The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  Cooper continues. “So I take it you know what’s been happening in the town.”

  Dean nods. He’s hefty and his posture resembles that of a toad on a rock. He has thinning hair and a wide speckled forehead and a face that’s inscribed by transgressions that even he can’t recall or recount. Cooper can see all that now. It’s all so obvious, once you know to look for it.

  “How long have you been here, Gerald?”

  “Nearly eight years. A long stretch.”

  “That’s right. You came in the first year, maybe six months after we opened, by my recollection.”

  Dean nods. Still waiting to learn why he’s here.

  Behind Cooper, the fax machine sparks to life and begins to whir.

  “Deputy Dawes—you know Deputy Dawes, right?”—and here Dean nods again, trembling his chin wattle—“Deputy Dawes,” Cooper says, “has a theory. About you.”

  “What theory?” Dean’s voice a croak.

  Watching him, Cooper thinks: There are hard people living in this town. People who look for excuses to detonate. Their minds may not remember who they are, but their muscles do. People like Dick Dietrich who are wired to do damage. But Dean is not one of those people. Dean is not a coiled trap, waiting to snap. Dean is more like a malfunctioning valve, a faulty weld, a crack in a storage tank leaking toxins into the world. Dean is a mistake, an aberration. He leaches a different kind of harm.

  A long sheet of fax paper spits haltingly from the machine behind Cooper, coiling extravagantly as it ejects, but Cooper ignores it.

  “Seven years ago, you submitted a request to be moved to another part of the town,” Cooper says. “Closer to Errol Colfax.”

  “Sure. I wanted somewhere quieter.”

  “And how did that work out?”

  “It’s pretty nice,” says Dean, suspicious, still wondering when Cooper will circle around to the point. “I mean, aside from that nastiness with Colfax.”

  “True. And you drank frequently with Hubert Gable. May he rest in peace.”

  “I don’t know if I’d say frequently. We liked each other’s company. I was sorry, what happened to him.”

  “Still, you can see how all these connections might raise an eyebrow. Given your curious proximity to these two dead men.”

  “I didn’t even know Colfax—”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Gerald. I just want to let you know what kind of talk there is out there.”

  Cooper pulls a ring of keys from his pocket, and thumbs through them until he finds a small desk key.

  “You know how Gable died, yes?” he asks Dean.

  “He got shot, right?”

  “That’s right. By a nine-millimeter pistol.”

  Cooper slides the key in the lock on his bottom right drawer and unlocks it. Pulls the drawer open. Retrieves a handgun. Holds it up to show Dean.

  “This one right here, in fact.” Cooper puts the gun down on the desk, next to his revolver. “Same gun that killed Errol Colfax, too. Never did make its way back to Amarillo as evidence. Wound up stranded here in my desk drawer.”

  Behind Cooper, the fax machine stops. There’s a sudden jarring quiet in the absence of the whirring. A long ribbon of paper, its sheen catching the fluorescents overhead, hangs languidly from the machine.

  Cooper stands and turns, at last, to the fax machine. He rips the paper from the machine. It looks almost comically like a Christmas list in his hands—like he’s Santa, checking who’s naughty or nice. He turns back to Dean and passes him the sheet of paper.

  “I thought you might be interested in this,” Cooper says.

  Dean takes the paper but keeps his eyes locked on Cooper, searching for some clue of what’s in store. Finding nothing, Dean smoothes the paper on the desktop and starts to read.

  Cooper stands over him. Watching as Dean’s face drains to an even paler, near-impossible whiteness.

  On the paper. Dean’s photo. A mug shot.

  The rest of the paper a rap sheet.

  For someone named Lester Vogel.

  Some vile twin.

  Sixty-eight counts of conspiracy to create child pornography. Sixty-eight counts of possession of indecent material. Twenty-two counts forcible confinement of a minor. Eighteen counts kidnapping. Twenty-one counts statutory rape. Twenty-seven counts conspiracy to pervert a minor. Eighteen counts—well, the list goes on. A litany of unimaginable perversion. The chronicle of a broken valve, a mistake, an aberration, leaking toxins, poisoning the world.

