Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  Seven Bulls said, "He knows some stories, and he knows the language. He’s a disgrace, but letting them take him at his age and put him in prison is a death sentence. You want everybody to get together to further the cause of the Indian. Well, here’s an Indian. He’s carrying what’s left of his people in his head."

  Seven Bulls had her and he knew it. She had driven Alfred Strongbear aka Alfred Strong aka Demosthenes Patrakos off the reservation in the trunk of her car past a roadblock of state cops who had traced him that far and figured he would try to hide in the crowd.

  She had been the one who made Alfred Strongbear a Venezuelan. She had been new at the craft in those days, but she had an aptitude for it. In the early part of the century, people used to take a name off a gravestone and get a copy of the dead person’s birth certificate, which they used to start collecting other documents in that name. By the eighties that method wasn’t working in the United States anymore, because it had been done too often. But Jane gambled that it might still work in a country where there wasn’t much demand for false identities and the records weren’t all computerized. Jane had a college friend named Manuela Corridos who was spending her summer vacation at home learning her parents’ sugar business in Merida, Venezuela. Manuela had found it exciting to collect the names and file the papers.

  The bargain the elders had made with Alfred Strongbear was that within one year he would make one thousand hours of videotape recordings of the stories his parents and grandparents had told him—Beothuk mythology and cosmology, anecdotes about the old times, and whatever else they had managed to retain over five or six generations—and one thousand hours of videotapes in the lost language of the Beothuk. When Jane had seen him off in New York on what must have been the first of many cruises, he had given her a blessing in a language she didn’t know, winked, walked up the gangplank, and said something to the purser in Spanish. She had felt relieved to see the last of him.

  A year later she received an envelope with the return address "Kills on Horseback, Big Wind Reservation, Wyoming." Inside was a photocopy of a letter from a professor in the anthropology department of the University of California at Berkeley. It said that the first five hundred hours of the tapes had been copied, circulated to experts, and analyzed. They were in an unaffiliated language that showed many similarities with what had been pieced together of the Beothuk Language Isolate. He needed to know more about Alfred Strongbear. Jane had sent the letter on to the mysterious Venezuelan in care of the shipping line.

  Four years later, Alfred had sent her Harry Kemple. It had been the middle of a cold winter night, with the wind blowing hard across the river from Canada, and she was wearing thick wool socks and a flannel bath-robe. She had just come in from a trip to Chicago to transplant a teenaged boy named Raul. She had done this to hide him from a Los Angeles street gang who would only temporarily remain under the impression that they had succeeded in beating him to death for quitting. When Harry had said, "My name’s Harry Kemple and I’m from Chicago," her first thought was that he had something to do with Raul. He had said it apologetically, as people spoke when they came to announce that somebody had died.

  Somebody had. Harry told her the story of meeting Alfred Strongbear first as a kind of credential, but he got around to the part about Jerry Cappadocia soon enough.

  Harry told it to her differently. She could see him telling it now. "So Jerry Cappadocia walks up to me in the middle of the lunch hour at Mom’s. Hell, it was worse than that. What walks up to me is not a guy but a couple. What I see first is the girl. She looks like a cheerleader in one of those movies about cheerleaders where the whole thing is a waste of time until they end up in the shower, you know?" Jane didn’t, so he explained. "She’s very blond, very smooth, very young. Now, Mom’s has not seen a girl like this for some time. Mom’s is not in the guidebooks. Mom’s is what the polite would call a hole. It’s likely that this is the only female in the place who still has all her own teeth. So every head in the room turns to stare at her and each of her components. And to make matters worse, her name is Lenore. Not Eleanor, not Lena. Lenore. It actually occurred to me after I knew Jerry Cappadocia that having her was some kind of security measure—like in a war, they send in a big artillery barrage and aerial bombardment and flares to dazzle the enemy before a few little guys in olive-drab suits slip out of their foxholes and attack. But he seemed to really like her. I actually heard that she wasn’t even his full-time. He had to compete, because she couldn’t decide if she liked him or somebody else better.

