The Railroad

by Neil Douglas Newton

  Her eyebrows rose. “You sound like you have a big secret."

  “Not really. Let me ask you. Who do you think is responsible for your daughter’s disappearance?”

  “My daughter decided to follow a stupid path. She had a good marriage and a good husband. And then she blew it and started to hang around with a strange crowd.”

  “And who was that?"

  “People who told her that she should be independent and gave her a bunch of idiotic ideas about child abuse and her husband.”

  “And why do you think they were idiotic?”

  “Felice had a great marriage.” Her eyes strayed to a set of pictures framed and sitting on a glass shelf. I recognized Felice’s pictures from the television. The man who stood by her side was box office quality handsome. I saw Jane’s eyes linger over the photo, a strange look coming over her face. “David was so good to her. And she threw it away.”

  That made me uneasy. I’d read some of the claims Felice had made about her husband and they at least deserved some attention. What was worse was that Felice’s daughter corroborated the mother’s claims.

  Jane got up and picked up one of the photos. If I had to guess, I’d say she was looking at David and not her daughter. I started to wonder what was driving Jane. “A man like this doesn’t abuse children,” she said with utter finality.

  “Of course,” I said woodenly. It seemed that I was in over my head. The best I could do was to get my information and go. “Do you happen to know someone named Robert Benoit?” I asked quickly.

  Her eyes unfocused slightly as she considered the question. Then she smiled strangely. “Why do you ask that?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “I know that name, I think. He was in the news wasn’t he? For something…Oh yes. One of my daughter’s causes. Another one of those child abuse things. She’d tell me about them as though they were proof that David was a pedophile. I never understood her.”

  And you won’t now, I thought. “I guess that means you don’t really know him personally?”

  “No, Mike. I can’t remember ever having seen him or even having heard about him outside the news.”

  “Okay. Well I guess I won’t bother you anymore.”

  “Oh. Is that it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Could you tell me what it is you’re investigating?”

  “Um, I know some people who’ve ... had some trouble with child abuse. I’m not sure if they’ll be affected by these murders, but I want to find out.”

  She cocked her head. “A woman friend of yours?”

  I saw an out. “Yes.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “I think so.”

  “Oh. I thought you might want to stay and have dinner.”

  “I appreciate that. But I have someone else to meet.”

  “Oh. Well…I know it’s not considered the thing to do but,” She picked up a napkin from her dining room table and a pen from a rolling tray and wrote down her phone number. “This is my cell phone number. It’s easier to reach me on this than my house phone.” She watched me for a moment, waiting for a reaction. “Something to think about at least,” she said softly, her eyes on mine.

  “Well once the complication in my life dies down I’ll certainly think about it.”

  “That’s fair.”

  As I left, I wondered if her son-in-law had turned her down. Not a very worthy thought, but it seemed a reasonable one.

  *

  A few hours later I got another silent call. I’d developed a rhythm with those calls, one where I waited at last 30 seconds through the initial silence. Then I’d recite a limerick or read something out of the literature on my ratty bookshelves. I thought it might confuse Benoit; anger him or at least edify him.

  This time I was so disgusted that I ran out of patience after only ten seconds of silence.

  “What a pedophile does with his time when he isn’t terrorizing children. I’m impressed.”

  Silence. I hung up as usual.

  It was three A.M. before I was forced to realize that I wasn’t going to sleep. I had gone lighter on the booze, though my insomnia had convinced me to take a drink every couple of hours in the hopes that it would put me to sleep. I finally gave up.

  I walked out of my bedroom and turned on the light. I was about to turn on the TV when something caught my eye. Of course I wasn’t much on putting anything away in my present state of anomie. So it was no surprise that I found the movie Moskowitz had given me. Fahrenheit 451. I had seen it years before and I seemed to remember that I liked it. It was an old movie, with a cast and director that had once been famous, but now were relegated to the arena of film arcana for the few that coveted such things. On a whim I pulled it out of its case and stuck it in the awful old DVD player that had lived in chez Moosehead for years.

  The film began as I remembered it: edgy music and a view of a fireman’s pole. We are introduced to Montag, a stoic fireman, ambitious and ready for promotion. Only Montag and his colleagues aren’t any regular firemen. In this alternative future, firemen burn books.

  Why? Books are the seeds of discontent; they make people ponder the meaning of their existence, they force us to seek something greater and more divine. In short, they make us dissatisfied and are therefore illegal.

  Montag, our fireman, has in him the seeds of discontent. During a raid on one house where thousands of books are kept, he steals one, too curious about their content to pass up the chance of reading one. Seconds later he is setting the house and its contents on fire with a special torch.

  Back at home we meet Montag’s wife, Linda, a pretty woman who is part of the fabric of the times: self-centered, child-like, and emotionally numb. She spends her waking hours watching an enormous wall screen television, being lulled by hypnotic images and prescribed drugs. The television is a tool of socialization, promoting a sense of belonging to a surrogate family of characters, eclipsing the real world.

