by Peter Straub
All right, there’s that one, let’s draw a line through his name.
It seems to him that the men examining his taxi have grouped themselves together to conceal the twisted heap behind them.
The driver turns onto Central Park West and says, “Did you see that, sir?” He is an Indian, and he has a musical accent. “I can promise you one thing, that you will never read a word about it in the newspapers. And yet it is an event I believe that would be of serious interest to a great many people in this country.”
“That’s the truth,” Tom says. “Keep going until you get to Sixty-first Street, then turn right and go about thirty feet, I’ll tell you exactly where. Stop and honk your horn. We’re picking somebody up.”
“Because do you understand why, sir? Because it is a conspiracy of silence!” the driver tells him. “I was born in Hyderabad, in India, sir, and I came to this country twenty-one years ago, and neither in India nor in this country are things what they appear to be. I am telling my wife every day, ‘What you read in your newspaper is not true!’ ” He looks at Tom in the rearview mirror. “There will not be much waiting time, I hope.”
“I hope there won’t be any,” Tom says.
“Now, those men we saw were government officials,” the cabbie says. “But the names used by such men are never their real names. And when they die, it is as if they have disappeared completely from the face of the earth. What a thing it is, to live a life of lies and pass from the earth unrecognized. But the evil that they do amongst us in this life is repaid a thousandfold in the next.”
In front of the Mayflower, the sidewalk is completely empty.
“Okay, here’s where we turn,” Tom says.
“Do you think I do not remember that you wanted to turn right on Sixty-first Street? Do you think I have forgotten that I am to stop and honk my horn?” While he is making the turn, the cabbie twists sideways and glares at his thoughtless passenger.
“No, sorry,” Tom says, scanning the street before them. Way up the block, a couple of guys he cannot quite make out are talking in front of one of the Florentine-style apartment buildings. The usual knot of pedestrians streams across the intersection with Broadway. A northbound patrol car zips by in a flash of white. The conditions look about as good as they could be.
“Where is it, exactly, that I am to stop, sir?”
Tom is keeping his eye on the dark, scratched-up surface of the service door. He imagines Willy crouched behind it with her ear cocked, fearful that he will never return.
“Okay, stop,” Tom says.
“And I am to honk my horn now?”
“Yes,” Tom says, a little more loudly than he intends.
The cabbie taps his horn, which emits a brief blatting noise.
“That’s not much of a sound,” Tom says. “Do it again.” He slides open the heavy door and steps down out of the cab. He leans over and speaks through the opening he has made. “I mean it. Do it again.”
The driver really leans on his horn, and the service door flies open. Out onto West Sixty-first Street tumbles Willy Patrick, scrambling to stay on her feet. She is carrying her suitcase and the duffel, and her white shirt glares like a flag.
“Oh, thank God,” she says. “I was so worried.” She wobbles toward him. “Did you see them? Are they still around?”
“We’d better hurry.” He grabs her arm to hold her steady, and reaches down with his other hand for the suitcase. The cab driver is watching all of this with glum, gathering suspicion.
“You won’t believe this,” Willy says, “but they really did teach me how to make veal Bolognese in there.”
Tom pitches the money bag into the back of the cab and waits for Willy to step up and in. Now the cabbie is looking straight ahead and pointing toward the windshield.
When Tom looks up the street, he sees the two men who had been standing in front of an apartment entrance running pell-mell toward them, the larger of the two reaching under his jacket for what is probably not his wallet. It’s an awkward business, because the man has a cast on his right arm, and he is forced to use his left hand, which makes reaching his holster difficult.
Standing beside Tom, Willy freezes. Tom tries to push her into the cab, but has no luck until Roman Richard at last has extracted his pistol from its holster and begins to take aim. At the sight of the weapon in Roman Richard’s massive hand, Willy vaults into the spacious back of the taxi, taking her suitcase with her.
“Come on, get in!” she screams, reaching out for Tom.
“Tom Hartland!” yells Giles Coverley. “Stop right now! If you do, my friend won’t shoot. You’re never going to get away, so you might as well cooperate.”
The cab driver rams his vehicle into reverse, and Tom sees Willy lurching, bent over, toward the opening in the side of the vehicle. Her face seems to widen with panic.
Twenty feet down the otherwise empty street, Roman Richard Spilka steadies his left arm upon his plaster-encased right and squeezes the trigger. Flame seems to jump from the end of the barrel, and a low, flat crack widens out around the two running men and the reversing taxi. Tom Hartland sees a spatter of blood appear on Willy’s dazzling shirtfront at the same moment what feels like a horse’s hoof slams into his chest. Then the cab has flown backward past him, and he realizes that he is lying flat on his back with the impression that the taxi’s door slid shut at the moment he hit the deck.
Another soft, minimalist explosion goes off in the air above him, and he says to himself, Oh, a silencer, that makes a lot of sense. Tom Hartland has written about silencers but never seen one, and he’s sorry he did not get a better look. Willy’s screaming, and the driver is cursing, presumably in some Indian dialect. Or would it be Gujarati? Tom has no idea. He regrets never having gone to Bombay or Hyderabad, he’s sorry that he never learned even a little bit of the language. If he had, over the past ten or fifteen years he could have had lots of interesting conversations with cab drivers.
