About the Author (31 page)

Chopper nodded. “Oh,
thanks
, Mr. Cunningham!”

“Don’t mention it,” I said, rising from my chair.

I ushered her over to the back door and guided her out onto the dark driveway, where a flurry of white moths traced blurred arabesques against the night. I told her to be careful. Chopper turned and looked up at me, her brows creasing her pale forehead.

“I hope it’s okay I told you where she’s at. She told me not to tell nobody. I told on account of you’re old friends.”

“That’s our secret, Chopper,” I said, patting her shoulder. “You mustn’t even tell Les that you told me where she was.”

“Oh, I won’t,” Chopper said, laughing nervously. “She’d prob’ly
kill
me.”

“So it’s our secret,” I said.

She breathed a shaky sigh, then turned her rounded back to me and hurried off down the driveway.

So Les is alive. She breathes. She
lives
. Why am I not
more
surprised? By now I am incapable of surprise. Especially where my tormentor is concerned. Now it all makes sense: Les, hunkered low, moving into the clearing, scurrying crabwise toward the bundle that lies where I threw it, a cloud of talclike powder rotating slowly in the moonlight. She has almost closed her hand around the package when our pursuers break through into the clearing. She looks up, the burning spheres of their flashlight beams alight upon her, and she reacts like an insect stung by the sun rays focused through a sadistic child’s magnifying glass. Her body jerks sideways at supernormal speed. The guns blaze. But the girl has already rolled into the low vegetation beside the clearing. She pitches herself down the slope. Still the guns roar, senselessly, a riot of overkill—until one member of the gang sights the package lying out there in the open. With a shout and a wave of his hand, he silences the weapons of his cohorts. They pause for a moment and listen. Perhaps they hear, distantly, the sound of both the girl and me running in our separate directions, toward our separate destinies. But they have what they came for. A couple of halfhearted shots are fired into the woods. Then they take up the bundle and make off with it to their boss. To Alain.

Yes, it must have been something like that. Something very much like that. Why did I never imagine such a scenario before?

This is, however, no time for me to lament my already exhaustively documented failures of imagination. I must think. I must figure out what to
do
. The girl is alive. But she is not in good shape. She is penniless, having given away all her money to that lizard Alain. She is homeless, unable to return to the Yellow House, ever. Unable to return to New York. The entire night is arrayed against her: it seethes and crawls with people baying for her blood. It is a measure of how low she has sunk that she turns to
me
as her sole ally. And why me? Because she still has the laptop. The laptop is her protection, and her leverage. It is her sole possession in all the world. Just as the contents of that laptop once gave
me
a life and a future, so they promise to do the same now for Les. She clings to the device like a life raft as she floats in a night sea of circling sharks. I could almost feel sorry for her. I
do
feel sorry for her. But I must fight that urge. She means me harm. She would harbor no such pity for me if our roles were reversed. She sends the message, through Chopper, that if I give her the money to escape from New Halcyon, she will “call it even.” By this I presume she means that she will cease to blackmail me. I would have to be a fool to believe that. For why, then, would she have risked her life to come back to New Halcyon and collect the laptop from her cottage? Oh, it would not be long before I started to receive postcards from Mexico or Florida informing me of a post office box where I must send the hush money. The nightmare would resume. I would never be rid of her. That much is obvious. I cannot simply give her the money without first demanding that she surrender the laptop to me.

What time is it? Almost ten now. It’s pitch black outside, but still too early to make a trip down to the Halberts’. What do I say to Les once I get there? Does she still have her gun? Yes, I remember her stuffing it into her waistband before she ran off. Has she reloaded the gun since that night? Yes—I’m sure bullets were among the precious items she collected from the Yellow House this morning.

Still, I must go to her, try to reason with her. Bargain with her. Get her to agree to hand over the laptop. How much cash do I have on me? Eighty dollars. I can’t see her handing over the computer for eighty bucks! Would she agree to hand it over on trust? For the promised two thousand bucks, deliverable tomorrow?

Or will she, panicked, shoot me on sight?