  The figures and phrases on the page sound loudly in Dean’s head as he reads them, like thudding explosions from very far away. Dean hears a rushing, a roaring, all around him, in the trailer. His mind is now a vacuum that threatens to collapse in on itself, to swallow itself whole. He doesn’t understand.

  Yet the picture is of him.

  The deeds described are his.

  He looks up at Cooper, with nothing to say.

  “That’s you,” says Cooper. He points to the rap sheet. “You’re Lester Vogel. You did those things. All of them.”

  Dean sits, shaking, confused, his hands quaking, the fax paper rattling in his grip.

  “I’m not supposed to see this,” Dean says finally, quietly. “I’m not supposed to know this.”

  Cooper picks up the 9 mm from the desk.

  “They’re children, Lester.”

  At the sight of the pistol, Dean flinches. Then Cooper grips the pistol by the barrel and holds it out to Dean.

  “Take it, Lester,” Cooper says, calling him by his real name.

  Vogel puts down the paper and takes the gun, as he’s told to do. He regards the pistol quizzically. Then he seems to figure something out. Something dire. When he speaks, his voice quavers. “What do you want me to do with this? Am I supposed to shoot myself now? Is that what happened to Colfax? To Gable?”

  “No,” says Cooper. “You’re supposed to shoot me.”

  Vogel looks around, wondering what fresh trap this is, and what new horror will visit him next. He holds the pistol limply in his hand.

  “Don’t worry,” says Cooper. “It’s not loaded. Though I believe some bullets arrived for you in the mail today. They were scheduled to, anyway. That’s what the fax machine told me.”

  Vogel squirms and considers running, his chest rippled through with dread. But his body’s not built for flight, he knows that, and in the panic of a dead man he’s gripped with a last lunatic notion of survival and he points the gun at Cooper and pulls the trigger and hears it click.

  “I told you it’s not loaded,” says Cooper. “I am many things—many bad, bad things—but I am not a liar.”

  Vogel keeps the pistol raised, his arm still stiff and shaking. As though he believes that as long as he keeps it aloft he can hold his fate at bay. His eyes swim. He looks to Cooper. He looks at the sheet of paper in front of him. Then back to Cooper.

  Then he says, simply, “Why?”

  “I might ask you the same thing,” says Cooper. “Given the choices you’ve made.”

  “That’s not me,” Vogel whispers.

  “That’s your history, Lester,” says Cooper. “Your record. Your deeds. Your life. You thought they wouldn’t find you here. But they did.”

  Vogel barely gets the words out. “I wish I didn’t know this.” Then he drops the hand with the gun to his lap.

  “I’m sorry,” says Cooper, not without sympathy. “I can honestly say, I wish I didn’t know it, either.”

  Then Cooper picks up his revolver and shoots Lester Vogel once through the chest.

  As Vogel slumps in the chair, Cooper gathers the long fax paper and feeds it into the shredder. As the hungry blades gobble and swallow the detestable record of Lester Vogel, now deceased, Cooper prepares himself to greet the panicked citizens of the Blinds, who are even now bound to come running, frantic, full of questions, their peaceful evening shattered for the third time in a week by the rude intrusion of a gunshot.

  THURSDAY

  20.
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  YOU CAN’T KILL A MAN without consequence.

  Calvin Cooper understands that now.

  Even if that man’s continued existence on this earth runs contrary to any notions you may hold about fundamental or celestial justice. Even if that man has laid a trail of grievous harm and pain and death, inflicting misery on innocent others in some previous, despicable, and since-forgotten life. Even if that man’s manifold sins are enumerated plainly to you in a straightforward and pitiless accounting, and even if the terms of his subsequent protection and clemency under your watch were granted by powers you no longer have faith in and to which you no longer feel any loyalty.

  Even then.

  Even if that man is Gerald Dean, aka Lester Vogel.

  Even then.

  Or Errol Colfax. Or Hubert Gable.

  Even then.

  Take Colfax, for example. Because he was the first.

