by Peter Straub
A police car turned out of a side street and stayed with us all the way down Goethals. I waited for the flashing lights and the siren. The car followed us onto Livermore. “Lose him,” John said, and I made a careful right turn onto South Second and looked in the rearview mirror. The police car kept moving in a straight line down Livermore.
On Muffin Street, I turned left and drove past the rows of quiet houses. Through most of the dark windows flickered the gray-green of the television screen. They were sitting in the dark in front of their sets, watching what was left of the excitement. Finally, I came to South Seventh and turned down toward Bob Bandolier’s old house. Two blocks away, I cut off the headlights and drifted past the darkened houses until I reached the same place where John and I had parked in the fog. I pulled in next to the curb and looked at John.
“Okay.” He turned around to speak to Alan. “We’re going to go into a house in the next block. If you see a man come out through the front door, lean over the seat and tap the horn. Tap it, Alan, don’t honk the thing, just give it enough of a touch to make a short, sharp sound.” He looked at me, still thinking, and then turned back to Alan. “And if you see lights come on in the window, in any window, or if you hear shots, get out of the car and hustle up there as fast as you can and start banging on the front door. Make a hell of a lot of noise.”
“What is this about?” Alan asked.
“In a word, April,” John said. “Do you remember what I told you to do?”
“April.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m not going to sit in this car,” Alan said.
“For God’s sake,” John said. “We can’t waste any more time arguing with you.”
“Good.” Alan decided the issue by opening his door and climbing out of the car.
I got out and went around the rear to stand in front of him. John softly closed the passenger door and moved a couple of feet away, deliberately distancing himself. Haggard and defiant, Alan tilted his chin up and tried to stare me down. “Alan,” I whispered, “we need you to stand watch for us. We’re meeting a policeman inside that house”—I pointed at it—“and we want to get some boxes of papers from him.”
“Why—” he began in his normal voice, and I put my finger in front of my mouth. He nodded and, in his version of a whisper, asked, “Why didn’t you ask me along in the first place, if you needed me to stand watch?”
“I’ll explain when we’re done,” I said.
“A policeman.”
I nodded.
He leaned forward, curling his fingers, and I bent down. He put his mouth next to my ear. “Does John have my gun?”
I nodded again.
He stepped back, his face rigid. He wasn’t giving anything away. John moved up the block, and I went toward him, looking back at Alan. He had the monkey-king look again, but at least he was standing still. John began walking across the street, and I moved along the side of the car and caught up with him before he reached the next curb. I looked back at Alan. He was walking past the front of the car, clearly intending to keep pace with us on the other side of the street. I waved him back toward the car. He didn’t move. A single gunshot came from what I thought was the northwest. When I looked back at Alan, he was standing in the same place.
“Let the old fool do what he wants,” John said. “He will, anyhow.”
We went toward the Bandolier house with Alan trailing along on the other side of the street. When we reached the boundary of the property, John and I walked up onto the lawn at the same instant. I looked back at Alan, who was dithering on the sidewalk across the street. He stepped forward and sat on the curb. From one of the houses on our side of the street, Jimbo’s bland, slow-moving voice drifted through an open window.
I went up toward the side of the house, hearing John pull the fat wad of keys out of his pocket. I hoped he could remember which one had worked the last time. We began working our way down the peeling boards.
When we reached the corner of the house, I grasped John’s shoulder and kept him from walking into the backyard.
“Wait,” I whispered, and he turned around to face me. “We can’t go in the back.”
“Sure we can,” he said.
“We wouldn’t make it halfway across the kitchen before he knew we were in the house.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“I want to get on the porch,” I said. “You stand against the building, where he can’t see you when he opens the door.”
“And then what?”
“I knock on the door and ask if I can see him now. He has to open it. He doesn’t have any choice. As soon as he opens the door, Alan’ll stand up and shout, and then I’ll go in low and you come in high.”
I jerked my head sideways, and we crept back along the side of the house.
