The Edge of Doom

by Amanda Cross

  “Then everyone knows wrong,” Reed said, allowing some asperity to creep into his voice. “Terrified witnesses, who may not themselves have committed any crime, are persuaded to testify and promised the Witness Protection Program. I think we ought not to leap to conclusions without more evidence.”

  “If we get more evidence in time, that’s all very well. Meanwhile, I think we better take certain precautions against this man.”

  “Laurence,” Reed said with more patience than he felt, “you yourself mentioned him to Kate and arranged for Kate to meet him. What has brought about this sudden suspicion and accusations?”

  “I know, I know. The fact is, I didn’t think the man would test out. I didn’t for a moment suppose he was Kate’s father. I thought she’d hand over her blood sample and then we’d go after the impostor. And it happened my wife or maybe my daughter was discussing Edith Wharton, and the whole comparison seemed amusing at the time. If you intend to tell me I should have known better, I won’t be able to deny it.”

  “Meaning,” Reed said, “you thought you would get a chance to make fun of Kate and show her up.”

  “I can hardly stop you from saying what you want in her defense,” Laurence said coldly. “After all, she is your wife. But she certainly doesn’t show much respect for her origins.”

  “Kate needs no defense, mine or anyone else’s. You behaved like a cad, and now you want to hunt down her father—and he is her father—to make up for your silly indiscretion. It’s hardly a worthy motive, Laurence.”

  “Since you have no wish to protect my sister, and since she is too much of a fool to defend herself against a criminal, I feel my actions are quite justified. Good afternoon.” And Laurence hung up. Reed told himself that he had not handled that conversation very well, and that he would have to do something to make sure that Laurence continued to tell him the results of his, Laurence’s, investigation.

  He said as much to Kate that evening.

  “Your father was in the Witness Protection Program; that’s what Laurence’s sleuth uncovered,” he announced to her in conclusion.

  “What?”

  “The Witness Protection Program.”

  “You mean there really is such a thing? I thought it was just something they’d made up for TV cop shows.”

  “Really, Kate. It’s not a good idea to lose one’s grip on reality. There is such a program, and then there are TV shows.”

  “Don’t be so sure, Reed. We live in a postmodern age, which freely translated means it is no longer possible, let alone easy, to tell the difference between reality and simulated reality.”

  “I see. Like that Wag the Dog movie, where they managed to convince everyone there was a war on when it was only a simulated war.”

  “That’s the idea. Could you tell photographs of a tornado from a tornado created on a computer? No, you couldn’t. I believe in the dinosaurs in movies, but I don’t think they’re part of a government program or of reality. When it comes to anything more recent than dinosaurs, I’m far from sure.”

  “If we can postpone this discussion of post-modernism, frightening as it is, let me assure you that there is indeed a Witness Protection Program, and I’m willing to believe Jay was in it. What we have to discover is why.”

  “I only hope if Laurence finds out, he’ll tell us.”

  “I was quite rude to him today; he is a maddening person. But I shall have to throw myself on his mercy in the hope that he’ll keep me informed.”

  “If I know Laurence,” Kate said, “his desire to gloat and to prove his clout means he’ll tell you. But it never hurts to get on his good side with flattery and bullshit if you want something from him. I haven’t wanted anything in years, but recollections of childhood dramas can be summoned up.”

  Reed did phone and apologize to Laurence for his unfortunate remarks, to which Laurence, with a stab at affability, responded that he did not blame Reed for being troubled by this dreadful situation. Reed managed to end the call without responding with the irritation he felt.

  The next day Kate telephoned Reed’s office. This was unusual in itself; he could not remember the last time she had called him at his office; any plans for the day were usually confirmed before they parted in the morning.

  “Clara has called in some alarm, and so has the superintendent,” Kate said on the phone. “Two men, well-dressed, turned up saying they had orders or a warrant or anyway the right to search our apartment. Clara, whom we now salute as a prize among cleaning women, not that we didn’t know it before, refused to let them in. I like to think that Banny standing beside Clara also had its effect. They had come upstairs with the doorman, who didn’t want to let them in either, but agreed to take them this far. The men apparently were quite good with their demands, but our defenders held firm. Then started the questions: had there been an older man around—they described Jay, or I think they were describing Jay. They quizzed Clara and the doorman, and the other man in the lobby, and finally the doorman called the superintendent, who asked them to leave. What strikes me as sinister here, Reed, is that these men had enough presence and authority to avoid a quick refusal. Do you think one of us should go home?”

  “I take it they are gone.”

  “So the superintendent said, and I thanked him and kept insisting that such people should never be let in under any circumstances. If they come when we are home, then we will go down to the lobby to meet them. Does that sound about right?”

  “Of course. The question is, who were they and what did they want?”

  “I assume they wanted Jay.”

  “Very likely, but not certain. They may have been studying the layout, so to speak. Casing the joint.”

  “Whatever for? Anyway, they kept asking the doorman, the superintendent, Clara, even Banny for all I know, if there had been any sign of a man around our apartment, visiting us, staying with us, anything. They were all able to assure him that there was no such person. I got the impression the men were convinced by these sturdy denials.”

