Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  In a city of fifty thousand motel rooms, it is easy to find a safe place to keep Amanda, at least in the short term, as long as we usher her into the room unseen. Pop on the television, give her a pile of books, an endless supply of junk food, bar the bathroom window so she doesn’t contemplate anything foolish on her occasional peeing breaks, and then we will wait. Wait to hear what comes first—wailing sirens at full alert, or a discreet phone call to the untraceable number we left.

  Is it a safe motel room?

  Depends on what you mean by safe.

  We open the motel room door to hustle Amanda in, and there are the Stewartsons, waiting for us.

  As previously planned, carefully arranged with me.

  Archer Wallace is disarmed in seconds—professionally, in a blink. Not even adjusted yet to the dark of the motel room, its blackout shades and blinds drawn, hardly aware of it even happening, he’s relieved of the gun that he so effectively and aggressively brandished, that he had stowed in his pocket during our check-in and for the necessary double-handed moment of inserting the key card and opening the door.

  Not too smart.

  His awkward, flailing, unthinking protest is met with a fist across the side of the neck. A blow I fully recognize as a veteran of it. Swift, sobering, decisive, only needed once—one warning punch all that is necessary.

  And I happily hand them my gun too—no bullets, only a prop anyway—glad to be relieved of it.

  What choice do I have?

  I knew that Wallace and I could not pull it off without the Stewartsons following us. That they would be watching me, watching us, no matter what. Even when I found Wallace at the eldercare facility, they were close behind me, barely shakable. Even though I know Vegas like no one, I didn’t think I could lose them—or if I could, it wouldn’t be for long, and they’d only come back madder and meaner.

  And I could not forget the beating I took last time. It was exactly as memorable as they hoped. It achieved what they wanted, I know, redirecting, refocusing, my behavior and actions. Their carefully calibrated escalation of violence with each encounter. I was painfully (ha-ha) aware of that measured escalation. I could too fully anticipate the next lesson. And the only way to avoid that next encounter was to bring them Archer Wallace, and fast. Risky enough, the lost hours of my quick and startling side trip to my mother. Hard enough to hold them at bay during that. So really, what choice did I have?

  So I have delivered the goods directly to them. Amanda, their bargaining chip, and Archer Wallace, who crossed them. He and I are taking the risks. The Stewartsons and I will reap the rewards. An arrangement the Stewartsons liked immensely when I filled them in on Archer’s plan the day before. Letting them avoid the risk of actually kidnapping Amanda, letting it happen from a safe remove, no risk of video cameras capturing them (they didn’t know about my extensive knowledge on that) or of being seen, leaving them less exposed.

  “Nice work, boys,” says Dave Stewartson—highly arch, broadly sarcastic, a movie-gangster imitation. With a little nod, he adds, “We’ll handle it from here.”

  In a few moments, Archer Wallace has come full circle.

  Gagged and handcuffed to the tub and sink in the motel bathroom.

  Back where I met him. Back where he began.

  And now that the Stewartsons have Amanda, Archer Wallace has lost his value. That was part of the appeal of Archer’s kidnapping plan when I told the Stewartsons about it: no more worrying about, dealing with, Archer Wallace. He was no longer a picture card, just a mere deuce or three in this high-stakes poker game. The nothing, the nobody, that he was when the Stewartsons discovered him. Worse than that, because he is now expendable, and the Stewartsons seem entirely comfortable and vaguely experienced with various forms of “expending.” They won’t leave him chained to a motel tub and sink forever. What will happen to him?

  What choice did I have?

  Better, I had decided, not to contend with the Stewartsons’ practiced violence. Better to prove myself to them, get the credit I may need to exercise later. Better not to have them enter the Wallace fiefdom, the Wallace Shangri-la themselves, and do something foolishly violent, their instinct, their default setting, I knew by now. Better to acknowledge to them that I had found Archer, that he had this kidnapping idea and I thought we should go through with it. That it might be the only sure way to get Wallace the Amazing to respond, to act, to deliver.