Christ, this is so like all those times when I tried to write my pathetic fictions, when I would sit over the page for hours, examining the ever-branching possibilities of motivation and action, unable to imagine
how
my cipherlike characters might plausibly behave in any given situation, unable to imagine how anyone
could
project himself into the mind of another that way. Especially a fictional other. But I must figure this out. Janet will be home tomorrow by noon.
This is happening
. It is not fiction. This must be resolved. And soon. I must figure out how to steer these events toward a conclusion favorable to myself. I must figure out, through the vexing, confusing, half-glimpsed possibilities, a happy ending.

A dark idea just came scurrying up to me on the silent cat-paws of night. A diabolical flash of creative inspiration that actually makes me shiver.

Suppose Tommy was to learn where Les is hiding
.

Just imagine if that murderous, slow-moving, psychopathically brutal thug, after a month spent doggedly, remorselessly searching her out through the wilderness of the American Northeast—imagine if that man, who roils with a fury so lethal that he has never given up the search even after weeks of stumbling into blind alleys, blind leads, blind rage—just
imagine
if he learned the girl’s hiding place. As I write these words, I realize how the Novelist must feel when he has arrayed all the forces of his characters and plot for the finale, when he has set the stage, when he has steeped himself so completely in the inner workings of his characters that he can predict their every move, indeed preordain it. A single word from his pen will set the denouement in motion, so that the whole spring-wound apparatus will unspool with perfect, crystalline inevitability, as if the characters had taken on a life of their own, leaving the writer detached, blameless, observing it all from above—like God.

I called the Halcyon Inn, and an adenoidal young man—probably some local high school kid on the final weekend of his summer job—answered. I asked for Detective Cantucci. He tried to connect me with the room, but the phone rang and rang. The young man came back on and asked if I would care to leave a message. “No,” I was starting to say, when I heard another male voice in the background: “Is someone calling for the detective? I just saw him go out onto the veranda. He ordered a drink.” My helper repeated this information to me and added, “I can take a phone out to him there if you’d like.” I told him not to bother, and I hung up.

During the delay, it had occurred to me that “Detective Cantucci” might be wary of accepting an anonymous phone tip—might, in fact, assume that the call was some kind of setup. I had to figure out some
other
way of obtruding the information onto his consciousness. But how? I visualized the brooding Tommy as he sat nursing his homicidal rage in one of the wicker chairs on the Halcyon Inn’s veranda. That’s when I hit upon my plan.

There was very little time to spare. No telling how long Tommy would remain sitting there. I locked these pages away in the bottom desk drawer and hurried out to my car.

The night was—is—sticky, black, windless, hung with nightshade and night’s perfume, deadly with silence. . . . Jesus, what am I writing? Getting tired. Punchy. Must keep going. . . .

At the inn, I strolled over to the front desk and asked the clerk if Bantam was around. The young man hesitated, as if not sure how to answer this question. I knew what that meant.

“Is he in his office?” I asked, moving toward a nearby door marked MANAGER. The young man gave a reluctant nod. I pushed into the office.

Bantam was slumped at his desk like a gunshot victim, his head lying on his arms. A bottle of vodka, half empty, sat in front of him. I said his name loudly, and his head shot up.

“Naw’sleep!” he said. “Jus’ resting!” He blinked several times. Then his face, as if by a computer morphing effect, changed from slack-jawed, droopy-lidded incomprehension to a sloppy, thick-tongued smile. “Cal,” he said. “Th’great author! T’what do I owe thish extreme pressure . . . pleasure?”

I told him I had just come by for a nightcap. Would he care to join me? On the veranda?

Bantam said that sounded “capital.”

Passing the bar, I asked the bartender to bring us a couple of whiskies. “Doubles, no ice.”

Bantam and I stepped out through the French doors onto the veranda. I pretended to take in the view of rolling lawn, cabana, and lighted swimming pool, but in reality I was casing the place for Tommy. The lights were, for some reason, out, so the veranda was couched in darkness. It also seemed to be deserted. I cursed the desk clerk and was on the point of dragging Bantam back inside when I realized that we were not alone after all. In the darkest region of the veranda, some ten feet away, there was a man in an armchair facing the lake. A beer in a tapering glass glowed on a table beside him. The sudden orange flare of a cigarette tip lit up, briefly, partially, the bland and brutal features of Tommy.

“This looks perfect, Bantam,” I said, settling into one of the wicker armchairs. Bantam lowered himself, wobblily, into a chaise longue. Tommy was off to my left, well within earshot.

