The Edge of Doom

by Amanda Cross

  “Have you something, anything, to eat?” he asked. “And some water? I’ll stay in here. It’s even got a bathroom; better than I could have hoped.”

  “Are you saying you can’t come into the kitchen?”

  “Better not. I don’t want anyone to catch even a glimpse of me through a window. A piece of bread would do.”

  “I’ll make you a sandwich. Anything to drink besides water?”

  “Coffee would be welcome, but I don’t want to bother . . .”

  “You want to hide out in our apartment, which is probably some sort of federal crime, but you don’t want me to bother making a cup of coffee. Well, I’ll make the sandwich and the coffee; I’ll bring them to you in here. But there is a price: I want some sort of explanation; I want to know what the hell is going on with you.”

  “It’s a bargain,” Jay said. “But please, Kate. I haven’t committed a criminal offense; I’m not a criminal under any law. I wouldn’t have burdened you in this way, except that someone is trying to kill me. I may decide to let him kill me, but I thought well, if I hide out with Kate, at least I can explain all this. I gather Reed has been doing some detecting, having spotted the lacunae in my résumé. And I thought it was such a clever résumé.”

  Kate went to make the sandwich and to put up the coffee. She felt that she could use a cup herself. Banny, who always monitored the doors, back and front, when anyone rang, sat looking at Jay calmly, but steadily. The slightest of rumbles had risen in her throat when he entered the apartment; these had now subsided.

  Kate brought a tray with the sandwich, the coffee pot, two cups, and a glass of water into the maid’s room. It was an extremely odd place to be holding a conversation, but Kate had every intention of holding it. Jay had spotted a folding chair behind some boxes and opened it. “Chair or cot?” he asked Kate.

  “Chair,” Kate said. She put the tray on the cot next to Jay, and poured the coffee. He drank the whole glass of water without pausing, and then began eating the sandwich; his hunger was evident. Kate sipped her coffee. They sat with their knees touching as, Kate thought, in some old-time spy movie. She picked up one of the large cartons and heaved it on top of another, which allowed her to move her chair back an inch or so.

  Dramatic sentences began to drift into Kate’s mind, such as: he gave me life and now he might kill me; can anything be said for having a criminal as a father? how much is owed a father, particularly one you haven’t seen for fifty or so years? She uttered none of them, banishing them from her thoughts. “Start at the beginning,” she said.

  “What is the beginning?”

  “When you left my mother.”

  “I could start there. But I think what you want to know now is why I was in the Witness Protection Program, why I left it, and why I’m in danger now. That’s not quite the story of my life, but it’s a good bit of it.”

  “All right,” Kate said. “Tell me that story.”

  “After I left your mother, for the next twenty years, life was just as the résumé reported it, with one significant exception, to which I’ll come eventually. Let’s skip over that for now. I went to architecture school, just as the résumé said. I worked on odd construction jobs. I started an architecture firm with a partner, the man who is still my partner, though he knows nothing of all this. He knows I took a leave but not what for or anything about it. We worked on the restoration of historic buildings. As you know, we started in New York but soon moved west, to my great relief. Not only because I was farther from your mother, but because restoration work in New York City can get really nasty.”

  “How’s that?” Kate asked. Nothing, Reed would have said had he been there, could keep Kate from asking for information, even under the most extraordinary circumstances.

  Jay did not seem to find the question strange. “Well, say there’s an historic building that needs to be rebuilt; it’s in a stage beyond disrepair, definitely in need of attention. The owner, constricted on every side by the Landmark Commission—a very good organization, by the way, organized when the great old Penn Station was torn down without a thought in the 1960s, I think—where was I? The owner asks and gets permission to add a few stories to his old building, on which he is spending a fortune. Now come the folks in brownstones next door who fear a shadow will be cast on them by the extra stories. In fact a shadow will be cast. So the poor architect is bombarded on all sides, by the owner, by the neighbors, by the Landmark Commission. It’s not so bad in other cities.”

  “I see. Do go on.”

  “There we were, established in the West, a firm with an excellent reputation, and undertaking interesting work in restoration when, sometime in the Seventies, I cut loose.”

  “You left the firm?”

  “Call it, as I did, a leave of absence. I wanted some time to look around and think; as a partner, I continued to get some income from the firm.”

  “Were you married by then?”

  “No. That came later. The problem was, I had been involved in a crime, well, a kind of crime. I can’t explain the reasons to you now, and I’m not sure I could have done a very coherent job of explaining them then. I became the accomplice of an art thief.”

  Kate stood up from the folding chair, which was already making her feel cramped. Jay started to get up also, but she pushed him back onto the cot. “Is this some nonsense I’m supposed to listen to with innocent belief? Are you making all this up as you go along?”

  “Am I indeed? A rational question. I thought I knew why at the time, but in retrospect it’s as unbelievable to me as it obviously is to you. It’s connected to Shakespeare in a way. I think I better stand up, too. No, I won’t stand up with you; I think I might stretch out on the cot. Would that offend you? I haven’t had much sleep lately.”

  “Go right ahead,” Kate said. “The cot may not be long enough, and it’s certainly not very comfortable. We used to keep it for use when nieces and nephews unexpectedly turned up to spend a day or two.”

