by John Lutz
Back across the street from the burned-out building, the three men removed their helmets and smoothed back sweat-drenched hair.
“You need a shower after each of these inspections?” Quinn asked.
Hertz laughed and emitted his peculiar snort. “That’d be nice. ’Specially for my wife.” He looked from Fedderman to Quinn. “So, what’s next for you guys?”
“We’re going to interview the super,” Quinn said. “We’ll copy you.”
“Vice versa,” Hertz said. “Supers know everything in these buildings. See if he’s missing any alarm clocks.”
He was smiling again, obviously enjoying his work. Quinn liked him for that.
“His wife, Anna, is not to be taken lightly, either,” Hertz said. “She’s the beauty and the brains.”
10
Quinn and Fedderman found out from Hertz that Emilio and his wife Anna were staying temporarily in an apartment that was owned by the proprietor of Off the Road.
They were both home and both looked nervous when Emilio opened the door and invited them in.
“More questions,” Emilio said. He was a short, mustachioed man and seemed more tired than annoyed. “I’ve already told my story more than once to the police.”
“We’re fussbudgets,” Fedderman said.
Anna, a handsome Latin woman with a profile that belonged on a coin, smiled wearily and motioned for them to sit down. Quinn and Fedderman sat in uncomfortable modern wooden chairs of the sort that rigid religions might use to guarantee discomfort during sermons. Anna offered them water.
“We could have used more of that last night,” Quinn said.
“Yes,” Emilio said. “We found that out too late.” He and his wife sat down side by side on a sagging, stained sofa. It looked as if it would open and become a backbreaking bed. Anna absently reached over and patted Emilio’s thigh. Quinn saw that these two were actually in love. And the arson investigator wasn’t wrong about her being beautiful. Emilio wasn’t going to do any better.
“We read your statement,” Quinn said. “You saw someone who might have been the arsonist emerging from a basement window.”
Emilio said simply, “Yes,” as if testifying in court and a stenographer needed brief words from him rather than images.
Fedderman said, “Would you say he was trying to get away from the scene, or attempting to escape the flames?”
Emilio thought. Shrugged. “It could have been either. The whole thing didn’t last that long. He squeezed out of the window, then took off running and disappeared in all the smoke.”
“I only caught a slight glimpse of him, if I saw him at all,” Anna said. “The smoke, the smell, it played with the senses.”
Quinn smiled, wishing she was as helpful as she was beautiful. He focused his attention on Emilio. “Can you give us a description of the man?”
“I would be repeating it once again.”
“Yes,” Quinn said.
Emilio sighed. “Small man, dressed in black and wearing a blue baseball cap pulled down low. Moved in a very nimble way. One of his ears—his right one, I think—stuck straight out and came to a point at the top. Like he was a . . .”
“Gremlin,” Anna said.
“I thought you were going to say leprechaun,” Fedderman said.
Anna looked puzzled. Shrugged. “I don’t know leprechaun. I know gremlin. They tinker. Break.”
“You’d have to be Irish,” Quinn said. “What about his other ear?” he asked Emilio.
“I’m not sure. The cap was too large for him, and it might have covered his right ear, held it flat against his head. Hard to say. He moved very fast, like a mirage.”
“But you did see him?”
“My husband doesn’t see mirages,” Anna said.
That seemed definite and final.
Quinn smiled. “Don’t worry. That’s not what we think. The fire was started by someone who wasn’t a mirage, but was very real, using an alarm clock as a timer to set off an incendiary bomb.”
“Terrorism?” Anna asked, her dark eyes wide.
“We don’t think so. No terrorist group is taking credit, and this wasn’t a very skilled bomb maker.”
“But the bomb worked,” Emilio said.
“That’s a good point,” Fedderman told him. “But everyone who should know sees this as simple arson, committed by someone clever, but not very knowledgeable about bombs.”
“And you can’t put a policeman in every building,” Anna said.
