Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  Who is still alive.

  Enough!

  I do what I should have done in the first place and call the Elm Harbor police. As I hang up the telephone after five minutes with a skeptical desk sergeant, the doorbell rings and I jump, but it is only the delivery man with the food I ordered.

  (II)

  I MUNCH MOROSELY ON THE RAPIDLY COOLING PIZZA and sip the rapidly warming Diet Coke and wonder when I should call back. The sergeant promised to send a car over to the house as soon as one was free. Nothing I was able to say persuaded him to hurry. Perhaps he gets calls like this all the time. I sit in Aspen in the little condo, my face in my hands, as I wait for some word. Is there a protocol? An established interval between calls to the police? I do not remember when I have felt so impotent, even when I was nearly arrested the night the two men beat me up: there, at least, I knew it would all be straightened out in the end. But now, two thousand miles from home, I am utterly helpless to do exactly what Jack Ziegler was just telling me was my duty, to protect my family … .

  Jack Ziegler?

  Should I?

  Nothing to lose, not now. I pick up the phone and call the house on Red Mountain, and the telephone barely has time to ring before I hear the voluptuous voice of Henderson.

  “Yes, Professor?” he murmurs before I can speak, and I am stunned only until I realize that Uncle Jack would naturally have caller ID.

  “I … I need some help,” I say, not bothering with pleasantries.

  “In what way, Professor?” Patient, calm, but not quite eager.

  “Is Mr. Ziegler available?”

  “I am afraid that he is asleep and cannot be disturbed. May I help in some way?”

  “I … I can’t reach my wife,” I blurt.

  “Yes?” The same quiet monotone, proclaiming a readiness to kill or be killed with no whisper of objection.

  “She’s back home, in, uh, in Elm Harbor. It’s awfully late, and she’s not answering the telephone, and if … if there’s anything …”

  “Let me call you back,” he says, and the line goes dead.

  Again I am forced to wait. Now I outline a different scenario. Kimmer is not dead, and she is not running an errand or at the office. She is at another man’s house, in another man’s bed, her recent protestations of love notwithstanding. She is sleeping somewhere in Elm Harbor, not with my fellow pugilist Gerald Nathanson, but with a black man who calls her baby, although where our own baby would be during all this, my fevered imaginings are not ready to supply.

  The telephone finally rings.

  “Kimmer?”

  “Professor Garland,” says Henderson, “I am sorry to say that we have no coverage at this time.”

  “Can you give me that again in English?”

  “I have no immediate means of checking on your wife. I apologize. I suggest, if you are worried, that you call the police.”

  “I already did,” I mutter, hanging up, dizzy now, unreasonably shattered to discover that Uncle Jack, with all his supposed power, is unable to reach into the heart of Elm Harbor with a word, talk to some spy stationed along Hobby Road, and find out whether my wife is dead or alive or sleeping in another man’s bed.

  I sit up very straight, panic starting to take me: if Jack Ziegler has no … coverage at this time … then who exactly is enforcing the edict that says my wife and child cannot be harmed?

  I snatch up the telephone and call the Elm Harbor police again, and the same sergeant tells me he gave the request to the dispatcher, and he will call me when he has something.

  “It wasn’t a request,” I nearly shout across the miles as everything boils over. “Didn’t you hear me? I said my wife is in danger!”

  “No, sir, you said she might be in danger.”

  “Well, I think she is in danger! Right now. I think … Please, send somebody over now, right now, okay?”

  “Can you say what kind of danger?” He sounds only mildly more interested than he was before.

  I try to think what will catch his interest. “There could be … uh, an intruder in the house.”

  “Do you know for a fact that there is an intruder, or are you just saying that so we’ll skip all the calls ahead of yours?”

  “Sergeant …”

  “Mr. Garland, look. We only have six patrol cars on duty at night. That’s for a city of a little over ninety thousand people. That’s one car for every fifteen thousand people.” I groan at the thought of what havoc income inequalities can wreak on real lives: I am willing to bet that there are six patrol cars, all of them private, up on Red Mountain alone. “Now, we’ll get to your call as soon as we can.”

  He hangs up.

  It is well past eleven in the East. I call home and there is, once more, no answer. I am shaking all over now.

  One last idea.