  The discussion of the idea with them had been concise, focused, professional. Wallace the Amazing didn’t seem to be taking the threat of his false past and stolen identity being revealed very seriously. The Stewartsons were beginning to understand the same thing I was—that he was above all a showman, and this would become part of the show. This sideshow was not merely a distraction and annoyance, but would feed directly and usefully into the main event. What were the consequences of revealing his identity? The threat of the loss of his fortune. Of his show. But only the threat. And only eventually. And on the way to it, years of litigation. Teams of high-priced Las Vegas lawyers. A circus of a court case. Publicity you couldn’t buy. A colorful, hidden past, which would create intrigue, excitement, and who knows, enormous sympathy? (The lawyers’ investigations would probably bring out all kinds of nuggets from the past, which would only excite more interest.) You couldn’t say what the outcome would be. And he and his brand and his influence seemed to be so well established in Vegas, who knew how well or how fairly the litigation would go?

  The Stewartsons had assumed that it was worth at least a few million bucks to Wallace the Amazing to make this little problem from his past go away, given his stature now. For a few million bucks, why jeopardize it?

  What they hadn’t figured was that Wallace the Amazing might not take it seriously at all. Might welcome the threat of exposure. The challenge of litigation. That he didn’t really see it as very jeopardizing. Because he could hold them at bay, duck and feint, go on with his act, even incorporate it. Frustrate and infuriate them.

  So the threat of exposure seemed to take a backseat. Kidnapping seemed stronger. Traditional. Tried-and-true. No matter how he genuinely felt about his own children, he’d have to deal with it, one way or another. He couldn’t simply let his daughter be taken. He’d have to try something, do something, to get her back.

  (And once kidnapping was the plan, I had to be the one to do it. To engineer it, to oversee it.)

  I know. First, my partnership with Wallace the Amazing. Then, a partnership with Archer Wallace. Then, a partnership with the Stewartsons. Always, a path of least resistance. A path of agreement, of docility. Secret partnerships, that no one else knows anything about. Don’t think I don’t notice the pattern. New partnerships before the old ones have dissolved. Saying yes to everyone. Accommodating everyone else. Never doing it on my own. And is it now primarily to best protect Amanda and myself, as I tell myself? Or is it the need to stay the beta male, keep to the background even when I am forced into the foreground? A man of changing loyalty—because a man of no loyalty? Or of enormous loyalty to his own daughter, and I see this as the only way to protect her. To be there for her—literally, finally.

  A man of no relationships. Inexperienced, incompetent with relationships, with friendships, with loyalty, with belonging. Cut off from all social interaction. So what do you expect when relationships are demanded of me? I don’t know what to do, how to treat them, how to behave. Promiscuous in alliances. What do you expect?

  I can’t bring myself to even exchange looks with him. My doppelganger. Fortunately he is back in the bathtub. Out of the way. How far out of the way remains to be seen.

  And now I have kidnapped my boss’s daughter. What a sorry banality. What a low-class, sordid revenge.

  Or if you prefer, I have kidnapped my own daughter. Still a banality. Like white-trash couples who use their kids as pawns in divorce proceedings, in love triangles, swiping them from each other in Wa
lmart parking lots or from school playgrounds in situations of increasing and surpassing sordidness.

  And the only solace, and the cruel irony—and it is considerable in both solace and irony—is that I get to know her a little. This truly wonderful young girl.

  I look at Amanda. I can’t help myself. Bright, alert, yet managing to remain calm. (I had gotten the inkling, in those few swift, chaotic, purposeful moments inside their home, that she was the smart one, the calm one, and it turns out I am right.) Terrified of course, but hopeful. She is executing the best strategy, pulling off the best trick of any hostage—making her captors, or this captor at least, feel horrible about the turn of events.

