Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  What I saw then took my breath away.

  She was there.

  Neither blood nor death has ever fazed me. I would even say they have come to draw me in a way others would deem unhealthy. The clearest memory I have of that attraction goes back to when I was eleven. It was summer 1989 and the kids on our block were scuttling back and forth in their bat masks and T-shirts, in the belief it was really cool to be a crime-fighting orphan superhero. I could have told them a thing or two about having no parents, but I was minding my own business.

  Dr. Roger Evans, my adoptive father, felt strongly about interacting with other kids, and that afternoon he came into the backyard to share them.

  “David, why don’t you go out to pl—?”

  He broke off midsentence, most surprised.

  I was squatting on the ground. A dead cat lay at my feet, one that had belonged to Mrs. Palandri, who lived at end of the block. I had a stick in my hand and was busy hauling out a good length of the poor creature’s large intestine with it.

  The doctor appeared neither horrified nor appalled. Merely surprised.

  Someone else in his situation—myself included, had it been Julia—might have yelled, acted on gut instinct, whatever. But not Doc Evans. He was a patient man whose greatest pleasure consisted of getting himself over to Nalgansett Creek with a fishing pole and sitting still hour after hour.

  I had had occasion to try his patience to the limit after I had moved into his home two years before. At first it didn’t work out. I broke stuff, valuable heirlooms. I wouldn’t eat. I cussed.

  Doc Evans simply waited. A few weeks later, he went up to my room and said:

  “You’ve behaved as badly as can be and we haven’t thrown you out. We’ll never do that. Now, don’t you think you’ve tried us enough?”

  His voice carried that selfsame tone of wisdom and boundless patience when he asked me:

  “Did you kill it?”

  I shook my head and stood up.

  “It was that way already when I got here.”

  “And what are you doing with that stick?”

  “I wanted to see its insides. I want to see how they work.”

  He stared at me for a while, his arms folded. Nowadays that answer would have earned me a couple of years’ counseling and stacks of little pink pills. Things were different in those days, but he was a smart guy, anyway. He knew no good would come of kids who tore the wings off flies or stove cats’ heads in with rocks. I think he was searching for something perverse or unhinged in my interest in the cat, but he didn’t find it. The more I think of it, the more convinced I am that that stare was a pivotal moment in my life. The way I turned out had a lot to do with that gaze.

  He finally made his mind up to believe me. He lowered himself next to the animal, examined it and looked around. Our backyard had a wire fence around it with more holes than the Clippers’ defense. And behind our house was a wood. Not big, but a thick one.

  “That will have been a fox or a coyote. Give me the stick.”

  I did so, but what came next surprised me. Instead of burying the poor thing, as I thought he would, he put it on the garage table. He spread out some garbage bags and old newspapers and then had me fetch his doctor’s bag. It was big and made of worn leather, had his initials engraved on it and weighed a ton. I had a hard time lifting it up to the table. From it he extracted a scalpel and forceps.

  “To harm a living thing is wrong, but this was an accident. It’s sad, but we can learn from it.” He hesitated, then went on. “You still want to see an animal from the inside?”

  I nodded.

  “Then we have to do this properly,” he said as he rolled up his sleeves. His arms were dark, tanned and hairy, while his hands were large and skillful.

  I sat next to him while he dissected the animal. He did so in the way he did everything in life: slowly, gently and respectfully. He briefly explained what the internal organs were, what they were for and what happened if any of them went wrong.

  Today they don’t do dissections in high school, not even on frogs, as they did in my day. In less capable hands than the ones I was in, it can be a traumatic experience. Even many years later, kids shudder to recall the smells and sounds of dissection.

  I simply remember the smell of Old Spice and Doc Evans’s deep, dry voice. That afternoon he won me over. I began to call him Daddy and he set me on my way to becoming a doctor.

  Twenty-six years later, as I beheld Svetlana Nikolić’s body, I remembered the day my father had taught me to fear neither blood nor death. I took a deep breath and tried to take in what I saw.

