by Amanda Cross
“As in the circus.”
“Not quite. An officer named Ringley who will escort Jay into the interior of the station where he will be locked into and expected to relax in a holding cell. You and Banny will then come home, stopping on your way into the building to mention loudly to the men in the lobby that your husband has had to leave for work.”
“Is someone supposed to overhear me say that?”
“I don’t know if it will be overheard, or if it will be believed if overheard, but we’re doing our best. Have you got it all straight?”
“I suppose it’s no good asking where Jay is going after he leaves the holding cell.”
“The plan is for him to proceed in a police car, some hours later, to a prison upstate where he will be protected for the time being.”
“And what are we, or you, since you seem pretty much to have taken this over without much consultation, going to be doing while Jay is in the cooler?”
“This is consultation; I’m consulting you. True, I arranged the police part before I had consulted you, but time was of the essence.”
“You haven’t told Jay about this yet?”
“Certainly not; I wanted your agreement or refusal before going any further.”
“You apparently assume that you and Jay look enough alike to get away with this charade.”
“You’ve never been great at noticing physical characteristics, for which I have long admired you. They aren’t as important as everyone else in our society seems to think. In fact, however, Jay and I are of a height, not dissimilar in coloring or in the way we walk and carry ourselves. If you sign off on this plan, I’ll spend a large part of this evening encouraging him to walk like me. If this doesn’t work, we haven’t lost a great deal. We have to get him out of our apartment, and he’ll be safe for a short while with the police.”
“And if they, whoever they or he are, spot him the moment we leave the house and nab him, what exactly am I to do?”
“Rush back upstairs and we’ll call the police. But I very much hope that won’t happen, and I don’t think it will. They may not even know that he is in our apartment, but for various reasons to do with certain lurking types I’ve spotted, I think they do. Now, take my arm.”
“What?”
“Take my arm. As though we were out together to have an important talk and needed to feel close.”
“We are having an important talk.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean—a private, personal talk; we’re making up because I treated you badly last night. Take my arm.” Kate did so.
“Good,” Reed said, squeezing it to him. “Take Jay’s arm tomorrow. Even if they see through this plan, they are hardly going to try anything with you hanging on to him, a large dog nearby, and many people in the park and on the streets. That, at least, is my hope.”
“Mine, too, Reed,” Kate said, squeezing his arm and resting her head for a moment on his shoulder. “You do realize that Freud and his followers could hardly fail to think Oedipus complex; my husband and my father treated with identical familiarity.”
“We shall have to risk that interpretation, as I hope you agree.”
“But I still want to know the details of who this is who is after Jay, and why, and what sort of person or persons we’re up against.”
“Jay is going to tell us all about it tonight, under threat of immediate exposure. But I don’t think he’ll need the threat to tell us.”
“Be sure to leave enough time for his lessons in walking like you.”
“Remind me, when this is over, if it ever is over,” Reed said, “to tell you again how much I love and admire you.”
“And me with a criminal for a father, and the genes of heaven only knows what else seething about.”
“You’re you. Do try to keep that in mind, will you?”
And they walked on for a bit, Kate’s arm in his.
Reestablished in the maid’s room that evening, they were seated in their by now familiar position of the men perched on either end of the cot and Kate, on the chair, with her feet extended onto the cot between them. Jay began to recount how this deathly relation between him and his enemy had come about.
“I’ve already told you some of it,” he said.
“So you have,” Reed agreed. “But we could do with a bit more elaboration on that part of the story, as well as some description of the man who is determined to kill you.”
“I’ve told you; he became obsessed with me. The FBI told me that, though I hardly needed to be told. He’s shadowed me ever since he got out; it was a while before I noticed. Before he wanted me to notice.”
“I have trouble putting it together,” Reed said. “I mean, the different parts of your life. The architect, partner in a firm famous for its work in restoration, and the young man willing to steal a painting from a gallery, and later, the older man willing to testify against a killer who must have had friends on the outside, even if he was convicted.”
“I didn’t fear his friends. He hadn’t the means to pay enough; he wasn’t part of a gang or an organization. No, he was the only one to fear. I sensed what a sick person he was from the first time I met him.”
“Why did you go on with it?”
“Why did I agree to help my friend commit theft in the first place? Because it was unjust; because his mother ought to have had her picture. It was hers by rights. The theft didn’t seem that terrible, and my friend promised to return the picture one day. And he did.”
By this time he was talking to Kate, not by any means excluding Reed, but there could be no doubt who his chosen audience was or to whom the story needed to be told.
“It all goes back to Louise, to your mother. She refused to come away with me—well, I’ve told you that. There are two bits I neglected to mention. One was that I wanted to take you with me. I had nothing, no one else. Oh, I had fine plans about how it would happen without a scandal. We would pretend you had died, or been kidnapped, or—one mad scheme after another, all impossible, of course. I did see that. But she left me nothing. She had her family, her boys, her damn social life, everything; and what did I have? Well, she offered me money. I knew it wasn’t as though she were buying me off—I never thought that, and neither did she. Her argument was that I needed to get started at some profession, she had the money to give, I could pay it back someday, and so forth. I needed the money; of course I did. But I felt she needed to give it to me, and I wanted a part in nothing that would assuage her guilt at deserting me, at throwing me out, at ending it. I knew and she knew that she could just turn away, hide her bruised heart, and go on with her chosen life. I wasn’t going to make it easier for her if I could help it. But I certainly needed money. So when the chance to make a good sum, at least for those days, came along . . .”
