Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3

by Dick Cluster

  “How far are we going?” he asked. “I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “For a little ride. If you talk fast, you might make it. Who knows?”

  “You took Meyer for a ride,” Alex said. “Davis Square? He talked fast, didn’t he?”

  Turning his head slightly to the left, he could see the sleeve of a sport jacket, a blazer this time, blue, unremarkable, with a plastic button, colored gold. There was a gold ring on the little finger, too. The man said quietly, “Worry about what’s in my other hand. And keep your eyes on the floor.”

  Alex was tired of disembodied voices. Nonetheless, he did what he was told so he could think. Firing a gun in an airport lobby was a dangerous game. He remembered watching in amazement, on TV, the number of automatic weapons that had appeared out of nowhere when John Hinckley took a shot at the President, out of doors. He could imagine how many plainclothesmen were assigned to the average international departure lobby these days. Neither of them would make it very far.

  Alex watched his sneakers move slowly but steadily along the floor. The plastic tiles, rough-surfaced, gray mixed with black, were like cracked, fossil-bearing rock. He thought, irrationally, that only ages hence would anyone bother to look here for his tracks. When he didn’t show up in London, and Meredith called, and then she called Kim. There would be no reinforcements today. He counted twenty more steps, coming to a decision. Gerald Meyer had gone for one ride, and survived at some cost, still unknown. Then he had gone for another, a little walk down a dark driveway to a place where it ended in rubbish and yellow-eyed cats. Better not to go that way. Better not to get started. Better to break the momentum. When he judged he ought to be even with the base of the escalator, he fought the grip on his shoulder, twisting around.

  “I’ve got a plane to catch,” he repeated. It seemed preferable not to say the word shoot, or gun. His heart hammered away. “All I’ve got to do is yell ‘Long Live Kaddafy,’ and we’d have security swarming all around. I’ll have time to yell that, and take me with you, before I die.”

  The man dug his thumb into Alex’s neck, just below where one of the remaining tumors, shrunken in half from what it had once been, pressed out. Alex winced and avoided any sudden moves, but he looked the man in the face and insisted, “I’m going up.”

  The man had a rat’s face, lean and sharp-nosed, with protruding teeth. Alex could see how the teeth were clamped shut by the taut muscles of the man’s narrow jaw. His chin was close-shaved, smooth, his eyes small and blue. He let Alex turn the corner, let go with his right hand, and moved up close behind so that Alex could feel the hard object in the left pocket of his jacket. It pressed into Alex’s kidney.

  The escalator step, emerging from the floor, carried Alex up and away from the gun. Still, it would take a bullet only a fraction of a second to pierce his back and do its work inside. He thought of the single hole in Gerald Meyer’s skull. He pictured Maria, right now, snuggled with a book, or playing with her toddler half-sister, or in front of the TV. He pictured her at his funeral, in a dress-up dress, some hurriedly bought black shoes, her hand in Laura’s, her eyes wide. His only consolation was that this was a scene he had imagined more than once before. He rode upward. He waited.

  The first escalator led to a landing, a narrow mezzanine overlooking the ticket counters, and then to another escalator of equal height. At the top of the second one, orange letters glowed. SECURITY CHECK-IN, they said. CENTRAL. WEST. EAST. With arrows, pointing appropriate ways. Stairway to heaven, the words formed in Alex’s brain.

  For the moment, he and the rat-faced man were alone. No one was in earshot on the moving steps above or below. Figures and faces passed going down, unreachably far, a yard away. Another security man— or was it the same one?— held his walkie-talkie with an air of authority as he slid by. “Next stop,” the low voice said, “get off. We talk there, or you never talk again.”

  The landing came. Ten paces to the next escalator. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. The gun pressed against him again, now under his ribs, from the side. Alex imagined it angled up, the trajectory straight toward his heart. He moved faster, oozing sweat now, aching to run but not daring to. Too much challenge, too much pushing the gunman to the point of decision. Best not to force him. Besides, Alex did not know what a pistol could do, from how far.

