by Martin Rose
“Couldn’t be bothered to come down himself, could he?”
“We served together, after the war,” Lionel said.
“He talk about me?”
“No, actually. He spoke of Jamie. Which is what unites us all here, at the moment. We have greater jurisdiction than the local police department, in your case.”
“Who is we?”
“Come, Vitus. You know our policies.”
“There’s been so many of you from the alphabet soup agencies lately, it’s getting hard to keep track.”
Lionel sighed. A gust of breath. “Your unfortunate decision to kill your brother has resulted in a change of priorities. Your father has taken interest.”
Lionel’s voice lulled, tailor-made for Shakespearean theater. He orated as in a grand speech before a vast and unseen audience. I smelled his aftershave, particles of stink settling in my mucous membrane. Like swallowing pieces of my father. What a shame I’d never had the chance to do so when I’d been pre-deceased. Perhaps that’s why my father had never visited.
“What happens now is both above and outside of the auspices of any agency. There is no ‘alphabet soup’ when it comes to you, Vitus.”
“What’s it like, knowing my father sent you on a mission to babysit his brat son?”
Lionel ignored this. “I have the greatest authority in the nation when it comes to making decisions in your case. The local police department are in the dark. They believe you are Amos Adamson, and you have just killed your own father. Your future, should you remain here, is one of endless incarceration. Your sanity in question, your past unknown, unrecorded, classified. You will die within these cell walls without our help, Vitus Adamson.”
“I’ve been dead before—”
He cut me off with a hand. “Save your bravado for later. In your father’s court, your swaggering sarcasm has no currency.”
Sullen silence. He was right. I could throw out every cheesy two-bit line designed to bite, but the invocation of my father cut out the spine of my devil-may-care banter. He and I both knew I was no more than the smallest cog in the most ruthless machine. The high standing of my family was the only reason I was being offered an escape hatch.
“You can choose to wait out the rest of your life in this cell. I don’t need to describe to you the interminable years ahead, do I, Vitus? You may be crude and vulgar, but if you think you will fool me, rest assured now, approaching eighty years old, it takes no great genius to see through you. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in an institution?”
“No.”
He inclined his head. “That’s good, for a change. Now we’re getting somewhere. I’m a civilized man, Vitus, and not unreasonable or unsympathetic to your plight. Your decision to kill Jamie came at an inopportune time. Your brother had a number of ongoing projects. Those, we’ve been scrambling to reconfigure and replan as needed. That is not so much a catastrophe as it is an inconvenience.”
“So what’s the catastrophe?”
“Quick. Good. You’ll need to be. The catastrophe is that Jamie was running projects he could not commit to paper.”
“Black projects.”
“So dark they could not be written. There is no record of them. We depended entirely on Jamie’s resilient memory to keep them in line.”
“And now Jamie’s gone. What a shame.”
“You are the author of that shame, Vitus. More than a shame, very wealthy investors expected results from those projects and experiments. How do you think you were funded all these years? You don’t think New Jersey property taxes pay themselves, do you? Or your prescriptions?”
“What do you want from me, old man?”
Lionel smiled, revealed a line of teeth behind expanding wrinkles. His mouth looked like mine when I had been dead. But without the mold.
“You were a private investigator before this, yes?”
I nodded.
“We will give you freedom and a clean slate. In return, we need you to sniff out your late brother’s hidden secrets. We will, in essence, hire you.”
“Oh?”
The old man came forward from Elvedina’s monolithic shadow to stand before me. His aftershave, an invisible python, constricted the air. He reached up with one shaking hand to take my cheek in his cool palm. The gesture unnerved me, forced me to lean forward so he could whisper into my ear.
“Your father wanted me to give you a message. He regrets he could not deliver it in person.”
He withdrew a paper from his breast pocket with one tottering talon. I snatched it, rattling both chains and paper as my eyes adjusted. I ripped open the envelope and unfolded the single paper.
