Caller unknown, p.11
Caller Unknown, page 11
“I guess I had a bottle in the desk even then. After he hung up I poured myself a good one and considered. I’d hidden my problems from Bettie, thinking something might come up to save my ass. All we had built, Bettie and I, was about to disappear and here was a magic solution. Long story short, I got up and went through to Bettie and you know how she was a little old-fashioned, how she went along with me on decisions? I said I’d been thinking, and it was selfish of us to want to have an infant when the children of that awful tragedy up in Maine were going without homes. How God would be displeased with our selfishness and that I had reconsidered Bates’s proposal in that light. Well, she put up a bit of a fight, talking about the adoption agency we’d been involved with, the kids from Vietnam and Cambodia and all, but I wasn’t for turning and in the end she gave up, as I knew she would, and… Well, things just unfolded as they unfolded…
“The money came in, a lot of it, and my debts went away. These payments were from some offshore clients I was supposedly about to build something for. Needless to say I never met them, no plans were ever drawn up, not a clod of earth was broken, but the money kept coming, enough to get me going again. I started thinking of new projects for myself. I began to dream again. Maybe dreamed too big. Took out new loans.” He sighed. “Yeah, history repeats…
“Bates would ring every Sunday night asking after you and how you were doing. Always interested in your ‘mental welfare’ as he put it; always a big emphasis on that. Asked me if you had bad dreams and such—weird images. I guess I kept him and whoever was behind him happy for a few years till he had that stroke. Since then there’s been another guy. Name of Vermeulen. Operates out of Pittsburgh. Says he owns a large part of my debt.”
Stu poured and chugged another shot. He didn’t invite Ed to partake and Ed felt dizzy enough from what Stu was telling him to not need any more.
Stu went on. “Vermeulen made it very clear: like Bates, he wanted to know how you were getting along. His questions got more and more specific. Down to what you had for breakfast, how you interacted with the other kids at school, what TV shows you liked… All of it. I asked him why he needed to know all this stuff, but he just laughed. Said one day it would come in useful. And I said, what day? And he said when it came to settle up. I told him I could handle my own affairs, but he just laughed again. By then I was half crazy anyway with Bettie in hospital and all those bills mounting up on top of the old ones. Then, after she passed, the bottle took over totally.”
He stared at his shot glass. “This stuff makes you brave… foolishly brave. I told Vermeulen I wouldn’t take his calls anymore, wouldn’t do anything more for him; not a thing. The phone rang off the hook the next Sunday and the one after but I didn’t pick up. Then the offshore clients stopped paying. There were no new deals. I was cut dead. My new partners scooted. Money dried up. Had to let my secretary go. The firm went bust six months ago. The landlord repossessed the office. Thought I could fool you when you were home. Used to go out to bars all day.”
Ed wasn’t listening anymore. “You spied on me?” he said.
“I had no choice. Listen, Ed, I thought there was no harm in it. I needed the money. Then I thought I could cut Vermeulen off. I’ve never met him. He was just a voice on the phone. Cut him and hope he would just go away…”
“Do you know what David wants from me?” Ed asked.
Stu held up his hands. “No, I swear.” But Ed knew he was lying. He guessed Stu knew a lot more; maybe everything. Maybe had an understanding with this Vermeulen despite what he claimed. Why had David approached him the very day he had left Winthrop? That seemed very convenient. So whatever happened didn’t happen right in front of Stu? Don’t shit in your own backyard and all that.
“What’re you going to do?” Stu asked.
“Me?” Ed laughed. “You ask me that now? Well, I’m not going back to campus for a start, not with David around. Maybe I’ll just hang around here until he shows and then the two of you can explain it all?”
Stu didn’t answer. He looked shrunken. There was a drop or two of vodka left in his glass. He knocked it back, his knuckles so white on the glass that Ed thought it would shatter.
His silence was eloquent enough. Ed stood up. “I guess we’re through,” he said.
Stu didn’t look up. “There’s money in the safe,” he said.
“I don’t want your money,” Ed spat.
He went out into the hall and upstairs to his primrose bedroom. He looked at it anew; it had never been a safe haven. Instead, it had been a cage for a laboratory rat.
There was a childhood trunk full of toys in the closet. He lifted it out and removed the battered Six Million Dollar Man toy, the Easy Money game, the Spirograph, the Magna Doodle, the pile of comic books. Yes, Stu and Bettie had not failed in generosity when it had come to spending Vermeulen’s money.
He expected to find the oilcloth-wrapped Colt and the cardboard box of .45 ammo that Jim had given him at the bottom of the trunk.
They weren’t there.
Below there was a cry from the study, like the howl of a cat, then a single, deafening shot.
Ed got to his feet. His vision was crowding in, just as when David had confronted him at Stetson East, leaving only a narrow black hole through which to see. He reached out for the wall, felt his way blindly out of the room and, holding the banister, went down the stairs slowly.
He hesitated at the study door. There was the smell of cordite in the air. His vision came back. He went in. Stu was still in the swivel chair, what was left of his head tipped back at an unnatural angle. His rheumy eyes stared at the ceiling, unblinking. He’d shot himself through the temple. There was a wide splash of blood and gray brain matter on the wall behind the desk and that end-of-firework smell in the air. The Colt lay under his hand on the table, his index finger still curled through the trigger guard.