Fedderman said, “Another good point.”
“The neighborhood gossip, who usually starts and ends nowhere, is speaking of him as a firebug,” Emilio said.
“That might be part of it,” Quinn said. “But it’s more than that. He seems compelled to look inside things, see how they work. Know anyone like that?”
“A lot of people,” Emilio said. “But not arsonists.”
“There is the off chance that they’re not the same person,” Quinn said.
“Not much chance of that,” Fedderman said.
“‘The Gremlin,’ some newscasters are calling him,” Anna said. “A kind of ghost in the machine, causing trouble.”
She apparently believed the single-killer-arsonist theory.
“Gremlins have been known to tinker with electronics or engines and bring down airplanes,” Fedderman said.
Quinn looked at him. “Who told you that? The FAA?”
“Harold.”
Of course.
“Those media people who tagged the killer the Gremlin,” Quinn said. “Was one of those mouthy newscasters Minnie Miner?”
Anna said, “How did you know?”
Quinn wasn’t telling.
Minnie Miner had cooperated, and the rapacious little newshound would surely want something in return.
But right now Quinn was trying to keep a lid on things, and gremlin was a kinder word than terrorist.
“‘Gremlin,’” he said. “Very descriptive.”
“We wouldn’t want it to become a household word,” Fedderman said.
“We wouldn’t,” Quinn said, “but the killer might.”
11
“About half an hour before the fire in the Village,” Renz said, “there was a similar fire uptown.”
It was the next morning, and he and Quinn were in World Famous Diner on Amsterdam, having coffee and doughnuts. Renz had a large red napkin tucked under his chin so as not to get powdered sugar on his Ralph Lauren tie, tan silk suit jacket, or white shirt. Quinn could see the tiny roughness of sugar on the part of the shirt that showed, like lumps of something under a recent snowfall. Probably all the sugar would drop onto Renz’s pants when he stood up.
“Coincidence?” he asked Renz.
Renz shook his head, causing sugar to drop from his napkin to somewhere beneath table level. “Diversion. Same arsonist.”
“How do we know that?”
“The fire was in a dry cleaners only a few blocks from a firehouse. It didn’t get a chance to burn very long before the FDNY arrived in full force and extinguished the flames.”
“Start with an incendiary device?” Quinn asked.
“Yesh,” Renz said around a mouthful of chocolate-iced doughnut. “Alsho an alarm clock timer. The firebug didn’t splash a lot of flammable liquid—probably plain old gasoline—around the place. Enough, though, that the blackened clock didn’t yield any prints or anything else. It was the same kind of job as down in the Village, only on a smaller scale. Like a warm-up as well as a diversion that would rob the larger conflagration of firefighters and equipment.”
“Any casualties?”
“None.”
“Same amateur touch?”
“Oh, yes. Almost certainly the same arsonist. It was almost like a practice run.”
Quinn sipped from his white coffee mug. “Witnesses?”
“Not of any value. One guy in the building across the street claimed he saw somebody or something running from the fire about an hour before it even began to
look like a fire.”
Hope moved in Quinn’s heart. Not a lot of hope, because he knew how much an eyewitness report from someone glimpsing something from a window across the street was worth.
“He just got a quick look, doesn’t know if there’s any connection with the fire. But the guy was moving fast, as if trying to get away from the area without drawing a lot of attention to himself.”
“You think this witness is worth talking to?” Quinn asked.
“Definitely.”
“Small guy?”
Renz stared at him. “Yeah. Somebody else see him?”
“Maybe somebody downtown.” Quinn looked into his coffee mug, as if for answers, found only questions. “Anything else your witness notice about the uptown guy?”
“That suggests he was also the Village firebug?” Renz glanced around as if to make sure they wouldn’t be overheard. No one else was in the diner except for three teenage girls giggling in a back booth, and a bearded guy at the counter almost embracing a mug of coffee as if he wished it were booze. “There is one thing,” Renz said. “The witness said the firebug’s ears stuck out.”
