My cell phone rang at seven thirty the next morning, one minute after I’d switched it on. It was the Bohemian, and he didn’t take time to schmooze.
“You can’t go to the police.”
“Your bomber is sending you another message.”
“By blowing up a lamppost?”
“By showing you he can do it anyplace.”
“We must wait for his letter.”
“What if he doesn’t send one? He never did send a follow-up to collect money the last time.”
“We must wait.”
“Go to the police, or I will.”
“You think the Maple Hills police can solve this?” His voice rose.
“No, but they’ll pass it off to the F.B.I. or the A.T.F. They’ll check the soil around the lamppost for D.X.12 and start a professional investigation.”
There was a pause. “It was D.X.12,” he said.
“You know this already?”
“I had Stanley take a soil sample to a lab last night.”
“That kills your theory that the first bomb was aimed at the Farradays. Your bomber is targeting all of Crystal Waters.”
The Bohemian said nothing.
“The Feds might be able to trace the D.X.12,” I said.
“The police tried after the Farraday bomb. D.X.12 hasn’t been manufactured since the sixties. There are no sources to trace.”
“Then somebody’s got an old cache,” I said, “and that’s a clue you, Stanley, or I don’t know how to handle. The Feds might.”
“People will be ruined.”
“People will be dead.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. “Vlodek, ask yourself: Does he want to kill, or does he want money? He blew up a house when nobody was home. Now he’s blown up a lamppost safely outside the walls. He’s an extortionist, not a killer. He wants money. The lamppost increases the pressure, perfects his position. He’s priming us. He’ll send another note, we’ll pay him, and he’ll go away.”
“How can you be sure? He hasn’t contacted you for payment. He might just keep setting off bombs.”
“He will communicate. He’s a businessman. He wants money.”
The Bohemian sounded so cocksure: a bomber as businessman, rational, perfecting his position. It made it all the more chilling.
He went on, each word calm and well reasoned. “Our bomber knows publicity would ruin house values. That’s his lever against us. But it cuts both ways. He fears publicity, too. If this gets out, we’ll have no choice but to bring in the police, and that will end his chances for money. That’s why he won’t kill. This is a kind of blackmail, Vlodek. We must handle it ourselves.”
“We just wait?”
“He’ll contact us for the money.”
“And once paid, he will stop?”
“He knows our resources are not infinite. If he gets too greedy, he knows we’ll have no choice but to involve the authorities.”
“Is everything in your world always so logical, or are you just
practiced at making it sound that way?” I struggled to keep my voice as sure as his, to not let him hear I was furious with his calm logic—and furious with myself, because he was manipulating me, and I didn’t know how to stop it.
“The lamppost was a heads-up, a little notification. Obviously it will be followed by a money demand, with instructions.”
“What if you’re wrong? The police can give you security that Stanley Novak and his band of gatekeepers can’t.”
“Do you recall the two groundsmen digging in the hole yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“A tall man and a shorter one?”
“Yes.”
“Describe the shorter one.”
I thought for a minute and realized I couldn’t, at least not well. The tall man had drawn my attention; he’d done the talking.
“The shorter groundsman is from a private security firm,” the Bohemian said. “You didn’t see it, but he had a gun. There are others as well, acting as landscapers or contractors.”
“None of them did any good yesterday.”
“It was outside the gate.”
“The police need to see the note, and they need to know about yesterday.”
“Let me handle this, Vlodek.” He clicked off so smoothly it took a few seconds to realize I was listening to dead air. He’d flicked me off like lint.
I went over to the Mr. Coffee, thought better of it, and balanced my cup on the pile in the sink instead. I was already breathing like I was running uphill. I went outside to sit on the city bench facing the river.
The only thing worse than being a paper tiger is being the last one to realize it. I could growl in the air all I wanted, but the Bohemian had me pegged. He knew I wouldn’t call the cops.