  Jay stretched out on it, his head lying flat, his feet dangling over the bottom of the cot. Kate waited with what she considered commendable patience, then turned to ignite him with another question.

  He was asleep. She looked at him. His was a sleep of extreme exhaustion; it might continue for hours. She thought of covering him with something, and then decided that she would not offer a single further indulgence. She had probably gone too far already in letting him fall asleep in their maid’s room. She closed the door of the room and left him to it.

  When Reed came home she went to greet him in the hall. It occurred to her that since the advent of Jay, she and Reed had taken to waiting for each other in the hall, a clear sign that the even tenor of their lives had been disrupted.

  “What now?” he said, before she spoke.

  “He’s here.”

  “Who?”

  “Jay.”

  “What do you mean, here?”

  “Here, in the apartment. Actually, in the maid’s room, which he is determined not to leave even for a moment. He’s fallen asleep.”

  “Kate, are you out of your mind?”

  “Don’t start huffing and puffing until I tell you what happened. I was more or less trapped. Well, I could have dialed 911, but failing that, I had no other recourse.”

  Reed sat down on one of the chairs in the hall and seemed to lose himself in unhappy contemplations.

  “What on earth are we going to do?” he asked.

  “Well, I rather thought we would hear him out. He started telling me about getting into a life of crime—art theft, apparently—but simply sank into sleep the minute he stretched out on the cot. He’s very tired.”

  “He’s very tired. Kate, you do realize that harboring a criminal is a felony, among other things. I know he’s your father, but do you want to go to jail for him, or worse, have to testify against him?”

  “Why don’t we sit down in the living room and talk about this calmly?”

  “Calmly! You’ve never advised calm
in your life. You’re always the one I have to pacify. I hate what this whole damn business is doing to us.”

  “Let’s talk about it. If you insist on calling the police or the FBI or the Witness Protection Program or whomever, I’ll go along with it. But let’s chew it over first. How about a drink?”

  “I hope you didn’t offer Jay a drink.”

  “He doesn’t drink, remember? Oh, no, you weren’t there. The first time I met him—which feels like a century ago—he said he didn’t drink. His mother was an alcoholic, he said. He asked for coffee. Not then, I don’t mean, just now. Then he asked for tea.”

  “I don’t believe his mother was an alcoholic. I don’t believe he had a mother. Were it not for DNA, I wouldn’t believe he had the smallest connection with you. Did you know that men now can get on the Web and send in their specimens and that of their children to find out if the children are really theirs?”

  “Reed, please sit down. We will settle what to do about Jay one way or the other in a few hours, when he wakes up, or when we wake him. Meanwhile, I can’t help feeling a drink might lessen the tension, temporarily at least.”

  To her relief, Reed smiled. Kate didn’t doubt that it was his knowledge of the law, particularly criminal law, that was troubling him so profoundly. But for the moment for her, she had to admit to herself, curiosity was winning out over fear. For the moment.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

  Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

  They looked in on Jay from time to time, but he slept, as the old saying goes, like the dead. Kate and Reed ate dinner, but hardly felt able to return to their studies at the other end of the apartment from the maid’s room. Theirs was an old apartment, built in the days when everyone who could afford to live there had at least one sleep-in maid; thus these apartments built in the twenties or earlier each had a maid’s room. It was small, with an attached small bathroom, and in the years since World War II no one but Fanslers and their ilk had household help who hung around for more than a few hours, let alone overnight. A maid’s room now served other purposes.

  Occasionally, a child occupied it, but that was rare. Usually, as with Kate and Reed, it served as an “attic.” Some who had redone their kitchens had broken down walls and included the maid’s room in their enlarged, modern, magazine-worthy cooking environment. Then there were those in large, rent-stabilized apartments, clinging to the low rent, who secretly, and illegally, housed lodgers in their maid’s room to expand their shrinking income. Whether any other maid’s room had ever harbored a man running for his life Kate doubted. Meanwhile, she and Reed found it impossible to get down to work, and so they hovered—in the living room, the kitchen, the hall. Kate took Banny out for a walk; they returned to find that Jay was still asleep. Reed was still hovering.

  “We can’t spend the night like this,” Reed said. “I think we had better wake him.”

  “We could sleep in shifts,” Kate said.

  “The fact is, we could ignore him. He’s not likely to leave the room; we can just let him sit there. After all there is a bathroom and running water.”

  “But would we sleep very well?” Kate asked.

  “The hell with it,” Reed said. “Let’s wake him.”

  They knocked on the closed door of the maid’s room, not wanting to walk in on him unannounced, though it occurred to them both that such courtesy seemed slightly comical under the circumstances. But there was no answer to their knock. Reed opened the door and peered in.

  “He’s still sound asleep; I’m going to wake him.”

  “Then what?” Kate asked.

  “Then he can start talking.”

  Reed had to shake Jay, who woke suddenly and leapt up in fear. Then the knowledge of where he was returned to him. “Sorry about that,” he said to Reed. “I haven’t had so extended a sleep in, well, quite a while. I must have felt safe, because I was certainly out cold.”