Quinn was interested. “Both ears?”
“I asked him that question,” Renz said. “He told me he doesn’t know. Might have been only one ear, pointed as it was.”
“Pointed?”
“Yeah. It stuck out and was pointed on top.” Renz took a huge bite of doughnut and chewed. “Newswoman called the firebug a gremlin, maybe because of the ears.”
“Leprechauns’ ears stick out, too,” Quinn said. Not actually knowing.
“But they don’t plant bombs,” Renz said. “They’re too busy looking for rainbows and pots of gold.” He swallowed masticated doughnut. Quinn could hear his esophagus working to get the doughy mass down.
“If they want to give this guy a tag,” Quinn said, “the Gremlin is as good as any.”
“I guess,” Renz said. “I wonder who thought it up?” He smiled like a croissant.
12
Iowa, 1991
Jordan Kray’s twelfth birthday hadn’t been mentioned except for the traditional birthday spanking, which was expertly applied to his buttocks and upper thighs with a leather whip. The flesh hadn’t been broken but was raised with fiery welts that would sting for hours. He didn’t think he’d sleep at all tonight.
His twin brother, Kent, hadn’t minded his birthday at all. He was given a Timex watch and allowed to stay up and watch television. Their father had told him it was for work done around the house and small farm, work that was seldom done by Jordan. Kent and Jordan’s mother smilingly agreed while she wielded the whip and her husband watched, fondling himself.
It was a fairly normal night for the Krays, while five-year-old Nora slept peacefully in her bed in the far bedroom. Kent had told Jordan he’d heard their mother and father talking about moving Nora in with him and sending Jordan to Nora’s shoebox-size room. Alice and Jason—their mother and father—had talked about moving different kinds of equipment into the room with Jordan, but Kent, overhearing this, had no idea what they were planning.
Whipping required exertion, and Alice stopped and stepped back, breathing hard.
“Leave yourself alone and use this for a while,” she said, tossing Jason the coiled whip.
Jason obeyed, but didn’t whip hard. Jordan knew this wasn’t an act of kindness; his father was simply more interested in other things. Kent lay on his stomach, pretending sleep while facing the wall.
Jordan knew his brother was the better looking of the twins. His features were even and he resembled his mother, with her bold features and curly hair. Jordan had small, pinched features, and one of his ears stood straight out like an open car door and was kind of pointed. This, along with his diminutive size even for his age, lent him an elfin quality that would stay with him the rest of his life. The other ear—his left—stuck out a little and wasn’t pointed. The midwife who’d delivered the twins had learned from the firstborn, Jordan, who was a few minutes older than his twin, that identical twins weren’t alike in every respect. The protruding, pointed ear seemed to become even larger and more pointed after a schoolyard bully held Jordan in a headlock and rubbed the side of his face over and over on concrete. It was decided that Jordan had started the fight.
Kent tried to explain to his mother that the accusers were lying, but Jordan received a harder than usual whipping, and was made to stand in a corner for yelping and waking up Nora.
A week later Jordan tried to change the oil in the car but confused it with transmission fluid. He enjoyed working on things mechanical, large and small. He had a driving curiosity. Jordan liked to think that anything he took apart he could reassemble. He was as wrong as he was confident, but that didn’t stop him from tinkering.
He saved his money and bought a model airplane he had to construct by hand. When it was finished, it looked more like a Russian MIG than the sleek American Saber Jet pictured on the box. When he tried to glide it, the plane looped and then nosed hard into the ground. He would have rebuilt it and tried again, only his father stomped on the plane, laughed, and said he’d thought it was a big bug.
That was how Jordan’s childhood went, except for his dreams where he went to hide. Except for his nighttime hours of lying in the silence and thinking until early morning, when he was forced to get up and do his chores before walking down to the road and waiting for the school bus.
