Caller unknown, p.27
Caller Unknown, page 27
Ed shook his head. “It’s a long story.”
“All bad?”
“All bad. What do you think happened to Alice Mae?” Ed asked.
“Nate and that other fellow must’ve took her the night before. It’s odd she didn’t cry out.”
“Did you get a look at the second guy?”
“They turned the headlights off before walking up. But I saw his face as he passed the window in the streetlight. It was weird, like he knew I was watching. He stopped and looked right at me through the crack in the curtain. His eyes were deep-set, a pale face, widow’s peak, thin lips like Dracula, a lot of pockmarks.”
David, Ed thought.
Zielinski fixed him with his pale eyes. “You were her friend. You gotta find that girl.”
Ed stood up. “I’m going to do what I can. Listen, Mr. Zielinski, I’m sorry I came here. There’s a car out the front. The apartment is being watched. I may have placed you in danger.”
Zielinski held up his hand. “I saw it. It’s OK, you were cautious.”
Ed said, “Nevertheless, I think you need to leave for a while.”
Zielinski nodded. “I thought the same. I have a nephew in Chicago. He’ll take me in. So, it’s shalom, Miami. Everything I need can fit into a suitcase.”
“Do you need any money?” Ed asked.
Zielinski fixed him with a cold stare. “Young man, I’ve been looking after myself for a long time now. I don’t need your charity.”
Ed held up his hands. “OK, sorry. Just promise me you’ll go as soon as possible.”
“First, do something for me, will you?” Zielinski stood and went to the dresser, where there were used envelopes and a stub or two of pencil. He scrunched up his brow as if trying to remember something, then wrote on an envelope and handed it to Ed. “Here’s my nephew’s address. Just drop me a line if you find the girl. You don’t even have to sign it. Just write something like, ‘Alice Mae sends her regards.’”
“I promise,” Ed answered.
They locked eyes. “OK,” Zielinski said. “Go now, and God be with you.”
Ten minutes later, Ed was heading back east on a Line 110 bus.
Zielinski was true to his word. Shortly after Ed left, he called a cab to the Amtrak station in Hialeah and boarded the Silver Meteor.
Jakub Zielinski’s suitcase was still in the luggage rack when the Acela arrived in New York the next day. He never made the connecting train to Chicago at Washington Union.
What was left of him was found twenty-four hours later near Okeechobee. The Silver Meteor had made an unscheduled stop there after the emergency brake was pulled by persons unknown. CCTV footage had been installed at the station a year or two earlier and captured Zielinski’s last moments. He had disembarked and taken off in a limping run down the platform. He had looked anxiously behind him as he had jumped down from the platform end and disappeared up the tracks to the north. It looked like he was being pursued, but no other figures appeared in the camera shot.
Zielinski had been trying to cross the express track a mile or so further up when the southbound Miami Amtrak hit him on a stretch of line where the Acela got up to about 80 mph. The coroner determined he had been killed instantly and his torso flung into some trackside bushes. The maintenance workers who found him initially thought they were looking at a few discarded hobo clothes until they noticed body parts littered by the side of the track. The Treblinka tattoo helped to identify him. His detached skull, when it was found, bore a rictus of terror. Whether it was caused by the Acela bearing down on him or by whoever he was running from was never established.
The news item appeared in the inside pages of the Miami papers. One old man’s death was not big news that day.
Ed missed it altogether—by that time he had become what he had always feared he would become.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The journey home was twenty-five minutes. Ed’s racing pulse was at odds with the bus, which kept rigorously to the limit on the 195. He was barely conscious of the Julia Tuttle Causeway, the Welcome to Miami Beach sign, and the floodlit Romanesque campanile of St. Patrick’s.
By the time he got to Lenox, the blood was coursing through him so fast he had reached a stage of mental blindness. So, as a blind man, he pulled out his key, went up the path and stepped up to the porch—only to find the door was already slightly ajar. It was the moment that all homeowners most feared. He pushed it fully open and stepped into the hall.
