Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Romulus, I think.” Kubicek let the Venetian blind drop. “Almost gone.”

  “Give it another ten minutes. Did you see the Satyricon?”

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”

  “Brilliant fucking film. Do you go out to see movies often?”

  “We used to, when our girl was little. You could take a kid to the pictures then, without checking first to make sure some joker didn’t pull out his schlong halfway through. I think the last one I went to see was The Cowboys. Say what you like about the Duke, he keeps it in his pants.”

  “Pretty soon you won’t have to go out at all. Every movie ever made will come in a cartridge that you poke in a machine and watch on an ordinary TV set. That’ll be the end of guys like me.”

  Kubicek waited. If he knew anything about the little twerp by now it was that he didn’t need to be prompted to make a speech. It had something to do with being a genius.

  “All the movies ever had going for them, the one thing that separated them from all the other arts—not counting live drama, which to hell with that, it’s like going to the Louvre and not being sure if Mona Lisa’s smiling this time or picking her nose—was you had to stay in one spot for a fixed amount of time to get the full benefit. The theaters cooperated by closing the doors and turning off the lights and hiring monkeys in uniform to tell the rowdies to shut up. TV doesn’t give you that; the viewer has all the control. People talk when the set’s on. They jump up in the middle of a scene to make a sandwich or go to the can. They try to make sense of what they see and when they can’t they say it’s cool, it’s just television. When this videotape thing is perfected they’ll watch movies the same way. If they do go occasionally to the theater, they’ll go on talking and getting up and moving around just like at home, and no army of ushers is going to get them to pipe down and sit still. So to beat that the movies will get louder. There’ll be all kinds of explosions and blaring music and goosed-up stereo gizmos to drown out the filibusters in the mezzanine. No dialogue. You can’t expect a customer to pay attention to what the actors are saying when Aunt Effie’s in the next seat giving him the lowdown on Cousin Phil’s prostate. The next generation of movie stars will be retired bodybuilders and former fashion models, just like in the silents. It’ll be as if the fifty years since The Jazz Singer never happened.”

  “It’s the shits, all right.”

  “Well, hell.” Corky drained his glass and swung his feet to the floor. “Let’s go make some art.”

  Another forty-five minutes or so went by while the director checked with all the technicians, ordered some lights and big sheet reflectors moved, and rode the camera boom surveying the scene through a hand-held lens, looking like Sabu the Elephant Boy. Meanwhile the final rays of sunlight went down beyond Belleville, the streetlights poinged on, and the late-January cold came down straight from outer space without so much as a thread of cloud for insulation. The location was the warehouse district, specifically the foot of Riopelle where the rum-running boats used to dock during Prohibition, bearing cargo loads of illegal spirits from the Canadian side of the river. Brick warehouses with blank panes in their windows and inspired signs reading NO. 3 and DO NOT BLOCK LOADING RAMP made square shadows against the dusting of lights from Windsor. It took a native to identify the piles of broken asphalt that had been there since the First World War from the fresh debris at the other end of the alley where clearing had begun for the construction of a new building already being lauded by the city administration as a symbol of Detroit’s coming renaissance: A shopping center. Kubicek wondered if he was alone in the knowledge that the only authentic Detroiters with money to spend on new clothes and sets of china were, pimps and drug dealers.

  While Corky was still aloft, a white stretch limo pulled onto the set and a trio of local celebrities stepped out: Councilman Kelly, red of hair and pocked face, a throwback to the city’s Irish past; Judge Del Rio, a black rookie jurist in a sharp suit and camel’s-hair coat that made him look every bit the two-bit procurer that Kubicek and most of his police colleagues thought him; and Doris Biscoe, WXYZ Channel 7 newscaster, a trim handsome black woman in a fawn trench coat with the station logo stitched on the shoulder flap. In a spirit of cooperation with Hollywood, the Chamber of Commerce had prevailed upon the administration and the halls of journalism to supply the production with bit players recognizable to the regional audience. According to the copy of the script Kubicek had seen, Kelly and Del Rio had a line apiece, while Biscoe was supposed to read a passage of invented news copy for a fictional TV camera crew. Also on hand was an engine company from the Detroit Fire Department. The city had given Corky permission to set fire to an empty warehouse, and the firefighters were there to make sure the rest of the riverfront didn’t burn down for the sake of art.