Point One: I wasn’t a licensed investigator, or an attorney, but the Bohemian would have checked around, learned I always respected the confidentiality of my clients. Point Two: If I ever did go to the cops against the wishes of a client, I’d be ruined in the business I was trying to rebuild, and afterward, the best I could hope for would be a greeter’s job in a discount store. Point Three: Amanda’s three-million-dollar house was involved. She didn’t have much cash, just that big-buck residence and a fortune in art. Losing the house would jeopardize her ability to keep the artworks, and the Bohemian knew I’d go to any length to protect her.
Points One, Two, and Three were why the Bohemian hired me in the first place; he was sure of the control he’d have over me before he sent Stanley flashing a check. I could protest and threaten all I wanted, but the Bohemian knew I wouldn’t go to the cops.
But there was a Point Four: The sand was running out of the hourglass. The Gateville bombs couldn’t be kept quiet forever. A Board member would tell his wife to get the kids out of town; she’d tell someone, and someone else—a cleaning woman, a gardener working under an open window—would hear and sell it as a news tip to a radio station for twenty-five bucks. Word was going to get out, unless the bomber sent a note soon, he got paid, and he went away. Quickly—and for good.
Point Four was where my brain dead-ended: Why did the Bohemian think he could get the whole thing resolved before it became public, and why was he so certain that, once paid, the bomber would go away forever?
What did the Bohemian know?
I watched the river, but the river offered up nothing but empty eddies.
I got up. Maybe the answer was simply that the Bohemian understood money motives better than I. He was managing multimillion-dollar portfolios while I sniffed varnish, trying to
cobble up enough for a roof and a hot water heater. I went into the turret for my gym bag.
Except for the trucks lumbering through town along Thompson Avenue, the streets were empty. It was nine thirty in the morning, too early for the commerce of Rivertown, too early for the pawnshops, video arcades, bars, and working girls. That would change when the lizards got the condo builders to start stacking young urban professionals along the Willahock. Then the latte emporiums, trendy clothiers, and organic-broccoli peddlers would come, daytime places for daytime people with daytime needs. Until then, Rivertown would stay a nighttime town.
And that was fine, at least until I could finish the rehab, get my zoning changed, and unload the turret. Because when the developers did come, the first thing they’d push over was the health center, to chase out the drunks. Yups won’t pay a half million for a condo if they’re going to be greeted mornings by some grizzled fellow in urine-stained pants, savoring an eye-opening splash of muscatel against their bricks because he couldn’t find his way back to his room.
I needed that health center, too, except I needed it for the hot water and for the times when the inside of the turret got too tight.
I pulled into the lot and crept around the potholes to the husk of the doorless Buick. The locker room was empty except for the guy asleep on a towel bag. He had a room upstairs but slept down by the lockers in the summer because it was cooler. I put on my workout duds, went up, and walked more laps than I ran, so my gasping wouldn’t drown out my voice of reason, should it decide to speak up. It didn’t. After forty-five minutes, I went down to the showers, no closer to understanding why the Bohemian thought he could buy off the bomber for good.
I spent the rest of July like a man waiting for bad news from a doctor, trying not to jump at the first ring of the phone or tap at the
door, for word that another note—or worse, another bomb—had come to Gateville.
I sent out letters to former clients, newsy little bundles of lies about how busy my firm was, yadda, yadda, yadda.
I called the roofers, had them come out again, peppered them with too many questions about how each would fix my roof. And then waited by the door for Elvis to come huffing over, so we could yell at each other while he inspected my roof and I inspected his complexion.
I hung dark oak trim on the first floor of the turret, CD player blasting Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Blues men from blue times.
I went to the health center every day and laughed at Nick’s jokes and did circles around the track like I was doing in life.
And I went nuts a little, because all I’d really been doing was waiting for another bomb to go off. So, on the tenth long day after I’d messengered my report to the Bohemian, I launched a minor war against city hall.
