by Evans, Jon
I began to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. "Kevin —"
"It's important to realize that our growth paradigm will not in the long run be affected by this and we view it as a hiccup. However in the interim we have been forced to make some very difficult decisions with a view towards consolidating our operations—"
"Kevin, are you laying me off?"
He tried to look me straight in the eye, I'll give him that, but at the last second he failed, and staring at the desk he said "Yes."
"Okay," I said.
"Paul, I'm really sorry, I fought as hard as I could for you, but the top brass —"
"I'm not just saying okay," I interrupted. "I actually mean it. In fact I'm happy to hear it." And I did too. In fact I realized I was smiling. I felt as if a huge weight was ballooning away from my head. Unemployment! I felt like I was being paroled.
"Really?" he asked.
"Absolutely."
"Why?"
"Middle management like you will never understand." I meant it as a tease but I think he took it as an insult. Ah, well, he had after all just fired me, I could live with him thinking I'd taken a shot at him.
"What about Rob?" I asked.
"Him too."
"Severance package?"
"Four weeks pay and one month free COBRA health coverage. Here." He gave me a manila envelope from a frighteningly tall stack on his desk.
"That sounds fair. Am I supposed to sign a contract saying that I won't sue you or something?"
"Jeez. We never thought of that. Do you think you could… " he began.
"Kevin," I said. "I'm not suing you, but I'm not signing anything either. Anything else?"
"What about the Palm Pilot we gave you?"
"I threw it into the San Francisco Bay," I said. It was the truth.
"You — what?"
"Can't stand the things," I explained.
"Oh," he said. "Well. I guess we'll just write that one off. Your laptop's here?"
"It sure is," I said, very glad that all of my important notes and correspondence were backed up on my Yahoo account. "I'll just leave it."
"Okay. Well. Thanks for taking this so well."
"My pleasure. Are you supposed to escort me out of the building now?"
He looked miserable.
"Ah, jeez, you are, too." I shook my head. "Just watch your own back. I've heard that in some places the last guy to get the axe on a day like this is the guy who just fired everyone else. Spares the place a lot of bad blood, or something."
This was a total lie but it was worth it for the frightened expression that crawled over his face. I followed him out of the building feeling a little guilty about it. But only a little.
* * *
I walked out of the office, crossed Mission Street, took the little pathway that led to Market Street, intending to go down to the Muni station and go home. Just at the corner of Market and Montgomery I stopped dead in my tracks so abruptly that an Asian woman nearly collided with me. I barely noticed her furious look.
I stood there for what felt like a long time. I think maybe it really was a long time. Maybe half an hour. People gave me strange looks. Probably because I was dressed normally. Part of San Francisco's charm; if I had covered myself in silver paint or mummified myself in leather strips nobody would have paid me the least bit of attention, but a tranced-out yuppie like myself, that was man bites dog.
I guess I flipped out a little just then. It was a whole bunch of things. Partly it was being newly unemployed. It's something that rattles you, a lot, even if you have money in the bank, even if you know you can get a new job in a matter of days, even if you're actually happy about it. And I was happy about it. I was happier than I had been for months, but I didn't understand why. That rattled me too.
I had never been so free, not in my whole life. It was terrifying.
I don't know why, but I felt like there were an infinite number of roads leading from the corner of Market and Montgomery, and the one that I chose would define my entire life. That half hour felt pregnant with… whatever you want to call it. Doom. Fate. Destiny.
I could get another job. I could stay here. I liked Talena, and Talena liked me, and she hadn't said anything about a boyfriend. I thought there might be possibilities there. I could stay and try to teach myself how to be happy. It couldn't be that hard, could it? Lots of people seemed to manage it.
I could move to London. Move to my tribe, or at least find out once and for all whether they were in fact my tribe. Maybe a change of scenery was just what I needed. Maybe my problem was that I was never meant to live in America, and I could never be happy here.
