by R.J. Ellory
Don’t get nasty, John . . . I’m just calling you because your aunt couldn’t get hold of you so she called me. I’m here at work, John, still at work, and she called me here and I’ve been trying to find you. I did meet her, John, remember? She must have remembered where I worked.
‘So what’s so important, Nancy? What’s so important that she needs to call my ex-girlfriend?’ Emphasized ex, like he wanted to say something to get back at her.
Like I said, it doesn’t make any sense to me—
Nancy paused, and then, She said it was about your family John. She said she needed to speak to you about your family.
‘She what?’
John, will you stop asking me questions I can’t answer. You have any idea how stupid you sound?
A heartbeat of hesitation, then, ‘I’ll call her, okay?’
Okay . . . that’s all I wanted. Now let me speak to David.
Harper opened his mouth to say something else. He felt awkward, disjointed; his thoughts present, half-formed, but seemingly disconnected from speech.
He held out the phone. Leonhardt took it, turned and walked back to his desk, speaking as he went.
‘So what the fuck is going on?’ Harry Ivens asked.
Harper looked blank. ‘My aunt—’
‘You need to call her, right?’
‘Yes . . . call her . . . yes . . .’
Harry took a step forward. ‘So go call her, John. Go call the woman and find out what’s going on.’
‘Yes,’ Harper said. ‘I’ll call her.’
Harper backed up and started towards his office at the far end of the corridor. He glanced left at Leonhardt. Leonhardt had his back to him but sensed that he was being watched. He shifted his chair a few inches forward in an effort to disappear. Harper would have said something, would have asked him how the hell Nancy Young had his cellphone number. He didn’t. Kept on walking. Stepped into his office and sat down at the desk. Picked up the phone. Dialled a number he remembered by heart.
She answered the call within three rings. ‘John,’ she said, and Harper knew from her tone that something serious had happened.
THREE
An hour later. Sky had bruised, color of blood washed out but still visible. Atmosphere was punch-drunk kind of hot, moody and solid, humidity up around the barely tolerable. Traffic gridlocked on the North-South Expressway. Windows down, people shouting and cussing and losing their language amidst expletives – F-words and sometimes worse. Pounding rap: Eminem thundering from the back of a jacked 4×4. Emotions tilting towards the regrettable edge of anger where things are said in the heat of the moment, things that are best forgotten and if – somehow – memory serves to float them back, they are viewed with shame and a sense of awkwardness that makes folks wonder if they really knew themselves.
They didn’t; truth was what truth was; people didn’t know a great deal about much of anything and – guaranteed – they knew least of all about themselves.
It had rained for fifteen or twenty minutes; hot-top damp, steam rising now, and though this should have served to lighten the atmosphere it did not. All closed up inside a fist of sky, oppressive and swollen with pressure and tension.
Now there was a cool breeze from the Atlantic, tradewinds from the Gulf of Mexico, and John Harper stood near his inched-open bathroom window, closing his eyes and imagining the rumble of traffic along the Expressway was something else altogether. Frustration perhaps, or some other awkward emotion he could not identify. Hadn’t taken a holiday for as long as he could recall. Life is like this sometimes, he thought, and then tried not to travel the line that ran an indefinite course between what he’d hoped would be, and what he found he had. But the line was there somewhere back of his forehead, and even as he crossed it he wondered if he would feel this way in a year’s time, or two, or five. Come June of the following year he would be thirty-seven, more than likely single, more than likely standing in the same bathroom listening to the same sounds, pretending those sounds were something else altogether. Life need not always be this way, he added. Life need not always be sharp corners and rough edges. Life could be cool and spacious, uncomplicated, profound but possessing humor. Life could be a great many things besides what we have here . . .
He stepped back, back and to the left. Looked sideways in the mirror as he exited the bathroom.
‘What the fuck went wrong?’ he asked himself, and turned out the light.
The call had been brief.
‘You need to come back to New York, John.’