  "Anyway, now that he’s got the attention of half of Cook County, he makes his announcement. He likes to play poker, and he is interested in an invitation to my game."

  Felker hadn’t mentioned any of this. Maybe Harry had told him an abbreviated version. Harry had been talking to a cop, and when someone talked to a cop, he tried to say the things that mattered. What mattered would have been the murder.

  She tried to bring back what Harry had told her about the murder. "So Jerry Cappadocia is a bit ahead. I’ve been watching his hands like I’m considering putting mustard on them and eating them. It had occurred to me that a man like Jerry might very well be waiting for a chance to palm cards or even slip in some readers. Not that he needed the money, but because it was a reflex. This was not a sportsman; this was a thief. So far I hadn’t caught him at it, but tonight he was getting a little ahead, and that could mean he was doing it or it could mean nothing. But when amateurs start to see those chips piling up in front of them, even the best of them get some kind of euphoria, and they take chances.

  "I had been drinking club soda all night to keep my head clear, but by now it has to go somewhere. I’m a little nervous about leaving the room to go to the can at this time, but I convince myself that this may be the best thing to do. If Jerry is going to cheat, he’ll pick the time when I’m gone to do it. That night the game was in an old-fashioned motel with eight little cabins. The bathroom is right behind Jerry, who always liked to face the front door, for obvious reasons.

  "So I go into the bathroom and find that five or six bottles of club soda take a long time to drain out of a person. This gives me lots of time to stand there looking around. I notice that there’s a vent over the door. If I put one foot on the bathtub and hold on to the towel rack on the door, I can actually see down into the room. Better than that, I can see it from above, the way the bosses watch the dealers in Las Vegas. There’s only one thing I haven’t figured out, and that’s what I’m going to do if I catch Jerry cheating.

  "Next thing I know, there’s something going on at the front door. I didn’t hear anybody knock, but I guess somebody did. This guy Milhaven, who is a very rich guy who probably never got a door in his life, says, ’Must be more drinks. Harry, get that, will you?’ He sees I don’t hop to it, so he goes to the door.

  "He gets his hand on the knob and turns it, and that’s about all he gets to do. The door is kicked in, and it hits him. He’s on the ground. The two guys who kicked it in are already inside. One of them holds his gun in two hands to aim and pumps two rounds into Jerry Cappadocia’s chest, while the other bends over Milhaven and puts one into his forehead. There are four more guys in the game, and they go crazy. Nadler the lawyer charges toward the door, but the guy who shot Jerry stands his ground and drops him, then steps aside to let Nadler fall while he aims again. Somebody kicks over the table, and Villard the grocery king and Smith the broker duck behind it. I could have told them this was going to turn out to be a bad idea. They each get hit three or four times through the green felt. Hallman, who owns a bunch of sporting-goods stores, decides to go acrobatic and dive through the closed window. He gets two steps before they clip him, so what hits the window is a dead Hallman. About this time I hear another shot, and I’m ready to faint. I mean, there’s nobody left to shoot at but me.

  "I’m still in the bathroom watching this, too scared to move. These two either don’t know about me or they heard somebody say I wasn’t around to get the
door. They start stealing things—taking wallets and watches and stuff. Now, these particular six players represent a pretty impressive chunk of money. Each time they arrived to play, I would sell each of them ten grand in chips. It was a kind of assurance that everybody was serious. But each of them brought a lot more, so they could buy more chips if they had a setback. Gentlemen don’t ask each other to take checks for gambling debts. So right now these two shooters are doing pretty well pocket-mining. They get the money, walk out the door, and close it behind them.

  "I’m still clinging to the bathroom door like a kitten that climbed up a tree that was bigger than it looked. I’m shaking. To tell you the truth, I’m glad they didn’t break in until my bladder was empty. After about a minute, I can’t think of a reason not to let myself down. I go and look at the six guys on the floor and see there’s no chance anybody is going to make a quick trip to the emergency room and make a dramatic recovery.