  The nanny was bundled up in a thick, see-through plastic sheet. Only her bare feet stuck out from under it. She was clad in a blue sweat suit such as she often wore around the house, although it looked much darker, almost black, through the gruesome wrapping. Her head jutted from the top end, at an unnatural angle. You didn’t need to be a brain surgeon to tell her neck had been broken. It was an instant and almost painless execution, but one that required brute strength, a lot more than it seems in the movies. Even for a skinny Serbian college girl.

  The worst thing was her eyes.

  Whoever had done it hadn’t troubled to close her eyelids. On the contrary, her eyes stared straight ahead and accusingly reflected the flashlight. They were at precisely the right angle, which was weird. Anyone who approached that shelving would have to come round the bike and meet those eyes.

  Whoever had killed Svetlana was a very sick son of a bitch, and he had Julia.

  Then the phone pinged again. In the pitch-dark cellar those three cheery chimes were doleful, a beast howling in the depths of a cave.

  I THINK YOU’RE READY TO MEET ME, DAVE.

  5

  I screeched to a halt by the curb outside the Marblestone Diner. I tore out of the car berserk, ready to beat up whoever might be inside. I would beat my daughter’s whereabouts out of him.

  I didn’t make it around the corner before someone grabbed me from behind and rammed me against the wall. The rough, faded concrete felt cold against my cheek. But not as cold as the steel somebody jabbed in the back of my head.

  “You have been invited to a very civilized meeting, doctor,” said a voice with a strong eastern European accent. “Your host begs you to keep your composure.”

  I tried to turn around, but the arm pinning me to the wall was too strong to brook any disagreement.

  “We can stay as long as it takes to cool our temper, doctor.”

  I felt the anger that had bottled up inside me die down, stifled by fear.

  “That’ll do,” I said.

  “Zen I will let you go. Don’t turn around. Walk inside and behave.”

  The weight on my back was gone and I edged away from the wall. I could sense them, two shadowy figures I had spied out of the corner of my eye when they assaulted me. They didn’t seem to follow me to the doorway, but I obeyed them anyway. They had made it clear that this was no time for heroics.

  I didn’t spot him on my way in. The diner is L-shaped and he was sitting at the back table, engrossed in his iPad. But when he looked up and our eyes met, I felt as if the breath had been knocked out of me.

  Ten minutes before I had been staring into Svetlana Nikolić’s lifeless face. But believe me, those cadaver eyes were more alive than the two cold, bright blue stones that stalked me from the back of the joint.

  He got up as I came close and held out his hand. I made no move to shake it, but the stranger deflected the snub by turning his gesture into an elegant flourish, pointing to the bench in front of him.

  “Please take a seat, Dave. I trust you didn’t have too much trouble finding your way.”

  The text had copied some directions off Google Maps, but I didn’t need them. I knew the Marblestone well. It was close to home and I would swing by every morning to grab coffee before
I dropped Julia off at school. Juanita, the waitress on the graveyard shift, always served me. She walked across, notepad in hand, surprised to see me there at two a.m.

  “Hi, Dr. Evans. You up early or working late?”

  I looked at her in amazement. So normal, so indifferent. I didn’t get it. Could she possibly not see something was wrong? No, indeed not. I wanted to make a sign, to appeal for help, but the stranger wouldn’t take his eyes off me.

  I tried to act normal.

  “It’s been a long day, Juanita. I’ll have coffee, if you don’t mind.”

  “No one comes here midweek at this time, especially on a night like this,” she said, pointing behind her with a pen. The place was empty, apart from us. “Anything to eat?”

  I shook my head. Now that she couldn’t help me, I just wanted her to go away as quickly as possible. The man and I weighed each other up in silence.

  He was young, closer to thirty than me. He had blond, curly hair and pale, smooth skin. His features might have been chiseled out of marble, and you could have cracked nuts on his jaw. He was decked out in a gray woolen three-piece suit by Field, no tie. The way it hugged his shoulders, it looked made to measure and must have set him back three or four thousand bucks.