  This bland world stifles Montag. He begins reading steadily and soon makes the acquaintance of a young woman who is a criminal: she keeps and reads books in secret. Montag falls in love with her and with the rich world of books, in contrast to his empty life. It’s she who tells him about The Book People, a small band of rebels living in the woods, far outside of the city. Each of them has made it his or her life’s work to memorize the text of one book, keeping it safe for posterity, until the world embraces books once again.

  Montag’s life eventually falls to shreds; he is turned in as a criminal by his wife to the very people he works with. In the end he turns his torch on his own colleagues and runs off to join The Book People. We watch as Montag is welcomed into the community, in turn, by each solitary book person, each consumed by memorizing a single book. In some cases, the books are handed down from father to son. Others memorize their books alone, looking forward to the day when they have committed them to memory and are ready to burn the books themselves. Each introduces him or herself as the book they’ve come to love. I am The Martian Chronicles…I am War and Peace…I am Dante’s Inferno.

  As the movie came to a close, we watched scores of Book People walk by the camera, crossing each other’s paths. Each is speaking lines from their own personal book. I found myself being drawn into the montage of faces, the movement of their mouths, and the certainty of their purpose. I felt a tear fall. Watching it, I could understand easily why Moskowitz would call books the defenders of civilization. In that story, in a time of darkness, a small spark of human divinity was being kept alive. I did my best to think of anything in my life that had ever been that important, but I drew a blank.

  It all came crashing in on me. I saw my years at Crabtree and Dain, my superficial predatory existence, and my love of the game. I’d been trying to cheat my mortality and for a while it had seemed like I succeeded. I was on my way up.

  But posterity isn’t something you could buy or climb on the backs of other people to achieve. I thought of The Book People and
I knew it was something you had to earn, something you had to make sacrifices for. It took a greater goal, something I’d never had. Something I could never dream of in my small addictive world. So there it was. I was in an ugly house, depressed and alcoholic. I had nothing to lose. What would I do then that was worth more than all of my big wins at Crabtree and Dain?

  I’d come close to finding it. But I hadn’t gone with Eileen and Megan. It seemed sensible at the time. But so had a lot of other things I’d done. Maybe I needed to be less selfish, sacrifice something to be worthy of posterity. Moskowitz wanted to save the world; maybe he had the right idea. I could see why this movie appealed to him.

  I thought about posterity. Suddenly those handbills came to mind, the ones that plastered every inch of open wall in the days after 9/11. Those people were all dead, all those faces. But someone cared and would continue to care. It occurred to me that posterity is what you leave behind.

  What would I leave behind?

  *

  Despite the lack of sleep I woke up relatively early the next morning. I knew Moskowitz would be at work, but I thought I’d thank him for the movie. I guess it had affected me more deeply than I would have liked to admit.

  I dialed Moskowitz's number and he answered on the first ring. He sounded harried but asked me what had been happening. I ran down the last week: there was the incident in the bar, the break in and, of course, Wills's intrepid detective work in my trashed house. I thought for a moment before putting forth my new theories of the Chapter and Verse murders; he would most likely shoot me down. Then it hit me that I had to take my suspicions seriously if anyone else was going to; I told him about the connection between Benoit and the murders. For some reason I decided to leave out my conversation with Felice Hammon’s mother; I thought that he might try to talk me out of my investigation.

  “Whoa,” Moskowitz said when I’d finished. “You don’t just sit on your ass, do you?”

  “I try to keep busy.”

  “You might be busier soon; I doubt Benoit will let this go with a warning. He’s sensitive in his own sick way.”

  “I’m not worried about his feelings.”

  “ Have you reconsidered the Manhattan alternative?”

  “No. I feel that there are things I have to do here.”

  “Oh god! Did you see Rambo lately?”

  “Actually I watched Fahrenheit 451 last night.

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I watched it. I am surprised to find that, unlike everything else you do, there was no point you were trying to make by giving it to me.”

  “Hmmm…there is a point, but not about your situation. I just wanted you to have it. It means a lot to me.”

  “I can see why. Maybe that’s why I came up to chez Moosehead to live. To find a meaning. I’ve spent too much time with the buzzing of corporate America in my ears. I want…I wanted things. All kinds of things. And now they don’t mean much.”

  “I get it. Look I can’t stay on long. I wanted to know what you think you have that’s keeping you here?”

  “All the things I’ve told you. Benoit. The murders. Eileen.”

  “You can’t do much for Eileen up here that you couldn’t do in the City."

  “And if he’s murdered all these woman?”

  “That’s a new one! Are you serious? What makes you think that?

  “Things he said to me in a phone call. He and his friends decided they wouldn’t put up with having things taken from them. That’s how he put it. He went on and on about it.”

  “Come on, Mike! You don’t know anything for sure. At least you can’t prove it. So you’re not doing anyone any good.”

  “I was always taught that it was better to be safe than sorry.”

  “I know you’ll think I’m an ass for saying this, but you have to let it go. Yes, this is America, but you can’t save everyone. Except yourself in this case.”