Alan looked up at us as we crept back into view on the side of the porch. I put my finger to my lips, and he squinted at me and then nodded. I pointed up toward the porch and the door. He stood up from the curb. Stay there, I motioned. I mimed knocking and pretended to open a door. He nodded again. I poked my head forward, as if I were looking out, then put my hands on the sides of my mouth and waggled my head. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and stepped back off the sidewalk into the deeper darkness of the lawn behind it.
We came around the side of the porch and moved silently over the site of Bob Bandolier’s old rose garden. Alan came a little forward off the lawn. Someone in the old Bandolier living room stood up on a creaking board and began pacing. Fontaine was walking around in his childhood, charging himself up.
Everything fell apart before John and I reached the porch steps.
Alan bellowed, “Stop! Stop!”
“Goddamn,” John said, and took off across the lawn. Alan had misunderstood what he was supposed to do. I came up out of my own crouch and ran toward the steps before Fontaine could open the door.
But the front door was already open—that was what Alan had been yelling about. Paul Fontaine stepped outside, and a squad car, the same car we had seen patroling, turned into South Seventh from Livermore. Its light bar had not been turned on.
“Goddamn you, Underhill,” Fontaine said.
Alan blared, “Is that him?”
A light came on in the living room of the house behind him and in bedrooms of the houses on either side.
“Is that the man?”
Fontaine swore, either at me or at the world in general. He came running down the steps, and I tried to get away from him by cutting across the lawn toward John.
“Come back here, Underhill,” Fontaine said.
I stopped running, not because of his words, but because I thought I saw someone moving through the darkness between the houses behind John and Alan Brookner. Alan was staring wildly from Fontaine to me and back, and John was still trying to calm him down.
“I’m not letting you get away,” Fontaine said. The man between the houses across the street had vanished, if he had ever been there at all. The patrol car swung up to the curb about thirty feet away, and Sonny Berenger and another patrolman stepped out. As he uncurled, Sonny was looking straight at John and Alan—he had not even seen us yet.
“Underhill,” Fontaine said.
Then Alan ripped the big revolver out from under John’s jacket and jumped down into the street. Instead of going after him, John flattened out on the sidewalk. Alan raised the gun. He fired, and then fired again in a chaos of flares and explosions that filled the street. I heard people yelling and saw Alan drop the gun a second before I realized that I was lying down. I tried to get up. Pain yanked me back down into the grass. I had been hit in the front, but the pain blared out from the hot circle in my back. It felt as if I’d been hit with a sledgehammer.
I turned my head to see Fontaine. The big wheel of the world spun around me. Part of the wheel was a black shoe at the end of what looked like a mile-long gray leg. When the world came right-side up again, I turned my head very slowly in th
e other direction. I saw the stitching around a buttonhole of a gray suit. The reek of smoke and ashes came from his clothes. On the other side of the buttonhole a white shirt printed with a huge red blossom jerkily rose and fell. Alan had managed to hit us both. I got the elbow of my good arm under me, hitched up my knees, and pushed myself toward him. Then I rolled up on my elbow and saw the other patrolman running toward us.
A few inches away from mine, Fontaine’s face was dull with shock. His eyes focused on mine, and his mouth moved.
“Tell me,” I said. I don’t know what I meant—tell me everything, tell me how Fee Bandolier turned into Franklin Bachelor.
He licked his lips. “Shit,” he said. His chest jerked up again, and blood gouted out of him and drenched my arm. “Bell.” Another gout of blood soaked my arm, and the policeman’s upper body appeared above us. Two rough hands dragged me away from Fontaine. I said, “Ouch,” using what felt like commendable restraint, and the cop said, “Hang in there, just hang in there,” but not to me.
I stared up at the black, starry sky and said, “Get Sonny.” I hoped I would not die. I was floating in blood.
Then Sonny bent over me. I could hear the other cop doing something to Fontaine and visualized him slapping a big pressure bandage over the wound in his chest. But that was not where we were, that was somewhere else. “Are you going to make it?” Sonny asked, looking as if he hoped the answer were no.
