Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “Now,” she said, licking her lips, turning white, smiling toward Cover-Hoover and edging toward Fred’s doorway.

  “Should we say a prayer first?” Fred suggested, lofting himself across the space between them and smashing the flame, and her right hand, and his, together in one creaking, snapping, fist.

  * * *

  He did not let go of Sandy’s crushed hand, but dragged her by it behind him all the way to the far end of the corridor, and through into the next room, until he had it down in the filthy and blessed water of the sink.

  “I trusted you. You fuck, I trusted you. You’re like the rest of them,” Sandy Blake whined.

  Fred locked her into one of the furnished stalls. The new personality Sandy had chosen he didn’t want to give much independent room. He ran back into the so-called meeting room, where Molly was calling for him and where Eunice Cover-Hoover stood pale and calm as Joan of Arc after the last-minute reprieve, wondering how to justify her divine mission given the intervention of human mercy between herself and martyrdom.

  Fred kicked the soaked cloth away from her. He picked up a length of pipe and knocked out glass and boards from the windows on both sides of the room, so they’d start sucking a damp crossdraft. The soaked cloth he threw out a window, along with the gas can.

  Molly said, “OK, Fred.”

  “I thought you were exchanging my baseball glove,” Fred said. “Which I know is a surprise. I can’t undo the cuffs. I’ll get someone as fast as I can.”

  “Soon would be good,” Molly said. “Meantime, maybe something to kneel on? A pillow?”

  “Untie me,” Eunice Cover-Hoover demanded.

  “You interrupted a precious dyad,” Fred told her. “Molly, you were saying?”

  “Just, my knees ain’t what they were back when Sister Rita was training me for Queen of the May,” Molly said. “What with all this cement.”

  “Will do,” Fred said. “I’ll make you as comfortable as I can. I know you’re freezing. But I don’t want anything in here that will burn.”

  “Cold and wet is my favorite,” Molly assured him.

  “Untie me,” Cover-Hoover repeated. “There is still danger.”

  “Molly has questions,” Fred said. “The two of you might as well take advantage of the opportunity, as long as Molly is detained.”

  * * *

  It was after eight o’clock. Sandy Blake yelled in her locked stall. Fred used the safe house telephone to call Cambridge police headquarters and made an obstinate stink until they gave him Bookrajian’s home number, which was answered on the tenth ring by a sweet, little-girl Southern voice.

  “Blanche Maybelle?” Fred asked. “Stardust?”

  “Bookrajian,” she answered proudly.

  “Put Bookrajian on.”

  * * *

  The parade did not start arriving until twenty minutes later; but after it started it left little to be desired from the point of view of the children of the neighborhood: rescue vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks, fire marshal, bomb squad, a representative of the sheriff’s office, and five squad cars—as well as Bookrajian in his old Diego. Fred had urged strongly that he begin by coming alone, leaving his cigar outside, and bringing tools to deal with Molly’s cuffs.

  Only with difficulty, and by offering threats of mute non-cooperation, did he cause Bookrajian to hold back the army of occupation, keeping them in a cluster in the living quarters. “See, of the three people detained against their will, only one of them should be at large, and she would prefer, not being of a type who courts the public eye, that I carry in those bolt cutters by myself, and that we give her a chance to become decent. Otherwise you are going to be asking questions for a long time to one very silent man.”

  Bookrajian sent the fire team and bomb squad outside to get set up and detained the others, allowing Fred three minutes to cut the chains on Molly’s cuffs. The cops would get the bracelets off her wrists and ankles later. Cover-Hoover snarled as Fred wrapped Molly in the pink blanket he had found, which, when he opened it, turned out to have a Mickey Mouse head emblazoned in the center.

  Molly, her teeth chattering, said, “Thanks for not bringing in the cavalry. I’m not at my best until I wash. Cover-Hoover wants to know if we want a present of fifty thousand dollars. All we’d have to do is go to the Cayman Islands to pick it up.”

  “Got an account there, have we?” Fred asked Cover-Hoover.

  “I told her we have too much money as it is,” Molly said.

