“That’s not even an option,” he said. “Those rules don’t apply.”
“We’ll see,” I told him.
I opened the driver’s door and got inside. He motioned for me to roll down the passenger window, then leaned in for a final word. His hand wasn’t under the jacket anymore. And he was smiling like his usual self.
“I’m gonna keep an eye on you,” he said. “Maybe I’ll drop in and see how you’re doing from time to time. This isn’t goodbye. I’m taking the long view when it comes to you.”
I waited for him to pull back so I could roll up the window.
“You ever read Conrad, March? Joseph Conrad. You should. I told you I was more of a literature man. There’s a book of his-it’s great. It starts with a guy blowing up some Russian aristocrat’s carriage; then he hides out with this second man, more of a law-and-order type like yourself. And he can sense the judgment coming from your guy, just like I can sense it from you. So I’m gonna tell you what he tells the guy in the book.”
“Fine, go ahead.”
“Here’s what he says: ‘Men like me are necessary to make room for self-contained, thinking men like you.’ You understand? Say what you want-and believe me, I’ve heard it all before-but men like me are necessary. But maybe men like you are necessary, too. I’m keeping an open mind about you, March. One of these days, maybe I’ll find a use for you after all.”
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER 30
In the end it is politics, not virtue, that saves me. Even as the surgeons perform their ethered miracle inside my chest cavity, a narrative begins to take shape. Bea Kuykendahl tells the story in the presence of Federal agents as they number the bullet wounds in Brandon Ford’s recovered corpse. According to this account, Ford died in the line of duty, and so did I nearly. Though I don’t remember it this way, I am later told that when the Federales burst into the apartment, they found me bleeding out with a pistol in one hand and the scruff of drug lord César Soto-Andrade in the other.
I am a hero.
Not only that, but at the time I was apparently operating with the blessings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in full knowledge of the Mexican authorities, who not only sanctioned the operation but played a significant role in its accomplishment. The first photo of me to hit the wire is snapped at my bedside with my torso swathed in bandages and my chin covered in stubble. I’m shaking hands with a uniformed Mexican military official while members of Bea’s team, including the old-timer who’d warned me off, look on in stony silence.
There would be many more photos, many hospital-room interviews, many tight-lipped congratulations from law enforcement officials who had a good idea what had really gone down. But politics is politics, and none of them could deny the bounty: a high-profile cartel boss, a thwarted arms shipment, and a dead FBI rogue contractor in need of posthumous apotheosis. Is there any other kind? All the bent and broken rules, all the red tape, all the fodder for an international incident-with the wave of the political wand, it all just vanishes.
All that’s required of me is to keep my mouth shut. For once, I do. Whether Bea is a snake or not, I can’t tell, but if so, she’s the snake that saved me.
The real story goes something like this. When they found me, I was short of breath and coughing up a fine mist of blood. The bullet had entered my chest and collapsed a lung, which made my blood pressure drop rapidly. Keller put pressure on the wound to try and stop the flow of blood, but by the time the paramedics reached me, I had slipped into shock.
Bea says I was rambling incoherently, that I mistook her for a boy at one point, and for my deceased daughter at another. It pains me to hear this.
After they stabilized me, I was rushed into surgery, spent the night on a ventilator, and woke up with a blank space where my memory of the night before should have been. I was flown back to Houston and discharged after a week free of complications. The doctor who signed off on my papers told me I was lucky.
He had no idea.
While I was in the hospital, Charlotte posted herself beside me, scrutinizing everyone who came in. Officials in search of photo ops she sent packing unless I insisted, not realizing that after my string of misdeeds, nothing but a dam of publicity was holding back the tide of consequences. Cavallo came, paving the way for a state visit by Wanda Mosser, who poured on a treacly layer of kindness for the cameras before giving an interview out in the hallway, stressing her commitment to interagency cooperation. Before she left, Wanda conveyed her thanks to Charlotte and whispered in my ear that from now on I should direct any inquiries from reporters to her desk. I agreed wholeheartedly. Cavallo stuck around awhile after she was gone, angry with me for what she called my “rampage,” but grateful and teary-eyed that I was still alive.
One evening after visiting hours, Charlotte managed the thing I wanted most.
After disappearing for half an hour, she returned with Gina Robb holding a swaddled baby in the crook of her arm. Carter came in behind them, looking askance at my chest tube, almost afraid to come close. I beckoned them forward. Their baby girl was pink and translucent and beautiful in every way, with a downy cap of dark hair on her crown and a pinched little face. Gina bent low and offered to let me hold her, but I was afraid. It didn’t feel right somehow, touching such innocence with these hands. I stared at that little girl, and when I looked up, all three of them were gaping at me, triggering a memory of Keller’s exclamation of shock when he saw the ragged hole in my chest.
But it was my eyes that set them off, my eyes goggled with tears.