  Shotguns and rifles, he’d learned to handle those during his time in Nebraska— blowing cans off rocks, hunting rabbits and birds. But handguns remained one of those shadowy myths of city life. Always imagined, one in every passerby’s pocket on an empty street at night, one behind many a door. A fast death, at close range. Shot by her estranged husband, during an argument in her home. Shot by a hold-up junkie, in the store the old man had tended thirty years.

  Six paces covered. Alex kept going. The hard barrel of the pistol followed him. So did an image of cans felled by shotgun blasts on the edge of a cornfield. The cans jerked upward, then rolled on their sides, pierced all over. Seven. Eight. Nine.

  Ten. The last escalator lifted him free of the barrel, but the gun’s owner cursed him softly from a few inches behind and below. “Now you’re gonna get it, smartass cunt. Think you’re gonna be a hero.” The voice, no longer calm, was getting a nasty edge. “I’m gonna wipe your ass off the planet, cocksucker.”

  He’s working himself up to it, Alex thought. Not good. Still, they kept on rising toward the orange letters, in stately progress under the white Tinkertoy-molecule beams. Alex’s heart drummed against his ribs, hammering out seconds, half-seconds, too many and too long. “Jesus,” the voice complained, “who the fuck do you think you are…”

  Alex sprang forward, away, tossing his bag to the top of the moving stairs, flying after it out of his assailant’s reach. But not quite. The man’s free hand closed around his ankle with that same iron grip. Alex toppled, knees painful against the point of the ribbed steel step, hands going forward to break the fall. He watched his hands glide toward the escalator’s mouth, where the stairs flattened and pinched and disappeared. He kicked backward and forward with his caught leg, lifting his hands to grab the moving handrails as they moved toward the floor. He grabbed as high as he could reach, braced the foot of his free leg, and hurled himself forward onto the dark, rocklike floor. He felt freedom, grabbed up his bag and ran, like any passenger late for a plane, stumbling in his haste and then sprinting for the gate. He turned sharp left toward the door labeled WEST SECURITY CHECK-IN. One of the blue-shirted security men lounged against the partition that cordoned off the waiting area from the rest of the upper lobby. It was thick glass, bulletproof, like that which surrounded the exchange booth. At the entrance Alex stopped, huffing, and pulled open the glass door. He flashed his boarding pass at a small, fattish gatekeeper. This Saint Peter was as good as any— an old man, Italian, East Boston, in a bright orange jacket. He might have been an usher at Fenway Park. Alex slid the bag containing Gerald Meyer’s legacy onto the conveyor belt and stepped through the metal detector, while the glass door closed behind him with a satisfying soft sound. Turning, he saw no rat-faced man.

  11. Caverns of the City

  Alex paced the length of the lounge, searching for his attacker through the transparent wall. It was not so much that he wanted to capture the man’s features as that he wanted to see him whole. He needed a real person, vanquished, not a disembodied threat still at large. But the man with the vise-like grip was gone.

  Within the security area, Alex crossed to a pay phone and dialed the Cambridge police. Trevisone would be off duty, according to what he’d said. That was just as well. Alex delivered his tip to the police-station operator.

  “Never mind my name,” he said quickly. “There’s a guy got killed, Meyer. I bet you his blood was pickled in alcohol. If you want to know where he did his drinking, he was out at Logan last night. Yeah, drowning his troubles in the North Terminal bar. Waiting on a United flight, maybe. Find out who he left with. It might do you some good.”

  Then he went to the men’s
room, bolted himself inside a stall, and smoked his last joint this side of British customs. Not many minutes later, strapped securely in his jumbo-jet seat like a patron in a cramped modern movie house, Alex smiled at the thought of Trevisone receiving his message. Maybe it would be possible to work out a long-distance relationship with the sergeant— you scratch my back and I scratch yours. As the jet taxied into line, Alex felt ready. Not confident, exactly, not like he had all the threads in his hands. Chastened certainly, warned, somewhat humbled by what had just occurred. But not intimidated. In a word, ready.

  He knew this feeling, recognized it immediately, because it was a feeling he had come to value very much. This time it did not come as a surprise. The first time, it had. That had been eight months before, seated on the only chair in the small office of the unfamiliar woman armored in her white coat. She had given him, without fanfare, the pathologist’s verdict on the swollen nodes in his lymphatic system. In the privacy of this isolation, receiving his diagnosis, he had been surprised to feel neither rage nor fear nor depression sweep over him.

