The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  This was a joke and both women smiled. Detective Barren nodded in farewell and crossed the street. For a moment she was overcome by the bright late summer morning sun and the routine conversation with the woman. Everything is normal, she thought. Everything is simple and ordinary and in its place. Birds singing. Children playing. Light breeze blowing. Temperature soaring. Woman walking her dog. Norman Rockwell America. Simple steady rhythms and melodies.

  She shook her head and thought of the dissonance in her pocket. I’m getting closer, she thought.

  Pennington faded around her and she envisioned the hard city streets of her destination.

  She slid back into her car, and within seconds was heading toward New York.

  The tidal flow of argument ebbed around Martin Jeffers.

  He had started the session by asking the Lost Boys a simple question: All of you have relations, he’d queried. What do you think they think of your behavior? Do they have any connection with your crimes? There had been a momentary uncomfortable silence, and Jeffers knew he’d struck a nerve within them. He knew, too, that his question, not so innocently posed, came from within his own heart. He had instantly pictured his brother, then forced the image from his mind while he listened to the men’s memories unfold. There had been a rush of denial, almost en masse, which he had, as always, taken as representing an opposite reality. It was a simple formula: that which the Lost Boys most vigorously denied was closest to the truth.

  Now he waited for the voices to subside so he could interject some comment that they would pick up and argue more about. But his attention wandered in and out, and he had trouble concentrating on the progress of the group. Luckily, the Lost Boys were in active form; they needed little input of his. He found himself nervously eyeing his watch, hoping for the end of the session. Where is she? he wondered.

  “You know what was funny?” It was Meriwether speaking in his small, reedy voice. “When I got busted and sent away to this country club, my wife was more upset than I was. I mean”—he breathed through his nostrils with a wheezy laughter—“I would have thought that she’d divorce me. Shit, I thought she would shoot me herself. Christ, she’s twice my size anyway, she coulda just walloped me a couple . . .”

  All the men laughed at this.

  Jeffers thought: What does she want? Arrest him? He remembered the ice in her eyes.

  “. . . But she didn’t. She was crying and wringing her hands. And even while I was copping out, she was, you know, denying it. It was like she thought that neighbor’s kid I did somehow, you know, seduced me! She had to believe that.”

  Meriwether hesitated.

  “Hell, the kid was only eleven . . .”

  In the momentary pause, Jeffers’ mind worked quickly: He has always involved me! I’ve always been a part of everything he did. Always on the edge, just barely included, but connected nonetheless. He’s always wanted it that way. And he’s always gotten it the way he wanted. That’s the older brother’s prerogative. What younger brother ever refuses the older?

  “Fucking weird woman. Now she visits twice a week and bothers the parole board.”

  He looked out at the group.

  “Somebody here explain it to me.”

  Jeffers could think only of the words: A sentimental journey. He was suddenly suffused with a complete frustrating anger. What the hell did he mean by that? he asked himself furiously. Where has he gone? What sentiment is there in our lives? Did he visit the old family house? It’s right down the fucking road in Princeton. He could have gone and seen the old man’s drugstore. A chain owns it now. He didn’t have to take off to do that! So where’s he gone? What’s he visiting? He would never tell me anything!

  A thousand dark thoughts flooded Jeffers’ mind.

  Wasserman spoke quickly in reply to Meriwether’s question:

  “My mom was the same. I get a package from her every week. She wouldn’t believe anything. I coulda fucking killed some gal right under her nose and she would have looked down and said, ‘Well, honey, it seems you fucked her too hard ’cause now she’s had a heart attack and gone to heaven . . .’”

  Jeffers noted that Wasserman’s usual stutter had deserted him momentarily. My brother, he thought, was always direct and cryptic. He told me only what he thought I needed to know. What he thought! And now when I need to know something, he’s left me a void. Empty! Nothing!

  But then he said to himself: You do know.

  He shook his head. What do you know?

  Around him the men were snorting and hooting.

  “S-s-s-sometimes I thought M-m-m-Mom was crazier than I am.”

  The men nodded in agreement. Jeffers heard the stutter return.

  Pope spoke in his solid con-wise tone. “They never want to believe. They don’t want to believe you could do it when you lift a candy bar from a store shelf. When things get worse, they just refuse harder, you know. And when you get busted for fucking, like all of us here, they won’t accept it at all. It’s easier for them to believe something else. Simpler.”

  “Not always,” interjected Miller.

  The men turned to the hard-edged professional criminal.

  Miller looked about the room as if assessing a stolen jewel. “Think about it. There’s someone for all of us, probably a father, maybe a mother, who knew what we were and hated us for it. Someone you couldn’t con. Someone who beat you, maybe, or left you, maybe, because they couldn’t beat you. Someone who got out while the going was good . . .”

  This comment made him laugh, but the other men had grown silent with their thoughts.

  “Maybe someone you wanted to get rid of. Maybe someone you did get rid of, only the good doc there and the proper authorities”—he said this sneering—“don’t have such a good idea about.”

  He paused, and Jeffers saw that he was delighting in his opinion and the dampening effect it had on the other men.

