by Jeffrey Ford
"No chiles," she said and shook her head. She served us each-Antony, herself, and I-a bowlful and a wedge of bread. Morgan was asleep in the back room.
While we ate, Antony and I filled her in on what had happened at the ERO. She'd never met Hal, so we had to describe him for her, and then Antony was good for a few stories from the old carny days when they'd worked the same shows. Finally the big man got up from the table.
"That meal's brought me to the conclusion that my cooking stinks," he said. He looked around the tiny cottage and then lifted the gun off the table and told us we could cram onto the couch, he was going to sleep in the car. "If I see anything going on," he said, leaving, "I'll hit the horn. We should've brought a fucking bottle from the house."
Isabel and I quietly cleaned up the dinner table, and when we were done, I sat on the couch and lay my head back. She came over and stretched out, resting her head on a pillow on my thigh. It was the exact position I'd seen Schell and Morgan in the last time I'd spoken to him.
"Morgan told me about her life in the city," Isabel whispered. "Very sad. She ran away from home and ended working for some man. You know, como puta. One day she returned to the place where he kept all his women and found him dead on the floor with a bullet in the back of his head."
"Sounds familiar," I said.
"I think she very much likes Mr. Schell," said Isabel.
"Yeah," I said, "they need each other. But what am I going to do? As it stands now, it's either one or the other."
"Pensarбs en algo; duйrmete," she said.
The imagery of the day ran through my thoughts in a crazy patchwork-Hal running around stark naked, Agarias's smirk, Antony's death-wish driving. It all ended with that dead butterfly on the kitchen table back at home. Suddenly, the wings of the mosaic twitched, and it began to flutter. I continued to stare as it lifted into the air, into the sky where the ceiling had been, and then I knew I was dreaming.
PERFECT
It was late morning, and I sat in the kitchen back at Schell's house. Antony came in from the newsstand but didn't, as usual, throw the paper on the table. He kept it rolled up under his arm as he poured a cup of coffee and then left it facedown on the counter before pulling out a chair and joining me.
"Stintson?" I asked.
He scratched his head and nodded. "Took one the hard way. Back of the head."
"Robbery?"
"That's what they say."
"Agarias is out of control," I said.
Antony gave a sad grunt of a laugh. "Well, think about his plan. From what you told me, he's taking the blood of some mistake of nature and using it to try to clean out the blood of what he considers to be other mistakes of nature. How's that figure?"
"My guess is the thing that attracts him, like a shiny object attracts a cat, is the whiteness of the skin. This is about whiteness."
"That and the blood," said Antony. "Nothing is ever more fucked up than when someone decides they're going to save the human race from itself."
"You mean like me," I said, "thinking Agarias has got to be stopped one way or the other?"
"Boss, make no mistake about it. In case you were thinking otherwise, he's never going to let us live if he can help it. We'll make the exchange with him, and then he's going to plug us all. So as you're dreaming up a plan to save Schell, you better keep that in mind."
I nodded. "My mind's a total blank. I couldn't dream up what to have for lunch."
"He's definitely got us by the short hairs," said Antony.
"We don't even know if Schell's still alive," I said.
From that moment on, for the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, Antony said nothing. He read the race results, picked up around the house where items from the break-in still lay in disarray, and spent hours in the Bugatorium, carefully collecting the fragile corpses of dead butterflies. As for me, I sat at the desk in the office, pencil and paper at the ready, waiting to jot down an agenda that never materialized.
While sitting there, drawing circles, I considered the talk I'd had with Morgan that morning before Antony and I had left the cottage. She'd had a hard time accepting that she was the cause of Schell's kidnapping. I didn't think she'd really understood the implications of the entire thing, the part about Agarias and Merlin and herself. When I'd relayed to her that what they were asking for was an exchange of her for Schell, she'd said she would gladly do it but then dissolved into tears and ran to the back room. I didn't have the heart to pursue it, so I simply asked Isabel to do her best to calm Morgan down, which she said she would. And then we'd left…to do what?
That's the way the entire day went. Nothing but bad thoughts-the grief of Stintson's family; the innocent Kern, wasting away in a jail cell; the Barneses still wondering why their daughter had been killed. Grim reality, like some insatiable spirit, devoured every idea I might possibly have hatched. I bit my nails, banged my fists against my temples, all to no avail. As twilight came on, I called for Antony, and he appeared at the office door.
"I guess we might as well write this one off and head back down to the South Shore," I said.
"Okay, Boss," he said, and my heart sank to see his dejection.
"Maybe something will come tomorrow," I said.
He went to get his coat. I stood up and threw the pencil down on the desk. We met in the living room, and just as we were about to push back the makeshift rug of a door and leave, Antony said, "Oh yeah, I'm definitely getting a bottle for tonight."
"Good idea," I told him.
He reappeared a few minutes later from down the hall with a cloudy bottle holding an amber liquid. "The good stuff," he said. "Something ought to be good."
We left, and the rug fell back into place. As we made for the Cord, I heard, in the distance, the sound of the phone ringing.
"Hey," said Antony, coming to attention, but I was already off, running up the path to the house. I was out of breath when I reached the office and fumbled the receiver before getting it to my ear.
