beating of his heart or maybe the wind in the branches. Or else something that didn’t come from outside but from inside. Maybe the last words he and Matt Corey had said to each other, many years earlier, were echoing in his mind.
Russell thought it best at this point to clarify his own role. ‘I’m here because I’m working in collaboration with the New York Police Department. It’s a privilege I was given because I had some information they thought would help them. If you talk about it to me, you have my word that I’ll tell them only what’s absolutely necessary to stop the attacks, without involving you.’
Ben said nothing, and still did not turn around. Russell decided to insist on the gravity of the situation.
‘More than a hundred people have died, Ben. And others will die. I can’t say how many, but next time the death toll could be even higher.’
The old man started speaking without turning around. ‘When I met him, Matt was in a reformatory up north, near the state border. I’d won the contract to renovate the building. When we got there and started putting up the scaffolding, the other kids looked at us suspiciously. Some of them made fun of us. But Matt was interested – he liked the way things kept changing in front of his eyes. He asked me questions, wanted to know what we were doing and how we were doing it. In the end I was convinced, and I asked the warden if he could work with us. The warden wasn’t too crazy about the idea at first, but he agreed in the end, though he warned me the boy was a difficult character. His family background was enough to make anyone shudder.’
Russell realized that Ben was reliving an important moment of his life. He didn’t know why, but he had the feeling he was the first person to hear any of this.
‘I became fond of the boy. He was quiet and touchy, but he was a quick learner. When he left reformatory, I took him to work for me permanently and gave him that room to live in. There was a gleam in his eyes when he went in there for the first time. It was the first place he’d ever lived in that was really his.’
The old man moved away from the window and came and sat down again facing Russell.
‘Matt soon became the son I never had. And my right-hand man. It was the other workers who gave him the nickname Little Boss, because of how he ran things whenever I was away. If he’d stayed, I’d have left him the business, instead of selling it to the asshole who bought it. But one day he told me he’d volunteered for Vietnam.’
‘He volunteered? I didn’t know that.’
‘This is the really lousy part of the story. The kind of story that makes you ashamed to be a man.’
Russell said nothing, but waited. Ben had decided to share with him a bitter pill he’d never, in all that time, managed to swallow alone.
‘One day we were called in to work on an extension to the house of the county judge. Herbert Lewis Swanson, God curse him wherever he is. That was when Matt met Karen, the judge’s daughter. I was there the first time they met. I knew right away that something had happened between them. And I also realized it’d lead to nothing but trouble.’
The old man smiled at the memory of that love.
‘They started seeing each other in secret. It may have been the only happy time in Matt’s life. Sometimes I like to kid myself that the time he spent with me was happy, too.’
‘I’m sure it was.’
The old man shrugged, as if to say: what’s the point in remembering the past? Look at me now.
‘Anyway, it was no use. Chillicothe’s a small town, and not an easy place to hide in. Sooner or later, everyone notices everything. The judge soon found out his only daughter was seeing a boy. Then he found out who the boy was. Karen’s life was all mapped out. She was beautiful, rich, intelligent. A guy like Matt wasn’t quite what her father had planned for her. And her father was a very, very powerful man at the time. He practically owned the town.’
Ben allowed himself a few more sips of his coffee. He seemed reluctant to turn that memory into words, as if doing so meant being hurt a second time.
‘Around about that time there was a double murder, down by the river. A couple of hippies camping out in the open were found dead. Both stabbed. They never found the killer, and they never found the murder weapon. The sheriff at the time was a man named Duane Westlake and he had a deputy named Will Farland. Both of them were tied hand and foot to Swanson, who’d bought them with privileges and money. A few nights after the bodies had been discovered, these two burst into Matt’s room with a search warrant signed by the judge himself. Among his things they found marijuana, and they also found a big hunting knife, which could have been the murder weapon. Matt told me later that he’d been forced to put his fingerprints on the handle of that knife.’
The old man’s voice was full of anger.
‘I’m sure Matt had never sold an ounce of that stuff to anyone. And he’d never owned a knife.’
Russell had no reason to do so, but he was inclined to believe him.
‘They dragged him to jail. And there they told him what could happen to him. A charge of using and dealing narcotics, and the much more serious charge of homicide. They were the ones who put the grass in Matt’s room. As for the knife, I can’t quite bring myself to believe the two of them killed the hippies on purpose. But the sheriff had been the first person at the scene of the crime, and getting rid of the weapon would have been child’s play for someone like him. In addition, seeing that Matt was living at my place, those two sons of bitches told him they could charge me with being an accessory. Then they offered him an alternative to being tried and sentenced. He could volunteer for Vietnam.’
Ben finished his coffee.
‘And he agreed. The rest you know.’
‘A story as old as the world.’
Ben Shepard looked at him with his blue eyes, in which the pain was now fully accepted. ‘The world’s still too young to make sure stories like that never happen again.’
‘What happened to Karen?’
‘She couldn’t believe it when he made that decision. She was incredulous at first, then desperate. But one of the conditions of the agreement he made with the sheriff was that he couldn’t tell anyone. Not her, not me.’
Without asking, his host poured some more coffee into Russell’s empty cup.
‘After a period of training at Fort Polk, in Louisiana, Matt was granted leave, like everyone before they left for Nam. He snuck back here, and spent a month practically shut up at my place. Karen would come and join him there. They spent all the time they could in that room and I hope every one of those minutes lasted years, although that’s not usually how it is. A month and a half after he left, Karen came to see me and told me she was pregnant. She also wrote him about it. We never got a reply, because soon after that we heard that he’d died.’
‘What became of her?’
‘Karen was a strong woman. When her father found out she was pregnant, he tried every way he could to persuade her to have an abortion. But she held out, threatened to tell everyone who the father of the child was and that the judge wanted her to have an abortion. That wouldn’t have looked good for his political career, so the bastard chose the lesser of two evils, the scandal of his daughter becoming an unmarried mother.’
‘But then Matt came back.’
‘Yes. In the state you know.’
There was a pause, during which Russell saw images of that encounter in Ben’s eyes.
‘When I saw him and recognized him, I felt a grief inside me that’s taken years to pass. That boy must have suffered tremendously. He must have gone through things it isn’t right for a human being to go through.’
