Mister White: The Novel

by John C. Foster

  He walked to the L’Enfant plaza metro stop at Maryland and 7th Street, pausing to purchase a coffee from a sidewalk vendor and using the moment to look around in the event Chambers had friends. His mind was working rapidly, despite the unruffled demeanor he had presented to the FBI man.

  While he sipped he availed himself of the least unpleasant of the public phones at the station.

  “We have a problem,” he said. The remainder of the terse conversation boiled down to a single sentence from his superiors: Your problem, deal with it.

  The special nature of Bierce’s duties made him pariah. If his project went off the rails, no one would come near him.

  He closed his eyes as he replaced the receiver in the cradle, wondering if Lewis Edgar had felt the same trill of fear when his superior, Bierce himself, had cut him loose.

  He dialed a new number, and after identifying himself and being relayed to a broker, relayed a string of interspersed digits and letters. “Move it immediately,” he said.

  “Consider it done. I’ll have the new account information—”

  Bierce interrupted him. “I will call you for the information.” He hung up.

  Riding the escalator down amidst a chattering flock of tourists in bright plumage, interspersed with government employees in various shades of gray, Bierce felt as if the clean, autumn air was replaced by something thicker. More than the result of too many people gathered together below ground. He hesitated a moment as the escalator neared the bottom and the stairs beneath his feet were hurled towards chewing metal—

  Bierce shook off the image and stood taller, unconsciously straightening his tie, navigating around the throngs of the confused as he contemplated what-ifs.

  He emerged from the metro three stops later amidst a crowd of loud young men with sagging pants and oversized, puffy winter coats, ignoring the casual insults, “Hey, Marshmallow Man” and “Yo, Snowflake, where the summer gone?” He accidentally kicked a bottle and they laughed as it shattered against a drain grate.

  Bierce had walked for only one block north before a cab responded to his raised hand, and he took that to the imposing edifice of Saint Matthew’s Cathedral. He entered a throng of tourists outside the double doors and wondered if it was merely his mood or had even the tourists grown more somber? His ear caught something that might have been Hungarian, and he wrote off the lack of chatter as a reflection of Eastern Europe, not his task.

  Face obscured by the clouds of his breath, he used the visitors as a scraper to remove any tails before hurrying towards a couple just exiting a cab at the curb.

  “Hold that for me please?”

  They did and he slid onto the still-warm vinyl of the backseat, cracking the window, despite the cold, as a salve for the driver’s body odor. They wound their way southeast, the driver admirably using his horn on both crowded and open streets as the buildings shrunk into squat things with peeling paint, and the statues grew more obscure, until eventually they left the landmarks and government buildings behind altogether.

  At one intersection a legless man in a wheelchair waited on the corner, bundled in layers, his jutting stumps wrapped in beach towels secured with mismatched belts. Bierce started when he realized the man was staring back at him through the window of the cab. Nearby, a crowd was gathered outside of a liquor store, half-heartedly jeering a woman wheeling a shopping cart. Bierce was struck by the visible process of the city’s decay since leaving Chambers and the opulence of DC’s National Mall. He struggled to write it off as urban blight and not a result of Him. And still, an unquiet part of his mind wondered if His presence created decay, or if the state of locales in decline drew Him, like the rotting nectar for some unholy bee.

  “Here?” the driver asked when they pulled up to the cracked sidewalk in front of the old, three-story building with a Chinese take-out restaurant and bail bondsmen advertising in bright neon in the plate glass windows of the first floor.

  Bierce shook off his thoughts, mindful of them now, bracing himself against their return.

  “Thank you,” he said, holding a twenty over the front seat. “Keep the change.” He tried not to react to the sight of the cabbie’s yellow, phlegmatic eyes but saw the man’s lip curl in disdain and knew he had failed.