‘Come back to New York?’ He’d laughed briefly. ‘That is the last thing in the world I need to do, Evelyn—’
‘Don’t argue with me, John. You need to come back.’
‘Why? What on earth could be so important—’
Interrupted him again. ‘I’m not going to get into it on the telephone. This is not a matter of negotiation dear, it’s just one of those things. I need you to get on a plane and come back home right now.’
‘But Ev—’
‘John, I might not be the most important person in your life, and after all these years I don’t necessarily consider that I have any right to tell you what to do, but this time, I want you to listen to me. After your mother died we took you in against Garrett’s wishes, and we never had children of our own as a result . . . I think that you owe me something for that John, I really do.’
Not again, Harper had thought. Don’t do this stuff to me again.
But she did. Did it again. Truth or otherwise, his maternal aunt, Evelyn Sawyer, had taken him in when his mother died. All of seven years old and moving across the river into Manhattan; Greenwich Village, small apartment, not the sort of place for a little kid, but Evelyn and her sister had been close, and when she died there was a burden of responsibility that she’d felt duty-bound to carry. Garrett Sawyer had been a different story. Tough man, hard-edged, laconic, unreachable at the best of times. Committed suicide 2 August 1980, once again another story. Harper’s own father, a man called Edward Bernstein, had left Harper’s mother when Harper was two, had died sometime in the early seventies. Harper knew very little of the details of their lives, and Evelyn had never been willing to speak of such things. So, all in all, it had been John Harper and Evelyn Sawyer, a strange and unwilling co-operation, and when Harper had reached nineteen he’d left New York and gone south to find his own way.
So when Evelyn talked of ‘owing’ and ‘emotional debt’ Harper felt the twist of obligation. He listened to her, he didn’t argue, and though he pressed her for further details she said nothing.
‘Just come home,’ she told him.
‘New York isn’t my home, Evelyn.’
She’d laughed drily. ‘Born in New York, John Harper . . . once you’re born in New York there’s nowhere else that can be called home. You might have run away but everything you ever were is here.’
Harper folded quietly inside. He felt tension in his lower gut. ‘Evelyn, I have work here . . . I can’t just up and leave—’
‘I’m not going to argue with you, John.’
‘We’re not arguing. What makes you think we’re arguing. All I’m saying is that there’s things I have to do here.’
‘There’s things here too, important things, and I need you to come back.’
‘Give me a reason why Evelyn, for Christ’s sake. Give me one good reason why I should just drop everything and fly up there.’
‘I can’t John, not on the phone. It’s too difficult to speak about on the phone. You need to come back. That’s all I’m going to say right now. Just come back and I’ll talk to you when you get here.’
‘Evelyn—’
‘Listen to me, John. It’s real simple. You need to deal with whatever you have to deal with and come back.’
Harper could hear the emotion in her voice. She sounded strained and exhausted.
Conversation lasted a handful of minutes more before he acquiesced resentfully, then spoke to Harry Ivens.
‘How long?’ Ivens asked. Always businesslike, always to the point.
‘Not sure. Few days, perhaps a week.’
‘Holiday or unpaid leave.’
‘Either which way, doesn’t really matter. Figured I might swing a compassionate—’
Ivens laughed. ‘Swing your fucking dick more like. Take half holiday, half unpaid. Have to understand that such a departure at short notice leaves me in the crap.’
‘Harry, you’ve got more miles of my fill-ins and bylines than Miami has freeways. You’ll cope. Pull some stuff from archives.’
‘I’m not happy, John. Don’t like to be caught short on such things.’
‘I’ll owe you, Harry.’
‘Trouble?’
Harper paused, thought for a moment. ‘No idea, Harry. She didn’t say a great deal. She was insistent, and when she gets her mind set on something she won’t give way.’
‘I hope it’s not bad news.’
‘Thanks, Harry. If it’s nothing I’ll get a return flight in a day or so, okay?’
‘Let me know, John. Take the time you need . . . I’ll handle things here.’
‘Appreciated.’
The negotiation ended.