  Real name: Kostya “Costco” Slivko. A debt collector for the Russian mob in New York. On the face of it, a standard thug, perhaps more enthusiastic than most. He’d earned the nickname “Costco” because he liked to kill in bulk. But this was not the quality that made him most valuable to his employers. Killers are a common enough sort, even enthusiasts. There are many sociopaths for whom a lack of access to the normal range of human empathies proves a formidable vocational asset. Slivko was one of those people. He possessed the kind of ill-formed mind, likely twisted in the womb, that came into this world with no interest in anything other than blood and no aptitude for anything but spilling it.

  But that’s not what made him valuable, or feared, or infamous, among the kinds of people who employed him. What made him all those things was his particular psychological innovation to the enforcement trade.

  Something Slivko liked to call krovnyi sled.

  Translation: blood trail.

  It worked like this: If you owed a debt to his bosses, he would not kill or even hurt you, or threaten you, or even contact you directly. Instead, he would find your furthest relative by blood. The further, the better. A distant aunt. Some second cousin’s niece. A person in some other state or distant country who did not even know you personally and with whom you had little or no contact. Certainly not someone you would feel a fierce loyalty to, or even a passing attachment.

  Then he would kill that person. This distant relative. This blood relation.

  Then he would work his way back toward you.

  A gardener, pruning the family tree.

  With the first person, he wouldn’t notify you. He’d just let word of their ill fortune wind its way back to you through the family grapevine. By the way, did you hear about poor cousin so-and-so. Very gruesome. Such a tragedy. Or perhaps you’d catch a stray news report. A face you vaguely recognize, come to a terrible end.

  It might dawn on you at that point but the connection’s so unlikely. You might think nothing of it.

  And then he would continue.

  A cousin. A nephew. A grandparent.

  Inching closer.

  Until you start to put it all together. That your debt had set this in motion.

  A brother. A sister. Then your child. Then your wife.

  Until the debt was paid.

  And all the while, you would come to know: You loosed this plague on your house. People were dying violent deaths and their only crime was sharing your blood.

  This was a far more effective and ultimately devastating technique, Slivko had found, than some of the more traditional persuasions, such as, say, cutting off someone’s appendages: a toe, a finger, an ear. People don’t want to lose those, but they can carry on. Slivko’s technique, by contrast, was designed (he explained later to the federal agents who finally apprehended him, one of whom, an eighteen-year veteran of law enforcement, excused himself from the room to be sick) to inflict a particular kind of psychological torture. You would, at first, upon hearing your second cousin’s daughter had been tragically and inexplicably murdered, recoil with horror and yet—and yet—a wound like that, you could survive. Especially if you were the sort to incur debts you had no hope of ever repaying. Flowers and weeping and funerals aside, a second cousin’s daughter’s death is by nature a distant shock, a muted cry, an easily recoverable harm. It might not be enough to motivate you to action. Until you understood. That it was just the start.

  That realization would definitely motivate you, Slivko had found.

  Then, of course, you had to scramble to assemble the repayment, which would obviously be difficult, and by that time, Costco Slivko was working his way back through your more dearly held relations. Like some viral congenital epidemic, affecting only people whom you love. You would come to dread the very passage of time. Your debt of course would quickly become unpayable. Never mind the money. You’d find the money. But your entire family’s ruin was now on your hands.

  A very effective form of terror.

  Krovnyi sled.

  Blood trail.

  Slivko worried his technique might lose its capacity to terrorize once it became widely whispered of, his modus operandi quickly recognized. But he found, to his pleasant surprise, that there was no dilution of terror; in fact, when debtors recognized his work early on, from the very first victim, it made the whole ensuing process even more palpably devastating. Still, he came to miss the early days, when his technique was in its nascence, not yet infamous, and he could savor the slow accretion of tragedy as the debtor continued, clueless. Only eventually, over months, understanding the connection. Like Job in the Bible. Slowly figuring it out: Wait, this isn’t all just really shitty luck. Slowly figuring it out: My God has abandoned me.

  By the time the FBI apprehended Kostya “Costco” Slivko, the most conservative guess put his personal body count at somewhere in the range of sixty killings. He was always coy to particulars. But to the FBI, catching Costco Slivko was like finding the cure to a lethal disease.

