Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  I recovered my poise somewhat. “Is that supposed to

  intimidate me?”

  He grinned through his slow reps. “You think that

  hanging around Juno, something’s going to rub off?” he asked, showing off that he could talk without distortion even while working really hard.

  “She doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on you any.” It

  wasn’t much of a retort, but I meant it, so I had sincerity on my side if not eloquence.

  “What the fuck do you know about me and her?” He

  sounded rougher, less urbane than usual, no longer the slick media personality but just a thug. “You don’t know shit about us.”

  I’d touched a nerve somehow, but had no idea what it

  was. “Maybe, maybe not.” I tried for my best poker face, but he wasn’t playing.

  “Everyone in EAR is laughing at you,” he said, as

  unctuous as ever.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said.

  “They are. You’re pathetic.”

  “Are you jealous of me and Juno?” It wasn’t a dig—I

  really wanted to know what his deal was, and was more curious now than offended.

  Rusty had switched to doing hammer curls with his

  hands held thumbs up, then he stopped, turning to me from the mirror. For a wild moment I thought he might heave a dumbbell at me, but he simply squatted and put them down near my bench.

  “You should be careful in The Club,” he said. “You could drop a weight on yourself, or slip in the showers. It’s easy to get hurt.” He ambled off in his typical “I’m ready for my close-up” way.

  “It’s a lot easier being an asshole,” I said to his departing back, loud enough for him—and anyone else who might be lurking—to hear my rejoinder. Of course, I realized someone overhearing us might have thought I was referring to myself.

  I didn’t go on for a moment, wishing I had been able to face him down, but all I could do was sass my chair and Detective Valley. Rusty seemed more threatening and

  unpredictable.

  I did not want to run into Rusty in the showers, so I added some more sets and was exhausted when I left, though not a whole lot calmer, given our exchange. Showering, I tried not to peg him as the obvious suspect, but it was hard not to. He had a criminal past, was married to Juno even though they were separated, owned a black SUV, and didn’t like me at all. He was definitely strong enough to have gone for me at Parker Hall in the bathroom, so if he wasn’t harassing and stalking me and Juno, who was?

  Mrs. Fennebresque was glad to see me, but she refused to show me any .38s or .45s until I sat down on the stool she brought out from behind the counter and drank a cup of tea.

  “Verbena,” she said, as I sipped appreciatively. “It has a relaxing effect.”

  “I’m not relaxed?”

  She shook her head daintily. “Now, why don’t you tell me about it?” she said in her best nurse-will-calm-you-down voice. If it had been Stefan talking to me like that I would have exploded at the condescension. But Mrs. Fennebresque had age on her side, and the fact that she was a stranger. So, as the Anglo-Saxon poet says, I opened my word hoard and spilled out my narrative. She held her chin in one palm, leaning forward like one of those corny author photos, making ts-ts-ts noises at the appropriate points. It all began to sound almost funny, and Mrs. Fennebresque, in her antique-looking garnet jewelry and pink dress splashed with yellow tea roses, seemed like a host of a garden party more than a gun retailer.

  “Why did you want to know all that?” I concluded.

  “To slow you down, of course. To relax you.”

  I wasn’t sure reviewing the last few days of hugger—

  mugger was exactly a restorative. “Because you wouldn’t sell me a gun otherwise?”

  “Of course I’ll sell you a gun, but do you think you can walk into a police station as agitated as you are and register a gun? You have to go through the registration process first, remember? You’d never make it. They’d pretend there were delays, computer problems, anything to keep you unarmed and undefended. Why, they’d think you were a danger—to yourself at least, if not to others.”

  Ah, but wasn’t that exactly what I wanted to be?

  Dangerous?

  15

  THE northern precinct of the Michiganapolis Police

  Department looked very much like a small branch campus of a hip university. The cluster of five low redwood-sided buildings facing each other around a circle of lawn was set in what looked like several acres of park filled with fairly young evergreens and deciduous trees and lined with beds that had been flowering with purple and orange mums. Connected by winding concrete paths bordered with glazed red brick, the buildings were very appealing and secretive at the same time, mixing warm colors with small windows and deep overhangs.

  Under an enormous flagpole that flew the U.S. and

  Michigan flags, one sign pointed to the Fire Department, another to Service, whatever that meant, and the next to Police. I didn’t drive far enough to see who or what was housed in the other buildings, just followed the driveway to the public parking lot. It was set well away from the core of the mini-campus, separated from it by a low, man-made-looking hill, as if to protect against assault. Given the middle-and upper-middle-class neighborhood, I couldn’t imagine a reason for upscale rageful crowds hurling Molotov cocktail shakers and exploding cigars. But Michiganapolis did have a long history of sports-related violence, whether SUM teams lost or won, so I suppose the landscaping was a useful precaution.

  The lot was uncrowded, and I parked right by a walkway. Getting out of the car, I felt suddenly conspicuous and wondered if there were surveillance cameras monitoring me. It was the vague unease I had always experienced around anything connected to the police. When I was little, along with making me memorize my address and phone number, my

  parents had adjured me to find the nearest policeman, but the idea of confiding in one of those ominous-looking blue monoliths had seemed more terrifying than the idea of being lost itself.