  While the special effects team busied themselves planting incendiaries inside the designated building, the director shot the dialogue scenes involving the guest actors. Biscoe, experienced at delivering on cue, made her contribution in one take and went to the catering truck for a cup of coffee to warm her hands around while she watched the others. Kelly blew his single line six times in six tries, finally supplying adequacy on the seventh. Del Rio, notorious for packing a revolver beneath his judicial robes, out-shouting objecting attorneys into numbed silence, and convening court wherever he happened to be—a restaurant, the ground floor of police headquarters—and finding everyone present in contempt, kept trying to pad his part with hammy elaborations and was escorted from the set with effusive thanks for his performance, after which the director told his half-pint assistant to replace him with anyone in the area who happened to belong to Equity.

  Even Kubicek, whose tolerance for cold weather went far back in his family, was stamping his feet and flicking icicles from his nose by the time the fireworks were set to begin. By this time the conversation among the actors and extras had all but dwindled away as they sought to keep their chins from freezing by tucking them inside their collars. A gray pall of breathed air hung overhead like nitre from the ceiling of a cavern so deep it had never known a temperature above zero. The snow creaked loudly when they shifted their weight.

  The moment arrived. All the personnel who had been in the building were present and accounted for. Corky’s assistant socked down the telescoping antenna of his walky-talky with the heel of his hand, reporting that all cameras and sound equipment were in position. The director, at ground level now but still straddling the boom, peeled off both jersey gloves, blew on his fingers, tugged the gloves back on, jammed down the leather visor of his baseball cap, and jerked his head once. His teeth shone white in the thicket of his beard. The assistant director unraveled a white lawn handkerchief as big as a tablecloth from his jacket pocket and snapped it at the ground.

  The head gaffer, a man built along Kubicek’s lines—thick through the chest and abdomen but short in the limbs, with brown hair spilling to his shoulders from under a black knitted watch cap—had been watching for this gesture from his perch on the platform of a freight car parked on one of the sidings that networked the area. Now he pointed a device the size and shape of a garage door opener in the direction of the warehouse and mashed one of the buttons with his big thumb. In the instant before detonation, the police sergeant noticed that the man wore a black eye patch behind his glasses and that he was missing two fingers from his right hand.

  It started slowly, with a dull rose glow behind the empty windows of the ground floor. The sound came behind it, a wheezy kind of a thud, as of a heavy weight striking the floor of a lake. It was followed by a sustained sucking noise as the glow turned yellow and the flames leapt to the sills. To the right of the loading dock, a bank of windows, all its panes miraculously intact, shuddered, then exploded, spraying glittering splinters in front of a fist of fire that opened when it hit the outside air, drenching the block in bronze light. Kubicek felt the heat on his face at a distance of sixty feet.

  He saw the assistant director touch Corky’s sleeve
and point skyward. Shielding his eyes from the firelight with both hands, the director tilted his head back, peered, and nodded energetically. At first Kubicek saw nothing in that direction. He felt rather than heard the beating of blades, and then a constellation of orange and green lights, shaped just like a dragonfly, soared into view above the black smudge of smoke; a helicopter filming the conflagration from above.

  The sergeant wondered at which point in the two minutes since the cameras had begun turning that the cost of the scene had exceeded his pension.

  A heap of dirty snow piled against the base of the building by plows crumbled in on itself with a sigh, bleeding rusty water in a spreading pool from which steam rose. By now the windows on the top floor were aglow. Thick brown smoke, heavier at first than air, rolled out of holes and fissures and boiled around the foundation like the lower tract of an atomic blast. It clung stubbornly to the earth like ground fog. The cinders tickled Kubicek’s ankles.

