Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  It was nearly a lawyer’s summation from Dave Stewartson. And I had to hand it to him, that was the sum of it.

  “One option is to leave you out here in the desert, to give ourselves a little head start. That’s what you’re thinking we’ll do. And you’re right.”

  He doesn’t verbalize other, darker options. He doesn’t have to.

  The midday sun beats down on us. The Stewartsons turn to head back to their idling Nissan. But Dave turns back. Has something more to say. He looks at me. Shakes his big square head. I look again at his oddly chiseled features, their off-kilter angles. “Thing is, Chas, it was never about the money.”

  And I already feel the sense, the force, the logic of what is coming before he even says it. I already feel how it is going to fit together, before I even hear it. Because originally, they had wanted to expose Wallace. To bring him down. So isn’t the financial motive really only secondary? To give a little meat and meaning to the exposure? It had only become more important, come to think of it—the right sum, the right deal between us—after I suggested the kidnapping.

  “The money was just a consolation we were letting you sell us, because we figured we could get close to Wallace that way. We figured the kidnapping would draw him close, put us eye to eye with him. And we assumed you were the only behind-the-scenes operative, Chas”—looking at Dominique—“never thought there’d be two.”

  They hadn’t imagined or conceived it, any more than I had.

  “It was simple all along. We wanted to get him, have him, alone.”

  To kill him? No—you could assassinate him anywhere. Pros like the Stewartsons could engineer it easily. To get him alone—so they could whisk him away? Without anyone knowing? That would be the reason, the need, to get him alone. So no one else would know. To take him away. To where? To whom? To face retribution? To face justice?

  “Who are you?” I ask them.

  They stare silently. Debating how much to say. Dave shrugs. “Contractors.”

  And of course, when I thought about it, they had always worked for someone else. They were the type. Like Dominique. Like me. Were we all so alike after all? And yet here—pissed off, offended, frustrated by something in their shadowy careers—I figured they were striking off on their own. Like me in my rage, when I found out the truth about Wallace. Like Dominique, with this plan of hers. Were Dave and Sandi Stewartson disgruntled employees from some previous venture I knew nothing about? Part of that past I had helped erase and couldn’t find much of to begin with? Part of those long-ago events in South America, as I’d imagined? Jesus, were we all really on the same mission after all? Nursing a grudge, discovering the depth of his falseness, all working for Wallace’s downfall and yet at cross-purposes, tripping each other up?

  “Contractors. Who do you work for?”

  Dave shakes his head. “Can’t tell you that.”

  And as I thought about it—thought about their past, their skill set, their style, who they really were, how this had all begun, it didn’t take much insight to imagine who their employer had been.

  A huge employer. Huge enough to have the Stewartsons invisibly on their payroll.

  The hugest.

  And suddenly the world expands, far beyond a Vegas act and my silent profession and clean little condo and routinized existence, beyond its interruption by the Stewartsons and a seamy, twisty little case of kidnapping and extortion; it expands suddenly into an enormous realm I know nothing about—never even think about beyond a glancing headline or one-minute story on the evening news. An amorphous ocean of geopolitics, national security, national interests, threats and counterthreats, secret operations. A realm where a detective’s dogged efforts hit a brick wall—or perhaps a razor-wire fence. A realm where there will be no answers, only multiplication of questions. I feel it.

  Because their employer, I suddenly realize, was the US government.

  Whose case against Wallace fell apart? After they had invested so many years, so much energy? No matter. They were going to get him. And if they had to leave the justice system to achieve justice, they would.

  They had faith that they would.

  And I realize that this was not just a case of identity theft. Wallace had done something bigger. Something more elaborate. Somewhere in the past. Somewhere in South America.

  Something more elaborate than what he had done to me? Some deal more sinister and draconian than the one he had struck with my mother? But he had proved to me, over these past few days, that he had the skills, the cold calculation, the will, the discipline, to pull that off. I began to feel the detective’s dread of stumbling onto something deeper, of being pulled, lured from the edge into the swirling water . . .

  Stewartson looks at me, reads my mind perfectly, confirms. “Yes, Chas. Bigger than what was done to you,” he says darkly. “Makes yours look tame.”

  And once they had discovered it, stumbled into it, now they were doing what the federal government always did, using a time-tested tactic that usually worked for prosecutors, DA’s, the criminal justice system:

  Attempting to convict on a lesser charge. Fraud. Identity theft. To get him into the criminal justice system, where they can engineer the outcome, apply the justice, that they really want.

  So “Dave and Sandi Stewartson”—even in their previous incarnation as Stewart Davidson and Sheila Barton—are not who they had seem to be, any more than Wallace is. Even their “identity”—my sense of the unrepentant thieves and seedy opportunists behind their fake names—has morphed again into a new identity: They are zealots, patriots, idealists, vigilantes. Uncompromising. True believers. The faithful. Even when America, perhaps, abandoned them in their effort.

  And they had worked tirelessly, behind the scenes, unknown, thanklessly, for a paycheck and little else. Unacknowledged. In the shadows.

  Gee—who does that remind you of?

  How could I not have seen it? How could I not have seen myself reflected in that mirror?