White House stationary. The sort they kept in the guest rooms on Pennsylvania Avenue. The eagle against the blue shield.
Beneath it, my father’s scrawl, like squirming night crawlers burrowing into the paper:
I’m proud of you, my son.
And to my everlasting shame, I burst into tears.
*
Life has a way of drying you up inside. It becomes so you don’t notice this missing part of yourself. And then it floods like the river Nile. Like the Ganges.
For years, I’d watched Jamie blaze the path before me. He did it in the warm afterglow of our father’s pride and approval. Me, I was the crooked shadow stretching behind him. The sorry, second-born backup plan if anything happened to Jamie.
We knew it, even if we didn’t talk about it. If it weren’t for the genetic stamp of our features, we would have cast doubt on our own paternity. But for the same pattern of wrinkles at the corners of our muddy eyes. The odd-shaped nose that looked like it had been perfectly fashioned and then dropped on a sidewalk in all the wrong places. Our faces, wider in the cheeks and narrowing to an underdeveloped chin. We’d never be leading men material, but that was our charm—good looking enough to break hearts, ugly enough to mean business.
And people are at their ugliest when they spill their tears. I turned to face the wall and attempted to manfully suck it up while Lionel stepped aside, polite. I was grateful to him and his ancient manners. Elvedina’s presence gave it a special agony as she continued to stare with rigid and granite control. Eyes as empty as automated camera lenses.
“What are you looking at?” I muttered.
She said nothing. I swallowed a mouthful of tears. At least the waterworks had stopped long enough for me to breathe like a human being instead of a gaping fish.
“Will you work for us, Vitus?” Lionel asked.
“You know I don’t have any other choice.”
The cell door opened. Lionel picked up his cane from where he’d left it against the wall. Its silver top shook a crescent of light out into the hall and then he was tapping his way down, past a thousand and one closed cell doors, leaving Elvedina and I alone.
Looking at her was like being in an empty theater when the film credits stop but the reel still runs an empty frame. Her eyes didn’t flicker. Smoky eyelashes but no makeup on her face. Bulky clothes swallowing slender wrists, narrow neck hiding a thinner version of herself.
“Don’t say much, do you.”
Nothing.
“You got a father, Elvedina?”
Nothing.
“You’re some hard case, huh?”
Her eyes remained fixed on me.
I wasn’t ready for this. I was still trying to figure out how to get comfortable in my new skin and I hadn’t even gone into Niko territory. If my arms weren’t constrained to my belly, I would have been smoking like a chimney and pulling out my hair thinking about how, exactly, I was going to fix my fuck-up with Niko.
What do you get for the woman you handcuffed to plumbing and then left out in the cold after making hot monkey love with her on the kitchen counter?
*
A sneering guard bearing the charming scent of tobacco and halitosis unlocked the chain and then the ankle bracelets. Elvedina remained my ever-present shadow. Time and time again, I attempted to decipher her purpose and
her meaning, but there was nothing there to interpret or figure.
Elvedina jammed a box of tissues in front of me on the table. I plucked one out and blew a pound of snot into it—and then another ten pounds of spite. In the days of being pre-deceased, my tear ducts had dried up like the canals on Mars; now that I was alive, it made my disappointment in this human body all the more bitter.
A kick to the chair jarred me. I flailed, stumbled, and rose to my feet.
McSneer.
Named by virtue of how his lips cut through his face to form his pirate’s smile, leaning on his knee with his foot on the seat of my chair. Like my balls were under his heel and he was mashing them into the plastic.
Some people like the prison life. I should have taken to the structure and the discipline with my military background, but I never had been a good soldier. McSneer could smell it on me. Some people lived and breathed prison. I loathed it. Every day from sunup to sundown, I was taking mean-spirited sucker punches from convicts and crooked guards. Some prisons are more violent than others. I was in one of the better ones. But every prison makes an industry off neglect, and I’d watched while McSneer flirted with a female guard for a half hour while a man with a broken leg screamed and screamed for his medication. His pain increased, and McSneer just shook the bottle of pills and kept chatting.
