“I know she is. But you don’t want her to worry, too, do you?”
“No.” But the little girl didn’t make any move to leave. “Can you help her stop being afraid?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to try. But I don’t know.”
“Sometimes she’s too afraid to take us to McDonald’s. Yesterday, Reysa cried because she wanted a Big Mac but Mommy wouldn’t take us.”
“Sometimes,” Justin told her, “when people are afraid it makes them not act like themselves. But you know what? It always changes. People change back to the way they were. And they act just like they used to. You and your sister have to try to be really nice to your mom while she’s nervous and afraid. That’s what she needs. And pretty soon she’ll be just like she used to be.”
“And she’ll take us to McDonald’s?”
“I promise.”
Nine-year-old Hannah Cooke thought about this for a moment, then she decided to continue the conversation from the front seat. She pulled herself up over the top of the passenger seat and plopped alongside Justin. As she landed, something fell out of her hand. Something small and shiny.
“What’s that?” Justin asked.
The girl reached down, picked it up with her right hand, then opened the palm of her left to show him what she had.
“Jacks,” he said quietly. “Are you a good jacks player?”
“Uh-huh,” she told him. “I play all the time. Are you good?”
“I haven’t played in a long time.”
“I know. That’s what happens to grown-ups. They stop playing.”
“Can I ask you something, honey?” She nodded, so he said, “Do you know what your mom’s so afraid of?”
“The men.”
“What men?”
“The men Daddy brought to the house.”
“Do you know who they were?”
Hannah shook her head. “One was scary. I didn’t like him.”
“Do you remember anything about him?”
“Uh-huh. He was a general.”
“A general? Like in the army?”
“I think he wasn’t a real general. Just an assistant general.”
“An assistant general? Like a colonel?”
“No. He wasn’t a colonel. He was an assistant general. And he was mean to my daddy.”
“How about the other man? Was he mean, too?”
“No. He was nice. I liked him.”
“What did you like about him?”
“He played with me. The general talked bad to my dad but the nice one played with me. For a long time.”
“Hannah,” Justin said, and suddenly the inside of the car seemed very quiet and still. “Did he play jacks with you?”
“Yup,” the little girl said. “And guess what?”
“What?”
“He was really, really, really good.”
He was back in his house by a few minutes before ten, happy to be in East End, happy to be away from soldiers and bureaucrats and widows. By ten, he was at his living room window, looking at the house across the street, catty-corner from his. Reggie’s lights were on. She was awake. Go on, he told himself. She told you to come over. So go. Go. But he stayed, one knee on the couch, his arms leaning on the backrest, looking at the stillness of her front yard.
Justin’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the darkness outside his window. He could make out the edges of the telephone wires across the street. And the hedges that sat below them. He thought about the little girl’s jacks, the way her soft hands curled around them, and it made his stomach hurt. He thought about Martha Peck, not knowing whether or not she’d come through as promised. And the colonel; his fierce and misplaced loyalty. Again, he could see Hannah Cooke’s hand curl around the jack, and now he closed his eyes and he was back inside Harper’s, walking through the bombed-out remains, and Chuck Billings was pulling a jack out of the wall. A tiny children’s toy, embedded in the wall. A toy stained with dried red-brown blood.
He opened his eyes. Saw—or maybe just felt—some kind of movement in Reggie’s house. Maybe she’d noticed his car. Maybe she was coming over. He waited but there was no further movement. Just silence. And shadows.
Things are muddy, he thought. Things are muddy.
He looked at his watch. Ten-twenty.
