The Killing of Butterfly Joe

by Rhidian Brook

  I walked towards Chuick just as Isabelle appeared at the entrance.

  ‘What news of Joe?’

  ‘Who knows. He hardly made any sense.’

  ‘Are you going to New York?’

  I took off my suit jacket and threw it on the back seat. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know.’

  And with that I got in the car and drove off, enjoying the fact that it was my turn to be irritated and taking a cruel satisfaction in leaving Isabelle just standing there, none the wiser. I’d even suggest that she looked concerned about me.

  It was good to be alone in Chuick. Sometimes inanimate objects are all we can trust. Dear Chuick, I will write an epic ode to you when I have the time. You are faithful as a hound. As reliable as gravity. You were transport, sanctuary, and at times my home. And I thank you! I didn’t completely know what my intentions were for the first few miles. I think I wanted to know what quitting would feel like. And perhaps I needed to glimpse the Quiet Life. I was, in effect, taking two roads at the same time: one to New York; one back to my aunt’s. It was convenient that they happened to be the same road.

  The sight of the house and the barn of ten thousand books was like a battering ram crashing through the fourth wall of my adventuring. Perhaps it was time to go back to reading of the escapades of imagined heroes and heroines instead of having the hubris to think I was one of them. Of course, as is always the way with these things, the place was at its most appealing. The trees were in their full fall glory, all burning reds and glowing golds. There was a sleek Buick Riviera in the drive. There were lights on inside the house and, intriguingly, in the barn (a light that would have been my light had I stayed). I parked across the road, switched off the engine and sat there taking stock. The idea of quitting and resuming my old walks and habits, returning to the life I had been leading before I met the man known to the Federal authorities as ‘Butterfly Joe’, was compelling. I just had to walk up to the house, ring the bell.

  I turned the radio off, closed my eyes and projected what might happen from here, were I to step from the car and knock on the door. Images of a Quiet Life flashed before me: my aunt embracing me with open arms and full bosom; me calling the Boscos to tell them I was quitting; a proven-right Edith saying ‘I told you so’; a relieved Isabelle. A Mary cursing my name; and a still-incarcerated Joe despairing that I had back-slidden into being boring. From there my quiet life reduced to a quick succession of scenes: my mother saying, ‘It’s lovely to have you back, Llewellyn.’ My friends pleased to see me but their interest leavened by healthy indifference and having their own lives. My brother sarcastically asking how the great Welsh-American novel was coming on. The safe course of this life led to a sensible job that didn’t require me to misquote poets and presidents, or use the exaggerated tragedy of someone’s past to get people to buy things from me. A girl who listened with interest to my half-tales of selling butterflies in glass cases in America and thought me imaginative for having even done such a thing. The images accelerated through the stages of life: a wedding, children, setback and disappointment. I grew fatter and lost my hair but at least I grew old knowing the difference between delusions and dreams. The Quiet Life. It didn’t seem so bad.

  The side door of the house opened and someone – a tall man – walked across the lawn towards the barn. He was carrying something under his arm: a file, papers, a manuscript! It was Garton Lake, the novelist who used my aunt’s barn whenever he needed to ‘get away and do some hard yards on a book’. He’d said this to me when I met him at my aunt’s apartment in New York. I was fresh off the plane and my aunt had thrown a dinner in my honour and invited Lake to encourage me in my own writing endeavour – and to make an impression. At some point in the evening I had the temerity to ask what his book was about and he’d turned to me and said that his first rule of writing was ‘never to discuss the work whilst it was still nascent’. This seemed deeply impressive to me at the time. But as I sat there thinking about it now it just sounded pretentious. I watched him cross to the barn and he seemed lost in whatever world it was he was creating. Was that the book? I wondered. Had he nearly finished it? It looked substantial. Would it be good enough to be one of the books in the Barn of Ten Thousand Books, as I’d hoped my own might be – one day. I felt an envy and frustration rising up again. Damn him, for writing that book. Just as Lake reached the top step of the barn he seemed to notice Chuick for the first time. I sank down in my seat, like an undercover agent. He stood there for a while, watching, and then, seeming unconcerned, he entered the barn, closing the door behind him. I could have gone up to the barn, said hello, asked him what the book was about now that he’d finished it. But I didn’t care what his book was about (a book I decided I despised without even having read a single word). I needed to know what was going to happen to Joe. To Isabelle. To Mary. To Edith. To the butterflies. To me! I couldn’t quit because, despite Joe’s latest misdemeanour, the sensible advice of my father’s ghost and my own conscience, this story wasn’t over.

