The Edge of Doom

by Amanda Cross

  To Kate’s immense relief, the turnoff was easily found, as was the right-hand turn after that, as were the abandoned stores. The first one, toward which she was to walk after parking the car, seemed to have been some sort of ice cream place. Further up the road—she had no idea how far was meant—she stopped the car; after some thought, she decided not to lock it. True, it might be stolen, but suppose she wanted to get away fast. She vaguely perceived that this decision made little sense, but she stuck by it all the same.

  Approaching the boarded-up ice cream parlor, she looked for a door. A man standing at the corner of the building beckoned to her, indicating that she was to walk toward him. She followed him around to the back of the building and through an open door. The room she entered was dark; coming from the bright sunlight, she was for a moment blinded, unable to make out anything at all. During that moment of waiting for her eyes to adjust, she found herself to be, in the odd way (as she later surmised) of deeply introspective people, simultaneously frightened and thinking of how she would describe her fright. It was almost as though her fear were packed down inside her, not making itself evident to her mind or body, just unmistakably there. It was a new experience and gave her a sense of power, even as she knew herself to be, somewhere deep within her, terrified. Perhaps that was how it was with men in battle?

  Gradually, her vision returned. There were three men in the room, each seated oddly on a tall stool, probably left over from the ice cream parlor. Jay was one of the men, just sitting there, not shackled in any way, indicating with ominous clarity that he was constrained by the other men, both of whom held guns; only one of the men sat with his gun pointed at Jay. The other man, his gun held in his hand, his hand resting in his lap, was the person in charge. Kate would be asked later why that was so immediately clear. The answer was a class answer: The man in charge was not a hired hand, or a thug, but rather a man like Jay: college educated, urbane of speech, with an air of natural authority. Also, it had been the other man, the man now pointing his gun at Jay, who had waited for Kate and beckoned to her to go around to the back of the building. He was a different sort from Jay and his pursuer the product of a different world. Kate felt apologetic about this explanation, but there it was.

  “Sit down,” the man in charge said. “My name is Charles, not that it matters. I’ve never been called Charlie.”

  He pointed to another high stool, across the room from him and Jay, next to his partner with his gun at the ready. Kate clambered up onto the stool and sat, facing the two men. Suddenly she realized, though she could never understand why it had not occurred to her before, that Charles might shoot Jay, or tell the other man to shoot Jay, right before her eyes. Kate might not be able to imagine the man’s reasons for shooting Jay in front of her, but whatever the reasons, they were doubtless a symptom of obsession. The man noticed the look of horror on her face, and reassured her.

  “I’m not going to shoot him, not right now,” he said. “Had I wanted to shoot him, I didn’t need to send for you. Shooting a man before his daughter’s eyes is not my immediate aim. It may never be my aim; it all depends on how you conduct yourself.”

  Kate, having somewhat recovered herself (“Did you know you can actually feel the blood come back into your head?” she would ask Reed later), looked directly at Jay. Jay tried to smile at her, but his demeanor suggested someone experiencing a profound indifference toward everything.

  “He believes me that I will not injure you,” the man said, as though he could read Kate’s thoughts. Well, apparently he could read her thoughts, which under the circumstances was hardly the work of genius. “You’re here to listen. His punishment, whether or not I kill him after you have left, will be to listen as you hear what this noble man, your father, has been up to for most of his life. Are you ready?”

  All I could think of, Kate said later, was the children’s game of hide-and-seek: Ready or not, I’m coming. It was clear my readiness was not an issue. Kate nodded all the same, and squirmed a bit on her stool trying to get more—well, comfortable was hardly the word, but less cramped. The man sitting near her raised his gun, positioning himself into greater alertness, but she soon settled down.

  “And what has your newfound father told you about our long relationship?” Charles asked.

  There was a long pause as Kate searched for words.