  I can’t say I’m really into clothes—that had been Rachel’s department, and was now sorely neglected—but I am a neurosurgeon in a private clinic. I spend my days surrounded by snobs who chat about such things. I am fond of watches, although I can’t afford much in that way. And I knew the limited-edition Audemars Piguet on that man’s wrist cost more than half a million dollars. It wasn’t a showy watch. The expense came with the handmade inside, which had more than three hundred moving parts. But its titanium case and foreign brand name would go unnoticed by anyone who didn’t know what a doodad like that was worth, which was the whole idea.

  Juanita brought coffee and gave my companion a smile, which he returned, revealing a row of nuclear-white teeth. He reminded me of that Scottish actor who plays Obi Wan in the new Star Wars movies.

  “Gracias, señorita linda,”* he said in Spanish.

  Juanita blushed at the compliment and slipped behind the counter. The man followed her with his eyes until she was back in place, and fitted the iPad’s headphones over his ears.

  “The coffee here is excellent, don’t you think?” he said, raising his own cup.

  His posh accent and appearance, straight out of the pages of Town & Country, were unyielding. I could not believe this was the man who had killed Svetlana and sent those texts. I was perplexed but also mad as can be. I balled up my fists under the table.

  “Who are you? Did my father-in-law send you?” I said, knowing how absurd the words sounded before they were out of my mouth.

  “The hardware dealer? Don’t make me laugh, Dave.”

  There wasn’t a shred of laughter in his corpselike eyes.

  “Tell me where my daughter is, or I’ll call the cops this second,” I said, raising my voice despite myself.

  He leaned over the table slightly and frowned.

  “Dave, if you raise your voice once more, I’ll have no choice but to give our hostess the same treatment I gave Svetlana,” he said, nodding toward the counter. “We’ll have to leave here and resume this conversation in a cramped car, rather than this warm, roomy diner, out of the rain. We’ll all lose out, especially Juanita’s children. Do I make myself clear?”

  He said his piece in a cut-glass tone as devoid of feeling as that of a waiter reciting the day’s specials. That ice-cold poise was hideous.

  For a second I was lost for words, my throat constricting.

  “Well, what do you say?”

  “I won’t raise my voice.”

  He smiled. It wasn’t a real smile. There was no light in it, no feeling. His face muscles merely rearranged themselves. Very different from the deceptive and perfectly contrived rictus he had given Juanita. More authentic, too.

  “That’s more like it, Dave. You may call me Mr. White.”

  His hand reached across the table again, and this time I had no choice but to shake it. It was strong and cold to the touch.

  “What do you want from me? Money? I don’t have much, but it’s all yours. Just tell me where Julia is.”

  “Dave, Dave, Dave. Do I look like I’m short of cash?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “And even so . . . You want to fob me off with a few bucks, like the conscience money you drop into that homeless guy’s jar on Kalorama Circle, when you step down from your Lexus?”

  I was frozen stiff. Occasionally, we went to a shopping mall where a panhandler in a 76ers cap would bum around with a sign that said “War Vett.” I often gave him change, because I liked him.

  “You know nothing about me,” I said, offended.

  “You are in error, Dave. I know all about you, more than you do yourself. I know your every trait, your every feature. You are the orphan who made it. The whiz kid with the Johns Hopkins scholarship. ‘A natural talent for medicine,’ the Pottstown Gazette said. You’ve come a long way since you were a newspaper boy in small-town Pennsylvania, haven’t you?”

  I held my tongue and quietly stirred the coffee I had no intention of drinking. My stomach was churning like a volcano.

  “You are the doting but somewhat absent father. The good neighbor. The grieving widower.”

  “Knock it off,” I whispered.