I could go home to Canada. I could work for a year as a volunteer teacher in some godforsaken village in Chad or Suriname or Bangladesh. I could move down to L.A. and start writing screenplays. I could move to Zimbabwe and join my cousins on their farm. I could go to the South Bronx and begin a romantic Dostoevskyesque death spiral of drugs and violence and empty sex with crack whores. I could become an Antarctic explorer, or a professional scuba diver, or a Cirque du Soleil acrobat. I could enter the Shaolin Temple and become the baddest motherfucker in the whole wide world.
The man who killed Stanley Goebel was in Kuta Beach, Bali. He might be the same man who killed Laura.
I reflexively told myself to stop thinking about Laura. I had done enough thinking about Laura. I had done more deep wrenching thinking about Laura than I ever would have if she had not been murdered and we had gotten married and spent the rest of our lives together. I had to get on with my life. She was dead. A man had killed her. For a long time I had nursed a suspicion that her killer was someone I knew, someone on the truck. But I could let that suspicion go now. I was free of it at last. One thing this whole Stanley Goebel thing had made clear was that there was no way that someone on the truck could be The Bull. And that meant that Laura's murder had been nothing but a random act of senseless violence. It proved that her killer was John Doe, faceless, anonymous, unknown.
Wait.
Did it?
Or was there another possibility?
I turned away from the Muni station and walked back along Market Street. I entered the American Express travel office at the next corner.
"Hello," I said to the lady behind the desk. "I want to go to Bali."
"And when would you like to go?" she asked.
"Today," I said, living out a fantasy I had long had, and despite the emotions flickering and straining within me, a toxic maelstrom of suspicion and anger and confusion and loss and the need to do anything rather than nothing, I managed to enjoy the look of surprise on her face.
* * *
It all worked a charm. There was a flight from Los Angeles to Denpasar that left at 10PM. Shuttle flights went from SFO to LAX every half hour. It wasn't even that expensive, two thousand dollars return, not so bad for a last-minute ticket across the Pacific. I could afford it. I scheduled the return flight for three weeks later.
I went home. I packed. I called SuperShuttle. I wanted to check the Thorn Tree, but my laptop had been repossessed, so I went to the nearest copy center and checked from there. And indeed:
BC088269 11/07 08:02
As a matter of fact I am pretty smart, Mr. Wood. A lot smarter than you're going to look when I'm through with you.
I felt triumphant. I'd lured him into a conversation. I wrote back:
PaulWood 11/07 16:51
Spare us, OK? I'm talking about real murders here. I don't have time for a juvenile full-of-shit wannabe like you. You say you're the Bull? Then tell me this, what colour jacket were you wearing up on the trail? You know when I'm talking about. Or you would if you were for real.
Then I went back home and called Talena at work. She'd just left. I called her at home. She wasn't there yet. I left her a message telling her to call me right away. I waited in the study, for her phone call or the SuperShuttle van, whichever got there first.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
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"I called my friend in Cape Town," she said. "The South Africans were the same as the others. Swiss Army knives in their eyes. He's reopening the case and he's going to talk to your friend Gavin and call Interpol."
"Great," I said. "I'm going to Indonesia."
"You're what?"
"I'm going to Indonesia."
"When?"
"Tonight," I said.
"Tonight? Are you crazy?"
"Maybe."
"What the fuck do you think you're playing at, you idiot?"
"Hey," I said, more than a little hurt. I was doing this, I suddenly realized, in part to impress Talena. "I got laid off today, I got nothing better to do, I'm going to go down there."
"And do what?"
"Find him," I said shortly.
"Yeah? Suppose you do. And then what?"
"And then I'll know who he is."
"No, you dumb shit, and then you'll be dead, because in case you've forgotten, you're a computer programmer, and you're chasing a fucking serial killer, and he already knows who you are, and he's going to fucking murder you if you find him. You're being the worst kind of macho moron. Cancel the tickets and stay here."
I chose to ignore her advice. "Listen," I said, "he sent another message today."