I’d spent the morning and all afternoon on a long ladder, caulking the gaps around the slit windows on the second and third floors, and being subjected to the whining voice of some adolescent outside city hall, counting to three, over and over, sound-checking a P.A. system. Across the lawn, workers were setting up green-and-white-striped umbrella tables along the terrace, and they’d hung a huge RIVERTOWN RENAISSANCE IS READY banner across the front of city hall. The lizards were holding their first evening soiree for contractors and developers.
The reception started at five o’clock, and from my ladder, it looked to be high style for city hall: candles on the tables on the broad limestone terrace overlooking the Willahock, strings of brightly colored Christmas lights woven into the bushes, an out-of tune, two-sax-with-drums trio, and, judging by the volume of shrill laughter as the soiree got under way, plenty of booze. No
doubt there were also cocktail wienies on toothpicks, but I can’t verify that because none of the lizards thought to acknowledge me, up on my ladder, by sending over a sampling on a paper plate.
I quit working about eight o’clock. The sun was going down, and I had a pounding headache from the off-key music and the liquor laughter from next door. I had just slid the ladder into the shed when the combo stopped abruptly, as if somebody had mercifully pulled the plug of the P.A. The sudden absence of missed chords calmed the night like painkillers on a toothache, and I stopped outside the shed to breathe in the quiet.
The silence didn’t last. A minute later, the two saxophones attacked the first notes of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The drummer fought to keep in time. And some fool flipped a switch.
Four spotlights hit the turret with enough mega-wattage to light a microsurgery. The combo screeched louder; people clapped. I froze, caught in the glare, staring into the white light coming from the city hall they’d built with my grandfather’s limestone, on the land they’d stolen from my grandmother. It was supposed to be high drama, the stark illuminating of the symbol of Rivertown’s renaissance. But to me it was assault.
The bastards didn’t bother to turn off the spotlights after the last of the developers had tipsied away. The slit windows of the turret are narrow, too skinny to admit much sunlight, but that night the interior of the turret was as bright as a bus station waiting room. I couldn’t sleep at all, from the glare and the anger, and spent the night on the roof, in a small patch of shadow cast by the top of the stone wall, staring at the floodlit water of the Willahock. If not now, then soon, the turret would be floodlit all night, every night.
And sometime, just before dawn, a switch of my own got flipped.
The next morning I pulled into the parking lot of Mabel’s Mature Fashions. I’d found it in the yellow pages.
“What are the largest-sized ladies’ undergarments you carry?” I asked the pink-wigged woman in the orange tunic behind the counter. She looked to be sporting the very sizes I was interested in.
She raised one caked eyebrow.
“Not for me,” I added quickly. My skin felt hot, and I wanted to giggle. It was probably from the lack of sleep.
“Fifty-quadruple-D in bras, 6X in panties.” She looked me up and down. “Might be a little large.”
I ignored it. “Do they come in colors?”
The other caked eyebrow went up. “White only in those sizes, sir, but they’re all cotton. You could dye them to suit yourself.”
I turned away to clear my eyes as I fumbled in my wallet for my credit card. This was not funny; this was war. I bought six sets.
After Mabel’s, I went to a hardware store for clothesline, clothespins, and Rit Dye. Back at the turret, I boiled water on my hotplate, mixed the dye, and became Michelangelo. As a kid, I’d tie-dyed all my T-shirts once, in a quest to become a ten-year-old hippie. That had been decades before, but I hadn’t lost my touch. I transformed the panties and bras, big enough for prizewinning pumpkins, into bright, psychedelic works of what could be called art. I spread them out on my table saw and over the plastic chairs, and when they were dry, I set them on top of my new coil of clothesline.
They would be the battle flags of my war against city hall.
The second reception was the same as the first: umbrella tables, colored lights, eighty-proof chatter, and the same two saxophones, sounding like they’d wasted not one minute on practice. As the last of the sun disappeared from the sky, the combo went silent, just as it had during the first reception. Only this time, I was behind the turret, tensed for the first shrieking notes of 2001.
