Ark

by Charles McCarry

  She winced at the Americanism.

  3

  HENRY AND I HAD SPENT no time alone together on Nuku Hiva. On the plane, he decided that the moment had come to tell me something about himself.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. I was already too close to him, I already knew too much. Why did he want to do this? Did he feel he owed me a confidence in return payment for my having told him about my history with Bear? Was it ethical for me to listen to his secret without telling him about Adam? But then, how likely was it that he didn’t already know all about Adam?

  Henry read the look on my face as easily as Clementine had done.

  “It’s nothing terrible,” he said.

  “So I’m not likely to be called as a witness?”

  “No one would believe you if you were. Shall I go on?”

  I nodded. He went on. When Henry was eight, he had scarlet fever. It was misdiagnosed as a fruit rash and left untreated. It developed into rheumatic fever, which resulted in damage to his heart valves and congestive heart failure.

  “The valves were fixed surgically,” he said. “I take pills for the congestive heart failure, but it sometimes causes episodes of shortness of breath.”

  “How short?”

  “Short. One moment I’m OK. The next I can hardly breathe at all. Sometimes I pass out. This only happens every five years or so.”

  It happened to him when he was at Caltech. He was taken to an emergency room and treated with drugs—lots of drugs. The doctor on duty kept injecting new ones until he found one that worked. Henry remained in the hospital overnight.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Henry said. “At about three in the morning, the routine noises of the hospital faded away, as if someone had turned down the volume all the way. I thought maybe I was dying. Then I began to see things. Very clearly defined, three-dimensional images in living color, as if the things I was seeing were in the room with me.”

  “People?”

  “I saw a person asleep. It was an early human, a caveman—naked, stocky, hairy. For a while, he continued in a deep sleep. Then, as if he felt my eyes on him, he woke up. He opened his eyes and looked straight at me. It was obvious that he saw me as clearly as I saw him. He recognized me. He understood that I was a man like himself. I could see it in his eyes. I understood what he was thinking. He wasn’t sure that I was real.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he faded out,” Henry replied. “Other images appeared—crowds of people, patiently waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “There were no explanations, just images,” Henry said. “All sorts of people, all races, both sexes, clothing from many eras. Soldiers in ranks, wearing the uniforms of different wars—armor, shakos, steel helmets, World War I khaki. They stood absolutely still, absolutely silent, absolutely patient.”

  “Wounds?”

  “None visible.”

  “Did they see you, like the caveman did?”

  “I don’t think so,” Henry said. “They weren’t looking at anything.”

  “These were long shots or close-ups?”

  “Both. I didn’t see all of it. It went on forever. I had a sense that there were an infinite number of these silent, motionless people, and I was just being given a glimpse of the multitude.”

  “What did you think you were looking at?” I asked.

  “While it was happening, I didn’t think.”

  “And later?”

  “Limbo? The dead waiting for judgment or reincarnation? I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure.”

  Limbo? Judgment day? Christian soldiers? I couldn’t believe my ears.

  I said, “Did the hallucinations, or whatever they were, ever repeat themselves?”

  “Not the same ones,” Henry said.

  “How long did they last?”

  “All night. I got out of the hospital the next morning and went back to the frat house. The doctors told me to spend the day in bed. Ng Fred was my roommate.”

  “He knew about the hallucinations?”

  “No. Until now I’ve never told anyone,” Henry said. “That evening, I heard music, coming from outside the building.”

  “What kind of music?”

  “A choir—male voices singing, as if a choir were standing under my window. It was completely different from any music I knew—scales and tones I had never heard.”

  “Did anyone else hear it?”

  “No. I said, ‘Fred, listen to that.’” He said, ‘Listen to what?’ A couple of guys came into the room to see how I was. I asked them the same question. They didn’t hear the music, either. They thought I was kidding around. The music went on and on, and it was almost too beautiful to listen to. We watched TV for a while and turned out the lights. Fred sleeps like a stone. He dropped off immediately.”

  I started to ask a question.

  Henry held up a hand and said, “Wait. I was lying in the dark, trying to go to sleep. All of a sudden, I heard church bells—just a few at first, then more, then hundreds, then many more than that, all sorts, every tone. They were near and distant. It sounded like every bell in every church for miles around was ringing. I knew Fred wouldn’t hear them if I woke him up and asked him to listen. I thought, If this is dying, how kind the Great Genetic Engineer has been to arrange things as he has. I thought I should call my parents and tell them that I loved them. I had to urinate—all part of the process, a last reminder of my physical self, I supposed. I got up and went down the hall to the toilet. All the while, I kept on hearing the church bells. They drowned out the music. On my way back to the room, I thought, If I see myself in bed, I’ll know for sure. But as you can see, that didn’t happen. Here I am.”

  So he was. I knew I should say something, but what? I didn’t doubt for a moment that what Henry had told me was the literal truth. He really had seen the caveman and the silent armies waiting for the last trump. He had actually heard the ethereal music and the church bells.

  I said, “So what do you make of the experience? Was it the drugs, or was the Almighty revealing himself to you?”

  Henry said, “Who knows?”

  “You don’t reject either possibility?”