  I drove to New York, playing the radio loud so as not to hear myself think. When I crossed into Manhattan over the Alexander Hamilton Bridge the sight of the mighty monoliths of Midtown lifted my spirits. This was a city that forced you to look up and think soaring thoughts. And whilst my thoughts weren’t lofty they were at least focused on what I had to do. And what I had to do was save this deal.

  Around 45th I started looking for a parking space but drove block after block without any joy. It was two thirty-five and I must have been ten minutes’ walk from the Roth Building. What would Joe do? I thought, knowing full well that he’d ask God to provide a parking space, as he had done in Cleveland, an event that triggered an argument between him and Mary with me taking Mary’s side. Mary: ‘Why would he bother to help us find a parking space with a whole universe of serious things to be dealing with?’ Joe: ‘He’s either involved in our little bitty lives or he ain’t. You think he’s drawing the line at parking?’

  Without the Creator’s help I found a car park that held no more than a dozen cars and resembled a basketball court. The sign said FULL but I could see two free spaces. I drove up to a wooden signal box where a man sat playing with a roll of tickets.

  ‘Sign says full.’

  ‘You have two spaces there, I can see. There.’

  ‘For emergencies.’

  ‘This is an emergency.’

  The man looked at me. ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘My friend . . . is dying.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Then looked at Chuick. ‘The hell is this anyway?’

  ‘It’s a Chuick,’ I said. And I launched into a hagiography of my most trusted transport, using every scrap of poetry Joe had uttered in its defence. ‘Made before Motown made them to break down.’ ‘Two tons of Pittsburgh steel.’ ‘Someone hits this car they’re as dead as snot.’

  The Ode seemed to tilt things. He nodded and gave me a ticket from his roll.

  ‘Take the one on the left. Hope your friend gets better!’

  ‘Thanks. So do I,’ I said as I ran off toward the Avenue of the Americas.

  The Roth Building was over five hundred feet tall but I’d never have noticed it had I not been attending a meeting there. It was anonymous among the lovelier skyscrapers of Midtown. I ran into the entrance and took a lift to the reception on the twentieth floor where I stepped towards the reception desk and announced my name and the time of my appointment. It was a relief and a thrill to see my name already written down, next to Joe’s, in the 3pm slot in the appointment book. I explained that my companion was unable to attend the meeting due to being ‘indisposed’. I chose this word as it seemed to cover most eventualities, including the possibility that the receptionist wouldn’t ask for fear that she didn’t know what it meant or that the answer might be too distressing. She offered me a seat in the reception area. I couldn’t sit so I stood for a while and watched the traffic and people passing up and down the avenue below. So many people with lives I knew nothing
about and who in turn knew nothing about mine.

  ‘You can go on up now, sir. Take the elevator to the fortieth floor.’

  As the elevator rose slowly through the floors, the buttons lighting up the numbers, all the little lights started coming on in me. For weeks Joe and I had confabulated shamelessly to make the sale – killing off his mother in the fire in one store, his sisters asphyxiated in another; his father falling into a gulch in the jungle one day, killed by a jaguar the next. I was going to have to confabulate. The ding of the bell indicating that the lift had reached its destination only confirmed my thought.

  It was time to justify my existence by ending Joe’s.

  ‘Mr Rip Van Jones. Butterfly World,’ I said to the second receptionist.

  She led me to a room, knocked on the door, and leant in.

  ‘A Mr Van Jones is here to see you, Mr Eliot?’