A secret world had opened up to me, sucking me down through its many layers, and instead of swallowing me at the last moment, it coughed me up.
The official record had been not only tidied but heavily redacted, leaving behind a series of notable omissions. Jeff’s body must have been recovered from the barn out on the highway-I’d seen the column of police heading in that direction with my own eyes, and it was common knowledge that the van full of M4 carbines was recovered-but in the official version, he never existed.
All that’s left of the killer I brought to Mexico with me is a tattered copy of The Foxhole Atheist.
The murder of Chad Macneil remains unsolved, as it was in the beginning, and the headless victim he left in the park with its ominous finger pointing to the place Nesbitt died is still identified for the record as Brandon Ford. The man I knew as Ford was buried with honors under the name of Robert Johnson-the idea being, I suppose, that false identities are interchangeable.
The last time I saw Reg Keller was in his apartment in Matamoros. He is no longer a part of the story, either. As obliging as Bea proved in the aftermath of my shooting, whenever I brought up Keller’s name, she cocked her head in incomprehension. There will be no more confidences, she told me, never saying a word.
The week after my release from the hospital I eat a burger at Five Guys before driving out to the cemetery where Jerry Lorenz is buried. A riding lawn mover whirs in the distance, and I have to hold my breath to walk through a cloud of gnats. All the trees have been planted on the perimeter, leaving the cemetery grounds to bake and boil in the Texas sun, and me along with them. I press my hand to the back of my neck and it comes away damp. I’m cold-blooded by nature, and even in high humidity it takes more than a stroll across a gently rolling graveyard to raise a bead of sweat on my skin.
Either the heat is astronomical or what’s changed is me. I’m not the man I was, not so resilient. The ice water in my veins is starting to melt, and maybe I should take that as a sign.
The tombstone lies flat on the ground, a gleaming black slab incised with an ancient tablet and the inscription BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, FRIEND. I kneel down at the edge of the still-fresh grave, feeling a slice of pain through the back of the thigh. My old companion making an unwelcome return.
What do you say to a fallen partner? What do you say to a man you started off despising and came to grudgingly respect, whose death is on your conscience and whos
e absence you’re only beginning to feel? I’m not a good mourner, despite all the practice.
I press my hand flat on the granite, leaving a fleeting impression behind on the stone.
His last thought was for his kid, as mine would have been, as mine was in the confusion of shock when I mistook Bea for Jess. It was Lorenz who first thought that the finger must be pointing, Lorenz who later worked out what it was pointing at. And I’ve come without even a conclusion to offer him, no killer behind bars, no clearance on record. Just death. At the end of the day, Lorenz and the man he was hunting are both equals in the grave, their differing moral weight apparently balanced in a zero-sum game of nonexistence.
If there’s anything in religion I want to believe, kneeling beside this beacon in a sea of markers, serving no ostensible purpose but as a focal point of memory and remorse, as a blaze cut into the bark to let us know something’s rotting underneath, it’s that the dead and disembodied will rise again before the cosmic judge, that the zero-sum game will give way to the balance scales of an unblindfolded justice. That a cool psychopath like Jeff will be weighed and measured and found wanting, and someone will tell Jerry Lorenz that he didn’t die for nothing after all. Which is more than I can do, hovering without words over the silent grave.
At first I fear the ripping sound signals some new injury of the flesh, that I’ve popped some stitches in my chest or my taut sciatic nerve has finally snapped asunder. But the gashed seam isn’t inside me; it’s between my legs. The seat of my pants has snagged on the fence around Jeff’s vacant garage, the threads giving way. On the ground I make a quick inspection. An inch or so of frayed fabric gaping wide, nothing more.
The desiccated hulks of the once-treasured muscle cars haven’t moved at all since the last time I was here. Everything’s the same. There are no migrants congregating in the parking lot across the street, but otherwise the clock could have reset to the moment before my ill-judged southward journey. When we left, we were both in a hurry, and I distinctly remember Jeff pausing at the door only long enough to lock one of the dead bolts. With that lock in mind, I’ve brought along a crowbar. In thirty seconds I’m inside the garage.
I turn on the window unit A/C and the upright fan. The stifling heat doesn’t abate one bit. If anything, the thin sliver of refreshing air makes the rest of the space burn hotter. My shirt sticks to me, my imperviousness gone.
From my jacket pocket I remove The Foxhole Atheist, setting it on the table. Then I snatch it up again and start ripping the pages apart. It’s a fat little book and the dismemberment takes some effort, leaving me with an ache in my chest and the usual prickling along the sciatic line. The book’s pieces lay clumped around my feet. The idea of stomping them comes to mind, but my anger has already run through me like a fever and is gone.