He walked over to his computer, turned it on, waited for it to boot up. When it was ready, he went to his “Shared” folder, where he kept his downloaded music. He turned the volume on his computer all the way up, clicked on a Tim Curry song from the early ’80s, “I Do the Rock.” He let the music wash over him, its hard, staccato rhythm and its cynical obscure lyrics. In a crazy world, the only thing that still made any sense was to do the rock. Forget ideology. Forget growing old. Stay away from fame and politics and philosophy. Just do the rock. Justin agreed. It was about the only thing that still made sense to him, too. But his job was to make sense of things he didn’t understand, so, music blaring, he went to the folder he’d cleverly labeled “MI” for “Murder Investigation” and began to update his list. The first column he went to was “Connections.” There he found the link he’d initially marked as so tentative—Vice President Phillip Dandridge—between Bradford Collins and Hutchinson Cooke. He had typed in several question marks his first go-round. Now he deleted every one of them. He didn’t know what it meant, but he had a firm connection. Dandridge definitely knew both men. Justin stared at the fact, couldn’t make anything new of it, glad in a way that he couldn’t because what the hell was he possibly going to do to the vice president of the United States if it ever came to that, so he began typing again, adding everything he’d learned in D.C. Not a hell of a lot, he realized as he typed. But small bits and pieces. In the space he’d allotted for Hutch Cooke, he added, “Daughter plays with jacks,” and to the right of that he put in “Connection to bomb?”—and then he typed in all the question marks he’d just removed from link number one. He also wrote down just about everything he could remember that had come out of the mouth of Theresa Cooke. He even wrote down, “I fell down the tower—Eiffel Tower.” It seemed idiotic, but he’d learned never to dismiss anything. It meant that Cooke was a game player, he liked puzzles. Info that somehow might prove relevant since this was as complicated a puzzle as Justin could imagine. When he’d entered everything he could recall, he was about to shut down the computer, stopped, went back into the file, and added one more thing: “Everything’s muddy.” It seemed fitting.
Then he turned the computer off, took the half bottle of single-malt scotch left over from the night before, and went back to his lookout spot on the couch.
Reggie’s windows were dark now. She’d gone to bed.
Justin decided he’d better do the same.
His visitors would be arriving at nine in the morning. It was going to be a long and interesting day. He had to stay sharp. He’d have to be alert because he was going to need to absorb a lot of information.
Yes, he decided. Definitely time for bed.
One last look across the street.
Nothing but darkness.
Everything’s muddy.
He went to his computer, clicked on an illegally downloaded version of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine,” and cranked it up. It was the perfect song.
A half a bottle of scotch and three-quarters of a thick, hand-rolled joint later, Justin Westwood was sound asleep.
19
Nuri Al-Bazaad liked driving American cars.
They were so quiet. When you rolled up the windows all the way, you couldn’t hear a thing. It amazed him every time because it was like being in a small room shut off from the rest of the world. You could see what was going on in that world, you could sense the mayhem, the corruption, the evil all around you, but you couldn’t hear any of it. And it couldn’t touch you. You were sealed off and removed. Safe. Protected.
Everything was soft and spotless inside American cars, too. It must be very similar to being in heaven, Nuri decided. So clean, so far away from the
pain of the world, so comfortable and relaxing. He couldn’t wait to go to heaven. Nuri did not like it very much on earth where everything was so filthy and rough and corrupt. Where women exposed themselves and tried to be like men, and nobody had respect for anything or anyone, and everyone was in so much pain. So much awful, awful pain.
Nuri turned up the volume on the car radio now. Not too much, just a little. Just enough so the gentle strings washed over him like a soothing bath. The sound systems in these cars amazed him. It was like having an orchestra playing in the backseat. You could hear the resonance, the timbre in the music. Nuri thought there would have to be beautiful music in heaven, too. He couldn’t imagine it more beautiful than the surround sound coming from the four speakers in the rented Buick.
Nuri was never bored sitting in a car like the one he waited in now. How could you ever get bored? he wondered. As the music played, he slid the front seat back and forth. It moved so easily forward and back, up and down. He was parked now, he had to wait for the people to come out of their house, and he was becoming a little anxious. Not because he was worried about what he was going to do but because he was anxious to drive again. He was very impressed with the smoothness of the ride, the way this car barely felt any bumps, the way it seemed to glide over any obstacle in its path. He had to give credit to the American roads, which were paved and solid and built to last. Not at all like the roads at home, which were hardly even roads; they were ruts for wagons. They were filthy and ragged and bumpy. They were not like the road that led to heaven. That road would be like an American highway: long and straight and smooth and beautiful.
