“You didn’t answer the phone when I called, and I thought…”
“Because I didn’t hear it! We were asleep, I told you!”
I rub my temples. Yes, she said the word twice.
“Who’s we?” “Who the hell do you think? Me and Bentley. He missed you, he was crying, so I lay down with him in his bed, and we fell asleep. There’s no phone in there, Msha,” she adds, just in case I forgot.
“But how was I supposed to know…”
“I don’t know, Misha, but you could have come up with a better idea! I mean, I can’t take this shit all the time! You disappear for hours and don’t tell me where you are, you get into fistfights at your office, you almost get arrested”-suddenly, unaccountably, my wife is crying-“it’s too much for me, Misha, it’s too much, I can’t take this!”
“Kimmer, I’m sorry… I didn’t…”
“Sorry! I don’t want you to be sorry! I want you to stop acting so crazy! ”
“I was worried…”
“No, Misha, no! I don’t want to hear it, okay? I don’t want any more stories or any more excuses or any more explanations. You say you love us, but you keep thinking about you. You, you, you! Well, you have to stop acting crazy. You have to stop all the nutty theories and calling the police from Colorado and getting crazy telephone calls at two in the morning”-yes, I now see, Kimmer was listening in the night I was beaten near the library-“and just getting into trouble. It has to stop, Misha. I can’t take any more of this. It’s not fair. You have to go back to the way you used to be. Because, if you don’t, I can promise you, Msha, one day you’re gonna come home from one of your crazy trips and we won’t be here!”
Hanging up on me.
She calls me back six minutes later to apologize, but the damage, I fear, might this time be too great.
In the morning, waiting for the taxi to take me to the airport, I feel foolish for last night’s terrors. In the light of a crisp Aspen day, the larger terror is losing my family. Now that I have had some sleep, I realize that Kimmer is right. I have been acting crazy, and I do have to stop. The only trouble is, I cannot stop yet, no matter what threats my wife might make. We are not yet free: that was the message Jack Ziegler tried to impart last night. He will continue to protect us because he promised my father he would, but he can carry out his promise only if I continue my search. Presumably, that was his deal with… well, whomever a man like Jack Ziegler has to deal with. Leave him alone and he’ll find the arrangements. I guarantee it. Quid pro quo. If I give my furious spouse what she wants, if I abandon the search for the arrangements, then Uncle Jack might be unable to protect my family.
Everything is still a mess.
And it is all the Judge’s fault.
The beep of a horn announces that my taxi has arrived. I peek out the window and see the white van idling, the driver reading the newspaper. I go to the front hall, turn off the alarm, grab my overnight bag and my coat, and take a last look around. Have I left it all as neat as I found it? I hope so.
There is a way out of this. Morris Young would probably say that God will show it to me in time, and I think perhaps he has. A way to keep my wife and also keep the family safe. I believe I can do it, but I know I cannot do it without help, and I am running out of people who might be willing to… well, to take a chance for the sake of friendship. Really, there is only one. So I had better hurry back to Elm Harbor and ask.
With a shrug, I reset the alarm with the proper code, which will cause it to re-engage ninety seconds after I exit. I pause, my memory unexpectedly jogged by this simple act. A secret conviction that has been growing in my mind leaps once more to the surface. Frowning in worry, I open the door. And stop short.
In the middle of the doormat is a manila envelope with my name printed on the front in black felt-tip, block letters so big I could read them fifty yards away.
I wave to the driver, then stoop and pick it up with trembling fingers.
It is a little larger than the envelope that held the white pawn delivered to me at the soup kitchen, and I can feel something hard and flat inside. It does not feel like the missing black pawn I guessed it might be. I close my eyes, swaying slightly in the crisp mountain air. For a silly moment, I imagine myself reliving the past, frozen forever in an instant of time, forced to open the same envelope over and over again.
But this envelope holds no pawn.
Instead, I tear it open to find a hard metal disk, no more than an inch across, brass in color but smudged an ugly brown in places. I rub the disk. The stain flecks off. I turn it over, but even before I read the letters engraved on the other side, I realize what I am holding in my hand: a tag from a dog’s collar. I do not have to read the name to know the tag belongs-or belonged-to Shirley Branch’s dog, Cinque.
The brown stain is dried blood.
A note, generically word-processed and printed on plain white paper, provides the punch line: DO NOT STOP LOOKING. No translation necessary. The blood tells a story of its own.
They can’t hurt me, the well-connected Jack Ziegler assured me; can’t hurt me, can’t hurt my family. Uncle Jack promised it, and I believe him; I have never for an instant doubted his power.
But nobody has mentioned a prohibition on scaring me half to death.
CHAPTER 46
The law school stands at the corner of Town Street and Eastern Avenue. If you follow Town Street away from the university, past the aging sandstone pile shared by the music and fine arts departments, past the low, nondescript building that holds, improbably, the catering, parking, and public relations offices, you come to the eastern edge of the campus, marked by a poorly fenced, bumpy parking lot full of cheery red-and-white University Transit buses, all purchased secondhand from school districts looking to upgrade. Here you cross Monitor Boulevard (named not for the Civil War gunship but for a local kid who had a brief, uninspired professional football career in the sixties), and, suddenly, you are no longer on university property.
The difference is immediately apparent.
On the other side of Monitor from the parking lot is a disused park containing the muddy, grassless remnant of a softball field at one end and, at the other, what might pass for a playground among parents not picky about broken glass, splintered wooden swings, and seesaws missing a crucial bolt or two. Usually a couple of crackheads lounge harmlessly on what is left of the benches, nodding and smiling in their secret dreams. Today the park is deserted. Few students or professors venture out too far to the east, because of the crime rate-or, as Arnie Rosen likes to say, the perceived crime rate. The remnants of a public housing project lie a few more blocks in this direction, aging gray towers with the ubiquitous cream-colored window shades, and public housing, in the minds of most people, signals danger.
One wintry afternoon four or five years ago, I stood at the edge of this park with the Judge, who was in town for some alumni function, and he simply shook his head, wordlessly, as tears welled in his eyes- whether for his lost youth (when the park, if it existed at all, was no doubt vibrant), or the lost lives of those members of the darker nation who suffer here, or some fugitive memory of his Claire, or of Abby, or of his shattered career, I dared not ask. “You know, Talcott,” he pronounced in his preacher’s voice, “we humans are capable of so much joy. But we are born unto trouble…”
“… as the sparks fly upward,” I completed for him.
He smiled a bit, probably thought about hugging me, then thrust his hands more deeply into the pockets of his camel’s hair coat and pressed onward-for the park was, on that snowy day, not our destination, but a way station, a marker on our road. As it is for me today, as I repeat the journey I made with my father, past the park, past an elementary school that looks like a casualty of some Balkan war but is, in fact, still in use. Graffiti mark the