"Hello?" I said.
There was nothing for a second, and then a voice suddenly blared.
"Tommy?" It was Emmet Brogan again.
"He's not here," I said. I wasn't in the mood to explain everything that had gone on.
"Oh, he's a busy, busy man," said The Worm.
"Can I help you?" I asked.
"It's nothing, kid. Just a point of interest to a fellow lepidopterist. Page five in your local paper out there on the island today. Thought he'd get a kick out of it. Bottom right corner."
"I'll let him know," I said.
"What'd he think of the ERO stuff?" asked Emmet.
"Perfect," I said.
"Ain't that the fucking word for it," he said and hung up.
By then, Antony was standing in the hallway, looking on expectantly.
I put down the receiver and said to him, "Where's the newspaper?"
"In here," he said, and I got up and followed him down the hall.
I sat down at the kitchen table, the paper in front of me, and trying to ignore the photo of Stintson on the front, flipped through it till page five was facing me. "Here," I said and pointed to a small article in the lower right-hand corner.
"Boy Finds Exotic Butterfly in Fort Solanga," I read aloud and then scanned the rest of the article.
"Let's have it," said Antony.
"It says this kid caught a beautiful blue butterfly in the woods near his house yesterday. It's since died, but he brought it to his science teacher, who reported it to the newspaper. The teacher says it was bizarre finding this butterfly, which he identifies as a blue morpho, on the island, in autumn no less. His theory is that it came off a passing ship headed for New York."
"Schell?" said Antony.
"If the teacher has it right, and it's a morpho, they're from South America. Why would a ship coming up from the south circle around to the sound to approach New York? Besides, with the temperature as it is, I doubt it would have made the flight in from the sound to wherever
this town is. This has got to be Schell leaving his calling card," I said.
"Where the hell is Fort Solanga?" said Antony. "Ever hear of it?"
"No," I said, "but I bet the place he released the butterfly from has to be fairly close by."
"I've got the map in the car," he said.
A few minutes later, we were back at the kitchen table, Antony hunched over the map. "Fort Solanga," he said, "what kind of half-assed name is that?"
"You've got to give me a cigarette," I said. I couldn't sit still. Whereas earlier I'd been so depressed I could hardly think straight, a new nervous energy made my legs twitch beneath the table.
Antony reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his butts and the lighter. With his eyes still trained on the map, he handed them over. "Light me one too," he said.
Two cigarettes apiece later, he finally said, "Okay, we're in business. Fort fucking Solanga. Quick, get me a pencil before I lose it."
He took the pencil I got him from the office and circled the location, blowing a smoke ring at the same time. "It's out east a ways," he said. "Almost due north of King's Park up by the sound, south of a spot called Crab Beach."
"Tomorrow," I said, "we'll go out there. There's an address in the article for the kid who found the blue. We'll tell him we're biologists or something, slip him a buck, and get him to show us the exact place he bagged it."
That night, after dinner at the cottage, we sat around the table and sipped tumblers of the good stuff from the cloudy bottle. Morgan joined us and seemed to be in somewhat better spirits than she had that morning. Everyone was a little high with the promise that the article about the butterfly meant Schell was still alive.
Antony described how when he had collected the dead butterflies, a breeze from the rug-covered front door must have blown down the hall and entered the Bugatorium. "It was too slight for me to feel," he said, "but when I looked down at the table where I'd laid out the dead bugs, I saw their wings start to move, and for second, I thought they were coming back to life. I swear I thought it was some kind of ghost mess; like a miracle."
Sometime during the third round of drinks, Morgan said, "I've been thinking hard today about the past, and I remember my foster mother telling me one night when she was drunk that I had a brother. Actually, when I was very young, I might have met him."
"What about Agarias?" I asked. "Did his name ever come up?"
"I'm not sure, but again, when I was young, I remember a doctor coming to the house to see me. I thought it was just a regular checkup, but for a while he came quite often."
"I have a theory," I said.
"I know what you're going to say," she told me and held up her hand. "The person who left me the clues to where the bodies were was Merlin."
"Yes," I said. "The fellow you lived with in New York was killed the way Stintson and another researcher were killed. I'll bet Agarias was keeping an eye on you the whole time. He didn't like what you were doing, so he ended that relationship for you."
"I could almost thank him for that," she said.
"He followed you out to the island, kept tabs on you, but left you alone until recently, when he decided he needed your blood. Agarias's goons would drive by and send Merlin to the cabin to get you, but instead of breaking in and rousting the place, he'd leave you the notes about the bodies and the flowers and so forth."
"Why?" asked Antony.
"Maybe old Merlin isn't as stupid as Agarias wishes he was. Perhaps he'd overheard him telling one of his henchmen that you were his sister. Who knows?"
"Which would mean," said Morgan, "he knows what Agarias is up to."
"Exactly," I said. "Even if he's a monster, he may be a reluctant monster, but I wouldn't count on it. We have to remember that he gouged out Parks's eyes, broke the security guard's neck, and strangled the butler all in one night."
"He doesn't seem to have much affection for me," said Antony. "I'll tell you right now, if it comes down to it, I wouldn't hesitate to put his lights out."