  “There’s always someone who can see just exactly what we all are inside. It’s no big deal, really. You just got to handle that person a bit differently, huh? But they’re out there. We all know it.”

  The room tilled with murmuring, then subsided into silence.

  Jeffers tried to prevent himself at that moment of quiet from asking the question that seared across his imagination, but was unable. His words were like his thoughts: runaway, out of control, embodied by a purpose of their own. They frightened him terribly. But he was powerless at that moment. So he asked:

  “Well, turn it around for a moment. What would you do if you learned that someone you loved, a family member, was committing crimes? How would you act?”

  There was a short hesitation, as if the all the Lost Boys had inhaled at the same time. Then he was quickly enveloped in a cacophony of opinion.

  Detective Mercedes Barren drove north, passing up the exit on the New Jersey Turnpike for the Holland Tunnel, which would have been a more direct route. She headed toward the George Washington Bridge, with its great gray bulk stretching across the Hudson. She made her decision to avoid the tunnel consciously, despite the press of excitement and the furious sensation that time was growing shorter, compressing around her; she always avoided tunnels as much as possible. Ever since she was a child, she worried about the weight of the water pressing down on the tiles and cement just above her head. She could still see it, with that same child’s imaginative vision, cracking and buckling and the dark water suddenly pouring in on top of her. The confinement of the tunnel caused her breath to grow short and her palms to dampen unpleasantly. It’s like a kind of little claustrophobia, she thought. It’s not that terrible. Indulge it.

  As she accelerated across the bridge, she looked back quickly over her shoulder, glancing up at the Palisades. She saw the cliff faces tumbling precipitously into the water. Sunlight glinted on the surface of the river and she caught a glimpse of white sa
ils plying back and forth. She had always understood, especially on bright clear days, why old Henry Hudson was convinced when first he steered up the great river that he had discovered the Northwest Passage. It seemed reasonable to her, when you removed the buildings and boats and saw the river and the cliffs without progress littering them, that anyone would believe that around the first or second bend would be China.

  She stared at the city, with its massive phalanx of skyscrapers standing stiffly, like a great army at attention. She clutched the address paper in her hand and wove aggressively in and out of traffic. She stared dead ahead as she entered Manhattan, refusing even to look in the rearview mirror, pointing singularly for her destination.

  To her surprise she discovered a legal parking place on the street barely a block from the apartment. But before approaching the apartment, she stopped in a local delicatessen and purchased a haphazard bag of groceries. Carrying the bag and holding the key, she headed toward Douglas Jeffers’ home.

  He lived in a midsized, older brick building on West End Avenue. There was an ancient doorman who held the door open for her as she breezed through.

  “You’re going to see?” he asked in a cigarette rasp.

  “Just staying at my cousin’s while I take in the sights. He’s out of town,” she said cheerfully. “Doug Jeffers. He’s the best photographer . . .”

  The doorman smiled.

  “Four-F,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied, tossing him a smile. “See you.”

  She boarded an old elevator, closing the door firmly and punching up four. She saw the doorman had already turned back to his vigil. The elevator creaked as it carried her up slowly. It seemed to bounce into place and she stepped out carefully.

  To her great relief, the hallway was empty.

  She swiftly found 4-F and set the grocery bag down. She put the key in her left hand and pulled the 9 millimeter from her pocketbook. For an instant she listened, but she could hear no sounds through the thick black door.

  She took a deep breath and said: Go!

  She thrust the key into the lock and turned it. She heard the deadbolt release and she pushed hard.

  The door fell open and she crouched and jumped in.

  She swung the pistol up, still bent over, aiming, letting the pistol barrel guide her sight. She swung right, left, center, and saw no one. She waited. No sound. She straightened up and lowered the gun. Then she retrieved the bag of groceries and set them on the floor inside the apartment. She closed and locked the door behind her, putting the chain on as well.

  Then she turned and, still holding the gun, truly looked at Douglas Jeffers’ apartment.

  “I can feel it,” she said out loud. She was flooded suddenly with visions from a hundred crime scenes and bloodied, decomposing corpses that she’d visited over the years. They came back to her as if in some parade from the Grand Guignol. The ghoulish sights and sticky, awful smells filled her imagination and for an instant she thought that there was a body there, in the apartment.

  She shook her head as if to clear it and said, “Well, let’s look around.”

  She moved from room to room gingerly, still holding the pistol. When she was finally convinced that she was alone, she began to assess what surrounded her. The first thought that struck her was that it was clean and orderly. Everything seemed in its place. Not so organized as to be oppressive, but straightened up and shipshape. The contrast with Martin Jeffers’ apartment was striking.

  It was not a large apartment. There was a single bedroom and bathroom, a small kitchen and dining alcove, and a wide, rectangular living room. A half-bath off the living room had been transformed into a darkroom. The furniture was comfortable and stylish, but not to the extent that a designer had created a distinctive look. More that it reflected someone who understood quality and purchased an occasional piece. There were a few antiques, and in each room there were knickknacks on shelves and bureau tops. Detective Barren picked up a shell casing from what she took to be a mortar round. There were small artifacts, a statuette from Central America, a fertility statue from Africa. She saw a large shark’s tooth encased in plastic and an old rock also encased. It bore a legend: olduvai gorge, 1977. two million years old.