“I owe you one, and here it is,” I said. “Along with a lot of other people, Fontaine killed that graduate student and Ransom’s wife. He was a Green Beret officer named Franklin Bachelor, and he grew up in this house as Fielding Bandolier. Check up on a company named Elvee Holdings, and you’ll find out he was tied into Billy Ritz. Somewhere in this house, you’ll find two boxes of notes Fontaine made on all his killings. And inside a couple of boxes in the basement, you’ll find his father’s photographs of the places where he killed the original Blue Rose victims.”
As I said all this, Sonny’s face went from rigid anger to ordinary cop impassivity. I figured that was a long distance. “I don’t know where the notes are, but the pictures are behind the furnace.”
His eyes flicked toward the house. “Fontaine owns it, through Elvee Holdings. Also the Green Woman Taproom. Look at the Green Woman’s basement, you’ll see where Billy Ritz died.”
He took it all in—his world was whirling over on itself as sickeningly as mine had just done, but Sonny was not going to fail me. I nearly fainted from sheer relief. “The ambulance’ll be here in a second,” he said. “That old guy was April Ransom’s father?”
I nodded. “How is he?”
“He’s talking about the kingdom of heaven,” Sonny said.
Oh yes, of course. The kingdom of heaven. Where a certain man had wished to kill a noble, tested his sword by striking it against the wall, and gone out and killed the noble. What else would he be talking about?
“How’s Fontaine?”
“I think the crazy old bastard killed him,” he said, and then the huge space he had occupied above me was filled again with black, starry night. Sirens came screaming into the street.
PART
FOURTEEN
ROSS McCANDLESS
1
DURING THE JOURNEY in the ambulance, as endless as if we were going to some hospital on the moon, my body detached itself from my anxiety and settled into its new condition. I was awash in blood, bathed in it, blood covered my chest and my arms and hung like a sticky red syrup on my face, but most of it belonged to the dead or dying man on the next stretcher. I was going to live. One paramedic labored over Paul Fontaine’s body while another cut off my shirt and looked at my wound. He held up two fingers in front of my face and asked how many I saw. “Three,” I said. “Just kidding.” He jabbed me with a needle. I heard Fontaine’s body leap up off the stretcher as they tried to jump-start him, once, twice, three times. “Holy moly,” said the paramedic whose face I had not seen, “I think this guy is Paul Fontaine.” “No shit,” said the other. His face loomed again above mine, friendly, reassuringly professional, and black. “Are you a cop, too? What’s your name, partner?”
“Fee Bandolier,” I said, and startled him by laughing.
Whatever he had goosed into my veins put my pain to sleep and caused my anxiety to retreat another three or four feet toward the roof of the ambulance, where it hung like an oily cloud. We, the anxiety, the paramedics, the leaping corpse, and myself, whirled forward on our journey to the moon. “This Fontaine, he’s a DOA,” said the other paramedic, and from the oily cloud came the information that I had heard Fontaine’s last words, but understood only one of them. He had struggled to speak—he had licked his lips and forced out a syllable he wanted me to hear. Bell. The bell tolls, ask not for whom. The tintinnabulation that so musically wells, what a tale their terror tells, how the danger sinks and swells. I wondered what was happening to Alan Brookner, I wondered if Sonny Berenger would be able to remember everything I’d told him. I had the feeling that a lot of policemen would be coming to see me, in my hospital on the moon. Then I floated away.
2
IWOKE UP with the enormous drill-like head of an X-ray machine aimed at the right side of my chest, most of which was covered with a bloody pad. A technician armored in a diving helmet and a lead vest was ordering me to stand still. Instead of my clothes, I was wearing a flimsy blue hospital gown unbuttoned at the back and draped down off my right shoulder like a toga. Someone had cleaned all the blood off me, and I smelled like rubbing alcohol. It came as a surprise that I was standing up by myself. “Could you please try to stand still?” asked the surly beast in the armor, and the drill clicked and whirred. “Now turn around, and we’ll do your back.” I found that I could turn around. Evidently I had been performing miracles like this for some time. “We’ll have to get that arm up,” said the beast, and came out from behind his machine to take my right arm by the elbow and firmly rip it away from my shoulder. He paid no attention to the noises I made. “Hold it like that.” Click. Whir. “You can go back to your room now.”
