a stop behind the first van, almost five hours early, the detectives on duty had to be thinking either that some dink at HQ had altered the shift-change time without telling them or that a clueless dispatcher had sent these newcomers to the wrong stakeout … or that bad actors had entered the picture.