Chapter 33
Little Jack Coroner Sits on a Foreigner

BARRINGTON HAD THE gall to urge a return to Terra do Cão that very night, but Edgar refused—first by railing, then by whimpering, finally by conking out cold by the fountain. Only when Barrington roused him before first light—meaning Barrington himself arose before noon—did Edgar register how soberly his conventionally indifferent mentor apprehended the situation.

Bumbling and bleary, Edgar plopped into the Saab’s bucket seat, failing to see the necessity for this expedition. Hadn’t he sworn off this drill, and if so why was he heading once more to that filthy phone booth?

He opted to call his contact at the New York Times, where at midnight they’d still be putting the paper to bed. The night staff secretary on the foreign desk had grown so genial that, in more conducive circumstances, he might have asked her out.

“Ceendy?” Edgar was so exhausted he probably sounded drunk; in fact, maybe he was still drunk. “Thees ees Os Soldados Ousados de Barba, sim? . . . No, no bomba. Just, we change zhe code phrase, sim?”

She interjected something puzzled like, “Again?” but Edgar let it go. He wanted to get this over with and hit the sack.

“You ready? You have pencil? . . . That’s right, lápis! Muito bom!” (Edgar’s regular calls had inspired Cindy to take an introductory course in Portuguese at the New School.) “Last code we decide go, ‘Jack Splat was once too fat, his wife could be so mean.’ Esta bem? New code: ‘Leettle Jack Coroner sat on a foreigner, eating his words and clay.’ ” Edgar’s latest fad in code phrases was fractured nursery rhymes, and usually Cindy would repeat the couplet to confirm. Instead he heard crackling silence, so Edgar decided to make this one long and racy: “ ‘He stuck in his cock, and pulled out a sock—’ ”

“Mister, Mister SOB man,” Cindy interrupted, as she wouldn’t usually dare. “There’s no call to use that language.”

Impudent! “You want our new code phrase or not?”

“Not,” she snipped.

“Run that past me again?” Edgar forgot the accent.

“No, I don’t want your new code phrase,” she said primly. “One of you people called this afternoon and changed the Jack Splat to something else, which has already been distributed to staff. You’re not up to date.”

Edgar’s cheeks tingled. The last time he felt this chagrined was after a few months of “freelancing” and his platinum American Express card was declined at Tavern on the Green. “What, if I call up and claim a bomb with my Little-Jack-Coroner-sat-on-a-foreigner tag, the SOB doesn’t get credit?”

“Your responsibility would be reviewed, yes,” she explained, as if his account were overdrawn and he’d be considered for another card after a period of probation.

Edgar was enraged. Not only had those Creamie yahoos ransacked his house, but they’d filched his clout—the hard-earned clout of an organization whose reputation, like that of any respected family business, had taken years to build. This was a hostile takeover! At least now Edgar grasped why Barrington was so exercised about changing the code. As of last night, Edgar had been cut out of the loop. Without the current code phrase, the authority of any SOB statements he issued would be called into question.

“There’s—there’s been a split!” he sputtered.

“I’ll inform the editor,” Cindy said stiffly, and then softened. “And—I didn’t like the dirty stuff. But the first part—the coroner-foreigner thing—that was cute. Better than the other guy’s. His was kinda boring.”

Edgar said defeatedly, “I can imagine.”

Edgar did go to bed for a few feverish hours, during which he enfolded the entire SOB hoax into a dream from which he’d shortly awaken, just as the B-movie director escaped the sticky cinematic cul-de-sac with a hackneyed squiggly screen. Slitting his eyes open, he half-expected to glimpse his old blond-wooded bedstead on West Eighty-Ninth Street.

When he confronted Barrington’s bordello-red canopy instead, the last twenty-four hours restored themselves as belligerently real. Fair enough, Edgar concluded, burrowing further in his satinate cocoon, if the Creams had taken over the SOB, he’d effectively been bought out. They were welcome to it. The burdens of management had been lifted from his achy shoulders. Like any retired CEO, he could sleep late, eat well, and spend the rest of his days fishing.

But once fully, obnoxiously awake, Edgar glared over the duvets to accept that the SOB may have been Barrington’s ball, but he had run with it. Without being pumped up by Edgar’s faithfully frequent phone calls, that ball would have deflated into puckered historical oddity. If the Creams did anything untoward with that acronym, anything at all, it was his fault. But what could he do? There was nothing worse than feeling culpable, and powerless.

Hungry and hungover, Edgar dragged on his jeans and drowned himself in one of Bear’s oversize military jackets, which made him look suitably absurd. He felt so bewildered that no sit-down with Saddler would do—Saddler whose enticements to don his own demigod mantle had lured him into this fiasco to start with. No, Edgar was frantic to talk to someone who was actually there.

“Special K!” Nicola exclaimed fondly. She’d laundered the boarding school epithet into an endearment with the same thrifty ingenuity that converted her old Raleigh bicycle seat into a stool. “You look ridiculous!” she cried, taking in his get-up. “You also look dreadful. Do come in.”