More than anything else, Nuri liked the heating system that warmed the car. He would turn it all the way up and blast himself with hot air until he would be dripping with sweat on even the coldest day. He still had childhood memories of his cold desert home, of lying awake at night shivering, of thinking he would never be warm again, of his father beating him when he had the temerity to ask for a blanket. “Men do not need blankets,” his father would say, and then slap, hard across the face. “Men do not fear the cold.”
Nuri told his father that he wasn’t afraid. But he was. He was very frightened of the cold. As a child, he thought it would freeze him in place, that it would make his blood a solid block of ice the way it did with water, and that he’d be unable to move. He told his father he didn’t need a blanket and he never asked for one again, but he was always afraid that one day the cold would come and take him. It’s why he kept moving. Why he was always running. He wanted to stay one step ahead of the cold.
It would be warm in heaven, he knew. Warm like a rented Buick, driving along strong, sturdy roads with beautiful surround sound music everywhere.
He slouched down behind the steering wheel now, lowering his chin to his neck, his shoulders hunching up tensely, his eyes peering over the top of the dashboard.
They were coming out of the house.
Moving to their car. All of them.
Holding hands and looking happy.
Yes, yes, they were leaving. They were finally leaving, all together.
Life was very good. The heat was blasting and the music was sweet and they were finally emerging from their home.
Nuri started the engine of his Buick, waited until the other car pulled out of the driveway, then he gently put his foot down on the gas pedal and drove carefully after them along the uncrowded street. He shifted into drive, pressed down harder on the accelerator, and stayed with them, always twenty feet or so behind. Always there but never seen.
As he made his way past the manicured lawns and the young boys playing basketball in their driveways and the occasional bundled-up jogger, Nuri Al-Bazaad was very pleased. He knew he’d be in heaven soon. He knew he’d be far away from the squalor and the misery that lurked behind these suburban doors. That lurked behind all doors everywhere. And as he adjusted the thick seat belt that went around his waist and swung over his chest and back, he knew, too, that soon everything would be warm. The explosion he was going to set off would blow warm breath all over him, blow hard enough to make sure his blood could never freeze, hard enough to make him rise into the air and carry him along the beautiful, straight, glimmering road.
All the way to heaven.
20
“So why don’t you start to tell me about EGenco.”
Justin was anxious to get down to business. The first thirty minutes that his father had been inside his house made him feel as if he were sixteen years old again. Jonathan Westwood didn’t say anything about Justin’s East End house. Nothing complimentary, nothing derogatory. He looked around, took it all in, raised an eyebrow and said, “How far away is the ocean?” When Justin told him it was a ten- or fifteen-minute drive over toward East Hampton and that the bay was just a five-minute walk in the other direction, his father went, “Ahh.” Justin didn’t offer to show the upstairs of the house and his father never asked to see it.
They spent half an hour in small talk. Justin said that he’d take him to the police station later in the day, if he wanted, and Jonathan nodded stiffly. Justin said he’d show off the town, they could go for a short drive, and Jonathan smiled noncommittally. Justin studied his father’s clothes while they sat and had coffee. And his demeanor. Jonathan was dressed casually, beige pants and a light green sweater, and yet somehow gave the impression that he was wearing a three-piece suit. His posture was relaxed and confident and yet he never slouched, never looked awkward in any way. In comparison, Justin felt grubby. He knew he gave off the faint whiff of scotch. And he probably should have shaved. His jeans weren’t pressed, his sweatshirt was expensive but still a sweatshirt.
Yup. Sixteen years old.