  I prepared my face for the faces that would be staring back across the table at me by looking in the glass door beside me. Appropriately enough my suit and black sample briefcase gave me the air of a mourner. I looked as sombre and sober as hell.

  There were three people in a room which had leather-padded walls (to soundproof the screams of those who were being fleeced by Roth’s lawyers, perhaps). Roth’s lawyer (Mr Eliot), Roth’s head of acquisitions (Mr Matthews) and the curator of Roth’s museum (Ms Daniels). This was the three-headed Cerberus that stood between me and the death of the deal.

  ‘We were expecting two of you, Mr Van Jones?’

  Mr Eliot, the lawyer (the middle head), wore heavily horn-rimmed glasses and resembled a hornet. He was, I detected, the power in the room and I decided to meet his insect gaze with a piercing look of my own. I took my time. I was weighing up the depth of the dive I was about to make, just as I had done that first day I’d met Joe. (In a way, lies are like dives: the greater the height the more impressive they look; once your feet have left the solid rock of fact and propelled you up and out into the air there is no stopping it; you are committed.)

  ‘I . . . I’m afraid . . . my colleague Joe Bosco cannot be with us.’

  Mr Eliot detected the heavy burden in my expression and tone. ‘Oh?’

  I took a final look over the ledge (making sure I had all six eyes on me) and then I dove.

  ‘I debated long and hard this morning as to whether I should cancel this meeting in the light of recent events. But, after much discussion with Mr Bosco’s family, and in light of Joseph’s own wishes, it was agreed that I should come here today. But it is with a heavy heart that I have to tell you that my colleague, my friend, Joe Bosco, is dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mr Eliot said. ‘That is . . . most unfortunate.’

  ‘What does this mean?’ Mr Matthews asked. Roth’s man seemed quite put out. To be fair to him, he’d just flown in from London, where he’d purchased a set of sooty moths from Bonham’s. He couldn’t quite disguise his terror at the thought the collection he’d been sent to secure for his boss might have gone the same way as its owner.

  I’d only just decided to kill Joe – in the moment. And whilst less is more should have been my guiding principle, I felt I owed them some kind of explanation. For a few minutes I experienced what it must be like to be Joe – to be the Cat In The Hat – starting something and having to keep going lest everything collapse for the stopping.

  ‘He went lepping up near the Kaaterskill Falls, three days ago. He was looking for late season butterflies. When he didn’t return that evening we went looking for him the next day. And found him at the bottom of a creek. He’d fallen some sixty feet, off the edge of a hidden bluff. He died from the fall.’

  As I was killing him off I kept thinking how much Joe would have enjoyed my delivery. Of course, had he been there, I would not have been able to kill him quite so cleanly, or execute my speech without that wretched self-consciousness which is the crusher of all true poetic expression. But I gave him an end that was more poetic an end than he was likely to meet. Joe’s death was easily my most convincing sell. A competitive need to prove yourself, a reckless abandon, desperation and disregard for the outcome make for a potent mix. In business there’s probably no better way to pitch. Joe had taught me well. The Cat In The Hat had begat another cat.

  Mr Eliot put his fingers together in a pyramid, respectful enough. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Mr Matthews offered commiserations, too.

  Seeing that I had their sympathy I moved on to the real reason we were there.

  ‘I realize, Mr Matthews, that you have come a long way. The family obviously want to honour the deal to sell the collection. But they will need a period to mourn Joe.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Jones.’

  ‘How long do you think the family will need?’ Mr Matthews asked. ‘Just so that I can inform Mr Roth.’

  ‘Well, grief is no respecter of rules. I know this myself from the recent death of my father. But if you can give us a few weeks. Maybe forty days or so? Perhaps I can contact you when the family are ready. Would that be acceptable to you, and to Mr Roth?’

  ‘Of course. Please offer our commiserations to the Bosco family.’

  I should have left it there, but I was enjoying myself too much. ‘It’s no compensation for a life, of course,’ I said. ‘But perhaps in some small way the sale of this collection will be a fitting memorial to my friend.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In which I meet the man who caught ‘Butterfly Joe’.