Directly above him, Roman Richard Spilka’s immense body moves into the frame of unclouded sky and looms over him. Giles Coverley strolls into view. A lopsided frown disturbs the symmetry of his sleek face. “Did you really think we didn’t know who you were?” he asks, as if this were a perfectly reasonable question.
“Dumb fuck,” says Spilka, glaring down.
“Shoot him in the head, and we’ll get his body off the street,” Coverley says.
The entire top of Spilka’s body tilts over like a derrick, and the pistol comes abruptly, enormously into view, allowing Tom Hartland to observe that the silencer has a decidedly homemade look about it. It occurs to him that he is miraculously not afraid, for which he is deeply grateful. He hopes Willy can get away from these monstrous men. The silencer flickers and jumps back, but Tom does not see it move, for he is already elsewhere, confused and astounded, trying to find his way, like all new sasha.
19
In a town called Haleyville, which is located in a kind of generic midwestern landscape with woods and streams and distant farms, a sixteen-year-old boy named Teddy Barton awakens to a world that has been altered in some subtle yet unmistakable fashion. The air seems somehow dull, the colors of his walls and bedclothes a tone darker than they had been. The big round clock on the table beside his bed says 6:10, so his parents are still asleep. Teddy wonders what his mom and dad will make of this peculiar change, which now that he has been taking it in for a minute or two seems not to be merely a matter of color and tone but of substance itself. Maybe the change doesn’t go very deep, maybe it’s more a matter of perception than anything external. In that case, Mom and Dad won’t notice a thing. Teddy sort of hopes it will turn out that way. He has always been sharper, better at noticing things, than anyone around him, and he has noticed that in time people get so accustomed to new situations, new contexts, new furniture that they no longer register them, and life eventually seems unchanged all over again.
On the other hand, if his first impression is right, and the actual substanc
e of the world has somehow changed, become quieter, duller, softer, less vital, Mom and Dad are going to notice it, too, and then something will have to be done. Mom is going to go around the house polishing and waxing like a demon (for although most of his friends’ mothers have jobs that take them into downtown Haleyville every weekday, Mom, although once a famous stage actress in New York City, has settled down as an old-fashioned homemaker, albeit one with a lot of glamorous friends who drop in all the time), and Dad will charge down to the offices of the Haleyville Daily, where he is both editor and star reporter, and try to get to the bottom of this strange phenomenon.
Ordinarily, Teddy would feel that any new disturbance that enters his universe is bound to wind up in his hands. That’s how it has always been: no sooner does something shady rear its head in Haleyville than Teddy Barton’s fabulous intuition catches wind of it, and he’s off like a shot, let the wicked beware! But it is a sacred law of life that disturbances enter Haleyville either one at a time or in secretly joined pairs, and for the past two weeks, Teddy has been working full-time on a baffling puzzle involving an enormous truck with the words MOON-BIRD painted on its flanks that has been appearing out back of the Time & Motion building at odd times of the day and that building’s newest renter, a man named Mr. Capstone, who late at night goes out of his house on Marymount Street and digs a big hole in his backyard. This case already involves two elements, and they are obviously connected. There isn’t room for a puzzle involving a sudden and universal decrease of energy.
Because that’s what this feels like, Teddy realizes. It’s as though electricity started running backward through all the wires in the world and went dribbling out of all the world’s empty plugs.
He gets out of bed to look through his window, and it’s true: everything in his neighborhood seems slightly drained of color and energy. He is looking at a weeping willow and wondering if the tree is saggier than it was yesterday when a tremendous reality, an enormous fact, occurs to him—that in some sense the world around him just died, and he must return to a previous world, one that until this moment he had always assumed to be identical to this and separated from it by only the passage of time.
In fact, Teddy realizes, nothing new is ever going to happen to him again. He will never figure out what Mr. Capstone was up to in his backyard, and the Moon-Bird truck will go forever unexplained. That door, and those beyond, are forever closed to him. From now on, he can go only backward, through older worlds, solving mysteries that have already been solved, and as if for the first time.
20
From Timothy Underhill’s journal
Quivering with shock and terror, Willy is on her way across the Upper West Side of Manhattan, vibrating on one of the two back seats in the boxy Sienna piloted by Kalpesh Patel, a native of Hyderabad who refuses to stop or find a policeman because 1) he’s scared and excited by the obvious connections between the FBI dudes and those guys who came running down West Sixty-first Street, shooting at his previous fare, and 2) well, Kalpesh Patel was borderline crazy to begin with, and now he’s in overdrive. The woman weeping and trembling in the back of his cab has not given him a destination. If she did, he wouldn’t go there on a bet—unless, of course, she were to say, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars to take me to a top-secret government installation in the Sierra Nevadas,” or something similar, in which case he would flip on his off-duty lights and rocket straight for the Lincoln Tunnel.
At last, Willy wails, “I don’t know where to go!” She plasters her hand over her face and says, “They killed Tom! He’s dead!”