A quote came unbidden into Ed’s mind: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Outside, he heard birdsong, the sound of a passing car, a child crying—no indication anyone had heard the shot. Life on Winthrop went on; no one cared that a man lay dead with his brains on the wall.
Should he call 911? Something told him summoning the authorities would be a big mistake.
His eyes fixed on the gun. He had come here to fetch it. Nothing had changed, apart from the fact that a dead man’s finger was now in the trigger guard.
Stu’s hand was still warm as he lifted it and the gun slipped the quarter-inch from the finger onto the desk blotter. The tiny movement disturbed Stu’s body; it sank in the swivel chair and a little escape of gas came from the dead man’s mouth like a sigh.
Ed pulled the gun toward him by the barrel. Some of the blowback from the shot had filmed it. He felt the warm damp and his fingers came away bloody. He wiped them on Stu’s desk blotter. He noticed the papers scattered there for the first time: loan agreements, bank statements, default warnings, plans for malls that would never be made. There were doodles, ribbons of what looked like inverted tadpoles or musical notes drawn the wrong way around covering the tops of some of the plans.
He listened again. The silence was almost physical, touchable. He had a gun. He had a vehicle in the garage. But there were only nickels and dimes in his pocket. Stu’s last words came to him. There was money in the safe. What was more, now Stu was dead, it was his money.
Once, through the door of the study, he’d seen his stepfather fiddling with the safe. It was set into the fake chimney breast behind the oil painting of the Highland scene. He went to the fireplace and took hold of the side frame of the painting and swung it out on its hinge. The safe was mounted in the flue underneath. Its dial winked at him in the sun falling through the half-open curtains and yellowing ivy outside. He knew there would be three numbers. Stu had never told him the combination. What could it be? Birthdays, birth months, birth years? Even if he could guess the numbers there had to be the correct movements: clockwise and counterclockwise. Clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise? He was pretty sure that was right.
He took hold of the tumbler. He tried to calm himself. As far as he knew, there were unlimited chances, no lockout.
He started with the easiest: Stu’s birth month, day, year. Nothing. Then Bettie’s. Nothing. His: 07.04.61. A bust again. Then combinations of the house number, the phone number, the first six numbers of Stu’s social security, same for his driver’s license. Nothing again. Sweat beaded his forehead. He glanced at his Timex. He dropped his shaking hand from the tumbler and leaned against the mantel.
His eyes fell on the papers piled on Stu’s desk. Maybe there was some clue there? He pushed himself off the mantel and went around the desk, careful to avoid catching Stu’s dead eyes. He stared down at the papers, examining the scribbles he’d noticed earlier, but this time from what would have been Stu’s perspective. The ribbons of inverted tadpoles were not as he’d first thought. Stu’s handwriting had always been curiously upright, without curlicues. The doodles were sixes. Endless sixes. But now he looked closely in the mottled light and saw that there were points between the numbers so each number combo read: “66.6.6’”—endlessly.
It struck him like a mallet. He leaned hard on the desk, his arm brushing inadvertently against Stu’s corpse. It was as if an invisible giant hand squeezed his heart. He gasped for breath. Blackness began creeping into the edge of his vision again. The floor gave way.
He was back in the place he had visited before: at Pierce, at Stetson… Six other upturned faces watched a flickering movie reel. Their heads were held in restraints at the backs of the chairs to which they were tied. So they must watch. The old-time film projector whirred quietly as it turned. There was no other sound. A funnel of light flickered on the gray wall. His head, too, was pinioned. He stared helplessly as violent images cascaded before him. A worm wriggling on a hook; Hiroshima and the burnt people; a public beheading; a razor cut across an eye; the furnace of a cremation oven; then an ocean of lapping blood… Then, point by black point, a shape was inching out of the sea, becoming whole, like the first lizard life on Earth. Details formed: the top half of the head was vaguely human: a mop of shaggy hair and deep-set human eyes; but from where his mouth and nose should have been burst a hundred snakes like an obscene beard. The rest of his body was human-shaped, but all of it was covered with more serpents, encasing his chest, arms and legs. Instead of fingers there were five more snakes, and both his feet were ganglions of serpent tails.
The name of the monster came to him: Typhon.
He was sovereign of all, the emperor of fear. All must obey their fear. He owned all who looked upon him.
He owned Ed.
Above the sanguinary sea something large and white began to form, and he saw it was a huge, horseshoe-shaped dam between two ocher cliffs. Water geysered from the sluices and tumbled into space and down to a river far below. He knew this place, every child knew it. It was one of America’s greatest feats of engineering: the Hoover Dam.
The monster spoke and Ed knew they were the true names of the children: “The Angels of the Sores; of the Blood of Dead Men; of the Polluted Fountains; of the Sun’s Burning Power; of Darkness itself; of the Death of the Euphrates; the Angel who will say, like Christ, tetelestai: ‘It is finished.’”
