IT WAS THE end. Truly the end of it all.
He caught his reflection in the cab window and shook a dangerous fist at the translucent half image he found there. Since childhood, it had always been his way of threatening himself with violent abuse if he didn’t carry out his own orders, saving the actual pain of self-flagellation for later, relegating the deep degradations to the wee hours of the morning.
And Geoffrey Coldicott knew something about pain.
He had told the reporter, or whatever he was, that he would be home by six. He looked at his watch. Five-ten. At least time was on his side.
Because he had always wondered about two things his entire life, or at least that part of his life which began when, as a small child, after his father’s suicide, his mother moved him from Bristol, England, to Painesville, Ohio. Two questions he was certain he was going to live his entire adult life – the part that began five years ago when he had the nerve to move out of the house and into the big city – without ever having answered.
One: What would he do if he met someone like himself, face to face?
Two: What would he do if his collection was threatened?
Somehow, through some strange jog of serendipity, through some violent rip in the fabric of his rather imaginative fantasy life, he had managed to answer both questions within the past twenty-four hours.
When he had sat down at the bar at the Shenanigans nightclub on the west side the day before, deliberately far from his neighborhood, purposely out of his work environment, he hadn’t any real plan in mind. He’d heard they had recently revamped the club and he really did want to see what they’d done with the place, so he had frequented the establishment a few times in the previous weeks. But that, he knew, was only secondary to his underlying purpose. He was there to be someone else. Geoffrey Coldicott the swinger. Geoffrey Coldicott the libertine. Geoffrey Coldicott the brash hedonist.
Just a few moments after he had entered and taken a stool at the far end of the enormous bar, a stranger had entered the nightclub and, it appeared, Geoffrey’s life. The man took a stool immediately to his left and ordered a Rob Roy.
Ten minutes passed. Then the stranger turned and smiled at Geoffrey. ‘Not really my kind of music,’ he said. The DJ was spinning some sort of electronic dance/trance stuff. To Geoffrey it was all static.
‘Nor mine,’ Geoffrey replied.
The man was handsome and athletic, well dressed in a casual, collegiate way. Witty in a deliciously sarcastic way. He said he was in Cleveland on business and was flying out in a few hours. He called himself Tom Macarty. Or McCartney. Or McIlvainey. Or something Irish like that. The music was loud and Geoffrey hadn’t heard him well, so he decided to just call him Tom. Tom was fine. He really didn’t need to know more.
Yet there was something about Tom that was familiar, as if he had come into the store once, or they had met at a house sale or a liquidation sale. No. It went further back than that, much further. College? Geoffrey was usually good with faces, so the idea that he couldn’t place Tom gnawed at him.
The conversation eventually flagged. Geoffrey sipped his drink, tried to think of something clever and urbane to say. Instead, he offered: ‘So what brings you to Cleveland, Tom?’
‘Business first, I suppose,’ Tom said, turning to face Geoffrey fully. ‘But I’m always open to pleasure.’
Tom smiled when he said this, and it both chilled and warmed Geoffrey, who was already into his third gin and tonic, no longer feeling the barstool beneath him, no longer feeling the inhibitions of an overeducated rural kid gone to the city.
Before Geoffrey could stop himself, the words came out.
‘What do you do for pleasure?’
Tom turned slowly and fixed him in a knowing stare, one that loosed something in Geoffrey’s stomach. It was the kind of feeling you get when you are in a foreign country and hear a voice spoken in the idiom and inflection of your native tongue, your region, your very hometown, a kinship that went beyond understanding. It was a citizenship of the soul.
Tom remained silent.
Two cocktails later Tom said he had to leave. Something about a meeting, a plane, something about returning a rental car. He asked Geoffrey if he might point out the nearest entry to the airport, and Geoffrey said that he would.
Tom paid the check. The two men walked out of the bar, across the lobby, to the parking lot, then on to the far end, the dark end. Geoffrey was pleased they had to walk a bit. He felt it gave him time to . . . what? He was painfully unsure.
But halfway across the deserted, moonlit parking lot, Tom supplied him with his answer. He stopped and placed a hand on Geoffrey’s chest, halting him just inches away, staring into his eyes.
The moment drew uncomfortably long until Tom reached into his coat pocket and produced a small stack of photographs. He handed them to Geoffrey. Geoffrey took them, and found that his hands were shaking, his heart stuttering in his chest. Even before he began to flip through the pictures, he knew what they would be, that they were the answer to his question:
What do you do for pleasure?