After that, the funny noises emanating from behind her hands disturb Patel so greatly that he considers personally ejecting this woman from his cab, by force if necessary. She calms down, however, and begins to look about her, which Patel takes to be an excellent sign. And since he, like his distraught passenger, has no idea where he has taken them, he begins to check around for landmarks, too.
“Where are we?” Willy asks.
“Yes, in several senses,” says Patel, trying to catch sight of a street sign. “Riverside Drive, I’d say, and about 103rd. Yes, there is the sign, miss. We are at 103rd Street. The question is, where do we go from here? The government agents will be mobilizing soon, and the police, too, will be massed against you. If you wish me to continue helping you, it is necessary that you explain the entirety of your situation to me.”
“The police, too?” Willy asks.
“I have no doubt of that, miss. From what I saw, the police are in league with the forces against you. Nothing is as it seems, and those who pretend to act in the name of good in fact serve dark and evil masters.”
“The evil master is my fiancé,” Willy says. “His name is Mitchell Faber, and he isn’t what he seems to be, that’s for sure. He murdered my first husband, and my daughter, too.”
“This is your story. It was given to you, and now you must repeat it. I understand. You are supposed to imitate a parrot. But now your story has reminded me of something I read this morning. It was that name—your fiancé’s name. I am sure of it. Let me check on this, miss.”
“Mitchell’s name was in the paper?”
This seems so unlikely, also so foreign to Mitchell’s character, that Willy cannot believe the driver’s words. Besides that, this driver, although very polite, is also a screwball. She’d known people in the Institute who, like him, were convinced that they had the inside dope on governmental or military conspiracies. The problem with such people was that their theories almost always incorporated a good deal of the truth, as you learned every time governmental officials were caught telling whoppers, and this occasional (even fundamental) accuracy served only to buttress their faith in the wilder branches of their conspiracies.
Kalpesh Patel has pulled up in front of an unusually beautiful brownstone on the corner of 103rd Street, and he is bending over, evidently shuffling through a stack of newspapers on the seat beside his.
“Yes, that was the name. Undoubtedly, we are talking about a bit of disinformation planted by government agents.” Willy hears the sound of pages being turned. Then Patel’s arm stops moving, and his mouth stretches out in a smile. “Oh, my, the lies these people are willing to tell their own citizens. It is shameful. Do you know you have been accused of bank robbery, Miz Patrick?”
“Bank robbery?”
“And your name is Willy? You were given a man’s name? Not even a true, dignified name, but a mere nickname? How did your mother explain this decision to you?”
“My parents were killed when I was a child—I never had a chance to ask her. I want to see that newspaper, please.”
“You must read about your alleged crime,” Patel says, and passes a folded-over copy of the Daily News over the seat and through the rectangle cut into the plastic divider between them.
Willy sees it instantly: a smudgy photograph, lifted from film taken out of a surveillance video camera, of herself seated before the desk of Mr. Robert Bender, president of the Continental Trust of New Jersey. She is dressed in the jeans and cotton sweater she had been wearing that day, and in the hand that rests on Mr. Bender’s handsome desk is a pistol that looks a little too large for her grip. The headline reads Imaginative Newcomer Breaks New Jersey Bank.
“I wasn’t holding a gun,” Will says. “I don’t even own a gun!”
“Photoshop,” says Patel. “The maker of miracles. I believe this kind of thing happens nearly every day. Look how much money you are alleged to have stolen.”
“I didn’t steal, he stole from me!” Willy yelps, and scans the article running down the page alongside the photograph.
In an act that had puzzled both bank officials and New Jersey law officers, Willy Patrick, thirty-eight, a prizewinning author of novels for young adults and the fiancée of well-known area figure Mitchell Faber, had pointed a 9mm pistol at bank president Robert Bender during a private consultation requested by Ms. Patrick, and ordered Bender to give her $150,000 in cash from her future husband
’s accounts. “For the safety of my employees, I did as the lady requested,” Mr. Bender was quoted as saying. A “troubleshooter” for the Baltic Group, Mr. Faber was said to be hurrying back from meetings in European capitals to offer support to his troubled bride-to-be and aid to area law enforcement officers. Aldo Pinochet, a spokesman for the Baltic Group, described Ms. Patrick as an “unstable woman with a history of mental problems and in desperate need of help.”
“Aldo Pinochet,” Patel says. “See how they work? Everything is connected. You need only take a few steps back, and the pattern comes clear.”
“ ‘Troubleshooter,’ ” Willy says. “That’s literally what he is.”
“Will he want to shoot you?”
“Oh, shooting wouldn’t be nearly good enough,” she says. “First he’ll want to break most of my bones, and after that he’ll start cutting off little bits of me.”
“Is there someplace safe I can take you? The meter will stay off, that should go without saying. However, I must soon return to my duties. You have a headquarters in this city, do you not?”
“I don’t have a headquarters, no. Why would I?”
“Then perhaps you wish me to go to a police station and report your friend’s murder. Or perhaps I should go to the offices of the New York Times and tell them what I saw.”
“I don’t know what to do. Maybe they’re looking for this cab.”