“The plan to steal the Shakespeare picture for your friend.”
“Exactly. I don’t know if I mentioned that he offered me money; he’d kept his nose to the grindstone and made a neat packet by then. I needed money badly, as I’ve said, as Louise knew. I hadn’t a penny to my name. I like to think—I certainly persuaded myself then—that if I hadn’t been convinced that my friend had a right to get that picture back, if I hadn’t resented the picture having been sold from under his mother’s nose, I wouldn’t have agreed to the whole caper. Sure, I know what you’re thinking: that I probably identified the loss of that picture with my loss of your mother; all I can say is I was highly motivated to commit a crime. A victimless crime, as I thought of it.”
“Except for the museum that owned the picture,” Reed injected.
“Well, they didn’t trouble too much to find out who really owned the picture, did they? I don’t think museums and galleries and private owners are too particular on that score. Anyway, I didn’t even think about the museum then.”
“And your friend hired this man who helped you to steal the picture.”
“That’s him. That’s the one.”
“And he has found some comrade
s to help him in his quest for you now, is that it?”
“I don’t really know. I think so, because the one or two times I’ve caught sight of him, there seemed to be others. Helpers, I think; hired help. He intended to kill me himself; they were just for the capture is the way I see it.”
“And he hates you because you testified against him?”
“He was a rough type, even when we met; I’d asked my friend not to use him, but he wouldn’t listen. And, in fact, nothing much went wrong. Not during that theft.”
“But later.”
“Years later. I read about an art theft he was involved in; they were spotted, and he shot one of the security guards. He didn’t need to shoot him; he said when the police spoke to him—eventually it was the FBI—that the guy would have killed him if he hadn’t shot first. But the security man didn’t have a gun. It became obvious that what he feared was that the guard had seen him, could have described him, would have led to his arrest.”
“Surely killing the guard would be as likely to lead to an arrest?” Kate said.
“Not really. He denied being the shooter; he insisted the guy working with him was the one who did the shooting. That seemed unlikely, given the character of his accomplice—no record, and no gun. The bullet from the killer’s gun indicated the kind of gun it was, a kind that I knew the man had; he had had it when we did our theft, which was one of the main reasons I didn’t like or trust him; I don’t like guns. The police couldn’t find the gun; he’d ditched it somewhere.”
“He’d have got off on insufficient evidence without your testimony, is that it?” Reed asked.
“That, and that the other guy, his accomplice, might have been convicted; there was always that chance.”
“So you testified and went into Witness Protection. Why did you take yourself out of it?”
“He’d been given a long enough sentence to assure my safety. After a time, I wanted to get on with my life. I wanted to get back to being an architect.”
“If I’ve got this straight,” Kate said, “the robbery in which this man killed a guard happened twenty years or so after the art theft you took part in.”
“That’s right.”
“And you’d married the woman with the two sons in the meantime.”
“Yes. She and the boys—they were small children then—went into the Witness Protection Program with me. I came out alone; the marriage was over by then. I’d adopted the boys; I still see them occasionally; I always kept up with them; my wife died a few years ago.”
“And we are to gather that the killer was paroled against all expectations,” Reed said.
“When he was convicted, they promised they would fight parole if it came up, appear before the parole board. But it was a different cast of characters twenty years later, I guess. Anyway, he was out, with one aim in mind: to get me.”
“And he found out about Kate being your daughter.”
“Yes. I never guessed that. But before I heard he was out, he’d taken to—what’s the word—stalking me. He knew more about me than I did. I didn’t even know he was out on parole until he let me know he was out. When I discovered that he knew who Kate was, I tried disappearing. But he was always there. So I came here to hide, endangering Kate, endangering both of you. It would be hard to think of a more perfect screwup; I know that. I want to get out of here, and get him off your backs at least.”
The three of them stood up to stretch their legs, not that there was sufficient room to move about, but the relief of standing was for the moment enough.
“You’ve never forgiven my mother,” Kate said. “Everything you’ve done, all that you’ve told us, was about her—was aimed at her. You became a success at your profession, but she had expected that of you; that wasn’t sufficient to pay her back. But going to the bad, committing a theft, testifying against a killer, putting your life in danger, then leaving the Witness Protection Program to become the target of a maniac—all that was to make her sorry, wasn’t it? She had died somewhere along the way, but by that time it hardly mattered. And then there was me.”
Kate had expected Jay to object to this analysis, which in fact she thought a bit oversimplified, but he made no objection, just kept silent.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” he then said to Reed.