Rumors circulated of “accidental” deaths. Heart patients whose medication was mysteriously never refilled. You don’t need to put a shiv through a person’s heart when bureaucracy sufficed.
Unfortunately for McSneer, my heart came straight out of the box still in its plastic wrap. And he’d been playing low-grade pranks for my benefit all through my miserable stay. Did my water taste like urine, or was that just a feature of the rusting pipes? McSneer had suspiciously zipped his pants up in the hall.… Was that the oily sheen of plastic wrap stretched across my toilet bowl? Did I dare relieve myself without indulging in my paranoia? I provided the watching guards with endless amusement as McSneer’s favorite captive guest.
But now his prize weeble wobble had been handed his walking papers. I wasn’t his most hated prisoner, I wasn’t his favored target—I was just the shitty tetherball he played with at recess if all the other toys were taken. In his hungry eyes, I hadn’t become his preferred thing to fantasize about dismembering until it was apparent I would no longer figure into his universe. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
McSneer shoved a set of clothes into my chest. They smelled musty and I recognized them as my own. All my effects from the crime scene—wallet, watch, and even the mysterious skeleton key Jamie had bequeathed me before I killed him—that I thought were missing and taken into evidence were now returned to me.
This button-down shirt and a pair of jeans had been filched from somewhere else. The men in black had raided my wardrobe and been to my house. They had infiltrated and knew all my dirty secrets. Guns hidden behind loose panels. Secret hideaways. Magazines of ammo lodged in the underbelly of fake Raid cans. Maybe even the missing porn mag I didn’t like. What else had they been nosing through while I’d been wasting away in county prison?
“Next door’s a spare room before you get processed out,” McSneer said.
“So sorry our time together had to be cut short. I’ll send flowers.”
He gave me the finger. He’d find someone new to hate and go on being the same schoolyard bully he’d probably been in his youth.
As I turned to follow his shadow into the hall, he stopped and jammed his boot back in one calculated step, grinding his heel into my toes. My face bled out white. A splinter of pain knifed up from my bones and into my gray matter.
Before I could finish my exhale, Elvedina crossed an impossible span of distance to stand beside me. Her speed gave the illusion that her shadow lagged seconds behind her. She reached ahead of McSneer in one arc and swept the door back into his face.
His nose broke—the sound a peanut makes when crushed by an eighteen wheeler.
His hands at his face, McSneer snuffled blood, but it sprayed down his chin. A tirade of curses erupted from him. Elvedina yanked me out of his path with her fist knuckled into my prison orange, pushed me into the hall. My cracked toes howled. She hadn’t broken a sweat. Her lips parted, yet no breath moved through them.
While Lionel signed papers in the hall, I entered a new and more soulless concrete block room than the one before. Air-conditioning cranked high enough to see my breath. McSneer’s yelling faded into a background din. Footsteps behind me. Elvedina filled the doorway.
“Whoa, you’re not coming in with me.”
Lionel’s voice snaked around the corner.
“Perhaps in time, when you can prove you’re both emotionally stable and trustworthy, it won’t be necessary. I think if you can tolerate having your privacy stripped from you all these weeks at the prison, Elvedina poses you no threat. She’s here for your protection.”
Or to keep me prisoner?
“You afraid I’m gonna jump out the window?”
“Elvedina is here for many reasons. As am I. Your brother’s death has left a mess of inconceivable size. You do, in fact, need a babysitter.”
So I am still a prisoner.
I pulled out the packet of clothes. Underwear, socks, all the fun trivial things I didn’t miss from being a zombie. Now I got to do the boring stuff again. Shower, shit, shave, eat, sleep. Rinse, repeat.
Maybe being a zombie hadn’t been all that bad, after all.
I unbuttoned the prison jumper and did my best imitation of a surly stripper not being paid enough for Elvedina’s one-woman bachelorette party.
“So, how you liking Jersey?”