  “No. Which would you choose?”

  “The drugs.”

  “You may be right. But three weeks after that, I saw the solution to the superconductor problem.”

  “Saw it? Like you saw the caveman?”

  “The two experiences were quite similar. I was riding my bike, coasting down a long hill, and it came to me in pictures, not as real as the caveman and the soldiers, but pictures nevertheless.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “The solution. Equations. Apparatus. The entire instructions manual.”

  “Has the same thing happened with all your other discoveries?”

  “Yes.”

  “Including the Event?”

  He nodded.

  “This stuff just comes to you?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did you tell your parents or your teachers about this gift of yours?”

  “You call it a gift?” Henry said.

  4

  BACK IN THE CITY, MELISSA dropped by with some papers to sign. Henry was transferring ownership of the apartment, contents included, to me. Just sign here and here and here and initial in these five places, in blue ink, here’s a pen.

  I was annoyed. What right did Henry have to inflict such largesse on me?

  I said, “Keep the pen, Melissa.”

  She sighed deeply and said, “What’s the problem this time?”

  “Same old problem. I can’t possibly accept this.”

  “Of course you can accept it. You’ve already accepted it. This is a formality. In Henry’s mind, it’s part of your compensation package. It’s his way of telling you he values your services. It’s not as though he can’t afford it.”

  “What Henry can afford isn’t the point.”

  “You’re right. Take the pen.”

&
nbsp; “Why?” I said. “Tomorrow we die.”

  Melissa recoiled. She said, “How can even you joke about that?”

  Tears spurted from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks, two thick trickles of mascara. I was astonished: This was Melissa. I sat down on the arm of her chair and put my arm around her. I kissed her cheek, tasted powder and paint, and said, “What is it, dear?”

  She waved me off. She covered her face with her hands, as if I might kiss her again. Quite soon, she got hold of herself.

  “My kids,” she said. “They go to school and every morning after they get in the car and drive off, I know, know, that I’ll never see them again, that the earth is going to open its mouth and swallow them before the sun goes down. I hate Henry for telling me.”

  “So do I,” I said. “But he may be wrong.”

  “Like hell he is.”

  Melissa grabbed her purse and left the room. While she was absent I signed the papers. She returned with her face repainted and immediately spotted the signed documents. She did an about-face, went into the kitchen, and returned with a bottle of wine in her hand.

  “A 2000 Pauillac,” she said. “It must have come with the place.”

  We drank the entire bottle in half an hour. Then she gathered up her papers and left.

  The wine put me to sleep. I woke up a couple hours later with a cottony mouth and a bad headache. I had nothing in the house that might dull the misery. I stuck my finger down my throat, but it was too late.

  I tried to remember where I had hidden my Chef Boyardee cans so that no one would catch me with them. Finally I found them inside an empty canister. After eating a bowl of microwaved spaghetti and meatballs—a sovereign cure for hangover—I felt well enough to go out.

  In the cool of the evening I went to the Reservoir for a run. Now that I had been assured that the suspicious characters who haunted me were protectors, I didn’t bother to take evasive action. After a week on a tropical island, it seemed strange to be loping along in the midst of dozens of strangers, listening to the clatter of the city. They all looked terribly serious, as people of my age group tend to do, weighed down as they are by the fate of endangered species, the many carcinogens in the air they breathe, the maddening triumphs of politicians and colleagues they loathe, the disillusionments of career and marriage, the guttering candle of the sex drive.

  That evening I called Melissa to see if she was all right. She was. I told her about the Chef Boyardee. She actually giggled. In college, we had often pigged out together on the stuff—Melissa preferred ravioli—when we drank too much, etc., on weekends.

  The next call was to Adam. I used a special throwaway phone I had bought to call him. I got his voice mail. I left no message.

  After a while Adam called back. We went to a violin recital at Carnegie Hall. The artist was a boy virtuoso who played Bruch’s ravishing second violin concerto. After the recital we went across the street for coffee. Adam lifted a strand of hair and tucked it behind my ear and touched my cheek with his thumb.

  He said, “Shall we?”

  I said, “After listening to that music? Are you kidding?”

  Adam said, “Your place?”

  “No. It’s too messy.”

  “Mine, too,” Adam said. “The maid quit.”

  I said, “I don’t like hotels.”

  He tucked a strand of hair behind my other ear.

  “Really?” he said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  He made calls to three hotels on his cell phone, using speed dial. Apparently he had a list of them programmed in case of need. The third hotel, the same one we had used last time, had a room. It was quite nearby, a godsend after the Bruch. Adam paid in advance with hundred-dollar bills. He had a stack of them—thousands of dollars—in an envelope in an inside pocket of his grungy old suede blazer. That seemed like a lot of cash for a struggling young lawyer to be carrying around, but this was not the moment for suspicions.

  We went upstairs. We had the same room as before. What were the odds on that? Adam asked. He was a little too amazed. Was he in fact some sort of undercover operative who had been trained in the art of driving foolish women out of their minds, maybe by Markus Wolf himself? The more I thought of this dispiriting possibility—thank, you Clementine—the more plausible it seemed.