  “Never mind,” Charles said. “I’ll tell you what he has admitted to you about his past: that he took part in an ‘honorable’ burglary, that I was there, that later he learned I had killed a man during another burglary, that he testified against me and was therefore responsible for getting me convicted. Is that about it?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Speak up. We’re recording this, the way they do in the police station. You have to speak up so that the machine can hear you.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “That’s what he told me.”

  “He suggested I was a cold-blooded killer, carried a gun”—here he waved his gun in the air—“and should have been put away for life.”

  “Not exactly,” Kate said.

  “But, put a bit more delicately, that was the idea, wasn’t it?”

  Kate nodded, then caught herself. “Sorry,” she said. “Yes, that was the idea.”

  “Good; at least we’ve got that bit behind us. Would you like to go to the bathroom? I know fright does make one have to go. We haven’t got a proper ladies’ room, but please make use of what we have if you need to.”

  Kate did need to. She had been worrying about whether she could ask, and where she could go if she did ask and Charles said yes. “I’d like to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  “Fred here will show you where it is. He’ll wait outside the door, but you’ll be private. We don’t mind waiting, do we Jay?”

  Fred got off his stool and gestured with his gun for Kate to get off hers. She followed him through a door she hadn’t noticed and down a short hall to a small dirty room with a toilet and sink. “Would you like to make use of the facilities?” a pompous man had once asked her. Why should she remember that now? But at least Charles spoke direct, clear English, neither euphemisms nor that slang now current with the educated classes. Why on earth should she find that hopeful? Did that indicate that he was likely to be more reasonable or less? Villains in literature were often polite.

  When Kate and her escort returned to the room, she was offered a glass of water, which she welcomed. Fright induces thirst.

  “Good,” Charles said. “Now, shall I begin?”

  He seemed actually to be waiting for a signal from her to continue. Kate nodded, then immediately said, “Yes, please begin.”

  We might have been in a play by Sartre or someone, she said later to Reed. I suspected and feared that he was lulling me into acquiescence, even into admiration for him, or at least a willingness to hear him out. At the same time, I wanted to hear what he would say. At the back of my mind, as Jay sat on his stool, allowing his head to droop with tiredness, I feared for him. My God, I said to myself, he’s over seventy years old.

  And then it occurred to me, she told Reed, that Charles was also seventy or a bit more. He was the same age as Jay.

  Charles began to speak, slowly, taking his time, as though he had been planning for a long time what he would say if he ever got the right chance to say it.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  How say you?

  My prisoner or my guest? by your dread

  “verily” one of them you shall be.

  “Jay and I were at college together. We were roommates. He was best man at my wedding. That’s where he met your mother. So far, that’s what he told you, yes?”

  This time he didn’t wait even for a nod but went right on. He was talking to Kate, but he was talking for Jay; he was telling Jay his version, he was making Jay listen to Kate listening to his, Charles’s, version. That was his pleasure. Kate could only hope it would complete his pleasure, that shooting or other violence would not be required; that talking would
suffice.

  “So Jay met your mother at my wedding,” Charles continued, “and it was instant love, across a crowded room, fireworks—in short, passion. My guess is that Jay met an older woman who wanted his love rather than alcohol, and your mother, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it, hadn’t been made proper love to and was smart enough to know it and to want it. Or maybe she was enchanted, too, and just wanted the experience of a younger man; who knows? Anyway, lo and behold, you appeared a year or so later. And after that, your mother does not wish to run off with Jay here; in fact, she wants him out of her life, particularly since no one’s noticed that this baby girl doesn’t exactly resemble the other Fanslers. But then, she’s a girl, which nicely explains everything. As for your mother, passion is one thing; practicalities quite another. Jay felt like shit, and I for one don’t blame him. Not,” he paused, as though Kate had interrupted him, “not that I blame your mother either. But it did complicate matters between Jay and me. To put it mildly. In fact, it screwed things up in a really big way.”