  Through the haze poked a pair of headlights that caught the corner of his eye and made him turn in their direction. They winked off, the door opened on the driver’s side, and a figure in a leather coat started walking toward him through the swirling smoke, looking exactly like something Corky might have filmed, although all the lenses were pointed the other way. Just then the door on the passenger’s side popped open and two men dressed in the winter uniform of the Detroit Police Department climbed out.

  Kubicek’s eyes were smarting from the smoke. He slid his hand toward his automatic, recognized the man in the leather coat, and got out his handkerchief instead to mop away the tears. Officer Charlie Battle waited for him to finish, then drew his Miranda card from an inside pocket and began reading the sergeant his rights.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  FOCUS WAS THE THING.

  When she was still very young, Caryn had sensed that she could not count on her father, usually away at some plant, or her mother, constantly preoccupied with the search for the perfect caterer, to provide strength when Caryn needed it. Early on she learned that tears only complicated a bad situation, blurring her vision and closing her throat; and so at age six she had ceased to cry. To order her emotions she would select some singular object—the rosettes at the corners of the doorframe in her nursery were endlessly fascinating, and appealingly out of reach—a thing of substance and interest to focus on until her world stopped rocking. So completely had alcohol taken its place in the years between that she had nearly forgotten the device. Determined not to take that first drink, she now found her object in the person of one Special Agent Francis Riordan, Jr.

  He was hardly as singular as the rosettes. At first glance, Riordan was just one more of that Hoover stamp she had seen so often at her father’s side during the war: Pink chinned, temples shaved, that subliminal American flag of red tie on white shirt with blue suit, black mirror wingtips with thin soles and shallow heels lest the wearer tower too obviously over the Director on a visit. Ten years earlier she wouldn’t have noticed him at all. But the look of the world had changed. In a society whose CPAs, dentists, and even politicians had laid aside their white button-down oxfords for sunset polyester, sprouted muttonchops and granny glasses, and swaddled their throats in neckties the size of lobster bibs, quiet was loud, ordinary odd. The man was so purposefully in keeping with the bland wallpaper in the little hospital waiting room that had become Command Central for the Crownover-Ogden investigation that she couldn’t keep her eyes off him, even when a semi-hysterical nurse kept wailing that it wasn’t her fault that a sick little girl had been spirited away from her charge as easily as shoplifting a Snickers.

  “Please try to concentrate, Mrs. Crownover,” Riordan was saying, ignoring the nurse. “Are you sure you’ve received no threats over the telephone or in the mail? Sometimes they come disguised as pleas for money.”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down. I’m the president of a charitable foundation. Listening to pleas for money is in the job description. And please don’t call me Mrs. Crownover. Crownover was my maiden name.”

  “Caryn, he’s just trying to help.” Ted, standing beside her chair, squeezed her shoulder gently.

  She reached up and patted his hand, concealing her irritation. Ever since the call to the police, everyone had been treating her as the mother maddened by fear. Which she was, although not to the point of helplessness. She was the one who had asked that the local office of the FBI be notified. She was in no condition to repeat the details all over again when that inevitability occurred. Perhaps a little mania would have been more palatable. People were so much less concerned for a woman when she behaved as the pathetic idiot they expected.

  “May I have your permission to order a tap on your telephone, Mr. Ogden? We’ll have to work quickly. In cases like this the first ransom demand comes within hours.”

  “Certainly not. My clients call me at the house all the time. Our conversations are confidential.”

  “I shouldn’t have to assure you of the Bureau’s discretion.”

  “A U.S. Census taker used those exact same words. I happened to mention that I subscribe to The American Rifleman so my sportsmen clients will have something to read in my waiting room. Inside six months my mailbox was jammed with applications to join the NRA, the John Birch Society, and the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “With respect, sir, your child’s life—”

  “Oh, let him have what he wants, Ted. They’ve been listening in ever since Papa told H. R. Kaltenborn the Zero was a better fighter than the Corsair.”

