Robbie said, “He did that?” He sounded awed.
“That was all Caissen land,” the cabby said, “the part she lost to him in the divorce. And that's what he did with it. For revenge, some say.”
“Wow,” Robbie said.
Pointing again, the cabby said, “And that's her wall.”
A gray stone wall that had to be twelve feet high marched along beside the final row of little houses. Robbie said, “She did that?”
“So she'd never have to see the desecration of her land,” the cabby explained. “And became a hermit for the rest of her life. Still up in there, ninety-something years old.”
“Wow,” Robbie said. “What happened to him?”
“Died in prison,” she said.
“No!”
“Yes. Went to prison for bribing Congressmen, all about some more development over in Jersey. Got stuck with one of those homemade knives they make in prisons. Shivs, they call them.”
“That's what I've heard,” Robbie said.
“Here's where you're headed,” the cabby said, and pulled to a stop at a tall iron gate flanked by tall brick gateposts, just where that high stone wall stopped at Sandy Drive.
“What a story,” Robbie told her.
The cabby shook her head. “Wealth,” she said. “Greed. Property. I'm glad I'm not rich. That'll be seven dollars.”
30
STANDING IN FRONT OF THE closed gate, with the cabby's story fresh in their minds, it was easy for them to see the history of the place in the layout. These high square brick gateposts, topped by gray stone balls, were surely the original entrance markers to the Caissen estate, which would have stretched from left to right, west to east, from Sandy Drive north to Long Island Sound. Originally, the gate itself would have been much less imposing, with possibly even a gatehouse, and a simple stone wall along the road.
Once Miriam Caissen had been unlucky in love, however, and the court, using the same Solomon precedent they always do, had split the baby in half, everything to the right of the gateposts had been lost to the estate and turned into that warren of the working class. The original stone wall along the road, which was the obviously older workmanship up to about three feet, had been heightened to seven feet and topped with broken glass embedded into concrete, while the monster wall along the dividing line had been made tall enough to keep out not only interlopers but the very view itself.
The only place to see inside the estate property was through the iron bars of the gate, where a neat crushed-stone road led at an oblique angle to the left, inward through very messy underbrush and crowded-together small pine trees and scrubby bushes and interweaving vines. It all looked neglected and overgrown, and no building could be seen back in there, nor any other sign of human occupancy except the road itself.
“Let's see what's down at the other corner,” Josh said, so they started to walk along beside the glass-topped stone wall, which was, as the fellow at Mailboxes-R-Us had described, pockmarked with hostile signs: Keep Out. No Trespassing. Private Property.
They walked quite a while next to all this disapprobation, and then abruptly the stone wall made a right turn and streamed away north, over a gentle slope. Beyond it, along the road, was suddenly a much gentler fence, three strings of black wire stretched above a low and crumbling old stone wall. “The neighbor,” Josh said.
“The land Mrs. Caissen never did own,” Robbie said.
They walked a while beside this new fence, seeing beyond it neat parkland, specimen trees, ornamental statuary and curving blacktop paths, but no people. Then they did see someone; or actually two people. Both were middle-aged white men, seated side by side on a golf cart puttering along one of the blacktop paths at a point where it briefly angled closer to the road in order to meander around a spreading beach plum. The men were in almost identical business attire of dark suit, white shirt, dark blue figured necktie, and black oxfords. They would have looked perfectly normal, except that they were seated side by side on that traveling settee, and that both wore Day-Glo orange baseball caps with Day-Glo green CC emblazoned on the front.
Josh and Robbie stopped to take in this apparition, just at the moment when the two men noticed them in return. Simultaneously, they offered big smiles and big round waves; the same wave, synchronized, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, scootering through Wonderland. Josh and Robbie waved back—what else would you do?—and then the blacktop curved the men away, and off they went, out of sight among the varied plantings.
Josh said, “What the heck was that?”
“Something new under the sun,” Robbie suggested. “Let's go see.”
They continued to walk, and as they went they saw a few other golf carts, all at a greater distance, all with their complement of two business-suited orange-topped white men aboard. Then, even farther back, they saw a group of maybe a dozen such men, strolling along in animated conversation.
And here was the entrance, a broad white concrete sculpture, ten feet high, of hands with their fingertips meeting, in the symbol of making a steeple. Between the spread-apart palms was the entrance drive, and way back in there was what looked very like the plantation from Gone With the Wind. An elaborate billboard on posts beside the entrance, featuring the make-a-steeple hands in all four corners, read, in large green letters on a white background, CHRISTIAN CAPITALISM, and in smaller green letters beneath, “A Retreat To, Not From.”
A bright orange bar was down across the entrance, between the hands, with a guardshack containing a brown-uniformed guard just inside it to the left. The guard, air-conditioned within his glass booth, was reading a magazine, and didn't look up as they neared, since he was programmed to respond only to automobiles.
So, from east to west, this side of Sandy Drive consisted first of Revenge Estates, then the remaining half of Mrs. Rheingold's property, then these beanied Capitalists in their parkland. What an odd pair of neighbors Mrs. Rheingold was tucked between; if an estate, even half an estate, can be tucked.