No answer.
“That’s what most people say,” I said. “Got a boyfriend? Husband? Girlfriend?”
No answer.
Oh, fuck it, what’s a little modesty these days, and I continued to shuck off my prison clothes, down to the last stitch. Bare skin in the stale air. The body might technically be mine but it was going to take some getting used to. Freckles not where I remembered them. Moles in different places. A whole different gravity. I missed my bowling ball belly in my center that used to hug my disintegrating guts inside me. Even my center of gravity shifted to suit Amos’s compact frame, and it came with a surge of contradictory feelings—sorrow and guilt, unreality of trying to fit into a body that wasn’t mine.
I couldn’t shove my clothes on fast enough, yanking myself into sleeves and thrusting into uncomfortable underwear. One pant leg in, an object clattered to the floor along with a dime, a penny, and my tattered wallet—all the things I’d carried on my person and had to surrender when I got processed. I scrabbled after the spare change and shoved my wallet into my back pocket before bending down to retrieve the other object.
The skeleton key, on a chain.
I held it up and it swung in the impersonal light. The end of the key was still ringed in Jamie’s blood, where he’d touched it, pressed it into my hand. My murder key. Beware the echoes and specters.
I slipped it over my head and stashed it out of sight beneath my shirt.
“How do I look? Ready for my close up?”
I snapped my fingers in front of her face an inch away from her nose. She blinked and looked at me like a spider crawling on her prized carpet. A faint whiff of disdain. Even she knew I was still a monster, deep down inside.
Elvedina, I thought. That’s a name I haven’t heard since Sarajevo.
But Sarajevo was long ago and far away, and I had bigger problems.
*
Home sweet home.
The place in which I decomposed and rotted away my hours for a decade while I solved petty crimes, tracked down missing people, and surveilled unfaithful spouses. Lionel parked the car in the blacktop driveway before the single car garage, and I stared from the window.
Formless hedges ran riot. The lawn, overgrown. My house stood out in the sleepy Levittown division like a rotting mushroom. Paint peeling off the porch. Had I really lived in
it all these years and not realized it was falling apart? Weeds sprang up from the gutter and the windows were layered in dust inches thick. Moths and insects smothered the lamp beside the door so only the tip of the bulb was visible.
Beside the door, a black shadow perched on the wooden railing—my resident turkey vulture haunting the premises.
It looked like the place Uncle Fester went to blow off steam with hookers and coke.
My car door jerked open. Elvedina stood behind it like the Devil’s personal chauffeur. My own personal Jiminy Cricket, now that I was a real boy after all.
I lurched out of the vehicle.
Lionel dug his cane into the lawn and placed a shoe in a dandelion patch, a look on his face like he’d stepped into a dead bird.
Hard to imagine my father with friends. How likely was it he left behind the snarls of Washington, DC willingly? Or was he someone who liked to grow roses in his greenhouse, or grapes in a vineyard, reclining on a porch in Venezuela or a forgotten part of the world where old hawks fly when the world has done away with them and their service?
What does that tell you, Vitus? came the hot whisper of the Id.
Blackmailed? I wondered. Coerced? I rolled my living tongue in my mouth. In the past, my principal worry would have been the integrity of my teeth, popping out of my jawline like cooked kernels of popcorn. Now they stayed there, fixed as stars.
A car horn brought me back to reality. If I was to be of any use, I would have to learn how to filter out this endless parade of sights and scents vying for my attention.
The garage door lurched open, the motor whirring. The Ford Thunderbird rested there where it had been returned to the house during my stay at prison. The garage door squealed to a stop, followed by the steady beat of wheels and a figure, emerging from the gap.
Geoff Lafferty.
Four feet, five inches. The spokes of his ancient wheelchair high-shine steel. The barrel of his rifle in one hand and his other on the wheel. Bare feet in the stirrups. I stood in my own driveway with my old friend and summed up every hollow excuse to explain myself. Lafferty pointed his rifle up and away from us and said: