by Brad Meltzer
“Roosevelt, I shouldn’t’ve said that—”
“—the horse on her Polo shirt . . . is real!”
“You used that last week.”
“Yo momma’s so fat, in elevators, it says: ‘Maximum Occupancy: Twelve Patrons OR Yo momma!’ ”
“Does that really make you happier?”
“Just take the money next time, Cal,” Roosevelt says as he twists a dial on the old, stolen police scanner we superglued to the dash. The cops don’t care. On homeless calls, they want us there first.
“—ave an eighty-six, requesting—zzzrrr—nearby units to Victoria Park,” a woman’s voice says as the scanner crackles to life. The park is less than a mile away.
Turns out this is the call I’d been waiting nineteen years for.
3
Cal . . . I need help!” Roosevelt screams.
My tenth-grade English teacher once told me that throughout your life, you should use only three exclamation points. That way, when you put one out there, people know it’s worth it. I used one of them the day my mom died. But tonight, as I sit in the van and hear the sudden panic in Roosevelt’s voice— Across the wide patch of grass known as Victoria Park, he flicks on his flashlight. But all I see is the bright red blood on his hands. No. Please don’t let tonight be another.
“Rosey, what the hell’s going on?” I yell back, clawing over the passenger seat, sticking my head out the window, and squinting into the darkness. He’s kneeling over our newest homeless client—“86” on the radio means “vagrant”—who’s curled at the base of a queen palm tree that stands apart from the rest.
“It’s a bad one, Cal. He’s a bleeder!”
A ping of rain hits the windshield, and I jump at the impact.
If this were my first day on the job, I’d leap out of the van and rush like a panicked child to Roosevelt’s side. But this isn’t day one. It’s year two.
“You got his Social?” I call out.
Kneeling at the base of the queen palm, Roosevelt tucks his flashlight under his armpit and rolls what looks like a heavyset man onto his back. As the light shines down—the lumpy silhouette—even from here, I can see the blood that soaks the man’s stomach.
“His wallet’s gone,” Roosevelt shouts, knowing our protocols. “Sir. . . . Sir! Can you hear me? I need your Social Security number.”
In my left hand, I’m already dialing 911. In my right, I prop my laptop on the center console. But I never take my eyes off Roo-sevelt. Breast cancer took my aunt, the aunt who raised me, a few years back. I don’t have many friends. I have this job. And I have Roosevelt.
“Cal, I got his Social!” Roosevelt shouts. “Sir, were you mugged? You have a gunshot wound.”
“Gimme one sec,” I call out. The computer hums, our tracking software loads, and I click on the button marked Find Client. On-screen, a blank form opens, and I tab over to the section labeled SSN.
“Cal, you need to hurry,” Roosevelt adds as the man whispers something. At least he’s conscious. “He’s starting t—”
“Ready!” I insist, all set to type with one hand. In my other, I grip my cell and hit send as the 911 line starts ringing.
Years ago, if you wanted to drive around and work with the homeless, all you needed was a van and some Lysol. These days, the state of Florida won’t let you pick up a soul unless you’re logged on to the statewide computer network that tracks who’s where. The better to see you with, my dear. And the better to see what diseases, medication, and psychological history you’re carrying around as well.
“Zero seven eight, zero five, one one two zero,” Roosevelt announces as I key in the man’s Social Security number.
In my ear, the 911 line continues to ring.
In the distance, refusing to wait, Roosevelt rips open the man’s shirt and starts applying pressure to his wound.
And on-screen, I get my first look at his identity.
LLOYD RANDALL HARPER
DANIA BEACH, FLORIDA
DOB: JUNE 19—52 YEARS OLD
A swell of heat burns my chest, my throat. I can’t breathe. I open my mouth to call Roosevelt’s name, but my lips won’t move.
LLOYD RANDALL HARPER
My father.
“This is 911,” the operator announces in my ear. “What’s your emergency?”
4
Darting between two oak trees, I race through the black park as the rain collects in little rivers on my face. I ignore it. Just like I ignore my heart kicking from inside my rib cage. All I see is him.