“Listen, is Henry here?”

“No, he’s off covering the big story. I’m surprised you’re not as well.”

Edgar didn’t ask what story. He didn’t want to know. “Gotta talk. Better it’s just us.”

He nestled into her bunchy hand-upholstered couch, propping his head against the pillow lumpily crocheted with the Barking Rat logo, while Nicola rustled up coffee. A stained-glass mobile poppled sun blobs onto the throw rugs’ strange off-center stripes. Since it was Nicola’s “mistakes” that made her handiwork loveable, Edgar prayed that the same could be said of people.

“I heard on the radio there was a split!” Nicola shouted from the kitchen. “In the SOB! According to one pundit, a splinter group may want to call a ceasefire!”

“Yeah,” Edgar slurred, head back. “There’s an element in the SOB that’s had enough alright.” All the way here he’d rehearsed what he planned to say, but hadn’t come up with quite the optimal, well, transitional phrase.

Coffee arrived. The steamed milk was sprinkled with cocoa, the mugs glazed in celadon with salamanders scampering the handles. Right now Edgar wished he could spend the rest of his life sipping this fortifying brew while Nicola Tremaine massaged his feet.

“What was so urgent?” she asked cheerfully.

That fantasy with the feet would only wash if Nicola were still speaking to him.

“I, uh, owe you an apology.” Edgar rubbed his forehead and avoided Nicola’s gaze. “In a way, I’ve been lying to you. I never meant for things to get so far out of hand. But it’s too late now, and I have to get this off my chest.” He smeared his hands down his cheeks to inspect the palms as if they belonged to somebody else.

When he glanced up, Nicola was leaning forward, considering his face intently. “It’s Barrington, isn’t it,” she intuited. “You know where he is.”

Rattled, Edgar broke stride. “Um, no. I haven’t the faintest idea where he is, or if he’s alive or dead. If I had, I’d have said so.”

Her eyes drilled him another long beat before Nicola sank back in her chair. “Sorry,” she said wiltedly. “Of course you would.”

“Christ, you still jump when the phone rings, don’t you?” Edgar asked, peering at her sunken expression with incredulity. “But it’s been—”

“I know. Gave myself away there, didn’t I?” She smiled. “And I was terribly rude. Here you came to confide in me, and I leap right into my own neurosis.”

“I’ve got a few quirks myself.”

“Let’s see, what else could it be?” Nicola mused. “Angela’s begged you to come back. You’re tempted, but she’s still ‘friends’ with Jamesie, and even considering it makes you feel ashamed of yourself.”

“I’ve a whole file of old letters to Angela on my hard drive, but not one of them got sent. Or I used to have a file,” he mumbled. Shit—those letters, which had morphed into his journal . . . Verdade could now scroll through Edgar’s personal life at will. “That’s not it.”

Nicola leaned forward again, and if Edgar didn’t know any better he’d think she was coming on to him. “You’re in the CIA?” she teased.

As she bent so far across the tray that her hair trailed into her steamed milk, Edgar realized with horror that she knew very well he’d got over Angela ages ago; that she was expecting a declaration of love. He’d have liked nothing better than to fall on bended knee, but now was not the time. Jesus, this was embarrassing.

“Nick, the SOB—” he began.

At this unexpected detour to politics, Nicola drew back, wiping the milk from her split ends with hasty self-consciousness. He gave her a moment to rearrange both her hair and her expectations.

“The SOB isn’t real,” said Edgar bluntly. “It doesn’t exist. It was just Barrington’s idea of a ha-ha.”

Her face remained unchanged. “Edgar, check your calendar,” she said evenly. “It’s not April first.”

“Heard of that American tourist trap called ‘Santa’s Workshop,’ where it’s Christmas all year long? Well, in Barba—” Edgar’s eyes met hers—“every day is April first.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Her voice was calm.

“Well, it sounds more dastardly than it is, or was, at least at first . . .”

“Start at the beginning,” she urged neutrally. Though her body language remained languid, inviting, her temperature was dropping. Edgar had to talk fast, before her demeanor cooled from tepid to icy.

Edgar told her everything—or almost. About the statements, the surgical gloves, the phone booth. The accent, the atrocity poaching, even the interview with Jasmine and the Groucho glasses. He did save the Creamie break-in at Abrab Manor for later, to give her a chance to accustom herself to the core concept. And the other bit he tactfully omitted was that he’d become inseparable pals with Barrington Saddler—whom he’d never met. She only interrupted to ask simple, practical questions.

When he finished, Edgar fell back onto the couch, weak with relief. He’d had no idea that keeping his eccentric hobby to himself had taken such a toll. He hadn’t felt so liberated since submitting his resignation at Lee & Thole.

However, that untethered sensation on quitting the firm had proved grievously short-lived. It was the briefest of windows: when you were released from one life, but weren’t yet forced to face the life that followed. As Edgar had recognized lifting off from Kennedy, you could never perfectly leave. You were always arriving somewhere else. And Edgar arrived somewhere else the next time Nicola opened her mouth.