  The residuum of that fear survived and whirled up inside me now as if in some Kafka knockoff I was about to be accused of crimes I didn’t know I’d committed. I tried walking from my car as if I had nothing to hide, but then slowed down. If I was being observed, I didn’t want to appear cocky or overeager.

  The entrance was framed in more of those glazed bricks, but despite the four panels of glass, there was only one door, and when I entered, I was surprised to find myself in just a ten-by-twenty lobby with a bare handful of chairs. Though spotless and obviously new, it looked like a not very imaginatively decorated minor-league bank: shiny and dull, not at all as interesting as the colorful police stations of Hill Street Blues or Silk Stalkings.

  “Can I help you?”

  From behind the long security window opposite the door, a slim light-skinned black woman in Michiganapolis’s blue police uniform was watching me, her face half past neutral.

  “I want to find out about registering a gun?”

  There, I’d said it. There weren’t any alarm bells, the floor didn’t slide open underneath my feet and send me hurtling into a pit of crocodiles or down a James Bond-type roller-coaster shaft.

  “Sure.” She waved me over. “Is this a gun you own?”

  “No, I don’t have one yet.” I stopped myself from saying more. She did not need to know the story of my life or even the kind of day I’d been having lately.

  “Can I have your driver’s license.” It was not a question.

  I fumbled with my wallet, produced the license without too much confusion, and slid it through the kind of small grille you see in pawnshops in dangerous neighborhoods. She

  checked the license carefully, matching it with my face. “Is this your permanent address?”

  I nodded, even though who knew where I’d be living

  next year; as Oscar Wilde said, this was “not the time for German skepticism.” She clipped it to a b
oard, handed me a pamphlet to read, and disappeared behind a high partition.

  Looking around, I could make out several cameras monitoring the lobby both on my side and on hers. I stole curious glances at the fact sheets pinned to a corkboard for her consultation but couldn’t make out exactly what they were about. Mindful of the cameras, I took the pamphlet over to a chair. It was an official publication about gun safety, and as I read through it, I realized it was almost identical to pamphlets I’d gotten from Mrs. Fennebresque, covering safety alone and in crowds, proper targets, gun cleaning, storage, and transportation. But for all the familiarity, my pulse increased so much I could feel veins throbbing in my throat.

  “Relax,” I thought imagining Sharon there by my side. It worked, and I was able to focus.

  In the next few minutes, the phone rang just once;

  someone out of sight must have picked it up, because it stopped. The quiet was so intense and the lobby so neutral it could have been a front for some kind of illegal business. The calm seemed as artificial as air spray covering some nasty stench. Was this an afternoon lull? It couldn’t always be quiet here, could it? Or maybe it was, and the other precincts saw more action.

  “Okay,” the officer said when she returned, and

  motioned me back to the window. She passed my license back to me through the grille. “The pamphlet?” I returned it to her, embarrassed, not having known it wasn’t for me to keep.

  “Here’s a quiz,” she said, handing me a white sheet half the size of a notebook page.

  Trying not to show my surprise, I took the form back to my chair. I hadn’t expected to be quizzed right then and there; I thought the pamphlet was for me to study at home. Was this what Mrs. Fennebresque had said would happen? If not, had the procedure changed?

  Fifteen true or false questions covered the identical material I had just read. This was how they checked people’s gun safety knowledge? It seemed more like a test of short-term memory, but I thought it wise to keep my opinion to myself.

  But as I read the questions, I found them phrased so

  circuitously that each one felt like a trap. Trying not to grade the person who’d composed these questions, I reread them all as attentively as if I were taking the GRE and my college career depended on it. Despite the subject, and despite having been out of college myself for decades, I was plunged into the disorienting remembrance of tests past: worried that easy ones were really hard, and whether I was being careful enough, and all that other crap that seems to haunt anyone emerging from America’s educational swamp.

  I brought it back, and she checked the answers on her computer screen. “All right.” She didn’t congratulate me.

  “Now, I’m required to ask you these questions.” She reached for a pale blue sheet of paper and a pen. “Do you have any criminal convictions?”

  “No.” I hoped it didn’t sound arrogant.

  She marked my answer. “Are you the subject of any

  restraining orders?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, call Records here in five days.”

  “And then what?”

  “We issue you the permit—”

  “—I buy the gun and bring it back here to register?”

  “That’s right.”

  When I left, I didn’t feel like a pariah, I felt liberated. It was as if I’d had psychic liposuction, and my troubles weighed a great deal less. It all seemed so easy. Unless I was a split personality and had committed crimes while thinking I was someone else, I would have a gun in less than a week. I could hear Stefan saying, “No wonder there are so many nuts with guns out there.”

  Stefan walked down the hall into the kitchen. “I had a very weird day.”

  “Couldn’t be weirder than mine.”

  “Why?” He set down his briefcase and headed for the

  coffeepot.

  “I went to find out about applying for a gun permit, and they gave me a quiz right there. It’s in motion.” I gave him a précis.