When I was little, I used to have fantasies about finding my dad. That he’d be released early, and my aunt and I would run into him at dinner or while I was getting a haircut. I remember being in church on the plastic kneelers, praying that we’d find each other again in some dumb Disney movie way. But those dreams faded as he missed my tenth birthday. And eleventh. And twelfth. Within a few years, the childhood dreams shifted and hardened—to fantasies of not seeing him again. I can still run them in my head: elaborate escape plans for ducking down, running, disappearing. I’d ready myself, checking over my shoulder as I’d pass the bagel place where he used to love to get breakfast. And a few years after that, those dreams settled, too, entering that phase where you think of him only as much as you think of any other dead relative.
For the past nineteen years—for me—that’s all he’s been. Dead.
And now he’s crumpled at the base of a palm tree as a slow, leaky rain drips from above.
“Cal! Med kit!” Roosevelt shouts.
I cut past the white gazebo at the front of the park, and my foot slips in the grass, sending me flat on my ass, where the damp ground seeps through my pants.
“Cal, where are you?” Roosevelt calls without turning around.
It’s a fair question. I close my eyes and tell myself I’m still in the poorly lit park, but all I see is the tarnished doorknob in that spearmint-gum-and-hairspray room where my dad and I said good-bye. I blink once and the doorknob twists, revealing the child psychologist assigned by the state. It’s like that Moby song. When you have a damaged kid, you don’t ask, “How you feeling?” You give him a crayon and say, “Draw something nice.”
I drew lots of nice.
“Med kit!” Roosevelt snaps again.
I scramble to my feet. Years of training rush back. So do decade-old escape plans. I should turn around now. Let Roosevelt handle it. But if I do— No. Not until—
I need to know if it’s him.
Ten feet in front of me, Roosevelt still has the flashlight tucked under his armpit. It shines like a spotlight, showcasing the bloody inkblot stained into the man’s silk shirt. As I barrel toward them, Roosevelt turns my way and the armpit flashlight follows. There’s no missing the terror on my face. “Cal, what’re you—?”
Like a baseball player rounding third, I drop to one knee and slide through the wet grass, slamming the med kit into Roosevelt’s chest and almost knocking him over.
“Cal, what’s wrong? Do you know this guy?” Roosevelt asks.
Grabbing the flashlight, I don’t answer. I’m hunched over the man, shining the light and studying his face. He’s got a beard now, tightly trimmed and speckled with gray.
“Shut it off,” the man moans, jerking his head back and forth. His eyes are clenched from the light and the pain, but his face—the double chin, the extra weight, even the big Adam’s apple—it can’t be.
“You’re blinding him, Cal!” Roosevelt says, snatching the flashlight from my grip and shining it in my face. “What the hell is wrong with—”
“C-Cal?” the man mumbles, looking at Roosevelt. He heard him say my name. But as the man turns to me, the light hits us both from the side. Our eyes connect. “N-No. You’re not— You’re—” He swallows hard. “Cal?”
It’s an established scientific fact that the sense of smell is the most powerful for triggering memories. But it’s wrong. Because the moment I hear that scratchy, stumbly baritone—everyone knows their father’s voice.
His hand shakes like a Parkinson’s patient as he tries to wipe flecks of blood from his mouth. He has to tuck the hand underneath him to stop it from trembling. He spent eight years in prison. It can’t be just his nose that’s been broken.
“You okay?” Roosevelt asks. I’m not sure who he’s talking to, though it’s pretty clear it doesn’t matter. Down on my knees, I’m once again nine years old, pulling crayons from an old Tupperware bin. To this day, I don’t know if it was my greatest fear or deepest desire, but the one thing I drew over and over was my father coming home.
5
Cal, you need to hurry,” the man with the ponytail called out across the park. “He’s starting t—”
“Ready!” shouted the one called Cal.
From the front seat of his sedan, Ellis stared through his windshield, watching the scene and knowing that coincidences this perfect were never just coincidences. Next to him, in the passenger seat, his dog rumbled and growled—first at the rain, then at the flashlight, the bobbing and glowing light-stick in the distance.
