honey if you want it.” She refused his offer of help preparing her tea and managed it quite well considering it was a first for her. She was half blind for less than an hour, and already her other senses were noticeably heightened.
“Why the bus, the walk around the corner, and the twenty minute wait?” Isobel stirred her tea. “And the trip to Grant’s Tomb, or wherever? Don’t you trust me, Bob?” She aimed again for that elusive sarcastic tone. “Is ‘Bob ’ okay? I knew a Bob in London. He could have been your son.”
“In my position, who would you trust?” he said.
“Knowing me as I do, I would trust me.”
“I do, Ms. Gitlin. I do indeed. But you know you could have been followed. You must know you’re being watched.”
“W-w-watched? I don’t think so. I really doubt it. I seriously do. But let’s not d-dwell on that.”
“It’s important for you to understand-”
“And the driver with the frisky hands? What if he was caught? Would he have given up? Did he really have a gun? Would he have sacrificed himself for you?”
“Sacrifice? The word has a different meaning to us. We have already been sacrificed. We have nothing left to lose. What should I fear? Harm to my family?” There was a cruel irony in that and she knew it. “Freedom. Isn’t that what makes us so dangerous? Survival makes us free, doesn’t it?” Then he muttered to himself. It sounded like, “Freedom’s just…” She couldn’t make it out clearly. “… to lose.” It made no sense to Isobel. She wondered whether she’d heard it right, but did not ask; if he’d wanted to say it out loud he would have.
He reached behind for a box of sugar cookies, and offered one, which Isobel took. He did not notice that she reached directly in the box to take one. Perhaps it meant nothing. “Of course,” he went on, “as a tactical matter, what I have day-to-day is not getting caught. If I do get caught, it’s over.” He went silent for a moment, made all the longer by her darkness. “Does this seem like some kind of game to you? Believe me, it’s not. It’s everything because it’s all I have left. You should understand how important that is.”
“I know who you are.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. I thought you would have known some time ago. At first I was concerned, but I’m not anymore. See, I told you I trusted you.”
“What about your followers?”
That seemed to amuse him. “There are no followers.”
“Do you act alone? What if something happened to you? What if you got caught?”
“If I were gone tomorrow, who knows? Someone else might come along. You think I should groom a successor? Do you think I want to be Robin Hood? Or Joltin’ Joe-where have I gone? You think I should have an understudy?” He shrugged. “That’s the last thing I want to think about.”
There was no anger in his voice. His tone was warm and friendly. But this was a self-proclaimed multiple killer. How could such a person be normal, regardless of how he sounded? They sipped tea. Behind blackened eyes she flashed on two old men she’d seen in a Reuters photo last week: in the mountains of Armenia drinking tea from glasses through sugar cubes held in their teeth.
Leonard Martin drinking his tea might just as well have been one of them. Walter had signaled number 8, but this Leonard Martin, was he the one in the photographs tacked to her kitchen wall? Was she sitting inches from the fat man with long blue eyes? Leonard Martin? Yes, of course, Walter was right. For a moment she wondered how often he’d been right, the same way, in the past thirty years. To be sure, she sat facing number 8. Unable to see Leonard Martin’s unhappy eyes, in her own mind’s eye she put them, quite definitely, with the picture.
She asked, “Are you in good health, Mr. Martin?”
“I am in good health, thank you. I can’t and won’t, of course, confirm my identity. There are many things in life we think we know, but the list of things we don’t is far longer. I may be Leonard Martin-then again, I may not be. You know, I thought you’d find me before I found you. ‘Who Is Seeking Revenge?’ That is a bit pretentious, don’t you think?”
He continued sipping his tea. Isobel wanted badly to see him at that instant, to look at his hands on the cup. The sound of his voice hinted that he might be suddenly nervous. Was he staring at her? She tilted backward in her chair for just an instant. If she could only get a fleeting glance… and then she stopped breathing. “Oh, my God!” she thought.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
Isobel said, “I’m fine, fine.” She took her notebook and Sharpwriter pencil from her purse, then, realizing she was in no shape to take notes, she laughed. Then she asked, “When did you meet your wife?”
“It’s not that kind of story.”
“No?” Isobel asked, “I thought we could get some background.”
“No.”
“What kind of story is it then?”
“A story you’ve never written before. Maybe nobody has,” Leonard said.
For the first time, Isobel felt frightened.
“I am going to tell you about the people I’ve killed and the people I will kill. And I’ll tell you why I will kill them.”
The fright passed, but not the shakes. “Yes? And why will you be telling m-me that?”
“I don’t want any more Harlan Jennings.”
“I see. Well that’s… a good idea.”
“Are you ready to start?”
Isobel nodded, still working on her breath. “You rejected speaking in the plural before. You just said ‘I’ will kill, not ‘we.’ Can you clear that up for me? Are there others working with, if not for, you?”
“Others give me support. They don’t know what I’ve done until you do. They read about it in the papers. The boy in the car knows nothing before the fact. He does not know anything that would make him a contributer to any illegal act. We avoid such conversations.”
“You want me to write it just that way. You’re a lawyer.”
“Write it just that way. And you’ll want to identify me quite clearly. You’ll want to leave no doubt about who I am. I will help you do that. Your cup is empty. More?”
Isobel declined. “Why am I wearing a blindfold?” she said. She had recovered her composure. She had seen enough of him to go on.
“Do you believe we live in a just society?” He asked it with a studied calm, a kind of forced serenity. Very much like a teacher too much in love with his subject-like one of her professors at Oxford who’d dry up and die without Dante or Francis Bacon. “Do you, Isobel?”
“What is that to the price of eggs? You haven’t answered my question-the blindfold.” She pressed the point to see if he thought she had seen something of him underneath her blindfold. He went on with his own question.
“Do you believe what your government tells you?” he asked. “Your church? Your media? Do you believe what your own newspaper prints?”
“I don’t have a bloody church.” It surprised her to hear her father’s voice jumping from her mouth. “The newspaper sometimes gets it right. Politicians lie, most of them. But what’s that got to do with the price of bloody eggs? And why, damnit, can’t I see you, straight out?”
“You will hear the names of people who will soon be dead. I’m going to kill them. You will know why they died. When the public reads about them, they’ll know too. These people are premeditative mass murderers. They did a cost-benefit analysis and made a decision to kill my family for money. I do not believe that they deserve to live.”
“Let’s take that as given. I’m still at a loss. Why is identifying you so important, and seeing you forbidden?”
Leonard said, “I am a lawyer, Ms. Gitlin. So long as you do not actually see me, and I believe you have not, you cannot actually know it is me. You believe I am Leonard Martin. That’s fine with me. But you can’t know it, and so long as you swim in that stream of uncertainty-the high waters of doubt, as a law professor once put it-you avoid the label of accessory. New York’s press shield law notwithstanding, the FBI would draw and quarter you.” He let that sink in, then continued. “Do you think I’m crazy? I think you know that I’m not. And here’s my point. I don’t want the story spun in that direction. I know how these things work. Think ahead.”
Instead, Isobel focused on the very immediate present. A self-proclaimed killer was asking her to think about