  Cover-Hoover said, “It will be the word of lunatics against mine. My offer was made simply to preserve my work from distraction. I can assure you…”

  Fred took Molly to the bathroom and left her to it, watching hot water start its rush into the big tub and telling her, “I’ll find you something more than that blanket to wear.”

  Bookrajian, in the living quarters, kept his team at bay and told Fred, “Listen, sport. I figure we got two minutes before the Chronicle gets here; three for the Globe; maybe seven for the Herald and WBZ. You want to give me a clue here what the story is on all these victims?”

  “If you’ll keep the other two ladies in protective custody, Bookrajian, and bear with me while we waltz together down the fine line between victims and murdering assholes.”

  “I said we got two minutes. Call me Ernie. It’ll save time. Meanwhile I’ll be thinking about what kind of custody to put you in.”

  * * *

  At almost midnight the party had adjourned to headquarters at Central Square. Sandy Clarke, in an incoherent threshold phase between personalities, was on her way, restrained, to make a close encounter of the third kind with the shrink at Cambridge City Hospital. Cover-Hoover was talking to some people elsewhere in the building.

  Bookrajian had brought Fred to headquarters in his own car, leaving Fred’s on Richdale Avenue to start collecting nonresident tickets. “You’re an interesting guy,” Bookrajian had insisted, “that I want to keep next to for a little while.”

  Fred and Bookrajian had picked up Boardman Templeton and shipped him, strapped to a stretcher and under police escort, to Mount Auburn Hospital. “We like to throw a little of our business to everyone,” Bookrajian confided, “so nobody gets jealous.”

  He’d learned enough from Molly, and from Fred, to call in warrants and seal off the place on Richdale Avenue, as well as Kwik-Frame, Cover-Hoover’s office, and the apartment on Hay Street. At each place a team was now working.

  “You are a busy guy,” Bookrajian told Fred as they watched the medics bumping Manny’s stretcher along the corridor outside Cover-Hoover’s office. “Two naked chicks restrained, as well as this wicked-witch-of-the-East Doctor Cover-Hoover, who I will lock up permanently if I can; though it’s hard persuading a judge to put away a beautiful professional woman who’s a full professor and on the board of several big-deal places and the rest of it, and also publishes books. They think it’s a vendetta or professional jealousy. Too bad she’s not an ugly man. Besides, a doctor—they’re gonna say her patients need her and let her out on her own recognizance. Then there’s Mickey, who you say did the old man, and that lady antique dealer?”

  “It’s just a suggestion.”

  “You did that to his arms?”

  “I was pressed for time,” Fred said.

  “I love it. Understatement. The Greeks have a name for that rhetorical device. They call it dehydrated bullshit. Who else you got on ice?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d arrange for my friend Molly Riley to be released so she can go back to her children.”

  Molly, walking stiffly, and wearing a collection of drab and outlandish clothing brought to the safe house for her by one of the female cops—Bookrajian would allow nothing to leave the premises, since everything in the place might become evidence—was driven to Arlington in a cruiser.

  * * *

  After Molly had been sent home, Fred suggested, “You want to talk to the other sister?” They were sitting in Bookrajian’s office, smoking cigars lik
e old poker-playing buddies.

  “I hoped you were going to ask me that. Meanwhile, you mind letting me have the keys to your car? Save us breaking in with a warrant. Save us even getting a warrant. I am a thorough guy and I like to make sure nothing gets away from the scene of a crime by accident.”

  Fred tossed him the keys. “Be my guest. You’ll find a recording device, maybe under the seats. I took it off Cover-Hoover. Be careful with the picture in the back, though, would you? It’s kind of fragile.”

  Bookrajian handed Fred’s keys to a waiting gofer. “Tell the guys to give special attention to the picture in the back. You want to tell me anything about the picture in the back?”

  “I’m thinking the animals are snakes or snails. Maybe your people will know. You want me to telephone the place where the sister is, tell ’em we’re on our way?”

  “I like a surprise. You are gonna stay away from telephones, and you are going to ride with me, sport.”

  36

  Jackie Banner, a huge black-bearded man in rags, was doing the honors at the desk in the Chestnut Street vestibule. He looked up in a question when Fred appeared with the two uniformed Cambridge cops, an escort from the Boston force, and Bookrajian in plainclothes, who had just been remarking to Fred, “This is supposed to be my honeymoon.”