My footsteps slap against the concrete. My soles stick a little before lifting. The surface is tacky with grease. I pace around the reclaimed corner of living space, noticing a film of dust over everything. It wasn’t so different before. Though the garage was fitted out for primitive occupation, were there signs that Jeff was really living here? Try as I might, I can’t recall. Looking at it now, the place seems long unoccupied, more of a clubhouse than a bedroom. Things were not as they seemed. If I’d been looking closer, I might have realized.
The gaping hole in the floor left by the removed lift is rimmed with oil-blackened track and random debris. I bend down to examine the abyss, which gives off a smell not unlike an overheated engine when you first lift the hood. At the bottom of the hole, jutting up from the floor, there’s a metal remnant of the lift, a shaft maybe four feet tall that splits into two arms at the top, like a gently curving iron T. When I slide down into the hole for a closer look, marking my pant leg with grease, I find the shaft is socketed into the floor but jiggles around freely in its mount. Cords dangle loose at the end of each arm, secured at one end by complicated-looking seaman’s knots.
I don’t try it out, not wanting to mark my shirt, but I can imagine a man leaning forward against this shaft, his arms stretched just as I saw Brandon Ford’s arms back at the barn in Matamoros, wrists secured at the end of the metal arms. Remembering Jeff’s makeshift dissection, I feel light-headed. Queasy.
Removing my flashlight, I peer along the grimy floor for any signs of blood, but if they’re here, they are hidden from the naked eye. A forensics team could find them, I’m certain of that, and they’d match the telltale grease stain on the back of the corpse’s leg to some piece of railing in the pit. He would have been filthy from dying down there. Jeff would have had to drag him up, then over to the bathroom for a wash. I look for an axe, just in case, but there’s no sign of one.
Climbing up to the floor, I retrace his probable steps, ending in the small, dank restroom. The sink is gray from oil. The trash basket beside the basin bursts with fetid gray rags.
The night he rescued me from Ford’s men, it wasn’t home base Jeff brought me to, not his refuge. He brought me to his killing ground, his carefully appointed torture chamber, then spun a story so he could gauge my reaction and determine how much I knew. I’d felt so grateful to him for the unexpected deliverance that I wasn’t really on my guard. Not psychologically, and certainly not physically. If he’d wanted to, if he’d decided I could be of more value to him down in the pit than up here on the surface, I have no doubt Jeff would have killed me. After seeing him standing over Ford with the glistening knife, I have no doubt at all.
I spin and stumble, reaching for something to steady myself on. My hand rests on the edge of the table where Jeff stacked his many books. His books. I’d imagined him reclining on the army cot, reading his paranoid literature until the wee hours of the morning, unable to sleep. Now I can picture him coming up out of the hole for a break, a little rest and relaxation, leaving his victim down below to linger in agony. I see him reading while a moan ascends from the abyss, a private smile on his lips.
I don’t rip the books apart or even lash out at them. All I do is push them one by one, with the slightest pressure of my fingers, over the edge and onto the floor. Each one drops with a satisfying impact that sends a thud reverberating through the garage. I move the books over the edge like so many beads across the wire of an abacus, counting an arithmetic of hidden shame. The whole place should burn. It should be razed to the ground. But it’s not up to me to see this done. None of it is up to me anymore. I was not born to set this right. Not this.
The last book left is a thick old paperback with a creased black spine. The pages curl upward from repeated reading, their edges brown with age. On the cover is a detail from a medieval painting, a horned demon with serpents projecting from his head, the bare legs of a half-consumed man dangling from his mouth. All around him, naked bodies writhe in bubbling oil vats. They are stoked by pitchforks, their bone-white faces twisted in pain. This is a thousand-year-old vision of the depths of hell, affixed to the front of Dante’s Inferno, a place Jeff didn’t believe in but brought to life.
I snatch the book up, the same copy Magnum was reading the morning I jogged past him at the picnic table. Can you keep a secret? And to my surprise, in blue ballpoint just inside the cover is written the name ANDREW NESBITT.
That confident trickster and talent spotter, grooming future dictators for the good of democracy, a would-be puppet master whose own paranoia became his undoing, who never settled the debts he owed to justice and didn’t live to see the red harvest his deeds put in motion. Like a jeweler gazing through his loupe, he had seen something in me all those years ago, some flaw of character that led him to believe I would go along with concealing a woman’s murder. And then he’d seen something else and, after a lifetime, sent me a message by way of his torturer, hoping to put that second flaw to use, my willingness to travel on the other side of the line that keeps good men on the path and bad ones in check, to balance his sheet while avenging the death of a nameless woman in 1986, and every woman who came after her, and all the rest. I look in vain for a
place to set the book down. Finding none, I take it with me. Full circle and a fitting end to a story I never intended to be a part of, let alone to tell.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-6d9f32-8a1e-da4d-5c96-8821-5f95-44e0d1
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 30.09.2013
Created using: calibre 0.9.36, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Bertrand, J. Mark
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