  “I don’t know why they might have been getting an idea of the layout, in addition to finding out if Jay were with us or had been with us; that’s what I want to know, or at least to figure out. I’ll be done here in a while, and I’ll head home and talk to the men before their shift ends, just to satisfy myself about what questions were asked.”

  “Good,” Kate said. “I’ll see you there then. Ought I to worry? I will worry in any case, but have I grounds for serious worry or only generalized anxiety?”

  “Somewhere in between, I think. When will you be home?”

  “I’ll try to make it by five. No doubt I shall listen with less than my usual patience and sympathy to whoever comes in my office hour.”

  “Unlikely. The question is, really, why do these unofficial men want Jay, and how did they know to look for him at our house?”

  “So many questions; so few answers.” Kate sighed and hung up.

  “What I suspect,” Reed said later, when they were sitting with their drinks, “is that these chaps who didn’t get in here know that Jay has left the Witness Protection Program and want him now, before he can tell the authorities anything. Which leaves even more questions: what did he do? Why was he in the Witness Protection Program? Why did he leave it? What is it he could tell that would endanger our visitors and has them so frightened?”

  “Reed, I know it sounds naive, foolish, and unbefitting my professional station in life, but what the hell is the Witness Protection Program? I do gather, I really do, that it consists of hiding people who have given information to the police or the FBI or someone for which they could be killed. But how often does that happen outside of television cop shows?”

  “Since you had already uttered this same disbelief concerning the Witness Protection Program, I made use today of LexisNexis and found that someone had written about the program for the New York Times Magazine.*1 Here, I’ll leave it for you to read on your own. Just to note that the wife of the man being moved
into the Witness Protection Program as described in this article agrees with your disbelief. When she realizes that she must abandon her life for another one utterly different, she says: ‘I couldn’t believe it was real. All that time I didn’t think that this type of organization really existed. I thought it was just in the movies.’ It was real enough. She and her husband, together with their three children, would begin a new life in a new place where they knew no one, would have different names, and be permitted to take virtually nothing of their past with them into their new existence. The woman who had thought this organization existed only in the movies would never see her parents and her siblings again.”

  “Could they leave the program?”

  “Yes. But at least by 1996 when this article was published, no one in the program had been murdered, but thirty who had left the program had been murdered.”

  “So the odds are that Jay will be murdered.”

  “The odds are that he is in danger; serious danger.”

  Kate shook her head. “I can’t believe this is happening; the normal reaction under the circumstances, no doubt. One has to accept that Jay was either a criminal testifying against another criminal, or that at the least, he was involved with criminals, testified against them, and was thus in danger for his life and went into the Witness Protection Program. Does that seem a fair statement of the facts?”

  “It does to me,” Reed said. “But we are talking about a program, or organization, which is hardly open about its operations or any facts about those taken into it. I don’t think it’s quite time to conclude that your father was a criminal; the most we can assume is that he was a witness, and that that puts him in danger.”

  “That still leaves us with our own facts—that he shows up in our lives, establishes himself irrefutably, thanks to modern science, as my father, while leaving us to guess what his motive was.”

  “For showing up? For leaving the program?”

  “All of that. But why is connecting himself to me the advisable action for him to take at this time? How does it serve his, if not criminal, at least hardly legal or conventionally upright purposes?”

  “My dear, I hardly know what to say. We can’t demand that he appear and explain himself. We certainly can’t demand to be told about him by the Witness Protection Program; I doubt even Laurence’s influence could accomplish that. I realize it’s no use asking you not to brood about it, because of course you can hardly help brooding about it.”

  “Are you sure Laurence couldn’t find out more from the Witness Protection people?” Kate asked. “If there’s one thing we all know about the government and Washington bureaus and so forth, it’s that money and power—which are probably the same thing—can buy you any information or influence you want. After all, Nixon could get the FBI to go after people who openly opposed the Vietnam War.”

  “I don’t know how far Laurence’s arm reaches. I could ask him; you could do your best to persuade him at least to set queries into motion. He has to feel some responsibility to you in all this, quite apart from his own fears and angers. But think, Kate. Do you really want to do that?”

  “I don’t know what I really want to do. I hate the thought of encouraging Laurence against Jay, if you want to know the truth; at least I think I hate the thought. On the other hand, whatever nefarious practices Laurence had indulged in, they are, so to speak, accepted nefarious practices.”

  “Kate, I’m not sure . . .”

  “Remember when George W. Bush was elected president, or anyway, when he achieved the presidency? He had taken a lot of campaign money from the oil and the mining industries, and the first thing he did upon taking office was to reject his campaign promise to lower emissions standards, and to revoke Clinton’s attempt to reduce the amount of arsenic in our water. Don’t you think Laurence had a part in all that, or something very like it?”

