THIRTY-TWO
WHEN HE COULD BREATHE, Frank said, “Are you Louis?”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’ll never see you again. People call me that sometimes. But let’s not waste precious moments.” The man wore an immaculate long-sleeved white shirt with a raised stripe in the same material under a navy blazer with dull silver buttons. The nails on his gun hand were clean and buffed, and his scent was of nothing. Louis said, “Let’s make a plan. Here’s how I see it. You can stall so that I shoot you, and no one will recognize that sound because this silencer is absolutely state-of-the-art, and I will still go back to the farm and take Ian. Or you can go back with me and make it all easier. You can keep the other kid. I don’t want him.”
Of course, Louis would not want Colin. Colin would be a liability.
Although Ian couldn’t answer Colin with his mind, there would be some kind of sensitivity that would bind them telepathically, and who knew how much Colin would be able to do when he was older? He might grow up to be a GPS straight to Ian, and Louis knew that Frank would never stop searching for them.
“There’s nothing on earth you can do to make me give Ian to you.”
“I can kill your wife also.”
“Why?” Frank asked. “That just creates more havoc. More ways people could see you. Patrick’s there now. So is my mother. And the vet. Will you kill everyone?”
“No, they aren’t there now.” Louis tapped Frank’s skull, not gently, with the muzzle of the Colt. “Your mother is at church, the nice one, miles from here, and Patrick is keeping company with the daughter of the fellow who sells horse chow or whatever it is you buy. He stopped there on the way home from the vet’s.”
“He’ll be back any moment. I told him to be.”
“He won’t. Don’t you think we plan things, Frank? Don’t you think my good friend makes webs of all you do, and buy, and all the places you go, and for how long, and your taxes and your inheritances and your medical bills? When the older boy came to the United States, we knew what plane he was on, of course. We knew that the hatchet-faced sister wasn’t really just visiting, she was leaving religious life forever. Even you didn’t know that. She’d made job inquiries. She’d written letters. Do you think those things are really private to anyone who can really use that vast net of information out there?”
“Some things are.”
“No things are, Frank. Not if someone is paying attention. That is an illusion. Privacy is an illusion. The professor has paid attention for many months to bring us to this exact moment.”
“Who’s the professor?”
“Your transfer of the farm, to Claudia and then to Patrick Walsh, it was not effective, but it was quaint—”
“Who is the professor?”
“Shut up. Now, Patrick left quite a little while after you did, hoping to have a short visit with the girl and return before you missed him, but we’ve timed him, and you don’t start to notice his absence, ever, until at least an hour or so after you get home. We don’t need anywhere near an hour.”
“How long have you known we were here?”
Louis shook his head tolerantly. “You must know that I knew you were here before you came, Frank. We saw every move you made. We encouraged you.”
“Why? Why did you wait?”
“Don’t you see how much easier this is? How much more private? Out of your comfort zone, away from all your usual support systems? You don’t even have your phone with you. You’d have to think twice to recall the number for emergency services. You’re not a stupid man, only a foolish one.” Louis sighed, and turned his expensive watch so that the band sat directly on the most prominent bone of his wrist. Louis’s wrists were delicate, almost childlike. “I do like things to be easy. Your being so happy and so busy didn’t do me any harm. Lots of activity with the horses, and how odd that Prospero was lamed, huh? Lots of romance, lots of fun with the boys, all good distractions. The old Frank Mercy would have noticed certain things a long time ago. He would have noticed people who didn’t belong where they were, from day one. Right down to this day. The old Frank Mercy would have locked the car, right here in this quaint little road.”
“Police cars lock on their own,” Frank said, stuttering before he could stop himself. “Some do now.”
“Yes, of course,” Louis said. “And I should give you proper credit, Frank. You did foil us. A number of times.”
“If you think I’m going to drive you to my house to kill my wife . . .”