“Sarah?” he called. His briefcase fell from his hand onto the rug and burst open; papers scattered out of it. He tried the hall light, but it didn’t work. The problem was just in the hall—the kitchen down the corridor was lit up. He could just make out muddy prints on the corridor carpet leading to and from it. It hadn’t rained in Florida for two weeks. It seemed very cold in the house. Someone had turned the air-conditioning up to maximum. There was a distant roar from the system. Some of the fallen papers blew past him in the frigid blast from the vents.
He followed them, but on the threshold of the kitchen he tripped on something in the gloom. He pushed open the kitchen door to get more light on it.
He saw it was a copper plate. It had writing stamped on it:
“ENG NO.8 SHOP NUMBER 4553 ALLOWABLE PRESSURE 190LBS HYDROSTATIC PRES 239LBS.”
The “3” of the shop number was printed the wrong way around.
He’d thrown this thing into Carl’s grave a decade before: the backplate of one of the engines on the Eagle Lake and West Branch Railway. Clumps of mud and some rotten cloth still stuck to it.
He couldn’t feel his hands or feet anymore. They were like blocks of ice. He backed against the frame of the door and inched around the plate.
It was bright, so very bright, in the kitchen after the corridor.
Sarah’s paring knife was on the fake marble countertop.
So was a spreading pool of blood about a foot across. In the center of the blood was an object. A small, pink object.
He was still some twenty feet away, but even in the sudden glare of the lights he saw what it was.
A finger. A little finger. Even from here he could see the nail polish was a soft shell pink. Sarah’s favorite.
He wondered then at the almost God-like prescience of Typhon. How, no matter how far he had run and whatever measures he had taken, they had predestined this evening, this homecoming: the pool of blood, the severed finger—just like in the movies shown to him long ago.
The icy tendrils in his veins were inching into his mind. A glacial breath soughed over his back. He turned slowly, his neck muscles frozen, expecting to see Carl standing there, covered in grave mud, his face and clothes hanging in rotten threads.
Nothing. Just the copper plate lying there in the corridor, surrounded by the muddy footprints. Bloody footprints, he corrected himself.
He staggered into the kitchen and grabbed the countertop to steady himself. His right hand smeared through the blood. He looked at his bloody palm and then to the house phone on its bracket on the wall. There was one last chance. He would call 911. The consequences didn’t matter anymore.
Then he saw the phone cord was cut. The severed length lay in a spool on the tiled floor.
There was the pay phone he had used the week before in the corner store down the street. He would go there. He took a step back toward the front door. The room seesawed one way and then another. He braced himself against a wall, leaving a bloody handprint.
He zigzagged back down the corridor like a drunk, leaving more handprints. Through the cold fog he noticed the main bedroom door was open. Had it been open when he’d come down the corridor? Was there someone, something in there?
He pushed the door further open.
The bed sheets were in a twisted heap on the floor. There was a bloodstain in the center of the mattress. One of the pillows had burst and the feathers stirred in the blast of the air-conditioning. Every drawer but the one in the cabinet on his side of the bed had been pulled open and tossed.
From that unopened drawer came a brrr-brrr sound, like the stirring of a giant hornet.
He pulled it open with his bloody hand. It contained the detritus of bedroom life: loose change; a pair of cufflinks in a velveteen box; a half-used blister pack of painkillers; a scattering of condoms—and the unused office cell in its box.
The vibration was coming from that.
The cell had never been charged. It had never even been taken out of its box. But now, somehow, it was alive.
He lifted the lid and there it was, eight inches long, a black fascia with white buttons and white casing, a chunky black antenna.
A red LED display. Its message: “CALLER UNKNOWN.”
There was a green Call Accept button.
Nothing would have made him answer that call, but they had taken Sarah. A polar choice: press the button and he would die, but there was a chance, at least, that Sarah and the child would live.
He pressed the button.