  Bierce produced a key as he approached the narrow, metal fire door between the two businesses, grimacing as he stepped over a sticky red mess of discarded barbecue and turned the key in the lock before stepping into darkness. The space reeked of rancid grease from the take-out place and something less tangible, yet uglier, from the bail bondsman, but he paid neither any heed.

  A weak light flickered into being overhead when he flipped the wall switch, and Bierce ascended the narrow staircase, the toe of his shoe catching more than once on the cracked linoleum. At the top was another locked door, this one with pebbled glass and the faded lettering of a long-dead business. He brushed cobwebs off a mezuzah affixed to the doorframe.

  If Bierce had a romantic train of thought he might have imagined the space as the office of a former private investigator, a Sam Spade type who entertained tough-talking dames and broken-down men, whiskey drinkers and cigarette smokers. He was not a romantic, however, and inserted yet another key into the lock with nary a stir of his imagination.

  The air was stale and his passage stirred up dust, which he took as a positive sign that the office had entertained no visitors since his last check. Bierce removed a handkerchief from an inner pocket and held it over his nose as he closed the door. He glanced around the dim space, noting the absence of light from the windows before producing a small flashlight in his right hand.

  It was a dismal space of yellowing walls and floor tiles, their corners curling with age. Dust and a vaguely oily miasma lingered in the air and had settled over the two metal desks and ancient swivel chairs with chewed seat cushions. A dirty, black wastebasket sat next to one desk, and a lonely fly hovered over it, likely starving but drawn to old smells. The window shades had been fixed in place with thumbtacks, and Bierce ran a finger over the bottom of each. They were secure.

  It was a colorless place, uninteresting enough to be almost deliberately so. The faded wall calendar displayed a frigate from the age of sail and showed anyone who cared which day was which in August of 1998.

  Bierce placed his handkerchief on the floor on front of the metal file cabinet and lowered one knee onto it before pulling out the bottom drawer, wheels squeaking on the runners. Only a careful eye would note that the drawer was not long enough to account for the depth of the file cabinet.

  He winced at the gritty feel of the floor as he braced himself on one palm and aimed the light into the empty cave left by the drawer, and then placed the flashlight on the ground, reaching past it to turn the combination of the small safe hidden within the recesses of the cabinet.

  Removing the files took only a moment, but they slipped from his fingers as he stood and several sheets of old paper slid free. He snatched up the flashlight and played the beam across the floor, chasing the fluttering ghost shapes see-sawing through the air.

  Two were easily located, but a third glided silently beneath a desk and he had to crawl after it, ignoring the dirt griming the knees of his trousers. Shipping paperwork for a large crate, six feet by fifteen feet. Faded customs stamps circa 1948. He fed it back into the file and rose again.

  There were two more objects he required.

  He crouched and reached in blindly as demanded by the awkward angle, as tense as a trout noodler reaching into a swampy river hole beneath the water’s surface. His fingers probed tentatively, as if at any moment he would feel the searing snap of a mouse trap, or worse, needle-sharp teeth. Instead they located a smooth object and he pulled it free—a small case in black leather, rounded and held closed by silver snaps. It bore a resemblance to a shaving kit his father—or, more likely, grandfather—might have carried.

  Bierce sniffed against the dust, and a single bead of sweat dug a river through the grime that had settled on
his temple. He reached inside, eyes closed and fingers splayed, until they felt the ugly warmth of the last item and pulled it free. It was always the last retrieved for reasons no one had ever explained. Bierce, in a rare moment of inebriation, had opined that it was last retrieved because it wanted to be last.

  He had never shared the sentiment again for a variety of reasons.

  It was a small book, perhaps the size of a young girl’s diary, if young girls still kept diaries and if said diaries were bound in human skin.

  Cut into the cover were words that he studiously avoided reading. It was wise to read only what was needed in this volume and no more.

  Bierce was already heading for the door with his finds before remembering to turn back and close the safe, returning the file cabinet to its former, uninteresting appearance.

  He paused again, slowly dragging the beam from his flashlight around the edges of the room, crouching to peer under the desks.