A minute passed, then another, and then both saxophones bleated into the night air, fighting to approximate the same note.
The four spotlights hit the turret with white light.
I started feeding my flags onto the clothesline I’d strung on the property line facing city hall.
I played them out slowly, letting the bright colors unfurl with their own drama. By the time the second pair of tie-dyed 6X panties—these scarlet, gold, and Kelly green—hit the white light and started flapping in the night breeze, the cocktail chatter next door had dissolved into shrieks of raucous laughter. The band stopped, confused, as the people roared, louder and louder. I fed two bras, the first one magenta and yellow, the second neon green, onto the line. The people clapped and cheered.
And that brought Elvis.
He stormed across the lawn, chasing his own shadow made long by the spotlights behind him. He wore a greasy powder blue dinner jacket that had the look of something discarded after a prom.
“You got a woman living here, Elstrom,” he screamed, his face contorted, his hair wall glistening in the glow of the floodlights. A hundred yards behind him, the well-lubricated contractors and developers shrieked, drunk enough to think this was a skit, done for their amusement.
“This is not underwear, Elvis,” I announced. “It’s art.” I clipped a bright purple and orange bra that I was particularly proud of onto the line. In the shadows of city hall, the developers hooted and clapped, a hundred happy hands.
That infuriated him further. “It’s underwear, damn it.” Bits of spittle bubbled at the corners of his mouth. “Get her out here so I can throw both of you out.”
“There’s no woman, Elvis.” I smiled and bent down to my laundry basket for something pink and yellow.
“When I catch her, you’re gone.”
At that point, someone must have cued the combo, because they took off into their approximation of “Fly Me to the Moon,” each saxophone flying in a different key. It made further discussion
impossible. I closed my mouth and beamed at Elvis, mellow as a panda on Percodan.
Across the lawn the people kept clapping, and the drummer began singing about Jupiter and Mars.
Elvis wasn’t done. He leaned to within an inch of my nose. “What the hell do you want, Elstrom?” he screamed, spraying spittle into my face.
“Change my zoning to residential or commercial. I’ll sell and leave,” I yelled back, waving at the still-clapping crowd behind the glare of the floodlights.
“No can do,” he shouted. His lips gave a final twitch, and he stalked off. Someone at last thought to kill the floods, and the developers gave a final burst of applause.
My stunt was stupid and childish. That night, I slept better than I had since I’d moved into the turret.
The lizards held two more receptions. They didn’t risk the floodlights again, but the ambient glow from the colored Christmas bulbs was enough to light up my undies, and the effect was mostly the same. Each time I’d start stringing my flags, the crowd would roar, and Elvis would march over, his oily face shining red above the pale blue of his prom jacket.
“Change my damn zoning, and I’ll leave,” I’d yell.
“No can do,” he’d scream back.
And the drummer would sing about Jupiter and Mars.
That was how July died. Every evening I ran up my flags, to remind the lizards that I was twitching for a fight. But after the fourth reception, no more were scheduled, and that was just as well. My little battles were just diversions, things to keep my mind from circling around what I was really doing, which was holding my breath, waiting for Gateville.
So I felt a sick kind of relief when, at the steaming beginning of August, I answered the door just after lunch and found Stanley
Novak standing outside, clutching another tan envelope. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The sweat on his face said it all.
I’d been varnishing, and Stanley didn’t look like he could survive the fumes, so I led him down to sit on the bench by the river. I took the new freezer bag out of the envelope and read the note on the child’s paper through the plastic: NEXT TIME SOMEBODY DIES. FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND SUNDAY NIGHT SAME PLACE. The perfect pencil lettering, the computer printing on the envelope, and the Chicago postmark were the same as the first letter’s.
I looked at Stanley.
“It came this morning. Mr. Chernek wants it analyzed to make sure it’s the same guy before he pays.”
“It’s the same, Stanley; you can tell just by looking at it. What I want to know is—”
He stood up. “Please, Mr. Elstrom, have it analyzed. Then we’ll talk.”