  Kate glanced to her right to see how the second man, gun still at the ready, was taking all this. Evidently he wasn’t paid to listen, just to be present and on the alert with his gun. He probably thought all this nonstop talking was for types like Charles and Jay, who couldn’t do much else in the way of action, and had to hire types like him for backup. That, at least, was what Kate was pretty sure Fred was thinking.

  “Don’t worry about Fred,” Charles said, as though he could read her thoughts, and not for the first time, Kate noticed. Am I that obvious, she wondered, or is this an easy situation to read? The latter, I think.

  “What had it to do with me, Charles? you are asking yourself. What did I care about whether or not Jay hung around on the outskirts of the Fansler world? Good question.” Kate in fact had not thought of that question; her cognitive processes had definitely slowed down. She seemed to stay on the right side of fear, even hysteria, by thinking only on a rather superficial, partially attentive level; she knew herself to be incapable of complex or cogent thought.

  “Well, as Jay’s daughter and as a Fansler yourself—and keeping that name rather than taking your husband’s made it much easier to find you, for which many thanks—as a Fansler you will, I know, be shocked to learn that I am an art thief and was, even then, though very few people knew that; not even the wife I was married to at the time had a clue; we’ve since gone our separate ways. Would you like another glass of water? Fred here will get it for you.”

  Kate said she would appreciate more water. Fred, whose head had come up at his name, rather as Banny’s did, Kate thought, went off to get the water. Kate drank most of it when the glass was handed to her.

  “This may get even thirstier,” Charles said. “Sorry I can’t offer you a more interesting drink. Your father doesn’t drink, as you may know. I guess that’s why he wanted a mother-figure like your mother, a woman who was a lady and didn’t drink. Where was I?” But of course he remembered exactly where he had got to.

  “I’d been Jay’s roommate; I’d been his friend. He was my best man. But the truth of the matter, dear Ms. Fansler, is that it wasn’t until Jay was in your mother’s bed and out of his mind with amorousness that I told the poor chap what I wanted from him. You were on the way by then, which put even more power into my hands. Are you taking all this in?”

  Kate nodded, and then proclaimed that she was indeed listening most carefully, which, she later said to Reed, was the most absolutely inexact statement she had ever uttered. The best she could manage at the time, she told Reed, was to catch the drift.

  “Right,” Charles continued. “Well, not to beat about the bush, I was by the time of my wedding not only an art thief, I was a very accomplished practitioner in that calling, top of the field you might say. And there was Jay all lost to passion with Madame Fansler, who moved in the richest of circles, amid a most efficient and happy group of art collectors. Do you begin to get the idea?”

  “Not exactly,” Kate said, which was the simple truth.

  “And here I thought you were a clever girl, a professor and all. Well, if needs must, I’ll draw you a clearer picture. Are you concentrating?”

  Kate nodded. She felt a slight urge to defend herself by pointing out that to be sitting on a stool, surrounded by two strange men with guns as well as one’s newly discovered father was not a situation exactly conducive to clear, perceptive thinking. But to say that required more energy than she wished to expend at that moment, so she just said “Do go on.”

  “What I wanted of Jay and your mother was some guidance to their world of the rich, especially those who bought art and kept it at home on their walls to pretend they knew how to judge art. Of course, what they knew how to judge was the dealers who found the art for them, and those dealers knew what was hot and what would become even hotter. Sometimes, though not often, these rich friends of the Fanslers got a chance to buy something old and valuable and just a teeny bit foggy as to its provenance. I wanted to know where the art was, what the situation was, and then I wanted to steal it. I didn’t put it that way exactly to Jay; not at first. I said that I could sell the information, which would earn me credit in my professional circles. I didn’t mention right away that I planned to steal the pictures myself.”

  “I’m following you,” Kate said, since he seemed to want some indication of her attention. If he expected her to become upset by what she was hearing, he would have to be patient. Given the chance, she would have liked to suggest that conversations taking place under pleasanter, less constrained circumstances were likelier to evoke more satisfactory responses. In truth, Charles was certainly getting more and more of her astonished concern as his story proceeded, but she considered it wiser not to reveal this.