  The file was intact. Nothing else had escaped. Still, he had to be careful. Bad luck, accidents and foolish happenstance hovered around these particular papers in an invisible cloud of unexpected possibilities.

  Holding the file to his chest, he left the office and locked the door behind him, descending with more haste than he had used mere minutes before, vaguely aware that his pulse was racing by the time he emerged onto the sidewalk and closed the heavy fire door.

  Sweat beaded on his upper lip and he wiped it away, frowning at the dirty smear on his fingers and thinking thoughts of corruption.

  The light outside had grown grayer as the sun slid towards the west, and Bierce took a moment to glance around but detected no interest from the few derelicts on the street. Several blocks away, a man sang drunkenly as he rolled slowly up the sidewalk in a wheelchair. It was not the same man. Surely it was not.

  Somewhere, a car horn bleated and Bierce set off on foot, dwelling on what-ifs and preparations for such.

  CHAPTER TEN

  - 1 -

  It was well past sundown when the Edgars reached Flintlock.

  Empty storefronts with peeling FOR RENT signs lined either side of the street, and lifeless houses hunched under a heavy mantle of snow. The Jeep’s tires crunched over frozen sand on the tar, so she knew there were some municipal services functioning, but there were no street lights to be seen, and the town seemed deserted.

  She knew from the last letter Uncle Gerard had sent that recession had hit the northern New Hampshire town brutally hard. The textile mill, the area’s main employer, had closed a decade before, and many of the residents that hung on after its closure were on public assistance. The town had enjoyed a brief respite when a group of Massachusetts developers built a winter resort in the nearby foothills, but a fire destroyed the property and it was not rebuilt.

  More people left the town. Those that stayed hunkered down under the slate gray skies in the shadow of the mountains.

  Gerard had ended the letter, “God does not smile on Flintlock.”

  Guilt washed through her in a wave as Cat realized that she had never written back. It was one of those things that she meant to get to, but between Lew’s travels and growing worry about Hedde’s estrangement, she never seemed to get around to it. A year had passed without her ever seriously thinking about her uncle.

  Now she was planning to show up unannounced on his doorstep to beg for help.

  Cat’s eyes closed under the unrelenting weight of emotional exhaustion. It was only for a moment, but long enough to miss the patch of black ice that the sand had not reached.

  She felt the slide in the pit of her stomach and wrenched the wheel over, but the tires found no traction on the slick surface and she hit the frozen snowbank with a loud crunch. Glass tinkled as her headlights shattered and she was wrenched hard against her safety belt. There was a hard thump against the back of her seat as Hedde was hurled into it.

  “You okay?” Cat asked, unbuckling her belt to turn around. Hedde was picking herself up from the footwell.

  “I’m fine,” Hedde said with disgust.

  Cat was stretched to the limit of her endurance and had only enough energy for basic functions.

  The engine was still running, so she shifted into reverse and pressed her foot down on the gas pedal. The Jeep lurched, but even with four-wheel drive it couldn’t pull itself free. The front tires were stuck, and the rear wheels spun on the frictionless ice.

  Cat shook herself. The engine was racing and she eased her foot off the gas.

  “If we still had cell phones we could call a tow truck,” Hedde said.

  Cat opened her mouth but found herself unable to speak. A sob wracked her body and she felt hot tears sting her eyes.

  She leaned forward until her forehead rested on the steering wheel, and she began to weep.

  - 2 -

  Hedde touched the lump on her forehead and thought about getting out of the Jeep and just walking away into the night. Her mother had gone insane and thrown out her iPhone. Now she had stuck them in a snowbank and was crying like a lunatic.

  Uncle Gerard the redneck. The townie’s townie. God, she would kill for a cigarette, even a menthol.

  She looked up at her window and saw a face pressed against the glass. For several long seconds every muscle in Hedde’s body locked.