So Reed explained the plan, while Kate went into the kitchen to make some coffee. Doing this, as she had more often in the last few days than in most of the rest of her life, she was reminded of the English always fixing tea. Although lately, it occurred to her, in contemporary English novels, they served coffee instead. Kate returned to the maid’s room to find Reed, his Irish hat on his head, walking and moving as much as was possible in the confined space while Jay watched him and tried to follow his movements. Kate put the tray with the coffee down on the cot and left them to it.
But later that night, she asked Reed why the police in the local precinct and upstate should agree to take Jay into custody, or pretend to.
“You forget how long I was an assistant D.A.,” Reed said. “One makes connections, one gets to know people, one asks and returns favors.”
“It seems a pretty big favor to me,” Kate said.
“It is. It’s a pretty big problem we’re facing; don’t you think so?”
Kate didn’t bother to answer, but she pondered, not for the first time, what all this was costing Reed; what it would cost him in the future.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Look, with what courteous action
It waves you to a more removed ground.
Early the next morning—early at least in the light of Kate’s usual day—she and Jay and Banny set out, Jay being, to all appearances, Reed. Kate took his arm, and found herself tempted to discuss this identification of her father with her husband with as many Freudian and Lacanian references as she could muster. But she resisted. Jay, seemingly beyond speech, concentrated on imitating Reed’s walk and wearing Reed’s Irish hat, efforts which obviously consumed all of his energies. Except that he had mentioned, as they set out, his wish that this walk might be not a performance but a regular father-daughter excursion, there was only silence from Jay.
Kate, graveled for lack of matter, turned to Shakespeare. “Do you know The Winter’s Tale?” she asked Jay.
“No,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
“Somehow your appearance in my life reminded me of The Winter’s Tale—although our ages are all wrong, and the plot hardly applies. Still, there are echoes.”
“Tell me.”
“There is this king, Leontes, who is being visited by his boyhood friend, Polixenes, now king of somewhere else. Leontes is a fortunate man: he has a wonderful wife, a small son, another child expected, and this long visit from his friend. Oh, dear. Have you ever thought about how hard it is to tell the plot of a Shakespeare play? His plots are almost as tumultuous as opera plots, but with him it’s the language that gets you; with operas I guess it’s the music.”
Kate was aware that she was chatting on, not making too much sense. The park was full of cars (permitted before ten) and rampant off-the-leash dogs (permitted before nine), along with dogless people hurrying to offices. Kate found it hard to imagine that anyone was watching them.
“Go on with the plot,” Jay said.
“For no reason anyone can fathom, Leontes decides his friend and wife are having an affair. He expels his wife from the court; he may even order her to be killed. His son, meanwhile, has died of sorrow; his wife has given birth to a daughter supposed to be Polixenes’ (it was a long visit); he orders the baby to be killed also; the friend makes a hasty exit. They send to the Delphic oracle, who says Leontes was all wrong; his friend and his wife never dallied with one another. Twenty years pass. The son of the friend, Polixenes, meets Perdita, the not-killed daughter who lives with her supposed father, a shepherd. They fall in love and make their way back to the court. The wife, Hermione, turns out not to have died but to have been preserved by means that would be invaluable to
the cosmetic industry if they could bottle it; the friend’s son replaces the lost son, the daughter lives. I know it sounds mad, but the language is heavenly. As to the plot, I haven’t a clue why it comes to mind. Except that a lost daughter is found. She is, however, seventeen or so and gorgeous.”
“Also, there is a lot of sudden, but lasting anger.”
“Yes, that too.”
Kate fastened Banny’s leash to her collar, and they made their way out of the park and toward the street.
“I left something out,” Kate said. “And it’s important. The traduced wife, Hermione, had a good friend, Paulina, who has defended her and stood by her all those years. She is rewarded at the play’s end with a new husband, since her first one has been killed in Polixenes’ service: he famously exits ‘pursued by bear.’ Pauline says she will, like an old turtle—I think she means turtledove—go off to lament her lost husband. But Leontes simply gives her another husband. All the loose ends must be tied up for the finale, if it’s a comedy. Shakespeare was unusually good on women’s friendships, most of the time.”
“You say that the play makes you think of me, of us?”
“Not really. But there are certain echoes. Since we are not actors, we have let fifty years, rather than twenty, pass.”
Jay seemed inclined to speak, and then did not.
“Oh, well,” Kate said, “there’s one thing to be said for Shakespeare’s plots and opera plots: telling them certainly takes time. We’re almost at the police station.”
“Do you know what Reed plans after this little charade we’ve been performing; after I am safely in the arms of the police?”
“No; I’m not sure he does. But perhaps one day we will sit again, as we sat in Laurence’s club, and by the sailing pond, and simply converse.”
“The thing about Leontes in the play,” Jay said, “is that he was a king and could make all things come right. I can’t imagine what Shakespeare would do with our plot; I only hope Reed will do something beneficent.”
The three of them, Kate, Jay, Banny, walked into the police station. The man at the desk seemed, rather to Kate’s surprise, to know who they were and why they were there. (Kate, though she was rather ashamed of it, had no great opinion of the police.) She and Banny left before she could get involved in any conversations with anyone: Reed’s instructions; she waved goodbye to Jay. Walking home on the busy streets, she and Banny met with no incident whatever.