THE SAPSS CAPER scrolled through Edgar’s mind as he chugged down Rua da Evaporação the day after the bombing of Grant’s Tomb, though he hadn’t thought about the would-be swindle in ages. After all these years he could still run, though without the buoyant tirelessness of his late teens. He’d developed a middle-age affection for the indoor treadmill, with its reassuring readout of calories burned. But health clubs weren’t on offer in Cinziero, and Barrington sure as hell hadn’t installed a gym. There was no alternative to braving the elements outside.
That meant loping off with the massive front-door key in his shorts pocket, the key to the tower jingling against it, the heavy brass shaft hitting his thigh on every stride. He might have left the set behind and counted on Saddler to let him in, but he remembered Nicola’s caution: that Barrington was “unreliable on purpose.” Edgar always took the keys.
Besides, a rhythmic thump against his quadriceps was the least of his problems, and on the slog westward he sure couldn’t hear any jingling. White-noise whaaa roared in Edgar’s ears, though at least the blare obliterated the rasp of his own wheeze. Pounded into every yard across the scrubby plain, wooden flautas ventosas whooshed in the unified alarm of an oncoming-train whistle. The atmosphere bore down on Edgar’s chest as if Bebê Serio were blocking the way. Whipping down his nostrils, the gale dried his throat, while tears streaked his temples like rain on the side window of a speeding car.
There, that stumpy pera peluda tree up ahead, rotten fruit sliming the ground on its leeward side: his regular turn-around. Splatting a Nike in the purplish guck, Edgar held his breath to avoid the smell and slapped the rough bark of the tree in official acknowledgment that the hard bit was over.
Edgar pivoted, and suddenly his ears went quiet. Only the moan of the wind flutes remained, the countryside’s panpipes differentiating into separate notes a quarter tone apart and striking bittersweet minor chords. The return journey was almost effortless, his stride long and high. The tailwind made Edgar feel sixteen again, and newly freed from a hundred pounds of Entenmann’s raspberry coffee cake. Mentally, too, he was looser, lighter, and more prone to leaps as he skipped over violet pools of pera peluda goop to keep from slipping. On the slog westward, the sere landscape had looked ominous, branches scraggling like witch’s fingers, the flutes deep and dire, his quandary over whether to claim Grant’s Tomb for the SOB weighty and torturous. On the homeward leg, Barba’s hokey horror-movie theatrics seemed burlesque, and so did Edgar’s agonizing.
Funny, his destitution in Yardley’s locker room in the face of Falconer’s gauntlet, “anything you say!”—it bothered him only to a degree. The truly original mind was a rarity, perhaps a burden. So, however disappointing, your own limitations also let you off the hook. If Edgar wasn’t creative, ingenuity wasn’t his job. The notion to run the marathon for real, for example: Edgar had simply taken Falconer’s initial concept an extra step. Edgar was a natural executor. He didn’t come up with great ideas himself, but he knew one when he saw one, and he could bring an inspiration to life.
Once he collapsed, dripping, onto the pillows by the fountain, Edgar was a little offended when he failed to draw a single disparaging word from Abrab’s resident hedonist. Saddler looked coldly indifferent.
“Man, running toward the coast is like jogging in petroleum jelly,” said Edgar, smearing his sweaty cheek with a sleeve.
Listlessly, Barrington browsed an Economist, pinching the pages with distaste. Rather than lounge amid the pillows in a convivial sprawl, he sat remotely upright in the atrium’s only chair, legs crossed, one silk slipper lifted at a finicky tilt. In the context of Barrington’s flamboyant wardrobe, the maroon smoking jacket was subdued. The hazy sunset filtering through skylights had grown too dim for reading, but Barrington hadn’t lit a lantern or switched on the overhead, as if to deliberately make the room dingy. Oozing misanthropic malaise, Saddler looked as he might have in pre-SOB exile, week after uneventful week sifting by like so much sand.
“Nick seems to think you’re alive,” Edgar prodded. “Some postcard arrived, blank. She couldn’t have been more over the moon at the declaration of world peace.”
Flap, flap.
Often as Edgar had coached himself that the best thing with cranky prima donnas is to leave them alone, he compulsively beseeched Barrington for attention. “Heard about Grant’s Tomb?” he asked, his voice high and tentative. Pathetic. He might as well have dropped to his knees and blubbered, Don’t you like me anymore?
Barrington grunted a churlish affirmative.
“You should have seen the hacks go berserk at the Rat last night,” Edgar nattered, unable to check this shameless appeal. “Hulbert full of stratagems, Collier frantically punching that flashy cellular phone . . . If the SOB doesn’t claim it, they’ll be crushed.”