  The calm one. The smart one. And unquestionably the beautiful one. Big eyes, ethereal, flawless complexion, despite a childhood beneath the harsh Vegas sun. And as we check into the motel room, move around it cautiously, I see that she knows it about herself. Her smarts, her calm, her own beauty, are not lost on her.

  I don’t tell her, of course, that I know her friends’ names, have checked on the safety of their homes and the relationships of their parents. I have checked on her safety and comfort at school. I have been her silent, unseen, and unknown protector for all her fifteen years. I have been her silent, unseen surrogate parent, and now, as of an hour ago, I have taken an utterly opposite role: very much seen, in behavior that is far from parental. And I don’t know if I’m managing to hide my paternal concern for her—I don’t know if anyone could do it completely—because she seems to somehow sense (and why wouldn’t she?) this special connection, this special concern. And she looks at me with questioning eyes, with a slight tilt of the head, as if waiting for me to explain myself, waiting for me to right things, to release her, to bring her back home.

  “You need a sweater?” I ask her. “Let me know if you’re cold. I’ll get something for you.”

  “No, I’m fine. But thanks.” Then looking up at me, quizzically. Gauging me for a moment—judging my capacity for sympathy, for humanness, for her own safety—before asking what she’s clearly been wondering. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  It startles me a little, of course. But she doesn’t know me. She couldn’t. I’ve spent my life carefully out of her sight. I shake my head no.

  “You’re not, like, some distant uncle or something, who I’ve never met?”

  Jesus. Her power of intuition. I shake my head no.

  “And this is just business, right? Get money from my dad, leave us alone after that?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “And you’re not gonna hurt my sister or my mom? They’re out of the picture now, right?”

  “Right.” Adding, “There’s no reason for anyone to get hurt.”

  “But sometimes things go wrong in kidnappings,” she informs me. “You always read about that. People panic. Somebody tries something stupid. Stuff can go wrong.”

  “Your dad just has to follow the directions.”

  She looks tentatively up at me. “You’ve got a nice smile.” Smiling a little herself. “Whoever you are.”

  And do I have the nerve to hurt her, if need be? Fortunately, the question is moot. My partners will be more than glad to do her any injury, if that’s what’s called for to get their money. The question is, how far will I go to avoid that, to defend her?

  The answer is, far.

  Only days before, I was held. And now, she is. Which gives me even more empathy, even more identification with my victim, probably a dangerous thing. Probably a very dangerous thing.

  I don’t tell her all I have done on her behalf. That I have been there, at the protective periphery, for all her birthday celebrations, her preschool and elementary school graduations, that I have looked in on the privilege, observed from just outside the candy shop’s plate glass window.

  And with her now so close, so real at last, cloaking her own fear admirably in quiet bravery, but her eyes betraying it—eyes on mine questioningly, and my eyes on hers—the motivating, propulsive rage that pushed me so forcefully into Shangri-la is diffusing, softening, confusing me. I don’t know if I am going to rob them or protect them, Amanda and her family. To finally and fully bring them down, or to make sure nothing happens to them. Am I going to see our plan through, or foil it in the end? I honestly don’t know. Because I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t have any values, because who I was, all my values, were in the job I was doing, the circumscribed life I was living, and suddenly both are irreversibly disrupted. I’m displaced, and I have nothing to fill the vacuum.

  “You’re sure I don’t know you from somewhere?” she asks again, quietly, when no one else is near us. Not playful. Direct. Puzzled. Deadly serious.

  If you don’t know who you are, then you don’t know what you are doing or about to do. A precise, ingenious, quick biographer of other lives, I’ve been set utterly adrift in my own.

  And then, I hear Amanda praying. The daughter of the Amazing, who knows there is nothing out there, praying. They have grown up going to church, Wallace and Sasha taking the girls fairly diligently. Vegas churches—how anomalous, how absurd—and yet they are huge, their congregations loyal and dutiful, as if to bask in the absurdity, establish a beachhead in it.

