by Andrew Pyper
I raise my cup, but the sight of the sludgy coffee, the floating island of milk, almost makes me gag.
“The man in that room was mentally ill,” I say. “He was vulnerable to becoming convinced of impossibilities.”
“We all are.” The Pursuer almost smiles. “Maybe none more so than you.”
“He killed himself.”
“Just the same as they’re saying your kid did. Like they might end up saying about you.”
“You’re threatening me?”
“Yes. I most certainly am.”
I get up. My knees knocking against the side of the table and overturning my cup. The still-hot cappuccino spills over the table, splashing onto the man’s legs. It must scald him. But he doesn’t flinch. Grabs my wrist as I move to go.
“Give me the document.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I feel the turned heads of the other customers behind me. But he doesn’t notice.
“You misunderstand me,” he says, slowly and patiently. “I’m not a nuisance you can just walk away from.”
He lets go of my wrist. Expecting me to walk. But instead I bend low so that I’m inches from his face.
“I don’t care what you do. I’m not giving you a goddamn thing,” I say. “You lose what I’ve lost, and you hold on to whatever you’ve got left. In my position, there’s no protecting yourself, because I don’t have a self to protect anymore. So go ahead. Pursue away. And tell your employers they can go fuck themselves. Okay?”
Now I walk.
Up Amsterdam a block and a half, take a right onto my street. I don’t look back. But even after I turn at the corner, he’s watching me.
I know this as certainly as I know who Dr. Marco Ianno was.
10
I DIDN’T RECOGNIZE HIM AS THE MAN IN THE CHAIR AT THE TIME. But as soon as I heard Marco Ianno’s name moments ago he was returned to me. A colleague who witnessed the most unprofessional moment of my career.
It was at an unusually glitzy conference held at Yale seven or eight years ago. Rome was rumored to be quietly picking up the tab. “Future/Faith” was the title of the proceedings, as if belief were a tired product in need of some snappy rebranding, which I suppose it is. Top scholars and philosophers and op-ed pundits from around the world were assembled to discuss “the issues Christianity faces in the new millennium.” My job was to deliver a punched-up, PowerPoint version of my standard lecture about how Milton’s Satan is an early advocate for the dissolution of patriarchy. “The Devil has father issues,” was my laugh-getting opening zinger.
After my talk, the house lights were raised for a brief Q&A. The first to stand was a theologian whose work I was aware of, a priest (fully collared and frocked for the occasion) who was known to be a policy advisor to the Vatican, devising defenses that might hold the line against creeping modernizations in Church doctrine. He was polite, his question a softball about some citation or other he failed to make note of. Yet something about the man instantly set me against him. I became uncharacteristically aggressive in my replies to his follow-up questions, until, within minutes, I’d worked myself up to spitting insults from the lectern (“Maybe that thing around your throat is choking off the circulation to your brain, father!”). The room seemed to enlarge and contract, breathing like the bellows of an awakening giant. There was no stopping, no control. It was as though I was involuntarily playing a part, someone wholly other than myself. I remember the coppery film in my mouth when I bit the inside of my cheek and drew blood.
Then it got truly strange.
The priest stared at me, puzzled, seeing something he’d just noticed. He took a step back and bumped into the legs of the person sitting behind him. His hands searching the air for balance.
“What is your name?” he asked.
And I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t, because I no longer knew.
“Professor Ullman?”
A new voice, coming from the rear of the hall. Kindly and sympathetic. An accented voice belonging to a man who was advancing with sure purpose and a familiar smile so that, when he finally stood next to me and took me by the elbow, I seemed to have known him all my life.
“I believe our allotted time has expired,” Dr. Marco Ianno said, offering I’ll handle this nods to those seated in the rows and leading me toward the doors. “Perhaps you would like to join me for a refreshment, David?”
Once we were outside in the bracing air of the quad, I felt like myself again. Close enough to myself, in any case, to thank Ianno and assure him I was fine, that I needed only to return to my hotel for some rest. It was the end of an embarrassing performance, later requiring letters of apology and the fictional excuse of a fever that had taken sudden hold of me. An unsettling incident, to be sure, but over now.
Yet Ianno, a man I knew only through his written work and never saw again until the room in Santa Croce, called after me as I left him standing in the New Haven cold. A message I dismissed as mistranslated Italian at the time, and remembered only when the Pursuer mentioned his name moments ago.
“What happened in there—it has happened to me, too,” he said. “I believe we may have been wrong in thinking they were just words on a page, Professor!”
I DON’T GO STRAIGHT HOME. IT’S NOT WORRY THAT THE PURSUER will follow me there or break down the door once I’m inside. There’d be no point: He knows what he seeks won’t be in the apartment. He’s most likely already been through the apartment. He’s looked in all the obvious places, but now requires me to tell him what he needs to know. He asked politely today. Next time he will employ harder persuasions.
Why not just give the “document” to George Barone? It would be easy enough. And I believe if I did, I would be left alone. He was concerned about residue: killing a Columbia prof would leave even more stains than a cash payoff. It would be the easiest thing in the world to accompany my Pursuer to the Chase Bank at 48th and Sixth in a couple of days (when the legal instructions will permit me reentry to the box) and hand him the laptop and camera, the only evidence of my dialogue with the late Dr. Ianno.