  "I think maybe I’ll call the cops. I mean, I’m an innocent bystander, right? I actually reach for the phone, but I stop. There’s nothing I can do for these six guys, but there’s a lot I can do for me. See, what happened is strange. Maybe it’s just a robbery. They got maybe a hundred thousand and change. But what happened when they kicked in the door wasn’t that somebody said, ’Give me your money.’ The first one in found Jerry Cappadocia and put two holes in him. I went to look at Jerry’s body, and sure enough, while they were robbing the corpses, one of them had put another shot through his left temple. That was what I heard.

  "It’s possible that these two robbers were good judges of character and realized in a tenth of a second that if anybody was going to give them trouble it was Jerry C., or maybe he made a move I didn’t catch and the robber panicked. I don’t know. But it looked to me like one of those situations where somebody wanted to kill one particular man and everything else was just to cover that. At this point I start thinking about how this affects my future. I can be excused for that because I’ve just established that I’m the only guy in the room who has one. The room, in fact, is my first problem. It would not take the C.I.A. to figure out who rented the room for the game. There’s also the fact that Jerry C. heard about the game a month before. If he had, just about anybody else could have too. And even if for some reason he didn’t tell his buddies about it, there was his girl."

  "Lenore?" asked Jane.

  "Yeah, Lenore," he said. "Her last name was Sanders."

  "She would go to the police?"

  "The police were my primary concern," said Harry. "But they were not my ultimate concern. One way or another the police were going to find out it was my game. They were also capable of counting the bodies and noticing that mine wasn’t one of them. Would this cause me harm? Some inconvenience, certainly. They would try to find me and hold me for questioning. But there were other considerations. I start thinking about the five original gentlemen I recruited for my game: Villard, Milhaven, Nadler, Hallman, and Smith. I realize I don’t really know much about them. If I get picked up and questioned and let go, are their families and friends going to forget it? Maybe. But in my experience, nobody in this country gets rich by accident. A lot of people who haven’t gotten caught at anything are pretty ruthless. The heirs and colleagues of men like that can be pretty ruthless too. And speaking of heirs and colleagues—"

  "—Jerry Cappadocia," she said.

  "Yes," said Harry. "Him I don’t have to wonder about. I know about his colleagues. A couple of them used to show up once a week in the attic of a furniture store where Handy Andy Gurlich ran his bookie operation to collect the Cappadocia family’s license fees. Any two of them together were evidence that human evolution is not a straight line. There are lots of dead ends and throwbacks.

  "Then there’s the question of heirs. Jerry Cappadocia’s father has a certain renown. He had announced a couple of years back that he was retiring and Jerry would run the family businesses. This is a man who spent forty years building those businesses with his hands, and what they consist of is killing people who don’t give him money. He’s healthy, no more than sixty-some years old. I’ve heard he speaks English like a native, except there are a few words he never learned, like mercy. What is this man going to do when he learns his only child has been killed? It’s true I was a little worried about getting picked up by the police for questioning, but it was only because they’re the ones people call when they hear shots, and they drive through red lights to get there quickly. What was really on my mind was getting picked up later for questioning by Jerry Cappadocia’s father.

  "And that brought to mind another problem. I really didn’t know anything. I saw two men kick in the door and murder six men and then spend five minutes kneeling on the floor to search them. I had never seen either of them before. I didn’t see their car, if they had one. They both wore white coats they stole out of the motel’s linen cart. I saw them through a vent, so most of what I saw was backs and the tops of heads covered with navy watch caps. But if these two shooters read in the papers that there was a guy who was watching them, what were they going to do? I mean, if the first order of business when they kicked in the door was shooting Jerry Cappadocia, they must have known who he was, right? They had to know what would happen to them if Mr. Cappadocia found out who it was that killed his son."

