by Peter Manus
“Je t’aime!” I think at him. “I am with you!”
He thinks: “You’ve killed me.”
Brain communication, I have found, carries no inflection. It is not a conversation, not language, although my clumsiness with imagery has made me present it as such throughout this memoir. Telepathy, at least as it works for me, is closer to a communication between human and animal than human and human. So when Simon thinks up at me that I killed him, it is not fully clear to me what he means. Whether it is a statement of profound thanks and love for my pulling the trigger and doing the deed as I have solemnly promised him, or a simple accusation that I am his murderer, I will never know. Either way, his last thought is a lie. I did not kill Simon. I did not keep my promise.
The arrow that has pierced him through the heart is short, made of a thick, blunt metal, sticking out like an erect quill from his back. I try to pull it out, but I cannot at first, and it is only with a great second effort that I drag the thing out of its hole. Blood follows—thick and so fast that its beaded bubbles wink at the rim of the wound. I press at it with the heel of my glove and feel my hand grow wet and then fill like a cup, heavy with the tide of it. I cry out, but weakly, like a wordless child mewling at the world. He will not live out the minute.
His eyes, so strangely luminescent in life, remain bright even after he dies. I see those bright eyes often; to this day I conjure them up, while I am serving the men their mashed potatoes, while I am riding the bus through the wire festooned gate, while I am lifting the baby and feeling for wetness below, the baby with those same other-worldly eyes. Perhaps Simon’s eyes are bright, still, in the box under the earth where they laid him. This idea makes me strangely uncomfortable. I let myself think about it often, though, and I believe I always will. It is my penance. A word from Scripture: Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both; as one dies so dies the other.
A small group approaches, two laughing girls and their escorts, out for a night and feeling quite gay about it. I can hear the stuttering heels of the women as they punch the bricks. They come nearer. Simon and I remain in the spotlight of the auto, which has stopped and hovers just over from where I sit on the sidewalk. One of the men laughs in disbelief—can people be so drunk at this early hour as to have collapsed in the gutter? A woman catches on to what she is seeing—the blood, so much blood—and screams. I am grateful. She is screaming the scream I cannot dislodge from my chest.
Très sincèrement,
Nightingale
THIRTY-TWO
Marina Papanikitas’s Personal Journal
False start, Zoey. Rugged guy heading for the copter turned out to be the mechanic who does the check. Pilot’s on the way up, he assures us. Hey, I got time, but some poor Yank over on “fog island” who needs intensive care better get his second wind. It is breezy up here at rooftop, Zoey, but the mechanic assures us it’s not gusting nearly enough to abort. I’m thinking we got rain in our future. I could get a little uneasy about that if I allow myself to think about it.
So, back to Cambridge. Harry gets to the crime scene first, as predicted, but some witness has dialed emergency so he only beats the ambulance by minutes. Me, I miss the show entirely, so essentially I get everything secondhand. Simon Love lays dead, having bled his heart out—that’s literally, Zoey—on the Arrow Street sidewalk, just off Bow. By the time the Cambridge cops show, Harry’s already got a bead on a couple of Lesley College undergrads and their MIT escorts, wandering around before the late show at Davis Square and apparently harboring some confusion—the split running along the gender line—on whether they’re on a double date or just out as a platonic gaggle. The one girl who can actually articulate herself relates a story about a woman crouching on the sidewalk, more or less under the dead man, as if she’d shot him point blank, then took his weight when he toppled. Girl’s claim is that some man came round the front of a car that was hovering in the street—a male accomplice—and he grabbed the woman under the arm to help hoist her up. The woman seemed to come to her senses around then, and went hurrying off with the man, hopped into the car next to him, and away they whisked.
One of the male witnesses—tall Indian kid, very certain of himself—claimed he saw a gun in the woman’s hand. Small, black, snubbed—he claimed she dropped it into a little bag she had strapped over her shoulder. The Indian kid was the only one who gave Harry a detailed description of the female suspect—she’s my vishie from Elliot Becker’s death scene, down to the stockings and shawl.
Unfortunately, not a one of the college kids got a decent read on the guy from the car—too busy watching the geyser burbling its way from Simon Love’s back. Still, the getaway vehicle was an old model Mercedes, black or brown. Never noted Brewster Van Ness’s wheels, myself, but it sure sounds like a match. In any event, all of that was certainly enough to send me and Harry southward while the Cambridge cops took care of carting off the corpse and hosing his innards down the storm drain.
Heading down to the South Shore, I get Yolanda Van Ness on the line. Lady picks up all by herself rather than making me bully my way past the butler, which feels lucky, but only for a minute. Yolie assures me that Brewster is right there with her, safe as mice. I ask to speak with him and she demurs—the boy’s been under a terrible amount of stress what with the threat to his life looming out there, and so is heavily sedated. Seeking to prepare her for our momentary invasion into her domain, I make sympathetic noises about Brewster’s injuries and the death of his little friend Armand, and that’s when Yolie gets kind of strung out on me. She accepts my condolences but there’s a tone change.
“Poor Armand,” she says. “Is he—will he pull through?”