  I don’t know why, but I had been holding back the one detail that had made me start this crusade; the postcard I’d received with 4-5-1 written on it. At that moment, I found that I wanted Moskowitz to believe me. So I let it go.

  “What if there’s another little detail that seems important to me,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve been getting these postcards.” I stopped, feeling stupid.

  “What kind of postcards?”

  What the hell. “I started getting them a few weeks back. The first few were from places I have no connection with. I have no idea why I got them. They just had my address on them and nothing else. No message or anything.”

  “This makes you think Benoit is one of the Chapter and Verse Killers?”

  “You know, I wonder why I even want to tell you anything.”

  “Oh shit, Mike. You’re not going to get all sensitive on me, are you?”

  “Heaven forbid. What I was about to say is that I got one a couple of days ago that had a message: 4-5-1”.

  I thought that I heard a small gasp but, in a second, it seemed like an illusion, maybe just some noise on the phone. “You’re kidding me,” he said.

  “Oh yes. This whole thing has been a big joke. There is no Eileen or Megan. The two girls you met were just actors. It’s a reality show. Fuck you.”

  “This isn’t a joke! That’s all it said, 4-5-1?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you recognize the handwriting?”

  “No, of course not. It looked vaguely like a child’s writing, but that could be faked.”

  “So who do you think sent it?”

  “Who else? Benoit! He’s the only one who’d be trying to psych me out. Probably all the postcards came from him. I doubt it would be one of my friends in the City, the few that know where I am. He put the numbers 4-5-1 on it. Why would he do that unless he wanted me to know?”

  “He wanted to freak you out. It makes him seem more important than he is.”

  “You’re not listening!”

  “I’m not. This is bullshit. Where was the postcard from?”

  I thought for a second. “A town called Pesquot. That’s what it was. Pesquot Glass Works.”

  “Hmm….”

  “You know the place?”

  There was a pause where Steve said nothing. That in itself was amazing.

  “Steve?”

  Another second went by until he seemed to return to himself “No. I’ve never been to Maine. That’s got to be 10 miles from the Canadian border if I remember correctly.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I don’t get to New England much, Mike.”

  “I guess there isn’t much call for Jewish pro bono lawyers up there.”

  “I’ve never been north of Boston.”

  “Somehow that fits. The point is when my house was trashed, that postcard was the only thing that was missing."

  There was another pause. I was waiting for another opinion about my paranoia when he surprised me by saying, “Listen, I gotta go. I’m glad you watched the movie. I’ll call you later.”

  I was about to pursue his strange lack of interest, but something told me to let it go. “I’ll be here.”

  “Hopefully not if you take my advice.”

  “Bye Moskowitz.”

  “Bye.”

  *

  Somewhere in the night I woke up with something nagging at me. When I tried to go back to sleep I found that whatever it was that was bothering me had weaved itself into my dreams and wouldn’t let me sleep peacefully.

  I decided to sit up and stay awake for a few minutes and clear my head. All I could remember from my dreams were the numbers 451 which, of course, wasn’t miraculous considering the continued press the Chapter and Verse Killers were still getting. But there was something else and it seemed to be related to something recent that had happened to me.

  I ran my mind back through the past couple of days four times before I remembered what I’d done only days before. I’d gone to Steve’s house.

  And he’d given me
a movie called Fahrenheit 451.

  4-5-1.

  In the following hour I bounced back and forth between two extremes: one a certainty that Moskowitz was not a murderer; that in fact all of his actions proved he was a protector of weak people, destroyed by the system.

  The other extreme was one that came from my gut; it seemed far too convenient a coincidence to be ignored. There was too much rightness in the idea that there had to be a connection.

  In the end I drifted off to sleep, sure of both extremes and strangely aware that I wouldn’t be able to prove either. All I could say conclusively was the fact that I knew almost nothing about Steve Moskowitz and that I’d have to be wary.

  *

  Two days after my visit to the library I was puttering around the house, getting ready to go to the McDonalds. The bell rang.

  No one came by to see me except Moskowitz and he was at work. I walked slowly to the door, trying to imagine what I’d do if someone broke it in or if there was someone unfriendly on the porch. I went to the bedroom and peeked through a crack in the window shades.

  It was Dennis. I ran back and jerked open the door. We stared at each other for a few seconds.

  “You’re going to tell me I should have called,” he said.

  I tried my best to be angry but it didn’t quite work. I immediately thought of Benoit and his friends and wondered if it was safe for Dennis to be anywhere near chez Moosehead. But it was likely he'd already been seen. What the hell.

  “Come in,” I said, gesturing into the house.

  “You don’t seem happy I’m here.”

  “I’ll explain.”

  He took a look at my living room and whistled. “As ugly as I remember. A triumph.”

  “It fits my mood and my experience. A drink?”

  “Sure.”

  I went into the kitchen and poured a couple of Laphroaigs on ice; I thought he deserved the torment of the whiskey after the way he’d been to me back in New York. When I returned, Dennis was looking out the window into the backyard. “Pretty desolate looking,” he said, turning.