The monster pointed at the vision of the dam, the serpents parted around its mouth and it opened its jaws agape like a python swallowing a cow and within was a ferment of more roiling serpent tongues, which spoke in the voice of the seven children: “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.”
The dam began to crumble like a sandcastle in the surf. A wall of water burst forth and fell toward him, crushing, atomizing…
Dark again and then the dream cycled back to a vignette, almost innocent compared to the others, but seemingly of great portent: a countertop in a domestic kitchen, a spreading pool of blood and what looked like a pink worm in the center—but, as the focus tightened, he saw it was a severed finger, cut above the middle joint.
There was a noise like thunder. Maybe the thunder of that wall of water going down the Colorado.
The thunder was rousing him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He woke up. The thunder was his heart. For a moment he panted, covered in sweat, utterly disorientated.
At first he had no idea where he was. An orange beam of light blinded him. Then he remembered. He was at Winthrop. The light was the late-afternoon sun through the crack in the curtains in Stu’s study.
He was lying behind Stu’s desk. There was a damp patch at his elbow: Stu’s blood, not yet dry. He had only been out for an hour or so. But he had gone deep, very deep. First David, now these numbers, just as Cowdray had predicted.
He stood shakily and forced himself to look down at Stu’s doodles again. The room spun and he braced himself on the desk. But knowing the attack was coming was power of sorts. The world stilled. He could resist. Good.
How had Stu known these numbers? He remembered David’s words at Northeastern. Debts. Stu had owed these people everything. Owed and therefore been owned by them. As he’d reasoned before, why had David appeared the very first day, no, the very first hour, he was away from Winthrop? Was it a prearranged agreement with Stu? Ed’s disappearance from his dorm would not be considered too strange; after all, many freshmen couldn’t take the stress of the first day of college.
He was conscious of time slipping away. David would return to the dorm room the moment Garval was off duty, no doubt expecting to find Ed waiting like a zombie. And when he found Ed gone, his next stop would be Winthrop.
There came a creak of the floorboards outside the study and his heart jolted. Was he here already? The creak came again. He picked up the Colt, thumbed off the safety, pulled the slide back, chambering a round, and aimed it at the threshold. But now there was only silence. The house was just settling.
He went around the desk to the window, parted the curtains a little and peered out. The tree-lined street was empty.
He pulled the curtains firmly closed, then switched on the overhead. The safe combination was back at 00. He quickly spun it left, one full rotation past “66” and all the way back to it, turned the lock right to “06”, then left again through “06” once, and back once more to the same number. The mechanism gave a click and the safe door opened fractionally.
He took a breath. He pulled the door fully open and looked inside. There was cash alright—a lot of it: three thick bundles of used dollar bills held together by elastic bands. Ed riffled through them: singles, fives, tens, twenties, and fifties, randomly intermingled. At a glance, thousands. A rainy day fund Stu’d kept from his creditors.
He set the money on the mantel. There was a thick, official-looking envelope at the bottom of the safe. He took it out. Inside were birth certificates, Bettie’s death certificate, the deed to Brantwood—the cabin at Lake Tranquility. He saw that the deed was in his own name. Maybe that had been Stu’s last attempt to protect an asset. The transfer had only been notarized two months before. Ed was now the proud owner of Brantwood and everything in it.
Pushed to the back of the safe was a small Woolworth’s spiral notebook with a red cover. Ed opened it and flipped through it quickly. There were only a few entries: names and telephone numbers arranged alphabetically. Woodson Bates was there, but the number was not the one for the parish office that Ed had sometimes had occasion to ring. There were seven other numbers. One of them, Grant Fitzgerald, rang a bell. But why? At the back was Vermeulen. Area code 412. A Pittsburgh number.
He pocketed the notebook, the deed to Brantwood, and the cash.
He went back up to his room. There was a book of Auden’s poetry on the night table. He picked it up. The bookmark was the scrap of paper that Gloria had given him nine years before with the El Paso number. It might have been an olfactory illusion, but did he still detect the faintest whiff of Youth Dew? He felt her vanished warmth, her softness as she’d hugged him and the furtive burrowing movement of her ringed fingers into his with this scrap. He pocketed the piece of paper.
Would she still be in El Paso? He had no idea how the FBI worked. She could have been reassigned several times since. Moreover, it would be midafternoon there. She would presumably be working? And, if she answered, would she even remember him?
He crammed some clothes in a bag, stuff he had rejected the day before but which was now his only choice, and added the Auden. Everything else was in his suitcase at Stetson East. He knew he would never see it again.
He carried the bag down, went to the rotary phone in the hall and dialed the El Paso number with numb fingers.
On the third ring a dusky voice answered: “Yes?” It was her. He heard a TV and a grumpy male voice in the background asking, “Who is it?”
Was this a terrible idea? “Gloria, it’s me, Ed Constance.”
“Ed?”
“Yes, do you remember me?”
There was a rustling and the sound of the TV diminished. The faint male grumbling continued.
“Wait a minute, Ed. I’ll take this on the other line. My husband’s watching something.”
There was the sound of another receiver being picked up, footsteps, the original phone being placed back on its cradle. Then, after a few seconds, her voice again.
“Ed? How are you? What’s happening?”
