Nerve Damage (21 page)

“An expert on North Africa and fluent in dialects of the Maghreb,” Janet said. “Which is why they recruited him.”

“By ‘they' you mean Tom's section?” Roy said.

“Not Tom's,” Janet said. “Why all this emphasis on Tom? It was Delia.”

“Delia recruited him?”

“She was the boss,” Janet said.

The aura, trembling at the edges, touched him.

Roy couldn't hear the storm, but he knew it was
out there, violent and roaring. Nothing to be afraid of: he was safe and warm in his igloo. Anything to stop him from staying here forever? Not that he could think of, not one single reason. So let it blow. His mind was at ease. He listened to the fire, crackling away. He got warmer and warmer.

But: uh-oh. Igloos were built with blocks of ice. Therefore getting warmer and warmer meant…uh-oh. Bad things. Bad things like melting, dripping, homelessness. He opened his eyes.

Fire burned, very near. Roy squirmed away.

“Are you all right?”

He glanced around, maybe not without panic, saw a woman gazing down at him, a woman with wild graying hair and shadowy eyes: Janet Habib.

“You fainted,” she said.

“No,” Roy said. “Not possible.” He sprang to his feet, or at least that was the signal his brain sent his body. In fact, he rose slowly and with difficulty, a little breathless. That gave him plenty of time to remember.

“Are you all right?” she said again.

“You saw her alive?” he said. The words: they sounded so strange to him; and so did his voice—like an old man's.

“Exactly the way I told you,” Janet said. “You look pale.”

“Delia?”

“Delia.”

“But it's not possible,” Roy said. “Because then why wouldn't she have…”

“A glass of water?”

Roy shook his head: because then why wouldn't she have come home?

Janet moved into another room, returned with a glass of water. She handed it to him: all those rings, and that naked ring finger. Roy drank, at first a sip or two, and then, as though he'd been a long time in the desert, with greed. He gulped it down. The water-life equation couldn't have been more obvious.

Janet was watching him. “Don't worry,” she said. “It's safe.”

“What is?” said Roy, suddenly feeling stronger, more like himself.

“The water,” she said. “Pollution's spreading through the aquifer but my well tested negative just last week.” She took the empty glass. “I've got something to show you.”

“What?”

“It's outside.”

Roy put on his jacket. Janet got a flashlight, led him outside, around to a shed behind the house. The moon had risen, just a sliver, but reflected countless times in the ripples of a nearby pond.

“This is a nice spot,” she said. “If you like isolation.”

Janet unlocked the shed, shone the light inside. Roy saw a white convertible, old and covered with dust and cobwebs, the top down.

“Paul's car?” he said. But he knew: white with white interior, waiting for Delia under their personal cherry-blossom tree.

“He loved it,” Janet said.

Roy went over, rested his hand on the passenger-side headrest. Cold, cracked leather, but Roy, touching it, was hit by a sudden sensory mem
ory of the exact feel of Delia's skin. If he still knew something like that, didn't it follow that he'd known everything about her?

“I had this idea of burying him in it,” Janet said. “But then I started having doubts—would he have wanted that? We…we were young. So many things we never got around to discussing.”

Roy nodded.

“The funny thing is,” Janet said, “I kind of did end up burying him in it.”

“I don't understand.”

Janet came forward, reached into the car, opened the glove box. She took out an urn, oval-shaped with flattened ends, made of some dull silvery metal, maybe pewter.

“This came a few days later, UPS,” she said. “I just didn't take the last step, burying the car. It seemed so over-the-top.” She held the urn in one arm, enfolded, the way you carry a baby.

What was the expression?
Starting to show
. When would Delia have started to show? Soon, right? And then a thought struck him, struck him with physical force. If Janet Habib was telling him the truth, then it was possible Delia did end up showing. And more; an almost unimaginable chain of mores that made him lean against the car, and hold on, just in case.

“Tell me again,” he said.

“Tell you what?”

“This story—of Delia coming to your house in Cambridge.”

“I have no interest in persuading you,” Janet said. “Believe or disbelieve, it makes no difference.”

“Just tell me again,” Roy said.