A sigh whinnied through Saddler’s substantial nose. Not glancing up, he turned another page.
A little camaraderie was the least Edgar could expect, wasn’t it? “I was thinking of claiming it,” said Edgar irritably.
“Then do.”
“I was under the impression you were keen for me to carry on your pioneering work,” said Edgar aloofly, though the scale of his relief that Saddler was at last speaking to him at all was humiliating. Gathering his threadbare T-shirt like the shreds of his dignity, he wiped his face. “Now you don’t seem to care.”
Barrington closed the magazine in his lap. “Why do you care if I care? Suit yourself, Eddie. I couldn’t be arsed either way.” With a flick of his wrist, Barrington tossed the Economist in the pool.
As the magazine sogged and submerged, Edgar’s enthusiasm for paramilitary farce sank disconcertingly with it. He knelt and scooped the periodical from the pool, as if to rescue his prospective project from suddenly seeming all wet.
“Have you any idea what it’s like when your every acquaintance is desperate to please?” Saddler volunteered flatly. “It’s living hell.”
“Then you can’t know much about hell,” Edgar returned readily.
“You think Picasso really relished the fact that in his heyday he could play tic-tac-toe on a napkin and sell it for thousands of francs? I doubt it very much. A market that blindly elevates your every sneeze to genius invites disdain for your own enterprise.”
“I thought you got off on disdain.”
“I didn’t used to be disdainful. I once had respect for any number of people, before they developed too much respect for me. Or whatever it was.” Barrington stood and craned his chin toward the ceiling, rubbing the back of his neck.
“You know, it’s not true—” though he spoke quietly, Barrington’s rich, round baritone filled the marble hall as he paced measuredly by the pool—“as Trudy Sisson is fond of promoting, that I ‘hate myself’ or feel ‘unlovable.’ I find my own company tolerable enough. But everywhere I go, my company is sought above anyone else’s. That is not a boast, Eddie. It is a fact. So I ask you: whose company can I covet? Whom am I meant to revere, Eddie? You? You already lionize me; we can’t turn the tables at this late date. For whom do I wait to walk in the door? Who do I hope will come to the party? Who’s to be my idol, if I’m perpetually doomed to be yours?”
This was the first time Saddler had ever confided in him personally, and Edgar was touched. He felt frantic not to blow it, to break the spell.
“Ever hear of the ‘impostor syndrome’?” Edgar asked diffidently. “It’s a problem especially for professionals—doctors, lawyers. You work and study and aspire away and suddenly someone hands you a piece of paper that says, okay, you’re a lawyer. A lawyer! And you don’t feel any different. You know you’re still that kid with a Spyder bike who shoplifted Ho-Hos. You think you’re a fraud. It can get pretty bad, this terror of being discovered. Happened to me, I think—and I dealt with it by debunking the whole profession instead of just myself. If a former fat boy looking for love could be an attorney, bar membership wasn’t worth much. I figure the impostor syndrome applies to adulthood in general. After all, being a grown-up is disillusioning. I guess being a fetishized grown-up is disillusioning in spades.”
“Quite,” Barrington agreed dolorously. “Apparently, I’m as compelling as people get.” The assertion was steeped in disappointment.
Edgar wanted to reassure Saddler that he seemed a likable enough fellow, except it was Saddler’s very likableness that depressed the man. Edgar considered a variation, about how Saddler seemed a stand-up guy, but that was a lie. Saddler was a selfish, unprincipled, untrustworthy troublemaker. (Consequently, the man was impervious to inversion—since how do you upend faithlessness and nihilism into qualities that are any less appealing?) Edgar gave up. Nicola was right. Enough voyeurs had anguished over the nature of Barrington’s soul.
“So what’s the verdict?” Edgar asked instead. “Think I should claim Grant’s Tomb for the Sobs?”
“I told you, I don’t give a toss!” This time, Barrington kicked a whole pillow into the pool.
That pillow would take forever to dry out, and would mildew in the meantime, but the Saddlers of this world never considered the workaday consequences of their theatrical impulses. Edgar didn’t carp—Bear would call him a Girl Guide again—though in holding his tongue Edgar appreciated how Barrington tyrannized acquaintances with the threat of his disapproval. However the Big B might disparage it, that unshakable likableness protected Saddler from ever staying up nights dithering over whether Eddie disapproved of him. If Edgar Kellogg or Win Pyre got difficult, there were plenty more sycophants in the sea.
“I was only asking what you thought,” said Edgar stiffly. “Making conversation.”