  Riordan’s mouth opened, but it was Casimir Dobrinski who filled the silence. The hospital administrator had on the same white sport coat and striped shirt he’d worn the previous afternoon, without the necktie; obviously he’d simply shaved and thrown on whatever was handy as soon as he got the call. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves with all this talk of ransom,” he said. “We don’t know for sure this is a kidnapping.”

  “I’m sure you’d rather treat this as some sort of clerical error.” Ted had gone pale, always a danger sign. “You can’t keep this in house. Somebody waltzed in here and took my daughter. If you think we’re not going to hold the hospital responsible—”

  During the ensuing squabble, Caryn got up and walked down the hall to Opal’s room. There the oxygen and i.v. tubes and monitor wire from which the little girl had been torn like a melon from its vines still dangled beside the empty bed whose sheets bore the child’s imprint. Her big stuffed Snoopy sat in one of the visitors’ chairs gazing expectantly toward the door as if awaiting her momentary return. Something inside Caryn that was only barely holding on slipped another sickening inch, but when she put her hands to her cheeks they were dry. That was abnormal. A mother who couldn’t cry for her lost child fell outside the definition of the term. And the urge to partake was upon her stronger than ever, burning in every nerve and capillary like a million tiny white-hot buzz saws. She left the room abruptly, in search of a water fountain. Perhaps simple rehydration was all that was needed to put her tear ducts into working order.

  In the hallway she almost ran into Riordan. The agent in charge was absorbed in a sheet of stiff paper held by a somewhat less successful carbon of himself in a gray suit and glasses with heavy black frames.

  “The nurse has confirmed her description of the man she saw loitering outside your daughter’s room earlier from the Identi-Kit,” said Riordan, when he became aware of Caryn’s presence. “Do you recognize him?”

  The sketch reminded her of the art lessons of her childhood, only half attended to as she eavesdropped on her brother’s executive exercises in the room next door: She could almost see the intersecting dotted lines through the center of the face oval, indicating that the nose and ears were to be found halfway between the top of the head and the point of the chin and that the eyebrows were level with the tops of the ears. But this face was fleshier than that anonymous model, strong-jowled, with a scowl tugging down the corners of the wide mouth and a squint in the eyes that brought to min
d alone figure in feathers and buckskin scanning a horizon for covered wagons. She had a hunch the baseball cap that had been added to the Identi-Kit prototype concealed a wealth of long black hair. Something fluttered in her memory and was gone. A face behind glass. She tried to bring it back, couldn’t.

  “It looks like some kind of Indian.”

  “That’s what the nurse thought. Is the face familiar?”

  A face behind glass. Not enough. “No.” She handed back the sheet.

  Riordan made a noise of smothered exasperation. Caryn had already pegged him as one of those civil servants who tried to make you feel guilty for forcing them to earn their government salaries. He returned the sketch to the agent in glasses. “Wire it to Quantico, then circulate it. Black on black, thirty to thirty-five, American Indian, five-five and a hundred and sixty. Go heavy on the reservations up North. Don’t forget the island.”

  “Mackinac?”

  “Did it sound like I meant New Zealand? Use a local informant. Those people have trouble opening up to anyone who looks like he’s from the G.”

  “Can’t think why.”

  Alone with Caryn, Riordan said, “You sure you didn’t see the man? The nurse spotted him two or three times. Smelled him, too. She said his cologne would stop a runaway horse.”

  “I only left the room once. There was no one in the hall.”

  “He must’ve ducked into a vacant room at the end of visiting hours. Great security you have here,” he said as Dobrinski joined them from the waiting room.

  “This hospital covers nearly a million square feet. We haven’t the personnel to watch every corner. It isn’t a prison. People come and go: residents, consultants, visitors, fulltime staff, temporary help, maintenance, outside delivery people. Every day I see a hundred faces I never saw before. In any case—”