  Adam slept, snoring gently, until I woke him up at first light.

  He looked at the clock and said, “It’s 6 a.m., for Pete’s sake.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to be late for court on a Sunday,” I said, studying his sleepy face for clues that he remembered his gaffe. None showed.

  We ordered a room-service breakfast. Adam paid the bill in cash.

  Buttering toast, he said, “By the way, I stopped by your place a couple of times last week and buzzed your apartment. No answer. The second time, I felt somebody behind me and when I turned around, the guy asked me if I knew you.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. He had me trapped in the entryway.”

  “He was a mugger?”

  “I thought it was a possibility. He held out his hand and said his name, or anyway, a name.”

  “Which was what?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Did you shake hands with him?”

  “No,” Adam said. “Why would I do that? It was one o’clock in the morning. The guy was a total stranger.”

  “Was his manner threatening, or what?”

  “Let me put it this way. He was acting like a husband.”

  “Acting like a husband? In what way?”

  “Suspicious, tough, pissed.”

  “You sound like an expert in husbandly behavior. There are a hundred apartments in that building. How did he know it was my apartment you were buzzing?”

  “He was looking over my shoulder while I did the buzzing, so maybe he read your name beside the doorbell.”

  I said, “What did he look like?”

  “Huge, like an NBA center,” Adam said. “Maybe three hundred pounds, all muscle, like he’d been lifting weights in prison.”

  The ghost touched me. My skin shrank. I felt very, very cold.

  I said, “Any facial hair?”

  “Big red handlebar mustache,” Adam replied, talking with his mouth full of toast and drawing in the air a cartoon of Bear’s mustache.

  Four

  1

  CLEMENTINE SAID, “MY DEAR CHILD, you’re having an anxiety attack. Hence the tremor, the twitching eye, the shortness of breath, the perspiration, the fact that the smallest noise startles you, et cetera. Fright often brings on such symptoms.”

  We were alone together in my apartment. Clementine seemed oblivious to its splendors. No doubt she had become familiar with them while supervising the installation of the cameras and microphones. She was the last person in the world I wanted to talk to, but when I called Henry from the hotel room and told him I was too terrified to go home by myself, she was the person he dispatched to walk me back to the apartment. He himself was too far away to help, exact location unspecified.

  Clementine said, “You really should ring up Henry, you know, and report in.”

  It was easier to do as she suggested than to be stubborn about it. I punched the hot key on the videophone, and two seconds later, Henry’s image flashed onto the screen. Wherever he was, he seemed to be in bright daylight. Behind him I could see sunlight bouncing from a windowpane, a bookcase, a table. I squinted, trying to read the titles of the books, as if knowing what was on the shelves would tell me where he was. To a rational mind, it wouldn’t have mattered where he was. To my addled brain, in this moment, it was vital, but as luck would have it, I had enough of a grip on myself not to ask.

  “You’re all right?” Henry said.

  “Fine.”

  “Clementine can stay with you, if you want.”

  I said, “That really won’t be necessary.”

  “Whatever you say,” Henry said. “But pay attention to what she tells you. She kn
ows her business.”

  Back in the living room, I found Clementine with her cell phone to her ear. I could tell from the signs of delight in her face that she was talking to Henry. When she caught sight of me, she turned her back and murmured a few final words, then hung up.

  She said, “Henry tells me you want to be alone. Does that still apply?”

  “If you don’t mind. I can’t write when someone else is around.”

  “Right. Before I go, we should discuss one or two matters. The first is your protection. A team of ten chaps is assigned to you. They will be in place at all times, day and night. I promise you they will keep you safe. Second, though I don’t believe you’ll need it, you should have some means of self-defense. Have you ever used a firearm?”

  “My father taught me to shoot a .22 rifle. I had a boyfriend in college who liked to shoot rats at the town dump. We went on rat-shooting dates.”

  “What sort of firearm did you use?”

  “A .357 Magnum Smith and Wesson revolver.”

  Clementine lifted her eyebrows. “You fired it?”

  “Lots of times. It was fun.”

  “You didn’t mind the recoil, the report?”

  “No. We wore earplugs.”

  From her large reticule, Clementine produced a semiautomatic pistol. It was stubby and sort of earth-toned. I hadn’t known that guns came in any other colors but black and blue and nickel. This one was loaded. Handling the weapon with aplomb, she removed the magazine and ejected the cartridge from the chamber, catching it in midair.

  “This is a Heckler and Koch .40-caliber model P2000 SK semiautomatic pistol,” she said, handing it to me, butt first.

  The gun was very heavy, about the weight of a two-quart milk carton.

  “This weapon is the ne plus ultra of handguns,” Clementine said. “It makes a very loud noise when it goes off. It holds ten rounds, nine in the magazine, one in the chamber. The trigger is stiff. That makes it less likely to go off accidentally, but you have to use some strength to shoot it. Try. Squeeze, don’t pull.”

  I planted my feet apart, held the pistol in both hands, aimed at a bare spot on the wall, and squeezed, as my gun-nut boyfriend had taught me. The hammer clicked on the empty chamber. She was right. The trigger was stiff.