  “Well, dear Kate, your papa was not very quick about getting his newfound love, your mother-to-be, to cough up the information I wanted. I was getting slightly impatient, as you may imagine, but I didn’t want to put on too much pressure and perhaps ruin the whole plan. And then, just as I was about to tell Jay that I would go to Mr. Fansler and reveal the whole affair between his wife and Jay, you were born. And within a very short time, or so it seemed to me, Jay had been handed his hat and told to get lost, though doubtless this was hedged in more delicate language with many explanations and persuasions being offered. The upshot was that Jay took off. He left full of anger, resentment, despair and a wish to put himself as far away as possible from his lost lady love—i.e., your mother.”

  “Go on,” Kate said.

  “Ah, encouragement,” Charles said. “I may safely assume that you are indeed heeding my words.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “I am.”

  “Good. I got hold of Jay just before he cleared out and told him either he went to his lady love for the information I wanted, and convinced her to continue providing that information, or I would go to her, threatening of course to tell her husband about all the hanky-panky in his very own house with his very own wife. Jay was, as you might expect, furious and refused my request in an exceedingly rude fashion. To say he was insulting hardly represents his words or manner.”

  Kate glanced over at Jay. “In short,” she said to Charles, “he told you to publish and be damned, the only possible words in which to answer a blackmailer.”

  “We are waking up, I see. Well, you are right. He said if his affair had to come out, then let it, though I knew he didn’t mean that for a moment. He was bluffing, of course. He said he wasn’t going to play any part in thieving and he doubted Louise, your mother, would either. Would you like another glass of water? I wouldn’t mind having one myself. Do you think you could find another glass Fred?”

  Fred departed presumably to look for another glass. He returned to say he couldn’t see any other glass, and they were damn lucky to have that one which someone must have left by mistake. He proffered the one glass now filled with water to Charles.

  “No,” Charles said. “Offer it first to the lady. Drink all you want, my
dear. Fred can always fill it again.” But Kate, not wishing to aggravate Fred, drank only half of the water in the glass and then handed the glass to Fred to hand to Charles. Not much action in this play, she thought. Even Beckett had more action than this, not to mention better dialogue or monologue as the case might be.

  “So there was our Jay, taking off in a cloud of dust and despair, and I was left to consider what my next move might be. After a time, I decided to visit the lady herself—your mother, my dear. Getting to see her was no great problem; we had met at my wedding and she knew me to be a friend of Jay’s. Perhaps she even wanted to see someone who reminded her of Jay, brought him to mind so to speak. Her complete innocence and pleasure at the thought of seeing me demonstrated clearly enough that Jay had told her nothing of my plan, or indeed anything about me, let alone that I was a purloiner of art. I didn’t mention my nefarious scheme at our first little chat—she served me tea, and let me google at you in your cradle. But at my second visit, some weeks later—it never pays to rush this sort of thing—I confessed the truth of my profession, as I called it; she was shocked, but a smart lady, no doubt of that. Her first question was, did Jay know? You still with me, dear?”

  Kate assured him that she was, paying heed to every word she might have added, but didn’t.

  “Here I made an important and, as I came to think, clever decision. I told her that Jay knew nothing of this, that unlike me he was boringly straight and honorable, as I was not. In fact, I added, I had hoped that she might be willing to help me in my less-than-honest endeavors. Doing so, I pointed out, might add a certain element of adventure and danger to her rather overmeticulous and mundane life. I was in high hopes this idea would appeal to her, and had she shown the slightest inclination to consider that challenge, I would have left her to ponder it and, I might have hoped, to persuade herself to add this touch of spice to her daily round. But no such luck. She flatly refused even to contemplate so dishonest a scheme, and ordered me to depart, in the most formal and ladylike if unmistakable manner. You, no doubt, would have responded in the same way: stiff, dismissive, but not obviously rude.”