  “Why don’t you wash up?” Reed said. “And then Kate and I would like to talk to you. Are you willing to try the kitchen if we lower the blind?”

  “Do you usually lower it?”

  “No, we don’t usually lower it.”

  “Then let’s sit in here, if you can put up with it.”

  “Are you really suggesting, or fearing, that whoever is after you is so intent and so observant that even the lowering of a shade that is usually up would signal something?”

  “I can’t tell how much he’s able to watch, of course,” Jay said. “But he’s capable of anything. Killing me is his only aim in life; he has no other. It has become his obsession. He may decide I must be here because I’m not anywhere else, but I think this is safe enough for now if there’s no indication of my presence.”

  Reed, leaving Jay to use the bathroom facilities, reported this conversation to Kate, who was making coffee. When Jay beckoned to them from the small room that, for now at least, was his, or so it seemed, Reed and Kate entered, Kate carrying yet another tray with a coffee pot, cups, and a plate of ginger cookies.

  Jay took it from her and placed it, sideways, in the center of the cot. “Why don’t you sit at one end?” he said to Reed. “I’ll sit at the other, with our legs out as far as they can go, and Kate can sit in the chair and put her legs on the cot between us when we remove the tray. Does that suit you?”

  And so they settled themselves. Kate at first was content to sit in the chair with her feet crossed, drinking her coffee, but after a while she was glad of the chance, when Jay had moved the tray onto a box, to stretch her legs across the center of the cot.

  “We are all three too tall for this caper,” she said. Reed and Jay were both tall men, and Kate was tall for a woman, or at least for a woman of her generation. They grew women bigger now, she had noticed, which was, in her opinion, a good thing. One might not play basketball, but it must be pleasant to know that one could.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do about you,” Reed said to Jay, “but while we’re all hiding out here like burglars caught on the premises, why don’t you begin the story of how you got here?”

  “Do you want an outline or details?” Jay asked.

  “Outline first, details later, if required,” Reed said.

  “I take it you both know about the Witness Protection Program.”

  “Not a great deal. Just what we read in the magazines and newspapers,” Reed said. Kate suspected he knew a bit more than that, but nodded to affirm his statement.

  “Then I won’t start there. I’ll start with a crime I committed, or helped to commit, in the late 1950s or thereabouts. It was art theft. We broke into a small museum and stole a painting.”

  “We?” Kate asked.

  “There were three of us. My friend, whose plan it was, me, and the man who is now trying to kill me.”

  Jay seemed to be waiting for a response, and was rather at a loss when none came. And what response could he have expected us to give, Kate asked herself. She found this whole situation so bizarre that almost nothing Jay might say could make it more so. This man, her father, into his seventies, a man her husband considered capable of many and assorted criminalities, huddled with his newfound daughter and her husband in a small, back room, speaking of how he had committed a theft.

  “Go on,” Reed said.

  “Let me diverge from the outline for a moment. I loved your mother”—he faced Kate—“as one is supposed to love only in romances and old-style movies. Remember that you mentioned Brief Encounter to me that day by the pond?”

  “I remember. That film must have been made very long ago; it’s not even in color.”

  “Around the time you were born, I think, or a year or two earlier. I also saw it revived. You remember the story?”

  “They meet in a railroad station, fall in love, and then part in the railroad station.”

  “They fall in love forever; at least, he does. When they must part because they’re both married, he says to her: ‘
I will love you all my life,’ or words to that effect.”

  “So you mentioned when we sat by the pond. And there’s a good chance he will love her all his life, since they will never meet again,” Kate said.

  “What a cynic you are.”

  “I’m not the least cynical. But perhaps we had better postpone this discussion.” Reed looked as though he might explode if this sideline on love was not short-circuited.

  “Most people doubt that kind of love,” Jay said. “Anyway, just accept for the moment that leaving your mother changed my life, changed how I looked at things, how I judged them.”

  “So stealing art was justified because you had lost your love,” Reed said. His tone was harsh.

  “Not stealing any art. I don’t think I would have considered any other crime, certainly not another art theft. But I had this friend, and he had lost his love, too.”

  “Under similar circumstances, arousing your sympathy?” Reed asked.

  “Not similar, no. His passion was for a painting.” He paused, as though expecting an interruption, but none came.

  “It was a painting both he and his mother had loved; it had hung in their living room, where she could see it from the chair she always sat in. He remembered, as a very small child, sitting with her while she told him the story of the painting. Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it portrayed Prospero revealing to Miranda the story of how they had come to be shipwrecked on that island. The painter, my friend said, had caught the relationship between father and daughter in a way that seemed to him, when he was a child, to picture the bond between his mother and him. Anyway, his parents divorced, his father walked out, blaming his mother for the destruction of him and, he said, his son, and he had taken the picture and sold it, either out of revenge or for what money it could bring. When my friend was grown, and his mother had become ill, he hired someone to find the picture for him, if possible. His mother said it had been painted in the nineteenth century by someone well-known, if not exactly famous, which seemed to suggest it might turn up somewhere. In fact, it turned up in a small—well, hardly large—museum in San Francisco.”