"Antony, what you say, I understand. But I feel sorry for him a little bit," said Isabel.
"I'm glad you didn't know anything about him that night at the Parks place," said Antony.
Morgan started to cry, huge glistening tears running down her face.
"I'm sorry, Morgan," said Antony.
She reached over and patted his forearm. "It's not you. The whole thing is just so sad." Antony offered her a cigarette to make amends, and, I suppose, to prove she meant what she had told him, she sang him a couple of verses of "You Forgot Your Gloves."
After that, I needed another drink.
SWEATING THE KID
With another hit from the dregs of the cloudy bottle to cure the morning funk, Antony and I set out early for Schell's place. Once we were there, I took a bath and picked another suit this time, a double-breasted, gray pinstripe. Antony also bathed, applied some of his special tear-inducing cologne, and changed in order for us to make the best impression we could with the parents of the kid who'd found the butterfly. It was Saturday, so we knew he'd at least be out of school. Before nine, we were on our way to Fort Solanga.
Maybe it was on my mind from having recently dealt with Agarias, but I decided an Anglo face would be more convincing in this situation, so Antony led the way as we took the steps to the house on Clayton Road. He knocked on the door and a young boy of around ten with freckles and red hair answered.
Before speaking, the big man took his hat off. "Is this the residence of the remarkable young man who discovered the blue butterfly?" he asked.
"Yeah," said the kid. "It was me."
"May we please speak to your mother or father?" asked Antony.
The kid disappeared and a few minutes later came back with a woman in tow. She took one look at the two of us and her expression went south. "Yes?" she asked, looking as if it might not be a better idea to close and lock the door.
"I'm Professor Cramshaft from the Royal Academy of Butterflies, and this," he said pointing over his shoulder at me, "is Dr. San Francisco, our South American specialist."
"Hola," I said and bowed.
"Dr. San Francisco?" said the woman. It was evident she wasn't buying it. Antony must have sensed that too and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a five-dollar bill.
"At the academy, we're very interested in the butterfly that your son found. We were wondering if you would allow him to show us exactly where he located it."
The woman looked hesitant. Antony flashed the cash. "Of course, we'd be willing to offer a small fee for your trouble," he said.
"I don't know," said the woman.
Antony took out another five and held the two bills in one hand, flapping them slightly. Like some sleight of hand that Schell might pull off, the woman moved so fast I could hardly track it. Next I looked, she was holding the bills.
"Jimmie," she said. A second later, the kid reappeared. "Put your coat on and take these two professors out in the woods and show them where you found it."
"Yes, Mom," he said and went to get his coat.
The kid returned again, dressed for the outdoors. Even though the mother still had a sketchy look on her face, a deal was a deal, and she kissed the kid and told us she'd be watching from the back window. "If you want to buy it from us, we can make arrangements," she said.
"I'll be in touch about that," said Antony. We smiled, tipped our hats, and took off after the kid, who was out the door and down the steps in a flash. As we moved around the side of the house to the backyard, Antony said to the boy, "Your old lady drives a hard bargain."
"That's what my dad says," said Jimmie.
He took us to the edge of his yard and into a wood of scrub pine and oaks that seemed to border the backyards of all the street's houses. We walked through fallen leaves along a path the local kids had probably worn. It wound around trees and through stands of sticker bushes.
"How far back does this woods go?" asked Antony.
"I don't know," said Jimmie. "I
'm only allowed up to the sand hills."
A few minutes later, we were at the sand hills, a large clearing of small white sand dunes, surrounded by trees. "This is where I found it," he said.
"Where, exactly?" I asked.
The kid looked around, as if he was making up his mind. "Over here," he said, walking to the nearest pine tree and touching one of its branches.
"Jimmie," said Antony, moving up a little closer to the kid. "I think you're feeding old Professor Cramshaft a line of malarkey."
"I found it here," said the kid.
"I know you're not supposed to go past here," said Antony. "But let's face it, Jim, no kid is going to be satisfied for long by stopping at the sand hills."
The kid shook his head. "I'm going to go back now."
Antony leaned way down so that he was face-to-face with the kid. "You mean to tell me that you and your friends never went out there to see what was on the other side of the sand dunes?" asked Antony.
I couldn't believe the big man was sweating the kid.
Jimmie started to get nervous, but then Antony's jacket opened a little. The kid's face broke into a smile. "Hey, mister, you've got a gun."
Antony straightened up. "Of course I do," he said. "This butterfly stuff is dangerous business. You like guns?"
"Yeah," said the kid.
The big man took the Mauser out and removed the clip. "Here," he said, handing the kid the gun. "You can hold it. Lead on, James, only the absolute truth will do."
"Don't tell my mother."
"I swear," said Antony, crossing his heart. "You too, Dr. San Diego."
The kid led the way. Fifteen minutes later, after passing two ponds and winding snakelike along a less distinct path, our journey ended at a ten-foot stone wall. It stretched a good fifty yards in either direction.
"Who lives here?" asked Antony.
"I don't know," said Jimmie. "But I found the butterfly on that wall right there."