I don’t do a gentle build-up that well, particularly when I’ve already spilled the beans, and the person just isn’t hearing it. Maybe Brewster’s been soft-pedaling the ugly facts to her, but they’re about to emerge, and I remember that the lady does pride herself on taking it straight.
“Look, I’m very sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, Mrs. Van Ness,” I say, “but Armand is dead. He was killed at the shop. Throat cut. Died instantly.”
She’s silent for a long moment, during which it occurs to me that this is the first she’s hearing about Armand having even been present when her son was attacked. What this signifies to her, she’s keeping to herself. I ask whether she’s still on the line, and she murmurs something about the man having been with them for years and years.
“Such a very long time, you see, I’d begun to think that he was like family to us…to all of us.” She sounds vague because she’s sad, but she doesn’t sound spacey, if you get the difference—Yolie Van Ness sounds like she’s suddenly very sad about something she’s also quite lucid on. She sounds heartsick, actually.
“Mrs. Van Ness?” I say. “Would you like to tell me something?” It seems fruitless to try and insist that she wake her son. Besides, at this point I don’t think there’s a chance in a million that he’s actually there, or that she’ll admit it if she has any idea about where he may be. “Mrs. Van Ness?” I repeat. “There may be other lives at stake.”
The line stays live for a long, drawn-out minute or so, but I don’t think she’s deciding whether to talk to me. I think that it’s that she’s moving in slow motion. When she hangs up, it’s like she’s finally lowered her arm enough to drop the receiver gently into its cradle. It’s like she’s finally accepted what she’s always suspected. Must be a frightening jolt, that moment when you realize that your son is the raging psychotic everyone’s always hinted he is.
We’re ten minutes from the Van Ness place. “I think we better turn it around.”
“Where we heading?”
“Nantucket. I think Brewster’s taking Agnès Rossignol to the old summer place.”
“What, on his boat?”
“It’s a way to get there.”
Harry nods. “Mother say something just now to make you think he’s heading out there?”
>
I shake my head. “She’s in shock. No one’s pulling anything out of her.”
“So we know it’s Nantucket how, Pop?” I sit there as he takes the exit to reverse us. “You have one of your sighting things?” He says it more than asks it.
I must blanch in response, because my hands and forehead go to ice for an eerie couple of seconds. I have to clear my throat before I can talk. “What?”
He shrugs. “Don’t know what you call them. One of your psychic events.”
I go from cold to hot, clear my throat. “I call them premmies,” I admit, then try to fake a chuckle. Comes out sounding like I’m choking on a cracker. “For premonitions. The more intense ones I call vishies, for visions. And, yeah, I had one.”
“So what’d we see?” he wants to know, busy slicing across traffic to hit the on-ramp.
I breathe down. “Saw Rossignol. Outfit that witness gave you—the fishnets, the shawl, everything. She’s falling through the rain, like she went off a cliff.”
Harry nods. “The Van Ness Nantucket place is on a bluff. I’m with you.” Back on the highway now, he picks up speed.
“If you’re waiting for more, that’s all I saw,” I say, kind of miserable.
“Logan or Hyannis?”
I shrug, dissatisfied. “Logan. I’ll call ahead. We’re going to need a charter.”
I’m doing the phone bullshit when Harry puts out a hand and touches mine. I almost start. Cripes, Zoey, it’s like when I was in ninth grade and people would bring up the L-word. You kind of think you got your private stuff wrapped up tight, you know, and suddenly you realize you’re out there naked. Takes some getting used to, apparently at any age.
“Got a better idea,” Harry says. “Guy I know flies the emergency helicopter shuttle at BMC. Let me get him, see if he’ll let us hitch a ride.”
“There’s a chance they’ll carry us?”
“They carry Chinese takeout. I’d say it’s worth a shot.” He beckons without glancing over, and I hand him my phone. I wonder if he gets that I’m looking for a wing to hide my head under. If he does, he knows not to notice.
Ten minutes later, Harry’s pilot buddy has come through and we’re sweeping back into the city while I dial Super Jack and ask him to make the connect with the Nantucket cops. He’s weirdly accommodating, considering I offer no explanation for how we know that our guy’s heading out to sea. “No Coast Guard and no sirens, Jack, right? Stress the fact that this guy’s got a hostage and he’s planning on killing her one way or another. And we got time, Jack. He’s heading over by boat. Going to take him all night.”
Super Jack knows his job. He reminds me of that before he hangs up.
Good thing we got all night, as we just found out we’ve been postponed due to weather. Harry’s pal sits it out with us. Kind of a little fella—I’d have pegged him for a horse jockey before I’d have guessed he’s the helicopter kind—but maybe size is a disadvantage when you have to walk underneath those whapping blades all the time.
Talk later. Pray for me, Zoey. And not about the flight.
THIRTY-THREE
I am Nightingale—
I sit on the deck against the side of the boat, knees up, arms embracing my legs. The decking looks slippery, but Brewster has no trouble working the sail and the rudder and the ropes. The salt wind bats his hair about—occasionally one of the front locks sticks to the still-raw slash that dissects his forehead, left temple to right eye. I can discern the stitches from where I sit, even in the dark. Earlier on, while we were still chugging along on engine power, he had invited me to duck down below, clean up, try to rest. There is an old-fashioned bathing tub and quite a comfortable mattress in the stateroom, he assured me, and Simon’s blood must be drying stiffly on my pretty dress. I suppose this superficial chatter was meant to taunt me. I do not know for certain, of course, as I dare not delve into this one’s brain. Not after that first time.