I didn’t waste the words. He was a blind pawn on the chessboard, like me. I walked him up to his station wagon and told him I’d have it checked right away.
I drove to Leo’s. Up on the porch, television sounds came through the window screens. I knocked, waited, knocked again. After five minutes, Ma opened the front door against the chain, her head still aimed at the T.V. in the living room. People were grunting. Leo was in L.A., she said, but would be home that evening. I passed the envelope in, and as I did, Mr. Jack Daniel himself came wafting out through the crack in the door. Cocktails had started early. I made a polite grab to retrieve the envelope, but she was already shutting the door. The grunting inside had reached a fevered pitch. I let it go. I could only hope she’d drop the envelope on the hall table as she teetered back to her chair.
Leo had told me she only drank when he was out of town. As long as he kept his trips to one-nighters, he’d said, he didn’t worry. He even brought her back the disposable plastic hotel cups she
buried at the bottom of the kitchen garbage so she could think she’d left no visible evidence of her drinking.
I called Leo’s cell phone before starting the Jeep and told his voice mail I’d left another note with Ma but that she’d been vaguely disengaged. He’d understand. Hurry home, Leo.
It was two o’clock. The turret would feel like a cage until Leo looked at the letter and I could press for a meeting with the Bohemian.
I drove west, meandering, wrestling with the last words on the note: SAME PLACE. Words that meant the Bohemian or the Board already knew where to drop the money, words that meant there had been other communications, letters, maybe even phone calls they hadn’t told me about. Fair enough. I was the document guy, hired to be a cog, not the whole wheel. I didn’t need to know.
But need and want are two different things.
I swung over to Thompson Avenue and headed west to Gateville. If I showed up unexpectedly, I might be able to open up Stanley Novak about what had happened in the past.
From the crest of the hill, Gateville once again looked like paradise: green lawns, big houses, shading oaks, all nestled inside a protecting wall in its own little valley. I drove down the hill.
A stake truck loaded with plastic flats of flowers was stopped diagonally in front of the wrought-iron gate, blocking the entrance. Its engine was off, but its driver was still behind the wheel. I pulled onto the shoulder across the street and shut off the Jeep’s motor.
Two masons in white overalls were tuck-pointing the outside wall, troweling small amounts of mortar from wood pallets into the brick joints. It looked to be slow, painstaking work, pushing in the little amounts of mortar and then smoothing the joints with a jointer. One tuck-pointer sang to himself, his lips moving softly.
Two pale-blue-uniformed guards came out from between the white pillars, waited for a break in the traffic, and crossed the street toward the Jeep. Each wore a gun belt, something the Gateville
guards had never done when I’d lived there. The retaining straps of their holsters were unsnapped.
It was good. The landscaping truck blocking the entrance and the slow-moving tuckpointers were security. The one tuckpointer hadn’t been singing; he’d been speaking into a microphone to alert the guardhouse that a Jeep had stopped across the street.
I put both hands on top of the steering wheel where they were easily visible. One guard came up to my side window as the other moved to the front of the Jeep.
“Dek Elstrom, working with Stanley Novak. Would you like to see a driver’s license?”
The guard nodded.
I kept my right hand on the wheel and extracted my wallet with my left. I thumbed it open, slid out the license, and passed it out. The guard bent down to compare my face with the photo, then backed away from the Jeep to use his cell phone. After a minute he came back and handed me my license.
“Mr. Novak said if you need to speak with him, to call him at home.”
“I just saw him a couple of hours ago. Is he ill?”
“Not him. His wife.”
“Nothing serious?”
The guard shrugged. “Call him at home if you need him.”
He motioned to his partner, and the two guards walked back across the street. I watched them disappear between the white pillars and thought about another time.
Nine months before, in the black of the night of Halloween, Stanley Novak had escorted me out from between those same pillars, at the direction of my ex-wife.