Robbie grabbed Josh's forearm: “We go back.”
“You've got an idea?”
“We just do it,” Robbie said.
As they walked, returning toward the more imposing wall that surrounded the Rheingold property, they saw more of the traveling pairs of orange-topped men and another group of the strollers. “Something like a monastery,” Josh suggested.
“I bet it's tax deductible,” Robbie said. “And the thing is, except for the hats, we could just go in there and mingle.”
“Are we going in there?”
“I think so. Let's check out the security.”
Josh didn't see any security to speak of, just the three iron wires above the old stone wall, but he walked along with Robbie, and when they got to the juncture of the two properties, where Rheingold's wall undulated north, Robbie bent to study the post holding the wires. Josh watched the sparse traffic on Sandy Drive—mostly service-related, he noticed, plumbers and furniture store vans and diaper services—and then Robbie said, “Ah hah. I thought so.”
Josh looked at him. “You thought what?”
“Where there are capitalists,” Robbie told him, “even Christian capitalists, there will be paranoia.” Pointing at the post, he said, “Electric eye; see it?”
Josh bent and did, the steady small amber light beam at just about five feet above the ground. “That wouldn't be easy to step over,” he said.
“Under,” Robbie told him. “There's room between the beam and the top of the stone.”
Josh looked out at the road; no delivery trucks, no repairmen. “Try it,” he said. “I'll watch your back.”
“You don't have to get melodramatic about it,” Robbie told him, as though he didn't.
Pretending patience, Josh said, “What I meant was, I'll watch to see if the light shows up on your back.”
“Oh, sorry.” Robbie grinned. “Good idea. I'll do the same for you.” And he dropped to his knees like a penitent, to crawl through.
Neither of them br
oke the beam.
31
THE MEANDERING BLACKTOP PATHS where the golf carts roamed didn't extend to this extreme end of the Christian capitalists’ land, so they were alone as they walked beside Mrs. Rheingold's wall, which remained too tall to look over, but with continuing glints of broken glass along the top. After a minute, Robbie said, “You know, the law is, private property owners can't block a beach, so this wall has to stop before it gets there.”
“If there's a beach,” Josh said.
“Well, a waterline,” Robbie said. “The point is, the wall has to stop before it reaches the water, so then we can just walk around the end of it. What do you think of that?”
“I think it sounds too easy,” Josh said.
“Me, too,” Robbie said, and stopped. “I just have to see in there. Give me a boost, will you?”
“You can't go over, not with that glass.”
“Not over, just up. So I can see inside.”
“Fine.”
So Josh stooped and made a stirrup of his cupped hands. Robbie put a foot in the stirrup, a bracing hand on Josh's shoulder, and Josh straightened, lifting Robbie high enough to rest his forearms carefully on the top of the wall and look at Mrs. Rheingold's hermitage.
Josh waited a while, bearing most of Robbie's weight, seeing nothing but stone wall two inches from his nose, and then he said, “What do you see?”
“Well, not much. Let me down, you can take a look for yourself.”
They switched positions, and when Josh rose up he saw a much messier landscape than that created by the Christian capitalists. Weedy scrub growth was everywhere, much of it old fallen trunks and branches from years of windstorms. Some distance away, a gray stone pile of a house was visible, its bay windows gleaming copper, its black roof sagging, the whole structure seeming to be in a long slow process of sinking completely into the ground. A small slice of driveway was visible leading away from the house, and here and there were cleared rectangles of land that might once have been gardens or vegetable patches, long overgrown but retaining something of their shapes. A look of abandonment and decay was everywhere, as though the house hadn't been lived in for more than a century.
Off to the left, northward toward the Sound, he could just make out some more stone wall, at right angles to this one, with more glinting of shards of glass. So the wall made a turn before the waterline in order to continue across the rear of the property, which meant the idea of wading a bit to get around the end of the wall was, as they'd supposed, too easy.
Josh was about to tell Robbie he was ready to come down when movement over by the house caught his eye. Some people had come out, and were moving through the scrubby woods in this direction, though not as though they'd seen the eavesdroppers. They seemed to have something else in mind.
Josh squinted, trying to see them, since even in full daylight there was a kind of evening vagueness inside there, and as the group came nearer he saw they were four men, young, with thick black hair and full black beards. They were dressed alike in elaborate sneakers, dark green shorts, and white T-shirts. They picked their way through the undergrowth at a diagonal to Josh until they reached one of the once-cleared sections. There they stopped, conferred briefly, and then formed a line, standing at attention side by side, shoulder to shoulder, their right profiles toward Josh.
“You're getting heavy up there.”
“Hold on a second, there's people. I'll come right down.”
Apparently, one of the four men gave orders, though quietly, so that Josh couldn't hear him. The four made a snappy left turn, then began to march, left arms swinging in an exaggerated manner, right arms held bent upward, forearms parallel to the ground, as though they carried rifles on their shoulders.
Josh stared, fascinated and appalled. They marched five paces across the semi-clearing, rigidly together, then one by one made a sharp left, then another.
“Josh. Enough already.”
“Right. Here I come.”