  “Teddy says wake him when you come in,” Jackie Banner growled. “You need help entertaining these people, Fred?”

  “They’re friends. Thanks.”

  Bookrajian noticed how Jackie Banner’s hands rested quietly on the desktop. “He knows what he’s doing,” Fred assured Bookrajian. “It’s in the top drawer of the desk, and yes, there’s a permit for it.” The others were looking back and forth, wondering what this was about.

  “I’ll rouse Teddy,” Banner said, and shoved his chair back. He climbed the stairs leading up from the vestibule. Bookrajian stood tense, his eyes alight. “Interesting place,” he said.

  Teddy came down with the key to the back room. Fred made introductions. Bookrajian and his people stared at Teddy, who slept in red long johns and had not bothered to alter his costume for the interview. “The lady won’t stop calling me Mr. Pix,” he said. “I got so tired listening to her confessing everything she ever heard of, I locked her in the back room. The foreign guy, the Hungarian, with the busted hands is with her. She feeds him. You didn’t tell me what to do with him.”

  “Marek Hricsó,” Fred told Bookrajian. The vestibule was so full of people it was hard to concentrate. “You recall the piano player? The nephew?”

  “Yeah. Who is not a friend of yours. Before we meet the sister, just for the hell of it, soldier, what has she been confessing?”

  Teddy told him. “Devil worship, and dropping her father off a bridge, and in a past life she is Nicholae Ceauşescu, and someone is stealing a painting from her, and she’s been framed, and what time is the train for Concord, and she yells for more gin, and don’t believe anything her sister tells you, she got most of the stuff, she should be set up for life, and the devil is after her again—this lady has one shitload of shit on her mind.”

  Fred spread his hands, remarking, “The denouement coming down off this thing is going to take some time.” He sat on the desk while Bookrajian and a mixed pair of officers followed Teddy to the back room. In a few minutes Bookrajian came back and told Fred, “You are excused. Pick up your car on Green Street. The stuff in it we keep. They’ll give you a receipt. I want to see you tomorrow; no, later this morning. Call at ten. Can you do that? So I don’t have to find a place for you to stay?” He rubbed his hands in the gesture that says, Come on, buddy. Give me an excuse. Just try me.

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing how my friend is making out,” Fred said.

  * * *

  Fred drove to Arlington entertaining dread and misgivings. He had never seen Molly so threatened and had no idea how the aftermath would read in her. It was after three when he brought his car into her street. A darkly unobtrusive sedan sat at the far end of Molly’s block. It stood out because of Arlington’s no-overnight-parking regulation. Bookrajian was a cautious man. Fred flashed his lights in greeting to the watcher as he turned into Molly’s driveway.

  Molly met him at the kitchen door. She smelled not of gasoline, but of hamburgers and onions, shampoo and soap. She was wearing the red terry-cloth robe. She was excited.

  “Come look!” she said.

  “You got back all right.”

  “I got home, and I got it home also. I couldn’t help it getting rumpled, and I thought they were going to frisk me—but I’m here and it’s here. Come look.” Molly dragged him into the kitchen, where she had her library’s World of Copley lying open next to the last two fragments, one on top of the other, of the painting—still, Fred thought, slightly fragrant of gasoline, whose scent would always, from now on, make him think, with a twinge of anxious tenderness, of Molly’s skin, against which they had been smuggled out of the building on Richdale Avenue.

  “It’s the same head in Watson and the Shark,” Molly insisted. “It’s just he’s younger in yours. You got my note?”

  “It’s you I want to look at. Honey, I didn’t…”

  “Never mind. I’m going to shake and cry and bitch at you a lot, but first look at this, and then we should make love because we are alive. No. Not yet. First look at Watson and the Shark with me. It’s the first thing I did after I hugged the kids and cried. I thought I recognized that face. I’ve seen it a hundred times at the MFA.”