"I know. I saw."
"Could you try to check to see if it came from the same place? If you remember anything about what I did?"
"I remember fine, I already checked, it came from the same place," she said. "Now tell me you're going to cancel the tickets."
"I'm just going to go there and see what I can find out," I said.
"Balthazar," she said quietly. "You stupid shit. You think I want to find you with knives in your eyes?"
"Call me Paul."
"All right, Paul. Tell me this. Suppose you do find him. Then what exactly are you going to do?"
"I don't know," I said.
"You think you're going to kill him because he killed your friend?"
"I don't know," I repeated.
"Because I'm telling you now, you're not the type."
"How do you know what the type is?"
"I've seen a lot more murder victims than you ever have, you… Look." She abruptly switched from angry hectoring to pleading. "I grew up in Bosnia. I was there for the war. I've met enough nice guys who wound up dead for one lifetime. Take it from me, you're no killer. And I know you're a guy and that sounds like an insult, but it's not, I like you for it. And believe me, please believe me, chasing him down to Indonesia is the worst and stupidest thing you can do right now."
"I gotta go," I said. "SuperShuttle is here."
"No, Paul, don't be a total fucking -"
"Wish me luck," I said. "I'll be in touch."
Part 3
Indonesia
Chapter 13 Too Many Australians
The flight passed in a haze of bad food and bad movies and bad company. I didn't really mind. Sometimes I felt that as I had gotten older the only thing I had really gotten better at was waiting. Twelve hours on an airplane? No problem. I dozed, watched movies, read the Lonely Planet guide I'd bought at the airport, stared out from my window seat at the endless metallic sheen of the ocean. I had an emergency-exit row and the extra space to go with it, for which I was very grateful, as they don't make economy-class seats for men six feet tall. I didn't really think. There didn't seem to be any need for it.
The twelve hours passed in a flash, and then I was outside in Indonesia's sweltering heat, walking down steep stairs from the airplane to the tarmac. I passed a McDonald's and a Hard Rock Cafe on the taxi ride from the airport to the beach, and found a comfortable bungalow room for two dollars a night.
Kuta Beach was awful. Green, and pretty, and it boasted a terrific beach, but awful all the same. It reminded me of Fort Lauderdale. The population consisted largely of noisy, obnoxious, drunken college-age Australians. Generally I like Aussies, but not this batch. Indonesian men wandered around with hateful eyes and briefcases full of cheap knockoffs for sale, watches and perfume and rings and Zippo lighters. Indonesian women walked around, barely clad, offering five-dollar "massages" to the Australians. And watching the Aussies I could see how the idea that all white men look alike and all white women are easy gets around the Third World.
I sat on the beach and watched the sunset. It was spectacular. But it was half-ruined by the company. One drunken batch of Aussies played rugby on the beach, shoving the Indonesian hawkers out of their way, knocking one woman and her cargo of bright sarongs sprawling onto the wet sand. Another group passed a huge hash pipe around. At the beachfront cafe where I sat there were two men sitting at tables with prostitutes. One was a fat bearded man in his twenties, strutting and beaming as if the presence of two twenty-dollar-a-day whores showed that he was the most desirable man on the planet. The other was a wrinkled, white-haired man with two girls who looked about thirteen.
It occurred to me that The Bull was not so different from a lot of other travelers. Some people go traveling to explore, or to experience; but a hell of a lot go to exploit. Many Third World travelers are there at least in part because poor countries offer cheap drugs, cheap sex, complete anonymity, and police who happily turn a blind eye in exchange for a small contribution. The Bull took it a little further than the drug tourists or the sex tourists, he got his kicks from murder, but the general idea was the same.