Josh lowered himself, then made a stirrup again and said, “You have to see them.”
“Who are they?”
“The assassination team.”
“Really?” Up he went, and studied the assassination team for a minute, then came down again and said, “They're rehearsing.”
“They're drilling,” Josh told him.
“It's the same thing.” Robbie shook his head. “In any profession,” he said, “to be good at it, you have to keep doing it. They don't want to look like rusty amateurs when they slip into that honor guard.”
“Okay,” Josh said. “Now that you've seen them, how do we stop them?”
“We'll talk on the way back,” Robbie said.
Josh gestured at the wall. “You don't want to try to get in there?”
“Why? There's probably a door on the waterside, people always leave one exit to the sea, but it'll be locked solid. And we don't want to be in there anyway, Josh, not with those people.”
“No, I don't,” Josh agreed.
“Come on.”
They walked back along the wall, headed for Sandy Drive. Josh said, “Do you suppose she has any idea what's going on?”
“Mrs. Rheingold? No,” Robbie said. “Not for seventy years.”
They made it back to the road, slid out of the Christian capitalists’ property between low stone wall and high electric eye, and turned to walk back to town.
“Too bad we can't call a cab,” Josh said, not meaning it.
Robbie gave him a look. “I'm surprised you don't carry a cellphone.”
“Too many people reach me as it is.”
They walked past the iron gates closed over the entrance to Mrs. Rheingold's property, and looked in at the same nothing as before. That moldy old pile of a house couldn't be seen from here, nor could the marching men. They walked on, Revenge Estates now on their left, schoolbuses stitching through it, returning the summer-schoolers to their cookie-cutter homes.
As they walked Josh shook his head. “I wish I'd brought a camera.”
“Why?”
“To take pictures of those guys drilling.”
Robbie frowned at him. “What good is that gonna do?”
“Well, look. There's nobody following us now. Nobody knows where we are. If we had something to show the police, we could go to them, and end this thing.”
“Show them what? Pictures of four guys walking around in the woods?”
“Drilling.”
“Who says? We say they're walking with pretend rifles. Prove it.”
Josh shook his head. He felt hemmed-in on every side. “You know,” he said, “our Fire Island rental is over on Monday, I was supposed to go out there tomorrow to help pack. Eve and I talked about it, and it seemed as though I should stay in the city, try to do something to make this horrible thing stop. But what am I accomplishing? What are we accomplishing? Nothing.”
“We're working on it,” Robbie said, but he sounded defensive.
Frustrated, Josh said, “God damn it, Mitch, it should be so easy. Just go to the police, that's what they're for.”
“Sure,” Robbie said. “Turn ourselves in as spies. Show the evidence, the checks over the years and the bank accounts down there, wherever it is.”
“Cayman Islands.”
“I don't really care. The point is, the only evidence we could show the police is evidence of our guilt. Nobody's plans to kill anybody, no nothing except us. Sleepers. Moles. Traitors, with the big T.
Frowning deeply, Josh walked along next to the rows of little anonymous houses, trying to think. “What if—what if, when we get back to town, I go to the police, tell them everything, tell them to go to my apartment, they'll find all those guns and uniforms there, and probably Tina Pausto, too.”
“They'll kill your wife and child,” Robbie told him. “And my old mother in Hartford, I have no doubt. Any security lapse, our families get killed.”
“All right, all right, what if…What if, when we get to town, I first call Eve, I tell
her to take Jeremy and go to her mother in New Jersey, and you—”
“That's a great hideout.”
Josh stopped on the roadside, occasional traffic whipping by as he stared in agony into space. “There's no place to hide, is there?”
“Either we get the goods on these guys,” Robbie said, “or they do their thing. And if they do their thing, it's our job to be the dead perps.”
Josh moaned. “I thought you were somebody who thought outside the box.”
“I do.”
“And?”
“Well…I don't see anything out there yet.”
They walked along in silence another minute, not companionable, and then Josh said, “What if…” and again, “What if…”
“Go ahead, Josh,” Robbie encouraged him. “We can't know it's a bad idea until you come out with it.”
“All right,” Josh said. “What if I call Eve and tell her not to go to her parents, but to go someplace else and not tell me where.”
“You've got a kid.”
“I know,” Josh said. “It wouldn't be easy.”
“For my mother in Hartford,” Robbie told him, “forget it. She won't even take the train.”
Josh plodded along, hemmed in, confined, hopeless, doomed. “Mitch,” he said.
“Yes, Josh?”
“It's all slipping away from us. Here we are, we know so much, we found out so much, and none of it means a thing.”
“You're right,” Robbie said.
“I don't want to be right,” Josh told him.
They walked along another minute, ignoring the summer sun, the schoolbuses, the little houses. Then, abruptly, Robbie stopped and said, “All right, what about this?”
Josh stopped and looked back at him, waiting.
Robbie spread his hands, and offered a shaky grin. “It's a crazy idea,” he said, “but it just might work.”
Josh nodded. “Yeah?”
“Have you got sleeping pills at your place?”
“No. Lately, I wish I did.”
Money for Nothing Page 13