  I pull Fred Nunzio’s card from my wallet and use his beeper number. And I add, at the end, the two-digit code he told me to include if the matter was urgent.

  He calls three minutes later.

  And sounds concerned, or at least willing to play along. “I’m sure everything is fine, but, if it will make you feel better, I’ll call this sergeant myself, okay?”

  “Thank you, Agent Nunzio.”

  “Fred, I keep telling you to call me Fred.”

  “Fred. Thanks. And you’ll call me right back?”

  “Of course.”

  The wait is no more than ten minutes, which I spend pacing the first floor, wishing I had a punching bag. “Okay, Professor, there’s people on the way to your house right now. I’ll clear this line so they can call you. I’m sure everything’s fine, but call me back.”

  “I will.”

  Again I settle down to wait. Ten minutes. Fifteen. It is almost midnight back home, and my resources have run out. I simply have no ideas. Are matters as bleak as they seem? Surely there is a rational explanation: the telephone is not working right at Hobby Road. I should have called the operator. Except, if the telephone is malfunctioning, how could I have reached the answering machine? Midnight in Elm Harbor. No call. I want to throw things through the window, I want to grab a gun somewhere and ride to my family’s rescue, I want to pull the Judge out of the ground and shake him until he explains why he has done this terrible thing to us.

  I want my family, safe and sound.

  Finally, I do the one thing left to me. I kneel in front of the living-room sofa and pray that Kimmer and Bentley are safe, or, if not safe, then resting in God’s arms.

  As I rise, the telephone rings immediately.

  I steel myself.

  (III)

  “WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?” demands Kimmer, incandescent with rage. “We’re fast asleep, and all of a sudden, there’s, like, this banging on the door, and I nearly jump out of my skin, and I’m scared half to death, nobody knocks on the door at midnight, and I put on my robe and I go down there and it’s like storm-trooper city, half the cops in the world are out there, and they say you called them and the FBI called them and—”

  “I was worried,” I put in, sagging in the chair as decompression hits. “Worried! So you just thought you’d wake up the whole neighborhood!”

  “You didn’t answer the phone when I called, and I thought …”

  “Because I didn’t hear it! We were asleep, I told you!”

  I rub my temples. Yes, she said the word twice.

  “Who’s we?” “Who the hell do you think? Me and Bentley. He missed you, he was crying, so I lay down with him in his bed, and we fell asleep. There’s no phone in there, Msha,” she adds, just in case I forgot.

  “But how was I supposed to know …”

  “I don’t know, Misha, but you could have come up with a better idea! I mean, I can’t take this shit all the time! You disappear for hours and don’t tell me where you are, you get into fistfights at your office, you almost get arrested”—suddenly, unaccountably, my wife is crying—“it’s too much for me, Misha, it’s too much, I can’t take this!”


  “Kimmer, I’m sorry … I didn’t …”

  “Sorry! I don’t want you to be sorry! I want you to stop acting so crazy!”

  “I was worried …”

  “No, Misha, no! I don’t want to hear it, okay? I don’t want any more stories or any more excuses or any more explanations. You say you love us, but you keep thinking about you. You, you, you! Well, you have to stop acting crazy. You have to stop all the nutty theories and calling the police from Colorado and getting crazy telephone calls at two in the morning”—yes, I now see, Kimmer was listening in the night I was beaten near the library—“and just getting into trouble. It has to stop, Misha. I can’t take any more of this. It’s not fair. You have to go back to the way you used to be. Because, if you don’t, I can promise you, Msha, one day you’re gonna come home from one of your crazy trips and we won’t be here!”

  Hanging up on me.

  She calls me back six minutes later to apologize, but the damage, I fear, might this time be too great.

  (IV)

  IN THE MORNING, waiting for the taxi to take me to the airport, I feel foolish for last night’s terrors. In the light of a crisp Aspen day, the larger terror is losing my family. Now that I have had some sleep, I realize that Kimmer is right. I have been acting crazy, and I do have to stop. The only trouble is, I cannot stop yet, no matter what threats my wife might make. We are not yet free: that was the message Jack Ziegler tried to impart last night. He will continue to protect us because he promised my father he would, but he can carry out his promise only if I continue my search. Presumably, that was his deal with … well, whomever a man like Jack Ziegler has to deal with. Leave him alone and he’ll find the arrangements. I guarantee it. Quid pro quo. If I give my furious spouse what she wants, if I abandon the search for the arrangements, then Uncle Jack might be unable to protect my family.