  Then she screamed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  - 1 -

  The axe blade split a length of stove wood with a single blow, and the big man had to brace a boot on the stump before yanking the axe free.

  He bent down and grabbed another length in one scarred hand, positioning it on the stump to stand upright. He grunted as he swung the axe and split the wood. Glowing embers drifted from the end of a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  It was a clear, cold night and moonlight painted his property in silvers and grays. The work and a checked flannel shirt were enough to keep him warm.

  He freed the axe. Placed another piece of wood on the stump. Swung.

  The stump was broad enough across to serve as a table top and squatted in the crooked shadow of its brother oak tree. Some years back, when the textile mill was still employing townsfolk, a man named Buddy LaChaise told a story about the stump, at that time a tree. He said it used to be called Dead Nigger Tree, the name reflecting an incident of violence involving the Underground Railroad.

  “The dead niggers involved,” as Buddy explained it, “escaped the South only to find that white men in the North didn’t want their kind either.”

  Gerard had decided that he disliked both the story and the way Buddy told it. The discussion that followed had left Buddy LaChaise with a permanent limp, and that night the very same axe that was now splitting wood had chopped the tree off at the base.

  Later it was whispered that the wrong tree had been chopped down, but it wasn’t whispered often. Buddy LaChaise’s limp saw to that.

  Another stove length felt the bite of the axe and the man paused, leaving the blade buried in the stump. He slipped a metal flask from his back pocket and took a hit of Canadian Club, ambrosia of the North. The whiskey burned a path straight down to his stomach, and he wiped the back of his hand across his lips, feeling the whiskers grown in since he had last remembered to shave.

  He stepped back from his work and glanced over the hillside and its incongruous forest of Christmas trees in carefully organized rows, poised like a phalanx of short evergreens ready to assault the jumbled forest beyond. They were coming in well, except for the Douglas firs. But he had a few nobles that topped eight feet, and most of the Frasers stood around six feet, which is where most of his customers wanted them. Claire Whitman at the MLO—Methodist Ladies Organization—had once suggested holding a tree cutting festival on Beaumont’s land but was quickly talked out of it. She was new in town, after all, and didn’t know any better.

  Soon enough the trees would belong to anyone with fifty dollars and a saw, but for now they were his, and he enjoyed their squat presence and the clean smell
they lent to the air around his home.

  Gerard took another hit from his flask and hissed at the ugly taste. He didn’t cut wood every night, but it had become an irregular ritual since the evening of LaChaise’s story. If, as he had heard it whispered, the wrong tree had been cut down, he figured the murdered folks were most likely to let him know during dark hours, and he could set things right. That this was not a thought he shared went without saying, and no one ever asked him about his nocturnal wood-chopping habits. He was content to let the few townsfolk who even remembered he existed think him strange and bitter, knocking about in his big, drafty house on the hill.

  Gerard Beaumont was a man built to be alone.

  - 2 -

  The dog started barking and Gerard stood up from his chair beside the fireplace, already pissed. He stopped to pull on his boots, but was otherwise wearing only jeans and a thermal undershirt when he banged out the front door to see headlights winding their way up his long driveway. He grabbed a big handful of salt crystals from the sack by the door, scattering them in a wide arc across the frozen walkway to give a little traction if he had to do the unthinkable and invite someone inside.

  Detouring past the stump, he yanked the axe free before meeting the vehicle at the top of his driveway. The headlights blinded him as it pulled up and stopped behind the covered bulk of his ongoing automotive project, a 1969 Camaro.

  Gerard threw an arm over his eyes.

  “Turn off your goddamned lights,” he said as the driver’s side door opened. A moment later the lights went off and Gerard recognized the broad shouldered form of Giancarlo Messina, the local Catholic witch doctor.

  “Gerry,” Messina said.

  “Father Messina, it’s too goddamned late to cut a tree.” Gerard said, blinking to get back his night vision. He had just realized that Messina was towing another vehicle when a door popped open and a woman leapt out.