“That,” she said slowly, “is the most juvenile story I have ever heard.”

“You don’t believe me? But I—”

“Oh, I believe you,” she cut him off briskly. “It’s the very juvenility of your story that makes it credible. Is this what I’ve heard about all my life, ‘boys being boys’? Do you really think people are toys?”

Edgar realized that he might never have seen Nicola angry.

“Tell me,” she went on, and somehow the fact that she kept her voice low and steady instead of screaming made the drubbing harder to take. “Are there any limits? If someone released smallpox on the New York subway, would you claim that? Or if bubonic plague were dropped from airplanes all over Europe, would you claim that?”

“The SOB was supposed to be harmless!” he protested. “No one would get killed who—”

“Yes, you explained all that—several times. But you’re aware that two Muslims were murdered in Novo Marrakech last night? In an anti-immigration riot?”

Edgar bundled the crocheted pillow against his stomach like a teddy bear. So that was the “big story.” “No,” he said forlornly. “I switched off the BBC last night. Lately the news makes me ill.”

“I can see why. It’s hard to imagine those immigrants would have been lynched if your ‘harmless’ prank hadn’t got, as you say, ‘out of hand.’ And is it surprising? In fact, isn’t an incident like that positively overdue?”

“How was I to know!”

“Oh, you mightn’t have been able to determine what, exactly, would come of those phone calls. But you should have known for certain that if anything came of them it would be bad!”

Edgar groped to reconstruct all those copacetic justifications his tempter had supplied. “It does a favor for victims’ families . . .” (How did that go?) “It’s better to have some object . . . somebody to blame, you know, instead of it just being, like, a drag . . .” Barrington’s phrasing had evidenced more flash.

“My husband is better off having his family’s tragedy turned into a ‘ha-ha’?”

“He’d only feel lousy if, you know, he found out, and, in the meantime, he’s got, like, an enemy, to, you know, hang on to—”

“The world suffers from a scarcity of enemies. In your view.”

“Well, I was trying, especially since, you know, Madrid, to make these guys who really do this shit, well, pissed off. I figured, if those bombs and all didn’t boost their own pet causes . . . maybe they’d give up.” If anyone was going to give up soon, it was Edgar. This wasn’t going over well, as Barrington would say, a-tall, a-tall.

“Your terrorist affiliates have handed in their notice? Out of frustration, your colleagues in the FARC have formed a book club instead.”

“No, but—”

“To the contrary, haven’t there been more bombings in the last few years than ever?”

“Well, maybe—”

“And wouldn’t watching Tomás Verdade incrementally get everything he wants inspire other groups to use the same disgusting tactics?”

Edgar retreated. “The SOB was Barrington’s idea!”

“Maybe, but no one forced you to keep making his ‘ha-ha’ phone calls, did they?”

“He left instructions! The code phrase! The gloves!”

“So in your version of Genesis, Eve eats the apple at gunpoint.”

Edgar didn’t care for her girly metaphor. “It was an interesting experiment, right? A social, I don’t know, psychology thing. I thought it was worth finding out what happens next.”

“I see. We’re not toys. We’re lab rats. Well, you’ve found out what happens. And you’ll keep finding out.”

“Nick, I said I was sorry. And if I had it all to do over again I’d . . .” Edgar pulled up short. He didn’t want to lie to her anymore, not even in the hypothetical.

“You’d what?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. For a little while,” Edgar confessed sheepishly, “it was fun.”

“Yes, it was Barrington’s brand of fun, but I am floored it was yours!” She could no longer sit, and paced. “When you first got here, you must have noticed how screwed up this place had become. How Barbans had fallen in love with the idea of themselves as dangerous. How a whole new political party had started here that would never have got off the ground without your SOB ‘ha-ha’—a party that does nothing but goad its followers to glory in their own murderousness! Wasn’t that enough evidence to demonstrate that what you found on Barrington’s floppy disks was poison?”

“Maybe I didn’t think it through,” said Edgar morosely. “When I first got here, nobody had been hurt, really—”

“People were badly hurt in that riot you and I got caught up in. Though now I see why you were so extravagantly glad no one was killed. Their blood would have been on your hands, wouldn’t it?”

Chin dropped, Edgar nodded.

Nicola flapped her hands in the air with uncharacteristic jerkiness. “I—I don’t understand. You have to help me out here. I don’t get it. I cannot for the life of me grasp why you would do such a thing. Can you explain? Please?” She really did appear to be begging, if only for some small scrap to hang on to that could keep her from detesting him.

But then, maybe she was doing Edgar a favor, since this was a question he’d never answered to his own satisfaction. As a stopgap theory, he could have bowed to Saddler’s charge that, in perpetuating the SOB, Edgar was planning to wow Nicola with his unsuspected dark side. But frankly, her recoil was no surprise. He’d known she’d go ballistic. Edgar hadn’t been trying to impress Nicola. He’d been trying to impress Barrington.