Outside the wind rose, banging the shed door closed. Janet flicked a wall switch, turning on a bulb that hung down from a crossbeam, the light harsh on her face. She squinted at him—what was she seeing?—and said, “You're really telling me you never saw her after the trip?”

“Tom Parish called with the news,” Roy said. “And came to the funeral. She's buried in the old town graveyard.”

“You saw with your own eyes?” Janet said.

“Of course—I was at the funeral.”

“She wasn't cremated?”

“No. There was a coffin.” White, with scrollwork highlighted in gold leaf, all paid for by the Hobbes Institute; at least, that was what Roy assumed: he'd never seen a bill.

“I don't understand,” Janet said.

“That's why I'm asking you—are you sure it was Delia in the limo?”

“Beyond any doubt,” Janet said.

“Did Tom Parish say where the car crash happened?”

“I didn't ask.”

“Why not?”

“I didn't want to know,” Janet said. Her voice grew quieter, almost as though talking to herself. “I didn't want any of the details. And I wanted Tom to know that.”

“To know you didn't want to know?” said Roy.

She gazed at him. Her eyes were dark and blurred.

“Explain,” he said.

“Are all artists like you?” she said. “The answer should be obvious—to make sure nothing like this ever happened.”

“Nothing like what?”

“A stranger turning up with dangerous questions.” Her gaze, drawn back to the urn, went far away. “Paul told me he was going to Washington, nothing more. But I knew. I knew from how nervous he was.”
Habib's shirt was the color of the cherry blossoms; damp patches had spread under both arms
.

“Knew what?” Roy said.

“And from how he muttered in his sleep,” she said, now meeting Roy's gaze. “Muttered in Arabic.”

“About?” said Roy.

She looked away. “I don't speak a word of Arabic.”

“I think you know where they went,” Roy said.

She shook her head.

“Tell me.”

Janet took a step back, cradling the urn. “What are you doing?” The lightbulb flickered, went out, came back on. She looked scared. “Well? What are you doing?”

What was he doing? Right now, he was trying to come up with an explanation more believable than what Janet took to be obvious—that Delia and Paul had gone to some Arabic-speaking place, not Venezuela. Did that mean Venezuela had never been in the plans, that Delia had lied to him? Or had there been some last-minute change, a message waiting at the airport?

“Why did you come here?” Janet said. “What did you want with Paul?”

“The Hobbes Institute has disappeared,” Roy said. “As though it never existed.”

“So?”

“What do you know about it?”

“Nothing.”

“That's not possible,” he said.

“Think what you want.”

“What are you so afraid of?” Roy said.

“Nothing,” she said. “You.”

“You've got nothing to fear from me,” Roy said. They were mirror images of each other. “I'd like to see his pay stubs.”

“What pay stubs?”

“From whoever did the paying.”

“I didn't keep anything like that,” Janet said.

But here was the car, not up on blocks or preserved in any way, just retained; and the ashes, not underground, not on a mantelpiece, still unsettled. Roy didn't believe her. Much more likely that she'd held on to everything: Paul Habib was still unsettled in her mind. Roy was starting to understand that feeling very well. “Where are the pay stubs?” he said.

“Nowhere,” Janet said. “I threw all that stuff out years ago. Years and years and years.”

Roy shook his head. His mind grasped something important. This shed—with the car that had taken Delia away, and the ashes of the last person he'd seen her with—had to be square one. He was on the right track, if for no other reason than that here was the first face that didn't go blank at the mention of Tom Parish and the Hobbes Institute. That realization had an effect, immediate and physical. He felt pain-free and full of oxygen; strong, potent, clearheaded, felt, in fact, the way he had on any given day a year ago, six months ago, even two.

“I'm going to look for those pay stubs, Janet,” he said. “I'd prefer your help, but I'm going to do it, one way or another.”

“Are you threatening me?” she said.

“It doesn't have to be like that,” Roy began, “but if you don't—”

With her free hand, Janet was reaching under her Scandinavian sweater, into the waistband of her jeans. A little late, Roy remembered the gun. Then—things speeding up—the gun was out in the open, the barrel rising. Roy's body, as it had done so often on the ice, took over, and flew at her, totally airborne. Not a great distance, and his legs had always been strong, but for some reason Roy fell short, swiping weakly at Janet's arm as he went down.