“Easy, girl. . . . Good girl,” Ellis whispered, patting his dog’s neck as they spied the two homeless volunteers shouting at the far end of the little park. Cal. One of them was named Cal. From this side of the park, it was hard to hear much. But Ellis heard enough.
“Zero seven eight, zero five, one one two zero,” yelled the ponytailed man.
Ellis pulled out the file folder the Judge’s office had put together and checked the Social Security number against the one on the pink sheet from Hong Kong. The driver picking up the Book of Lies: Harper, Lloyd.
Ellis’s amber eyes narrowed as his thick eyebrows drew together. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
He’d been following Lloyd for barely ten minutes—following the simpleminded courier just to make sure the shipment got through. But what Ellis had seen . . . when the flash of the gun erupted and Lloyd stumbled in the park . . . No, Lloyd wasn’t simpleminded at all. Lloyd Harper might not’ve known exactly what was inside, but he knew the value of what he was carrying. Ellis shouldn’t’ve been so surprised. His own father was a liar, too. And a far worse trickster.
The dog raised her head, always reading Ellis perfectly.
“I’m okay, girl,” he promised.
Across the dark park, there was a burst of light as the door of the van flew open. Ellis saw an older man with white hair— No. He had an open, boyish face and loose-jointed movements. Like a giant marionette out of sync. He was young. Young with white hair.
Ellis flipped through the pages, still rubbing his thumbnail across the corner of the file folder. White hair, twenty-eight years old. There it was. Known relatives. Calvin. Cal.
One of them was named Cal. And the way he was running—the shock and fear on his face as he came bursting out into the rainy night—Cal knew exactly whom he’d found.
For a moment, Ellis laughed to himself. Of course. It had to come back to father and son. Just as it began with Adam and Cain. Just as it was with Mitchell and Jerry Siegel.
It was the same when he’d first heard the truth about his own family—the lifelong lie his father had told him. In that instant, Ellis realized how much of his life was a construct. But Ellis wasn’t sad. He was thrilled. He knew he was meant for something bigger. No question, that’s why his mother left him the diary, the softbound journal with the water-stained leather cover.
For over a year he’d been studying the diary’s pages, absorbing the theories that his grandfather and great-grandfather—both Leadership officers—spent so many years working on. Throughout the books, his name was spelled differently—Cayin, Kayin, Kenite—depending on the translation and where the story originated. But there was no mistaking the world’s first murderer. Or the first man God forgave—and empowered. The man who held the secret of God’s true power.
Ellis still remembered—his hands shaking in the estate lawyer’s office—the first time he read the words his great-grandfather had written during his time at the Cairo Museum. Ellis had to go find a Bible—check the language himself. Like most, he’d grown up thinking Cain killed Abel with a stone. But as he flipped through the pages, speed-reading through chapter 4 of Genesis: “And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” That was all the Bible said. No mentions of stones or rocks or any sort of weapon.
Time and history added other ideas, filling texts with theories of clubs, sticks, and wooden staffs. The Zohar, the most important work of the Jewish Kabbalah movement, insisted that Cain bit Abel’s throat, which led others to proclaim Cain as the world’s first vampire. And in ancient Egypt, archaeologists found hieroglyphics depicting a weapon made from an animal’s jawbone and sharpened teeth.
It was this theory of the jawbone that filled up half the diary. Shakespeare wrote that Cain’s weapon was a jawbone, featuring it in Hamlet. Rembrandt depicted the same instrument in one of his portraits, even including Abel’s dog barking in the background.
But for Ellis’s Cairo-based great-grandfather, the real question was: How did this obscure theory from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics suddenly become such a rage in seventeenth-century Europe? For years, there was no logical explanation—until his great-grandfather read the story of a small group of Coptic monks who emigrated from Egypt to the north, where they hoped to hide the small but priceless object they’d stumbled upon. The object from God Himself.
Then the Leadership took interest. The group was new then. Untested. But extremely enthusiastic—like Ellis, especially now that he was so close.