  Alex always found it difficult to explain this. Or, as he saw it, other people always found this difficult to understand. No denial, no paralysis, no trembling, no “Oh, God, why me?” One inadequate way he tried to explain it was to remind people that he did love to ski. He tried likening his emotion to what he felt before pushing off at the top of a steep, swift run. That emotion was a challenge, not to understand or justify or explain what had brought him to this pass, but a powerful urge to get on with doing it. He felt challenged to go where he had not yet been, to put his skills to work, to handle in his way something that many people might confront and handle in their own ways, well or badly, but that perhaps no one else had handled in just his particular way.

  Alex had been extremely happy that he could stand there on the snowy summit and look down without an immobilizing vertigo. In the time since, there had been many moments— in fact, most moments— when he had no conscious sense of being or ever having been on that mountaintop. But now, as the jet taxied and then rose, buoyed even more by the sudden thrust of the big engines, he knew, once again, exactly what he was doing.

  He was racing down that icy mountain, yielding to gravity in order to fight it, fighting it in order to yield, riding the mountain in a state of controlled excitement, taking the ride however it developed— and knowing all the while that sometime, not soon, he hoped, but sometime, it would end. Then, in a peaceful moment, he would walk triumphantly through deep, powdery snow, perhaps arm in arm with someone, to a place where he could sit and gaze back up and say to himself, “Wow. I did that.”

  * * *

  Seven a.m. Sunday, Greenwich Mean Time, was still 2:00 a.m. Saturday night as far as Alex’s metabolism was concerned. He had barely slept, and the confining plastic cabin had pressed in on him. Euphoria had faded into a nagging, persistent nausea, a yecch, like a case of guilt or a pulled muscle-oppressive not in itself, but because it was so hard to shake. He had tried but failed to concentrate on the Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh’s book, A Zen Way of Baseball.

  All told, he felt like a poor specimen, though a hardy one, when Heathrow Airport presented itself as a mass of nylon and gabardine, denim and leather, all moving too fast. However, his spirits lifted when Meredith Phillips stepped out of the swirling crowd. Her autumn-leaf hair dangled to the shoulders of a leather jacket, equally if differently red. Alex felt a rush of happiness break through the yecch. He hoped that he was not going to be driving her too nuts.

  Meredith took him in her arms until he dropped his bags and kissed her as it ought to be done. “I’ve got a car,” she said. “Do you want to go home, or out?”

  “Out, please. I want to walk empty streets with you and nobody else. It’s Sunday, right? The City will be empty.”

  Meredith eyed Alex curiously but only said, “Wherever you’d like.” She took his hand and carry-on bag and guided him through the pathways of Heathrow Airport, to a garage where she tossed the bag into the trunk of a Ford Fiesta. She took the suitcase from him and added it too. Alex had landed in Heathrow before, a decade ago, but could summon no visual memory. Once into the light stream of inbound traffic, Meredith said, “You look good. Have you done the final day’s medicines yet? How do you feel, Alex?”

  “I feel like we’re driving on the wrong side of the road. I want to keep going, while I can. I want to walk and talk, and then go eat Indian lunch. That’ll be breakfast, according to my body—I can take the pills then. After that, I’m ready to go home, meet the family, and collapse.”

  “I understand. And I’d better warn you right off, we’re lunching with the proper family on Tuesday. The Reverend Phillips desires to meet his daughter’s lover. I thought by Tuesday you’d be settled down, you know.”

  Alex swallowed. “Um, by Tuesday I’m planning to leave for a detour to the Continent. That’s what I want to walk and talk about. But I think if it can be breakfast it should work out. Or brunch, maybe. I have to be in Hannover by late Tuesday night.”

  “Hannover,” Meredith said. “The duchy that gave us Georges numbers I through III, among others. What is all this on-again, off-again about? And why do you feel you need to declare your independence from me? Your marijuana is in the glove box, by the way.”