“Yes, your wife. You asked why. Why would I kill your wife? I don’t really want to, and not because I think she’s great, and not because I think I would be caught. I’ve seen the British police in action. No, it’s because it would upset Ian. It would make it harder for me if he’s distraught. I want him to think he’s just coming with me for a short time to do one important thing, and then coming straight back. He can’t tell if you’re lying. That’s not part of his makeup.”
“How do you know?”
“I do know, but also, you will reassure him.” Louis paused. “If I must, though, if time starts getting short, I will kill her. You know that.” He let the gun burrow into the hair at the base of Frank’s skull. “Now, let me tell you about the people who really are at your farm. There are two friends I know quite well, and they have radios in their pockets to match the one I have right here.” Louis tapped the pocket of his navy blazer. “It’s a little James Bond. I admit that! But there is no decent cell-phone signal up here. So all those things you might be thinking of doing, like crashing the car and hoping you’ll knock me senseless, or driving through the window of one of those stores to get attention, or rolling out on the ground, don’t even bother. Really don’t. The minute I touch my pocket, your wife’s head is blown up by one of my friends. Both boys will see it.”
“Why do you want me there?” Frank asked, and with all his might, he willed Harry—Harry or anybody—to step out into the silent street, to come out for the newspaper, or a delivery, or a breath of air. “What good will I do?”
“It’s obvious. I told you. The confidence you inspire. The hope that puts aside the fear. To lessen the chance that the little kid will shut down mentally. You’ll promise him that Daddy will come and get him so he won’t be afraid.”
“He’ll be afraid. And you know he can stop you.”
“No, he can’t stop me.”
“Why? Are you not human?”
Louis sat back slightly in his seat, using his right hand to smooth his gray pants, which Frank studied: they were made of a wool so fine that the fabric puckered and draped like silk. If Frank had dared to chance it, that was the moment he would have shoved open the door and dived out, just as Louis prophesied. But even in his reflective posture, Louis’s hand on the gun was steady, pointed correctly and directly at the vulnerable lower globe of Frank’s head. “If you asked my parents, they would have said no, I was not human. You can’t ask them because they’re dead, although this isn’t a movie, and I had nothing to do with that. There is no Mycroft to my Sherlock, or to my Moriarty . . . if you will. I’m one of a kind. But whatever I am or am not, the boy’s ability, powerful as it is, has no effect on me.”
“Do you know why?”
“I don’t really know. From what I understand of child psychology, children are solipsistic, something you can ask your lovely wife about one day when the two of you are discussing philosophy. I think they believe until a certain age that what they want is also good,” Louis said. “It’s possible that other people identify with that notion. I can’t explain what I’ve never felt.”
“What if he realizes you were asking him to do wrong?”
“Well, he would have to do it anyway.”
“It might not work.”
“We would explain to him what would happen to Mommy and Daddy and little Colin if he chose not to do what we asked him to. And if he still resisted, well, sadly, then he would be of no use to us anymore, unless we were able work with him as I worked with
the young woman you knew as . . . well, I don’t know what name you knew her by. But she came to learn that her childhood instinct for self-preservation as the utmost goal was quite correct and she usually acted accordingly.”
Linnet.
“But she sometimes failed with people like Ian,” Frank said quietly. “There was something left in her.”
“Fortunately for me, there seem to be no other people like Ian, but in a word, yes, she failed.”
“And you let her die, even though you raised her from a child.”
Louis sighed. “That would also be something my parents might have said, but in reference to a dog or a cat. In fact, she was very talented and I did, as you know, give her a second chance, not even a year ago.” Louis sighed again, deeply. “This whole business has been a strain. I’m glad it’s over, sincerely. I’m ready to get going to your place now . . .”
Frank turned to face him, for a moment disturbing Louis’s aim. Someone of lesser mettle, knowing he was up against a larger, younger man who had been police, would have been unnerved. Louis only blinked. “What’s so important that you need Ian to get it for you?”