There was only one thing in his way.
Across the park, Cal slid on his knees, his flashlight shining into Lloyd Harper’s terrified face.
A trickster, Ellis decided. Every family had a trickster.
In the passenger seat, Benoni cocked her head, which meant Ellis’s phone was about to—
The phone vibrated in Ellis’s pocket. Somehow the dog always knew.
“Officer Belasco,” Ellis answered as he readjusted the badge on his uniform.
“You still with the driver—what’s his name again?” the Judge asked.
“Lloyd,” Ellis replied, watching Cal’s father across the park and unable to shake the feeling that the bleeding old man was far more than just a driver.
“He get the Book yet?”
“Soon. He stopped for some help first,” Ellis said as he eyed just Cal.
In 1900, the Book—one writing called it a “carving,” another an “emblem”—whatever it was, it was stolen from the Leadership. Ellis’s grandfathers hunted it for decades, tracing it to father and son. Always father and son. And tonight, seeing Cal and his dad, Ellis finally understood how near the end was. All he had to do was wipe out these villains. Then Ellis—for himself, for his family—would finally be the hero.
“Is that concern in your voice?” the Judge asked.
“Not at all.” Ellis scratched Benoni’s nose, barely even hearing the ambulance siren that approached behind them. “Lloyd Harper can bring as many dogs as he wants into this fight. It won’t take much to put ’em down.”
6
You’re gonna feel a sting,” the nurse says, wheeling my dad into one of the emergency exam rooms. As she’s about to pull the curtain shut, she turns back to me and stops. “Only relatives from here. You related?”
I freeze at the question. She doesn’t have time for indecision.
“Waiting room’s back there,” she says, whipping the curtain shut like a magician’s cape.
Sleepwalking toward the L-shaped hub of pink plastic waiting room chairs, I’m still clutching the mound of my dad’s cr
umpled belongings—his bloody shirt, pants, and shoes—that the EMTs cut off him. A digital clock on the wall tells me it’s 1:34 a.m. To Roo-sevelt’s credit, as I slump down in the seat next to him, he doesn’t say a word for at least four or five seconds.
“Cal, if he’s really your dad—”
“He’s my dad.”
“Then you should go back there.”
I start to stand up, then again sit back down.
I’ve waited nineteen years to see my dad. Nineteen years being mad he’s gone. But to hop out of my chair and peek behind that curtain and reenter his life . . . “What if he doesn’t want me back?” I whisper.
Smart enough to not answer, Roosevelt quickly shows me why, after he raised his own hell in high school, he was such a great Methodist minister. Sure, he still had his rebellious side—with a few too many Iron Maiden quotes in his sermons—but the way he breathed life into Scripture and related to people, everyone loved that pastor with the ponytail.
The only problem came when church leaders told Roosevelt they didn’t like the fact that he wasn’t married. In the wake of all the church pedophile cases, it didn’t reflect well that even though he was from one of the wealthiest families in town, at nearly forty years old, he was still single. Roosevelt pleaded, explaining that he hadn’t found anyone he loved. His family tried to help by throwing around their financial weight. But in rural Tennessee—where a handsome, unmarried, thirty-eight-year-old man can mean only one thing—his church refused to budge. “If you want to be queer, don’t do it here,” said the message that was spray-painted on the hood of his car. And Roosevelt had his first personal heartbreak.
Which is why he empathizes so well with mine.
“Cal, when you were little, you ever watch The Ten Commandments?”
“This gonna be another sermon?”
“Boy, you think you’re the only one who likes saving people?” he teases, though I know it’s no joke. No matter how happy he is, Roosevelt would kill to have his old parish back. It’s not ego; it’s just his mission. He’ll never say it, but I know that’s the reason he took this job. And though I bet his family could easily buy him a new church, well, it’s the same reason he won’t buy us a new van. Some battles you have to fight by yourself. “Think about the Moses story, Cal: Little baby gets dropped in a basket, then grows up thinking he’s Egyptian royalty—until his past comes kickin’ at the door and reveals to him his true purpose.”