I was no angel myself. I had lost track of how many countries I had gotten high in. Sure, soft drugs should be decriminalized, but in the meantime it was hard to argue that I was somehow helping a country by contributing to the violent gangs that invariably control the drug trade. I'd never slept with a local girl, the idea made me morally queasy, but I'd met and traveled with lots of people who had. It wasn't exactly prostitution, the way it was usually done, just an accepted tradeoff; the local girl sleeps with you for a week or two, and you buy her a lot of gifts. It wasn't just men, either, I'd met musclebound Africans with temporary European girlfriends who were, shall we say, not conventionally attractive. Sometimes it was genuine romance. Sometimes it was a harmless fling. Sometimes it was exploitation. The line was much too fine, and rationalization much too easy, for my liking. I was sure the fat bearded man was already telling himself that the two beautiful women at his side were there mostly because of his powerful physical magnetism.
I finished my beer, watched the sunset, listened to the ocean. I was exhausted, drained by a day's travel and by jet lag. I wanted to sleep, but instead I went out and found the Internet World cafe. It was fair-sized, about twenty machines. There was nobody there that I recognized. I'd spent the flight alternating between fear that I wouldn't be able to find the killer and fear that I would. Now that I was here it was the first fear that dominated. There were literally thousands of tourists in Kuta Beach; even if my theory was correct and I would recognize the killer, what were the odds that I would just happen to bump into him?
I logged in and checked the Thorn Tree, but no response from our boy yet. Talena had sent me an email telling me I was a complete idiot and she'd be damned if she'd help me and I better send daily updates. I sent one back telling her I'd gotten in and everything was fine, went back to my bungalow, and got a much-deserved night's sleep.
* * *
I had come to Indonesia because I had resurrected the theory that Laura's murderer was somebody on the truck. Originally I had written that off because the dates didn't fit, there was no way a trucker could have been involved in the Southern Africa killings. But now I wondered: what if Laura had been a copycat killing? What if somebody on the truck had heard out about the Southern Africa killings, from a phone call or an e-mail, and decided to respond in kind? What if Laura's murder hadn't been random at all? What if she was killed somebody she knew, who dressed it up to look like the work of the serial killer allegedly in Africa?
What if it had been one of us?
I could think of three candidates. Three people I had traveled with, gotten drunk and gotten high with,
cooked with, sweated blood with, who I had seen sick and angry and embarrassed and ecstatic and giddy, who I had spent nearly every day with for four solid months; three people I could still envision as killers. Lawrence Carlin. Michael Smith. Morgan Jackson.
If true this would explain a lot. Especially if the same person who killed Laura had killed Stanley Goebel as well, if Goebel had been a victim of the copycat — call him The Bull II — rather than the original killer. That would explain why he came after me on the trail. Because he knew me and I knew him. He feared I had seen him in Letdar or seen his name on one of the checkpoint ledgers. I wished I'd looked at those more closely. So it also explained why he switched to using Stanley Goebel's name and passport.
Of course there were still a few holes in the theory. First of all, how would he have known the vital detail of the Swiss Army knives when apparently nobody knew this but the South African police, who weren't telling? And if Laura's death had been a crime of passion, which I thought possible — Lawrence, in particular, had had a brief fling with her early on in the trip, before she and I came together, and I thought had never really gotten over it — why would the same person have gone on to kill a total stranger in Nepal two years later? And what were the odds against me stumbling onto a crime committed by the same man?
Actually those odds weren't as awful as they first looked. It is an enormous planet out there, people who say "it's a small world" obviously haven't seen much of it, but the backpacker trail makes up a pretty small and navigable part. It wouldn't be the first time I stumbled into someone I knew. When in Thailand last year I bumped into a girl I knew from England on Thanon Khao Sanh, and the very next day met a guy I'd traveled with briefly in Zimbabwe. The Lonely Planet is a shrunken planet. And it shrinks even further depending on the type of traveler you are. Anyone who spends four months on a truck in West Africa is an adventure traveler, who likes struggle and challenge, prefers doing over seeing, and is too poor to buy their own Land Rover. There are a finite number of places in the world that suit the budget adventure traveler, and the Annapurna Circuit is one of them.