But I can’t do that. Because if the Pursuer wants it—or if whoever is paying his freelance fee needs to get it as badly as they seem to—then it has value. Without it, I might not be worth any more visits, might not be receptive to any more signs. Even if holding on to what the Pursuer called the document endangers me, I have no choice but to keep it mine and remain a target. Only as a wanted man will I retain my part in the story. And while I have no real idea why I’m wanted, I’ve got to stay in the show if I’m to find a way to Tess.
One thing is clearer now that the Pursuer has introduced himself: there is less time than I had guessed.
I call O’Brien, and she picks up halfway through the first ring.
“David,” she says with relief. “Where are you?”
“Here. In New York.”
“So why are you avoiding me? I’m your friend, you jerk.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure I could give it a name.”
“Don’t diagnose yourself. Just tell me what you’ve been up to. Because I know there’s something happening. Surprise trip to Venice, what happened with Tess. And no calls from you even once you got home. That’s not you, David.”
“I am well and truly messed up.”
“Of course you are. You’ve lost so much. It’s unimaginable.”
“It’s not just Tess. There are . . . aspects to her disappearance I can’t explain.”
“Disappearance? It was suicide, David.”
“I’m not sure that’s true.”
She absorbs this. “You’re speaking as to how it happened?”
“As to why.”
“Okay. What else?”
“I’ve had . . . visits.”
I can hear O’Brien measuring this. Giving me an opportunity to share everything. But suddenly, on the street, on the phone, I worry what we�
�re saying might not be private. Phone hacking. They can do that pretty easily now, right? And the last thing I want to do is imperil my friend. She’s got enough to manage on her own without me sending a Pursuer to knock on her door.
“You are sounding genuinely weird,” she says.
“You’re right. This is just unprocessed emotional stuff morphing into twisted, paranoid stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff.”
O’Brien pauses. She seems to understand my aversion to saying anything more isn’t a dismissal of the topic, but a concern about privacy. In any case, when she speaks next, it’s in a code known only to us.
“Well, I just wish we could get together,” she says. “But I’m up to my neck in a dissertation evaluation right now. And then there’s a whack of late freshmen papers to grade. Total pandemonium.”
That word. The demons’ palace. Our meeting place.
“Sorry to hear that. Would’ve been good to get together.”
“Definitely. Another time. Soon, okay? Be well, David.”
“Thanks. You, too.”
She hangs up.
And I’m hailing a cab.
“Grand Central Station,” I tell the driver, and we swerve out into the currents of traffic heading downtown.
AT LEAST WE’RE supposed TO BE HEADING DOWNTOWN. THE DRIVER must be new. Or stoned. Or both. He heads south on Columbus before taking an aggressive, spontaneous right that throws me against the door. Then he’s going around the block and, even when he has the chance to correct himself, keeps heading all the way to Central Park West.
“I asked for Grand Central. As in the railway station,” I call up to him through the cash receptacle of the plexiglas shield. “You know something I don’t know?”
He doesn’t answer. Pulls over to the curb somewhere in the mid-seventies.
“Why are you stopping?”
I knock on the plastic. He doesn’t turn.
“I need to keep going that way,” I say, pointing straight ahead.
“You’re here,” the driver says. The voice barely audible but distinctly wet-sounding, as though he’s just had dental surgery that’s left his mouth drooling and numb.
“I’m going downtown.”
“This is where . . . you have to go.”
He doesn’t move. In the rearview mirror only part of his face is visible. And half of that is obscured by aviator sunglasses, as well as a black, chest-length, Middle Eastern beard. In short, he looks like a cab driver.
Except for the tongue. Sliding out past his lips, glistening and obscene. The tip twitching. Tasting the air.
As soon as I’m out I slam the door shut and he’s skidding away. I try to get his car number as he goes but he’s blocked by traffic in an instant. A battered yellow sedan among others.
Now I’m here. Half a block north of 72nd Street. Where the grand old Dakota Apartments building overlooks the park. Not the more famous south end, where John Lennon was shot (a drop-off point for an inexhaustible number of ghoulish tourists) but the north corner, famous for nothing. If the driver intended for me to see one of New York’s best-loved bloodstains, he got even that wrong.
I decide there is something to this.
It’s an act of will on my part as much as deduction. There are no accidents anymore, only meanings and prophecies. I’m an overnight fundamentalist interpreter, seeing confirmation of some Great Plan in the Virgin’s face appearing in the outline of a cloud or what’s spelled out in my alphabet soup.
He dropped me off at the north corner of the building. North of the Dakota.
North Dakota.
The map on Tess’s wall. The state she’d selected for her school project. Or, now that I think of it, the state she’d been assigned.
“Why North Dakota?” I remember asking her the day she’d brought the map home and started rummaging around for the scotch tape so she could put it up.
“I don’t know. It was chosen for me.”
“By the teacher?”
“No,” she’d said, pretending to be engrossed by digging through a kitchen drawer.
“Then who, honey?”