It was Mrs. Frome’s voice on the end of the line.
She said, “A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and wine.”
And that was the last thing he knew.
PART THREE
TRANQUILITY
DECEMBER 1989
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
When he found himself again, it was just a tiny piece. Like something lost down a couch back that reminds you of a long-forgotten day and the person you once were…
In that instant of coming back, he realized he had been seeing and hearing for some time, but there had been no connection between what he saw and heard and his mind.
But now there was.
He was in a warehouse. There was strip lighting overhead and metal tables stacked with cardboard boxes stamped with the name “Speedy Enterprises” on the ground. It was very cold. His breath plumed in the air.
He was sitting on a folding chair, his hands were on his knees and he was staring at two men dressed in bomber jackets standing in front of him. He found he resented their scrutiny, just as a drunk would resent someone staring at them when roused from a stupor.
He guessed the scrutiny had been going on for some time. The scene was just like in a movie, he thought… a movie? He tried to recall what a movie was. He could not associate words with things. His brain churned on the word for a beat before it engaged. Yes, he knew about movies. Bad movies. Hiroshima and split eyeballs and little pinkie fingers severed at the joint. Knew about the other kind: Bogie and Bacall, Casablanca. Black and white greats, the Golden Era of Hollywood. Golden, gold—colors came back…
The goons (another word) weren’t really like the ones in the movies. They looked young, for a start, and didn’t have that six o’ clock shadow favored by movie bad guys of the Golden Era. The one thing they did have in common was that they were both holding pistols and the pistols were pointed at his chest. And their eyes were hard. One of them had a discoloration on his neck—the word for that came then: tattoo; a gang tattoo—and the other a scar that ran up his cheek from the corner of his mouth.
“Who are you?” he asked. His voice sounded slurry, drunk. The room spun when he spoke.
Scarface grinned. The overhead lighting was so harsh his teeth looked yellow. “We’re the ones who ask the questions, bud. What’s your name?”
His mouth opened and his jaw moved, but nothing came out except for a strange honking noise. He didn’t know his own name. The two goons laughed. He felt a flash of anger, helplessness. Good. It was good to feel. Feeling would lead to remembering. He could remember Bogie and Bacall. He must have a name too, but his memory was a tabula rasa. He did remember the cell phone ringing, ringing, and a splitting pain in his head like an ice pick in his skull, and then nothing until he was in this warehouse, as if he had been beamed here like in… Star Trek. Kirk. Spock. Scotty. Uhura. More names.
“I dunno,” he answered. “What’re your names?”
“Quite the joker, ain’t you?” Scarface laughed. Then he said to the gangbanger, “We gotta make sure it’s the right guy.”
Tattoo said, “He knew the numbers of the keypad. Hey, bud, what’re the numbers?”
He answered without thinking, “Sixty-six. Sixteen. Sixteen. Fourteen.”
Tattoo said to his companion, “See? Just as Vermeulen said: walked right in here and sat down, didn’t he?”
Vermeulen—a name he knew.
“Yeah, he’s a real zombie show,” the other said. “Just stared through us when he came in.”
“Well, he’s woken up now. Check him for ID.”
“Hey, bud,” Gangbanger said. “You got a wallet in your coat?”
Wallet. Money. Credit cards. ID. The universe was filling in a little now. Like a vast paint-by-numbers. He was in a corner of it, working his way out.
Wallets were kept in pockets. There was something weighing down the inside of his coat. Quite a lightweight coat, given how cold it was. He wasn’t sure it was a wallet, though. It felt heavy, solid, a little uncomfortable. Under that he had a jacket. In addition he felt a package under his shirt, next to his skin. He ignored that and the heavy item and slid his hand into the inside jacket pocket. Slick leather. A wallet. He took hold of it.
“OK, nice and slow,” Scarface said. Ed drew the thing out. He saw it was leather: brown crocodile.