  Or does Wallace, from his years onstage, simply recognize the childish human need for belief, belief in some kind of beyond, for all the human comforts it supplies, the human needs it answers, the human ego it assuages—a confirmation of our species’ special place in the universe? He would hardly deny that to his daughters for the sake, and rigorousness, of grim reality. He coddles them in expensive luxuries and comforts; why should he deny them this essentially free one? They can grow, they can decide on their own at some point when they are older. As he looks out on his audience—delighted in the magic, awed by his connection to the beyond, shaken and shivering in the naked demonstration of its power—he looks out nightly on the sheer heft and force of this need to believe. Its sheer muscle and bulk, if not its monstrousness. He makes his handsome living on this need; he is hardly one to deny its force and size and power.

  Amanda, my daughter, is praying.

  Silently, I join her.

  Prayer? Me? Sure, why not? If only for the sense of connection. In sympathy, in unity, with my sweet, frightened daughter.

  THIRTEEN

  But I am, of course, doing much more than praying. You know me by now. I am working diligently at the opposite end of the belief/faith spectrum—at the end where it is all facts and data. As soon as I left my mother’s house, I had opened my laptop and started.

  I knew he was scrubbed from the Internet. Part of my job was to scrub him. To maintain the aura of mystery, to endlessly rewrite and reconfigure his past, to leave it in vague mists of southernness and poverty and a mysterious extrasensory gift. Part of my job was to keep him that way, but he had done a pretty creditable job of it before I even arrived on the scene. A quick look revealed how well he’d done. Tens of thousands of pages referencing the Wallace of today. But little to nothing of a verifiable past. Compared with audience members, whom I could trace back carefully, methodically, step-by-step, his life began fully formed at thirty, as if he had sprung whole from the soil one night. But that absence, that emptiness, made all the more apparent that there were answers, there was truth, hidden back there. And, ironically, I had finished the job, completed it, as only a professional could, as he knew only I could. And now that I desperately wanted to know more, to discover the truth, the truth had been expertly disposed of, erased, stolen away from me. By me. Writing the biography of no biography. Letting any observer’s imagination write it his or her own way.

  Now I had to somehow resurrect it.

  At this stage, a real detective shuts down his computer, steps away, and goes and looks, cruises the neighborhood, searches door-to-door, chats casually with the kids hanging out, asks questions, finds old relationships, slouches low
in the driver’s seat in a car across the street. All of which I was willing to do, but couldn’t, of course, because I needed to continue to deliver the data to Wallace the Amazing, without interruption, now more than ever, so that he would not suspect me of being involved in taking Amanda. Could I learn anything in a day or two? Ask the favor of Dominique again? But it wouldn’t be a quick, focused errand with a specific destination, like seeing my mother. It would require time—days, a week, poking around, getting familiar, exploring.

  If I was going to learn anything, wouldn’t I have to go back to the South, figure out who he really was, where he came from, find his roots and the roots of this overwhelming and total and perfect theft? A theft so complete and overwhelming and perfect that all trace of it had apparently disappeared. Had been reconfigured and remade, truth and actuality buried deeply and shunted aside. It meant I had my work cut out for me. Who had he touched; who knew who he really was?

  But I can dust for digital fingerprints. As if discovering the latent fingerprint on the LED screen, finding a faint track in the digital dirt, stumbling onto the missing person’s sock, or a slipper, in the thick digital underbrush. I was the right person to bury it all—and I’m the right person to unearth it. So it is that my fleet expert fingers pick up the first traces, the faint whiff, of Wallace the Amazing before he was Amazing or Wallace. Returning to those archived newspaper articles about Archer Wallace, mining the smallest details of the reporting, winding out from them in several directions—archived school records, birth records, drivers’ licenses, tax records, all the techniques I have perfected over twenty years. Once I have the scent, my sensitive Internet nose can follow it into far corners, opening the dusty, digital attic trunk, unpacking the old albums, peeling it all back, laying out the startling biography, until I am staring at it, spread out in front of me, in amazement.