She didn’t answer. But had her shoulders stiffened as the answer paused in her mind, before pulling the tape from the drawer and running off to her room? It’s certainly how I remember the moment now, though it meant little at the time, other than a preteen’s impatience with her father’s nagging.
It means considerably more now.
If the point of my wandering is to look for signs, maybe this is one of them. Whether he was one of the good guys or the bad, the driver brought me here for a reason. I was meant, like the apostles, to see significance in coincidence. I have to, for Tess’s sake.
Blind faith. Though in my case, a faith not in heaven but those at war with it.
11
I DON’T CALL ANYONE. WHO WOULD I CALL? DIANE DOESN’T NEED to know. And though Tess is gone, maybe she already does.
Then there’s O’Brien. Who I’ve now stood up. I would text her to say I’m not coming, but I’m underground, taking a subway uptown to my campus office. There, I quickly gather the only things I can think of being of use other than the credit cards in my wallet. Books. A hastily assembled personal library of demonology pulled down from my shelves and stuffed into a leather satchel. Paradise Lost. The Anatomy of Melancholy. The King James Bible. Along with the unrelated but just as necessary Road Atlas of the United States.
I walk off campus into Harlem and buy a car. Renting would certainly be cheaper, but I worry my whereabouts will be easier to trace if I’m beholden to Budget or Avis to return their property at some point. And there’s a used car lot up on 142nd I’ve passed on my way to a good Mexican place (that is, a good margarita place) O’Brien and I have been to a few times. It turns out they take credit cards for full payment and don’t ask for ID when I give my name as John Milton for the registration forms.
The better decision would probably be to go generic, some reliable Japanese four-door in a gray or beige. Instead, I buy a custom black Mustang. Not a vintage model but a chunky newer one—two years old, just eight thousand miles on it, if the odometer is to be believed—with chrome hubcaps and leopard-fluff seat covers. Subtle, as drug dealer rides go, yet still something of a standout on the muted highways and byways of today’s America. I’ve never driven a car like this—never really been into cars at all—and now, walking through the small lot of repossessed Mercs and fat-assed SUVs, the contradiction of a wire-rim bespectacled, comfort-fit Levi’s me (the permanent undergrad look, as Diane called it) emerging from an inner-city hot rod appeals to me. It’s funny. If Tess were here, she’d find it funny, too. She’d also be jumping to get into the passenger seat, settle into the spotted fake fur, and tell me to gun it. So I give it a go in her honor. A polite tire squeal out of the lot and then south to the apartment, where I throw some clothes in a bag. Along with Tess’s journal.
Then north again, into the merging lanes that lead onto the George Washington Bridge that takes me off the island. From there, westward on I-80, entering the grid of interstates that, with its GOOD FOOD! diners and KIDS STAY FREE! motels is an exclamation- marked world unto itself. A paved gateway to widening spaces and progressively fewer people. Leaving the fixed certainties of New York behind and rolling toward the wilder possibilities of the less scrutinized cities and towns, the forgotten plains. North Dakota. The Overlooked State.
Not that I’m going to get anywhere near there today. A collected fatigue hits me as I roll over the Pennsylvania state line, and I start looking for a rest stop. Also to call O’Brien. She didn’t deserve my rudeness earlier today, and she’s likely worried after I didn’t show up. But it felt like I had to get out of the city right away, an urgency fueled by the notion of the Pursuer as well as the timely puzzle piece of the Dakota.
This one looks nice. Weed-free picnic area, only a few balls of hamburger paper rolling around the overflowing bins. I park in the far corner of the lot and speed-dial.
“You okay?”
O’Brien asks when she picks up. The worry in her voice triples my guilt.
“Fine. Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t make it this afternoon.”
“So you understood my code.”
“Oh yeah. That was good, by the way.”
“I’m blushing.”
“I was on my way downtown when . . . I had to change my mind.”
“What happened?”
How to answer that? “I got a sign,” I say.
“A sign. From the heavens sort of sign?”
“Not heaven, no.”
“David, could you please tell me what the hell is going on with you?”
How to answer that? How about the truth? The impossible truth I’m halfway to believing but haven’t allowed myself to say aloud or even think to myself until now.
“I think Tess might be alive,” I say.
“Have you heard something? The Italian police—they’ve found her? There’s been a sighting?”
“Not a sighting, no.”
“Oh my God! David! Has she contacted you?” At the next thought, O’Brien darkens. “Is it a kidnapping? Does somebody have her?”
Yes, somebody has her.
“Nobody has called me,” I say instead. “The police haven’t found anything. In fact, they’ve more or less given up looking. All they’re waiting for are her remains to show up. They think she’s dead.”
“And you don’t?”
“Part of me knows she must be. But there’s another part that’s starting to think otherwise.”
“Where is she, then?”
“Not in Italy. Not here either.”
“Okay. Pretend I’m holding a map. Where should I look?”
“Good question.”
“You don’t know?”
“No. But I’m feeling something. That she’s alive, but not alive. Waiting for me to find her.”
O’Brien breathes. It’s something like a sigh of relief. Or perhaps it is the breath that signals the summoning of the energy she requires to carry on a session with a friend who is now, with these last words, confirmed to be certifiable.