  The parson’s daughter, as usual, was nothing if not direct. Alex had once told her she was a walking carpenter’s level. She’d replied in all seriousness that she was so pleased not to be compared to a dwell meter. A level was an old-fashioned, logically comprehensible tool— the sort she respected. Alex put a joint, already rolled, into his mouth and ignited it with the lighter.

  “In Hannover, I’m supposed to see the daughter of a man I met in the post office. I went there to mail you the letter explaining that after this go-round with the chemo I needed some time to myself.” He inhaled a deep breath of smoke and watched West London glide by, not quite ready to take it in. “Footloose time. No-schedule time. Remember-who-I-am time. Then I met this man, and now the man is dead and I’m knee-deep in his shit. I don’t know what’s happening, exactly. Whatever it is, though, I’m in it and I don’t want to let it go.”

  “I see,” Meredith said, though possibly she didn’t. “And the medical news?”

  “Good,” he said. “Here— feel the change.”

  He took her left hand off the stick shift and put it first below his ear, and then to the back of his neck.

  “One’s gone,” she said, resting her hand a moment longer on his neck. “Isn’t it? And the other’s down significantly. What does the doctor say?”

  “To see her when I get back. She expects she’ll want to hit them twice more while they’re down. By Thanksgiving I should be as normal as I’m going to get.”

  Thanksgiving was when Meredith was due back in Boston. With luck, Alex would have no more tumors and be done with medication. But he still might not be the man she had fallen in love with— that was what he meant. He would still be a man with a kind of monkey on his back. He could be expected to go through the whole thing again within five years, quite possibly less. With luck, again, the cancer would not have developed much resistance to the drugs. Nodular lymphoma, Alex’s disease, was a relatively domesticated cancer— but not, in the current state of medical science, a curable one.

  “How’s the teaching?” he asked.

  Meredith shrugged and returned her hand to the wheel. “I’m nearly halfway through, and the work makes me feel professional, competent, insightful, and sometimes gifted. Or, to put it another way, I am surrounded by panting groupies who look at me like I was Simone de Beauvoir.”

  “A link to lost feminist generations, you mean?” Meredith had come to the States originally to research a book on a writer from the twenties, Susan Glaspell. She was also an acknowledged authority, at thirty-two, on Virginia Woolf.

  “I suppose.” Meredith kept her eyes on the road, but grinned. Alex marveled as usual at this parson’s daughter with the dark red hair, cat
’s eyes, and alive, inquiring face. “What I meant was someone who seems to them old, wise, and sexy. The students are all very bright, but I have the feeling that for a lot of them it’s basically a game.”

  They sped along the Embankment now, toward central London, then drifted up Whitehall in the sparse early-Sunday traffic. The sights came back to Alex as if from a dream: not quite real, but nonetheless already observed. At Trafalgar Square, Meredith pointed out South Africa House, where Alex had missed a large demonstration she’d attended the day before. She turned right on the Strand, toward the financial district. Alex kept silent as they reached the canyons formed by incessant construction of newer and sleeker skyscrapers.

  “Thatcher’s miracle,” Meredith said. “The rest of the country can rot, but the sun never sets on British finance capital. Deserted today, as you say. Now, Alex, what brings us here?”

  They walked hand in hand through vacant streets, while Alex told Gerald Meyer’s story, and his own. Meredith let him tell it, but from time to time she stopped and looked away, up at the distant sky, in mute exasperation. “So, somewhere up there,” he concluded, “is Moselle’s castle, and I’m down here like David with his slingshot. The thing is, it wouldn’t surprise me if something in that package belonged to Jack. It wouldn’t surprise me if Meyer knuckled under to those two guys and told where it went. Maybe that’s why he wanted me to get it back. I want to go see Moselle, like Meyer suggested. I want him to think I’m happy to be his pet retriever, to bring it back and drop it at his feet.”

  “Are you happy to?”

  “I guess that depends on what’s in it. Possession is nine points of the law. And on Cynthia— it’s her inheritance, in a sense.”

  “What about the fact that Moselle may have killed Meyer, or had him killed? And that he may have sent that thug after you, as well?”

  “I’ll have to keep my eyes and ears open. That’s all I can say.”