Justin realized that a lot of things were making him feel sixteen again these days. The combination of Reggie Bokkenheuser and alcohol, for one. He quickly shoved that thought away. And he shoved hard. There was too much at stake to allow any distractions. Not parental, not sexual, not romantic.
A bit more self-insight, Justin thought. He definitely believed in alternatives. He just didn’t believe in distractions. So he decided to get a big distraction out of the way as quickly and easily as he could.
“Look,” he said to his father. “I know this is hard for you. It’s different seeing me here than when I’m up in Providence. But this is the way I’ve chosen to live and this is what I do. I know it’s not what you’d choose for me but the choice has been made. And it was made a long time ago.”
“I understand,” Jonathan Westwood said.
“I know you do. I just thought it needed saying. And I also want you to know I appreciate your coming here. I think it’s going to turn out to be very important.”
“There’s nothing to appreciate,” his father said. “You asked and I came.”
It was as intimate an exchange as the two had had in years. And it was followed by an awkward silence that lasted until Justin turned to the third man in the room, a man who was blushing furiously and looking in every possible direction but at the two Westwood men, and said, “Sorry, Roger. Family shit. But now it’s out of the way. So why don’t you start to tell me about EGenco.”
His father had flown in with Roger Mallone, at Justin’s request. Mallone was one of the elder Westwood’s key financial advisers and had been extremely helpful to Justin in the past. Roger wasn’t a redhead but he looked as if he should be, with his ruddy complexion and tousled hair. He had the aura of someone who’d once been a terrific high school athlete but hadn’t done much in the thirteen or fourteen years since other than pick up a tennis racket for an easy game of doubles. Softer than he should be, with a self-mocking demeanor that recognized his own lack of strength, Roger was no hero, he was a numbers man with superb connections in the business world, great insight into that world, and tremendous access to information. Right now, all of that was more important to Justin than heroism.
“The last time you were asking me for information,” Roger Mallone said, “you were pointing a gu
n at me.”
“Slightly different circumstances,” Justin said.
“No one’s trying to arrest you now, I assume.”
“That’s right.”
“Or kill you either.” Mallone smiled. But the smile faded quickly when Justin didn’t answer.
“Jay?” Roger said, looking to prompt an answer with a raised eyebrow. And when Justin just gave a little shrug, Mallone said, “Shit,” and then, quietly and grimly, “You lead a very interesting life.”
“Yes, interesting,” Jonathan said.
“I just hope I don’t have to be around it too much longer,” Mallone muttered.
“EGenco,” Justin prompted. “What can you give me?”
“I can give you days and days. You see the suitcase I brought? That ain’t clothes, pal. It’s filled with financial reports, corporate histories, Wall Street analyses, depositions, reports on various lawsuits. It’ll help if you can narrow things down. The company’s all over the globe and has twenty different divisions that are larger than most companies you’ve ever heard of.”
“Start simple. How about a general overview if you can? And remember, I’ve been out of the financial world a few years.”
Justin could see his father nod firmly at his last statement, as if to add some sort of emphasis.
“All right,” Roger said. “Let’s start with a little history. I’ll work my way forward, and, at some point, if I go off track you lead me back so I can try to focus on the areas you need to understand.”
“Perfect.”
“EGenco was founded in 1922. The founder was a Texan named James Merriwell . . .”
The story Roger Mallone proceeded to tell was one of picture-
perfect American capitalism. As he listened, Justin tried to relate the story to anything in his own experience, realized that was an impossibility. EGenco’s past was one that paralleled and exemplified the country’s history: it was a tale of dedication to constant and obsessive expansion. Justin’s life was, he realized, the longer it went on, becoming one of gradual retraction. The boundaries of his existence had, for quite a few years, narrowed and gotten smaller. Something that could never be said of the business that started as an entrepreneurial Oklahoma-based company with the overly grand and self-important name of the Merriwell 20th Century Ultimate Oil Well Cementing Company. As the firm’s reputation grew, it was referred to simply as Merriwell.
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