  Everything is still a mess.

  And it is all the Judge’s fault.

  The beep of a horn announces that my taxi has arrived. I peek out the window and see the white van idling, the driver reading the newspaper. I go to the front hall, turn off the alarm, grab my overnight bag and my coat, and take a last look around. Have I left it all as neat as I found it? I hope so.

  There is a way out of this. Morris Young would probably say that God will show it to me in time, and I think perhaps he has. A way to keep my wife and also keep the family safe. I believe I can do it, but I know I cannot do it without help, and I am running out of people who might be willing to … well, to take a chance for the sake of friendship. Really, there is only one. So I had better hurry back to Elm Harbor and ask.

  With a shrug, I reset the alarm with the proper code, which will cause it to re-engage ninety seconds after I exit. I pause, my memory unexpectedly jogged by this simple act. A secret conviction that has been growing in my mind leaps once more to the surface. Frowning in worry, I open the door. And stop short.

  In the middle of the doormat is a manila envelope with my name printed on the front in black felt-tip, block letters so big I could read them fifty yards away.

  I wave to the driver, then stoop and pick it up with trembling fingers.

  It is a little larger than the envelope that held the white pawn delivered to me at the soup kitchen, and I can feel something hard and flat inside. It does not feel like the missing black pawn I guessed it might be. I close my eyes, swaying slightly in the crisp mountain air. For a silly moment, I imagine myself reliving the past, frozen forever in an instant of time, forced to open the same envelope over and over again.

  But this envelope holds no pawn.

  Instead, I tear it open to find a hard metal disk, no more than an inch across, brass in color but smudged an ugly brown in places. I rub the disk. The stain flecks off. I turn it over, but even before I read the letters engraved on the other side, I realize what I am holding in my hand: a tag from a dog’s collar. I do not have to read the name to know the tag belongs—or belonged—to Shirley Branch’s dog, Cinque.

  The brown stain is dried blood.

  A note, generically word-processed and printed on plain white paper, provides the punch line: DO NOT STOP LOOKING. No translation necessary. The blood tells a story of its own.

  They can’t hurt me, the well-connected Jack Ziegler assured me; can’t hurt me, can’t hurt my family. Uncle Jack promised it, and I believe him; I have never for an instant doubted his power.

  But nobody has mentioned a prohibition on scaring me half to death.

  CHAPTER 46

  RESTING PLACES

  (I)

  THE LAW SCHOOL STANDS at the corner of Town Street and Eastern Avenue. If you follow Town Street away from the university, past the aging sandstone pile shared by the music and fine arts departments, past the low, nondescript building that holds, improbably, the catering, parking, and public relations offices, you come to the eastern edge of the campus, marked by a poorly fenced, bumpy parking lot full of cheery red-and-white University Transit buses, all purchased secondhand from school districts looking to upgrade. Here you cross Monitor Boulevard (named not for the Civil War gunship but for a local kid who had a brief, uninspired professional football career in the sixties), and, suddenly, you are no longer on university property.

  The difference is immediately apparent.

  On the other side of Monitor from the parking lot is a disused park containing the muddy, grassless remnant of a softball field at one end and, at the other, what might pass for a playground among parents not picky about broken glass, splintered wooden swings, and seesaws missing a crucial bolt or two. Usually a couple of crackheads lounge harmlessly on what is left of the benches, nodding and smiling in their secret dreams. Today the park is deserted. Few students or professors venture out too far to the east, because of the crime rate—or, as Arnie Rosen likes to say, the perceived crime rate. The remnants of a public housing project lie a few more blocks in this direction, aging gray towers with the ubiquitous cream-colored window shades, and public housing, in the minds of most people, signals danger.

  One wintry afternoon four or five years ago, I stood at the edge of this park with the Judge, who was in town for some alumni function, and he simply shook his head, wordlessly, as tears welled in his eyes— whether for his lost youth (when the park, if it existed at all, was no doubt vibrant), or the lost lives of those members of the darker nation who suffer here, or some fugitive memory of his Claire, or of Abby, or of his shattered career, I dared not ask. “You know, Talcott,” he pronounced in his preacher’s voice, “we humans are capable of so much joy. But we are born unto trouble …”

  “ … as the sparks fly upward,” I completed for him.