  After killing Joe, I went to see him in jail. I was on a high from the thrill of the kill and I felt no shame for what I’d done. If anything I felt justified: the deal was alive. Joe’s death was a blessing; and it wasn’t even one in disguise. That meeting gave me renewed enthusiasm for butterflying and a confidence in my ability to save impossible situations. It is true that I had sacrificed Joe in the process, but I was sure that was a detail he could live with. All I had to do now was let everyone know that Joe was dead. Anyone can walk into the underworld, that door’s always open; it’s just that they’re expected to stay there.

  The FWA facility was in a brick office in a nondescript strip of buildings that if you had to describe you’d say looked like an underfunded school. The name ‘Fish and Wildlife Agency’ carried more farce than threat. I thought Joe’s situation would be resolved quickly; it was just another fix Joe would talk his way out of and walk away from. All I had to do was turn up, pay a fine, set him free and drive back to the Catskills. At the desk I presumptuously announced that I was here to pick up a Joseph Bosco. The duty officer asked me to take one of the three plastic chairs in the waiting area. She didn’t act as though she was expecting me or as though she knew who Joe was. I sat there for half an hour – time enough to think that perhaps I wasn’t going to be leaving with Joe. Eventually, a man wearing shades, a six o’clock shadow, a white short-sleeve shirt, grey flannels, brown shoes and a job-done smirk entered the reception area. He looked more like a caporegime protecting a crime racket than a man protecting rare species. It was the man who had arrested Joe. He of the bogus angel surname. I tried not to think of him in those terms but when the good seed’s been thrown the idea keeps growing. Right from the start I imagined him with wings tucked away beneath his shirt.

  ‘Mr Jones?’

  I stood. ‘Hello, yes.’

  ‘Or is it Mr Van Jones?’

  ‘It’s both. The latter is my working name.’

  ‘My working name is Agent Devon Moroni. I need you to come to my office. I have some questions to ask.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘Am I keeping you from something?’

  ‘I was told to come and pick Joe up.’

  ‘Mr Bosco won’t be going anywhere today. Or tomorrow. And – hopefully for many days after that.’

  The sign on his office door said ‘Agent Devon Moroni’ in white lettering printed against the black strip. A photo of a butterfly was stuck crudely beneath his name, a handwritten, taped strip of card said ‘Bug Patrol’. Moroni’s offic
e was stuffy (‘air-conditioning is killing the planet’). There was an office chair behind the desk, the kind of IBM electric typewriter that I coveted, and ‘an interrogation chair’ opposite the desk. On the wall was a single shelf with reference books on butterflies, as well as other insects. There was a framed giant horn rim beetle on the shelf next to what looked like small elephant tusks.

  ‘Walrus ivory,’ he said, seeing me wondering. ‘Twelve years.’

  ‘Twelve years?’

  ‘That’s what they got for smuggling them. Two schmucks – same age as you and your friend.’

  I didn’t like what Moroni was implying.

  ‘Such a waste. Imagine. You’re twenty-three, twenty-four years old and to go to jail for twenty years, you come out my age, fat, bald, your balls hanging down, your best days behind you, and all for what?’

  I saw a pack of cigarettes on his desk but I resisted the temptation to ask for one, associating such an action with a signal to confess. When he offered me gum I felt sure he was going to try and get something out of me, get me to tell him things about Joe, betray Joe. That was what his manner was telling me.

  ‘I have a few questions for you, Mr Jones.’

  ‘Do I have to answer them?’

  ‘No . . . but it might help your friend.’

  There was a cork ‘suspect’ board with photographs of people and lines of string joining up the suspects to a map of the world. There was a photo of Joe, wearing his suit and bow tie. A line connected his image to a spot in the Catskill Mountains.

  ‘So how long have you been working for “Butterfly Joe”?’

  ‘ “Butterfly Joe”?’

  He reached up to the filing cabinet and pulled out a blue dossier which he set with a thud on his desk.