As we get some distance from shore, the boat seems to fall into a rhythm against the waves, and Brewster switches off the engine and crouches by the rudder for a while. He seems invigorated by the sea air and obviously enjoys the spray in his face. I notice that he has changed to navy blue rubber-soled shoes and abandoned his socks—possibly back in the boat house. The ascot and cashmere jacket’s tail flicker in the wind. Above us, the sky is deep and black—there are no stars, no clouds. The moon clings to the horizon, cowed by the expanse of night and sea.
I am strangely confident. I will not die before Brewster. I have met and accepted each of my victims as he was, each as he was shaped by what happened to Jakey—the opportunist, the misanthrope, the penitent, the martyr—and, as you see, I have done what needed to be done, one way or another, to achieve my end. But my fifth victim—the one who interpreted the event of his past only as a signal that he is untouchable, free to snatch life up and smash it without conscience or consequence—he imagines he has dashed my plans. On my side, I see nothing to prevent me from accomplishing my task—not my sorrow, not my inhibitions about using my mental abilities on him, and most definitely not the fact that this time I dance quite openly with another killer. I have got my Jeanne Moreau on, one might say.
Apparently Brewster misreads my silence, there in the boat. “Don’t fret over Brother Simon, dearest,” he calls to me over the wind. “He’d been playing the sin and regret game for a long, long time. It was bound to catch up with him, one way or another.”
I ignore the invitation to exchange quips and instead stare past him at the stretch of foaming wake and the dark waves beyond. The last glimmers of coastal lights are just blinking into oblivion. It soothes me—I prefer the unbroken blackness of sea and sky.
He tries to goad me. “I do realize that you imagine yourself to have been in love with the creature,” he calls to me. “I suppose all women like the idea of defrocking an instrument of God. Did you fantasize about being some biblical figure when you were fucking—the great whore of Babylon, Delilah castrating Samson? Maybe Eve with her wicked slice of fruit?”
I continue to stare past him. The crests breaking against the hull become choppy, and the gusts whimsical, so he has his hands full for a while. I can tell, from the way he twists the ropes and brings the sail round, that his arms are quite strong. Strong or weak, I will take him.
“Like that Neva creature,” he throws over his shoulder. “D’Amante would have cut off her tits if he’d imagined she was straying, but still she couldn’t resist seducing Simon. It’s got to be something about corrupting the devoted—proving that your vagina has more authority than God. It’s a battle easily won. I mean, who among us can stave off a horny teenage slut?”
I talk in spite of myself. “You know less than nothing.”
He sneers happily, encouraged by my foolish words. “Not quite. Infiltrated the empty flat above Simon’s, you see, and it was a simple matter of removing a bit of flooring to allow myself to watch you through those antiquated ceiling fixtures. You know, technically it was rape, the way you fucked him without his consent. Don’t think I’m censuring you—he certainly turned out a willing subject when you decided to try him out awake.”
I give him a glance of disgust. “You would lie there, face pressed to the mouse dung, watching others live their lives? You are one to cast the disparagements.”
He smiles, but I can see I have cut him. “There’s a device they call a spy cam, love. Quite reliable these days if you’re willing to go top of the line. Little devils work in the dark and record only when there’s action. Anyway, don’t worry your pretty head about my life. I’ve been a busy boy between our little dates with death.”
“Our dates?” I do not want to engage, but I cannot help myself. “You imagine you have a kinship with me because you watch me kill?”
He chuckles, focusing on sailing for a bit. “I’ll give you D’Amante,” he calls over to me. “Wasn’t even there for that. The rest were mine, from Becker to Love.”
I turn my head away. If he could read me, I
would have welcomed him into my head to hear what I thought about him. But Brewster is only psychotic. He has no other talents.
“My dear, don’t pout—it isn’t becoming, as Mother always reminds me,” he calls over the noise of the sail. “You simply hadn’t the strength to tip Elliot, and that stuff you used on Rocco—well, you saw how it worked on Simon. And, sweetness, velour bedding is fire resistant these days. As for Simon himself, shall we be kind and say I beat you to it?” His tone takes on a mocking quality. “Or were you truly giving it all up?”
I plan my answer. “I knew what I was doing,” I say.
“You’re saying you were aware that I was closing in? I doubt that.”
“He is dead, is he not?”
“Good girl,” he says approvingly. “You’re a credit to Moreau.”
I glance sharply at him and he gestures grandly. “You must remember that I saw you tie off the scarf that night we were both stalking Becker.” He kisses the air in my direction, then winks. “Of course it didn’t hurt that I happened to notice the film in your little stack of unshelved videos when I called on Jakey. Don’t worry—I tidied up. We needed to keep the cops guessing. The lady detective in particular seems like a lot of fun when it comes to mental chess.”