  "Are you sure they’d know about Jerry’s father?" she asked.

  "I know you’re not from Chicago, but trust me," Harry said. "Not knowing about Mr. Cappadocia is like saying, ’You mean Nancy Sinatra has a father?’ "

  "So they’re probably looking for you too."

  "As soon as they reload."

  "What do you want to do?"

  "I want to disappear for a little while," he said. "I don’t know who these two guys are, so I can’t get the police off my back by telling them, and I certainly can’t get Mr. C. off my back. And if I’m right, these two guys were not working on their own. Somebody hired them to kill Jerry C. In fact, this is the only bright spot."

  "This is a bright spot?" she asked.

  "For me it is. These days my standards are lower than other people’s. I figure the reason to hit Jerry is somebody wants to take over the Cappadocia operations. If that somebody now makes a move on Jerry’s father or goes around trying to slide Cappadocia businesses onto their own inventory, the somebody gets a name. Then I got nothing to tell anybody that they don’t know already. There’s no reason to put my feet in a meat grinder to ask me questions, and no reason to cut my head off to keep me from answering them."

  As Jane brought it all back, this was the part that came back to her most vividly. Harry was only going to have to disappear for a little while. She could see him saying it, his face haggard and hopeful, like the face of a flood victim saying the rain had to stop soon. It was Harry at his most basic.

  Harry had shown up at her door with nothing to offer except the story about Alfred Strongbear. The two robbers had left no money for him, not even the table stakes for the final poker game. He had tried to make up for it with expert advice. He once asked if she liked horses, and she had answered, "Yes," before she realized that he had said "the horses." "Never bet on anything less than a twenty-to-one shot," he advised. "It’s not worth your time. You can’t make anything. The secret is, the numbers fool people into thinking that handicapping is an exact science. No expert can figure it that close. When a horse opens at twenty-to-one, all they’re saying is that it’s a long shot. Fact is, it’s probably ten-to -one, or even eight-to-one unless it’s got three legs. One race in ten or fifteen, the others all go out and trip over their shoelaces." Harry had spent his life convincing himself that the long shots were going to come in. After she had studied him for a time, she understood that this was because he identified with them. If people had been assigned odds the way racehorses were, Harry would have been a twenty-to-one shot. She had an intuition that Harry was going to have to stay under longer than a little while, so she had given him a cover that would hold up. That had been five years ago
.

  Felker had gotten the essential parts of the story right, the ones Harry would have told a cop to get him to help. There was an account of the murder vague enough to reassure the cop that Harry didn’t know the kinds of details that would make it worth the cop’s while to put him in a cell, but vivid enough to convince him of what would happen to Harry if he did.

  She was feeling a very strong impulse to believe Felker. It was just like Harry to have said Alfred Strongbear had given him forty thousand dollars instead of five thousand, and where would any of the story have come from if Harry hadn’t told him? And then there was the way he told it. He had listened to Harry’s voice, and she could tell that he liked Harry, thought he was funny. Maybe Harry was safe. Maybe this one was another like Harry, a man nobody was willing to take in and protect because he wasn’t exactly an innocent but who wasn’t a monster, either. The missing parts, the ones Felker didn’t know or didn’t remember, made it seem more likely. Harry had asked Alfred Strongbear, "If you want a mustache, why don’t you just grow one?" The old man had told him, "It comes in too thin. People would know I’m an Indian."

  Jane said, "All right. You can get up now." She relaxed her arm to let the gun muzzle point down at the floor and walked into the living room.

  "You’ll help me?" he asked.

  "I didn’t say that," she said. "I’m just not afraid enough of you to shoot you. Go connect my phone."

  6

  She waited in the living room and watched John Felker come in and sit in the chair across the room. She picked up her telephone, listened to the dial tone, then put it back in the cradle. "You were a policeman." The light was behind her, so it shone over her shoulder to illuminate him and remind her that there wasn’t much time left before dark.

  "Eight years. You want to know why I’m not now."