Kent sometimes walked with him, but usually had been sent on before Jordan. Nora, too young for school, lay dozing in her crib and was treated like a princess.
Jordan knew she wouldn’t always be treated like a princess. Sometimes he found himself looking forward to that and felt guilty.
He was thirteen when he came upon an old Movie Spotlight magazine that was mostly pages of beautiful women posed various ways in various skimpy costumes. Some of the women Jordan was familiar with, like Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan. Others were more his friends’ grandfathers’ age; Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner. Others had names that were only vaguely familiar.
Jordan turned a page and was surprised to see a photo of a man. Bing Crosby. Jordan knew he had been a singer and a movie star—had been famous for some time. There was a black-and-white photo of Crosby leaning on the fender of a car. A newer photo, in color, had him leaning on a tree and looking straight at the camera. He was, in fact, looking straight at the camera in both photos. In the earlier one, his ears stood straight out, not so unlike Jordan’s. In the newer, color photo, his ears were almost flat against his head. Beneath both photos was the caption “Bing’s Secret.”
Jordan read the accompanying short text. It seemed that Crosby’s ears did stick out, but there was this tape that was sticky on both sides that the movie star used when he was in front of the camera. Supposedly, Clark Gable used it, too.
Jordan couldn’t help but smile. If famous people used the special tape, he shouldn’t be embarrassed by his ears. He could find where the tape was sold and buy a roll.
He stood before the bathroom mirror, holding both ears back with his forefingers.
Yes, it made a difference.
He was almost as handsome as Kent.
He got a role of white adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet, and unrolled about an inch of tape, tore it off the roll, and then doubled it so it was sticky on both sides. He tried it on his right ear.
It worked for a few seconds, then the ear pulled lose and sprang out from his skull.
When he attempted to tear off another piece of tape, the metal and cardboard spool came apart. That and the roll of tape flew from his grasp and clattered to the tile floor.
The door opened. His mother. She looked at him, then at the clutter on the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.
Jordan was too surprised and frightened to reply.
She grabbed him by the right ear, squeezing hard, and walked him out of the bathroom. He could feel tears streaming down his cheeks.
His
father was standing in the hall, holding a sheet of newspaper—the sports page. “What the hell you catch him doing?” he asked Jordan’s mother. “Jerking off again?”
“Who knows or cares?” his mother said. She released his ear and slapped him hard on the left side of his face. His cheek burned.
“What’d he break now?” his father asked. “Was he taking that tape dispenser apart?” He clucked his tongue at Jordan. “You ever see anything you didn’t wanna take apart and screw up?”
Jordan knew when not to answer.
His mother shoved him toward the bedroom, scraping his bare elbow against the wall. “I’ll take care of him.”
Jordan’s father studied Jordan’s face, which Jordan studied to control, and then shook his head. “You really do need to learn to behave.”
“I’ll teach him.” Another push toward the bedroom. His mother and father’s room.
There was motion off to the side, and Kent peeked around the corner. His face paled. “What’s goin’ on?”
His mother glared at him, and he pulled back and disappeared.
The noise had awakened Nora, who screamed in her crib.
“I’ll take care of her,” Jordan’s mother said, “soon as I’m done with you.”
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Jordan’s father said.
She laughed at her husband and looked at him a certain way, until he turned away from her.
13
New York, the present
“Have a nice night, Margaret.”
The woman, Margaret, returned the good wishes of the man in the suit and tie who had come out of the office building she had just left. A fellow worker drone, no doubt.
Jordan watched her as she crossed the street at the signal. How could she move that way? The precision of her stride, the rhythmic sway of her hips, the swing of her free arm with its opposite resting lightly on the purse that was supported by a leather strap slung over her shoulder. Why wasn’t she like the other women he saw every day? How was she different?
Whatever the answers to those questions, he knew it was fate and not chance that had brought them together. And that would bring them ever closer to each other.