  And the moment he was arrested, word came down from the pinnacles of the shadowed criminal hierarchies that employed him: a hefty bounty for a quick result. He’d served his masters admirably but now, like a rabid dog, he must be put down before he barks and wakes the neighbors. The first attempt on Slivko’s life came on the very first night the feds had him in custody, during a transport, an amateurish approach, clumsy and easily foiled by Slivko, but he knew that this would now be his life. An endless procession of petty attackers with their makeshift shivs and awkward ambushes. It all seemed so very tiring to him.

  So it took little convincing, on the part of the federal agents, to sell Slivko on the notion of providing enough evidence to put three of his bosses—top men, long hunted, masterminds for whom twisted soldiers like Slivko were little more than disposable tools—in prison forever. Big catches, all three of them. And, sure enough, those three men are now interred in three different supermax facilities, serving thirty-six consecutive life sentences between them, with no possibility of parole. Moreover, the agent who solicited Slivko’s testimony is now associate deputy director of the agency.

  As for Slivko, his part of the deal was that he got all memory of his transgressions wiped and he got shipped out to live in a place called Caesura. In peaceful oblivion, as the newly christened Errol Colfax. A quiet type who kept to himself and showed little taste for socializing. Those sixty or so lost souls who died at his hands now as forgotten to him as he was to the rest of the world.

  So, no, Cooper did not feel remorse for killing Errol Colfax.

  Of course, the $50,000 didn’t hurt.

  But the killing was not without consequence. Spiritual and otherwise. Cooper understands that now.

  Cooper learned of Slivko’s backstory by anonymous fax. The first of which arrived over two months ago.

  Cooper was alone in the police trailer, working late, fussing with paperwork, when the fax machine started chugging. That infernal whir. A single sheet, unfurling.

  On that sheet: A proposal. Addressed to Cooper.

  A proposal. A task. And a price.
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  To this day, Cooper still doesn’t know who sent it.

  The incoming number was blocked, untraceable.

  He assumed at first it was a joke, of course. Some clown in Amarillo, probably Brightwell, who got hold of the fax number, having a laugh. Cooper fed the fax into the shredder and thought nothing of it.

  Until, a few nights later, the second fax arrived.

  This time, it came attached to Slivko’s arrest record. His mug shot. The charges against him, which were never officially filed. A summary of his “alleged” crimes.

  This required a much longer piece of fax paper, curling endlessly from the machine.

  At the end, another proposal. And an account number. For an offshore bank.

  Twenty-five thousand dollars had already been deposited, the fax explained. Cooper could call and confirm.

  The other $25,000 on completion.

  It took three more days before Cooper finally called the bank, from a phone booth at a gas station a few miles outside of Abilene. Hot as Hades and Cooper crammed into that phone booth, sweating, like Houdini in an upright glass coffin. The booth as small and airless as a confessional. Flies smacking like buckshot at the glass.

  On hold. Waiting for confirmation.

  Receiving it.

  Twenty-five thousand dollars. Fully accessible.

  He pondered that figure over whiskey later that night in his bungalow with the ceiling fan turning slowly overhead. This was two months ago. Cooper had just recently celebrated his eighth year as Caesura’s unofficial sheriff.

  There are plenty of people in the world, Cooper figured that night, twirling the amber whiskey in his shot glass absently, who would pay good money to find someone like Colfax and make an example of him. Though he didn’t know exactly who was making him this offer, the “who” was not what concerned him. The “who” were bad people, with resources, that much was obvious. The kind of people in whose employ, or debt, you would not want to be. The “why” was not difficult to discern, either: Cooper knew there were many people beyond this town’s fences, from criminals betrayed by testimony to law enforcement officers offended by Caesura’s particular form of clemency, who might wish certain of the town’s inhabitants dead. Slivko once made a habit of hurting people by killing their distant relatives; maybe a distant relative of one of his victims had decided to enact an ironic revenge. In any case, the motive of the proposal, while never made explicit in the faxes, was not difficult to guess or imagine. The “why” is revenge. Retribution. Some distant relative of justice. The “why” was written out in plain English on the long, curling fax that enumerated all of Colfax’s former sins.