  He smiled a bit, probably thought about hugging me, then thrust his hands more deeply into the pockets of his camel’s hair coat and pressed onward—for the park was, on that snowy day, not our destination, but a way station, a marker on our road. As it is for me today, as I repeat the journey I made with my father, past the park, past an elementary school that looks like a casualty of some Balkan war but is, in fact, still in use. Graffiti mark the walls. So do black burn marks, as though from an explosion in the yard. An armed police officer stands near the front door, scuffing the dirt with his toe as he sneaks a cigarette. Lonely sepia faces challenge me from the barred windows. Are the bars to keep them in or to keep me out? I shake my head, wondering how many of my faculty colleagues would remain so adamantly opposed to voucher programs if their children were required to attend a school like this one. Alas, the education of the darker nation has become a side issue in contemporary liberalism, which has found more fashionable problems about which to obsess.

  Before continuing my journey, I turn slowly in a complete circle, looking for any sign that I am being followed. I see nothing suspicious, but, unlike Maxine, I have not been trained in figuring out what to suspect. Somebody is out there. Somebody is always out there. Somebody always will be out there, I remind myself as I begin walking once more. So Jack Ziegler implied: somebody will
always be out there, until I dig up what my father buried.

  Nice metaphor. Catchy.

  A block farther on I reach my goal, which is the Old Town Cemetery. Over the years, the name has given rise to some silly campus rumors, such as the tale that the cemetery was once surrounded by a historical site—the eponymous “old town”—that the university plowed under in its manic, eternal, and ruthless quest for space. The truth is that the cemetery was once known as the Town Street Burial Ground, and then, when a newer cemetery was built at the other end of campus, the Old Town Street Burial Ground, and the name over the years grew clipped, as names will, its several metamorphoses signaling the gradual obscuring of history. Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.

  I step through the single gated opening in the high wall and wave to the sexton, a guileless old man named Samuel, whose principal job seems to be to sit on an overpainted metal bench near the neat little stone cottage just inside the cemetery gates, smiling vacuously at every person who enters the grounds. The cottage is just one room, an office to keep all the records, with an ancient bathroom attached. Now and then Samuel vanishes inside, perhaps to relieve himself, although he never seems to eat or drink. And six nights out of the week, every week out of the year, promptly at half past five, Samuel locks the heavy iron gates and disappears to wherever it is that he lives. (On Wednesdays, for some odd reason, the cemetery is open late.) In my student days, when Samuel had the same job and looked every bit as worn as he does now, the wits used to claim that Samuel locked the gates from the inside, turned his body to vapor, and drifted into the nearest available grave. I knew this to be untrue, because once, as a law student, I was locked inside by accident, walking in the cemetery with my future wife, who sought me out because she was in the process of deciding between two men, neither one of whom happened to be me. She came to me for advice, not particularly interested in whether I found it painful to listen to her troubles. It was May, a few weeks before graduation, the weather balmy, and Kimmer was looking particularly ravishing, as she always does in the spring. We talked for a very long time but did not kiss or hold hands or any of the other things that had been, for the ten sizzling months of our middle year of law school, as natural to us as breathing. When at last we reached the entrance once more, Kimmer had resolved to dump both men and find somebody better, which I hoped was a reference to me—although, as matters turned out, it was not—and she was in a gay mood. Until we discovered that the gate was locked, and no apparition appeared with a key. The sandstone walls of the cemetery are eight feet high, and the front gate is higher still. As Kimmer alternated between giggling and growling, I peered through the bars, hoping to flag down a passerby. Nobody passed. I banged on the door of the cottage. Nobody banged back. Finally, I told Kimmer that we had only one choice. She glared, hands on her hips, and told me she was not about to spend the night with me in the cemetery. I spared a few seconds to wonder if she meant the conjunctive or the disjunctive—with me, just not in the cemetery? in the cemetery, just not with me?—and then I shook my head and told her that when I was an undergraduate some of us used to sneak in and out of the cemetery through a drainage tunnel at the other end. Did you say drainage? she gaped. From a cemetery? I assured her that it was perfectly safe. I asked her to trust me.