There were only eight photographs in the stack, but to Geoffrey Coldicott they were a treasure beyond imagination. Each image plumbed a new depth to his sickness, scribed an as yet unwritten chapter of his hunger. By the time he looked at the last one he found that he had begun to weep.
A few moments later, without a word, Tom took the photographs back, withdrew across the parking lot, toward his car. Soon he pulled onto the marginal road toward Hopkins airport and beyond.
Geoffrey Coldicott had not slept since that moment.
That was last night. And now, today, some reporter wanted to take a look at his computer.
It was all too much.
Because he was certain the man he had talked to on the telephone wasn’t a reporter at all. He was a cop of some sort. FBI or federal agent or Internet cop, something like that. Regardless, Geoffrey didn’t buy this business about a mysterious e-mail document. Not for a moment. He had always suspected that somebody, somewhere, knew the sorts of things he was downloading into his computer. He knew that one day they would catch him and there would be a half-hour special on CNN during which they would show his high-school photos next to the shot of him being dragged up Mayfield Road. They would display some of his naughtier computer graphics files (certain bits obscured, of course), and then they would—
The cab turned off Mayfield Road onto Golden Gate, then pulled over to the curb.
As Geoffrey scaled the steps, he knew that what he was about to do might be unnecessary – the erasure of his small but very specialized and expensive collection of digital porn – but he also knew that he couldn’t take the chance. If he were exposed, what would it do to his mother? It would kill Mina Coldicott, that’s what it would do. Mina Coldicott would curl up on her creaky bentwood rocker back there in Painesville, Ohio. Mina Coldicott would evaporate from shame. All eighty-one years and ninety-nine puritanical pounds of her.
Geoffrey, a bit winded now, reached his door and inserted the key in the lock. But before the first tumbler fell, a shadow darkened the wall beside him.
He spun around, more than a bit startled, and saw that it was Tom.
‘Oh. Um. Hi,’ Geoffrey managed.
‘Hello,’ Tom said softly, taking the key from Geoffrey’s hand. Tom reinserted the key and opened the door. He gestured to Geoffrey to enter the apartment. Tom wore a black wool crew neck, tan trousers, camel-hair blazer. Very smart, Geoffrey thought. Very Ralph Lauren. He seemed taller to Geoffrey than he had the day before, broader through the shoulders and chest.
Tom closed the door, turned the dead bolt. ‘Here,’ he began, reaching out, ‘let me help you with your coat.’
Geoffrey turned slowly around, unbuttoning his coat, and noticed that his pulse had begun to race. Geoffrey took a deep breath and let Tom peel the coat from his shoulders.
‘How did you know where I lived?’ Geoffrey asked, fumbling with his pack of Salems. He was blowing it. He wanted this man to stay, to leave, to get in and out of his life as soon as possible.
‘You told me last night, Geoffrey.’
‘I did?’
Tom laughed and it ran a shiver down Geoffrey’s spine. ‘Somebody was into the Pimm’s before they went to the pub, eh?’ Tom walked over to the hall closet, seeming to know where that was located, as well. He hung up the raincoat and returned to the small front room. ‘You mean you really don’t remember telling me all about yourself last night, Geoffrey?’
‘Well, I—’
‘About how you really don’t read very much anymore and how you really don’t like going to the movies as much as you used to because the films are just so silly nowadays. Don’t you remember, Geoffrey?’
Geoffrey tried to strike a calm, affable pose. He failed.
‘And how you really only care about one thing these days. Your computer.’
Geoffrey glanced at his computer, which sat in an alcove off his living room. He looked back at Tom and the dominoes began to tumble. He remembered now. The graphic of the poem, the T.S. Eliot poem he had received on his secret e-mail account and had summarily erased as so much cyber junk mail. The image now drew itself in his mind, the fluid strokes, the jet black ink.
T.S. Eliot. Julia Raines.
My God, Geoffrey thought.
All these years.
Geoffrey thought of the stack of photographs Tom had shown him. How the man fucking knew. He felt a black gorge rise within him.
‘We have business to do, and we have pleasure to do,’ Tom said, reaching into his coat pocket, retrieving a pair of thin rubber gloves.
Geoffrey stared at the gloves, his eyes widening. ‘We do?’
‘Oh yes,’ Tom said, his voice affecting a British accent. ‘Which do you fancy first, love?’