“Where am I?” I asked, and he laughed. “I’m serious. What hospital is this?”
He walked out without speaking, and a nurse hurried forward out of nowhere with a long blue splint festooned with dangling white strips of Velcro and the information that I was in St. Mary’s Hospital. Here was another homecoming: it was in St. Mary’s that I had spent two months of my seventh year, and where a nurse named Hattie Bascombe had told me that the world was half night. A great dingy pile of brown brick occupying about a quarter-mile of Vestry Street, the hospital was a block away from my old high school. In real time, if there is such a thing, the whole endless journey in the ambulance could have taken no more than five minutes. The nurse clamped the sling onto my arm, tied up my gown, deposited me in a wheelchair, pushed me down a corridor, loaded me into an empty elevator, unloaded me, and then navigated me through a maze of hallways to a room with a high bed, both evidently mine. A lot of people wanted to talk to me, she said, I was a pretty popular guy. I said, “I vant to be alone.” She was too young to know about Greta Garbo, but she left me alone anyhow.
A bemused-looking doctor with a long manila envelope in one hand came in about ten minutes later. “Well, Mr. Underhill,” he said, “you present us with an unusual problem. The bullet that struck you traveled in a nice straight line past your lung and came to rest beneath your right shoulder blade. But according to these X rays, you’re carrying so much metal around in your back that we can’t distinguish the bullet from everything else. Under the circumstances, I think we’ll just leave it there.”
Then he shifted on his feet and smiled down at me with the envelope of X rays dangling over his crotch in his joined hands. “Would you mind settling a little dispute between me and the radiologist? What happened to you, some kind of industrial accident?”
He had clear blue eyes, a thick flop of blond hair on his forehead, and no lines at all, none, not even crow’s feet.
“When I was a little boy,” I said, “I swallowed a magnet.”
A tiny, almost invisible horizontal wrinkle, as fine as a single hair on a baby’s head, appeared in the center of his forehead.
“Okay,” I said. “It was more in the nature of foreign travel.” He didn’t get it. “If you’re not going to operate, does that mean that I get to go home tomorrow?”
He said that they wanted to keep me under observation for a day or two. “We want to keep you clear of infections, see that your wound begins to heal properly.” He paused. “And a police lieutenant named McCandless seemed concerned that you stay in one place. I gather that you can expect a lot of visitors over the next few days.”
“I hope one of them brings me something to read.”
“I could pick up some magazines from the lounge, if you like, and bring them to you the next time I’m in this wing.”
I thanked him, and he smiled and said, “If you tell me how foreign travel can put about a pound of metal fragments in your back.”
I asked how old the radiologist was.
That little baby-hair wrinkle turned up in his forehead again. “About forty-six, forty-seven, something like that.”
“Ask him. He’ll explain it to you.”
“Get some rest,” he said, and turned off the lights when he left.
As soon as he was gone, whatever they had given me while I was still only semiconscious began to wear off, and a wide track through my body burst into flame. I groped around for the bell to ring the nurse and finally found it hanging on a cord halfway down the side of the mattress. I pushed the button twice, waited a long time, and then pushed it again. A black nurse with stiff, bristling orange hair came in about twenty minutes later and said that I was due for a painkiller in about an hour. I didn’t need it now, I just thought I needed it now. Out she went. The flames laughed and caroused. An hour later, she turned on the lights, wheeled in a tray with a row of needles lined up like dental tools, told me to roll over and jabbed me in the butt. “See?” she said. “You didn’t really need it until now, did you?”