“So, Bantam,” I said, trying to sound natural, trying not to hurry—trying, in fact, to create a believable scene of dialogue between me and my hopelessly drunken interlocutor. “How’s the inn been treating you?”

But Bantam was in no mood for pleasantries. “Where’s that goddamn drink?” he said, craning around in his chaise.

I told him I was sure the drink was on its way. This did little to appease him, though. He remained hopelessly distracted and twitchy, scratching at his neck as if his collar were too tight, scowling in the direction of the bar.

“So Bantam,” I soldiered on, “I suppose you’ve heard that Jeremy and Laura are off in Europe?”

“Fire that damn bartender,” he mumbled. “Whazzat’bout Jeremy?”

“The Halberts. In Europe. Been gone almost three weeks.”

“Ahhh, here’s that drink!”

Indeed, the waiter had blessedly arrived. He deposited two glasses on the low table between us. Bantam fairly dove at his drink. I dropped a twenty on the waiter’s cork tray and told him to keep the change. He moved off.

“Awwhgh,” Bantam groaned after he’d taken a deep guzzle. “Thassgood.”

Peripherally, I studied Tommy’s stolid profile. He was calmly sucking down his cigarette, apparently oblivious to us.

“I have to say,” I continued, “I commend the Halberts for their trustfulness. I mean, I’m not sure that many of us would have felt comfortable with it.”

“Huh?” Bantam said.

“Well,” I went on, “maybe you didn’t hear whom they got to house-sit for them.” I snuck a quick sideways glance at Tommy. He was raising his glass to his lips. “Lesley,” I said, perhaps a little too loudly. Then I repeated it for good measure. “Lesley—from the Yellow House.”

Tommy’s glass froze an inch or so from his lips. He slowly replaced the beer, unsipped, on the table. In no other way did he indicate that he had heard a word I said. His profile maintained the same stoic outline against the night; his big left hand continued to dangle from the end of the chair’s armrest, a cigarette between index and middle fingers. And yet I could sense the quivering attentiveness that had seized him.

In a very clear voice, I said, “The Halberts hired Les to house-sit their place. You know, their place on River Road. The big A-frame. She sleeps there every night. She’ll be there ’til Sunday, when the Halberts get back.”

I’ve often heard actors describe the satisfactions of working in live theater. They invariably speak about the immediacy of stage work: you say a funny line, and you
hear
the laughter in the audience; you deliver the climactic speech in a tragedy, and you hear the sniffles and rustling of Kleenex. It was a little like that for me now with Tommy. For hardly had my last utterance left my lips when he was heaving to his feet. He flicked his cigarette butt into the garden. Then he turned his great, grim slab of a face in my direction. For a moment I was terrified that he was going to say something to me. Instead he simply stalked, with menacing deliberation, off the veranda. Throughout Tommy’s exit, I tried to keep the flow of dialogue going, for purposes of naturalism, and babbled on about how wonderfully trusting and open-minded the Halberts were for hiring Lesley for such a job; but after Tommy’s murderous bulk finally disappeared, I fell silent.

I sat there trembling. Listening to my heart beat. Evidently the expression on my face betrayed something of my inner state, because Bantam, even in his drunkenness, said, “Cal? Waz wrong?”

I said I was fine, just a little dizzy. I stood up on quaking knees. Bantam said something about another drink, but I told him I must get home.

I’ve been home for about forty minutes now. It’s almost twelve midnight. He’ll wait until at least one or two, if not later. True, the Halberts’ place is secluded. You could slaughter a whole family there at midday, and no one would be the wiser. Still, he won’t want to risk anyone’s hearing her scream.

I find that I can’t stop thinking of how her swollen, blackened eyes looked on that day when she fled to New Halcyon from New York City. What
will
he do to her now? There was something about his heavy, funereal tread as he left the Halcyon Inn veranda: his slow, unhurried movements were somehow so much more disturbing than any signs he might have shown of agitation and haste. It was his sheer confidence that he had the situation firmly in hand, that his prey could not now escape. Think of the pent-up rage he will unleash on her, the terrible
focus
of his single-minded stalker’s obsession—an obsession that made him follow her all the way to New Halcyon.