  But mirrors had been misleading me.

  As if Stewartson could further read my mind, could know how far I could get on my own, and what he would have to fill in to get me the rest of the way:

  “The case fell apart,” he says, as if we have just been discussing it. “So sensitive, so potentially explosive, the federal government didn’t want it discussed in open court . . .” He looks at me, the anger still alive in him. “He was working with someone. Someone he was very close to, whom we knew he would trust. But someone he ultimately had something on. Some point of leverage and control over this key witness of ours, who suddenly refused to testify . . .”

  And suddenly the abstractly geopolitical goes personal. Comes back from the amorphous world stage to an inadvertent detective tied up in desert scrub at the side of a Vegas highway. Because I had a hunch who that someone was. And a sense that the balance of control and power had gotten cemented with a child.

  A hunch that I was born not in a nameless and unnotable American town, but in South America, in the middle of this case—maybe the deus ex machina—the very reason for it.

  Pulled from the curtains, to center stage.

  “We started as federal agents. The highest ideals. And have ended up as criminals, kidnappers, failed kidnappers, who now need to go on the run.” He shakes his head. “He’s done it again, Wallace. He’s pulled it off.” He straightens, brushes the dust of his trousers, squints out at the desert and at his rented Nissan waiting for him at the side of the highway. “But that’s how important it was. How important to at least try.”

  With Dominique and Amanda now so long overdue (and probably assuming that I have taken them somewhere), Wallace has likely called the Las Vegas police, who are undoubtedly on their way. Or he has somehow realized what Dominique is truly up to. Or else the timorous, overweight Western Loan and Trust branch officer, seeing the Stewartsons forcefully hustle us out of the
branch, has stopped cowering and notified the authorities.

  Whatever the reason, we can hear the sirens. Several now. Baying into the desert with high-pitched excitement.

  It will be just us here with Amanda. The Stewartsons will be gone. Our wrists will still be tied. I can’t imagine what the police will make of the picture.

  But then the picture changes.

  For the worse.

  Amanda stands up.

  Amanda takes off.

  Turns on her heels, and heads out across the desert into the midday sun.

  First walks, then breaks into a trot, then breaks into a run, as if afraid, expecting, that one of us—that any of us—will follow.

  But no one does, of course. Dominique and I are tied together. We could never catch her.

  And the Stewartsons simply watch her go.

  The ten million has been delivered, after all. Who gets it, what the allocation is, where the money is exactly, that is all up in the air now. Dominique has stopped the Stewartsons from getting it. The Stewartsons have now stopped Dominique from getting it. But the ransom has been delivered, so Amanda is free to go. No longer a hostage. Released.

  She has no further value to the Stewartsons. They just admitted they were never concerned with the money anyway—and even less with her. And now they are more preoccupied with the approaching sirens.

  Dominique and I watch powerlessly as she goes.

  Her biological mother. Her protective half brother.

  “Amanda! Amanda!” I call out to her. Does she even hear me over the approaching sirens, over the wash of highway noise? Or is she ignoring me? Refusing to look behind her. Refusing to see, to deal with, any more of it.

  Look what she’s just learned about her past. Look what she’s overheard about her father. Look what she’s at the center of. I’m your mother, Amanda. Your mother, and your rescuer, but now I am intercepting the ransom money and you have to come with me. I’m your half brother, Amanda. Your half brother, and your kidnapper. She doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know who to trust anymore, needs the room to think it through, to figure it out. A fifteen-year-old whose world has turned upside down. Who can blame the impulse for escape?

  Come back here, Amanda. Right now, young lady. For your own protection. For your own good. You’ll be in danger out there. But we don’t say it. Because we recognize the absurdity. The danger is us. She is heading to safety. Away from us all.

  And I, at least, have seen how determined she is. How smart. How strong-willed. And I know that words, argument, persuasion, will never work on her. And we are unable and unwilling to physically, forcibly, hold her anyway. That would only add a wrong to the wrongs we have already amassed.

  She hears the sirens as well as we do. She knows this would be her rescue. That the police would save her from all of us, return her to Wallace and Sasha, her mother and father. So heading off into the desert is to escape that rescue, that safety, that return. Why? What is she thinking? Something about me? About Dominique? What has gotten under her fifteen-year-old skin, that she wants to avoid the reunion, be somewhere, anywhere, else? Maybe the impulses of any fifteen-year-old, writ large, amplified by circumstance, made suddenly and necessarily actionable.

  Amanda heads off into the desert. A shrinking figure, soon a black dot, disappearing against the endless scrub and distant peaks. I cut off my fingertip for her, and now—just as cleanly, almost as physically—she has cut herself off from me.

  The sirens draw closer, their tones broadening, deepening, as if sniffing prey.

  Sandi and Dave Stewartson check our plastic ties once more. Then hustle to their rented Nissan and pull away, smooth, unobtrusive, onto the untrafficked boulevard. Disappearing sleekly. Pros.

  Our hands tied. Our fates tied. Bound like this, we’d never get very far. We are stuck here, to be found by the Las Vegas police, here at the edge of the desert, only a mile or so from the bank branch.