  The reproduction of Copley’s heroic-rescue painting lay next to the painted head. A naked swimmer, blond and male and young, splashed in Havana harbor in imminent danger of death at the jaws of a sea beast fifteen times his size curled around the lower right corner of the painting: one of three versions Copley had done, spurred by the commission from Brooke Watson, the one-legged victim-hero of the encounter.

  Molly pointed to the apex of a group of sailors racing their longboat through green braided water to Watson’s rescue—some reaching to gather him aboard; some at the oars; one threatening the aquatic monster with a gaff. The figure standing tallest among the sailors, Fred could accept in theory—older by a dozen years, and worn with care and voyaging—could be the father, or older brother, or cousin of—or even Mr. Pix himself.

  “The boy in trouble’s Brooke Watson,” Molly announced. “You’re going to think I’m being dramatic when I say that the gesture on the part of the African sailor—he’s not helping. It’s a gesture almost of mortal ambivalence, as if he’s saying to himself, ‘If I save that man’s life, how will he punish me later?’

  “Brooke Watson, minus one leg, grew up to be a great success in England after the Revolution: a big merchant, Lord Mayor of London, and a member of Parliament; where, incidentally, he campaigned to preserve the institution of slavery in what remained of the British colonies.”

  “Could be,” Fred said. “We’ll check and see if that sailor has been identified. Meanwhile, the other plan you had…”

  “I retain my red robe, symbol of my new virginity, until you explain this Mr. Pixie business.” Molly pointed at the signature, in black letters, not far from the left cheek of the portrait’s subject. “There’s no way I can read anything other than I. S. C. Pix.”

  “You got a half-hour to spare, or do you want the miniversion?”

  “The kids are going to wake up. Give me the mini.”

  “Speaking of the kids—Molly, what you said, about appointing me their guardian, I’m…”

  “It was a moment of mental aberration on my part. Don’t mention it, all right?”

  “It’s just, I’m touched.…”

  “Pix,” Molly said firmly. “That is all I care about.”

  “By 1765 Copley’s excited, thinks he’s going to be a real artist. He gets the Latin bug. He often signs himself with his initials in monogram, J.S.C. But sometimes, since the Latin has no J, he goes with I for the first initial. Then the Latin pinxit means “painted,” which he occasionally shortened
to Pix. I. S. C. Pix means John Singleton Copley painted this. That’s the short version. That’s all.”

  “Unexciting but essential. If I don’t make love with you now, I’m going into post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome in a big way,” Molly said, “and maybe try the multiple personality route instead. We’ll do it therapeutically, like role-playing—one of the techniques they use to dredge up hidden, secret, repressed whathaveyous. You be Watson, and I’ll be the shark. To quote another famous American dead person, ‘Watson, come here; I want you.’”

  * * *

  The morning brought heavy rain that seemed to rise out of the ground. Fred heard it as the background to Molly’s scolding at the kids. He’d slept an hour but suspected she hadn’t closed her eyes.

  “But it’s his birthday,” Terry’s voice wailed from across the hall. “What do you mean let him sleep? He’ll miss it!”

  Molly’s voice mumbled something incoherent. The bedroom door opened and Fred cracked one eye to see Sam standing in the doorway. “I didn’t know if you are awake,” Sam said.

  “Be down in two minutes. You got the time?”

  “Seven. Make it five minutes, OK?”

  Fred pushed himself through the new shower. It fell at the same rate of inches-per-hour as the rain on the bathroom window; but it was warm. Fred, under the sting of it, counted the players who were, at least for the moment, out of action: Manny, Ann Clarke, Sandy Blake, Eunice Cover-Hoover—the rat’s nest of guilts and responsibilities for two deaths and how much else—that was someone else’s problem. Martin Clarke was dead: an old man who may or may not have been some kind of grievous son of a bitch also. Oona Imry was dead. As he’d learned from Ann Clarke, Oona had given Sandy Clarke a ride back to the safe house after Sandy sold her the second fragment and some silver, whereupon the antique dealer had to be eliminated by Sandy’s mouse-infested protective-hero former-victim lover, Boardman Templeton. And Marek had been unkindly plucked from one profession and dropped into another, at which he would be either excellent or a fast failure. You can’t be a sort-of-good dealer in antiques for long.