Harper stood for a moment at the window of his apartment. Looked out over Gibson Park, north-west to the Expressway. Tried to think of nothing, to read nothing of significance into the conversation with Evelyn. Evelyn had her moments, her episodes, and this was more than likely no different. Something had spooked her, spooked her enough to call him, to insist that he come. There was no-one else for her to call. That was the simple truth. Maybe it was time he saw her. Last visited the better part of four years before, Christmas time, and it had been hard; not only Evelyn but everything that New York represented.
Harper picked up the phone and called Miami International. Flight departure for Newark in two and a half hours. Booked a seat, paid by credit card, left it open for return. Half an hour to put a few clothes in a bag and get himself ready. Stood in the doorway looking at his empty apartment, nodded as if acknowledging the presence of someone unseen. Said his goodbyes as if he somehow knew that things wouldn’t be the same when he returned. Things were never the same when you left and then returned. Something always changed, often internal, often profound. Such was living.
Banking high and steep, evening casting sequins across Florida as the setting sun reflected off a hundred thousand mangrove swamps and tributaries. Window seat, no-one beside him, Harlan Coben book in his lap which he couldn’t find the concentration to read. Stewardess asked if he wanted something to drink and he declined, changed his mind, asked for a Jack Daniels with a single ice cube. Ice melted before he drank, and it didn’t taste so good.
New York beckoned like a half-forgotten dream, a dream he’d had before and recalled with a feeling of tight anxiety. Altogether unsettled, angular distractions that sat between duty and resistance, emotions bound one to the other – anger, resentment, sympathy for Evelyn and her all-too-evident loneliness. Harper smiled to himself, a smile that did not reflect in his eyes, leaned his head back and exhaled deeply.
He drifted away and did not wake until the stewardess leaned across him, smiled like an angel, asked him to buckle up for landing. She smelled of something one could breathe in forever and never be satiated.
Newark Airport, New Jersey. Took a cab through the Holland Tunnel. Evening; the swollen hum of the city pressing against the windows as he went. Everything he remembered, nothing had changed, and all of this crowding up against his eyes like it had a wish to burn itself indelibly into his mind. Home is where the heart is, he thought, but the heart that lived in New York was a dark and shadowed version of his own. He realized that only in his mind was this the same city. Notwithstanding his Christmas visit four years before, he had been gone since 1987. This was New York post-Bush Snr, post-Clinton, post the fiasco that saw Al Gore take the popular vote by 540,000 but lose at the Electoral in 2000. This was New York after the first attack against the homeland by foreign aggressors since the War of 1812, the ghost of 9/11 inclusive and encompassing despite the passing of three years. Harper could still recall a news headline that had stopped him in his tracks – ‘Vacant Rooms, Empty Tables and Scared Tourists’. I’ve come back, he thought, but what have I come back to?
Detoured on Sixth, headed for West Third on foot. Diverted by the Blue Note Jazz Club where he paused and drank a soda. Evelyn would have smelled alcohol and bitched at him, called him a deadbeat, a bum. Garrett had been a drinker and had fallen by the wayside. By the time Harper left it was gone eight. Yellow medallion cabs, New York buses, cars crowding fender to fender, smell of diesel and cigarette smoke, the sweat and frustration of several million lives, each of them intersecting, each of them lost and yet still looking for something in their own quiet and special way. Back out into Greenwich Village, bohemians and skateboarders, freethinkers and hopheads; sharp darts from the past, like edges of things he didn’t want to recall, but he did recall them, and somehow they hurt. This was all a hundred thousand years before, and yet – with each step towards Evelyn’s three-storey walk-up on Carmine between the Cherry Lane Theater and Sheridan Square – John Harper felt the past rolling up towards him, inexorable and relentless. The past did not tire, the past did not disappear, it merely waited for you to come home. Home? Harper stopped right there on the sidewalk. Was that what he believed, even after all these years – that he was really coming home?
He remembered this same walk as a child; a particular day, an unforgettable Wednesday.