  She saw that Jeffers had a worktable—a draftsman’s bench, situated near the bank of windows which let the room fill with light. She saw the paraphernalia of a photographer: negatives, enlargers, paper, piled neatly about the table.

  There was one large bookcase, which covered an entire wall in the living room.

  The walls were white. There were two posters, framed: The Art of Photography, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and a Horn Gallery Exhibit of Ansel Adams.

  Everything else was by Douglas Jeffers.

  Or, at least, that is what she took them to be.

  There were dozens of pictures covering all the walls. They were in all shapes and sizes, framed in different styles. She glanced in their direction, thinking: They are what I saw in the magazines. They’ll tell you everything and nothing at the same time.

  But her eye was caught by one small frame, in a corner. She walked to it and stared. It was of a man on the near edge of middle age, but with a clearly contradictory youthful vitality. He was dressed in olive fatigues and blue workshirt, draped with cameras and lenses. The background was of some anonymous jungle. She could see tendrils and vines flowing from the twisted branches of a thousand interwoven trees. He was sitting on a stack of boxes marked with ammunition numbers. He was grinning widely out from the picture, his hand cocked in a mock pistol, making a shooting motion toward the camera. In a corner of the frame typed on a small white piece of paper, were the words self-portrait, 1984, nicaragua.

  “Hello, Mr. Jeffers,” she said.

  She took the picture from the wall and held it up.

  “I am your undoing,” she said.

  She replaced the picture and told herself to get started. She cautioned herself to be careful and systematic with this brother’s apartment. She turned toward the desk and saw, neatly placed in the center, a large white envelope. On it was written in strong block type: for marty.

  Her hand shot out for it.

  There had been much disagreement among the Lost Boys.

  Opinions had ranged from Weingarten’s whining “Jeez, what could you do? I mean, ask ’em to stop? But people do what they want anyway. You can’t just force them to do anything. I mean, I never could, and nobody could ever get me to stop . . .” to Pope’s stolid “If I knew somebody in my family was doing what I do, I’d shoot the fucker, real fast. Put ’em out of their misery,” to which Steele had interjected, “Are you in such misery? Dear, dear, you don’t act like it . . .” And Pope had replied, “Watch out, faggot, before I fucking well do you.” This, despite the integrity of the threat, had caused everyone to laugh. Killing a man such as Steele struck most of them as a great waste of time. This opinion was shared among the members of the group with great enthusiasm.

  It seemed that they, who should have been experts, did not know what to do any more than anyone would.

  Any more than I know what to do, Martin Jeffers spoke to himself.

  He despaired inwardly.

  He sat alone in his darkened office. Outside, the night had swept up and taken over the hospital grounds, throwing shadows across the stately lawns. He could hear an occasional shout, an infrequent cry, which were the sleeping norms of the hospital. The night awakens our fears, he thought, just as the day calms them.

  He thought of all the things the Lost Boys had said. “You see,” Parker had sputtered in the midst of the argument, “you got to do the right thing. But what is the right thing? What’s right for some cops maybe isn’t what’s right for your family: You go to the cops and they’re gonna want to know everything and they sure as hell aren’t gonna be your friend. All they’r
e looking to do is bust somebody. And, man, you’re gonna give them your mother or brother or father or sister or anybody. Shit, even your cousin, man? Blood is thicker, you know . . .”

  To which Knight had interrupted: “So you make yourself into an accomplice? You do. By being quiet, don’t you become as bad as the person doing the crimes?”

  The room had filled with both agreement and disavowal.

  He remembered someone saying, “If you know, and you stay quiet, you’re just as guilty. There ought to be a special prison for people like that!”

  There is, he thought ruefully.

  Acquiescing to the knowledge of crime is almost as bad as the crime itself. He thought of the Holocaust and remembered the particular problems at Nuremberg, dealing with the people who’d merely remained quiet in the face of depravity. It was easy to single out the performers and punish them. But those people who’d turned their backs? Politicians, lawyers, doctors, businessmen . . .

  He wondered: What happened to them?

  Jeffers considered the enthusiasm with which the group had greeted the issue. He wondered why he’d never posed the question before. What struck him was the idea that virtually everyone in the group seemed to have considered the problem that they themselves posed to their own families. How would they deal with themselves? They didn’t know.

  He remembered the shouting back and forth through the sunlit day room. They’d run some twenty minutes over the regular end of the session. Finally he’d held up his hand.

  “We’ll continue this tomorrow. Everyone think over your responses and we’ll talk it over some more.”

  The men had stood, starting to exit in their usual small knots, when Miller, the man Jeffers thought perhaps the least perceptive, turned and asked, “Why’d ya ask us? You got some reason?”

  The men had stopped, looking back at Jeffers.

  He’d shaken his head in negative, swiftly adopting his usual exterior countenance of mildly amused intellectual curiosity, and the Lost Boys filed out in silence, without further comment. He thought: No one believed that denial. Not for an instant.