Mr. X (31 page)

My heart, that old warhorse, foamed at the bit.

I hastened across the street and materialized beside Frenchy. In years past, I now and again had summoned him to my service, invariably with the sense of mysteriously accommodating myself within a range of visibilities rather than anything as decisive as making myself visible. As far as Frenchy is concerned, one minute I’m not there and the next minute I am, and the process dismays him far more than he wants to let on.

When he became aware of my presence, he flinched, then twitched his narrow shoulders and pretended he was doing loosening-up exercises. People like Frenchy never loosen up, and their only exercise is running from the police. “How come I never see you sneakin’ up on me?”

“You don’t look in the right places,” I said.

He gave a rim-shot laugh,
rat! tat!
, bounced up and down, and glanced across Word Street.

“Do you know those hillbillies?”

He shot me a wary look, then thrust his hands into the pockets of the leather jacket. “Might have seen ’em in the Speedway.”

I raised my head to expose, beneath the brim of my hat, my left eye.

“One of ’em’s called Joe Staggers,” he said. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Two nights ago, you were busy behind
Lanyard Street with Clyde Prentiss. Tonight you have nothing to do but listen to me.”

Frenchy jittered himself back into a semblance of confidence. “Clyde’s only a friend of mine, all right?”

“The old Grueber warehouse,” I said. “Microwaves. How many did you get before Clyde’s mishap, a dozen?”

Frenchy breathed through his mouth while admiring the lighted upper windows of a tenement across the street. “Around ten. I dumped ’em in the river.”

He was telling me what he should have done. All twelve of the stolen microwaves were stacked against a wall of his tiny apartment.

“Clyde Prentiss represents a threat to your freedom,” I said. “If he should happen to recover, he’ll turn you in for a reduced sentence. Some would say Clyde should have done his friends the favor of dying.”

Frenchy tried to look unconcerned. “The poor guy could go at any moment. Bad heart. Fifty-fifty chance.”

“I am going to improve those odds, Frenchy,” I said. He stopped twitching. “After tonight, you won’t have to worry about Prentiss. In return, you will perform a number of errands for me. You will be remunerated. This is your first installment.” A fifty-dollar bill passed from my hand into Frenchy’s pallid hand, thence into a zippered pocket.

He ventured a sidelong glance. “Uh, are you saying …”

“You know perfectly well what I’m saying. Who are those meatheads after?” I wanted to learn how much he knew.

“A guy named Dunstan took some bread off ’em in a card game. They’re sore.”

“Would you recognize Dunstan if you saw him?”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to work through the lanes. If you see Dunstan, tell him that someone wants to meet him in Veal Yard. Show him the way. If you run into Staggers or his pals, send them in the opposite direction.”

He moved away, and I said, “Unload those microwaves in Chicago.”

Frenchy took off as though jet-propelled. I slipped back across Word Street and into the nearest lane. My long-delayed encounter with Master Dunstan would not occur until the brat’s birthday, but in the meantime it was my ironic duty to protect
him from harm. I went gliding up Horsehair with every anticipation of spilling a quantity of Mountry blood.

Though I could wish for half a dozen Horsehairs, one will do. Swelling and contracting in width, a back alley’s back alley, it snakes back and forth through Hatchtown, and from within its walls the experienced listener can discern a great deal of what is going on around him. In high good humor, I awaited broadcasts from Mountry.

Hatchtown residents stumbled home, lurched into taverns, wrangled, copulated. Children squalled, slept, squalled again. I was pretty sure I heard Piney Woods humming to himself as he shambled along Leather toward Word Street, but it may have been some other derelict old enough to remember “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” I ducked into Veal Yard, and the music for which I had been searching came to me from the direction of Pitch and Treacle.

The music in question was the
click-slop, click-slop
of cobblestones meeting steel-tipped boots with run-down heels, highstyle footwear amongst Mountry’s finest. I made my way into Wax. The yokel made pursuit all the easier by rapping his baseball bat against the bricks, producing a sharp, ringing
tock!
vivid as a flare. I was still unable to distinguish whether he was on Pitch or Treacle, but a little extra speed would bring me to the point where the two lanes flowed together into Lavender only seconds behind my quarry. Concentrating on the
click-slop
,
click-slop
and the occasional, radarish
tock!
, I ignored the other sounds drifting from adjacent lanes. Then two different sets of footsteps snagged my attention.

To those who can hear, footsteps are as good as fingerprints. Two men of approximately the same weight walking across wet ground in identical pairs of shoes leave virtually identical impressions, but the sounds they make will differ in a thousand ways. What made me attend to the pair of footsteps coming from Pitch or Treacle was their unreasonable similarity. (They were not identical. Even identical twins do not replicate each other’s tread, they cannot.) One man, the first, moved in fearfully, with an irregularity that betrayed overindulgence in alcohol. The man behind him glided along in confident high spirits, not only unimpaired but as if the concept of impairments or obstacles did not exist for him—it was the walk of an
unearthly
being.

I must allude now to a circumstance beyond the grasp of any
mortal reader. In the stride of an unearthly being nothing even faintly like morality may be detected. A transcendent ruthlessness resounded from the tread of the second pair of footsteps drawing near the joining of Pitch and Treacle and their meeting with the more spacious Lavender.

And yet! Although the first set of footfalls contained virtually no resonance of the so-to-speak angelic or unearthly, it uncannily resembled the second.

It was like

I felt as though

I might have been standing before

You Mighty Ones, in his present euphoria Your Servant can find no better description of the emotional state induced by this impossible resemblance than the adjective most beloved of the Providence Master,
eldritch
. I had heard the footsteps of my son. Aware that the redneck was in pursuit, he possessed the capacity to mislead him with the false signal of, I don’t know what you call it, an auditory hallucination. I could do many things, but this stunt was as beyond me as time travel. With the awareness that my adversary was more supple than I had supposed, I got myself once more in motion and hastened through Horsehair’s convolutions only to arrive at Lavender after the fact.

From Horsehair’s opening, I glimpsed lounging in the doorway of an abandoned warehouse one of the band of urchins who gather there at night. The bully-boy was swaggering off. After a moment of appalled indecision, I thought it possible that the wicked offspring had after all spoken to Frenchy. Back down Horsehair I flew to vacant Veal Yard.

Cursing, I rushed through the byway and heard, mystifyingly, the hallucinatory footsteps and those of a child moving down Lavender. Eventually I came near enough to recognize the child as Nolly Wheadle, whom I had betimes dispatched on harmless errands. When I realized that our journey was taking us toward Hatchtown’s southern border, the exercise suddenly became clear: though my only-begotten son might have occult powers denied his father, he didn’t know beans about geography. He had hired Nolly to lead him out!

Complete understanding did not arrive until after the pair in front of me reached a patch of cobbles named White Mouse Yard, where both they and I, a cautious distance behind, heard the
click-slop
,
click-slop
of the bully trudging down a nearby
lane. The next sound to reach us, the tread of unearthly footsteps, blasted all my conjectures into powder. Nolly fled, yelling directions to the tourist. My son and adversary approached, but in the destruction of every certainty I could not tell from where—I concealed myself within Horsehair. The tourist pounded into Silk, and I sped to the next lane. At the opening onto Glass, I wedged myself against the bricks, looked out at a lamplit corner, and was given the third and greatest revelation of the day.

A man in a dark suit ran forward, took off his shoes, and trotted toward my niche. Before he had come close enough to the light to expose his face, the bully-boy lumbered around the corner of an intersecting lane. The bully-boy raised his bat and attacked. I crept out to put an end to the lout. Then, bafflingly, a second form, in every way similar to the first, sprinted down the lane. One of them was my son, but which?

I drew back. A promissory music filled my ears.

The new arrival pushed the tourist aside and leaped upon the roughneck. Surely, this was my son. In seconds, he had claimed the baseball bat and was bringing it down on the roughneck’s skull.

Taking in the careless beauty of his features, the darkness of his lustrous eyes, the abrupt angle of his cheekbones, I watched my scion saunter toward the lamplight. The commission of a violent homicide had ruffled him no more than it would his old man. The Adversary’s radiant monstrosity utterly belied the terror, the quailing dismay of his shadow-appearances. I supposed that the little shit had grown into this self-assurance around the time I erased from the earth, as Commanded, the last of the Dunstans no longer resident in Edgerton, those barrel scrapings through whom I had moved like a plague.

But what in the world was he up to, and who or what was the replica whose life he had saved? I hugged the wall and watched the blood-soaked center of the stage.

My foe strolled glittering into the spotlight. With the self-awareness of deliberate art, he appeared to hesitate. That devil knew exactly what he was doing. He was
posing
. Slowly, negligently, he turned his back to me and faced the man in first row center. After a beautifully timed delay, he spoke.

Unfortunately, he uttered only an anticlimactic sentence concerning the hypothetical male obligation to honor the sexual overtures of females. Evidently he had bedded someone the
other fellow had rejected. My inner receptors continued to hum in expectation of more essential info. My formidable son and adversary vanished down the intersecting lane. As if linked by an elastic band, the other stumbled into the circumference of the lamplight.

The recognition of how close to understanding I had come while failing completely nearly made me burst into laughter. I was looking at the same face, more or less, considerably more than less. They were brothers.

Star had given birth to two boys, and while I had vainly sought the first, it was the second son, apparently named Ned, whose shadow-self had floated behind me on their mutual birthday. Star’s death had summoned them both to Edgerton, and until a moment before, the dope now hovering at the edge of the light had been as clueless about his brother’s existence as I.
Star had not wanted him to know. Star had protected him
. Stunned, the lad moved forward to pursue his brother, shuddered back, and skedaddled.

I have been given what I needed all along.

41

“Under the bed is not a new concept,” said Lieutenant Rowley. “But you pushed that sucker way
back
there. Were you afraid someone would steal your winnings?”

Lieutenant Rowley raised his rust-colored eyebrows toward his crinkly, rust-colored hair. The wrinkles in his forehead deepened, and his mouth stretched into a narrow line. Creases like hatchet marks appeared on his leathery cheeks. He was smiling. It was 4:56
A.M.,
and Rowley had been having a wonderful time since 3:30, when he and Officer Treuhaft, a human totem pole swathed in blue, had awakened Nettie and Clark, charged into my room, read my Miranda rights, and arrested me for the murder of a man named Minor Keyes. Rowley was just getting into his stride.