“Bollocks,” Barrington boomed. “You want my palsy-walsy complicity. Bear and Eddie against the world. You’re only considering the claim in the first place to prove to me you’ve got the bottle—to make me happy. Well, I don’t wish to be obliged to be happy to make you happy. Do what you want, Eddie. I am sick to death of being abjured that because I’m in a filthy humor, or because I don’t feel like coming out to play today, I have crushed the tender petals of some nonentity’s bloody feelings. Why do you think I vanished? Maybe I was tired of mattering so much.”
Truthfully, Edgar had never exactly sat himself down and dwelled on what he thought of claiming Grant’s Tomb for the SOB, irrespective of Saddler’s opinion. “Well,” he supposed out loud, “I do wonder if, when you take fraudulent credit for a terrorist attack, you’re suggesting that, even if you didn’t do it, you sort of wish you had.”
“Right over my head.” It wasn’t. Barrington meant that handwringing of any description bored him silly.
“And I also worry,” said Edgar, “about getting caught.”
“My innocuous prank, illegal?” Barrington scoffed.
“Oh, nobody could do you for murder or conspiracy. But at the very least, you could be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Wasting police time. The FBI’s involved; bingo, federal offense. Frankly, I don’t understand why you’ve never been arrested.”
“Low tech,” Barrington advised. “That’s the secret. In all those film thrillers, it’s getting fancy that trips the culprits up. All you need for this gambit is a telephone. Even the SOB statements, which are optional—bit of stationery, a stamp.”
“The risk still isn’t zero.”
“The escapade wouldn’t be much fun with no risk at all.”
Granted; the adrenal rush of the last twenty-four hours had been intoxicating.
“On the other hand,” Edgar reckoned, “I don’t feel like going back to New York.”
“Better,” Barrington commended. “Solid self-serving argument.”
“And as you’ve said, there’d be no harm done that hasn’t been done already.”
“Not so far,” said Saddler brightly.
“What do you mean?”
Saddler faced his palms up in coy innocence. “As I said. Not so far.”
Edgar eyed Barrington warily. “And if the hoax is neither good nor bad, well. It’s more interesting to keep the SOB alive a while longer, isn’t it?”
“Now you’re talking. But what about your King for a Day option? That would be ‘interesting’: turning me in.”
Edgar averted his face, abashed. “That might feel, um—traitorous, at this point.”
“You feel loyal to me? We’ve never even met.”
“I know you’re sick of folks liking you. And I haven’t quite decided if I like you, frankly. But I do feel a warped kinship with you. Maybe that makes me loyal, by way of being loyal to myself.”
“I don’t see how we’re the least bit similar,” said Barrington cuttingly.
“The main thing we have in common is we both bore easily.” Edgar stood to strip off his soggy T-shirt and wipe down his chest. “And I’m bored. I’m even bored with blabbing to you. I didn’t become a journalist to sample the world’s suck-ass beers.”
With that, Edgar marched into the living room and picked up the phone.
“Are you insane?” Barrington shouted at his back.
“Probably.” Edgar dialed.
Barrington pressed the button to disconnect. “The secret is low tech, not low IQ. Take minimal precautions, please. I thought you read the files. There’s a pay phone in Terra do Cão whose location is apt.”
Edgar did feel stupid. A call to a newspaper was unlikely to be traced, but there was no need to run that risk. Red-faced, he trooped upstairs, grabbed a fistful of escudos from atop the jar in the study, tripped quickly up the tower’s spiral staircase to snap on some rubber gloves, and ducked into the bedroom to pull on some jeans. After running, he should have washed up first, but this impulse was so wild and patently foolhardy that he was reluctant to test it with a contemplative bath.
Downstairs, Edgar paused at the front door. “You think I’m a copycat.”
“Of course,” said Barrington cheerfully.
“Well, I’m not arsed if you do.”
“That’s the spirit! Oh, and before you go. May I assume that you’re taking full responsibility for this decision?”
“Why?” asked Edgar suspiciously.
“We agree that if anything regrettable happens as a consequence, it’s not my fault.”
“What could happen?” asked Edgar brusquely. “The bomb’s gone off already.”
“Oh, nothing, nothing at all. I simply don’t . . .” Barrington fluttered his fingers.
“What?”
“I don’t want to hear about it, is all.”
“What’s to hear about?”
Barrington smiled with a bashful shrug. Escudos clinking in one pocket and the other bulging with Saddler’s goofy homemade kazoo, Edgar lunged out the door. Foom, the vento slapped him in the face with the sure knowledge that in crossing that threshold he had also crossed a line that could prove difficult to sneak back over.