  Stefan nodded. “I guess there’s no turning back now.”

  “I haven’t bought a gun yet.”

  “But you’re going to.”

  “Are you saying you changed your mind?”

  “No, I’m just tired. We’ve had too much happen to us— life has been too crazed. A gun makes it seem even more out of control, that’s all.”

  “I can see that. Maybe once I get the permit, I won’t want a gun.” I knew that was unlikely, but felt I had to say it to ease Stefan’s mind a little.

  “So that’s it? About the permit? Because unless there’s something else, like you were arrested, or deputized as a member of a posse, I have you beat, I think.” He settled at the counter and held the cup up to his mouth, blew into it a little to cool it. “Peter de Jonge told me his story.”

  “He already told you his story. He’s Jewish. His parents were survivors.”

  “No, it’s much bigger than that. They were the only ones in both families that weren’t found and murdered in the camps. His parents were hidden, and once they left Holland, they stayed hidden. They never told anyone here they were Jewish.”

  “Oh, my God, like your parents.”

  “Yes. He’s kept it secret, too.”

  “Did they raise him Catholic? No, they were Dutch—so

  what is that, Lutheran?”

  “They raised him afraid. Everything was secret, where they came from, who their family was. Everything.”

  “I guess with a name like de Jonge, it wasn’t obvious.

  Wow. So that’s why he’s drawn to your fiction. Maybe that’s why he really came up here to take some graduate courses.”

  “I don’t know. There’s something else he’s not telling me.”

  “What? What else could there be? Something about the

  Holocaust?” Most people lionize the Dutch, thinking of them during the war in terms of Anne Frank. But they forget that she and her family were not only hidden, they were betrayed.

  The death toll for Dutch Jews was very high, and most of the survivors returned to their homes, often living in the same streets as those who had sold them out to the Nazis. Was Peter perhaps on the trail of someone who had betrayed or even murdered members of his family? “Have you suggested he might want to see a counselor?”

  “He is a counselor. That’s what he does at Neptune

  College.”

  “That doesn’t exempt him from needing help.”

  “He’s troubled, but he’s not disturbed. There’s a

  difference.”

  “I guess. So his degree must be in psychology or

  something if he’s a counselor. Then why’s he interested in American studies and SUM’s hate archives?”

  Stefan shrugged, and drank some coffee, and murmured

  his approval. I’d made it very strong.

  I asked, “What if he’s the one who’s been after Juno and me?”

  Stefan grimaced. “Peter? What the hell for?”

  “Well, he’s got something to hide. You feel it, and I’ve seen it.”

  “But he’s trying to connect with me, and he’s even said he’d want me for his adviser if he enters the graduate program.”

  “That could all be a cover. And if he’s after me, getting to know you might be the best approach.”

  “But why would he be harassing you?”

  “After how he grew up, after what happened to his

  parents, he could be completely fucked up. It wouldn’t have to make rational sense.” I mused a little. “Like, he could resent you because you’ve made a career for yourself and you’re successful, and he’s just a counselor at some backwater college.”

  “Neptune is one of the best-endowed small conservative colleges in the Midwest. In the country.”

  “Come on—how long a list is that?”

  “Okay, it’s possible, but I didn’t turn out fucked up.”

  “You were lucky. You met that girl in college, and you met me. Without the two of us
, you might have ended up anything. God, even a Log Cabin Republican! I know Peter’s unlikely, but sometimes the unlikeliest person in a mystery is the one who did it.”

  “I thought you said it was sometimes the person who couldn’t have done it.”

  “That depends on the plot.”

  Juno called me a little while later when I was trying to grade some papers. “How about computer databases?” she said, as if we had been discussing this just minutes before and had been interrupted by a bad connection.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I’ve been wondering, can’t we track black SUVs in mid-Michigan that way?”

  I lowered my voice because the study door was open.

  “We’re private citizens. How can we get access to that kind of stuff? I can’t just do what they do in mysteries and call around to some friends who owe me favors. It doesn’t work like that in real life. And even if it did, can you imagine how many black SUVs there are on the road in this city, let alone the whole county?”

  “But can’t you mount surveillance?” Juno asked.

  “I’m just one guy, Juno. I could trail after Rusty or Avis or whoever, but so what? Sooner or later they’d notice. I have no training, and this isn’t Toronto or a real city where it’s easy to blend in, this is just Michiganapolis. How could I be inconspicuous?”

  “Why are you being so negative? You think it’s fine for you to get beaten up and me to be sent to the emergency room and then all we do is sit around with our thumbs up our asses while the police are as ineffective as a slobbering blind old collie trying to chase squirrels? You’re starting to sound as serious as Stefan.”

  I didn’t like that jab at him. “You’d be serious, too, if the Nazis had put your parents in concentration camps.”

  It was a cheap shot, but she deserved one right then. It shamed Juno as I knew it would, because she sounded

  profoundly apologetic. “Were they? Oh, God, I’m so very sorry—”

  I let her struggle to find something to say, but she

  recovered.

  “I don’t like being helpless,” Juno said briskly, and I wondered where she was going. “I want to know who’s been after us, and I want revenge. ”