“You are buying time. But I have a little time. What I want is something . . . like me. Like a very good recycled material, I leave a very small carbon footprint. And so do the things I want. In short, they are things you never really see in ordinary life.”
“Like?”
“Oh, some mundane things, a magnificent grade of opiate, currency, of course . . .”
“But you could get that other ways.”
“That, probably yes. But other things require a delicacy. Perhaps a lesser version of something like van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers, or a pre-Columbian figure, or the bas-relief face of a Persian king no bigger than your two hands, from the fifth century BC,” Louis said. “What do people do with these things that they pay me millions to bring to them? I don’t know. I certainly don’t care. They would never tell anyone my name even if they knew it. They can’t display their prize. Perhaps they look at it occasionally. Perhaps they feel that thrill that can only come from possession of the one thing that is like no other thing. Power. Which brings us to Ian.”
“You don’t need Ian.”
“I don’t need the millions of dollars either. I want them. And Ian made my vocation easier, when it could often be difficult, and sometimes dangerous. I was able to work with Ian for such a short time, just a few months. And who knows what lies ahead for him? Who knows what he could cause people to do, with the proper training? With the proper incentives? Perhaps not art objects, but mineral resources. Perhaps governments. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It’s early days yet for Ian.”
To Frank’s horror, the street was as resolutely quiet as it had been when he’d first approached Harry’s. Later, people would stroll out for tea and fresh pastries, a late breakfast, or a bite after church. Now the only people out were farmers, or people going to work at the kind of places that never closed, like hospitals. Claudia would be leaving soon. Well, she would have been leaving soon.
Dad, are you coming home? There are people down there in the garden.
He wished he could answer, and say, Run, Colin! Run, Colin, and keep going, even if Ian can’t keep up.
His phone chimed. Claudia. It was a text that had not come through, five or ten minutes old. There was no decent reception.
I need to leave for WORK.
Then, seconds later, there came another. Frank. Come right now.
Louis said, “Have they relayed the message that you’re to come right now?”
“Yes,” Frank said.
None of this was a ruse. He should not have expected a ruse.
Louis said, “Oh, there’s a bread truck. A lorry. Time for us to be off.”
Frank started the car and floored it, intending to smack into the front of the bread truck, hard, on Louis’s side, but Louis lowered the gun and reached up for his breast pocket. What was in there could have been a business-card case, or a European cigarette pack, but Frank was pretty certain that it was a radio.
“Frank,” Louis said. “You persist in thinking I’m trying to run some kind of game here.” So Frank drove slowly, but not too slowly. He was not, and had never been, a speedy reactor, though, for twenty years, he had relied on logic and good instincts to keep himself out of mortal trouble while putting himself in its way for the sake of others. If it hadn’t been for the radio in Louis’s pocket, he would have driven hard, off the road on Louis’s side. But the element of surprise was so unlikely that it was not even theoretical. To wonder about it would be like banking on coincidence.
Frank pulled into his own home, his circle drive, and got out with Louis at his side.
His heart squeezed when he heard Sally barking wildly. Then came two gutty whooshing sounds, in quick sequence, and Sally didn’t bark anymore, but he heard Claudia crying. A lean, dark-haired man in dark work pants and a windbreaker came around the side of the house and greeted Louis with a nod. Together, they walked up toward the barn and the paddocks.
Wearing her gray flannel work skirt and a long red sweater, Claudia stood next to the small paddock, a huge baby bottle near the toe of her boot where she had dropped it. Another slender young man, this one collegial and natty, leaned on the fence a few feet from Claudia. His was a shotgun that he cradled gently. At the corner where the fences met lay the terribly small, bloodied mat of fur that had been Sally. In a moment of crackling clarity, Frank recognized him as the guy who’d stood outside Gate A-2 in the Brisbane Airport the day he’d taken Ian to the United States, the young man in tortoiseshell glasses. Quickly, Frank averted his face, but before he could, he saw the guy make the same connection. So far? So early? So soon?