  “Do I take that to mean you don’t want to encourage Laurence in his pursuit of Jay or that you do? I don’t say I am entirely in accord with your judgments of Laurence; you are rather being carried away, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it. On the other hand, I do concur in your taking no action, at least for now, if that’s what you’ve decided. As you know, I’ll back you in whatever you decide to do, as long as it is not criminal. I’ve no desire to be swept off with you into the Witness Protection Program; our life here is certainly worth preserving, as I hope you agree.”

  “Well,” Kate said, getting up to head for the kitchen and decisions about dinner, “at least I, unlike the woman in your article, would not mind being forced never to see any of my family again. On the other hand, I don’t think I’d care to settle down somewhere in the South or the Midwest. I’m a Northeasterner at heart; and after all, would any southerner or midwesterner want to be plunked down in New York to start life all over again? Of course not.”

  “A bit dramatically put, but I’m glad of the conclusion.”

  “I don’t condone Jay’s actions whatever they were; if they landed him in the Witness Protection Program, they are no doubt beyond approbation. But I do feel I owe him something for demonstrating that I am not, and have never been, a Fansler. I don’t know how I feel about this discovery of my paternal heritage, but I do know I can at last understand why nothing my family stood for seemed to me desirable. I’m also proud to learn that I went a different way than either becoming the anarchical member of a family who is forced to the enactment of violent insurrection, or someone like Edith Wharton who turns to writing but never abandons the manners of her culture, however much it made her suffer. Me, I just didn’t belong, I knew it, and now I know why.”

  “As I keep saying, you might have turned out very much the same as a real Fansler.”

  “No, Reed, I’ve decided. Jay made the difference. I can’t think why, if he had never appeared, I wouldn’t have realized that. I guess it’s because the question never came up; because I never really thought about it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  . . . he is arrived, here where his daughter dwells.

  During the next week nothing whatever happened. Reed and Kate promised each other to resist any temptation to do anything about Jay. As they recognized, the temptation was great to make something happen: perhaps to call Laurence, urging him on; perhaps to try to probe further into Jay’s life. They yearned to set some action, any action, into motion, but bound by their mutual agreement, they abstained. By well into the following week, as a result of this forbearance, they found it increasingly easier to let hours pass without thinking of Kate’s father and his putative criminal career. Kate even stopped obsessing about what such a father meant to her sense of herself. They had even begun to wonder if they might not stagger through the rest of their lives without ever encountering Jay again.

  And then, as suddenly as he had disappeared, he reappeared. One morning, when Kate was home alone with Banny, the back doorbell rang. Supposing it to be a delivery or Con Edison to read a meter, Kate opened the door to confront a painter. The back-elevator man explained that this man was working with the company painting the lobby and some of the halls, and he wanted to come in to examine the front hall outside of Kate’s apartment. The painter was slumped against the elevator wall, his body language indicating annoyance at having to examine the hall, at permission having to be asked. Upon Kate’s nodding agreement with this plan, the painter slouched into the apartment.

  “Shall I wait?” the elevator man asked.

  “Don’t bother,” the painter said. “I’ll walk down. I have to get some measurements.” And with that, the elevator closed.

  “This way,” Kate said.

  “It’s me,” the painter said. And the slouching painter took off his cap, straightened up, his whole demeanor changed, and Kate recognized Jay.

  “It’s an old trick,” he said, “but still a good one. You kind of join up with some outfit that’s doing some work in the house, and try to get past the staff; this fellow is so lazy he couldn’t bother to check me out. And why should he?
I’m with the outfit that’s doing the painting. They send different painters around each day—the boss comes to check them and their work out at the end of the afternoon. As long as I avoid him, I’m okay. It has to be supposed that he knows what painters he’s hired, but the painters don’t always know each other.”

  Kate stared at him. So many questions crowded into her mind that she was beyond expressing any of them; her astonishment was palpable.

  “It’s all right,” Jay said. “Have you a room you don’t use much; one with the shades drawn, or able to be drawn?”

  Kate took a moment to register the question. “Well,” she said, “there’s a maid’s room. We don’t use it, except as a sort of attic. In here.” The “maid’s room” opened out of the kitchen. It contained a cot, a bureau, some shelves bulging with unassorted items, and a number of boxes from computers, printers, and VCRs stacked around. There was not much room to move.

  “We could throw out most of this,” Kate said. “We also have a bin in the basement where we could put what we want to keep. We just never get around to it. If we got rid of some of these boxes . . .”

  “Don’t get rid of anything,” he said. “Don’t do anything unusual. This is fine.” He pulled the drawn shade aside to ascertain that the room looked out on the courtyard, ten stories down. The room across the way also had its shades down.

  “There’s a lamp somewhere,” Kate said.

  “No lamp. No light must show. The thing is, Kate, I’d like to hang out here for a day or two. They’ve already determined I’m not here, which makes it a good place to lie low.”

  “Won’t the back-elevator man wonder why you didn’t leave?”

  “No. He’ll assume I walked down as I said I would. Anyway, he’s a lazy fellow. If we can manage not to arouse his curiosity, he won’t bother about me. Is it all right if I stay then?”

  Kate pulled herself together. She thought of calling Reed, and then remembered that he was in court and would not be available.