  “The surgeon with the golden hands. The wisecracking colleague. Your St. Clement’s buddies used to call you Wiseass Dave until you returned from your long break after the business over Rachel. Now they call you Spooky Dave, you know. Not to your face, evidently. They whisper it in the locker rooms and by the water cooler. Some anesthesiologists swap shifts when they see they have a long operation with you lined up. It gives them the jitters.”

  I knew it, sure. Or at least I suspected. But it is one thing to have an inkling, quite another to hear it from a total stranger who has just kidnapped your daughter. His metallic voice struck home, every word he said a blow to my solar plexus. Stripped of answers, powerless to speak and with no chance to respond with violence, I was putty in that maniac’s hands.

  “Besides, it’s quite to be expected,” he went on. “You haven’t exactly been the life and the soul of the party since Rachel killed herself, have you?”

  “You leave my wife out of this, asshole,” I grunted.

  “Don’t try and tell me you’re ashamed now. It was such a sweet way to end it all. And those words she wrote you in her farewell letter”—he adopted a repellent falsetto—“ ‘My darling David. We will be together always. Hold on to each of my smiles, and remember me this way . . .’ ”

  I could take no more and banged my hand on the table, rattling the cups and the cutlery. Even Juanita flashed us a quizzical look, but dived back into her gossip magazine. Luckily she was too far off to hear us.

  White gave her the once-over out of the corner of his eye and then leaned toward me.

  “You won’t make me repeat my earlier warning, will you, Dave?”

  I ignored him. I was too busy crying. I turned to face the wall and hide my tears. I stayed that way for a few minutes.

  No one but I knew what was in that note. Rachel had not left it by her body but had mailed it to me the same day she went away. I guess she didn’t want the police or anybody else to read those words, which came right from the heart. She had left another run-of-the-mill note to explain why she’d done it, and that was it. I hadn’t told a living soul about the letter and kept it at home, under lock and key in my study. To hear those words from that slug’s mouth was sacrilege. I felt so used, naked and helpless, that for a few minutes I went to pieces.

  When I pulled myself back together, I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and garnered the strength to face him. He smiled, and now the smile was for real.


  I knew because it frightened the shit out of me.

  “You win, White, you goddamned wacko son of a bitch. So you know it all. You call the shots.”

  “Now you’re catching on, Dave.”

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s very simple. If your next patient leaves the operating table alive, you will never see your daughter again.”

  I gawked at him, petrified. Now it all fell into place. Why this White character, who looked to be made of money, had set up such a well-oiled and well-timed plan. He didn’t want Julia or to take what little money we had. But the ransom was monstrous, unthinkable. The price was the life of the man I was due to operate on in two days’ time.

  To save my daughter, I had to kill the president of the United States.

  * * *

  * Thank you, gorgeous.

  6

  “So that’s it. You’re a terrorist.”

  White shook his head and clicked his tongue, as though he found the term distasteful.

  “That would require an ideology and beliefs, Dave, of which I am bereft. No, my friend, I’m an outsourcer, although that doesn’t exactly fit the bill, either.”

  His eyes shone and he waved his hands about to stress each word. Everyone likes to talk shop. For the vain, self-centered White, it must have been sheer torture that he couldn’t shout about his feats from the rooftops.

  “Let us say I am a specialist in social engineering. A client comes to me with a problem, and I fix it.”

  “B-but . . . ,” I stammered. “I’m not a murderer. Go look for a soldier, a mercenary, or someone who knows about weapons.”

  “The cracked lone gunman is so 1960s . . . It’s a tired old trick and we’ve used it too often. No, Dave, that is not my style. Any two-bit hoodlum with three bullets and telescopic sights could set up that kind of hack job. I mean to say, it would turn out badly. In all likelihood with the gunman shackled to a chair and bleating out—shall we say—unseemly remarks about his employers’ identities. And let’s not even talk about tanking stock markets, social unrest, rising international tension . . . Our country is already in a bad way. A new scandal would tear it asunder. We’re patriots and we can’t have that, now, can we, Dave?”