He landed heavily, mostly on his cast, cracking it open; he cried out in pain, lost his breath. Janet, off balance, tripped over a paint can and went down, also landing hard. The gun and the urn both sailed free, hitting the floor. The top of the urn popped off.

Roy rolled over, crawled toward the gun, fighting to get air in his lungs. He grabbed it, turned. Janet was on her knees, gazing down at a small charcoal-gray nest: the ashes.

“Oh my God,” she said. She began rocking back and forth.

Roy got up, ripped broken plaster off his arm—the pain didn't get any worse, lessened if anything—and went over to her. He put the gun in his pocket, knelt beside her. She didn't seem aware of him at all.

“Oh my God,” she said, “oh my God.”

Roy reached for the urn, held it horizontally on the floor, the way you would a dustpan, started sweeping the ashes back in with his hand. The crematorium—perhaps some foreign crematorium—hadn't done a
great job, unless it was normal to find tiny bone fragments among the ashes. And—and what was this? Something shiny?

Roy picked it out of the ashes. Beside him, Janet went still. A metal object, high-quality carbon steel—Roy knew metals—about two inches long, irregular and partly blackened at one end, sharply pointed at the other: the broken-off blade of a knife.

Janet's hands covered the lower part of her face; her eyes were wide and dark. “He was murdered?” she said.

Roy gazed at the blade. He could make out some engraved letters:
zerland
.

“Is that what this means?” Janet said. “Tell me.” She dug her nails into his arm. For some reason he didn't feel that at all. “Tell me what it means.”

 

“This is everything,”
Janet said. They were back in the house, in front of the fire. She dumped out cardboard boxes—three, four, more—spilling the contents onto the rug. “So much,” she said.

It took hours. Roy came away with three things.

One: Among the many pay stubs, the only one not from MIT:
Verdadero Investments,
$783.56 to Paul Habib.

“What's Verdadero Investments?” he said.

“No idea,” said Janet.

Two: An overhead color photograph, shot from a high-flying plane or maybe a satellite, of a large square structure with towers on each corner. Computerized printing at the bottom read:
Operation Pineapple
. But this couldn't be Venezuela. Desert lay all around, not an American-style southwestern desert, but the kind with dunes; they cast rippling black shadows.

“Where's this?”

“Couldn't tell you.”

Three: Another photograph, this one black-and-white, out of focus. Paul, younger and thinner than Roy remembered him, sat on a fence
rail, laughing. A man in a Stetson stood beside him, in profile. He was laughing, too. Out of focus, face in shadow beneath the Stetson brim, and hair brown, not white, but: Calvin Truesdale, almost for sure.

“Do you know him?” Roy said.

“No,” Janet said. “I've never seen this picture.” Her eyes were still on it. “Who is he?”

Roy could feel how intensely she waited for his answer; a little too intensely, he thought. “No idea,” he said.

“But you think it's important?” She had a sudden thought—a thought that seemed to scare her. “Because of who took it?”

“Maybe.”

“Who took it?”

But Roy didn't want to say. If all this was true, then: Why hadn't she come back to him? He thought again of that line Delia had once quoted, when he'd asked how work was going: the line about holding two contradictory thoughts in your mind at once. Now it scared him.

“What's going on?” Janet said. Her eyes went quickly to a window, returned to Roy.

“That's what I'm asking you,” he said.

The fire had gone out; a few embers glowed faintly in the grate, and even more faintly in Janet's eyes. “I always felt uneasy,” she said, “way down deep—where I could ignore it. My whole marriage.” She handed him the picture. “Did you feel uneasy, too?”

“Never,” Roy said.

Tears rose up in her eyes, overflowed. “I thought I was all cried out.”

“That won't happen until you tell whatever it is you're hiding,” Roy said. Then came a thought. “Did Paul ever mention a woman named Lenore?”

“No.”

“Tall, light-skinned black, now in her midforties?”

Janet's eyes widened.

“I've seen her,” Roy said. “Who is she?”