He shrugged off such thoughts; they scurried away like trick-or-treat children, catcalls and snickering and curse words.
Harper started walking again, crossed West Fourth towards Bleecker and angled left. Thought back to the moment on the Mary McGregor, the defining moment. After that the call from Nancy Young, the question asked but never answered of David Leonhardt. Why did Nancy have his number? She’d met Leonhardt a couple of times – Herald functions, such things as that. Had there been something between them? Had they started something, and had starting something with Leonhardt given her cause to end what she had with him? He wouldn’t know, not until he returned to Miami, and even then Harper felt sure he would find only a slim impostor of the truth. Wished he was back in his own apartment and not a block and a half from the junction of Carmine, a junction that came back all too familiar.
Harper paused and looked at the house, sensing tension and unwanted premonition inside of him; oblivious to the car across the road, a dark sedan, in the front two people – a middle-aged man, a younger woman. Unaware of their conversation.
He stepped up to the riser and felt his heart have second thoughts.
‘That’s him? That’s John Harper?’ Cathy Hollander asked.
‘Sure as hell is,’ Walt Freiberg replied.
‘He looks like him . . . he really looks like Edward.’
Walt Freiberg nodded.
‘And this woman is his aunt?’
‘Right, Evelyn Sawyer. Her sister was John’s mother. Evelyn Sawyer is a hard-hearted bitch . . . a dangerous woman. A really dangerous woman.’
‘Dangerous . . . why? What did she do?’
Walt Freiberg smiled. ‘Do? She didn’t do anything. It’s what she knows . . . woman is dangerous because of what she knows.’
‘They’re going to come around here, the police?’
‘They’ll be round. They’ll come and ask her about Edward, about what she knows, about why she thinks he might have been shot.’
‘And she could say things? She could tell them what she knows?’ Cathy Hollander asked.
‘Not any more,’ Freiberg replied. ‘Not now John Harper’s here.’
‘Late,’ she said. ‘Why’d you have to be so late?’
‘Hi, Aunt Ev . . . good to see you, you know?’
‘Figured you’d be here hours ago. What you been doin’?’
‘Having a life. Organizing myself to come up here. Catching a flight . . . the us
ual shit.’
‘No need to badmouth me young man . . . always had an answer for everything didn’t you? Always had a sharp tongue in your head.’
‘Can I come in, Ev?’
‘Yes, you can come in, but wipe your shoes . . . in fact, take your shoes off at the door and leave them in the hallway. Come on through to the kitchen.’
Sixty-four years old; hair silver-grey, eyes as sharp as pins; whiplash in her voice, a little edgy, easily irritated. House hadn’t changed – smelled of cinnamon, violets, camomile, a robust undercurrent of oil of bergamot from the constant supply of Earl Grey tea that fuelled Evelyn Sawyer. Stairwell to the right of the lower hall, kitchen to the left, ceramic-tiled floor, window over the sink that looked into the yard. Nothing had changed, and though Harper believed he himself had changed he still felt the same emotions, considered the same thoughts as he always did when he came back here. The Carmine house was not so much a representation of his own past, but a representation of everything that he’d never wanted to be, never wanted to become. The house was silence and tension, tight emotions and anxiety; it was Evelyn’s crying jags and Garrett’s drunken stupors; it was the awkward transition from child to man to departure . . . it was the memory of a family that never really existed at all, a family that Harper had prayed for so many times, and a family that had never returned.
‘Tea?’ Evelyn asked.
Harper shook his head. He set his bag down just inside the kitchen door and took a seat at the plain deal table. Twelve years, two meals a day, many of those times seated alone, Garrett out, Evelyn bustling around the kitchen making her existence seem busy. Eating in silence, nothing much of anything to say; wondering if the kids from his school went to homes just like his, or if there was another kind of life out there somewhere. He’d believed he’d heard rumor of such a thing, but wasn’t sure.
‘You want a scotch or something?’ Evelyn asked.
‘Do I need one?’ Harper asked.