“Good, bud, now slide it over the floor,” Scarface ordered. Ed leaned down and skated the wallet over the concrete floor. It hit one of the goon’s feet and credit cards and a photo spilled out. A woman’s face. Dark hair. Attractive. A jolt to the heart. Who was she?
Gangbanger leaned down and picked up the spilled cards and the photo. He showed the photo to Scarface. “Not bad, eh?” He had gotten Scarface’s attention. The other guy leaned in to have a look.
He was surprised to find that his hand was back inside his coat, to where he’d felt the heavy object. His hand closed on a checkered grip. A revolver: what a revolver did arrived in the same instant as he withdrew the gun and stood up from the chair, his index finger engaged with the trigger as he did so.
The two men looked up from the photo at the same time. Because his gun was pointing at the gangbanger, he shot him first. In the solar plexus. The gun kicked like a mule. A heavy charge. The man doubled up. One of his legs pushed back as if he was fighting against a furious wind, then he sank to his knees, laid the photo and his pistol almost gently on the concrete floor in front of him and clamped his hands to his stomach. Blood spurted around them. His mouth opened stupidly as he saw it.
He thought it was strange that time should be like this: taking so goddam long to unspool as his gun tracked around to Scarface. He was seeing everything in a very detailed way, as if in slow motion, yet still Scarface hadn’t lifted his own weapon until it was too late.
He fired again, his arm jerking back. He liked the kick of the gun, he decided. He also guessed he’d had some practice firing guns. When? This round hit Scarface higher up than Gangbanger. Under his left armpit, as the man tried to ward off the shot. Scarface took a few sideway steps, traveling in an oddly balletic way on his toes. His gun discharged once and the round zinged off the concrete floor. There was a bee-like hum past his ear and a sudden punching sound as the round went through a metal divider. But, again, he didn’t really mind this feeling of being shot at. He found he was immune to fear. Scarface continued his strange ballet, tiptoed to one of the metal tables, fell onto a Speedy Enterprises box, then slid to a sitting position on the floor in a shower of Styrofoam peanuts, his back propped on one of the metal stanchions of the table. His eyes were directed at him, but they weren’t seeing anymore. He guessed Scarface was dead, or at least he would be in a few seconds.
He was pleased he had time to register that detail too, just as in all the details of the shooting of Gangbanger, to whom he must now return his attention.
Like his pal, he was not moving. He was still kneeling in the same position. Blood was pumping from the stomach wound and he was panting heavily.
Something must have alerted him to the fact that the shooter had turned to him again, because he looked up. His face was sweaty, the whites of his eyes rolling.
“Please…” was all he said.
He was a little surprised when the gun jerked in his hand again. And he was surprised to see Gangbanger’s right eye socket disappear and red and gray matter instantaneously shoot out the back of his head onto the concrete floor. He noticed that because it was so cold inside the warehouse, the scattered brain matter steamed a little where it lay.
Gangbanger was on his back now, one leg tucked awkwardly under him, his remaining eye staring at the ceiling.
He walked from the chair to the dead man and picked up the billfold and the picture of the woman. She looked back at him. Dark hair, dark eyes. Another little stab to the heart. There was writing on the back. To Ed, always on my mind, xoxo
He looked at one of the fallen credit cards. It had a different name to the one on the picture: Martin; Martin J. Cruz. He put the things back in the billfold. Martin, Ed? Why did he have two names?
He knew one thing. The two men had been sent here by Vermeulen. He remembered that name. It was in a little red book. And now he remembered: the little red book was one of those things in the package next to his skin.
He listened for police sirens. There was nothing. He went to a side door and found it unlocked. Outside there was an alleyway with a frosting of snow. A solitary sodium light shone on a car. A black Volvo estate. He knew it was his car. He looked through the window. The keys were still in the ignition. There was a lot of stuff in the back. Black trash bags, overspilling with clothes, and what appeared to be boxes of dry food.
He opened the driver’s door and noticed something else: a black leatherbound Bible lay on the passenger seat.