  We will look, at first, of course, like victims. We are victims. But when the police interview the bank clerks, the bank officers, the story will get more complex. And probably they already have descriptions from Wallace the Amazing. And no matter what, we will be held. If there is no Amanda, we will undoubtedly be held.

  Bound to each other. And not able to see each other. The metaphor is all I think of, as three squad cars pull up.

  TWENTY

  The Las Vegas police holding cells are clean, modern, germ-free, and suspect-free, for that matter, except for Dominique and me, in adjacent cells, our plastic ties now cut. The cells are painted in cheerful tones, obviously the conclusion of a report from expensive industrial psychology consultants.

  We wait silently, in a silence so total it is perhaps disconcerting to the two guards observing us. But our work has always been done in silence. Nothing feels more natural to us—even in cells next to each other. We have always been in adjacent cells, after all. We know, without discussing it, who we are waiting for.

  In the afternoon, he arrives. Strides off the TV screen and into the holding cell area with the same forthright gait, the same self-contained aura of disconnection and indifference. Daddy—coming to get the misbehaving children. To rescue us? Or to teach us a lesson? Daddies do both.

  He stops outside the holding cells, stares first at Dominique.

  The accompanying detectives observe, can report, only the continuing silence.

  He shifts his focus to stare at me. Equal time.

  His daughter’s captors. His mutinous employees.

  It is the third time I have seen him face-to-face. The third and, I sense, last time. It has been twenty years since we looked at each other across the coffee shop table on the morning he hired me. There was also, of course, that frantic predawn moment when I freed him from the clutches of Big Eddie a few years ago, but that was rushed and desperate and in the dark, and did not even include a good look for either of us.

  Both times were before I knew he was my father.

  There are no lines around his eyes. He is as lean as ever. Anodyne. Artificial. His body, his physical presence, seems to have made little concession to time or reality.

  “Do you know these people?” the detective asks him.

  “No,” he says. Our nonexistence, our orphan status, our aloneness, confirmed. By the one person who could resurrect us. Who could bring us into the land of the living. No. With that one syllable, consigned once more to our strange, faceless existence.

  And really, how could he say yes? How could I expect it? Because that would mean investigating the connection, the link between us, and finding absolutely none at first, none at all, and that would only stir more interest, deeper digging, until the truth is revealed. He must think, somewhere in him, that if he refuses to recognize us—says he doesn’t know us—that the show can go on. The consummate showman, or the consummate fool. The consummate illusionist . . . or delusionist.

  “They haven’t found Amanda yet,” Wallace informs us, assuming (correctly) that it’s the first information that either of us would want—and making it appear to all observers that it’s what preoccupies him most. “No trace of her. Do you two have any idea where she is?” Asked with the naïveté and forthrightness of a desperate dad—imploring the criminals directly.

  “She took off across the desert.” I know he knows that already, of course, but I say it so that he hears it from me, from an eyewitness. And in truth, to hear myself say something live, actual, to him.

  “You think she’s going to turn up?” he asks us—generally, not directed at either of us specifically. It is almost merely rumination.

  Dominique shrugs. I am silent. He looks at us.

  His unspoken question: What did you tell her? How much?

  And our unspoken answer: Enough. Enough that she took off across a desert. Enough that she wanted to disappear.

  If he were to say to
the guards, “I’d like to speak to these two privately,” well, that would risk revealing a previous relationship among us all, which the Vegas police would feel compelled to explore further, and they might stumble into the whole truth of our cozy connection.

  But he surprises his police and guard entourage, if not us, with his next statement.

  “I don’t want to press charges.” Wallace looks at us. Altruistic, superhuman, always surprising. “However these two were involved or not”—a dismissive flutter of hand like a magic wand—“I forgive them.”

  “But your daughter hasn’t been located,” blusters the detective standing next to Wallace—KITEGAWA, his nametag says, presumably here in special deference to Wallace—and he is on the verge of outright anger. “Your daughter is still missing.”

  “Yes. But these two didn’t take her.”

  The detective: “How do you know that?”

  Wallace turns to the lead guard, smiles thinly, sardonically, tilts his head a little. Are you kidding? How do you think I know? Because I am Wallace the Amazing. And I know.

  The detective appears sheepish. Looks uncomfortable. But then stands taller. “Well, look, sir, it doesn’t really matter if you want to drop charges. The state will press charges in any case.”

  “Oh, they will?” And I can hear in his tempered response, a challenge. We’ll see about that.

  And for once, Wallace the Amazing is not the mind reader. I am. I can read his mind:

  He can’t do the show without us. He needs us. At least one of us. His redundancy system, his backup plan (in case one of us gets sick and dies, or is in a crash, or has a stroke) is now side by side in a Las Vegas holding cell. Unless there is a third, or a fourth data specialist. But if there were, Wallace wouldn’t be here at all. He wouldn’t need to be. He wouldn’t be taking the risk of being seen with us. He needs us.

  And without our jobs, jailed here—nonexistent, off-the-grid black holes for the LV police to begin to explore, unless he steps in and claims us—we need him. To get us out, his clout the only way—we need him.