Claudia said, “Frank, don’t let them take Ian.” Stepping forward, Frank put his arms around his wife. Peripherally, he could see the boys’ small, white faces in the frame of their bedroom window, but he did not look up at them. “Don’t let them take Ian.”
“We’re not going to discuss this, the way people would do in a film,” Louis said. “I want you to go into the house and bring Ian down here. Don’t bother with any of his clothing unless he has something he specially loves. Then Frank will explain to him that I’m only taking him for today to London, not back to the tree house or anywhere else.”
Frank said, “No.”
The young English-professor fellow leaned over the fence and fired into the soft ear of the baby colt All Saints, and the little horse crumpled, a window blind with cut strings. Glory Bee and the other colt shrieked and pelted to the other side of the paddock.
Ian was suddenly there, tears all over his dirty face. “Be happy,” he said to the professor, who smiled gently and swung the gun back on Claudia. Frank glanced up covertly and prayed that Colin was not on his way down. The other man with Louis turned away, toward the low fence and gate that bounded the house from the road.
Colin, run, Frank thought. Don’t look back.
They would all die, he thought, trapped in a foolish vise caused by bad timing on his part and exceedingly good timing by men of bad intent.
If he could let Ian go with Louis, he might save Claudia and Colin. Or the mild young man that had shot down the newborn colt might turn back from the vehicle and pop all of them in parting. Patrick would summon the police, but Louis would have melted away with Ian and the others slipping identically back into the box of human life like a tube of glass alongside many others. Given Louis’s disdain for mess and his confidence in his own camouflage, there was a chance they would simply go—or shoot to wound Frank or Claudia and then go. If he gave Ian up to them, Frank could console himself in the untruth that Ian could be found. He would never see Ian again. Ian would be like dead. But he would not be dead. The money was not on misplaced heroics.
Kneeling, Frank said, “I know you’re scared of him. But Dad wouldn’t let you go unless I could come and get you. You’ll only go to London and get one box or some papers for this man, and the
n he’ll leave you . . . Where will you leave him?”
“At Paddington Station in the Rose Cup, at ten tonight,” Louis said, as if this all were real. “Like the bear.”
“I’ll already be there at Paddington Station with Mommy and Colin. You won’t see us, but we’ll see you. We’ll come right to you and we’ll catch you up and bring you home.”
Ian didn’t speak. His lips shut tightly, he studied Frank’s face.
Claudia said, “Frank, wait . . .” but the young man in glasses jabbed Claudia fiercely in the side with the stock of his shotgun. She sat down hard in the mud.
“I’m a little scared, Dad,” Ian said.
“Don’t be scared,” Frank told him.
“Do you promise I shouldn’t be scared, Dad?”
“I promise.”
“He killed the baby horse.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re letting them take me away, Dad?”
“I wouldn’t let them take you away for overnight . . .” Frank glanced down at Claudia, then up at the loaf of hill between Stone Pastures and the Gerrick farm, Windward. Distantly, he saw Shipley Gerrick and one of his boys preparing or plowing soil, rumbling along toward him in Gerrick’s proudest possession, his nine-thousand-pound John Deere tractor. Someone else drove the smaller tilling machine with its mouth of blades. If only he had a flag. Frank picked Ian up and asked Louis if he could get Ian’s booster out of his own Land Rover.
“Of course,” Louis said.
Go slow, Dad. Go really slow.
“The belt is stuck,” Frank said. “My hands are shaking. Claudia, help me.”
Getting up, she walked over to Frank, her shoulder touching his. They pretended to pull at the clasp on the seat belts. “It’s too old,” Claudia said. “It hasn’t got the right kind of releases.”
“I’ll do it,” the young professor said. “I had a kid.” Nodding to Louis for permission, he momentarily propped the gun against the side of the Land Rover, and stepped between Claudia and Frank to lean into the backseat. Frank could hear the big tractor now, and the bumping whine of the harvester, and, additionally from behind him, some other kind of heavy, rolling machinery.
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